Inbound Success Podcast

With search engine algorithms constantly changing and the level of content saturation on the rise, what does it take to create content that will both delight readers and dominate organic search?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, MarketMuse founder and Chief Strategy Officer Jeff Coyle breaks down the factors that search engines consider when determining how to rank organic content, and explains what content marketers can do to solve for search engines and the humans that will be reading your content.

From pillar content, to visitor intent profiles, establishing authority on a topic, building site sections and more, Jeff gets into the nitty gritty technical and organic SEO details that factor into modern search engine rankings.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the MarketMuse website
• Email Jeff at [email protected]
• Follow Jeff on Twitter

Kathleen (00:02): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Jeff Coyle, who is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at MarketMuse. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff.

Jeff (00:31): Thanks so much Kathleen. I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Kathleen (00:35): I'm really looking forward to this because I have a lot of guests that come on who are MarTech vendors. But not always are they from MarTech companies where I use the product and MarketMuse is not just a product that my team uses, but we love it. So, so we'll talk about that a little bit, but we're also going to talk about some really interesting things around organic content strategy and how you can craft a winning strategy, how you can really start to understand what the ROI of that strategy is going to be. So before we get into all of that, let's take a minute, and if you would tell my audience a little bit about yourself and who you are and also what MarketMuse is.

Jeff (01:19): Yeah, sure. So I'm Jeff Coyle like you said, I'm the co-founder and chief strategy officer for MarketMuse and what chief strategy officer means, it's actually a role that I just transitioned to this year and I'm focused on some of our really not even yet released products you know? Real significant data innovations and also kind of horizon scan. So where is the company going? But prior to that, I managed both the product, data science and engineering groups and the marketing group. And now we have a CTO and a Vice President of Marketing. So I've moved on to do even wackier things. But I've been in the search engine optimization, content strategy and lead gen space for gosh, 22 years would be kind of a scary frame of reference. But I was really focused on anything that would lead to, you know, traffic coming to one, the site, and then converting it into something meaningful, whether you're a publisher, whether you're a B2B tech, you know, person or affiliate person, or you're just, you know, building content sites.

Jeff (02:24): And you know, we're now things are so, so, so driven by quality and comprehensiveness. And it goes very well for MarketMuse and our mission, which is, you know, I, sometimes I say, you know, it's ridding the world of bad content. But the actual mission statement for MarketMuse is setting the standard for content quality on the web. And what MarketMuse really does is it gives marketing teams the information that they need so that they know who they are, what they're about, where they have, where they have strengths and they can build actionable plans and cut down on the manual work that people don't want to do. So whether it's the, you know, ideation phase or having to prove why on a pro on a content plan, I know we're going to talk about that today is, is a lot of teams go through their entire content journey with a business and they never have, they never put a why on a content plan, right.

Jeff (03:27): And then all the way down to execution and our most familiar solution is MarketMuse Optimize which is, you know, you can put in a, a page, your page, a draft that's then published. A paragraph, some other URL you want. And it will tell you how well it's written from a standpoint of quality and comprehensiveness. And when I say that, I don't mean, you know, some sort of hack it's, it's really telling you if you were an expert and you were covering a topic comprehensively, how would you do it? And it gives you that juxtaposition instead of just giving you a, you know, make your title eight X D characters, and, you know, update this page tag, which as we know is, you know, only gets you it might get you the half of an invite to the party, but it definitely doesn't get you through the door these days. Yeah.

Kathleen (04:18): The thing I love about MarketMuse well, and so I'll preface this with saying, so the way my team uses it is when we're creating new content for our blog or for creating new pillar content, we run the topic through MarketMuse in the very beginning to understand like some of the things that need to be incorporated in order to really optimize it well, and then also run it through later, just to make sure that we've done that. But what I really like about it is, you know, we've, we were all trained on how to, to do good organic content. We all understand SEO. And in fact, you, you used to be a HubSpot partner, correct?

Jeff (04:57): Yeah, absolutely.

Kathleen (04:59): As was I, and so this is another thing we have in common. But you know, and so we worked with clients for years on this kind of stuff and, and it's, there, there are many best practices out there. There's, and, and I think good marketers know that if you want to rank for something, you got to go out and figure out what's already ranking number one for it are the top three, and you need to make something better. Right. And the better, there are a lot of different ways to define better. I'm doing air quotes, which you can't see if you're listening. But the thing that I like about what you guys have done is it's one thing to look at a piece of content in isolation and say, is this good content it's entirely another to say, is this good content? And, oh, by the way, how does it compare to what's already out there that's ranking? Well, because that's really important. Like you ha you still have to do better than the next best thing if you really want to get found. And I really appreciate that. It gives you essentially a simple, stupid roadmap to creating the best piece of, for that topic on the internet.

Jeff (05:59): Yeah. That's really the progression with our, you know, for, for people using artificial intelligence to accelerate each of the stage of the content creation life cycle. So whether it's the research, whether it's the planning and prioritization content briefs, which, you know, we can talk about more, you know, the actual writing and editing, you know, pre publish, you know, tuning and expansion, and then post publish optimization, tweaking, you know, regardless there's ways that you can make that a smarter process in a less manual process. And what you're speaking about is really that, you know, I want to make sure that I don't have any blind spots. I want to make sure that there, I know how I'm differentiated or how I'm going to be better for the pages that you know, for the topics that I care about and what the specific intense, because it's, it's important to not just copy other people whenever I'm talking about competitive analysis, you know, a lot of people take it in there.

Jeff (06:57): They think it's just, we're, we're, we're doing what everyone else is doing, but it's good to know what those table stakes things are. So the things that you must do to tell the story that you're the expert, you know, I always like to use recipes as examples and say, you know, if you're, if you're making beer and you forget water, it's not really a great recipe. And, and, and so the, you know, a lot of these times you write stuff and you have a, you have a bias or your writer, or maybe they weren't as much of an expert, maybe your brief, wasn't very good that you sent to them. There wasn't a single source of truth that really got into the outline. And they're going to have significant blind spots. And so what we do is we build our recommendations by looking at every article that we can find about a topic, not just 10, 20 of them.

Jeff (07:42): We're looking at sometimes hundreds of thousands of topics. And we're distilling that into an easy, you know, easy map to what it would mean, like what you have to do. And then some things that are maybe ideas that would differentiate. And then when you're building content briefs, which are, you know, outlines effectively for your writer, it's giving them those topics, but it's also giving them a proposed structure for the page. It's giving them questions to answer. It's giving them internal and external linking recommendations. So it kind of tells them the whole story. And the whole point is really that writer is an expert on writing and telling a, building a narrative. I want them to focus on that. I want them to focus on building a beautiful page, high production value. I don't want them worrying about what words they have to include if they, if they take that.

Jeff (08:28): And then they expanded and add another section. Great. You know, if that helps the narrative, but my dream was always that MarketMuse would bridge the gap between an editorial lead, a subject matter expert, and the search engine optimization team who traditionally just throws a word at the writer and the writer's like, girl, you know, I don't want that word in my page. And how can you make that actually make sense? So everybody accelerates and then, you know, you're on that single source of truth with the writer. So when they give you that draft back, you are editing it west. Your trust in them goes up their trust in their collaborative desire to collaborate with you goes up nothing is worse than when you write it. You're a writer and you write a draft and you, it gets marked up by the editorial lead. Then it gets marked up by the SEO team, and then you get it back and you're like, wow, this, now this doesn't even represent my view or my narrative because it's gotten, so it's kind of hacked up so much. So what we're trying to do is really raise all boats by making that less abrasive. And, and what it ends up doing is it makes it, yeah, I was to say, I've seen that.

Kathleen (09:43): Yeah, I've seen that. I mean, I have a full-time writer on my team and, and he would tell you when he hasn't used MarketMuse, like we come back with more edits. And so he's sort of been like, yeah, I just need to do it in the beginning and saved myself a lot of time.

Kathleen (10:01): So, so I want to kind of like peel back some layers of the onion here, because the way I understand this and tell me if I'm wrong, but you've built this tool to effectively mimic what a human being would do if they had a whole lot more time to really do a super thorough best in class content strategy and kind of optimization process. And so, so we can talk about the tool, but like these, I always come at these conversations with the assumption, like not everybody can afford this tool. So let's back up and talk about if the tool is built to mimic that, what does that look like? Like today? Where, where are we are now given everything we know about how search engines work? What are those components of the best in class organic content strategy and optimization process?

Jeff (10:53): It's a great question. Just to talk about it. And if you had to do it manually, because I think it really starts at the, you can start at the page level, right? And then dive all the, you know, go all the way up to the site. I'm doing hand gestures too. I'm originally from New Jersey, but we're on a podcast, so you can't see them. So I went up to the site level, but if you're also a publisher and you work within a publishing networks can be network level. And you also need to understand your landscape. The various workflows though, a lot of like events at the page level, if you're just working kind of in a box, and this is where a lot of outsourcing proposal based or outsourcing brief based workflows breakdown is that the writer has no context. They don't know anything about your site of that much.

Jeff (11:45): There've been given a proposal and they write a page and will that page actually effectively fit into the structure, your site, funnel it up to the section of your site and the structure of your site and will it actually perform. So the workflows that we're liking, we like to do kind of solve all of those potential process issues. But they really start with, if I'm looking at something at a site level, I want to inspire someone to be able to prioritize. And how do you prioritize, like just what you're going to write or what you're going to update.

Kathleen (12:22): Let's, let's pick a topic just to use as an example cause I think that'll help. It's definitely gonna help me to like, make this more concrete. So I'm gonna let you pick the topic. Cause you're the one who's having to explain this. Okay.

Jeff (12:34): I'll give you a great example. And this is one that is a content plan in process for MarketMuse. I mean, we are avid users and so we identify, so we write content briefs, right? Content brief, you go search for content brief in Google. I hope we're number one. Right? But 99.9% sure we are. Right. And what we identified was using MarketMuse, that there were other intent profiles for people who were looking for content briefs, that they were landing on our pillar page for content brief, which is very informational. It's what is a content brief? It gives basic overview of why one would need one. But a lot of the intent profiles that we identified were maybe some more specific intent, like content brief examples were content, brief templates. We also look for different types of briefs right.

Jeff (13:32): So it was marketing content briefs. It was creative briefs. And they were all finding this page. So we identified that we might have those other pages or those topics covered in other pages, but they're not the ones that are performing. So we're both identifying the gaps in that cluster of content. For these intents that we're getting to our page, we may be ranking very well, or we may write maybe ranking on page two or, or somewhere else for these other variants, but there was intent mismatch. So if I looked for content brief examples and I landed on this page, I might look at and go, okay, well this gave me a great overview, but it didn't give me examples. So I referenced that as an intent mismatch. And so one plan dimension that MarketMuse identifies and that you should always be doing as part of your process is do you have pages that people land on and then they're not happy? You know, it's not just reporting bounce rate it's did they make them, were they successful? Right.

Kathleen (14:32): This exact thing happened by the way, I love it. Then we had an article that we wrote called what is influencer fraud. And all of a sudden we had this like 4000% traffic increase in a week on this article. And it was because there was this like related thing that it, it must have happened. The news. And everybody started searching on that and landed on our article. And it really wasn't what our article was optimized for. And so we did see an increase in the bounce rate, but then it was like, so we had to think through like, are these people that, that are good fits for us? In which case do we want to try and keep them? Or is it just sort of like, yeah, go ahead. You can go.

Jeff (15:11): And did you, do you want to, do you want to capture that? Do you want to do something with it? Is it valuable? And so in, in our case, in this example, this intent mismatch it's, we need to go build out templates and examples, even maybe putting a content upgrade into this page that is, you know, download these top N content brief examples and, you know, maybe like ebook or so there's all these different strategic gains you can get by thinking about intent mismatch. That's just one example of ways that you can find situations by looking at a site and understanding where you have strong content. So one thing we use, we have our own metrics for authority. So we're basically telling you where you have authority on a particular topic. And that doesn't mean just, you know, you got a link, you got a bunch of links.

Jeff (16:05): Authority is quite often misused as generic link data. It's not how the search engines calculated authoritativeness, their search engines calculate authoritativeness. I don't, I don't usually get into this much detail, but at the site section topic level combination. So just unpack that for a second. It's if you're familiar with computational power, it's a big O, M times N challenge. The only people who could even think about doing this, it's like this crazy permutation, would be people like Google who have this massive computing power. So they're calculating basically on this site section and this topic combination, is this person, is this entity, have they written great content on this topic? And that's one of the components of authoritativeness. So we do what we feel is the best job of getting you that data point. So, you know how well you've covered this particular topic on this section and then rolled up to this site.

Jeff (17:07): And so we can confidently say effectively, what's your momentum on this concept? And that's your breadth of coverage? How much content you have, how in-depth and how well intertwined or interwoven or linked together is this content that's related to this topic. Do you have any really great standout pages? And then we can cross reference that against the competitors. So by the way, I'm comparing, I'm saying all this, because you have to do this manually, right? You have to know, like, I mean, if you want to go in and say, I've got 10 pages about cookies or what content briefs I've got, you know, I wrote two long form ones. I've got four support structure pages that just answer specific questions. I've got these many pages at this stage of the buyer cycle, right? This is the work of a content strategist.

Jeff (17:54): You need to know where you're at, and then you also need to know your wins. And then we do that for all of your competitors. And we do it for this particular topics, competitive landscape. And we factor in off page factors like links, but that is not the dominant net number. And compare this to some traditional SEO practices that just look at links, they're completely correlative. And they basically say for this keyword, right, what is the link profile of the top end ranking pages? And they say, if you are within this range, you can have a chance. That's not good enough. It's not predicted you might as well roll dice.

Kathleen (18:39): Not only is it not good enough, but I feel like of all the things that we've talked about, it's the thing that is the least within your control, right? Somebody else has to agree to link to you. And I know I'm on the receiving end of those requests all the time and 99% of the time I ignore them and delete them.

Jeff (18:56): Well, not even that, it's just, it. Doesn't nothing about that. Read your content and tells you whether you written this stuff and no matter what, right, you there's the, the, the, imagine the graph is a crazy log logarithmic graph, right? Unless you're super mega powered at the top end, first of all, I'll give, I'll tell you a little anecdote about the top end of the power chart, which y'all, everybody needs to be thinking about this, something you said earlier that like gave me a little bit of a trigger, which I'll get into. But unless you are, you can't go out and write something about grapefruit seltzer today and then kitty cats tomorrow and guitars and guitars the next day you can't. Right. So if you're just looking at links, those links could have come to your site through a different section of the site. They could be about something else completely. It's not giving you any information about whether you can rank for this topic.

Kathleen (19:55): Well, and I feel like at the end of the day, it's solving for machines and if there's one thing I've learned in my marketing career, which is as long, if not longer than yours, by the way, it's that when you focus on solving for machines, you set yourself up for failure because the rules that the machines go by will change. That is inevitable. And if you, instead, if you focus on solving for human beings and their needs, that is the thing that the machines are trying to solve for. So you're really like cutting to the chase and doing yourself a lot of favors by focusing on people and not machines.

Jeff (20:26): Exactly. And longevity. I mean, it was another thing, a lot of the advice and the and the, what you hear about how this stuff works, comes from people who are, they don't really care about the longevity of their sites. A lot of them are affiliate marketers. I love affiliate marketers. We have a ton of marketer clients, right. And, but the thing is they're, they can be a whole lot riskier than you, if you're a B2B brand or a major publication, because if you screw up, you're a B2B brand, you can't just change it overnight and you have to build stuff that's going to have. And you're also thinking about the people part, that's why, like some of the SEO tricks, they, they bug me out because it's like, I actually, I might be able to do this a couple of times and build this operational practice, but wouldn't it be better if I had a team of my four writers and search engine optimization professionals and content strategist, all on the same page so that we actually launched 30 articles that were great, and we all liked, and we still like each other, then we did some crazy trick that was risky.

Jeff (21:34): I mean, it just doesn't even, it doesn't even compute. And when we were talking about the doing things for the machines, the machines get smarter, that's the nature of the gang. So, you know, there's a lot of these, I was like web dot archive is my web.archive.org is my source of truth for the opinions and the the opinions and the thought leaders in the industry go back to their same pages and see how often they update what they say is best practice. Right. And so, yeah, if you have a, if you have a four hour break, go look at all of it and go back through these articles and look how they change over time, because stuff changes the best. So these, these tricks, you know, they don't last forever. And so I much rather build my house on a strong foundation.

Jeff (22:25): And one that also creates harmony inside my organization, and nothing does that better than quality. And, and you, you know, that that's really, and that's where you're gonna end up getting your longevity from anyway. But what I will, the one thing I did want to mention and then we can dive back in is when you were, you said the top performing pages, when some of when, when those pages are in the top elite pool of sites, so are, you know, the dominant publishers in the world, the dominant entities, depending on what industry you're going for, they play a whole different game. They're on a, nothing, not even, they're not even playing a different sport, they're on a different field. They're in a different gravitational level than you are. So if you're copying Amazon, if you're copying you know, three letters, three levered, or three-letter publishers names, if you're copying Wikipedia, you're in for a world of hurt.

Jeff (23:26): For so many different reasons, which could take, you know, a three hour podcast. But I see so many folks dive off the wrong end of the pool because they think that mimicking their idols is going to be the way that they can be successful in organic search. And it, trust me, it just doesn't work. And, and it's you know, when we're talking about predicting outcomes, what I'm trying to do is give advice. That's going to be dramatically more predictive than 50, 50, 50. And is this gonna work or is it's not and that's where the one thing I've seen time and time again, is, is mistakes made from, because a lot of the pundits they'll say look at the top three ranking pages that have in, in, and then do do it, ideally the skyscraper technique. Right. It's great. It's great. If those articles it's great, but there's a list of disclaimers. Like

Kathleen (24:30): If their Alexa rank is, is 80 and yours is 15, it might not work that well.

Jeff (24:37): Well, it's, it's just to say, make sure that they focus on the same intents, make sure that they're within the same cluster structures make a lot of things have to be cohort. They have to be similar in order for that to actually work. And it's it, there's too many gotchas in that in that, in that problem. And then also, you know, Google is getting so great at understanding the intent behind queries. And if you're optimizing for a topic that has what we call intent fracture, it means that a user is diving in and I'm like, oh, I'll give an example. Then there's an esoteric concept. There's meaning ambiguity. So I'll use the word shell, right? If I, I always pick a different one, but if you just type the word shell in to Google yeah. Who the heck knows what you're looking for. Right. Nobody knows there's, there's both meaning disambiguation, you could be looking for an actual thing you'd have on the beach. You could be looking for the company shell. Right. You could be looking for, you could have mistyped...

Kathleen (25:47): Outerwear.

Jeff (25:49): S H E A apostrophe L, you know, possibly it could be the outerwear. Right. and so what Google has to do, if you type in shell is it is saying, okay, fractured intent. I don't know, I'm looking at all the data I have. I'm going to present to this person based on a lot of detailed data points, who they are, where they're at their history, if they're in incognito mode and through a proxy, right? That's when you get them the most ambiguous, they throw out what they call their favorite intense, and they, it might be a blend of them. You know, if you wrote the word back, you know, these are things that it meaning ambiguity, ambiguity, but there's also intent ambiguity and intent fracture. So if I type in CRM software, for example, CRM, softwares, you know what it is, it's CRM software, but I don't know where the person is in their journey.

Jeff (26:44): I could be what they may be looking for a definition. They might be looking for lists of software packages that they could be anywhere. So the way I like to think about it is how much fracture is in my query from the buyer journeys perspective versus ambiguity. And when you're just analyzing search results to look at competitors, some of those pages may be at different stages of the buy cycle. Some of them may be different meanings if you smush all those together and try to copy that, and you're in deep trouble, could you be creating, I've seen the funniest pages in the world, right? Where they, they smushed together two meetings of words. And like, there's a section about some people when they're thinking about bats are thinking about these flying, you know, flying animals, but other ones are talking about baseball bats.

Jeff (27:31): And they actually that, and that's, that's that mentality, right? But it's just as bad if you're writing a content page that is not comprehensively covering the buy cycle, but you weave in concepts that are good for a beginner early stage awareness. And you also were touching on bottom of the funnel. You're creating the logical content. You're creating content. That doesn't make sense for someone to consume all in one place, because buying a, you know, buying a CRM package is not going to happen in 2000 words of reading. So if there's these, these, just these general concepts, and I love this because it dovetails well with our conversations, like how do I build great content? You build great content by understanding the client and speaking to all the possible levels of understanding they may have and covering the whole buyer journey and throwing it, the idea that you should create one page for each keyword out in the window, you create one package, maybe even a site section on this topic, if that's what somebody would need. So that every time anyone has a question about this topic, or they're at any stage of the buy cycle, you have the right page for them.

Kathleen (28:47): Can you just define what you mean by site section?

Jeff (28:51): Sure. so you may need based on where you are, based on your authority you may look at, and we have a metric in our system called personalized difficult. It's the laser beam for organic searches, if the deadly weapon. All right. And it tells you based on your existing authority, based on your momentum on this topic, right. And how hard it is to rank for this topic based on us reading all the articles that we can on this topic. And, you know, what's out there how much content you need to build. So we can actually tell you with the degree of predictability, how much content you need to make on this topic, where related topics in that cluster. So what I'm saying, the site section, I'm looking at this from saying, let's say I have no existing authority on this topic.

Jeff (29:42): And it's a really hard one. I'm not going to be able to get away with just adding pages to my blog on it. It's not going to happen for me with any degree of speed. I'm going to have to devote an entire wing of, of my house to building a foundation on this topic, and then expanding on that. I just, I haven't earned it yet. I haven't earned the ability to just build a cluster. So I'm actually going to have to build out significant foundation on this. And that's a possible situation. One might be in it. It often comes up in a situation where someone wants to start to cover a topic, but hasn't gotten there yet. Is it,

Kathleen (30:26): Is it like, are there structural things you need to do? Meaning is this building out like a sub-directory with that topic name, or is it more about creating, is it that sort of pillar content approach where you need to create the really long form, massive piece first and then build the cluster around it? Like what, how does that play out?

Jeff (30:45): In, in an ideal scenario where so the site, the actual URL or the structure there's different schools of thought on that of whether it works or not. In the end, if you're talking, if all variables were taken out, kind of doesn't matter on that front, I like having topics, topics driven sub-directories in my instructors that I'm building out ideally and as long as they are smartly structured, if everything's bucketed in, you know, one pool of pages, it's still going to be grouped logically by the way that it's linked. And then the inbound links that those pages get, which also inform the search engines on what these pages are about. And cause every link passes, both, it passes a lot of information. It's information about the page that is linking to the other page where, you know, the actual node on both ends, the strength of those have been information.

Jeff (32:02): And so when I'm saying site second, I just mean somewhere in a logical place. Yeah. And, but it's just, it gets to the sense of like what what breadth of coverage is needed with respect to your entire pool of pages. You're not going to get there. Like, let's say you have a thousand page site you're not going to get, and it's a, it's a big lift. You're not going to get there with a couple of pages. It's just, it doesn't mean Rome wasn't built in a day. It doesn't make sense that you're the authority on Gibson guitars on your personal blog. If you've only written three articles about Gibson guitars. And I see this all the time, people are like, oh, I just had to go out and write a cluster. They write a six page cluster about, you know you know, red wine. And I'm like, you are not the authority on red wine. I mean, and even though you wrote this great cluster, I can't break out of page seven.

Kathleen (33:06): Oh, I will say the opposite can be true. Some of my favorite moments in my marketing career had been when I search a topic and I find no exact match results for it. And I'm like, yes, universe, you've handed me this opportunity. All I have to do is write one blog and I can rank, right.

Jeff (33:25): That's the trick. You've absolutely nailed it. So if you go and that's where an intent mismatch is beautiful. That's where a no rank authority. So a no rank authority is where you can assess that a site has authority on a topic, but has no pages represented, has no ranking pages or is ranking very poorly with an unrelated page. Those that's your, those are your dream scenarios. That's what you get out of bed for, right? Because you can go write one page. Sometimes you don't even have to write one page. Sometimes you just have to add a section to an existing page, and those are really dream scenarios. And so those sweet spots, they happen all the time and they require a lot of work to find. And we've built technology that just finds them.

Kathleen (34:15): Well and I think sometimes they require a lot of work, but sometimes they're literally sitting in front of you. But the quote, unquote marketing best practices give you, make you blind to them. And what I mean by that is I ran into this at my last company. We sold a, a product that had a very, very, very niche use case. And in most cases, when you learn about content strategy, like I don't care where you learn it. Usually when you're taught how to do a content strategy, you're told to look for keywords with a certain search volume, right? And yes, if you can do that and succeed, it means you'll get more traffic, a higher volume of traffic. But in our case, when we looked at the, the highest intent keywords for, for the product that we were selling, there was like zero measurable search volume. But, and oh, by the way, there was the only other source that was ranking for those keywords was the National Security Agency.

Kathleen (35:10): Cause this was in cyber. But the thing is, if somebody is actually searching them, there could be 10 people searching a month, but those 10 people are like perfect, amazing fits for us. And you know, it was, we were a business to government sale. And so one contract was worth a lot of money. So it was like doing a whole content strategy around what effectively might be 10 searches a month was totally worth it. And fast forward now a year. And that company is getting a ton of really high quality leads that are leading to actual pipeline and revenue from that. But because we're taught as marketers look for search volume, I feel like people see that they'll do their homework and they'll say, but there's no, there's no search volume for this. And then they say, so I can't do it when, in my opinion, it's like, oh my God, do it cause nobody else is, right.

Jeff (36:00): Preaching to the choir for search volume. And you know, search volume is a point of reference. But it is the most misused data point in content in, in SEO. And I always give a test for folks right on this one. And I, and I can walk through why I love that you've walked through this, by the way I call it the search volume illusion. It is, it is a, it is a blankie. It's a blankie for content strategists. It's a blankie for large enterprises because they say you can't write a topic that's higher, low that isn't over this, right. It's such a mistake.

Kathleen (36:43): And the, the high search volume ones are always the most competitive also.

Jeff (36:47): But it allows, it allows really smart search engine marketers to wreck you. If you can see that a competitor writes against Google AdWords Keyword Planner sort and descend by search volume and has a line, right. You can actually chop their legs out from under them with a good content strategy. It's about chopping down the tree. And so if you see that that's happening and you can watch that strategy occur, it is, it makes you so susceptible to competitive risk. And what, the way I always explain a great example of this is pick your favorite search volume for something you were successful with, right. Let's say it was 10,000 search volume and you got number one and your click-through rate on that page is you know, 10%, I'm just making a fake. So you're supposed to get a thousand entrances. If your prediction, if your, if your math and your guide post was right, you're supposed to get a thousand answers, go look at your analytics for that page.

Jeff (37:50): And let's say that page is now getting 3,800 entrances. Well, you look at, then you're like, yay, that's a win, right? But what it tells you is that the frame of reference for using search volume was worthless because you couldn't come close to a predicted the gap between those 1000 and that 3,800. And that pool is called a term pool multiplier. And that term pool comes from adjacent variance comes from concepts that are one-time searches. It comes from maybe things that are intent mismatch, right? And you couldn't have predicted those. And the same is, goes for the opposite direction. And so when you're, when you're looking at pages and they rank well, they're also ranking for lots of other stuff that is trackable and they're renting for lots of other stuff that isn't trackable. The amount of intent fracture is that term pool multiplier. I have a huge article about this on my blog. I believe it's called keep search volume in the keyword research delusion or something. I love it. I love it. And so you go to check that out. It actually walks through how to do that process manually to prove your point intern. The goal of this piece is to prove your point internally, that search volume should not be your north star.

Kathleen (39:07): Wow. I totally agree with that. You don't have to convince me because every time I tried to go after high search volume keywords, it's just, it's been a lot of work for very little pay off. And the opposite is true for low search volume keywords. So I don't know. That's, that's just been my, you got it. I mean,

Jeff (39:28): You got for me, I just want, I want to set expectations properly. I mean, I, I, I've owned, you know, multi-million search volume tops positions for seven plus years, right? I've also given advice to B2B companies that an entire content strategy for their entire year is on stuff that's below 10 and it's either, you know, it has to be a fit for the, for the company. And the cool thing is knowing how much work you need to do to get that money, you know, to get, to get that money. You know, I mean, we had so, you know, good, another good example. You said you can give a lot of examples, you know, content strategy, right? I believe I'm still number one for content strategy. I hope I still have.

Kathleen (40:17): That's a tough one because there's some really big guns going,

Jeff (40:21): Right. And to gun down, somebody who has that much power, it's a different strategy. You have to do some of those things I was talking about. You have to pick them apart at the intent level, at the question answer level at the zero search volume level, they're giving away some of my tricks to build the foundation. They're not going to build, you have to know their strategy. You have to document what they're likely going to do, and that's painful. And that's really hard, but to win in the big leagues against the big players, you have to actually know exactly what they're going to do, where their gaps are. You need to know, did this writer leave and they were really good at this. So they're not going to update those pages. I mean, getting into that level of detail, which we have to, I mean, to beat off spot, we have to that's HubSpot was the one that was in the back of my mind when I was in there.

Jeff (41:17): I mean, that's what we had and we, we're kind of doing it, the proof points, right. Because you know, how much actionable conversion do I get off of that? I don't know. But it's, it's one of these things where you have to think cutting your money, where your mouth is, and you got to think like them into to really get it done. Yeah. And you know, I was looking at a a customer of mine site yesterday, funnily enough, it brought me and it was a three letter word that is a common networking acronym. I'm not gonna say it out loud, but I said, yeah, a person I was speaking to this, this page has ranked for seven years on this term in the top five. And I said, and he also has another one of the ranking pages in the top five.

Jeff (42:11): And we walked through and said, you know, the only way you will move on this high volume mixed intent keyword is to truly put yourself in the mind of the content teams publishing and you're going to have to do a whole lot of work and is it worth it? And then we walked through the way we're actually gonna make moves there, the way you make moves on head terms, isn't publishing against the yeah. It's publishing against the infrastructure. Yeah. And then the head term moves. It's the rising boat. You know, the rising tide raising all boats scenario and a lot of editorial teams that don't get it. They don't realize that that head term will move along with the mob. The mob is the rest of the, of the mob is the rest of the fleet. Right. So mixed metaphor. I could literally nerd out on this all day with you,

Kathleen (43:07): But we're going to run into a time constraint, right. So so I mean, I think you've really covered the ground on a lot of the basic building blocks for how we should be thinking about content strategy and how to really like the David versus Goliath, if you're trying to do that, how to, how to approach it. Can you share, do you have any, like, just recent examples of having done this and what the results were?

Jeff (43:31): Oh yeah. Have a few, gosh we work with so many teams and it, you know, some of them we can, you know, get into the details. So when we I'll give you a great example and it's going to be an upcoming case study. We worked with, and I'm going to have to be a little abstract with the company. So we worked with this company and they are one of the most prominent brands in this B2B technology space. And just an amazing team led by their, you know, wonderful SEO, wonderful content, wonderful conversion rate optimization team really understands everything, but they had a competitor who is an exact match brand name for the term they were firing for. Right. And, and they weren't. Right. So you know, so let's just say you were, you know you're you're, you were called Halo, right.

