Inbound Success Podcast

"If I only knew then what I know now..." We've all wondered how we would do things differently if given the chance for a do-over. Here's how Rand Fishkin applied the lessons learned from the past to the launch of his new startup, SparkToro.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, SparkToro Founder Rand Fishkin talks about starting over.

Rand rose to marketing stardom as the Founder and CEO of Moz, where he became known as one of the foremost experts on SEO in the world. 

When he exited the company a few years ago and founded SparkToro, he reflected on the lessons learned from his experience at Moz to develop a fresh new approach to everything from raising investment funding, to speaking out about issues some might consider controversial and the development of a marketing strategy for his startup.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the SparkToro website
• Get Rand's book Lost and Founder
• Follow Rand on Twitter
• Email Rand at [email protected]

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host Kathleen Booth. And this week I am incredibly excited to tell you that my guest is none other than Rand Fishkin. Welcome Rand.

Rand (00:26): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Great to be here

Kathleen (00:28): To say that I'm excited is an understatement. I, this is, I'm just going to throw it out there and this is embarrassing, but I have had a marketing crush on you for a long time.

Rand (00:39): Marketing crush. One of the most unusual types of crushing.

Kathleen (00:42): I mean, you have to really be a marketing nerd to develop like marketing crushes and I truly have one. So I will just tell a brief story about how and why I developed this crush. And then I'm going to ask you to tell a little bit about yourself. So I, I started reading your content when you were at Moz and I always just loved, loved it for two reasons. One is, it was incredibly substantive. There's a lot of crappy content out there and I've been a marketer for a long time. And I don't like to waste my time with stuff that isn't going to teach me something new.

Kathleen (01:17): And I just always felt like I learned something when I read your content, but I loved also your delivery and the fact that you let your personality shine through and you, weren't afraid to be kind of fun about it. And that's what first you know, turned me on to the content you were creating. But then I think what really cemented it was actually when you left Moz and you wrote your book Lost and Founder, I was a business owner for 11 years. I owned a digital marketing agency and I had what I would call a less than glorious exit. You know, there were a lot of failures along the way. I even actually toyed with writing a book. It's the first time I've ever said this to my podcast listeners. I toyed with writing a book called full frontal failure about like how important it is to just own it and put yourself out there and how, like being an entrepreneur is so lonely and nobody talks about the bruises and the, you know, the bad parts and I saw your book and I read it and I was like, Oh my God, this is what I'm talking about.

Kathleen (02:18): So it really spoke to me and then you started SparkToro and I was so fascinated and impressed by how you built the audience first. And really again, what putting out incredibly substantive content, I loved everything you did with Jumpshot while it was still available. Anyway, so I mean, I could go on and on and on, but that was kind of my journey following you. And I've always just loved how unflinchingly, honest you are. And the most recent example of that is the amazing blog you put out about why you left Moz's board of directors and, and you've always been a champion of diversity, and I love that it made room for two women of to join the board. So I'm going to stop now, cause this is getting a little awkward.

Rand (03:04): No, no. I mean I think what's, you know, what's wonderful, Kathleen is I always felt like the the contributions that I, that I wish, you know, resonated more in the world are exactly the ones you're talking about, right. Transparency around entrepreneurship and around the hard parts of broken relationships and broken systems and you know, work around diversity and equity and inclusion and those kinds of things. And yet, you know, mostly for better or worse, right? Mostly what I'm known for is like, Oh, you really helped me learn keyword research.

Kathleen (03:45): Whiteboard Fridays.

Rand (03:49): I'm, I'm very grateful and honored to have helped people with those things as well, of course, right. That, that built my career and, and helped build Moz. But I think there are, there are lots of places to get that information and to your point, it, it can be pretty lonely and challenging to find real people telling real stories about the painful and hard parts of work and life and and recognizing what opportunities they've had and which ones maybe they didn't earn. Which, which has certainly been the case with me too. So,

Kathleen (04:29): Yeah. And I would add to that and helping other people perhaps avoid some of the pitfalls you did. I love that you shared your term sheet and lost and founder. You know, I, I actually sent that to a friend of mine right after I wrote it. He said he was starting to look at maybe taking on investment. He had a completely bootstrapped, very, very successful software company, but he didn't have a succession plan. He didn't have children who wanted to take over and he wanted to retire. And I said, I have a book, you have to read, read it before you take any investment. And I just think that's, so what a gift to be able to like, pass that on and allow people to, to avoid some of the things that you've had to encounter in your journey. So thank you for that.

Rand (05:09): Oh my gosh. I'm honored. Thanks.

Kathleen (05:11): Yeah. Well, the big reason other than the adulation I'm pouring on you, that I wanted to have you here was that I, the thing I think is so interesting and what makes me want to ask you like a thousand different questions is that you are somebody who has started and grown a very successful business in Moz and learned a lot along the way and SparkToro's a more recent journey. And you know, we always say like, Oh, if I had only known that, then what I know now, and you kind of had that opportunity a little bit with SparkToro. So that's really what I want to dig into as someone who has been there, done that and seen both the good and the bad of growth and what works with marketing and what doesn't when you decided to start SparkToro, can you, can we, maybe we could start by having you walk me through, what were the lessons you pulled from your earlier experiences to put together? What, in your mind was the plan that would work for a brand new company from a marketing standpoint? Because of course we talk about inbound marketing on this podcast.

Rand (06:16): Yeah. let's see. I had a bunch of things that I really wanted to do very differently. And some of those, some of those, I kind of outlined at the end of Lost and Founder, but you know, I wanted to fund SparkToro differently. I knew that I wanted to raise investment because I didn't, you know, to your point around leaving a company and not having a financial exit, right. I didn't have a financial exit from Moz. And so, you know, I needed to I had a nice severance agreement, but otherwise right. Had to start getting income pretty darn fast. And I knew that I wanted to build a company that could be successful, successful, meaning for its employees and its customers and its shareholders be successful for all three of those groups without having to be hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Rand (07:16): And so the VC model just does not really allow for that, right. It is you know, Moz is a company that got to $50 million in recurring revenue and is considered kind of a, like frustrating mediocre plateau, you know, of a, of a company, because it just won't, it won't go away and die, which would be fine, right. In venture capital world. It's fine. If 98 out of a hundred companies that they invest in die or right. Or could it get to a fast growth rate and North of a hundred million dollars in revenue? That's fine, too. Everything in between is no good. Right.

Kathleen (07:56): That's so funny because I feel like if you talk to any startup founder, well, I don't know any, but most 99% of startup founders would say $50 million company. Yeah. Sign me up. Like that sounds great. It's weird.

Rand (08:09): And I think almost all of us, in fact, all of us should feel that way, but the venture capital asset class has biased a lot of people to think like, Oh yeah, that's, that's not good enough. And that's pretty, that's pretty dumb, right? Because what we want, what we want as a society and as people, and as human beings who are familiar with how capitalism and economics interact and politics, we should want lots of little companies, right? What makes a sector robust? What makes an economy vibrant is competition and lots of diversity of, of, you know, different companies owning parts of the market and innovating as a result of that. What you absolutely don't want. The last thing you want, if you want a healthy economy and a healthy politic and a healthy sort of income equality you want, you do not want Facebook owning 90% of social media, Google owning 95% of search Amazon owning, you know, whatever it is.

Rand (09:16): Percent of e-commerce 50% of e-commerce, right? Those are negative externalities and the results of you know, a sort of system that gravitates toward the most powerful. And that is bad for everybody, right? Bad for entrepreneurs, bad for employees, bad for consumers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So I knew that I wanted to build a company that could be successful without the forced venture type of outcome. I knew that I wanted to keep the team really small. I don't like building big teams. Casey doesn't either, both of us have worked at, you know, companies that are like at Moz when it was like 20 people and 25 people. That was great. 50 people. Okay. Still, all right. 75, Ooh. I'm not feeling as great about this hundred, 200 plus really I'm not a match for what the kind of working environment that I like. And so, yeah, that was another intentional decision to, to longterm. Keep the team small. We knew we wanted to build an audience before we launched a product. We knew we did not want to launch an MVP. We wanted to launch a very robust sort of impressive product. That would be remarkable to a lot of people. The first time they tried it. So all those things are very different.

Kathleen (10:40): Yeah. Let's talk for a minute about building an audience before you build a product. That's something that I'm personally passionate about. I, I spent two years as head of marketing at IMPACT. And I, after I exited my agency, I always said I would never be in an agency again. But I stayed in IMPACT because that was Bob Ruffolo, the CEO, his vision was to build a media company around the agency. And I was like, that is interesting to me and that model was build the audience and then, and then we'll have products we can roll out to them. So it's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's that same mindset of, if you have a really passionate audience, it unlocks so much opportunity. I'm interested in knowing like, how did you go about that with SparkToro? I kind of saw it from a reader standpoint. Cause I think I've read every one of your blogs since the beginning, but maybe explain to my listeners a little bit about why you chose that approach and then how, how you approached it. Because I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding how exactly you would go about doing that.

Rand (11:38): Yeah. Yeah. And I did it quite differently than with Moz, right? So Moz was like blog five nights a week you know, try and get traffic to all those posts, try and get good at SEO earn, you know, links to those posts. And then, you know, slowly build up this sort of content and SEO, flywheel and SparkToro was essentially built on the back of what I call social media marketing and digital PR. Right. So I did lots and lots of and continue to do lots and lots of podcasts and webinars and conferences and events and guest contributions and you know, get interviewed for other publications platforms, blogs, media channels, research reports get quoted in news, like all, all that kind of stuff. Right. Essentially leverage the power of other people's platforms because SparkToro, when it launched had none of its own and also leverage the social media platforms that I carried over from us.

Rand (12:40): Right. So I didn't, I didn't get to carry it over, like my, you know, my content library and all the search traffic, but I got to bring with me, you know, some of that social media presence and, and that following on like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram that essentially kickstarted the SparkToro audience and the sort of what, what started as our beta invite list and then became our early access customer list. I think for any startup, for any business that's trying to build its audience and email addresses the most important thing to capture, you know, getting website visits, getting social followers yeah, those are okay. Not, not like a problem or anything, but an email address is so incredibly valuable. You can do so much with those direct communication, you know, broadcast communication. And of course all sorts of, you know, stuff on the ad platforms too.

Rand (13:43): So we, over the course of about 18 months, which was essentially the development time, the R and D and testing and beta process for SparkToro we had about 15, 16,000 email subscribers who said like, I want to get notified at launch or like I'm interested in being a beta tester if you'll have us. And that helped us. And even though we launched in April of 2020, like the worst possible time in the last hundred years to launch a company we did manage to get our first, I think almost 150 ish customers via that, that list of folks. Right. Who said, like, I'm interested in what you're doing. And so that platform has done through, you know, social broadcasting. I published probably, I mean, you, you, you read them all. So I think over the course of 18 months, I don't think I published 30 blog posts even right. Fairly small limited number, but I probably did a hundred. Yeah. You know, interviews and conversations on other people's this sort of digital PR approach to things. And I would do that again. I think that's a, that's a great way to play it. I mean, you know, obviously we're having a podcast conversation.

Kathleen (15:01): That's very meta.

Rand (15:05): Yeah. Which is a little bit of the reason that's so valuable is because when you don't have an audience of your own finding the audiences that are, that potentially will resonate with you and leveraging them from other folks, platforms is a super valuable way to go. It also worked really well because we had that sort of free signup funnel, you know, before launch, it was give us your email address to get notified at launch. And after launch, it was tries searching SparkToro for free, and then, you know, register to create a forever free account. And that that funnel has also been very successful for us. So, you know, I'll be on a webinar, I'll be on a podcast. I'll, I'll do a video live stream or something I did when a couple of days ago. And you could see like the spike in Google analytics, right. Cause lots of people are paying attention to podcasts. We're having a conversation and they're like, Oh, let me go try this SparkToro thing. Right. So it works really well. As long as you've got your funnel optimized for that type of acquisition.

Kathleen (16:05): It's interesting that you say, you know, you, you were successful because you essentially identified other people who had audiences and you were able to draft off of that a little bit. I'm going to put a pin in that. Cause then we're going to come back to what SparkToro does. Cause I feel like that's the perfect segue before we get there though. So I want to make sure I understand correctly. You had about an 18 month development period during which the product was not publicly launched. You mentioned you wrote 30, let's call it 30 blogs. In addition to doing your digital PR, I do want to add as the reader, that, that sounds simple, but it wasn't because these were not just opinion pieces or, you know, 10 ways you can write a great subject line. These were blogs that included a lot of original research that you did in conjunction with the Jumpshot data, as well as some real thought leadership around what was happening with Google and, and being able to get clicks in search results. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that because I do feel like that was one of the reasons that I avidly followed you, was the quality of the information in those blogs was not to be found anywhere else. I couldn't find that information elsewhere.

Rand (17:17): No I didn't. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. So, you know, part of my thesis around building a successful whole marketing flywheel is going and finding a way that you can contribute unique value that your audience cannot get elsewhere. Right. And you know, I've written about this and I talk about it all the time and when you know, startup founders and marketers ask me like, Oh, well, where should, where do you recommend that someone new to marketing start building their their funnel, their channels, their, their, their flywheel. My recommendation is always something you're passionate and interested about somewhere where your customers actually pay attention and somewhere where you can add unique value that no one else is providing. And so this was, you know, this was sort of my stab at what, what can I do uniquely? I had this relationship with Jumpshot.

Rand (18:07): I had been using their their data at Moz. I've been really impressed by their click stream data quality. And so I continued that relationship sort of helping them by being a vocal supporter and proponent of their day of using their data. And in exchange, they gave me a bunch of, you know, research time. So they, you know, they had someone super friendly guy named Sean who worked with me on their, on the R and D side of Jumpshot. And I'd be like, Hey Sean, can you pull this data for me? And he'd pull it, send it over, I'd put it into Excel and play around with it and produce some nice looking charts and graphs and publish that and try and try and tease out the interesting bits of like, Oh, here's the distribution of where web traffic is coming from? Like, you know, more than two thirds of all web traffic is controlled by the alphabet corporation, right.

Rand (19:00): Between Google and YouTube and Gmail and Google maps and yada yada, yada, that entity was referring more than two thirds of all web traffic to sort of the top. I think we pulled the top 20,000 or so websites. Right. so that feels a little monopoly. Yes. Great. It's sort of, yeah. Sorta dangerous. And then you look at, you know, web search as a whole, and of course, Google at the same time was trying to claim to who was at the attorneys general of the United States who were looking into it from, I think like 40 some odd States, quote your research as part of that. Right. So, you know Congress through what's his name? Congressman David Cellini I think is the, the representative who's looking into an a, on the house subcommittee for antitrust and, you know, they're, they're asking Google, all these questions and Google is giving them these clearly obviously BS lie responses.

Rand (19:59): And so I'm able to call that out, right. I'm able to look at the data and be like, Nope, you're lying to Congress. I don't know if there's consequences for that. Apparently there's not, but yeah. Let's not go down that road right now. Cause I'm yeah. If you would like to take away women's rights, apparently it is totally cool to lie to Congress, but, you know but yeah, so being able to call out, you know, Sundar, Pichai, Google CEO, and say like, look, the thing, the thing that you told Congress under oath is provably false. Maybe, maybe Congress wants to do something about that. Right. You know, maybe that's going to come back to bite you in the butt. I hope it does. Cause I, you know, I don't think that's acceptable behavior. And I don't think any of us should, should, should accept that, but, but these are kinds of things, right.

Rand (20:47): That it did, it did two things, right? One, it brought a lot of folks like yourself to SparkToro subscribing to the, the blog, paying attention to the publications. And it also helped create in my opinion, a very accurate narrative around how do we, as marketers break free from the duopoly of Facebook and Google, like, can we do other things, other marketing things, can we pay attention to other channels? Can we spend our dollars and time to go find other publications in people and sources of influence that reach our audiences and not exclusively rely on these untrustworthy and potentially risky partners. And that obviously serve SparkToro's interest as well, because fundamentally at the core of SparkToro is I'm trying to solve this problem. Right? The, the reason I created the company is because I'm frustrated with the Google Facebook duopoly. Over-Marketing

Kathleen (21:51): Well, let's take a minute and actually have you explain what SparkToro does cause we kind of skip that part in the beginning and I'm gonna make sure we don't completely miss it.

Rand (22:01): Yeah. Fair enough. I, I don't love to be self promotional, which is a little,

Kathleen (22:06): But I mean it's germane given what we're talking about. I'm the same way, but yeah,

Rand (22:09): Yeah. Right. Is that weird? You, you like, you should, that, that's the goal of marketing and you know,

Kathleen (22:16): I always say marketers are terrible at marketing themselves. I'm I'm, I've been trying to get a personal website launched for the last two years. And I don't know if it'll ever go live because having to write my own website copy is like the most insane form of torture about myself.

Rand (22:33): Open offer. I have been working with a wonderful technical writer. I'm a woman out of the UK on some of our case studies for SparkToro. And she is amazing. If you want someone to interview you and then turn that into your copy,

Kathleen (22:47): I will get her name from you because I can't, I cannot write about myself.

Rand (22:51): I love working with consultants and agencies. I know that's weird. Like startup founders is supposed to want to build that strength internally. I don't, that's one of the things I did at Moz that like, we always tried to hire instead of work with consultants and agencies. I think that was a really dumb move. At SparkToro I'm using tons of agencies anyway. You would ask, what does the company do? This is very fair. Right? So trying to solve this problem around Facebook and Google's do opoly over online marketing and advertising. And if you're in e-commerce Amazon sort of makes how to try opoly. Essentially what we realized is that the, the challenge comes in when folks are asked to understand where they can reach their audiences outside, they're outside those platforms. So like, Kathleen, if you and I start a new company to sell, I don't know bone broth, we're like, Oh yeah, let's, let's do the, the, the bone broth thing.

Rand (23:53): And like, w we'll we'll we'll make lovely stuff and then we'll sell it online. And where do we reach people who are interested in things like, you know, paleo and keto diets, right? Cause that has a big overlap with it. And people who are big into like college enrich foods and people who are big into cooking. I don't know the result though. And where do we, where do we find those communities? Like, okay, I, I know a few recipe websites, but are those the right places or not? And so what you want to be able to do ideally is go find all the people online who are talking about whatever bone broth or collagen or keto diets, or I don't know, maybe you have a big affinity overlap with yoga instructors or something, right? You want to go to those communities, go find those people and then figure out, probably figure out like their home address so that you can break into their house and steal their phone and log into it, right.

Rand (24:55): Get their unlock code, log in and then see all the things they were browsing and reading and watching and listening to and following. But of course that's illegal and super unethical. And so the next best thing to do, because surveys and interviews don't work for this. Like that's the way most marketers get this data. That's how I got it before. And it does not work because people just can't. It's not that they don't answer, honestly. It's just, they can't remember. You know, if you ask someone like, Hey, tell me a hundred people you follow on Twitter. What? No, I can't. How am I supposed to remember that? I can tell you maybe like five,

Kathleen (25:34): Right? The classic story. When I used to own my agency, I had a client I worked with who said, Oh, we, we train all of our sales people to say, how did you hear about us? And one of the most common answers we get is, Oh, I saw your ad in the Washington post. And my client was like, I have literally never advertised in the Washington post. You know?

Rand (25:51): And this, this speaks to another fundamental problem, which we found with a ton of you know, agencies and consultants who would work with businesses. And you, you go talk to the executive team and they'd be like, all right, I want you to get us placed in the wall street journal. Why the wall street journal, like we're selling bone broth here. I golf with our customers every weekend. They read the wall street journal. You get us covered in the wall street journal. Like, no, my friend, I look, you you're getting super biased responses. And like you and your golf buddies, I'm sure do read the wall street journal, but that is not sample size of three. Yeah. Right. And so apart from breaking into people's houses, what the other way to do that? We saw a few really, really smart businesses marketing teams and customer research teams who had their engineers basically take a list of their customer's email addresses, send them through a service like full contact or Clearbit and get all of their social accounts.

Rand (26:54): So like, you know, here's Kathleen and here's Rand and here's, Rand's LinkedIn account. And here's his Facebook page of it's public. And here's his Instagram, if that's public and here's his Twitter and here's, Kathleen's, you know, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Medium, blah, blah, blah. And then they would crawl those social URLs. If they're public and extract all the data, they could like everything that's publicly shared by that person online just like Google. And then they would aggregate it together and be like, okay, our customers follow these social sources. They listen to these podcasts, they're sharing these YouTube channels. They're sharing these articles and websites. Now we can put our data together and go advertise and market in smart ways in smart places. And Casey and I were like, Oh, that's genius.

Kathleen (27:44): Amazing. What is incredible? And also, are you kidding?

Rand (27:48): You custom built with like three engineers on your team over nine months, this process, just to get that one piece of data. No, that's unfair. We should build that for the whole internet. Right. Let's just build that for everybody. So now you can go to SparkToro and sort of instantly, you know, search for any audience and discover what they read, watch, listen to and follow

Kathleen (28:11): It's awesome. And, and I can, I will add, as we go through this conversation, I am a customer currently. I was actually one of your beta users at a different company. So your funnel works because I am the living breathing example of it. But now going back to, so you had 18 months, you created this awesome content. One of the things that really struck me that you said was you partnered with Jumpshot and, you know, they have this data and they assigned a researcher to you. And, and the reason that struck me is that I imagine there are probably a lot of people listening, especially if there are people who are engaging in, in creating a startup who are saying, that's great, Rand Fishkin could do that because he's around Fishkin. And he worked at Moz and people are going to give him anything.

Kathleen (28:57): But I think the truth is though that the, at least the, the lesson I extracted from what you said is about partnership. Like if you are somebody who doesn't have a huge following, if you are somebody who doesn't have access to a ton of proprietary data, who out there is in an adjacent space to you, is complimentary, who does. And I mean, I did this in my last job because I worked for a small cybersecurity startup that had like no web traffic. And we put on a, a four day virtual summit on IOT security and the partners we had were unbelievable. Nobody had heard of us, but they had all heard of our partners. And my whole deal was, I'm not going to charge you to be a sponsor. You're going to get a speaking slot. All I ask is that you promote this and am going to put in all the elbow grease, right?

Kathleen (29:43): Like I'm going to do the marketing. I'm going to get like 500 people to come to this thing or whatever it was. And I think to me, like, I love that example of Jumpshot because you don't have to be a Rand Fishkin. I think you just have to understand what's in it for the other partner and the fact that you were able to shine a spotlight on their data and give them visibility. You know, there's, there's something for everyone out there in terms of figuring out the right partnerships. So I feel like that's a really valuable lesson.

Rand (30:10): Yeah. I was going to say a lot of, a lot of amazing data is public or publicly available. I a guy just emailed me in the, in the SEO space. Jeff, what's his last name? Jeff Baker, I think. And he had put together this study where he analyzed a bunch of SEO tools. It just use their public, like, you know, he subscribed to the free trials or paid for a month of access or whatever. And then like did a big comparison and published it on. He pitched it to search engine land, which is a big publication in the, you know, search marketing world. They accepted it, you know, despite that he didn't, it's not like he had a big history with them. He didn't have a big following previously. He pitched it to them. They published it. He emailed me and was like, Hey, I think you'd be interested in this.

Rand (30:51): Would you share it? I was like, yeah, this looks great. And did really nice work here. Right? It's small sample size, but excellent methodology. Sure. I'll share it with my audience. Right. I posted it to Twitter and LinkedIn, it got picked up by a bunch of more people like great, you know, he had no special, you know, relationship previously. I think there's opportunities like that to find unanswered or unasked questions in virtually any topic and field, and then expound on that take advantage of that, that opportunity in the market, underserved opportunity in the market to create unique value that your audience can't find elsewhere. And if you do that even just a few times, you know, I am not talking about publishing every night or every week, you can publish, you know, five times the year and be very successful with this kind of thing. If you become known for providing that source of information, data opinion you know, analysis that is unavailable elsewhere.

Kathleen (32:00): Well, and I would also say having a point of view, which is something that you've done consistently on everything. Yep. And this is a, this is something I want to explore just for a minute, because you know, having, having owned an agency, I've talked to so many business owners and, and, you know, heads of marketing having worked at other agencies like hundreds, hundreds over the year, the years. And there's a lot of, I feel like this is the third rail for so many of them. Like there are a lot of people who just firmly believe you don't take a position on anything period. End of story. I am not one of them, I believe in taking positions. But then there's this whole other gray space in between of like how, how firmly can you plant your flag in one direction or the other?

Kathleen (32:45): And a lot of business owners get very afraid of offending anyone and then kind of shying away from that. They become, I always refer to it as like the milk toast of marketing. You don't offend anybody, but nobody really likes you that much either. So I would love to hear your thoughts on, because I think I do think it takes guts. You know, and what you take a stand on has to match your personal passions and what you truly believe in because you are putting yourself out and taking risks. So maybe talk through a little bit as the owner of the business, how you thought about this and, and how in your head, you reconcile the risks of taking controversial positions with what you see as the, the kind of things you could gain out of it.

Rand (33:27): Yeah. So let's see, I think about this in sort of three ways. I think about it from a an ethics and philosophy sort of perspective. Like, am I a good person? Am I doing good things for the world? Am I prioritizing the goodness that I do for the world over a personal greed, right. Making more money? And if the answer to that becomes no, then I am obviously the definition of evil, right? Evil is not like I'm going to go murder people. You know, like that that's almost never happens almost all evil, at least in our society exists because people trade the courage of doing what they know to be the right thing for money or power or influence. Right. And that there's, that's evil. So I think about it from that perspective and on that vector, this is just an incredibly easy answer, right?

Rand (34:28): Like you, you should obviously do it the second way. I think about it is from a marketing and branding perspective, which is essentially what kind, what do I want to be known for recognized for appreciated for what kind of audience do I want to attract? Who do I want to you know, bring to my community and who would I like to keep out of my community? And from that perspective, it, it also is a relatively easy answer, right? Like, I, I want people I'm happy to have you know, what would have been classically called political disagreements on like, well, what should the tax code look like? Or how should we do zoning and you know, a neighborhood or well, what about, what about investments in whatever it is, you know, military versus environmental spending versus regulation on mining, like, okay, those are all political conversations that I think are, are reasonable. And then there are unreasonable political conversations like, well, should we allow blacks and Jewish people to live? That's not a political conversation. Right? I of, that's not, that's just human, right.

Rand (35:42): That's not an open for debate conversation. Right. And I think unfortunately there has been a a rash of sort of, well, don't you want diversity of thought and diversity of thought just means a diversity of thought to me is like a look I'd like to be white supremacists and not get criticized for it. And so can we just agree to, let me be like that? No, we cannot agree on that. That is an untenable well position. We're not, I'm not okay with it, so right. I'm I am, I'm happy to turn away those audiences and build a, you know, build an audience around that. That resonates with my perspective. I also think about it from a third perspective, which is what does the structure of the business that I'm building forced me to accept and allow me to work with them.

Rand (36:37): And so this was one of another really big reason. I didn't want to raise venture capital because yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Right. Like in the venture backed world, you do not that you need to be milk toast, but you are absolutely pressured to build a giant market and building a giant market often means attempting to turn off almost no one. Yeah. Right. Attempting to be uncontroversial in a lot of ways. And and I don't think that's a healthy or right thing. I am. I mean, I'll definitely say, I think probably a lot of Americans and a lot of people all around the world who are facing sort of this nationalist, autocratic surge in politics that we've been seeing globally. Right. A lot of, a lot of those folks, a lot of folks are frustrated that like these sorts of issues have become so front of the top of mind for so many people all the time, I, I feel that frustration too, right?

Rand (37:43): Like I'm, I am absolutely in the world of, gosh, I, you know, I really disliked a lot of previous administration's policies and like things in the United States, but I never felt like they were going to absolve us of our democracy. And now suddenly we have to worry about that. And that that's very frustrating. I don't like that. So I think that this these sort of three things have guided me towards an ability to say, okay, the structure of my business, the way that I want to attract customers and market to them and the audience that I want to build. And my philosophy and ethics are all in alignment. I don't know that every business owner gets to do that, but yeah, I hope I hope they do because they should. It's absolutely. It's, it's obviously the, the best way to go. I need more people

Kathleen (38:38): That hits the nail on the head, because I know I've always said this, like when it comes to taking a position, there's not like any one position everybody should take. I mean, that's where the owner of the company, the founder has to kind of a very much align with them as a person and you are going to attract the people that are naturally attracted to that same position. And so it is, it is interesting, but I think it takes a lot of guts and I really commend you for it. And, and you're right. Yeah. I don't think you could do it if you had traditional investment in your company.

Rand (39:09): Yeah. I mean, I certainly could, but it would put me in conflict with some of the goals and expectations. It could create strife and you know, who knows if I would be able to maintain that longterm. I think, you know, as a, as a key example, right. You can see with with Facebook and Zuckerberg, this sort of like and, and Larry and Sergei and Eric Schmidt and Sundar Pichai at Google, you can feel this sort of tension between like, they sort of know what the right thing to do is, but they're really scared about doing it because of fears of a combination of like political interference from, you know, people who's in who's interested is not, and market fears around, you know, where, what their users will do, what their customers will do, and the fact that they have to generate billions of extra dollars of revenue every quarter.

Kathleen (40:07): Yeah. Yeah. It's a prison that they've grown into over time. I think.

Rand (40:12): Yeah. I mean, we, we amplify that, like there's a lot of, there are a lot of people I'm sure there are people listening to this podcast right now who equate a person's worth with their productivity and their economic entrepreneurial contributions, right. And their financial success. That is a pretty terrible metric of a person's worth, right? Like we all know we should be measuring people's worth in the kindness that they bring to the world around them and the way they build relationships and how they and, and fundamentally all human beings are worth while. Right. All of us have, that's why human rights exists. And, and reducing that to this late stage capitalist model of like, you are how much money you make. That's, that's a bad way to go friends.

Kathleen (41:08): And this is why you are widely known as the nicest guy in marketing. Is that, so that is the word on the street. I'm just gonna,

Rand (41:16): Or a significant number of people on Twitter who disagree.

Kathleen (41:19): Oh, well, there's a significant number of people on Twitter who disagree with everything. So so going back for a minute to, you made a point about digital PR and again, I'm going to just sort of put this through the filter of, there are probably a lot of people who think, Oh, well, that's easy for Rand Fishkin. Cause he's everybody knows who he is so he can get the interview. So any advice for founders who don't have the reputation as to how to go about doing that?

Rand (41:47): Yeah. Yeah. So this is an area where I think before you start your company, it is hugely valuable to build up your expertise in a niche and to build up a network as well. Right? So that doesn't have to be through, you know, blogging. It could be through your social channels. It could be through video. It could be through hosting your own podcast. It could be through unique research that you do. It could be through one on one consulting and help that you give people whatever it is, right. But build your expertise and then use that expertise to build your network so that you are known for having that talent and being able to contribute in those ways. Once you do that, then it is so much easier to do all of the forms of digital PR and, and earning amplification getting attention. I cannot recommend it enough, but I think for whatever reason, there's this sort of sense of in the entrepreneurial world. Like I start my company, I build my product and then I figure out how to market it. No,

Kathleen (42:52): Oh, backwards.

Rand (42:55): That's not how you do it. Right. First, if you build up a community of people who care about the problem you're solving, even before you have the product that solves it, your launch and your growth will be so much easier. Right. So don't, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying this from the perspective of like, yes, I obviously have the privilege of, you know, the 20 years that I spent at Moz building up a, a reasonably sized following in this sort of niche of digital marketing world. But that, that can be a relatively easy, easily achieved, not necessarily the same degree, but easily started down the path of, and you don't need 15,000 people on your email list if you have 1500 or 150, that is still such a better starting point than zero. Yeah.

Kathleen (43:41): Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So when you think about the future of SparkToro and where you're going to go from here, what how do you think you're going to grow it moving forward? Is it still the same strategy of digital PR and really great content? Or are you changing anything starting anything new?

Rand (43:59): I, so I really, Kathleen, I really desperately want to invest in self hosted self created episodic content. Like what I did with whiteboard Friday at Moz, right? Like a series, probably something with video. Cause I'm reasonably good and experienced with video. Maybe involving a whiteboard too. I don't know. But the what's holding me back right now is, is time and bandwidth and investment dollars. Right. So I know that, you know, if I was going to do something like that, I'd probably want a video producer that's super challenging during COVID just, you know, by for one thing. And it's also a really hard to make the time available when it's just me and Casey working on SparkToro. So I think, you know, it might be next year when we're, you know, able to grow enough, to be able to bring in another hire or to invest in a, you know, whatever a content agency that helps me produce that that content with some consistency.

Rand (45:00): But I, I do think that would be a very valuable thing. And even doing that something like once a month, you know, having a monthly episode of a, whatever, 15 to 30 minute video series on topics related to things that are of interest to our audience, that probably would do pretty well. So episodic content I think is, is very under invested in because it's hard to start. It's hard to get the motivation to keep going. It, it generally doesn't, you know, take off immediately. Like it's a, it's a slow burn, slow build process, but it is something we really want to invest in.

Kathleen (45:37): I love that. Well, I will watch it when it starts tell me then I'm in the Rand super fan club clearly.

Rand (45:47): What I love, I love what I love about it is like the, it almost works like the Netflix model, you know, where you, you see one episode of the show and you're like, Ooh, that was really good. I kind of want to binge watch all of them. Right. And if there's a big catalog, you just get all this engagement and yeah, I'd like that. I think that model has legs. I don't see a ton of people investing in it. So I'd like to do something like that. Nice.

Kathleen (46:13): Well, we're going to come up to the top of the hour and I have a thousand more questions I want to ask, but we don't have time for it. So what I'm going to do is shift gears because there are two questions that I ask all of my guests at the end of every interview. And I don't want to end without having the opportunity to find out what you have to say about this. The first one is this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that today you think is really kind of setting the gold standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?

Rand (46:47): Ooh. Okay.

Kathleen (46:49): You can name more than one if you want to.

Rand (46:51): Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of folks who have been really impressing me lately. Let's see. So I don't know if you follow Melanie Deziel. She wrote a, she, yes. Yeah. Okay. So she writes, she just published, I think earlier this year Content Fuel Framework which I think, Hey, look at that. Hey Melanie, look, I'm promoting your book. No, I, I, I think, I think the world of Melanie she's extraordinary and she just she just keeps contributing in, in such a remarkable ways. I think she's keynoting content marketing world, the digital version, this week.

Kathleen (47:30): Wow. That's awesome.

Rand (47:31): Isn't it incredible. So amazing stuff from her. I've also been really impressed with, do you follow Nandini Jammi on Twitter? She's @nandoodles.

Kathleen (47:43): I feel like I maybe even touched base with her about coming on the podcast.

Rand (47:48): Oh, amazing. Yeah. So she is my God. She's so impressive. Like she's kind of my hero. She's she's been working on kind of a, a, a new version of brand safety and advert and helping advertisers save money and optimize their spend away from manipulative and sort of trolling. And I don't know what you would you call it, like sort of non-factual you know, Macedonian creatives.

Kathleen (48:24): This is why, so I know her not through the podcast, but I'm in week four at a new job. And my company is, amongst other things, we solve for publishers. We have an anti malvertising software. This is why I know her.

Rand (48:40): Got it right. She was one of the cofounders of Sleeping giants. Now she's the co founder of check my ads. And so they, you know, she, but she writes about and talks about all these topics on, you know, national media and and, and online. And she's just extraordinarily smart. I think she, she's a what I would say she's like a very sharp edged person on Twitter. And like many folks, right? She's, she's, she's much more sort of heartfelt and, and a little more, you know, leans into kindness off of Twitter, which, which we probably all do when we're not limited to 280 characters, but I think the world of her I'm super impressed with her work. Sarah Evans from, she's @PRSarahEvans on Twitter. She has a newsletter. She does amazing work in the PR field, especially for early stage companies. Super impressed with her. Yeah. So that's awesome.

Kathleen (49:36): I love all of those and none of them have been on the podcast. So I'm going to have to reach out to them now and ask them to come on.

Rand (49:41): I have so many recommendations for you Kathleen.

Kathleen (49:46): We're going to talk. Second question is the biggest challenge I hear a lot of marketers say they experiences is that keeping up with the changing world of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally keep yourself educated, stay up to date on all of these changes?

Rand (50:03): I built my own tool for it. I dunno. I dunno if you have checked out, but we have this thing called trending on SparkToro. It's just sparktoro.com/trending. And when you go there, it's basically like the 25 most diversely shared articles, every 12 hours by digital on Twitter. So we essentially just built a little system, you know, where people OAuth their account, their Twitter account, into the trending tool. It's free. It's not like part of our paid package or anything, but yeah, like, I don't know, seven or 800 marketers every day, read, trending, and check it out. And so, yeah, it's fun too cause people reply and be like, Oh, so cool. Our article was on trending today.

Rand (50:51): You can get traffic from it. And you can, you can go there once a week or once a month and click the, like, what was the most shared article this month, this week, any given day. And that has been super useful. Like really it helps Casey and I just kind of stay on top of everything going on in digital marketing world. With very little effort, like we don't have to scroll through a bunch of feeds. We can just like, Oh, all right. That one looks interesting. That's cool.

Kathleen (51:20): So it takes the firehose and turns it into a little garden hose for people.

Rand (51:24): Exactly.

Kathleen (51:25): I love that. Yeah. well we are now coming to the top of the hour and so unfortunately we're going to need to wrap it up. If people are listening and they have questions for you want to follow you or connect with you, learn more about SparkToro, what is the best way for them to do that?

Rand (51:42): Sure. So my email address is [email protected]. I'm pretty fast on email. I am most active on Twitter where I'm @Randfish. And if you are interested in trying SparkToro for free forever, it sparktoro.com.

Kathleen (51:57): Awesome. All right, there, you have it. We, we could go for 10 hours, but we only had one. If you enjoyed this episode, as much as I did head to Apple podcasts or the platform or your choice, and I would love it, if you would leave the podcast a review because that's how other people find us. And if you know someone else who's a kick ass inbound marketing person, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Rand. This was amazing.

Rand (52:25): Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

Jeff Reekers joined Aircall when it was a small startup looking to break into the US market. Here's how he's built a marketing strategy that fueled 15X growth in just three years.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Aircall CMO shares the marketing strategies he's used to help the company achieve extraordinary growth in just three years.

When he first joined Aircall, Jeff was one of just two marketers on the team. Now, the marketing department alone has 30 employees. 

Jeff shares why the company's international-first approach, along with its emphasis on partnerships, allowed Aircall to scale quickly.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Aircall website
• Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn
• Give Jeff a call on his Aircall number at (646) 712-9381
• Learn more about the Revenue Collective

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Jeff Reekers, who is the CMO of Aircall. Welcome to the podcast Jeff.

