Inbound Success Podcast

How can marketers use MRI data and neurolinguistics to develop strategies and campaigns that get better marketing results?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Hackstone founder and CEO Dan Hack talks about the process his team uses to incorporate lessons learned from FMRI scans in crafting impactful stories that really resonate with audiences.

Dan breaks down what he calls the "three brain framework" and shares a formula for using it to create messaging, campaigns, stories and videos that help viewers convince themselves to make a purchase.

Highlights from my conversation with Dan include:

• Hackstone is a video production company that acts as an outsourced creative team for agencies.
• Dan and the team at Hackstone use neuroscience research from FMRI scans to determine what taps into peoples' emotions, and they use that to develop marketing campaigns.
• Dan says most marketers make the mistake of leading with facts, when in reality, buyers are driven by emotion, and then look for the facts to back up their emotional decision.
• The three brain framework can be used to apply these principles. It segments the brain into three parts - the emotional brain, the logical brain, and the survival brain.
• The survival brain decides what information the brain will actually take in based on what is needed for survival.
• The emotional brain is where connections and associations are made, and where memories are stored and relationships are developed. It is what triggers the desire to purchase something.
• The logical brain is all about facts, and is used to justify the purchases that the emotional brain wants.
• FMRI data is used to determine what really resonates with people, and what they really want - as opposed to what they say they might want.
• The most important thing in developing marketing messages and campaigns is to determine what your customers want, but unfortunately most marketers start by identifying what they want to tell customers. Dan calls this selfish marketing.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Hackstone website
• Follow Hackstone on Instagram
• Check out some of the sources Dan relies on for neuroscience data:
  • CXL
  • NMSBA
  • Journal of Consumer Research
  • Journal of Advertising Research

Listen to the podcast to learn how to incorporate neuroscience into the development of your marketing strategies.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Dan Hack who is the founder and creative director of Hackstone. Welcome Dan.

Dan Hack (Guest): Thanks.

Dan and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode.

Kathleen: I'm happy to have you here and I am excited to talk about some of the things that you're working on which are really, really kind of cool and scientific.

About Dan and Hackstone

Kathleen: Before we get into that, for those who are listening and might not be familiar with you or Hackstone, can you talk a little bit about your story and who you are and what you do and also what Hackstone is?

Dan: Yeah, sure. So Hackstone started out as a video production company. I started Hackstone like 12 years ago I think now. We've kind of developed into sort of an arm of an agency and it's been a lot of fun because we get to do the creative things we get to, we get to do different... our clients are all over the place, big and small. And we get to do a lot of kind of the creative part and work with agencies to come up with the creative, to recommend the creative to their clients and also to our clients.

And then we do a lot of testing. We do a lot of like, is this going to work, you know, testing storyboards and the creative and then also doing the, you know, we call them postmortems, you know, we're afterwards you go and see why something worked and why why it didn't work. Right?

So we're kind of a production company on steroids we've been called. So it's a lot of fun. We really like what we do.

What does MRI data have to do with marketing?

Kathleen: That's awesome. One of the things that drew me to talking with you and having this conversation is that I learned that you guys are using actually MRI data and neurolinguistics to figure out more effective ways of tapping into emotions and developing narratives.

I will be the first to say, I'm a huge marketing nerd. And I think while many people think of marketing as this creative discipline, I'm always naturally drawn to the side of it that's a little bit more scientific, which is why I was like, Oh, I totally want to talk about this.

So tell me, what does MRI data have to do with marketing?

Dan: So nothing and everything all at the same time.

So basically what we're doing, and it's funny because you develop instincts, right? About what's going to work and not work. And there's always the chase of how do we know this is going to work and why did something work and why did something not work, right?

Like way back when, the reason I got into this whole thing was because I was young, I was creative. I had two projects that fell into my lap. They were really successful and creative people have a huge ego. And I had a ginormous ego, right? I became so arrogant when I first started this. I wanted to be a director, I wanted to affect the world with my product, right?

And then, you get to projects that don't work at all, right? That are just flops.

And the thing about a big ego is that they're incredibly fragile as well. Right? And then you become crushed and everything you thought you believed about yourself is wrong essentially.

So that's when I really got into the world of like, I wanted to find out why were these two projects after I've had this success, why did these projects not work? Right? Because clients give you their money when they give you their money, they give you their trust as well. They're like, Hey, we trust that you're going to make something that's going to blow the lid off of our KPI. You know? And, and that's a lot of responsibility and that's a lot of pressure as well.

So I was exposed to the world of testing pretty early on in my in my career and, and it just started with just asking people like, do you like this?

Do you, how did we do? Like, do you think this is something you would buy? Is this a good product? Like, how did you resonate with it? What annoyed you?

But there are a lot of problems with that and you find that, that people respond and oftentimes tell you they're really nice. People inherently are good, right? And they tell you what they think you want to hear.

So the information you get back from them is not entirely accurate all the time. So you go deeper, right? You go into like, okay, well we're going to use eye tracking technology, right, to figure out like where they're looking.

And then you go even deeper. You were going to use EEG to see how their brain is firing, which is, which are the like the probes you put on the head. Then you measure sweat glands and you measure pulse.

And basically stop asking them questions. It's like, Hey, we're not going to ask you any more. We're just going to see how you respond to whatever stimuli we put in front of you.

Kathleen: It's like a lie detector.

Dan: Kind of, exactly. Only less pressure for them. You don't go to jail afterwards hopefully.

But so then you get into all the way up to FMRI data, which is essentially putting somebody into an FMRI machine. And FMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. And what that does is it looks at your brain and tells you real time, with a few second delay, how your brain is firing or responding or what parts of your brain are using the most blood right? The most fuel based on what you're showing somebody. And it's like a light bulb.

It's super cool. Like you can show somebody a commercial and you can tell right away based on what parts of their brains are firing, whether they like it or not. Right?

Apple develops their products in FMRI machines where they show the different cases of the different screens of the different iPhones. And they can tell right away like, okay, well this part of the brain is firing and that means they like it or they don't like it or they're responding negatively or positively or whatever.

And really we've taken that, so trying to kind of sum it up here, they've taken that, we've taken that and sort of put that into a framework that we call the three brain framework. That tells you certain things like we know from FMRI data that people don't respond to facts, right?

But people don't buy cars because of the safety features, they don't buy cars because they have the radar you know, the radar cruise control on the highway or the leather seats or whatever.

It's all about emotion, right?

And that's why we always go back to how should it make you feel? Right?

That's how we start every single project. We have two steps. Number one, how should it make you feel? Number two, support that with facts, right?

A lot of people get that backwards. And that's what we know from FMRI data is that when you're selling facts, you're selling to a part of the brain whose only job it is to support the emotional decision that you've already made.

Kathleen: Right. It's to reverse justify what we like. First we figure out what we want and then we figure out how to justify it.

Dan: Right? Exactly. Exactly.

But here's the thing, like we don't even know we're doing it right? Like there's, one of my favorite studies is a smoking study back from the nineties. I think it was early nineties. The biggest FMRI study ever done where it was when the surgeon general started putting the warning on the packs of cigarettes, right? And researchers wanted to find out like, well, people are still smoking, but people are saying, right, we're doing these focus groups.

And people are saying like, yeah it's making me not smoke. Right? And they were like, okay, we need to put these people into FMRI machines and figure out what's going on.

So first they asked them, they said, do you think the Surgeon General's warning on the pack of, you know, any tobacco product makes you less likely to smoke or makes you smoke less?

And they were like, yeah, I think so. And then they put them in FMRI machines and they watched their brains as these people, number one smoked, and number two, were exposed to the Surgeon General's warning, right?

And what they found is super cool. They found that when people smoke, their brains have the same reaction as, it's the reward center lights up, it just explodes, as when they see the Surgeon General's warning.

It's the power of associations, right? So because when people smoke, what they usually do is they stop working, they walk down the hallway, they link up with coworkers, they have a conversation. And the last thing they see before they light a cigarette before this release of dopamine is they see the Surgeon General's warning, right?

Kathleen: Pavlov's dog, right?

Dan: And so they create that association, right? It really is. Yeah, exactly.

So in neuromarketing, what you're doing is you're trying to figure out how the brain works and you're trying to, you don't always have the budget to test every single project, but you're trying to figure out, you're trying to make an educated guess on how people are going to respond to certain things, right?

Kathleen: Sorry to interrupt you, but it's so interesting listening to you talk about this because I'm actually fascinated by the neuroscience behind all the anti-smoking campaigns.

And I had done some research on this as well. And a corollary, kind of additional story to the one you just told, which I think is so interesting is you know, for many years, depending upon how old you are, if you're listening, you may or may not remember for many years, the government used these campaigns that were these very scary images of like black lungs. And, it's interesting, they're starting to do this again now.

What they found, the primary focus of a lot of the antismoking campaigns was on teenagers because that's like, if you can prevent somebody from starting to smoke in the first place, it's a much better approach than trying to get somebody who's already smoking to stop.

Dan: Right?

Kathleen: And so they used to use those scare tactics and like, you know, just like the eggs and this is your brain on drugs kind of thing. And those did not work well.

It wasn't until they had something called the Truth Campaign where they started to see some success. What the Truth Campaign did, which you may recall seeing, is it scrapped all of those fear tactics.

What they did was they figured out, they really thought about like, why do people smoke? Right? Why do teenagers start to smoke in the first place? Is it because they don't understand it's bad for them? No, it's because they are rebelling against their parents. And that is a form of rebellion.

And so what the Truth Campaign did was it looked at, well, if we want to tap into that feeling of rebellion, how can we leverage rebellion to get them to not smoke in the first place?

So the messaging and the Truth Campaign was all around big tobacco wants to control you and has you in their pocket. So it was like rebel against big tobacco and don't fall for it essentially.

And that got a much, much better outcome than all the fear tactics. And I feel like that's kind of like the same thing that you're talking about.

All of these campaigns, you can pour a ton of money into them. But if you don't really understand at the very core what is that emotion that somebody is driven by, then you're not going to be successful.

Dan: Right.

Kathleen: So that was a long tangent, but I'm fascinated by this and there's so much interesting work being done in behavioral health that I think can inform marketing.

Dan: Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, and the problem I think is that it's still kind of expensive, right?

Like there are research groups and there are subscription services and we subscribe to those where when researchers do this research to find out what campaign was the most successful in this last super bowl, right? And they do the FMRI studies and they're funded.

You can subscribe to that data and get that data and then use that data to kind of inform what you do.

In a perfect world, yeah, we would have, you know, when we do a car campaign, you know, put people in an FMRI machine to see like, Hey, are they most stimulated by the color? Are they, is that a red car? Is it a white car? Is that a black car? So, those are all the nitty gritty things that you get into.

But I think at the heart of it is exactly like what you said. You need to figure out who your audience is. You need to figure out what they want, and then give it to them. It sounds really simple and it kind of is, right?

And then all these tools, this neuromarketing is essentially, we use that to try to figure out what it is, what exactly is it that your audience wants and how do you give it to them?

Because a lot of clients come to us and they say here's what we want to say. Or, when you ask them questions like what causes a campaign to not perform well? And usually it goes back to selfish marketing, right? You approach that campaign with what is it that we want to say, right?

We want to tell our story.

Like, the word story, I'm an oppositionist. I get that. But, the word story drives me up the wall. It drives me insane because it's become this catchall, right? And it's all like, tell your story has become this romantic replacement to messaging, right? Or information or get your message out there.

What does that mean? Right?

So this is really a sort of a way to figure out what is the right story. There are a million stories. Like, nobody cares who started the company, right? Nobody cares why even necessarily you started the company, right?

People care about other things. And this is really trying to find out what those things are and then giving them those things essentially.

Kathleen: So I have so many questions for you.

Dan: I'll just go and go.

What is the Three Brain Framework?

Kathleen: No, no, no. I warned you, I'm a huge nerd. And so like you've already seen through the smoking stuff, you and I could go for hours on this topic. But I want to break it down a little bit.

So first of all, you mentioned you have this Three brain approach. Can you define for me exactly what that, like what are the three brains?

Dan: Sure.

So obviously, there are more than three parts of the brain, but for our purposes, for this marketing purpose we divide the brain into three parts.

We have the survival brain, you have the emotional brain, and then you have the logical brain, right?

And we look at it as kind of a funnel. All three parts of those brains has its own purpose.

So you look at the survival brain, sort of like a club bouncer, right? He stands in the front with his arms crossed and he decides what gets in and what gets out, right? The brain is cognitive miser, right? So the brain tries to save calories.

He's the guy who decides number one, is this important to my survival? Do I need to know this information? Is this going to save my life? And then he also decides, is this new information? Do I already know this information or can we just radically summarize that?

So to put it on the shelf, and a good example of that is like your lawn, right? Nobody knows how many blades of grass they have in their front yard right now. It's not looking good for my yard. I have room for a lot. I've only had four like blades of grass or nursing them and, but everybody knows that you have that you have a lawn, right? You see a lawn.

That's an example of something being radically summarized and then you know, and then put on a shelf. So you have that.

Then if you do get through that, you have the emotional brain, right? And the emotional brain is the, we call it the mother, right? It's the mammal brain, if you will. You know, some people call it that. And basically that's where you create associations, right?

Like, Hey, last time when I touched that, it burned me and that hurt. And that's important to my survival.

And it does other things like memory. That's where your relationships are built, right? Like where do you fit in, in your tribe? And how do you advance, you know, in your tribe and, and you know, again, important for your survival.

And also you have some really cool things that happen in here, like synesthesia for example, which is like, which is where...

Kathleen: Is that where you see colors as emotions?

Dan: Yeah. Kind of. But it's like when you're watching a commercial. We use this in food commercials, right? When you're watching a commercial and you do a really good job in filming that and getting that across, the viewer will actually taste what they're seeing, right?

It's essentially you have these neuro pathways for like vision and for taste and for smell and whatever. And sometimes when they're really powerful, when you have a train, there's a train outside.

So that made me think of it. When you have a train like hurling down this neuro pathway, sometimes it'll jump the track onto another pathway. Right?

Kathleen: I feel like I totally know what you're talking about because when I go to the movies, my chain of cinemas locally, in the intro kind of footage that leads up to every movie, they always have the sound of the can of Coke popping open. And then the pouring into the glass with the ice and the fizzy sound combined with the ice clinking and the Coke filling.

And I'm like sitting there going, Oh my God, I need a Coke. And I can taste it right now.

Dan: I want that. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is. So that's the part of the brain where those kinds of things happen, right? And those are the kinds of things we want to do.

And that's why you make food. Like your goal is to make the viewer taste the food, right? Pizza. Really close shots of the cheese pulls and those kinds of things. Right? Super important.

So anyway, the emotional brain is where we do most of our decision making, right?

Then you have the logical brain and the logical brain is sort of like, it's like, it reminds me of my dad, right? He's the accountant and he's the guy who basically, he's like the legal department, right? He's the guy who who ruins the fun essentially, you know, like, like you say...

Kathleen: We call that "the fun sponge".

Dan: Yeah, exactly. It's the higher processing.

Dan: And this part of the brain either supports what your emotional brain has already decided when it comes to purchasing or it overrides that decision, right?

So you can go and sit in a Ferrari and you smell that new smell of the Ferrari and you really want it and you feel that emotional connection to the car in that red and that tan leather, you know, or whatever. And then the logical brain comes in and says like, Hey, 2,500 bucks a month. Like that's more than your mortgage. There's no way. We're not doing that.

And really, that's the way it works. So the emotional brain is where you should be selling, right? When you create something, you should create it for the emotional brain and then create facts to support the logical brain in helping support the emotional brain in making that decision.

So that's why facts should come second. Yet most of our marketing aims directly for that logical brain, yet that's not where we make decisions.

Kathleen: Yeah, that makes total sense. Cause I totally know that myself, how I buy. It's like I see something I like and I'm like, I really want that. How can I justify it? It's the old saying buy the dress and then find the party.

Where to find neuroscience data

Kathleen: So for somebody who's listening, I think if they understand this conceptually, you know, if it were me, my next question would be like, great, now how do I find this data to help me figure out what emotions to tap into? And you were mentioning there's ways you can subscribe to information about FMRI data.

So can you get into a little bit if somebody wants to learn more about this, get tapped into to that kind of data, where can they find it?

Dan: Sure. So I can send you some links afterwards if you want to put those in the show notes there on some of the places where you can subscribe to that. Publications, you can subscribe to even industry standard or industry specific data, you know, that apply directly to your industry.

But a lot of this stuff is really, it's not new information, right? You have to beat it into your brain to kind of remember that.

So, for example, the principle of the three brains, right? The fact that our minds look for contrast. There's this framework. Your mind looks for contrast, right? It's got to get into your mind first without being filtered out. And then you have certain principles that are kind of spread out. They're all over. And I think you have to make a decision.

So that's why you have neuro marketing firms who put that together for you if you don't want to think about it.

But I think it's important to become familiar with that. And then to put everything you do marketing wise, messaging wise through a framework like that. Does that make sense?

How to apply neuroscience to B2B marketing

Kathleen: Yeah, it does. And, in my head I'm thinking I can see so clearly how you would use this. You used the example of a Ferrari. If you're selling a Ferrari or you're selling a food product or you know, clothing or some things that are more consumer facing, maybe more optional products if you will.

But my question is when it comes to, for example, like what somebody might consider to be a boring B2B purchase, like accounting software or you know, like I'm in cybersecurity. Walk me through how you think about developing an emotional tug for something that most people look at as a pretty boring thing.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing before we even get to that emotional tug, we have to remember, get through the bouncer, right?

So one of the things, and I had this super cool example, hold on, I might have it written down here, that that I pulled. Now maybe I don't. You get these emails where people use industry jargon a lot, right? You first have to think about how do you get through the bouncer.

So you have to make it easy to understand. You have to, you have to understand that you're super close to your industry. The person you're talking to might not be super close to your industry.

So understand that your brain immediately asks, do we even let this information in? Whether it's an email, whether it's a marketing video, whether it's a commercial, like whatever it is, whether it's a billboard even.

Should we let this information in?

And you have to then go to the emotional connection of how do you make that emotional connection.

So when we say emotional connection, you have to emote. What we mean is you have to think about how should this messaging make you feel.

So some questions to ask are, should this make the person feel like I'm an authority? Should this person feel afraid that you know, that somebody is going to hack their system or steal ransomware, viruses, those kinds of things.

Should they feel funny? Or should your messaging feel funny? Should they be amused? So you go back to that. How should it make you feel?

And then you take that information and that information should support that. Does that make sense at all?

Examples of marketing campaigns that have been developed using MRI data

Kathleen: Yeah, it does. It totally does. So let's get into some examples because you guys have done work with some really interesting companies and I feel like this is especially one of those topics where you can talk about it conceptually and still not understand it. But when you dive into actual examples, it starts to become much more clear.

So can you maybe talk about how you've used these principles with some of the companies you've worked with to get really great results?

Dan: Sure. Exactly.

So car ads. So I'll take a local first. So we work with a local brand. It was a Ford dealership and they had done celebrity commercials in the past where they had an athlete say like, Hey, here's where I'm shopping.

And when we look at data, FMRI data, even with the, with the latest COVID, there's a lot of data coming out from COVID PSAs where they're saying a lot of these pieces are falling flat, right? A lot of this messaging from COVID 19 is falling flat, even with celebrities in it. Why is that? Right?

And then you get into like, it's not just a matter of getting celebrity, you have to put that celebrity in a, in a situation where it's authentic.

And what's authenticity? That depends on your brand.

So, a while back, we put an athlete into a set of Ford commercials. And the problem was that athletes can't act. Not only can't they act, athletes don't want to act right. And it was almost like, you know, having this athlete is working. It's okay, but we're doing it because we've done it in years past and it's sort of like people expect that from our brands. How do we ramp that up?

So what we did was we came in and we said okay, the athlete can't act, he doesn't want to act. He shouldn't act if he doesn't want to, so you don't have to. What does the audience want?

So we created this campaign where we took this athlete, made fun of the fact that he's in a commercial where he's being asked to act and he doesn't want to act.

And it was phenomenal, right? It went all the way up the chain to like, what are you guys doing? This is awesome. This is like the best campaign ever. The athlete had a lot more fun doing the commercial. The client had a much better response from that.

And that trickles down to now you have fundraisers with the athlete where now you have a better response to that. You sell more cars. People are talking about your brand more and most importantly, people remember your brand more.

Because ultimately it's about attention and it's about keeping the attention. And then, how were you remembered by the people who maybe aren't ready to buy now but are ready to buy in 90 days? Wherever they are in their cycle and their buying cycle.

And how do you stay top of mind for that?

Pizza, same thing. You know, in the celebrity line, we work with a pizza brand every year where they have an athlete who works with them to not only sell pizzas but also to raise money for a charity. A certain amount of your sales goes to whatever the charity is. And they had typically had this green screen and put the celebrity up. The celebrity image, let that just do the work. And people didn't respond to that. So we went back and said, okay, who is the audience here? Who are we really trying to attract?

And it's fans of this athlete, right?

So you look at the basic framework. You don't have to FMRI study this to kind of get that framework. We look at that information and we say okay, they want to be entertained.

And the best way to entertain them, and we know this from FMRI data, it's the associations, right?

So if you were to put a puppy on the screen, and then put the brand at the end, if that's the emotion you want to be linked to, you are already 75% of the way there, right? When it comes to commercials then you put in your messaging and you make it even better.

And we found in the past that when you take a product and you integrate it into a piece of entertainment, you maintain that audience attention. It's the sense parts of an advertisement.

So when I say ad, I mean like a video, even a video on Facebook for example. And you're trying to get a lead or you're trying to sell mattresses or whatever it is you're trying to sell, it's about keeping the attention, and especially how long a viewer stays in a video matters because that's how you retarget, right? That's how you recognize how interested they are.

We have a three minute video. They made it all the way to the end, they're super interested, right?

So it becomes like this capturing the attention and then maintaining the attention. So what we did with the pizza brand is we created a short film and we put this character, the athlete, which was Alex Ovechkin, into this pizza commercial where he was in these absurd scenarios. Like he initially moved here from Russia where pizza was the reason he moved, not hockey. He stumbled upon hockey when he was delivering pizzas, right?

And it was this absurd storyline that was just fun and entertaining. And you saw this athlete in a situation he's not normally in.

When you're selling, you're always asking people for their attention. When they're seeking you out, that's when it's okay to just give them the information, like on an iPhone, right? But when you're asking them, when you're interrupting their lives and you're asking them for their attention, you're saying like, Hey, we want you to buy our pizza.

Because when you buy our pizza, a portion of your proceeds go to whatever the charity is, you have to make it worth their while.

And we saw a a phenomenal capture rate. Not only that, but the average, I'm trying to think of like what it is now. So the average completion rates for any video for a long form video is about 15%. We were hitting 86, 87% completion rates because when somebody starts the video, they watch all the way to the very end to the logo and to the offer. Which is phenomenal.

And those are the kinds of things, more than just views, you can say Oh yeah, this got 2 million impressions, you know, which is great.

You can buy impressions. Impressions don't really mean a lot. Are they meaningful impressions?

Ultimately that's what you're trying to get to with FMRI, or with any neuro marketing, you're trying to get to the bottom of, is this meaningful to our audience? You're getting their attention. You're hopefully keeping their attention by creating a meaningful experience that is worth their time, which is ultimately the most valuable thing I think we have.

How to get started with neurolinguistics and MRI data

Kathleen: That's so interesting. Throughout this conversation, you've sprinkled in things that are a good guide for somebody if they're thinking okay, I want to do this.

Can you kind of summarize, if you were meeting with somebody for the first time and you needed to tell them, here's how you're going to go ahead and use this concept for your own marketing, what are the steps they should go through? Where do they get started?

Dan: Sure. So we've got a framework, I can pull it up here real quick just just as a reference. We've got a campaign worksheet that we use for these when we go in that's based on our three brains.

So for example, we always ask, what's the purpose of your video? What's the primary goal of your campaign? And that's just the background information. So you say who's your customer? And then how are you going to measure success?

I think it's super important to figure out how are we even going to gauge if this thing is working or if it's successful or not? You'd be amazed how many people don't know.

A lot of times, especially with video, we find that a lot of people come to us and say like, Hey, the CEO wants a video. We don't really know what the purpose is, but can you just get it off my plate?

We call those box checker videos and then we're like that nerdy kid in class who's like, but we still want an A, right? So we'll get the A for you.

So again, we start out with contrast. So we say like, who are your competitors? And you take inventory of what your competitors are doing.

And again, through this neuro research, we know that it is better to be different than it is to be better. It's very difficult to quantify better. Like, what is better to some people, right?

So, for example, banks might say, and this is a common thing, when a customer comes into our bank, we know their name. We know them, we have that personal relationship. To me that's not better.

I love being anonymous. When I walk into a branch and they say, good morning, Mr. Hack, I'm like, Oh cool, I need to find a new bank. They know my name. That's not good. I don't like that.

So that's something that doesn't work for everybody.

So then you say how many competitors, what are your competitors doing? How do you not do what your competitors are doing? Because we know through the tests we do repeatedly that when you put a series of car commercials that all say the same thing, when you watch the Today Show in the morning and you see the lawyer commercials one right after the other that say, we're fighting for you, we're here for you, we're the tough guys. You know, people don't remember that.

People will watch that. We watch people watch those. It's commercials where we'll put like five or six of those in a row. We'll watch people watch them. We'll see them interact with them. Yet at the end of that run of commercials, they don't remember anything. They don't remember any of the brands.

Because again, the bouncer, right? The survival brain has decided like, Hey, you don't need to know this information. Even if you're in the market for that, you don't need to know this information. It's going to use too many calories to process it.

I'm going to put it all together for you, put it in a basket and put it on the shelf. You don't need to worry about it. People don't remember what they saw. They don't remember brands. They don't even remember the storylines at the end of that.

So the first thing we do is try to figure out, okay, what do we do that's different? We put that into our framework.

The next thing is simplicity. And this again is the survival brain. So for a long form video, you might decide what are the three points we want to make really well? Where for a commercial you may decide what's the one point we know, through testing?

When you try to make three points in a 32 second commercial, people remember generally nothing. It's like 0.5 when you average it out, right? When you put one point in a commercial, when you try to make one point, people tend to remember mostly that one point that you're making.

So you have to ask yourself, okay, like we want to get these 15 things across in our messaging or in our video. Is this the place for that? Where are you in the buying cycle? And right now when you're top of funnel, is this the place where you want to try to educate customers on your product? Usually, no.

So because it's just too much to remember at that point, what do you need to prove to your customer to convince them to buy?

So that's how you appeal to the logic part, because the logic part is going to ultimately support the emotional part. How should you deliver that information?

And then we look at the reward. The final thing is the reward. Why should your viewer keep watching? And when we test a long form piece, like with the Ovechkin piece for example, it looks fun and it looks interesting and it looks entertaining, but it's very thought out.

We went through and figured that in a piece like this, you have somebody's attention for maybe seven, eight seconds before their mind starts wandering. What can we put in there at the seven, eight second mark that is going to recapture their attention, draw them in?

So you have to do that throughout your video. And when you watch I don't know, like the Purple Mattress for example, is a really good campaign. That was done to repeatedly bring you back in those really good long form, like Dollar Shave.

Kathleen: I was just going to say that first Dollar Shave Club video that made them go viral, you couldn't stop watching because the pace was so perfect and you knew there was something more fantastic that was coming.

Dan: Yeah. So, and you have to remember that what's interesting to you is likely not interesting to your customer. And that's what we talk about as selfish marketing. What do they want to hear versus what do I want to say? Yup.

Kathleen: I love it. Well, okay, so any chance that I could share a link to that campaign framework in the show notes because that sounds like a super valuable document for people to have.

Dan: And then it's got other things too, which is super cool. What does your customer want? What's their internal problem?

Then you get into internal versus external problems and those kinds of things. What's keeping them from having what they want and how do you solve that problem? But ultimately, people remember how they felt when they watched your stuff or when they're exposed to your brand much more.

And again, FMRI data or not FMRI data, it comes down to the fact that people remember how they felt. They don't remember what you said.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: This is so interesting and it's been so much fun to talk about. I want to ask you two questions and then I want to get into how somebody can follow up and learn more.

So my two questions that I always ask everybody, the first one is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. I'm curious, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the standard for doing inbound marketing right now?

Dan: Yeah, I do. I think there's so many of them.

Most of the national long form ads that you're seeing on Facebook now are really well done. For example, Purple Mattresses, really well done. They have the bears, right? I think Geico, the Martin agency, Geico does a phenomenal job.

And I also think that Dollar Shave Club really was the kind of the groundbreaking long format that changed how long form ads work.

Even though you had that data, there's a disconnect between people know what the right thing to do is versus them actually doing those things.

Kathleen: I love those examples.

And then the other thing, most marketers I talk to say they suffer from this problem of what I call drinking through a fire hose. Digital marketing changes so quickly. It's really hard to keep up with best practices and new technology and all that. So how do you personally keep yourself educated?

Dan: So you know, there's certain people, certain things I follow. Some people follow Gary V - Gary Vaynerchuk. So people like that. You take those sources.

I have a ton of those sources that I use. And then in the morning I sit down and go through them to see what's happening. And then you decide what you remember and what you don't remember. I can send you some of those links.

Kathleen: Who are your top three sources? How about that?

Dan: Top three sources? I'd have to say, so I use a lot of the curated stuff like IAB, the newsletters. I use a lot of those. We use CXL. We use a lot of Harvard Business Review.

And then just staying in touch with people. I've got a lot of colleagues in the industry where we talk about what's happening, who's doing what? What worked for your clients, what didn't work, what did you find out? Did you hear about a new study that just came out? You know, those kinds of things.

How to connect with Dan

Kathleen: Awesome. Well, if somebody is listening to this and they want to learn more about what we talked about or they just want to learn more about you or Hackstone, what's the best way for them to connect with you online?

Dan: Hackstone.com. That's our website. We're on social as well. We try to make our social a little more entertaining than the website. The team is a lot less ADD and a lot less all over the place than I am. So they typically will do the talking. So if you're lucky, you won't have to actually talk to me.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: Alright, well I think talking to you is fascinating. So if you are listening to this podcast and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I mean, I know I did this time for sure. This was so interesting. Head to Apple Podcasts and please consider leaving the podcast a five star review because that is how we get found by new listeners.

And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, and I would love to have them as my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Dan. This was a really fun conversation. Thanks.

 

What role should LinkedIn play in your overall paid advertising strategy, and how can use it to drive highly qualified leads for your business?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Modern Media Advertising Director Anthony Blatner shares his LinkedIn advertising strategies.

From how LinkedIn should be used in combination with other channels as part of a holistic paid advertising strategy, to what ad formats perform best and how to work with your sales team to ensure any leads you get are being followed up with, Anthony covers everything he does to help Modern Media's clients get killer results from LinkedIn.

Highlights from my conversation with Anthony include:

• LinkedIn is great for targeting niche audiences at scale.
• The cost per click on LinkedIn is higher than it is on other platforms, so it's important that you have a strategy for following up on any leads you get from LinkedIn.
• In Anthony's experience, LinkedIn ads work well for company's with a customer lifetime value of $10,000 or more.
• Whereas the cost per click on Facebook is generally around $2, on LinkedIn, it starts at $4.50 and goes up from there.
• LinkedIn is best for top of the funnel advertising, where you can attract a new audience and then retarget and nurture that audience on other, less expensive platforms.
• Anthony has found that LinkedIn lead forms work well for his clients. They tend to have a higher conversion rate because prospects don't have to leave LinkedIn to convert, but when you use a lead form, you sacrifice the ability to cookie a contact. 
• If you are concerned about GDPR compliance, there are a number of ways to use lead forms to secure explicit consent and stay GDPR compliant.
• Another LinkedIn ad format that works well are newsfeed ads. Whereas on Facebook, video works well for this format, Anthony recommends using images on LinkedIn because you are being charged by the click and not the impression (which is how Facebook works).
• There is a new LinkedIn ad format that uses chatbot-like functionality called conversation ads that is also worth checking out.
• Anthony says sponsored InMail can be an effective way to get more conversions for ads that are already tested and proving successful in the newsfeed.
• With many marketers cutting their ad spend due to budget restrictions relating to COVID, Anthony says the cost per click on LinkedIn is down 30 to 40 percent.
• He recommends setting a maximum cost per click when advertising on LinkedIn, and then playing around with lowering that number to see how little you can spend and still see results.
• If you are doing LinkedIn ads and not seeing great results, it is most likely due to your targeting. Anthony recommends that you go back and revisit your targeting strategy to see if that helps. 
• The minimum number of emails you can target on LinkedIn is 300.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Modern Media website
• Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn
• Contact Anthony by email at [email protected] 

Listen to the podcast to learn how the top LinkedIn ads experts are using the platform to drive leads, and how can, too.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Anthony Blatner who is the advertising director at Modern Media. Welcome Anthony.

Anthony Blatner (Guest): Hey Kathleen. Thanks for having me on the show.

Anthony and Kathleen recording this episode.

Kathleen: Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting into it with you today, talking about some LinkedIn ads. But before we start, can you please tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and about modern media and about really just how you wound up doing what you're doing today?

About Anthony Blatner and Modern Media

Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. So modern media, we are a LinkedIn ads focused agency. We do a lot of B2B lead generation and all of our focuses on LinkedIn ads.

The way that I got to being here is I actually come at it from the tech and software development world. I originally started my career working at IBM, working on their consulting teams, working on big eCommerce stores. Really enjoyed that, got to travel around a lot.

I live in Austin, Texas and I also got involved with the startup community while I was here and ended up falling in love with that. So after a few years at IBM, I spun off to start my own mobile app development consulting company who would build mobile apps for for a variety of other companies, a lot of startups, some other like larger tech companies that we would partner with.

And when I was doing that, I saw that we were building all these apps and like some of these companies would actually have startups with build an app and launch and like do very well. And we had a number of clients that went on to get acquired or like Stallard technology.

And then we also work with some bigger partners who may have already had a customer network and they launched their app and it goes up to that customer network and does very well out of the gates.

Then you would have other companies who would spend all this time and money developing app their software and then they would launch it and without a good marketing plan in place, it would just sit on the app store. No one would download it. And you'd see how much time and effort these teams are putting into this.

And without, you know, without that marketing plan afterwards, then it was just, you know, it was dead in the water.

So I saw it, I saw the need for it and then we naturally got pulled into doing it, helping out with a lot of those. So from doing marketing for my own agency and for a lot of clients I ended up just really loving the marketing that I was doing, so a few years ago, transitioned to focusing solely on marketing.

So now Modern Media focuses on marketing. B2B lead-generation solely using LinkedIn ads.

Kathleen: I love how focused you guys are because I mean, I come from an agency background. I owned an agency for 11 years and you know, I think that's the big conversation in the agency community, right? Like it's easy to try to be all things to all people, especially when you're chasing dollars. But there's really something to be said for niching down and becoming, you know, the best expert in the world on the thing that you want to do, you know, and focus on. So I think that's great.

Anthony: No, it wasn't easy to get here. You know, it's a lot of trial and error along the way to where getting into the marketing. A lot of the apps that we started by marketing, no, sometimes we did start with like Facebook ads and Google ads.

So like I've, I've done a lot of all of that kind of advertising over the years. And just with my background and with the type of clientele we had, LinkedIn was just repeatedly becoming the best platform to market them on.

So we had done a lot of Facebook, done a lot of Google. I'll tell you a story of probably the first one that really stuck out for me. They were, they were, this was a company that we were taking on to do marketing. They were at big data, but they are the big data platform. They sell their tools made for enterprise companies. It's like thousands of dollars a year.

They were doing the traditional Facebook and Google marketing. But as we audited their account and looked at their lead list, a lot of the leads that were coming in from Google were like people looking for jobs, searching for jobs or students looking for research.

And they were, you know, they were following best practices for keywords and negatives and all that stuff, but you still get a lot of leads coming in. And then on Facebook it'd be a lot of people who are maybe clicking on the ad cause it had like a pretty picture in it or something that was attention grabbing. But a lot of those leads that were signing up were just not good fits. Their sales team was complaining that they were wasting a lot of time calling out these people and they just weren't qualified to buy.

They didn't have the budgets to buy the software. So we took him over to LinkedIn and you know, targeted like CTOs, data scientists at specific types of companies who would be had the, their platform was made for a few different industries. So chose those industries, chose companies I think like a hundred people and above and just right out the gates.

Those leads that were signing up were like the perfect fit for them and they're just like, this is night and day. Like the clear differentiator there. And since then it's just been like, I'm just an advocate of LinkedIn now for, for B2B for these industries that that's our focus now.

Who is LinkedIn advertising right for?

Kathleen: That's great. Now I feel like when people think about online advertising, they have a lot of choices these days. You mentioned a number of platforms just, and you know, in the last few minutes I guess my first question for you is really who is LinkedIn advertising right for and where does it fit within that big mix of different options?

Anthony: That is a good question. That is a very important question to ask. So it's not, it isn't a good fit for everybody. I'll tell you a few things about it is LinkedIn is great for targeting niche decision makers at scale.

It is a more expensive ads platform to use than a lot of the other ones out there. So it's good for companies that have the resources to go work those leads that they acquire. It's going to be more expensive to acquire those leads than like most other channels.

So, you know, they're higher value leads need to work them when people are signing up. It is more expensive to acquire them. So you, your offer, your LTV for your customers should be high enough to make sense. What we'd like to see is an LTV of about 10k for that ROI to make sense.

You know, if your sales and marketing engine is very honed in, you can be less than that and still make an ROI. But that's a good rule of thumb.

If you're on Facebook ads, you can get CPCs under a buck, you know, they might be a dollar to $2 on average. On LinkedIn the minimum is about $4.50 in the US so right out of the gate, that's their floor and you're just going up from there.

And if you're targeting CEO's only, you know, that's gonna be even higher than that.

So just be prepared for higher acquisition costs.

And that leads to how it fits in with the ecosystem. LinkedIn is great for starting the conversation and for acquiring very high quality traffic. Once you acquire it, you know, you want to then nurture it on other cheaper channels or more cost efficient channels.

So once somebody signs up to be a lead, you know, follow up over email, outbound calling oftentimes we retarget with Facebook and Google ads. So we acquired traffic on LinkedIn and then well, retarget on Facebook and Google because it's a lot cheaper.

And you know, retarget those ads, retarget those leads to, we're doing lead generation on LinkedIn, and then retargeting them to maybe book a call on Facebook or Google.

Kathleen: Got it. So it sounds like from what you're saying, focused lists you know, not kind of throwing a bunch of darts at the wall and hoping one sticks. It's like if you know exactly who you want to target and you have some good targeting parameters around whether that's job title, what have you, and then the budget to be able to support a larger, potentially larger per lead ad spend the team in place to follow up on those leads. And then really from an expectation standpoint, using it at the top of the funnel.

Understanding LinkedIn ad formats

Kathleen: So then knowing that if somebody is listening and they're thinking, okay, check, check, check, you know, all of these things I have, can you talk a little bit about LinkedIn ad formats and what you find performs really well? So like, what do you need to have in order to advertise effectively on LinkedIn?

Anthony: Yeah, so a few things. So approaching the LinkedIn campaign is a few things and I'll kind of tell you about our most common campaign we'll do for people is a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn using lead magnets.

So a lead magnet is some asset of value that your target market would be interested in. So a guide, a PDF, a checklist or something like that. Linkedin, like I said, this is starting a conversation with somebody, your target market.

So offering people guides and easy downloadables is the best way to start the conversation to get them interested. Most, you know, unless you're a major brand, most people have not heard about your company. So leading with like buy now or contact us isn't gonna do as well. We're gonna have a much higher cost per lead. So on LinkedIn use lead magnets to start.

As far as ad formats, we do often use the LinkedIn lead forms. They will auto-populate with the person's information. So the lead form is a little form when you click on the ad that'll open up right inside of LinkedIn, just like a Facebook lead form.

They work very similarly. But on LinkedIn you can auto fill that with information from the user's profile and it comes with information from your profile. While you know on Facebook it's usually personal email addresses. In LinkedIn you do get number of personal email addresses, but you also get like work email addresses as well.