Jeff (44:35): And the competitor's name were remote speakers and you were trying to rank for remote speakers. So they had this, then they had a goal and they were trying to outperform for this query and the opposing company's brand within it. And they also internally had a problem where they wouldn't allow their team to publish for, I think it was below 400 search volume. Yeah. And we dug out that route, tossed to the side, built up a huge infrastructure around this concept in bridge out. And now they outperform that exact, like exact match hybrid competitor. Right. Fun fact on that one, because we're anonymized, I can talk a little bit out of school, right. Is when this all happened, everyone got jealous internally. Right. And they want, they wanted some of the other, the juice from this. And it was like, wait, we'll wait.

Jeff (45:36): But not all these pages are set up for you know, it's content upgrades and all this other stuff. And so I just love that because it's like, okay, you've moved on from this one challenge of visibility. And now you've moved on to this next level of maturity where it's like, all pages grow the business. Now you got to figure out, once you got the eyeballs, now you got to figure out how to monetize it. You got to figure out how you look for those intent fracture situations. And we see it. That's a great example of one where, you know, you did the time, it felt hard. But you're trying to get to that next level where, you know, I, you know, what is, is it is, it is a website I used to manage what is.com? And so many early, early stage awareness definitions that just own it.

Jeff (46:27): Right. And a lot of the conversation was how do we get those people into some sort of level of conversion, right? How do you progress them? What I like to say is your content has to answer the next and the questions, not just this question, if it needs to be the source of truth, but it also needs to escort them across the journey. If you're in e-commerce and you're on a category page, that's your chance to present all the content you have. That is part of the buyer journey, not just a picture of the pair of socks. And that's it, that's the other piece of it. If this fits for any type of content, like you want to escort them through all you got and where that, that, that if you're in a pillar page, don't just think you are, you're escorting them across the entire inventory. You got to go back to your old content and update it. You got to do all those things so that when they land there, they truly know who you are and all that you have to offer. So many times I, I talked to the strategist, I land on their page. I can read it. I'm like, whoa, this is really good. That's it?

Jeff (47:38): You know, and so often because they didn't give me their, they put their best foot forward. And that's what you have in a lot of these teams where they're not thinking about the journey and that they are escorts, they're Sherpas. And I don't want someone coming, reading my 3000 word article, and then not knowing that I actually have six other great articles for this. You know, that that's where you know, the user experience is so important and conversion rate is so important. So I love that.

Kathleen (48:08): All right, we're going to switch gears and I'm going to ask you the two questions that I always ask all my guests. The first one being, you know, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days?

Jeff (48:25): Oh gosh. So many. One person I'll call out. I like to call different people out whenever I get asked these types of questions, but one person I'll call out is, his name's John-Henry Sceirk and J H S, J J H S is his first three letters. And you can look it up. John-Henry Scherk Gowth Plays is his agency. If you've never read anything that he's written, you have a whole weekend and you will be 10 times smarter, that's on all topics and he just gets it. And we've been friends for a very long time. But I find so, so many people, like, unless you're in this kind of B2B content growth hacking space, you kind of, you, maybe you didn't hear about him cause he's not writing for a big blog, but I love everything he reads and everything he writes.

Jeff (49:19): And yeah, J H S, he's a superstar and he's doing it. He wrote a lot of stuff about working with Notion lately. And really do, he just, he has his he's always ahead of the game. And I like to think I'm ahead of the game too. But like Dave, sometimes he's ahead of the game. I should interview for this podcast. Yeah, you definitely need to get J H. I'm happy to make that intro. But yeah, go check out his Twitter. It's, it's, it's really hot.

Kathleen (49:49): Awesome. All right. Second question. Most marketers I talk to say that their, one of their biggest challenges is just keeping up with all the changes, whether it's an algorithm change or regulatory changes or best practices or new platforms, are there particular sources that you turn to, to really stay up to date other than JHS?

Jeff (50:08): None other than John Henry? Yeah, there is, I'd say though it's changed for me over time and I rely a lot on the communities that I'm in and my mastermind groups and things. Because I'm like so overwhelmed. I have two small children you know, I run a business and, you know, multiple that says and I also, you know, my job probably is four jobs at MarketMuse too. So I have to rely on, I can't do it. Right. And so I really rely on my peer groups, rely on my team to surface things. I think if you have a Slack or something in your office, like have a learning channel, we do, we have a learning channel where everybody posts the stuff that led to information gain for them. Right. And then you have 10 minutes. You read what the, you know, in my case, the 35 to 40 people that I love so much what they learned from this day, you know, sometimes there's some dumb stuff on there, but it's usually really good, but, but also my other, the other community is the content strategy, collective slack channel, which is a community that we manage.

Jeff (51:18): But also I'm in an entrepreneurs group called Rhodium. The Technical SEO Mastermind led by Pat Stox and a few others. But like whatever your space is, I think get into these groups so that, you know, you get their collective like hive mind impact because, you know, Twitter can be noisy. You could like be really hard working one day and miss a whole bunch of stuff like, and because you didn't do your updates and you follow 3000 people and especially if you're doing a lot of different things I think that that's key don't just rely on a few influencers to filter, like try to get a kind of a hive mind approach. That's the way that I'm able to do it and still keep my sanity. I still miss stuff though. Yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna miss something.

Kathleen (52:08): You are human.

Jeff (52:08): A big, big one for me is like, MarketMuse doesn't really get into a lot of the structural type analysis and of sites, but we don't do a lot of the speed and or core web vitals. And that's the hottest topic right now in organic search, other than, you know, content strategy and natural language generation, you know, which I'm in. Right. And I'm building products in generation. and the other one is core web vitals, but like, we don't do anything on it. So I've had to rely on like my, my crew really like, and get that from Haas MOSIS. And luckily, you know, a couple people that I mentioned, all that notably Patrick stocks, who, if you haven't read his stuff about core web vitals, just type in P a T R I C K S T O X core web vitals. It's the you now will be as smart as, you know, 98% of the SEOs in the world.

Kathleen (53:11): I love it. There's some good resources you're dropping here.

Jeff (53:15): Build your network and and just like find ways to give them, you know, a little bit of your time and you're gonna, you're gonna get to at least sound smart. Yeah. It sounds smart at parties, right. Or not be ignorant. Right, right. That's a good, a good goal to set.

Kathleen (53:35): Well, this has been so amazing. If, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about MarketMuse, or they want to connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that.

Jeff (53:43): Go check out MarketMuse. We have on our blog, it's it's an amazing blog. We have a content strategy crash course is kind of, it's like a huge walkthrough. If this is something new to you. We also have hundreds of articles that get into the details. Go check out that keyword volume, keyword search volume one from what we're discussing, but there's also a really cool, really cool ones on there about kind of myth-busting some common practices. Jeffrey underscore Coyle on Twitter. [email protected]. And I'm very active on LinkedIn, but please, please shoot me a note. DM. I answer everything. I love this stuff. I'm extremely passionate about it. I even will. If you give me, you know, your site, your page, I typically will dive way too deep into the details. So as long as you don't have thin skin, feel free to shoot me anything you want me to look at. I love it.

Kathleen (54:35): That's an awesome offer. So I will put all those links in the show notes. So head there if you want to get in touch with Jeff. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review. That helps other people find us. And if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at my crazy Twitter handle, which is @workmommywork and I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, Jeff.

Jeff (55:05): It was awesome. What a fun discussion. Cheers.

Outside of emails, landing page copy and offers, what are the levers that marketers can pull to get better results from their conversion funnels?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, DropFunnels Founder and CEO Jordan Mederich explains the importance of what he calls "building your house on rock as opposed to building it on sand" — or why it's so critical to nail certain fundamentals on your website in order to drive big results from your conversion optimization and lead generation strategies.

In this episode, Jordan discusses how things like page load speed, social proof, and landing page design can all play big parts in boosting traffic to your site and ensuring that the visitors you attract stay and convert.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the DropFunnels website
• Email Jordan at [email protected]

Kathleen: Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week, my guest is Jordan Mederich, who goes by Jordo, so that's what I'm going to be calling you after this. He is the founder and CEO of DropFunnels. Welcome to the podcast, Jordo.

Jordan: Really glad to be here, I appreciate you having me.

Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you. I love getting into deep technical levels of marketing nerdiness, and I think that's what we're going to do here today. So let's start out by having you just do a brief overview of who you are, what you do, and what DropFunnels is.

Jordan: Yeah, sure. And anyone who's here, hopefully we can give value and new insights, regardless of anyone who's just starting out, or you've been doing it for a really long time. So I've been in the marketing game for, I'd say about a decade, actually I came from the filmmakers' perspective and training, I was in very much the creative space. And I make commercials for a long time and had films produced on Amazon Prime, and we've been seen on all the big networks and whatnot. And I realized that there was this big switch that I kind of had to make from kind of the mass market branding, corporate level of marketing, and realizing that I was blown away and shocked by the amount of waste that occurred specifically in marketing, corporate level businesses. I did work for Sony and Verizon, I was like, "Wow, there's so much money, billions of dollars being spent on advertising with no attributable results from most of those marketing efforts."

Jordan: And so I dove deep into the direct response marketing world, and I was building sites and whatnot on WordPress. So WordPress powers 34% of the internet, it's Google's number one favorite platform to rank. But it's also extremely technical. It's very powerful, in that sense, it can do a lot. But you better have a marketing or development team, a designing team, you better know what you're doing, you better have great servers and all those things. And so I was building new marketing funnels on WordPress, and building new sites in businesses on WordPress. But about six years ago, there's this resurgence, and it kind of started with ClickFunnels, and Kartra, and Kajabi. It's the sales funnel builders, hard coded platforms that made it more simple, I would say, easier to build your business on a platform and they had the psychology of sales.

Jordan: So we know that sales funnels blow away as far as conversion rates are concerned any corporate website and can really help you to get new leads and sales. And so they had this psychology but not the technology. And I look back and I realized as I was making the switch from corporate marketing into more direct response marketing, WordPress really has the technology, but not so much the psychology, it's really difficult to build on. So a couple years ago, I was looking back and I said, "Why don't I just combine these two worlds? Why don't I bring them together and make it easy to have the psychology and the technology at the same time? Make an entirely drag and drop, remove the code and the difficulty," and so we're the first platform ever to combine these two worlds. And to give you unlimited sales funnels, your websites, your blog, all of your courses into a WordPress based infrastructure, so that your sales funnels can rank, you build true domain brand authority, your pages load at around two seconds, which is really powerful for both paid and organic traffic.

Jordan: And it gives you the absolute strongest foundation to be building your marketing on outside of having a massive team of servers and devs and all of that if you're going to go build it on your own, DropFunnels is really the all in one platform to help make that happen. So since we launched in early 2020, we've seen unbelievable tremendous and very rapid growth, and we're breaking things all the time and re-innovating and reinventing what we want to see the marketing world to be like, and we're seeing some amazing growth there. So that's kind of the history of DropFunnels and where we are.

Kathleen: Well, the first thing that stands out to me that you said is that you launched your business in early 2020, what a time? It's a lot to do business, wow. I mean, granted now what you're doing is mostly online thing, but I'm just curious, how were you affected by COVID?

Jordan: So being online was a huge blessing for sure at the time and everyone who was already established in the online space pretty much won, everyone won through with that whole thing. Zoom obviously exploded, all these online companies did, and what I saw was a lot of people who were doing physical business or brick and mortar business wanting to move online and really struggling to learn how to do that, to make that happen. So for us, it made us step up our training and our onboarding processes, because we had to make it not twice as simple, but probably four or five times simpler to help them to get moving, because it's such a foreign game for most people.

Jordan: I think this morning, actually, I had a call with a client who is very brick and mortar, physical business, and just even using the verbiage, the vernacular of sales funnels in direct response marketing is so foreign that it's more of an education play than it is a service or marketing play. It's like we have to help the world understand how to reach people online instead of physical business. But I think it was a wake up call. Kathleen, I think for a lot of people running physical businesses and having no digital presence at all, it's like, "Wow, this kind of stuff can happen like that, and when it does, if you're not prepared, it can sink the ship."

Kathleen: Yeah. It's really interesting the way you describe that, because in my day job, I am head of marketing for a company that sells software into e-commerce. And we saw something really similar where, at least in the retail industry the data that I've read indicates that COVID sped up the shift to e-commerce by something like 10 years within the span of a year. So it was this massive acceleration, and you're right, a lot of people weren't really ready for it, but they were sort of forced to make themselves ready. And so it was an interesting time for sure, just to see the people who would normally not be the early adopters or the technology adoption curves sort of being forced into a place of discomfort and having to do things sooner than they otherwise might.

Jordan: Yeah. And I'm super well clearly thankful for it, but in a universal sense, it's like we needed some kick in the butt. The industry, the marketing world, the business world needed a kick in the butt to say, "Hey, it's not 1992 anymore, you have to adopt these methods or you're no longer competing against the guy down the street from you, you're competing against guys like me who live and die marketing." And so when you move into the space, it's this new world of early adopters, right? It's now a new phase of people who have never done it and never had an incentive to do what they have to do it.

Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny because I was going to say I said early adopter, or innovator, but those are actually the wrong terms, Because those people have already converted to digital. So this is the... I don't remember what the term is, the laggards, the laggards are now being forced to move more quickly than they otherwise might have.

Jordan: Yeah, I'm glad. Yeah, because I think it serves them better, too.

Kathleen: Yeah, agreed. Well, one of the things that I was really excited to talk with you about is just, obviously with all direct response the goal is conversion and there are a lot of ways to get there. And one of the things that you've talked a lot about is getting to better conversions by improving traffic. And I wanted to sort of open that up to you and hear your perspective on that and then maybe we can dig in and get a little bit more nerdy on it.

Jordan: Yeah. So I think there are two audiences to speak to as it relates to conversions in the online space. So for people who are doing really high volume traffic to specific offers, it's really the small hinges that swing big doors and identifying where the key measurements to really make a big move and dial-in processes. So what we see for example, in every single study on the planet that's ever been done, you find that your page load speed is one of the biggest movers as it relates to your conversion. Amazon found that in their own individual test, every 100 milliseconds of latency could cause a 1% decrease in conversion. Obviously, their mass traffic mass, mass appeal, and I think a lot of people realize, "Oh well, maybe one second isn't going to make that big of a difference, because I'm not that big yet."

Jordan: But you have to realize that if you ever have that desire to be big the time to fix it is right now. And as we spoke before in our previous conversations, that it's really the comparison of building your house on the rock instead of on the sand. Building it on the rock means starting from day one on a strong infrastructure where you have the best chance to win versus the house on the sand, which is like, "Hey, I can just get this going, it'll be fine for now, and eventually, we'll go solve this," or "Eventually we'll go make this." And I kind of liken it to, if I were to get married to someone and say, "Well, it's not that great right now but it's going to get better later." We don't know if things and everything will be better, right? It's just not the case and it makes it harder to solve a problem down the line.

Jordan: Whereas building it on a strong, firm foundation, where it's fast from the get go... I always wondered, I asked the question, "How many sales are you willing to sacrifice because of one thing that you could control from day one?" So high volume, page speed is important, social proof is important. And actually, this is something to kind of nerd out on, which is probably good for both high volume, but also people just starting to get into the game, we find that in our marketing, specifically direct response, so direct Facebook ads or YouTube ads directly to the landing page, we find about 30... This is going to blow your mind, about 20 to 30% of our traffic who go to a funnel, we're directing them to a funnel not to a home site, they're leaving the funnel and often on mobile or desktop, they're leaving it and going to the root domain to go get more information.

Jordan: So we're seeing that even if we have an offer, maybe it's a coaching offer, or a course or whatever that is, and we send them to that funnel, they leave and go to the home site and then they'll go back to buy again, or they'll go buy a different product. So we realize that for marketers who are just relying on a sales funnel, or that infrastructure, and you have no home base authority there's nothing there to go back to go learn more to establish some of that trust, you're losing between 20 and 30% of your buyers, potential buyers there, and only about three to 5% obviously, depending on the funnel are ready to buy right now, right? And so we're losing so much of this and I feel like a lot of the general answer to marketing is you need to go spend more on traffic, you need to go spend more, spend more, get more traffic, more traffic.

Jordan: And I say, you're not maximizing the value of the traffic you have right now, you are hemorrhaging traffic, because they're leaving for whatever reason, to get their design, or the offer doesn't really make sense to them on the page so you have to retarget them. And we know it's true, that's why retargeting is so valuable and follow-up sequences is so valuable, because just expecting them to go to a page to buy right away, it's the smallest percentage of the people most problem and solution and product aware audiences who can actually take an action on that right there. So it's all these pieces, I would bet that anyone listening to this year, you could literally double your sales by not increasing your traffic at all but by maximizing the traffic you have available to you right now.

Kathleen: So Alright, I have a ton of questions. First, and we're going to kind of try to break this down. The first thing you talked about was page load speeds. So obviously, everybody's got their websites built on different platforms and we can't control that. I mean, of course, people can change, but assuming everybody is where they are, are there certain low hanging fruit things that you usually see that somebody can do to immediately improve page load speeds?

Jordan: The first thing you want to do... There's lots of tools out there, our favorite is gtmetrix.com, and you can run it directly through there to find out where you're at. And here's the benchmark, if you're over four seconds in total page load time, you're losing conversions, period. It's undeniable, every study on the planet from Harvard to Stanford to Google and Amazon, they've all done the studies, you're losing money, period. So when that happens it's time to take some radical action. Inside of that page load report you'll see a waterfall breakdown, and it'll tell you what's slowing down your speed. If you have some developers who can help you and your more advanced in that way, you can defer some of your scripts to load later, that can help, crushing down images to be a small file size as possible is one of the biggest movers, or eliminating images at all, if you can.

Jordan: Backgrounds, don't have images in backgrounds, embedded videos can slow things down quite a bit as well.

Kathleen: By the way, is there a certain image size that you want to target to be under?

Jordan: Yeah. I don't think that there's a universal answer as it relates to what that would be. If you had one image on the page that could be larger than if you had 20 images and they all need to be under a certain benchmark. But generally pages that are over 123 megabytes in size, they're really going to start to load slowly, especially on mobile. And mobile is what you want to optimize for first. So I always say build with mobile in mind and then move into desktop, where it could be a slower loading experience because desktops can handle that. So images and embeds of videos and those types of things can can really make a big difference. And you'll really want to watch out for any external tool that you're depending on their servers, right? So here's an example.

Jordan: If someone was on DropFunnels right now we're extremely fast, the average is about 800 milliseconds in load time, but everything you add to the page slows it down beyond that. So if you added a hot jar traffic recording tool script on there, that's going to depend on their servers. A Wistia embed is going to do the same thing, a social proof widget pop-up, a chat icon that you can click to chat. Now each one of these things you want to keep in mind can really help you with your tracking and your overall conversions. But again, you want to start as the baseline and say, "Okay, a page with nothing else on it, how fast can we get that to load?" And your goal is under three seconds, for sure. As of today it needs to be under two seconds.

Kathleen: I was going to say, I feel like even three is too long, for sure.

Jordan: It can be, for sure. Especially if there's no other tools on top of it, right? So your base page you want to shoot for under two seconds, and then when you add a tool on top of that what's the impact going to be in that regard.

Kathleen: So say the name of that tool that you mentioned again that's a good way to test.

Jordan: Yep. So gt, the letters G-T, metrix, M-E-T-R-I-X.com. Is a great place, throw in your URL, you can test from different data centers depending on where you are. And to get a complete breakdown... And actually, they've just optimized to be kind of based on the lighthouse code base, so it's more recognized by Google as to how they see page speed.

Kathleen: Got it, that's interesting. Okay, so that was the first thing you mentioned. So definitely run your site through gtmetrix, and dig in and see what's slowing it down and where the biggest issues are, and that's step one it sounds like in squeezing the most juice out of the orange you already have, meaning the traffic that's already coming to your website. The second thing you mentioned, if I remember correctly, was social proof. Is that right?

Jordan: So I think that's one of the easiest things you can do immediately. I think we're in this third era of marketing, where now that consumers are more knowledgeable, they have information at their fingertips that we've never seen before. So it's like the used car dealer type of comparison back in the 80s and 90s, you'd go to a car dealer, and you hope he doesn't swindle you because he's the one with the information. He's like, "Hey, this car does this, and this, and this." Now, you don't even go to a car dealer with not an idea of what you're going to... You know the car, the color, the mileage on it, you've done a Carfax report on, you have all the information and it's the powers in your hands.

Jordan: So when you show to the dealership, they're not trying to get you into a different car, they're saying, "I want you in this car, because I know this is what you want and you've researched." So with that what we find is, you can't over educate someone to buy, it's much more a trust and a relational play. And so we see that testimonials, quotes, any videos or text that you can do actually will have a bigger conversion rate change than adding more copy to the page to try to convince them to buy something.

Kathleen: So a question on this, and I'm 100% with you, I am a strong believer that you've got to have social proof. One of the things that I hear though a lot, and I used to work in cyber from some companies is like, "I work in an industry where my customers don't want anybody knowing that they're using my product," either cyber or I don't know, my husband is VP of a company that makes competitive intelligence software, and so you don't tell your competitors what software you're using to track them, right? So what's your opinion on how to handle that? Is it still valuable to have a testimonial, where it's a little anonymized where you say like, "Head of marketing for this type of company," and you don't name the company or the person or do people just see that as BS?

Jordan: Well, such a great question. It's like the overall question is, is social proof if you don't know who the person is? Is that even social proof?

Kathleen: Yeah.

Jordan: So like a tree falling in-

Kathleen: And sometimes I feel like... I don't know, I wonder can it hurt you if people think you're making it up? I don't really know the answer to that.

Jordan: Yeah. It would be tough for them to know whether or not you are making it up, I hope people are more integrous than that but I know that there are those cases. I would say that if it's not a reputable name, it's tough to have social proof that really carries any weight, so that can be tough. I think asking the right way can generate testimonials to say, instead of saying, "Hey, would you give us a quote about us using your service?" You could say, "Hey, we'd like to feature your company as one of our cases, would you be open to us featuring you?" And it becomes more of a marketing play in that sense.

Jordan: Again, I think for most companies they'd be fine to scratch backs in that way, but in more specific niches where it's kind of guarded and confidential. Yeah, that's a tough one. I haven't thought about some ways to kind of get around that other than just asking whether or not, maybe even just a logo could be fine.

Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, I think there's still definitely people who are going to say no across the board. It's so funny, because I actually saw a conversation about this recently, where somebody said that the best way around it is to give your customers awards. And because everybody to brag that they got an award, and so it was like, if you can figure out a way to make it about an award and not about your product, they'll consent to mentioning it effectively in that's sort of a backdoor way.

Jordan: Yeah, that's a great play. I think, recognizing them or even doing a case study on their business specifically, you'd be like, "Hey, here's how these guys got this x result." And again, it feels like it's more of an ego play then, really.

Kathleen: All right. So that was social proof, we already talked about page load speeds. And the third thing was-

Jordan: Yeah. I think the overall concept is about optimization of the funnel flow. So it doesn't matter what you're selling, I can't tell you how many websites we see that are just... It's a hose with holes all over it, you put in leads and are going to go all over the place. There is no benefit to linking to Facebook from your primary corporate page or your funnel, there is no benefit. No one is sharing it enough to make any quantitative or qualitative impact on your business. So I say for almost all offers, strip away everything that doesn't serve you.

Jordan: And frankly, we only build sites like they were in the '90s in that same way today because it's what's always been done, not because it's-

Kathleen: Right. And I feel like some of those features come out of the box also, and so people are like, "Well, it's there, so it must be a good thing."

Jordan: Yeah, exactly. It's the De Beers Corporation kind of invented wedding rings and we still do that till today, but for the longest part of history that never existed. It's like we do what's been done because it's been done and that's what I should do. So I say just be a little bit adventurous, in the sense that you have permission to not do what everyone else is doing. And if someone goes to DropFunnels.com, for example, there's only one call to action on the entire page, every button really for all intents and purposes, almost every button is called an anchor link and it drags people down the page to more information, instead of moving them to About Us, no one cares About Us. No one cares about me or what we're doing, they care about themselves.

Jordan: So I think they want to know, is this end result going to help them? So we really try to focus all marketing efforts towards a single call to action. So and I think it's important that companies get clear on that strategy. What is the main thing that you want them to do? Is it driving them to a lead magnet or an ecosystem offer? Is it booking a consultation call or strategy call? Is it adding them to a Facebook group, because that can be advantageous as well, but push them into the main ecosystem, push them where you want them to go. And it's easier to optimize around one point, around one metric point instead of 30 and hoping, "Hey, I don't even know where these people are going, they're clicking here and going there." And even in Google Analytics, you can track where people are going, but the more links you have you'll find the more erratic people are, because they don't have a plan, it's your job to point the plan for them and to give them that path.

Jordan: So for us, I think optimizing around clarity and simplicity in all of your digital assets, even like, "Hey, let's kill some sacred cows here." Is the fact that you have a blog is it actually serving you? Linking to your blog and your homepage, does it actually give you any output? I mean, you can track those things. Is having any social share buttons or any links to social or a billion things for people to do, does it actually serve you? And I think those are the tough questions we should have.

Kathleen: So you mentioned something interesting when you were talking about this earlier, which is that, even if you have, say a landing page where you've got your offer, a lot of the time somebody will actually jump from that landing page and go back to your homepage, whether that's to research something or just learn more about you or to find some other information. Knowing that's the case, it's funny to me because the traditional kind of thing that you're taught as a marketer is don't put navigation on your landing pages, right? To your point like, "Let's not distract anybody with links that aren't absolutely necessary."

Kathleen: So they find a way to get back to your homepage despite your best efforts to not lead them there, what does that imply for what you should do to the design of your homepage to make sure that they don't drop out of your funnel? So that they stay engaged and ultimately convert?

Jordan: Yes, and that's exactly what I was just mentioning about being so clear about that call to action, that for us it's very circular and it feeds itself. So if someone goes to a funnel and we're recommending a software or a trial, or whatever that happens to be, if they leave that and go back to our homepage, they're going to end up right back to the funnel, because our homepage will push them back into that way. So I would say that there are a lot of great companies do this well. One of my favorite funnels of all time, it's through this company called Get Sunday, and they're a lawn care company.

Kathleen: Oh, I used them.

Jordan: Yeah. We probably bought through the exact same funnel, it was genius. And hopefully, people are buying things even just on propulsion of seeing an ad and going to buy just to study what they're kind of doing-

Kathleen: That's 100% I was targeted with an ad.

Jordan: Yep. And I met with them for two years, I don't know anything about lawn care, but I was so entranced by their funnel. But it was a perfect example of the experience of going through that funnel is really in synergy with what their homepage is doing. And I'd recommend anyone go to their site to take a look. I think Basecamp does some interesting things, they're very an analytical company, but their page is, I think, very well done. But generally speaking, if you have a landing page, I promise you people are leaving your landing page and your funnels to go check you out on your homepage. If you don't have a home site with that domain and that brand reputation there, you're losing sales, period.

Jordan: And on that, instead, again, eliminate what doesn't serve you and focus everything on to getting them back to that funnel, either with a complimentary or identical offer, so that because when they do that you don't want to lose them when they finally land on your page and suddenly it's some rabbit trail that takes them off somewhere else.

Kathleen: So for those who haven't experienced it, can you just describe a little bit about the Sunday funnel and what you liked about it? Granted, you're going to have to do this from memory, so it won't be exact, but what stands out in your head as what worked so well?

Jordan: Yeah. I have this kind of rule when it comes to marketing and when we're consulting with people as well, the best words that you can think about it's two words, it's for you, for you. So even in sales calls or any of that, it's the best phrase, I think that you can use. Is that people when they have high amounts of information, especially in competitive markets, and there's lots of people to compare to, personalization is absolutely key. My buddy, George Bryant, he actually coined the phrase, "Relationships beat algorithms." And it's not always the best offer gets their wallet, it's whoever gets to their heart gets to their wallet.

Jordan: So what Get Sunday does that I think is so unique and I think a lot of brands are tapping into this as well, is the for you experience, the personalization. So you literally type in, I think it's your address, I did it a year and a half ago, I still remember it. It's your address, and they show you a satellite image of your house. And then you draw these lines or whatever around your lawn about what's... They're, "Okay, based on this, hey we're going to send you this soil kit." And it's just free kit or whatever it was part of it, I don't recall it exactly. They sent out this thing, it came the next day, it scooped out some soil, and actually my kids got into it too, it was kind of a fun science experiment.

Jordan: Gave them that and then they sent back this custom report, "Okay hey, this is the acidity, the phosphorus, all the chemical things, this is the for you experience. Hey, we've also looked at the weather patterns for the past 12 years, here's how much rain you're going to get this year, here's how much sunlight based on the geography of your land," and I was like, "Holy cow, they know more about me than I do, right?" Which is so critical. And through that process, I ended up taking every upsell, everything there is because I felt like it was so personalized. And they said, "Hey, Jordan, for you, this is what is going to be a good fit."

Jordan: And to put a cap on that, one of my favorite phrases is that a prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. Prescription without a diagnosis is malpractice. And so when you get a diagnosis and you're given the prescription to not take that is insanity, right? So they're telling me, they know my lawn better than me, they know the geography, they know the weather, they know the soil better than I do, if I have any desire for the end result, which is they have a beautiful lawn, what else am I going to do? Am I going to go figure that out on my own? No, I'm going to go give them my money and they're going to tell me exactly what to do, and ship it right to my doorstep.

Jordan: And so some of these home kit companies have really tapped into this as well, "Based on your diet, based on your preferences, what is it that you like?" So I think all of us, all these kind of technical aspects are sometimes almost a moot point if you're not delivering to someone some for you experience, some way to make them feel like they're not a number, that they're a person and that they've been diagnosed as a specific prescription to what's going on. If we can tap into that psychology more often, I think, you could have a 12 second loading website and you could have a personalized experience, you'd probably be fine.

Kathleen: Yeah. It's so funny to hear you talk about Get Sunday, because that's the exact same experience I had. And I went through it, and I was like, "Wow, clearly they've tapped into, I don't know, Google Earth, or whatever it is, and they're measuring my lawn and checking my weather and the whole thing," and I was so enamored of it. So I definitely became a customer based on that funnel, I have a feeling they're doing pretty well off of it.

Jordan: And as anyone will experience if they go through it as well, you get a phone number to your person, your consultant, which I mean, it was a heart check for me too like, "Man, what are we missing out on the support aspect?" I think I've utilized it once in two years, so it's not like I'm using it, but knowing that it's there will probably keep me on for a very long time.

Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. They've nailed it. I love that example and how specific it is. Anything else that you want to add beyond? So we started with three things, we started the page load speed, social proof, and then shoring up the leaks in the bucket, if you will. I mean, and the last category really encompasses a lot. So I just wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything before I move on.

Jordan: No, I think that's like drinking through a fire hose probably for most people. So it's-

Kathleen: Yeah no, that's great. So you obviously have worked with a lot of different companies, you've got a lot of different brands using your platform, any examples from the DropFunnels world that you think are notable to share in terms of before and after results from doing some of these things, even if it's just your own marketing?