Jeff (00:25): Thanks Kathleen. It's a pleasure to be here.

Kathleen (00:27): I'm excited to talk with you. Aircall has such a fascinating growth story and you know, one marketer to the other, I'm always interested to kind of try and pull back the curtain and see how the, not to use too many analogies, but see how the sausage is made. So, but before we dive into the Aircall story maybe you could talk a little bit about yourself, what your background is and, and how you wound up in your role at Aircall.

Jeff (00:53): Yeah, sure. So I've had a few different experiences before joining Aircall. I started my career going way back. I'm from the Bay area originally. I moved out to New York city to start my career originally, didn't really know what I wanted to do, had a economics major and I was coming out and hoping to do grad school at the time. And ended up getting a job at Forbes, which is where I started my career. Mostly doing copywriting, ad copy, a little bit of journalistic ghost writing when I was asked to do it. And it was an amazing experience and it got me introduced into marketing. But interestingly, one of the articles I had to write was something called best of the web, but essentially you know, interviews with entrepreneurs we're getting started in the New York city area.

Jeff (01:50): And somebody I came across in my research for that was a company called Lawline, which was an online education startup for attorneys who needed to recertify their license. And it was just like the emerging time when you remember like real time player that they, that was a, that was a thing. And the videos were just starting to go online. And so this was a first step towards online education for attorneys who all have to recertify their licenses. And we were the first to do that, to move online. That was an amazing experience because it was just from the start and we scaled and we grew, and, you know, I had that traditional experience of kind of doing everything in a company from being joining it early. And I realized immediately that that startup life, that was exciting to me and having a real impact was exciting to me. And so that was sort of my springboard into the the startup world. And I got deeper into marketing thereafter headed demand at a few different companies. Think HR, Handshake, which was recently acquired by Shopify. And then I joined on with with Aircall about four years ago now.

Kathleen (03:03): Awesome. And what does Aircall do for those who are not familiar with it?

Jeff (03:06): Yes. We're a business, a hundred percent cloud based phone system for support and sales teams. So focused on the SMB. So any inbound, any teams that are receiving inbound inquiries, e-comm companies, whatever it might be, that need to efficiently route calls and know who their customers are before they call them, or the sales organizations that are looking for a productivity boost or to have better insights into the customers that they're calling. There are two main focus points.

Kathleen (03:34): Great. And the reason I was so excited to talk with you is that you came in at an earlier stage with the company. It wasn't really all that long ago, three, four years ago. And at the time how big was the company?

Jeff (03:51): I have a trouble remembering the exact number of employees. We had around 40, 40, 50 employees somewhere around there and you know, a couple million in revenue at that point.

Kathleen (04:03): Yeah. And, and today, how big is the company?

Jeff (04:08): Larger than that. We're we've, we've gone from, you know, that stage closer to the $50 million mark. So we've grown quite well over that time. And we've expanded into the U S, which is essentially one of the initial points of myself joining on in the company was helped build out the U S and we scaled other regions as well across the, across the country. And now we're at about 350 probably going on 400 pretty soon employees.

Kathleen (04:39): Wow. And if I understand correctly, like I'm not a big math person, but I try to, I try to do math in my head if I'm doing it correctly. It sounds like you, as a company, you grew by about 15 times in three years. Is that roughly accurate?

Jeff (04:55): Yes. I think that sounds, I think that sounds pretty accurate. Yeah.

Kathleen (04:58): Wow. That's unbelievable. And, you know, selfishly, like, I, I want to know, I want to know what went into that, cause that's, that's such a crucial stage of growth. I'm also a startup marketer. I love the startup world, right. That's like the Holy grail that everybody wants to experience. You come in when the company is smaller and you ride that rocket ship and you're a part of that story and you contribute to the growth. So, you know, from a marketing standpoint, like, I'll just turn it over to you. Maybe you could kind of set the stage and talk about like what you did in the beginning and some of the key leavers that led to the growth of the company.

Jeff (05:31): I think, I think what's important to realize is one is yes, I like to believe that there's been things on the marketing and we've done that have had a major impact here, but even going before that there's, there were some inherent aspects of Aircall that stood out at the time that I joined, even though we were small, that that indicated we had a really positive opportunity, big, really big opportunity for growth. And a friend and former colleague and great, just start up mind, his name is Preston Clark, I remember he wrote an article years ago about I think it was how to become a VP of sales in SaaS. And he wrote about uncovering the hidden opportunities or how to, how to find those small companies that were just going to take the, the I'm really going to explode it in the next stage.

Jeff (06:22): And so there were, there were some things I recall when I joined our call that really made me feel that this was something special. The first was there was an early product market fit. We sold there was traction in a very specific segment of the market, which is SMB market. There was inbound demand for the product already. And there was positive, you know, positive growth. And you could see that from an early stage, there were some things that had to be improved on certain customer segments. We had to go further into further develop who our real customers were, all these things, but there was something, there were part of us put out in the world and people were finding it, signing up for it, sharing with their friends. And that was a really positive sign. The second was, we were just getting started in a new market, which is the U S and so we had proven traction in Europe and we were just starting on the U S side.

Jeff (07:21): And so that was very exciting to me. Cause you could see the ability for the product to adapt over into the U S market. And third was probably most important because it's the sustainability of the company is Olivier, our CEO wanted to build a great company to work for and you can't really accomplish what you like to accomplish. If that's not true, is this harder to stick with a company it's harder to be there for four or five, six years or for the long haul, if you don't have that. And those, all those things were really true. First off at Aircall that I think helped us. And that, that to me was the foundational part that all their marketing tactics or strategies or how we sold it, came from that base in a way.

Kathleen (08:11): Yeah. That I love your point about wanting to build a great company because it is true, you know, to support growth that fast. I I've, I've owned a company in the past. I've been a CEO and any CEO can tell you that growth can either be the greatest thing that ever happened to you, or it can be the thing that kills your company, you know, and growth is the thing that kills your company. If you're not building that, that strong culture, like a place where people really want to be where they're inherently self motivated and excited about the mission and all that. So it's interesting that you brought that up because it's seen as something outside of marketing, but I think it's, it all goes back to that philosophy of like you companies only have customer service to the extent that they have happy employees is sort of the same principle.

Jeff (08:57): Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And you know, from there, it was from there, we grew up our, our strategy and we scaled fairly logically. So we had a good presence already in France and other parts of Europe and we wanted to expand those, get into a few new markets. There's Germany, Spain, UK, that we wanted to grow more aggressively. And we had some early ground already coming from a few other regions like Australia. And then we, you know, we really needed to focus on, on us and let that expand as well. So we had an international strategy as well from the start, which I think was very advantageous to us because we were able to spread very quickly and have an infrastructure that that was global from day one and...

Kathleen (09:51): Now just a clarification. When you joined the company, how many people, including yourself, were in the marketing team?

Jeff (09:56): There was one other person.

Kathleen (09:59): Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Were you the first US hire on the marketing team?

Jeff (10:03): No, we were just starting our us office and our one other employee was also in the US.

Kathleen (10:10): Okay. So they, so the company had grown outside of the US without having like fulltime in-house marketers. Is that?

Jeff (10:18): Yes. Correct. So we had I think we had a couple people writing content local content out there. But really our first marketer was in the U S and Olivier, our CEO, was very adamant about going to the US market very early in the company's history. So it didn't become this sort of you know, stepchild or the hated stepchild or the always in the back seat or something like that. And so was very adamant about building and moved from Paris to New York city. And so he started the first office out here with a few other, a few other employees that were hired soon after that, including our first marketer who's a sort of a junior generalist at the time.

Kathleen (10:58): So that's okay. So, so you come in your, did you have a background in international marketing at all?

Jeff (11:05): That was pretty new to me. That was pretty new. Only other really other English speaking countries, you know, UK, Australia but not real dense in across the European markets was that intimidating was exciting to me, to me that was exciting. And that was it was the perfect, that was the perfect balance because there was something to offer on both ends. You know, I was going to get to know those markets extremely well. And at the same time my first and foremost focus was how do we do this in the US? How do we replicate this in the US? So I was allowed in a lot of the opportunity to really focus on the U S for the first six months or so, because that was objective number one, build pipeline in the US. So I didn't care about product, I mean, there was no care about or no focus on product marketing. No we weren't yet on post, you know, post sale customer marketing. We cared about it a lot, but

Kathleen (12:09): Got it. You can't boil the ocean. Right. So what did you start with? Like, how did you come in? You've got good bones is how I would describe it, right? Like you said, you've got great product market fit. You have the start of a really great company and you've got inbound interest. So you've got all the good bones, like, what do you start with?

Jeff (12:27): Yeah, there were two things. One, our product demos really well. It's a beautiful product. Ease of use. The design is really what stood out as a differentiator. So first was what makes this product different? And, you know, I came from a background where I had set up phone systems in the past. One of the many things I did at Lawline of all my jobs there was I set up our company phone system. It was ShoreTel. It's actually a company called N5 networks, which was acquired by ShoreTel soon after, but I set up that system. And so it was like, you know, it's a baby boy product. He still had the landline, phones, everything plugged into some thing in the, in the back room. Every time I went to go troubleshoot it, I was unplugging wires and shutting off the internet accidentally.

Jeff (13:12): I didn't know how to train anybody cause it was just difficult to use. And so I recall my first experience using Aircall and it was just, I signed up for my own trial. It was just this wow moment because what took me weeks to set up, I already had this, I was already set up in the app. Like I signed up for trial. I had a phone number. I signed up for a Zimbabwe phone number. I was adding my teammates, I had everything set up. And so to me that was this wow moment where I really felt that from the side that I, when I was a consumer, I could empathize with that. And so first thing I really, we really thought about what is, how do we just show that to people right off the bat? How do we get that out? And so, you know, we've always focused on trial experiences and trying to get people to the point of a demonstration. And so we focused a lot on events, inviting people into our office, holding community events. We'd demo people and show the product at, at those at those events. I used to do a lot with webinars, like really bottom of funnel webinars, product driven, and just get it out there and get some early customers coming in the door.

Kathleen (14:27): And when you say events, did you, do you mean like local events or describe to me?

Jeff (14:32): We did both. We would do some trade shows. Really costly. So we were cautious, cautious of doing too much there, but yeah, we would do local events, invite people into our office and gather 50, 60 people in the sales or CX community, holding events. Do a little bit of a community around it. And then eventually we were able to follow up with them, you know, show them a demo, something like that. And it gets some early cost get, just get a few customers in the door, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. And then that would say that scaled into more questions. Okay. So we've got some things working there. Then the more challenges came with, how do we really scale and grow that more quickly? And I think one thing that's been very unique to Aircall in our marketing has been our focus on partnerships and integrations.

Jeff (15:28): And so by far the biggest driver of growth in North America has been that we've partnered with very strong companies to integrate the product for one and then to drive co-marketing and co-selling efforts. And so how do we build a brand in North America? Well, easiest way to do that was to try to attach ourselves to HubSpot and Intercom and Zendesk and companies that were already doing a great job. If we could just attach ourselves to that, that would be fantastic. And so we worked really hard to build integrations, drive up app rankings on their app exchanges, do co-marketing efforts where we did all the work. Just hope that the, let us slap the logo on there and, and help distribute it. We worked to get into onboarding emails. So it came out from a HubSpot, for example, you know, like you signed up for HubSpot, they'd recommend Aircall, one of the apps to sign up for. And so we just started attaching ourselves to these brands through product integration and then co-marketing efforts and it kind of organically grew from there.

Kathleen (16:38): So what I think there's a lot of people that talk about co-marketing and talk about channels and things like that. Can you talk a little bit more about what it takes to, to really make that partnership successful? Like you talked about doing a lot of the work, like dissect that a little bit for me.

Jeff (16:56): Well, it has to start with the need. And so we tried to go beyond the co-marketing was a way that helped promote a dual need that their customers also had. And so the integration product part is really critical. And I think, I think that's been a core thing is that the product and the marketing are really integrated at Aircall. And they always have been whether it's that trial experience and getting the customer to a wow moment, whether it's being able to have a, an amazing UI UX that we can demo really well. Or if it's on the integration front so that we are partnering with companies, building integrations into their product, to help them solve a problem. And then leveraging that from a marketing standpoint, how do we comarket with them? And so, you know, HubSpot, for example, timing is great.

Jeff (17:46): They're building out their CRM system, a sales hub, soon after they started building out support hub. And what's something you needed, you go from Salesforce to HubSpot, you need a dialer on top of that. And so we built that integration and we solved that problem for them. So somebody goes from Salesforce to HubSpot, I'm a HubSpot account executive, and I'm getting an inquiry of, okay, I'm using, you know, NewVoiceMedia with, with Salesforce. I need something new because you guys don't integrate with HubSpot, or you guys don't integrate with NewVoiceMedia. What can I use? They, and eventually we got top of mind with the HubSpot team so that, Hey, we promote Aircall and that's fine.

Kathleen (18:24): And how do you get top of mind? Like what, what, any advice? Yeah. Like what would be your advice for somebody who's just starting that process?

Jeff (18:31): A lot of work. We, we put a lot of focus on our partnerships from both the, we have that team. That's been a part of marketing, but we focused on the partnership itself, relentlessly. And so first to get one customer and do unscalable things, you know, if we got, when we were trying to really grow on certain apps with certain apps like HubSpot or a customer with it, with a K or a Intercom, those first customers, they were very meaningful. They, they have an issue. You've got to hop on it immediately. If you just got up to go above and beyond to show that, okay, I've referred over, you know, Aircall on top of HubSpot and, or I have an app that comes into attaches in the HubSpot. We have to know that if I'm the HubSpot team, I'm probably going to get a question about this integration of it's not working.

Jeff (19:24): And so if that sort of stuff comes up, you have to solve it immediately. Give HubSpot a really good experience from your side. Let them know the partnership's valuable. Gain traction over time with getting good reviews you know, lots of installs. Helping them. If you think of HubSpot, for example, they had a lot of focus on growing their ecosystem. One part of growing their ecosystem was showing that apps are getting installed. So how do we get as many apps installed as humanly possible on top of that ecosystem, regardless of whatever we have to do, and we can get their attention in that fashion. So we really focused on just hustle, really? How do we, how do we get a lot of installs? How do we drive an amazing experience with those partners? How do we solve a need for them? And then eventually if we can service them enough and give enough value, we can be top of mind for them.

Kathleen (20:16): Was there anything in particular that you can point to that really drove the growth in installs?

Jeff (20:25): There's a number of things that say there's no, there's no one magic thing. I can't think of one magic, you know, activity we did that that opened the flood Gates. It was just a lot of work. It was getting one, doing one-on-one on outbound on just a specific focus for three months, sign up many customers in the segments. It was SEO, you know, searching for what competitive terms around our partner plus phone system or call center or apps on that exchange. Could we do it was positioned our website in a certain way that facilitate people to go towards one direction. So let's just, a lot of activities, you know, they all come, they all sort of compounded. I think that the main thing is that we, we focus that as a core part of the strategy and the product was solid there. And so we, we combine the, the marketing effort and the product effort together. I think that was the, you know, that was sort of the kicker. And then was just a lot of activities after that.

Kathleen (21:32): And you talked about also one of the things that was key was really getting a lot of reviews in their partner marketplace, if you will, or their app marketplace. Were there any strategies in particular that you use that you found to be successful for getting those reviews? Cause I've, I've been in the position of having to get reviews before, and sometimes it can feel like, like pulling teeth, trying to get people they'll, they'll say yes, yes, I'll do it. And then they never do. Or, you know, like how did you, how did you approach that?

Jeff (22:01): Just pay people. An email and pay then a $25 gift card. This is pretty much our only tactic.

Kathleen (22:09): Yeah. Well, Hey, if it works, if it works. Yeah,

Jeff (22:12): Yeah, yeah. Pay for the review.

Kathleen (22:15): And did you, did you invest in any like review site marketing outside of your partner relationships? Like, did you do any G2 Crowd or any well now?

Jeff (22:25): Yeah. Yeah. So, so I'd say on top of the partner, which, which has always been still is one of our key drivers. We've always had an intense focus on inbound as well. So review sites have always been a core part of that. And you know, we could, we could control that. And so we tried to look at like, what are the things in the world that we can control? We have customers, lot of them are happy. We can control number of reviews that we have on G2 and Capterra. We just have to hustle and do it. And so we focused heavily on the first, the app review sites where we thought we could gain SMB market share, which is what we were more focused on at the moment, really small business. And we focused on Get App, Capterra. Sort of winning the awards for those those categories or those those platforms promoted them and so on. And then eventually we would spend money on them to help promotions as well.

Kathleen (23:23): Nice. So, all right. I totally took you down a winding path there cause I love, I just like getting into details. So you formed these partner relationships and that really began to kind of like heat up your, your lead gen and customer acquisition. I'm going to turn it back over to you now.

Jeff (23:41): Yeah. We did it with HubSpot, Intercom. We had a great with, still do, and that makes sense. Aircall plus Intercom, you've got chat and phone together. So I'm really focused on co-marketing with them. Co-Marketing calendars with them. We developed a couple of unique products with them as well. We have one product called Aircall now. It's not something we still actively promote, but I had a ton of buzz around it at the time, which was you could convert an Intercom chat directly into a phone call and that phone call would go directly to the rep that you were chatting with at the time. So when you got really innovative with the, those types of activities, and then we turn that into an app ecosystem. So initially we hustled, we built all the, all the apps.

Jeff (24:28): We tried to create partnerships with them. And then at some point along that growth cycle, we thought to ourselves, well, we could be that company that other companies are building into and then trying to get leads off of with us and partner with us. And then we could do lead sharing in that way. And so at some point we turned that into an open marketplace for apps that could be built on top of the Aircall market, on top of the air call API. We publish them on our app exchange and that's something we've been focused on the last year and a half, two years or so. And we've had 60, 70 companies build out apps on top of us and that's scaling quite well. And so we kind of use that as a, okay, we had to really hustle, get it done. We still do that. How do we enable other companies to do that also? Create a flywheel effect from that.

Kathleen (25:21): And now you're in the opposite position of people wanting to, whereas you were bending over backwards to make a relationship work with HubSpot, hopefully now there are people bending over backwards to make a relationship work with you.

Jeff (25:31): Yes, it's both. It's both ways still. Yeah, we grew those out. Gorgeous customer. I think I can name many, many partners that we've had that have been really strong for us. And that's been a big driver in other areas, you know, inbound, outbound.

Kathleen (25:49): When did you add outbound into the mix? How soon?

Jeff (25:53): Early? Pretty early.

Kathleen (25:56): And did you insource, like, did you have your own team doing the outbound or did you outsource that? How did you handle it?

Jeff (26:03): In house? From the start and different regions respond? You know, the international part is very interesting with with outbounds in certain regions. You know I think of France, for example. The response rates are just 3X, 2X higher than they are in, in the US for example. And so we've grown them everywhere. We've had SDRs, we have an SDR team in France for Germany, Spain, for UK, for APAC and North American team as well, although it has slightly different oddities and unique points to the local markets to grow. But yeah, we, we scaled that out and built it early. We want to do it in house and I found it particularly valuable, not just from the pipeline generation standpoint, but early on when we were first starting to go to market. I mean, that's how you get to know and experiment who your customers are. You can try different segments out, you can iterate, you can see what messages that respond, that you get are being responded to.

Kathleen (27:16): And did that team sit in marketing or in sales?

Jeff (27:21): It sat in, it sat in sales. Yeah, it sat in sales, but worked really closely with myself. And there was a brief period of time, again, this is like startup sort of life, I guess, but there's a brief period of time in 2018, late 2017 and most of 2018 that I headed up the North American sales team. And so it's kind of a blurry question because it was all coming in to me.

Kathleen (27:46): So that, you know, it's so funny because I always say like, every marketer should work as, as a salesperson at some point in their career, it makes you such a better marketer.

Jeff (27:54): Yeah, totally. And there's no better way to get to, yeah, to get to know the customer, to understand what messages are resonating. I mean, the, the campaigns we're running to figure out what what pockets of customers are responding, what messages are they responding to?

Kathleen (28:12): And to know how, like what salespeople need from marketing.

Jeff (28:15): Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's, that's how we figured out what integrations to build. That's what we figured out. The messaging on the website, and we're still using a lot of that copy today. And a lot of the information that we found throughout balance is, is, you know, actively in our, our our marketing today.

Kathleen (28:31): Nice. Now I really want to hear like, kind of the parallel story of all of this is happening. This is what you're doing from a strategy standpoint. How did your team evolve? Because you joined and it was you and one other person and how many marketers are there on your team right now?

Jeff (28:51): There's approximately a 30 marketers.

Kathleen (28:53): Oh my gosh.

Jeff (28:55): And then we've got another 10 or so in channeled partnership.

Kathleen (28:59): Talk to me about like, how did that evolve? Like what positions did you add first?

Jeff (29:06): Yeah, so we're very demand focused. Most of our early hires were in demand. I like that mentality when you're first starting because demand can hack, not a word I'm using frequently anymore, but demand can kind of piece together and hack product marketing to a degree in messaging. We could figure out contents because you have to answer those parts to get the, to get pipeline generated. So by default, you have to experiment, you have to figure things out. You could start the other side and really focus on product marketing and messaging did not solve the demand part, not piece everything together. And so I think first off was what am I okay. Being okay. And what would I like to be really great with? And we really want to be good on demand, acquisition marketing, build up our SEO strategy, figure out what channels could really work for us.

Jeff (30:08): And then have an experimental mindset when it came to customer cohorts, you know messaging, all those activities. And so our first hire was in demand for North America. We hired multiple content marketers at that point to build out our SEO which you put a lot of effort into. We then hired we, then continued on events cause we have been marketing early on was, as I mentioned, was working well for us. We hired on events. We started adding on partner account managers to handle our partners. And it, it kind of scaled from there. Eventually we got to the point where everything was being housed in the US and I started seeing a huge imbalance at that point. We're putting all this emphasis on the US and then just trying to translate things for Europe which was a mistake.

Jeff (31:03): You can't just translate content and call it localized you know, localized market ready work. And so we then, one of our first hires then went out to Paris to lead our growth efforts in Europe. And she ended up building out a pretty large team. That team was actually larger than the US team at this point because we localized everything, we built original content for Spanish market, for the German market and so on. And so we've really focused heavily on that content marketing portion there. And then I would say we delayed product marketing till about hire 15 or so, a year and a half year. And I hired our first product marketer. It was too late, but I think at that point, for every role that we've had, and, you know, I think we, before we expand into a new area, if it's demand focused, want to know this is what to double down on.

Jeff (32:00): If it's not demand focused, then I really want to feel some pressure. Like we have to have it, we can't hustle any harder than we're hustling. And if we don't have this, it's really going to hold us back versus versus getting into that mentality when you start to scale, which is you know, like, Oh, we really need customer marketing, but really nobody's, we could do customer marketing if we just prioritized it internally, or, you know, it gave somebody a new opportunity or figured out a way to move pieces around. And so he, we brought product marketing on second. We brought operations on third. We don't have a director of operations though. We've kind of more leveraged our revenue operations team for that. And then more recently we brought on brand marketing as well. So if I go through our lineage, it was demand, content, and then doing that same thing in Europe. Product marketing next. It's really help us figure out what cohorts and sort of scaling different verticals, enabling sales to go up market and these activities. And then starting to bring on brand managers to think about, you know, our, our, how we are competitively different in terms of our style, our tone of voice, all these activities that we have. We have a good longterm vantage point of our our strategy.

Kathleen (33:30): How many direct reports do you have today?

Jeff (33:33): I have, let's see. It's it's changed a little bit recently, so I have eight at the moment.

Kathleen (33:41): Yeah. That's about, I feel like that's about the max that you can have before it starts to feel like crazy. You're in one on ones all, all week long.

Jeff (33:50): Yeah. Yeah. So those teams are North American demand, European demand, product marketing, brands. We have an ecosystem head person that runs our marketplace, that new apps that are installed on our marketplace. We have a head of developer evangelism as well, who's one of our cofounders and he's responsible for essentially the marketing for developers to come build stuff on top of Aircall. And then our head of brand as well. And then the last two that sort of fringe with our North American team, which would likely now report into marketing longterm would be our partnerships head and head of channel sales.

Kathleen (34:31): Okay. All right. So I could talk to you forever and there are some more questions I have, but you are a very busy man clearly. So the question I have for you is if you were talking to somebody who right now was in the same shoes you were in three years ago, like coming in as the first, you know, head of marketing and like, and it's one or two people in the company and they, their goal is to scale the way you have. What advice would you give them?

Jeff (35:00): Well, I think there's, there's two seemingly separate concepts here. One is we really focused on what was, where could we find growth efficiently? Testing it, and then doubling down, while also placing some big bets along the way that were going to be necessary for two years down the line. And that's really critical because if we didn't do the big bets that weren't going to pay off for a long time, that we couldn't really test, we wouldn't have continued to grow. We would have grown in the short term, but not the long term. And so I think what we had done, and still do successfully is think of both the short and long term, an example. I think all the things I was mentioning earlier were sort of short term. That testing mentality and growing off of that, but then longterm, you, we had to answer some difficult questions.

Jeff (35:56): We've got to, we invested a lot in certain integrations and partnerships like Salesforce. We invested in channel which it was a lot of work to build up a channel team and direct sales. It's a lot of work to put into our marketplace and get apps to get built on top of the marketplace. On top of that marketplace, who was, are things that weren't going to payback for two years down the line, and we think they're going to work. But you have to place enough of those and and structure it in a way that you're okay if a couple of them don't work out fully and that the upside is going to be there. A couple of them do really, really well.

Kathleen (36:37): And you also, I would assume, need to have a CEO that has the same attitude. Cause it's one thing for you to feel like I'm going to place big bets and know that that's a big bet and it may or may not pan out. But like, I feel like that's the tricky thing as head of marketing. You know, there are lots of marketers who see the value in that, but if they're not really aligned with the C suite on that approach, then that can really backfire.

Jeff (37:01): Yes. Yes, totally. And I think that goes back to that original point though, which is what were the, what's the pre joining the company components that indicated this had an opportunity to be kind of special and the mindset of the CEO was a critical component of that.

Kathleen (37:20): Yeah. Wow. Well, like I said, I could pick your brain for hours, but I'm going to shift gears cause there's two questions I always ask all of my guests. So before we wrap up, I want to make sure I ask you. The first is the podcast is all about inbound marketing. So I'm curious if there's a particular company or individual that you think is really kind of setting the gold standard for what it means to do inbound marketing well these days.

Jeff (37:44): Well, I, can't not say Intercom because I just love Intercom and I'm not just saying that because of our partnership. But, but when I originally joined, I remember our, our one of, one of the members of our board interviewed me and asked me if, if we could build one company, who would you build it after? Emulate? Intercom was my go to response. Just love their brand or their content strategy. And it's just they're, they're, they're quite inspiring. I think they've always done a good job. Individual named Shane Murphy runs their marketing now. He's quite fantastic. So also love the work that there's a few answers to this from different ways. Like I love the sort of mojo that Gong has built. I find that inspiring. Drift's done a really cool job on, on social media and there's definitely parts to take out of their playbook for what they've done, what they've created. I also think that Gorgias a company that we work closely with who's in the help desk space does a really fantastic job of having that growth sort of, you know, hacker mindset. So there's a lot of companies that I think do a really admirable job on the inbound side.

Kathleen (39:00): Nice. I like those examples. You are not the first person to mention Intercom, so it's not just that he's biased. There's definitely something there. Cause I've heard people say that before. Second question. A lot of the marketers I talk to say their biggest challenge is just keeping up with everything in digital marketing, cause it changes so quickly these days. How do you personally stay up to date on, on all of it?

Jeff (39:23): I mean, I read as much as humanly possible. Both on marketing and not on marketing, I find a lot of inspiration from, you know, non-marketing books. Like there's gosh, whether it's like bio's or, you know, stories of generals and strategies type of books, I really, really enjoy. There's a book called Thinking in Systems, which is Donna Meadows, which is just a fantastic book about logical mindsets, like logical thinking and the systems that can help, can basically create the infrastructure for anything. And I find that to be a really fascinating book as, as it applies to marketing because you know, marketing is an insanely complex system as it grows kind of logically about it. You can, you can tie things back and I, I get a lot of inspiration books like that.

Jeff (40:21): And then outside of, it's more, more specific direct marketing related. I mean, any of the sort of traditional blogs, whether it's Saastr or whether it's Tom Tungaz, whether it's your traditional like SEO land, you know, SEMrush, those types of things. I love, I love inbound. I love SEO. And so I try to read as much as possible on those activities. And I'd say also Revenue Collective. I mean, gosh, I don't know what I've learned more just like life as a whole, but also marketing, because you have every great marketer on the planet in that group and you can post messages to them. So I'm giving, I'm giving a shout out to the Revenue Collective, but gosh, that's how we met.

Kathleen (41:11): That's how we met.

Jeff (41:11): Yeah. I think that's the community where I've just learned so so much. And you can just go through the logs and read old history of conversations in there and that's, that's an evening of reading right there.

Kathleen (41:21): Yeah, that's great. I would second that. So if you like autobiographies, as you said, I don't know if you've already read this, but my one hot tip for you, and I am shamelessly copying this from David Cancel at Drift because he's the one that I got this tip from, read the autobiography of Arnold Schwartzenegger. Actually has some of the most amazing like marketing and business and life lessons. I was totally captivated by it and I mean, that would not be who I would normally pick up a book off the shelf by, so yeah, it's great.

Jeff (41:55): Yeah, I will, I will. I'm gonna play this part for my wife because she knows I have a fascination with him.

Kathleen (42:03): Have you read it yet? Have you read it?

Jeff (42:06): I read like the first half of it, I have not read the completion of it. Actually. It was Audible. Like I was doing it on my own.

Kathleen (42:11): I did, I listened to it when I worked out, actually I would listen to it while I was lifting weights and I'd be like, okay. I mean, if Arnold can do what he did, I could lift 15 pounds. Right. So it's so good. I loved that book. But anyway, enough about Arnold. So if somebody is listening to this and wants to learn more about Aircall or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jeff (42:35): Well I always have to say this. An easy way is to call me on my Aircall number, (646) 712-9381. And you'll get a, you get a nice voicemail experience there as well as if you call it, then I've got a lot of lines. So I can, I can, I can distribute that and not ruin my you know, my, my cell phone for,

Kathleen (42:59): I think you're the first guest I've ever had who's given out their phone number. So I love this.

Jeff (43:04): That's it? That's it. You don't, you don't, don't email me. You can LinkedIn me, I suppose, because it's easy to, to find my my LinkedIn. But yeah, it's just drop an Aircall and that will get the message and tell me how to contact you back.

Kathleen (43:19): Cool. I think everybody should test that out. That's fantastic. All right. Well, if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, preferably a five star review, but of course, whatever review you think it merits cause that's how other folks find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Jeff.

Jeff (43:47): Thank you, Kathleen.

Podcasting has taken off as a business marketing strategy, but while many businesses have podcasts, not all of them are successful. Here's what it takes to get your podcast in front of the right audience.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Motion Agency co-founder Justin Brown shares the strategies he uses to promote both his own podcast, and the podcasts he produces for clients.

Motion Agency provides podcasting services for B2B tech marketers and Justin has worked with a lot of different companies to get better marketing results through podcasting.

In this interview, he talks about how to promote your podcast, including repurposing the content, sharing on social, using graphic assets to gain greater visibility and more.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Motion Agency website
• Connect with Justin on LinkedIn
• Check out the two Slack channels that Justin mentioned:
  • Revenue Collective
  • RevGenius

Kathleen (00:01)Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And my guest this week is Justin Brown, who is the co founder of motion. Welcome Justin,

Justin (00:20)Kathleen, thank you so much for having me.

Kathleen (00:23)Yeah. it's so funny because you and I connected, you were connecting with me as a potential guest and I'm thinking, Oh, you know, I wonder where he is and we were talking and you're right around the corner in Northern Virginia. So it's kind of nice to have a local guy on the podcast.

Justin (00:39)Yeah, it was funny when we were talking, I know you're in Annapolis and I'm here in old town Alexandria. And for those who don't know, we're like on opposite sides of DC, but very similar towns on on the water. So we're, we're close in proximity and kind of just the, the place that we live. Yeah.

Kathleen (01:00)Yes. Like twin cities in spirit. Well, before we get started can you maybe talk a little bit about yourself what you do, your journey and also what motion does?

Justin (01:14)Yeah, absolutely. So I have an interesting journey. I started my career in sales development. That was my first exposure to marketing. When I was doing it, I didn't really realize, and this was before the time of sales development falling under the, the marketing umbrella. So I thought I was just going to be a salesperson that was going to be my career. Then from there I ended up becoming a head of sales for an agency and you can already kind of see how these things are all starting to splice together. You know, I got this sales development background, then I go work for an agency. Fast forward to today. I've started my own agency where we help B2B tech companies to launch podcasts. So that's where I am today. I work with and talk to CMOs regularly. I have a podcast of my own. So I work with CMOs and tech as my clients, I talk to CMOs and tech on my podcast and that's really what I do with my life.

Kathleen (02:13)Awesome. Well, I'm a CMO in tech, so, and I'm also passionate about podcasting. Yeah, I have two podcasts right now, one this one, and then the other is one I do for my company. And actually I had one before this, so this is my third. I'm a three time podcaster.

Justin (02:31)Wow.

Kathleen (02:32)So big, big fan of it. And you know,

Justin (02:35)So maybe you can tell other CMOs why it's so important.

Kathleen (02:39)Oh, well, I mean, I could, that could be a whole episode in and of itself. Like honestly I could go on and on. It's so valuable for so many reasons. And we have actually a couple times on this podcast, talked about the value of podcasting, but what we really haven't dived into as much is for those who are podcasting, what are some things you need to do to really build your audience and make your podcast successful? And that was one of the reasons I was excited to talk with you because you also helped your clients with that. And specifically you have some thoughts around LinkedIn. So I was hoping that we could start there.

Justin (03:19)Yeah, for sure. So I think where I want to start is, pod fade is a real term. I think the average podcast last five episodes and that's because the startup cost is very, very minimal to start a podcast. I mean, really, I could, you could hit record on this zoom conversation like we're doing, you could hit record on a voice note on your phone and call it a podcast. And it sure is the issue is, is it takes time. It takes, thought it takes energy and what are you getting out of it? And I think that people the, as this podcasting medium is new into B2B for a long time, it was even in business, a B2C focused for the most part, people had B2B podcasts, but you know, it was a, here's how, you know, Chobani, yogurt got in stores across America or whatever, because you're trying to appeal to wide audiences.

Justin (04:17)That's something that my mom would listen to. My mom's not going to listen to a CMO in tech talk about how their Salesforce integrations are changing the game. But I would listen to that. And so we're building out this world of smaller niche podcasts. Well, that's great for the content, but it's tough for conversions. People are like, I want to see an increased web traffic to my site. We're releasing episodes. Why aren't people filling out forms saying that they heard about us or from us from our podcast. And the reason is, is because that shouldn't be what the focus of your podcast is, and that kind of breaks some traditional inbound mentality, which is do content, get leads, get MQL, get results. And that's not, that's not exactly what this is. And I can dive into some of the approaches that we recommend or go really whatever direction you want me.

Kathleen (05:25)Well, before we do that, I just want to say amen. Because I mentioned that I had a podcast before the ones I'm doing now, and, and that was exactly kind of my lesson learned was I started the first podcast when I had my, I was, I owned an agency at the time and I was like, Oh, I'm going to start a podcast and get leads. Exactly like you talked about. And I did it for, I don't know, 20 something episodes. And I was like, yeah, this is not going to get me leads. And so then you really have to think about like, so what's my goal as you said. And, and I think, I do think a lot of first time podcasters jump in without really thinking through the goal and the strategy and all that. And so when I created this podcast, it was more about raising brand awareness getting, and at the time I still owned my agency, obviously don't have it right now, but it was about getting our name into the conversation in the marketing world.

Kathleen (06:20)And, and it's morphed over time. Like for me now, the goal is relationship building. Like I it's, to me, this is an amazing way to meet experts within the marketing industry and to form relationships that can lead to other opportunities, but then also secondary to that, or maybe even not secondary, like I just learn a lot as a host. It's kind of amazing. So everybody's goals are different, but I could not agree with you more that for the vast majority of podcasts lead gen is really not. It's not a great strategy for that

Justin (06:53)Can be a great strategy for target account lead gen. I will say that so we recommend that you go after five different personas for your podcast. And if we talk about that relationship building aspect what you're going to do is get relationships with the people in your space, customers, internal subject matter experts, that's to industry influencers, partners. And then the final one is prospects. You know, the same idea of sending someone, something in the mail to try to capture their attention. You can bring them onto your podcast to highlight them and create a relationship with someone that you didn't previously know. Obviously don't just flip it right away into a sales call and try to you know, kind of pull the chair out from underneath of them, but they understand, you know, if you've been reaching out and trying to get in front of them, and then you have a different ask, which is, Hey, I was wondering, OK you don't need to come on my demo, but would you be open to being featured on our podcast? They get it. And usually they're excited about that. Anyway, people like to be able to talk about their personal brand, but it should be a flavor of those five things with traditional lead gen only being a small portion of that.

Kathleen (08:13)Yeah. And what's interesting to me is that, and I can only speak from my personal experience, you know, I've had the opportunity to interview people who otherwise, I can't imagine why they would ever have a conversation with me. You know what I mean? Like not to talk myself down, but but you know, people will say yes, a lot of the time to a podcast interview because it is great marketing for them. And so some of the people I've interviewed, it's been the result of purely cold outreach, like Goldie Chan, great example. I really wanted to meet her. She's somebody who's an amazing LinkedIn video creator. She's actually moved on to other things now, but I just had no, like outside of my podcast, I had no entree whatsoever, no reason for that. She would take my call, you know, but I tweeted her and I was like, I would just really love to interview you for the podcast. And she said, yes. And how awesome is that? And now I have a relationship with this person that I just think is amazing. And I've learned so much from, and you know, she's just one example and there are handfuls of them in the course of the podcast history, cause I'm almost 160 episodes in. So I've had so many great opportunities to meet people who are like my marketing idols, but also other people who maybe I have never heard of, but who are amazing. So I love that part of it.

Justin (09:34)Yeah. I actually just released on LinkedIn the other day, a post about how it's a great way to have conversations with customers. You know, you hear all the time, people say marketing should listen to what the customer is saying. So how do you do that? Right. Well, here's one option. Let's do a sales call our prospects going to be a hundred percent honest on sales calls about all the things that they're going through and experiencing. So bring your prospects and customers on and have these 30 to 60 minute conversations, not about your technology or what it is that you sell, but just about what they're experiencing and going through similarly to you, I've recorded a couple of hundred episodes. I actually know what CMOs go through. I know what is frustrating. I know. And that wasn't me saying, so, you know, what are you dealing with in terms of content marketing and how can I help?