I find that data quality is very high coming off of LinkedIn. And we also often use like job title and company name so we know who are these leads that are signing up. Or using the LinkedIn profile.

You are also going to look up those leads afterwards and you know that that gives you a lot, a lot more richer information about your lead. So you can see, okay, who is this person, where do they work? And understand, you know, understand where your leads are coming from.

Usually, you're setting those targeting criteria up front. So you know, people coming into your campaign are going to be part of that audience. But our average campaign or our most helpful one is, is using the LinkedIn lead forms, your lead generation offering a lead magnets to, to your audience.

Kathleen: So this is an interesting topic to me because I've heard this, that lead forms are more effective than trying to get somebody to like go to your website and convert. But I guess my question is really if you're using a lead form, What are you sacrificing?

I use HubSpot and so I can't, if I use a lead form, I can't cookie somebody. If I can't cookie them, then I am giving up the ability to see all that rich data about their behavior on my site, et cetera and things like that. But then you had mentioned also using LinkedIn leads or ads rather to then retarget those people on other platforms.

Can you do that if you're using a lead form? Because at that point, you're not having a tracking pixel firing on your website.

Anthony: Right. At that point we retarget based on the email.

Kathleen: Okay. So if, but if there...

Anthony: You lose some data you know, that is, it is different than going to the landing page and opting in. So we do often use both, but most common is using the lead forms. The conversion rate is just much higher.

Typically using the lead forms the quantity you're going to get is going to make sense. You will see a lower conversion rate for pushing people to your landing page.

But I do say, you know, there are times where maybe you don't have the sales team available to call all those leads. So it is more important for you to get fewer, more higher intent leads. And then at that point maybe a landing page is a better one for you to use.

Because we do have accounts where like, you know, if they have a large budget they can be driving a lot of leads through there. And if you don't have the sales team to contact all those leads, like, Hey, I'd rather have higher intent leads. So landing page opt ins would then be better with them.

LinkedIn ads and GDPR compliance

Kathleen: Yeah. Now the other question I have about lead forms is, it relates to GDPR. So if you're driving somebody to your site, you have a lot of control. If you're trying to be GDPR compliant, you have a lot of control over how you structure, you know, your opt-ins and your GDPR language, et cetera.

I don't have a lot of experience with LinkedIn lead forms. So can you talk a little bit about, if somebody is trying to adhere to GDPR, can they use LinkedIn lead forms and if so, what kind of control do you have over being able to document that opt-in?

Anthony: Yeah good question. So we haven't seen too many issues with that on LinkedIn.

Two things with lead form that you can include is number one, you were actually required to include a link to the company's privacy policy. So usually you use the privacy policy which will cover, you know, all those terms.

You can also include a little blurb at the bottom of the lead form. Anything else that you want to make clear to the user as they're signing up.

So those two inputs as far as that we usually get involved, you know, we're, we'll use the privacy policy from the company. And any other information on the lead form that needs to be,

Kathleen: So am I correct that there's no explicit checkbox built in that would say, for example, I agree to receive other communications from company X,

Anthony: You can add a custom checkbox to do that.

Kathleen: You can, okay. Okay. So that would presumably then solve that issue if somebody was really being strict about how they complied with GDPR? Yeah. Great.

When should you use a LinkedIn lead form?

Kathleen: So yes, there's this trade off then with lead ads and it sounds like it's important to understand your goals.

What I'm hearing, or at least what I'm taking away from what you said, is that if your intent is to really have a laser focus on your certain market or your leads that you want to attract and, and your goal if they do convert is to really follow up with a phone call from your sales team, then it doesn't really matter if you're driving them to your website and having them fill out a form because the goal is to get the sales team call them and or, and, or reach out by email. And so, you know, having a lead form would make sense there.

But then it sounds like if your goal is to either put them into, you know, a full funnel nurturing sequence where you're retargeting on Facebook or something or where you're going to do mass emails then maybe it might make sense to not use a lead form and instead to direct them to a form on your site. Is that accurate, would you say?

Anthony: Yeah, we've got the best results that we see are when we, when we use lead forms to drive the higher volume of leads and then the client usually has a sales team who's on top of those leads right away calling them, you know, it's like they say like the five minute after submission rules, like the best practice, you know, contact them soon afterwards.

But five minutes is very fast. But if it, Hey, if you're on top of your leads, call them right away. Like, that's where we should have the best results. The sales team do work those leads. If someone signed up, they've indicated interest and if you position your lead magnet the right way, then they should be very open to like a sales conversation or at least that introductory like discovery. Hey, how can we help you in conversation

Kathleen: Do you give your clients any coaching as far as how to follow up on those leads? Because I think the one thing I've noticed is that there can, there's the potential for a big mismatch. Like somebody fills out a form on LinkedIn to get a white paper there. They might not be expecting to get a phone call. So how do you advise your clients to follow up?

Anthony: Yes, good question. So LinkedIn is great for starting the conversation. It is top of funnel.

Be aware that these leads, this is probably the first time that they're seeing your company, they probably opted in to get your lead magnet. So yeah, I kind of joke about the five minute rule thing. I would say that it's very fast to contact them at the point where they have just for the first time seeing your logo and heard about your company. They probably haven't even come to it, had time to read that lead magnet yet.

So I, you know, I don't say within five minutes, contact them soon. But you know, some of it is like you want that lead magnet to help do some of the education and warming up with them. It might take a little bit of time for somebody to receive that email, to click through to read it or to receive that email and then go read it.

And then yeah, follow up with them, have them on an email sequence, follow up with them shortly after that and then have the retargeting funnel in place. So that's you know, if they sign up via email, if they click through and pixel them, then you can retarget them with ads afterwards.

So we do recommend like a multi-channel approach afterwards as many touch points as you can, you know, shortly afterwards, while while it is still top of mind for them.

And then there's a lot that goes into the lead magnet strategy as far as, you know, how do I pick the best asset? How do I create the best asset that's going to work here?

For companies and brands and topics, services, that's they are, that are, it's like the levels of awareness thing pyramid. If they are not very aware of what your solution is and you work that you want to focus on their pain points and make the topic about them. If they are more aware, maybe if you are a well known brand and maybe you can make the topic about yourself if there's something that they're interested in.

So for lower levels of awareness, keep in mind that this is the part of the first time the senior company. So that call, the way I coach people about that call is that needs to be very introductory, very discovery. How can we help you get focused?

Other LinkedIn ad formats

Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now we talked a lot about lead ads. Can you talk through what are some of the other ad format options on LinkedIn and for each of them, you know, when would you use it and, and how does it generally perform?

Anthony: Sure. so the next, so as far as specific ad units in the newsfeed, so that's a sponsored content and you have image ads and you have a video ad there, you also carousel ads. And they work just like Facebook carousel ads essentially.

We actually start with image ads most of the time. So I know, you know, on Facebook everyone's about video and like video performance better on LinkedIn to start, we often, we always start with, we almost always start with image ads in the beginning because we find on LinkedIn you're usually paying per click. Whereas on Facebook, usually paying costs, CPM by impression.

So on LinkedIn you want to reduce the chance of any irrelevant clicks to your ads. So that in one way that is don't be misleading.

You know, on Facebook people tend to be very curiosity invoking of like drawing the click in. That could be flashy videos, that could be vague copy that's just curiosity invoking. On LinkedIn you want to be very direct about what's what it is you're offering, who you are, who you're targeting because you don't want people to just curiosity click, okay,

Kathleen: You're paying for that. Yeah, that's an expensive click. Especially when five bucks is your minimum. You could have bought yourself a latte at Starbucks.

Anthony: So, we're usually starting with image ads because you can instantly, somebody can consume images rather than watching a video.

We usually find, to start, videos tend to be flashy and like eye catching and they draw the click more often. So in the beginning we see images perform better. And then once you prove your audience, which audience you should be split testing a number of audiences, once you prove which audience is the best, which ad angle, which imagery is the best, then we can then go turn that into a video or create a video similar to that.

And then, at that point we do see often video can outperform images. So in in the newsfeed you have images, video next format that we most commonly use is probably sponsored InMail.

Sponsored InMail can be great. It can be expensive as well. So it's mostly InMail charges you per send. I think the minimum 5 cents per send. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a lot when you add it up over the size of an audience.

Sponsored InMail is great because we do see very high open rates of those messages. Keep in mind a lot of people that are opening those are probably just clearing out the notification. So the offers that work best in sponsored InMail are the ones that are like the, if you have a very appealing offer.

So usually we'll start by testing in the newsfeed and if an ad does very well there, then we will take that and go turn into a sponsored InMail ad. Because if it's performing really well in the newsfeed then that means the offer's proven and that we can go take and put in as much with InMail.

Sponsored InMail, you know, it's a one, it seems like a one on one conversation and if it's like, if it feels like a personal offer that you're making to somebody usually, you know, sometimes offer a free consultation there or like free gifts there are, do, do better. But it's, it's a good ad format to try out.

Next, Linkedin just released conversation ads, which are kind of the next evolution of sponsored email ads. This gets more to be more chat bot like so we do see LinkedIn does follow. It's tends to follow Facebook and a lot of different ways. And you know, we've seen how Facebook has evolved with the last few years. We've seen Facebook Lives, we've seen chat bots and stuff like that. Linkedin is kind of following along the same steps.

Kathleen: So can you actually explain how that would work? Cause I haven't seen that at all. I'm super curious about it. The chatbots.

Anthony: So it's not, it's not a chatbot, but I think LinkedIn's on their way to getting more towards this.

But conversation ads, you will create a chat flow. So instead of just a sponsored InMail message that you send to somebody, it is similar to that. You send the message, but then they have a few options that they can choose from and you can create a, a tree from there. So that if somebody clicks on option a, you know, essentially you can offer them multiple different things in the app.

So the reason why we've seen performance improve from it, because you can offer people, you can make multiple offers,

Kathleen: Right? It's like a choose your own adventure kind of a thing. Now, does that appear as a direct message in their inbox or how does that appear?

Anthony: Yes.

Kathleen: Interesting. I haven't seen that. I'm going to have to now search for it, find it in the wild. So, so many different options.

Who is finding success with LinkedIn ads?

Kathleen: I know you work with a lot of clients. Can you share any examples of, you know, campaigns or companies that you've worked with who are using LinkedIn ads really successfully?

Anthony: Sure. so right now, well, just in general the HR space always does very well on LinkedIn. So I'd say for any space, any campaigns that I would highlight, like it's probably gonna be an HR campaign.

The biggest categories on LinkedIn are like, I think IT is number one. And I think HR is number two, and then it's like the rest of the tech software world and then like financial services.

So if you're in one of those categories, those are the biggest audiences. So those are probably gonna be great campaigns for LinkedIn.

I'm always surprised when somebody gives me a very niche audience to target how many people I'm able to find on LinkedIn. So, and pretty much any niche decision maker, any niche B2B targeting, go scope out what the audience sizes. And I'm always surprised how many people I can find in the different niches.

But to highlight any campaigns, HR, I'd say just in the last, especially in the last couple months since we've all been quarantined and at home, the HR category has been very active on LinkedIn. So not only have ad prices gone way down the last few weeks, they're down about like 30 to 40% in a lot of cases.

Kathleen: Now, I've heard that. I've heard that also for Facebook. And is that on LinkedIn? Is that because basically so many companies have cut their marketing spend and so the demand side if you will, has gone down

Anthony: Exactly. LinkedIn is an auction, just like Facebook.

Kathleen: Yup. Okay.

Anthony: So less, well, it's a combination of less advertisers and then also more eyeballs. Supply and demand there where we're all stuck at home. So everyone's spending a lot more time online.

Kathleen: Yeah, I've heard, I've heard a ton of people say they're spending way more time on LinkedIn these days.

How to structure your bidding strategy for LinkedIn ads

Anthony: A random tip is I always recommend bidding max CPC. Do not use auto-bid on LinkedIn because you just, you say go spend wherever you want it and LinkedIn will go whatever it wants. Set max CPCs for most of your campaigns.

We've noticed that we can drop that max CPC all the way down, nearly all the way down to the floor. Each audience in each geography has its own floor so go test in the tool and see what yours is, but we dropped it nearly down to the floor for a lot of campaigns and I'm seeing cost per lead improve a lot.

Kathleen: Wow. That's awesome. Okay, so sorry, I interrupted you. You were talking about examples and you talked about HR. Any particular campaigns that you can think of that have done really well lately?

Examples of successful LinkedIn ad campaigns

Anthony: Yeah, so there's two very specific HR ones I'm thinking about right now that, especially in the last few weeks, that they've done very well.

I mentioned how like lead magnet strategy is very important. They both release lead magnets that speak to kind of what's going on right now, how to hire in tough times and how to support your people during tough times.

And, you know, COVID messaging might be getting stale now, but especially over the last couple of months, it's been performing super well. So where they were traditionally between a 40 to $60 cost per lead, they're down below $30 per lead.

And then the other campaign, they were a little bit more cause they were targeting a higher level of HR people. And they're down below 50 bucks per lead.

So yeah, we've seen lead costs like almost cut in half in a lot of cases. And just like HR activities, you know, through the roof. So those ones have done really well.

Attracting high quality leads on LinkedIn

Kathleen: And then would you say the quality of the leads - I know you mentioned doing almost the opposite approach from Facebook where you're trying not to be click baity cause you're paying by the click. And I'm interested specifically, because you talked about one example that was targeting very senior level people. That's an audience that's usually really hard to get in front of.

So can you talk a little bit about what your experience has been if somebody is going after like a C level audience, what are some good tips for being successful with that on LinkedIn?

Anthony: Absolutely. That's why you use LinkedIn. Cause a lot of these upper level people, there's just no other place or way to target them without, without buying an email list. Yeah, there's no other place. Linkedin is the best place with that kind of data at scale.

And LinkedIn's always the first place that people update their profile when they get a new job or get a promotion. So it's very high quality data and that's the only place, a lot of times, you'll see these people.

As far as targeting goes, the LinkedIn audience approach is the opposite of Facebook, I guess. Again, with Facebook you give it, you know, you tend to give it a big audience and you let the AI algorithm go find the best people for you and that audience. On LinkedIn you want to do the opposite because, because you are paying cost per click, you want to exclude any irrelevant ones.

So you want to be very niche, very laser focused on who you want to target.

As far as lead quality goes, you know, you're setting up your targeting in the beginning. What are the job titles I want, what are the functions with the seniorities? So if you're not getting those leads, the right leads coming through your funnel, go back to your targeting and tweak that up.

You don't usually have a problem with lead quality. The quality is always clients. It's always funny, like a client that has run Facebook ads in the past and like, we'll have like our lead tracker set up and they'll see the job titles and company names coming in and they're just like, perfect, perfect, perfect. And sometimes we'll get feedback of like, Oh, this title was a little bit off maybe because you said this, so let's go add this exclusion and then we'll go work that back in.

But, well, yeah you know, if your leads that come through on LinkedIn aren't a great fit, then just tweak your targeting a little bit. But you can set the specific job titles in specific industries and company size you want. So lead quality is usually awesome.

What is the minimum audience size for a LinkedIn ad?

Kathleen: Yeah. now one of the things I've always been interested in and I feel like it's changed, what is the minimum audience size that you can target on LinkedIn because there are some crazy opportunities with LinkedIn ads. I love the idea of you're submitting a proposal to do something for a company and how few people can you target in that company with your ad?

Anthony: 300 is the minimum. It Is a little bit bigger of a minimum than Facebook. I want to say Facebook is a hundred for a minimum.

So in two cases is yes, it is hard to be that laser targeted in some cases. It's also a challenge when you want to retarget cause if you are building a lead list, you're gonna have to wait until you have at least 300 leads to go retarget them using the email method.

So maybe a simple alternative that is go connect with those people on LinkedIn and send them a message via your chat.

Anthony's tips for anyone getting started with LinkedIn ads

Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, what tips do you have if somebody is listening and they're thinking they want to get started with LinkedIn ads? Is there anything you wish you knew that would have helped you avoid some mistakes?

Anthony: Hmm. Anything that I wish I knew. So I have a number of tips that I usually talk about, so I'll give some of those.

Well I'd say the biggest thing I wish, like even if I would have told myself this a year ago I probably wouldn't have listened, is don't ask for too much information from your lead in the beginning. You know, you're starting the conversation. They don't have any reason to trust you yet. Keep it as minimal as possible. And that's going to maximize your conversion rate.

You know, I go check out a lot of their ads just because I'm always interested to see, what are they advertising? What are they asking for? What does the lead form look like?

I opened some of these companies' lead forms. I'm just like, you have seven imports.Is anybody submitting this form? Questions and stuff like that. I'm like, I should reach out to you and be like, Hey, I know your cost per lead is terrible. Do you want some help?

That's the biggest thing is these people don't know you. They don't have any reason to trust you yet. Only ask for the information you need, which is usually like email address to send them the guide and then continue the conversation from there.

Various other tips.

I'd say the image thing is a big one. We get a lot of people who wanted to just have a folder of videos and like let's use these. Let's start with images first and then get those converting and then move to video afterwards.

Some other tips are I mentioned the don't auto-bid. Start with max CPC and bid low and then crank it up slowly until you find the sweet spot.

Short and direct copy usually works the best. So now on Facebook, a lot of people write these long copy and a lot of emojis and stuff like that. Short copy tends to do best. Keep it shorter than about 150 characters and won't trigger the "see more" button.

Most people don't click the "see more" button. I'm kind of, I advocate in both cases where you want your CTA, you want it to be standalone above the "see more". If somebody doesn't click the "see more" it should still be just as appealing. But for the people that do click the "see more", here's a tip that clicking the "see more" button does not charge you. So there's no harm in having more copy than the rest of your ad for the people that do click that "see more" button.

So split test both short and long. I do say, I will say we do see shorter, usually performs better. But there is usually no downside to having more copy there.

Kathleen: And then with images, I know Facebook has a limitation of how much copy can you have on your image? Are there any limitations like that in LinkedIn?

Anthony: Nope. Actually we use a lot more copy and images.

Kathleen: Okay. And then the other thing I've heard with Facebook is that you should have a very active page where you're posting often to sort of like warm up your audience, which I think is interesting cause I feel like nobody ever sees any Facebook page posts, but that's a different conversation for another time.

So do you ever, what kind of advice do you give people regarding their LinkedIn company page? Not their ads, but the page itself as far as how that should be used to support a good LinkedIn ad strategy?

Anthony: Yeah, good question. So you want to have the basics covered.

LinkedIn company pages people tend to have more, more connections and more followers on their personal page. So I'd say put most of your focus there, but you know, if you are running a company page, you should have that company page fully filled out. It should look nice and professional and polished and it should have some activity on there.

If you were gonna go hire a social media person to manage your profile, I'd say have them manage your personal profile because you'll have more activity there. Because you have more connections in your personal than typically a company page.

But have all the information filled out, have good imagery there, have all your links filled out.

And then, to bring back the lead magnets again, a lot of times in the headline or in the about section of the body copy, I recommend putting that called to action there. Download our guide. And while that link won't be explicitly clickable, we do see a lot of people will copy and paste it. Make it a simple URL. Mydomain.com/guide and then they'll go there and get it.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: That makes sense. Great.

Well, shifting gears I have two questions. I always ask my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say.

First one is, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing?

Anthony: So the company that has been advertising to me the most is outreach.io. So they're a pretty well known company out there, but they just, they must spend a lot on their ads because every time I log into LinkedIn I see them there and I'm always like, that's a good ad. I like that ad.

So I'd say that they do a very good job. I think I've probably signed up for a few of their lead magnets because I always scope out what other people are doing. Their content's good and their ads are good quality.

And if I was to give people any tip, it's you can go see the ads run by any LinkedIn page out there just like you can on Facebook by going to that company page. On the left hand side, on desktop, there's a little navigation bar on the bottom it says ads and it'll show you those, the ads being run by that company page.

So for whatever your industry is, go scope out what your competitors are doing and maybe similar offerings are new.

Kathleen: That's a great suggestion.

Second question, marketers tend to have a common pain point, which is that so much is changing so quickly. LinkedIn is a great example. I feel like just when you feel like, you know how it works, something big changes and it's, you know, you almost have to start over.

How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated about

Anthony: In the world of digital marketing? For LinkedIn specifically? I'd say I see there's not much content out there about LinkedIn ads. So the surprising thing, like as I've learned this over the years there's so much out there about, about Facebook and Google ads, like the huge communities and stuff like that, of courses, everything. There's not much about LinkedIn ads.

So I've gotten the most by joining a number of different groups and like asking questions to people there and like, and like, just like working one on one with other people who are active advertisers.

Kathleen: Any particular groups that come to mind?

Anthony: LinkedIn Official Advertisers, a group on LinkedIn. That's a group on LinkedIn. Yeah. I have a small one that I started recently. It's called, this is on Facebook, LinkedIn advertising strategies.

Kathleen: And you said that is or is not on Facebook?

Anthony: That is on Facebook. Yeah. Okay. Got it. LinkedIn groups overall are still,

Kathleen: Yeah, they've kind of like died on the vine a little bit.

Anthony: I hope that they put more effort or like, you know, improve them because I think there's a lot of potential. Like we've seen how Facebook has put so much focus on groups and how they've been, like a number of groups that I'm in are super active and super valuable. I hope that it does the same there.

Kathleen: So yeah, I was going to ask you about that. It's funny, I'm glad you brought it up cause it is, it used to be so great and then it just, was it just, Ugh. I mean I don't spend any time in LinkedIn groups these days, but I used to spend a ton.

How to connect with Anthony

Kathleen: So okay, well we're coming to the top of our time. So if somebody is interested in learning more or they want to reach out to you and ask a question, what is the best way for them to connect with you?

Anthony: So the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Anthony Blatner on there. So go look me up. Connect with me and send me a little message in the add now and the add connection requests because we all get tons of them.

You can find me at my email is [email protected] and then our website's modernmedia.io.

If you're looking to learn more about LinkedIn ads or understand strategy, I have tried to put out a lot of content as I've learned over the past few years, knowing that there's not much out there. I've tried to put out more content to share with others. So we have a number of blog posts about funnel strategy, lead generation strategy and then specifically LinkedIn ads, tips and best practices. We got one about lead magnets and then we have one about all the tips around copy and creative. What works the best.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: Awesome. Well, I'll put those links in the show notes so that people can go check that out.

And if you're listening and you have learned something new today, which I certainly have, head to Apple Podcasts and please consider leaving the podcast a five star review. That's how other folks find us.

And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest.

Thank you so much, Anthony. This was great.

Anthony: Thanks for having me.

With COVID-19 upending our work and home lives, how does user experience need to change to reflect the "new normal"?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I dig into this question with guest Bob Berry, a virtual operations and user experience expert who is a principal at AnswerLab and founder of ItsTheUsers.

Bob has helped some of the world's largest companies, including Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and others, to create new, optimal online experiences in the age of Coronavirus and in this interview, he explains why companies must relearn what their customers and prospects ant and expect as their lives are transformed by the pandemic. 

Bob says that to not only survive, but compete and win in the future, businesses need to create optimal online experiences now. Check out the podcast to get his advance on how to go about doing that.

Highlights from my conversation with Bob include:

• The sudden shift to working from home during the Coronavirus has put digital, virtual and online experiences front and center in a way that they have not been before.
• This makes it imperative that companies develop a deep understanding of what their customers' lives look like now in this new normal so that they can craft experiences that match that. 
• Bob believes that virtually everything that happens in business is a set of individual choices or decisions by real people and the sum total of those choices is what drives the global economy. This is why user experience design is so critical.
• Because of changes related to the pandemic, we're going to have to determine, as marketers, whether the assumptions we've made about how people buy are still valid. And if they're not, we're going to have to learn what the new patterns are.
• One area that Bob believes will change is how people think about data and privacy. He predicts we'll have a quicker movement to more stringent privacy rules, prompted in part by the need to do more contact tracing related to Coronavirus.
• Changing user experience require that you look holistically at a business. Bob gave the example of his work with Deluxe Corporation, where he undertook an omnichannel business assessment that looked at the entire lifecycle of a customer's experience with the company. The result of that assessment and the changes the company made drove an additional $3 million to the company's bottom line.
• Bob says the best way to get started is by doing an inventory of every touchpoint that a customer has with your business. From there, you can use that data to develop a new narrative around what the buying journey looks like today.
• Understanding customer buying journeys is not an event, according to Bob, but rather a process that must be undertaken on an ongoing basis.
• One way to accomplish this is through survey tools and diaries that require your customers to document their interactions with your business. Bob has used a tool called dscout to do this in the past.
• For now, the two things that businesses can focus on are how they will stay in touch with and maintain relationships with their customers in the future, and what their products/services need to look like going forward.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the ItsTheUsers website
• Visit the AnswerLab website
• Connect with Bob on LinkedIn
• Follow Bob on Twitter

Listen to the podcast to learn how the keys to business success have shifted, and what companies need to know -- and do -- right now to create user experiences that will position them for success in the future.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Bob Barry who is the founder and principal of it's the users. Welcome to the podcast, Bob.

Bob Berry (Guest): Thanks Kathleen. Glad to be here. Looking forward to this.

Bob and Kathleen recording this episode.

Kathleen: I am really looking forward to this because this is an interesting time and as we're recording this we're I don't even know how many weeks -- seven, eight weeks, what have you -- into pandemic quarantine. I guess it depends on where you live and et cetera, but it feels like forever and the world has undeniably changed quite a bit in that time.

I think many people are just starting to kind of find their footing in what may or may not become the new normal. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and what that means for user experience.

About Bob Berry and ItsTheUsers

Kathleen: But before we do that, could you please tell my audience a little bit about what ItsTheUsers is and your background, and how you came to be doing what you're doing today?

Bob: Certainly. So, my history goes actually back quite a ways.

I originally got my degree in computer science and out of college, I actually worked for Hewlett Packard back in the day when bill and Dave were still alive. It was a very different company back then and I was one of their early eCommerce business managers when the internet and the web came along.

And that's where I first started getting involved in this whole idea of experience and how experiences can really influence what we do in business. Back in those days, we developed some of the early social media, online learning, e-commerce and cloud based services before a lot of those terms even existed.

I actually left HP to get involved in a number of startups during the dot com boom, and started a company that did a lot of training and learning and curriculum for youth.

We actually embedded some pretty interesting experiences for young people to help them get ready for life. We were pretty far into that as we approached the great recession when a lot of the spending was starting to dry up and entrepreneurs like myself were struggling. My wife sat me down. We had five kids, four cats, and a dog at that time. And we were surviving on her teacher, principal income. She worked in public education.

She sat me down and said, Hey, this isn't working. We need to find a way to have my income be more stable and more predictable. So I actually made a big shift at that point, that was around 2007, 2008 and actually became full time involved in user experience and really understanding what impact that has on business, what impact that has on people.

And I've been doing user experience in one form or another since then, both as an independent and working in a corporate environment. Now I'm working for a company called AnswerLab. I do that in addition to ItsTheUsers.com.

AnswerLab is really focused on working with a lot of major companies. We work with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and doing projects for all of those companies right now around user experience and helping them to figure out how to adapt what they're doing and shift their online presence and their digital strategies into this new world we're about to enter.

ItsTheUsers.com is focused on bringing new people into the world of user experience and really understanding how to do that. So it's focused on a lot of people that may not have a tremendous amount of money to spend who can't pay the big ticket research studies that some of those big brands can.

So it's a really interesting mix. I get to work with those big companies, you know, they invent a lot of cool new stuff and I get to work with them and put those out in the public and learn how real people react to things that those companies are inventing.

And then with ItsTheUsers.com I get to work with a lot of small businesses, professionals, entrepreneurs and help introduce them to this whole world as well. And of course now we're entering this whole new phase. Like you say, we've only been a few weeks into this and we're all very interested to see how this is going to unfold and what's going to happen as we try to go back to work as we try to get our businesses restarted.

I think we all have a lot to learn about how this new world is going to function.

Kathleen: Absolutely. Boy, listening to you tell your story, I just have to share that it really hit close to home because when that recession hit in 2008/9, my husband and I owned a digital marketing agency together and we had four kids and two dogs.

I'm listening to you tell the story and we looked at each other and we were like, Oh God, we're in the same company. We're totally in this boat together. It's either gonna sink or it's gonna float. You know, it was, those were some crazy times. I guess for that reason, my heart goes out to people who own businesses right now because I've been through that experience and I just remember so clearly the stress that that put us under at the time.

So that could be a whole other podcast that we talk about, but we won't, it would probably be very stressful.

It could be several podcasts, but you know, focusing on the situation that the world is in right now, it's such a unique situation, but it's also, in some very interesting ways, at least to me, it's presenting us with a unique, once in a lifetime opportunity because it's really speeding up some things that I think were going to happen anyway as far as movements to remote work and the acceleration of companies really doing more business online and all of these things that we were sort of creeping towards over time.

But that process has accelerated dramatically as a result of what's happened, and I know a lot of companies are kind of scrambling to figure out what it means for them. So in terms of user experience, I'm just going to hand it over to you and I would love to hear what you're seeing as far as the changes and what you've seen done well and where companies need to improve.

It's a big topic. So, you know, where do we start with this?

How is COVID-19 changing user experience?

Bob: Yeah, it's a big question and there are a lot of challenges wrapped up in this. I think one of the major effects that's happening right now is because of the need to quarantine, the social distance, all the lockdowns that are happening, you know, not just here in this country, but really all over the world.

It's putting digital, virtual, online in the center of what we're all going to need to adapt to in a much bigger way.

Fortunately, we've been working on this for a long time with the internet and the web and a lot of these virtual tools and platforms have been around long enough that all of us, or most of us, are pretty familiar with them.

But as we drive that massive shift to digital and virtual, if you look at all the industries out there -- look at education, finance, entertainment, sports -- the ways we interact socially, you know? Medicine, commerce...

So many things now are being transformed by this and digital and virtual really becomes the centerpiece of how we're going to have to conduct business and interact with one another.

In the midst of that, there are going to be a lot of new innovations. Things are gonna change. So some of the old ways of doing things are going to go away and there are going to be a lot of new technologies.

We're already seeing some of these now. A lot of new innovations are coming out just dealing with the virus. We're coming out with a lot of new technologies and new ways and of course people, as they're working remotely or as they're living and socializing remotely, we're inventing a lot of new ways to apply this technology.

So to cope with all of that and deal with all of this change, the experience really is the centerpiece of all that.

And so Kathleen, I kind of have this crazy idea that I promote, you know, both in my role with ItsTheUsers.com and then in my research role with AnswerLab, and the premise is that virtually everything that happens in business is a set of individual choices or decisions by real people.

So certainly in inbound marketing, if somebody is going to respond to some content marketing, if they're going to react to a paid ad, if they're going to click on anything online, it's all about individual people making individual choices and decisions. And all of those decisions happen within whatever experience we put out there for them to encounter.

And in fact, the other part of this theory for me is that the sum total of all of those choices is really what drives the global economy. So if that's really true, if experience is that centerpiece, if that's truly what happens, then all of it is being transformed right now.

When I talk about user experience, it's more than just sort of the traditional usability. It's really about understanding people. Who are they? What are their lives like? What are their challenges? What's their personal narrative? So understanding that whole journey that they're on and therefore how do they accomplish what they need to -- that's a key part of the experience as well.

So, those trends that the personal and business people that were going through this massive pivot to digital and all of the new innovations that are going to occur as a result of this, they all intersect in the experience.

So we have to figure out how to invent better and new experiences so people can function, so business can function, so we can continue to run and do what we do. And we're going to have to find new ways of building, deploying and verifying all that, because now we have to do it all remotely.

Kathleen: Yeah, it's so true. It's very interesting as I listen to you talk about it, I thought of a personal thing that happened in the last couple of days that I think for me at least illustrates part of what's changed. Everybody's talking about how the whole world is all of a sudden using Zoom.

I've used them for years. I've worked remotely for a long time and sometimes I feel like I spend more time with Zoom than I do with my husband. So for me, Zoom has always felt very easy to use and very intuitive.

I think it was designed for a person like me who is relatively, you know, technologically fluent, spends a lot of time on their computer, working remotely, et cetera. But in the last two months, the number of users of zoom has mushroomed and it includes a lot of people who are not as technologically fluent, who don't spend as much time on computers.

And for me, the way this has really come to light is, I joke that my unpaid second job is that I'm now a Zoom tutor and I have taught my sister in law, my parents and my mother-in-law all how to use Zoom so that we could do these family calls.

My mother in law in particular just is really reticent about it and you know, she's a little older. It was really interesting because I got her to the point where she could get on and join a call. But the other day she called me and said, I want to be able to start a call. And we went onto that little, the Zoom screen. I'm sure most people are familiar with it by now, where it says like, join, start, schedule, et cetera. And she didn't understand the difference between schedule and start and join.

So I was listening to you talk. It got me thinking that Zoom is a great example, it has this new audience that doesn't just intuitively understand the differences in those meanings and it's almost like they need to change that little screen.

Just say I want to start a meeting, schedule one for later, join someone else's meeting. It needs to be even more explicit now for those people who aren't as much digital natives as maybe it's prior user base wise.

So I just wanted to share that story because it's so fresh in my mind and it's nothing that I ever would have thought of. To me, the interface of zoom just seems so easy and simple. But then when I was walking through it with her, I was able to see it through a different lens.

Bob: Yeah. I have to laugh because I'm sure you've heard the Zoom story yesterday with the Supreme court. So the Supreme court is trying to hear cases and make decisions using Zoom and similar kind of situation, there are probably a lot of them in the same age group as your mom.

Well, apparently somebody used the bathroom and there was the sound of a flushing toilet. That's now referred to as the flush heard round the world. And I haven't heard yet who exactly was.

So here's these most distinguished members of our society and they're struggling with something as simple as remembering to hit mute when they do something personal or they're on zoom.

So that's a really good example.

Another really important dimension of this that I wanted to bring up and kind of get your perspective on as well, because we're so early in this process, speaking of inbound and I've been, you know, been around the internet and the web since the very beginning and I've seen so many changes and one of the major changes that of course has occurred is our access to data.

In such a big way, data drives what so many inbound programs and capabilities do. I think we're in the beginning of a major shift in data. I've also done a lot of research around data privacy and personal data on how individuals deal with this.

As we try to deal with this pandemic, I think one of the things that's coming is we have to increase our ability to test, trace and track who's got the virus, who's had the virus, et cetera.

We're in the middle of this big experiment where big parts of the country are trying to go back to work, but we don't have that capability yet.

Google and Apple have announced that their devices can communicate, and we hear about new apps now being launched that are supposed to provide this capability.

Well, I suspect that people, in order to trust this process of gathering all this data to manage the virus, are going to have to be very confident that that data is protected in a whole different kind of way.

If that happens, does that mean new regulations are going to come into effect, new practices, new principles around how we gather and use data and are those practices and principles now and probably going to be a lot more strict, are they going to apply to the data that we acquire for marketing purposes, for inbound marketing purposes? And so what does that future look like?

And so it's really difficult to predict where that's going to go, but that's something I'm really keeping a close eye on to see what kind of data requirements are going to be needed. What influence is it going to have on all the other data that we have out there right now?

And, you know, then I think it also begs the question of is the data that we have now on our customers that we use so widely in inbound marketing, is that data still valid? Is the world changing enough that we're going to have to relearn some of that because people's buying patterns or their preferences or their economics have changed?

So there's some big issues at work that we're looking at.

Kathleen: Oh, I, I totally agree with you. I think there's absolutely a heightened awareness around data now, especially health data as you pointed out.

Interestingly, I think businesses and marketers in particular are having to rethink the whole notion of personalization and tracking because so much of it was done based on IP addresses, corporate IP addresses, which, with everybody working from home, you lose the ability to track that way.

Not to mention then the whole topic of accessibility. You know, when you have people who are visually or hearing impaired, who might have been able to physically come into a business in the past more easily now really can't. There's always been this requirement that websites be built in a way that's accessible. But so few businesses have really done it.

I just think it's going to happen on so many fronts that we have no idea the tidal wave of change that's going to hit us.

Bob: Yeah, I agree. And I think one of the key aspects of this that we're trying to implement and that's really a lot of what we're trying to stay on the forefront of is to figure out ways to track all of this, to stay in touch with these people, to learn, you know, individuals in businesses.

There are so many ways that individual businesses are trying to adapt. Now businesses are coming up with some very creative ways of reacting to this. And then, you know, how our individual lives are changing and you know, how are we going to keep our fingers on the pulse of everything that's going on.

And there's, again, so many dimensions to this. So from a research standpoint, there's a lot that we need to pay attention to, and a lot of new tools and methods and approaches that we have to put in place in order to continue this relearning process.

And again, it's what kind of new experiences are going to be required to help people that maybe have never used Zoom before that are now going to have to deal with new apps on their phones because they're going to be tracking health data or you know, they're not working in an office anymore.

They're working at home and what does that mean about their whole set of digital experiences that they have to deal with?

So being able to relearn it, retrack it, gather all the data that's required, create all the new experiences -- that's what we're trying to stay in front of and trying to help other companies and individuals figure out how to do that as well.

How are companies changing user experience in response to the Coronavirus?

Kathleen: Well, there's no doubt that the changes, it's not just coming, it's already started. So I'm curious to dive into some specifics.

What are some, some specific things that you have seen or worked with? I know you probably can't talk about specific clients and what you're doing for them, but, in generalized terms, can you share any specific examples of things that have had to change already in order to adjust user experiences to the new environment?

Bob: Yeah, so there's a lot going on out there right now.

So again, being able to understand, first of all, who is your audience and how is that changing? So who are these individuals? What kind of things are they dealing with?

I think it's important to make the distinction between whether you're talking to B2B or B2C, because those are different types of dynamics. There's a lot of business and instructional and operational changes that organizations have to deal with as far as how to go remote.

So in this process of staying in touch with your customers and learning what they're up to, how are you going to manage your workforce? How are you going to manage whoever your teams are as you go through that process?

I think there's also a tendency to want to stay in touch with the larger trends out there. So what's happening, you know, socially and politically, economically? There's money available from the government and how are you going to get access to that and how are your customers and your clients getting access to that and how does that change what you might be doing with them?

An example that I can name, where we actually did a pretty massive business transformation process, maybe it's helpful in this context to give you an example of the kinds of things that we've done that will need to evolve but that are still very sound practices.

So a few years ago I did a study for Deluxe Corporation.This was actually in the midst of the great recession. So they were in the process of doing a pretty major business transformation and their business is very much about financial documents and checks and related types of products.

We did what was called an omni-channel business assessment, and this was something that took place over a couple of years. We looked at a number of different touch points.

The reason it's called Omni channel is because we look at a variety of different ways that they interact with customers. So we looked at email, we looked at web, we looked at their call center, we looked at all of their print programs and we also assessed their direct sales force.

This was a combination of both B2B and B2C. The problem with just looking at any one of those is, any one customer can touch multiple aspects of their business.

Somebody can pick up a catalog and interact with that and then they may find a phone number and then dial the number and talk to somebody in the call center. They may get an email message with that, which then sends them to a website.

So there's all sorts of aspects of inbound marketing involved with this. There's probably a few outbound aspects as well.

And so long story short, over a couple of years, we assessed all of those different touch points and made sure that the overall experience was effective, that people could find their way around that, the pathways from one aspect of it to another were smooth, that the messaging was consistent, and that the people that different aspects of that you could hand a customer off effectively from one, one part to another.

At the end of the day we were able to drive over $3 million of new business to their top line by optimizing all that. And this was in the midst of the great recession when things were financially very challenging.

So that type of approach I think is going to be a really important, that sort of omni-channel, multi touchpoint approach is going to be really useful, really important as we enter this new world. Because in a lot of ways, all of those different touch points are going to be changing and evolving for businesses. And if you don't pay attention to all of them, you won't have the big picture of what's really going on and the different journeys and pathways that customers might be taking in interacting with your business.

How to get started

Kathleen: So where can companies get started? How do they begin? You know, if somebody is listening to this right now and they're thinking, okay, things are going to need to change. We don't maybe know how much permanent change that it's going to be, but obviously things need to change.

How do they begin to wrap their heads around this and, and begin to figure out what's the right approach?

Bob: I think you have to start, I think a lot of cases with where you are.