Jordan: So, this is less technical on maybe slightly more mindset. I would say, for most people, and again, we're a more advanced platform than many, so people are looking for click button done type of thing, it's not really a good fit. It's meant for those who really want to dive in and-

Kathleen: You don't need to be a developer though, do you?

Jordan: No, there's no code at all.

Kathleen: That's what I thought, yeah.

Jordan: But just things are in different locations. It's like you move your house, they say the two most stressful things in life is divorce and moving. So moving your business is no different, sometimes it... Well, we've got migrators that can help people in that regard. But I think the mindset for most people is that, we're all duct taping so many tools together between autoresponders, and CRMs, and call floors, and dialers, and website, and funnels, and courses, and all those things depending on your business model. And for us, I think the biggest thing that people fall in love with is how many tools they can subtract, so getting more by doing less.

Jordan: Here's an example. We have this tool and I actually built it in, we might be one of the first ever to build this, I'm not sure. But I added a feature that allows you to collect a legally binding signature on a checkout form directly through mobile. So when someone's going to go in and purchase your product, there's actually Terms and Conditions box that normally you would check, but I instituted a finger scribble sandbox that generates a PDF that would help you against refunds and chargebacks to ensure that you're collecting those terms specifically. So for some people they'll cancel like DocuSign through that because they can use that as an actual legally binding contract generator.

Jordan: So I think it's an example of that, of having fewer tools, fewer monthly subscriptions. And again, I don't want this to just be in advertising for DropFunnels, more a mindset about get more by doing less and simplify as much as possible so that you have less mental real estate being lost, right?

Kathleen: No, I think tool sprawl is a real problem. And it's not just a problem from a psychological standpoint of like, "Where is my information? Where is my data? How is it all talking to each other?" It's a huge financial problem. I mean, as somebody who owns a marketing budget for a company, by far the biggest line item for me is my tech stack. And so if you can eliminate things that frees up money to do other things in marketing, which can have a big impact, potentially. So I definitely think that's important.

Kathleen: All right, we're going to shift gears because I've got two questions I always ask all my guests before we wrap up, and I want to make sure I know what your answers are. First one is, the biggest pain point I hear all the time from marketers is that it's like drinking from a fire hose trying to keep up with everything. And so are there particular sources you rely on to stay up to date and educated?

Jordan: I'm probably the worst person to ask that, because I kind of live in a cave for most of the time. But I stay connected with a couple people in different industries, so I think masterminding is really important, networking is important. And I listen to a lot of audio books as well, so that's helpful. I just finished actually, for the first time, The Richest Man in Babylon, which was a great short listen, for most people a great mindset book there. And doing a lot of that, I also have this remarkable tablet, I'm holding up for those on the podcast, the-

Kathleen: My husband has one of those and he loves it.

Jordan: Yeah, it's super cool for doing some deep work and writing without any connection to the internet. So I guess my answer is, I tend to feel escape when I get off of the internet and consume a little bit less, because there's so much kind of noise going on there. So I find that my relaxation and escape comes from disconnecting, but I'd say audiobooks are big, I actually really like going on YouTube and listening to some TED Talks, and they're quick bite size-

Kathleen: Any particular favorites?

Jordan: Everyone says it start with why, but there's actually some really... I mean, it's fine. Simon Sinek is great. I like Malcolm Gladwell stuff, and there is actually one on... I don't know the name of the guy, but it's about addiction. And he lays out this thesis for I think it's called The Hidden Truth Behind Sobriety or Addiction or that kind of thing. But he lays out this incredible thesis that, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection, its like this perfect theorem of why we get addicted to things, and the recourse from that, etc. So I couldn't recommend that more, it's one of the most watched ones on there. So TED talks have been a really good way to stay.

Kathleen: I love that, and I've seen that Ted Talk, it's very good.

Jordan: Yeah, very good.

Kathleen: All right, second question. Of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, and is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park and doing inbound marketing well these days?

Jordan: I think most companies doing really well or really maximizing both and turning... There's a guy named Cole Gordon, who is in the high ticket closing space and is a master at, I think both inbound and outbound. And so he maximizes all of his inbound with additional outbound outreach, and whatnot. And so he's just so masterful at that, so that's Cole Gordon, I think it's Gordon Advertising, people could probably Google him. I also see Gary Vee and some of those influencers, they're doing a lot of like, "Hey, text me, get out this number," and getting people onto your list with a more relational SMS. Which by the way, I'm fairly convinced is the future of marketing is going to be SMS.

Jordan: Email rates are deplorable, Facebook, the algorithm is getting harder all the time, and I think SMS has about a 99% open rate.

Kathleen: It's very generational. I mean, I have kids, when you look at how our kids communicate, it's so different than how we do, it's crazy.

Jordan: Yeah. And I think it's probably going to change as new... Man, it's probably eventually going to be TikTok, and-

Kathleen: Or I was just going to say Discord. I have a 14 year old and they're all on Discord playing their video games and talking to each other. And I think that's already starting to happen, the number of private communities that are cropping up. I just attended, Shopify had its Annual Developers Conference, and all of the chatter around it, all the conversations, they set it up in Discord. And they created a room, I don't even know if that's the right word, because I'm not a big Discord user but I did do it. But yeah, I was like, "This is really interesting." I see my 14 year old on it, I see Shopify having official conversations with its audience on it, I definitely think there's a move in that direction too.

Jordan: Yeah. And actually I'm to the point, we just did it this week, that we're pretty much eliminating our post purchase Facebook support groups and moving even into Slack to do-

Kathleen: Yeah, Slack is huge.

Jordan: Slack is good, and people say Discord's like Slack on steroids, I haven't done much on Discord.

Kathleen: Well, I just used it for the first time, I was a little intimidated, but it is. If you are a Slack user, it will feel very familiar to you.

Jordan: Right on, yeah. But I think the social channels and social media and whatnot, they're going to start to kind of wane. And people are wanting to go into more private servers, and Telegram groups, and eventually, it'll all be on the blockchain and everything will be completely anonymized and encrypted, it seems like that's where the world is going.

Kathleen: Yeah, for sure. All right, well, we've come to the end of our time, and so before we finish, importantly, I need to ask if somebody has a question about any of this or wants to learn more about you or DropFunnels, what is the best way for them to do that?

Jordan: Yeah. I'd be happy to give my personal email, it's [email protected]. If anyone has any questions, or if I can encourage you in some way, J-O-R-D-A-N, and it's my personal email, so it'll go straight to me and would be happy to respond with any insight that I can. And then dropfunnels.com is the main place if you want to check it out and kind of see even as an example of how we turn standard sites, or how we utilize standard sites into a sales funnel type psychology. But I'd encourage anyone to no matter what platform you're on, or whatever you choose to use, to just remember that those principles are true, a confused mind will do nothing.

Jordan: And so simplifying, make things faster, think about your strategy, what do you want people to really do? And in any infrastructure that you're on right now, push more people into that way and eliminate the things that don't serve you, and I really think that that's a way to grow very quickly.

Kathleen: That's great advice. All right. Well, that is it for this week. If you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. And of course, 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. That's it for this week, thank you so much, Jordo.

Jordan: My pleasure, thank you.

Who is YouTube Advertising right for, and how to top brands get big results from it?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Linx Digital founder Shash Singh breaks down his approach to YouTube advertising. Shash and the team at Linx are YouTube ad specialists. It's all they do, and as a result of that specialization, they've been able to get great results for a wide variety of brands across a range of industries.

In this episode, Shash explains how YouTube advertising works and shares the ad formats that he believes deliver the biggest bang for your marketing buck. He also digs into details around how to film your ad, how long it should be, and how to set up audience targeting.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Linx Digital website
• Check out Shash's YouTube channel

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Shash Singh who is the CEO of Linx digital. Welcome to the podcast, Shash.

Shash (00:32): Yeah. Thanks for having me on here. I'm really excited.

Kathleen (00:35): Yeah, there should be a fun conversation because we are going to be talking about YouTube advertising, which is something that I have touched on a little bit in former interviews, but we really haven't dug into to any level of depth. And I do feel like there's so much potential there, but also so much potential to screw it up if you don't know what you're doing. And so I'm really excited to pick your brain, but before we do that, can you just tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and Linx digital and how you came to be doing what you're doing?

Shash (01:06): Yeah, so basically I got started with YouTube ads five or six years ago. But one of my friends, he runs the fitness program and like a fitness coaching business and his his business called you know, body. And he basically wanted me to run YouTube ads. And at that point I'd never run paid ads ever in my life before. So it was an interesting experience, but within two weeks we were profitable and I think within three weeks, we're scaling to $5,000 a day ad spend. So it was pretty impressive in terms of how powerful this platform was. And after that, I kind of fell in love with YouTube advertising, did it for a bunch more clients started an agency about it. And now we do trainings about it. So basically just kind of really enjoyed going in deep into this platform.

Kathleen (01:49): And so does Linx digital really only do YouTube advertising or does it do other things as well?

Shash (01:56): Well we occasionally do some Facebook advertising or some little search advertising, but our core focus is YouTube ads. So that's what people come to us for.

Kathleen (02:04): I love that. I love that you've been brave enough to sort of plant your flag in the sand and say, this is what we're going to do, and we're going to specialize it in it. And we're not afraid to, you know, go really niche. I think that's, you know, these days with digital marketing things change so quickly and the only way to really develop deep expertise is to focus. So that's awesome. All right, so, so let's get into this topic of YouTube advertising. I guess I would start with who is YouTube advertising, right? For, because I have to imagine there, there are certain types of businesses or certain audiences you may be able to be trying to reach that are a better fit for it than others.

Shash (02:44): Yeah. Honestly, at this point, I'd say you do, that's going to work for a lot of different types of businesses. Even you know, B2B, B2C e-commerce courses, anything really lead generation for local. The main thing you have to keep in mind is can you make the numbers work? Right? So for example, if you're selling an e-commerce product, you want to sell something that's a little bit higher price, because if you're selling something that's $20, it's most likely not going to work in a way that's profitable for you. On the other hand, if you're selling an $80 e-commerce product, I usually have a much higher acceptable cost per acquisition, and that kind of makes those numbers work. So that's the key thing there in terms of audiences at this point, pretty much everybody's on YouTube. I believe one of the fastest growing segments on YouTube is actually older demographics, right?

Shash (03:33): So I don't think it's an issue of like, oh, is this person on YouTube? Even if you're in B2B, right? You can actually use some of these advanced audiences that Google has. For example, they have custom audiences where you can plug in a competitor's URL and basically Google will go and try and find people that are similar to that. People who visit that website. So we've even for many B2B companies basically it can work quite well. And we've worked with some SAS companies as well that have done really well with YouTube ads. So really can work for a lot of different businesses. Ultimately just want to make sure that, you know, you have a solid funnel and a backend and the numbers work out for you.

Kathleen (04:12): So, so it sounds like almost any type of business could use it. And then you said something which resonated with me, which is just like, you know, everybody's using YouTube, right. I certainly everyone from my 14 year old son who is on it basically all day long to myself, like I watch things on there as well. So I think it's safe to say that we're all familiar with YouTube as users, but advertising is a very different side of YouTube. So could you just talk a little bit about about that? Like how is YouTube advertising set up? What are the different types of ads we'll start there and then we'll see where that takes us.

Shash (04:55): So you do have a bunch of different ad formats. The one like we like to focus in on are the in-stream ads. So the in-stream ads are basically the ads that show up before you're about to watch a video. So let's say you click on a video and before, you know, you have another ad show up, it's like the five seconds to skip. Basically you have five seconds and then you can skip afterwards and yeah, that's the main format, right? And that's basically the format that gets the best results for us. Now, there are other ad formats, for example, this responsive which kind of shows up in a bunch of different places, but typically most of our budget is spent on those entry mats. And then there's a lot of other formats as well. Right? So we have the basically for the in-stream ads, what we do is we use TrueView for action, which is really focused on getting conversions, but there's also ads like bumper ads and for six second in-stream ads that basically you can't skip, there's non-skippable 15 and 30 second ads as well. So there's different ad formats, depending on what you're trying to do. If you're doing direct response TrueView for action, in-stream ads are what you want to do.

Kathleen (05:57): True view for action. Okay. I have a lot of questions. All right. The first one is why do you focus on in-stream? What is it about in-stream that, that you feel is so valuable?

Shash (06:11): Well, I mean, it gets results now that are just like discovery ads, which are kind of like, you know, you'll, you'll click on it. It shows up in the search results, you click on it and it will take you to a video. However, in-stream just works really, really well. Right? Like it's pretty much in every account. It's like the majority of our budget because it just performs so well. You're basically able to just go in and grab people's attention and be able to compel them to take action. And YouTube has put a lot of, Google and YouTube have put a lot of resources into making that whole in-stream ad format work really well.

Kathleen (06:41): Okay. So, so you mentioned Google, Google, and YouTube, the relationship there, you know, people who are listening, I'm sure have done lots of advertising on different platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook. Many of them have probably done Google pay-per-click, what's different about the YouTube advertising kind of interface and management.

Shash (07:03): So basically the YouTube so like obviously Google owns YouTube and because of that, you're using Google ads as a platform. So if you're running search campaigns, display campaigns, you do campaigns, essentially doing it from the same account, same place. So that makes things a lot easier. And one of the benefits of Google owning YouTube is you get to use Google's massive source of data, which is the world's biggest search engine is Google. And the world's second biggest search engine is YouTube. So the massive scale is something that really is cool with YouTube ads especially because you can go and leverage the data from Google in the sense of somebody can search something on google.com and, you know, they could search for example, the best enterprise software for small electricians, right? And you could target that search term on YouTube. So you could show that person an ad on YouTube. So that's really powerful because a lot of times these search terms on google.com are extremely expensive, extremely cost per click is very high, but then if you reach target, basically if you're able to target them with a video ad, you're going to be able to get significantly cheaper click costs. So these custom intent audiences basically are incredibly, incredibly powerful. And one of the key reasons why I love YouTube ads so much.

Kathleen (08:17): So, so you use the Google ads interface and there, it sounds like there are a lot of different ways that you can set up targeting. You mentioned targeting for keyword search intent. Can you, you know, I'm familiar with a lot of the other ways that Google allows targeting. Can you use those same targeting approaches such as custom audience match lists lookalikes you know, what are the options there?

Shash (08:49): So, so as I mentioned, custom intent, which is basically a type of custom audience where you target people based on what they search on Google. There's custom affinity, which is a custom audience based on a URL or even an app that you can put in. So you could literally put in your competitor's URL and Google will try to find people that are similar to that. So, and the reason they can do that is because they have all this data from Google analytics from basically you know, obviously search engine, et cetera, where they have massive troves of data to make these assumptions and help you with these audiences. And these audiences often are favorites and on other audience types include keywords. So basically based on the metadata of YouTube videos, so the title, the description, and so on, where you're able to target videos that are about a certain topic.

Shash (09:39): You also have placements where you can specify the target channels are videos. So if you have a competitor and they have a YouTube channel, you can show your ad in front of them, which is really, really powerful. If you're basically trying to get your competitor's audience base right into your funnel. And then there's in-market audiences, which is Google's basically audiences of people that are interested in buying something. So there are in market audiences for let's say, automobiles or home and garden for beauty, there's like all kinds of categories, right? So you could dig in and this, I believe there's even like hair, hair extensions for hair lashes. Yeah. So you literally have so many audience types. There's topics, which are videos about certain topics, like broad topics there's affinity, which is basically based on interests. So it's like, oh, these people are interested in X, Y Zed. And then there's also similar audiences, which is kind of Google's version of lookalike audiences. So there are a lot of different options. And a lot of times in certain pumps, some work really well, some work don't work well, but because of you have this vast number of options, there's definitely a lot of different things you can do with that.

Kathleen (10:50): Wow. So you mentioned earlier cost, how does the cost per click compare on YouTube to maybe other forms of Google ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera.

Shash (11:05): So the cost per click, for example, as compared to Google search, it'll be significantly lower. As compared to let's say display, it's going to be more expensive because it displays usually far less qualified clicks. And as compared to Facebook, it can really depend on niche. Some niches, it can be a little bit lower, some niches, it can be higher but the traffic is very, very qualified. Typically find that YouTube graphic and works well. And usually they're, long-term buyers that people who are usually very interested, especially if you're targeting them with a targeting option that, you know, they're basically, let's say they're watching a video about that top. Right. That's a really good lead.

Kathleen (11:42): Yeah. Interesting. So, I mean, it sounds like it makes sense to consider for almost any business. I think the thing that might seem intimidating to people is like, it's video. Right? I got to, I got to create a video, correct. Like if you're doing an industry mad, you're creating video for your advertising. Right.

Shash (12:01): Absolutely. That's, that's something that scares a lot of people. They, but it's actually not that hard. So for example, if if you're running an ad for, let's say a software company, right. It's not that hard. You could literally take kind of a, you know, basically a selfie video as like a selfie iPhone camera, and then pair that with a lapel mic and be able to shoot simple ads. There are a lot of people who run softwares that have been able to do that. Now, obviously you can go the whole production route, but basically what Grammarly or monday.com have done, but you can just start simple with a selfie video ad. So the key thing to understand is you've got to start somewhere and that video in general is a huge competitive advantage today, if you're not using video, it's basically one of the formats of communication. That's just the most effective and consumers love video, right? There's been so many studies on it, landing pages with video, typically perform better product pages with video, perform better. People kind of want to see and watch basically video of what they're about to buy because you get so much more information than images and touch. So it's absolutely something that's you, you, you should dive into. And basically any business that has a core competency competency than video, typically their marketing efforts just do so much better.

Kathleen (13:18): So you talked about using your cell phone camera and a lapel mic to create video, but I have to admit I'm skeptical because I feel like, yes, it's easy to do those kinds of videos, but I also have to believe that there are certain things that you need to do to create a video that's really going to drive conversions because it's not about just like getting your video out there. It's obviously about, you know, inspiring action. So can you maybe like break down what you found in your experience makes for a high converting video?

Shash (14:54): Absolutely. So you need to follow a structure and you need to basically be able to hit those persuasion triggers. The first piece of that puzzle is the hook, right? Like you've got to grab their attention basically the way you want to think about it, as you need to like basically grabbed them by the throat would be like pay attention. So the way we do that is real often say a controversial statement are we'll call up, call out our iden audio. Our we'll call out our ideal audience with their major pain point. Right? So we'll say something like, Hey, are you let's, let's go with a local electrician example. Right. I don't know why I came up with that idea, but let's say, are you a local, are you an electrician? That's just tired of of your expensive software bills for a program that you don't even know how to use.

Shash (15:43): Right. and then basically that steep and you've grabbed their attention. And it's also something that kind of calls them out and they're like, oh yeah, this, this ad is for me. Maybe he has a, there might be a solution to this pain point I'm having write down. Right? So the key to any YouTube ad is really knowing your customer's pain point and being able to really grab their attention with that pinpoint. Right? So they're, you know, motivated to keep watching. And after that, what you'll want to do is you will want to start building some authority and credibility. You'll want to show them how your product works and why they should even consider basically checking out whatever you're giving them. And you'll want to make sure that it's very strong call to actions. So to give you to continue on with the treadmills as electrician.

Shash (16:29): So let's say, Hey, are you in a local electrician? That's just tired of overly expensive software that you don't know how to use and that's buggy. And it's basically, it's not helping your business in any way. So that's, and then the second part of that I imagine would be something like, so I used to be a local electrician had that, that was a huge pain point for me until I decided to build my own software specifically for us, because, you know, I'm an electrician as well. And so I decided to build this software called whatever. And we basically used we talked to thousands of electricians to figure out how to build a best solution. That's, you know, doesn't have let's say this common issue that they have typically that their software or this issue, and then actually show them the product and perhaps show them that.

Shash (17:24): Yep. Imagine if you could just let's say call up all or imagine if you could send out a quote and just one easy click, right. And imagine if you could let's say be able to get your subcontractors to bill you in one easy system. Right? So now you're actually showing them what that is about. So from there, you'll go into call to action and tell them, Hey, if you want a free trial click, the link or below, or if it's like, for example, what we do a lot is send them to some sort of case study. So one angle you could go with this is if you want to see a free case study on how we use this tool to double the revenue of our business in less than a year and all the tactics and strategies we use, then that's a big to do it.

Shash (18:07): So a lot of this, you know, as you brainstorm it, you come up with it, but you kind of have that base structure, which is cook. You want to call your audience out. You want to show them the products and its benefits. You want to build some party and building, right? Like why is a, you know, for e-commerce products, right? Often I've seen some of them use research or other others have used, you know, personal experience, right? Like I've actually done this or I've, I've been in your position. So that's one way of building a party and credibility. Another way is, Hey, I've helped over 5,000 people with this problem. And then from there, your first call to action, where you tell them, Hey, click the link above or below to go get this free training, free trial, free you know, basically lead magnet, case study, et cetera.

Shash (18:51): Right. And then from there, you might want to show some social proof and show them that, Hey yeah. Maybe show them as basically a sliding wall of testimonials and the videos. So like half, half the video just be testimonials are, you can even clip in videos of happy clients, like quick 10, second clips. It could even be potential, you know, other forms of social proof, like you've featured in Forbes magazine, et cetera. So from there, you can have another call to action because you always want to have at least two call to actions and you wanna tell them, Hey, click the link below to go sign up for this free trial. And the key here that you got to understand is once you actually start running basically YouTube ads, you will get a good feel for it. But also the biggest thing to do is you gotta be, you gotta do preparation for us, right? So number one is use this tool called Vid Tao dot com, vid Tao, T a o.com. And this is a completely free tool. That's what we use to find really great video ads. So we will just use that and be able to just basically enter in a competitor's name final to video ads. And then you can see how many views that ad got. And typically if it's gotten a ton of views, you know, that that ad has done really, really well.

Kathleen (20:08): Oh, that's a good tip. It sounds like timing is really key. So you mentioned in the beginning having a hook and is that because with in-stream ads? I mean, at least my experience has been like, you have a certain number of seconds before the person is given the option to skip the ad.

Shash (20:25): Yeah. So you have five seconds before they're given the option to skip that. So you want to really grab their attention in the first five seconds.

Kathleen (20:31): So you have to have the hook quick, you know, don't bury the lead as they say in journalism. Okay. And then, and then I also would imagine from a timing standpoint, that overall length of the video is pretty important. Like have, do you see people drop off after a certain amount of time? Is there like a standard length that you think performs really well?

Shash (20:54): I would say we've had ads from 45 seconds to three, four minutes long work. Typically what I say the ad is as long as it needs to be. So don't try to artificially make it longer, but if you need to add more length, do cover the key persuasion points or the cover, the key benefits of your product. You may need to add a little bit more to it, right? Because some products are softwares may just need more explanation, right? So our, some might be super simple and might only require a 62nd ad so that ultimately the length is something you can test, but the key is you don't want any fluff in there. If there's fluff, you want to get rid of it.

Kathleen (21:34): And is your call to action always at the end? Or do you ever have anything sort of in the middle

Shash (21:39): Typically two call to actions at the minimum, sometimes even three, but typically one call to action. That's maybe, you know, somewhere in the middle, right? Like at least 30, 45 seconds in, and then you'll have the second and third call to actions be a bit later. They could be different, but usually you'll, if you're, let's say sending them to a case study, right. You, there's probably only like a couple of different ways to say, click the link above or below to go check out this case study. Right. you could do different variations, but it's like in the first one you could focus on like click, click the link above or below to check out this case study where we show you how we doubled our client's revenue with a strategy. And then the second one could be perhaps another benefit point, click the link up or below to see how the reduced amount of time you know, our client works in his business by 50%, right? Like it, if you have perhaps multiple parts of the case study, you can kind of play on that and use different CPAs to basically get clicks from people who are looking for different things.

Kathleen (22:42): Okay. So, so let's say somebody does this, they get their video, all done, they get it set up, they have their audience ready to go. And then they go to launch the ad from a budget standpoint. How much do you think somebody should expect to spend in the beginning in order to have a viable chance of the ad being successful?

Shash (23:02): So with YouTube ads, I would recommend a minimum of a hundred dollars a day as a test budget. That typically gives you some good data fairly fast with, if you're trying to be more aggressive, you can go up 200, 300 a day. Usually you'll want multiple ads. So the one to test the ads, the hubs you can look at and you can edit them in that way, you can get some variations and you can see which hook grabs the most attention. And then but we typically will also recommend that, okay, you want to have a couple different bodies, right? So we might have two different pubs, two different bodies, that's four variations. And that allows you to kind of have a much better idea of what's working and not working. And then based on which ad does the best you can go and modify the landing page to basically be congruent with that messaging.

Shash (23:51): Ultimately it comes down to testing a lot of ads and then tweaking your landing pages to be able to figure out what's working and not working, or sometimes you'll get lucky. And your first kind of ad and landing page combination just works amazing. If you've done a lot of Facebook ads and search ads, it's going to be a lot faster for you because you already know the process of testing kind of creators. You already know how media buying works. If it's your first time doing media buying, it's probably going to take a little bit longer.

Kathleen (24:17): So that was going to be one of my questions. So it's like once you get it all set up and it's running, how much time should you give it before you like make that keeper cut decision?

Shash (24:29): That's a good question. Ultimately what I would say is it depends on a few things, right? The first thing is before you even run ads, you've got to figure out if it's realistic to make YouTube ads work for your offer. What we find is higher ticket offers for well e-commerce offers that a higher price info-product offers at a higher price or SAS products that are either, either you have some way of collecting money up front, or you have, you know, basically you're okay with, you know, spending a couple of months of basically revenue from the recurring to get that right. So if you're selling a software, you know, your lifetime value is like $900 and that's over nine months, let's say it's 99 a month, nine. So nine months or 10 months, that's a $900. And let's say, it's the average cost per acquisition for a hundred dollars a month.

Shash (25:23): Customer is $350. So if you have venture capital, then that's a no-brainer deal because you know, you're going to make $900 and you spent $350, however, it's, you don't have venture capital. Then that makes it really tricky because you don't have three and a half months of cashflow to basically put into it. So what you need to do is figure out a creative solution and usually software companies that have been able to do that, what they do is they'll typically either do a bundle. So you'll have maybe a year upfront or they'll perhaps have a training or some sort of front end offers. So what that, what I've seen softwares like click funnels do is they will literally have a $997 info product that as their front end offer and then click funnels to bundled in the back. And I've seen this with multiple different niches.

Shash (26:05): It's basically you have the training program, but maybe a couple months of the software. And then because you're collecting a thousand dollars upfront, you're profitable on the front end, and then you also have the recurring on the backend, and that's just purely a way of how you structure your offer. Now, on the other hand, if you're trying to just, you know, basically let's say you have a 10 month based customer retention rate, they stay for 10 months and you make $900 from that. But the issue is that you're spending $350 to get them and you don't have the capital for that. Then your YouTube is not going to work for you unless you figure out either a venture capital or you figure out how to structure your in a way where you collect that money upfront. So that's really, really important is just figure that out before you run ads.

Kathleen (26:49): Okay. That makes sense. And then once you're running your ads, what's, what is your kind of routine for how often do you check back in and kind of watch performance so that you're able to tweak and optimize?

Shash (27:03): I'm checking every day. So every single day go in and chat. So basically the way we optimize is on the ad level. So, you know, there's the campaign level does the ad group level and then this the ad level. So we usually just look at all the ads and if an ad starts getting out of KPIs, then we'll just pause it.

Kathleen (27:19): Okay. All right. So let's shift gears for a second and we've talked a lot about how it works and kind of what you should be doing and watching. Let's talk about some examples, cause you've worked with a number of different clients. Can you share like some stories, success, stories, or examples of where you've done YouTube ads and what kind of results you've been able to get with them?

Shash (27:41): Yeah. So for example, B2B, the ran ads for a software company called helium 10, I think they probably spend like a couple of hundred thousand dollars over the lifetime. And it was, it was a pretty good traffic source for them fairly profitable in terms of their long-term customer value in terms of companies that are more in the info-product space. So if you, nobody's a really good example because basically I got in there started running the ads and we're spending a new year's 5,000 a day and making 10 to 15,000 a day back. And it also got him device magazine because the ad was just so so interesting and so controversial that he was kind of talking about it.

Shash (28:28): I see. So it was a nice little bonus as well on top of the profit. So that's a great example of where not only did the generate really great direct response results, but we also ended up getting a lot of branding out of it because a ton of YouTubers started, started making videos about it's add a ton of people on different farms, started talking about him. Everybody just started talking about the ad and, you know, it led to the point where the organic growth from the ad was probably just as powerful as the pay pros from the ad. Other clients we've worked the amazing selling machine, the renter ads for a couple of years. And yeah, YouTube was just a huge, huge basically revenue source for them generated multi-millions from YouTube. And ultimately just came down to there. They had a really good funnel and the ads were really good.

Shash (29:16): So we scripted a lot of these ads and then they will just execute it because they just had a videographer and the founders, Matt and Jason would just jump on the camera and shoot ads. They were really good about it. They've all finished ads. So that's a great example as well. So yeah, basically different niches indestructible shoes, for example, that's an e-commerce brand. So we were able to generate 1.2 million for them with e-commerce YouTube ads. So e-commerce can work as well. E-Commerce is often easier because of the fact that there's less competition. You just got to figure out the video part. So you've got to put more effort into the video for them we found a production agency that we partnered with to create video ads and those video ads just absolutely did so, so well because they were well thought out well-produced you know, kind of just there was effort put into it, right? So if you're doing e-commerce YouTube ads, you do have to put effort into it unlike with Facebook where you can just put an image ad on there.

Kathleen (30:11): Yeah, that makes sense. What do you see as the biggest mistakes that brands make when they start doing YouTube advertising?

Shash (30:19): So usually the biggest mistake I see is they've tried to take their Facebook ads, creative and strategy, and use that for YouTube ads. So Facebook ads, campaign and optimization strategy, audience strategies, and then also the creators where, you know, on Facebook, a lot of times you can run like the super simple video ads, just slide shows, and there's no voiceover, there's just some music on the background and they do well on Facebook, but on YouTube, they don't work because on YouTube number one, people expect the human touch, right? They at the very least expect a human voice, even if there's not a person in the video, even if it's not after they want somebody that's guiding them through this video, right. They don't want it to be kind of just like background music because of the fact that everything on YouTube has basically a voice, you know, even music videos have a voice.

Shash (31:07): There's usually somebody that's a lot of commentary videos that people will share their screen or, you know, show like a video game while they're commenting or they'll do animation with a voiceover or they'll have live action where they're basically in front of the camera, even if it's selfie style or if it's just them pop in front of camera. But this all is that human element. Right. And a big part of that is when you're running a YouTube ad, right? The video ad isn't muted by default, while on Facebook, a lot of times, you know, you'll see a video ad on the, on the newsfeed and they're all automatically muted, right? You have to click the button to listen to sob. So that's something that just makes a huge difference where you need to make sure you have that voice or human element to it.