Justin (10:26)It was like, I got a full picture of what they're experiencing and going through to then say, wow, this is what these, these folks are good at what they like to do and enjoy. And this is where they maybe need a little bit of help. You know, your other option. Your other option with the customer is to say, Hey, do you want to take 30 minutes to talk? I don't know about you all, but me personally, I have enough zoom meetings during the day that if I'm buying something from somebody, I probably just want them to give me the service and you know, and nothing against them or anything. But if they said, Hey, Justin, you know, would you mind coming on our podcast and talking to us and spending some time together there? Okay, you've got my attention. And then you can go talk to your customer. Maybe they drop, you know, a line about how they're using your technology. It's not a testimonial, but you know, maybe they talk about it or what have you. So there's a lot of things

Kathleen (11:18)That you can do. Yeah. Now, okay. We clearly are big fans of this as a medium. Again, we could do a whole episode on this. So let's say you're podcasting and you've got these episodes and it is totally the tree that fell in the forest, right? If there's nobody there to see it fall, does it make a sound? So talk me through how you counsel your clients on what they should do once the episode's been created to get it out there into the world.

Justin (11:48)For sure. So I think that is the big move that we made was we were a content marketing agency. We will, we'll build your website, we'll write a white paper for you, whatever, you know, we'll do video, whatever it may be. And what we found was when we launched our podcast in 2019, was that it's not just about this little audio recording that you get, that you throw up on Apple podcasts and Spotify. What we found was what it really is, is capturing 30 to 40 minutes with someone in your space, those five profiles that I mentioned before, and then getting to create content out of it, it's the best type of content that you can create. It's people having organic conversations about what they're experiencing in your space. And so then your promotion strategy becomes around the content itself. Not necessarily just about hey, do you want to listen to my podcast and hoping that people convert then your conversion strategy becomes very similar to anything you'd be doing with content anyway, promoting your content, getting it out there in front of the people, in your space and providing useful assets that people want to consume because they're actually getting educated.

Justin (13:13)You know, I'm an agency owner. If I go out there and tell a bunch of CMOs how they should be doing their job, they're not going to listen to me. But if I say, Hey, I've interviewed a hundred CMOs. And here's what each one of them are saying. All of a sudden, I start to get people's attention. So if we fast forward to your question, which is, you know, how are you suggesting to promote the podcast? The answer is, is using the content on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on the platforms that you use for me, it's mainly LinkedIn. And so we have, we chop each episode up into eight different deliverables because people consume content in different ways. There are video assets that are, that we create called audiograms. There are imagery which are called quote cards, which are static images with a quote on them.

Justin (14:02)We have featured articles that go out that are actually blog, you know, long form blog posts written about things that were said on the transcripts and what you need to do. And what we advise that our clients do is it's not just about posting to your company page. It'll be interacts with a company page. Maybe they throw you a like here and there. Maybe they say, eh, you know, they see someone who they know and they say, you know, Hey Jimmy, you did a great job on that episode night, nice to work. But for the most part, what people want to do is they want to interact with their people and they want to, they want you to have opinions about the content. So I don't just say, Hey, I released another episode, check it out because people aren't on people go to LinkedIn and to consume content there.

Justin (14:55)So by me saying, go check out my podcast, you know, search Apple podcasts. So if somebody's literally going to read my post on LinkedIn, pull out their phone, and then they're going to type in my podcast, tech qualified. Then they're going to throw in headphones. They're going to sit there for 30 or 40 minutes and listen to it. Probably not. And that's not what I want my content to do. I already captured this episode. I have my set of listeners. What I want to do is I want to take hard-hitting quotes. I developed another one of the deliverables is a transcript. And I pour over that transcript. What were some maybe controversial things that were said, some interesting things that were said that are different that might get people talking, take that, give my opinion of it on LinkedIn, and then let other people start to chime in and interact with me, not with motion, my company and they're talking to, and we're not Wendy's.

Justin (15:50)And you know, I know I use this example with you, Kathleen, but Wendy's is a great social profile. They do a great job. They're funny. People tweet at them because they want Wendy's to tweet back. I would say 95%, maybe more, and this is not a hard number, but are brands that people don't care if they interact with they want to interact with people. They want to interact with you. They want you to have opinions and then to chime in comments, start conversation on LinkedIn around that. So I'll stop there. I've got a lot more thoughts here, but I'll let you kind of interject and give your, your thoughts as well.

Kathleen (16:27)Justin, you and I have like a mind-meld going, because I just did a rant on LinkedIn about this yesterday. That like, I don't know. I don't know why more people don't understand this more marketers, more specifically more executives. What you just said is so important. So I want to take a pause. If you are listening, I want to repeat something he said, which is that basically nobody wants to really follow and engage with a company. There are companies that have really great witty social media presences. And I would say those are like few and far between, and that's great if you have that, but it's still no substitute for people engaging with people. So think about your own behavior. When you go to LinkedIn. I know when I go there, I'm not like, Ooh, that corporation just posted again. I got to reply to them.

Kathleen (17:20)No, not at all. I might look at their posts, but I'm not like carrying on conversations with companies on LinkedIn. I am carrying on conversations with people 100% of the time, but it's so fascinating to me because when I talk to CEOs, so many of them don't understand why it's important for not only them, but like multiple people within the company to have strong personal brands. I mean, the, the best companies, I was just discussing this with somebody yesterday. The best companies I think on LinkedIn are the companies where it's like in the culture. So like Drift is a great example of that. Like all of their employees are really active on LinkedIn. I want to say it's probably part of the job description. Like everybody's doing it. They're all doing it really well. It's baked in, there's probably really good training and they have an amazing presence that people really engage with versus that company that just like posts, self promotional stuff to their feed all the time. And that's it. It's just so boring. The ladder is so boring. So again, I totally agree with you.

Justin (18:27)Yeah. And, and I think that's what, and what the podcast does is it gives you something to talk about, you know, for me and I get it, there are so many people that are out there that feel that they, that they have imposter syndrome or no, one's going to care about what they have to say. And for me, the podcast gave me a voice because I wasn't using only my own ideas to go out there and start to talk. I was taking ideas from the people in my space and then giving my own opinion on them. So they gave me kind of clout if you will. Because these are recognizable names in my space to the people in my space. And once people see that, then you know, I actually have a topic that I can talk to because it's clearly a topic that the people in my space care about because they talked about it on the podcast.

Justin (19:23)So I think, you know, the common misconception, if we go back to it, is that a podcast is going to do the work for you. What a podcast is going to do is it's going to create the foundation of content for you to be able to distribute, to put on your site stuff that people are actually going to care about and then stuff for you to talk about. And you mentioned executives, you know, that's one of the biggest reasons that we recommend bringing on internal subject matter experts onto your podcast, get them to be evangelists of the show, get them to start to see that they have a voice, empower the people in your organization to get out there and start talking about what it is that you're doing.

Kathleen (20:03)Yeah, it's, it's so important. So let's say somebody is listening and they're thinking, okay, I have a podcast, or I'm totally gonna create one and bought into this notion that it can be the thing that seeds my contact, my content on LinkedIn. It gives me something to talk about. Can you talk a little bit about like, how you go about building your personal brand on LinkedIn and how you like get a little more granular on how you use that content?

Justin (20:29)Yeah, for sure. So a few things with your posts. Try to follow some guidelines of writing copy for LinkedIn. There are all sorts of books that are being written about the way that people digest copy on LinkedIn. So just kind of separate your lines a little bit so that it makes it easy for the, those reading. That's, that's simple in terms of the tactical approach to it. Consistency is King on LinkedIn. You get rewarded for being consistent on the platform. You will increase your visibility. So for me personally, I put out one post a day and this is what I recommend for my clients and anybody who I'd be talking to one post a day, have it go out early in the morning so that it's there all day long, maybe plan it out, you know, the day before.

Justin (21:23)So you're not, or, you know, in advance. But try to make it personable, try and make yourself vulnerable and show, you know, what you're going through, what you're experiencing, some things that you heard or are seeing things that you feel like if you saw this, you would have an opinion on it cause you want to get people to interact with the content. So when you write your post and whether that has an image or video, or it's just, text-based try to have some sort of call to action to get people to chime in. And so that's your, your personal outpour right there. Now, if you're just getting started, the biggest recommendation that I can give to you, well, two things, one don't get frustrated when you don't have it. It's definitely comparison is the thief of joy kind of situation where you see you have this great post and then you see posts that for whatever reason you may feel are inferior to the posts that you posted yet.

Justin (22:28)It has 2000 reactions, 760 comments, and it was two lines that really didn't empower your community in any way. That's fine. Don't get discouraged by that. It takes time. Most of those people who have that kind of engagement have been at this for a long, for like a year plus posting every single day. And the second piece of that, that I was going to say is commenting on other people's content that is going to be thought. And my my personal approach with LinkedIn is I'm not there for hot takes. I try to be thoughtful and everything that I post for myself. And I try and think about if it's going to help the people in my community, which is CMOs in tech. And with my comments, I try to beat them. So it's not just 100% absolutely agree. I try to give, you know, almost like a pseudo, a post of my own. That's like maybe a full paragraph or, you know, two short paragraphs on my opinion that are thoughtful comments. And when you, I do that and I try and do 10 a day. And when you do that, you watch the the inbound connections increase. Because, I mean, I can't tell you how many connections I've had that said, I saw your comment on so, and so's, I thought it was insightful. I hope to hear more from you. And then the more connections that you get, then your content will then start to get interacted.

Kathleen (24:10)So I want to say something about that, because this is a debate I've had a lot with my husband. I don't talk about him. I don't talk about him a lot on this podcast. I'm just, cause I don't like to mix the personal with the work,

Justin (24:22)But I'm excited now for what it's going to be.

Kathleen (24:25)Yeah, well so it's so funny. The first podcast I ever had was called, he said, she said like a marketing and sales podcast and he's a sales person and I'm a marketer and it was just like us arguing with each other. And so one of the debates we have is around LinkedIn and accepting connection requests. And it's really interesting cause I've done, I wouldn't say I'm the most consistent person on the planet, but I try to post pretty often on LinkedIn and I, you know, I have opinions that I put out there and this and that, and I'm pretty into like building my brand. I hate to call it that, like building my brand on LinkedIn, but it's like other stuff I'm passionate about. So I talk about it. So my, and I, Oh, go ahead.

Justin (25:03)Oh, I was going to say is, you know, I know that people sometimes get weird about saying that. I do want to say if you're not someone who's super active on LinkedIn, it has gotten incredibly better over the last six months. So I, I have no shame in that game.

Kathleen (25:19)Yeah. Agreed. And, and so the debate we have is that I pretty much accept connection requests from like everybody. It's very rare that I don't accept one. There has to be some major red flags and that he, on the other hand is very picky. Like he has to know you and you know, this and that. And, and then he wonders why he doesn't get a lot of engagement with his LinkedIn posts. And I'm like, well, you don't have any connections. I'm like, I connect with everybody because why not? Like, what is the harm? LinkedIn has changed. When it first started it was definitely like, this is my network. And so for sure, there are times right now, and it just happened to me yesterday, when somebody will message me and say, I see that you're connected with so and so. Can you make an intro?

Kathleen (26:06)And I gotta be like, I'm sorry, I don't know that person from Adam, you know, they're in my, they're in my network, but I don't know them. And I'm sure he, on the other hand, if somebody reached out and asked him that same question would be like, absolutely, this is my good friend. So, it is a trade off. And I'm sure there's people have strong feelings about this, but I guess it depends on what your goal is. Like if your goal is to get your content out there to really build your audience, then you should be accepting lots and lots of connection requests. That's just my opinion. And it's probably controversial, but that's what I do.

Justin (26:40)I accept everybody. I mean, if I, if somebody, I heard a new term recently when somebody sends you a a LinkedIn request and immediately pitch slaps you, which I thought was funny, very common. So, you know, I get those just as much as the next person, but you just ignore them. I just ignore it or I say, no, thanks. Not right now. Because for me, I want my LinkedIn rewards content that gets interacted with. Yeah. So if that person who wants to, you know, pitch me I create a decent relationship with them and just say, Hey, you know, I'm not interested maybe in the future. But it's nice to connect with you. And that person starts throwing me. You know, reactions are basically likes or a comment on my content. I move up LinkedIn's algorithm. I get more, I get viewed by more folks, you know?

Justin (27:42)So for me, that's beneficial for some people who get frustrated by that, or, you know, they want to be able to go search through their connections quickly to go see, you know, who they want to talk to that day, especially for somebody in sales that could be valuable. It's kind of like their own, you know, personal Rolodex. I get it. For me, I want to have broad reach. And I want people interacting with my content. I want to get rewarded for that. So for me, the reason that I'm going out and I'm commenting is two fold. One is I want the people who I'm interacting with the people in my space to start to recognize my face and say, Hey, yo, that guy, you know, he always comments on my stuff. And you know, I appreciate that. And I remember him. So that's one. And then the second is that you increase the amount of inbound requests that you get. Because I don't want to go out and spam the entire LinkedIn universe with connection requests. I want those connection requests to be real. And it's really nice when they start to come my way and they come my way by interacting with others.

Kathleen (28:51)Yeah, totally. I mean, I will say again, I accept all the requests and since I've started using this approach that you're describing, like I probably get 10 new connection requests a day. So it does work for sure. Again, it's not for everybody, but certainly if you're in marketing or sales, I would say this is a game changer.

Justin (29:13)And if you don't feel like you have anything to say right now for yourself, commenting is still valuable. You don't need, and it's a lot less putting yourself out there because it's okay. If a comment gets no interactions every morning and I put a, I put a post out on this the other day and this is, you know, just me being like I've mentioned vulnerable and honest and telling real life stories. Every morning I, I come into my office and I take 10 coins and I put them out on my desk and I put them away one by one throughout the day for each comment that I do keeps me honest. I know my day's not over until I do that. And that is a way that I've really increased that inbound connection requests. I think I'm up like 250% since I stayed consistent with that.

Kathleen (29:58)There's an awesome trick. So again, pause, if you're listening super great way to build a habit, get 10 items can be coins, could be paperclips, whatever, floats your boat, put them on your desk. And over the course of the day, take one away. Every time you make a comment. And at the end of the day, you'll have no items left in the pile.

Justin (30:17)I know, I know the audience can't see, but yeah, this is my Boba Fett.

Kathleen (30:21)Give it a shake.

Justin (30:22)This is my Boba Fett piggy bank I got like five Christmases ago as a, as a joke gift. And yeah, I use it every day, take out my 10 coins. And I know that I don't get up from this desk and my day until I've commented on 10 people's things. And I know it sounds maybe silly or trivial.

Kathleen (30:41)Oh, whatever works it does. Yeah.

Justin (30:44)People appreciate it. Think about yourself. If you put something out there and you're nervous about what you were going to say or, or what you were going to put out and nobody interacts with it, everybody out there is feeling those same feelings and they appreciate the comments. And what you'll also find is it's best practice on LinkedIn to respond to all comments. So even if you see like a post that has 60 comments on it, you'll be surprised at the amount of people who will respond to what you have to say, regardless of how big their name is. And that's something that I've found to be really nice about the LinkedIn community is if you take the time to say something insightful, a lot of people are going to take the time to say something insightful back. And it's, it becomes this very much. You know, I scratch your back. You scratch mine kind of community.

Kathleen (31:37)Yeah. And I would, I agree with you. And I would say because of that, LinkedIn is more and more becoming a place where true conversations happen. Whereas it used to be a place where everybody just broadcasted their career updates. So it just really changed as a platform. A couple of things I want to just kind of like go back to first of all, you mentioned, there's a lot of content out there on how to create LinkedIn content. And you mentioned like spacing out your lines. And I had to chuckle because after you said pitch slap, it reminded me. There's also a term for this form of content on LinkedIn. And it's called broetry, as in poetry by bros. So if you Google the term broetry, you'll find examples of this. And it, it cracks me up. I heard somebody else call it the dead broets society.

Kathleen (32:25)People call it that cause it is a lot of guys that do it. But not exclusively. The people that post this way on LinkedIn and some people take it to like seriously annoying extremes where it's like three words per line. Like I called her. Hard line break. She responded. Hard line break. You know, I, I don't think you need to go to quite to that level, but the, but the bottom line is the reason people write that way is, is twofold. One, it is aligned with the way we like to read, which is we do not like walls of text and two, it actually plays into LinkedIn's algorithm because LinkedIn rewards posts on which people dwell for longer. So like they stay looking at it for longer. And if you put a lot of line breaks in your post and you make it a really long post, it, people are forced to essentially dwell longer on the post. So it's just interesting to me, but I wanted to mention that because I absolutely love the term broetry. But, and then the other two things I was going to mention and maybe ask you to talk about. One is tagging other people and when you should do that, and two is hashtags.

Justin (33:32)Okay. So Broetry, I had not heard the term, but it's funny because I think that it, it stemmed from one of the early creators of this was Josh Fetcher of BAMF media, BAMF media, broetry, it all kind of plays together. You can see kind of where that all came from. But I, you know, it, it works and I like reading stuff like that, but I'm the same way. If, if I write in a way that tries to just separate my lines to make it easy, to read the three words per line thing I don't read. I personally, maybe I'm just different with, I also don't like when there's a ton of emojis, it looks like it was written by someone who's a professional copywriter. Not like, Hey, this was just an idea.

Kathleen (34:21)Yeah. Like on my personal approach to emojis. And that's a, I'm glad you brought that up because that is another thing to talk about. Like a, I do think emojis are fine. Even in the most professional settings, I think they can be used really well if used correctly. Like my whole thing is, is it adding value? Like sometimes I'll use it to call attention to a particular line in my post or like if I wanted to bullet point something, but LinkedIn doesn't allow me to do bullet points. I'll find an emoji to sub as a bullet. But yeah, there are some people who take it just to crazy extremes

Justin (34:53)And that, that goes back to you know, I try to have these personality traits that are my personality traits that I embody on LinkedIn. And I always try to think of if it's providing value in the word, the trait that I try to embody for myself is thoughtful. You know, it is me putting this out there thoughtful, or is it just trying to draw attention? And I don't want my content to work because I had some growth hack. I want it to work because I'm helping the people in my space.

Kathleen (35:25)Amen. There are a few people I follow who use that format and they do it in a way that just is so contrived feeling like I get so sick and tired of their posts. Cause I'm like, Oh, another one of these. And then there are people who do it and they follow that format, but they're like really sharing something that's interesting. And that makes me want to read it. And that's thoughtful. So couldn't, couldn't agree more. You and I are just like on the same page about all of this, I feel like we need to find something to disagree about. Do you have any controversial opinions on hashtags?

Justin (36:02)I don't do so I'll go to the previous question, which was tagging people in it. I hate to sound like a broken record here, but I try to be thought I, I'm not going to do massive tag ins. What I try to do with my content again, if we go back to looking in the mirror, I'm an agency owner. People don't care that much about what I have to say in my space and that's fine. Believe me. I don't lose sleep about it at night. I've, I'm very comfortable in my own skin. And I think it helped me a lot as a professional to understand that as an agency owner people, don't net, maybe they'll care a little bit about all my personal opinions, but I try to, because I run a podcast. And because I talk to these people all the time, I try to bring in things that other people said that I hear from other folks or other LinkedIn posts that I saw.

Justin (36:59)I talked about my 10 comments per day. Well, sometimes I'll write a comment and I'll be like, wow, that's a good post actually. And so then when I go to write that post, I thank that person who I commented on initially for inspiring that post. Then I get a comment there from them and maybe there was someone else who I thought that it might be interesting for. So I may tag them in the comments, but you'll see these giant bricks of 20 people who are tagged in a comment to try to drum up engagement. And again, I view that as counterintuitive for your personal brand. If you look like you're trying to hack the system to drive up engagement, people will recognize that, right. Kathleen saying, you see it, you, you feel it, you know, it, you don't think positively on the people who are doing that. If you don't think negatively, if you're not like, wow, this person is really out here to help me. Right?

Kathleen (37:53)No, the only time I like it is when somebody is like, Hey guys, I I've heard that LinkedIn really rewards posts that like are in this format. So here we go, space, I'm going to test it at space. What do you think? Like when they just say like, this is what I'm doing and here's why I like that. That's cool with me.

Justin (38:13)So I think, you know, when it comes to tagging people in, if you're being thoughtful about it, I think people appreciate it. I know almost every time that I tag someone in and say that they've inspired my posts, they don't even know that I'm about to do it. And they're like, wow. You know, I I did one yesterday. I, I think this woman who had put out a post and show her, I, you know, I have a note sheet that I keep of all the things that I may want to write about. And she was one of them and it was a post that she released two weeks ago. And then I say, two weeks later, Hey, you know, I was thinking about this post that Kathleen wrote to two weeks ago. I think her name was also Kathleen or Catherine. And you know, it just inspired me to, to write this and she's like, wow, you remembered my post. It's like, I spent time on that. You cared enough to remember it and bring it back up and talk about it again. That means a lot to me. I have now left a positive impression on that person. So be thoughtful care, you know, when, when you're writing something, don't just write it to try to drum up engagement, but really try to help the people in your space. And people will recognize it.

Kathleen (39:25)And to go back to what we started with to bring this full circle, if you did interview somebody for your podcast, then you absolutely should tag them in your post, both so that they see it. And also when you tag them, their followers will see it. And I think people that's of interest, like you've just interviewed them, they're sharing their knowledge. That's a great way to get that knowledge out in front of a bigger audience.

Justin (39:46)Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, just using real world situations makes what's suppose so much easier. And if we go all the way back to, you know, we went down this, this pathway of talking about LinkedIn, but if we go back to the podcast, I mean the podcast, it just gave me a voice on LinkedIn. And then the content that you get out of it is more important than the actual podcast itself. Because if you're looking to have, you know, 5,000 downloads per episode, well, I definitely recommend you don't make a podcast and B2B it. It's just going to be really hard. I'm not saying it's not possible. And there aren't podcasts out there that do extremely well. But I think the people who do well with their podcasts understand that number of downloads per episode and inbound traffic directly from someone saying, Hey, I listened to your episode and it made me want to work with you is probably way down the ladder in terms of the reasons that people are doing it.

Justin (40:51)I'd say what you said, which is relationships with those people in your space. And then the content and the voice that he gives you in your space to be able to go out and talk and say, look, I I've interviewed me personally since the pandemic. I think I've interviewed 75 heads of marketing. I'd argue that I can go toe to toe with anybody in the world in terms of how many heads of marketing and B2B technology that they've talked to since the pandemic hit. I would, I don't think there are many people who have heard from as many people as I had and that's powerful.

Kathleen (41:25)Well, and I think there's a fundamental flaw in the assumption that you need to have a lot of downloads, which is that, as you say, in B2B tech, for example, or in B2B anything, oftentimes our audiences just aren't that large to begin with. Like if, if you're really being focused, like if you want to reach a very specific audience, that audience may not be that big, but if you're getting the, call it 300, people that are in your super, super focused niche, if those 300 people are listening, that's the most highly qualified audience you could get. That's the best audience. So who cares about the other 5,000? That 300 is the 300 you want, right? Like it's quality over quantity, in my opinion.

Justin (42:12)I mean, anybody out there who's listening. If, if you had the choice to have 5,000 random listeners or 200 executives in your space that listen to your podcast, I know what direction you're going to want to go. You want those executives to associate your podcast with thought leadership with the people who are spearheading the way and they'll listen. They want to hear what their colleagues are doing there. It seems like it's an infinite world out there, but there's only so many CMOs CEOs, heads of finance in specific industries. And if you created a niche podcast, you'll get the people in your space, listening and caring about what you're doing.

Kathleen (42:57)Yeah, absolutely. Alright. We could go on and on all day, but we're actually going to run out of time because we have so much to talk about. So we're going to shift gears here for a sec. I always ask my guests two questions. I'd love to know what your answers are. The first one is this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or a specific individual that you think is really a great example of how to do inbound marketing right these days?

Justin (43:22)Yeah, for sure. So let's, I'd rather give, I think people, since we went down this LinkedIn path, I'd like to give people some profiles to check out that I think do what we talked about. A lot of that let's do. My favorite person is Justin Welsh. Justin Welsh combines the ability to have broetry, he's all text but is extremely thoughtful in what he puts out. And you can tell it's really who he is as an individual. He teeters more on sales. He was the VP of sales for a company that exploded. And now he spearheads his own consulting business for companies from zero to 50 million SaaS organizations. And he, he's amazing with the way that he speaks on LinkedIn. He talks about, he wants to post to be polarizing and he defines polarizing as the balance between intriguing and crazy. And so he teeters that line all the time and it drums up crazy engagement. So look up Justin Welsh and then two other people who I really look up to and I think that they do really well on their profiles and just being themselves are Kyle Lacy of Lessonly. You're I see you shaking your head, so I'm sure you know who he is.

Kathleen (44:42)I just interviewed him. He, I haven't published his episode yet, but that'll be coming up or by the time this airs, it will have been.

Justin (44:48)So if you're listening to this episode right now, after this, cue up the Kyle Lacy episode, because he will be better than that.

Kathleen (44:56)Totally different topic.

Justin (44:58)Totally different. He is fantastic. He comes from just a wealth of experience in the, in the tech space as a CMO awesome guy. I've had him on my podcast. I interact with him on LinkedIn regularly. And he is just, he's a guy that, you know, he's a tactician, he's doing, he's doing the job every day. And he balances, you know, Justin Welsh and me, Justin Brown are, you know, entrepreneurs and, or just self-employed. So we have the time to really promote our personal brand. You want to look at somebody who is doing it in terms of he's a CMO at a tech company, he's got a boss, but he's out there, a mate, jumping on your podcast, jumping on my podcast, putting out content all the time for both his personal brand and his company brand. He balances it extremely well, just a really talented, smart interesting person. So those two were the two that, that came to my mind that I thought might be good examples for the audience.

Kathleen (46:01)That's awesome. I love those examples. So keep an eye out for that Kyle Lacy interview. Maybe I need to interview Justin Welsh next so that I can make it the trifecta. But those were great answers. The other one I always get the question is how do you keep up? Like, there's so much changing all the time in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally keep yourself educated?

Justin (46:23)Yeah. So I have a few answers to this question. The first is I still try to read and that's not actually staying educated in current climate. And so when I read, I've tried to read books or reread books that are like pillars of sales and marketing. I don't have the time in it. And I think this is hard when people want to pick up something to read. They're like, what do I read? And for me, I like to read books that were pillars in sales and marketing because they age well. So examples of books that I've recently read I re-read spin selling and I re-read how to build a StoryBrand. Those are books that aren't going to age out. They're done on research. They're done as books that when they came out, they were, they were just, they changed the way that we do marketing.

Justin (47:23)So I wanted to start there because I think it's important that people still read. And I didn't want to give you the same cookie cutter answer of LinkedIn, like but, and I won't go to LinkedIn next. The next thing I'll go to is I recently joined a Slack community called rev genius. There are a couple out there. I know the revenue collective is a great one that Kyle Lacy's in and a lot of practitioners are in. I am not allowed to be in the revenue collective because you have to be, you can't be an agency owner. You have to actually be doing the job. So I had always had people on my podcast and I felt left out cause I want to join. I wanted to join the revenue collective. It's all these people that I find so interesting.

Justin (48:02)And I look up to and recently this new one came out, which was called rev genius. And I think in the last three to four months, and don't quote me on that, cause I might be wrong. They've gone from 15 to 5,000 members. It's a Slack channel. I'm a part of it. And I look and I love it. I, I'm talking right now about launching a podcast with them. And I get to interact very easily with all of these people who are out there doing great things. So I would say find communities of people that can help to educate you, especially in the world that we live in. Now it's so much harder to interact and engage with folks. It's why podcasts are on the rise. It's why so many people are going to LinkedIn, which would be my next recommendation. That's how I stay up to speed, having conversations with people in my space.

Kathleen (48:48)Well, I am a member of both the revenue collective and rev genius and would second that. It's a great recommendation and I'll put actually the links to both in the show notes in case people are interested in going and checking those out. So awesome recommendations, Justin. That is all the time we have. So if somebody is interested in learning more about you or motion or connecting with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Justin (49:14)Yeah, for sure. Just LinkedIn backslash Justin Brown motion. Awesome. Then my company is motion agency.io. I mean, you're, you're welcome to go fill out a form on there if you want it to work together. But you're just going to get me anyway. So you can just reach out to me on LinkedIn open to all connection requests. Like I said, happy to engage.

Kathleen (49:36)Awesome. All right. All of those links will be in the show notes. So head over there, if you'd like to connect with Justin or learn more about some of the resources or the people that he mentioned, and that is it for this week. So if you're listening as always, if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast or review preferably five stars. But if you don't think it deserves it, I get that too. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass, inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much, Justin. This was a lot of fun.

Justin (50:12)All right. Thanks Kathleen. It was great to be on.

The term "account-based marketing" gets tossed around a lot. Here's how top brands are really using ABM to get better marketing results.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, B2B Fusion founder Jon Russo explains what account-based marketing is, and breaks down the strategies that top brands are using to penetrate target accounts, get meetings, and drive leads and sales.

From researching your ideal customer profile, to building your tech stack and using direct mail to get meetings, Jon gets into plenty of detail about what is and is not working with ABM today.

Jon's agency works with industry-leading brands like Level 3, Thompson Reuters and Blackboard. Check out the episode, or read the show notes, to learn exactly what he is seeing get results.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the B2B Fusion website
• Connect with Jon on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Jon Russo, who is the COO and founder of B2B Fusion. Welcome Jon.

Jon (00:20): Hello, Kathleen. Thanks for having me.

Kathleen (00:23): Welcome to the podcast. I am excited to dig into some nerdy marketing topics with you. You know, and especially because we have a particularly interesting topic, I think in a time like this with COVID, which is account based marketing. But before we start talking marketing, can you talk a little bit about your story? You know, your background, how you came to be doing what you're doing now, what and what B2B Fusion is?

Jon (00:52): Sure thing, Kathleen, and thanks for having me. I know we've been trying to get this on the calendar and greatly appreciate kind of us getting together here. So, great news. Yeah, my story. Look, that's my favorite topic. We could talk about me all day long, but I've been head of marketing or what they now call chief marketing officer for 10 years in public and private companies. And that was in Silicon Valley, New York city in Luxembourg. So I've seen kind of every iteration of B2B marketing in smaller companies, as well as large companies in that process and how I kinda got to where I am today. One of those CMOs assignments. I remember the emotion that I felt as a head of marketing, having to account for my function. And this was probably close to 10 years ago where I distinctly remember the best practice kind of companies that are out there that are professing the funnels and funnel shapes and definitions.

Jon (01:52): And then at that time marketing automation was new. And so one of my challenges as head of marketing was I was trying to take this best practice theory and be able to articulate to the CEO and the board members, what my impact was to the business. And to my surprise, Kathleen, what I found out was I did a, with the help of a, my 22 year old sales operations assistant, who now currently works for me a little bit older now, but at that time he was fresh out of school and we were in Excel putting together marketing impact. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. I'm spending all this money on marketing automation. I'm spending all this money on best practice investments. And I can't get these two things to work and then show it to my board of directors and compounding.

Jon (02:41): That was the fact that when we were producing this information, I was literally getting it in real time. So I was basically getting the information the day before a board meeting and racing it to my board of directors. And to my surprise at the time my border directors were like, wow, we never see marketing and actually measured. We've never seen anybody take an interest in this. And I remember coming home that night and sharing that with my wife saying, you know, I can't believe that this, these esteemed board of directors have never seen marketing measurement before, and they are top, top notch VCs. And that's when she said to me, I think you have a business there. And of course, like all men, I'm very slow to learn that. So she said, I think you've got a business there. You should really go after kind of the marketing measurement side.

Jon (03:29): And that began my journey a little over nine years ago with B2B Fusion. And really we, we formed an agency that's at that nexus of systems and strategy to get the best measurement. And it's morphed a little bit since that initial vision, but that was kind of how I got to this point in time. I basically thought, well, I could become a CMO or a head of marketing for our 11th year in a row, or I could help other marketers on their journey to be more effective. And I find a lot more passionate in that, quite frankly right now. Maybe it's just where I am in terms of where I'm at in my career. I'd rather see others succeed and help them on the journey because it's not an easy journey for anyone. So that's a very long winded answer as to how we got to this point.

Kathleen (04:18): You know, it's interesting listening to you talk about that. There are two aspects of it that really resonated with me. One is when you talked about the emotion involved and having to kind of justify your existence as a marketer and I think anybody listening I'm sure can relate to that because, you know, we get into such technical details and weeds. And it's funny, cause I literally came to record this episode from a meeting with my company sales team, where they were asking about this and, you know, thank God I can pull up my marketing automation platform. And today the tools have come so far. That was the other thing I was going to say really resonated with me was, you know, I owned an agency back around the same time that you were getting started and, and it was a completely different world back then, as far as our ability to track and report. And now, now it's almost like we have too many tools and that's the problem. The bigger problem is figuring out which one to use and how to like how to really use, fully get use out of it. Cause there's just so much available to us. And so the world has changed so much for marketers. So I think it's really neat that that's what you focus on. Every marketer needs needs somebody like that, kind of looking over their shoulder and helping them.

Jon (05:35): Yeah. And you know, we're, we're on the Budweiser hot seat here in terms of performance, right, as marketers. And it may not seem that way. No one ever tells you that as a marketer, you just kind of discover it. So and especially as a head of marketing, your shelf, life is not that long. So you better be putting points on that scoreboard quickly. And it takes a village to get the right business processes, the right measurement, the right systems in place. And to your point, now we have 7,000 MarTech choices out there. 10 years ago, it was maybe in the hundreds. So it is exploded. And I think that's kind of where our direction for my agency kind of morphed was we broadly now see two major issues. One is how can we grow faster with this new technology and how do we get the most ROI out of the investments, whether it's measurement or otherwise.

Jon (06:35): And sometimes measurement is a distinct question that comes up in and of itself. But those are kind of like the categories now that we're finding most companies asking about in those first two categories, they kind of sorta existed. Like the MarTech really didn't exist at all. But the, the growth one people kind of thought about it, but they're thinking about it a whole lot more, especially post COVID. So those are the three buckets that I'd say today. I think we broadened our lens from that emotion that I felt a few years ago. Because of exactly what you said, the landscape has changed quite a bit.

Kathleen (07:11): Yeah. Now one of the areas where you're, I think doing some really interesting and, and forward-thinking work is, is in the area of account based marketing which I feel like has become a big buzzword in the marketing world, but it's really interesting because I'm a part of a couple Slack groups for marketing leaders and sales leaders. And one of them is the revenue collective, which is a fantastic group. And I remember we had a, I co-lead the, the Washington DC focus group for them. And we had a conversation about account based marketing and everybody wanted to talk about it, but then we get on the call. And first of all, nobody really could define it. And those who tried, none of them had the same definition and nobody was nobody really, at least by their own way of defining it was doing it. And so I feel like this, there's this interesting paradox with ABM where we all have heard of it and think we should be doing it. And yet not a lot of people are, and those that are doing it probably aren't like really doing it. So maybe coming to this conversation from that perspective, maybe we could begin by just having you really define what ABM is to you. And, and we could use that as a jumping off point.

Jon (08:34): Yeah, no that I could, I could see why there'd be some confusion. And maybe as a precursor to that, I'm drawing upon a hundred plus ABM experiences that we've been through primarily through relationship that we orchestrated through Demandbase slash Engagio. And we've had a great relationship them and through our own mechanisms as well. So across those experiences, I could see why a question would come up. And by the way, if you don't have that well-defined definition, even in your own company, it makes it very challenging to measure and to improve. So oftentimes we start with defining what is account based marketing. Now your mileage can vary quite a bit depending on the type of company that you're dealing with. Right? So typically we see two classes of companies that are doing account based marketing right now. The first class would be more or less along the lines of very large companies.

Jon (09:35): So for example, one of my clients McAfee, we did a quite a bit of ABM work for where they had a global sales organization. And one of their challenges was pivoting from a lead based system to an account based system. They have a very different challenge because they've acquired a lot of companies and they're doing a lot of upsell cross sell. So in bigger companies, it's a, an upsell cross sell type initiative. Now it contrast that to another one of our clients code science, as an example, they build apps for the app exchange on Salesforce are explosively growing right now. And they too had a lead based system wanting to pivot into an account based system and why they wanted to do that was really because of growth. So it was new account growth in very specific tiered vertical markets.

Jon (10:26): And so account based marketing terminology is used there in terms of acquisition, as well as the upsell and cross sell. There are probably other ways you could define it. I've seen definitions in terms of a triangle of very strategic accounts. Perhaps you're only focused on three to five strategic accounts versus kind of a mid tier accounts. There always seems to be tiering that's involved when it comes time to whatever the strategy might be. So I guess the answer is it depends a lot on the situation but getting that definition right in your company and making sure that it's well understood is critical for the measurement side of things.

Kathleen (11:11): I'm glad that you started with what you did because at least in my own experience, I think that the big mistake a lot of marketers make is they define ABM, not by what it really is, but by how it manifests in terms of tactics. And so there are a lot of people who think ABM is just targeted, dimensional or direct mail, right? And then there are people who think it's a particular way of approaching paper, click advertising. And then there are people who see it as a combination of both like, but that is not really ABM. Those are the tactics that you use to carry out your broader ABM strategy. I think you defined it really nicely, which it's really a shared definition of how you're going to go to market and how you segment your list and focus and prioritize at least if I'm hearing you correctly.

Jon (12:03): Yes. Yeah. I think you're exactly right. I think you're exactly right. It's almost, in some cases it's almost doing demand generation a lot better than what perhaps we've done before. So I think it's confusing because there's so much technology out there. Now you have the salespeople that have their own definition of account-based, whatever sales, marketing, everything, you know, whatever the flavor is du jour. And then you've got marketers that also have their definition. So it's chaos in terms of definitions which makes it really, really challenging for marketers to say, Hey, I produced X number of MQLs or marketing qualified accounts for, for sales to then go target or go after. So I'm not surprised that you found, you know, what you saw in that Slack channel. It's not a surprise to me.

Kathleen (12:54): Well, and then the other thing that I find interesting about ABM and this came up in that conversation, I mentioned that we had in the revenue collective because we had half of the people on the call were sales and half were marketing. And what became very clear very quickly is that it's, it's not, it is something that spans both groups. And it, you know, we always talk about the importance of sales and marketing alignment, but I would say perhaps with ABM, more so than most things, it's so important because there were people who sort of said, well, I'm in marketing and we've started doing ABM, but the sales team's not on board, which basically means you're not really doing ABM. And then we have other people who are like our sales team has a list of, you know, tier one, two and three accounts, but our marketing isn't really doing anything, which also, you know, so it's, it's, that, that is also interesting to me is that it really needs to be a joint effort between the two and, and getting that coordination seems to be more difficult maybe than it should be.