So what do you know now about who your buyers, your prospects, your customers, your users? You have to start with them. If you haven't already, it's important to begin to develop some sense of their story, their narrative, and again, who they are, what they're challenged with, where do they live and work? Are they still in an office? Are they still in their store? Is that whole work environment now changing? How they make buying decisions -- is that still the same or how is that evolving?

So you have to start by understanding what are those stories, those narratives, those journeys that people are going through. And there's a variety of ways to do that.

There are a lot of a very effective tools out there right now because the demand for doing a lot of this remotely is increasing pretty rapidly as you can imagine. So you know, if you go out there and look, there's a lot of different ways that you can interact with these customers and gather a lot of information and survey them or really understand who they are and what type of interactions that they're dealing with.

So once you have a sense of who they are, those journeys, those personas, those narratives about who they are, then it's a process of understanding. Again, what experiences do you need to put in front of them? Are those web experiences or those phone experiences? Are they mobile? Are they on an app? What are all the ways that you need to interact with them so that they can understand your business and what you offer?

Do an inventory of all of your touch points, and certainly inbound marketing is a key part of that as well, and begin to measure how much business you're getting through those different channels and begin to put in place ways to actually understand and observe how they interact with those experiences.

You're going to want to do this on an ongoing basis. This is a process and not an event. You want to make sure that over time you can start to identify what are some trends that are going on and begin to track those trends.

Again, there are a lot of different ways and approaches to evaluate mobile experiences and a lot of different ways to evaluate in person or desktop or web based experiences.

So there's a lot of different approaches and tools that are available to do that.

Tools for doing audience research

Kathleen: So you mentioned starting by learning more about your audience and your customers. Are there any particular tools that you've worked with that are favorites of yours? I imagine there are some that probably are better for larger companies with bigger budgets and some that are better for smaller guys with smaller budgets.

Any, you know, sort of list of your favorite tools?

Bob: Yeah, so there are various tools out there that can do a variety of what we consider like diaries.

So we actually have tools that allow people to keep track over time of how different apps or devices or interfaces work within their lives.

So, understanding a day in the life or a week in the life of somebody based on having them create a diary of how they interact with your business or your apps or your website gives you a good sense of putting those things into context of who they are and what they're dealing with.

So diary tools are really important.

One that we use is called Dscout and we have some of our own internal tools that we use as well. 

Kathleen: How do you get somebody to follow through on it though? Because obviously you're asking them to spend time for you documenting how they interact with your business or your product. And I know just from experience myself and from working with other marketers that very often even just getting customers to agree to doing a 15 minute phone call or filling out a survey can sometimes be a battle.

How have you found is the best way to get people to comply and follow through on keeping those kinds of records?

Bob: We usually provide some kind of incentive. So in many cases we, they get paid for their time. Some companies, when they do this kind of research, they may provide some kind of in kind reward.

So if it's a restaurant chain that's doing this kind of study, they might offer vouchers for food or something like that. It might include something simple like an Amazon gift card.

And so usually we try and incent people, give them some kind of reward for whatever time they invest. And that can vary based on how much time you want them to participate, and how involved you want them to be. But that seems to be the best way.

Kathleen: Any particular approaches that work well for B2B companies?

Bob: We put quite a bit of effort into locating and recruiting the right people. So a lot of times in the recruiting phase, we have questionnaires that we put together, and we ask people about what they do and you can kind of gauge their level of interest or their level of willingness to participate in something like this.

We have a lot of third party companies that we've worked with that have databases of people and companies that they've worked with. So we also have individuals that might be more inclined to want to be involved, make a contribution there and are willing to follow through on this kind of thing.

How are companies adapting to the new normal?

Kathleen: Got it. So I'm curious if you have any examples of specific changes that you've seen companies need to make as a result of Coronavirus and this new environment that we're living in?

Bob: Yeah, so it varies a lot.

So just in my own neighborhood here, I'm seeing companies become very creative. We have what used to be a cafe down the street. Because people can't go in and congregate there anymore, they've made the shift to providing produce. They obviously had suppliers that they used for doing whatever they were doing to serve their cafe. And so now they've evolved to actually using those food suppliers to providing fresh meat and cheese and produce to people in the neighborhood. And they restrict how many people can be in the store.

So being able to adapt, looking at your available resources, supply chains, customer base, and being able to think of new ways, and doing a lot of this online. So now if you want something, you go online, you can order everything that you need.

And the only time you need to spend physically in the store is just to go in and pick up your bag and leave. So all the ordering and payment and everything happens online.

Another example is a local construction company. I have a videographer partner that I work with and he's doing work with them to take everything that they do and turn it into video. So if you want to do a remodel or if you want to do various types of home improvements, then you can go online and you can look at a lot of examples of things that they do with video.

You can also take your phone and do a video walkthrough of your house and show the areas that you want to have remodeled. And then they will take that and turn it around and they'll provide another video that will describe to the homeowner exactly the steps that they're going to take and where they're going to be in the house or what they're going to do.

And so the amount of time that they have to spend face to face is really minimal. There's so many examples of this, of companies figuring out how to adapt, and how to do things better, how to do things differently.

Kathleen: That's really smart. Having now spent so much time in my house for the last several weeks, I would love to just have them come in and tell me what I should change in my house. Because I have found that being stuck at home through the Coronavirus, you start to see like every little maintenance project that you've ignored for so long becomes that much more in your face and annoying because you're spending so much time with it.

So I imagine they're getting a lot of traction with that offer.

Bob: Yeah, they are. And they'll even give you a video of when the work is actually going to occur. They'll kind of stage it out for you and say, you know, we need to be in your home on these days to do these steps. And obviously all the products and all the materials and colors and all that kind of stuff, they provide all that to make that available as well.

So those are just a couple of examples of figuring out how to adapt and certainly digital and online creating those new kinds of experiences again, are going to be a critical part of how companies can do this.

You know, at AnswerLab, we have offices in New York and San Francisco and in early March, like a lot of companies, we had to turn on a dime and figure out how to be remote.

And so that's another aspect of this too. Depending on what your business is, you're going to have to get creative in building and managing and maintaining a remote workforce.

Now obviously for some companies, this is going to be easy. Other companies, this is going to be a lot more challenging. So it varies a lot in how you might approach this and how you might go about doing that.

If it would be helpful, I can share with you what we went through in this whole process of making our whole operation remote. And it's actually going quite well right now. And fortunately a lot of the companies that we work with have gone remote as well. So we've created a whole virtual culture and whole virtual operation that, right now is, is running quite smoothly.

Kathleen: Oh, that's great. I think there are a lot of companies struggling with that, that weren't used to working remotely before. I've worked in places that have been almost entirely remote and there are definitely playbooks out there for how to do this and how to do it well. You just have to be willing to embrace them. It's things like being on video when you talk to other people and not everybody's ready for that, but, but it can really make a difference.

Bob: Yeah. And we have what I like to say is a MacGyver kind of culture, which is, there's all these technical challenges and everybody's willing to jump in and just figure things out, trying out new tools, trying to figure out new ways of interacting with our clients. How do we share information? How do we conduct research? How do we do a lot of in person workshops and brainstorming sessions and, you know, how do you replicate that kind of team spirit and that kind collaboration interaction when you have to do it all through a computer screen? There are actually a lot of really creative ways to do it.

So figuring it out, just jumping in with both feet, getting everybody involved, creating a culture of making it happen, is really important.

Kathleen: Yeah. I think the same challenge is really facing the events industry. I've been parts of lots of calls with people who've been talking about how they used to hold in person events, conferences, et cetera, and now we're going to try to do them virtually. Let's not just make it into one long webinar. Let's try and capture some of that same feeling you get when you're there in person in a new way online. It's a similar challenge

Bob: Yeah. And that's, that's another example of it. Entirely new excited experiences that we're going to have to figure out. I mean, there's so many large events.

You know, before I got into podcasting, I used to do a lot of teaching and speaking at conferences and, you know, we have to completely rethink that now. And those are a whole new set of experiences that we're all going to have to figure out how to create. How to validate that they work and people are getting what they want out of them? And then we're gonna have to figure out how to participate in them and, and make them successful.

What are some things you can do now to prepare your business for the future?

Kathleen: Yeah. Well if there's a marketer or a business owner listening and they're thinking, okay, I need to focus on this for myself. Do you have like two or three key pieces of advice for them that they should really focus on in the next couple of weeks?

Bob: So are you thinking about the whole process of going remote or the whole process of figuring out what this new digital world is gonna look like?

Kathleen: The latter.

Bob: I think a couple of things that people need to do is they need to figure out what are the ways that they're going to stay in touch with their customers.

Who are your buyers, your purchasers, your prospects? How are you going to develop longterm connections with them as they evolve, as they adapt to what their new world is going to look like?

And then to figure out how to put your business, whatever product or service you're offering, how are you going to evolve that along with them to stay relevant, to make sure that you're still something that they're going to need and be willing to pay for?

Whatever those businesses and those individuals are going through, whatever is changing in their lives, that's going to determine how your business needs to evolve to stay with them.

So number one, you need to figure out how you're going to maintain those connections and do that relearning that's necessary.

And then the second part of it is, what kinds of experiences are going to be required?

And of course a lot of those experiences are going to be virtual, digital, online. Does that mean you're going to need a new kind of app in order to communicate with them? Does that mean you're going to have to now, like with the example of the construction company or you're going to have to start developing new types of media, like video or audio, are you going to have to create new ways of selecting and ordering your products? Does that mean a new eCommerce system?

So figure out who they are, where they're going, what they're up to, what they're experiencing, and then decide how you're going to create the right kind of virtual digital experiences that are going to be relevant and important to them and how you're going to make sure all that plays together.

That's probably the most important thing right now because it's changing rapidly and now's the time to start relearning.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: Good advice. Well, shifting gears, I have two questions I ask all of my guests and I'm curious to know your thoughts on these. The first is, is there a particular company or individual that you think sets the standard for inbound marketing?

Bob: Yeah, I actually, I thought about that quite a while. As I mentioned, we work with a lot of the big brands, you know, Facebook and Amazon and Google and FedEx and they have obviously some great examples there.

But another company that I worked with for a long time is actually a fairly small operation. They're based here in Colorado, and the leader is called Jeff Walker and he's in charge of something called Product Launch Formula and years ago, he developed an inbound system that allows you to go out and find a target audience and interact with them and provide them a lot of valuable content and draw them into your product or service through really effective content marketing. He does a lot of books and courses and affiliate programs and video and email and stuff like that.

He does a lot of the things that work well.

I think the number one thing that stands out for me though is so many organizations and companies that I see online are using his system, which to me is the greatest testimony.

So you can tell your story through PR or marketing programs, but nothing speaks like success and the number of organizations and people and platforms out there that have adopted his model. I think if you look at a lot of the inbound programs now, they actually use a lot of the principles that he developed probably decades ago. So he's one that I pointed to it because he's had such, such a big influence on the whole digital and virtual marketing world.

Kathleen: That's a great example. I'll definitely have to check that one out.

Second question, marketers always talk about how difficult it is to stay abreast of the rapidly changing digital landscape. I think the conversation we just had is a perfect example of that. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?

Bob: Well, podcasts is certainly a big one. I listened to a lot of them. I listen to them pretty constantly. I do a lot of reading. LinkedIn is a big source for me as well. I do a lot in networking, so I learn from people and I get a lot of great information off of LinkedIn just from what's posted there in the form of learning and articles and also, another way is just really through my colleagues.

I work with a lot of very talented people and they're constantly presenting new challenges and new technical things to solve. And so that, to me, is probably one of the best ways I learn is just sort of on the ground, you know, with my fingers in it and trying to figure out how to make it all work.

That's probably a big one for me.

Kathleen: Any particular podcasts that you really love?

Bob: So I actually listen to a lot of historical podcasts.

I'm also a big fan of Sam Harris.

Right now I've been listening to a lot of podcasts on LinkedIn about LinkedIn to figure out how to do better as we now have to do a lot more things virtually. And we don't have to do as much face to face and really trying to get geared up for LinkedIn.

I actually listened to a very interesting historical podcast yesterday about pandemics and putting all of this into context. It was very interesting to kind of see the big picture over history. Probably one of the big takeaways there is that there are a lot of people who hope we can get back to normal and I think they're thinking of the old normal, but we have to let go of the old normal because it's gone. We're looking at a new one and we have to figure out what that means.

Kathleen: Yeah. It's amazing how quickly things can change, isn't it?

How to connect with Bob

Kathleen: Well this has been so fascinating and I think you're doing really interesting work with a lot of really interesting companies.

If somebody is listening to this and they want to connect with you online or learn more, ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that?

Bob: Certainly LinkedIn. So look up Bob Barry. That's B E R R Y on LinkedIn. And again, I'm associated with AnswerLab and with ItsTheUsers also.

You can go to my homepage at inbound.itstheusers.com.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: Awesome. All right. I'll put that link in the show notes.

If you're listening and you liked what you heard today or you learn something new, I would really appreciate it if you would go to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by new listeners.

And if you know someone who's doing great inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommwork, because I would love to make them my next guest.

Thank you so much for joining me this week, Bob.

Bob: Kathleen, thank you very much. Good luck, so they say.

 

What's the best way to develop a content strategy that reflects the reality of today's buyer journey?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Ashley Faus, who is the Content Strategy Lead for Software Teams at Atlassian, shares why she thinks a playground provides a better analogy than a funnel for marketers looking to develop their content strategy, and how to use the concept of a content playground to provide your customers and prospects with a better buying experience.

Highlights from my conversation with Ashley include:

• Many marketers use the concepts of the linear funnel and the looping decision journey to develop their content strategies, but Ashley says that those don't reflect the reality of how people buy.
• Much like in a playground, where there isn't a singular goal (get to the top of the jungle gym!), your prospects aren't always ready to buy and may have other interests. For this reason, a playground offers a better analogy.
• Rather than forcing prospects to follow a specific journey that we as marketers have determined is ideal, Ashley recommends focusing on creating strong content depth that allows your prospects to follow their own journey, wherever it takes them.
• For smaller teams that are just getting started, Ashley recommends identifying your "hedgehog principle" - that one thing you do better than everyone else - and creating a very in-depth piece of content on that.
• Then, you can use that content to repurpose into a variety of assets that can be used on social media, for your trade shows, in the sales process, etc.
• The key is to find a topic that is substantive enough to support the development of this amount of content. 
• In terms of how this content gets presented on your website, Ashley recommends ungating it, and then being very explicit with your CTAs so that your website visitors know exactly what they will get if they click a button. 
• She also suggests adding a related content module on your site to encourage visitors to browse through your content.
• The best way to begin measuring the impact of your strategy is to use simple tools like Google Analytics in combination with UTMs. As you grow, you can use more sophisticated marketing automation software like HubSpot or Marketo.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Atlassian website
• Connect with Ashley on LinkedIn
• Follow Ashley on Twitter
• Check out Atlassian's Team Playbook and Agile Microsite

Listen to the podcast to learn why envisioning your buyer's journey -- and their interactions with your content -- as a playground is a more effective way to approach the development of a content strategy.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Ashley FOSS, who is the content strategy lead for software teams at Atlassian. Welcome Ashley.

Ashley Faus (Guest): Nice to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to have you here.

Ashley and Kathleen recording this episode.

Kathleen: And, and for those who are listening, you can't see it. But Ashley has an awesome virtual Zoom background of the golden gate bridge.

That's one of my favorite things about the pandemic is that it is revealing people's personalities through the Zoom backgrounds that they choose. 

Ashley: It's been interesting. I actually think didn't have the latest version of Zoom. I got scared that if I upgraded and something went wrong, I wouldn't have access to it. So for a long time I was the lame person that didn't have a background and it was just my kitchen the whole time. So yes, I finally upgraded.

Tell any of the listeners that are hesitant, you can upgrade. And it's not going to ruin your computer. And you, too, can have a nice virtual backgrounds.

Kathleen: Oh yeah. For our all hands meetings at my office. We've been having so much fun with just seeing the backgrounds that people come to these meetings with. It's, it's awesome. It reveals so much about their personalities.

About Ashley and Atlassian

Kathleen: But so we have so much to talk about. And the first thing I want to talk about is really have you explain to my listeners what Atlassian is, and then also your background and what led you to your current role as Content Strategy Lead.

Ashley: Sure. So Atlassian is a collaboration software maker.

A lot of people are very familiar with JIRA, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket, Status Page. We have a number of different products that people use all the time. JIRA especially is a staple for software teams.

So I actually started at Atlassian two and a half years ago and I moved among a couple of different teams.

My background is primarily marketing, but I actually started on the corporate communications team, moved over to editorial, doing a mix of content strategy, social media, thought leadership for the corporate side, and then just recently made the move over onto software teams.

One thing that's kind of interesting and great is having that diverse background has given me that ability to move across different areas and go where my skills can be most useful.

So I'm excited to dive in. I'm fairly new to the role, so it's been an interesting transition to try to onboard from home and then also start to get up to speed both from a content standpoint and a strategy standpoint, and then also from a tactical standpoint of where are all the different boards, where's the JIRA tickets? Like what's the process, what are the meetings?

So, um, it's been fun. It's been fun.

Kathleen: I will definitely say as far as Atlassian is concerned, I've been a user of so many of the company's products. I've used Confluence and JIRA. I'm currently using Trello. I know our dev team uses a number of products as well. It's a great company and a great suite of products, especially for anybody who's practicing agile, which I have done a few times. And so that was another reason I was excited to talk to you.

But one of the things I think is really interesting is, you know, you mentioned you're relatively new in the role and we were just talking before we came on and you were explaining how your fiscal year, it's going to change over pretty soon. And so not only are you relatively new in the role, but you're being thrust into the situation of having to plan and strategize for a whole new year in the middle of the pandemic, no less all of these things happening at once.

Your current focus is on content and I was really fascinated by how you think about content and content strategy planning and this concept of the content playground. So could you talk a little bit about that and what do you mean when you say a content playground? 

What is a content playground?

Ashley: I started thinking about it because I needed a new metaphor. Everybody that I talked to was talking about primarily the linear funnel. And you know, you've got your three phases with your editorial calendar and you say, "I need three content, three pieces of content per phase. I'm going to do one per month. Cool. Now I have nine months of content strategy, if my math works out".

Most of your listeners are probably sitting there going, "That's not how you do content strategy. You can't just say one piece of content per phase and then call it".

Kathleen: Wouldn't it be nice if you could though? 

Ashley: You bought a calendar, write three articles and you're done.

Then, you know, I know a lot of people have moved on to the looping decision journey where you basically add a fourth phase in there. And you're kind of almost recycling these people, but now there's a cross sell or upsell, but somehow you're dumping them back into that awareness phase from the linear funnel.

If you look at the Google results for both the linear funnel and the looping decision funnel, it's kind of terrifying. It's very confusing. It basically just shows that we all agree that humans don't work this way. Nobody just goes politely down our little funnel.

The 10-3-1 conversion was kind of the standard for a long time. You get 10 people in awareness. A certain amount of drops. So you get three into consideration to be able to get one to that kind of purchase decision.

I was really wrestling with this because I was like, how do you create content in a way that allows people to do what they actually do, which is enter and exit and go sideways and all of that?

So I had originally come up with this idea of a jungle gym. But there's two problems with that -- mainly that there's only one objective. It's either to get to the top or, if you're my three year old nephew, it's to go across without touching the lava below that.

It's still me as a marketer forcing you into what I want you to do and it's taking all these touch points and saying, what's the fewest number of touch points that I can use to get you to a purchase?

And yes, ultimately we need to sell products. Ultimately we have to make money as businesses, but it feels bad to everybody to just constantly be like, are you just trying to sell me something? Like what's the catch? I don't really trust you because I know you're trying to sell me.

So if you look at an actual playground though, what's the point of the playground?

Is the person who's sitting on the bench just enjoying the sunshine? Are they enjoying the playground the wrong way? No, actually perfectly acceptable. Sit on the bench.

Again, you know, thinking about what the right way is to play on the playground for the adults and the playground designers, going down the slide is the right way. Three year old nephew, every time wants to go up the slide.

If you translate that to content strategy, I recently had an example of this where in the traditional funnel, pricing is considered a very bottom of funnel action. If I'm asking you about price, man, I'm ready to buy.

Well, in my case, I needed to go ask for budget before I could even do the RFP and I had no idea what that budget should be for. It was going to be a SaaS product. So understanding, you know, the subscription, SLA, the licensing tiers, all of that.

And so I started reaching out to some vendors in the space asking them for just ballpark pricing so I could go get budget. And so many of them were like, well, allow me to send you a white paper about why this matters a lot and you know, Oh, you need to do a demo. And I'm like, Nope, I don't want to waste my time going through your traditional funnel when I don't even know if I have a budget yet.

Kathleen: I have to just interject there and say amen because this has been a frustration of mine for so long. I had this recently with a marketing software product. It was exactly what you're talking about.

It was last November and I was working on my budget and I knew that I was not going to purchase this product until halfway through 2020. And that was even before all this craziness with the pandemic hit. But I needed a placeholder number for it in my budget. So there's no chance I was going to engage in, like multi meetings and demos and hours long calls with people to pitch me what I know I'm not ready to buy yet.

I just needed a price.

There's nothing more frustrating than companies that make it that hard and it wasn't a one time thing. I just found myself doing this yesterday. Somebody started talking about email signature software and they mentioned the name of a new company, and I literally Googled the company name and pricing because I was like, I don't even want to waste my time looking at everything else and getting excited about it if I can't afford it.

Ashley: Yeah, well, and it's interesting too because once I got the budget approved, I was already completely sold that this problem needed to be solved. I just needed to get management on board that yes, we are committed to solving this problem.

So then I actually got into the sales process and you know, I started kind of at the top of that and I just said, look, I'm bought in, draw me all the way down to the bottom of the funnel and I want you to just pitch me.

Kathleen: Yeah. 

Ashley: It blew the sales people's minds. And they're like, well, let me just go through the deck. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know how many slides you have, but I'm telling you I'm bought in, I agree with you. This has impact. It solves a problem that I have. I have money, here's what my budget is. I'm BANT qualified. I need you to drop me all the way in and I need you to sell me.

A majority of them just froze because they didn't know how to go through there. They only know how to do this step by step. And that's where I think the content playground comes in. Obviously there's a sales component to this too. When you do get people who just want to jump right in, I wouldn't send them to play on the swings.

That's what we're doing right now. We're spending all our time on the swings.

Let's just do it. Quit trying to force them to go down the slide.

It's so funny because people have this idea that there's a specific way that you're supposed to build the relationship and you're supposed to, you know, okay, let's get you through the marketing funnel and get you through MQL and then SQL and then a sale.

And it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you meet somebody and they come at you and they're like, no, I'm literally ready to sign on the dotted line, whether it's you or one of your competitors. So why should it be you?

Kathleen: Yeah. And not only is that an issue, but it's like I'm going to sign and it's going to be fast. So if you can't meet my fast timeline, just get out of my way.

Exactly. That's so interesting. I love that concept.

How to use the concept of a content playground to develop your content strategy

Kathleen: So give me an example of, conceptually, how does that play out in terms of developing and executing your strategy?

Ashley: I've done this at a number of different companies and then we also, you know, do this similar type of thing, whether you see whether you recognize it and call it a content playground or not. When you start to recognize companies that do it because you go through and there's a nice experience to say, Oh, I've kind of landed in this problem space or solution space and now I have the ability to go explore.

So we've done that quite a bit in it last year and moving into this content strategy role on software teams, I'm getting exposed to some great ways that they've done it.

So for example, we have this agile microsite and then we paired that last year with this agile coach series. This is all work that has been done that I'm excited to come in and kind of optimize and see how can we replicate this across other content types.

And it basically says, you know, yes, JIRA helps you run in an agile way, but if you don't have the right practices set up and you don't have that mindset in those processes, a tool is not the thing that's going to fix it for you.

And so sure we can sell you JIRA, but if we don't show you the right way to set up the workflows, if we don't help you have acceptable standups, if we don't help you improve your retros, having these things on a board is not going to solve, you know, your agility problems.

And so putting that together, if you look at it from a content depth standpoint, instead of organizing around specific phases of the funnel, organizing it around content depth.

So from a conceptual standpoint, what the heck is agile? Why does it matter? What kinds of success, you know, have people seen with it, what are the problems from a strategy standpoint, what are the practices and rituals?

So that's where you get into some of the standups. That's where you get into some of the retros. And then from a tactic standpoint, how do you actually do those things?

And so we have a number of things from the agile coach series, from the agile microsite and also our team playbook, which talks about things like my user manual. So how do you work together as a team? Um, putting together project coasters for kickoffs. And then yes, there's some product demos in there. There's some guides in there, there's some tutorials, there's here workflows that you can set up to do that in JIRA or to do that in Trello.

But it's really that full content experienced to say, I just need help figuring out how to run my standups or my retros. And then, cool that I can do that in JIRA as well.

So I previously worked at Duarte, if you're familiar with Nancy Duarte's work. Um, she wrote Resonate, which was, you know, a big game changer for a lot of people. They do workshops, they do presentation design for tons of big names and Fortune 500 companies.

So we did this in a number of ways. When we launched her slide decks book for example, we put that as a free, ungated version on SlideShare.

And then we linked over to this kind of more traditional inbound strategy page where you've got a landing page with a form, you give away a free piece of content, show good faith that this is good quality, and then you've got a form fill out to download some templates that people could use that would then drop people into a drip campaign where we would showcase more templates, we would showcase some use cases that we had built and give them more content to ultimately lead them to say, "Hey, if you want to buy a workshop to learn how to do this at a pro level, here's how you can do that."

Getting started with your content playground

Kathleen: So if I love the whole concept here, and I love the notion of content depth because I do think that there are so many marketers that almost try to cover too much and they skim the surface on everything and it doesn't work.

I think the thing that could be challenging about this is hearing that, like, where do you start and how do you, how do you get there? Because you can't snap your fingers and have a lot of depth in all these topics right away. And also, how do you know what those top level topics are? If you were teaching this to somebody, how would you walk them through that?

Ashley: So there's a couple of ways that, uh, we've been able to do it at Atlassian. Obviously we're fortunate we have a large team and a ton of experts that have complimentary skills.

So for example, we have done a ton of keyword research to understand both search intent and the specific wording of that.

From a market standpoint, agile came in and changed the game, and it turns out that JIRA was actually a really good fit to run agile.

So we already kind of were keeping a pulse on the market and we started to see that agile is becoming this very mainstream thing, that our tool and our technology is really useful in helping people run. So let's focus on agile.

Okay, where do we focus? And that's where things like SEO and keyword research, that's where focus groups, that's where digging through the feedback that your customers are giving you and asking like, what are the top questions in terms of workflows? How do those map to things like running scrum teams or running Kanban boards? How does that now map to workflows and guides and onboarding tutorials that we would share with somebody who starts with your product or working with Trello products, for example?

So I would say I'm doing a listening exercise and there's a number of tools. You could do it on social media as well, particularly for software devs, which is one of our core audiences. They hang out on Hacker News, they hang out on Reddit.

And so go look there. That's, that's another core tenant I think as marketers is loving the whole human and not just who are you as a buyer? I only care about you as a buyer or user.

How do I get you to engage in the product every day or buy more of the service? Okay, these people have lives. And so if you can figure out what do they love, what are they passionate about outside of the one thing you're trying to sell them, that also gives you an entire new space to explore for thinking about what topics could you engage in.

And so, when you think about engineers, efficiency, optimization, clean and concise process is something that's very important to them. Well what are some of the frameworks or what are some of the topics that deal with optimization that could potentially lead you to lead you to something like Six Sigma or manufacturing for example, right?

There's a lot of ways that you could think about it if you just know what do engineers generally like? And it's like, they really like efficiency. They like optimization, they like tight, elegant solutions and just jump off from there to see, okay, what are the specific topic areas that would coincide with your product offering? And with the things that they generally care about, what does that mean?

Kathleen: And if you don't have an enormous team and you want to take this approach, how do you do it? Because I imagine you'd have a choice of like, okay, I've identified 10 areas that I want to go deep on, you know, and I could either take area number one and fully play it out and develop all the content. Or I could do one article for each of the 10 areas and then go back and do the second article. Like how would you tackle it?

Ashley: Yeah. So one of the things that Nancy Duarte actually talks about a ton, from Jim Collins book Good to Great is this concept of the hedgehog principle. And that's if you can do one thing and be the best at it, just do that one thing.

So instead of trying to spread yourself too thin across all of those 10 topics, I would be ruthless initially in what is the thing that we actually have the ability to talk about without having to spend a ton of time and energy going and finding that expertise? What's the thing that leads most to the product market fit, or the service market fit, whichever of those that you're selling? And then what's the thing that has depth?

This is something that I see a lot, is people start throwing topics on the board and you're like, okay, but how many words can you actually say about that thing?

And for the most part, people were like, "Whoa". And it's like you can't even say one sentence about it. How are you going to write a full article? And then that also gets into, it's not just one article, it's okay, how do we also turn that into a video? How do we turn that into an infographic? How do we turn that into a social media post? Because this thing has to live for a lot of time.

Nobody has time to keep creating net new content all the time. And so if this piece can't be repurposed or broken apart, it probably doesn't have enough depth to chase.

So I would say if you're very first, starting from scratch, to limit it to probably two, maybe three topics that are related to each other and that you know, have depth.

And I would say especially if you're dealing with a small team, like you're at a start up and the founder is kind of the only person who could talk about this, I'm definitely limiting that to two topics that you know you have in house expertise and then doing a good job to capture that from a conceptual, strategic and tactical standpoint the first time.

And then go with the repurposing strategy.

So instead of saying, "Oh my gosh, we have to cover it, a thousand words or a 20 minute video every single time", think about it as, no, nobody wants to read that, nobody's going to scroll through all of that. So let them pick their journey of how deep they want to go.

Repurposing your content

Kathleen: So can you dig in a little bit more to that repurposing topic because I was interested to hear you discuss all the different ways that the content can manifest, because I think a lot of people might hear this and think it's a bunch of blogs, but it's, it's really not.

Ashley: One of my favorite campaigns that was super successful, there was a startup that I worked at that got acquired by Oracle called Palerra. Palerra was a cloud access security broker, which, you know, doesn't matter as much to the majority of the audience if they're not in tech, but, basically they're kind of a complimentary security product to a lot of cloud offerings.

We were primarily an enterprise solution. Technology is a really heavy topic. And so what we did, when I came in, there was this raw word doc of just random customer interviews, and problems that they had faced. And so for example, we all know on a personal level we should update our passwords regularly. A lot of companies have that installed where it's like 72 days time to change your password.

So at an enterprise security level, there's a similar concept for your keys to your different cloud services. And so we had a scenario where there was a customer that hadn't rotated their keys in like two years. It blew our minds. So our product actually found that.

So we actually were talking about cautionary tales and focusing specifically on AWS because that cloud offering is quite ubiquitous among our customers and these are a lot of common pitfalls that our products can help solve.

So we called it a cautionary tale. We turned it into an ebook first that then became the basis for our booth graphics at AWS Reinvent. And then we had a booth giveaway. We put an Amazon Tap in a clear box and then we had a bowl of keys sitting next to it and they looked identical. And so you drew a key and if it unlocked the box, you won the Tap.

And so that was able to lead us into, "Have you rotated your keys? How are you doing password management?" But not just those basic tactical issues, but also like how do you know there's even a working key in the bowl? How do you know that Kathleen is supposed to have the key and not Ashley? What happens to the keys after the show? So let's say Kathleen and Ashley both leave and the bowls just sitting there. Now what happens to the keys? Right?

And our product can help with that. And from a security standpoint, those are a lot of blind spots that at the time people were missing.

And then the nice thing about that being at a security conference, people were very skeptical that there were any working keys in the bowl. Right? There's no keys. Yeah. So every time someone won, we took a picture and then we put it on the company Twitter feed.

And then if they had a Twitter handle, we tagged them and ask them to retweet.

And so there were people, and I mean we had people, well, again, they're very methodical about this. They're like, okay, it looks like roughly once an hour people are winning. So the last time somebody won, they just won. Okay, well I'm going to come back and try again later.

Kathleen: Like people play slots. 

Ashley: Yeah. It's like slots. But that was a great way. And then we were also able to share that ebook on Twitter as well to say, "Hey, if you're curious why we're taking pictures of the food, you can read this ebook." And then we were able to send that as well with some deeper case studies to anybody that we had scanned at the booth.

So it was a really nice integrated online, offline and social media experience.

That's another one of my pet peeves is people who are just like, come to booth 123. I'm not at the conference so you're just going to spam me for three days.

So making sure that you have content that tells a story to your social media audience, whether they're attending the conference or not.

Kathleen: That's great. That's a really good point about the shows too. Because yeah, you do so much marketing. And if somebody is not going, it's just annoying.

How to share your content on your website

Kathleen: So if you've created all this content, what does that look like on the website from an experience standpoint? Are there content hubs? Is it a resource center? How do you organize this all for presentation to your audience?

Ashley: I think it really depends on the audience. I think HubSpot, obviously from the hub and spoke model that they've done, is amazing so that you can kind of see, you can dive in deep per topic, you could dive in deep from an integrative marketing standpoint, you can dive in deep from a tech stack standpoint and obviously they have solutions for that.

So the way that they've organized it is actually really great because it allows people to kind of slice and dice how they want.

One of the things that we've done that I think is really great and it lasts and is, for example, on the work-life blog, which is like a corporate level, so deals with things like teamwork, practices, leadership, et cetera. We've got a related articles function. And so when you get to the bottom of the article, yes, there's a CTA.

If you want to sign up for the newsletter, you want to um, go talk in the community. Or in some cases where we're doing product focused content, it's go to the product tour or something like that.

But then at the bottom there's related content. And so we have a mix of collections, a mix of tags, and then those get fed into the related content. And so there's always a next step for people to take.

I think that's the biggest thing, whether you organize it as a hub, whether you organize it as a resource center that's done by topic filtering or content tagging, that ability for somebody to always take the next step and to, to only force that next step to be a buying action if they're in a head space for buying action.

So if you're on a product tour, the request a demo or the sign up for free, or the do an evaluation for seven days or 30 days, whatever it is, that makes perfect sense.

But if you've just read an article about productivity, it's a really hard landing to talk about five tips to manage your time and then all of a sudden be dropped into, you know, by the way, you need to buy Trello. It's like, why would I do that?

So making sure that there's always a next logical action that either takes them deeper toward a purchase or deeper tool, words and practices that will help them or allow them to say, I don't know how I landed here. How do I get back to the first thing that I clicked so that I can get back on the path where I think I should be?

Kathleen: Yeah. How do you execute that? Because you just gave the example of somebody who's just poking around and then they're all of a sudden getting pushed to buy. You know, being that it's a playground and people can go in any number of directions, how do you craft those next steps so that they make sense?

Ashley: I think the biggest thing is, there's obviously an ideal customer journey and that does include some post-sale engagement.

That could be things like documentation. It could be a support community. But really, I mean even from like, um, practically accessibility, labeling your buttons with what it is you're doing. Are you downloading this? Are you reading this? Are you clicking to do an evaluation? Are you starting a trial for free? What is that? And then that way people are very clear whenever they get down there, they know what they're clicking on.

I know I've had this experience a few times where it's like, see more. And I'm like, yes, I wish to do that. And it automatically takes me into this form where it's like put in a credit card. And I'm like, you didn't tell me that's what I was doing. That's not, I didn't agree to that.

So having really clear navs and in the resource center, not having buy CTAs all over the resources.

For example, Intercom does a great job with this. They're a messaging, communication growth platform. You can go over to their journal section or their resource center and it's all thought leadership. It's all very high level and they state at the top, "This is free content. It's educational, no sales."

And so, you know, when you're that part of the website, you're not going to get sold to and there's a nice handy button at the top. It's like go back to home. And that's where, you know, you could either be directed down an education path or sales path and you can kind of choose.

So I think just being really explicit. We're past the point of I'm going to trick you into sales.

It might've been on LinkedIn. I saw a discussion that maybe you and somebody else were having about, "Oh, I got a thousand leads from this form. And the question is, are they qualified?"

Jay Acunzo actually has a whole rant about this. Stop gating your best content and then pretending whoever fills out that form is a lead sales lead. That's not what they agreed to.

And so don't try and trick your audience. If they want to buy, they'll let you know. If they want to be educated and they want to form a relationship with you, they'll do that.

And so giving them a clear path to let them either do sales or build a relationship makes them feel empowered. It gives everybody good feelings and it doesn't clutter up your sales process with people that are junk, that are not qualified or that are not actually interested in buying.

Kathleen: So true. I find it's counterintuitive because, I started a few years ago ungating as much content as I possibly could and just putting it on the page and then adding like a little field just for email saying, "Want to get the PDF? Put your email in." And that was it. 

What was fascinating to me is that not only did conversion rates not go down, in many cases, they went up. It's really psychology if you think about it. There's so much crappy gated content out there and the problem with gating it, first of all, is people are very jaded and a lot of them will think, I'm not giving up my email only to find out that this is junk. And so then they don't convert at all.

Whereas, if you give the content away and then give them the option of downloading, you're basically allowing them to try before they buy. You're proving that what you're giving them is really good and if they do think it's really good, they are going to convert because they're like, "Well, it's no skin off my back. This is great content. I don't mind giving up my email address for it."

And so the people that wind up converting on the ungated content are more qualified because they've self qualified.

The other thing I've found, it goes back to your thing about being explicit, is especially when you don't have things gated, like on the page before or in the marketing you're doing for it, just coming right out and saying, "No need to fill out a form to get it."

Ashley: Yeah.

Kathleen: You don't have to give us your email address. People are so naturally almost defensive or they're like, Oh, Nope, Nope, Nope. They're going to ask for something. And if you can just come out and say, I'm not going to ask you for anything, that goes a long way.

Ashley: Well, and I think what's interesting in this, in this thought about building relationships and giving that content away, a great example, there's a company that I worked with, they were an agency for us.

We were a startup. We were using, you know, a lot of agencies and freelancers and they host these dinners and it's basically, you know, just get five, six, seven people together, have dinner, nerd out about marketing topics.

And yes, we all know full well some of us are current customers of this company. Some people are prospects of the company. But I don't have budget or need to work with them anymore. But every single time I meet somebody that says that they have the need that this company services, I refer them and I refer probably three or four clients to them.

I would continue to do that and we have a great relationship. They still invite me to the dinners. I sent one of my colleagues to a dinner to basically make a connection to say this might be relevant for you to meet some people that we might want to put spokespeople on panels with in the future.

And so that willingness to connect with each other.

I'm loyal to that company even though I have no budget and no need to buy from them right now. But I'm referring, I'm still giving them revenue because again, it's, it's fine for, for me, when I meet somebody at a conference and they're like, how would you do this? I'm like, actually this is a great company. Would you like an intro?

And so a buying action may not necessarily be the person who downloaded the content buys. It may be, I mean, again, I talk about Intercom.

I love the content that IDEO puts out.

Again, I have no need to buy their services at this point, but I tell everybody, go look at HubSpot's content or go look at Intercom's content.

And so there's no way for them to measure that. I'm just another random name on their list that hasn't converted, but I'm a brand champion for them and they don't even know it, you know?

Measuring the ROI of your content playground

Kathleen: That's awesome.

So speaking of measuring, you get this all set up. You deploy it. How do you track and measure whether it's working, how it's working, et cetera?

Ashley: So I've done this in a number of different ways depending on the company and the strategy and the bandwidth and all of that kind of stuff.

If you're just starting out in your tiny little team, and you don't have the ability to do, you know, Tableau or Databricks or kind of all of these fancy data pipelines, at minimum just start out with your Google tracking.

Google has free stuff that you can put on. Use your UTM codes to understand if these things are getting tracked from a social media standpoint, what's the referrals, if you are using any pages with forms from any of the marketing automation providers.

Again, I'm pretty partial to HubSpot just because I think they do amazing content. The platform is great.

We've used Marketo in the past, and other companies.

So any of those are great to really understand what are the trends.

I think that's the biggest thing. Making sure that you're looking at a correct trend level.