Kathleen (31:48): Is it important to have captions on your video ads and YouTube

Shash (31:53): It's worth testing? I don't think it's absolutely essential. It does help as a visual aid. It doesn't even necessarily need to be like captions of every single word you say, but it could be literally like key key emphasis moments. So you could emphasize that, but we've definitely used a lot of captions in our video ads and that definitely helped significantly. And in split tests, we've run. However, in certain ads you want to just make sure it doesn't look, you know, if you have a really cinematic app typing captions on the bottom that are like hard coded and it's, it just looks can be distracting. Yeah. That's for sure. Yeah.

Kathleen (32:25): Interesting. All right. We're going to change gears again because I have two questions that I always ask my guests. And I'm curious to hear your take on these first being of course we talk all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days, inbound

Shash (32:46): Marketers? Huh? That's a great question. I would definitely say in terms of pure marketing genius, I like Alex Becker. He's, he's got really good marketing skills, some of the best I've seen. Yeah, I think he's just really good at understanding human psychology and being able to hit those triggers and pain points and being, you know, not necessarily being the most sophisticated marketer, but being the most efficient and effective. Like he's very good at that. So I really, really liked his his marketing methods. I also think this marketer it's that whole crew over there, they're doing a great job. I love to just cut out things. Yeah, those, those two are two that come to mind.

Kathleen (33:34): You just, you just cut out when you said your second one, it like totally cut out. So can you start over when you said, I also think and just, just start there.

Shash (33:43): Yeah. Yeah. So I also think that my second pick would be Ryan Deiss and the whole Digital Marketer crew. They just do such an excellent job. They're really, really good.

Kathleen (33:53): Yeah. They're great. I know those guys and they're very sharp and Ryan is a real go-getter. Awesome. All right. Second question. Most of the marketers I speak with their biggest challenge is just keeping up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing, staying on top of, you know, the new regulations, the new algorithms, the new tools, the new strategies. How do you personally keep up to date and keep yourself educated?

Shash (34:19): So, I mean, the number one thing is you just gotta be inside the ad concept because that's where you're gonna see stuff first. Number two is obviously I, I would say just having the network of people who do the same thing. So for me I talked to a lot of YouTube marketers. So on top of our own media buyers, the also I talked to guys like Tom breeze and like, they're basically other experts Brian Moncada, for example. And these are guys that I often communicate the then, you know, basically being in that circle, you kind of get that information first because sometimes you might dig into an issue and bring it to attention, or sometimes they'll do it. But typically if you surround yourself with marketers who are doing the same thing, you'll get it a lot faster.

Kathleen (35:13): Great. All right. Well, if somebody is listening and they have a question for you or they want to learn more, what is the best way for them to connect with you online?

Shash (35:26): Yes. So the first resource I would check out is our YouTube channel. If you look up Shash Singh, so S H A S H and S I N G H. So we got a lot of videos there. That's probably the spot to kind of just learn stuff and that other resource I would, if you need to get in contact with me, I will check out our website, which is Linxdigitalagency.com. And I can throw links to that as well.

Kathleen (35:54): Awesome. And I'll put those links in the show notes for anybody who's listening. So had there to get more information. And in the meantime, if you are listening to this episode and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, I would love it. If you would head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice to leave a review, that's how other listeners find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me Shash, this was really fun.

Shash (36:25): Thank you for having me.

In the hyper-competitive world of e-commerce, how to the top performing brands drive continuous improvements in conversions and revenue?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Dexter Agency CEO Joris Bryon talks about the importance of A/B testing, and why small improvements to your website can drive big increases in revenue.

From the process he uses to identify which website pages need to be optimized, to how he determines what aspects of the page are underperforming and the nitty gritty details of setting up and running tests and user surveys, Joris lays out, step-by-step, a process anyone can use on any type of website to improve conversions and pipeline.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Dexter Agency website
• Connect with Joris on LinkedIn
• Check out Joris's book Kill Your Conversion Killers

Kathleen: Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today, My guest is Joris Byron, who is the founder and CEO of Dexter Agency and the author of Kill Your Conversion Killers. Welcome to the podcast, Joris.

Joris: Thanks, Kathleen. Great to be here, actually. Yeah.

Kathleen: I am so excited to talk to you, but I have to start with a question. Kill Your Conversion Killers, is that kill or be killed, conversion rate optimization style?

Joris: Actually, it came from the baseline we had when we started the agency. So it was Dexter Agency. And Dexter, the serial killer who kills...

Kathleen: Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about that [crosstalk 00:00:55].

Joris: ... serial killers. Yeah. And that's where it came from. And conversion killers is a thing, actually. So we kill conversion killers, and it's a bit of a play on words. And that's where the title came from and the baseline for the company as well. Yeah.

Kathleen: I love it. So speaking of the company, maybe you could just briefly introduce yourself to the listeners and talk a little bit about your background and what Dexter Agency does.

Joris: Sure. So I've been in marketing for 20 years now, and I started my career in traditional advertising agencies and actually did that for about 10 years. But I got fed up with the typical discussions you have with clients, like make this blue, make this red, put this on the left, put this on the right, that kind of stuff based on nothing. Well, I discovered online marketing, and I started learning about SEO, PPC. I went working for an agency as well. I had to stop in between where the company, it had failed. And then I went into digital marketing. But anyway, in that visual marketing agency, I learned a lot about digital marketing. And at one point, I fell in love with conversion optimization. And that's how it all started. And I ventured out on my own. I learned everything I could about conversion optimization. And first, I tried to implement that in the agency where I was working. And it was a great agency, but back at the day, conversion optimization was still pretty new. And there weren't any clients prepared to start doing that, so I had to venture out on my own and started out as a freelance CRO consultant, and that grew into an agency. And yeah, here we are now doing this for six years already.

Kathleen: And I saw in my notes that you have done over 1,500 A/B tests. So you have a ton of data that you bring to this conversation, which I love. Conversion optimization obviously is a broad topic. We're going to focus specifically on e-commerce, which is an area that historically we haven't talked about a ton on the podcast. Although, I've started talking about it more lately because selfishly I'm working in the e-commerce area. And so I'm really interested in learning more, and so I'm excited to dig into this with you. Let's just start with a background on conversion optimization because I don't know that everybody fully really understands what it is, why you should be doing it, how it works. Give me just a really quick summary on that.

Joris: Yeah. I'd say conversion optimization for me is trying to make more from what you already have. You already have visitors; try to make more out of the visitors you already have. They already buy from you, so why don't you try to increase the average order value? And you have them as customers, so why don't you try to sell to them again? For me, that's conversion optimization. It's basically working with what you already have. I know there's definitions out there that focus entirely on conversion rate optimization, but I think that's too narrow. It creates wrong expectations. I don't think conversion rate optimization is a great name for the discipline as such. So if I have to say something about it, I usually say conversion optimization as you do rather than conversion rate optimization because that creates false expectations.

Kathleen: Yeah. I spent a little over a decade as the owner of an agency, and I used to always talk about this and frame it as if you want to double your revenue and you look at a traditional marketing funnel, there's two ways to think about it. You could say, "Well, I have these conversion rates and this number of visitors and this number of leads. If I want to double the number of visitors who ultimately turn into customers, I can double my traffic, and if the conversion rates all stay the same..." And I'm going back to conversion rates right now, so I'm deviating a little from what we just said. But I think it's a helpful rubric. You can either try to double your traffic and just stuff twice as many people in the top of your funnel, hoping that it produces the same outcome, or you can work on converting more of the people that are already coming into your funnel. And in a perfect world, you're probably doing a little bit of both, but the reality is that the fastest path to more revenue is the second thing that you focus on. It's much harder and longer term effort to double your traffic than it is to double the number of leads you're getting that ultimately turned into customers. And I'm sure the same is true of repeat purchasing and things like that.

Kathleen: When you talk about ultimate impact on the business, trying to squeeze more juice out of the orange you already have is always a better approach in the short term, certainly, than trying to grow more oranges.

Joris: No, absolutely. And I think a lot of business owners, they're so focused on traffic that they forget there's other ways to double their revenue. And I get it. In the beginning, the fastest way to grow is adding more traffic, and especially PPC. If you pay for that traffic, it's going to get you quick growth. But at some point, you'll hit a plateau, and it's going to get harder and harder to attract relevant traffic because you can dump the traffic on our site. But if it's not relevant traffic, why bother, and why pay for it? And what I feel is by then, most business owners are so stuck in a traffic mindset that they look for ways to still make it work. Maybe I try something new, some new campaign or some new channel or fire their agency, work with another agency, whereas they miss out on the opportunity of working with what they already have and try to improve that instead. I think one question that helps is, do you want more traffic, or do we want more revenue? And when you put it like that-

Kathleen: That's a pretty easy question to answer I would hope.

Joris: Yeah, yeah. Right. And that's a bit of an eye-opener, but most business owners are so stuck in traffic mindset, whereas there's a lot of potential in increasing the order levers. I think for e-commerce, the formula that I always use is revenue equals your traffic times your conversion rate times your average order value times your purchase frequency. There's only four levers that you can grow your e-commerce. There's nothing else. If we're talking about your own life story, you can start selling on marketplaces. That's a different story. But if we're working on your online store, it's still those four levers. Yet, most companies focus only on traffic, and they miss out on the other three levers, whereas if you look at that formula and you can increase these three other levers by 30% each, which is pretty doable, then you double your revenue. And doubling your traffic sometimes it's going to be very, very hard. For me, it's sometimes a mystery why people get so stuck in a traffic mindset when there's auto levers that you can pull.

Kathleen: Well, and I think everything you just said honestly applies to, really, almost any type of business. And in fact, I just had this conversation last week. I have a weekly marketing meeting with my team, and we had been tracking traffic and conversion rates and all that stuff. But we're also tracking marketing source, pipeline and revenue. And it was really interesting meeting because I've been feeling lately like I'm beating my head against the wall trying to increase traffic. And it isn't working as quickly as I would like it to, but my marketing source revenue is really good. And so I finally said, "You know what? I'm not even going to report on traffic anymore," because, clearly, it's not a good leading indicator for what really matters. And I don't want to keep pouring a lot of time and energy into changing a number that isn't going to get us necessarily where we need to go. It's not that I'm not going to ever work on traffic anymore, but I do feel like as a marketer, I could let it really eat away at me when it doesn't need to. So I think your point is really well taken.

Kathleen: But what I want to start with on this topic is, how do you know if your conversion rates aren't good? How do you know if you're functioning in a way that there's real low-hanging fruit from conversion optimization? Because I think a lot of the marketers I've talked to in principle are fans of it. Everybody says, "Sure. We should all optimize our conversions to the greatest extent possible." But I do feel like there's this feeling out there that, well, I already have a pretty well running system, so why should I invest in that? So how do you look at your existing funnel, your existing business, and identify whether that is the right thing to invest in and when it is the right time to invest?

Joris: Yeah. That's an excellent question. I think, first of all, I've never seen a site that cannot be improved. So we've always made our clients a lot of money. You can always improve. So never assume that you're at the top of your game and you cannot improve anymore. The second thing is always look at, for me, it's Google Analytics. So look at the data and try to figure out where you're losing money. So it's really about finding those areas on your site. Maybe there's a huge drop off in a certain page. Look at bounce rates as well. If you drive a lot of traffic to a certain page with very high bounce rates, start there. So look at those numbers in Google Analytics, and that'll tell you where you have opportunities. And whenever you can, try to also put a number to it in terms of dollar value.

Joris: Let's say you have on a cart page on an e-commerce site. So you have a 50% drop off. So people reach the cart page and 50% drops off. There's always going to be drop off. But what you try to do there is, what if we can get it up to 60% going through to the checkout, so only 40% drop off? What would that represent in terms of annual revenue? Then you can look at, let's say, checkout pages and see what the drop off is there and what would be a more normal level and try to put a number to it or a dollar value to it on a yearly basis. And then you know where you have to start because if one page represents a problem that could, basically, if it's fixed, maybe you can get a $200,000 a year extra. And the other one is $1 million a year extra, you know where to start and start digging further to understand why that is happening. So we always start with where it's happening, and then you try to figure out why that is happening and try to solve that problem, basically.

Kathleen: I like how you frame this. If I look at my Google Analytics and I find a page that has a really high bounce rate, in this case, maybe it's my cart page, I've identified where. And then how do I go about identifying why? What's that process look like?

Joris: So there's different research methods that you can apply here. What I find is one of the most effective ones is user testing. So basically, you give a couple of assignments to regular people who they have to do those assignments. They have to comment out loud what they're doing. And if you're doing that remotely, you'll get a screen recording of it as well. And you see them moving through your site trying to do the assignments that you gave them, and they have to comment out loud. And it's going to give you a lot of insights. It doesn't always have to be that kind of setup. You could just ask someone random, I don't know, in a Starbucks or something and pay them for a coffee and say, "Hey, do you want to take five minutes and go over to my site and say what you think," something like that. Just try to get feedback from people who actually use the site. And that's usually going to be one of the most valuable things.

Joris: Obviously, we look at it ourselves as well. We are conversion experts, so we know what might be issues. But you always have to test it and never assume that you're right because as an expert, we sometimes get it wrong because what works on one site doesn't necessarily work on another site. And I know a lot of people don't grasp that idea. They think, oh, it should work on every site, but that's not the case. So you can look at click maps and scroll maps. You can record visitor recordings so that you see people moving through the site. So there's a bunch of research methods that you can use to get some qualitative feedback. You can also, which is very good one, is on the checkout. So basically, on a thank-you page, you can trigger a survey, ask a couple of open-ended questions so that you get valuable, qualitative feedback because that's the thing. It's not always about percentages and the hard data that you find in analytics. You have to understand the why. So the qualitative feedback is going to get you so much further than trying to look at the hard data. And you really have to try and step into the minds of your consumers. That's where tools like user testing and surveys come in and can give you very valuable insights.

Kathleen: I love those little surveys. And I know there's a lot of tools out there from Hotjar to Lucky Orange and platforms like that that you can use to create them. But I've tried using them before, and I don't get many submissions. And so I'm wondering, what is a typical survey response rate? And are there any ways to increase the odds of getting somebody to actually fill it out?

Joris: So there's two ways to do it. You can set it up before someone checks out, so before they buy. So it's visitors, not consumers, and that's different. Your response rate is going to be lower than when you do it after the checkout, for instance, or you send them an email with a questionnaire. In that case, you're going to get a lot of responses. If you trigger that Hotjar pop-up to any visitors, it's really going to depend on the quality of your traffic as well, the timing of the pop-up because I often see those pop-ups really being [inaudible 00:15:05] after five seconds. And I don't even know what you do yet, And you already asked me what your experience is on the site.

Kathleen: How long do you think it should be? Or should it be on exit?

Joris: Well, it could be an exit, for instance. If you look at the average time on site in Google Analytics, that's when you know it's probably going to be somewhat qualified visitor already. They've spent some time on the site. And I would start there and trigger it there, and then you can start playing around. Another thing that helps-

Kathleen: Wait, I just want to make sure I understand what you just said. Do you look at Google Analytics for that specific page and see how long people spend on that page or the overall session length?

Joris: Yeah, session length. So basically if you see a session length is on average one minute 27 seconds, then you trigger it at one minute 27 seconds to start with. And you'll see what happens. You'll get much better feedback also because people that bounce usually are not interested anyway. It might be a mismatch, so it's not only about the amount of responses that you get but also quality of feedback that you get. So you've got to play around with those things. And there's no one formula for that, but it's just a couple of criteria that you can use and play around with it. Another thing that you can do is ask two questions, and the first one is a yes or no question. And then the second one, you expand on that and have an open-ended question because what happens is people want to be consistent. So if they've clicked on yes or no and then you ask them a follow-up question, you'll get better feedback. More people will fill that out. So that's a good way or another way to test.

Joris: Never make it longer than that if it's one of those pop-ups before someone buys. If it's after the checkout, you can ask more questions. People will be more involved already. So I don't have a hard answer there. It should be this percentage, but you just have to try and improve what you already have. I think that's the main message here because it can vary wildly. Also, if you have a site with a lot of diehard fans and you have a good, interesting brand and a lot of brand fans, you're going to get much more response. Yeah. It's [crosstalk 00:17:19].

Kathleen: No, that's good feedback. I like the idea of looking at session length. That certainly is a little bit more scientific than just randomly picking a number of seconds. So I have a bunch of questions on this topic. So I've been in the situation before where I know I have a page that has issues, and it's that feeling of like, oh my God, where do I start? And you can certainly go to user testing, and there are other things like that. But I also know there's some gold to be mined within Google Analytics. And sometimes the issues you have have to do with devices or browsers. So how do you approach sussing out whether the issue is something that's on the page or whether it's more of a device or browser issue?

Joris: Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think it's a matter of keep asking the right question. So when you see a number that looks off, then you have to think, oh, okay, is this only on mobile? This is on desktop as well. Is this on a specific browser? So you start checking all those reports. There's no one way to go about it. You start very high level to see if there's some numbers that seem a little bit off, and then you start digging and look at segments and apply other reports and that kind of stuff. And it's a matter of asking the right questions and being curious and really trying to figure it out. And you can spend a lot of time in Google Analytics before you find something that is off and find a reason for it.

Joris: It could be bot traffic for instance as well. If you see very high bounce rates, then you might want to look into, is it a specific browser or even a browser version causing this? Is it only on the homepage? Is all the traffic going to the home page? Do you see 98% bounce rate or 99% bounce rate? It's probably a bot. If that then comes all from one location, it's very likely it is a bot, and you have to exclude that traffic and it's just skewing your data. So you really have to keep asking questions to find the answer. And I start at high level and then dig deeper.

Kathleen: So wait, the bot traffic thing is fascinating to me. What do you do about it? How do you fix that?

Joris: Yeah. You can exclude some of the bot traffic if it's really clear. If, let's say, it's all from one particular location, you could [crosstalk 00:19:46]-

Kathleen: Meaning one IP address?

Joris: ... for instance. Yeah. You could just exclude that. Or it could be, let's say, even on an old Internet Explorer browser version, sometimes you see that it's sending bot traffic. And if you're like, oh, the only traffic that's coming in is from that bot, you could exclude that particular browser version as well. You try to find a unique identifier for that bot, and then you exclude it. Sometimes it's just impossible to do, but at least you give it a try and see if you can find one unique identifier that you can filter out.

Kathleen: And then, I've always been taught with any conversion optimization or any A/B test you only change one thing at a time. So walk me through when you're trying to really optimize a specific page. You pick one thing, and how long do you let that experiment run? Is it a matter of time? Is it a matter of volume of page visits? How do you know when that experiment is up and it's time to move to the next thing? Because I'm assuming these all layer on top of each other. You're testing multiple things sequentially, correct?

Joris: Yeah. So typically, we test on several pages at the same time. So you could have a test running on all product pages. So we don't test on one product page, but on all product pages at the same time, when I'm collections pages or category pages, one on the cart, one on checkout pages. So you could have those running simultaneously. Well, you have to have enough data before you call it. And usually, what we look for is, to make it simple, It's more complex than that, but is at least 300, 400 transactions per variation. So you need quite a bit of traffic to pull it off. And I like to or I prefer to say the number of transactions rather than in traffic because, ultimately, that's the main conversion that you're tracking. So you need at least 300, 400 transactions per variation, and you always have to let it run in increments of seven days. The reason for that is you can see a big difference. On a Thursday night conversion rate, could be totally different than on a Sunday morning. And a variation on a Thursday night could work better because it triggers something in your consumer that is relevant at that point, but it could work not so well on a Sunday morning or the other way around.

Kathleen: Right. The type of person who shops on Thursday night might be completely different behaviorally than the type of person who's shopping Sunday morning.

Joris: Absolutely. Yeah. Especially if, for instance, you're going to buy something you need on Saturday, so you need it to be delivered on Friday. Then you're going to decide a lot quicker than on Sunday morning. So there's different times of the day, different days of the week that have different conversion rates and different behavior from your consumers. So always run a test in increments of seven days. So if you have enough data after five days, sit it out. Wait until you have full seven days. If you have enough data after eight or nine days, too bad, you have to wait 14 days. We had one client where we joked about it because on Friday nights, it was always like, oh, this variation seems to be winning, and on Monday morning, it was totally flipped. So the behavior-

Kathleen: Interesting.

Joris: ... on the weekends was usually completely different there. So it's really something to do to be very strict about. And if you do this for clients and you look over your shoulder and you look in the A/B testing tool, you have to educate them on that because they're going to be like, "Yeah, but we have enough data. This version wins. Let's implement it." No. Just be calm. Let's give it some time because you don't want to implement something that ultimately ends up being a loser because then it's going to cost you money.

Kathleen: Yeah. So this is interesting to me. And I started thinking about this as you were talking because you mentioned doing something on a category page or product page, a cart page. Any given customer, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, goes through a journey. And when they're on their path to purchase, even in an individual session, they're going to visit a lot of different pages on your site. And so I already mentioned once changing only one thing. So if you're doing an experiment on your cart page, you pick one thing to change and you test it. But how does that reconcile with the fact that a customer has this journey, they're visiting all these different pages on your site, if you have experiments running on your category page, your product page, there is a chance that that person in their single journey to purchase could encounter three different experiments at once on three different pages. It's one thing to say we're testing a change on the cart page, but if there are experiments going on three, how do you know what really led to that purchase? I feel like that's where it starts to get complicated. How many things can you have going at one time on different pages?

Joris: That's a very good question. And it's something that a lot of people struggle with. Just the easy version is as long as you equally divide the traffic for every test, there's no issue because let's say you have two tests running, one on a product page and one on a cart page. Now, 50% of your traffic is going to see the one on the cart page. No, sorry, 25% version A on the cart page. 25% is going to see version A on the product, version B on the cart. And 25% is going to see version B on the product and version A on the cart. And 25% is going to see version B and version B. So it's hard to follow and very hard to explain without a visual, but bottom line is if you divide the traffic equally, there's no issue.

Kathleen: So it basically allows you to create cohorts, and each cohort has one single experiment running for them.

Joris: Yeah. You could also double check all of that in Analytics, for instance, by making a segment. So anyone who's seen version A here, if you suspect some influence from one to the other, then you can basically make those segments in Analytics and see if there's a different behavior and a different outcome. So you could double check that. Apart from that, there's also something like a multi-page experiments. So let's say you want to test something that is on several pages at the same time. A typical one would be the navigation or the footer or a benefits bar with all those USPs you typically see on an e-commerce store. That's something that is across pages. That's not an issue either because it's very consistent across all those pages. So sometimes you want to set up a multi-page experiment as well. If someone does something on the product page and this needs to happen on the cart page, that could be an option as well. But I'm making it a bit complicated. So it really depends on what you're testing, but if it's two separate tests and you split the traffic evenly, there's no issue.

Kathleen: So as I listen to you talk about this, I'm fascinated because this is not my primary area of expertise. But I'm also a little intimidated because it's starting to sound like you, A, could potentially need to be really, really well-trained in this, and B, it sounds like it could be a complex tech stack to support this, having these multiple experiments running with different cohorts going through your site. Can you talk me through really what does it take to pull this off?

Joris: Yeah. So I think in terms of tech, if you have Google Optimize, it works perfectly fine as perfect tool to get started. It's free. We still use it a lot for a lot of our clients. There's other tools out there as well, but don't spend any money if you can do it with Google Optimize. So that's the tech side of things. For the rest, it's a matter of understanding a couple of best practices as well in terms of how to set up a test, like let them run in seven days, let them run long enough, how you need to analyze those tests. I describe all of that step-by-step in my book without making it needlessly complex because what I find myself is the whole CRO community likes to make things complicated and sound very high level and a lot of statistical stuff in there as well to make them look smart.

Kathleen: Yes. And it makes me feel really dumb.

Joris: Absolutely.

Kathleen: [crosstalk 00:28:43].

Joris: No, no. Absolutely. I think that's a mistake from CRO community because we alienate people we do this for because they don't understand it. And it is complex. There's a lot going on when you do a conversion optimization. At the end of the day, you need to know a lot about design, about copywriting, psychology. This takes research, all that kind of stuff. So it is a hard discipline to grasp, and there's a lot of misconceptions about it. And clients don't always understand it. And then on top of that, as a CRO community tend to make it look much harder than it actually is. That was one of the reasons I wanted to write my book, is make it as pragmatic as possible without... My objective was not to make me look smart but really to help people out. And usually, people in CRO community want to look smart. I had a discussion about that the other day on LinkedIn, where someone was attacking me because I didn't share all the statistical stuff behind an A/B test. And it was like, I think that's not always needed. It's about inspiration, about opening their eyes. [inaudible 00:29:55]. Obviously, that's our duty as well. But if we use all that statistical stuff around it, we scare people off. And as you said, they, they feel dumb themselves.

Kathleen: Yeah, and then they check out.

Joris: Yeah, absolutely. And we're marketeers. We say it to our clients. Hey, you have to understand your clients and speak their language, and then we don't do it ourselves. So there's a big gap there, I think, in the CRO community and a big responsibility in the CRO community as well. But most of the CROs, they just want to look smart, and that's a mistake, I think.

Kathleen: Well, I appreciate that, that you are focused on making it accessible, because I will be the first to admit that sometimes I read this stuff, and I think I just must not be smart enough to fully understand it. So I want to do a few rapid fire questions for you on this theme of debunking myths and making it more accessible to people. The first one is, and you alluded to this earlier, why should people be running A/B tests? Why can't they just read a best practice somewhere and do it on their site or look at what their competitor's doing and do it on their site?

Joris: Yeah. We see that all the time. So there's something called best practices. I prefer to call them prototypical principles or common practices because what we see is when you test the best practice on a site, it may fail and cost you money. We've seen that many, many times. So there's just no way of predicting it. Those are great way to start. If you're just starting out, use those best practices by all means. But then at some point, you'll have to start questioning is this actually working for me. And if you have the volume to the test, then you definitely should start testing it. So the word best practices is very misleading.

Joris: The second part of your question, following what anyone else is doing, that's also thinking, first of all, they know what they're doing.

Kathleen: They're right, exactly.

Joris: So you assume that. That's not true. Or you think like, oh, I know they're [inaudible 00:32:00], but then you're assuming that they've already beat us at that, which may not be the case. If it's, let's say, a call to action, maybe they haven't even tested it yet, so it may not be working. It may be a problem for them. And then you're maybe implementing problems on your site. You don't know their data. You don't know anything, and you just assume that they are doing a good job. And you just implement it. And it's very dangerous to just follow what your competitors are doing. The only situation in which you can do it for me is when you see you have a problem and there's an issue and you're looking for inspiration on how do other people solve it or go about that problem and maybe work around it, and then you start testing different solutions. So you can go out there and look for some inspiration, but don't just follow it and implement it.

Kathleen: That makes sense. Use it as the basis to inspire your tests as opposed to assuming that the test has been successful.

Joris: Absolutely.

Kathleen: So if somebody is listening and they're in e-commerce and they're thinking, okay, I'm willing to give this a shot, what are three things that you think they should start out doing A/B tests on?

Joris: Yeah. First of all, start doing the research. You'll know where your problems are. But where we often see a lot of opportunities is anything around value proposition on the homepage. If you don't have that yet, that's usually a good area to start. Then anything else that underlines your USPs, basically, and that gives people a reason to buy from you, and especially if those reasons are unique. We see a lot of value around that as well. And then what I think is usually a good place to start as well, product pages, anywhere in what I call the decision area. So anything near the picture and the button, anything you can improve there is usually also a good place to start. But product page in general usually is a place where you can make a lot of improvements.

Joris: But do the research first, and try to understand where your biggest problems are because I remember one time where working for client, and we were testing on the product pages. We just looked in Google Analytics, and we saw they had a huge drop off in one of the steps in their checkout. So they were losing millions of euros, a Dutch client, of euros a year in that step in a checkout, but didn't even know it. And they were testing a product page, which was acceptable at every product page at the time. So look at the data first. That's the best place to start.

Kathleen: So on that note, look at the data first, and you mentioned Google Analytics. We've all got it. It's the one tool I think all marketers use. At least all marketers that listen to this podcast I'm sure use it. What do you think? If we're going to rely on the data there, we better be looking at it correctly. Are there certain mistakes that you find that marketers make when looking through Google Analytics that somebody should be aware of if they're listening?

Joris: Yeah. I think a lot of people focus on the wrong data. So focus on those data that are actionable and [inaudible 00:35:06] metrics. What I would say as some test if you're looking at the right data, always ask yourself, how can I use this to improve my site or my marketing? How can I use this number to improve it? If it's time on site, for instance, you can use that to trigger a Hotjar pop-up, but that's about it. If time on site increases, it could be that people have a harder time to find what they're looking for. So you can not really use that metric. Yet, some people look at that metric. So ask yourself that question. I think that helps because what I find is that most people don't have a lack of data. There's not a lack of data but lack of insights. And they get overwhelmed by the amount of data and analytics, and they don't really know where to look. And so we always ask the question, how can I use that? And if you don't have an answer, then don't use those data.

Kathleen: Yeah. Your point is so good about session length and time on site. It seems like it would be good to increase it, but it's true. If somebody is frustrated and not finding what they want, they could have a long time on site or, what I find often happens, if they're a job seeker and they're reading all of your content. I'm in B2B SaaS, and the DIYers, the ones who are never going to buy from you, but they're like, I'm going to read all the educational content so that I know how to do this myself, those are the people that spend a lot of time on site, whereas somebody who comes in knowing they want to buy often has a very short time on site because they're high intent, going right to your contact us page and filling it out.

Kathleen: And it's funny because I used to look at this too when I had my agency. We would try to look at patterns of people who bought from you, how many pieces of content did they consume, thinking, gosh, is there some rule where if somebody consumes more than 30 pieces of content, then they're a good lead? And I found actually it was almost like the inverse was true, that the customers that were converting consume very little content on site because they came in ready to buy. So it's really interesting, And I do think you have to question the assumptions that you have as a marketer before you go and try to implement changes. Well, last question on conversion because I am just curious. What is a good conversion rate? And I guess we'll talk about e-commerce because that's where your expertise is.

Joris: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's a question I get a lot. And the only right question is a good conversion rate is one that's better than last month's. Just look at yourself because there's I know there's benchmarks out there, and people always want to look at benchmarks. But that doesn't really help you. Benchmarks usually you mention it's 2%, 2.2%, but it depends on so many variables.

Kathleen: And is that for a visitor to purchase conversion?

Joris: Yeah, yeah.

Kathleen: Okay.

Joris: Yeah. But it doesn't mean anything. If your average order value is $20 and you have a 3% conversion rate, you might think based on a benchmark that you're doing all right. But I would say your site probably sucks because it's only $20 average order value. You could probably get it up to six, eight or maybe even higher. And so you could be complacent about it. Whatever. It's 3%. I'm doing good. Whereas if your average order value is $1,000 and you're a 2%, yes, then you're probably doing pretty good. Or you might be at 1% and thinking, oh, I should be improving a lot. I can easily go to 2%, maybe more. [inaudible 00:38:46] a little bit difficult to get to 2%, but you could probably get it to 1.2%, 1.5%, and it could be a lot of money as well. So there's a whole bunch of factors out there, also the quality of the traffic that you drive to your site. So I would suggest don't pay too much attention to benchmarks. And I get it. People want to have an idea. Am I doing all right or not? But basically, just look at your conversion rate from the past and try to improve that. The only good conversion rate is one that's better than last month's.