Jon (13:55): Yeah. This is a topic we've, we've been talking sales and marketing alignment. We've been talking about for 20 years and I think you're, you're hitting the nail on the head in terms of, for ABM to be successful you really have to have that alignment. And if you have an SDR function, that's the connective tissue, meaning it's the connective tissue between marketing and sales. So you're only as good as that connective tissue in terms of targeting. And let me give you an example on that. I won't name names, but we were in another client situation and you got to remember SDR is a very, very difficult job, very, very challenging job, and probably the most valued job from some surveying that I've done with my peers in terms of what the next generation CMO is. Having said, that we found SDRs that were faking Amazon gift deliveries and to book meetings, because that's how they were incented to get meetings.

Jon (14:52): Now, you think about the brand damage that you're doing when now when you're 22 or 23, I don't know what you were like when you were 22 or 23. I couldn't even remember, you know, my head for my elbow back then, but it's a tough job. It's a pressure cooker job that you've got to get these meetings. So you know, bad behavior, but the damage that, that does to the brand and, you know, forget about ABM, just growth. Like how can you possibly grow when you're, you're, you're doing something like that. So that's one very clear example of why that function is so important in account based marketing of that handoff between marketing and sales and that, that connective layer.

Kathleen (15:36): I think you hit the nail on the head with the SDR being the connector and it's, it's interesting, cause you do hear more and more conversation about SDRs traditionally having been thought of as sitting in sales and now more and more we're seeing them sitting in marketing perhaps for that very reason. So I'm, I would love to, to hear from you, I think for a lot of people it's hard to, to really picture what a best in class ABM strategy looks like without kind of having some examples. And you do work with a lot of companies, as you mentioned maybe you could share, and you don't need to name names if you can't, but I'd love to hear some examples of some campaigns that have gone really well and been super effective. And what goes into that?

Jon (16:20): Yeah, it's a, a thoughtful question. And just thinking back to a couple end points like to me, the end point is what have you done to move the needle from a certain stage? So I can think of cases where we've helped move the needle from say a stage zero to stage one, and we can measurably see what that conversion improvement is over a period of time. So I could give you an example of where we more than doubled it from a 22 to 49% jumped from stage zero to stage one and how we got there was really through a series of plays a series of plays, meaning it wasn't just marketing batch and blasting a bunch of emails. It was being really thoughtful toward very specific accounts. So it started with what accounts were you focused on? And within those accounts, do you have the right contacts, are the contacts that you have?

Jon (17:21): Do you have enough research that's done on those contacts? So in this case, in order to get to that doubling, we had to do a lot of pre-work and do some research on those contacts. Then it became a question of what that campaign strategy was. So together with sales, we put together a coordinated touch strategy between marketing and sales, electronic outreach with phone outreach via LinkedIn direct sequence, as well as a marketing followup. So kind of a multitouch cadence or approach. And what we found was the more obviously, I mean, everybody talks about it. The more personalized you can get, the more relevant you will be to that end user. We spent a lot of time on that personalization. It's really hard to do at, you know, people talk about personalization at scale. The most effective way that we have found doing that is actually offshoring research at a very low cost and doing a lot of groundwork that the SDRs quite frankly could or should be doing, but it's, it's a function of their time. So what you're doing is you're trying to speed up some of the research process of the SDRs. So in this case, as we did the multitouch, the SDRs were prepared with their outreach and their canes with some nuggets that they could drop into their sequences and then target that end user.

Kathleen (18:47): So can you just, sorry, I want to clarify when you say offshoring research, what kind of research is this? Like, what are you looking to surface?

Jon (18:54): So it, it, we've got if you're familiar with a Miller Heiman blue sheets model, it's a similar model to some of the questions that are typically needed to be addressed going beyond firmographic information account industry, revenue size employees. It could get down to somebody's college or university, which you could scrape off of LinkedIn, and you can potentially personalize that the interests in terms of what they follow. There are now vendors that kind of focus in an in and around that area as well. So if you don't want to off shore, you could get a vendor that would focus on it. Anything that could get it a little bit more personalized and then doing the account-based research itself. So any G2 that you can gather as far as what some of the company initiatives are, that two would go into this form. So the way we did it was we had a set of questions that they would go and, and why we offshored is, you know, we would structure it in a way where they would have to fill out or populate the questions and do the research via the web to them present back to the SDRs. And it would be resident in Salesforce, such that you could, you could pull out access information as needed. So that's how, how we would approach that.

Kathleen (20:17): What's an example of how an SDR might use some of that?

Jon (20:22): Really, really good questions. So we've seen actually an evolution of this too. At, at first we kind of let SDRs, we would give the information to say, you know, have added SDRs, do whatever you need to do over time. What we've learned is there's a lot of benefit and value of having marketing really create the cadence structure or the message and the outreach with the fields that might be populated by the SDRs through that research. So marketing is really the skeleton and they provide the skeleton. It doesn't matter where the SDRs report to, and why we, we came to that conclusion is it totally avoids the Amazon gift scenario and it controls the message. And typically salespeople are grateful that you take, as a marketer, interest in that. And sometimes marketers end up ending the, that tool as well, like the sales loft or the, the outreach. But anyway, to answer your question, I'm, I'm deviating a bit, what we would do then is give them the opportunity to pull that information from the research and drop it into the template, and they're going to have to massage it. There's some level of massaging that has to be done, but what they're not doing as a wholesale net, new creation of that template and that outreach.

Kathleen (21:46): Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So we have really good research on the front end. We have marketing essentially dictating messaging frameworks, so that SDRs, you know, are not creating it out of whole cloth every time they have a conversation. And your SDR is really trying to get you that first meeting. What are some of the other elements of, of these really great campaigns you've worked on?

Jon (22:13): Yeah, some sometimes we've seen, and I wouldn't say in all cases because I wouldn't want to mislead people, but in some cases doing a direct mail or a customized mail campaign somewhere early on in that prospecting cycle has been helpful. There are a couple companies that are out there that do that. But the one that jumps out to me that we've recently have experienced with one of our own clients is a company called Alyce where Alyce has a lot of sophistication around the interests of the end user and can pull information from the web and make recommendations based on the interest. So for example let's say I was the prospect and you can see visually behind me, I've got a lot of college basketball memorabilia behind me. So it's likely that a system like Alyce would pull that information and say, Hey, Jon is really interested in college basketball, specifically the university of Connecticut college basketball, and maybe there's something related to that, that you could recommend under a certain budget that could eventually get to Jon. And there are ways to get it to the home address now as well. So that has been an effective way. It flies close a little bit to the sun of, you don't want to do a quid pro quo, like, Hey, I'm buying your first meeting. But sometimes what we see is it's, it can be an effective way to kind of break the ice. Or if that first meeting's already established, the second or third meeting, it's just helpful to kind of maintain that momentum.

Kathleen (23:52): Yeah, I've done a little bit of that kind of mailing in a past life. And I found that the real utility of it was twofold. One it's getting past gatekeepers, especially if you're trying to connect with somebody who's fairly high level in an organization. You know, flat mail does not do nearly as well at that. And secretaries, personal assistants, et cetera. If it's a package, if it has something personalized, they're going to forward it on. They might open it. They might not, but they're going to forward it on. And then the other one is just, I think, on the recipient end, at least through the feedback I've gotten, if it is truly well thought out, and if you've done a good job of it, a lot of times you'll have, like, we had somebody, this was back in the early days when I had my agency, we actually had a guy that we had been trying to get a meeting with, write us and say, wow, you really like hit the nail on the head with that. Like it's worth having a conversation just cause I totally respect how well-targeted this was. And I think, I think it can peak somebody's interest if you're able to, to really nail something that matters to them.

Jon (25:02): I think a good example of that was the last physical conference marketing conference that you and I think were both, that was the demand gen conference in February and Phoenix or Scottsdale. And there was somebody on stage in the millennial section that talked about how she received a yoga mat. And she said she was blown away because she's like I do yoga 24 by seven and out of the blue, this person, after I was already in a sales cycle toward midway or toward the end, sent me this out of the blue. And she's like, it resonated so much. And here she is telling an audience of a thousand plus people of marketers, right? Like we all, we're all drinking the Koolaid. But it was really a really powerful example as to the level of connection, if you can get that personalized touch. And that's where I think Alyce kind of separates themselves from kind of the other, other systems that I've seen on the market that our clients sometimes use as well, but where they can kind of separate themselves as they have the intelligence to figure out what does this person really, really what are they interested in?

Jon (26:11): What's relevant to them? What's going to resonate with them? We've had situations where we've actually tested handpicking versus their system and their system has been more effective. So yeah, it's, it's been pretty, it's pretty amazing. And you know, that technology didn't exist 10 years ago, so it's a, it's a new world. So I think that those types of things help with ABM. It's not a Nirvana, it's not going to solve world hunger, but it, if you do things like that your chances of success go by an order of magnitude.

Kathleen (26:44): Now you mentioned as part of what you were just describing that it's, there are ways of getting home addresses. And I feel like this is the challenge we're all facing right now is that, you know, people are not in their offices. And so what used to be a simple exercise of, you know, look up the website, scrape the address and go is, is no longer. So can you just touch on, are there any particular tools or anything that you like or a strategy for tackling that?

Jon (27:10): Yeah. And I think a couple of the the direct mail providers Alyce and Sendoso specifically, and probably PFL, I just have not checked with them recently, but it wouldn't surprise me if they haven't thought of this because the other two have, they now have figured out a way to drop in a form and capture the home address without storing the data longterm. So they've figured out a way to, to reroute that direct mail and bring it to the home address. There have been some instances that I've heard of, some people were early on with COVID they were very reluctant to receive direct mail because they just didn't know. But I've heard that more as the exception rather than the rule. But, but there are some of those case is out there. The other thing, the other value in doing that validation is direct mail can be a very expensive proposition. And there are ways that we, we have recently figured out ways to do this where you can actually track the ROI, whether it's gaining new meetings or accelerating the pipeline, but it's it's PhD level work like something that would come intuitively you really have to stare at the systems to figure it out. But there are ways where you can actually now begin to track that depending on your marketing automation system, so that too can be valuable data to, to bring back to your company.

Kathleen (28:34): Yeah, you're so right, because when it comes to that direct mail stuff having done a few of those, I would say if they're easy to do, but they're easy to do wrong in the sense that you could send a really cheap, not so great item that doesn't, that isn't effective and you could spend a lot of money in doing it. Or you could like narrow your list a little bit more and spend more per person and really get amazing results. And I think that's, that's where a lot of people go wrong is they try to go too big and, and it doesn't, it doesn't have the effectiveness of spending more per individual getting a really fantastic item and maybe doing it in stages. Like we used to always tell clients when I had my agency, pick, you know, if you want to spend a lot, pick 20 accounts that are like super strategic and spend a lot on them, send it out, see how it works. And if it works, then do the next one. Right?

Jon (29:28): Yeah. Yeah. Staging, I think is a terrific idea because it does take time like any of this marketing technology or, or anything new, it takes time to see those results. It takes time for end users to adopt to. So you're talking about maybe working something new into a sales person's workflow that didn't exist before or an SDR workflows. So you're changing behavior, which I don't know about you, but for me, it's difficult to change behavior. So it, it takes time, but once you figure it out it's pretty powerful. It's, it's really, really powerful.

Kathleen (30:04): Yeah. Now moving beyond the mail piece, because I feel like we could spend all day on that as a topic in and of itself easily. And it's an interesting topic, but when you look at approaching ABM campaigns what are some of the other pieces that go into those campaigns beyond mail and SDRs?

Jon (30:25): Let's see, what other things? Other than the personalization piece I guess the biggest piece would be the measurement side of things and really making sure that you are capturing what it is that these campaigns are producing and ideally in Salesforce. So there's probably, there's a whole campaign strategy to get to that point, but the end point would be, you really want to have a clean and crisp measurement. And I'll give you an example of what I mean by clean and crisp measurement. So it's easy for us to get caught up in the campaign lingo and you probably have used Salesforce before. I'll give you an example, the leads object in Salesforce, what they call the leads object, doesn't necessarily relate to anything else in the database. So you could have all sorts of activity on the lead side of things and your salespeople who may work in your contacts and accounts may never see any of that activity.

Jon (31:26): Even if you have the technology to in theory, link those two up, there still can be cases where there's activity on the leads that are not coming over to the accounts and to the contact side. So to answer your question on the campaigns, if you're doing all this campaign activity and you're like, Hey, I'm a, I'm doing this great, great job, but if your underlying processes aren't right in Salesforce, it's not going to matter. Your campaign strategy is not going to matter, or it may matter, but somebody else is going to get credit for it. Meaning the salespeople will take credit and say, Hey, we did all this work. Marketing didn't do the work. So really getting clarity around kind of that measurement and NPS is a very, very critical piece. And I can give you an example of a client of ours, that, where they came into the situation and through a dashboarding, we, we learned a couple different things.

Jon (32:20): One was there was all this activity going on on the lead side and they couldn't understand it because it wasn't in their targeted tier one, tier two and tier three, they're running all these campaigns. And lo and behold, what we discovered was their ICP was not correct. They thought it was a certain assumption, but through our dashboarding, what we realized was there was a new target market that was returning, eventually returning, a lot of revenues. So what they ended up doing was pivoting the entire company. This is post COVID pivoting the entire company toward that vertical market and, and getting a lot more folks just because of all this activity that was going on. So that's another reason to dashboard. The other example that same client, what we discovered was in the sales efforts, we found that the sales team was following up on certain accounts.

Jon (33:14): And in one dashboard we could see the activity level of sales and we could see the activity level of marketing, and we could see that the accounts were different. And so we were like, well, why is there a difference? It goes back to what you said, you know, a minute five, which is why aren't we aligned? Well, now we can visually see sales is focused on five accounts and they're hyper engaged here. Our marketing's got six accounts that are hyper engaged, that that sales is not. So visually we now have the data where we can say, Hey, we're just not aligned. So it goes beyond the theory of alignment. You can actually see it. And this all rolls up to your campaign question, like, what are you doing right in your campaigns, if you're able to dashboard some of that, your chances of campaign effectiveness and future investment go up by an order of magnitude, because now you can have the conversation. It could be a lot more data driven versus, you know, Hey, I just ran this great seven touch cadence, or with direct mail and this, that the other because you really need to measure that days on.

Kathleen (34:20): I love that, that we're sort of bookending this conversation and coming back to measurement. Cause I feel like that's what we started with. Like that was the Genesis of your business. And it, it, it does it like always comes back to that. Right. so speaking of measuring, can you maybe share with me a sense of what kind of ROI some of these companies have seen from account based marketing when they do it? Right.

Jon (34:45): Ooh, good question. And I've got a bunch of statistics, but I don't have them off the top of my head

Kathleen (34:50): Ballpark.

Jon (34:54): The hard thing with ROI is you really need to track costs too, with your upside revenue. And what I find is very few companies have that level of visibility. So I don't have a really solid answer on that one other than I can get back to you, but that's not gonna help your podcast. But typically what I see is mostly on the revenue side. So for example, I'll see engagement in terms of accounts that are happening. So if, if you're getting a large percentage of accounts that didn't engage pre ABM to post engagement, that would be a mechanism. So if you have the definitions, right, you're, you're making progress as a milestone of saying, I've got a certain percentage that are showing account engagement and within those account engagements, what percent are then converting to an opportunity after that initial ABM strategy implementation. And that's usually more of a revenue metric as opposed to an ROI metric, if, and I'm really, you know, I'm splitting hairs here. I also think that not a lot of board members and VCs are asking per se about ROI. They're asking about some other questions. They're asking about a cost of acquisition, CAC, LTV to CAC ratios. So they're going more broadly bubbling things up at a more broad sense, which are typically manual calculations.

Kathleen (36:34): Do you find that cost of acquisition comes down dramatically with ABM or no?

Jon (36:39): I think it all depends if, if your, your focus on strategic accounts, it's costly, no matter what, because you got to, you got a huge buying committee. It's a lot of energy and effort to kind of crack that from a strategic account, but if you're doing a one to many, yeah, it can, but I think it's, it's an investment, no matter how you slice and dice it. I don't think it's any cheaper than demand gen. I think demand gen is kind of the first generation of marketing automation where you can just kind of spray and pray, but you're using a lot of the same technologies and the same people as you are with ABM. So I don't know if there's a huge savings per se. It's just a little bit more focused effort. I think that that would be the best way to think of it.

Kathleen (37:28): Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, it's, I feel like this, this could be a 10 hour long podcast on the topic of ABM. But it cannot be because we do not have 10 hours nor does anyone want to sit and listen for that long. So I want to switch gears for a second and ask you a couple of questions that I love to ask my guests. The first is, you know, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast, and I'm wondering if there's a particular company or a specific individual that you would point to that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days.

Jon (38:03): Hmm. Great question. I think some of the vendors that do a really good job at it, Drift, Gong, the usual suspects, Drift, Gong, HubSpot I would say, would be the strong, strong performers in terms of they're putting out a lot of content. Drift feels like a very natural kind of inboundish, I don't know if you'd kind of call it inbound. It's not, you're not really calling people if somebody has to reach to your website. So I guess that that would be an inbound. So I would say those three are the ones that come to mind in terms of who's doing it really, really well.

Kathleen (38:41): Drift certainly comes up a lot when I ask that question and the other ones, I mean, while, I mean a HubSpot of course but Gong has started coming up more and more lately. So it's always fascinating to me to see the trends in how people answer. And when I start to hear certain names over and over again, like that's an interesting indicator. Second question is that...

Jon (38:59): Gong has done a phenomenal job there.

Kathleen (39:01): Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Jon (39:03): No, go ahead.

Kathleen (39:03): I was just gonna say the other, the other thing I hear a lot of marketers say is that they really struggle trying to keep pace with all the things that are changing in the world of digital marketing. And I think this conversation is a great example, this struggle with like, what really is ABM and how really do you do it? What, how do you personally stay up to date and current on all things digital?

Jon (39:25): Yeah. And that's a, a common issue right now, you know, going back to MarTech of three to five years ago, there was a thousand MarTech providers now 7,000. So how do you keep your finger on the pulse? It will sound self-serving, but relying on agencies that spend time with a lot of different technologies, cross organizations and tapping them, I'm surprised actually that more of our clients don't rely more on us for that type of advisory work. Typically we're attending a lot of the conferences. So you'll see me at either speaking or attending a lot of the major conferences and whereas they may get the opportunity to go to one or two, I'm going to eight in a year or 10 in a year. So we're leaning heavily on kind of your partners for that expertise or understanding is certainly one way post COVID now.

Jon (40:25): I think another way is just Slack and being, you had mentioned, Hey, you're involved in Slack channels. And I think you and I are involved in some of the same Slack channels cause we've been communicating on some other things there, but post COVID, I think a lot of stuff now is just gone to communities like Slack. And there are a number of different communities, whether they're marketing operations specific, growth operations specific. I'm on a board that is focused on growth ops and we've got a community. There's CMOs specific Slack channels. So that too would be an area to ask, you know, colleagues. There's even geographical ones. I found one up in the Boston area that that has a heavy concentration of Boston based heads of marketing. So, you know, I think triangulating across all of those sources, as I think about it out loud are probably, that's how I keep kind of in the know so to speak.

Kathleen (41:20): Yeah, I think you're right with a lot of these communities. It's a way to shortcut what otherwise would be a much longer process, you know, and, and just sort of take it from the people that, you know, know a lot and let them tell you what, what need to care about. But yeah, I mean, I rely on those communities heavily, although I will say my latest pain point is that I'm in too many Slack groups and there are a few that are just a lot of noise and I'm, I'm now to the point where I'm thinking I'm gonna just exit some of them and focus on the two or three that are really delivering value. Cause it can become a huge, huge distraction.

Jon (41:54): I, yeah, I could totally see that as well. And sometimes what I do with Slack is I kind of cherry pick and go in and out, the beauty of Slack for me is if you ask an ignorant question about two days later, everybody forgets about it. Cause it's so, you know, it's pushed up in the, in the threads of threads. So I feel you on that and that's how I kind of dip in and out. I'm almost like a seagull I'll fly in. I'll ask a couple of questions and then I'll pop out.

Kathleen (42:23): Yeah. My favorite feature of Slack is that you can set up your sidebar to show you all of your unreads. And I can just like come back in, look at all the unreads. Mark them as read, see the ones that are important and then go. Cause it's really distracting if you try to like jump in every time you get a notification.

Jon (42:42): I hear you loud and clear on that. I think that that too could be a generational thing for me. I would never want, some of our clients ask us to have Slack. I reluctantly agree to that because it is incredibly disruptive to my workflow. It is incredibly disruptive to the workflow. So, but there are ways that we've integrated Slack with other project management tools that have helped speed up the process. So it helps them and it helps us but from a workflow process, that can be very disruptive. I agree with you on that. Yeah.

Kathleen (43:15): Well I'm sure that there are some people who are listening, who have questions or would love to reach out and connect with you online or learn more about B2B fusion. What is the best way for them to do that?

Jon (43:25): Yeah. Great question. So two ways. One would be on LinkedIn or you can always email Jon dot Russo, [email protected]. And at any point in time, if you just want to have an exploratory conversation or need something to bounce off, I'm happy to do a quick call with you. And you know, we can, we can compare notes, so don't hesitate to reach out

Kathleen (43:45): Great. And of course, as always, I will put the links that Jon just mentioned in the show notes. So head there, if you want to reach out and connect with him and if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, I would love it. If you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, a preferably five star review so that others can find us. And if you know somebody who's doing really great inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much, Jon. This was a lot of fun.

Jon (44:16): Thanks Kathleen. I really appreciate it.

SEO best practices are constantly changing as search engines fine tune the way they determine how to rank content. Here's what's working right now.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, iPullRank founder Mike King shares the SEO strategies that he's using now to get results for his clients.

From content and keyword strategies, to natural language generation, internal link generation and technical content optimization, Mike goes into detail with tips about how you can spot SEO issues that might be hurting your rankings, and what you can do to fix existing problems and proactively position your site to rank well.

If you love getting into the technical weeds (like I do), this episode is for you!

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the iPullRank website
• Check out Mike's movie Runtime
• Follow Mike on Twitter
• Read Mike's Medium article "This, too, shall pass"

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week I am excited to welcome my guest Mike King, who is the managing director of iPullRank. Welcome Mike

Mike (00:32): Kathleen. Thanks for having me.

Kathleen (00:34): So excited for you to be here because I heard you speak back in, I think we decided it was 2016. I was attending Wistia Fest, which is not a thing anymore. It was an awesome annual conference that Wistia ran for a few years there. And I went to it and I, I saw you, you speak on the main stage about SEO. And I remember at the time thinking this guy is amazing. His talk is really good. It's packed with incredible substance, which you can't always say for main stage talks. And, and like, wow, I was just so impressed. And it was funny because recently when I was asking people in my network who I should interview for this podcast, your name came up and I kind of connected the dots. And I was like, that's that guy? So I'm so excited that like this has come full circle and now I get to meet you and, and pick your brain.

Mike (01:40): Thanks for having me. And yeah, that was a great show. I really enjoyed Wista Fest. I really appreciate them as a company too. Like just their ethos. It kind of reminds me of early Moz. So yeah, I really love those guys.

Kathleen (01:54): And they did a very Seinfeld-esque thing where they had a great conference that was growing and they were like, we're not going to do it anymore because we've realized it's not the right thing for us, but they definitely left while they were on top. So that was cool. So before we jump into all things SEO, can you maybe give my audience a little history on yourself and how you came to be doing what you're doing now? And also what iPullRank does. And I should note, as I say that, that this is basically the sixth anniversary of the company, so happy anniversary, that's a huge accomplishment.

Mike (02:32): Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, it feels crazy to be here six years and, you know, just because of like the, the weight of everything that's happening in the world. So yeah, I'm very appreciative that we are still around. So yeah, me, my background, I did music for a living for a number of years, but, you know, before that, I grew up a very nerdy kid who learned to code from 12 and all this, and actually got into a bike accident. And and I didn't have health insurance cause you know, I was a rapper and this before Obamacare and I had to get a job to pay my medical bills. So first place to hire me was an SEO agency because of my, my technical skills. And then I ended up working at some bigger agencies and then some search focus firms.

Mike (03:25): And then after that, I was just like, I'm pretty sure I can do this myself. And so six years ago I started the agency just put a, put like $5,000 in a bank account and never really looked back. And so what we do is, is digital marketing of course, with a primary focus on SEO and content strategy. And, you know, we work with a lot of clients and we really build that rapport and that trust. And then they allow us to do other things as well. So we've got some expertise in things like analytics and machine learning and so on. And there's just a lot of overlap between those that allows us to be very effective and the things that we do for our clients.

Kathleen (04:03): I think it's interesting that you say, you know, your background, you were kind of nerdy and you learned to code because I feel like what marketing has evolved into these days, that is a super power, like people who know, who understand code and who, who are more data driven and, and kind of think like a programmer there's so much you can do with that knowledge, as opposed to the way marketing was taught way back when I studied marketing, which was like a much more about like strategy and creative. And it's just, it's a different discipline today.

Mike (04:39): Yeah. And I think that we kind of exist at the confluence of like marketing technology, creative and like media, right? Like, so there's when I worked at some bigger ad agencies, everything was pretty rigid in kind of like what you just described. It's like, okay, you do that. We have a strategy, we do the creative, we run the media and that's it. But because with SEO specifically, you have to like fix the website, you end up like touching a lot of other different areas. And so that's why we ended up getting into machine learning and things like that because all of that supports what we're trying to do. And I kind of look at it as though, you know, the web is a program. You know, the search engine is a program. Your website is a program, that's an input for the search engines program.

Mike (05:31): And so if you think of it as just like an ecosystem of program, you can make your website do anything and then you can make it ultimately, you know, work for these other programs. So if you think about something like personalization that is literally turning your marketing mix into a program that reacts to people's you know, their, their features and their behaviors. So yeah, I agree with you. It's definitely a superpower because if you think of, of everything in your marketing in that way, you understand that you just have so much control over what can be done.

Kathleen (06:08): Yeah. It's amazing. And, and I know, you know, you have pretty deep SEO knowledge and experience. In fact, you were recently you were, you're going to be speaking at Moz con live, which of course, due to the crazy situation that we're in as a world, you presented at Moz con virtual you did something really different and creative that I want to maybe start with here. So can you talk a little bit about that? Cause it's so cool.

Mike (06:38): Yeah. We made a movie. And the way I describe it as it's like Batman, the animated series meets the TV show, mr. Robot. And so they told me like the theme of Moz Con this year was going to be something like circus or carnival related. And I was like, all right, why don't we use a character that's like, kind of like the joker and make it like the three ring circus of technical SEO. And so you've got this protagonist who she's like this hacker type who is when you first meet her. She's just like doing all this SEO stuff, like super fast. So of course you got to present it in like a Hollywood way. Cause otherwise people would get bored. And then she runs into a problem. She meets me. I'm kinda like her coach. And so during the process of me coaching her to beat these different challenges, I'm also teaching the viewer different technical SEO tactics.

Mike (07:32): So going into this, you know, like you said, I was excited to speak at Moz con live cause to me it's like the super bowl of SEO conferences. And when they said that they were going to go virtual at first, I was a bit disappointed because I really enjoy the, you know, speaking in front of 2000 people with my newest, coolest tactics and all of that. But then I realized like, no, this is an opportunity because not only is this virtual, but they want to do a prerecorded. And I'm like, alright, let's maximize this media, let's do a movie. And so my, the, the creative folks on my team were super excited about it. And we came up with a few different concepts of how we could do it. And then we just made it happen. You know, we, the, the music in the film is mostly in house.

Mike (08:21): Like the person that is the voice actor for both the clown character and the woman, that's a protagonist also sings. The first song that you hear when the wind starts. Yes. Her name is Neferkara, she's our office manager. And she's so talented. And it was really cool to be able to like extract the talents of different people across the team. So like I wrote the script, I'm also a voice actor in it, our senior visual designer, she did the design concepts and then we've got designer who's also an animator who contributed. And then, because the timeline was so compressed, we also brought in a couple of freelancers to help us out. And it was just like, you know, one of those round the clock projects until we turned it in, like we literally turned it in. Like they said, we need it by 3:00 AM. At this point I had sent on the email at two 59 and 48 seconds. But yeah, we made it happen. It was a really fun project.

Kathleen (09:23): So I just want to pause for a second. And for anybody who's listening, he made a movie. Like this wasn't just, let's film a video. This is like, you made a movie, you wrote a script, you brought in talent, it had a story. It was animated, which I think is, makes it even harder and more work. That just blew me away when I heard that. And when I saw it, I was blown away too, because it's really good. No, it's really good. And so where I, I'm sure the thing that everybody's thinking as I listened to this is wait, now I need to go online and see this movie. So where is this movie? Where does it live?

Mike (10:05): Yeah. You can watch it on our website. You just go to i pull rank dot com slash runtime. Runtime is the name of the film. And it's right there and we watch it.

Kathleen (10:16): So cool. So a lot of what that movie was about is what is working right now in SEO. And that's really what I wanted to talk to you about because, you know, SEO is one of those things that like, you can't learn it and be done, right. It's just constantly changing to the point where this week, you know, all I look online and, and I'm seeing like, Oh, there's a core algorithm update with Google. And then, and then two days later, it's no, they just made a mistake. And you know, there's all this craziness happening in the world of SEO, which is why it's so appropriate. So people who are listening to this can't see. But if you check out the show notes, you'll see it. Mike has this awesome zoom background, which is like, it looks like the house is on fire and the Simpsons is my best guess?

Mike (11:01): It's from that meme with the dog where everything is on fire. And he's like, this is fine.

Kathleen (11:05): Yeah. Everything's fine. It's fine. Literally the world is on fire. I feel like that's SEO half the time.

Mike (11:12): Pretty much. Yeah.

Kathleen (11:15): So, so yeah, I would love it. If you could just sort of like talk about with what you're seeing. I mean, most of the people listen to this podcast are pretty experienced and they understand content marketing and they get keyword optimization, but there's a whole nother level out there that I think unless you're a specialist, you, you just, you can't keep up with

Mike (11:35): Yeah, that's the thing. So, I mean, SEO does change every day. There's algorithm updates regularly lately. And the thing is, people are very reactive to those algorithm updates. That's not the way you should approach it. Like if they roll out a new algorithm update, you got to wait a couple of weeks and see how that settles. Google is a software company, just like any other software company. And so when they roll things out, they may say, okay, we're going to roll out these five things at once. And they may say like, okay, four of those things didn't work. Let's pull those back. And only one of them stays there. So if you're jerking the wheel back and forth in reaction to them, you may end up being caught up in one of those things that wasn't actually a problem for your site.

Mike (12:18): So I always tell my clients like, Hey, if you hear about an algorithm update, wait two weeks and then see where you fall from there. And the reality is that, you know, most of the things that you would want to do in reaction to one of those updates anyway, were things that we probably already told you you should do. Right? So it's not, it's not, it's very rare that it's a dramatic change to whatever you thought about doing or whatever your, no, you should have been doing it. And so it's all about prioritization from there, but to your point of it being another level, like most people that are doing content marketing don't necessarily know like how search engines think about content, right? So you may think like, okay, these are my target keywords. I got to talk about these keywords when I'm writing about a thing, that's the top level of it.

Mike (13:12): So the way you got to think about it is that your keywords have keywords. And what I mean by that is that there's a context that's built based on what currently ranks for any given keyword. So as an example, if you rank for the, or you want to rank for the keyword basketball, and right now, the things that ranked for basketball also feature, you know, NBA bubble and LeBron James, and, you know, championship. Like if those words are featured on pages that rank, you also have to use those, those words on your page when you're trying to rank for basketball. And that's a simplified version of it. Like there are, you know, you gotta think about as far as like the topics being covered, the current, the people, places and things that are being covered. And we call this whole process of understanding that and using it technical content optimization, and it uses a lot of natural language processing to understand these concepts and so on.

Mike (14:10): But the ultimate output from that is a very data-driven brief that we use to inform the content that we create. And these concepts are super powerful. You know, like again, most people are just being like, Hey, I want to rank for basketball. So I'm going to talk about basketball and use that word 49 times, but we will beat you because we're thinking about it the same way the search engine itself is, and we're looking at those topics and incorporating them so strategically, I would say that any content marketer that is, you know, optimizing for SEO, they should look into these concepts, more, plenty of tools out there for it. Search metrics, have a tool called content experience. SEMrush has a tool for optimization like this. There's a tool called phrase. So there's plenty of tools out there that do this level of analysis.

Mike (15:02): And there's also a tool called content success by a company called Ryte. And what they do is like, as you're writing something, they'll say, here's my target keywords. It'll say, okay, well, use these words more, talk about these subjects more so you can be more optimized with respect to what search engines expect. So that's, that's one of the bigger ones that I would say that people that, you know, have knowledge about SEO don't know about this, and when they discover it, they see just like these small changes of how their writing would dramatically improve their rankings and so on.

Kathleen (15:38): Yeah. It's interesting. Have you also heard, I keep hearing a lot of buzz about a newer tool called market muse. Have you heard about that?

Mike (15:45): Yeah, they, yeah. Market Muse. They do a very similar thing. So they they've actually got a lot of different features and functionality to support this type of work. And they're also going into leveraging natural language generation pretty heavily as well. They do something that I can't remember the name of the product, but basically they'll give you a first draft of a piece of content based on what you're trying to target. And that type of technology has dramatically improved in the last couple of years, you know, or even the last few months. And that when people used to try to like generate content, they usually do, what's called content spinning. And that's where you kind of like take an existing article and just like change the words around like use synonyms and things like that. That's always been bad content. Now you have something called GPT two and also GPT three, which was put out by Elon Musk's company, open AI. And it's like really good at writing content. Like as long as you configure it, right. A human cannot tell the difference between a piece of content written by a human and written by this.

Kathleen (16:59): It's funny that you say that because I just talked to somebody who rewrote 60% of his website using GPT three, cause he got access to the early beta and he was like, it's performing so much better. It did a better job of saying what we do than I could have done. And, and all these people in the Slack group I'm in, went to look at it and we were all like, that's amazing. It's crazy. It's like a little freaky though, because I don't know, like what does that mean for, for the future of us as marketers? Right.

Mike (17:29): I think it means good things. You know, I think it frees us up to write content that's valuable and creative rather than like, imagine your eCommerce site. Right. And you're like, okay, to optimize these pages, I gotta write 200 words on every category page. No one wants to do, wants to do that. No one wants to write the copy that goes on product detail pages. They just want to be able to like take that data and turn it into something. Well, now you can't. And so it frees up actual copywriters and creative content marketers, and so on to think about how do we make interactive content? How do we write things that are like emotional and so on? Like, you know, I don't think we're going to get to a point in the near term that something like GPT three is going to be able to write conversion copy right now. I think he can give us some insights, but I don't think it's going to be able to very much be able to say like, okay, this certain type of person I want to write for them.

Kathleen (18:30): Well, I think your key, you said the three key words, which was in the near term, I think eventually it'll figure it out,

Mike (18:37): Right? Like we get to enough computing power and, and people are writing the right algorithms. Yes. You can retrain anything. But right now...

Kathleen (18:45): Hopefully by that point you and I will be sitting on a beach somewhere and having a pina colada retired.

Mike (18:54): But the other thing is that I think that we're going to get to a point where you can say, I want to rank for this keyword. And those types of tools would just ingest what ranks there and then use all those features that I'm talking about that we use as humans and it's going to write the perfectly optimized content for you. So then what is going to, what's gonna make, what's going to be differentiator between you and me and how we create the content. I think it's going to be those creative aspects that are going to be even more valuable. So GPT three does not replace your editorial team because you're still gonna need editors to edit whatever it spits out. And then you're going to need creative people that can create things that don't exist because GBT three learns from what does exist.

Kathleen (19:41): Yeah. It's pretty crazy. But it also goes back to that point I was making earlier where, you know, programming and knowledge of code is a super power because you can't just like get access to GPT three and just like, it will know how to write your website. Like you had there's there's you have to understand how to leverage those tools. And there's a certain degree of technical sophistication required for that. At least at this stage, I'm sure at some point someone will build a software interface that will make it easy for anybody to do it, but that doesn't exist yet. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. So, all right. So we have number one, understanding the context around your SEO and that your keywords have keywords. I love that. What else do you got for us?

Mike (20:23): Let's see. So I'm a strong believer that for, you know, the last like five or six years, SEO has become more content marketing. And a lot of people that do SEO don't know much about the technical side of it. And I don't think there's necessarily a problem with those people. I just think that the technical stuff needs to be brought back to the forefront because a lot of things have changed about the web in the last couple years. You know, JavaScript is more prominent in the way that search engines can understand that stuff and so on has changed. And so there's been a lot of new tactics that have popped up as a result of that. So one of which is AB testing specifically for SEO. So if you've got a big site and you're like, Hey, we're considering making this change before.

Mike (21:20): It's like, well, we make the change and see what happens. Now you can do that as kind of like a step approach by taking a you know, representative sample of URLs, making that change there and validating or invalidating that hypothesis that this will work. And then once you see that it works, you can roll it out at scale. So I think that that's something that every SEO needs to know how to do, because that's a good way to avoid losing money. But you know, again, that goes back to the technical aspects because that is a very technical thing to do. Like you got to know more about CDNs and how sites are set up, or you got to know about Google tag manager and things like that. So my point here is that, you know, we're, we're still going through what I've, I've called for a number of years.

Mike (22:07): Now, this technical SEO Renaissance where people that sit at the intersection of like code and, you know, creative marketing sophistication, and, you know, I guess SEO are able to really capitalize on things that others can. And I very much encourage, you know, SEO or content marketers to learn more about these things. So at least they can be aware and discuss with more technical people. Like how can we deploy this in such a way that what I'm doing as a content marketer works even better. So, you know, it used to be that you could just like build a site and put a bunch of great content on it. And the links that you would attract as a result of those, those that content would yield better rankings for you. But because Google has gotten more sophisticated and they have better understanding of the pages that are very rich in that type of content, you've got to understand things like server side rendering and dynamic rendering and, and Google's capabilities like where they end. So you can make sure that that content always has the best chance of ranking.

Kathleen (23:22): How much do you think the average marketer needs to learn about technical SEO? Because like, I've always, you know, I've always kind of looked at the landscape of the marketing industry and there are some people who like all they do 24 seven, like their one job is they are a technical SEO expert and they do it really, really well. But I do think, I mean, it seems to me there is some baseline level of technical, technical SEO understanding that every marketer should have. I'm curious where you fall on that.