I've worked a lot on the social media side and people get freaked out per post. "Oh my gosh, we did 10 posts last week and this one did, you know, half a percent better than this one." And it's like, let's zoom out and look monthly. How are things trending? Let's do some testing to see if we post more. Does our engagement rate go down if we, um, the other big thing is optimizing the CTA is for what you want to happen.

So it's going to be really impossible for you to get somebody to like, comment, retweet, follow, and click through all in the same posts.

Like there's not enough words for that post. And so making sure that each CTA belongs where it should be.

So if you're asking for a poll on Twitter or Facebook, that's the goal. Responses in feed is the goal versus explicitly asking someone to click through. Make that explicit and you need to make sure that you're putting in some sort of hook or benefit.

I see this a lot with people who are just starting in social media, for example, that they just give the title of the article or they just say, read these five tips. Well, what are they?

On the opposite extreme, they give it away and they say, here's the five tips. And then they laid them out. And I'm like, well, now why do I need to read the article? You already gave me the tips.

Give me the first tip that you think is the most interesting and then say, click through to read the next four tips.

Kathleen: Right?

Ashley: So, from a measurement standpoint, being very clear on a per post basis about what your goals are, if you're looking at click through rate or engagement rates and what type of engagement.

So that's kind of more from a social media standpoint. If you're doing YouTube, if the answer is subscribe to the channel, if the answer is watch the next video, if the answer is go visit the page, those are very different actions. And so making sure you're optimizing those.

And then obviously looking at things like organic traffic is always great. Looking at whether you have emails or product tours.

From an email standpoint, looking at the open rates and the click to open ratio. So a lot of people look at the CTR, but that's a little bit out of whack. If there's a thousand people that opened it, but you sent it to 5,000, it's not very fair to say what's the CTR on the 5,000? Use it on the thousand.

In some cases we've gotten really granular to look at which pieces of content get the most clicks. And so that helps us to understand, it's great that you want to put 10 pieces of content in the newsletter, but if only the first five ever get clicked, you need to find something else to do because you're not amplifying those things.

Kathleen: How do you get people down further?

Ashley: Yeah, exactly.

What kinds of results can you expect?

Kathleen: So any examples of like, what kinds of results does taking this approach yield in terms of pipeline or engagement or revenue or any of the above?

Ashley: Yeah. From a scale standpoint, it depends. It's not very fair to say like, Oh, you'll get a thousand leads.

It's like, okay, well if your revenue goal is 10,000, that's a struggle. Or if you're a billion dollar company, a thousand leads doesn't do you any good, right?

So, we've done content pairing for example, where we've done a mix of gated content and ungated content. When we did that at Duarte, the ungated piece has over 300,000 views. Now it's been up for a couple of years, but it's got over 300,000 views.

We were getting roughly 10 to 15% download rates of people going and getting that content.

And so that's something where you're still getting the benefit of the people looking at it for free and ungated, but then you're starting to see higher engagement, you know, 10, 15% on that.

Whenever I've done newsletter sends that have been more thought leadership focused with very light touch sales, we've been able to see 20, 30% open rates, 15 to 25% CTOR rates. Again, because we're serving that content that they've requested, not trying to shoehorn in sales.

Whenever we've done sales, as a piece of content, like, "Hey, get a trial" or "Use this code" or "Refer" or "Here's an eCourse and then we'll give you one module for free because you've signed up for this newsletter" or something like that, those do have a much higher conversion rate for whatever the next buying action is.

Again, it depends on the scale. So like the Palerra one at the time, you know, that ebook and we were a tiny little company.

I mean we only had, I think when we got acquired, we had maybe 60 employees total. So very small company, 10 by 20 booth at AWS Reinvent, which is a massive conference. And we got, you know, almost 2000 views on that small ungated ebook. And then we got substantially higher open rates, and then our lead scans at that booth, I mean it was ridiculous. I want to say we scanned like 500 people and at most shows we were only scanning probably a hundred to 112 and so it was huge because it all tied in.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: That's awesome. Well shifting gears because we're gonna run out of time.

I have two questions that I like to ask all my guests and I'm really curious to hear your answers because you've worked with some really interesting companies who are very good at this.

Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now?

Ashley: So I will do the shameless plug for Atlassian, A, because I work there so of course I think we're doing a good job. But truly, I think one of the biggest examples of this, we have our team playbook and this is something again where we connected our work futurist Don Price, has done a number of different keynotes around the world and always promotes the team playbook and that has led to this health monitor -- the team health check, understanding where your blockers are.

That led to a large engagement with ANZ bank, which is a huge bank in Australia and they have now done a case study with us. They're huge champions that come for our conferences and speak about how this one tiny little interaction with this health monitor has led to this entire agile transformation across their business.

It's a mix of the tools, the people, the practices, it all came together perfectly. So, yes, that had a revenue result for us, but it started with that ungated content at a conceptual level about how do you do your team work better and that's what Atlassian really tries to empower.

I mentioned Intercom as well. They have a ton of great content. They've got sales manuals, they got marketing manuals that talk about a variety of different ways to think about content marketing, sales, the interaction between sales and marketing. Highly recommend their content for both sales and marketing practitioners.

And then, IDEO, just like if you want to elevate your creativity and you want to kind of think outside of a traditional business or products. I work in tech, so of course I'm in this little bubble that everything is SaaS and everything is ARR. IDEO has none of that. And so every time I go to IDEO and just like, this is fascinating, how does the world work when you're not in your little bubble?

And so I would say, no matter what bubble you're in, IDEO will help you get out of it.

That would be three that are a mix of marketing focused, tech and then a design consultancy that's just completely out of my wheel house. 

Kathleen: I can't wait to check some of those out -- particularly IDEO. It sounds really interesting.

Well, second question is, the biggest pain point I was here from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly and they feel like it's drinking from a fire hose to try and keep up with everything and stay educated and on the cutting edge. So how do you personally do that?

Ashley: Yeah, so from a broader view, kind of outside of marketing or just business chops, which I think is really important, it's how do we fit in and especially as you move up in your career and you become COO or something like that, understanding that business acumen is really key.

I love MIT Sloan review for that content and they've been killing it lately. Every single thing that's come out from them over the last probably six or seven months, I'm like, "Yes, one hundred percent fascinating". So I love MIT Sloan from a business standpoint.

There's a couple of marketers that I think are a little bit contrarian and I joked about going on rants about things and I'm like, "Yes, ranting. I love it."

Katie Martell is somebody that I've been loving her content lately.

Jay Acunzo I think is great. He's really honing in on podcasting and show running over the last year or so. But just in general, his thoughts on content marketing and strategy are great.

I love Scott Berkun. He is primarily a designer, and more on that design thinking. He has a new book out that I need to get because it looks amazing. It's like How Design Makes the World, I think is what it's called. And it's looking at how all of these interactions and everyday things influence our path, our actions, et cetera. So Scott Berkun is great.

And then I would say just like a book that I always come back to is this book called The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. It's primarily about intersectional thinking and divergent thinking. And so yes, there's an element of understanding the tactical nitty gritty from a digital standpoint.

I think there's a number of, you know, Marketing Profs, CMI, HubSpot, all of those do a really great job of that. But how do you think about change? How do you think about a problem space? How do you think about a solution space? The Medici Effect is just every, it's like I come back to it kind of annually.

It's like, okay, somewhere in there I'm missing something. I should probably just reread the The Medici Effect. In fact, I should probably just to think about the concepts and The Medici Effect to jolt myself out of being so focused on, okay, what does this button on Twitter do or what does this ads do? Like are we doing AB testing? We're doing multivariate testing, what's our competence interval, whatever. We're pulling those things down. Like I don't know what the best practice is.

It's like I'm clearly thinking about it in the wrong way. If I'm so twitchy about such a small detail, you get lost in the weeds pretty easily.

Kathleen: Those sound like some really good resources. I will put links to all of them in the show notes.

How to connect with Ashley

Kathleen: If somebody is listening and they want to connect with you online or follow you or learn more about this topic, what's the best way for them to do that?

Ashley: I would love to connect on LinkedIn. I'm Ashley Faus. For the most part, I think I'm the first search result for that. And you can also follow me on Twitter also @AshleyFaus.

Kathleen: Great. I will put Ashley's links to her social accounts in the show notes. So head there if you want to find them.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: And if you are listening and you liked what you heard today or you learned something new, and how could you not because Ashley shared so many good ideas, head to Apple podcasts and please leave the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by more people.

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 interview.

Thanks so much for joining me this week, Ashley.

Ashley: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's always fun to nerd out about marketing.

Kathleen: Yes!

How did IMPACT grow the subscriber base for its email newsletter to 40,000+ in under two years?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, IMPACT Editorial Director Liz Moorehead talks about THE LATEST, IMPACT's email newsletter. Created in 2018, THE LATEST is written by Liz and sent out three times a week. It's one of several email newsletters that were created around the same time and are really disrupting the world of email marketing.

In this episode, Liz shares the story of THE LATEST, from how she writes it, to the newsletter format and design, how they grew the subscriber base, and the impact the newsletter has had on IMPACT's business.

Best of all, she shares her advice for anyone who wants to start an email newsletter, or is interested in revamping the one they currently publish.

Highlights from my conversation with Liz include:

• Liz is the Editorial Director at IMPACT, where she overseas a team that publishes approximately 25 articles a week and a thrice weekly email newsletter, THE LATEST.
• In 2018, IMPACT had a large audience and a lot of content, but no email newsletter.
• THE LATEST was originally created as a way to consolidate all of the email that IMPACT was sending and create a better experience for its subscribers.
• When THE LATEST launched, there were only about 1,200 subscribers. Today, there are around 42,000.
• The newsletter goes out three times a week and every issue is personally written by Liz, and sent directly from her email address.
• Each issue begins with a personal story by Liz, where she often includes very personal details.
• This choice to mix a business newsletter with very personal stories was a deliberate one that has helped THE LATEST connect with its audience.
• Liz's advice to anyone writing an email newsletter is to be honest and vulnerable, but keep the stories somehow relevant to the content and audience.
• Liz tested a variety of different formats for THE LATEST, and eventually landed on one that is very text heavy, with few if any images. This ran counter to what she thought would work, but testing proved it to be the best performing format. 
• She uses emojis to break up the text and draw the reader's eye to what she wants them to see.
• IMPACT uses HubSpot to measure the performance of its marketing and through that, can tell that THE LATEST has influenced more than 2 million dollars in revenue.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit IMPACT's website
• Check out THE LATEST
• Connect with Liz on LinkedIn
• Follow Liz on Instagram

Listen to the podcast to learn what makes an amazing newsletter and how you can use your newsletter to grow an audience and drive revenue for your company.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is my good friend Liz Morehead, who is the editorial director at impact. Welcome, Liz.

Liz Moorehead (Guest): I am so excited. Can you believe it's taken us this long to have the idea to have me on this podcast?

Liz and Kathleen having WAY too much fun recording this episode.

Kathleen: And if I'm being honest, I honestly think I thought I had already done it, which is why I didn't do it because I thought I already had. 

Liz: I'm going to try not to take this personally. You may get an official demerit in the mail. The jury's still out on that. We'll see how today goes. 

Kathleen: I don't know how this happened, but we're making it right now.

I'm so excited to have you on because you are somebody who is doing so much amazing work in so many different areas. To be candid, when I invited you, I had to choose because there were so many topics we could have covered. You're the pillar content pro and all these other things. But the thing I really wanted to talk with you about is email newsletters.

But before we get into that, pose people out there who may not know who you are or who or what IMPACT is, can you please talk a little bit about yourself as well as the company?

About Liz Moorehead and IMPACT

Liz: Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm the editorial director here at IMPACT.

IMPACT is a digital sales and marketing company. That basically breaks out into a couple of different things.

Number one, we consider ourselves the top educators in the space of digital sales and marketing, and that manifests itself through our publishing. We publish the anywhere between 20 and 25 articles a week, seven days a week, even on Christmas.

We have IMPACT Plus, which is a self guided learning platform for digital marketers, sales pros and business leaders. And then we also have our agency services as well. So we originally started out as an agency, you know, the traditional inbound marketing HubSpot partner agency before we really started getting our claws into the education piece of it.

One thing I will say though that is a little bit different about our agency services is that instead of the traditional model of, you know, "Hey, just, you know, kick your marketing over here, we'll take care of it. Like don't worry about it. We got it, we'll take care of it," we have more of the "Teach a man to fish" model.

So we do a lot of empowering businesses to bring their content in house, bring their video in house, really take ownership of their marketing technology stack with things like HubSpot.

So that's, that's IMPACT in a nutshell. All things digital sales and marketing. If you have questions about it, basically just come to us.

Kathleen: You've had an interesting journey because you're like part marketer, part editor, part writer. You're a different kind of a person than we've traditionally had on the show. So could you talk about your journey a little?

Liz: My journey is strange. I never fancied myself ever getting into marketing. I only ended up in marketing and quite frankly, landing in your lap Kathleen, as the result of a layoff.

Prior to being in the inbound marketing and content management space, I had been working in communications and I had been working as a senior editor at a digital publisher that catered exclusively to trade associations and then they overhired, or there was a market contraction, and there were a bunch of us, since we were the last in, we were the first out.

So my editorial team, we all just like, 50% of the people, left like overnight. Then, the next day, a mutual friend of ours who was working at your agency Quintain at the time said "you should come out for lunch." I'm like, "I don't want to," like, "I want to stay in pajamas, I want to be sad, I want to keep crying cause I just lost this job that I really loved."

And it turned out it was when you were guys were doing the Inbound Marketing Summit at The Metropolitan in Annapolis. And I walked over to her and I said, "I had no idea the rest of everyone that you worked with would be here."

And that's how you and I met, because you said "You're the one who writes the beer column for the Capital Gazette. Right?" And I said, "yes". And the next thing you said was, "I don't like beer". And then I, there was a little pause and in that pause I'm like, "This is the worst 48 hours". I'm like, "I look like I just got dumped. I feel like I just got dumped. This lady in front of me, dressed to the nines, and I looked like, just awful." And then you said, "But I like your writing".

Kathleen: Yes, it's true. I was a devotee of your beer column, which I just think, it's hysterical because you're right, I don't like beer. I don't drink any beer, but I loved reading about beer because you made it so interesting. So go figure.

Liz: Yeah. So I came on board at Quintain and I'm going to make this part of the story pretty short, but it was kind of, it was a, it was the first time I had really failed at something.

I was very excited to be in marketing. It was a new challenge. I had done each piece of that job desperately across different roles throughout my career. Things that I had done historically very well, and it just wasn't working.

I think about a year or so afterward, you and I had one of those “carefrontations”, a candid conversation, a crucial conversation, whatever you want to brand it as. And you and I were sitting there talking and you and John Booth, your husband, who ran the agency with at the time said essentially, you know, we have a right person, wrong seat. So you put me in a content management role.

That was, I feel like, when my career changed, because prior to that moment working in marketing, I had always been brought on in the way we had discussed it. As, you know, "you needed a marketer who knew how to write". And the reality is I was a writer who had a strong marketing backbone. It was the flip.

And so once I really went into that role, which at that time I remember you saying like you had heard about it from Marcus Sheridan and you know, there were all, you know, people were starting to realize that you couldn't just like market, you had to have someone who knew how to write, who knew how to communicate, who knew as a native skillset, the way people know how to build dimensional, like email marketing strategies and revenue campaigns and like all of these things that are not native skillsets.

To me, brand storytelling, interviewing, voice and tone development -- like, how do you make content that is so memorable that people not only remember the answer that you told them, they remember that you're the one that said it to them. That's the kind of stuff I was really good at.

So to be able to really focus on that exclusively in the role just really changed it. But that is something we're still seeing today. You know, there's more traction, there are more content managers now, but at the time, you did something that was atypical. You created that role that I think was, in a way, ahead of its time.

Kathleen: Well, you're giving me a lot of credit, but you are an incredibly talented writer. And for those listening, Liz and I have had the opportunity, and I would say for myself, the good fortune, of working closely together several times. We don't work together now.

You've had a really an amazing career and, I would say, she has set the bar for what it means to be a Head of Content in many ways, in the sense that not only does she do an amazing job, but she also teaches others how to do it.

Why IMPACT started THE LATEST

Kathleen: So that being all said, let's talk about email newsletters. I want to preface this with, when we were working together back in 2018, we were both at IMPACT and IMPACT produces a lot of content and has a big audience.

But at the time, it didn't have a newsletter, which I always thought was interesting because it had this huge, built in audience. So we were talking about creating one, but we really wanted to create something special and not just kind of check the box with a newsletter.

It just so happened that that all happened around the same time that I feel like newsletters were undergoing a Renaissance. It's funny, I just gave a talk on this last night.

2018 was the same year that Morning Brew was founded, that The Hustle was founded, that Ann Handley started writing Total Annarchy. That was a pivotal year for email newsletters.

And I think I would hold up the newsletter that you're involved in right alongside those others in terms of the, you know, how it's kind of breaking new ground on what it to send an email newsletter.

So with that as an intro, maybe you could rewind the clock and start at the beginning. For people who are listening and might not be familiar with the newsletter, could you talk a little bit about, you know, what it is, how frequently it is sent, who the audience is, et cetera?

Liz: I like how you phrased the history, by the way, of THE LATEST, because I remember that conversation. "Liz, how would you feel about writing our newsletter?" And I said, "Nope."

I waffled, was a bit wishy washy. I was trying to say no, but with as many yes words as possible.

And then you did that thing that you're so good at doing, which is like basically communicating that you're voluntelling me. Like, "So you're going to try it out and see what you think about it."

So that went pretty great.

So we have THE LATEST. It's meant to give digital sales and marketing pros everything they knew need to know to make smarter decisions, faster, and to do their job better in around five minutes.

It hits inboxes Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. I do emphasize to people who may not have heard of this newsletter before or are new to this, yes, an actual human being writes it.

That human being is me. I spend about six to eight hours a week working on it and it is a labor of love.

Now, Kathleen, you remember the discussions that we had. We had already been doing some passive email distribution of our content, but we were starting to run into a couple of challenges. You know, HubSpot, for those who may or may not be familiar, has an option where you can automatically generate instant, daily or weekly digests of the content that you're publishing.

We had scaled up rapidly from the traditional model of like, a few times a week of publishing content, to what I mentioned before, you know, seven days a week. No holidays off, 20 to 25 articles a week.

That's a large volume. And we were running into a situation where we had emails competing with each other. You know, we had events we wanted to promote. We had all of this content that was going out and it was just this passive valuable-ish maybe kind of thing that we'd been sending previously.

So THE LATEST was really meant to solve for that, as the centralized location where we could put all of our most important information.

And we had a new opportunity to show one of the things that we believe about the most at IMPACT, which is our people, our products. So if that's the case, we're going to make it as personal and as impacting and as thoughtful and hand curated as possible. We wanted it to be as valuable as it could possibly be.

Kathleen: So that was the nice things about newsletters, is it's their ability to consolidate a lot of what you want to communicate to your audience. And I do remember at the time that, you know, we have those instant blog notifications going out, but we were emailing people about events, and webinars and you know, social groups that we were running.

There was a time, I think we counted and people were getting, you know, an email every day from us, if not more than that. And that can quickly lead to major email fatigue, which you know, really can hurt your sender score.

So that was a great reason to shift over to the newsletter in and of itself, was let's email people less and let's be more efficient about it.

But I think you're right, there was so much more to it in terms of being able to really cultivate a voice and develop a relationship with the audience.

Getting personal in a corporate email newsletter

Liz: I believe though, that was the thing I didn't expect out of it. And I'll admit, I'll still get the heebie jeebies every time I have to smash the send button on a newsletter that goes to I think 42,000 people at this point.

That's still something where in the pit of my stomach, I'm like, "fine".

The thing I never really expected out of it is that piece you just mentioned, which is really developing a relationship with your audience. I remember when I first started writing the newsletter, earlier issues were a little bit more pithy, a lot shorter, not very personal.

I always like to embrace the Kathleen mindset of "keep doing stuff until people tell you to stop doing it", then just keep going and see what happens.

And so I started using it, especially last year, to just be more emotional and honest about where I was personally because I went through quite a bit of stuff last year. I'm just ripping off that bandaid.

I now live in Connecticut, but I used to live in Annapolis, Maryland with you -- not with you in the same home, but like a mile down the street. I was married at the time. I am not married anymore. I was moving up in my career. I was trying a lot of new things. I was experimenting with a lot of, just, new things professionally.

It was a really big year of growth for me and I started talking about it. I started talking and I had no idea. I don't know what possessed me to do it, but very similar to Ann Handley and a lot of other newsletters you might see out there, we really focus on putting the letter in the newsletter.

Now you may think to yourself, well, things like divorce and moving and all that stuff -- that's not really relevant to digital sales and marketing leaders.

What was surprising to me is how many of those elements of going outside of your comfort zone, being willing to embrace change, all those things really apply personally and professionally as well.

And the audience, that really ended up resonating with them. I would get start getting responses and replies. You know, we were in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and I remember there was one where like, I was trying to be positive. I was trying to be like the little fortune cookie, you know, confused to say it's all gonna be fine. Like it's not, I couldn't get myself there. And finally I just wrote this thing about how I was just flirting with an emotional cliff.

I wasn't in a really horrible spot, but it was becoming increasingly more difficult to carry the weight of my own feelings, carry the weight of the feelings of my friends and family -- the fear that for a while there was really gripping the country and the world and still is to some degree.

That was one of the issues that I got the most responses to.

It becomes this thing where I essentially started just writing to the people in front of me and they would respond and they would also still read all the stuff I put in there -- still read everything else. They would read all the articles, they would click through everything. 

Mixing business and personal in email newsletters

Kathleen: so taking a step back, as I think it's interesting, if somebody isn't familiar with the newsletter, this might be confusing.

This is a corporate newsletter in the sense that it is IMPACT's newsletter as a company, but you write it pretty much every time. Every now and then somebody else jumps in if you're on vacation or, you know, for whatever reason to take a Saturday off.

But really, this company newsletter starts off every time with a very, very personal introduction from you.

So can you just talk about that dynamic because I think that's a dynamic that is going to be very new to a lot of people. They might be thinking, "why would you have a company newsletter come from one of the employees and start with a personal letter from him?"

Liz: Well, let's face it. People trust human beings. People buy because of relationships they have with human beings.

Now more than ever, since we are trapped behind our screens, my entire social life is conducted via Zoom at this point and has been for the past seven plus weeks.

They don't want to talk to a nameless, faceless company. They want to talk to a human.

Also, if you want to just get more technical and tactical about it for you business leaders out there going "I don't know, we're different. That's not for us guys." Just to be perfectly candid with you, your open rates will increase if it comes from a person. The moment we stopped sending things from IMPACT or "Liz from IMPACT" or "whomever from IMPACT" and just put "Liz Morehead", boom, open rates popped.

Kathleen: Yeah. It's funny, I was, so I mentioned I was giving a talk. I gave a talk last night to the Public Relations Society of America about basically this topic of newsletters. I talked about having it come from a person and, and how a lot of companies are very skeptical and they think "No, our audience is too professional, we need to be more formal." The example I love to show that shatters that myth is there's a company called CB insights, which is a technology analyst firm. Like, big time tech companies, you know, are their clients -- the Googles, the Microsofts of the world.

This is a very highly respected company in the analyst field. They have an email newsletter that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and it comes from Anand Sanwal who's one of their principles.

This is the part I love the best. He signs off, like at the bottom of the newsletter, he writes his intro just like you do. And at the very bottom, instead of saying "from Anand", he says, "I love you, Anand".

This is a highly professional tech analyst company and one of the principals signs off the newsletter "I love you".

Like, you know, I think that that to me just says, if they can do that, then anyone can kind of cross that bridge and become more personal in the way they do their email outreach.

Liz: A hundred percent and I get that feedback a lot too. "Well, Liz, you're in marketing, you're allowed to do this kind of thing". I'm like, wait, hold on a second.

Our target audience are high level VPs, CEOs, no nonsense business leaders, and they're reading and subscribing to my newsletter. It's still works.

Yeah. I think a lot of people talk themselves out of trying things before they're even willing to see, you know, they're, they're ready to indict it. They're ready to pass judgment and say, "Oh, this won't work for us. Yada, yada, yada."

But that's not true.

And I would also say, you know, this is something we've been seeing with video right now too. This sounds like a strange correlation, but especially in this, you know, in the wake of Coronavirus, the threshold for production quality right now is a little bit lower, especially in video.

People are expecting you to be in your homes, to be more human, to be more open. And I think this is a great opportunity for us to open that door and realize, yeah, so they're tech people or they're this or they're that, but they're also humans first.

They are human beings first.

The anatomy of THE LATEST

Liz: But to get back to your original question, yes. So the anatomy of the newsletter in terms of how it's set up.

At the very top you're always going to have a big headline that basically showcases the three top stories that we're covering in a given issue. So for example, the one that went out yesterday was "How to have really difficult conversations over video" and "Are you ready to do content marketing right?" and "How we planned and executed a 3,000 person virtual event in only three weeks."

So we'll have that right underneath that. If nobody wants to read my letter, that's fine because we give you the links to those three articles in a little box right above it. So you could just like, you know, "That's fine Liz, you have a lot of feelings. Maybe later I want to read this stuff."

Now underneath that then we have the letter.

The letter itself usually falls into one of two categories. I would say 75% of the time it is somehow tangentially related to one of the three articles that's included. I like to keep it relevant.

There are, however, the fringe cases -- that other 20% of the time where it's like, I have something I want to talk about. Maybe something big happened at IMPACT. Maybe there's just something more global that I want to talk about.

For example, let's just go for it. The issue when I told everybody I was getting a divorce and I did it kind of euphemistically was the New Year's Eve issue. So it really made sense because essentially I was saying I was moving to Connecticut and doing so by myself. I'm only going with my cat. It's crazy to think about what the beginning of this year was like versus the end of this year. And I think a lot of us are feeling that way.

That is something where like there's a bit of a balance. It's not always like, emotional bloodletting, but that's how I bring those types of stories in.

I don't just decide, "Well I don't have anybody to talk about my feelings with. I'm going to do it here." It has to be relevant to the moment, to the context of what I'm talking about after the letter.

Then it goes into a little bit more detail about each of the articles. You know, what question does it answer, what is it about, who wrote it?

And then I also include some related links. So for each article, if somebody is interested in the topic, but that's not quite the article they're looking for, I'll pull in some other things. We feature our latest podcasts and shows -- the usual stuff like marketing events you need to know about.

And then right now, because everything is so stressed out, we used to have something called weekend nonsense in our Saturday issue. Now it's in every issue because I think we all really need a laugh right now.

And then I might throw in like, "Hey, I'm reading this" or you know, I, I fool around with what's in there.

But that's really the anatomy of it. The goal is essentially to make it something people are excited to open. I think if you're creating an email newsletter, yes you want to drive traffic to your own site. But when I wake up on the days that I have to put this together, my number one goal is to make it something so insanely valuable that no one will ever regret having opened it.

Even if they don't click through, that's fine. I just want them to feel like I have somehow made their job easier, their life easier or made it easier to make some sort of decision that day.

Designing your email newsletter

Kathleen: That's awesome.

Now I know way back in the beginning we had a lot of debate about what this newsletter should look like, and how it should be formatted.

There's lots of different schools of thoughts on this -- you know, how many graphics do you include and pictures and videos and gifs and emojis?

Liz: So many things. I was so wrong.

Kathleen: So talk a little bit about that. I think it's evolved over time and you've done a really good job of testing everything so that you can make data backed decisions.

Can you share a little bit of that whole evolution and what you've learned?

Liz: Sure. First of all, it's good to keep in mind, just from an email deliverability perspective, the more graphicy, flashy, design-y your email newsletter is, there is a higher likelihood that people will not see it that way either due to settings in their email that automatically turn off images if you're in a particularly like cybersecurity or technology focused space.

Outlook inboxes are brutal in terms of what they will let through or what they will actually show.

So we tried to keep the structure of it pretty lightweight. It doesn't look all the way plain text. There's some tabling in there, there's a little bit of structure, but for the most part it's just a basic rich text editor.

But it wasn't always that way. Well, originally it wasn't.

We had a little bit more structure around it, but for the most part I would say as long as I've been doing it, I really try to keep it more of that loose structure.

Now a couple of the things though at the beginning that I, let's just talk about the thing I was most wrong about. So, as you know, every blog article you publish on your website should have a featured image associated with it. You know, people like things to look at. So I was of the idea that every featured article -- because again, they were under that welcome letter for me, there are three articles -- that every single one should have like, a featured image with that.

We did that for a while and the open rates were great, but the click through rates were fine.

Then somebody said we should test it without images. I just thought that was going to be a disaster.

I am always coaching people about content, when they create it, to not create giant word walls. Beause that's the first thing that makes people go, "No, no, this looks hard. I don't want to do that. That is visually, that is not a content piece I would like", you know?

So this idea that we were going to have just like, so many words, really freaked me out with no visuals. Lo and behold, when we took out the three featured image, one per each of the articles, our click through rates went up.

Now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense. Imagery in a newsletter. If you subscribe to it already or will be in future, you'll see that I still use images, but they're purposeful. They're only there to drive the story forward. They're only there to provide visual context where I think you actually need the context.

Otherwise it's not there. There are no images.

I like to use emojis, which is also another thing I was wrong about. Not really so much in the text or the letters, but we use them as visual guides. Like for example, there's always a pointing finger in front of every headline for each of the three articles. The marketing calendar always has the same little calendar box, hot topics and Elite -- I'm very proud of this one -- a little spicy pepper. Things like that.

It's so that people can visually scan and they get used to knowing where things are. And it allows me to visually call things out without it being intrusive. But that was something I was always very against.

Just, you know, I'm, I'm knocking on the door 40, I've never been a huge emoji fan. We had to have like two or three people in our team at the time help us try to figure out Snapchat, and I still don't understand it.

I've just never been an emoji person, but it allows me to add a little bit of personality, razzle-dazzle when I want it. Occasionally I'll just like throw one in to be a little bit cheeky in my intro, but that's really the only visual compliment other than me including an image when I feel like it's necessary.

Otherwise it's just, it's just words and links.

Kathleen: I think this is another area, like, emojis are a great example where you hear people say, "I can't do that because my audience is older and more professional". But the audience for THE LATEST is, how would you characterize it?

Liz: All over the place? I think a lot of people on the surface would say, okay, so you're a young, hip marketing agency. You can get away with this stuff.

The people I hear the most from -- this reminds me a lot of my beer column. Everybody always thought that my beer column audience was like young bearded flannels, you know, the usual beer drinking crowd. And I did have a lot of those. But the people I've heard the most from, my most devoted people who still actually read me to this day, even though I retired from that like what, six, nine months ago? They're older, 40 and above.

It's the same thing with this. Some of my most devoted people, the people I hear from the most, are much more established in their careers. CEOs of businesses, VPs of sales and marketing.

One of the guys is actually one of our clients, was one of our clients. He's like some good old boy from Tennessee. He's a straight shooter. He's just that guy.

People you would never imagine are actually reading my newsletter and they're engaging with it.

The other thing I'll say about emojis, too, is that remember it doesn't always have to be a smiley face. There are emojis for things like charts or very basic things like a calendar tab.

You know, take a look at what's available to you. You can get away from the kitty stuff, you can get away from like the silly stuff. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

Kathleen: Yeah. And there's a great site. My favorite resource, the site getemoji.com because you could just go there and you can see them all and you can copy them and use them wherever you want. I use them a lot, not just in email newsletters but in LinkedIn posts and stuff like that.

The other thing too is that going back to the conversation we had about fact that a lot of your images will get stripped depending on where it's being sent to and what the email platform is. Emojis are Unicode text. So you are able to make your visuals have a little bit of flair.

Liz: It gets in there without it getting stripped out.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Liz: So that's really nice. It's, it's good for me. I use it for visual hierarchy the most.

Kathleen: Yeah. It's very, very effective for that.

What impact has THE LATEST had for IMPACT?

Kathleen: So, this started in 2018. Can you talk a little bit about the results? Like how large is the list now? What are you seeing in terms of marketing results from the newsletter?

Liz: Oh yeah, for sure.

When we started this, I think the  number was somewhere around like 1200 people maybe because we didn't want to force opt-ins. We had people who were opted into our daily, our weekly notifications, but we didn't want to force people to come on board with it.

We did an initial push, I believe, with garnering subscriptions. We brought some people over who were already opted in in certain capacities and it started as a very small list.

After that, today, I think I already mentioned it, we're now at 42,000, and in terms of results of what we're seeing from it as of today, we're closing in on about $2 million in revenue associated with it via HubSpot, which is outstanding.

Kathleen: That's awesome. 

Liz: It's a newsletter. You watched me last year on stage at IMPACT Live. I like content that makes money. You know, a little little skin off my back there. I'm pretty happy that that's uh, that's doing well.

The results really speak for itself. I think if you go into that with the same mindset that I have, whether it ends up looking like mine or not, it's not just about what articles do you want to in here? Do you want to drive traffic?

If you just focus your entire energy for a couple hours that you're putting it together and say, "I want to make this the most valuable thing that my ideal buyer would have in their inbox", you will be astounded at the brand evangelists you can build out of that.

Email newsletters in the time of COVID-19

Kathleen: That's great. Have you had to change anything with the newsletter as a result of this whole craziness with the Coronavirus?

Liz: I think what's been surprising is how much benchmarks no longer matter. Like, we had all this benchmark data, right? We've even written the same articles, like "When's the best time to send an email newsletter?" When's the best time to do to do that?

Those rules no longer apply because everyone is trapped at home. So for example, we had, you know, a pretty steady average open rate that had been growing incrementally over time. And then there were a couple of days just because, you know, I think a lot of people can relate to this, as soon as Coronavirus hit, it was, it moved like a wave across the country and around the world. But when it would hit wherever you were, it was like 24 to 48 hours of complete madness. There was shell shock. There was, what are we doing at our company?

There are all these things that need to happen. And so I was talking with Vin, our VP of Marketing, one day and I said, "Look, there's no way I'm going to get to this until like, THE LATEST is actually going to be the latest my time. Like that's just how it's going to happen because I have X, Y and Z to do." And he's like, "Those are the top priorities. As long as it gets out the door today, I don't care when it gets out."

We had sent it at like six or seven o'clock at night. We had almost doubled our open rate.

Kathleen: Wow.

Liz: It was absolutely absurd because it made sense. Right? People are now just sitting at home, not understanding boundaries between work and play because, I don't know if anybody else is like me, I know I'm done with work when I move from this side of the couch, which is the right side of the couch, to the left, just to kind of mix it up just to see what happens.

That's been kind of crazy. I would say also the level of emotional honesty I'm allowed to get to has been great, but it is a balance. I really was struggling for a couple of weeks there of, you know, I used to find inspiration for the newsletter out in the world, face to face human interactions. What do you do when 80% of your stimulus for how you create as a writer for me is gone? That was really a big challenge for me.

Some days I feel better than others. And I think as this has become more of a normal, as this has become more status quo, again, this is the end of week seven of this, at least for me, I'm learning to find stories in different ways.

But for awhile there it was hard. You know, just, I couldn't be depressed all the time.

Kathleen: You can only talk about your favorite Netflix show so many times, right?

Liz: Well the other thing too though, is that there's an emotional delicacy to it. There is a reality that I need to constantly be aware of. There's a difference between humor that genuinely puts someone in a good mood for the first time in a day and humor that's tone deaf and falls flat and actually ends up offending someone.

So it's been a tricky thing to figure out because I understand that everybody has a different situation. Here's a good example. IMPACT Plus is that learning platform we were talking about earlier. I run the virtual peer group for content managers.

We have CEOs and business leaders, sales and videographers and content managers, yada yada yada. So I run the content manager one. We had a content manager virtual peer group scheduled for the week after everything just caught completely on fire. I had originally slated to be teaching people how to build a content strategy, and instead I was like, I'm not sure if this is what they even want to be hearing about or if this is even what they care about right now.

I'm so glad I didn't do that because as it turned out, a couple of people on the virtual peer group had been laid off, weren't even content managers anymore, but they were still there, there were business owners who were concerned whether or not in a month they were going to still have the business.

I mention that because I had a similar reaction to THE LATEST. I remember the first couple of issues, I sat there and said "Am I helping people who have just lost their job?" You know, I'm in a place of privilege. I still have my job. It's all relative in terms of what everybody's dealing with, but that is a privilege.

I've had to maintain situational awareness that I'm not speaking to an even more diversified audience with a much more volatile emotional range. And I'd say that has been a really big challenge, but it's also been really fun.

Like yesterday's issue of THE LATEST I talked about weird food and combinations and stuff. Like the other night for dinner, I had this fantastic 2015 red Bordeaux from France and I paired it with an Oscar Meyer baloney sandwich and I started getting all of these funny emails back from people. One guy was like, "The only reason I was able to build a spreadsheet last night was because I took a break and stood over the sink and ate cold pizza."

I think good advice for this is to just be honest. Everybody's kind of blindly feeling around the dark room for a light switch right now, but the only way you're going to get through it is just being aware of who your audience is. Be cognizant of the emotional state they might be in, but don't let that restrict you from a place of fear. Let that give you freedom in terms of the stories you're telling because I think people are really looking for people to be honest.

I'd say that's one of the big impacts that this pandemic has had on our newsletter. I was already being really honest. I was already really doing a lot of these things, but it's made me a much more creative storyteller in terms of where I find stories and it's also made me, I think, a much more empathetic storyteller. It's made me more human, more open, more personal. Whereas I think the knee jerk reaction might otherwise be to restrict, pullback, be more corporate.

What Liz says you should know about starting an email newsletter right now

Kathleen: if somebody is listening to this and they're thinking, well, I might want to try either starting a newsletter or revamping my newsletter and taking a different approach, if you had to give somebody advice on, if you were starting a newsletter now, what, what would you tell them?

Liz: I think it's important to have a very clear idea about the why behind the newsletter.

Why are you making this choice? Is it because your current email marketing isn't working? Is it like us, where you have so many different communications? We need to bring that together and there's a new opportunity to do it better.

Really understand your why. I would say that's the first step.

Then be very clear about what your goals are. I think that if you're going to go into this, like, "we need to check the box, we need to do a newsletter," then what I'm talking about is not for you. In fact, I'd say probably in a year or so, that kind of email newsletter stuff I don't think is going to really survive.

It'll be there. People will open it, but it's never going to drive the brand awareness that you want. It's never going to create that community. It's never going to make people initially have that reflexive "I have a question about this. I should go to them after that."

I would say when you're building out what goes in your newsletter, you need to put out of your mind, your priorities. You need to say, "What is it that, if I were my ideal buyer, what would make me go, 'Oh wow' every time I open that newsletter?" -- that's what you want.

You want to create that moment where somebody opens it up and it's a present like on Christmas morning and they say, "My gosh, they got this just for me!"

That's what you want to do and it's going to look different. You know, you may not have the crazy personal letter or like, I think one time I made like condolence cards for marketer's failing email campaigns and stuff. Like I get really weird in mine.

Just make it personal, tell a story, you know, make it so people understand that there's a human behind what you're doing and then just commit to it and be willing to try different things. Be wrong about images.

You know, you're going to have to fight a lot of your own instincts. You're going to have to do a lot of testing, you're going to try things, they're going to work, they're going to not work and that's okay, but be consistent.

Kathleen: Yeah, and just keep doing it.

Check out THE LATEST

Kathleen: If somebody wants to check out THE LATEST or subscribe to it, what should they do?

Liz: Just go to impactbnd.com and if you scroll down, you'll see a little bar that says THE LATEST. You could see the latest issue and then there's a big button that says "Subscribe to THE LATEST" and you'll get me -- actually me -- in your inbox three days a week.

Kathleen: You can scroll through so many past issues of it, unlike many newsletters which only exists in your inbox. I think the cool thing about what you guys do is you can go back and read prior issues on the website, which is really nice. So you can try before you buy if you want.

Liz: Yeah, absolutely. I mean if you follow me on LinkedIn, my username is Liz clam. Every time a new issue of THE LATEST comes out I share the web version of it, which is, you know, it's user friendly to look at. 

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: All good things must come to an end, but we're not quite done yet.