Kathleen: That's great advice. All right. We're going to shift gears because I can talk with you about this forever, and I feel like I'm getting a masterclass here. But I have two questions I always ask my guests. And I'm just curious about your viewpoints on this. The first is, of course, this podcast is focused on inbound marketing, and the definition of inbound has evolved quite a bit. And so I really look at it as anything you're doing to attract the right type of customer to your business. So when you think of it that way, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really raising the bar or setting a great standard for what it means to be an inbound marketer today?

Joris: Yeah. I think there's a couple of marketers that I follow and I look at. I tend to follow people more than brands. And you could say they're brands, so all their personal brands. I think when it comes to anything B2B on LinkedIn Marketing, I very much follow Matthew Hunt. He's doing a great job in anything small business marketing and startup marketing related. I really look up to Noah Kagan from AppSumo. Makes great YouTube stuff and great videos, and you just keep binge watching them. And he has a great style but also great advice. And when it comes to e-commerce, there's two people. I tend to follow Ryan Daniel Moran and Ezra Firestone. I think Ezra Firestone, he does a lot of inbound marketing the right way. And he experiments a lot and invests a lot of money in trying new techniques and then sharing those findings with his audience. I think Ryan Daniel Moran is really good in terms of building e-commerce brands and making it less complex because we tend to over-complicate things, and he makes it less complex and helps you focus on what really matters.

Kathleen: Oh, interesting. I'll have to check those out. Those are some new ones for me. All right, second question. The marketers I've talked to consistently say that one of their biggest pain points is just keeping up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally stay educated? Are there certain sources of information that you really rely on to stay on top of your game?

Joris: Yeah, it's hard to stay on top of the game. Fortunately, in conversion optimization, it's pretty evergreen. New things emerge, new tools, for instance. And obviously, you want to follow all of that. But if you look at a global digital marketing game, it changes every single day. And there's a lot of marketeers that suffer from shiny object syndrome, I guess. And you see something, you want to try it out, whereas I believe that you got to be consistent and try to find what works and give it a real shot because don't try it just today and then give up tomorrow. Sometimes you have to make a choice and stick with it for a while. So I suffer from that myself, shiny object syndrome. So I try to stay away from too many things that distract me from the real path that I want to walk on.

Joris: I think in terms of getting new trends, LinkedIn is my source of information. If my network shares, it's probably going to be worth reading. So that's where I spend most of my time, is on LinkedIn. And that's where I discover. And then when I see there's a topic that really is important to go deeper, I just buy a course or read a book. So I stay away from too many blog posts because it's so fragmented. You don't know who wrote it. You don't know if they know what they're doing. And when it comes to courses, I think CXL Institute is a really good source of high quality courses. So that's where I look first as really... Yeah, CXL for me is benchmark when it comes to marketing courses.

Kathleen: Well, I am a huge fan of Peep Laja, so I definitely agree with that. He was an early guest on the podcast too, and he's doing great work and, in fact, when it comes to message testing has a really neat new platform called Winter, W-I-N-T-E-R, that if you're listening and you haven't checked it out, you should, for sure.

Joris: Yeah, absolutely. For B2B, it's a great tool.

Kathleen: Yeah. I found it really useful in my experiments. Actually, it's funny. I recently interviewed Chris Walker from Refine Labs, and he talked about how at a certain point in your career, you really can't rely on outside educational materials to stay on top of your game. At some point, it has to be about doing your own experiments and doing the work and testing. And so I feel like as somebody in the field of conversion optimization, you have a leg up because that's literally what you do for a living. So that's great. Well, if somebody is listening and they're interested in connecting with you or learning more, what's the best way for them to find you online?

Joris: Yeah. So on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active there. So just to add me on LinkedIn. And then you can also email me, [email protected]. And if you want to learn about this yourself, you can download the free PDF version of my... You could buy it on Amazon, but you can download a free PDF version on dexter.agency/free-book. And there, you can get a free PDF version of the book. If you want to get started yourself, just check a few things, like what are best practices about A/B testing, what we talked about. So that's all in there.

Kathleen: That's great. And I will put those links in the show notes. So if you're listening and you're interested in connecting with Joris or getting a copy of the book, just head there, and you can hit the links and get all of that information. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, you learned something new, please consider heading to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving a review. That's how other folks find us. And, of course, if you know somebody doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @WorkMommyWork because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you for joining me, Joris. This was so interesting.

Joris: Thanks for having me. It was great to be here.

When it comes to multi-location or franchise marketing, the key is balancing centralized brand control with hyper-local marketing.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Wild Coffee Marketing co-founder Amy Anderson explains how her team approaches managing the marketing strategies for some of the countries biggest franchise brands.

From working with Franchise Advisory Councils (FACs) to leveraging technology to deploy consistent marketing messages across geographically distant franchise locations, Amy shares insider tips and insights on how her team helps franchises achieve their growth goals.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Wild Coffee Marketing website
• Connect with Amy on LinkedIn
• Check out Propellant Media and Strategus to learn more about geofencing

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Amy Anderson, who is the co-founder of Wild Coffee Marketing. Welcome to the podcast, Amy.

Amy (00:24): Thank you so much for having me, Kathleen. I'm super excited to be here.

Kathleen (00:27): This is going to be a ton of fun because we're going to talk about something we have not talked about yet on this podcast, which now that we're almost 200 episodes in is, it's pretty rare. So I always get really excited about these episodes. But before we jump into our discussion topic, tell my audience a little bit about yourself, what Wild Coffee Marketing is and kind of how you ended up doing what you're doing.

Amy (00:50): Well, I can't believe it's been almost 30 years of a marketing career that went by very, very quickly. And I actually started in the media business in New York right after college, I moved there and I worked at 17 Magazine and I loved the pace of it. You know what, 21 year old woman does not want to work at 17 for a bit, but I had a really hard struggle with the accountability and the performance of print bothered me back then. And so I ended up in broadcast actually at Calvin Klein cosmetics, where I was managing $70 million of co-op funds for radio and television. And I love that we at least had Nielsen data, right? So at least we understood audience and then pure play internet media came on. Right? So in the mid nineties and I worked at the New York times digital, I was part of the original group that had launched with my times.com and that was gated content, right?

Amy (01:41): So you had to register, you still do, and now it's paid, right? So that was my first foray into sort of personalized content, registration, data, user data. And I've sort of been obsessed with it ever since. And running marketing departments then and B2B and tech and financial services. So I stayed home for a few years raising my young sons. And when I went back into the market, I would have had to have a really sort of senior job at that point. Cause it had been 20 plus years and I wanted the flexibility to be able to raise my young kids and started consulting. And I joined forces with my former boss who is now my business partner, Solomon Wancier. And we founded Wild Coffee Marketing, knowing that there is a place in this market for sort of this hybrid model, right part consulting firm and part agency. So we're very heavy on sort of strategy and advisory services, but we also implement what we recommend or we can. And it's been a really great three and a half years so far.

Kathleen (02:41): I have a bunch of questions, the first one, and I'm sure you've gotten this many times in the past. How did you come up with the name Wild Coffee?

Amy (02:50): Well, I was living in Miami for 17 years and an area called Coconut Grove where you'd have to like knock back all the weeds and foliage with. I mean, it is jungley and there's a native plant called Wild Coffee that grew all over my property and it was hardy and beautiful and sort of energetic plant that was hard to keep back and it attracts birds and butterflies and bees. And I was sitting in my office one day and I said, you know, if I ever form a company it's going to be called Wild Coffee. And it's been a lot of fun for us because it has a lot of fun brand extensions that we are able to work with.

Kathleen (03:25): Yeah, that's neat. I had to sort of chuckle when you talked about Nielsen ratings being the thing that got you into being like a data-driven marketer, because wasn't it, I feel like in the last two months, Nielsen has come under fire for mismeasuring just recently. And it's just, it just points to like how far this stuff has come in that time period. Like in a short amount of time, the way we measure has gotten so much more sophisticated and we're able to have such a higher degree of accuracy. It's, it's pretty fascinating to me to, to track. Are you still doing a lot in broadcast now or no?

Amy (04:03): They're doing some OTT actually the over the top for one of our actual multi location franchise clients and that, you know, I always preface it when I'm at a cocktail party or at a meeting or speaking to a group and you have to sort of say, I know the creepy factor is there that we're kind of continuing your journey from the internet into broadcast in your home, but there's also no sort of margin for error anymore with tracking right there last, you know, last attribution and things like that, that you can't be wrong. So when Nielsen comes on their fire for things like that, it's just, it's unacceptable at this point. Yeah. We're expected to be accurate all the time. Well,

Kathleen (04:39): And I also feel like, yes, there are a lot of people out there who, who complained vocally about being tracked and all that. But I've had a lot of conversations recently, recently, especially since apple started doing a way with, you know, cookies and things like that, where people are saying, I kind of want to be tracked because I want the ads I see to be relevant. Like I was joking with somebody who said, you know, my advice to all the men out there was get your mother's day presents before apple, deprecates the cookie, because all you have to do is go look in their feed and see everything they like, and that's not going to be there anymore. And so it is interesting that I think there are people who, who it's, we're very divided as a society in terms of what we want.

Amy (05:23): I agree. And you want things to be personalized and relevant, but there's a price that comes with that. You know, some of the geo-fencing that we're doing. I mean, I'll tell when we have multi location, highly localized marketing that I know if you've been in Orange Theory or Publix in a shopping center and it's highly effective for us in some ways, but I understand sort of the creepy factor of it, but at least I'm going to serve you something that makes sense to you.

Kathleen (05:49): So let's actually get into that a little bit because the topic that we're talking about that we haven't talked about before is multi location or franchise marketing, you know, and we've talked about probably every aspect of marketing in some way or the other for single businesses or single locations. But it's very interesting to me when you start talking about franchises because not only are we talking about multi location, but with franchises specifically, we're really talking about multi owner as well. And like, how do you craft marketing programs that, that are manageable with such a broad constituency for them, but then also protect the integrity of the core brand. I'm fascinated by that, because this is the kind of thing that if it's not managed correctly could like really do a lot of damage.

Amy (06:39): We talk about the rogue franchisee, right? So that's a thing. It's interesting for us. It's fascinating because it is a, it's like, it almost is a marketing program that has tension in it, right? So you have the corporate roles, which is, you know, brand, getting new franchisors franchisors on board, multi unit location investors. So you have this sort of corporate aspect and then you have this theory sort of hyper localized and they have different goals, right. So one is brand value, equity, consistency of message. Growth. And then at the local level, it's like, okay, that's all really nice and well in science, baby, give me the leads. Yeah, exactly.

Amy (07:27): Meets the road for sure. Absolutely. And it's two totally different strategies. So how do you bridge that? And I think you have to have two disparate programs. I mean, there has to be a corporate marketing team of corporate marketing focus and plan that may be PR, right? So we have, one of our clients has a hundred plus locations. They recently hired a celebrity, sort of endorsed her, but he bought 20 locations. So what do you do with that and him and PR at a corporate level, but then how do you make that translate into local markets? And one is that we use pretty sophisticated technology and platforms to push whatever we want at a corporate level, to the local level. So we'll say, Hey, you can pick from all this social content in this platform that we use, but we're also going to push some things and you have to be okay with that because there are certain messages that have to trickle down, but otherwise we're going to give you evergreen and promotional content that you can pull.

Kathleen (08:19): And I assume that that's all baked into the franchise agreements so that the framework is there from the start.

Amy (08:27): Yes. And we actually have another client that has a hundred corporate owned locations, right? So that's a little easier because they're corporate owned, you have more flexibility. Franchises usually will even have a council, right. They call it the FAC and those people are representing interests of the individual franchises. So you've got this local strategy, delivering leads, putting together that sort of program. And then they come to you as a group with, okay, this is what we need to have you do to improve this. So it's just a lot of sort of moving parts, a lot of dynamics and you have to be super flexible and focused on performance and focus on overall growth at the same time of the actual brand.

Kathleen (09:06): And it's interesting because prior to my life in marketing, I actually worked in what I would call stakeholder consensus building for, for large public sector reform projects. And it was about building up grassroots support at the ground level so that these projects could like could, could go through their life cycle without getting derailed essentially by opposition. And I feel like what you just described is exactly also that, because like, if you, from what I'm hearing, if you go into this and you haven't got the, not just the buy-in of corporate, who I'm assuming is your customer, but then you don't take the time to really socialize what you're, what you're going to do with the franchisees, or at least this CA this council of representatives, then that's going to cause a lot of problems down the road. Is that accurate?

Amy (09:52): That's absolutely accurate. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's representing lots of different interests showing performance results, you know? Yes. The corporate, the corporate group and the C-suite is our client, but we also care very deeply about these people who in many cases have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're small business owners, right? So maybe 41 of our clients, all the locations are owned by 48 people out of 110. So some have multiple, but we really care about what happens. And I think you've probably seen this over the years in B2B marketing and in marketing, if you don't love and care about your salespeople and their experience and their needs, you will never be successful. And that's sort of the case here that I see that they have they're with customers in store, they have their own set of challenges, especially in COVID. Right. So I just think that sort of empathetic approach to those people and delivering their needs is a foundation for a lot of our strategy.

Kathleen (10:53): So now, in terms of how you work with these companies, you said often corporate is your client, is that right? Yes. And are you doing the corporate marketing and, and some of the PR as well as the actual local marketing, or are they bringing you in to take on the local piece?

Amy (11:10): That is a really good question. It depends, in some cases we will actually manage the localized digital agency. That's doing lead generation for a fee per location. So they'll be doing sort of local paid digital. And then we handle it, the corporate level SEO overall all of the PR and then social media usually, although, you know, that's sort of the agreement that you have is okay, please, because really sort of genuine engagement at the local level is super important. So go ahead and create your own social, but we are going to provide you a library to supplement that. And then we're also going to push things to your page sometimes, cause that's really important too. So it's sort of creating this hybrid model of that and we love managing the localized agencies cause they're typically very good at what they do. Franchises usually get a choice of three to four to work with.

Kathleen (12:06): Interesting. So when you come into a new client, walk me through how you break it down because this feels like, like eating an elephant. I hate that analogy, but I'm going to use it anyway. Like you've got to do it one bite at a time. And so there, cause there is a lot that could be done here. So, so how do you, do you have like a mental model for how you tackle this?

Amy (12:28): Absolutely. I mean, any engagement that we start with always has a positioning, right? So we all use April Dunford and work with her. You know, we love all, I love her too. So we all sort of have that foundational work that we do with the brand, right? So you have to identify who all your personas are, what matters to them. And once you mobilize all of that in the positioning, we usually start with corporate, understand the growth targets, understand what's worked, what hasn't, where they're trying to go. We have a client now that's trying to go from one 20 to 240 locations. They are a stretching gym and they have had zero problems after COVID, which is incredible. I think people are ready to be out and wellness is very important to all of us. So really sort of working at the corporate level and then going in and looking at their funnel, right? So what's the awareness phase, what's consideration and conversion, and then starting to deploy local strategies on top of that, for example, we know 97% of consumers engage in local search when working, looking for a local business, right? So what do those Google My Business pages look like? What is happening with all their directories? And imagine all the directories times a hundred locations, the scalability is tremendous. So you have to have a centralized sort of command center to start doing that.

Kathleen (13:49): And are there any particular tools that you find really helpful? I mean, I know I've used like some rushes, local SEO bolt-on there's Yext there's there used to be Moz local. I don't even know if it's still exists anymore. Like, are there certain platforms that you've found to be really scalable for that?

Amy (14:06): Absolutely. We use Yext for some of our bigger sort of enterprise clients for that we're actually using a platform called Soci. So I don't know if you've heard of them. They're meant for multi location marketing, they offer the localized local pages, directory pages, social. So when I talk about creating those folders, pushing social app chat, we use them for, and really what's been super helpful recently is reviews. So right. So up to maybe 30 to 40 locations of a business, you can do a lot of things manually. You get to 50 plus, and that's where the scalability sort of shifts at a hundred. Plus you, you have to, so to look at reviews across a hundred locations has been super interesting. You get an sort of scale of sentiment, right? So you can see how's my, how, how am I? How's the health of all my locations?

Amy (14:58): That visibility is really important. And then what we've seen, we actually have a formal ware client with a hundred locations rolling up in a single brand and that starting to happen. I'm in the middle quarter of the US. And you know, there's a lot with prom emerging. We're coming out of COVID massive mandates lifted. All of a sudden problems are happening. My son has a mock prom this weekend. It's sort of a fake one, but they're all going. And we're starting to see individual sort of tuxedo, formal wear specialists who are like rock stars in the market. So even helps you see visibility down to who likes whom and what stores and how can we surface that into social media content with like Tufts tips with Terry and things like that. That really give you three content ideas when you're actually looking at reviews and things on those pages. So tell

Kathleen (15:48): Me, you said Soci. Tell me how that's spelled.

Amy (15:51): S O C I.

Kathleen (15:53): Okay. Interesting.

Amy (15:54): Soci.com to look that up, but we work with them on, on several different deployments and it's just been really effective in helping us scale.

Kathleen (16:03): It makes sense because it does sound like you would need a specialized program, rather platform for this. You talk about pushing updates out to different accounts and you know, I, I owned an agency for 11 years and, and boy, I remember the, when you first start working with brands, how, how terrified they are to give you you know, control over social, especially. And so what does that look like? Is it, is it complete control where you're able to come up with the creative and send it out? And as I imagine, then there's a process to get there with the trust or is it you're coming up with the creative, sending it to corporate, having it vetted and then pushing it into the system? Like what, how do you, how do you handle that?

Amy (16:48): It's sort of a hybrid model. I think with that, you know, the local stores or local locations or studios, you know, whatever you're working with, really, they should be doing their own social media. We don't want know, say a restaurant chain came to us and wanted to do social. I mean, imagine us trying to take, you know, it just doesn't work as well. That'd be boring, it'd be stale. It feels corporate, right? So there's a lot of, a lot of, sort of in-store in boutique things that have to happen. We did launch associated with one of our clients and we did have an approval place process in place because there were some rogue Zs as we call them. And there were a lot of sort of off-brand graphics being used, maybe language and copy that wasn't quite on brand. And so we had it going through an approval process.

Amy (17:37): We were, we were looking at posts, approving or giving feedback or suggestions. And then once that trust started to build, and once we started to push content out, then sort of that trust loop was closed. We stopped approving. That's great. Okay. You guys can fly on your own. And then we give them good content with good folders promotions, and it's all organized. And so she said they can pull down and then super important sort of corporate wide announcements, then they're like, okay. Yeah, that's interesting. You can go ahead and push it. So it's really trusting each other. And then everybody gets more comfortable.

Kathleen (18:11): It's so important because I mean, having done this for several years and worked with different types of clients, like the, to me, the biggest problem with, with really succeeding on social very often is speed. Like you have to be able to capitalize on something's happening in the world and you, you comment on it or a trend pops up, you know, like I think back to the Bernie Sanders meme with him in the chair and the mittens and like the worst thing was when people were posting that a month later as though it was news and it's like, no,

Amy (18:40): Three days, even three days later it was sort of done. Right? I feel like it peaked with the one of him on Melania's dress. There were so many good ones. Oh my gosh. But yeah.

Kathleen (18:52): I mean, if you, because I worked with a lot of financial services firms and everything had to go through compliance and there came a point where it was like, why bother? You know, like if you can't move fast, it's not worth doing right.

Amy (19:04): Well Matthew McConaughey was on Jimmy Kimmel talking about Al's former lawyer and we had a post in 45 minutes. So, I mean, that's how timely, I mean, even big days it makes you irrelevant sometimes. And you're absolutely right. That the speed is important. We are on it like that. And something came up recently about one of our clients was like, well, should I have one social media person in-house, you know, and named a very low salary level. And I said, that's so interesting that CEOs think that interns do social when it is your most visible right. Potentially vulnerable and most on-brand things you have to do. So, you know, we do have an in-house director of brand strategy who does social, she's a brilliant writer, PR crisis management background. You can't just throw that at, at a, you know, an entry-level person on your team and expect that it's going to really fly.

Kathleen (20:03): Absolutely. And I think a lot of people confuse young with inexperienced. Cause there are, there are definitely a lot of young people who like, naturally get social really well. But there's a difference between young and understand social, but has no good judgment and young and understand social and how to use it for business, like, and the young and understand social and how to use it for business as the one who like gets paid the big bucks.

Amy (20:29): And they're hard to find. They're a little Unicorny and this market we're always on the lookout for them. Because it's hard to scale that part of the business. Being in the agency world, you know this.

Kathleen (20:41): And throw in sense of humor. And they're like the unicorn of unicorns.

Amy (20:44): Well now we have short form video content, but if you get wrong, get really, really wrong, you know, and it's an area that we're ramping up more than more. I mean, I'm, I'm advanced in my career. You say Tik Tok to me and I start to sweat, you know, I look at my teenagers and I'm like, don't worry. Mom's not going back.

Kathleen (21:01): I know I'm like, I've, I've, I've given it up on Tik TOK. And honestly I have to be on a Snapchat too. Like I just can't, I don't have the, I don't have the energy, but I also don't have to because I market B2B software. So luckily it doesn't hurt my career. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, so let's talk a little bit about the hyper-local marketing because this thing it gets really interesting. And what I find fascinating about this is I think that franchise companies do do this really well because they're like able to do it at a micro level, but at scale. And so they have that experience to bring to bear, but everything they do is so applicable to other hyperlocal businesses that maybe just don't have the same experience and resources. And so I, I love this topic because I feel like if you own a local business and you really want to kill it, you can, if you're willing to put some effort into this area. And so I'm hoping that like, we're going to cover this and yes, there might be some, some things that like are out of reach for somebody who's local, but I also think there's going to be a lot of really good takeaways.

Amy (22:04): Let's absolutely, I mean, the areas that we look at right first Google My Business. What does your local listing look like? I mean, that is your, the cornerstone of your digital footprint in search.

Kathleen (22:15): Are you keeping it updated because especially during COVID, this became really obvious to me that there were people who maybe had taken the time to set up really good listings, but then didn't update them with their new COVID hours or protocols or what have you. And that there's nothing more annoying than going someplace to patronize whether that's a restaurant or another type of a business and showing up and they're closed.

Amy (22:39): Absolutely. And in images in your Google My Business listing people sort of overlook that it's good to change them. Right. And we recently did a big, a hundred locations push of directory listing content. And we did not override the photos on the local level because again, it needs to have, even if the storefront is not the most beautiful glossy sort of aligned with corporate brand that you would want, it's still the base of the store and that's what people are looking for and it's theirs. So that's that balance. We talk about Mary with that. What we also I think is really important is what is your review program of a local business? Are you asking for them, are you responding to them? And that's another aspect that Soci gives us. We can look across a hundred locations, how long it's taking someone to respond to a review.

Kathleen (23:28): So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what you've seen work well, as far as asking for them, because I think that that is where a lot of businesses stumble is they either they're not asking or the way they're asking is sort of doomed to failure. So, so what's successful in this area?

Amy (23:45): I definitely think a follow up email if you have that customer data, right? Texts will work also if you have a platform installed. But I think asking in a subtle way that really leaves it up to them. You know, if you liked what you got from us in this location, we'd love for you to let us know. And then there are platforms grade us we've used grade.us where it enables you to ask for them, you have your own sort of landing page for them. But I, I think multiple asks is probably not the way you want to go. Right. Ask ones, leave it up to them. And then, and then go from there.

Kathleen (24:22): Is there a point in time or place when it's most impactful? And what I would equate this to is, you know, like you're in the grocery store, you're going to check out and if they, whatever food they seem to put in the checkout aisle is what flies off the shelves because you're stuck standing there and it's like, you're about to hand over your cash. Right. It wouldn't hurt to just take that pack of gum. So is, are there points in time or place with local businesses, whether that is, I mean, you mentioned email and I'm assuming that's immediate post-purchase, but if it's more of a physical interaction, is it like slipping something in their bag if it's retail or, you know, putting it on the receipt? I know, I know lots of places do that. Like what, what works well now?

Amy (25:03): I think in store, it's definitely having that conversation there. I think that's okay to say it was really nice to meet you. And I'm so glad you were here putting a personal note on a receipt. Absolutely. Sometimes. I was on an a flight recently and I flew to Seattle and actually the flight attendant gave me a card with his name on it and said, and you can review him too as well. And that's the first time I've had something like that where I've had a flight attendant. Yeah. Solicit that. So I think it's more immediate and it's conversational when, when they're in store for sure. Email wise. Yeah. I like the 24 hours sort of the same as the abandoned cart cadence that we love, which is 24, 48 72 that we put typically will email with an abandoned cart.

Kathleen (25:48): So, and then you mentioned responding, which I hope everybody, I think everybody out there listening, because I do tend to have a fairly sophisticated audience, knows that like you gotta respond. You gotta are you

Amy (26:00): Surprised? Well, cause they're also in store, right? In many cases right now there's a lot happening, right. We're transitioning out of this period in time of business and they're busy and they're making sales, but this is a really important part. So that's almost like a corporate process and culture and educating them on the importance of it. We're doing a lot of just sort of screen-sharing videos for them because they're using associates, well, training them, communicating the importance and the impact of their business, how it helps them in a positive way. And maybe there's a little bit of that. Oh wow. Now I hate to say corporate right. Or home office or, but the reality is, that's what it is. They can actually see what we're doing a little bit more easily. Right. So I wonder if that creates a little bit more of a sense of urgency and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's not an over monitoring. It's Hey, we're here to support you and help you create a better customer experience.

Kathleen (26:54): Well, and it's all about also taking the high road when you respond. Because I mean, I've had restaurant clients in the past and I've seen firsthand just how heinous people can be in reviews. And sometimes it's because they had a bad experience and sometimes it's because like their friend used to wait tables there and didn't like getting fired for stealing something. You know, it can be anything, but I, you know, I think you have to, there's an art to responding to these things and not like going on the attack back at somebody.

Amy (27:24): Absolutely. We actually can put responses like that in the platform for them so they can see like five issues. We can have canned responses and groups of five, right. So we give them so much content to sort of help them along the way there too, which has been really helpful to them.

Kathleen (27:40): That's good. All right. So let's talk about geo-fencing because you mentioned that and I'm fascinated by it and that technology has changed so much. So how do you tell

Amy (27:50): We actually we'll use a couple of third-party platforms, which I am not as familiar with them as my team is. But I know when we first started about two years ago, the response rates with click-through and leads were really low and I'm seeing a big change in that. So recently we launched a campaign that had a 2% conversion rate on geo-fencing and we're actually fencing the area around the stretch gym locations. And it's super fun. Cause you can offer them an offer. You can give an offer. We usually tie a sense of urgency to it. It's in app with things that they're using. And so I think it's sort of come a long way with that in that way. And we're having a lot of success with it at the super local level. We've also done some trade shows too in the B2B world. I don't know if you've done any geo-fencing that way where you'll fence the convention center.

Kathleen (28:42): I have not. So talk to me more, what platforms are you using also? Cause this is super interesting.

Amy (28:51): I do not know which one they're using right now. And they're, I know there are two, so it's, I I'd have to ask them.

Kathleen (28:58): I'll tell you what, if you follow up with me afterwards, I will put it in the show notes.

Amy (29:03): Thank you. And they'll probably, they're all, they'll probably be listening like oh great. But she doesn't remember and it's put through.

Kathleen (29:09): Well, we can't be expected to know everything that the teams are doing.

Amy (29:11): So did you know that I had a conversation recently about how wide we're expected to go and how deep now is, you know, just the number of platforms alone we use are probably over 15, but we, yeah, we had a medical device client at a dental show and we were sending people to the booth by fencing the convention center. And then we're also doing it sort of at a hyper-local with competitive fitness centers, trying to get people interested in wellness to do a free stretch. So that's where we've seen some really good lead forms. And it just really, as, as marketers and we just talked about how data has to be accurate performance is critical for us as outsource marketing teams. And so you have to be bold to try different things and be really sort of creative, courageous about it. And I think that the geo-fencing is one area that we're going to start going down a lot more.

Kathleen (30:05): How does the cost per acquisition for geo-fencing compared to traditional pay-per-click? Is it more? Less?

Amy (30:11): It's around the same.

Kathleen (30:12): Okay. Oh, that's great. Because I do feel like traditional pay-per-click is getting harder, you know, with cookie deprecation.

Amy (30:20): Well we just went through an election cycle. Right. So now we've gotten much more astute at really sort of looking at budgets around major life sort of events times of the year, managing expectations with that. And cost sometimes are going up five times at certain parts of the year.

Kathleen (30:37): Yeah. During the election cycle, during the holiday season, when it gets more competitive. Absolutely. Everyone's like, well it's like half the year now, like Amazon prime day, I feel like it's like four months before Christmas. I don't know what happened, but it starts in August or even sometimes July.

Amy (30:55): It's like 4th of July is going right into Halloween now.

Kathleen (31:00): So depressing, like don't start releasing things that are flavored like pumpkin until after the summer is over.

Amy (31:04): Although I do, I love my pumpkin spice memes that come around in the fall.

Kathleen (31:08): Yes. so I there's so many different aspects to this. Maybe you could just share, and I don't know if you can talk about specific clients or not. It doesn't really matter if you name names, but can you just give us a sense of like what kinds of results you've you've seen and, and what, what has driven those?

Amy (31:24): Sure, sure. What, what has been most remarkable is the increase in social traffic and that's something we didn't anticipate. Right. So before COVID to after COVID, so we have these two sort of worlds, we don't even look at things versus 19 versus 20 quarter over quarter with this client is sort of pre COVID post COVID, right.

Kathleen (31:43): BC and AC, right?

Amy (31:46): Right. We actually saw a 36% increase in social referral traffic. And what I think has happened is I know that these locations, as much as they want that autonomy of posting, they're also starving for content. So in many cases it was probably infrequent, not optimized. You can set when we're going to post right. And optimize in that way. But now we're just seeing engagement rates go up and actually referral traffic has really increased a lot, which has been great. And I mentioned before with our formal where client really surfacing content ideas and creating like mini rock stars of people out in the field has been super effective and just bringing to life the brand.

Kathleen (32:32): Do you see a trend across the content that you push out where anything that's user-generated seems to perform better?

Amy (32:40): Well, because we're in bridal.

Kathleen (32:42): I'm sure it depends too though. Like there's that user-generated content.

Amy (32:47): But do you know, just the time that it takes to review UGC is, is pretty significant, right? So our social team, I mean, I'm sure they time block UGC time. Right. And so it takes a lot of time, but it performs really well. It's authentic. Right. Which when we talk about sort of brand voice and trends in 2021 and what's happening, I think people, I don't, I don't want to say that they're cynical, but they're going to see through sort of glossy corporate materials. And I think to be genuine is really important and you could see sort of it connects with them better. They can identify with it a lot better.

Kathleen (33:24): You can see yourself in the advertising much more than you can with stock photos or really slickly produced things.