Mike (23:53): Yeah. And I don't think that everyone needs to know how to do like 301 redirects and fix AC access files and so on and so forth. I think they just need to be exposed to those ideas. So if you're someone who read Moz's, you know, beginner's guide to SEO, I think that is a good base layer foundation of understanding technical SEO, because you're exposed to all those problems that you might have. And you can say like, Hey, I don't think the page that we just published is in our site map, that's important. Or I looked at, I looked at this plugin and it showed me that, you know, what is showing up for Google is not what I see in my browser. Like understanding those base level concepts is enough because you can find an awesome technical SEO, like you described, or even just an engineer themselves and be like, Hey, I'm at, I see these problems. I'm not the expert here, but can we look into this so that we can make sure that the content I'm creating is visible to Google?

Kathleen (25:01): Yeah. That's kind of what I was going to say is it's like, you need to know enough to be able to recognize that you have a problem so that, you know, when to make that call, right. Like whether it's, I have a feeling, my images are too large. And so my page is loading too slowly or, you know, it might be, I need you know, more structured data on my website. I don't know how to do that, but I know what it is and that it needs to be done. Like there's sort of that level that I think is important for marketers to have.

Mike (25:30): Yeah, absolutely. Cause you know, I mean, I personally come from a time back in my day where, you know, doing websites was you had one title and that was webmaster everything from master of all the web. Yeah. You were like a network administrator, you are front end and back end developer, you did Photoshop. Like you did everything. Right. So for me, like I want to know everything because I'm just used to that. But the modern web doesn't work that way. And so people have their, like their separation of concerns and that's fine. But I do believe that having like a general understanding of what someone like that technical SEO or engineer does just makes the end product even better. So I would recommend people just learn that foundational.

Kathleen (26:23): Yeah. That's good advice. All right. So other things that you're seeing really kind of move the needle these days from an SEO standpoint.

Mike (26:35): Yeah. so I mean, I'm, I'm starting to get super tactical. One of the things that we run with every single website that we pick up, especially because we work with mostly enterprise brands is they always have a bunch of external links pointing to pages that no longer exist. So the worst I've ever seen was, you know, one of the bigger sports organizations had 12 million links pointing to pages that 302 redirected. Now a Googler will tell you, there's no difference from how they handle 302s and 301s. I can definitively tell you that that is not true based on my experience. And this was a case where it was like one of the few things that we were able to push through in the organization was converting those 12 million, 302s and the 301s and their traffic shot up dramatically from organic search. So ever since then, I've, I've made sure that we always look for that. And every time you always find it, that's a problem. And one of the things that we do to make sure that that's not a problem moving forward is is with Ahrefs, which is one of the link index tools. They have a API end point for telling you what pages have broken links. So what you can do is set up a script. And again, this is something that you would work with your engineering team on.

Kathleen (28:02): It all comes back to that coding.

Mike (28:04): And I have a script that pings that API and says, all right, here's your list of broken links now automatically set up your 301 redirects from now. So then you don't have to worry about that as a problem. One issue though, is that Google and I believe this would be true. I don't have any definitive evidence of this, but it's something that I've like my hypothesis based on things that I've read in patents. They store copies of your site forever. So if you make a change to a page, they're able to look at what the previous version of that page is just like the way back machine. Yeah. And so if you implement a 301 redirect from one page to another, and those pages don't match up, like the content that used to be there, it doesn't match up with the content that is there.

Mike (28:51): Now, they won't apply all the value of the link that you're redirecting. So the way that we've gotten around that, and again goes back to code. Google has something that they call the natural language processing API, which will allow you to determine the topics of pages. So what you would want to do is look for an old version of whatever page was there. Again, the way back machine is a good place for that and run it through that NLP API. And then they'll tell you all the topics and were called entities that were on that page. And then you run your other pages through that and find whatever page has the closest match topic. And then that's where you redirect it to. And then you're more likely to get more value out of that.

Kathleen (29:39): That's cool. I did not know that. See, this is why I wanted to talk to you. I knew I was going to learn some new things. And by the way you were like, now we're getting tactical, I love this part of the conversation. So let's go into the tactical weeds. Do you guys have anything else like that?

Mike (29:55): Absolutely. So another one that again, another commonplace thing that we see when we bring on clients, well, the first thing that we do is our SEO quick hits. So what are the things that are, you know, high value that we can do very quickly to show that, right? And another thing that we find, and this is especially important for big sites, but it's important for all types of sites. And there are links internally to pages that redirect. So 301 redirect is, you know, they're your last resort basically like when you have links pointing from an external site, it is difficult to reach out to a hundred or a thousand sites and say, Hey, can you update? So the 301 is the best thing you can do in that case, but within your own site, you have complete control. So you shouldn't be linking 301s because for every 301, there's a small loss of link equity. So again, whenever we get a site, we'll crawl a site and see what that internal linking structure looks like. And if there's a bunch of links to 301s, we fix those by just linking directly to the final destination URL. And then while I can see improvements from there, and the same is true of links to 404s. So those two things, and, and also with the external links, if you fix those three things, you will always see an improvement in organic search.

Kathleen (31:17): That's awesome. And I feel like that's just like good website housekeeping. And it's funny you mentioned that because I was just doing that. We migrated the site at the company I work for, we migrated it from WordPress to HubSpot. And when we did that, it meant that everything basically was on one domain instead of sub domains. And, and it was like, it was a painful few days, but so necessary. I, I spent like three days going through old blogs, like fixing what were section headings and turning them into H2s changing the link so that they went to, they were like internal links and not external links that went to 301s, like the whole process was such a slog, but when it was done, I it's the same feeling I have like when I clean out the junk drawer in my kitchen. I'm like, Oh, I feel so good. Now it's all clean and perfect.

Mike (32:06): Yeah. It's tedious, but it's work done.

Kathleen (32:08): Yeah, it is. It is awesome. Well, I mean, I literally feel like I could sit here all day and talk to you about SEO and you're this endless fountain of, of incredibly useful knowledge, but we only have so much time. So shifting gears for a minute, I always ask people at the end of my interviews, two questions, the first of which is the podcast is all about inbound marketing and people who are doing it really well. Is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really setting the standard, what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days?

Mike (32:43): Hmm. I mean, I feel like it's a cop out to mention Rand, but Rand is really good at it.

Kathleen (32:49): You know what, you know what, I just want to say this came up once before. He's almost never mentioned, which blows my mind because he is the person that I would probably mention. So talk, discuss Rand.

Mike (33:03): Rand is, he's like a inbound marketing machine, you know, like if you think back to the things that he was doing with Moz, where it was like he was blogging every night and he created the Fridays, Whiteboard Fridays, which he does, or he was doing every Friday. He had the beginner's guide to SEO, which he did the first iteration of, and then Brittany Mueller has taken over. So yeah, I think if, if you want to point to someone who is doing it and isn't a huge brand, like he's obviously, you know, a big influence in the space, you can watch him do it again right now with his new startup, which is Spark Toro. And so you see him blogging pretty regularly. He's putting out videos on like how to use the product. He is identifying new social channels that work for him.

Mike (33:54): Cause you know, Twitter engagement is down pretty dramatically. Linkedin engagement is up and I'm starting to see him pop up there more. He's doing a ton of different, you know, podcasts and webinars and things. So I think Rand is a really good example of how to do it right. And how to really laser focus in on your audience and then like continually know what they need and put it in front of them. So then show like, Hey, I've also got this product. That's very valuable. And then the other thing is that, you know, he's always had like a very empathetic approach to everything that he's done. And what was really striking to me was that they have an email through Spark Toro that goes out right before they're going to charge you like a week or so. And it's like, Hey, you know, this is of course a subscription product, but we don't want to just like lock you into a subscription and make you forget like, Hey, your, your bill is coming up. If you want to cancel. That's okay. You're welcome to come back. So it's like proactively being like, Hey, we're going to bill you just like, no. And I really think that speaks to his approach and why it's a better approach than a lot of other things that you see out there. It's really good in that market.

Kathleen (35:13): I could not agree more. And I, a couple things I would add to that. One is that, so it's Rand Fishkin, who was the founder of Moz, who now, as you've mentioned, founded this new company Spark Toro, which has an incredible product. That's a whole nother conversation, but the couple of things I've noticed about him, one, what he did that was so brilliant in Spark Toro is he started producing content before he had a product. Like I was following him before he ever launched that product. And he was building that audience. So that by the time the product was ready, you have this like ready-made group of people who were, who were waiting to just say yes to him, which is so smart. The other thing is that the content he creates is phenomenal. It's very, very high quality. So, you know, some people might hear, Oh, he blogs every day or however often he blogs and think, eh, you know, sure you could do that, but it's checking the box.

Kathleen (36:04): He does not check the box. It's very, very good content. And he does a lot of research. Like that's why people follow him so much. And then the other thing that I just love about him, and I think this, you reminded me of this when you talked about the email about billing, is he's so transparent even about the negatives, like what people might perceive to be negatives. So he has this book he wrote called Lost and Founder, which is very transparent accounting of how he wound up leaving Moz and all the lessons he learned. All the mistakes that he says he made and what he would do differently. And it's just like, if you've ever owned a business, which you do, and I have, reading that book, it's so relatable and so refreshing to hear an entrepreneur talk about the things they didn't do right. Cause sometimes you feel like people only talk about their successes and that is so not a true picture of entrepreneurship.

Mike (36:55): Yeah. I got an advanced copy of the book you know, at a, at a very challenging point in running my business and it was, and you know, I was like walking out the door to go on vacation. Like I can't see it anymore. And I took a copy of the book and it was so refreshing to read it and feel like, okay, there's someone else out there that understands this? Could you, you've got books. Like The Hard Thing About Hard Things by then, but that book is kind of BS. Cause it's like, Oh, everything got hard. And then I went and raised $60 million.

Kathleen (37:27): Thank you for saying that. Cause I thought the same thing I'm like, yeah. Huh.

Mike (37:31): Like that's not how this works in real life. So yeah, that book is definitely refreshing in that regard.

Kathleen (37:37): Yeah. I totally agree with you. Well, and to add to that, you yourself have just published what I think is an absolutely beautiful article on medium about your experience as an entrepreneur and all the lessons that you had learned. It's like you basically wrote a letter to yourself sort of from the future about the things that you should be doing differently. And I just thought it was so spot on to, I mean, I just, I just know I related to it as somebody who has owned a business and specifically an agency and like been in those shoes. So I will put the link to that in the show notes because it's definitely something everybody should read. It's really great. All right, second question that I hear all the time from marketers is how do you keep up? Because marketing and specifically SEO, as we talked about changes so quickly, how do you personally make sure that you stay educated and kind of on the cutting edge of everything that's happening?

Mike (38:31): Yes. Two things. One, following people that are not our industry. So I follow a lot of developers and things. And I just read voraciously, you know, I read all types of stuff and it's, it's very important to me to like have ideas that are not about my day to day. So then I can figure out ways to assimilate them to my day to day. And also it just like keeps me more broadly creative than if I'm just focused in on one thing. So yeah, it's just that, that curiosity and that thirst for knowledge and the way that I action that is my following more people and just keeping stuff coming at me.

Kathleen (39:11): Awesome. I love it. Any one or two people you want to mention who you think are worth following?

Mike (39:18): I'm putting you on the spot. Yeah, I can't really think of anybody. I would just say, you know, look at me on Twitter and look at who I follow.

Kathleen (39:26): That's a good idea. There you go.

Mike (39:27): The people, the people that you know are that will pop up first will be the people I've followed most recently. So yeah. Check those out.

Kathleen (39:35): That's a good tip. All right. Well, Mike, I'm sure there are people listening who are like, I want to ask this guy a question. I definitely want to see his movie. I want to learn more about this company. What's the best way for them to connect with you online?

Mike (39:49): Yeah. Just go to i pull rank dot com or just reach out to me on Twitter, which is just @ipullrank.

Kathleen (39:54): Awesome. All right. Again, all of those links will be in the show notes. So head there to check those out. And in the meantime, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, preferably a five star review. So that, that would help us get found by other listeners. And of course, if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Mike. This was a ton of fun.

Mike (40:28): Thanks for having me.

The holy grail of local search marketing is ranking at the top of Google's Local 3-Pack. Here's how a local search expert helps his clients do just that.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Local SEO Search Owner John Vuong shares the strategies he uses to help clients improve their local search marketing strategies and rank at the top of Google's Local 3-Pack.

Hint: There is no magic bullet.

Ranking locally begins with a well run business that sells a great product and treats customers right. If you've got those three things in place, then John has some straightforward strategies that any company - large or small - can use to get to the top of local search results.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Local SEO Search website
• Connect with John on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Vuong, who is the owner of Local SEO Search. How's it going?

John (00:21): I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

Kathleen (00:23): I'm excited to have you because you are a local SEO guru amongst other things. And I feel like, especially at the time we're living in right now with what's happening in the world, getting your SEO buttoned up is more important now than ever because everybody's starting online these days. Right?

John (00:46): Exactly.

Kathleen (00:47): Before we get into our topic today, can you tell my listeners a little bit about who you are, your story as well as what Local SEO Search does?

John (00:57): Yeah, definitely. So I started this agency seven years ago. But prior to that, I've always been in sales and advertising sales in particular. So I studied business finance, but I didn't really know where I wanted to go with it. And I got into my first job as a sales person and I kind of refined and learned the art of sales and really got better over the years, asked the right questions. Fact-finding, did a lot of training courses, audio tapes at the time because there were no blogs and video like there is today in podcasts. So consuming as much as you can to learn the art of sales. And then the last thing before I started my agency, I actually worked at Yellow Pages and I was there for over five years and I learned, I didn't really work in an ad agency per se, but I had a chance to understand advertising and how it worked in terms of a recurring business model and how to run a larger operation.

John (02:00): And I did, I was basically face to face with the end consumer clients. And that's where I learned the most because I connected with them. I understood their pain points, their troubles, and I wanted to really help. Right? However, I was restricted to the product line that we were offering at Yellow Pages. As you know, at the time Google was really taking off, they were getting more and more users and more people were spending more time in front of a computer than ever doing searches. And as you know, more people were spending you know, more money at Yellow Pages, but getting less return on their investment. And so that's the reason I started this agency. From listening to my clients, letting them know that, you know, you can continue with Yellow Pages, but they didn't really adopt quick enough. And they don't have a solution where customers, your ideal prospects are now actively looking for businesses like yourself. So that's why I got into the world.

Kathleen (03:00): So I just have to say that you saying the words Yellow Pages just took me down memory lane. And I'm sure there are people listening that either won't remember this or, or, you know, it's, they're too young, but like, just that I hear those words and all I can think about is the, the brick of the giant Yellow Pages book being dropped at my front door, like shrink, wrapped in plastic. And I have this one special drawer in my living room where I used to keep all the phone books. Cause you would get like your city phone book, your County phone bucket. And there was the Yellow Pages and the white pages and just the amount of paper that, that took, like, I don't know my mind, I was like, whoa, deja vu, as soon as you said that. So it's, I don't, I don't know whether I look back on it fondly or not. I haven't quite made up my mind.

John (03:54): Yeah. But, but if you imagine like think about 10 years ago Google didn't take off, like the internet was just slowly taking off where the speed of connecting to the internet was dial up, right? Like getting in front of a computer to check your email. It took you five minutes to open up a browser and then search and load up a website. I mean, things took a very long time. And so before, you know, computers and internet and technology started taking off Yellow Pages was still the most instrumental place for a lot of small business owners small, medium sized business owners to market themselves because they knew it was an active, engaged consumer that was actively looking for a product or service. And all you have to do is advertise your one page content and kind of call to action. And really hopefully they will convert, right. They're engaged, they're ready to buy. And all you have to do is be in front of them at the time of purchase.

Kathleen (04:58): So it's funny when I think about that, because, because yes, it was a very like binary equation of what it took to succeed in the Yellow Pages. It was a combination of purchasing an ad. And for those companies that were really creative, naming your company, triple a whatever, like, because literally ranking first was about alphabetization, you know, which is so simple and straightforward. And then you go into this world that we're in now we're ranking first is like, it's like magic, you know, or it seems like it's sometimes we were just talking about that before we started recording about how things changed so much and Google has this supposed algorithm, and now they have RankBrain, which is artificial intelligence. And, but, you know, they don't really tell anybody what's in that. I mean, they give you a sense of the big drivers of what makes you rank, but nobody really, really knows for sure. You know, what, what those factors are. So it's just such an interesting thing when you juxtapose, you know, it was alphabet, did your company name start with a, and did you have a good ad?

John (06:04): It was very straightforward and easy, right. But then comes, but it wasn't actually easy because you had to run a really good business as well. You have to take care of your fundamentals of understanding who your customer is offering a really good product or service taking care of your clients and staff and, you know, pricing it, right. Competitive analysis, all that other stuff like foundational right before you can then promote with a good offer or call to action or whatnot to get them in the door. Right. So you still need to know how to run a good business when you were advertising the Yellow Pages. Right.

Kathleen (06:40): And that will never change even today. Like all the digital advances in the world will never change the fact that you have to have the fundamentals straight. So if, when, when somebody comes to you and they're a business owner and they say, I want to, you know, dominate my local market for search, where do you begin?

John (06:59): Yeah. So I always first find out a little bit about the company to see if they're actually running a good business in the first place. Right. See the little fact check thing to see if they even have a digital presence in first off, like, do they have a website? They don't have any social assets social or any, any media. And then also find out if they are a profitable business, do they know how to run a business? Right. So understanding who their ideal customer is, persona avatars, understand all that. And then you take on the path of what we potentially can do, because ultimately it's all about positioning themselves as the leader thought leader, authoritative figure and expert right. In their niche. And then from there, it's all about like that journey, what it looks like, how long will it take, because we need to really benchmark them and figure out where and what we need to do in terms of strategy and a campaign over the next course of weeks, months, years, even. Right. so it is a long process in terms of inbound and intake, but it's the right thing to do because it is more of a relationship partnership that we're looking for versus an ad campaign.

Kathleen (08:08): Yeah, absolutely. So I mean the Holy grail of local searches, Google, there are other search engines, but let's be honest, you know, if you want to succeed in, in SEO these days, your, your starting point is Google and Google has the three pack. So can you talk a little bit about that?

John (08:25): Yeah, definitely. So as you know, most people are doing searches by keywords on Google. There's paid at the top, there's the local three pack, which is usually radius centric, relevance, and distance based on that storefront or service area that you actually go in and do service calls on as then below is there is an organic listing. So traditionally before the map existed, it was all about making sure you rank organically or naturally below the ads. Right? And the local three-pack came out because mainly the driver was mobile. The reason the map came out because people were on the goal and they wanted to look for local coffee shops, gas stations, restaurants, whatever at their fingertips. And it was easy to go to that store quickly because of directions. You could read reviews, check out their followers, et cetera. So Google's intention was trying to get people usage up on their assets like Google, but also display as much information on their property as possible without going to their website.

John (09:33): So state getting them to not go on your website, but keep them on Google as long as possible. So they can store and obviously, you know, understand your behaviors, right then there's ads. That will be retargeted to you. So the big thing for you to understand is how do you capitalize on what Google is presenting itself, where you can now be on the map potentially in front of a potential prospect who is searching or seeking out your keywords. So first thing is, make sure you verify and own your Google, my business page. So that's the first thing a lot of people don't even do. However, you should do that on it. Got to my business Google my business and own it. Usually it's a postcard that gets sent to you takes two weeks. It's just to verify that you're a legitimate business at that physical location. If you are a service type of business and you don't have a physical address, you can still claim it because you are a local business, you just service a radius. So you just submit it as if your home is your main central pinpoint. And then you can go into Google My Business and put in the radius service area or cities that you actually service.

Kathleen (10:48): No, I had somebody I know who did that. Actually, this is interesting that you bring that up, who was a service business who put in their home and then Google automatically pulled the picture of his house for the business. So how do you deal with that? Like, I mean, I think there's a lot of people who would say, I don't want anybody to have any information about my home. I don't want them to know that it's a home based business. So how do you manage that?

John (11:10): Because Google has maps, right? So there's a difference between putting your address and hiding your address. So you can actually go in and hide your address because then people will not know the physical address. So as a service base, most people are operating from the home and therefore you have the ability to just hide your address. Typically, if it is a service based like plumbing, HVAC, roofing, because these are category driven. And most of the time Google recognizes the services as if they don't have physical locations, because you can operate at home and just run a business, right? So certain categories, you can actually hide your address. And in that case, your friend, you can definitely hide it. And then that map and that photograph of your home will not appear.

Kathleen (12:01): Okay. Good to know. So when, when you talk about the three pack for people who might not be familiar with, what are the three things that make up the three words?

John (12:08): So there's a lot of factors to rank on the Google three-pack. And as you know, Google is always changing their algorithm and always looking for the best result for that given search query or the user. Right? And to understand that you need to understand users in general, right? Because each criteria each vertical, each industry, each market will have different subsets of criteria and factors to rank on that three-pack and even on the natural listings, right? Ultimately what you want to do is have a great website that answers the question, answers the user intent, but ultimately it's all about users behavior as well. So you need to understand that you're providing good, authentic, raw expert content on the website to position yourself as the expert clean look, user friendly website ease of navigation, quick loading, secure website, all these stuff that you should be doing anyways.

John (13:12): And then of course, it's the other factors as a fundamental. It's like, make sure that you have good reputation out there. Good reviews, make sure that other people know about you backlinks, right. Go out there and position yourself as an expert by being a part of better business, rural, or getting more speaking engagements or other articles. You know, it's like a guest posts and associations and memberships. All these are all other factors that organic SEO also plays, but there's other signals that Google local three pack are really prominent on, which is citations, which is you know, directories are submitted, which is consistent across all the board, all, all channels. So all your assets should be consistent. The messaging, the content piece, the authorship just everything, right. And then of course it's all about relevance as well. So if you service an area that is New York, for instance, Manhattan or whatnot, you have to make sure that your website, every property and as every post that you mentioned should be related to that region, right. That the surface area, because you don't want articles to be mentioning your, your service or product if they're in a different country or a different postal code, or, you know, because Google, their whole purpose is to really provide the best user experience for that customer. Who's seeking out the best product or service or finding best business owners to match them. So by displaying the best results for the user you're trying to position yourself so that, you know, you get a higher conversion rate. No, that seems pretty straightforward.

Kathleen (14:52): If you are, let's just use this as an example, a plumber, who's servicing a very specific area, but what if you are, you know, I'm a big like Mr. Plumber that has locations all over the country, but wants to show up first in each of those locations, because then you do have a situation where your website is going to have to have content on different locations. So how do you, how do you tell Telegraph that to Google that, like, I might have all this information on my site, but I have these very discrete, like territories or areas that I serve.

John (15:23): Yeah, definitely. So it's a very similar process as a local mom and pop shop business, small businesses owner, right. Because if you're a Mister plumber, Mr. Rooter or whatnot you have a franchise model and one person still owns that region, right. So there should be a website or a landing page or a subcategory within a page so that you can actually optimize and let people in on that page. Right. Because that's really representing the brand. So it's the same factors because you're still ranking for that one location one.

Kathleen (16:02): So are you putting that landing page in as your website address for that particular local pack listing?

John (16:09): You have to, because if you're going to the main page, which is where every other city is going after you're not going to be optimizing for the right reasons, right. Google will not, you know, signal their signals out there. Right. And they will know that it's more of a branded search versus like a local search.

Kathleen (16:28): So whenever I think about local search and, and you know, this whole topic, there, there are obviously fundamentals, as you said, that need to be put in place a good website, good content you know, getting, claiming your listing and having it all set up properly. So I feel like there's some table stakes and, and, and that's accessible to a local business. But then there are some things that are trickier, right? Where if you're a local business and you're trying to compete against the 800 pound gorilla of your market in the local listings there, they're probably going to have a much higher domain authority, more backlinks. So when you look at all of the different things, the factors are the levers you can pull that are within your control. Are there certain ones that carry more weight with Google? You know, so CA can David take on Goliath in this situation?

John (17:27): Yeah. With the local three pack, it's actually a lot easier for a small, medium sized business owner to capitalize on a competing with a big brand big monopoly, right? Because end of the day, the big, big brands, their main focus is really not on the local level, but more on the branded level. They're going after national campaigns, national ad campaigns, they're not focused on long tail keywords markets, regions, neighborhoods, cities, street level, right? Like intersections, that's where community level search results and queries can dominate versus large brands because their focus is on the bigger picture versus the like little micro level picture. Right. So I always ask clients like, you know, yes, there's a specialty, there's actually a niche in most subsets, like plumber, for instance, but you are also looking for like long tail, what are some of the triggers like drainage, septic tanks stuff that actually matters for that local small business owner that might not actually matter for the larger brands that were just going after very broad plumber terms, right? Yes. There's a lot more competition. There might be a little bit more keyword volume, but is the conversion rate as high, right. What really matters for a small business owner is leads cause sales, revenue, and profitability.

Kathleen (18:49): Yeah. Now it's interesting. Cause like we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast and a lot about content specifically. And so I think probably most people listening are pretty well versed generally on what constitutes a good content or organic SEO strategy. But what I think is very interesting, at least to me, is when you take that overarching approach to content marketing, like, you know, for example, you want to go after the long tails, you want to answer the questions that people are asking about the problems they have. And when you put that, when you put a local search lens over it, I think it could be very easy to get your content wrong. And what I mean by that, and I've seen this play out is I'll just use an example. Like I live in Annapolis, Maryland, and I, I know someone who owns a commercial real estate company.

Kathleen (19:41): And we talked about this once and you know, you can create all kinds of content around commercial real estate. And you know, you could even do commercial real estate in Annapolis, but, but there's, I think there can tend to be an inclination to get a little, I don't know if spammy is the right word. We're like, let's have a landing page for every neighborhood and let's, let's make sure to put the words, Annapolis, commercial, real estate and every blog we write and it can start to sound really forced. So do you, how do you generally counsel your clients to approach that so that they're creating genuinely helpful quality content, but still nailing it at that very hyperlocal level?

John (20:26): Yeah. So I, when I try to find out from the clients are, which markets really are important for them, right? Like always dominate local first and expand, you know, regional national, et cetera. So the big thing for me is understanding where they want to go with it. In terms of, yeah, there's service pages, blog pages, there's different content assets, like video, audio images and all that, right? Like written content. So you need to really refine and figure out like who your ideal customer is. Figure out, map it all accordingly with the journey, but then figure out like, yes, there's certain landing pages that will result in a higher conversion rate you to make it sound natural. So there's an an art to it. Then then more than anything, right? Like you're not just writing for the purpose of Google, you're writing for the purpose of the user.

John (21:21): Right. And you should always write for the user and yes, there's keyword research, semantic keywords, there's different variations. Yes. You can use some certain keywords and embed a couple drippings of that. Even internal waking and all that other stuff, but it's all about like always focus on your ideal customer and write for them. And if you do that on a really regular basis, consistent basis, then it's no longer spam because you see, you'll see a lot of fruits and rewards from it because your ideal customers will reach out to you so far down that funnel that all they care about is pricing, or they've already vetted you. They already check out your case studies, reviews, and testimonials. All they care about is when can you start.

Kathleen (22:08): Right. That makes sense. So when it comes to the listing, you mentioned in the beginning, you have to claim your listing. Obviously that's, that's step one, but then once you have that listing, there are a lot of things you can do with it. And you just talked about assets. And I'm really curious, you know, how important are those assets, the photographs, the video reviews. Like I would love to understand what weight reviews really carry and how many do you really need and that kind of thing.

John (22:33): Yeah. So it's all about perception of running a real good business, right? So it's your first impression. If people don't go to your website, they're going to check you out on Google, my business. Right. And the first thing they see is images of the store, either external or internal. So make it as professional as possible. Spend that extra photography fee to make it look as genuine as possible. And also it's all about like, you can put videos as well, right? Short little clips because more important than ever people want to check you out before they even come to your store today, especially during this pandemic. Right. So they want to vet you and then the reputation aspect is all about making sure that they're authentic as much as you want more, I'm more concerned about quality reviews, right. And always genuinely ask as a process to every single customer, not just your best customers. Right. Because those see right through that you vetted your reviews even, or you paid someone to get only five stars. Right. So try to be as genuine as possible, there are going to be some negative and that's okay. Right. It's all about being real about it and acknowledging it and really responding to positive and negative reviews. Right?

Kathleen (23:55): Yeah. There's a lot of research that goes into like that, that has shown that, that having only positive reviews actually is not good. And it makes sense to me intuitively as just a buyer. Like if I go and I'm looking at a restaurant and all they have is five star reviews, I'm like that that person got their cousin to write all of those, you know? So I agree with you. It's important to have variety. Any best practices around how you ask for them?

John (24:22): Put it in your process, right? So whatever it is from reception to invoicing to thank you, email or a thank you letter, make it a process or text message or call whenever it is. And drip them, it's the same thing as where you drip to get a new customer, you need to have that final, have a final for getting reviews. A lot of people forget that once you have a client that's active paying, they're inclined to do something for you already. They already, you know, use you for a reason. So why not? If, and it's all it is, is a process it's like, you already have an active client, get their email, their information so that you can drip them for a newsletter or whatever it is, right. Like referrals or whatever it is.

Kathleen (25:10): And how often should a business be looking at their listing, updating it, keeping it fresh?

John (25:19): So updating and keeping them fresh. I personally don't update mine quite as often as you know, because nothing really changes. You only update it when there's dramatic service changes or product changes, right. Unless you move location, you have new images of which we need to talk about. Yes. But it's all about like, you know, if you're in a very hyper competitive industry and they expect a lot of changes, like restaurants, like you need to stay on top of what's going on. Like, are you doing deliveries more so than ever where the specials, because you can do Google my business posts as well, very similar to Facebook posts. You know, you can post it on Google and they last for seven days an image and a content piece with hashtags. So why not utilize that extra piece of asset? Right. so I forgot to mention like images, make sure it's your own images to like never use stock photos, make sure you personalize it as much as possible, as much as a lot of people use image tags and make sure that, you know, you, you save it on a file with keywords, Google actually, you know, so they say they don't take that into consideration.

John (26:29): Right. They already have a geotarget. They already have their own vetting system to make sure that it's authentic and real. So do just things that are real to your business. Don't try to hack or trick anyone because people will see through it, especially Google. Yeah.

Kathleen (26:44): That's a good point. I didn't realize you could post updates like you can on Facebook. That's interesting. And I mean, how many businesses would you say really take advantage of that?

John (26:54): So all my clients, we do it for them. So when, when you, most businesses don't even know about it, maybe 5% actually utilize that feature because only half of the businesses actually claim and verify the Google my business page. So there's a huge amount of people that are even missing that boat, let alone, you know, understanding like the category that you put yourself in is so important. Right. And making sure you check in to see where your competitors are actively marketing themselves as well, in terms of review, count, always check into your competitors, make sure you're in the same playing field, right? Because Google will look at trends. They'll look at industry stuff to see if you suddenly have a hundred reviews and every, or your nearest competitor only has five. What's going on. Are you being in buying reviews? Like just do things that are natural, right? Because if you're a high, big ticket item and you're selling homes, you maybe sell five or 10 a year, how do you have a hundred plus reviews?

Kathleen (27:53): Yeah, no, that's a good point. It's a good point. So I assume that you have some clients that come to you and they don't have their listing set up and you need to help them do that from scratch. But I would think, and correct me if I'm wrong. Do you have some companies that come to you and they've set their listing up and they're like, I want to get higher in the rankings. I would love it. If you could talk maybe about any, any case studies or examples you have of like, what, what have those businesses done when they've come to you with an existing listing and they just want to increase their ranking? What are the things they've done and what improvements have you seen and how long does that take?

John (28:29): Great questions? Because we get asked this daily. So most of my clients, I mean, we've been in business for seven years and we focus on family, run, small, medium sized businesses, dentist, physio, chiro, you know, professional health and beauty as well as traits. Right. And usually they are smaller in size, but they're a local leader, right. They have experienced, they've been doing it for five, 10, 20 years. They expect it and plan on doing it for another five, 10, 20 years. Right. so that's my target client and what their intention is, is obviously to cultivate new, acquiring new customers because they understand like Yellow Pages. If you're not there and present, you're not visible to have the opportunity to generate leads, potential clients. Right. so most of my clients actually week we have a pretty good track record. And majority of them do see an increase of between, you know, 20 to 50% in terms of organic traffic growth annually.

John (29:36): And it actually grows afterwards too because we focus not just on the map, but organic as right. And we really focus on like service level targeted keywords that actually drive real business versus blogs that are general in nature and informative type of content pieces that doesn't really drive real customers acquisition of, you know, sales and revenue, because the main purpose for all my clients is phone calls, leads, revenue, sales, and profitability. Right. And if it's not working exactly. And if they don't, if it doesn't work, they're not going to renew with me. So my focus is yes, we have a longer term contract, but we have a very high renewal rate because our whole premise is longterm relationships because we want to grow with them. And it's more of a partnership than anything.

Kathleen (30:27): Well, what you're saying makes sense. And I think in general, philosophically, I get this question a lot. Like if you're doing content marketing, where do you start? Because you have, you obviously want a full funnel strategy, but like where do you begin? And I always tell people, you start at the bottom of the funnel, which is basically what you're saying, which is hyper-specific queries that have to do with high intent purchase searches. And that's because that's the fastest path to revenue and you start getting revenue in and that buys you a lot more time to figure out the top in the middle of the funnel. So I totally agree with you.

John (31:03): Exactly. And then in terms of timeline, I forgot to answer that. So I've seen clients rank months, and then it's some clients like dentists in Toronto. That's where I am may take years because it all depends on benchmark where they're at versus some of the major players. Right. and how much they've invested, especially your client competitor. So it's very hard and it's very individualized in terms of the quotes that we submit to our clients.

Kathleen (31:33): Well, I really liked your suggestion though, of competitor tracking, like, you know, set a schedule, whether it's once a week, once a month, once a quarter, whatever you decide it is. And I guess it depends on how competitive your spaces and go in and look at all of your different competitors and how many reviews they have and what's going on in their listing on the category they're targeting. Like that seems like something very actionable that any business could do right away. And if you see yourself slipping by comparison, then you sort of have your marching orders. Right. It makes, it makes a lot of sense. All right, well, shifting gears, then I have a couple of questions that I always ask my guests. And I'm curious to know what you have to say. The first one is that we talk all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is doing a really outstanding job, but with their own inbound marketing these days?

John (32:22): Yeah. So I I'm always reading HubSpot, Infusionsoft in terms of their you know, blogs and marketing tactics. Cause they seem to know a lot and just like a big brand, like Yellow Pages, you respect people that have been there for a very long time with a huge user base. And they usually hire the top leaders and experts in the industry. So I do follow them. In terms of specific people in SEO, there's dozens of people that I follow. Just because it's, so, I mean, there's so much going on from technical to link building to you know, user engagement, UX, design speed, there's so much going on. So for me, there's people. But there's also a lot of like big software that I follow it.

Kathleen (33:13): Yeah. Yeah. And I see if you're listening, you can't see this, but I, I can see cause we're on video that behind you, you have Rand Fishkin's book Lost and Founder, and he's one of my favorite people to follow for SEO information. So all right. Second question. I always hear from marketers that it's very challenging to keep up with all the changes, especially in the space you're in. I mean, as you we've talked about this at the beginning, SEO changes all the time, literally. And in fact, I think right now there's a lot of chatter that we're in the middle of a big core algorithm update and everybody's kind of like freaking out, what does this mean for me? So as a marketer, how do you stay up to date with all the things that are changing all the time?

John (33:55): So that's the biggest challenge like, yes, we read a lot. All everyone on my team needs to be on top of the game. There's changes all the time, but there's major changes. We try to stay away from like small level micro changes because it's not going to move the needle as drastic as the larger macro ones. Right. but we do read a lot. So Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, backlink.io, Or there's so many different blogs out there. So many videos and podcasts. I listen to it, but I always look at like core foundation and fundamentals all the time. That's more important to me like business. How do you run a good business that has lasted for generations? Not just five, 10 years, I'm talking about 50 years, 80 years, right? Those are the people that want to pick brains with and see what cultivates and what are the real, tangible things.

John (34:50): And that's why I learned a lot from Yellow Pages, like working with thousands of business owners that lasted through many generations. It was all very simple. If you think about it, it's taking care of your customers, listening, understanding what the value prop is, differentiating yourself from competitors, pricing it well, like all the things that you take for granted, but a lot of business owners oversee and they think, wow, getting on the first page of Google will be the Holy grail of at all. But if you think about it, if I get you there and you don't know how to answer your phone, take care of your clients, price it right. All these other factors, it's kind of a waste of effort. Right?

Kathleen (35:28): I feel like, I feel like it's like weight loss. Like everybody gets so entranced by the latest diet fad, but really it's eat less and more, but none of us want to do it. We all want the quick, the quick fix. Right? well, so interesting, John, I really appreciate you sharing all of that with us. If somebody wants to reach out and ask you a question or learn more or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do.

John (35:55): Yeah. So you can check out my website, it's www.localseosearch.ca. But you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best medium and you can find me. It's John Vong V U O N G. And I'm the founder of Local SEO Search.

Kathleen (36:11): Awesome. And I will put links to all of that in the show notes. So as always, head there and check that out if you want to connect with John. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a preferably five star review, because that is how we get found. Just like a, you got to get found in local search with reviews. That's how podcasts get found. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. Thanks so much for joining me this week, John.

John (36:47): Thank you so much, Kathleen. I had a lot of fun.

What does it take to build a thriving online community?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, host Kathleen Booth talks with Gianna Whitford, Aileen Casmano, and Maria Velasquez -- the founders of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society.

Gianna, Aileen and Maria created "the society" (as they call it) just a few months ago and in that short time, membership has grown dramatically and they are now putting on the first-ever CyberMarketing Con, a week long conference for cybersecurity marketers.

From how they built their rapidly growing Slack community, to what they're doing to make membership in the community a valuable experience that keeps members engaged, Gianna, Aileen and Maria share all the details behind the Cybersecurity Marketing Society's successful launch.

Listen in to learn what they did, and how you, too, can create a thriving online community that creates brand advocacy.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Cybersecurity Marketing Society website
• Check out (and register for!) CyberMarketing Con 2020

Kathleen (00:05): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And today I have my first ever episode with three guests. Three is better than one that's for sure. So this week my guests are Aileen Casmano, Gianna Whitford, and Maria Velasquez of the cybersecurity marketing society. Welcome ladies.

Maria (00:37): Thank you.

Aileen (00:38): Thanks for having us.

Kathleen (00:39): Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. This should be a lot of fun. And for those listening, the reason that I have three guests is that the, the three of them are the cofounders of the cybersecurity marketing society, which is an awesome community that I'm a member of that is on Slack, but that has a whole lot of other things going on. So we're going to talk about all of that in a minute. And we're going to talk about building community and what that can do for your brand and your business and, and other things.