I have two questions that I always ask all of my guests and now it is your turn to answer. The first one being, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really like the shining example of doing inbound marketing? 

Liz: That's a great question. And the funny part is, is that I always knew these questions were coming, but I'm still racking my brain about this. I think my answer probably would have been different had we had this about a month ago before everything happened or I guess more than a month ago at this point.

I've been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn recently as I think a lot of people in our space are. And I have to say, I have been blown away by three people who our names we're all familiar with. Marcus Sheridan and Ann Handley they started doing this live series about being trapped at home and talking about the most pressing questions, concerns, and fears that everybody was having now that we're all in this new reality and I just thought that was a really fascinating and new way to do inbound in a real time, human way.

Kathleen: That's really cool.

Liz: There's also a guy named Chris Carolan and he is a member of our content manager peer group. I'll make sure to get a link for him so you can put it in the show notes. He is in the manufacturing space and the stuff that he has been doing recently has been, I don't think he realizes what he's doing. He is a little pioneer of inbound and also now virtual selling. So doing sales demos.

There's this whole idea that as a sales person, you need to be in front of a person in order to sell to them. He's doing virtual sales demos, still closing deals, and he's also creating insanely good content about it. He's probably one of my favorite people to follow on LinkedIn and I'm not even in manufacturing. 

Kathleen: That sounds like me and beer.

Liz: Exactly. I will never build anything but I will follow him forever.

Kathleen: Yes, exactly. Awesome. Well I will put the link in the show notes for those people.

Second question. The biggest pain point I always hear from marketers is that digital marketing is just changing so quickly that it's like drinking from a fire hose, trying to keep up with everything. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated about all things digital marketing?

Liz: I mean, I almost have a cheat answer. I'm the editorial director at IMPACT, so I have to read pretty much everything that we publish. And it's across video, sales, and marketing. It's across HubSpot marketing technology, developing your strategy. And we also have a whole section devoted to just news reactions, which contextualizes the latest digital sales and marketing news.

So by virtue of my role, I know I'm a little bit spoiled in that I have to stay up to date. But here's what I will say. I use Feedly. I've never gotten over the demise of Google reader. I think it was the biggest mistake Google ever made was getting rid of that. But Feedly is now the devil I know and I've used it to create digital marketing news and publishing newsfeeds for me.

So I follow SEO Journal, Marketing Land, Search Engine Land, Forbes CMO Network, Digiday, all of these different things.

And then on the publisher side, it's like, What's New in Publishing, Poynter, things like that.

I just go in there and scan. Even if you're just scanning headlines, you don't have to sit there and be like, I'm going to take three hours out of my busy day and I'm going to read all these articles. I just skim and I look, I just try to stay abreast of what is happening.

There is no secret sauce, no silver bullet to staying up to date. You need to come up with a process and a schedule and you stick to it.

Kathleen: But I want to say, I mean you guys create THE LATEST as a way for people to stay up to date, so you can subscribe to THE LATEST and piggyback off of all the efforts of the folks at IMPACT who are trying to summarize the news every day for you.

Liz: Thank you for shamelessly self promoting me so I didn't have to.

How to connect with Liz

Kathleen: All right, well now we really are coming to the end. If somebody does want to ask you a question or reach out to you or connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Liz: So the best way for you to do that is to find me on LinkedIn. My name is Liz Morehead, L I Z M O O R E H E A D. And if you like pictures of beer and cats and the occasional Connecticut state park, you can find me on Instagram at @whatlizsaid.

Also, fun fact, if you go to impactbnd.com and type the word "genius" in the search bar, you will be brought to every article I have ever written.

Kathleen: That is amazing. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that just to see it work.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: All right, well, thank you so much for joining me, Liz.

If you are listening and you liked what you heard here -- and how could you not because Liz is amazing -- or you learned something new, which again, how could you not because Liz is amazing, apparently she's a genius -- head to Apple podcasts and please leave the podcast a five star review. That is how we get in front of new people and they find a find the podcast and hear and learn from amazing experts like Liz.

If you know someone else who is doing kickass inbound marketing, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest.

That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, finally, Liz.

Liz: I know, I know. Talk to you again soon Kathleen.

What do high growth companies with savvy marketing teams do to drive traffic growth?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Directive Consulting founder Garrett Mehrguth shares what his team does to help companies like Allstate and Cisco boost traffic even after all of the low hanging marketing and SEO fruit has been picked.

TL;DR, It all starts with product marketing, SEO and a focus on bottom of the funnel, high intent leads.

Garrett shares the specific strategies his team at Directive uses to get results for their clients, as well as his advice for startups that want to do it right from the beginning.

Highlights from my conversation with Garrett include:

• Garrett says that everything Directive does is based on the belief that your brand is more important than your website.
• What that means is that when someone with high purchase intent is searching online for a solution, you need to make sure you're discoverable.
• He says that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation with your financial metrics, meaning that if you focus on the top of the funnel, you might generate a lot of traffic, but you won't get as many high intent leads as you would if you focus on the bottom of the funnel (which generally results in less traffic).
• Garrett's advice is to track CAC (cost to acquire a customer) and LTV (lifetime value) and use that to determine whether you are paying a reasonable cost per demo, opportunity or proposal -- NOT cost per lead.
• For many companies, the best place to focus their initial marketing efforts is on ranking on review sites. Done well, this can allow a lesser known, newer market entrant to unseat an incumbent player very quickly.
• You can pay review sites to conduct review generation campaigns on your behalf, and Garrett says it is absolutely worth it to spend that money.
• Another strategy that works well is to use LinkedIn ads for awareness raising. Garrett says that leads that come through LinkedIn are not high intent, so you shouldn't spend a lot on a cost per impression basis.
• Instead, he and his team "trick" LinkedIn by advertising on a cost per click basis. Not many people click the ads, so LinkedIn accelerates their placement in the feed and they get seen by a lot of people.
• In terms of content, Garrett believes the traditional approach to pillar content and topic clusters promoted by HubSpot is wrong. Instead, he uses that same content and creates product pages as pillars, which he then uses to link to from blogs that address bottom of the funnel topics.
• Garrett builds authority for product pages by guest blogging (where he can control anchor text and backlinks) and doing podcast guest interviews.
• He says that where its tough to get your subject matter experts to create written content, you should invest more heavily in podcast guest interviews.
• Garrett's advice for companies right now is to double down on online advertising. Because so many companies have shut down or pulled their online ads back, prices are down and it is easier to get found.

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Directive Consulting website
• Follow Garrett on Twitter at @gmehrguth
• Connect with Garrett on LinkedIn
• Email garrett at gmehrguth[at]directiveconsulting[dot]com

Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies for combining product marketing and SEO to generate more qualified bottom of the funnel leads.

 

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Garrett Mehrguth from Directive. Welcome Garrett.

Garrett Mehrguth (Guest): Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. And yeah, excited to chat about search.

Garrett and Kathleen recording this episode.

Kathleen: Yeah, I love, I love getting into nerdy marketing topics, so I'm really excited about this. Before we dive in though, can you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your story and also Directive?

About Garrett and Directive

Garrett: I'd love to. I did my degree in three years in economics and I wanted to do my masters in a year. I was playing soccer. I thought I was going to go pro, be like a pro soccer player. I hurt my knee, and that kind of reset a lot of that stuff. And so I said, "Hey, you know, maybe I could try this consulting thing."

I applied to Boston, Bain and McKinsey. I'm not sure about Deloitte, but kind of the big ones and instantly got this auto-response. In the application process, I knew I was doomed because you go to their portal and the university I attended was not one of the options. I was like, "They do not tell you that before they take your money."

So from there I was like, "You know what? I'll just build my own agency and they'll have to acquire me."

I don't know why. That's how I thought, and was just like where I went.

I had no tangible skills, so there was that problem.

I have this belief system that perception is reality and I knew that people perceived I knew the internet and so I figured I should learn it. So I started to try to learn how to do WordPress sites.

And then I got this little shwarma shop in East LA. I was on my little moped. I had a 78 Peugeot 103. I was going around town on that thing and I essentially got the client. It was really, really small. I don't even remember because I was so bad at this point that I didn't put the amount in the contract. I still have the contract, but I don't remember the amount. It's probably like 200 bucks.

I did that for 30 days, came back on the 30th day to get the check. He said come back tomorrow. The whole place was boarded up. So that was our first client.

I was selling $5 social media calendars on Fiverr and I was just hustling and doing all this stuff. And then I got a hookah shop and the hookah shop asked me to build them a website and then I did that. It was okay. Looking back at, it wasn't the best website. And then he wanted to rank number one for hookah shop and all that stuff.

I said, "All right, I'll try." I've never done it before. So I went online, read everything on Search Engine Land, Moz, WordStream, Search Engine Journal, teaching myself kind of SEO and PPC.

I ranked him number one and all of a sudden you got all these people in a shop and it was completely dead before. I was like, "This is kind of cool."

So, one of my best friends who's my roommate said, "Hey, don't go to law school. You know, come join this company with me. We'll be millionaires" or whatever he said. I was paying him $3 an hour at this point.

So we kind of just started from there and now we get to work with really large enterprise accounts and mid market companies, mostly SaaS, doing SEO and PPC still. So pretty fun.

Kathleen: Great. Now one of the things that I think is interesting about the perspective that you bring -- and we've had lots of people on the podcast talk about SEO and PPC,  I was interested to chat with you because you do have these bigger clients and I think there are pros and cons to that, right?

The pro -- having owned an agency myself -- the pro of having big clients is they've got big budgets. They've got teams to support getting work done. They are generally very savvy.

One of the -- I don't know if I would call it a con -- but the tough thing about accounts like that is very often, they've already done all of the basic things that they should be doing. They're sharp, they know their stuff, they have their act together, so being able to really show results and traction requires taking things to a much more advanced level.

As I think you were saying when we first started talking, you've already squeezed most of the juice out of that orange. So how are you finding those opportunities for the last few drops?

You had some interesting thoughts on that and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say and to get into that technical level of detail with you.

What do top SEOs do to prevent traffic from plateauing?

Garrett: Let's do it Kathleen.

So first and foremost, it's such a blessing because I got lucky. Everyone gets lucky, I think, in business to get somewhere. I had no capital. I started this thing with 20 bucks. We have no debt. We have no anything, right?

I think we got Allstate when I was like 23 to 25 years old. And we've had them ever since. Right? So there's little moments like that. Or, we did the global SEO for Cisco when I was 26, I think.

So like, you get these little moments and they really help you. And obviously you have to deliver, right? And then you can scale that.

But one of the things that I think allowed us to be successful regardless of who we were working with, whether it was a Series A startup who was trying to go to the moon, or a mid-market SaaS firm that was trying to go after the market leader, or the market leader, right?

You have these kind of three groups to work with and they all need to slow down and reframe how they approach the idea of search. And that's what I think Directive is really special at, is taking a moment to say, how does your customer discover the products or services you sell, and how can we rethink our approach?

So here's what we do. We have two kinds of fundamental beliefs.

First and foremost, if you can eat enough humility as an SEO and say that my brand is more important than my website, you become an incredibly powerful and creative marketer.

So our first fundamental belief at Directive is your brand is more important than your website. What that means tactically is that when someone searches at the bottom of the funnel and has the strongest purchase intent, you need to make sure you're discoverable.

Now, the old adage was, you need your website to rank, but see something has changed in consumer behavior. I call this the Yelp and the Amazon effect.

See, consumers got trained at the transactional level that even before we spend $3 on a lollipop or on a breakfast burrito, we're going to look on Yelp to see the reviews.

Well, guess what? Before we buy quarter million dollar software, we definitely look at reviews.

See, Google caught onto this and they started to change the types of websites that they were showing when there was bottom of funnel purchase intent for SaaS. That's G2, Capterra, Software Advice, PC Mag. It goes down for days and hours, right? There's all these review sites.

Well if you search your primary keyword, let's say "ERP software", and you layer it with "top", "best" or "reviews" or "comparisons", you have purchase intent.

Also your most expensive cost per click and Google ads, all the sites are review sites. That's because Microsoft Dynamics has no SEO. That's not because Oracle has no authority or content. That's because Google is choosing to show these types of websites.

So if we take that fundamental approach that our brand is more important than our website, we can be hyper successful.

Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. And I've noticed that, too, with reviews. Over the years I've spoken with some other review sites that you mentioned. They've pitched me when I've been at different places and it's really fascinating to just do those searches.

And you're right, if you do it -- if you search those terms -- those are the sites that will absolutely come up first.

So when you consider that you need to appear on review sites, how do you go about tackling that? Because it's not as simple as just claiming your presence and setting up your profile. You can still get lost in the sea of companies that have done that.

How to leverage review sites to drive traffic

Garrett: The first step we want to do is we want to take another fundamental hypothesis and understand it, which is that sometimes your marketing metrics have an inverse correlation to your financial metrics. And it becomes very, very, very dangerous for SaaS firms.

So here's what I mean. Most agencies have this belief that in order to generate more MQLs for the demand gen team at a SaaS organization, they need to essentially increase the amount of keywords they rank for. They need to start going to top of funnel and they need to generate more leads.

So what happens when organizations pursue what I call a "breadth approach" is they start to experience what's called in economics diminishing marginal returns. In other words, their marketing KPIs improve.

So let's say you're trying to go for "top ERP software", but you just have a Google ad running. Instead of saying, "How can I show up more often when there's purchase intent?" and going with depth -- and so essentially expanding search impression share in Google ads for your primary terms that have purchase intent and then ranking on individual review sites through their cost per click models, and then evaluating all of that at a cost per demo level, not cost per lead level, and then doing financial allocation, right?

That's what we do here. We focus first on demand capturing before pivoting to demand generation.

So we go to the bottom of the funnel and say, "Cool. When there's purchase intent, we're going to show up as often as possible and as many places as possible before we try to show up for more terms."

So this allows us to experience increasing marginal returns for our clients in the first two quarters and get buy-in.

See, what most people do, is they start to go with their Gartner report and they start to leverage that, which isn't an intrinsically a bad idea.

But when they start to essentially go after informational intent and go to the top of funnel, they start to lower their cost per lead, they start to increase conversion rate and they think they're winning.

But if you're a savvy growth operator in SaaS, you know, like for example, I convert at 60% on lead gen ads on LinkedIn.

Okay, target market giving me their information -- 60%. I get that all the way down to $17 a week.

Yet that is 17 X more expensive than buying that same lead from ZoomInfo, and I have no greater purchase intent than someone essentially downloading an asset or me buying them from ZoomInfo.

So now I'm paying 17 X on a cost per lead.

And so that's the diminishing part where your marketing numbers look better, but your revenue doesn't increase because you have horrible CAC-LTV on top of funnel versus bottom of funnel.

And so that's kind of the other approach, is putting everything through an LTV-CAC model and then focusing on bottom of funnel first.

Start at the bottom of the funnel and capture high intent leads

Kathleen: So let's, let's dig into that a little bit. So you talked about starting at the bottom of the funnel and going really deep to capture high intent leads for very specific terms.

If I came to you and I said, "All right, let's go. I want to do that," can you walk me through what that looks like? You mentioned showing up as often as possible for that one, high intent term.

Garrett: Yeah. So first we're going to do what's called category defining. So we need to find your category.

One of the most difficult problems in SaaS, as most people approach it, is they want to create their own category or they exist as a subset of an existing category.

You have a lot of experience in cybersecurity, correct?

Kathleen: Yep.

Garrett: We do a lot there as well. So like we've been working with SentinelOne for a long time and other large players in that space. Now that's endpoint protection, right? People know they need a security solution, they don't always intrinsically know they need an endpoint solution. Right?

So how do you generate demand and increase MQLs if you're in a new category? Okay, so first we do what's called category definement.

And what we'd like to do is not only position you in endpoint, but position you in the security software category and then do hyper product differentiation through like product naming conventions and positioning, so that your CTO or whoever that person is who's your audience, they're searching and when they go to security software, we want them to show up above the fold with your brand as endpoint protection and then essentially drive awareness from the greater category to our subset or our pain solving product.

So that's kind of first step is define that category. Then we ask ourselves, are we above the fold? So on Capterra, when you land on that, do you have to scroll for a couple hours to find you? How many reviews do the top five have versus you?

That gives us a review target. Then we'll help you and say, "Here's how we've seen other clients go about getting reviews and here's the strategy you could pursue." Now we have a competitive amount of reviews on all of our categories.

Kathleen: Let me ask you a question about that real quick. Most of those review sites have, uh, call them packages that you can purchase where they will, you know, you give them your list of clients, they'll email them, offer them an Amazon gift card or something along those lines to get reviews. And so essentially there's a cost per acquisition model that you can use.

Do you find in most cases that that's worth doing, or do you work with your clients to develop their own outreach and review generation campaigns?

Garrett: That's totally worth doing. I think there's nothing more important than other people advocating for your product, especially with how consumer behavior has changed at the B2B and B2C level.

So no, that's critically important.

Now, what we need to be able to do here though, is we need to be able to measure everything on a cost per opportunity, cost per demo, cost per proposal -- whatever you want to call it -- level, not a cost per lead.

What we've found across over 350 SaaS companies that we've worked with over the last five years is that the cost per lead between Google Ads, Capterra, G2, Software Advice, et cetera, has a really, like it's not that different, maybe 15 to 30% range between each.

But then I found that third party review sites have a 230% lower cost per opportunity. And so what we do, like, we got hired a couple of years ago by a publicly traded sales compensation software company and within one quarter we increased their demos by over 300% by only pivoting budget.

That's the craziest part of all this, is most people are still evaluating their demand generation at an MQL level, not at an opportunity level.

And so the biggest, easiest thing you can do is go one step further and look at opportunity. And then the furthest step that we've now actually evolved to as an agency is putting all our clients in LTV-CAC models, and then looking at activation rate. So not cost per trial but trial activations, right? So how well people are going from trial to demo, or demo to close rate, and then we're evaluating channels by close rate or by trial activation rate.

And when we start to do that, that's hugely powerful for for financial allocation.

How can you use intent data to drive traffic and revenue?

Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. Now one of the other questions I had as I was listening to you talk about this, you talked about intent and bottom of the funnel and a lot of those platforms that you mentioned, in addition to being able to purchase a package and drive reviews, now they're selling their own intent data.

Are you also working with intent data and taking it and creating ABM or audience match campaigns around that for your clients?

Garrett: Yeah, so you can do a lot of that stuff.

I think we, like most people, are using that engagement data or enriching stuff with Bombora for sales dev.

Right now, if you do traditional ABM with account based advertising, so let's say Radius, Terminus, DemandBase, Madison Logic, Listen Loop, I mean we use Terminus personally internally. Now the reason is, is we need to be able to do cookie-based targeting, not IP-based targeting. Because, for example, right now, if you're trying to run IP-based targeting campaigns during COVID, you're not reaching any of your audience.

Kathleen: Oh, you are preaching to the choir, because the product that we sell incorporates IP obfuscation. So anybody using our products, you couldn't target them by IP. I think it's going to happen more and more, and more people are going to use tools like that.

Garrett: Yeah. I think to answer your question, yes, we are doing bi-directional syncs from HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot or Salesforce into our ad platforms. But you still have a really poor match rate because people are using personal emails on social because they don't want to get fired from their company and their LinkedIn goes down.

So, essentially what happens is, your match rate is really poor on social because the only one who still has firmographics after the whole Cambridge analytical debacle, -- because you've got Axiom data in Facebook and you can be really powerful there.

Twitter has always been crap, but essentially GDN is terrible right now unless you're doing managed placements, you're actually going in a search engine results page and then searching keywords and then finding every site that ranks in the top five for your keyword that uses GDN and then doing targeted URL placements

That works because it comes off as a native ad.

But then other than LinkedIn, it's not working. But then LinkedIn fails because there's no purchase intent and the CPA is too high.

And so what we're finding is the way we're doing LinkedIn is awareness, with text ads and spotlight ads. And that's actually working. But there's a lot of nuance in all that for sure.

How to use LinkedIn ads to raise brand awareness

Kathleen: So then you're generating awareness on LinkedIn and are you hoping effectively that that'll get somebody to go to the client's website? Then, you can retarget them on other platforms?

Garrett: We're actually being a little bit humbler than that because I don't think I can control my user. And what I mean by that is, the click through rate is crap on LinkedIn. In fact, it's so bad for spotlight and text ads and we've tricked it and we've figured out a game.

So we run brand campaigns for our clients and for ourselves based on what I call "clarity." It's this concept of saying what you do and who you do it for, and being humble enough to know that you have to get your message across without the click.

So what we do is we actually do it on a cost per click level on LinkedIn and we're able to deliver because nobody clicks.

What happens is LinkedIn accelerates our impressions and gives us a much lower CPM when I do CPC, than when I do CPM on LinkedIn. And then we personify everything.

This is the biggest trick to LinkedIn. So you take your primary asset, let's say "The Ultimate Guide to Demand Generation", and then you turn it into "The VP's Guide to Demand Generation", "The CMO's Guide to Demand Generation", and "The Marketing Manager's Guide to Demand Generation."

All you have to do is change the cover page and then run lead gen ads and we're converting at over 50% across the board.

So there's that route.

And then the awareness campaigns and the text ads and spotlight ads, you're on a CPC level and then you focus on what you do and who you do it for, and then you personify that.

You put that all together and you have really, really cool awareness campaigns. And then I say, spend as much money as you're willing to never stop losing.

And if you take that approach and you say, "Look, are you willing to spend $5,000 a month until you die and not know what it does for you?"

Because I'll tell you right now, I can target your exact audience to perfection and deliver your message to them till you've decided you're done with this organization.

"Are you okay 'wasting' five grand a month so that every person in your audience on LinkedIn knows who you are?" Yeah.

The trick is to not get results. Because what happens is, people go into it thinking they'll get results and they pause before they ever could have gotten results through a brand campaign.

And so when you take the other approach, it works really well.

Kathleen: Yeah. That's a really interesting way to think about it. I would love to be a fly on the wall as you have those conversations with clients to be like, you know, "You're going to spend all this money and I'm not going to show you any quantifiable results from it, but you're going to have to believe that the results are there."

It's like playing the long game and having faith.

Garrett: Yeah. Do you believe that this is your exact persona on LinkedIn? Here's your exact title, firmographic, industry, size of account, revenue...do you believe that? Yes.

Do you believe that your message is valuable enough to communicate it to them on a consistent basis? Yes.

Cool. How much does your company spend on snacks?

Kathleen: Give up the jelly beans and advertise on LinkedIn!

Garrett: Yeah. Honestly, it's the frappuccino a day is the kind of the joke I make.

What's your coffee budget? Cool. Could you spend that on this and never stop it? And it usually gets some pretty good buy-in.

How to optimize your website for traffic

Kathleen: That's a really interesting way to think about it.

Do you do anything with your clients in terms of what they should be doing on their own site to support all of this? You talked about how it's not necessarily about everybody getting to your website, and how the brand is more important, but I would think that there are still some things they need to be doing on the site to provide supportive content and other assets that you can then use to go out and have success on these other platforms.

Garrett: Yeah, that's a relative statement to shock people to think differently.

It's not that your website's not important. It's that your brand truly is more important than your website.

You really have to understand your brand is more important than it was.

Now your website is obviously critical, so what you need to be able to do is communicate who you are and who you're for and what you do for them.

We do custom landing pages here. We have a really strong conversion rate optimization team. And so all that review site stuff I'm telling you about, we're split testing two custom landing pages with messaging, calls to action and what I like to call psychological friction tests.

So the biggest issue right now in all of SaaS that they could change if they listened to this, is changing their call to action.

Almost universally it's "request a demo." There is nothing more psychologically friction than "request a demo."

Every time I speak to an audience, and I get to speak about 30 to 40 times a year at conferences, I love to ask, who here likes to do a demo? Who here likes to have a day of demos? Nobody raises their hand.

Kathleen: That's like saying, "Who here likes to sit through an hour long webinar?"

Garrett: Yeah, and so when I ask them, I said, what if you did something really simple? What if you change it from request a demo to watch demo video? You still gated it. You still sent that lead to sales development or your account executives, but you are asking yourself, can I give my visitor something of equal or greater value to what they're giving me?

That's the number one question with calls to action and demand generation is, am I giving someone something of greater value than they're giving me?

When someone requests a demo, they fill out a form and nothing happens and it says "Someone from our team will contact you in 24 hours." You're not doing it.

So what we always do, and we can take clients universally from around 2 to 3%, to over 10% conversion rates by simply doing watch demo video.

And then all we do is have a form that says "Fill this out and we're going to give you a five minute demo video so that you can have a better educated sales conversation when we follow up."

Close rates go up, activation goes up, sales development teams are begging for these leads because they're having product conversations, not like "who we are and these lame 30 minute intro slides" to finally get to price.

It works universally, exceptionally well.

So that's what we do on the website level. But when it comes to content, and I think that's kind of where you're headed with this, is like what do you do with that content engine?

Are you familiar with HubSpot's pillar content approach that everybody's following? I think it's a bad approach, financially. The reason I believe it's a bad approach financially, it's due to what I was communicating earlier.

HubSpot's approach is you take a really, really beautiful strong asset, and then you lead to that asset with other types of content clusters that support that and you essentially do lead generation through that asset.

I say, do that same thing but with features.

Here's an example. We do our own SaaS products at Directive to make sure that we're not just full of crap. Not enough people do that. We rank in the top five for all our keywords. We actually spend a ton of money on PPC and we try to actually test everything and our hypotheses on ourselves.

What we're doing right now is, we have an educational product called Institute. This teaches our clients and we give to our clients free of charge because we believe that education drives adoption.

As consultants, you don't need to only make recommendations, you need clients to adopt them, right? And so we need to educate them as to why. So we educate them on SEO, PPC, et cetera. We sell it to the market for $39 a month.

It teaches people how we do what we do, all our templates, our approach, et cetera. We have 40 lessons. So I'm asking myself, at a $39 a month product, my CPA, my cost per lead is too high to do a ton of paid acquisition. So how can I drive organic leads from my product?

So here's my strategy and I'll share with your audience because hopefully it can help them. I'm taking the top five to 10 keywords for every one of my lesson pages. So, "how to do Google ads" or "how to do keyword research for PPC", okay?

So then I put "keyword research for PPC" into a keyword research tool. Now I take the top five questions people ask around that. Now I'm going to use entity tools like Clearscope or Content Harmony or something like that to really understand what I need to write here to rank.

So then I write five articles all around that one lesson.

Then, above the fold on all five articles, I link to that lesson and say "Want to learn how to do it with video?" and come up with an offer that resonates with where they're at in intent.

In other words, they intend to learn this. That's why they're searching it. I can satisfy that intent with my product feature, AKA my lesson. And now I also create a content cluster.

So all of these content pieces around this topic are internally linking back to my lesson page, which I'm trying to rank at the bottom of the funnel. And so I'm using middle and top of funnel content with lead gen assets all internally linking and with magnets essentially generating leads for my product.

So instead of trying to generate informational intent leads, I'm trying to generate purchase intent leads.

So their hypothesis of what they want to do with content clusters works for HubSpot. The issue is that getting someone from informational intent to purchase intent is incredibly long and most marketing people won't survive their tenure if they're only focused on driving informational intent leads.

So we try to pivot everything to purchase intent. Does that make sense?

Kathleen: Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying, if I understand correctly, is basically the product page on your site effectively as the pillar.

Garrett: Yup.

Turning product pages into content pillars

Kathleen: The same exact approach applies only you're not writing a 4,000 word guide. You're creating the product page.

Garrett: Yeah. You just audit all the competitors in the industry to say, "Okay, how many words do I need on my product page to rank? How many internal links do I need? How many referring domains do I need?" And then you say, "Cool, now I'm going to create the entity, the topical understanding to Google that we're the best answer to the questions people have related to the product we sell."

And then when you do that whole approach, you're amazing at what you can do when driving MQLs and demos at the bottom of funnel.

What should your SEO strategy look like if you're just getting started?

Kathleen: So one of the things we talked about when when you and I first chatted about this was that, you work with a lot of big companies and they're coming to you and saying, "We're already doing a lot right. How can you take us to the next level?"

But then there is this other school of thought that, if you have, let's say a startup or a new company or a company launching a new product, they have this opportunity to do it right from the beginning -- to greenfield it.

Paint a picture for me of what that looks like. You're starting a new company and you want to really ace it out of the gates.

Garrett: First and foremost, I'm going to look at all the review sites and ask myself how many reviews I need to be perceived as a market leader.

It's the coolest thing in the world, right? Because someone searches now "top whatever software" you sell, and a review site shows up.

You don't actually have to be the best! You might not be because you've only been in the game for a couple of months. But if you can get the reviews there, you look like you're the best and that's 99.9% of marketing.

So first and foremost, we're going to position ourselves to be discoverable. When there's purchase intent, we're going to focus on demand capture, okay? Because to rank our website as a new organization, we don't have the authority, link profile or content, and investing in all those things takes a large financial upfront investment and has a long runway -- probably two years to build that organic engine.

So if you have a 24 month runway to build your organic engine and you need MQLs now, the easiest thing to do is paid SEO.

Now with that being said, we don't want to wait two years to try to rank because now we have another two years to get there, right? So we need to start from the beginning to try to position ourselves organically, to lower our cost per acquisition and have a better CAC-LTV ratio.

So what do we do? We are going to say, when someone searches for your product or your features, we're going to try to create as much bottom of funnel content as possible.

So not only a product page, but a feature page and solution pages. These are saying when someone has pain that your product solves and they go to discover that, can we show up?

Perfect. Next what we're going to do is, we're going to start with our link building.

So one of the things I had to do at Directive is, before we niched into SaaS, we were niched into just B2B. We had a lot of like manufacturers like Pelican Cases and stuff like that. So we had a lot of B2B players as well.

So I couldn't rank for the keyword "B2B SEO", but I wanted to. I didn't have enough authority. My site wasn't large enough. It just wasn't going to happen.

So what I did is I went on Search Engine Journal and I wrote, or Search Engine Land, I think it was, a fresh perspective on B2B SEO. In other words, I used someone else's site to rank for my keyword and they control the narrative.

So with a startup, what you're gonna want to do is, you're going to go on CIO or Tech Crunch and instead of just bragging about how much money you raised, you're going to want to actually try to position yourself for what your buyer journey is like.

We're going to leverage these other third party sites to do what's called guest posting to then rank exceptionally well for these top of funnel queries while internally linking from those guest posts back to our bottom of funnel pages we already built so that we can once again increase our rankings for purchase intent.

So you can actually win at the bottom of funnel faster than people realize because nobody's product pages naturally build links. So if you do a really aggressive link building strategy early, using guest posting where you can control the anchor text and the destination URL to point to bottom of funnel pages, you can grow.

And so then from that guest posting for bottom of funnel, now we'll focus on those products, kind of clusters we were talking about and our blog strategy, as well as Google ads review sites.

And next thing you know, you're 24 months later, you might have one of the best imagine engines in the whole entire industry because you did it right.

How to get executives and subject matter experts to create content

Kathleen: Love it. One of the pieces of pushback I hear often, especially when you're a startup and you don't have a huge team where often your CEO or your CTO are the primary thought leaders and they're busy, I hear a lot of "Oh, we don't have the time to do all that writing."

Any tips for how you can get the goods out of their heads and onto paper in a way that's efficient and scalable?

Garrett: Yeah, the most scalable, best link building and PR you can possibly do is exactly what I'm doing right now. Podcasts.

There's zero preparation for the thought leader. It takes exponentially less time and you have a much more engaged audience than an article.

The best part is, when you guest post and you pitch a guest post, your success rate isn't always as high because not everybody accepts guest posts. Not everybody cares what you have to say. Sometimes editors are busy.

On the flip side, the entire podcast content medium is guest dependent. So Kathleen's job is to secure interesting, engaging hosts for her audience. And so when you pitch Kathleen, you're going to have a much higher success rate than if you pitched Kathleen blog articles because now Kathleen has to edit your blog. She might not agree with your opinions because blogs aren't intrinsically the same format as podcasts. They're not op-ed like podcasts are.

And so the best thing SaaS companies can do right now is link-building via podcast, hands down highest success rate, most scalable, easiest ended up.

Kathleen: I totally agree, but I will say please, for the love of all that is Holy, take two minutes and learn something about the podcast and what it's about and tailor your pitch.

I get pitched a lot, by a lot of podcast booking agents. Generally they're pretty good at doing their homework. But I can't tell you how often I get pitched from people who are like, "So-and-so built his real estate empire and can talk about earning money and like changing your life." And I write back and I'm like, "What does this have to do with inbound marketing? This person sounds like an amazing entrepreneur, but that's not what my podcast is about."

Garrett: I'd say we have over a 75% success rate. So I'd give your audience some tips on how they can pitch. Get their name right. I know it sounds simple. Write a subject line that doesn't stink.

Everything should be about how you make the podcast host's life easier and better for their audience.

What I mean by that is there's a really important word when you do outbound or pitching. You say, "I am emailing you because", and that quickly allows someone to know why.

And then you hit them with why the audience cares, not about yourself.

So a lot of people like to say, "Hey, you know, my client, uh, built his agency from one to $10 million, you know, would love to be a guest on your show. He's been featured by Forbes, Tech Crunch, in the Inc 5,000."

And then the podcast host goes, "Who cares?" Right?

Compared to saying, "I'm emailing you because I'd love to talk with your audience about a topic that I know they care about, that I happen to be an expert in. Here's three different topics I think your audience might be interested in. Do any of these resonate with you?"

Ideally, you want your podcast host to just say "Yes, this one". And then that's all the preparation required and you're good to go and it works.

Kathleen: Yeah, I totally agree. At the last two companies I've been in, it's been a part of my strategy to get my CEO as a guest on podcasts. It's so much easier than trying to get them to write blogs.

I think there's a human connection element of, you hear the person's voice, you get to know their personality, that that draws you in so much more than written content can do. So there's that aspect of it too.

Garrett's advice

Kathleen: Well, any other last words of advice that you think my listeners should know about related to this topic?

Garrett: I guess one of the blessings we have with our portfolio is we have a lot of first party data. So I guess some encouragement.

Since March 1st I wanted to look at what happened across our portfolio. Spend is down 24%, but conversions are down only 18% because click through rates are up, CPCs are down and conversion rates are up.

So here's the really cool part about cost per click advertising is that it scales with demand and doesn't create waste. In fact, at a unit economic level, your advertising is actually more efficient now than it was before.

Is volume down? Yes. But also auction competitiveness is down. See, all CPC advertising and all channels is based on an auction. It's based on inventory. It's like an economic model. Supply and demand.

Well, because fewer advertisers are advertising right now, you're actually able to satisfy the existing demand that does still exist for whatever product or service you sell at a lower rate and you will have better efficiency and effectiveness in your advertising right now than you did before.

That's just at the ad level. It's not necessarily the close rate level or at the volume level. But just at the actual cost per click and cost per acquisition level, it's actually much more efficient right now to advertise, which is kind of cool. That's across over $1 million in spend.

Kathleen: That makes sense. So don't give up your ad budget altogether.

Garrett: Just to meet demand. But remember your ad budget will do that intrinsically. So as long as you're not spending a ton on display and CPM type stuff, you're going to find a ton of efficiency on CPC because fewer people are advertising, thus lowering your cost per click, and there are some people out there buying and you want to make sure you're discoverable to those people. So it's a kind of a cool way to still win right now.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: Absolutely. All right, well switching gears, I have two questions I always ask all of my guests and I'd love to hear what you have to say about these.

The first is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound who my listeners could go check out as an example?

Garrett: I mean, HubSpot's a monster at this. They still are. I know. And everybody knows that.

Kathleen: I'm going to make you tell me someone besides HubSpot though.

Garrett: I know, I know, I know. The thing is, it's a lot harder now to move somebody out of a top 10 ranking. And so you see a lot of people pivoting away from that old school, gated content theory of inbound. And so that's why off the top of my head, I can't think of someone who's like doing that part of it exceptionally well because the game's kinda changed. 

Kathleen: Who do you think is killing it with marketing right now in general?

Garrett: I always like what is Zoom is doing? Because I liked what they did with like offline advertising and I think that's so cool. I think they're really creative in the sense of thinking about how to position themselves.

I love the organizations that are investing heavily in podcast ads. For myself, that's one of my highest performing channels is niche-based podcast ads. I advertise on almost all the SEO or PPC podcasts that I can find because it works exceptionally well at a low CPM.

I like the D2C stuff. I think the D2C people are kicking B2B butt. Like Baboon to the Moon. I love their branding. I think if B2B had a little bit more boldness like this...

Kathleen: Yeah. What did they, I've never heard of them. I'll have to check them out.

Garrett: So yeah, if you want to see somebody who I think is brilliant and actually has a brand opinion and stance and is hyper creative and out there -- Baboon to the Moon.

Drift gets way too much credit for it because I don't actually think they're that good at it from a branding standpoint. They just have a free product so it's a lot easier to act like you're doing really good at it. They like try to take the human side of positioning.

I think Baboon is doing something really cool because they're taking a hyper creative approach and it's like they're on acid. It's like a goldfish on a human's body using their product, but it's brilliant because they are so consistent with it in their messaging, copy, and creative that it actually creates a brand theme that I don't recognize in B2B.

I think B2B organizations need to do a better job creating a brand theme. Like for us at Directive, we're trying to do a lot of people in our branding, but instead of just doing people in our branding, we're also like labeling them with their titles and their names so that it's so people know it's not a stock photo.

So we're trying to bring it to life. We can obviously do it a lot better. We're not nearly as creative as that, but I think if B2B looks at the direct to consumer brands that are doing so well right now, at the end of the day it's very similar if you have a self onboarding SaaS company to a D2C product. It's very still transactional.

And so if you can take your self onboarding, your trial-based SaaS company, and do that, and take that DDC stuff, and build that brand guide and just be really bold and crazy and ambitious with it, I think it'll pay off.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's, and you need to have leaders within the company that are willing to take a risk and be different. There's a lot of sameness in general in marketing and I think when everybody else is going right and you go left, there's a lot of opportunity there.

Garrett: Oh, a trillion percent. It's hard to get that buy in. I mean, I don't know anyone in my portfolio is actually doing it. That's why I'm in my head trying to think. It just starts at the top. You just need a CEO and a board that supports a bold new direction, not just verbally, but actually, and really actually sees it all the way through, especially when they get that first negative feedback or whatever from someone who doesn't like it.

Kathleen: Yeah. There are going to be people who don't like it, that's for sure.

Garrett: B2B is terrified of making anyone feel anything. That's truth, right? They're terrified of if someone doesn't like something. And the point is, the worst marketing is marketing for everybody. And so if you can be bold enough to have people hate you or like you, that's when you actually have marketing.

Kathleen: I totally agree with you.

All right. Second question. The biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that trying to stay on top of the changing landscape of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. And so I'm curious how you personally stay up to date and educate yourself on all of that.

Garrett: I think it's actually less important to stay up to date with things than people think, and here's why.

Most marketers don't have a fundamental belief and a hypothesis of how they approach generating revenue for an organization. What's allowed myself and my organization to be successful is we have a fundamental belief that you need to make a brand discoverable at the bottom of the funnel regardless of channel.

Now, the beauty of that is that it doesn't matter if digital marketing changes. See in 1997 when Google first came out, what was the whole point? People came to people and said, "Hey, I want to show up on this new search engine. How do I do it?" And the answer was, "Well, you need a website." See, the new answer is, "Well, you need reviews for your brand and you need to be positioned."

As long as you don't get married to Capterra and G2, but get married to the idea of showing up when someone has purchase intent for what you sell, everything can change without changing anything because your fundamental belief is that you need to be discoverable when there's purchase intent.

And so my encouragement to people is ground yourself in a fundamental belief of what you actually believe. It's such a critical part of marketing.

If you want to make a ton of money in marketing, you need to actually have opinions. And you actually have to have beliefs and a hypothesis. You have to also be willing to adjust those, but you need to have them.

And so I think if people have a real belief system and fundamental approach and then say we want to be essentially discoverable when there's purchase intent, that allows you to just naturally adjust whatever happens in the market because all you're doing is maintaining your belief.

And that's, I think, what's so important for marketers, is to get away from this idea of, "Oh, what could I try? What new trick or hack can I try in a channel?" to say, "How can I essentially take my belief of discoverability and apply it to all my chanels?"