Amy (33:30): Yeah. Stock photos, right. The necessary evil that we all sort of try to run from and find different ways. And, and I was recently in a meeting with a commercial, actually they do residential, mostly mortgage lender. And I looked at the CEO, they just did a $10 million round and they're taking off and, and struggling with scalability because I said, you know, it was really, I empathized with them. It's really hard to be a financial services CEO and have to be a publisher. And just for them to be able to keep up with the volume and the engaging nature of it. So when you're in a market that has a lot of user generated content, you're really lucky. Bridal is fantastic.

Kathleen (34:14): Oh, I was going to say, I mean, it's, like I said, I'm in B2B software and I used to be in cybersecurity, which is the worst industry for UGC because nobody wants to even say like what solution they're using. So you can't even get testimonials and case studies there. So I'm very jealous.

Amy (34:33): Well, especially with brides, right. And all looking to be the most original, I mean, it's sort of the Instagram bride, right? It's not even in Pinterest anymore. These brides are all on Instagram and they're very generous in the industry with tagging each other. And they're so they're so much of it that it's as, as a formal wear supplier or a bridal designer, we have a bride designer client in New York. It's just, it's so helpful to us in social for sure.

Kathleen (34:57): Oh, I love that. Well, I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this. But we're going to switch gears because I want to make sure I squeeze in the two questions that I always ask my guests. So the first one is, is that this podcast of course is about inbound marketing. And so like naturally attracting the right buyers to you. Is there a particular company or individual out there that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to do that well right now?

Amy (35:19): Well one of our values is always learning and as marketers, we have to be all the time. So I really follow a lot of our software providers that we work with. Because even yesterday we were talking about AI and how we're deploying it, how we're using it to optimize of our digital campaigns. And I have to say, I love Unbounce. They have just a lot of sort of reminder content. I consider it that's a little bit more surface and then they get really in depth. And then if you're a landing page company, I want to see what your landing pages look like all the time. You know, they really do. And there are standard for us and I really love to see always what Uber and Lyft are doing. I think they have, hyper-personalized sort of content it's very specific to your location. How they've ate, been able to sort of do that at a hyper-local level. Has been really interesting example for me to follow and watch for sure.

Kathleen (36:16): I love that. Well fun fact, Oli Gardner, who is the CEO of Unbounce or at least he was at the time I interviewed him was one of my first, probably 30 guests on the podcast. Great guy.

Amy (36:29): He's great. They're so smart.

Kathleen (36:32): Yeah. all right. Second question. And I really can't wait to hear this answer because you said you, one of your values is always learning. And the biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that it's so hard to keep up with the changing world of digital marketing. So what are your personal like go-to sources that you use to stay on top of what's happening?

Amy (36:52): Absolutely. So I find that LinkedIn is, has become my New York Times. Right. I love the New York Times. I have subscribed since the mid nineties, when I worked there, I did get a free paper every day when we worked on New York Times digital. So LinkedIn is sort of my news source. So my new my, where I go for all of my news, I love Reforge, I've got a lot of great stuff there and we actually for business management, we use a system called EOS. I don't know if you know, entrepreneurial operating system.

Kathleen (37:25): I ran my agency on EOS. Fun fact, hold on while we're sitting here. Yeah. I have a Gino Wickman book right behind me. Traction. Yeah, yeah, no, this was, this was my Bible. And in two years, it was towards the end of when I had my business. And then the two years I used it we, we only have joked that we got more done in two years than we did in the prior 10. And it's, it's really not, oh my God, amazingly, amazingly. And I still use a lot of aspects of it.

Amy (37:54): What did you love most about it?

Kathleen (37:55): I loved the IDS process. And when it's, which is identify, discuss, solve for those who are listening and when we would have our team, I also, I liked the, the very consistent meeting cadence. And when we would do our team meetings, we made everybody who worked for us, read the book and educate themselves on how it worked and what IDs was. And we would come up with these lists of challenges and just, we were able to so methodically work through it. And I remember the day when we had been doing it for like nine months and somebody on my team said, it kind of feels like the issues that we're working through now are really small. And I was like, isn't that awesome? Like, we've tackled all the big, awful, hairy ones that had been on our plate for years, like it's working, but it was just a funny, it was a funny inflection point. So how about you, what is your favorite part?

Amy (38:42): Well have to say that we run a hyper accountability sort of culture, you know, and the fact that there's one task per person, right. One to do, and one accountability per person. So it's just very clear how we're hiring. Right. I already know the next four positions we're filling and it's not just scaling one role it's rains that are sort of outside the function of our company now. So we know what we want to add. And just always having that in mind is, is really incredible. And then I love the aspect of one person is doing one thing and it may sound really simple. But, but it really is sort of transformative. And then everything's, date-based, you know, and those issues that get you in a, in a small company like ours, we have 16 employees and, but we've always sort of run it like a big company because we're always anticipating growth and scalability and onboarding new clients and onboarding new employees, which you and I talked about how, you know, that is the sort of the, the challenge of our business to have a system that sort of helps you get through the things that are difficult to talk about that you wouldn't normally identify in a public setting.

Amy (39:48): It has just been really, really helpful to us and help us grow. So I do look at a lot of EOS content and because I'm always looking for ways other companies are implementing it and other ideas that they have, and then I can't, I can't quit AdAge. I love it. Every morning I get the wake up call. I like to see what big brands I like to see agency movement. I like to see where people are going and why what campaigns are working. They tie in some timely political news, but that too, and sort of world news. And then I do use Twitter quite a bit. And that's more of my, sort of my news news. So we do take clarity breaks. So I don't know if you've ever scheduled time for learning.

Kathleen (40:33): Not as much as I should.

Amy (40:34): That's for sure. Yeah. So we, we reinforce that idea of clarity breaks and it could just be, go take a walk. It could be a power nap if you need that. Right. We're all working from home. So it's not as though we have people lying in pods or on the floor, but you know, we have people working at home. We do think that that sort of, that break of just clearing your mind. And then if you want to listen to a podcast, you know, go and do that on your walk, but it's really important to sort of clear your mind and then also be always learning and Superman.

Kathleen (41:04): That's great. And it's funny enough, this is why you and I get along so well. So one of the five core values I had at my agency was also, we call it continuous learning, but same idea. And as learning and continuous teaching were like two that kind of went together.

Amy (41:22): I liked that. We have energy is everything, which is sort of not a typical one, but I find that things are moving so fast and you need to be able to pivot. You need to able to sort of be ahead one step ahead of our clients. I mean, we're in the C suite, so we're going to weekly executive meetings with our clients. We are highly embedded with them. And as consultants, you always have to be proving your value, right? So, you know, that sort of energy is really important. We do have laid back people on our team, not everyone is, but they put the energy into their work. So it's not your disposition, but really kind of putting that. And, and it's, it's worked really well for us.

Kathleen (42:01): That's great. And it sounds like you're getting some fantastic results. Well that brings us to the top of our hour. So before we go, if somebody is interested in connecting with you online or learning more about Wild Coffee Marketing, what is the best way for them to do that?

Amy (42:16): Well, the best way is just to go to Wildcoffeemarketing.com. And there, you can see some examples of our work and sort of the areas and capabilities that we work in and see a little bit about the team.

Kathleen (42:27): All right. I love it. So head there, if you want to learn more, I'll put that link in the show notes, and if you're listening and you enjoy this episode, or you learn something new, I would love it. If you would head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else, who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork. Yes, that is my Twitter handle. And leave me a review or leave, not leave me a review, send me a tweet and let me know who I should interview. This is what happens when you do interviews at four o'clock on a Friday, on a Friday. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Amy. This was a ton of fun.

Amy (43:04): Thank you so much for having me, Kathleen.

What would happen if marketers forgot about leads and demo requests, and focused solely on pipeline and revenue?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Refine Labs founder and CEO Chris Walker breaks down his unorthodox approach to B2B marketing and explains why he believes most marketers are doing it wrong.

Refine Labs hasn't been around long (it was founded in early 2019), but in the few short years since Chris launched the company, it has experienced what most would term hypergrowth and now boasts more than 30 high growth SaaS brands as clients.

At the same time, Chris has become somewhat of a household name in marketing circles due to his consistent content creation on LinkedIn and his often contrarian, but always thought provoking, takes on B2B marketing best practices.

In this episode, Chris breaks down his approach to marketing and shares insights on why B2B companies should rethink how they approach lead gen. Check out the full episode to get the details. 

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Refine Labs website
• Connect with Chris on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and my guest today is Chris Walker who's the CEO of Refine Labs. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.

Chris (00:32)Great to be on here. It feels like just recently you were on our podcast and looking forward to diving into some topics today.

Kathleen (00:39)I love, I love the podcast guest swap. No, I'm, I'm really excited to talk to you because your name comes up a lot. LinkedIn is my favorite platform these days. It's the one I'm the most active on. I really enjoy it. And I hear your name all the time and I'm so glad we're finally getting a chance to get to know each other. So before we jump into deeply to our topic, for those who may be, haven't heard of you, or don't know you, can you just give a brief synopsis of who you are, what you do and how you came to be doing what you're doing today,

Chris (01:19)For sure. Yeah. Hey everyone. My name is Chris Walker. I've been in B2B marketing for almost decade now and have done almost all types of marketing for product marketing, field marketing, demand gen and brand. And I use them all together in a lot of different venture funded companies, both as an employee and now as a, a consultant or business owner. At the moment I run a company called Refine Labs. We've been growing rather quickly and we currently work with about 30 enterprise SaaS organizations throughout the US, EMEA and APAC to transform their demand generation programs with the core understanding or belief that the marketing game has changed dramatically, or the go to market game has changed dramatically from lead gen, high volume lead generation to feed sales with people that don't want to buy right now to marketing, executing demand generation, to generate high intent leads that want to buy for sales at a lower volume.

Chris (02:12)And that is the core thesis about how we operate, which requires a lot of different changes inside of companies, changing your metrics, changing tactically what you're doing, changing what success looks like at a campaign level, from leads or conversions to something that matters a little bit more deeply like qualified pipeline or revenue. And so that is what we do. I've been operating in this sort of like demand gen framework for the past five years, both as an employee and now as a business owner with a lot of different companies and just find that, objectively, the way we work works way better.

Kathleen (02:46)Love it. And what I think is really interesting about your journey is, so my background is I used to own a marketing agency for 11 years, and marketing marketing agencies is challenging, right? Because you're, you're trying to stand out in a very crowded field of all people who are good at marketing. Right. And it is, it's an interesting challenge. And that is why I think when we talk about the inbound success podcast and my profiling people who are doing inbound really well, you really stand out to me because, you know, you're, when did you start Refine Labs?

Chris (03:24)April of 2019.

Kathleen (03:26)Oh, okay. So this is not, you know, a company that's been around for 10 years. This is a relatively new company that came out of nowhere. And in just a very few short years, it has a ton of buzz. As you said, you've got 30 clients.

Kathleen (03:39)Your name is getting talked about a lot throughout the industry. So I feel like if you can, in two years managed to do what you've done and stand out in arguably one of the most competitive industries in which to try and stand out against, you know, a playing field of people who know by and large, what they're doing. If you can do this, then there are massive lessons to be learned for anybody. So I want to talk about how you've done it. And then at some point dive into what you do with your clients, which I suspect is...

Chris (04:13)Sorry to interrupt you, but I actually don't find it to be competitive, which I think is the challenge. Like, I don't think that marketing agencies are very good at marketing themselves. And a lot of one's not very good in operating for their clients because they execute a service that is, gets measured on top of funnel metrics that don't matter to a business, which is why the agency doesn't do it for themselves to grow their company. And so I think it's pretty easy when you start scoring on pipeline and revenue and looking at it that way and then reversing back to the activities that are required. One, it creates a massive product development pipeline for our company. And two, we know very clearly it's driving the business because we can measure it in our own revenue. And so it's weird. Like a lot of people say that it's competitive, but I think that from, for the most part, marketing agencies are actually quite poor at marketing themselves.

Kathleen (05:04)So let's break this down. You say that the problem has been a focus on top of funnel metrics. And so I'm assuming you're referring to, you know, website, visitor traffic, and then just leads like in a broad category. Is that accurate?

Chris (05:19)Yeah. Marketers tend to not spend time in the CRM where actual business data gets generated and tracked. And so anything pre CRM is what I'm talking about.

Kathleen (05:30)So, so what does that look like? You're, you're focused on the CRM. You're focused on pipeline opportunities, revenue. What does that look like in terms of how you then market differently?

Chris (05:42)So by focusing on pipeline and revenue in the CRM, it actually frees marketers from optimizing for top of funnel metrics. You can get scored later funnel, which gives you a lot more flexibility on what to do. If you're a marketer and you come into a company and they say, we need 3000 MQLs. So this month, and here's your budget and it we're projecting, it's going to cost $30 per lead. Then you actually have no money to do anything else, no money, no time, no mindshare to actually go and figure out how to do a podcast or figure out how to do LinkedIn by scoring on a metric that actually matters to a business. You give your marketers a lot more flexibility to do things that could actually work better from an experimentation standpoint. I think you also free marketers from channel attribution performance marketing, which is really I think hurt marketers over the past decade to a level where it's highly transactional and easy to track.

Chris (06:32)And therefore they love doing it because they can track it. But if they actually looked at the stuff that they're tracking, they would realize that they shouldn't be doing it that way. I do that with enough companies and analyze the data of performance marketing lead gen campaigns and how bad it is at a customer acquisition cost payback standpoint period. And like, like, I, I don't, people love to do those things because they can say we got a bunch of leads from LinkedIn, but they never look at how much that customer costs that we got from LinkedIn with all those leads. And that's what I'm suggesting that people do. And so once you get over that that path and you're measuring on qualified pipeline, for instance, one, the numbers get smaller, right? So I don't need to go out and generate 3000 leads. I actually just need to generate 10 leads that convert to a two qualified pipeline. And so it changed once you change the volume metric, you can actually change the tactical level things to having a high intent buyers that convert to qualified opposite 80% versus low intent leads that convert at 1%. And that's what I'm suggesting people do.

Kathleen (07:33)So when you come in and I'm assuming you've done this with your own business as well, but like when you look at at a company and you take this approach, you I'm, I'm guessing you start by looking at the deals. They have one to try to look at what has driven those, is that, is that where it starts?

Chris (07:54)Yeah. So most of the companies that are operating today from a SaaS standpoint because they get measured on top of funnel and they are obsessed with attribution, everything is tracked. And so it's very, very simple to go into the CRM and track all the different lead sources, all the way to revenue and then calculate things like sales cycle length, lead to win rate, average deal, size, different things like that. That gives you a sense about what is the efficiency of that lead source. Should we even start, keep doing that? You could, if you're doing advertising, you could do direct customer acquisition costs on those things. And what we find is that almost everything that a company is doing from a paid standpoint or a lead gen standpoint is not generating a customer acquisition cost that's anywhere near acceptable. And so once we present that data, it allows executives to help change away from this lead gen mindset.

Chris (08:41)And when you look at where the actual revenue came from, which from a marketing source revenue, or however you want to say it, inbound revenue, it's very clear the way that people come in to you to buy stuff, it's they come there on their own to your website. And they ask for a demo or ask to talk to a sales rep, or they have to get pricing. If you don't publish your pricing. And I would say almost any company could do that analysis and at least 70% of their revenue comes through that way. And so it's, how do you use all of the wasted money in advertising? That's happening over here to collect leads and change how that's being used to influence more people to come through your website and ask for a demo or to talk to a sales rep and is ready to qualify and ready to buy. And that's what we're focused on.

Kathleen (09:22)And I believe if I'm not mistaken that you call this the revenue growth optimization framework.

Chris (09:28)We call that part of the process, split the funnel. So what I find is that companies build their you know, demand waterfall from serious decisions in 2009 and put together one spreadsheet and say, we have to get 30,000 leeds and have blanket conversion rates across the whole funnel. Not respecting that different conversion sources have dramatically different intent levels from buyers and therefore converted significantly different rates. And so by splitting it out by lead source, it helps you identify what are the actual winners here.

Kathleen (09:55)So what has worked really well for, for your, how you market your business because you're drinking your own champagne. I don't like to say Kool-Aid, it's sort of a dark metaphor. What's working for you guys?

Chris (10:11)Podcasts, LinkedIn events, influencers, organic social.

Kathleen (10:16)So dig into that a little bit for me. Let's start with podcast.

Chris (10:20)There's a couple of things that work for us here. And I think that what people miss is I just laid out tactics. And I think that people miss on the strategy side, like we are a, we have air quotes for the listeners here of "marketing agency" with a highly differentiated product, sold to a very specific niche that I know needs it that's strategy, right? And so if you don't have a differentiated product and you don't identify your ICP and you start doing these tactics, they may not work as well for you. Strategy first right? And so we have that strategy walked in on who we're selling to, why they need us, why we're uniquely differentiated amongst their alternatives and different things like that. And then we think about it, just content marketing with effective distribution across the channels where people pay attention.

Chris (11:08)It's like basically what it comes down to. And so while other agencies continue to write blogs for SEO and spend a hundred dollars a click on marketing agency pricing and all the tactics that people have been doing for 10 years that are mature, expensive and flooded. We continue to do marketing on LinkedIn and still, I don't see any marketing agencies executing well on it. Linkedin and podcasts has been a gold mine for us over the past two years and will continue to be because companies are very slow to react to new opportunities and they have the wrong mindset when it comes to content marketing, which creates a huge opportunity for people that do like our content marketing. I'm not, I'm not measuring on how many leads that I got. I'm not measuring it on transactional. And so just the mindset about how we approach content marketing is the, is the secret advantage for us.

Kathleen (12:01)There are a lot of marketing agencies with podcasts. What makes yours different?

Chris (12:07)It actually makes an impact for the people that listen to it. I think it's, it's way more actionable, distributed at a much higher frequency from people that actually do progressive stuff. And I think that's why people tune into it. And we get plenty of notes. I would say probably at this point 20 a week from people said, Hey, I listened to your podcast at the beginning. I thought you were full of. And then six months later, I started doing those things and we stopped running ebook downloads on LinkedIn. And we started doing it more like the way that you said, and our pipeline went up by 300% this quarter, the first quarter of this year. And that's what people say. And so I know that it's making an impact. I'm not sure that you get that on other podcasts. So,

Kathleen (12:49)So for those who haven't heard of it the name of the podcast, state of demand gen, and it's published how often three times a week, and it is available it's video and audio video

Chris (13:03)On YouTube micro video on LinkedIn and long form audio on apple, Spotify, and all those other different channels. A key thing for people to think about there. And I've been talking about, we consult for a lot of people that are doing a podcast, and I hear this thing a lot. We need to make it short because people's attention spans are slowing down or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we want to do the seven minute podcasts. We, our average podcast length of somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes. Yeah. And so it has nothing to do with the length it has all to do with, is your content good enough to justify someone listening to it for that long? And I want people to think about that if they're getting ready to start a podcast as well.

Kathleen (13:42)You're preaching to the choir on that one, cause I, mine are usually 45 to 60 minutes and I always tell people it's going to be as long as it needs to be. Yeah. It's, it's the boring guests that, that would be a really short interview. Try to avoid getting those lines.

Chris (13:59)Okay. We'll try and get the 60 minutes that are misaligned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Kathleen (14:04)So, okay, so that's the podcast. Now I want to talk about LinkedIn because that is such a core part of your strategy. That's where I, at least to me, I feel like you've been very visible and very successful. So can you kind of break down how you think about LinkedIn and how you advise others to think about LinkedIn?

Chris (14:22)So when it comes to LinkedIn, I consider it a a highly effective content distribution, medium, and by acknowledging and understanding how dynamics of social platforms work, it can give you an advantage on how to use them. And so I'll give you a couple of examples about, and people think that if you like execute on LinkedIn, that you might miss on something else, but what they, what they don't understand that you build skills that you take with you to new platforms, right? And so in 2014, I spent time on Instagram. One of the most important things was trying to build an audience on Instagram. I figured out how to do that. And in 2019, when I saw LinkedIn working, I knew how to take the learnings of how to build an audience and move that over there, which is not just wait for people to follow you.

Chris (15:10)It's having a proactive strategy to get more people into your community audience. And so one of the things that we started doing probably in may of maybe for the past two years, is 30 people a day and connect with, with people that are active on the platform have posted in the last 30 days like content. That is like the stuff that we pump, we publish that's one, one consideration. The next consideration that we see across a lot of different channels is that I try and do all of the work in the feed, meaning that I'm not looking for someone to click on a link. I'm not looking for someone to comment. They're like, blah, blah, blah, like some algorithm hack to make a comment so that you can send them an email with a PDF. I'm trying to get to places where people consume and anyone that's listening to this you'll know that you're much more likely to consume something that's in the feed versus a link that moves off the platform.

Chris (15:59)And it's also better for LinkedIn. And so inside of the feed and the last one is 100% selfless, just con giving away the best stuff that we do. I publish stuff that people pay us a lot of money for. And I publish it on the internet because I know that it creates a huge inbound interest for us because we are considered the best, the smartest, the most forward-thinking because of the content that we produce. And so we publish that. I also know that a majority of people will never use it. And so those are a couple of key pillars in how we operate LinkedIn. And then the last one is just pure consistency. Like I don't think that marketers really understand. I think maybe they get, they get bored of doing the same thing. I've been posting videos on LinkedIn almost every day for 18 to 24 months.

Chris (16:46)And I'm not, I'm not bored of it at all. It's pure marketing is about finding something that works and then being incredibly consistent at delivering it while also innovating on a micro level. So you've known, you'll notice that we've changed up how we actually do the videos and how we film them and what quality it's in and how we cut them in different things like that. But we're still leaning into video mainly because a lot of people don't do it. And so I think it's just a huge, huge white space as a marketer on LinkedIn, it might feel like a lot of people are using LinkedIn and publishing content. They're good, but go look at other channels, go look at how competitive it is an SEO. Go look at how competitive it is and Google search ads for a trade show booth. Like all the places where you spend money are way more competitive from a cost of maturity standpoint than places like LinkedIn or a podcast.

Kathleen (17:33)So I'm interested to know how you work with clients on this, because I think as marketers, in many cases, we are naturally more comfortable putting ourselves forward on a platform like LinkedIn. But I do hear from a of executives, a lot of subject matter experts, this reluctance, and sometimes it's driven by, I think, fear that they don't have enough to say, you know, I think, you know, somebody can be an expert in something, but still have that almost imposter syndrome of like, well, am I do I know enough to really, to really put it out there? And then sometimes it's also driven by I can't come up with something every day. How do you do that? So like, how do you, how do you counsel somebody who, who doesn't come from a marketing background to develop this muscle memory, to be able to do this regularly?

Chris (18:24)Yeah. So I know how to do this because I've done it before at a company, as an employee in 2017, we were selling into hospitals and we had our subject matter expert VP of medical education. That was a practicing physician. That was our subject matter expert that people in the community found credible that had was an evangelist that had used the technology as a physician for more than 10 years. And so we had, and then became an employee of our company afterwards. And so we had that person. And the way that you figure this out is instead of trying to have forced that person to create information everyday, where they have to think about it, it's a marketer shop to put them in situations where they're going to demonstrate expertise anyway, create a fireside chat, do a round table, have them present on a webinar, on a new clinical trial, whatever those things are.

Chris (19:11)And then you record that event. And so I liked that also from the subject matter experts side, those people prefer that than recording a podcast in a, in a zoom on their own. They want to be out in engaging with people and talking with people. We had some of the most success, cause I, I heard people say, Hey, like this isn't worth my time to write this blog. But then when you say, Hey, we actually got you a spot to talk about the same thing that, you know, I didn't say this, but the same thing that we were going to write the blog about, but we're actually going to do it in Tulsa, Oklahoma with 12, you know, the best physicians in Oklahoma. And you're going to be speaking at that dinner and then we're going to record it. And it's a completely different story. And so people need to, I think, change the way that they set up their subject matter expert to allow it to work.

Kathleen (20:00)That's interesting. And then are you, are you publishing those recordings through that person's profile?

Chris (20:09)It was mostly through the brand in 2017. I think dynamics have changed quite a bit since then. But we could go just straight brand on Facebook, organic and a crushed back then. And like, it's just not, it's just not like that anymore. And so the distribution mechanisms over the past almost five years now have changed a lot. And I would at this point switch to some combination of brand and personal, depending on the platform. Yeah.

Kathleen (20:33)I mean, I really feel like today the power, the real potential is in marketing through personal brands. I mean, you can just from my company, you know, we publish a lot of stuff through our company, LinkedIn page, but I find it gets just dramatically less traction than anything put out by our CEO or head of product. The, you know, and so one thing is how do you get the content out of them, what you just addressed. But then the interesting challenge that, that introduces if you are going through the personal brand is how do you, how do you then make sure there's engagement on the backend, right? Because a great post with really good content is going to get engagement. It's going to get responses and questions. And so it's one thing if you, as the marketer are going in through the company page and engaging with comments, but then when it's on, you know, your CEO's personal profile, are you training that CEO to engage? Are you somehow gaining access to their account so that you can engage on their behalf? How, how do you, how do you think that should work?

Chris (21:34)So I'll talk about the ideal way and then maybe like a different, the ideal way is that whoever it is, it could be the CEO. It could be another person in your company recognizes how important this is and does all of it, right? Like I've never had someone else leave a comment for me or answer a message or anything. That's all me, the reason is because I recognize how valuable it is. I recognize that at the moment I can have, you know, a thousand touch points with different potential buyers in the market on my own by myself, and have 50 conversations this morning through comments on a LinkedIn post that I made versus what other CEOs might do, which is like go to a dinner once every couple of weeks to meet with one person. And it just get way more scalability of interaction this way.

Chris (22:20)I wish people would understand that. And so presenting that to people because I did this as an employee in 2007, around the same timeframe as I would run Facebook ads of the content of that this person was creating. And then I would engage in the comments and I recognize, Hey, I'm having a hundred conversations a day with buyers. Our sales, our sales team gets three connections when they go outbound in a day, like what what's going on here? Why doesn't the company recognize that this is a way better way to do what we're business development. What we're trying to do is connect with buyers in a way that they want. And so yeah. Yeah. I

Kathleen (22:57)Mean, I think it's really interesting to me because I don't think you can underestimate the importance of engaging. What I always say is like, you might get comments you could have a great post and you might get comments, but people aren't going to continue coming back to comment and engage with you. If you don't respond to them, you know, it's like a one-way conversation at that point.

Chris (23:18)Yeah, because people think that social media is about pushing out, not, you know, being social.

Kathleen (23:26)Yeah. so we've talked about the podcast, we've talked about LinkedIn, I'm curious to know how you approach written content on your website. You know, what are your thoughts around the classic kind of written blog? Are you doing much of that or is most of it like repurposed podcasts content?

Chris (23:50)We don't, we don't even repurpose podcast content on the website. It's just like, I believe that the the idea of what a website is for, for companies should change and we're trying to pave the way on it. And I'm also interested cause I'm very interested. It'll probably be within the next, you know, it'll be soon where we can say that we hit 10 million ARR and we didn't spend a second on SEO and companies can understand that there's a different way than writing long form blogs and different stuff like that. I'm interested in proving some points there. And so, no, we haven't done almost anything from a written blog content standpoint. Because I just feel like the way that people discover and research products has changed and they're doing it in specific places that are different than Google in 2009. And so our website and what I think companies should consider for their website is buyer enablement and a path to a high intent conversion. And that's it. And so if those, if we're serving those two things on our website, publishing pricing, case studies messaging about what we do, how we work and a way to get in touch with us to start a scale sales conversation and everything else that we're doing is in places where people actually are.

Kathleen (25:00)So you talked about how the way people buy has changed. What, how would you describe the modern customer journey?

Chris (25:08)I think the key that people I think the key that people need to understand in, in the difference in change is the access to trusted peers that B2B professionals have, that they didn't have five to seven years ago. And so I can interact with 30 marketers and understand what tool they use and what tactics they're doing in different things like that on LinkedIn and on Twitter in revenue collective through a text message through a private slack message through call through a zoom, all those different things that were much more difficult to do in 2014 as a B2B professional, you know, that you didn't interact with your peers in the way that you do today in 2014. And because you didn't have access to trusted peers, you trusted a couple of sources. You trusted analyst firms, you trusted conferences and you trusted Google search because you didn't have access to people. And that's the major change that's going on here is that now people get their information through their peers that they trust. And so leaning into that as the core shift is what I'm talking about, which I think would be very heavy on customer success and very heavy on effective content marketing and what I would consider the dark funnel, AKA social and other places that are difficult to track in attribution. So

Kathleen (26:27)Where do you review sites fit into all this? Because that is sort of a, a way people get peer feedback, but it's not the same as your connections on LinkedIn or the people in the slack channel. I know there's a lot of companies, especially in the software space that spend a lot of money on peer review sites. I'm curious what your take is. B2B

Chris (26:46)Companies love every channel that is lower funnel filled with intent. So because they can easily track it, the person's in buy mode and they can run performance marketing against it, which is why review sites, Google paid search. I don't even think contents indication fits into there because there's no intent, but review sites and Google paid search are lowest funnel, high intent. And that's where people are going to going to do things. What I think is actually more impactful is getting to the people before they have intent. And then they're not looking for a review site. They're just going to Google and searching your brand. And that's what I think people need to think about people. People fight companies fight over the small amount of buyers that are actively buying that have no preferred brand. So you're just competing with three vendors for somebody that doesn't care, it's going to be shopping on price. Doesn't have certain features, you're going to win some of them, but you're gonna lose a lot of them to, as opposed to figuring out what you need to do at the top of the funnel so that people don't even compare other vendors. And that's what we do.

Kathleen (27:44)Yeah. You gave me the perfect segue into my next question. Cause you talked about people going on to Google and searching for your brand for refined labs. What percentage of your traffic is direct?

Chris (27:56)I don't, I don't know. And I don't care.

Kathleen (27:59)I mean, I have a theory. I'm so curious to know if it's, if it's true. And that's something that I've seen. It's really interesting, even just with the company I'm at that, that the, the percentage of direct traffic as, as a part of the overall mix is, is growing. And I would think that yours would be a very large percentage direct

Chris (28:18)Or direct organic search. Yeah. I'm not sure how Google chucks it up. I honestly like what I'm looking at is something that's way further down the funnel than where it's being sourced from. Cause I it's weird as a marketer, when you get to this level, it's just you, I don't need data. Like I can, you can just feel what's going on at qualitative insights. What's happening in the CRM, inbound volume qualified pipeline where our conversations starting, we have conversations started in LinkedIn, DM through our website revenue collective through a text message through inbound emails from buyers. And so like, you can just feel where this stuff coming from, why what's going on. And I love being in that spot. Of course we use data. But nowhere near to the level that marketers obsess about it today.