Kathleen (01:08): But in the meantime, let's start out by having each of you do a quick introduction of yourself and who you are and where you work and, and anything else you, you decide you want to add. And we'll go in the reverse order from which I introduced you. So we'll start with Maria.

Maria (01:23): Awesome. So Maria Velasquez, I am currently the head of marketing at Unibuddy, which is an ed tech company, helping universities connect with prospective students via various tools and widgets and virtual event platforms and that sort of thing. And previously, I spent a few years in cybersecurity marketing, which is why I am part of this today. Except, you know, even though I moved to EdTech, half of my heart is still in cybersecurity. And so we're happy to be here.

Kathleen (01:56): Awesome. Gianna.

Gianna (01:59): I am Gianna Whitford dialing in from sunny, beautiful Tampa, Florida.

Gianna (02:06): I'm a cybersecurity marketing consultant and one of the cofounders of the cybersecurity marketing society. Previously, I worked at a threat intelligence company.

Kathleen (02:16): Awesome. And Aileen.

Aileen (02:18): I'm Aileen, and I work at Owl Cyber Defense. And I work as the integrated marketing manager, but basically do all of our outbound stuff, advertising, social email campaigns, all that fun stuff that we all love so dearly.

Kathleen (02:37): Alright. So I guess this is such an interesting scenario here because I've had people come on and talk about community on the podcast in the past, but they've always been like the in house marketer at an organization that wanted to build a community for itself. This is interesting because the three of you come from different places and you're this community for reasons outside of work. So I guess let's start out by talking about why did you create this and what the heck were you thinking giving yourself more work outside of your day to day jobs?

Gianna (03:12): Yeah, so I can kind of take a stab at this one. So basically the idea for the society, the cybersecurity marketing society, we call it the society, you know, exclusive, came from when I joined my first, I was creating a company as a marketer. So I had previously worked in big tech and real estate and all these different industries in a marketing role. And, you know, I thought that marketing in cybersecurity would be pretty much the same, but learned quickly that it is a completely different animal and totally different beast. There's a lot of complexities with the product. The audience is different, incredibly different. And so right off the bat joining this company that I first joined, I had wanted to find resources and information, other marketers to kind of reach out to and say, Hey, I'm new to cyber security marketing.

Gianna (04:16): Can you lend me a helping hand? Can you share, what's worked for you. And so a couple of years later I was just like kind of brainstorming with my friend Maria here catching up on a call and had said, Hey, wouldn't it. We were both like talking. It was like, Hey, wouldn't it be great if this thing that has always been an issue for every new marketer entering into the cybersecurity field? Like what if there was a resource there? What if there was a community? Like we all have this informal network of other marketers that we reach out to, peer mentors, essentially, that we ask for advice. Why don't we make this so that other people can access it too? And so Maria had worked with Aileen at Owl Cyber Defense and we all got together and that is sort of the the origin story of the society.

Kathleen (05:07): I love it. And it's so funny because, you know, I'm, I've been working in cyber, in house, about a year now. And before that I advised cyber companies when I had my agency. But I always thought the same thing. Like how come there's not a group that I can join? And then you guys created it, which is why I was so excited about it. So, so describe the society to me because there is a Slack group, but it's more than just a Slack group. You have some other things going on. So can you talk about like the different aspects of what you do and how you've built the community?

Maria (05:43): Do you want me to take this one? So, I mean, from the beginning, we knew that we needed to generate a lot of content and we needed to make sure that we were consistent with it to keep members engaged in and really happy with being part of the community.

Maria (05:59): I think you and I talked about this Kathleen, once about keeping the momentum and not letting it die out. So we were just really thinking outside the box and figuring out, well, there's a lot of zoom fatigue out there. What else can we do that is a little bit different, but still would engage people and get them to register and come on and join the conversation? So one of the things that we started doing off the bat are these happy hours on Fridays. And we try to manage to do them every other week, if not sometimes every three weeks, but we call them cyber beers and tears. And the requirement is that you bring a beer or some sort of other drink of choice, and we just talk and it's, it's usually smaller than, than a webinar.

Maria (06:41): And everyone talks about what they do, or we can talk about something other than work. So it's, it's really fun. And then most recently we did a couple of days and we're calling them fireside chats and they're very interactive laid back Q and A type sessions. And it's usually about one topic. And we bring on a couple of our members actually joined one time. We had someone else that was an expert in marketing operations joined, which was a really good session to a lot of questions and a lot of distraction in the chat. And those are really fun. And then the big beast that's coming up soon, which is the cybersecurity marketing conference and that's our inaugural conference. And we're so excited about that. It started off with a fun idea that Gianna came up with and now we're 15 sessions plus Gianna I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, you have the latest numbers, some amazing speakers one of which is you Kathleen. I thank you for that. Thank you for participating. And yeah, we're really excited about it. I think people, like you said, we needed something like this, and that's the reason why this has taken off the reason why members are so excited. And we've gotten so many signups from the conference and people waiting 40 sessions to, to, to kick off.

Kathleen (07:57): Are you cursing yourselves yet? Because I feel like every time I'm involved in planning an event, it always seems like an awesome idea. And then the closer you get to it, the more you're like, what was I thinking?

Gianna (08:09): We, we knew that. So at least we knew that it was kind of having not, I don't want to say a, make it or break it the conference because we're bigger than just a conference, right? We're a community, we're a society where group, we are interacting almost on a daily basis with other members. We have our fireside chats. We have our other ways that we interact and connect. But this conference was kind of put together in order to show the cybersecurity marketing society to the world, as well as help all of our members and produce something, you know, with love almost like for them. So yes, totally. I think all of us are, are maybe kicking ourselves a little,

Kathleen (08:57): But then I always, and this is maybe this is a terrible joke. I don't know. It's not even really a joke, but I truly have always thought of like running big events, almost like having children. You're like, Oh, I really want to have a baby. And then you get pregnant and the closer you get to your due date, you're like, this is terrible. What was I thinking? And then you have the baby and it's hard for a little bit, but then you're like, let's do it again. I haven't had to have my own. Yes. That's just my own personal outlook on it. But so, so in addition, so you have this community on Slack, you have a website, you have these fireside chats, these happy hours, you've got a conference, you also have a newsletter and you guys write blogs. Like how on earth are you finding all the time for this? Because you all have regular jobs. Maybe I'll have Aileen take this one.

Aileen (09:47): Sure. late nights, I know that's when I work on stuff. And Gianna specifically has been the one that has been sort of leading the pack with getting the most done. And we're so thankful for her. And then I think Maria and I try to find time after hours, usually texting at 11:00 PM, Hey, check out the newsletter, give some edits. So we're really just doing our best to, you know, we're, we're all super passionate about it. So when you're passionate about something, you find the time to get it done. And I don't know if you guys want to add anything. That's how I feel.

Maria (10:31): Yeah. A lot of late nights, once the little monsters are asleep, back on the computer and get a few things done. If you love it. I don't mind. I don't, to be honest, I don't mind the extra hours, the extra effort if you like it.

Aileen (10:40): I think what's so like what keeps us going too, is we see the benefits our members are getting out of it, like the peer to peer, like advice. And just like, if you have a question, I feel like there's always someone in the society that can answer it. And so it was like, you know, that saying, there's not for that. It's like, there's someone, there's a number for that. So I think that's what keeps us, you know, just so motivated is that we're seeing, this is actually helping people solve their problems and we're not, you know, there's nothing being pushed down. Anyone's throat. It's like you come in, you ask a question, are you engaged with it? It's just helping you to be better at your job.

Gianna (11:27): I'd add one more thing in that. Yeah, exactly. Aileen, your last, your last point there is that because this is a group focused around cybersecurity marketing and all of us are cybersecurity marketers or lead marketers. It's not like we had exactly to learn like an entirely new thing. You know, we built a community around ourselves kind of. So all the skills are there. The network is there, which also makes it easy. I'm glad this isn't, I'm glad we didn't start a group about like, I don't know, vegetable farming. Because that would be really hard. So cybersecurity marketing, at least we have an idea of.

Kathleen (12:06): So I've, I think hopefully people have a good sense of what the organization is and kind of some of the activities it does and who it's for and what it entails. What I would love to talk about now is your thoughts on an advice really for anybody else considering creating a community? Because I know I'm a member of a lot of communities and especially a lot of communities on Slack, probably like 20, but there's only a couple that I focus on because otherwise it's just too much and I can't do it all, but also not all of them deliver value. And so I would love to hear your thoughts on how do you structure the community in a way so that it really does deliver value to the people that are members and it encourages them to be active participants.

Aileen (13:01): I can start off. I think something two things we've done, right. One is, early on we just sort of reached out to people that we know in our network and said, we have this idea, what do you think of it? Would this be something you'd join? And that intrigued people and we sort of, you know, took that further and told them our idea. And they were like, yeah, I'd support you. And you know, our first call, our first cyber beers, I think we had around like 10 people. And the sentiment was like, everyone was like, all right, when's the next one? So it was sort of like, I like beta test group. And then we went on to like create the Slack. And I think what we're doing, why it's working is we're letting members drive, drive the conversation where we're letting them drive what they want to get out of it and what they want to put into it too. So people, you know, anyone can write in a channel, we had people request channels like, Hey, I want one on personas or I want one on podcasting. And we're just like listening to our members and giving them the avenues to just grow.

Gianna (14:11): I would also add we have instituted a couple of rules. You've seen them. A couple of rules to keep the community high quality as we scale. We're not, there's a thing called tragedy of the commons where things get too big and then they kind of get diluted in terms of quality. And we're trying really hard not to let that happen. We, that everybody who comes in to make sure that they're actually a cybersecurity marketer and not there to, for example, sell services.

Kathleen (14:44): We had that conversation early on. I'll never forget. Cause you guys asked, should we let vendors in? So, and I, that, it sounds like the decision was no.

Gianna (14:53): Exactly. And so that points directly also to Aileen's point there, is that we ask our members like how they'd like to see this shaped. And then, and then again on the, on the rules side of things, you know, pretty standard rules that we enforce as well as we can you know, standard rules and communities to ensure that everybody's respectful, everyone's polite. We don't allow people to be anonymous, which I think is a problem in online communities. When you're anonymous, you can be kind of you know, we've all seen it with Reddit and other social communities like that. You can, things can get a little nasty. So we make sure that everybody is a marketer. We started with a trusted base of people that we respect and like, and know are great. We have these rules and generally I think that creates a great environment. Maria, what would you like to add?

Maria (15:41): Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with both of you. I think also just keeping it authentic because at the end of the day, we're all just marketers alike and no matter our levels, right? In experience in cybersecurity marketing, we just come together and in this, we're sort of leveling the playing field a little bit and we're just coming together just to help each other. And nobody's there to outshine anyone. And it's been great. It's been actually really just a natural thing that's happening where everyone's just helpful, really kind and always, you know, raising their hands to provide and share the secret sauce of what's something that's worked for them. And I like that. And I think that that's because we put a lot of work in making sure that we put ourselves out there, people really know who Gianna, Maria and Aileen are. It encourages other people do really just break that barrier and to say, I'm here. I don't know much about SEO. I'd love to learn. Like that kind of thing.

Kathleen (16:41): Yeah, that's great. And then one of the things I've noticed or observed is that you have a really nice, very organized and very defined process for onboarding members. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about what that process is like and, and, and how it gets executed.

Maria (17:02): Yeah, that's Gianna. We're going to point to Gianna's corner.

Gianna (17:05): It's funny. Cause we're on a zoom and you're pointing, you're all pointing in like, different directions.

Kathleen (17:10): Right. It's like the Brady bunch only, everyone's seeing a different layout.

Gianna (17:14): Yeah, exactly. So the onboarding process is first through a form. So we have everybody who wants to join, apply on the website. They have the request to join. They fill out a type form and then we review the type form and I check their LinkedIn and make sure they're, they're who they say they are. And then I sent you send out an email invite to them to come into the Slack. And then we have a, it's not a welcome bot. It's me. You guys might think it's a bot, but it's actually, I go in, and, and personally, every

Gianna (17:50): Single person that comes in, I invite them to read our community rules. And I also invite them to share a little bit about themselves because along with being marketers where people and part of the society is is, is a networking group, you know, and I think in our rules we say you know, we want to network, share, solve problems, but also come out with some great new friends. So we invite people to share also a couple of fun facts about themselves in order to make sure it's not just like I work in threat intelligence. And like, that's it.

Kathleen (18:21): Two of the things I really like about the onboarding process. Again, I'm a member of a lot of Slack groups. And so I've had that, the benefit of being able to like, see how this plays out in different ways, both good and bad, two things I really like about what you guys do is you do in the welcome, as you said, are you linked to the community rules?

Kathleen (18:39): And you actually say, when you introduce yourself, please acknowledge that you have read them, which gets people to have to affirmatively say, I have looked at this, which is really smart. And then you also ask people to put their company name in their Slack public user profile name. And I find that really helpful because, you know, if somebody, if you're having a conversation with somebody we're all in there, because we're in the same industry, you know, and it's, it's nice to be able if somebody says, well, my company we're doing X instead of having to like, then go search LinkedIn for that person to be like, what's the context here? You know, you immediately kind of know, Oh, this person's from a big company or a small company, or they're a service company or a product or whatever. Like that context to me is incredibly helpful. And it's interesting to me that more select groups don't do that because I think it, it really adds to the conversation a lot. So let's talk about how you have grown the membership base, because that's been interesting also to me to watch. I think I came in pretty early and it's really seems to be heating up in terms of the pace of people coming in.

Maria (19:51): I think you came in at what? Five, no, you were number five. You would definitely one of the first 10.

Kathleen (19:55): I don't know!

Maria (20:01): Well I can take the start of this one. We put our sales hat on and our BizDev hat on very early on. And we went on LinkedIn and network and did a lot of outreach, a lot of cold outreach. And in, in the beginning it was, it was a lot. And then I think it just, it got to a point where people were starting to invite other people. And it actually took a while for some early members that, that have a big team of other cybersecurity marketers. It took a while for them to invite their team on. They kind of wanted to get a feel of what this is about before I invite my team. I want to make sure this is the right kind of environment. And once we proved that it was a really good environment that the team can actually learn a lot from then we saw everybody,

Maria (20:48): You know, inviting their coworkers and colleagues. So yeah, in the beginning it took a lot of biz dev and sales work and outreach. I'm not gonna call it sales. It's just outreach, just a little bit of brand awareness. And then, and then after that, it just took off on its own. Which, you know, I think there's still a lot to do, you know, in terms of growing it. But we like that there is organic growth because we could see that there is interest there in intent.

Kathleen (21:15): And you all have a website and I've joined some Slack groups where literally you get a link and it sends you to just a page with a, enter your email here to join. How much do you think the website has helped or, or do you like, do you send people there when they're interested in joining and do you think that's made a big difference?

Gianna (21:36): We try to send people there. We have, it's an interesting, because like that is the best path into the society because we vet people cause it's easy. People fill out a questionnaire, we know everything, not everything about them. We're not the government.

Kathleen (21:55): You never know, it is cybersecurity. We have hackers doing your background check.

Gianna (22:01): Exactly. That's the best in the first pass forward. But we started to see like various sad people started inviting people in to the society via just like Slack invite, like without, even without asking us which we were not offended by. So people still do that. Although we direct people to the website because the website's the best way to both like, let people sign up for the newsletter and also double check that there they are, who they are, who they say they are and all of that.

Maria (22:37): But they still need our approval, even if they invite through Slack and we get to see, you know, who they are. And a lot of times if it's the same domain name and we know it's the same company, then it, then it's kind of okay and it gets in like that.

Aileen (22:46): I think also, I mean, the first thing I do as a consumer is if I want to know about a brand, I go to their website. So I think it's important to just have a face for the society. And like people know that if it's serious and it's legitimate and you know, it's definitely a growing brand and it's, there's purpose behind that. So we have nice, like good info on there that people can read before they actually join.

Kathleen (23:15): So let's talk about the event. When is it happening? Give us some details.

Gianna (23:27): So the it's called cyber marketing con 2020 and it's happening completely virtually September 21st through the 25th with the main sessions held the 21st through the 24th and then an after party held in the afternoon of the 25th.

Kathleen (23:46): I love that you guys are doing an after party. I just think that's awesome.

Gianna (23:52): Yeah. We're hoping that people bring what's coming out of their swag bags to the after party. Yeah. We're doing swag bags. We, you know, it's, it's like we, we got a sponsor to do the swag, which is really, really the way that we could afford to do it. But we still wanted to make that connection to our members. Again, this is a member driven organization. Everything we do is in the interest of other cybersecurity marketers. And we're hoping that this helps, you know, being everything, being virtual it's like sometimes it's almost like not real. And we're hoping to create, we were hoping to create like a physical connection to our membership. Does that make sense? That's not too woo woo.

Kathleen (24:40): No, it's, I think you make a great point. And I should say just to put some context around this, at least right now, there's no cost to join the group. Yeah, you guys are all just putting in sweat equity at this point. What is the cost to attend the event?

Gianna (25:02): Tickets for the conference are currently $50 and they'll go up to $75. I think it's September 12th. So we're doing it South by Southwest style, discounted all the way up until the full price. And the event is chock full of sessions that are, are with wait, sorry, are, were, you know, I'm biased, but it was way more than what the ticket price is. We're going to have 15 plus sessions on all sorts of topics. I'm sorry, ten plus sessions on all sorts of topics. SEO demand gen, PR, partnerships, and all these sort of like things that you may not get as a cybersecurity market just inside your own organization.

Kathleen (25:45): Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing deal for an event that's going to spend multiple days. I'm just going to say that like it is, it's very cheap. Not cheap. That's the wrong word. I hate the word cheap. It's it's very reasonably priced.

Aileen (26:00): For attendees, if their company does any sort of personal development, reimbursement, not a huge reimbursement cost. So we get into that.

Kathleen (26:10): Basically like the cost for lunch out for two people, but you get a lot more value out of it. And if somebody wants to learn more about the event, where should they go?

Aileen (26:24): Yeah, we have a Hey Summit page. It's cybermarketingcon2020.hey,summit.com. And then you can also get there through the cyber marketing con spread through the society website. So cybersecuritymarketingsociety.com.

Kathleen (26:38): That's awesome. And I just side note, Hey Summit is the best if you're running a virtual event. I did my virtual event on that in July, and I couldn't believe that all I had to do was set the event up and then it did all like the email reminders and the speaker portal. I was like, Whoa, this is unbelievable. And it's not expensive. So if you're putting on a virtual event, small side plug for Hey Summit.

Maria (27:00): It's like having a part time event manager.

Kathleen (27:05): It really is. It's pretty unbelievable that they don't charge more for it. I shouldn't probably say that because then maybe they'll raise their prices, but it's a good deal. I won't tag them when I promote this post.

Kathleen (27:21): Awesome. All right. Well we are getting to that point in the podcast where we shift gears and I ask you guys the same questions that I ask all of my guests. So the first question is this podcast is all about inbound marketing. So I'm going to let each of you answer this separately. Is there a particular company or a specific individual who you think is really doing inbound marketing well right now who's a good example for listeners to check out online? And we'll go in the other order. So this time Aileen first.

Aileen (27:53): Okay. Well I'm not just saying this to say it, but I think IMPACT does an awesome job and I look at them a lot for best practices. I've attended their conferences in the past. I read They Ask, You Answer. And a specific individual. I, I honestly just try to leverage like who I'm connected to on LinkedIn and just get like peer to peer advice. I would say that's the best, the best way for me and people are always willing to share their, like their secret sauce or their way of doing things. And then you can sort of learn how to apply it back to your, your business or your strategy.

Kathleen (28:37): Awesome. Gianna, how about you?

Gianna (28:41): So I'm also going to say IMPACT and then for companies that I think are doing good inbound, I'm going to go off a little off the beaten track and say Afford Anything, which is a personal finance book run by Paula Pant is really good. It's a little bit of a personal finance book on the side, and I really enjoyed like the in depth articles that she produced on, for example, like real estate investing and stuff. So she's one of my favorite inbound marketers. And then of course you, Kathleen. The content you're producing. I have to honestly say that.

Kathleen (29:24): How about you, Maria?

Maria (29:26): Gosh, I would definitely second you Kathleen, because I mean, I've been following you for quite a while. I think I might've even stalked you, but I'm surprised you're here inviting me to your podcast.

Maria (29:42): I don't have just one favorite. So I love, and this is actually a CEO, but I love what David Cancel of Drift does. And he's the CEO and I'm a huge fan of any brand whose CEO is out there on social who's out there really putting content out and building the brand. So that definitely. I love Chris Walker from Refine Labs. His LinkedIn videos are amazing.

Kathleen (30:12): He's a machine. I don't know how he does it.

Maria (30:16): They bring so much value, so much good content to the point that I actually, it inspired something I'm doing at Unibuddy and I'm getting my sales team to do which we're calling higher ed hot minute. And so we think one topic for a quick minute and they get on video wherever they are. I don't care if they're in their backyard, just do it. And then I take it and put it in a nice frame and put the transcription in the bottom and we put it out there and it's been great. So I love what Chris is doing. So shout out to Refine Labs. And then the last one is Dave Gerhardt, which he's now at Privy. And I think he was at Drift. I love his, his posts. Lots of wisdom in his posts for sure. And the amount of engagement he gets on his posts is amazing. I'm so jealous. I need to, I need to ask him the secret sauce.

Kathleen (31:05): The secret sauce for Dave Gerhardt is he's been doing it for a really long time and super consistently. You know, it's funny because I interviewed him way back when I first started the podcast and I'm now like almost on episode 160 and back then he was already like, he already was in that position of having a lot of engagement and it's literally just he, and he said this to me once. Like he doesn't overthink it. He doesn't like plan out these big posts. He just, if he thinks of something, he puts it on LinkedIn. He just puts it out there. And you know, it's, it's literally almost stream of consciousness in some regards. And you'll, you can see that because early on, he used to do a lot of videos and now, and then he was doing like longer written posts and now it's just like a sentence. Its just on the fly.

Maria (31:52): He gets ts 5,000 views and I'm like, Oh my God.

Kathleen (31:54): But you know, it's funny. I feel like this is one of the biggest things I've learned doing podcast interviews over these past three years is, it's a lot like exercise. Like nobody wants to hear this, but it is totally just like consistency, like sticking with it over time and you know, not taking those days off. I have a problem with that in marketing and in exercise.

Gianna (32:19): My favorite quote is Calvin Coolidge's nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

Gianna (32:26): Like everybody listening, look it up. It's my well, you don't have to, but it's my favorite quote and it ends with this.

Gianna (32:32): Determination alone are omnipotent or omnipotent the slogan press on his salt and will always solve the problems with human race.

Gianna (32:40): Everything is about just doing it.

Kathleen (32:42): Yeah. It's so true. Well I feel like that's just a great kind of way to start to wrap it up. So thank you guys for sharing all of your wisdom about community building and where the society is going and the information on the event. So once more for everybody listening, if you want to learn about the society you go to where?

Aileen (33:09): Cybersecuritymarketingsociety.com.

Kathleen (33:12): And if, and if you want to learn about the event or register, you can go to that website and hit the link for the event. Awesome. All right. And if people want to connect with the three of you online, what's the best way to do that?

Maria (33:28): We have a LinkedIn page for the society and you can find us through there. Or you can just go on our website. I think there is a few blog posts with our name on it. I'm not sure if we linked to our LinkedIn pages, but there's definitely numerous ways you can find it.

Kathleen (33:45): And I can put those links in the show notes too, so that everybody can find you guys. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me this week and if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast, a preferably five star review so that others can find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing awesome marketing work, please tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much to Gianna, Maria and Aileen.

Gianna, Maria and Aileen (34:17): Thanks Kathleen. Thank you. Thank you, Kathleen.

In a world crowded with content, how can brands stand out and develop content that people will fall in love with?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Wall Street Journal best selling author and MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer Ann Handley shares her perspective on what makes great content.

Ann debunks the myth that business content has to be "professional" and shares examples of companies that have developed authentic brand voices and, in doing so, built huge followings.

Check out the episode to hear Ann's advice and get actionable takeaways for creating your own brand voice.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit annhandley.com
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• Get your ticket to Marketing Profs B2B Marketing Forum
• Get a copy of Everybody Writes
• Check out some of the other resources Ann mentioned:
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Kathleen (00:12): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And you guys, this week my guest is Ann Handley. Woohoo! Welcome Ann.

Ann (00:31): Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here with you and with everybody. So thank you for having me.

Kathleen (00:35): I'm so excited to have you. I don't know why it has taken me until episode 150 something to have you on this podcast. Shame on me. But then again, I will admit, I hesitate to ask the people that I, that are sort of like my marketing idols until I really feel like I have my act together. So I'm just going to say that I, maybe I finally have my act together enough, enough to have you on.

Ann (00:46): I like that. I like that.

Kathleen (01:01): So for, for those who don't know, Ann is a wall street journal bestselling author, the author of Everybody Writes. She is also a keynote speaker who's amazing speaking at live events, if you have not seen her. And she's the chief content officer at MarketingProfs, and I mean, I could go on and on about your resume, but I think you can probably tell us better than anybody your story and how you came to be doing what you do.

Ann (01:27): Yeah. So I think you, you covered the you covered the highlights. I went to school for journalism. In my mind. Journalism training is the best training that any marketer can have, because what that does is it inspires you. It instructs you, it educates you on how to think about the audience. And increasingly that is what marketers need to be doing. I mean, obviously we always need to be thinking about our customers. So thinking about your customers in terms of what they need from you, I think is uniquely suited to to journalists. And so I, I think that my background as a journalist, I worked for a journalist for, Oh, I don't know about a decade or so before I, I joined I launched clickz.com, which is one of the first sources of marketing education online for this using this nascent thing called the internet. And and yeah, and then so from there, I was a journalist for 10 years before I started dipping my toe into the marketing space. And it's surprisingly relevant.

Kathleen (02:40): You know, I couldn't agree with you more. I have hired a lot of marketers in my many, many years, I will not say how many in the industry and by far the best writers I've hired have all been, they've all come from journalism backgrounds to the point where now that's almost like a requirement for me when I put out a job description. It's not only I feel like, do they know how to really speak to an audience, but they know what questions to ask. Like, that's such an interesting skill that, that I think was surprising to me. And maybe I shouldn't have been surprised to discover that that marketers aren't always the best interviewers and listeners, whereas journalists are really good.

Ann (03:21): Yeah. And that's really interesting because I think about this a lot, you know, I wrote Everybody Writes as you generously pointed out in the introduction, and as much as I believe in the power of good writing, what good writing means in a marketing context is really about providing value for the audience. So what does your audience need? You know, I hear from people all the time who feel, you know, they say to me, I'm not a good writer and that's not really how I think about, you know, the value of writing because in a marketing context, again, the value of writing is really what is your audience need? What do you need to give them and what can only come from you? And so I think if you reframe writing in terms of that, it just it'll automatically just improve how you communicate a hundred percent, because you'll be thinking about your audience.

Ann (04:09): And, and that to me is the biggest differentiator between marketers who don't think about the audience, they just think about what they want to say. They want to talk about their products and their services and I get it because that's so exciting to us. We want to talk about that. We get excited about it. We see the value for the people who we sell to. And so we want to talk about that, but the reality is, you know, you've got to take it one step beyond that, right? Because your audience doesn't care about you. They care about what you do for them. And that's so elemental in so many ways, but at the same time, I see marketers and marketing all the time that doesn't look at the world through that lens. And so I think if we can constantly do one thing, just remind ourselves all the time, you know, what, what is it in it? What is in it for the audience? What do we need to lead with? Not to what, what not, what do we want to say, but what would be most important and resourceful and what would be most interesting to our audience? And so it's a subtle shift, but I think it's such a key and important one and one that we tend to forget. And I, and I'm guilty of the same, but we've really got to always remind ourselves of that.

Kathleen (05:17): You know, one of my goals before the end of this year is to actually have a baseball hat made that just says "Marketing" on the front. And the reason I want to do that is that I've been saying for so long, this the same thing that now I need like a physical prop for it, which is that we as marketers, we're all human beings, right? We, in our lives, we buy things. We are marketed to. We know, instinctively as human beings, what we like and what we don't like and what works and what doesn't. But for some reason, when we go into work, we put that marketing hat on and we like forget what it means to be human. And and so I think that's one thing I want to do before the end of this year is literally have the marketing hat, like sitting on my desk, in my line of sight so that I can keep remembering, like, do not put that marketing hat on when you write and, you know, and, and pretend like you're talking to your friend and not the audience.

Ann (06:09): Yeah. That's awesome. That's a really funny idea. I love the physical manifestation of that. That's really great. I love that. I think, yeah. If we take off the marketing hat while we're writing and then maybe it's okay to put that marketing hat on, when you think about, you know, things like distribution and how are we actually going to leverage the kinds of, of content assets that we've created. So, you know, that's not to say that there's never a time for a marketing hat, but I think when you were thinking about it as a content creator, and when you're thinking about serving the needs of an audience, it's, it's better to just sort of set it aside for, for a little while and then maybe put it back on

Kathleen (06:49): Oh, for special occasions,

Ann (06:51): Bring it out for special occasions. Yeah. Like that.

Kathleen (06:54): Well, one of the reasons that I have always really kind of admired you and followed you is because I like your writing a lot and I particularly have enjoyed reading your newsletter. And, and to me, at least I can only speak for myself, it, it it's, it makes me feel like I know you, like, you're my buddy. You know, like I read it and I, and I know things about you as a person, sad things like when your dog passed away and just like, it's funny, I guess it must be with like what celebrities experience, where they walk around and everyone feels like they know with them. I kind of feel like that about you. And then there's something special in the way you've developed it. And, and, you know, it's interesting when you talk about giving your audience what they need. Cause I feel like sometimes what the audience needs is information and sometimes what they need is a feeling of belonging and relationship. And you seem to have like intuitively mastered that. So I'd love it. If you could talk a little bit about that.

Ann (07:52): Yeah. That's so wonderful first. Thank you. I, that I've, I've never thought about it quite in those terms, so that's really, that's, that's really, that's nice. Thank you so much. So yes, I publish a newsletter every other Sunday. It's called Total Annarchy. And if you want to check it out, it's at annhandley.com/newsletter. And I'm sure you'll put links somewhere on this page, right? Yeah. And it's, it's funny because I started that list, started the newsletter because, you know, I've had my own site forever. I've, you know, as, as much as I I've grown marketing process, I've also had my own website and I would occasionally blog on there. But, you know, what happens when your career is that after a while you, you know, as you go further, along in your career, you stop touching things quite as much, you don't build products anymore and byproducts, I mean, marketing assets anymore, you know, you manage people who do that and you certainly might have a hand in it, but you don't physically touch things quite as much as you once did.

Ann (09:02): At least in my case, that's a hundred percent true. And I wanted something that I would build myself. So I wanted something that would really show me from the ground up. What does it mean? I like to build an email list now in, when I started at 2018, for example, here it is in 2020, I'm still learning that, you know, how do you actually connect with, with a, an audience, you know, from the start I started with very few people, that email list and here two years later, it's now I just hit 30,000. Wow. Which was, yeah, it was personally really gratifying to me. So what have I learned a lot in that, about building audiences? And so some of the things that you just talked about, like I said, I don't think I've quite expressed them in that way, but I've felt them, you know, and so connecting with an audience and growing it.

Ann (09:48): It's just, I've learned a whole lot about it and it's really given me something to own and to, to build myself, I get enormous psychic satisfaction out of it. But I also have learned a lot about what does it take to be a marketer in 2020 again, when you, you know, when you're, when you've been in marketing for a long time and when you leave teams, you know, you don't necessarily, you're not in the trenches quite as much. So I really have valued just that ability to do that. And that's really why I started my list. So anyway, all that to say, it's been interesting too, to see its evolution. Like if I go back two years and I look at it, what I was talking about, then I, you know, I felt a little unsure about how is it that I actually communicate.

Ann (10:34): I, I, was it like I can, it feels tentative when I read it now. And here it is two years later, and I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. And one of those things to your point is that the more you can be vulnerable, the more you can show people who you are, the more relatable you are and ultimately the more effective any piece of content is. And so that was just such a big, big takeaway for me from this whole exercise. And yeah, it sounds, again, elemental, it sounds like something I should have known, but I, didn't not in, not in any true sense, you know, not at that level. So that's, it's been really interesting to me just to sort of see that, and sometimes I'll publish something, you know, the thing about just publishing about owning something like I do and publishing it under me, not under MarketingProfs, but under me.

Ann (11:25): So it's very close to my heart. There's a vulnerability to that. So there's a vulnerability to writing about, you know, my dog passed away anyway, which was a massively emotional experience for me. Or, you know, this past week I wrote about imposter syndrome and how I still struggle with it from time to time and sort of what I've learned from it and how I've used it differently now than I might have a few years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago when I started my career. So writing about those subjects, you know, it can feel vulnerable and I sort of have to brace myself sometimes because I worry that it's going to, that people are going to be mean about it, basically, that they're going to say, you know, what are you, who are you to write about this? Or, you know, shut your face, or I don't know, whatever.

Kathleen (12:13): Have you encountered that?

Ann (12:15): Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Kathleen (12:16): I would be shocked if you hadn't.

Ann (12:18): Yeah, for sure. And so my point of saying this to you is that I think the more vulnerable that I am and the more vulnerable I feel when I publish, when I hit that button, I'm always a little bit terrified. And I actually think that that's a good thing. How does that relate to marketing? Because I think if, you know, as I wrote about this past week, and if we're not a little terrified when we're doing, doing whatever it is that we're doing, then I think we're not pushing ourselves far enough as marketers, because the point is, of course in marketing is not to connect with everybody. And as gratified as I am, that, you know, that they're, that my list has grown to 30,000. There's also a ton of people who have unsubscribed. Right. Of course, because if they don't feel like it's in that, what's in it for them is not a value and that's fine, but I think that's an important lesson for us to learn as marketers too.

Kathleen (13:04): The interesting thing to me about having this conversation is, is, you know, your, as you said, your newsletter as a personal newsletter, but you also create content for MarketingProfs. And I think it would be easy for somebody listening to say, well, that's great. That's a personal newsletter. It's different when you're writing for your business. And one of the first things that really illustrated to me that it doesn't have to be different actually is something that you turned me on to. I've never told you this story, but you mentioned in a conversation around newsletters, you mentioned the CB insights newsletter, and I, to this day, still use that as an example of how a very successful, very like a business that's in a very professional sector, can have a newsletter that injects a strong vein of, of personality into it. And the, the part of it that I always shine my, my spotlight on is that I think his name is Anand Sanwal who writes it, he signs off every newsletter with, I love you.

Kathleen (14:09): Who does that in a business newsletter? Like it's so awesome and unexpected and fantastic. And, and they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. So clearly it's not, you know, causing people to unsubscribe in droves. But I wanted to, for one, share with you that, like you were the one who first alerted me to that example, which is one that I really love and to this day, still share with people, but also ask you if you could talk a little bit about, you know, that objection, because I feel like it comes up a lot. Like I can't do that in my company newsletter or in my company marketing, because I have to be somehow, you know, display this other level of professionalism.

Ann (14:44): Yeah. I do hear that a lot. And that CB insights newsletter is a really great example of that in part, because of that, I love you, but also, you know, the way that it's written. He, Anand, writes it as a letter. Essentially it starts with hi friend, not friends, right? Hi friend, one person. Very different than a group, a room full of people. He does not write to an audience. He's writing to one person. And then, you know, the way that he approaches, so he talks about emerging technology, right? He he's he covers the, the the VC world a lot. He covers technology and data science and all kinds of things like that to your point, very, very buttoned up. And he talks a lot about FinTech, for example, not a category known for its warmth and humanity. And so I love the way that he's injecting that in a very, very unique way.

Ann (15:40): So when he writes it, it's, it's a little snarky, it's funny, it's, you know, it's got definite personalities that, that I love you with the end is not, it's not divorced from the rest of the newsletter is what I'm saying. It's very much baked into the vibe and the approach and his perspective. And so I think that the broader lesson I think in, in marketing is, is just, you know, a few of those things, like he's, he's grown that list by the way, from 3000 people to, I think he's just over 600,000 now.

Kathleen (16:11): It's unbelievable.

Ann (16:12): I know it's massive. And so just think about the lessons inherent in that, you know? I'm not advocating that every B2B tech company out there, that every B2B company or that every, you know, insert any category here, company needs to approach their marketing and sign their newsletter with an, I love you.

Ann (16:31): What I am saying is, you know, how can you inject your humanity and your personality into what you're doing? I mean, Anand Sanwal is a great example of that, but another one of my favorite newsletters is from a brand called Phrasee. It's with a ph. So Phrasee, I think it is. And they are based in the UK. What they do is very similar, like an ensemble, lots of personality goes into their newsletter, but it doesn't come from the CEO in this case, it comes from Phrasee. So it sounds different. It doesn't sound like any other tech company out there and Phrasee by the way sells a AI solutions for, for B2B companies

Kathleen (17:14): Also. So also an industry that you wouldn't immediately think of, you know, as lending itself well to personnel.

Ann (17:20): Yes, very good point. But I love the way that they write that newsletter. And you know, another objection that I hear is, well, we don't have an announcer on wall. We don't want it to come from one person. I mean, there's a diff, there's a million different iterations on that approach. And so I'm mentioning Phrasee as an example of another iteration of that tons of personality, they use lots of GIFs or, or Jiffs depending on,

Kathleen (17:46): Ann, don't stir that controversy on this podcast now.

Ann (17:51): Oh my gosh I know. We'll get letters. Talk about unsubscribes. That'll just, that'll just launch people into detonate. But they, they use GIFs in their, in their, in their newsletter. It's really fun. The personality just shines through and it comes from a brand. So it's, you know, we're not saying that you have to use, I love you. You don't have to have a person's name attached to it, although that's fantastic. If you do it, doesn't have to be personal in that approach. It just needs to be personable. So that's what I counsel brands about. It's not about personal, it's about personable. Are you actually showing people, you know, your personality and yes. Even if you are a brand are you giving them a shred of humanity to latch onto, does it feel like it comes from a person like start there? You know, that's a pretty low bar.

Kathleen (18:41): You would think, you would think. Yeah. So when you, you said you counseled brands and what's so interesting about that statement to me is like obviously a brand isn't a person. So when you have, let's say a larger company where they're there, you know, there may be isn't that clear or one person who could be the voice. How do you advise companies to determine what the voice of their brand is going to be?