When you do that, it allows you to stay really even keeled and focus on your customers.

Kathleen: Yeah, and I would add to that, the best marketers I know in many cases are not actually marketers.

You're a great example. You studied economics.

The best marketers I know tend to be the most avid students of human behavior. People who understand people make great marketers because they're focused on the things that are timeless.

It really doesn't matter what Google does with an algorithm because, honestly, Google is just trying to solve for people, right? So if you're focused on people and how they behave and how they buy, none of the bells and whistles matter.

Garrett: Take that same person and then they learn financial modeling. Now you have the best CMOs in the world. People who have a really authentic, true belief of understanding of people and how they buy, and then they also understand financials? You put those two people together -- those are the CMOs of the Fortune 500.

How to connect with Garrett

Kathleen: Amen. I could go on and on about that.

If somebody is listening and wants to learn more about some of this or has a question and wants to get in touch with y ou, what is the best way for them to connect with you online?

Garrett: I'm active on Twitter. I'm @gmehrguth. So first initial, last name. I'm active on LinkedIn. Shoot me an email, it's just initial last name at Directive consulting.

I'd love the chat and help anyone who has questions around demand gen. I'm pretty active on there trying to share all of our data and different tactics and things that we're doing. Almost daily I shared a new tactic or approach and a thread for essentially how SaaS markers can generate revenue.

So if you're interested in that, feel free to follow and engage.

Kathleen: Great. And I'll put all those links to Garett's social profiles and his email in the show notes. So head there to check that out if you want to connect with him.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learn something new, I would greatly appreciate it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a five star review.

We talked a lot about reviews in this interview and we know how important they are, and they are equally as important for podcasts as they are for products. So take a minute and do that. That would mean a lot.

And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview.

That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Garrett.

Garrett: Well, thank you Kathleen. Glad to be here.

What can startup founders learn from the marketing strategies of high growth, silicon valley tech companies?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Traction Hero founder Kate Walling talks about her experience helping VC-backed tech startups develop marketing and business strategies, and the specific things she recommends they focus on to achieve exponential growth.

Highlights from my conversation with Kate include:

• Kate advises early stage tech companies on their marketing and business growth strategies.
• When she starts working with a new company, the first thing Kate looks at is the product and business model to determine whether there are opportunities to use product-led growth.
• After that, she evaluates the company's brand and positioning within the industry, and then focused on the sales team.
• One strategy that Kate has seen several companies use successfully to drive growth is community, and specifically building a community of their customers, users and fans and allowing that community to mostly self-moderate.
• To be successful, Kate says marketers need to be a part of the larger corporate strategy conversations around what the product is, how it will be positioned, what the tech stack is, and how sales will go to market.
• Another effective way to raise your brand profile is to work with industry influencers. Kate says that these do not always have to be paid relationships, and that its important for your marketing team to be aggressive in building relationships.
• If you have a small budget, one of the best ways to gain early traction as a founder is through a personal email newsletter. This is a strategy employed by many of the accelerators. Send it to friends, family, former colleagues, etc., but NOT clients, and share your journey as a startup founder. You can also use this to ask your audience for help and introductions.
• PR is another good way to get the word out at a low cost. While you can always hire a PR agency, there are plenty of opportunities for you to directly pitch yourself to local media, and you can subscribe to HARO and respond to those pitches at no cost.
• Tools like Canva are handy for making marketing collateral that looks like it was created by a designer but really uses templates to look professionally made.
• Kate's advice to founders is not to try and take on too many things. Find a few channels and platforms that are a good fit with your audience, do them well, test and iterate.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit Kate's personal website
• Check out the Traction Hero site
• Email kate at kate[at]katewalling.com
• Following Kate on Twitter @katewalling

Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies you can use as a startup founder (whether you have a big budget or a small one) to hit your growth goals.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Kate Walling, who's the founder and CEO of traction hero. Welcome Kate.

Kate Walling (Guest): Hello Kathleen. I love your podcast.

Kate and Kathleen recording this episode.

Kathleen: Thank you. I'm excited to have you here.

I am going to do a little bit of an announcement for my listeners before we dig in. Um, if you have listened to my last few episodes, you might've heard this, but it's late March, the coronavirus pandemic is happening. We are recording on Zoom and Zoom is having some bandwidth issues. So just saying, if you're listening, be patient with us. If the audio gets a little funky from time to time, we're going to do our best and hope that Zoom holds up for us as we go.

But, these are interesting times we're living in. Lots of people working remotely, lots of people using video conferencing software. So it is what it is.

But with that said, welcome Kate. Can you please tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and Traction Hero?

About Kate Walling and Traction Hero

Kate: Absolutely. So let me try to make this the short version of the story.

I've been an entrepreneur since a really young age. I started my first startup at 23, which was a consumer facing startup. I've kind of been an entrepreneur since then, although I've had a corporate stint.

I'm in the middle because at one point I realized that being an entrepreneur from a young age means that you don't understand corporate structure and you just hit some walls because you have a lack of understanding.

So I've also worked in a public tech company here in Silicon Valley and now I'm back with Traction Hero, which is a marketing agency for startup companies where right now we provide a lot of tech companies with on demand services just as they need it. So basically they can email with a quick project they need done and we turn it around in a couple of hours.

So it's really good for companies that have large budgets, but not enough team. Basically there's a lot of those.

And then we're also slowly building out services that are really focused on the deliverable so that startups can say, "I need a market research study done" or "I need a new identity."

Everything is focused toward what needs to happen to get that done. So as you know, when you're doing a lot of projects, you've got to have a writer, a designer, a printer, all these different people, and it's very stressful for marketers. There's not really been a solution so far where they can just cross that thing off the list and know that the whole thing is getting done.

So that's what we're working toward, is really solutions that help marketers get stuff done as they need it. 

Kathleen: I love that you personally have been a startup founder and that you've done a lot of work with startup founders because I'm personally passionate about that. I have been a business owner. I've started a couple of different businesses.

Having walked in the shoes of the founder, I think you described it so well where there's so many things that need to get done. And that's just from a marketing standpoint, right? You're wearing all the hats when you're in a startup. You could be the owner, the chief salesperson and the marketer as well as other things. And in those early days it can be really hard to zero in on, what are the most important things I should be doing in order to gain traction?

That is one of the reasons, FYI, that I love your company name. You stay focused without falling victim to shiny object syndrome or you know, working so much in the business and not on the business, et cetera. It's a challenging, challenging time.

Kate: It is. And I think, you know, marketing's been already challenging for a number of years because the MarTech stack keeps getting larger and, and Silicon Valley, the budgets keep getting larger, but your team size doesn't.

But marketing is getting more and more responsibility for profit and loss. So there's a lot of pressure and I think what I hear from clients is, what you're saying, is that this was a different style with Traction Hero. And that's because I've personally been through the technology accelerator programs.

I am on my fourth startup. I really know what it's like. The interesting thing is that I started this agency model in Seattle. I built an agency in Seattle before I came down to Mountainview California and the model works so well, so it's called scrappy face and it was scrappy, right?

And we just went in and we helped these funded tech companies and we just moved as fast as we could. And we had a great team.

I closed the agency because I went through a divorce and growing a company really quickly in the middle of a divorce in a city that was always raining is brutal to say the least.

But the model was so interesting and when I went into corporate tech, what I realized is that I kind of thought their needs would be different. What I saw was just maybe limited, but it really wasn't, it was pretty much the same concerns of "I've got money, I don't have enough people to spend it." You know, "I don't have enough hands."

And then marketing has gotten so specialized that you can't possibly hire enough people to do all these things well, like they can't be experts at everything. So, you know, I'm a big proponent now of having smaller marketing teams, but knowing how to get more done quickly and having whatever workforce you need, that's really fluid.

Kathleen: I love that.  should take a step back because this topic, when you talk about startups, I feel like it's a Rorschach test because the word "startup" can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. And for some people, they hear "startup" and they think little, you know, two or three person company. And yes, of course every startup has to start somewhere.

But then there are startups that are incredibly well funded, VC funded, that go from being one or two people to 20 to 30 people within a span of a month. When I think the conversation we're having, it's more around that high growth startup, not that little company that's gonna slog along for five years. We're talking about, you know, startups that have a lot of potential that need to move fast.

I think that's really key here. That's the experience I've had working in startups, is that it's all about speed, especially if you're looking for investment. Because as soon as you bring on investors, there are high expectations. There are benchmarks you have to hit. There are thresholds that you need to get to. And all of that needs to happen really quickly.

And you're right, you know, you couldn't possibly hire enough people to do that and you can't have a team that includes the world's best in everything, right? Because you'd need to segment out each little thing you do and hire a different person for it.

So what's the best way to move ahead? And the other element of that that, I think, is so interesting is this need to balance brand with demand generation because those are two really important components. And especially if you're in a high growth startup, you absolutely need demand generation. There is no company that doesn't, but brand is really important these days.

How early stage startups can quickly gain traction

Kate: So like, yeah, how do you do all the things? It's so hard and I mean, you bring up a great point first. Defining "startup" is important. I think right now I do tend to concentrate on the tech startups that are scaling and have money. I also tend to help entrepreneurs that are somehow very well resourced and there's an opportunity that needs to move quickly. Those were the fun ones.

That can be anywhere. It's like there's been a regulatory or legal change and so it's presented this opportunity and you've got to go fast to take advantage of that opportunity.

So that looks different different ways, but it's typically those two categories in terms of entrepreneurs who are working on a smaller project or evolving it. There's so many tools now that they can use that would save them so much money that I think just having that right tool stack is a better situation.

But back to your question about balancing brand and demand gen. It's super hard and I think what I used to do is go month by month, quarter by quarter in my corporate role and say "What are the business objectives here? And so what does what makes the most sense?"

So if all of a sudden the sales team is growing from 40 to 90, right? I've got to get the demand gen up and going. I've got to get tools in place to deal with that. And that evolves into other things like what type of sellers are they? How are these tools going to work together?

Whereas if the brand is newer or there's been a change in the industry or there's some kind of potential in terms of content or positioning, you go on the brand side.

I think you just have to kind of reevaluate it every several weeks when you're, when you're at scale, when you're trying to work with scale.

Kathleen: Yeah. It's funny that you say that because I think the last month or two have been the best example of why it's important to reevaluate every few weeks because I can speak for myself.

I had a beautiful 90 day marketing strategy that I finished at the end of January. I'm a big believer in planning in quarters and adjusting in months.

And so I had the strategy put together and I was starting along my merry way, implementing my strategy and then coronavirus hit and blew it all up.

I feel like I, I, you know, I want to do air quotes, "go into work every week." You know, I'm not going anywhere. I'm working out of my house right now. And the priority is constantly changing based on the current fire.

And I say that not meaning that like, the house is on fire and the company's in jeopardy. That's not our case. In fact, oddly we have an increase in demand because of what our product does.

But, it's about pivoting and shifting and recognizing now it's all about remote work and you know, that sort of thing. And that's different than what I had planned out, but when things are moving fast, you gotta be able to go with it.

Kate: You do. And I think, you know, in terms of the virus, it's the emotional roller coaster for us personally. It's the same with business.

And I think it's that way with most parts of businesses, right? It's like, "Oh, I don't know if I have enough toilet paper. I don't know if I have enough this or the National Guard is moving in," you know?

So it's like, every day, assessing where things are and what your needs are. And I'm seeing that with my clients. The first week was about "What should we be doing? Should we do a campaign?" So we do an email and alert people of what services we're changing.

Now it's moved to, "Okay, competitively, what do we need to do? What's going on in the industry? What's the overall campaign, you know, with our overall strategy here?" And that strategy ends up being not just marketing, that's the whole business offering. We need to move products.

But marketing from my observation right now, which is, you know, limited in the grand scheme of things, marketing is driving some of those business questions, right? Because you can't go to a marketer right now and say, "I need you to do something about this virus." The marketer has to say, "Well wait, what are we, what are we offering here?"

You can't just throw together some kind of campaign or ad without meaning. I mean, this is not a, um, you know, "throw a graphic on it" type of problem.

How do VC-backed startups approach marketing?

Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So let's put the pandemic aside for a minute because I feel like we could have an entire episode on that and I may need to do that at some point soon.

My curiosity has been peaked by what you said about how you tend to work with these well-resourced, need-to-move quickly, but potentially bandwidth-constrained companies. I think what is really interesting about that is that a lot of marketers see those kinds of companies that do grow really fast and they think, "What are they doing? What is the secret sauce? What's happening behind the scenes that's enabling them to go so quickly?"

Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect it's not that they're just throwing money at the problem. It has to be more of, yes, you need money, but what are you going to do with that money that supports a really high growth kind of scenario?

So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and pull back the curtain on, if somebody does come to you and say, you know, we just got VC funding, we've got to triple the size of this company in a year. We've got the budget to do it. As a marketer, what kinds of things are you doing and looking at for them?

Kate: The first thing I look at is, is there anything in their model that should be evaluated overall for marketing in terms of distribution or influence?

For scalability, like you said, it's demand gen and brand. However, for a lot of things it's, is there something that needs to be built into the product from a marketing positioning standpoint or differentiation to make sure that that scale can happen with the brand and demand gen tools?

That's one of my favorite parts and that's where your puzzles come in. So if you're a SaaS company, do you need to be offering some kind of certification program because you need more people using the software? What are the different channels? How is that working?

I think getting a grasp on, is there something from a business model perspective that needs to happen?

The other thing is, a lot of companies at that point have some juggernauts, right? Like, we're seeing churn is hitting here and it's too high, or we're seeing these little scenarios happen with customers, or our lifetime value is off.

So we start trying to troubleshoot some of those things so that, that first step is really about marketing and the product and the operations of the business, and then also what needs to be worked out before you scale.

There are usually some major learnings there.

Once those kinks have been ironed out, we start looking at where are we positioned in the industry? Where is brand awareness? And then what is the plan with the sales team?

So if you've got two sellers and you're going to hire maybe one more, that's a pretty basic stack because you don't want to build anything too complicated until you understand, are these relationship-based sellers, are these more tech savvy sellers?

There's a difference in the tools required.

So you can do something more basic in the meantime, just getting them basic collateral, making sure they have that stuff on the brand side.

You start wanting to do more PR, more on positioning and really claiming your spot in the industry landscape.

Then, as your sales team picks up, so when you start getting to like 20, 40, 50 up and up sellers, you're looking at a lot more sophisticated systems. You're usually looking at a change of how sales works. So if you have inside sales reps, how are they working, how are they using your marketing software?

You get into really complex software decisions, and that's usually driven by marketing.

How can startups use product-led growth?

Kathleen: There's so much there. I have so many questions I want to ask you. Let's go back to one of the first things you said, which is that you actually begin in many cases by looking at product.

So it sounds like what you're talking about is product led growth, and really going in and looking at what are the opportunities to bake something in -- the product that we have that can itself be a growth driver.

I would love it if you could just talk a little bit more about that.

Kate: It's both from a positioning standpoint, and distribution comes up.

That comes up with SaaS companies a lot. And positioning can come up with B2C, right, of like what is this particular opportunity here?

With direct to consumer you see it because you'll see, like, consumer products that are extremely well designed or they're really hip or something like that. So that's where you'll see that brand move play in really big.

And, and usually with D2C, that's part of the initial product development. But sometimes that can come in as like, how do we do that?

Sometimes it can be, with B2C, how do we build a community around the product, right? So some companies are doing a really good job of using Facebook groups. I think Facebook groups are amazing for marketers right now of, we're going to liberate our whole community and let them build with one another. But what are the rules of that?

So I think there's just a lot there in terms of B2C, it depends. If it's a commodity-based business, it's harder. A lot harder, right? You're looking at, how do we feel different to the buyer? How do we provide a different experience?

If we're not really offering something different, can we deliver it different? Is there really strong brand value that can go throughout the whole company and how would that be protected?

So it really has a lot of different shapes. Think of channel partners or technology partners who are taking our API and installing it.

But is there something more? Is there a way to even scale it bigger than that? Right? Like get like a whole group of individuals selling this thing for you.

So I think it's really out of the box type thinking. And generally at this point, you know, the startup's been going for awhile, they've had some success, they're ready to, you know, commit, and they're ready to scale. They're leaning that way. So it's a really good time to do this work.

How marketers can play a role in the broader business strategy?

Kathleen: You're coming in as a marketing advisor. At the same time though, it goes to the core of the business strategy. It's not just a marketing strategy.

If you're talking about putting an evangelist program in place or changing elements of the product or building a certification program, some of these are business strategies.

So how do you navigate that conversation? Because I think often marketers are really challenged with, we're really comfortable staying in our marketing lane. But a lot of the times, when we get out of that lane -- and sometimes it manifests as, you know, we're starting to make recommendations about sales software, other times it's like the things you're talking about that can get rocky if you don't do it right -- how do you approach that?

Kate: Yeah, that's a great statement. It's so true with this early stage stuff that I'm talking about. It's typically before a startup has hired a CFO or a senior level marketer. And so you're working directly with the CEO and they have some marketing resources. They'll have a small agency, they'll have a couple freelancers, right?

Part of their problem is that they don't know who to hire. And most of the time what I tell them is you can't make that hiring decision yet. We don't know what the marketing is, so we don't know what type of marketer to hire, you know?

So I'm a huge proponent of fractional CMOs because I think it's just too early and you don't want to get the wrong person. There's a lot at stake. And I think a lot of startups at that base, they've got revenue coming in, hire a CMO to come in four hours a week and figure this out slowly.

And who realizes that you're going to hire for that position when you know what the direction is? So that's more early stage. And the company usually has maybe five to 10 employees, but marketing's not built out yet at all.

Later on is where you get really more tricky. You've got someone in charge of sales and they have a particular way that they're hiring. Then as a marketer, you're supposed to bring in demand gen, right? And the demand gen you need to bring in is a different skillset than the sellers have. And the sellers were not aware of the software that you have to do.

In my corporate role, it was a rollout plan. I started with HubSpot and got people used to this idea, this is what's going on and why.

Then I moved into Marketo, which is super hard.

Kathleen: I just went in the opposite direction. I went from a company with Marketo to a company with HubSpot and I'm like, "Thank God. It's so much easier."

Kate: And then with Marketo, the sales team was growing. We had to do much more sophisticated type rules and stuff too, because all of a sudden you can have a sales team and you start bringing in all these leads and a sales team does not care.

They don't care. And they're not gonna answer them. And you've got a cultural problem of you have to educate them toward how do you deal with these leads, what it means, their job and that it is, and you have to have support from the management team that this is going to be required.

There's a whole lot and it just really depends on who you're working with and what their background is. You have to take it one step, one day at a time.

So I think it just depends on the team. It depends on where people are. You have to be pretty fluid marketer. You have to be able to say, "This is what I need and it's going to be a process and I'm going to have to get buy in. And so how do I do that?" So you have to be patient.

Kathleen: I think you raised something really important, which is, when you're coming into the job, you're at an advantage because you're working with a CEO. But just one thing I've learned is that when you, when you're in those hiring conversations, you have to, you have to have a conversation about that. I might be making some recommendations that are outside of what you might think of as marketing. How are you going to feel about that? Are you open to it? Are you willing to keep an open mind?

You know, really, really figuring out that the personality type of the founder, the CEO, and whether they're willing to listen and, and consider other things I think is so important at that stage of a company.

Kate: Critical.

Specific strategies that startups can use to drive exponential growth

Kathleen: Moving onto something else. You said you started talking about community and I love that topic. I could talk about it forever. And I guess this is, this is part of a bigger question I have, which is, I'd love it if you could share some examples of what you have seen work really well to fuel fast growth in some of the companies you've worked with.

And maybe we could start with community because I came from a company a few jobs ago where we built a very large community and it was huge for us and it was a Facebook community. Through that experience I became really passionate about that.

So that's just one example but, but there may be others. So, specific things that you have seen really deliver for the companies you've worked with.

Kate: It's different for B2B and B2C. So I'll start with B2C because it's the easy, fun one.

What I'm seeing right now that I love are these Facebook groups around certain products.

This is not a client of mine, but it's actually a product I use. There was, what's it called, the meal delivery company that I was using for awhile when I had really busy days. It was all plant-based food and then they had this Facebook group and you could join it and people were just sitting there and they let people post whatever they want. They can sit there and post like "I really hate this smoothie. How am I going to get through this or am I supposed to do this later or not?"

And it's super interesting to watch how that worked because the community moderated the community members for the brand. Brilliant.

People will say, you know, "I did lose weight, I did not lose weight. This is really more about health." And so you start seeing these advocates come up and then they would use those advocates for their Instagram stories and other things.

So that organic way of building a community that moderates itself is really interesting.

Now initially, you have those questions about when do we step in and when do we not, and how do we moderate? I think if you can get by with moderating lightly, but you know, the feel of the brand is so positive, right? So that's a brand value that you have less of those issues but they're going to come up. But I think you have to have a very careful strategy about how to moderate that.

The other thing that people are using a lot on B2B is obviously these micro influencers. There's some startups paying a lot of money for this and it's all over the place. Traction on that sort of slowed down the end of last year and now I'm starting to see clients pick back up on interest in that because everybody's at home and online, right? So we're starting to feel like there's opportunity there.

I'd say if you can build your own organic community, that would be ideal, right? If you can't, you can use these micro influencers and that's great content as well.

I talked to someone last week and their product's working and they're sold out, and they've gotten all this influencer marketing and that helped. But then all of a sudden years later, they don't have brand values.

And so when you're needing to do more, you're needing to build content, you're needing to build demand and you're needing to build, you know, other parts of marketing, if you don't have those brand values built out, then all of a sudden you're like, well, who are we? We were using everyone else for the voice.

So you'll run into that for B2B. It's true here.

I think some of this comes to hiring.

So what I've seen work really well is that you become friends with all the influencers in the industry and you sponsor their podcast and you appear on their podcasts and you go to their events and you just kind of make sure the team knows who the influencers are.

And then you do everything you can to get involved with people at every level. You'll have local events and you'll bring the people in that you know, in that city and have them share their stories.

And so it's a constant kind of industry networking. I've seen that work really, really well on the B2B side. But it's definitely different.

Kathleen: It's so interesting that you say that because I've seen that work really well too, where people have formed strategic relationships with industry influencers and sometimes, not paid as you say. It doesn't always have to be paid. It could just be really showering them with love in the form of, you know, having them on your podcast or going on theirs or commenting and sharing and making introductions.

I worked for a marketing agency for awhile and they did this exact thing and their way of forming those relationships was by offering to make personal branding websites for influencers. That was a great way to get to know them. Then you've done them a favor.

So there are a lot of different ways that that that can be done. I think that's really smart.

How to hit big growth goals on a small budget

Kathleen: You work with well-resourced companies that are able to do a lot of these things. Any lessons learned or suggestions for companies that don't have those giant budgets? What are some things they can do in the early days?

Kate: Oh yeah. I love the scrappy brands and helping startup founders. So I advise a lot of startup companies. I love this part of the work cause I obviously identify with it a lot.

Being an entrepreneur for so long, I think, you know, when founders are trying to grow a brand unlimited budget, one thing I always bring up is never forget about email, because if you create an email list of your friends and family and colleagues and anyone that you meet with, those people become very loyal to your process.

If you share with them where you are and what you're going through and what you need help with, they will help. It will absolutely help.

I've seen that be really successful.

Now your tone has to be right because nobody owes you anything and you want to be entertaining and kind of make them feel a part of it. And that's part of the email structure, right? Of like, "Here's what's happening and you know, these exciting things are happening, these challenges are happening. Here's how you can help."

That is the basic format that does incredibly well. And that is one of the main marketing tricks that comes out of the Silicon Valley tech accelerators.

They have all their founders do a weekly email and it works.

I, on my own, I've had open rates of like 90% or higher, very high.

Kathleen: I want to talk about that for a second because I'm fascinated by this. I also believe strongly in email.

I also think that people think of email as this old, tired, dead strategy, but there's some really interesting things being done in the world of email right now.

So you're talking about founders doing a weekly email. Can you peel the layers of that back a little bit for me? What does that look like? Who does it go to?

Kate: Sure. So this is not client facing or customer facing. My personal list is maybe 200 people and it's my closest friends, my family members, colleagues I've worked with for years, people that I've met with on this journey.

So it's people that know what you're up to and what you're striving for basically. But not clients.

Clients and customers would get something different. They don't need to understand the process.

So that email list is specific for friends and family colleagues.

And what you do is, every time you send, you add more people that you've met along the way.

I usually start it with like "Hi friends" or something like that. And then I usually say something seasonal about what's happening in the world and that I'm thinking about them because I am. All these people, they're cheering you on.

And then I'll typically say, if you're new to the list, here's a link to the previous email, right? So that there's some sort of context in there drawn into the story correctly.

And then I'll put some kind of update about where I am or what challenges are happening. And it's usually interesting stuff because when you're building a business, you hit all kinds of things in the world that are happening.

So for example, with Traction Hero, there've been changes in California privacy law, changes in California employment law that have really changed the model. And that stuff is interesting. If you're not in it all day long, it's pretty interesting.

So share the challenges you have.

And then I usually say, "Here's the ways you can help. So if you just open your social accounts, we're now on Instagram. Would love if you would follow," and people will, they'll do it.

Or "If you happen to know a friend who knows anything about X, Y, or Z, would you mind connecting me?" They will.

This technique is straight from accelerator programs and it is a good one.

Kathleen: Do you add these people to the list or do you ask them if they want to opt in? How does that work?

Kate: I add them. I often will mention it to them. Like, "I'm going to add you to my newsletter. Let me know if it's okay."

You're not doing it for a business so the rules are different. This is actually a question I'm curious to know. I mean I still send, so my recommendation is, I send it through MailChimp, their most basic template. And the reason why is people can unsubscribe. It does hurt your feelings a little bit more when someone does that you know.

It's also interesting because if sometimes there'll be like a vendor or somebody and if they offer, I've actually had this happen, someone unsubscribed and I was like, then you're not interested enough in my story for me to pay you.

Kathleen: Yeah. Right.

Kate: Like, if you're not interested enough in this email because this is just basically what's happening with my business, if you're not interested in that, then I mean, I don't think that we'd be a good fit in terms of working together. I mean, I'm not bothering you.

It's like once every six months, I mean slow, but I used to try to do them once a month.

MailChimp's most basic template is perfect. And just text. I mean I throw in, maybe, you know, if I done a new logo design or something, throw it in. But keep it pretty simple. And that way people can unsubscribe.

Kathleen: I'm a big fan of not overly designing emails. I mean these days, most people have the images in their emails turned off by default. And so if you've got a lot of design in there, it just doesn't get seen half the time anyway.

And it looks crappy to have a lot of those image boxes. Like, "Turn your image on," you know, it just doesn't look good. So simpler is better all around with email in my opinion.

Kate: Yeah, I know, I totally agree. And that MailChimp basic template's nice. The fonts big, it works well on mobile. It's, it's a nice one.

These emails still take, I'm going to say it like if I'm fast, two hours. They still take time.

You don't want to bother anybody and you want it to be entertaining and you want it to be, you know, uplifting, even if you're talking about your challenges.

The most important thing is tone. I've seen some of these founder emails and if you use the wrong tone, people are like, "No thanks."

Kathleen: So what is the right tone?

Kate: I think it's friendly and I think it's engaging. You know, I don't think it's like, "Hi friends, hope you're enjoying this day. Please like my Facebook page, please sign up, please send me people who should be customers."

It's not about a million asks. People have a lot going on in their lives.

It's more of like, "Here's what's going on with building this startup right now. Here's what I'm trying to do. Here are the challenges I'm having. And that's interesting to people, because a lot of people haven't gone through it or want to go through it. And you know, entrepreneurship is never a straight line at all. 

Kathleen: I love that idea. I mean, that's something that really any founder in any industry can do. I think for some it's going to put them in a place of discomfort because a lot of the founders I've met don't like talking about themselves that much, which is kind of funny because you're going to have to at some point as a founder. 

But I think that's neat because that's something you can do that doesn't take really any money, that just takes your time.

Kate: I'd say founders who have marketing backgrounds definitely have a hand up on this one.

In tech accelerators, what would happen is I would send in mine first and then whoever in my batch would typically take mine and copy it. So people need examples of this.

Email me and I'll send you one of my past ones because it does help to see some kind of, you know, formula that's worked for people and it's so much easier for marketers.

Kathleen: I love that. So maybe we'll put Kate's email in the show notes and you can email her and say, Hey, I need your newsletter so you can see what it looks like.

So you had, you said you had some other things to be on that and I took you on a tangent with that one. 

Kate: So other things on my list.

Definitely write industry articles on LinkedIn so that you're showing industry expertise and what you're learning. I think that's very important just to start showing industry expertise and that you're connected to the industry.

The other thing I'll say is look for media stories where you might fit in and ping the journalists.

So a quick side story, do we have time for that?

Kathleen: Yeah, go for it.

Kate: When I started my Seattle agency, I had just been through this issue of what's called domain front running, which is when you go in and you're buying a domain and before you can hit checkout, someone takes it from you. So they're capturing it on the domain register thing.

Well, King Five, the big news station in Seattle ran a story about how these guys were making all this money on domain names and how it was such an innovative business.

Well, I got the journalist name and I sent them an email and I said, "I totally disagree with you. This is really bad for entrepreneurs. It's, you know, it's not right. There's some negative things happening that are just unfair."

So they came to the office and filmed me talking about the story about how someone stole my domain name and then sold it back to me for a lot more money than if I'd just been able to push the button. And that was a great opportunity.

I've had a lot of luck. You know, my first startup was around printing cookbooks and I had a lot of luck just calling local news stations and cooking on air. Free PR.

I've gotten a lot of clients placed, um, if you have a consumer based business, there are a lot of news stations that their lunchtime, they'll have like a third hour, they have a third hour. It's usually lifestyle and you can get pretty easily placed on it if you have some sort of presence and something to talk about. They need people for that lifestyle hour.

So always look for PR and media opportunities.

Kathleen: Yeah. And I would say a great resource for that also is help a reporter out -- HARO. I mean that's a no brainer. It doesn't cost anything. You subscribe to it, you get an email, however many times a day with reporters looking for sources for stories. It can be overwhelming, but it also is full of opportunity.

Kate: Yeah, if you have gmail, you can put on a label and then go in and look when you have time. But yeah, that's an awesome recommendation.

Podcast interviews are great. You find people like yourself and you have similar topics and interests.

There are websites like Canva that make building marketing collateral so easy and you look like you know what you're doing design-wise and it doesn't cost you extra money.

So by all means, make your decks, make your one pagers, make collateral for all these different use cases. Think about collateral.

Kathleen: Oh my God, I have to stop you and just say, I am the biggest Canva fan girl on the planet. I am not a designer. I do not know how to use the Adobe suite to design anything.

That's the one thing I've just realized. I'm not, I don't have the aptitude for it, but I can go into Canva and make the most beautiful things and I do it probably four times a day. I love it. Yes. It's amazing.

Kate: Yeah. Canva, huge. When you get later on in your startup and you have to have brand differentiation and you know, you don't want to use simple stuff, that's different. Early on, use Canva, print this stuff, have leave behinds for customers.

It doesn't cost that much money to just really work on your marketing collateral.

I think also when you're on the topic of press, look at your local press opportunities, where can you talk at local events, whatever works locally. We'll end up working in different geographies and at larger scale. So learn locally first and that stuff is free. It just takes time.

And also work on your industry. So look, so look at this stuff in terms of, are you being, are you B2B or B2C? So where does that fall in? Then look at your media, look at it local and look at an industry as well.

And then you want to start growing your community in terms of media.

I see entrepreneurs, it's kind of painful to see that they're trying to do all the platforms and it's terrible on all of them.

Just choose the ones that are most relevant and a couple to start and just start figuring it out.

There's some great tools. A lot of people are saying, "Well, I don't want Twitter because it's not working."

Okay. But the thing about it, the people who are on Twitter right now are really passionate and they stay on it. They're a very, very, very passionate bunch.

My favorite Twitter tool for growing a Twitter audience is called Jooicer, which is J. O. O. I. C. E. R. Have you seen it? It's awesome. It's like 30, 40 bucks and will grow your Twitter audience for you beautifully.

So you know, find tools like that.

And again, like we were saying with Canva, you can make beautiful social media posts in Canva since you now have to have more designed content. Use Canva for that. 

Kathleen: Yeah, I love this and I will tell you right now as the head of marketing at a startup, I use Canva, I use helper a reporter out.

I totally, totally agree with you on those suggestions. Those are great.

Kate's advice for startup founders

Kathleen: Well we are running low on time. So any last words of advice for startup founders out there who really want to take that fast path to growth?

Kate: Yeah, I think the important thing is to try to not get overwhelmed. And so what I recommend doing is, do a list of 10 to 15 different things. You can try figure out a small test for that, that's feasible. Like, if it's an ad unit, put enough money so it's actually worth the test and go through and test them and concentrate on one thing, like one thing a week, step by step by step.

If you try to do it all at one time, you get really overwhelmed and it ends up not diluting the quality of it. So, one foot in front of the other is what I always tell people.

Kathleen: Yeah. That's good.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: Now changing gears because I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. We're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. So when you think about inbound, is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really doing it well?

Kate: The first thing that popped in my mind was not what you asked. It was a company that helps people do it well. I really like Unbounce for landing pages. I think you can get a very beautiful landing page up quickly.

I would have to think on that. I think, sorry, I was not prepared for this one.

Kathleen: That's okay. Unbounce is a good suggestion actually. I can just keep that.

Kate: Okay. I'm a huge proponent of Unbounce. There are other cheaper tools, but I really like the quality of Unbounce.

Kathleen: Yeah, they're a great company. Second question, the biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that they can't keep pace with all of the different ways that digital marketing is changing. So how do you personally stay up to date with all of it?

Kate: Being an agency owner, I've spent a lot of time and resources going through MarTech tools and organizing them. If anybody wants these reports, just please email me.

And that helped organize my brain a lot and help me understand if I was doing the right thing or not. So we've done reports where we analyze CRM tools. There's one on website development tools. We've got one on email marketing and one on marketing automation.

What those reports did, because in my head I just couldn't keep it all straight, was say here are the solutions, here are all the features that they all have comparatively. And then here are the integrations they have.

Because I think what's so hard about MarTech right now is it's not only like I like this product, so I've got 20 products I have to put together.

And when you're going out to buy, it's, it's not a great way for marketers to have to spend time of like, which tool, and having to analyze this themselves.

So one of my goals to help marketers is to say, here's some reports. Go through everything that you need to know and hopefully you can pick a tool or at least narrow it down to two or three that you should get a free trial on before you commit to it.

So I think any website like that, save yourself time on evaluating tools. Find people who've done the research for you. I think that that is really overwhelming.

Kathleen: That's so true. It is. It's a lot. There's so many MarTech tools now.

How to connect with Kate

Kathleen: All right, well we're just about out of time. So Kate, if somebody's listening and they want to learn more about you or traction hero or they want to reach out and ask a question, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Kate: Katewalling.com is my personal website and Tractionhero.com is for the agency. It's a very landing page type website. Right now we're kind of building, um, by doing the work first.

You can always reach out to me on my email, which is kate[at]katewalling.com or Twitter, which my handle is @Katewalling.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: All right, fantastic.

If you're listening and you liked what you've heard or you learned something new, please head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcasts a five star review so we can get in front of some more folks just like you.

And of course, if you know anybody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest.

That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Kate. Stay healthy.

Kate: Thank you so much for having me.

How does Charles Alexander generate anywhere from 100% to 1200% ROI for his customers using animated explainer videos?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, small business advisor and video creator Charles Alexander explains how he helps customers create animated explainer videos, and how those videos are quickly generating huge returns on investment.

From why and when to use an animated explainer, to how the video production process works and how companies can use animated explainer videos in their marketing and sales process, Charles shares a wealth of knowledge on these types of videos, along with how you can create them yourself if you don't want to outsource.

Highlights from my conversation with Charles include:

• Charles is a small business coach who also has a business creating 90 second explainer videos.
• He specializes in working with people in an advisory role (ex. real estate agents, insurance agents, financial advisors, etc.) and helping them more clearly explain how they stand out from the competition.
• Charles says that 80% of online traffic today is video, and whether people like to admit or not, video is one of the main ways we all consume information.
• Unfortunately, many people are either very uncomfortable being on camera or very awkward when they are, and an animated video is an inexpensive way of reaping the rewards of video without having to put a subject matter expert on camera.
• The main reason to create video of any kind is to build what Charles calls a "know, like and trust factor" with your audience.
• Many people are uncomfortable or awkward being on video, and creating animated videos is one way to move quickly with video even where the subject matter expert either cannot or will not appear on video themselves.
• Charles's process for creating videos begins with his customer filling out a six question form that is all about their end client. He asks about the people they work with, the problem they solve, how they solve the problem, why they're different, what the steps are, and what the end result is.
• From that, he writes a 250 word script, which equates roughly to a 90 second finished video.
• 90 seconds is the sweet spot because anything shorter makes it hard to get a point across, and with anything longer, it can be tough to hold the attention of your audience.
• This also forces his customer to strip away all of the jargon and useless information that they might typically include on their websites and boil everything down to a simple story that is customer-focused.
• From there, Charles sends the finished script to a professional voice over artist, marries the audio with video that he creates, and produces a finished product.
• Charles has created a 12 point checklist that walks his clients through how they can use their animated explainer videos in their marketing and sales. It includes advice on using it for social media, on your website homepage, and in follow up emails to customers and prospects.
• The cost to create an animated explainer video can range anywhere from $300 to $20,000. Charles charges $999 for one video, but also offers packages with volume discounts.
• For many of Charles's customers, the payback period on this investment is very quick. He's had customers who have used his videos in their marketing and sales process and almost immediately closed new deals. For one client, landing one new customer meant 100% ROI, and for another, one new customer from a video translated to 1200% ROI.
• Charles is very transparent and shared that he uses software called VYOND to create his videos. He says anyone can do it, but it makes sense financially to outsource because of the learning curve and the amount of time you would need to spend.

Resources from this episode:

• Check out Charles' website at www.yourcharlesalexander.com
• Connect with Charles on LinkedIn
• Follow Charles on Facebook
• Check out some examples of videos that Charles has created for business owners, financial management companies, and insurance agencies.

Listen to the podcast to learn when to use animated explainers, and how they can help grow your business.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Charles Alexander, who is an expert in making story-based animated explainer videos. Welcome Charles.

Alessio and Kathleen recording this episode.

Charles Alexander (Guest): Thank you so much Kathleen. I appreciate you guys having me on.

About Charles Alexander

Charles: Just real quick about me. I have a couple of things that I do. I am a full time, small business coach and right now I am as about as busy as I have ever been working with small business owners in a trying time.

But also I have started, probably three years ago, creating 90 second explainer videos for people in an advisory role. A lot of financial advisors, insurance agents and other people that consider themselves advisers on what they're doing to stand out in the corral, work with their potential clients and really tell the story of how they help them

Kathleen: Love it. That's the perfect segue into me saying, if you're listening, this is the first inbound success podcast interview I have done now that the world, or at least the United States, is kind of quarantined and, and we're all working out of our homes.

And so I'm gonna preface this with, we're probably going to have audio issues on this interview because I'm using Zoom to record and I don't know how many of you out there listening have been using Zoom, but the world has definitely discovered it as a tool for video conferencing.

And so it is great for zoom. But they're having some bandwidth issues. If I had a crystal ball, I'd say that there are going to be some audio glitches as we talk today.

So if you're listening, please have patience. Bear with us. We're going to do the best we can to get through it as I know everyone is doing during this time, but you know, it's important to keep things going.

So with that, Charles, how did you get into making animated explainer videos?

How Charles got started making animated explainer videos

Charles: So, as I said, I am also a small business coach for a small business development center. And about four or five years ago, I decided I needed to probably eat some of my own dog food so to speak. And I thought, "Oh, there's a variety of things that I'm capable of doing." I always write, create content, training material.

So I started out by doing some website content and email marketing for CPAs and banks. And one of the very first CPAs I made a pitch to, I had basically three tiered pricing -- anchor pricing, same as the rest of us. And one of the pitches was the high highest price item was that I would take the written content and create videos out of it.