Kathleen (29:04)Yeah. I feel like we spend a lot of time and waste a lot of time just on tracking and reporting. And a lot of times we're tracking and reporting on metrics that even by traditional marketing logic are a waste of time. So that's really interesting. You talked earlier about having started out on Instagram and then moved to LinkedIn and I sort of put a mental pin in that and I wanted to come back because I do feel like marketers by and large suffer from shiny penny syndrome where like a new channel is hot. Like in the last year it's tick talk and it's clubhouse and this and that. And all of a sudden everybody's like we have to be there, right. Because everybody's talking about it. I have really strong opinions on that, but I'm really curious to know what your take is.

Chris (29:56)So I think what people obsess about is they look at a channel or tactical level, not looking deeply at whether their content strategy was working. If you're, if you can't produce content that people like on LinkedIn, you have no business trying to go to Tik TOK right now, at least for B2B marketing. And so I think people should think about those different things. When I mentioned being an Instagram, it was Instagram in 2014, selling a $60 product, organic yeah. Influencer marketing posting every day, building an audience, engaging with the community and watching sales grow. And so I just had a clear understanding of what that dynamic was in that channel. And LinkedIn's no different, right? And so once you understand the dynamics of one platform, you can move them to another one, which leads me to a place like if Tik Tok does become a place where it's important for B2B to go, we have a content strategy, we have the operational infrastructure and capabilities to support it. And we know how social networks work and we're going to be able to win there. And so that's the way that I look at it. But I think the companies look at it too at a channel level and not holistically at like their organizational capabilities.

Kathleen (31:03)Yeah. Amen. I mean, that's my whole thing. Somebody asked me when clubhouse first came out, you know, what my thoughts on it were. And, and I, I, my thing was like, it's not for me. Right. It could be for somebody else, but I am. I'm all in on LinkedIn. I know I don't have the bandwidth to do two channels really well. Like you gotta, I, I think you gotta kind of pick your, pick your channels and it doesn't have to just be one for other people. It could be more, but you have to understand your bandwidth and your ability to really dominate and master the channels that you've chosen before you start to spread yourself.

Chris (31:37)Yeah. And it was just clear, like I'll find, I'll find the clip. I think it was late 2020 where I said this, where it was very obvious that some but that other platforms would copy the clubhouse feature because that's the same thing that happened with Snapchat, right. Instagram and Facebook, and all of the other platforms now have stories and clubhouses audio thing is now getting rolled already rolled out in Twitter and it's coming out on LinkedIn. And it was very obvious that that was going to happen from that standpoint and other people that don't understand those dynamics, stop doing everything else. And when all pot committed on clubhouse and now you watch your user growth fall to the floor because it's available and put channels that are far more popular. And that's what I think that people need to think about. I think that the scariest part is that companies stopped doing things that are working in order to chase something else.

Kathleen (32:31)There seems to be this like weird feeling that you have to be in the early adopter crowd. Of all things. I don't know if you, if you know

Chris (32:41)That it's gonna work. Then being an early adopter is when I would consider myself an early adopter on LinkedIn, at least from a high activity standpoint. And it certainly benefited me, the algorithm reaches nowhere near what it was two years ago. And so if you know that it's going to work, then, then I think it's a good move to be early. But I don't think that I think a lot of marketers just read a report or some, see some ad or see some content about a new platform without knowing whether or not it's going to work or how it's going to work for them and then just try and do stuff. And that's, I think that the difference is having the experience to really know how it's going to work. Yeah. And you

Kathleen (33:18)Talked about that when, when we spoke on your podcast about you test things on yourself and on your own marketing, kind of you use, you use yourself as, as a Guinea pig, if you will, before we roll things out to clients, can you talk a little bit about that?

Chris (33:34)So at the moment we have a system where we can experiment more with a lot of things underneath the Refine Labs brand. Test, measure, characterize. Show companies what good looks like. And basically it becomes an R&D arm for our company to roll in new quote unquote products for our customers, which bleeds into our idea of just continuous innovation, which is not something that marketing agencies do. Marketing agencies get married to one channel and then try and make it as profitable as possible, which is why you see SEO agencies that still don't do anything else. And so ours is, we are trying to constantly disrupt ourselves when there's a day where Facebook ads don't work anymore, then I'm going to be pumped to have six more things that we can roll into the mix, other companies aren't. So they're going to keep telling their clients to run Facebook ads along the lines of why there's a lot of agencies that still tell their customers to run display ads.

Chris (34:26)And so we have tested a lot of different things from the beginning. The reason that we, that I know is because people told me that they weren't going to work. So podcasts, LinkedIn, the way that we execute events, the way that our top level content strategy with a subject matter expert works, influencer marketing, both for other, with other people, with us and myself, with other brands direct mail account based marketing in a thoughtful way, not like, you know, the way basically it's sales driven way. The companies execute it today. There's a million different things that we're incubating and testing here, and then we'll eventually productize.

Kathleen (35:05)So let's talk about a couple of those. You talked about events, the way you run them. So what makes it different?

Chris (35:13)It's driven on ex in-person experiential combined with digital amplification to create, reach and awareness of a content strategy versus collecting leads to try and sell people. And so B2B companies run events to co to have people register so that they can do sales to those people versus having people register to create an experience for them so that they can participate in content creation so that you're creating content that other people want so that you can amplify it on the internet and the more people see it. And that's the core difference about the way that we look at events. And I would say that a lot of companies don't even execute events at all. They're too busy building trade shows at least events in the way that I've stated them. And so just completely have been doing that since 2017 as well, just looking at our trade show booth expenditures and saying, how else can we spend this money to get a dramatically better return?

Chris (36:08)And I think the key is creating real life experiences that then get amplified digitally. And then once they get amplified digitally, it can feed the future in person experiences.

Kathleen (36:20)Give me an example of what that looks like.

Chris (36:24)Back in the day in like February to February, 2020, we were, we were heavy on these. We're going to do one a month, the whole year of 2020. Obviously we couldn't do that, but we did one in January and February. At that point, like Justin Welsh was operating as CRO at a high growth SaaS company, him and I got together and I invited him to do a fireside chat. We handled the event, you know, 40, 50 CEO, CRO, CMOs were there. We presented in person. Yeah. How to scale out your revenue team to 50 million. Like what Justin did.

Chris (36:59)We talked through different things between sales and marketing, and what's changed since he started there in 2015 to 2020. And if he could change things, what he would do, we went to Q and A for 30 minutes. We had high production, film and audio there. We created a nice video with B roll. We created the whole long form interview. It became a podcast. We had people come inbound to us five months later that were attending that event, but we didn't try and sell them right there. And doing that at a specific cadence to feed your top level content strategy, I think is a really smart idea.

Kathleen (37:34)Does that only work if you are, well let me rephrase that. So you're, you're in Boston, correct?

Chris (37:43)Yeah.

Kathleen (37:44)Did you hold the event in Boston?

Chris (37:46)No.

Kathleen (37:47)Okay. Okay. So the, where I'm going with this as, like, if you're somebody who's in some small market where, you know, 50 of your ICPs are not within 50 miles, do you, I'm assuming you need to hold these events in a, in a location where it's pretty easy to get folks, because generally they're not traveling for this. I would assume.

Chris (38:08)I would say that generally people aren't traveling for them, but you should travel to them. You're, you're traveling to a trade show booth and spending $150,000 to build a structure that gets torn down three days later. And so what's a flight to LA to put on an event. And so that's, that's what I'm thinking is you go to the places where you think that there's a high, a high density of potential people and the, you mentioned 50, I think these can be properly executed 12. I think that people get caught up in numbers a lot as well. Yeah.

Kathleen (38:39)That makes sense. A couple other things you mentioned. So you've talked a few times about influencers and I think a lot of times when marketers hear the phrase influencer marketing, they have a very rigid, traditional definition for that, right? They think about, well, a lot of people think Kardashians. But they think about traditional paid influencer partnerships, which I think is only one subset. How do you look at influencer as part of your mix?

Chris (39:06)I want every B2B company to listen to this real quick, to understand that they all do influencer marketing right now. And the way that B2B companies do it right now is analyst relations. And an analyst firm is an influencer. They just had a lot more influence 10 years ago than they do right now. And so what I'm suggesting is if you were going to have a, what I would consider a brand collaboration or a sponsorship with somebody else that wasn't an analyst firm that you actually consider structuring it, like you do with an analyst firm where they, you know, have, you know, make a video and content about how to use your product, they review it, they interact with people. They maybe take a couple of calls with people that are interested in purchasing it. Like that's an interesting thing to do with 20 people that influence buying decisions in your market.

Chris (39:57)The people look at it and say, it's influencer marketing and blah, blah, blah, blah. And we haven't even gotten to the measurement point, which is another reason why companies don't do it, but I would challenge them to try and quantify the impact of their relationship with Gartner. Yeah. And so I'd never said that clearly before, but a lot of companies just look at it in the, I think in the wrong way. And so from an influencer standpoint, yes, there is like the strict, like paid, you know, paid promotion, post type of thing, which I don't think is the way that this is going to play out. I think there's this like analyst firm relationship with people that are smart, that can, that I just laid out that I think is a very open area, collaborating on content, whether that be an in-person like physical event, digital content on a podcast, you know, whatever, from that standpoint, there's an interesting one with evangelists that I think companies consider, which is like basically making a, like a VIP customer list with people that are influential.

Chris (40:52)Some people call it a customer advisory board, whatever you want to do, where these people get more stuff. Maybe they get flown out to a specific event that's hosted by your company, that they, that they get a lot of different stuff. They already love your products. Why don't you just do surprise and delight so that they're more likely to tell people how great your stuff is. And so those are some of the potential open opportunities that I see there. And again, like when it comes to measurement companies won't do this because they can't track attributable ROI. They want to have affiliate marketing, not influencer marketing. And that's the part.

Kathleen (41:31)You talked about direct mail and piqued my interest. Tell me your thoughts about direct mail. What's the way to do it right?

Chris (41:41)I think that companies and people listening to this should consider the differences between direct mail and gifting. I think that most companies that are executing what they think is direct mail are actually doing gifting, which is just sending a gift to someone either to say, thank you, but most likely just to bribe them into having a meeting. And I think there's a different way to run direct mail where it's more experiential and actual marketing that can still be driven toward conversion. That's more easily measurable. And that's what I would, I would consider what would be an example of that. So let's see here, let me try and figure out one that we're not actively running. So you, you're a company that sells to massive banks. And at the moment you have bank of America and chase, and you're trying to get whoever the other six top banks are.

Chris (42:38)And so you put together a, a package that has, you know, a thing, maybe a nice bottle of wine, a QR code on that thing, somebody who receives it scans the QR code, there's a video of how Bank of America implemented your product and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they have an opportunity to book a meeting there. And I think that there's some micro then companies go for such scale and not thoughtfulness that they wouldn't do something that can only send a six people, even though those accounts are million-dollar accountants. And so I think that that's an interesting one. I think that you also could go for scale as a different conversion mechanism than outbound sales that might work better too.

Kathleen (43:15)So are you suggesting then that gifting is the, the way to look at it?

Chris (43:22)No, I'm suggesting that companies consider a different way of running direct mail, which I would say is more marketing than gifting.

Kathleen (43:30)Okay. Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned the smaller scale because, and this was one of the reasons I wanted to ask you about direct mail. When I had my agency one half of what we did had to do with promotional products, which I hate calling it that because it sounds super cheap, but my husband became really, really good at what you're describing. We called it dimensional mail, but I'm sending to small lists, like really curated packages with, and like tying what was in the package and with the messaging. And it was amazing how he was able to get meetings for people with that approach. And I think part of it is like, nobody likes, nobody likes to throw away a box, right? If you get a box, even if you have a gatekeeper, like a secretary, generally you're opening in that box to see what's inside.

Chris (44:15)And I think from a direct mail standpoint, what companies need to look at is not the conversion to a meeting, but the conversion after that, I think it's pretty, pretty easy to get a, to get a meeting. I think it's really hard to get a meeting with somebody that wants to buy an actually bought. And I think specifically on direct mail companies will optimize to the meeting by giving people a a hundred dollars gift card to sit on it or to do all the other dumb stuff that they asked to do. And all those people move immediately to close loss and it does the business. No good. And so I think companies should just think about when I'm mean when we're doing our tests with direct mail over the next three to six months, it's not about the meeting conversion rate. It's about the, it's the met the meeting to proposal, we're meeting the closed won rate that I care about.

Kathleen (44:58)Right. you just said a word that I'm really interested to probe a little bit more on, which is gift cards.

Kathleen (45:08)This is another one that I have a lot of strong feelings about, but I want to hear what you have to say. Cause there's, there seems to be this like movement that has happened, especially during COVID, it's gotten much more widespread, like get a gift card for sitting through a demo of something. What do you think about that?

Chris (45:23)It's just, it's companies optimizing for a metric that doesn't matter and, and building it into their customer acquisition costs and considering it, and probably not looking at it afterwards and just measuring it on demos. And what I've always been interested in from for a very long time is instead of having to bribe someone with a gift card to sit on a demo, how do we do great marketing so that they want that demo? And that that's the difference between giving away a gift card and doing marketing. I don't consider giving away a gift card doing marketing. I consider it a way to do sales, buying a lead or doing sales.

Kathleen (46:04)Yeah. I feel like there's also a perverse incentive there where like, you, you, people are doing your demo because they want the gift card.

Chris (46:10)I know I've audited enough Salesforce instances to do this. All of them go to closed lost after the demo, your sales team hates it. I don't know why. I don't know why people still do this, but in the only place that I've seen, I've seen it or heard about it work is in MarTech and that's great. But when you're selling to it or finance or HR or any of the other functions that are not revenue generating, I think that you're going to struggle in the data that I've seen shows that.

Kathleen (46:38)Yeah, I would, I would agree. I always feel like it attracts the wrong kind of buyer. And it sort of cheapens what you're doing. It is, it is very like transparently pay to play.

Chris (46:54)No, but, and again, I, I think that when a lot of companies move on dumb stuff like this, it creates a massive opportunity. I just don't think that people consider the opportunity of going in a different direction. Whereas I want, I'm going to earn my demos. When people sit on those demos, I'm going to earn them. And so in the future, I'm not going to need to give away gift cards and more people are going to do that. And so companies don't look at that. They look at the hack to get to the next round versus building something that's sustainable with IP and talent and operational infrastructure to actually execute on that longterm and continue to build on it. And that's the way I think companies should look at it.

Kathleen (47:31)All right. We are rapidly coming up on our 60 minute mark. So we're going to go rapid fire for the next few questions. And on time the first one is you talked about getting companies to shift the way they think about marketing and to focus on, you know, pipeline generation or you know, revenue generation really is better put it. I would assume in the short term, then that there's, while that shift is happening how can I put this? It might make a lot of people very uncomfortable because many of their leading indicators, if they're changing the way they're doing marketing and they're doing some of the things you suggest like many of what they think of as leading indicators to pipeline are going to start to dry up. And so how do you handle that panic that I have to believe sets in initially and convince people to stick it out, to see the results?

Chris (48:23)First showing the company that what they're doing right now and what they're measuring, doesn't align to what they're trying to accomplish. So getting aligned that I get that you're hitting your MQL target. I've had these conversations 50 times marketing continues to hit their MQL target. We continue to miss our qualified pipeline and revenue targets on the sales side. And just by surfacing that information and then knowing why that's happening. I think the key is that a lot of people keep doing that because they don't know why, or they don't know what to change. And so by first showing them that what they're doing right now, isn't working. And second centering on sales, qualified opportunities, because when you center on sales qualified opportunities at a stage that matters not you advance with an SDR and book the meeting, but the AEA had the meeting, there's still an amount attached to it and that's qualified. And so in that case, and you sent her on that, that number should never go down. When you change your marketing model, when you shut off your performance marketing, it will have no impact on that number. And that's why if you center on sales qualified opportunities, there's nothing to be afraid of.

Kathleen (49:22)Yeah, that, that's interesting that you said that because my next question was going to be, and I assume one of the people that panics the most is the sales leader, because they want to keep their sales team busy. But if you're focused on SQLs that..

Chris (49:33)Right? The wrong sales leader, the sales leader with the 2011 mindset would panic that way. The smart sales leaders that I interact with are pumped that their SDRs don't have to follow up with 3000 leads a month that don't close and they can do strategic outbound using intent data or a million other higher productivity activities than following up with content downloads that don't want to talk to you. And so smart sales leaders should, should appreciate this. Should enjoy it. It's like a path to building a better company. Yeah.

Kathleen (50:00)All right. Shifting gears. I always ask my guests two questions at the end of the interview. So I want to hear what you have to say. This podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I define kind of loosely. It's not the traditional, you know, put an ebook up and wait for leads to come in. It's basically pretty much what you're talking about, which is doing your marketing in a way that your ideal customer seeks you out and comes to you. When you think about inbound marketing defined in that way, other than Refine Labs or yourself, who is doing it really well right now? It can be a company or it can be an individual person.

Chris (50:47)I'm trying to think. Hmm. I don't really have a lot and on, and honestly, I don't want to shout someone out as like a, as endorsement of someone that I don't think is doing an awesome job. And so I'm going to pass on this one.

Chris (51:04)Yeah. I could shout out a customer.

Kathleen (51:08)You're the first person I've interviewed who hasn't given me a name. I don't know how I feel about that.

Chris (51:15)I definitely don't follow the grain, so I get it.

Kathleen (51:19)Alright. Second question. I hear marketers say all the time that one of the biggest challenges they have is just staying up to date on everything that's changing with the world of digital marketing. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated by doing it?

Chris (51:39)And so by by consistently pushing boundaries in places where I don't need a report to tell me what to do that I went and did it. And then I would be the one that publishes the report on what to do. That's where I think marketers should strive for. I think that a lot of marketers just get information and copy tactics from people. Like I imagine that there's plenty of people that take B2B enterprise, SaaS marketing and copy what's happening with ClickFunnels to sell a $60, $99 course and then try and sell that, do that, to sell a 100K ACV SaaS and fail. And so I think the company people should really like look deeply at what they're doing. And the reason that I know something's working, something's noticed because I've tried them. And then I understand the dynamics from the buyer standpoint. And I know, and so, and it builds experience to know in the future, if you're thinking about something, whether or not something's going to work based on past experiences. And so I would encourage people to listen to customers and then start executing and testing new things for themselves. All right. So learn by doing yeah.

Kathleen (52:45)Well this has been great. I can't believe 60 minutes has passed so quickly. I feel like we could have definitely gone longer, but I have another five minutes that we're going to wrap up. So if somebody is listening to this and they want to learn more about you or connect with you or ask you a question, what's the best way for them to do that?

Chris (53:04)So you can you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Chris Walker, and then questions feel free to shoot them in the LinkedIn DM. And we will cover them on a future episode, or I'll just answer you there

Kathleen (53:15)And definitely check out the podcast as well for lots of really interesting conversations. And if you're listening to this episode and you liked what you heard or you're learning something new and I hope you did, cause I sure did. Please take a moment and head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review so other folks can find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, which is my Twitter handle, as bizarre as that is. And I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thanks for joining me, Chris.

Chris (53:50)Nice. Thank you, Kathleen. This was a blast.

When COVID hit, many businesses were forced to pivot. How did Equinox Group quickly revamp its entire content production process to support the move to virtual classes?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal explains how Equinox Group used Airtable to build an entirely new content collaboration system as part of its shift from in person to virtual fitness during COVID.

By improving how the Equinox team organized, accessed and shared information about content and the content production process, and by layering in automation, the team was able to increase the speed of content production by up to 400%. The new process didn't just improve the team's efficiency—it also had a dramatic impact on how customers used the Equinox app.

Equinox's experience holds important lessons for any team looking to improve how it collaborates on content production.   

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear more about the Equinox story, along with Archana's insights on how a tool like Airtable can streamline workflows and improve collaboration.

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Airtable website
• Connect with Archana on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Archana Agrawal, who is the CMO of Airtable. Welcome to the podcast Archana.

Archana (00:22): Thank you so much for having me here today. Kathleen,

Kathleen (00:26): I'm excited to talk to you. You have such an interesting background, especially as a marketing leader and the stuff we're going to talk about, the topic today is also really interesting. So before we jump into that, can you take a moment and maybe share with my listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to be in the role of COO of Airtable and then also what Airtable is?

Archana (00:48): Yes. Love to, so let's see. Now I've been here at Airtable for a little over a year. And before this, I was at a company called Atlassian, also a builder of collaboration software. I think a pattern you'll find here is I just somehow seem to follow a product I absolutely love and that I have used or have seen used out there in the wild and that just make it so obvious that they have such a transformational impact, you know, on the way people work. And that took me to it last year. Gosh now maybe eight years ago and brought me to Airtable. Quick, quick introduction on Airtable itself. Really the way I think about Airtable is just really this platform that allows people to build the kind of tools and solutions that they want. We provide almost like the Lego blocks, you know, the building blocks that you can pull from as a non-technical user and create solutions that match exactly the need you have. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that.

Kathleen (01:51): Yeah. And I can say I've, so it's funny, I've been a user of Atlassian products, JIRA and Trello specifically, and, but I've also been a user of Airtable products. Yeah. And, and all in marketing capacities. And so that's one reason I'm very excited to talk with you. And I also, one of the things I found fascinating about you particularly is that you, your undergraduate degree was in computer science and I have met one other marketer who did her undergraduate in computer science and she is actually the best marketer. I know. So I have this theory that like having a computer science background really is like a hidden superpower for marketers, especially in today's world when marketing has actually become quite technical. And if you understand how to make tools and software work for you, like it's, it's very powerful. So, so I'm really interesting, interested to dig into that a little further today.

Archana (02:46): Yeah, absolutely. I'll I'll actually at least tell you two things about that. The first being you're, you're completely right in marketing just as a, as a craft has changed, right. When you think about it, it now feels like it's equal part creative messaging, you know, telling the story of your brand, but also creating data-driven customer touch points to be able to really take them along that journey. And so I do think some of that background where, you know, you can come back with, from hypothesis around the initiatives you have, or even taken a data driven approach to everything ranging from messaging to campaign certainly helps. It also helps quite frankly, having the technical background to understand sort of the diversity of talent that is needed today to actually make marketing work, right. Because it's, it's, you then know that, ah, this is all creativity that also really needs to be pulled into all of these channels.

Archana (03:38): And this is engagement levers that we need to use to pull into the channel. So certainly helps to realize that, gosh, this is really a medley of many, many different skills. And then the other thing I was going to say is being a developer and now working at Airtable almost feels like I've come full circle because the idea behind like, you know, originally went and started my, my degree in computer science and wanting to go that route was effectively because the power that software developers had, the creativity and the innovation that's possible is just inspiring. Right. and now at Airtable, I mean, we get a chance to maybe unlock that power for even the non-technical user for allowing them to create solutions that they want. And so it's almost like the bringing together all the way back, the origins for making my career choices. But, but really in a very different context.

Kathleen (04:38): Yeah, it's fascinating to me because, you know, I was just talking to somebody about the fact that there's a lot of data out there that points to in many cases, marketers have bigger, it budgets than the it departments within the company. You know, our tech stacks are really large these days. And, and so much of what we do in marketing can be made more easy via technology. But you know, and, and for many years you really did have to have a degree of, of developer knowledge in order to really make a lot of these tools sing and work properly and, and work together. But now we're, we're living in this funny time where it's now coming a little bit full circle because there are so many great low and no code tools. I think Airtable would be kind of in that category, certainly that, that it is beginning to make it more accessible to the rest of us who did not learn how to code in school.

Kathleen (05:29): So that's a great thing. Airtable. I, so my experience with Airtable was when I first, when I worked at an agency and we needed a way to basically organize information across multiple teams and, you know, a simple Google sheet or Excel spreadsheet was not going to do it for us. And also it lacked, I think some of the visual elements that we needed in order to really make our information. And so we, we used Airtable and I was blown away by how much more organized we were able to become as a result of it. And without a lot of time invested upfront in getting there, which that was the really impactful thing for me. And now today I experienced Airtable also as a user because I'm a member of an organization called revenue collective and they have their entire membership database built on Airtable. And it's so wonderful because we're able, as members we're able to go in and, you know, so quickly and easily find information, I can sort by my local chapter by title, by location and everything's right there. So just a big shout out to Airtable for making that so easy to deliver that kind of information.

Archana (06:43): It is so wonderful to hear stories like that. And, and I mean, honestly just, Kathleen, I mean stories that like, that just brought me into Airtable as well, right? Because that's, when you realize that you can bring people together, you can bring things, make things much quicker, the flexibility of the solution. You talked about it in marketing, but then you also talked about it in membership management. And when I, when I really try to simplify it at the end of the day, a lot of the power of Airtable comes from the fact that it's actually built on a relational database. And it has made that relational database available to folks that don't really otherwise have easy access to be able to program the way they want to program the data models and in a database. And then to add to that, it's like effectively made it so easy for folks like you and me to go in and put in business logic, which means that if someone's new to the if there's a new member that comes in a particular location, notify someone about it, you know, or kick off an onboarding process, it's just simple.

Archana (07:44): That's what we would want to do. But without the actual tools available to stitch that journey together, sometimes it tends to be very fragmented and it doesn't really give you that seamless experience that you want to provide your, your membership base as an example,

Kathleen (07:59): You know, you made me think of an interesting question that I want to ask you before we get into the, the specific story we're going to talk about today, which is that that is so powerful. And, and you've pointed to like how there are so many different use cases for what is in effect at its heart or relational database. But as a marketer, the first thing that made me think is that's so great for the user, but what a challenge as head of marketing, because when you have a product that can be used in so many ways, almost infinite ways. Like I related to the, what I like to call the cheesecake factory dilemma, which is when you go to lunch at the cheesecake factory and they present you with a menu that is 40 pages long, and you're like, this is terrible because I will never be able to decide, you know, and, and I don't think there's anybody out there who knows what all the options are. And so as a head of marketing, how do you tackle marketing a product that has almost limitless use cases?

Archana (08:58): That's a great question. And I want to, I won't pretend to know all the answers just yet, but I will tell you it's exactly the way you and I began this conversation, which is sharing our stories about what actually drew us to the product and, and actually candidly being most more than just open to our customers. Because at this point in time, we learn so much from them, right. Which is, there's so many use cases of the product, actually being able to understand and see how it's being used out there just really enriches it even more. So for the, for the next set of people that are going to use the product. And so to answer that question, it's really focusing on customers and sharing their stories, giving them the avenues to share their stories as well. Because it is truly a product that you feel it when you see it in action and and experience it in that way and being able to then you know, have not only customers talk about it and showcase their stories, but also learning from them and productionizing for the next set of customers that will come really sitting at our front seats.

Archana (10:08): What, what do we see making people successful? How do we see people engaging quickly with the, but one of the things you said it happened so fast, it was easy to get started with, and the way we've been able to productionize that is just by learning how other customers are actually able to engage with and use the products. What really makes it quick for them.

Kathleen (10:28): Yeah. And I imagine there's probably people doing things with it that even the team at Airtable never imagined.

Archana (10:34): Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why I say we learn everyday from how we feel the product being used.

Kathleen (10:41): That's so fascinating to me because I feel like most marketers are, our job is to teach people how to use the product. And it's, in some ways, it's, I imagine the reverse for you. So, but on the bright side, the best marketing is always about making the customer the hero of the story. So this is a perfect marriage of things within this. So let's talk about one of your customers, because I think this is a fascinating story to me, and this is the perfect example of how this works, right? Like you have a customer who was facing a real challenge and it has to do with the pandemic and how you pivot your business model. And I think this is a great example of exactly what we've touched on, which is that, you know, necessity is the mother of invention and they found a way to make Airtable work for them. But that is, it was, was very kind of customized to their situation, but really unleashed a lot of capabilities. So the company is the Equinox group, correct? Yes. And just do a little table setting for folks who are listening about how did this all begin because they were already a customer of yours, correct. When COVID hit,

Archana (11:45): Correct. They were, they were definitely a customer and using the product. Right. But when COVID hit there's so much change and so many different businesses you know, I was reading a study the other day where McKinsey searches the number of digital customer interactions that businesses had most from somewhere in the mid thirties to almost 60% in the matter of the first six months that we had that. Right. So I think the idea was currently think about it, Equinox, really their business was built around their customers going into the gym and being able to actually experience their programming and the gyms. And now when COVID hit and they had to actually overhaul how they engage with their customers, they ended up having to really deliver a lot of their programming via content. And that's a very, very large pivot. When you think about it company that having to change how it really delivers the product, the end product to the customer.

Archana (12:46): And so Equinox media media, which is a subsidiary of Equinox group was really a large part of making that happen. And they did that, what they call their Equinox plus platform, which includes both their mobile app, which is how they were able to deliver some of that content to, and the soul cycle at home bike. And, and really at the time of COVID, even though they were customers, it gives them that moment to actually take a step back and really get everyone onboarded and to re, to look for the new, new workflows that they had and be able to deliver in this new model that they had to

Kathleen (13:25): It's. It's amazing. So how were they using Airtable before COVID

Archana (13:30): Their marketing teams were using Airtable, but it was more in this format where it was just a part of the process, right. And now suddenly content became the most important part of the process. Like how do you start from collaborating with folks, external vendors and others who can actually provide help with the programming to all the way, how do you actually deliver the content into the app? And if you think about the number of teams that get touched along the way, then you realize, well, you've got to keep all of these people in lock step, and it's a new process and it's a remote customer base and presumably a remote team as well at this point in time. So in terms of the visibility of the information, that's required, both from a planning and an execution perspective, a lot of that comes right before, right.

Archana (14:24): And then it's, once you actually deliver the content, it's also about bringing sort of that video back into the system, to the marketing teams. Then as an example, can come in and they can create the assets that they need, and they can create everything that they need to actually promote and the schedules for it. And so when you think about how it was used before versus later, you can think about a completely different workflow that then got engaged in order to do that. They also by the websites ensuring that they had their publication system on Airtable also improved to be able to work with their own APIs. And so that helped reduce the time to publish, which is, which is very important. That's amazing situation, right?

Kathleen (15:13): Yeah. So as I'm listening to you talk, I'm kind of like categorizing all the different things they did with it. So it sounds like prior to COVID, it was like a internal team collaboration tool, and then COVID hit and it went from them selling experiences in the real world to selling basically digital media content products. And, and then it sounds like they, it's almost like they used Airtable to combine what otherwise would have been four or five different platforms. So what I'm hearing is collaboration and workflow management digital asset or marketing asset management. And then, and then this whole element of the publishing and the APIs, I don't even know how to classify that because that's, that's very interesting, and I think bespoke.

Archana (16:05): And in this case, you know, you can actually almost think about, and the way I think about it, I, I, I'm not even sure if that's the way Equinox would frame it, but really that there's ultimately at the end of the day, a single ID of that piece of content that's actually used in all different locations and where it turns around to be in that way is effectively or single source of truth of what's happening around multiple different teams. Right. And so every little detail that you need to find out about the asset, its shareability, when can it be sort of published, what's the next step there, all of that. And all of the maintenance that actually happens with the asset later on in the process as well, comes an idea we'll see, right? It's not only sort of workflow and collaboration, but then actually even improving it to be able to take advantage of it, publishing it. API is, it becomes the way you distribute things, the way you market things. It becomes a core part of all of that.