Ann (19:09): Yeah, your brand, I mean, sorry, your brand voice comes from your personality as a company. And so that's going to depend on your brand more broadly, you know, what is your positioning in the market? How do you communicate with your prospects, with your customers? What are you all about? You know, in a lot of smaller companies that is going to come from the CEO, right? Because a lot of, or the founders voice you know. Dollar shave club, great example of that, right. Right. Comes from the founders sort of quirky, fun, irreverent style. So in a smaller brand, that's a hundred percent true, but in a larger brand, I think you've, you've got to really just think about like, who, who are we number one, and then just some basic attributes about how, you know, what best defines you. How do you communicate with your prospects?

Ann (20:02): You know, do you want to keep it very buttoned up? And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way. I mean, I think you can be personable and buttoned up. But at the same time, you know, just, just make, making sure that it matches your, your overall brand. And the way the thing that I always think about is like, what are the three adjectives that best define your brand, right? How do you actually what are the three ways that, that, or three attributes, I guess, that you would, that you would say would best define your brand? So marketing process, for example, you know, when we think about this, we are marketers marketing to marketers. And so we want them to know that they can rely on us. So we want to project confidence, for example, another thing, though, we want to be approachable.

Ann (20:46): We want them to feel because we are marketers marketing to marketers. We want to have that personal approach, right. That we want to be personable. So we want to be approachable is the way that we define it. And the third way we define it is some elements of unexpected, like sell some elements of fun somewhere. We don't want to sound like any other marketing training and education company. So what does that element that we can, that we can use to spice up our, our voice from time to time to spice up our content, everything we're doing across the website, across social channels, our email, like all of it.

Kathleen (21:20): I like that approach because I think just the three words, it's very simple. It's approachable. Any company can do that, certainly as a starting point.

Ann (21:29): I mean, you could hire an agency and come in and they will charge you, you know, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars and do it for you.

Kathleen (21:34): To come up with three words?

Ann (21:34): They can go much deeper, but I'm talking about it, a basic that just, just start there and then, and then blow it out from there.

Kathleen (21:44): So it's one thing to write a newsletter and to have a voice in it. But it seems like, you know, that voice needs to carry you throughout all of your marketing. So how do you do that? You know, like how do you really filter that voice down and seep it and soak it through all the various aspects and assets that you have in your marketing?

Ann (22:08): Yeah. I think one of the things that we used to do in, in in my journalism days when I used to work for newspapers back when newspapers were actually paper we used to have editorial meetings, right? Every day we would have a standup editorial meeting. And so I think that, you know, that same approach applies to teams of marketers who all need to be on the same page. You know, it can be part of your creative review potentially, but I think it's important to just have that conversation, you know, to talk about your tone of voice as a living breathing document. So the first thing to do of course, is to write it down, document it somewhere, which sounds incredibly boring, but I think it's just the kind of thing where you need to have it front and center for you and for your teams all the time.

Ann (22:58): Even if it's just a simple Google doc, which is what we have at MarketingProfs, by the way, simple Google doc that you can refer to when you need it just as a refresher and throw in examples, you know, here's how we communicate here. Some really strong examples. And by doing that, it also allows you to share that living, breathing document with freelancers or content creators, or anybody who happens to be creating content on behalf of your brand. So, you know, I think we tend to overcomplicate this whole process, but, you know, internal conversations, talking, you know, calling out great pieces of content that, or, or are great examples of tone of voice within the own or within your own organization. We do that all the time. And then secondly, a living breathing document, and I'm emphasizing living, breathing document because, you know, your tone of voice, just like your brand, just like your company is not a stagnant thing. It's not like you say, here it is. And you put it up on a shelf somewhere in your brand guidelines and end of story. I think it's much more relevant if you keep it front and center close by and you, you iterate and evolve it over time. Yeah.

Kathleen (24:04): Now we've talked a lot about voice because selfishly, that was something I wanted to pick your brain on. But you know, I know for you this overarching theme of honesty, transparency, authenticity is like a big focus area right now. And I feel like for some people, those are very loaded words, especially in the day and age that we live in. And there's a lot of fear around that and what, you know, what are the guardrails to that and that sort of thing. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Ann (24:33): Yeah. I don't know if it's funny, cause I feel like, you know, here we are having this conversation in the we're, we're rolling into the, the, the close to the end of 2020, I guess, in, in, in August. And I started to feel like you can, you can see the end of the year over the horizon. And this has been such a crazy year for, for so many brands for so many people. I think if there's anything good that has come about from COVID is that I have seen greater transparency and authenticity with brands. Now this has obviously been a very difficult time for, for so many, so many businesses. But I, I do think that there's also, commensurate with that, there's been a sense of who people are as people within these, these brands, as much as we're getting a sense of of you know, just, just how, how are brands responding and how are people responding?

Ann (25:37): So, you know, just, just as an example of seeing people in their home offices, seeing the challenges that we all deal with right now with kids home and, and the lack of clarity around what's going to happen next. Like nobody knows. And so I think that has added to a layer of, you know, kind of empathy and understanding. I mean, I certainly have a sense of people on my team, what their challenges are much more so than I I did before this pandemic hit. And you know, and, and we've always been virtual, but I think that this added stress and added layer has only improved our communications internally because there's a whole lot more, I don't know, there's, there's, we're all so hyper aware of each other's humanity right now, I guess, is the best way to put it.

Ann (26:24): How is that playing out with brands? I mean, I think there's been a couple of great examples of companies who I think have done a really good job and trying to be as authentic and human and, and relatable as possible during this time at the very beginning of this pandemic, I really liked the way that Arnie Sorenson, who's the CEO of Marriott at a time, when so many brands were issuing emails or press releases to their, to their audiences expressing, you know, during this time during these unprecedented times, and I'm using like unprecedented air quotes during these unprecedented times, you know, we are here for you, we're with you, but I love that Arnie Sorenson did the complete opposite. Instead they fired up a video camera and filmed Arnie in this five minute video that they shared on social media. And in the video, Arnie discusses just how gutted he is by what's going on around the world, but especially how it's affecting Marriott associates.

Ann (27:27): I think that was just so poignant and such a telling example of what I think so many more CEOs and leaders in business should have done, which is get on camera and turn that camera around, show your audience who you are. Don't just say during these unprecedented times we are gutted, you know, actually show it. And that's exactly what happened in that video. You know, you could see the emotion on Arnie's face. So that's a great example I think, of, of using and using is the wrong word, because I don't want to sound like, you know, any brand should be using the pandemic, but, but taking the opportunity, I think to just not just say how you feel, but really show how you feel.

Kathleen (28:11): Yeah, it is so powerful and I'm sure there are many CEOs who probably have trepidation around that. Just like you say, you have trepidation around hitting send, but I think, you know, like you said, if there isn't a little bit of fear, then you must not be doing something, right.

Ann (28:26): Yeah. Yeah. And you know, since then, there's, I mean, he did that back in, I want to say late March, maybe early April, something like that. So pretty early on when we have seen more leaders come out front and center, but you know, not, not as many as I think we could have. And so I'm just really thinking about how is it that we should be communicating right now. I mean, I think every brand should be having that conversation internally. How do we actually communicate in a way that's different because the world is not different. I mean, the world is a hundred percent different. The world is a hundred percent different for your company, for your audiences, for the people you do business with for, for, you know, for you, for me, for everybody, it's like, none of it is, is as usual. And so I think the conversation that needs to be happening internally and every brand out there is, you know, what is our response to this going to be not just now, but longterm. Because I do think that's how we behave right now does have repercussions, you know, years and months and years from now.

Kathleen (29:26): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Now speaking of the world being a completely different place one of the ways that that has manifested is the whole industry of events has just had an atom bomb dropped on it. And, and I wanted to ask you about that because MarketingProfs has an amazing annual event, B2B marketing forum, and it was supposed to be coming up here shortly. Tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing.

Ann (29:58): Yeah, well, it is a surprise to absolutely know that the B2B forum, which was supposed to take place November 4th and fifth in San Francisco, California is now going to take place online. So it's going virtual, like every other event out there. It took us a while to get everything in line, but we are now moving full steam ahead with our virtual program. So it'll be a two day program. And one of the, the things that we've done is, you know, again, just like this conversation, we're having a minute ago about how it's incumbent on every brand to have this conversation, you know, what do we do now? How do we respond? And so a, I guess a silver lining of this pandemic is that we absolutely had to have that conversation internally at MarketingProfs about, you know, what does this mean for us and how do we actually respond in a way that's meaningful. We couldn't take a two day program that was intended to be in person and just poured it into an online platform. And I was like, okay, done. It just doesn't work that way anymore. And so we had to ask ourselves, you know, what's inherent to a virtual platform that maybe we can't do in person. And so that's an issue that we're working through. Like, is there, is there actually opportunity in a virtual environment? Now, one of the things obviously would be, yes, you can attract an international audience, whereas before not so much,

Kathleen (31:26): Although I will say I was at the event last year and I was actually shocked by how many people I met from other countries at an event of that size. Like, I felt like an outsized proportion of people came in internationally. Much more than I had expected.

Ann (31:40): Yeah. That's a fair point. Yeah. I think compared to other marketing conferences, I'll put it that way. Yeah. Yeah. That is a fair point. But I think even, even more so now, right. Because we just have the, once you, once there's no travel involved and whatsoever, that means that it does open it up to a whole host of people who may not have been able to be there otherwise. So yes, that's true. And then the other, the other issue that we thought about was, you know, the great part about going to an in person event is that you go there and it's, you meet all these people and you're inspired and you learning all kinds of new things and you just feel like, so I'm so filled up and so on fire. And then you get back to your office and it's you walk into the door and you sit down at your desk and as you open up your laptop and you've got like a thousand emails from that you need to respond to, and then your boss needs to meet with you and maybe your direct reports need some help and maybe sales wants to have a conversation.

Ann (32:32): And next thing, you know, like by the afternoon, like all those good vibes are just completely just destroyed and you're sitting going, Ugh, what was I going to focus on again? You know? And so we saw that as an opportunity. Okay. So that moment isn't happening, right? People are not going to walk back to their, their, their opposites, right. They're not going to drive to their office on Monday post event and, you know, fire it up. So how do we actually think about that a little bit differently? So our solution to that was to think about how do we actually extend the inspiration and the learning from something like the B2B forum year round. So what we've done is that anyone who buys a ticket to the B2B forum this year will also get a pro subscription. So that means that you'll get access to our pro community.

Ann (33:22): We have a Facebook group, we have ongoing resources, we have regular webinars and in the fall we'll be introducing masterclasses around various marketing topics. And so what we're doing there is essentially giving people the opportunity to extend that inspiration and that learning and that access to resources and that networking all year round. So yes, you can get fired up over two days, but then it's not going to go away because you're going to have access to it all year round. And so I'm sharing all of that with you as an example of how I think so many companies in the brands need to rethink, how is it that we are delivering our products and services with the, the, with empathy, for the mindset of, of those people you sell to, as I said, you know, people are not going to go back to their offices because we're already all in our home offices.

Ann (34:11): And so that meant that we needed to, we needed to strengthen the value for our attendees, but also it was, it was a great opportunity I think, to display something or, or, or, or to address a challenge that I know I felt as a, as a business person, as a marketer, as somebody who loves events. I mean, I feel that same struggle of going back to the office and just being, you know, all those good vibes being completely destroyed. And so how is it that we could address that? It, it, it, for me, I think it was a it's I'm really excited just to be able to talk about that more. And I'm really excited to see how it plays out long term.

Kathleen (34:50): I think it's really neat that you're including the membership in pro as part of it. Not only because it gives people access to all, all of that learning and education, but, you know, the community aspect, I feel like so much of it's really been interesting to me community online communities have been a thing for a long time. And but I really feel like in the last 12 to 18 months, some there's been like a tidal shift that has happened. And so much like goodness is occurring in these communities that are out there, whether they're on Facebook or on Slack or on somebody's website, in a, in a platform built there that, especially with us all stuck in our houses right now, it's such a great way to keep the energy going for the rest of the year and to build and, to form those relationships. And like, I mean, I've been in the MarketingProfs, the pro Facebook group, and there's great content in there, but it's also fun. Like I love watching Kerry when she does her videos.

Ann (35:48): Yeah. It's a lot of good stuff happening there. Kerry did a great job and it's new. Like we just launched that basically in April, I think it was April. Yeah. So again, that was another response to the pandemic, you know, how can we actually connect people without the, who don't have the ability to connect in person anymore? So that was another example of something that we, that we wanted to do as a, as a, as a kind of gift to our, our pro members.

Kathleen (36:14): Well, it's awesome. Everybody should be a part of it. If somebody is listening and they want to check out B2B forum, what's the best way for them to do that?

Ann (36:23): Oh, they can go to mpb2b.marketingprofs.com, or you can just go to marketingprofs.com and you can just click on, sorry, my daughter's coming in.

Kathleen (36:38): Part and parcel of the whole, yeah, the Zoom from home thing.

Ann (36:42): Just got completely distracted. Yeah, you can go to marketingprofs.com and you can navigate to the B2B forum easily from there.

Kathleen (36:48): Great. now shifting gears for a second, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests at the end. And I'm particularly curious to hear what you have to say about these two things. The first one is, of course, you know, we're all about inbound marketing on the podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be, you know, a great inbound marketer these days?

Ann (37:12): Hm. That's a good question. Setting the standard for what it means to be great inbound marketer. Does it have to be B2B or can it be, can be, can be an individual?

Kathleen (37:25): It can be a company from any industry.

Ann (37:32): Okay.

Ann (37:33): Yeah, that's really interesting.

Kathleen (37:35): And you can make more than one too.

Ann (37:37): So, yeah, so I think my, my favorite, I was, it's not really a company organization who I think is doing a great job with their marketing is it's a, I wrote about them actually recently in my newsletter. So maybe it's familiar to you, Kathleen, but it's the economic development agency in Currituck County. If you go to Think Currituck, and it's C U R R I T U C k.com. Thinkcurrituck.com. What I love about what they do is that if you go to their homepage, they have a button right on there that says how to do two different calls to action on there. One is a, I think finding properties, something like that because an economic development agency, you know, they're charged with with, you know, developing the business in that area.

Ann (38:32): But the other one says, call Larry. And Larry is Larry Lombardi, who is the executive director of the Think Currituck economic development agency, of the Currituck County economic development agency. And so all of their their, their marketing efforts are really around Larry. And so it embodies everything that we're talking about here, you know, that sense of humanity and vulnerability and transparency. But what I love about their approach is that it carries straight through to a call to action on the website. You know, so everything that Think Currituck is doing from both an inbound perspective, as well as, you know, just like again, they've thought through little details like that. I just think it's great. It's just genius. Their blog is, is really solid, really good. The website is not tons of bells and whistles on it, but it's it's so it's just to the point, you know, it's very direct.

Ann (39:29): And so I, I just love the way they've honed that message. And then it's also wrapped with it's a wrapped around Larry Lombardi's personality. And that that call Larry button is genius. And when you click on that button, by the way, which I did, it gives you Larry's contact info and it gives you his, his telephone number.

Kathleen (39:47): I was going to say poor Larry, his phone.

Ann (39:50): So I called it, I called Larry, of course, because it told me to. That was a call to action on their website. Partly because I was like, Holy, wow, I love this. This is genius. What are you doing here? It's hilarious. I have to meet Larry.

Kathleen (40:03): Yeah, exactly.

Ann (40:04): So when I called Larry, like, hello, Larry, he's like, Hey, I'm like, hi, this is Ann Hanley. And he's like, how can I help you?

Kathleen (40:11): Fantastic.

Ann (40:11): So just a genius use, I think, everything's sort of working together. And I asked Larry, like, how many, how many of these do you get? And he said, he gets about 15 a month, which is not, I honestly thought that it would be a whole lot more, but anyway.

Kathleen (40:26): I bet there's a lot of people who just don't believe like you're really going to get him. And there's probably a lot of skepticism out there cause people aren't used to anyone being that generous with their phone number.

Ann (40:36): That's exactly the point though, isn't it like people aren't used to that level of generosity. So, you know, we haven't really talked about generosity, but that's another great way to think about your marketing was through that lens. And so I love the way that he is so accessible. People don't abuse. It, it turns out and maybe it's because as you say, people don't trust it, but how fantastic is that?

Kathleen (40:55): It's awesome. Well, I can't wait to go check that out. I love hearing examples. So thank you for that one. All right. Second question. The number one pain point that I hear other marketers express is that things change so quickly in the world of marketing and they're, they feel overwhelmed by trying to keep up with everything and to educate themselves and to consume all the content that's out there. So how do you personally educate yourself and stay up to date?

Ann (41:23): That's a good question. I, I read a lot, I read a lot of industry newsletters but I also, you know, my, my family makes fun of me because I think of everything through a marketing lens. So I I'm right now, I'm, I'm talking to you now from a little town on the, in Southern Maine, right on the coast.

Ann (41:49): And when I go downtown, there's like, there's one little store in town, like one little general store with a tiny little sandwich counter at the back. And when I go down there, I just, I think about everything through a marketing lens and the way that they are approaching everything. And so I get a lot of inspiration just by the way that I move through the world, which sounds goofy. But man, it's like, I learned so much about what works and what doesn't work and by what I see other people doing myself. And so, yes, you know, you can read tons of, of online publications and you can, you can educate yourself all day long, but ultimately I think you've gotta just use all, you know, internalize all that information, just look to see what's working around you. You started this call today saying, you know, talking about your marketing hat.

Ann (42:38): And I love that because, you know, we do your point, like you, as you said, we are all being marketed to on a regular basis. And so what, what cuts through the clutter for you? Like, I get a lot of inspiration in that way. So when I go talk to Lisa down at the grocery at the right in downtown two blocks from here and I listened to her and what's, what's working for her. I get a whole lot of inspiration from that. And I don't think because I'm going to suddenly start consulting with a bunch of small town, grocery stores, what, you know, what she's doing has and what she's finding valuable and what she's not finding value in has repercussions for a database business or a technology company.

Kathleen (43:21): She's also very close to her customer, which a lot of bigger companies are not. So yes,

Ann (43:25): Yes. That's actually a really good point. Yes. That's in part and, and some things that she's feeling frustrated by, I think, Oh, that's because you're not doing this. Right. Right. Right. And so it's, it's, it's equally when she says something isn't working, it's equally as interesting to me. So so yeah, so that's actually how I get a lot of a lot of, of education and inspiration also just like social media. I learned a whole lot just by, just by listening on social media and shutting up every once in a while. And just listening to what people are talking about, podcasts like this one too. I mean, I get a lot of value out of listening to friends and seeing what, what they're talking about just as much as, as I do. Just, you know, just through my own reading and, and and you know, from, from any of that,

Kathleen (44:12): Well, it's really interesting to me to hear you talk about kind of just going out into the world and being a keen observer, because one of the things that I've noticed over 150 plus episodes of doing this podcast is that some of the best marketers I've interviewed - yourself, another person that springs to mind, Marcus Sheridan, who I know you're very close with - they're not trained as marketers. And it's, which is not to say that you shouldn't go out and study marketing. It's just that what makes them great marketers is that they are keen observers of, of the human condition and, and passionately interested in understanding what makes people tick. And like, that's what makes Marcus such a great communicator is he, he likes to figure out like, how do we connect as people? And I feel like you, you do the same thing. Like there's an instinct in there.

Kathleen (44:59): You know, your training was in journalism. I don't even know what he studied as an undergrad, but he had a pool company. And there are plenty of other examples from throughout the history of the podcast that that's the case for. And so it, I guess the takeaway for me is really like, you can study marketing and it's good to do that, certainly. And there's a lot to learn from that, as you say, you learn from that as well. But none of that can make up for if you don't have the type of mind that's interested in understanding what makes people tick as human beings.

Ann (45:27): Yes. Yes. And I guess the other thing I would add to that, and also this is a callback to what we were talking about earlier in this conversation, but make something, create something, try it, you know, build an audience. What are you passionate about? Even if it's something that isn't related to really what you're doing in your job at all? You know, my newsletter is about writing and it's about content. It's it's, I don't necessarily talk about writing all the time, but in this newsletter, that's what I focus on. And that's where I, what I am building an audience around. And so I've, like I said, I've learned a lot about communicating and writing and and what, what people really value and what connects with them just through that act. So wait in, get your hands dirty. Like you're not gonna learn it just from, from observing, you know, what, what, what other people are doing. I think it's much better if you can really weight in and apply some of that to actually building something yourself.

Kathleen (46:22): That is great advice. And on that note, we will wrap up with, if somebody does want to check out your newsletter and subscribe, where should they go to do that?

Ann (46:30): Yeah. So they can go to annhandley.com/newsletter. They can also go to just annhandley.com and, and navigate there via the newsletter button. Or you can check out anything that we're doing at marketingprofs.com as well. Awesome.

Kathleen (46:44): Well, I will put the links to all of those things in the show notes and of course, check out B2B marketing forum and the Total Annarchy newsletter, two of my favorite things. And if you're listening and you learn something new this week, please consider heading to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by other people. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much Ann. This was a ton of fun.

Ann (47:15): Yes. Thanks for having me.

How can any company - large or small - own their competitive market, charge more, and at the same time, build a customer base that absolutely loves it?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Theresa Lina, author of the book "Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More, and Have Customers Love You For It," talks about the Apollo method - the system that she says is the secret to standing out as a brand.

Theresa's method is simple and actionable, and something that any company can apply, and in this episode, she breaks down the details and talks about why so many companies get it wrong.

Resources from this episode:

• Connect with Theresa on LinkedIn
• Buy the book
• Visit the Apollo Method website
• Check out some of the other resources Theresa mentioned:
  • Visit ecorner.standford.edu
  • Stu McLaren's website
  • Salesforce's Trailblazers community

Kathleen (00:15): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Theresa Lina, who is the author of the number one Amazon bestseller "Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More and Have Customers Love You For It." Welcome to the podcast Theresa.

Theresa (00:35): Thank you, Kathleen. I'm so happy to be here.

Kathleen (00:37): Yeah, I'm really interested to speak with you. First of all, I love the topic of the book. I mean, who does not want to be the GoTo and also have their customers love them and be able to charge more and all the things that you mentioned in the title? But also you have a really interesting background and mix of things that you do. You're not only a book author, you're a consultant. You are a teacher. You're involved in Stanford university and educating people about marketing. I wonder if maybe you could take a minute and talk a little bit about your background, how you got to where you are today and all of the different things that you're involved in today.

Theresa (01:13): Okay. Yes. So yeah, my, my primary emphasis throughout my career has been strategy and marketing in the tech and mostly in the technology space and primarily B2B. So I've studied marketing and information technology at university. And then I got a job with Accenture coming out of college and spent many years with them and was in both the client on the client side. And then later helped start the industry marketing program there. And I had a global industry marketing role for one of the business units that I helped start with the partner in charge at the time. And we grew that to be over $850 million in a very short period of time with all organic growth, which was really incredible. It was an incredible ride. And now that business unit is a multibillion dollar business unit.

Theresa (02:14): It's massive inside the company. And then I went off on my own. I, part of me, I had, I sort of wore two hats. I had one company that was an educational entertainment company for children, which was a personal project. And then I started a strategy and marketing consulting firm and worked with Accenture and other clients with that. And then over time, there were various times when I went back inside to become chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer for a couple of different companies, which kept me grounded because as a consultant, it's so easy to think you have all the answers and, Oh, everything's straight forward, just do this and you'll succeed. And of course we all know, any of us who've spent time on the inside, life is very different when you're, you know, dodging the bullets every day inside a company.

Theresa (03:08): And one of those stints was during the dot com rise and fall. And so I lived through all of the dot com bust and the 9-11 and all of that. And then another stint was through the great recession. So you know, I definitely know what it's like to go through these hard times as somebody on the inside. And then I also have been involved at Stanford for a little over 15 years now in various capacities, both in helping with their own outreach to their alumni and their communities and stakeholders. And then also I help I'm on the teaching team for some courses and one of their executive ed programs at the business school. So I wear quite a few hats and then I have, I still have my consulting firm.

Kathleen (03:59): Now let's talk a little bit about the book. Be the go-to. What does that mean?

Theresa (04:03): Yeah, so, you know, one of the, the, the big problem that I was running into with my own business and that I was running into with companies that I was working for and with clients is that customers or clients started putting pricing pressure on us because they weren't seeing what made us unique and different from anybody else they could work with. And it was really frustrating because this was happening like say in my case with clients that I had had for a very long time who knew me, who knew our work, they, they had they knew we were a pretty different and the way we could execute and that we brought a lot of value. And yet they still would say, yeah, yeah, but, you know, we could go over here and get the same work for less money.

Theresa (04:51): And it was really frustrating. And meanwhile, I knew that there were companies out there, Accenture, the one I, the organization I have have helped start within Accenture. We were a very high margin business getting paid very well for what we were doing. And I was on the phone with one of my subcontractors one day who told me about a friend of hers who was charging $50,000 a day for what she was doing. And she had less experience than we did. And we, you know, it was, it was incredible. And so I really became fascinated by this. What is it that makes some companies able to charge so much more than everybody else? And they can command these premium prices. They hardly ever have to compete for work. They are there the first name that comes to mind when somebody has a particular issue or problem.

Theresa (05:41): And so I really wanted to understand what the recipe was. And a lot of the typical answers weren't in themselves enough having the best product, not enough having great PR or great market visibility, not enough you know, the, the list just went. So I did a, I did a lot of research and interviewed a lot of clients and executives and other people out there in the marketplace. And I came up with what seemed to me to be the recipe for my own business. And then as I wrote it down on a plane, on to Chicago, one day, literally I was jotting it down and I realized, Oh my God, all of my clients need this. This is, this is it. This is what you do. And that became what I ended up dubbing as the Apollo method for market dominance. Because later I came to realize that the parallels between what the Apollo space program had done to put a man on the moon actually were very striking compared to what a company needed to do to achieve sustainable differentiation and market leadership in, you know, a given market.

Theresa (06:54): So that was the genesis of all of this. And the essence of what the book is about. I basically wrote down the methodology. I've said, I want this to be something anybody can go off and do. It's very step by step and actionable so that you don't need me to do it. And it's not a big pitch piece to get to the upsell. It's you can go off, read the book, and if you do what it says, you can, you can have a, make a remarkable difference in your profit margins and your longterm sustainability in a, even in a very competitive space.

Kathleen (07:33): I'm sure everybody who's listening is thinking the same thing I am, which is, tell me more about this Apollo framework. What exactly does it entail?

Theresa (07:45): On the surface it's so simple, and it almost sounds insulting because it's, it's very straight. It's very simple, but of course, when you dive into the details, it gets a little richer with some of the nuance of what you need to do. But a lot of it is bringing together pieces that a lot of companies do go out and do. There are some things that I, I see missing, which is why I did feel compelled to write the book, because I just was not seeing it discussed out in the market. So there are four phases or four pieces, and I present them in a chronological order in the book, but you can do bits and pieces. You can pull from different parts depending on where you are with your business. So the four stages at the high level are launch, ignite, navigate, and accelerate. So launch is where you decide what it is you're going to be known for.

Theresa (08:35): You decide not just what product or offering are we going to put out into the market, but what, what do we want to own? What problem do we want to take full ownership for in the market where we are really the, the thought leaders around that problem. And we are the ones advancing progress in that area for the market. We have a vision for what the market needs to do and what will solve this problem. And we are in it for the long haul to to guide the market along. So that's, so during that phase, you decide what markets, what market or markets you're going to focus on, what you want to be known for. And then you develop your point of view on that problem. So what's why is it a problem? Why is it a pressing problem and what needs to be done about it?

Theresa (09:24): And then you define, or you hypothesize or define your unique, what your unique approach to solving that problem is going to be. And then you put your stake in the ground and say, by golly, we own this. You might do it with a big launch event. You might do it with a press release, with a, with an ebook, whatever it may be. So that's your launch. Then ignite is where you take that point of view and you go out and your, your goal is to lead a movement in the marketplace around that issue, around that point of view, around that problem and what needs to be done about it. And of course your approach, but on a, at a higher level, it's really more about taking the market forward. So you see Tesla doing this with electric cars, you know. They have their, they have their higher purposes.

Theresa (10:16): We want to accelerate the adoption of electric car technology in the marketplace. We really believe deeply that the world needs to move to electric car technology. And so when they talk about themselves, a lot of what they talk about is electric car technology, what we need to do to take the industry forward. You know, they, they talk about their cars to an extent, but it's really that, that bigger message and a key in the ignite phase is that you're getting other power brokers in the market to embrace your, your your point of view and your purpose. And so they become evangelists on behalf of you as well, out in the marketplace on your behalf. So the goal is to get that momentum going and really lead the market forward. We saw Mark Benioff do this with salesforce.com. Anybody who's watched that story unfold over the last 20 years saw him take a point of view, which said, we have got to get the world off of this expensive installed software that takes months, or if not, years, to install and millions of dollars, you know? We need to kill software.

Theresa (11:24): He literally had a a logo, the Ghostbuster style logo that said, you know, get rid of software. And so when he would go out to conferences, he would not talk about the Salesforce technology. He talked about the need to put the world in the cloud. And at that time, this was incredibly controversial. And a lot of people didn't think it was going to be ever embraced. Because at that time you didn't dare put customer, your, your most precious corporate data in the cloud, no way would anybody do that. So he was an example of somebody who really went out and started a whole new movement in the marketplace. So that's the goal with ignite. The third phase is navigate, and this is where you have to walk the talk you have to deliver on your promises. So this is where you actually take your offering to market.

Theresa (12:19): You sell and market your offering, you get your people on board. This is what people normally associate with the business. But the big difference is that you have a unique offering that is more than just a product. It's a true solution, so that you're, you're delivering a result. You're not just selling functions or features. You're delivering outcomes for the customer that really change their business and actually solve their problem. And we can talk about more, talk more about that later, if you want, because it's an important distinction between what, what a lot of companies need to be doing to truly be of high value and justify those higher prices versus the way they do it today. And then the fourth phase is accelerate. You have to invariably, even no matter how unique you are in the beginning, people are going to come out and start copying you, especially as you become successful. And the market is going to change. The world is going to change around you. So accelerate is all about staying ahead of the market and changing and adapting with the market. So those are the four key, the four phases.

Kathleen (13:29): So I have a bunch of questions. You mentioned at the, well, let me back up. The first one is, in the world of marketing, I feel like there's a lot of buzz right now about the concept that people refer to as category creation. And and there's, you know, the book "Play Bigger", which is on that. And there's, there's a whole host of other books in that space that this sounds a lot like that. Can you talk about like, is, is that really what this is? Are there differences?

Theresa (14:01): There are differences. There are differences. Yeah, I actually don't, I know, Christopher and I have had a conversation. He's a colleague in Silicon Valley and we have a lot of mutual friends. And I know that, that I know that they have a very strong, the authors of that book have a very strong point of view around category creation. And a lot of people talk about it. I personally don't believe that you have to go out and create a new category. In many ways, Salesforce did not create a new category. They, they did it differently. They did the same thing that Siebel and other salesforce automation companies were doing. They, they did the same thing, but in a different, unique way that solved a very particular problem. So my, my perspective is that the key is focusing on the problem. What, what problem are you solving for customers?

Theresa (15:00): What, so it's, and it's more around coming up with a unique approach that solves that problem in a very, very high value way. So you do, I don't believe you have to go. There are many, many companies that have tremendous success that don't go out and create an entirely new category, and some analysts would even counsel you against trying to do that because it's extremely expensive and you're trying to really change, fundamentally change the market. And yes, it's doable. And I know Blue Ocean talks about those as well, to some extent, but it's, it's not necessary. The one big difference with my book is that you can apply this to any business, no matter what phase they're in. It could a solopreneur could go out and implement this for themselves, and a person trying to figure out their career could, who could apply this, or any product organization within a big company, or the company across the board. You know, it can really be applied at various layers. So it's not about category creation.

Kathleen (16:10): I'm glad you've explained that because, and I'll just share, it's interesting. I have a point of view on this because, you know, I'm in a lot of different groups of CMOs and heads of marketing. And I feel like every single person I talk to says, they're creating a new category.

Kathleen (16:27): And at the risk of violating my clean content rating on Apple podcasts. I just think that's bullshit. Every single company can not be creating a new category because then every single company would be in a category of one. Like, it's just, it's almost gotten ridiculous how common it is.

Kathleen (16:46): And I do think there are companies that are genuinely doing it, and I think there's a lot of excitement behind that, but that, you know, I sort of like teed this up. I didn't tell you I was going to ask you that question, but, but I wanted to have that conversation because I just, I really do think it's become almost ridiculous that it's like, if you're today's marketer, you have to create a category, right?

Theresa (17:07): Yeah. It also kind of depends, you know, you can define the word category and I guess in a lot of different ways you know, I think with Play Bigger, they have a great perspective and you can do that and have tremendous success. And with enough capital and enough support and resources behind you you can definitely implement their strategy. They talk about some great stuff in that book. I'm by no means denigrating what they talk about, or it's just that I don't feel that's the only way to go out and have tremendous success and and have a tremendous impact. And, you know, my focus is more on how do you go and have you know, deliver outcomes to a set of customers that are going to view you as, you know, the thought leader and the torchbearer in their, in their world.

Kathleen (18:04): Yeah. So I like that. I like that you have a focus on making this accessible, accessible, I should say, because I think that that's one of the issues when people talk about category creation is it feels like you need to be VC backed and, you know, it's, it's a whole different play.

Theresa (18:21): It's expensive.

Kathleen (18:21): It is. It's very expensive. It's a long game,

Theresa (18:24): Right?

Kathleen (18:26): You mentioned at the beginning that it's, that this might seem like a big duh, but the reality is most companies are not doing these things. And so can you just take a minute and speak to why you think that is?

Theresa (18:38): Yeah. You know, it really confounds me. I developed this 20 years ago and I I'm stunned that nobody has already come out and come up with it. To me, it was, you know, it's almost like writing down the chocolate chip recipe, chocolate chip cookie recipe that grandmothers have been making for eons. But so when I first came up with it, I actually found some resistance in the market. I think I was a little early and talking to people about this because it was pre-internet and they couldn't see how similar they were to other companies. As a consultant, I'm traveling around, I'm talking to lots of different people. It's like Gartner, you know, all day long. They talk to companies and every company that walks in and sounds like the last one, but to the company themselves, they, you know, they didn't see each other.

Theresa (19:29): So they couldn't tell. Now that, now that digital marketing in particular has sort of put everything online companies, I think executives even now more see, they used to be very insulated from how much they looked and sounded like everybody else. And that's no longer the case. So I actually realized even last year, cause I've been trying to talk myself out of having to write this book for years, I've started and stopped thinking, Oh, well, I don't think we needed it. You know, I've heard about Play Bigger coming out. And with the way they talked about that book before it was published, I thought, I had a conversation with Christopher on the phone and after hearing him, I thought, well, I think their book might be the same as mine. Maybe I don't need to write this. And it came out and I realized, no, it's still not quite the same.

Theresa (20:18): And last year I thought, Oh my God, you know, we, we need it now more than ever. And so because companies, they're there, there are a lot of, they do some of the pieces, but they don't quite put the pieces together properly. And then they're really missing the boat completely in other areas like, like a point of view, you know? Very few companies have an overarching, true thought leadership point of view about the market and where the market needs to go. They have a point of view about themselves and their product and, and their, how their product operates and why. But you should be able to take your product out of it completely and talk just about where the market is going, what the problem is and what they need to be doing about it, independent of your company. That's true thought leadership. So that's one of many examples of things that companies are, are missing the boat on.

Kathleen (21:19): Yeah, I think that's, to me that's so important because I feel like it's that first step where probably 90% of the problems are. And I think you hit the nail on the head, which is that everybody thinks they are differentiated. Like, honestly, I mean, if you talk to any marketer, they're not going to say I'm doing a terrible job and I'm copying everyone else. Like they're going to give you their pitch and their value prop, and they're going to feel like they've done that.

Kathleen (21:43): So I think maybe it would be helpful if you spoke a little bit more about really what it means to have that point of view, because I'm not sure that people listening are going to understand, like, what does that look like when it comes to life?

Theresa (22:02): Okay. Yeah. So in the book, I have a very prescribed message framework that I believe companies should be using, especially if you are a solution to a problem. And what most technology companies, most B2B your audience has more of a B2B focus.

Kathleen (22:19): No, it's, it's not, it is kind of all over the place, but I tend to talk a lot about B2B just because that's where my focus is.

Theresa (22:28): And a lot of, I think a lot of it, it used to be interesting. It was so consumer and B2B were such completely different animals in the past and they still are somewhat different, but it's interesting how much more similar they are now than they, than they ever know, or in terms of how you do your marketing, but the point of view. So the message framework is this. It's three pieces. That's why there's a problem, what needs to be done about it and how you've uniquely solved the problem. So why, what, how. So the point of view is the first two. It's why there's a problem in the market. So it's not just that there's a problem. It's why is it a problem? What's the fallout from the problem? So for example, with me, I would say, you know, the problem is most companies don't adequately differentiate themselves in a way that's going to be sustainable over time.

Theresa (23:20): And this was a problem because it leads to declining margins over time. It leads to price based competition. When your customers can't see what makes you different. And over time, companies have to compete on price. They have to lower their prices. Margins fall. They have fewer and fewer dollars to invest back into the business and back into their future and in marketing. And eventually they go out of business. I mean, we say, see with agencies all the time. I mean, there's some of the worst offenders and failing to differentiate. So, so what should they be doing about it? They need to come up, you know, they need to be, have a unique approach to a problem that they're, that they own in the marketplace. So that would be for me, my what. So I can talk all day long about those issues and all, all what companies are facing and what they need to be doing, et cetera, and never once talk about me or my, my company's services or, or even my book. You know, I can go all day long just on that point of view about what needs to be happening. So every company ought to have that for themselves. They ought to have that very strong perspective.

Kathleen (24:38): You mentioned Salesforce earlier, which is a great example, and I love that story of Mark Benioff staging a mock protest with his sign. And are, are there any companies, maybe some more recent examples of companies that you think are doing that really well, that, that first step in your four step process?

Theresa (24:57): Well, I think for sure you know, I like to use Tesla because I think again, they're kind of a textbook because they have taken such a unique approach to solving a problem that people have been talking about for a long time, which is how do you get electric car technology to be embraced? I don't think people realize that I have the year in my book, but electric car technology has been around since like the beginning of the 20th century. I mean, we're talking over a hundred years of electric car and the, and you know, gas and electric were sort of developed at the same time. And then gas took off and electric got left in the dust. So but you know, Tesla has this, this very you know, Elon Musk. I mean, he's a great example for all of his businesses.