Well at the time, I really didn't know how to create videos. I was using that to get them to pick the middle pricing.

The only videos I had made at that point were home videos. So I had to quickly learn on the fly. And the first few I made were pretty bad. They were actually a bunch of still images of me doing the voiceover.

And for you guys listening out there, this is a very Southern accent. You know it's cute for about five minutes and then it wears on you.

Either way. I made videos. Even though the videos were bad, they still beat the written content and I realized I was quickly on to something.

So from there I'll fast forward to where I am today. I learned a variety of different softwares, finally settled in on one that really works, have a formula that works for creating a story for my clients that helps them stand out and be set apart.

So this is, you know, the part time gig is basically the equivalent now we're bigger than the full time gig and I work exclusively with a bunch of fine folks that are out there trying to create some kind of content that ties everything else together.

And that's what an explainer video really does. And I like animated because you know, people can relate to it, it lowers their guard a little bit. You can have a lot of fun with it and still be professional.

Why animated videos?

Kathleen: Yeah. So that's, that's interesting that you just said that because that was going to be my next question was I feel like within the marketing world at least, it's been incredible for me to watch in the last few years how companies have begun to embrace video and to recognize that it's really becoming a necessary part of the marketing mix just because of the way -- and this is at least my theory -- the way people consume content.

I mean when you look at younger generations and how YouTube has supplanted television and most other forms of content, you know, you can see the tide has turned and people want to consume information via video.

So I'm curious though, knowing that that's the case, when when a marketer or a business owner is thinking about having to use video to market their business, when is the right time to use animated versus talking head or some other form of video?

Charles: That's a question I often get. And going back to what you were saying just a second ago about video becoming more popular, we're close to about 80% of online traffic being video. And that's not decreasing. That's increasing.

That trend will not reverse anytime soon or even at all. And it's not just millennials, it's gen Xers, it's baby boomers.

People that say "Well, I'd really rather read something than watch it" because it sounds more sophisticated -- they're not telling the truth. The data doesn't lie on that.

So when somebody says to me, well, should we do a talking head video or should I have an animated video? I tell folks that if they're trying to build a know, like, and trust factor and they think that their face on camera can do it and they can speak through it clearly enough and they can tell an interesting enough story, you know, maybe you should go for it.

But what I have found, especially a lot of the professional advisers that I work with, they are awesome in a workshop. They do well in a one-on-one presentation, but something about the red light on that camera takes them from Zig Ziglar to Elmer Fudd and they aren't suddenly so clean and easy. There's a lot of bad talking head videos out there.

I'm heavy in the LinkedIn. Same with Facebook. Same with Instagram. There's a lot of, as you scroll through, somebody awkwardly adjusting the camera and looking into it, and then the first 30 seconds is, "Hey um, hey guys, well here again, so I wanted to share my thoughts, blah, blah, blah." And then they ramble for five minutes and never really come to a point. Or if they come to a point, it's generic.

So I learned that a lot of these folks can save time, effort and energy, spend a couple of bucks, but use that time -- I mean, the money they spend is well invested because they'll have a video that they can use forever. An evergreen a piece of content as I like to call it, and it ties in all of their other marketing and it will make them way more money than they ever spent on it, versus the bad talking head video that convinces them that video doesn't work.

I kind of equate that to exercise. People will tell me, "Well, I tried video once and it didn't work" is the equivalent of saying, you know, "I bought an elliptical or the Peloton bike. I rode it for a week and I'm still, you know, I'm not in the shape I want. What's wrong with it?"

What's the process for creating a 90 second animated explainer video?

Kathleen: I wish it worked that way. I wish I could just do it for a weekend. I would buy lots of Pelotons.

It's interesting because there are a lot of people that are uncomfortable on camera for sure. And so this does seem like it could be a good way to, for them at least, you know, unless and until they're able to get comfortable or to be trained to the point where they're good on camera too, to not let that be a thing that stands in their way.

So, if somebody wants to do this, talk me through the steps. Like, if somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, I want to do it. I want to do a video. What's your process?"

Charles: I high five them first.

But then after that, my process, and this is my process, anybody can use their own. I have them fill out a simple six question form that allows me to write their script. The simple six question form is really focusing on their client.

And I think that's where a lot of people miss the boat when they create any kind of script. They generally make it all about themselves.

But the client really doesn't care that much about you. I mean, only in the fact that you can help them in some way, shape, form, or fashion. But they're, they're there to hear more about them.

So, you know, if I'm creating it for Kathleen, you fill out this simple six question form about the people you work with and the problem you solve. And then a couple of questions are about how you solve the problem and why you're different, and then what the steps are and then what the end result is.

And from there I'll write a 250 word script. And to me, 250 words is important because that keeps it at about a 90 second range.

Anything shorter than 90 seconds makes it very difficult for you to get your message across. But then anything longer than 90 seconds gosh, almost has to be Oscar nominated worthy in order to hold our attention.

Kathleen: That's interesting because 250 words is not a lot. So you gotta be tight. You gotta be really careful with how you say things.

Charles: And that's where you know, I think that's where we have a big benefit beyond just the video because I've had to force people through an uncomfortable exercise they really haven't done before.

So if you take, let's say, I'll use financial advisors as an example. You go to the average financial advisor website and it is filled with words, all of them, lots of text, lots of jargon. "Customer service", "best in class", blah, blah, blah -- same thing that everyone else says.

When you want to put that into a video, it takes away from a quicker and a finer point that you can make where you're focusing on your customer. Telling them all that stuff is basically telling them nothing cause everybody else is the same thing. So it doesn't matter. You not saying it doesn't make them say "Well they must have crappy customer service because they never told me how world-class they were."

So we really scale all that back, take all of that out and make it really fine tuned to make it story based, to make a focus on the customer. And at about 250 words we can do that.

And then, you know, from there the process is really simple. I'll take the a script, I send it off to a professional voiceover artists. And when I say I take the script, I let the customer review and edit, tweak it, but the professional voiceover artists does it, gets it back to me and then I create the video and then my client has unlimited revisions of the video until they're happy with it.

Once they're happy with it, I lock it in and send it to them.

How to use animated explainer videos in your marketing and sales

Kathleen: All right. Now do you have any guidance for your clients when you work with them about what should they do with the video once they get it?

Charles: I sure do. I actually created a 12 point checklist that they can follow step by step. And I don't tell them to use all 12 examples of how to use video -- find three or four that really work for you.

And that goes back to figuring out who's your best customer in the begin with. And where are they? Social media is always kind of the layup answer, but that's not the only answer.

As a matter of fact, where I have found this thing really works best is on the home page of your website. When people come to you, most likely, even though you have a variety of marketing methods, they're coming to you through referral and word of mouth.

That is still the preferred method. And that's still the way a lot of people will find you. But if they find out about you, and they probably also asked somebody else, and a friend referred, you know, to this insurance agent and that insurance agent, what's the first thing they do?

They don't necessarily pick up the phone and call anymore. They do what? They visit your website.

So if you had that nice little video above the fold, so to speak, what's the first thing they see? They will watch it. The competitors' website? Don't worry, it'll have some bad stock images they see on all the other websites with a bunch of jargon. But they'll watch your video and if the video they watch is about themselves, the story opens and it's got the average person that's in the same situation they are and it goes through this hero's journey, so to speak, over they have the issue, they find the helpful guide. In this case, that insurance agent finds the right policy at the right price and then they kind of go back to their life as normal. That's gonna resonate and mean something to them.

And then also when they contact you, you should have an email followup unless you just close them right away. Well, the email followup does not need to be, again, a bunch of texts, a bunch of jargon or a boring PDF.

Send them a different video, a follow up video or that, you know, again, kind of tells their story that those two things are almost, well, not almost, those two things are worth it in itself if you never use the video in any other way.

But yes, I give them extra instructions on how to use it on Facebook or LinkedIn. More importantly on those tools, where it really works is in the inbox or in the messenger apps.

If you're sending somebody a one on one message and chatting back and forth with them, that animated video will make you stand out very quickly versus just anything else you could possibly send them.

But then on top of that, you know, regular email marketing, during your presentations, there's just a ton of ways to use an animate a video like that.

What does it cost to create animated explainer videos?

Kathleen: You talked in the beginning about how you work with small businesses and I really love that because I do feel like it's easy to talk about best practice marketing for big companies with big budgets and lots of experts on their teams.

But I've been a small business owner and I've walked in the shoes of that person who's like, "I don't have the money and I only have, you know, three employees" or, or "It's just me. I'm a solopreneur. I'm the owner, the salesperson, the dishwasher, the vacuumer and the marketer."

So I love exploring ways that small businesses can get better marketing results.

Putting that hat back on right now, the question that that person is always going to have when they hear something like this is, can I afford it?

So can you talk a little bit about what it costs to do this kind of video?

Charles: I'll give you what the investment is that I ask for from my clients, and in kind of a generic way, what is it all the way across the board?

It's still a wide variance. There's a lot of folks that will create something truly custom made that, you know, 15, 20 grand that you know, is unlike anything you've seen.

And then you have few out there that will do it for three or 400 bucks, but they're probably overseas. You won't be able to talk to him or you ever get an update on it ever. And it might not be the quality you want.

So I kind of tell folks where I'm at is the loaded Camry, so to speak.

Kathleen: I love it.

Charles: I'm not the Yugo that's falling apart in the driveway.

Kathleen: I drove a Camry for a long time and you know what? Those cars last forever.

Charles: Boom. Great example I made. But yeah, they're great. So I have three video packages -- a single video, two videos, or three or more videos.

The single video is only $999. I take care of everything from beginning to end and the only work my clients do is fill out a six question form. And from there I, I do all of the work. They just have to approve it and then they'll get a video 17 days or less from script approval.

The most popular one I have though is the three or more videos at only $797 each. And those are even invoiced out monthly through PayPal. So it fits within somebody's marketing budget.

And what I see quite a bit is that somebody will have an an idea of what they want for their homepage video that's a kind of not just about their customer but explains who they are, why they're different.

But then past that, people will have different targets or different niches. And I know you probably say niche, but I'm right here in middle Tennessee. We say niche.

Kathleen: Potato, Patato, nish, neesh. 

Charles: They have different things they offer. They have one or two other products or services that they really want to advertise and make sure that people are aware of or they may have different customer bases that, you know, if it's, let's say it's business to business, maybe you target healthcare, but then you also target CPA firms.

Listen, you know, if it's direct to consumer, you might have a product that targets women ages 30 to 40, but you also have a product that targets men 55 to 65 that are soon to retire, needs a golf lessons, whatever it is.

You can create additional videos for that. And the investment piece is simple because in most cases you need a client literally to probably pay for it. And then you know, you're, you're ahead of the game and then you've got the evergreen content you can use forever and will continue to help you close those clients.

The ROI of animated explainer videos

Kathleen: That's great.

Now you've done this for plenty of small businesses. Can you talk a little bit about what impact it has had for them in their marketing? Because of course on this podcast, we're all about results and how that translates into results.

So what has this done for your clients?

Charles: So just a couple of quick examples. I remember I had a pest control client that wanted one for termite damage. They created a fun and engaging video that explained how termite damage affected the client's home in this video. They sent it out in one of their email marketing newsletters and closed, I forget how many, she said several clients immediately. They watched the video and then right away after, after watching, called them and quoted what the video had told him. He said, "Hey, we need you guys come out and check right away."

One of the best ones I had was for a real estate agent. She had a series of six videos where she would, you know, upon initially meeting a client, she had a followup video and then it was a, she had them about buying, selling, pricing, negotiating.

She said there was a particular client that, well, somebody that became a client, but as they were going through the process, you know, they were still kind of feeling around, shopping around, and you know, that's a very personal process -- finding somebody that can help you with your biggest investment. But she said toward the end, right before they became a client, the husband and wife were sitting there and the husband started saying something that was a little negative and the wife said, "Hey honey, we're not going to be like those people in that video that are, you know, being negative about selling a house." She quoted a line from the video. They all laughed and then immediately signed Sandy to become their real estate agent.

Kathleen: Oh, that's funny. I love it. So have any of them been able to, I mean it sounds like they have real, concrete stories of like these people became, my client. Have any of them been able to share, like I, you know, I made this much more money because of my video or translate any of that into dollars?

Charles: I'd love to give you these great stories about how they told me all about their ROI. And what I've discovered is that even though I'm creating these videos, they have to already have in place a way to truly measure great return on investment. Do you know how many people out there are really measuring return on investment for marketing dollar?

Kathleen: Yeah. Especially in a small business community. That's, that's tough.

Charles: It's well, they, they do it by the number of clients. And in this particular case, you know, Sandy, for that one client alone, that was a $400,000 plus dollar house or whatever, you know, 6% of that was, but that was just that one client only or the termite, you know, that's a, they were doing Sentricon not the board paper with details, but that's $2,000.

Kathleen: So let's actually do the math on that. A $400,000 house, and I'm really bad at math, so I might get this wrong. Four times, you know, let's say you get half the commission because you're only the buyer agent or the seller agent. So $12,000 on a $1,000 spend. So that's a 1200% ROI.

Charles: Awesome. See, that's what I need to be out there. I have some content written on ROI. And I've got 40 plus testimonials on my page, but when I come back to ask people to help me calculate it, they kind of, they're on to their next thing. It exists. It works. But you know...

Kathleen: No, but that's, those are great stories because like, even the termite thing, if it's a $2,000 sale, you know, that's double. Right? Right, right. So I love that.

So it definitely points to, you know, this can be a really quick way to, to see some increased sales quickly. I love that story.

And, and I would love to include links to example videos in the show notes. So send me some links, Charles. We will put all the links in. So if you're listening and you want to see examples of these kinds of videos, head to the show notes.

Getting started with animated explainer videos

Kathleen: So what advice do you have for somebody who's listening and thinking that they might be interested in doing this?

Charles: So first and foremost you can actually go to my site and you can find that six question form there at yourcharlesalexander.com.

So the first question is if you should do it, you know, there's, I've already, I felt like I've already made the case. You need a video in some way, shape, form, or fashion. You probably need three or six.

So the next thing is, do I want to do it? And I don't tell folks not to do it. And I know if they're in a real startup phase and they're trying to wear all the hats, maybe that, maybe that's a scenario where you need to start and try to create your own. There are some tools out there you can use.

I'll even tell you the software I use is Vyond -- V Y O N D. And it's got a ton of competition out there. Toonly, VideoScribe, Moovly anything it ends in L Y, obviously. Powtoons.

But the point is you can create your own, but in most cases it looks like you created your own. I tell folks, where's your time better spent?

This goes back to my small business coaching hat. Are you better off working on the business or in the business, or are you going to be the one that is doing the $10 or $15 an hour activity? Are you the $150 to $200 an hour person now?

And you need to outsource that to somebody else and figure out where the true return on investment is. And that's when you decide if you should outsource it or not.

Kathleen: Amen to that because I have played around with some of those tools in the past and I'm not a video person. Yeah.

Charles: Like anything else, once you start digging into it, you find there's a lot of nuances with it.

Kathleen: Right. Let me just tell you, I could lose days trying to create a 90 second video. No, it would not be good. So that's, that's interesting.

I appreciate you sharing the names of those platforms because it's good to, to, you know, and it's not smoke and mirrors. I like that you're, you're really transparent about that and that you shared your prices. That is very inboundy of you. That's awesome.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: Cool. Well, let's shift gears. I have two questions I always ask all my guests, and I'd love to hear your answers to them.

The first one is, you know, we are all about inbound marketing on this podcast. And I'm curious, when you think of inbound marketing, is there a particular company or individual that you think is doing it really well? Right now?

Charles: John Nemo from LinkedIn Riches, and he has a variety of online content that he creates, but it's all about inbound marketing and one-on-one messaging.

So I'm a heavy LinkedIn user and he talks quite a bit about, you know, especially if you're doing B2B or you're using other businesses to help you create a center of influence to get clients, Linkedin is a fantastic platform, but a lot of people still don't know how it works.

I hear comment time and time again, "Man, you know, I created one a few years back. But I check it now and again, I really don't understand it. It's just like somewhere where I post my resume or people tried to poach me to go work at a different job or do something, do something else or sell me something."

John has created a really good business for himself. And he has his own podcast Nemo radio. But if you ever get a chance to interview somebody that really understands how that works, how to create evergreen content, how to bring in inbound clients over and over, he's your man.

Kathleen: And is that Nemo? N? E M. O?

Charles: That is, just like the fish.

Kathleen: All right, I'll check that out.

And then the second question is, you know, the, the most common pain point I hear from just about every marketer I talk to is that they feel overwhelmed with how quickly the world of digital marketing is changing and how hard it is to stay up to date with all of that.

So how do you personally stay up to date with all of those changes?

Charles: So what I do is I have found three or four things that really work for me. Not every single thing on planet earth, not every social media platform, not every email marketing tool, not every CRM. Find the three or four that really work for me and stick with those.

It doesn't mean you can't be aware of other tools that might be better, that you might need to change. But like you just said, they're changing all of the time. So one of the big questions I always get is "Charles, since this is video, you must know everything there is about SEO, Facebook ads, Google pay per click." And I tell them, actually no. There's a ton of other video folks that do that. They're knee deep in it and it changes every minute of every day. I don't do that.

What I have really works for me. Again, I've already mentioned his LinkedIn, so I stay on top of that. You know, I've got John and I stay connected with him and keep up with his content. So I figured out what the changes are through him. 

For email marketing, that's something I read up on and stay up on. But quite frankly it has stayed the same throughout all of this, which is crazy. People will tell me from time to time, they don't feel like it works. But I can tell you right now, email marketing in terms of social media has about three times the number of accounts that social media does all put together and it has stayed the same.

So there's not a lot to stay on with it other than creating something that's compelling. Just think about it simply. What would you want to watch or read? If it's a bunch of jargon and a boring stuff, don't do it.

It's that simple. It's a litmus test.

And you know, those are the primary things.

I hope this is a still fits within an inbound marketing, but I still do some old school stuff. My best clients and my centers of influence, I write them notes. I send them stuff in the mail.

Even just this last week I had created basketball cards. It was supposed to be for the NCAA tournament. So I told them, you know, I had some downtime from not watching the NCAA tournament. So I create these silly little basketball cards with their cartoon picture on it, instant stats and send it all to them. And I got tons of feedback from how much they enjoyed this.

So to answer your original question, find your lane, find two or three influencers so to speak, and then just stay on top of it. Don't get overwhelmed and try to be all things all people

Kathleen: Amen. And you know, it's, it's funny that you say that about the cards and March madness. I had a lot of plans in my marketing strategy to do some direct mail that was kind of account based marketing and that's gone out the window because nobody's at their office to receive it. So we all have to shift gears right now. Right?

Charles: The word, the word "pivot" hasn't been overused at all, has it?

How to connect with Charles

Kathleen: No, no, no, definitely. Well, thank you so much Charles. This has been so interesting. If somebody wants to learn more about the videos or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Charles: It's super easy. Go to my website. I got really creative with the name -- yourcharlesalexander.com.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: All right, I'll put that link in the show notes and thank you Zoom for mostly not glitching out on us in this conversation.

Charles: I think we did pretty good.

Kathleen: So yeah, so hopefully this, this'll be a bellwether of things to come for future future podcast interview recordings.

But if you're listening and you enjoyed this, like what you heard, I would really appreciate it if you would head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review. That is how we get found by more listeners.

And of course, if you know someone who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them.

That's it for this week. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Charles.

Charles: Thank you.

How did 16-year old online learning company Mindvalley double the size of its user base in a year?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Mindvalley head of marketing Alessio Pieroni talks about the company's internationalizing strategy, and how entering new markets fueled dramatic growth.

From translating versus dubbing content, to what international expansion means for hiring, how your social media strategy needs to change, and what to consider when localizing your product, Alessio talks about all of the different dimensions of internationalization.

Check out the episode to hear more about the impact that internationalizing has had on Mindvalley's business, and the advice that Alessio has for anyone thinking of entering new markets.

Highlights from my conversation with Alessio include:

• Mindvalley is an online learning company that focuses on teaching people the things they can't learn in school.
• The company has been around for 16 years and has historically focused on english speaking markets.
• In 2011, Mindvalley first attempted to enter international markets but was not successful because they tried to recruit employees to star in their online course videos, rather than the company's founder Vishen, who had always been the face of the brand.
• After that experience, they refocused on english markets again, but then a year ago, they were approached by someone who wanted to translate their course material into Spanish and market it in Mexico.
• They did it as an experiment and put some advertising dollars behind it, and were able to realize ROI in 5 days.
• After that early success, the company copied that same formula and now has course materials in Spanish, Portuguese, French and German.
• In just the Spanish speaking market, Mindvalley was able to add 1.2 million new users in 10 months, and now the company's Spanish customer base is larger than its English speaking customer base.
• This year, Mindvalley plans to add courses in Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and Indian to its offerings.
• Alessio says that the keys to the company's success are the quality of its courses and years of data, which it has leveraged to develop pay-per-click advertising programs that have allowed it to quickly scale growth.
• The company's cost to acquire a new customer in the US is between $8 and $10, whereas in Spanish speaking markets it is between $1 and $2.
• Going international is more complicated than it might seem and it's important to get details like language right. For example, with Spanish language material, they had to determine whether to use a South American accent or a Spanish one, and whether to dub the course material or subtitle it.
• There are other challenges as well, such as different payment processors and cultural attitudes towards credit cards versus cash.
• As the company has entered new markets, it has relied on contractors to help create course material.
• In some markets, it has had to outsource social media and paid advertising.
• Mindvalley has not yet localized the UI of its product as that would require a significant investment in technology.
• Alessio says that these efforts have resulted in the company doubling and nearly tripling its business in a year.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Mindvalley website
• Connect with Alessio on LinkedIn

Listen to the podcast to learn how Mindvalley experienced its strongest growth ever by internationalizing its marketing -- and what you need to know if you're considering marketing to an international audience.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Alessio Pieroni, who's the head of marketing for Mindvalley. Welcome Alessio.

Alessio Pieroni (Guest): Thank you so much for having me. So excited to be in this podcast.

Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. And fun fact, I am sitting here at 8.00 a.m on a Friday in my office and you are sitting there at what time?

Alessio: That's 9.00 p.m Kuala Lumpur time.

Kathleen: 9.00 p.m, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia time in the hot weather, whereas I am sitting here and it is cold and rainy and dark. So I think you win this one because it's not even happy hour, it's Friday night party time in the beautiful tropical Malaysia.

About Alession Pieroni and Mindvalley

Kathleen: Thank you for joining me and maybe we could just start by having you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and who you are and what Mindvalley is.

Alessio: Yeah, absolutely. I like to define myself as a full stack marketer. Because in my experience in the past six or seven years I've been working different areas of marketing.

So I started out around email marketing and funnel marketing, went on then going deeper into organic traffic and SEO. And then from there I moved into Product Marketing and conversion rate optimization till the last one took about two years ago where I'm managing an entire marketing division for Mindvalley, where I kind of need to be a generalist.

To speak a bit about Mindvalley, Mindvalley is the biggest personal grow the education platform in the world. And what we like to say that we do is that we take all the kind of education that traditional education doesn't teach you, and we bring it to you.

So education, for example, teaches you accounting, but doesn't teach you how to be rich. It teaches you science, but doesn't teach you nutrition, or does not teach you fitness. It teaches you a lot of things but doesn't teach you memory, doesn't teach mindfulness, doesn't teach you to be a great parent and lover, or how to be happy.

And that's kind of our mission to the world -- to bring that great education to the life of everyone so that everyone can improve their own life and live a happy life.

And we'e been doing that since about 16 years ago now. And now privy to about 10 million people reach across our social media. We have about four million users on our platform and hundreds of thousands of customers every year.

So it's an exciting company to work for definitely.

Kathleen: The world's largest personal growth and learning platform. And it's interesting to me that your focus is on that gap between like what you can learn from a book or a class, a normal school versus what you really need to know for life.

I feel like that's actually kind of what we do on the podcast. It's like, you can take marketing classes in school but what are the things they never teach you?

Alessio: Absolutely. I just had this discussion few weeks ago with some marketing students that came to our office and they were asking me some questions about how they could actually nurture their careers and I was like -- I speak frankly -- like, university will never teach you Facebook ads. It is too new for you to learn something like that in university.

Take university for what it is, but once you're out of university you learn so much more. And there is so much non formal education. And I believe that podcasts are changing the world for that. It's so beautiful, so much free and amazing education is out there and I love to market it every day.

Kathleen: Absolutely. I learn so much just from hosting this podcast and talking to people like yourself.

And that's one of the reasons I was looking forward to talking with you because you bring, I think, a different experience than a lot of the other guests I've had.

Specifically, Mindvalley is headquartered in Malaysia. It's grown considerably in the last few years. I mean, it was already experiencing a very healthy pace of growth. But then in the last couple of years, the company really made this decision to go more international. And that has just fueled this tremendous uptick in the company's growth.

So, we've talked a lot about many different aspects of marketing on this podcast, but one of the things we really haven't covered much is international marketing and what it means when you want to start selling into different markets around the world from a geographic standpoint, from language, cultural standpoint, etcetera.

So I am so excited to dig into this with you. But let's start.

Mindvalley's international growth

Kathleen: And can you talk a little bit about what that journey has been? And when did the company start thinking about going international? What was it doing before that? What was the pre international phase? And that sort of thing?

Alessio: Absolutely. So Mindvalley has been very focused on the English language and on covering all the markets that are English speaking. And we're pretty big on that.

And with it, with the wave of internationalization that we have been trying to do in 2011 - 2012, we like to say that that was a bit of a failure as a company.

What happened exactly in this case is that, Mindvalley, for the ones that are not familiar with our business model, we have a host, which is our CEO and founder Vishen, and he's the one basically hosting the personal growth and learning from all over the world.

And what we were doing 2011 and 2012 is that we tried to recruit some great employee and make them host in their own languages.

So Vishen wasn't any more the face of Mindvalley, but that employee was the face of Mindvalley in that language. And it was okay for maybe a couple of years. But then it definitely wasn't the right way to scale up. And all these kind of businesses that we were starting around the world kind of faded away and we kind of stopped them.

So for the next few years, we focused completely on English. Last year, we actually got a call from a guy that's in the marketing space from Mexico. And he was simply telling us, "guys, I really believe so much in Mindvalley, I really believe so much of what you guys do, can I translate your content in Spanish?".

And we were just like, you know what, that just such a small bag that we can play Just give him a product will pay him very little amount of money just to test out and see what will happen.

And what seemed to happen is that in this time we simply translated the program, keeping Vishen as our host. And after translating the program, we simply tried to say, "What would happen, now that we have this program, if we just put some advertising budget on that? What will happen?"

And the results were shocking. We're this very small firm, and we have been having such a big growth for a new market, which we weren't in, given the little investment that we made in the beginning. We literally paid it back in about five days.

When we looked at that, we were like, "Wow! Really, like, that's incredible."

And, so that simple little experiment that we did in a very random way, from that we said, "Okay, maybe this is something that is so much bigger", and that's when we started to actually assemble a team around that, and we started looking into the different languages that we can actually work on, which is the prioritization of languages. And how we can actually scale up this entire system.

So one year and a half later, we are now in four different languages -- Spanish, Portuguese, French and German.

We added, just in the Spanish speaking market, 1.2 million users in 10 months. And right now, the Spanish list -- actually the internationalization list overall -- it's bigger than the English speaking list.

So we have so many more users from all over the world. And for now, this year, we're looking into a lot of different languages -- Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and Indian. And so yeah, it's becoming global.

And its so beautiful to see the impact that we're able to make in a lot of, I would say, underserved markets, because a lot of these markets are very hungry and very willing to actually get the learning that we're giving at Mindvalley.

What's the secret behind Mindvalley's international success?

Kathleen: Now, you kind of, I don't want to say stumbled into going international but it wasn't this grand plan that you know, you worked up to it for two years. It was you, you were opportunistic, you had somebody come to you. The company jumped on this opportunity and went and it was successful.

Why do you think it worked so well? For you?

Alessio: Well, I would say that there are definitely a couple of things that were very interesting, and some feedback we got from our customers as well as why they love us so much.

So number one is definitely the quality of the product. In the last couple of years, we need to level up so much because the English speaking market ,the American market, its so competitive.

I truly believe that the average customer of Mindvalley every day will kind of think, "Should I watch Netflix? Should watch MasterClass.com or should I watch Mindvalley?"

The level of quality that we need to match for the English speaking market is so difficult that we really need to push ourselves so much more.

And the reality is that when we went to the Spanish speaking market, so many of our competitors are just not there. And the quality that that market is used to is so much lower that we as English speaking people are actually used to. And so when we went out there we just found ourselves being so much better than everyone else.

And that's actually a big advantage for us and it's definitely been a super great thing.

On the other side, I will say also that another big advantage we have had is that we've had tons of years of data. And having data -- even on English speaking customers, but also that you have maybe some English speaking customers from Mexico, from Spain, from Latin America -- learning which kind of customers we were still able to capture from those countries gave us a lot of ideas on how we could capture more of them.

So the data was especially amazing when we needed to actually just run advertising to that and let the Google and Facebook algorithms help us find customers that were similar to the ones that were already following us from that region.

And it worked really magically in a very scalable way that allowed us to grow exponentially.

What does it really mean to go international?

Kathleen: So I want to dig in a little bit to really what it means to go international because I think someone listen it would be easy to feel like, "I just need to translate my marketing materials into another language and, blast it out there and people will buy."

That's not really what we're talking about here. I mean, you have a product, which is an online product. So it's not just advertising that needs to be localized. It's the product itself, correct?

Alessio: Absolutely. And what I like to say is that when we took this approach, there have always been two phases of localizing.

The first phase is to kind of bring the best of Mindvalley in that language. And the second phase is to bring that language and that culture into Mindvalley.

Because obviously, it's really easy to take a program, translate it and put it out there. But the first thing is that you start to get tons and tons of feedback. And the reality is also that every different culture, every different language, and sometimes different countries in that specific language, will give you very different feedback.

So just to give you some examples, in the Spanish speaking language, there is a very big debate of, should you actually translate with a Spanish accent? Or should you translate it with the Mexican or the Colombian one?

And it's very interesting to see this debate and understanding.

So a lot of time what we needed to do is simply test it out a bit, and we've seen, okay, if we translate one program with a Spanish accent, what happens? If we translate another one with a Mexican accent, what about that?

So it's very important to check it out and actually get different feedback from different people.

Another important debate that you always need to face and understand is should you dub your content or do you actually want just to subtitle your content?

We are having this problem and debating in the Portuguese market, especially because what's happening in that case is that apparently, like some years ago, some companies went into the Brazilian market, they translated and dubbed their content. But they did it in such a bad way and the program was done in such a skanky way that they kind of destroyed the whole dubbing industry.

So there are so many people that just don't want to consume a program that is dubbed. But then there are so many other people that don't want to just read the subtitles for every everything.

So it's very difficult, even in the same market, to satisfy everyone. So we're trying different approaches and we are trying to understand exactly which approach will work better in which country. But a lot of that, frankly is really trying look for what the customers says and improve our progress day by day.

Kathleen: This is such a fascinating topic to me because I actually lived in Spain for a year after I finished college, and I happen to live in Barcelona, which has, it's not the same accent as even like the regular Spanish accent it's a little bit I guess you would say cleaner.

But, it's interesting too. It's not just accents, it's like between Spain and South America, there are different levels of formality in the way they speak. Like, if you're a Spanish speaker, it's the difference between using "tu" and "usted" and "ustedes" and vosotros" and things like that.

I guess, for somebody, you don't have to speak Spanish to understand this. It's like the difference between British English and American English. They're very different.

And in fact, it's so funny because I used to do a lot of work in India, where they have call centers, and somebody once told me this funny story which I have to relate. This is a little bit of a tangent. But they told me that in Karnataka, which is the state where I was working there...

Alessio: By the way, I lived in Karnataka, in Bangalore for a year.

Kathleen: So well, so you might even know this already. So they said there are two different schools. Like, if you're Indian and you're going to go work in a call center, you either go to the school where they teach you British English or the school where they teach you American English, and they jokingly call the American school the "duh duh duh school" and the British school the "tuh tuh tuh school."

And the reason is, think about how people say the word "butter."

I'm American, and so I say butter, which is duh, duh, duh butter versus the Brits who say butter, which is tuh, tuh, tuh.

So you know, it's fascinating, like, these nuances of language that I think we really take for granted. But then the other half of the story -- and sorry, I'm totally going on but you've made me recall all these memories -- is when I was living in Spain this issue of dubbing is so fascinating because Spain actually has like, I think it's like the world's preeminent dubbing school / industry.

And I'll never forget this is going to totally date me but I moved to Spain when the show Melrose Place came out in the United States, which was a really huge hit, but I happen to be living there when it started.

And so, I only ever saw it dubbed and listened to it in Spanish with the dubbed voices and there was this character played by the actor Andrew Shue, who in Spain, he had this very manly dubbed voice, you know, and he would be like, "Hola, Carolina".

And then I came back to the United States and he has this more, like, high pitched voice. He's like" hey Caroline", and it totally ruined the show for me.

Sounds like so anyway, total tangent, but it is super fascinating to me. Just the impact that those choices can make on your effectiveness and communicating and the way that your audience absorbs and forms an opinion about your product.

Like, I formed an opinion about Melrose Place the product because of this voice that was different the voice that actually was, etcetera.

So, anyway, that's my whole two cents on the dubbing and the language thing, but it's really interesting, and I think most people probably don't think about this. So I'm curious to hear from you, as you did these tests. What did you learn? Like, what were the winners from the tests that you conducted?

Alessio: Absolutely. So definitely for the Spanish speaking markets, having a cleaner accent, so having a Latin American accent, has been working much better for us.

The program that we actually tried in the Spanish accent from Spain, we needed to retranslate it into Spanish from Latin America, because we got so many complaints from our customers that now we're in the process of retranslating and recording that.

And that's actually a very interesting point. I guess about 65 to 70% of our users from Latin America are from Mexico. So a lot of time its simply about understanding the customer that you want to serve more, and understanding where your interest is going, where you're actually growing.

And interestingly enough, what we've been seeing now is that in terms of users, Spain is just number six among the Latin American market, but in terms of customers it's a close number two to Mexico. So obviously, the conversion is much better than when it comes to Spain, but then in terms of depth of the market and width of the market, it's definitely not the biggest one we could find there.

So for the Spanish market, we definitely decided to set them work.

The standard for the Portuguese market, frankly, is something that we are still trying to figure out. Probably between all the markets we've been going for, Portuguese was one with the highest expectations we had, but we still weren't able to go into that.

For example, another very big problem that we found in the Portuguese market is the fact that having a localized checkout makes the entire difference. So for some interesting reason, people from Brazil can't really buy products that we normally buy. They need a very specific checkout that is normally in a very specific way that allows the Brazillian credit card to work.

Kathleen: Is it just that they need the currency to be in reals? Or is it just the credit card processor?

Alessio: It's the credit card processors and 80% of Brazilians cannot buy with a normal process that is normally used for a normal website, or at least with our current websites.

So one of the major things that we're doing -- and this obviously, it's a tech change that you need to do -- is changing over checkout in order to be able to serve more markets.

So that's something that we're in the process of doing, but as you can imagine, it's such a big project because to better serve one county, you kind of need to start to change your entire process for the entire company.

So now we're working on that and ideally, in a couple of months, we should be able to have a solution that should allow us to serve these customers better.

Kathleen: Well, it isn't that really like, the classic conundrum of the product marketer, which is that, you know, there's this very natural tension between, you have a customer who could be a great customer, and they have this really specific need that might suck a ton of resources out of the organization versus, like, the population of the rest of the potential customer base who might need smaller changes in order for them to buy.

It's like, which one is more valuable, the bird the hand or, the bird that could potentially fly in the next week? I think that's a conversation product marketers everywhere can really relate to.

Alessio: Absolutely. I completely agree with that, it's something so crazy. And it's funny, because the more you actually learn about other languages, the more there are certain things that are kind of very interesting.

Like, an example of that is in the Russian market, which is actually the only market that's from the previous kind of internationalization that is still alive in Mindvalley. They have 20% of their sales that happen offline.

So what that means is that that people buy, but instead of buying, they actually take a screenshot of something that you put on your website. And then they go to the local shop, they show them the screenshot printed, and then they say "I want to pay in cash, and then they pay in cash to the shop, and the shop make sales for you." And it's just like it...

Kathleen: So interesting. I know.

Alessio: You're like "Why?", but a lot of people don't trust credit cards in our local countries. And a lot of people simply don't trust banks or don't trust anything. They believe much more in cash.

So that is very normal, and they expect, when they actually need to make a sale or to buy something, they want to pay in cash, simply because that's how the culture is.

Probably in few years, also in other countries, things will change. But at the moment, if you want to properly serve that kind of customer, you need to adopt your business a bit.

Localizing the product in addition to the language

Kathleen: That is fascinating.

You talked about having to create a localized checkout experience for people in Brazil. When you talk about internationalization, or localization really, is what it is, for these different markets -- you've got four now, Spanish speaking German, French, Portuguese.

I guess the question I have is, you're obviously translating and subtitling or dubbing the course materials, but are you really presenting a completely localized UX as well within the Mindvalley web experience?

Alessio: So we definitely translated the entire UI of our app, and our website and everything. Let's say that, in terms of you UX, there is definitely a lot more that we could do. Especially like, there are certain countries that we're looking at that present these kind of challenges.

So just as an example, right now we're entering Arabic. Now one of the biggest questions is, do we write everything left to right or right to left? Like, what do we do?

And actually, for us, writing in the Arabic way, so right to left, we would need to make so many changes, tech wise, that if we want to do that we would probably be internationalizing the country two years from now, not today.

So sometimes you might need to make some compromises.

And also, for me, being a non English speaker, natively, when when I was a kid, and I was playing games, I grew up basically with playing games that their UI was completely in english. It was actually my way to start learning English a lot of time. Sometimes there are certain things that people are way more forgiving.

And maybe even if the UI is not translated, it's still good. And the UX is definitely a very advanced level that you might want to adapt, just maybe in a second space.

So answering the question, in terms of UX, we have not done that yet. But it's something that we're definitely looking for. But for that, also, it would acquire our platform to become much more flexible than what it is right now. So it is a lot of tech work involved.

What kind of a team do you need to support internationalization?

Kathleen: Now, what about your team? Because this obviously has implications for the people behind the scenes, both those who are involved in creating the content and adapting it for new languages. Do you have any kind of, like, support functionality that needs to be internationalized? Like, what has that done to the structure of the company itself?

Alessio: That's a very interesting one. Because the team, the simplest way to do it, is to do it with flexible contractors. Okay?

So what we did for every country is that we have some very strong project managers, and those are the main hires that we did. And these project managers are the ones that actually coordinate all the different contractors of the different areas.

So we have some contractors that are in customer support, some contractors that are doing the entire voiceover, scripting, and copywriting in that specific language. We have some contractors doing the learning part. And then slowly, as demand for work is becoming bigger, the more we're starting to hire those people.

So we started to hire, for example, social media managers in all those different languages because obviously we want to go bigger in terms of social media.

And the next one will be hiring people to take care of the learning, because one of the next steps in terms of our localization is actually to start creating programs that are specific in that language.

So that's very interesting, because studying these markets, we've come to understand that there are specific needs that that market has that maybe the English market doesn't have. And so there are these possibilities that we can create specific programs just for that market. And that's something that we are exploring at the moment.

Mindvalley's international marketing strategy

Kathleen: Fascinating. I mean, I could talk to you for hours about this stuff. But I want to make sure that we build in some time to talk about, like, some of the marketing activities you did to really fuel the growth.

So you mentioned advertising. Is it fair to say that that was the primary channel that really drove customer acquisition in these new markets?

Alessio: Absolutely. In our industry, online education, advertising is always one of the major channels.

But what was incredible for us was that the cost per acquisition in that market was incredibly low. So while in the US we may need to spend about $8 to $10 to acquire a lead, in the Spanish speaking market, we spend between $1 and $2.

So literally, we can acquire four or five people per every English user.

So, it's very interesting from this point of view, which is why we were able to grow so much in terms of users in the year.

Then what's been interesting is that the more users you acquire and the more programs you launch, the more you can actually monetize this fan base and user base that you've been creating.

So definitely, email marketing was the other part that was incredibly important to keep those people engaged and to make sure that we could serve them with the best content, with the new classes, with the new programs, and create this kind of fan base. That was incredibly important. 

Kathleen: To what do you -- you mentioned the lower cost of acquisition in some of these new markets through ads -- to what do you attribute that that big difference between what you're paying to acquire customer in the US versus, for example, say Mexico?

Alessio: Well, two different things. So number one, the competition, having a much lower competition in the Spanish speaking market means that the cost is much lower.

And we see very clearly obviously, acquiring a new user in India is much cheaper than acquiring a user in the U.S.

And the other side is also that, obviously, we need to take care of our markets, as marketers, is not just about how much does it cost us to acquire users, but also what is the return that we can get from that?

And that's also a very, important one. So we've been looking into that. And obviously, it's very clear that the conversion rate that you will get in U.S market, it's very different than the conversion rate that you will get in a Spanish speaking market.

So you know that if in U.S you have 5% of users buying in the Spanish speaking market, might be only 2% or maybe 1% sometime.

So that's something that you always need to take into account and always pay attention to how you're scaling up and how this affects profitability.

So it's been actually a very good lesson for us because, in certain moments we were just so bullish, and we're like, "Okay, let's spend more and it just grow it." And then for a couple of more, if you look back and are like, "Okay, cool. Let's just make sure the profitability is there are we're able to do this sustainably" because that's one of the most important to you ought to do.

Kathleen: I feel like in the U.S, when we talk about pay per click and online advertising, 95% of the time we're talking about Facebook, Google and Google remarketing. Maybe some LinkedIn, but that's more B2B. Maybe some Twitter. But it's really mostly Facebook and Google.

So I'm curious, did you find that to be the same when you went internationally? Or were there other platforms or channels that performed really well for you?

Alessio: We definitely found that to be the same.

Specifically, what actually has been working really well for us is YouTube. YouTube has been an incredible channel for us. And we've had a few reviews, especially in the Spanish market, where we've had about 35 million views on a specific video that was part of our advertising mix. And that started to go very viral in the market. So definitely, that's what we've been seeing now.

But when we actually internationalize in a new market, what we're looking for in the future is definitely we're seeing that there are some other opportunities out there.

So in the Russian speaking market, Yandex is a big one. They have Yandex, they have VK -- they have a lot of different social media. Telegram is a big thing there.

So definitely, that would require a different mix that we're exploring much more at the moment.

Or, for example, in Japan, they have LINE, which is a sort of a Whatsapp, let's say, for the Japanese market and is much stronger than Facebook, for example.

So going in these markets really means changing your marketing mix. But let's say that in the four languages that we've been internationalizing until now, we don't have these needs at the moment.

Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like that's a whole nother kind of scary area for marketers, when they think about going internationally. They're like, "Hey, it's taken me a long time, but I finally understand how to do Facebook and Google. Now you're telling me I need to learn Yandex and WhatsApp and all these other platforms that can be really intimidating."

How did you handle that? Did you guys really just like, learn it yourselves? Or did you find somebody who's really good at it and pull them in to help?

Alessio: So let's say that's for Yandex, we would definitely work with external agencies.

And we are literally, one year announced that we are studying China, because China is probably the ultimate internationalization that you want to do. And if we want to announce that we are studying the market, we understand what's really there because it's a complete different ecosystem from every single point of view. And we're slowly approaching that big box because it's really the biggest opportunity out there for internationalization.

But we want to make sure that once we go there, we go that properly and with the right instrument to make sure that we will be able to actually do it effectively.

And in that case, obviously, WeChat, Weibo, Youku, and all the different platforms they have -- so it's really a different system.

But as of now, I would say that 80-20 is really what matters. And we're really trying to be able to understand what the best is that we can do with what we have right now. And then slowly, the more these get successful, and also give us enough profit to invest more, understanding how can we go deeper and deeper into the different channels, the different markets and doing understand though, can we do even better?

Mindvalley's international growth

Kathleen: Yeah, that sounds like it's so complicated. It's fascinating.

So before we run out of time, I want to make sure that we really highlight the results you've gotten. So before you did this -- before that person came to you and said, "Hey, can you turn this program into another language?" -- how big was the user base for Mindvalley?

Alessio: Our user base was about 1.7 million at that time.

Kathleen: Okay. And that was when?

Alessio: That was December 2018.

Kathleen: Okay. Wow. So, a little over a year ago.

Alessio: Yeah, a little over a year ago. And now, our user base is about 3.8 million. We also had a very good growth in English because we've been growing also there.

But we've been adding at least, in total, 1.5 million/1.6 million users, just from the internationalization effort.

Kathleen: So okay, I want to make sure I'm recapping this correctly. So the company is about 16 years old. And from years zero to 15, let's call it you grew to 1.2 million?

Alessio: 1.7

Kathleen: 1.7, sorry. Okay. Thank you. And then in the last little over a year, you've almost tripled that, correct? Or doubled to tripled it?

Alessio: You would say double to triple. Yeah, 2.5 million.

Kathleen: Wow. That is amazing.

Alessio: It's been a really, really exciting year from this point of view.

Kathleen: That's amazing. Well, kudos to you and the team for what you've done. This is not easy. But it definitely highlights what a game changer it can be from a growth standpoint, if you're able to do it and navigate it correctly.

Alessio: I personally think, after one year and a half of working on this, that it's probably one of the biggest opportunities out there that a lot of marketers have not been taking.

Alessio's advice for marketers thinking of internationalizing

Kathleen: So, if you had to start over again and talk to yourself two years ago, what advice would you give yourself? Is there anything you wish you would have done differently or you had known before you started?

Alessio: So what I would say is that I would have probably, from the first moment, I would have approached it, I would have tried to over hire probably, and to hire a bit more people because it really requires some good HR to make sure that you're actually been able to go that deep into the market.

We've been stretching our resources a lot to launch as much as possible. But I think that if we would have had two to three hires per languages versus just one we would have been able to do a better job, and been more profitable and growing more.

These are probably the only few things that I would say to myself because for the rest, like, the team, even if it was the very simple payment stuff, has been able to deliver amazing things.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: Wow. That's incredible. Well, we have just a few minutes left so I want to make sure I ask you the questions that I asked everybody who comes on this podcast.

The first one being, you know, this, the show is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing?

Alessio: So my actual favorite guy in inbound marketing is Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell. I'm a big geek, in terms of revenue, subscription terminology, growing revenues and listening, and he's incredible in terms of looking into pricing, hosting a show that's fun, but speak about things that for the probably 99.9% of the people are very boring. But he's able to do it in such a great way. Such a great quality, having some great guests as well. And I'm really incredibly surprised the content he's able to put out there.

Kathleen: That's a good one. I'll definitely check that out.

And you know, the biggest complaint I hear from marketers is that things are changing so quickly. It's really hard to stay on top of all the new developments in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally do that?

Alessio: I would say that one of the habits I've implemented is that I always keep one hour and a half a day to learn. That to me is just a huge part of my job. Like, you can't be a great marketer if you don't learn.

Digital marketing in 2020 is different than digital marketing in 2017. And if you don't have enough time to learn it, you just won't get it.

In terms of sources of learning, I definitely have a couple of Chrome extensions that that helped me out a lot.

So number one is Zest.is, which is a fantastic Chrome extension that gives me the best marketing articles every single day. That is followed by growthhackers.com, which has a fantastic newsletter.

And then I follow a couple of podcasts, a couple of different things in the startup, entrepreneurship, marketing, business space that helps me to think outside of the box.

Kathleen: So what are some of your favorite podcasts?

Alessio: Actually the podcasts that I like the most are more around growth hacking and how companies have been scaling and growing. So Reid Hoffman Masters of Scale and Andrew Chen from Andreessen Horowitz. That's really incredible for me and something that I'm always trying to be on top of and, and to learn as much as possible from them.

How to connect with Alessio or Mindvalley

Kathleen: Great. Well, this has been so much fun and so interesting. And I feel like we've barely even scratched the surface. But that's all the time we have. So if someone wants to learn more about Mindvalley, or if they want to reach out to you and ask a question about this experience you've had with internationalization, what's the best way for them to do that?

Alessio: Absolutely. So if you want to learn more about Mindvalley, just go to Mindvalley.com, and you can learn a bit more about that all our classes, our courses, and all the opportunities you have to improve your personal growth and education.

If you want to reach out to me, find me on LinkedIn, that's my favorite platform. I'm always putting out a lot of interesting content on marketing there, and just follow me -- Alessio Perioni. And I try to catch up with all the messages I get, and I'll be happy to answer every single question.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: Oh, fantastic. I will put the links to both the Mindvalley website and Alessio, his LinkedIn profile, in the show notes. So definitely head over there. And check that out if you want to get in touch with him.

And if you're listening and you found this episode valuable or you learn something new, please consider heading to Apple podcasts and leaving the podcast a five star review. That's how we get in front of new people and we get to share all this great information from folks like Alessio.

And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview.

That's it for this week. Thank you so much Alessio.

Alessio: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It was such a fun conversation.

How did Chili Piper grow to become one of the hottest new sales software providers, and what would the team do differently if they had to start all over again?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Chili Piper Founder and CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe shares the story of growing his company, from his early days bootstrapping, to what he is doing now that he has secured venture capital funding, and what he would do differently if he had to start over again today.

One of the biggest things Nicolas would change is his approach to marketing. Listen to the podcast to learn why he would have started investing in marketing much earlier than he actually did, and how he thinks that would have changed the company's growth trajectory.

Highlights from my conversation with Nicolas include:

• Nicolas started Chili Piper to help solve the problem of companies not booking meetings with interested inbound leads.
• The solution he developed helps his customer double their bookings.
• Nicolas credits his early success to achieving product-market fit quickly.
• The company gained traction in the US market by using what it calls the "bullseye" strategy, which involved targeting highly influential customers to establish social proof.
• This strategy was successful in helping Chili Piper bootstrap its initial growth.
• Now that the company has secured venture capital funding and Nicolas needs to scale it, he wishes he had made a larger investment in marketing earlier.
• Chili Piper calls the category in which it plays "buyer enablement" and is focused on creating products that are so good, buyers will demand to switch to them.
• This is how Nicolas believes they will unseat the incumbent providers, like Microsoft and Google, that their prospective customers currently rely on. 

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Chili Piper website

Listen to the podcast to learn why startups should invest in marketing early, and how even an unknown startup can take on the industry giants.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.

I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host, and this week my guest is Nicolas Vandenberghe, who's the CEO and co-founder of Chili Piper. Welcome, Nicolas.

Nicolas Vandenberghe (Guest): Thanks. I'm happy to be here.

Nicolas and Kathleen recording this episode.

Kathleen: I’m excited to have you here. I've been sort of watching you and your company for a few years now and I have a personal passion for startups. It's something that I've invested a lot of my time in, and I really especially love following startups that bootstrap for some of their time and find success, so I'm really excited to talk to you about that, and how you fueled your growth, and what the company does.

About Nicolas Vandenberghe and Chili Piper

Kathleen: So let's actually start out, if you would, by having you tell my guests a little bit more about yourself, your background and story, because that's pretty interesting as well, and Chili Piper and what the company does.

Nicolas: Sure. I'm originally French, as I'm sure everybody will guess. I came to the US in the mid '90s. I went to Stanford Business School with the idea of traveling the world, and when I was there I met Steve Jobs. He was invited to our class. He sat on the floor. At that time he was CEO of Next, going next to nowhere.

It was an amazing experience and I thought, "That's what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be like him, doing tech companies."

And so I proceeded to do that and I've done several startups, not quite as successful as Apple, I must say, but enough success to be happy and done three different startups.

I also had spent a lot of time in sales, so I funded my studies. I say that I sold newspapers in the streets of Paris. It's a true story. I am very proud of it because I outsold everybody else; this newspaper that sold more than anybody else.

So I have a passion for sales and more recently I got to know the world of sales is going to be completely changed. Digital is going to have a big influence and it hasn't happened yet.

Right now we are still at the stage where records have been put in place. That's what you call CRM. But it's a different role for crossing the chasm and I make a distinction between a system of records and system of action.

The system of action is what should be used to do your job, and that is yet to be invented. So that is the business of Chili Pepper is to say we're going to be the company that will bring central revenue to the scene.

Kathleen: I love that, and it's one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you.

I've been working in marketing and actually sales, I've been in sales roles as well for a long time, and technology and tech stacks have become an increasingly important part of the daily lives of anybody who's in marketing or sales.

It might just be me, but I feel like on the marketing side, there have been just substantial advancements in making the technology a lot more user friendly, but on the sales side, maybe not as much, for the most part.

You see that with CRMs and systems of records as you referred to them. Things like salesforce.com. Everyone I talk with kind of both loves it and hates it, and the problem with these platforms, if they're not user friendly, is they don't get used.

Your tech stack is only as good as the decisions of the person who is meant to be using it. If they choose to use something else, then it's garbage in and garbage out. So that's my little rant but what I like about-

Nicolas: You're absolutely right, and still to this day the service is so bad that these days you have companies saying, "If you don't put your data in Salesforce, I won't pay your commission." It's like threats and punishments to use the software.

I mean, imagine if I had to tell my kids, "If you don't use your iPhone, I won't give you any candies."

Kathleen: Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Nicolas: Right. That's right.

Kathleen: It's ridiculous that we're in that position. Yeah.

Nicolas: That's why I'm trying to change the system.

An introduction to Chili Piper

Kathleen: I read an interesting article that said that today every individual, marketer, and salesperson is their own CIO because of this exact problem. Because as a company, you can choose to put software in place but every individual person on that team is going to decide what software they're actually going to use.

If there's friction in the process, they're going to find a way around it. It's sort of like water. When water hits an obstacle, it goes around it and carves a new river. And I think that's what people do with software.

So tell me a little bit about exactly the problems that Chili Piper solves for because you mentioned that it's great for revenue teams, but what exactly does it do?

Nicolas: Yeah, so I started the company to help sales people, and we accidentally stumbled into inbound process. It's something relevant to this podcast.

What's happening is we started with helping people schedule their meetings. So especially with complex situations where there's a big SDR team booking a lot of meetings for a big company team, which they should book with the routing being fair with a round robin distribution. So that's how we get started.

And I was talking to some of our customers and saying, "What's your job?" and they say, "I am an inbound SDR, and what do you do?"

"Some people come to the website, marketing people spend a lot of money to bring them to the website. There's a form to request a demo or talk to somebody. I submit the form and my job is to call them and to book that meeting."

I said, "How is that going for you?" and they said, "It's going great. We're converting at 40%." To which I said, "Wait a minute, you're telling me that out of a hundred people who want to have a meeting, only 40 of them get a meeting? Because somewhere they got lost?"

That seems completely crazy to me but it seems to be accepted in the industry. That's what it is. You have a 40% conversion rate inbound, you're doing great. I didn't even have the... beat yourself up! I don't want to touch it. I'm 40% right. Thinking like it would be the ultimate achievement.

So we decided to build a solution for that and what we did is a small piece of JavaScript that companies put in their webpage, in their form, and when the form is submitted, we get the data from the form.

We can augment the data with solutions like ZoomInfo and Clearbit, these kinds of data sources. And in real time, based on this data, we need to find the right rep who should handle that prospect. We can dial the rep and dial the prospect and connect them in real time or we can retrieve the calendar and show options of the prospect and book a time.

So instead of saying, "Thank you I need to call you," say, "Just pick a time that works for you," they pick a time they're all set.

That seems obvious, but we are the first - and only to this day - company doing it.

When I launched it I said, "That seems too obvious to be true. I must be missing something." It turned out I wasn't.

All of our customers doubled their conversion rates. We had people at 80% conversion, a lot of people at 70% conversion. We had a company that was at 23% and went up 55% which is a very high volume.

So it just works. It was just a matter of innovating, coming up with a new way to do things.

The reason why it stayed at that level for so long is because we were just at the junction between the marketing and sales. So marketing thought we were bringing a good job bringing a lot of leads. Sales thought we were doing a good job filling up the leads.

The reference point was outbound, right, so all these companies you reach, you convert maybe 10% percent of meetings. In inbound we were getting 40%; that looked good.

That was a disconnect, so we're putting that all together with all inbound solutions to do this, handle it very efficiently and improve conversion rates.

Kathleen: It's really genius and it's funny how you mentioned that nobody thought of it sooner. You know, it makes me think of an experience that I recently had as a buyer, and I should preface this in saying that you referred to this under the umbrella of buyer enablement because I do think it's all about giving the buyer choices and allowing them to choose the path that they want to take, and not then putting things in their way.

It makes me think of, I was recently looking to vet agencies that do pay-per-click marketing and I went on to a website of a particular agency who I will not name and they had sort of like a quiz that they needed me to fill out instead of a contact us form, and I get the logic behind it so I filled out the quiz even though I was sort of annoyed.

I just wanted to talk to somebody and then at the end of the quiz, it was like, "We'll get in touch with you to set up a meeting," and I thought, "Well, no." Now I really want to talk to somebody and there was no way for me to go to any kind of a contact form or find any phone number.

It's interesting. By the time they emailed me to set up the meeting, I had already found somebody else that I was really happy with.

So there's like a perfect example of how the 60% of people who can fill out a form, who say they want to talk to you and then don't actually turn into a viable, bottom of the funnel lead/opportunity, because you've allowed that time in between to be filled with another solution, or they've talked themselves out of purchasing, which I'm sure happens a lot.

But it's frustrating. It's frustrating as a buyer.

Nicolas: It's crazy, it's crazy.

Something similar happened to me. I submitted a form to talk to somebody at LinkedIn. At the time, it was a while back, I wanted to buy a license of their solution, and you had to talk to a sales person, so I submitted the form and they said, "Somebody is going to call you," and to my knowledge, nobody did call me.

It turned out that two weeks later, it's not that somebody did call me the next day, but it was a 408 number and I got my setting that it go straight to voicemail, because I didn't know the number, and so I never knew that somebody had called. And it doesn't make sense these days.

So with our solution, a company has the option to connect in real time. We even have what we call real time video.

So if you... it's used a lot by companies for their in-app solutions, so if they're the free service, or paid service, somebody wants to talk to somebody, the most efficient in-app format for conversation is Zoom Video, because you can see each other, you can share your screen you can really engage with others.

We have a real time Zoom Video connection, where you can submit a form and say, "I need to talk to somebody," boom, so here is your Zoom Video link and you're connected to somebody over Zoom.

So, that's such a better experience for the potential buyer to be in real time connected to Zoom Video as opposed to waiting and wondering when they're going to be reached out to.

Kathleen: I want to make sure I understand. Are you telling me... I get that you guys through this JavaScript code can do this on a website, but you're saying that in-app, somebody can also use Chili Piper and immediately spin up a Zoom conversation with...

Nicolas: That's right.

Kathleen: That's a game changer. I mean, just like when you talk about trial to customer conversions and adoption and eliminating those friction points early in experience... that's amazing. I did not realize that it did that, which is very very cool.

Nicolas: Yeah. I think we need to market it a little bit better.

Kathleen: Well, there you go, we're talking about it on the podcast.

When should startups invest in marketing?

Kathleen: One of the things I am fascinated by is your earlier story with the company, when it first started, because, as I mentioned, I work with a lot of start-ups. I am a head of marketing for a start-up right now, and the conversation always revolves around, in those early days, before you have really deep pockets or VCs have thrown a lot of money at you, what should the approach to marketing be?

I feel like there's really two schools of thought from the founders I've met. Either they believe in throwing all their money and resources at sales and having an entirely sales led organization and they defer marketing until after they get a lot of investment money, or they really really believe in marketing and make an early investment in content and building out their top of the funnel, etc. And that's a bit more of a long game but it's a leap of faith so I'm sure there's an in between but I seem to talk to those two people who fall in those two courts.

So I'd love to hear what your experience was, because you were successful in your early days bootstrapping.

Nicolas: That's a great way to put it, and I will say that I think the right approach is to do the second, the all in, in marketing. I mistakenly did the first and went to sales, so I'm here to exemplify the mistake.

We did something right at the beginning -- the strategy that I call the "Bull's eye." When we came up with the first product -- and the first product was around handoff between teams, so distributing between SDRs and account executives -- we had a company come to us and say, "I have this problem, can you solve it for us?"

And so the product market fit was easy because somebody came and said, "I have this problem", and we check if other companies have this problem, and we finally did, and so there was no question of having an idea and-

Kathleen: I was going to say, because that's the danger of having that one customer who's the squeaky wheel and you build out a product just for them only to find out nobody else wants it.

Nicolas: Right, right, so the worst part of that, we actually went to SaaStr. Only SaaS companies, and I went around and said, "Do you have that problem?", "Yes", "Do you have that problem?", "Yes", so more than half had that problem.

Then we did something that was inspired by the fashion industry and namely I was exposed to, in the early 2000s, Louis Vuitton, the luxury brand, built their business in the U.S. They targeted the most influential people in the world, the celebrities, so they were not so well known in the U.S. except for a few people.

They went to famous actresses and got them free bags and free jewels, so these actresses were photographed. That was the center of the bull's eye.

From there, they went to what they call socialites. In every city there are people who are more visible than others. They're social, they're visible.

They targeted these people, and from there they extended it. So it was a top down, concentric circle.

That worked really well and we did the same and thought, "Okay, which companies are the most influential in our space?" Obviously it's not Beyonce that helps you sell software. It's companies like Square, Greenhouse in New York, Segment in the bay area -- the companies that people look up to and say, "These guys know what they're doing when it comes to sales and marketing."

So we targeted these companies. It may have taken longer to get the business from them, but once got the business, other companies came to us and that built our early inbound flow from these companies saying, "Hey I booked with Discover Org," "I booked with Discover Org, that was awesome, that was the same experience," "I booked with Segment and it was great, I just did one yesterday. That was a good experience."

So that's what did well to get started to build the foundations. And back to your question from there, what we should have done was build the marketing and expand it, our content and case studies.

Instead, what we did is extend our sales team, so that worked. Every rep paid for themselves. We were able to bootstrap. We passed two million without funding.

It worked well but now two years later we think, "Well we have to build these foundations," because if you want to grow to the hundreds of millions in revenues, you can not do it without a strong brand, and a strong marketing presence, so we waited too long to build marketing foundations at the outset.

Kathleen: This is such an interesting conversation to me and I appreciate your candor in saying you would have done it differently, but I think if somebody is listening they might be thinking, "He says that but they were successful," and so I'm curious what you think would have been different had you started marketing earlier?

Would there have been a different outcome or would it have been the pace that would have changed?

Nicolas: I expect that we would have grown faster.

We typically double over a year, and  expect that we would have done even better than that.

You have to think, the number one problem for us starters is product market fit. If our customers more than double their conversion, they have a return investment that is massive.

That's obviously the first place to get to, but once we have that then the question becomes, how fast can I go and what's the most effective way to go so for all you listeners, you can bypass the product market fit.

The question we're addressing now is how to go from there and the marketing investment is more leverage, so for the same investment, you're able to serve more people.

Initially it doesn't work, but when it does work then you have more leverage right there. A piece of content can reach 20,000 viewers. A rep can not be in touch with 20,000 viewers at the same amount of time.

That's the leverage you need to get and how you're able to grow at 3x or 4x instead of 2x because you get this leverage from marketing, that's big.

We just hired a CMO a few months back, and we're putting all these things in place. That's why I say, we'll see if it all happens, but I have a lot of trust in our CMO and his team to make it happen. I can see he is already putting in the information and I can see how it makes sense.

About the "bullseye" strategy

Kathleen: Well I definitely think you have a good team, I did a little bit of stalking on LinkedIn to see who was on your marketing team and it looks like a really qualified group of people so I'm sure you're going to see fantastic results from that.

I want to go back to something you said earlier, about the bullseye strategy. That's interesting to me because you talked about how Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy used that to bring Louis Vuitton into the US.

I've seen it also with one of the people that I sort of idolize who is Sara Blakely, who is the founder of Spanx, she did the same thing. She sent products to Oprah and other people like that.

In some respects, that can be really risky, and those are examples of product companies, but if you're sending product to somebody you don't really know, if they're going to do anything with it, if they're going to evangelize it... In your case it was going after really high value accounts.

While it's one thing to say, "We're going to do this, we're going to land the biggest fish in the industry," it's another thing to make it happen. So, I am curious, did you have another approach, or what did you do in those early days that you were able to get those meetings, especially as a company, at the time, that these other companies haven't heard of.

Nicolas: Yeah, it's actually not so much high value accounts we went after, it's highly visible accounts. It's a strong difference.

You get a lot more licences from selling to, say, I am thinking of an example, HP, than you get from selling to Segment. Both are costumers actually, and HP came much later, so we got a lot of licenses. Equal industries, these days.

Marketers look up to Segment to what they should do much more than HP, HP is known for other things. The target was not so much larger deals, it was very much who do people look up to.

It turned out that you think that, "Well how did you get about getting these costumers," people look up to these companies because they are forward thinking, and because they are forward thinking, they are interested in trying new tech.

I remember Segment had this French guy, Gillaume Cabane, and there was this discussion and he pushed back and I said “Hey Guillaume, you're super, and on the leading edge. Surely if I am right, you don't want to have missed it."

He said, " Okay, fine we'll do an AB test", and boom, we did an AB test, he went across 61%, it was super successful. He led a team that was known in the industry as forward thinking because he would try new things.

That helped us, because we would go to companies that would try new things, because they would implement these practices, and to implement these practices you have to take some risks.

You have to go and squeeze new solutions, you have to explore, you have to be willing to try new things.

So that's how we did it, and more practically, since...we implemented, and immediately, I did most of this in person. I actually went to events, meet ups and met in person in the early days.

It's not really scalable, but in the early days that's the best way to do it. Nobody knows who you are, if you email campaigned people will ignore it, so you have to go in person and engage in person, and try.

Once you get a few reference accounts, of course the game changes, and you can go online.

How Chili Piper gets customer success stories

Kathleen: Well, it definitely seems to be working because, I think, when Chili Piper came on my radar screen, I actually heard Udi Ledergore from Gong talking about some of the results they have gotten.

I am curious, you're going after these highly visible accounts, they're having some success. Do you have a particular way of approaching them and asking that they talk about those success stories?

Nicolas: Yes, Udi is a great guy and Gong is definitely one of the visible accounts that we love.

We do case studies. We have a case study with Gong, it's on our website. We have one with Grow. We have one with Segment.

So we definitely package it as success. Then we ask them to share with other companies in the community. Often you have questions in the community say, what should I use, partner with them? That's something we could have done better, but we did pay attention to make sure that these champions would serve as references and would talk about us through case studies, and other type of discussions.

How Chili Piper is approaching marketing today

Kathleen: Now, you got your first round of funding last spring, was it April of 2019?

Nicolas: Yeah.

Kathleen: Since then, you've gone on to hire some folks for the marketing team, you mentioned you have a new CMO, and I saw a few other roles. How big is the marketing team today?

Nicolas: We just hired....It's four people now.

Kathleen: Okay. As you think about looking forward, what is your approach to marketing, what are you looking for in the year ahead? Are there particular things that the company is focused on in terms of building its brand, its content, etc.?

Nicolas: Yes. When we took money last year, we were cash positive, so we didn't need the money from the existing business.

What we wanted to do was to invest in product development because we developed the new IDs that we thought were mature enough to bring to market, or to start building.

I should preface with that our inbound solution is growing. Of course we want to keep growing the business.

We're about to launch a very bold take on inbox, so we're taking on Microsoft, Outlook and Gmail.

With the new inbox, the difference is a collaborative inbox. The idea that revenue teams will be able to, we syndicate account-related emails across email boxes, so if you take a common account, you can see everything being discussed within the account, directly in the inbox.

Let's just say an account, let's say Gong, so if it's just for Gong, I'll see every email that's been sent to Gong, every meeting with Gong directly into my box from everybody. Then I can chat, comment on it, so ask somebody, "Hey, what did you do, say, when you talk to him at that meeting?"

It's a collaborative inbox. We think it's exactly the type of approach that sales and revenue teams need, especially the account manager, or CS. We need to know whether that's happened before.

We're about to launch that, and back to your question, we have this marketing team of four, what do we expect from the year?

Well we have this dual mission of building the business around our solution. As you pointed out, not everybody knows about everything we do, like the in-app solution. And start to position that new product line around our inbox, our collaborative inbox and revenue teams.

It's a lot to do. We are going to invest in content because we see that, obviously content marketing stuff works well, but in case there are lot of questions from companies, a lot of the things we do are new, leading edge, the idea of specializing revenue teams... What should the account managers do, what should the CS, costumer success do, how should the head off be done, how to be the best account manager of the best CS?

We are fortunate to have a lot of customers who are very smart and have great ideas, so we can bring these ideas, write them up and bring this content.

That's a big piece of what you're going to do in the future to lead the change... We said earlier on in the podcast, I'm a big believer that sales and revenues are going to be completely transformed with a new set of tools, so we want to make sure that we evangelize that.

How Gong is building the "buyer enablement" category

Kathleen: Now, it's interesting to me, because you coined this term buyer enablement and a lot of what you're doing, as you explained rightfully, is new. It's something that hasn't been done before. This inbox, totally different than what anybody has constructed. You know some of the functionality that you have in your initial tools, totally different.

I am selfishly going to ask you this because I am fascinated by the topic of category creation. So, as a smaller company, you're thinking about this concept of buyer enablement. I assume you're also talking to analysts, companies like Gartner or Forrester, what have you?

How do you look at that, because everything I've read, and I've researched, and seen about category creation, it's an incredibly difficult play. But if you can pull it off, it can be huge. But it's not a quick thing to build a category.

I just would love to hear your thinking about that, and how much of your strategy revolves around that term, buyer enablement, which you're really coining and introducing into the market, versus drafting off of existing searches and things like that.

Nicolas: I'm smiling because I had a long discussion with our CMO yesterday about the category creation and the role of analysts. You have to think that an analyst is not going to come up with an innovation that's in your category currently. An analyst is not going to say that, "the new way of doing inbox is collaborative inbox, and this is the new category, and players come play in my new category."

Kathleen: Right.

Nicolas: Their job is to observe where the market is going and say, "Oh there is something new happening there, it's real," and, "I'm going to call this category, I'm going to explain it within there." That's typically useful in crossing the chasm when you're moving to mainstream. When you move to mainstream, you need this clear explanation of what it is about, but when you build a category you're not at that stage, moving to mainstream, you're at the other stage, the early state.

Our focus is to provide a solution to an existing problem. It's going to sound boring, but the fact that this problem is big enough that it's worthy enough of being labeled its own category is unintentional.

We think that sales people should have better tools, and we think that inbox and calendar, we are also going to launch Chili Calendar, should be specialized for them. Because it works, we're going to solve the problem, and we're going to help them coverup their revenues better.

Hopefully someday Forrester, one of our costumers is Forrester, will call that a new category, will put us in the right quadrant.

It works the other way. Once we’ve done it, they'll say, "This is what's happening and we'll do it," so for now we focus on the solving the problem. It's not as hard as it seems in a sense to create a category because if the problem is real, you're going to have real movement in the market.

A great example, that has happened recently, is sales engagement. Sales engagement is actually, in effect, is synonymous with sales development, it's the tool for sales development. Their job is to prospect and to engage the initial engagement.

A bunch of companies can request tools early on in to us, CalTAP and Yesware, they were doing templates. Then SalesLoft and Outreach which came with a better way to do it, which was cadences, multi-touch cadences, it's the right tool for this team.

They did that tool. Then they got a lot of costumers, high growth.

Somebody, I'm not sure who, called it sales engagement. They thought, "Oh, that makes sense, I like it," and then the category was born, but it didn't come the other way around, it didn't come the other way around.

So buyer involvement is a term we've used because we strongly believe that the focus has switched on the buyer, and that's what we do with our inbound solutions. You can't let your buyer wait two hours or two days to get that.

It’s a focus, but it’s more of a philosophy. We don't expect that somebody is going to come up and call this category buyer enablement. Some day the category will be called, and as a mission, we hope that we'll be in the right quadrant when that happens.

Kathleen: I think that's the right way to look at it, because everything I've seen is that even if an analyst sees it as a new category, they're not going to spend the time to coin it as such until there is more than one player in it. You can't have a category with only one company, at least in the eyes in most analyst firms.

Nicolas: Yeah.

How to unseat the incumbent solution provider?

Kathleen: I think you're right. Last question, and then we'll kind of move into the wrap up. The thing that you're talking about doing, especially some of these new products around inbox start to get into the territory of taking on very well entrenched existing tools.

If I'm an enterprise level sales person, I have an inbox already, well I mean if I am anybody these days I have an inbox.

Nicolas: Yeah.

Kathleen: Often, in these larger organizations, it's generally Outlook, it's Gmail, and these platform, Google, Microsoft, have their tentacles into just about every aspect of the business.

So, how are you accounting for the fact that there is going to be an incumbent product in everyone's hand already, and does what you're building play with these other things, or how does that work, because that would seem very daunting?

Nicolas: That is a great question and it's for sure that the feedback we're getting from a lot of people, especially in the investing communities, are people who've never switched from our product, they get so attached to our product.

Kathleen: Well I don't know about that, Outlook is like SalesForce, people love to hate it.

Nicolas: You must be a Mac person because it doesn't work very... But the world has changed.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Nicolas: People adopt new tools much faster than they ever did. You see this on the iPhone, the level reduction, but look at Slack. There was email, there were also a bunch of messaging solutions like Skype and PICCHAT, but they came up with a better one, and people switched must faster than they used to.

It's up to us to come with a solution where the benefit is so obvious, it's a better way to do it, that people will switch intimidatingly.

That is much less of a risk than the investing communities sees, because people do switch. If in the inbox, this company called Superhuman that launched, say took after the inbox, and they've been successful.

Now there are so many new apps that users are accustomed trying new apps, changing new apps, and if it's better, they will do it. The job is to do something that is obviously better, and that's the challenge. If we do, then companies will switch, and usually will switch.

Kathleen: You just said something interesting, and this is my follow up question. Users might switch. This goes back to how we started the whole conversation about every person being their own CIO, because, especially in larger enterprise, I could see a sales rep saying, "Oh, I want to use this."

But at the end of the day if you want to get enterprise adoption, particularly for something like inbox, isn't the CIO, or the head of IT the key decision maker in that process. Which is a different audience than maybe you've dealt with in the past so-

Nicolas: Yeah, yeah, but there are two privileged citizens in the world, software developers and sales people. The software developer or sales person say, "I want that tool, nobody gets on their way," because you don't want to mess up your software development and you don't want to mess up your sales.

The reason for that is because obviously the software developers build the product, and you want to make them happy, but sales people, they bring the revenues. If they say the tool is going to help them, then it's very measurable.

That's the thing that's beautiful with our inbound solutions, that Chili Piper for the work sites. When conversion rates double, it's directly twice as much pipeline from inbound, the return investment is very easy to calculate.

It's not the feel good solution where you think, "Oh. That is helpful." No, you have twice as much pipeline, and that's easy.

So, same thing. When we launch our inbox, you're going to see shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates.

I mean obviously it will be more subtle, I don't expect that it will double conversion rates. It will be a few points, but it's a few points on your total revenue. So if you can increase 5% your revenue, then the company making $200,000,000, that's 10 million, we'll charge less than 10 million.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Nicolas: We'll all make money.

Kathleen: Well I think you're probably right about software developers and sales people. I am just waiting for the day when the marketer becomes the privileged citizen as well. I have a feeling I shouldn't hold my breath.

Nicolas: You're right, marketers on a budget also, but for some reason, they struggle a bit more.

Kathleen's two questions

Kathleen: Yeah, yes. This is the path we choose though. Well, all right, so... Shifting gears, there are two question that I ask all of my guests and I would love to have what you have to say about these things.

One is the core of what we talk about in this podcast, is inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you really think is killing it right now with inbound marketing?

Nicolas: Well, I am going to be boring and name the king, and the king is HubSpot. They've nailed inbound marketing. To a large extent, they've been so good that they've been able to hide the weaknesses of their product. It took the longest time to... But now they have a reasonably good marketing product, a reasonably poor sales product. They've written the book on it, and I think all the other companies that are doing well...

A lot of companies have spun off of HubSpot and are doing well. In the case of Drift, they take the playbook, they replicate it, and it works for them.

That's definitely the company I would mention.

Kathleen: Okay. Well I've definitely heard those names, HubSpot and Drift, a lot on this podcast.

The second question is, the biggest complaint I hear from marketers, or the biggest pain point I should say is that digital marketing is changing so quickly, mostly driven by technology. They feel like it's trying to drink from a fire hose to keep up with everything and to stay on top of latest developments.

How do you personally stay on top of things?

Nicolas: On top of all marketing and technology, all the tools are there?

Kathleen: Right. Marketing, but also you're kind of in that sales and marketing technology space. Are there particular blogs, or podcasts, or people you follow? How do you stay up to date?

Nicolas: Of course, since we're in the space, we want to know what's going on at anytime, so it's almost our job to stay open. I do that with all the tech, I was looking at whatever tools can help us.

We have this concept of decision memo, so whenever we look at the particular piece... For example, I want to train my salespeople better right now. The first reflex we have in the company, at Chili Piper, is to say, "Is there a piece of software that could help us do that," and of course we’re biased, because we are software developers, but that's how we do it. That's the answer to your question, we go outbound looking for solutions.

There'll be different places where we can find good advice. Podcasts are a great one, yours in particular.

We listen to what other people do, say, and you learn a lot more from podcasts because people leave more practical description of what happens.

Look at the vendor talk, often abstract. Then there are also online communities where people discuss the best tools, and we pay attention.

Then we do, we take, random demos. Right now we are in the process of taking tons of demos from Learning Management Systems, for this particular solution.

We have tech savvy people in the operation, that also makes a big difference. I see companies that don't invest in operations, or don't put the right people in operations, and they're held back by that choice. It's a super important opinion that all companies over sites get tech savvy strong people in their operations.

These people are able to bring in new technology.

Kathleen: Yeah. I think that makes a particularly big difference in the early days, when everyone has to be willing to roll their sleeves up, and not just strategize but do a lot of the work as well, and understanding how to use technology is very powerful for that.

How to connect with Nicolas

Kathleen: Well, we are coming to the top of the hour, so I wanted to make sure I ask you, if somebody wants to learn more about Chili Piper or reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that.

Nicolas: That is to come to our website, because we use our own tools. Chili Piper is a play on word, chili pepper, Piper as in pipeline, so it's C H I L I, Piper, Chili Piper, and if you request a meeting with us you'll see our technology in action. It will pop up for you so you will be able to book it.

Kathleen: Great, I'll put that link in the show notes. Also, I didn't tell you I was going to do this, I also want to give just a small plug for Gipsy Time, which is another company that you are involved in founding. I just submitted my request to get in on the early access, it looks really cool, because one of my biggest problems is I have a million tabs open on my computer at any given time, plus Slack, plus inboxes, and it's super distracting, and it looks to me like you're solving that. Is that right?

Nicolas: Thank you, I am really delighted to hear that. Yes, yes, it's a typical case of solving your own problem. I have ADHD, I have a focus problem, and these to-do lists, they keep accumulating tasks, and I needed to manage a way to do that. On the side, I did this other company, Gipsy Time, to help people focus. It's not about capturing the task in the long to-do list, it's about getting it done.

We have the distraction blocking, where you can block, close all your tabs, and reopen them when you're finished. Make sure how much time you spend on something, make sure you spend the right amount of time. Did I tell you... When you requested that... Invited, it's very promising and it's helped me a lot in getting more done.

You know what to do next...

Kathleen: Well, I need it for sure, so I can't wait to get my invitation. Well, thank you so much for joining me this week, this has been so much fun, if you are listening, and you like what you heard, please head over to Apple Podcasts, and consider leaving in the podcast a five star review, that's how we get in front of new listeners.

And, of course, if you know somebody else who is doing kick-ass inbound work tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much Nicolas, this was a ton of fun.

Nicolas: Thank you, great fun, yes.