Theresa (25:42): You know, his businesses start with a higher purpose. You know, SpaceX, you know, wants to make space, travel more accessible and more practical. The Boring Company, you know, he wants to solve the traffic problem. You know, he, we need easier, better ways to get cars off, you know, to get across town. So, you know, those are examples. You know, REI, well, that's not a recent example that these, you know, I, I tended in the book, I tended to study companies that have been around for awhile. The whole point is being sustainable. You know, I think, you know, I know you talk, talk about HubSpot a lot in your podcast and, you know, I think they're a good one. The, the challenge with that company is that it's a little broad the way they talk about what needs to be done, but if they just were to focus on the, and they talk, you know, of course emphasis is on inbound, but you know, with them, I'd love to see a more focused message around, you know, what's wrong with the way most companies approach their inbound marketing and what needs to be done about it.

Theresa (26:58): That would be an example of an opportunity, you know, for them to get more clear about leading the charge, even though they have done a great job of leading the charge in elevating the approach to digital marketing, getting people to be more integrated in how they do it and being more sophisticated and make it, making it more accessible to more companies.

Kathleen (27:22): Yeah. Now I think it's interesting that you have your second step as ignite because it is, you know, it's one thing to have your point of view, but if nobody knows about it, it's the tree that fell in the forest. Right?

Kathleen (27:35): So talk me through what that ignite step looks like or should look like, or how a company should approach it.

Theresa (27:45): Yeah. So a key thing is is, is understanding the role of power brokers in an industry. So a lot of companies, a lot of marketers, I think don't quite appreciate this, and they certainly don't leverage this to their full advantage. So every single industry or every market has literally a handful of people who know everybody, are respected by everybody in that market. They, their tentacles reach, I, I nicknamed them tree trunks with vast root systems, because that's how you can think of it. You just see one person standing there, but underground unbeknownst, you know, because a lot of times you don't even know how far reaching their network is, but there's this vast network and they all talk to each other and interact with each other. So one of the keys to getting traction is getting those powerbrokers converted over to your point of view and to the point where they actually start evangelizing on your behalf and they help get the word out.

Theresa (28:48): So it amplifies your message. So instead of having to reach 500 people, one person at a time, you can, with one power broker can just because they have so much power and such a voice in the market, they can immediately convert thousands on your behalf. You know, relative, let's say your market is, you have 10 or 20,000 people you're trying to reach. They can literally reach a giant chunk of it all at once. A good example of this in the technology space is Gartner. You know, if you get Gartner on board and behind what you're doing, they start writing about you in their reports. They start talking about you even informally in conversations. So and you know, the, the media can play that role, but there are also individuals just, you know, most industries have maybe a dozen who they know everybody, and they have the tipping point.

Theresa (29:50): Malcolm Gladwell talks about personality types, and one is the connector. And so these power brokers are connectors. They just proactively spread the word about other people and other companies they know and put people in touch with each other. So you're looking for those types of people and that can propel you very quickly into a market in a highly credible way that you won't be able to do on your own. So this is something that a lot of companies don't fully leverage. They do go after media. And you know, of course there are social media influencers and some, some social media influencers fall into this a lot. Don't, you know, a lot of them just have their 50,000 followers and they put out a tweet or whatever. That's a flash in the pan that might give you some quick response, but you're trying to get enduring influence in the market. You're trying to become one of the powerbrokers yourself. And so you need these power brokers to help take you in that direction, but they can also make it happen a lot more quickly.

Kathleen (30:55): So I think that sounds great in principle, but in my experience, a lot of the power brokers in any given market have a lot of people clamoring for their attention. And when we, you know, we started out by talking about how this approach is a very accessible one. So it's one thing if you're Elon Musk going to try and like get in front of power brokers, and of course, they're going to take your call. It's entirely another. If you are, you know, a first time founder who doesn't have a big reputation or VC backers, or, you know, that, that super powered network. So how does one go about brokering those relationships?

Theresa (31:35): This is where the power of the point of view comes in because when you have a very powerful, provocative point of view on a really critical problem, and you have a perspective on what needs to be done about it, that's truly fresh and innovative. People will listen. They're, they're hungry to know to understand what's going on out there. You know, I think of, I mean, not everybody may be able to relate to this example, but I think of Jamie Oliver who is the chef out of the UK, who caught, captured a lot of attention with a Ted talk he gave about nutrition and how it, how the typical person's nutrition is literally killing them. And he gave this powerful Ted talk. He was, he was a nobody at the time, just some chef, but he had this very powerful point of view and a very passionate devotion to his point of view.

Theresa (32:27): And he got the ear of lots of people and got onto the Ted stage. And eventually he got a TV show and, you know, he got a lot of notoriety, but it was because he had that point of view and Ted talks are actually a great example of points of view. They're not up there to sell anything. They have very powerful perspectives that are interesting enough for the rest of the world to listen. It's what's their slogan. Oh now I'm, now I'm drawing a blank on what it is. I'm sure somebody can put it in the show notes for us. Ideas worth sharing. So your point of view needs to be an idea worth sharing, because if it's provocative, I have four criteria, actionable, bold, controversial, and distinctive. And so the ABCD that's in the book, so you can have a reminder. But it needs to be provocative to get other people wanting to talk about it.

Kathleen (33:28): I love it. So we're probably not going to go into detail on the, the last two stages because I think those are probably the ones that my audience is much more familiar with, which is having to do with going to market and really how you execute. I think, I think at least the first two stages are the ones that, that really trip people up. And let's be honest, you have to get through those to get to the second two. So I'm wondering if you, just, for people who are listening, who are thinking, I'm interested in maybe doing this, other than going out and buying the book, which they should absolutely do and we'll talk about how they can find it. What are some things like if they just want to get started, if they want to listen to this podcast and then go back to work, what are, what are one or two things that they can immediately start doing that can set them down on the path to get started with this?

Theresa (34:14): Yeah, I think one thing is, first of all, it's just like any, anything else acknowledge the problem. Acknowledge that you have a problem. What I have found even as a chief marketing officer is sometimes having such a hard time getting the rest of the executive team to acknowledge that we have a problem. And marketers know how often do you feel like you're putting lipstick on a pig? You know, you inside, you know, know this company really isn't different. You know, I have to make it, I have to make it sound different, but in all honesty, it's not different. So if there's any way to get the rest of the full team to acknowledge that there's a strategic issue and that the company, this is not a marketing problem, this is a fundamental strategic issue for a company that the marketer and others in the company need to play a role in solving.

Theresa (35:07): So I'd say that's one thing. It's get the team. And even, even if you're a product team or a unit within the company, just to agree that this is an issue and that you need to do something. And then the next thing is really get clear on what problem are we devoting ourselves to? What problem do we want to be known for in the market? What problem are we devoting ourselves to eradicating in the marketplace? And then, what is point of view about what it will take to solve that problem? And then figuring out how to make your approach. If you already have a product, how do we make it more unique or how do we turn it into a more comprehensive solution? And instead of just some SaaS offering with our three levels of purchase option, you know, a silver, gold platinum, or whatever you want to call it, you know, how do we turn this into a full solution?

Theresa (36:05): I am, I, I have a support website out for the book Apollomethod.com. And there are some tools that I have in the book that you can also get. Just go to the website to get that. It will also help you start taking action on some of these areas right away. For example, an offering blueprint form can, it's sort of similar to the business model canvas, but it's an offering blueprint that will help you just define components of your offering. And you may see where some of your holes are right now that, that keep it from being a, a complete solution.

Kathleen (36:44): Awesome. Well, those are really good tips to get started. And I think, you know, that's, that's the first step as we said. So for somebody who does want to really see this through you, you mentioned the URL for the book website. Can you say that one more time?

Theresa (36:59): Yes. It's www.apollomethod.com.

Kathleen (37:02): And is that where they can get the book or will that take them to it?

Theresa (37:05): They can, yeah, there's a link to get the book, but they can also just go to Amazon and do a search on, on Be the Go-To and put my name in if they want, if they have trouble finding it. So Theresa Lina. And they can get the book on Amazon. It's also available on other platforms both in hard cover and hard cover paperback and ebook on Barnes and Noble and some others, I think.

Kathleen (37:31): Great. All right. Now shifting gears, I have two questions that I always ask my guests. So now it's your turn. The first one is, of course this podcast is all about inbound marketing and we've talked about a lot of companies in this conversation, but opening it up, you know, when you think about inbound marketing is there a particular company or individual person that you think is really kind of setting the gold standard for what it means to do that right?

Theresa (37:58): Well, right now, well, I've heard a lot of really good ones mentioned on your podcast. I listened to your podcast religiously. And so I won't, I don't think I'll duplicate that maybe they've been mentioned, but I really think salesforce.com still does. They're huge, but they do a phenomenal job of inbound strategies. Their trailblazer program is really phenomenal. It goes beyond just typical lead generation where they're really trying to, this is part of a strategy and the book, they, they, I did not work with salesforce.com, but they are a textbook implementer of the Apollo method for market dominance across the board. So they have so many great programs that are all about generating, you know, getting people to start using the product and then making the product more and more a part of their business. So I think they do a phenomenal job with all of their, the blogs and all their various blogs and materials and their free trials and the trailblazer program, the Dreamforce conference, et cetera.

Theresa (39:09): And you can do everything they do. You can do it on a small scale. You can, you know, Harley Davidson started the Harley owners group with 50 people back in the eighties, and now they have, I think, hundreds of thousands. But they started with just 50 people. So you can you can start these programs with, you know, on, at a very small scale and still experience a lot of success. And then, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if you've ever heard of Stu McLaren, but he, he's a, he's one of these internet creator, you know, in the internet creator space. And he specializes in building member-based communities. And I really think he's doing some neat things around helping people and companies start membership programs, membership, or community based, or member based communities, paying members. And for example, he has this wonderful founding member strategy, which I think is really brilliant that he talks about. If you Google him and listen to some of his podcast interviews, you'll, you'll learn some interesting things from him, I think.

Kathleen (40:23): Oh, I'm so interested to check that one out.

Theresa (40:25): Yeah. He's one that's caught my attention lately.

Kathleen (40:28): Well, funny enough. Yeah, you're right. I don't think anybody has mentioned Salesforce, even though it seems like it's obvious.

Theresa (40:34): Is that right?

Kathleen (40:35): But I also don't think anyone's mentioned Stu McLaren, so that's awesome. I like to get new ones. Second question, and you know the drill cause you listen, marketers always talk about how hard it is to keep up with everything. It's all changing so quickly. How do I do it? So how do you do it? How do you keep up?

Theresa (40:50): Well, I definitely listen to a lot of podcasts. One of the things I love about your podcast is you get into the mechanics of things with people, especially when you're talking to people who have specific tools. You know, I just love that you dive right into exactly how did you do this? So I love listening to podcasts and reading articles and blog posts. And then I do monitor academic research because especially when it comes to analytics, because I find it useful to show me where things are going. One of the departments I'm involved with at Stanford is the management science and engineering department, which has a big analytics orientation. And so I try to pay attention to what our faculty are doing in that space. And then there's a great resource called ecorner.stanford.edu, which has lectures by different thought leaders in Silicon Valley.

Theresa (41:50): And while not all of it relates to marketing, it is another, a lot of these are up and coming, for example. It's also part of put on by one of the groups in our department. And we had Mark Zuckerberg back when Facebook was just getting started. We had the Google founders when Google was just getting started. So they have a real knack for seeing what's coming down the pike. So I, again, I like to listen to that and look at what companies seem to be coming along and what they're talking about, because they're often on the front edge of things.

Kathleen (42:25): That is a great suggestion. And yeah, and when I have not heard about before.

Theresa (42:29): And then, you know, actually one more is political campaigns because they are, the stakes are so high. I like paying attention to what they're doing and what tactics they're using because a lot of times they borrow heavily from marketing, but they can also be borrowed from. And then my students in the Stanford marketing group are often at the front edge of what's going on out there. So I, I I like to watch what they're doing as well.

Kathleen (42:55): I love that. Well, that sounds like a lot of really good suggestions. And of course, as always, I will put the links to all of those, into the show notes. So head there, if you're interested in checking any of those out this has been a lot of fun and really interesting. Theresa, thank you so much.

Theresa (43:11): Thank you. This has been fun for me too.

Kathleen (43:15): Yeah. Now of course you're going to want to go out and get the book. So I'll put the link to the website in there as well. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this week's episode, please consider going to Apple Podcasts and I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review so that others can find it as well. And in the meantime, if you think of somebody who would be a great guest, tweet me at @workmommywork. I really do check out those recommendations. And a lot of people who come on the podcast come by word of mouth. So let me know if you think that there's somebody who would make a good guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Theresa.

Theresa (43:53): Thank you. Thank you. This was really great. Thanks.

ow did GeoFli help Onyx Maps almost double its website conversion rates?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, GeoFli founder Kyle Pucko talks about the benefits of website personalization and shares examples of companies that have used geotargeted website content to significantly increase website conversion rates.

Check out the full episode to learn more about geotargeted website content and how implementing it on your own website can help improve conversion rates.

Resources from this episode:

• Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn
• Check out the GeoFli website

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Kyle Pucko, who is the founder and CEO of GeoFli.com. Welcome Kyle.

Kyle (00:21): Thank you, Kathleen. Great to be here.

Kathleen (00:23): Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. Maybe you could start off by talking a little bit about your story, who you are, what GeoFli is and how you got to where you are today.

Kyle (00:32): Yeah, absolutely happy to do it. So like you said, my name is Kyle Pucko, founder GeoFli. We are based out here in Missoula, Montana, so big sky country for those who haven't made it out here. It's a beautiful place to visit even this time of year, which sounds a little funny to say. And so my story Kathleen really starts in marketing with higher education. So I spent almost a decade in higher education marketing. So colleges and universities. Worked at a small liberal arts school outside of Chicago and then made my way West to the university of Montana. And really during that time, you know, when we talk about inbound marketing and all the tactics that you've talked with your guests about over a hundred plus episodes not many of those existed when I started in, in higher ed.

Kyle (01:20): So it was a lot of traditional marketing. It was a lot of trade shows. It was a lot of sending packets and it was a lot of in person meetings and talking with students about just why they should go to this university. So, you know, fast forward and of course I'd be at these trade shows and I would see a lot of students holed in the corner looking at their phones, right? So the question became well where are these students spending a lot of time and attention? And I just started to really focus on, you know, if we are going to spend 10 hours a week marketing, where can we work? Can we have the best results? And so I, that, that transitioned into a more traditional marketing role into a, into a digital marketing role. And I was, at least according to LinkedIn, the first and only digital marketing manager at any university across the country.

Kyle (02:10): And I think this was in 2013. So really cut my teeth and, and learning things like Google ads, Facebook ads. And now, now we're getting into a lot of the topics that you cover with your guests. And then in 2015 you know, I started GeoFli and I, and I left the university full time to go full time entrepreneur. And what GeoFli does is it allows anybody to easily change and replace website content based on physical location. So somebody visiting a university website from California would see different content than somebody visiting that same website from New York. This was, this was a product at the university. We have students from all over the world visiting our homepage and getting the same one size fits all content. And so it was a problem. I looked for a solution, couldn't find it. And when I couldn't find it decided to do it myself.

Kathleen (03:04): Interesting. So, I mean, I think that the concept behind it makes total sense and I feel like that's the direction that the world of marketing is going generally is personalization and the ability to hyper personalize. You said you looked out there at the market and you couldn't find a solution. I would imagine when you think about building a solution for delivering personalized content on websites, it's not as simple as it may sound just because websites are all built so differently from each other. You know, there's different CMS's, different kinds of code behind them. Let's, maybe we can start just by talking about how GeoFli works. Like, does it work with every website?

Kyle (03:46): Yeah, so that's a, that's a really good question. And the first thing that, so I, I co founded the company with somebody that I worked with for five years at the university of Montana. He was the web manager there. And so he was really the, the, the technical side of building this out. And the first question we had to answer was is this even possible to do? And the way that we figure that out is we you know, we created this simple website and somebody would click on a link and a dot would appear on a map. And it would say, does this dot represent where you are located? And I think we posted on Facebook had a hundred people click on the link, had a hundred dots on a map and our accuracy was really great. So yep. There or somebody like, Oh, you're like a couple of miles off.

Kyle (04:32): So the way that GeoFIi works is we use IP address and then combine that information with latitude and longitude. So, you know, 99% of the time it will work really great. Somebody is using a VPN, that's going to be a little tricky. But you know, we've been able to mitigate those problems, you know, anytime they've, they've come up. And then, you know, from a technical side early on, like any like any early startup our product was clunky. It was difficult to use our, our value proposition was that anybody could do this, but that promise wasn't resonating when somebody would log in. So we ended up doing a lot of the work for our clients very early on. Today, GeoFli allows anyone regardless of technical background to log in. So there's a, a dashboard. You simply add your URL, select the element that you want to change, and then you can make that change depending on what region you want to do it for. And your question about kind of, does this work on any website? It does. It works on Wix. It works on WordPress. It works on custom content management systems. So as long as you can add the GeoFli script onto the back end of your website, GeoFli can personalize your site.

Kathleen (05:49): That's pretty cool. So, so the notion of personalization, I think it can sound really appealing to a lot of businesses. When you think about who is this right for how do you, how do you talk about that?

Kyle (06:04): Well, you know, I, I sort of alluded to our, my experience in higher ed and it might help to think about where the idea to do this sort of originated from, and it, and it started with Google display advertising. I was a counselor based here in Missoula working for the university of Montana. And occasionally I would get sent to college fairs on the East coast. So there was a college fair in Boston. Well, I was also managing the digital marketing. So, you know, in between traveling to Boston, I was setting up Google display ads and Facebook ads and purchasing keywords on search. So I launched a display campaign and I did a simple 50, 50 split, simple AB test. And I targeted the Boston area. So a 50 mile radius of any student in Boston that had any interest in Montana.

Kyle (06:54): They, there were retargeting audiences. There were interest based audiences, demographic based audiences, high school, students and parents. So one of the ads read, learn more about why UM is right for you and the other ad read Montana visits Boston meetup, and that's the button. The call to action is meetup. So the click through rate for the learn more kind of the generic message to New Englanders was 0.18% click through rate. The click through rate when I used personalized language was 0.3, 3%. So almost double click through rates still low and that's to be expected on display ads, but that, that happened before any idea or any code was written for GeoFli. So it, it became really clear that when people hear their local, their local region, or when it's personalized in some way based on location, there's there was a result at least in display ads.

Kyle (07:53): And so if you're out there and you're thinking, you know, all of my customers are exactly the same wherever they're located, then GeoFli probably isn't a great option for you. Personalization, you know, might be not the best use of your time. Most people though will, will say that, you know, they're when they start breaking down their personas, I'm sure there's demographic personas. You know, we're going to communicate. We want to communicate differently to 18 year olds than we do to 28 year olds. The same is true for location. If you have customers all over they're going to behave very differently. I mean, I think about an auto dealer that is based sort of on the outskirts of a city. You know, you may even want to communicate differently to folks that are living in a dense metropolitan area versus somebody that's visiting your dealership from a more rural or the outskirts of the city.

Kyle (08:44): You know, they might be interested in more compact cars if they have to parallel park every day, versus if they're coming in from out of town or from, they might be able look at the full size or the, or the SUV. So that's just one example. And I'm sure if you're listening, you can think about many more, but colleges is where we started, but today we work in e-commerce, we work in tourism, you know, if you were in Missoula. So it's a, we like to say, Montana is not on the way to anything. And so if you are looking to travel to Montana, you might be thinking, well, it's really hard to get to, you know, instead maybe if somebody from, where are you based out of Kathleen?

Kathleen (09:27): In Maryland.

Kyle (09:28): In Maryland? So Maryland to Montana is going to be a tough trip, but maybe if somebody from Maryland visits, you know, destination Montana or visit Montana, there could be a quick message that says something like, Hey, we're actually not that difficult to get to. Like, check it out. There's this direct flight from Chicago. If you can get to Chicago, you can get to Missoula. So just meeting people where they're at and you know, maybe it's a road trip for people from Washington state. Hey, have you ever thought about a road trip to Montana? So if you saw that message in Maryland, you'd be like, no, I have not thought of a road trip.

Kathleen (10:02): Well, I can totally see it too with like weather related content. Like if you're trying to say beat the heat and somebody's not in someplace that's hot or, you know, things along those lines, I could see a lot of applications for that. Not only in tourism, but in, you know, any companies that sell products that have to do with climactic changes. There, there's a whole host of things I think that you could use it for.

Kyle (10:31): Totally, totally.

Kathleen (10:33): Now is this, you know, I think the other side of this is there's the possibility of who could use personalization, but I've run into this as a marketer. I think personalization sounds so great to a lot of people, but then they, and they might even get a tool that lets them do it, but then there's the actual execution of personalizing. And, and I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit, because I feel like, I feel like it's the kind of thing where you could put all of your time into simply creating personalized messages. Like you could, you could go crazy, but I don't know. I don't know the extent to which the value would be there. Like what's, what's the right way to approach your strategy for personalizing because there has to be an element of bang for your buck involved.

Kyle (11:22): Absolutely. and anybody in marketing has probably tested or downloaded a software that they quickly think to themselves. There are so many features in here that I will never, ever use. And they might've heard the analogy of, you know, you're, you're driving a Ferrari, like you never drive a Ferrari over 20 miles per hour because just need the fire to get to point a to point B, you don't need to race it. You don't need so with GeoFli, you know, we want it to be the best in the world at geo personalization, at changing content based on location. And so when we, when we do onboard new clients, you hit the nail on the head, Kathleen that they, they immediately get excited. Like I can change the footer link. I can change this. You know, I have 127 pages on my website. I can change every word on every page.

Kyle (12:12): We, we usually pull back the reigns if you don't love to do, but we do that early. And we say, let's focus on, we call it three, three, three. So let's focus on three pieces of content on your website that you, that you want to change. What we usually recommend is anything above the fold on the homepage is a good place to start. You know, we don't really need to look at in depth, like, like scroll depth charts to understand the most eyeballs are going to be on these few sections. And that can be, we can change your homepage hero image. We could change videos. So video is a great, is one that we usually go to and say, do you have different videos of maybe your sales team for regions? Or just like we talked about some of these examples before. So we picked three pieces of content on, on on your website.

Kyle (13:05): Then we pick the three regions that you want to personalize content for. So I'll use a university as an example, the university of Oregon, you know, when, when they started working with us we chose Oregon. So the local audience, we chose California because that was the, they had the most amount of students come into the university of Oregon from the most amount of, out of state students coming from the state of California. And then we chose an international country. So Japan. So students coming from Japan to the university of Oregon, what is their website experience like? And that was really the first, the first two threes. And then the third three is we, we picked two more pages. So you have three pages total. So maybe your homepage, your contact us page and your about us page are the, are the three personalized pages.

Kyle (13:51): And that's where we stop. We set you up with the analytics, we integrate directly with Google Analytics. So if you're using Google Analytics, you will GeoFli analytics will work just fine. And then we wait 30 days and we see what were the results. And then based on those results, we make additional changes. So that's really how we start with folks. And we're right there with you. I think that's one of the differences you mentioned. Yeah. You get this tool and then it sort of collects dust. Virtual dust, right. I'm doing air quotes. It collects virtual dust. Charges, your credit card. And you're like, Oh, I gotta cancel that. Like that, that made no sense for me. We really make an effort to make sure that GeoFli does have a positive impact on your website. And if it doesn't, which has happened, then we'll cancel. But most of the time the results show that you know, things like bounce rate decreases, time on site improves, and conversion rates, if you're tracking that or any event type conversion, improves as well. So that's our strategy.

Kathleen (14:52): I like the three, three, three approach because that really does make it manageable. Can you give me, like, walk me through some examples of, of where you've implemented this either for yourself or for a client and what the results have been?

Kyle (15:08): Certainly. So we worked when we first got started here with a company named Onyx Maps. They're hunting software. So stereotypically there there's some things that are stereotypical Montana. For example, the first Uber I ever took in Montana was like a three 50 diesel. Sometimes stereotypes do turn out to be true. So we're working with a hunting application company based here in Montana and hunting for those that aren't in the world of hunting. You know, it's very state specific. Somebody in South Dakota is going to get it. Most hunters in South Dakota, or at least on a percentage basis are gonna hunt for pheasants versus somebody in New York are going to hunt for like white tail deer. So it's very state specific Onyx maps wanted to use GeoFli to showcase and to surface different images based on where people were visiting from.

Kyle (16:01): If someone's visiting from Florida to get a hunting permit, they're going to be a little dismayed when they see a giant elk. They're like, well, I can't hunt that elk in Florida. Like that makes no sense for me. So they personalize imagery and then what they also did was personalize testimonials. And so wherever you were visiting the website from, and this was specific to a landing page, you would see a state based testimonial. So if I'm visiting from Texas, I'm going to see somebody else from Texas that has purchased the app, download the app and have had success with the application in Texas. And basically what the application does is it tells you where the public and private land that you can hunt on is where those boundaries are. And so we ran a really statistically significant test where we would drive people to a specific page using Google search.

Kyle (16:51): So, you know, all the, all the ads were set up like hunting applications, hunting permit. And what we found was before using GeoFli or any of the non GoeFli'd pages that we, that we sent them to. So the default page the conversion rate for app download was right around 3% with. GeoFli'd pages, it was 5% across the board. And so that might not sound like a huge lift, but, you know, at a percentage base, it's, it's tremendous. And when you're spending a lot of money on those paid search ads it really made a positive impact. And so that was a really simple way. I think we changed an image and a quote, and it probably took for each state, you know, maybe five minutes to set up in a, in a really clean way. And that had a tremendous impact on, on the business and on the effectiveness of those, of that advertising campaign.

Kathleen (17:44): That's really interesting. And I definitely would agree. From three to 5% is a big, it is a big shift. Have you ever seen situations where it hasn't worked? I'm curious and, and like why, why would it not?

Kyle (17:56): Yeah, good question. You know, typically what will happen is the analysts on the analytics side, it can be difficult to prove that, that GeoFli is working if you haven't set up a conversion. And we help people do that. For example, tourism might be, might be one. So we worked with an economic development company that wanted to showcase different tax advantages to people in state versus out of state. Well, we set this campaign up and we felt like it was really strong, but at the end of the year, you know, when, when we asked the question, well, what impact did GeoFIi have on total businesses? Kind of moving or moving the needle on getting businesses to move to this specific city. It was just, it was difficult to prove, you know, we could show an increase in time on site. We could show an increase in pages per session to GeoFli versus non GeoFli visitors.

Kyle (18:51): But it's hard to say, trust us, it's, you know, it's, it's having, it's having a positive impact on your, on your ultimate conversion. But for those really long tail conversions in digital marketing, and I'm sure your audience can, can attest that it can be difficult. And the same is true of higher ed, really that a sophomore visiting your website from California you know, and they see a personalized message and alumni in their area. It's hard to tie that back to because of GeoFli that student three years later attended the university, the university of Texas.

Kathleen (19:30): Yeah. it, I think that's a great point. So what can you talk me through? How do you need to set things up so that it is trackable? So that, cause I think this is a mistake. Marketers make a lot, they jump in, they do these things, but they haven't put in place those fundamental building blocks, either the analytics or setting up the tech correctly and they might get further down the road only to find out they can't prove what they think is true, which is so frustrating. Cause you, you know, you have data, you just don't have data. That's usable. So what does somebody need to know before they start a process like this?

Kyle (20:09): I would refer to a book and I forget the author, but it's titled How to Measure Anything. And it talks a lot about removing layers of uncertainty. And so when we start with a new client, whether, you know, regardless of the size of that client, we want to meet them right where they are from an analytics standpoint. So if we ask them, you know, what is your, how many page visitors does your website currently get? And they sort of scratch their head and I'm like, well, that's a really good question. Like that's where we start. Okay. Let's set up analytics so that we can figure out how many page visitors you actually get from these different regions. Like, does it make sense to personalize for Texas if you only get a hundred visitors a year or a month? And then, you know, we, we then look at what we call third column metric.

Kyle (20:53): The first column metric is always impressions. And that's just how many people visit your page. The second column metric is sort of how many people actually, well, this is more based on an ad side, but how many people will click on your advertising? And then the third metric is how many people take the action that you want them to take on your page? And that to me, Kathleen is really the key. If you can get a third column metric and the key is metric, not dozens of metrics like, Oh, we want to know how many people watch this video. We want to know how many people clicked on this phone number. We want let's split, let's focus on, does your one, does your homepage have one goal or one action that you want people to take? And then what we do is we, we set up a Google data studio report for them.

Kyle (21:34): So we will actually go in and build you a custom dashboard. And we can help you do this. You become the owner of this dashboard. We set up all of the GeoFli regions. So again, three, three, three, usually it's three regions. So maybe you're targeting California, Texas, and Japan. So we show all the traffic from California, Texas in Japan. And then that third column metric actually becomes the second column next to the location and visitors from Japan. What is their conversion rate visitors from Texas? What is their conversion rate? And that can be purchase if you're e-commerce. That can be forms, submissions, if you're B2B, or it could honestly be like time on site, if you're if you're, you know, if you just want people to spend longer on your website. So that's our third column metric becoming the second column. I know this is kind of difficult. Maybe I can send you our template to put in the show notes.

Kathleen (22:28): Yeah, no, that's, I mean, it sounds like you have a pretty good format though.

Kyle (22:32): Yeah. And then the last piece is all other content, excluding the regions that you're GeoFliing so that you can compare okay. For non-GeoFli'd regions, the conversion rate is 2%. For GeoFli'd regions, it's 2.5%. And then you have to ask yourself, does that make, is that a big enough lift for me to keep GeoFli and continue to grow GeoFli? Or do I want to just stay where I'm at or do I want to cancel? And usually it's much greater than 0.5% difference and we will help figure out like, okay, now, now that we know this is working for these regions, let's pick three more regions.

Kathleen (23:08): I want to go back for a second and talk about data integrity, because you touched on this at the beginning, but I just want to dig a little deeper. And you mentioned that you're able to target geographically based on IP address and then longitude and latitude. And IP address targeting is, is interesting to me because in some cases it can be very accurate. You know, you're coming through a company IP, and it's very clearly denoted who it is. But in other cases, you know, you have people using Amazon web services or, you know, some kind of an aggregator for an IP, whether they're working from home or, you know, traveling, et cetera. And then, and then there's the whole topic of VPN, which that's a whole different ball of wax, but like to what degree is the data really accurate?

Kyle (24:00): We, we say that, you know, GeoFli is 95% accurate at the city level. So if you're targeting Chicago, you're going to have 95% of visitors that visit your website between 95 and 99% of your visitors are going to see the Chicago content. The other 1%, if you're targeting Chicago. It's important to remember that that 1% that maybe their IP addresses pinging from Denver well, they're outside of your targeted area. So they're going to see your default website, the same website as it exists today. So, you know, the question is, is it better for 95% of visitors to see personalized web personalized content and 5% of visitors to just see your website as it exists today? Or is it better to have a hundred percent accuracy wherever everybody's sees your, just your default site? And we believe that it's a, it's a better experience if 95% of your visitors are getting from Chicago are getting a personalized experience.

Kyle (25:04): Even if 5% of them are sort of, you know, left out of the personalization party. We also think we're, we're kind of ahead of, you know, we're early in this and the technology continues to improve. The accuracy continues to improve. You know, we're, it's something that we're constantly looking to get better at. Even at 95% though, we do feel like we are the most accurate tool out there when it comes to geo personalizing. You know, you'll find this feature in tools like Optimizely, but it's sort of buried under their enterprise plan and you have to pay thousands of dollars more to get access to it. And even then it's sort of an afterthought for them. This is what we study. This is what we look at. We, you know, we look at it every day. So the data integrity piece, and then if you're targeting at the state level or even at the country level, you're actually is going to be of course much, much higher.

Kathleen (25:59): And is there any variation in terms of desktop versus mobile users and how that renders data?

Kyle (26:06): There is. Yeah, mobile is usually a hundred, closer to a hundred percent accurate. So, you know, we, we've added a feature where on desktop, you can, you've probably seen it before, allow, allow this website to use your location. If you add that prompt, then we are of course, a hundred percent accurate. Without that prompt, that's when it drops you closer to 95%. So you can opt into asking your website visitors if they want to do that. So that's an option that you have.

Kathleen (26:33): And then I guess there's the data integrity thing can, can work both directions, right? As you mentioned, you can have people who are in your targeted area, who don't your targeted content, because they're not recognized as being there, but how often do you have cases where somebody is not in your targeted area or they might have, for example, I might be from Maryland, but I happen to be on a work trip in Los Angeles. I go to a website. It, it recognizes me as being from Los Angeles. It might even cookie me and then think every single time I come that I'm from Los Angeles. Like, how do you deal with that? Or do you?

Kyle (27:13): Totally. We, we call that the airplane problem, you know, and somebody lands at a different location. Of course their IP addresses is going to change. We've run into that the most in New York city when people are trying to target boroughs. So they, they treat Brooklyn as a city and they treat Manhattan as a city as they should. But those two are separate by a river. And so somebody in Brooklyn will see occasionally Manhattan content and, you know, that's, that's one of the issues that we run into is, is New York city being those boroughs, being so close together. But outside of that, you know, if somebody really, if that's if that's a real concern for folks and they, and maybe that surfaces, then we really recommend they prompt for location. Users have gotten used to it. My guess is that listeners out there have seen GeoFli'd content.

Kyle (28:01): They just don't quite know it. That's the other piece is we want GeoFli to feel like we don't want it to be an interruption, an intrusion, a popup, a GeoFli exists on your site. It's elegant. And so we want that experience. You know, we don't love asking people for location prompts because it's another click or it's just sort of an intrusion and it kind of goes against our vision right now while the technology is still advancing. And the IP address targeting is still, you know, we're still honing that in to be a hundred percent accurate. We would recommend you use the location prompt and just avoid that.

Kathleen (28:39): And then I guess one of my last questions before we shift gears is really with things like GDPR. I imagine that could be a plus and a minus. It could be a plus for you because you could theoretically use GeoFli to determine who is in a GDPR covered region. And then, and from that, maybe, you know how you need to treat them on the website. But I also imagine that on the flip side, if you're using it on your site, you're collecting geographic location based information, like is that somehow subjected to GDPR requirements? Like talk to me a little bit about GDPR and GeoFli.

Kyle (29:19): Yeah. GDPR and GeoFli. When, when every company in the world was sending the GDPR emails to us we, you know, we were, we were in that bandwagon also, or that, that boat also. We thought, okay, what, what impact is this going to have? Because it was so specific to location. And, you know, we sort of default to if you, if you have a GDPR notification and you're running and you're collecting cookies and you're collecting data on your website, visitors, like you, you just need to have it. We don't police our clients to make sure our customers to make sure that they do have it. You know, that liability is on them to make sure they do that. In our case though, you know, we've had some folks ask you. Yeah. So I could show this to, so I could surface GDPR to these countries and not these? And we don't love those conversations. We, we don't recommend people do that.

Kathleen (30:15): Can I ask about that? Because I would think there would be people who'd say couldn't I use GeoFli to determine with whom I needed to make sure I was being GDPR compliant.

Kyle (30:26): You certainly could. And, and you're spot on that people have inquired about that. And we usually deflect those and say, yeah, just, that's not what this tool is designed to do. Yeah.

Kathleen (30:37): Yeah. I don't blame you. All right. Well, switching gears there's two questions that I always ask everybody who comes on. The first being, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on the podcast. Is there a particular company or individual you think is really doing it right these days?

Kyle (30:56): Yeah, I, in, in preparation for this for this question, I was thinking, you know, I always like, as most marketers do to think about what marketing has worked on them and like gotten me to conversion or purchase. And it's funny, I recently purchased a GoPro. I never thought I would say that, but GoPro, that, that was my company that I came up with. I had been following along with GoPro for, Oh, probably the better part of seven years. Just kind of following them on Facebook and I'm looking at their images because I always thought they were really cool, but I always thought to myself, like, I, I don't do really cool things like that. I have no need for GoPro, but they've really done a good job of expanding their customer base and showing just how GoPro can be used in a day to day.

Kyle (31:40): And you know, us as a, as a marketing team and as a software company, I think there's a lot of use cases for it. We use it as a second camera when we're doing any sort of interviews or just capturing moments around the office. And so GoPro, you know, they are masters at sort of the jab jab, right hook strategy from Gary Vaynerchuk, which is like, we're going to show you seven awesome images of in that, you know, none, none of them are going to have a call to action. Oh. And then we're going to take 50 bucks off of our recent GoPro hero eight. So, so that's what ended up getting me and maybe it had something to do with quarantine and just like a retail therapy, but I purchased a GoPro recently, so well done GoPro.

Kathleen (32:23): Nice. All right. That's a good one. Second question, everybody in marketing seems to always complain that things change so quickly and it's really hard to keep up and, you know, there's so much information to absorb. So how do you personally stay educated and up to date on, in the world of digital marketing?

Kyle (32:42): Well, you mean aside from this podcast, I definitely, that's a really good question cause it does change so fast. And if you tried to keep up with everything you would, you could spend 40 hours a week just keeping up whatever with everything. Our team has a meeting every Friday, we call it just a strategy meeting where we actually bring something to the table that each of us has learned. So, you know, this week I'm really excited to talk about like Hulu's new self-serve ad platform which is a big one. So maybe we're not going to go in and design and build an ad campaign today. But just knowing that, Hey, they've opened this up to small businesses or maybe it's a beta version. I actually don't know, but I saw some headlines on it on SearchEngineJournal.com. And that's just something that I want to talk about.

Kyle (33:27): Is it something that we could use? Do we have some video footage we could put on there and test this? So you know, becoming a thought leader as you alluded to is so huge in, in the marketing space and, and it's funny because you don't actually need to spend that much time to know more than 99% of marketers into what's going on. It seems like that bar is kind of low. So I bet if we pulled a hundred marketers, maybe five of them would know that Hulu came out with a new ads self-serve platform. But so it allows you to just be keep on that cutting edge and reduce that crappy click through rate syndrome that can happen with, are you guys do using Facebook, newsfeed ads are pretty powerful. Like they're, you know, that's, that's been fatigued, so you have to,

Kathleen (34:15): Yeah. I love the idea of having a meeting with your team and everybody having to bring something to the table. I think the best marketers I know are the ones who are just insatiably hungry to learn and, you know, make institutionalizing that as part of the process is a really smart way to go. Yeah. So, great idea. So if somebody wants to learn more about the stuff you're working on or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Kyle (34:41): Yeah. GeoFli.com, and then Kyle Pucko, you can find me on LinkedIn. So I don't, I don't know if there's too many other Kyle Puckos out there. Shoot me a message. Happy to, happy to get in touch.

Kathleen (34:57): Awesome. I will put those links in the show notes. So head to the show notes, if you want to connect with Kyle or learn more about GeoFli and of course, if you're listening and you liked this episode, please take a minute to head to Apple podcasts and leave a five star review. It makes a huge difference. And of course, if you know someone who is doing kick ass, inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much, Kyle. This was a lot of fun.