Kathleen (17:04): My mind is kind of blowing right now because this, you just said something and it was, it was four words that were super important, which was a single source of truth. As you know, I run a marketing team and, and my company is nowhere near as large as the Equinox group. Hopefully someday we will be. But I, the, one of the big challenges we have is sales enablement materials, right? Like the, who has the most up-to-date and authoritative version of the sales deck or the case study, or, you know, the, the one sheet or the sell the sell sheet that is a constant an ongoing battle and having a, to define the single source of truth, but also keep it updated because I think you talked about that. Like, it's not a static thing. This content is always being updated and refreshed and being able to like point all, we have a way to always point people in a direction that they know they're going to find the latest and greatest is really empowering youth cross-team collaboration.

Archana (18:10): Yes. And, and if you would add one more sort of layer to that, then we recently did a survey, but it wouldn't be new information to most marketers, which is like 80% of the marketing teams that we reached out to said that they actually had felt a sharp increase in their workloads. This is not, not surprising, right.

Kathleen (18:34): I, 100% in the beginning of the pandemic, I heard people talking about things like, like learning new languages and taking up hobbies. And I don't want to sound insensitive. I mean, there are definitely people who lost their jobs, who, you know, made lemonaid out of lemons and did that. But like, if you were working everyone I know who was working just started working more and more and more in the beginning.

Archana (18:55): Yeah. And that is the way customers were engaging with the business. It's just changing. And if marketing's job is to drive growth, then marketing is going to have to change that customer. Right. So it seems like, yeah, it makes sense. Now the good news, in some ways, when I think about it as marketers, we're kind of ready for, for, for change, right? Because we've seen this all the time. Anytime there's a new platform, anytime there's a new media, there's new competition, there's a new product, there's a new region introduced and the teams rally together and sort of change and, and, and a large way. Right. So I think when we were talking about, yes, all of this is very important to have a single source of truth, but then the volume of work and the quantity of work, people were doing the amount of change that they're going through is also rapidly increasing. And, and when you combine those two, it becomes so critical that if you really want to be productive, and if you really want to have more real time and image, it moves in the market, operational excellence is absolutely got to be second nature to a marketing team. Agility is absolutely got to be second nature to marketing team.

Kathleen (20:07): Yeah, that's very true. And I think there's another aspect to this that is really interesting, which is it's not just that Equinox or, or really any company at the beginning of the pandemic had to completely change the way they did their work. But all of that was happening at a time when, in many cases in person teams were forced to move and go remote. And so being able to collaborate and be on the same page, but also move fast when you're not physically together is hard. I mean, it's hard even for teams that have done it for years, there are many that still struggle with that. And so can you talk a little bit about how using Airtable helped Equinox with that? Yeah.

Archana (20:48): I think that's the aspect around things around both real time visibility, you know, and, and I'll, I'll tell you in the context of Equinox, but even like, I'll, I'll live and actually talk to you about Airtable. I don't have really status meetings with my team anymore because I can go into now table base and I can understand the status of where things reside right now, but whether we were in the office, that would be true, or whether we are remote. That is also true. Right. So now going back to the Equinox story, yes, they're not only talking about remote teams, but also remote customer base at this point in time. And to be able to then move your sort of workflows in real time to take advantage, to sort of take advantage of what you have at this point in time, take advantage of the content, the best way you can, the folks that you have at, at that point, the realtime nature and the nature of what I actually think about as easy business logic, that's huge, right?

Archana (21:54): Because Oh, a piece of content is ready for approval, have an automation get going to the person, give them the notification, let them know that we're waiting on them. It gets done, goes to the next stage of the cycle, right? Just that simple idea of otherwise what used to be a lot of manual intervention? Oh, I need to take this from here to, there tends to be I'll go back also to the other survey that we did, it came through there, that marketing leaders said that they spent on average 13 hours a week with operationally manual tasks. Right. And I can imagine that you just talked about the rich MarTech landscape that we have right now, the proliferation of tools, how cross-functional marketing is you're not dealing only with marketing tools, honestly, you're dealing with many different other functions in your company. And so again, going back to sort of that team of operational excellence, to be able to do that in a remote environment requires, you know, knowing that you can go in someplace in real time, that you can depend on things like being notified when things are time sensitive or, or the ball's in your court.

Archana (23:10): And being able to build a solution that works for the way our team works very hard in this remote environment to get an entire team to change its working style, to match the way another tool might want to work. But if you can program that yourself and you can get the, the, the, the sort of solution to work the way our team works, there's huge. Just huge leverage in that.

Kathleen (23:34): So I have two follow on questions to what you just said. Cause there were some interesting things in there. Number, number one is less of a question actually in more of a comment, which is when you talked about meetings, I perked up because that is always been my biggest challenge as a marketing leader is I call it death by meetings. Like I'm in meetings all the time. And then, and you come up with these lists of things to do when you're in the meeting, but then you realize you have no time to do them because you're going to more meetings. It's terrible. So if there's, if this product can reduce the number of meetings that alone as a value proposition is amazing. But no, the thing I was going to ask you is you talked about automation and and I don't, I don't know if I realize, so does, does Airtable have automation built into it also? Absolutely. Yes. I did not know that

Archana (24:23): More about that. You cannot, you can, as things change into your system, new information comes in. You have a whole, you have an entire system there where you can go and program. As I said, just trying to abstract the way as a programmer. If you were trying to build a solution, you would need to be able to build business logic. And that's what we've tried to put in the hands of marketers or only sort of frontline workers, right? So if you need someone to actually be alerted or you need to post something to Facebook, or you need to schedule a notification to go out, right, it's all of those things that you need to know that they're going to get done. I don't need to go in and actually make sure it happens. That itself is sort of like an incredible, I think I'll, I'll tell you my own introduction to Airtable was when I was actually supposed to be a speaker at a conference and the speaker intake form came through Airtable.

Archana (25:19): And the minute I filled my information, I got a DocuSign with the speaker liability forms. Right. And similarly, when I, when I sort of put in information about dietary preferences, et cetera, I saw the, my as an, as an outside person, not knowing anything about the tool, my own experience was so much more enhanced because I just saw how things were orchestrated. Like, how do you actually manage the speaker experience was all orchestrated. And I thought, Oh my God, I run event teams as a marketer. I should be doing that. And I mentioned, I, I look at, I follow the products I love. And that was my aha moment as, as sort of a marketer, which is, this is how, how we need to do it. Not actually have, you know, I don't know previously like the spreadsheet and all, we've got more registrations and these are the actions now that we will take with those registrations and get it all done, that it orchestrate to the system, you know, what you need to do, you know, what, how you want to build a great experience, go ahead and do it and let it all happen.

Kathleen (26:24): That's amazing. I had no idea that that was built into the product. So now I have a little action item for myself to go to the website and dig deeper because now I'm really interested in all the different ways I can use it. I want to go back to Equinox though. And, you know, the, the, the premise of this podcast is always about results and leaving people with actionable things they can do to get better results. And so we've talked about the, about how Equinox used Airtable, and we've covered the actionable side, but we haven't talked about the results and they had some pretty interesting results from this. So can you maybe speak to, I know time to publish improved and there were some other metrics like actual outcomes in terms of adoption of customers using things. So tell me a little bit more about what came out of that.

Archana (27:12): Absolutely. It should be ongoing, you know, putting the production tracking system, as we talked about an Airtable they went and they built it out to support their publishing APIs, right. They could publish much faster than this, improve their time to publish by 400%.

Kathleen (27:25): Wow. That's huge.

Archana (27:29): But I think as a, as a customer centric business, as they are, what was really cool, which is that when they really looked at the, since they launched the Equinox plus platform in March, and they looked at it through the end of 2020, and then the members that used the app working out nearly 20% more per month, compared to what they had done in 2019, that's a pretty phenomenal customer outcome. If you ask me and I, it sort of resonated more with me, just, you know, given that time when I know how important sort of like exercising, both physical and mental wellness had recommend all of our lives, the fact that they were able to move that outcome for their customers and get their customers moving and exercising was huge.

Kathleen (28:16): Yeah, that's amazing. Both of those stats are amazing and it really speaks to great outcomes. All right. We're going to shift gears for a minute. And I have two questions I always love asking my guests. And I'm really curious to hear what you have to say on these things. The first being, you know, we talk all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or an individual that you could point to right now that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer today?

Archana (28:47): I think it's a, it's, it's a pretty large large range in group, right. I personally am always gravitating just even by nature. And I think a lot of inbound marketing does too, with the idea of simply allowing or scaling it in a way where your customers are able to participate in the process. Right? So we talked a little bit about customer stories, but places where you have strong communities, where people can get together and authentically speak to each other about their experiences or places where you can actually engage with enjoying conversations about your product. I've, I've often, like when, when folks ask me, you know, what, what is sort of the, the biggest marketing myth I'm like, that we love to believe that we can control the message, but really our job is to join the conversations and the conversations and the experiences with our brands will help really the outcome of that.

Archana (29:48): And so when you think about really, and they're just so many dimensions, when we think about all of these customer centric brands that try to do that and be there at the right time, at the right place, but with the, with the messaging, I hope I hope one of these days, but someone is going to answer with Airtable as their answer to you, but that's certainly what we're hoping helping to do, which is actually be able to meet prospects and customers in their journey. You know, give them the right information at the right time to scan the, you mentioned a note I took in my head, as we were talking is Kathleen said that she she uses Airtable, but she didn't know about automations. And so that's something, you know,, that I need to go and, and, and think through how that happened as well. And so that is yeah, th that's sort of my, my, my thing is about, you know, thinking about in the company. So think about that experience in the product led growth world, it's called a funnel, but think about that as your product, think about that engine as your product, as well as a product and manage it just like you would any, any product you manage, which is go in and fix the bugs and go in, enhance the features in it to be able to have measurable outcomes for the customer.

Kathleen (31:08): And you met, you talked about community, which it's funny that you said that because as the whole time we've been talking, that's kind of been in my head that, you know, for a company that has, you know, is really trying to elevate user stories. And where so much of the product innovation is coming out of the customer community community obviously is, is a key part of, of that strategy. Is there any company out there that you think is doing community really well, that, that you look to as a great example?

Archana (31:36): Yeah, I've I mean I've always looked up as an example to Salesforce as a brand that does community management very well. I'd like to think you know, the role that Atlassian plays in helping engage the communities is a very strong one as well. But, but I wouldn't want to be limited to those two brands because I do feel, I do realize that there's so many more marketers like us are coming for to, to, to understand what's the best way to give customers a platform, to understand it with the brand, but also with each other. And, and that's becoming a very strong sort of part of every market still, I believe, as we move ahead.

Kathleen (32:18): Yeah. I think that's one of the good things that's come out of this pandemic is it's been a forcing function to speed up this movement towards community building. You know, I, I've always been an avid fan of like joining, joining different online groups, but the number of like really high quality, for example, you know, private Slack channels that have cropped up in the last year has been just amazing to me and the conversations that are happening in those walled gardens have been, have really added a lot of value to my life as a marketer. So I think that's going to be a great thing in the years to come that I hope, hope we keep up with,

Archana (32:52): Yeah, th there's such rich conversations, right? Because we're all, we're all humans, we're all inspired by people who take actions and, and, and sort of enrich themselves. And we want to learn from them. And at the same time when we find that things have helped us, we like to share those stories, whether those are shared at events or in community forums or socially, or even in a conversation like this, I think it's a core part of how we all operate.

Kathleen (33:20): Definitely. All right. Second question is the, one of the pain points I hear from a lot of marketers that I speak to, is that trying to keep up with all the changing things in the world of digital marketing is a little bit like drinking from a fire hose, whether it's changing technology or, you know, privacy regulations, or what have you how do you personally keep up with at all and, and, and continue to educate yourself? Do you have certain sources of information that you really rely on?

Archana (33:48): Actually podcasts like this, which have become much more easier fortunately to access in our current current world where I feel like it brings forum for folks to learn from each other. So it's an easy way to say it. I wouldn't say I have any specific go-to ones there, but I certainly for a lot of companies in sort of the same area and that I follow them, product led growth companies or other enterprise B2B companies, where the leaders are speaking at it. I really like to go and listen to what's working for them. What inspires them? What are they looking forward to as changes that are coming? So that's certainly a, a big part of that.

Kathleen (34:32): That's great. Well, I've really enjoyed speaking with you. Archana if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about Airtable, or they want to reach out and connect with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Archana (34:44): So I'm at Airtable, of course, the website. But we also, you'll also find us on all social channels and I'd love to engage with anyone who would want to connect. Also find me on LinkedIn at the best, and that's the best way to reach out.

Kathleen (34:57): Great. Well, I will include those links in the show notes. So head there if you're listening and you want to learn more about Airtable or connect with Archana, and in the meantime, if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. That's how other people find us. And finally, if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork and let me know about it. Cause they could be my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you, Archana. This was a lot of fun.

Archana (35:29): Thank you so much Kathleen. Same here.

Getting new leads is just the start. Once that happens, how do you nurture leads in a way that increases their propensity to buy?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, glassCanopy Marketing President Rich Quarles breaks down the topic of lead nurturing and shares his thoughts on how to structure a lead nurturing campaign that will drive higher conversions.

From how many emails to send and how often to send them, to how to use display ads to increase brand awareness and stimulate higher email conversions, Rich gets into detail and shares actionable advice to improve your lead nurturing programs.  

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear Rich's insights.

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the glassCanopy Marketing website
• Connect with Rich on LinkedIn
• Follow Rich on Twitter
• Email rich at [email protected] 

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host Kathleen Booth. This week. My guest is Rich Quarles, who is the President of glassCanopy Marketing. Welcome to the podcast Rich.

Rich (00:21): Thanks. Excited to be here.

Kathleen (00:23): Yeah, I love, I love your company name. What is the story behind that?

Rich (00:28): So when we first started the agency 20 years ago you know, I was coming off of my previous experience working at one of the early web services firms here in the Bay area. And what really struck me was how limited the services a lot of the company has provided and how sort of they used to do a lot of shell game around, like who was working for them, who were freelancers and, and a lot of companies, you know you would take somebody who wasn't necessarily the most qualified to do a job because they were taking up desk space and salary. And and so glassCanopy was originally conceived as providing overarching services. So, you know, full spectrum of communication services with totally transparent you know, how we got it done, how we did the work.

Rich (01:32): So, you know, we eschewed a lot of the marketing bullshit. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. So there was a lot of bullshit, right? Like about what we chose this color blue for, you know, explicit reasons. And we were much more results oriented. So it was just really more the openness about what we were doing, how we did it and that that's the, the glass, the clear part. And then the canopy was the overarching you know, services that we provided. Ironically, we're now like one of the most niche agencies out there. We're still transparent about how we get it done, but we really focus on really lead generation content generation and lead nurturing. And that's all we do. And we do it for a very limited number of companies.

Kathleen (02:23): Great. Well, you just answered what was going to be my next question, which is to tell me about the company. So we're good on that, but I love that you guys focus so narrowly on, you know, lead gen and content and lead nurturing. And I think lead nurturing is actually what we were going to talk about today because I, and this is something that I've always been really interested in because I feel like there are a lot of marketers that are actually pretty good at lead gen. I don't know. I mean, lots of people do need help with that, but there's a lot of marketers that have figured out how to generate leads, but there's a lot of marketers for whom those just sit there and don't ever turn into anything. And so lead nurturing is one of those things that lots of people talk about, but I feel like few have really mastered and you guys have gotten some great results with lead nurturing and it is your bread and butter. So I guess let's start by having you talk to me about how you think about lead nurturing in general.

Rich (03:21): Yeah, so I think, I think first of all you know, we went through a very similar journey as an agency to what you just referred to in that, you know, we, we really changed our focus from being a full services agency to really focus on content marketing and lead generation. And about seven years ago, six or seven years ago I came back from marketing profs in Boston and was just like, I see the light, we are going to change what we do. We are going to do less, much less. And and we got really good at bringing in top of funnel leads. And, and I think, you know, for us, what was a little different is that we, we never focused on just, you know, leads, but the right leads. So all of our clients are B2B clients with really complex, very expensive solutions.

Rich (04:16): So typically six, seven, eight figure deals. And so of course, there's, you know, six to eight people in every deal and 99.99, nine, 9% of the population can't buy their products or services or influence it in any meaningful way. And so, you know, we started out with this really strong focus on getting the right kinds of leads. So, you know, we would call a marketing qualified lead irrespective of the scoring system that a particular client was using essentially the right title at the right firmographic type of company. And that really felt like a big accomplishment when we first started doing it, because typically when we came in, clients, a lot of times they were still focused on, you know, metrics like number of clicks or impressions or things like that.

Kathleen (05:07): Following their Facebook page is one of my favorites.

Rich (05:13): And then they were, they were only, you know, just kind of starting to really count the number of leads that were going into Salesforce. But, you know, there was a complete disconnect between marketing and sales. And so, you know, every time we came in there was that conversation with marketing saying we delivered 5,000 leads and sales saying, and they all sucked. And, you know, for most of our clients, it's a fairly defined universe of whom they can talk to. And so, you know, that first step was okay, we're only going to count a lead if it's that the right, the right lead. And then that started to open a conversation with sales, where they were like, Oh and we would kind of go through LinkedIn profiles of the leads that we brought in and that who are interacting with marketing and, and saying to sales things like, well, what about this person?

Rich (06:11): Do you think you could sell, you know, your $7 million widget to this person? And they're like, Oh yes. I'm like, well, but start down that process. But what we found was that there was a huge disconnect between those top of funnel leads that we were bringing in and the revenue numbers, because again, you know, we were dealing with a relatively few number of deals. And so we had the luxury of starting at the bottom and looking at all the deals that sales had closed in a given quarter. And then, you know, desperately trying to find a connection to anything marketing had done. And you know, and very often you know, that became an attribution issue is we, as B2B, marketers are always facing, right? So Susie downloads, the asset, passes it to Tom who sits on it and then shows up and sales was like, look, we got this deal. He just called us. It was inbound or came out of my Rolodex. And, and you're like, well kind of, but there was additional touches beforehand by other folks in the organization.

Kathleen (07:20): I literally just got off of that phone call. I am not kidding you. For the last hour. So yes, 100% that happens all the time.

Rich (07:33): I remember sitting in a client's conference room six or seven years ago, and I was just like, we're going to right now, we're doing this manually, but we are, we're totally going to automate this probably in the next six months. I'm talking to some other outside consultants and some, some data scientists on this where we'll have this nut cracked, and I hate to say it, but we still go through and manually double checks. You know, some of it, we can automate some of it we can see, but the asset getting passed from person to person sometimes in the same organization, sometimes not, that's, that's much harder to track. But I think having the luxury of being able to actually manually attack that, which most even B2B marketers can't can't do, it gave us a lot of insights in terms of who and how, and why did people end up having a conversation with sales and making that transition from an MQL to an SQL and a sales opportunity. And so, you know, we started applying that as, as often as possible. And I, you know, it's not rocket science, like much of marketing, it's really more an execution play. But what I feel like is it, it really comes down to how many times and how many different can you, you know, follow up with that initial lead from the client and do it in a consistent, non bothering way to really increase that flow down the, down the funnel.

Kathleen (09:11): I that's true, but I also think it's really easy to screw it up because if like, I can just think about my own situation. You know, you've got a ton of new contacts coming into your database and they're getting different emails for different reasons, whether those are marketing emails, whether those are lead nurturing, you know, then there's also different sales stages. Like when they first convert, there's a, there's like a certain need that they have at that first stage. Like they need to get to know your company. And then there's later when they've been in your database for awhile. And so, like, I feel like it's really easy to mess it up by sending too much, too soon, by not slow rolling in the beginning and not like properly introducing them to your company and almost like a welcoming or an onboarding sequence. And, you know, it, it also depends on their behavior. Like if they download five things in a day, are they getting enrolled in five different nurturing sequences? Or do you have a way to like reconcile what they hear from from you next? I like, I don't know. It's, it can be very messy if you don't approach it properly.

Rich (10:16): No, absolutely. And I think that, that's one of the things that that, that we all struggle with to a degree, but that you can tackle by having sort of a unified approach in how you're following up with a given lead. Right. So that they're only in one bucket or classification at a time. I think when I think of the, the amount of times you can touch a prospect, it's not in a single channel. Right. So I think that we sort of default to email but email is appallingly inefficient in terms of getting a prospect's attention, right. So, you know, if you've got a lead nurture stream, that's getting clicked on at two or 3%, you know, that, that feels pretty good. Sometimes depending on what the call to action is, right? So if you've got a content call to action, then that would be terrible.

Rich (11:15): But if it's, you know, get a demo for a $7 million project, you'd be probably pretty good with that. And so, you know, I think that what's helpful is to have a unified campaign within your nurture sequence. So you're addressing, you know, your best gas, are they trying to find out more about the solution category and, and they haven't gotten to like narrowing down vendors in which case, the more objective information that you can provide that allows them to start getting down that process, the more trust you build and the more likely you are to be in that final list or are they at the point where they've already got their short list of three prospects and three vendors that they want to talk to, and you're really trying to push through that. Or is it a different stage? Like, you know, I think one of the most frustrating things about plotting this out is that no one follows, you know, the lead process that we have in mind.

Rich (12:17): You know, I mean, the folks here, linear funnel, yeah. The linear buyer's journey is I, I, you know, and people have suggested all kinds of different metaphors for it. And I don't know that one works better than another, but, you know, we all know the linear customer journey almost never happens. And when you look at any given customer, it looks more like a drunken stagger then running in circles, chasing tails is but I think the, really the more the more ways that you can reach out to the customer, so more platforms, right? So just emailing, somebody will just get you, them trained to ignore your emails or unsubscribe, or you end up in, you know, spam or near spam folders. But if you add layer on say, you know, retargeting ads across a bunch of different platforms, you know, almost nobody clicks on a retargeting ad, but we see that, you know, increase our email lift by almost 50%.

Rich (13:31): And then how so, well, we've just won a number, different experiments. So if you're, you've got your email nurture stream going, and it's just email, it's just coming out of HubSpot or Pardot or Marketo or Eloqua. And then you add a synced banner campaign, not necessarily the same offer, but aimed at the same stage. Right? So, you know, if they're still figuring things out, maybe you're offering a webinar by email, but your, your banner ad campaign is, you know, offering a Gartner report or something like that, or a deep dive into how that solution works. You're not going to get a lot of people clicking on those banner ads and filling out the form and, and downloading your offer. But you will see an increase in responsiveness to your email campaign and you'll see an increase in the SDR BDRs success rate when they're reaching out. Right. You know, if branding didn't work we'd all be out of a job. And so that's very helpful. That's interesting. So, so at what point do

Kathleen (14:52): You start to nurture, are you, is everybody getting nurtured in some way, or is it only the people that have converted on something, or like you mentioned SDR and BDR, like, do you have your database of outbound outreach that you're doing and they're enrolled in nurturing sequences? What is it that like triggers them to be enrolled in nurturing?

Rich (15:16): So we, as an agency, don't do any outbound. Obviously a lot of our clients do. I'm not a big fan of the cold call, whether that comes via email LinkedIn or the phone. I think that, you know, inbound is really the way to create engagement and, you know, whenever we have measured that we see it very consistently. I mean, people just don't buy extremely complex business solutions based on a cold call. They develop a need, they have an interest they investigate and they, they move forward from that perspective. So, and I've lost track of the question,

Kathleen (16:00): How do you determine what's the trigger that determines who gets enrolled in nurturing?

Rich (16:04): So, so for all of our campaigns, you know, we need a prospect to raise their hand to say, I am interested. And, and very often that is downloading a content asset first. So, you know, a lot of times our lead asset might be a very in-depth, but non salesy objective way discussion, maybe 20 pages or so of how to solve a given problem. Now we don't expect people to read them but they're very scannable. You know, if you flip through it in a minute, you get the gist of it, but it, it actually feels and is substantial. And so a surprisingly large number of people will download it or print it out. However, they kind of shuffle their digital assets. And when we follow up you know is shockingly large number of times, they will brandish it and they'll be like, I've been meaning to get to this.

Rich (17:01): And so, you know, there's gotta be some sort of meaningful engagement on behalf of the prospect, or you're just hammering at a closed door. And so, you know, based on what it is that that initial engagement is that really determines on where they're going to go into the nurturing prospect, right? And so, you know, we're also really big believers and you only ask for as much information as you need. And I have this argument with, with sales and customer teams all the time, but the only piece of information you need as a business email, everything else is a little bit of work from a yeah, from a data augmentation point of view. There's a little bit of work, but you want to know their address, their phone number, their job, title, everything you can get all of with their email address. And so, you know, taking that that allows you to build a profile based on you know, who they are. And then you've got a good starter point based on what was that first interaction, what was the subject matter of that?

Kathleen (18:06): So when somebody does first interact and raises their hands, you know, it could be on any, any given thing. It could be on an ebook on a webinar. It could be that they subscribe to your blog. It could be that a meeting with a sales rep, people are coming in and all different ways. Do you generally have some sort of like singular welcome experience or are you contextualizes how you begin nurturing them based on what it is they converted on or raise their hand for?

Rich (18:34): Yeah, that's a great question. It's always contextualized based on how they came in with, with one exception which is the newsletter. And, you know, I think this is actually how you and I reconnected a couple of years ago. We both simultaneously, but little posts on how nobody wants to read your, your news, your company newsletter. And so, you know, the newsletter is never about the company. It's never about their product. It's about the customer and their profile and, and the business challenges that they face that are included in, or adjacent to, you know, where the solution that we're representing plays. And, you know, for the most part in as much as I can convince my clients it's, it's third party articles, because that's what customers find most useful. We've already got their business email. We already know where they live.

Rich (19:29): We don't need them to register for more stuff. We don't need them to click on stuff. We're just there to provide value and interest. So if there's a McKinsey article out there that kind of goes in depth or a Harvard business review article, that really talks at a theoretical level about how to solve some aspect of their job, it's really valuable for us to kind of serve that up. And, you know, we'll, we may have multiple newsletters for different personas. So, you know, oftentimes we'll call them the sayers or the doers. Like, you know, the folks that are in there using the software, using the hardware on a daily basis versus their bosses who did use that kind of hardware 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. And they've got different, you know, business issues that, that were progressing, but everybody kind of gets that once or twice a month newsletter that kind of helps them stay up to date on, on problems that we're presuming there, they're interested in based on their interest in our solution.

Kathleen (20:31): Right. So you kick off nurturing based on what they converted on. You have your email nurture. It sounds like you're doing ads as well. And then you might have like, newsletter, are there other channels that you're using for nurturing beyond ads, email, and, yeah,

Rich (20:48): So we encourage our clients to connect on LinkedIn with folks that have come in again, it's not like a, Hey let's connect, right? Because everybody ignores those, but offering an additional piece of value, often an ebook or something along those lines, you know, saw you saw this, here's an ebook that solves what we think probably you're looking at or talks about in depth. Would you like to connect and I'll email you a copy and, you know, we see about a 15%, 10 to 15% action rate based on those kinds of emails versus, you know, maybe a 2% or 3% connection rate, if you don't have an offer, but you sort of customize it and then a Bismal numbers, if you're just spamming people.

Kathleen (21:40): Hm. That's interesting that the connection rate is so low without like, without an offer, because I don't know. I feel like I spend a lot of LinkedIn connections and, and as long as I customize the message and it's like, here's, here's why I'm reaching out to you. And it's, as long as it's not a pitch, I feel like I have a really high acceptance rate.

Rich (21:58): Well, but how often is your "I'm reaching out to you because I want to feature you on my podcast"?

Kathleen (22:03): No, no, no, never, never, never. I don't. I actually, it's funny cause I'm at the point now and I'm really lucky. I realized, but four years into this podcast, almost everybody that comes on, I either get pitched or it's an introduction from a past guest. So, or it's like somebody I've been friends with for years. I don't, I, I only maybe once or twice if I done cold outreach and funny enough when I do it, it's usually on Twitter. So no, it's usually like, Hey, you know, I saw that you're, you are like a big expert in this. And I'm really interested in that. And I would love to add you to my network. And it's just funny, like I've found maybe it's that people are so jaded by just getting the one where nobody customizes it and they press the button, which is like, I'd like to add you to my network and there's no personal information at all. So maybe the bar is so low that as long as I put some tiny amount of personalization and people accept it, I don't know. It's really interesting.

Rich (22:58): That is interesting. I mean, I, I think that what we're finding is it the, the, the, generally the people that are doing the connection requests are SDRs or BDRs. And so it's sort of obvious that they're.

Kathleen (23:16): So maybe it's because they're in a sales role and people are like, I don't want you to sell to me.

Rich (23:21): With other, you know, like CTOs and other folks with different titles. But because, you know, your LinkedIn account is, you know, personal to you. If people, if you're doing that at scale, it becomes actually quite hard to manage that, that inbound flow, if that's not what you consider to be your job when, once people reply, you know, you have to kind of deal with that manually. And then to hand that off becomes a little awkward. And again, you know, I think we're not trying to, we're not trying to bother anybody, right? Like, that's not the way to get that sale either. It's, it's a way to, you know, come to make yourself available at different times in different places so that, you know, the customer is, you know, feels in control because ultimately they are in control. Yeah. You know, I, I think for me, you know, the, that moment where I was like, Oh, content marketing, that's, that's where we have to go, because ultimately you're just not going to be able to reach people unless they want to be reached. And, you know, one of our, one of our niches is reaching physicians. And, you know, they're sort of the ultimate.

Kathleen (24:42): They're hard to reach. Yeah. They don't give out their emails anywhere.

Rich (24:45): They don't, and they've got a whole phalynx of, of folks that are lined up, you know, to guard them from interactions that they don't want to have with people trying to sell them stuff. Yeah. And you know, one of the interesting things that, that we've seen from the pandemic is, you know, prior to the pandemic, maybe half of the physicians in the U S would let you know, reps of various types into their office. And, you know, obviously with the pandemic that went to zero, and what we're hearing loud and clear from the physician community is you're never coming back.

Kathleen (25:23): We like it this way.

Rich (25:24): Digital has worked out just fine. We don't need you to send reps to buy our, our folks lunch or anything like that. We'll contact you if you, if we want to hear from you. And, and I think the whole world is, is, is moving that way. We all have increasing control over who gets to contact us which I think is a direct reaction to marketers ruining everything. Right.

Kathleen (25:51): So speaking of ruining things, let me ask you a question. I want to dig a little deeper on the email side, just with her, just talking about email nurturing what are your thoughts around how often and how many times?

Rich (26:05): So I have dug through and seen so much conflicting data on this that I will, I will fess up and say, I feel like this is basically a personal preference.

Kathleen (26:19): That's why I said, what is your feelings? Yes. I don't buy any of the data because it's also different by industry. It's different by role, but like, I always like to hear people's personal takes on what is the right approach.

Rich (26:30): Yeah. So personally, I feel like you need a followup directly after the contact you know, where they're asking for an asset and that's not like an instant auto response. It's something a day later after that, typically we go either 13 day intervals or 15 day intervals. And we very deliberately didn't want to go on two week intervals because we want to hit on different days of the week, because everybody who you know talks about, well, on average Wednesday at 10:00 AM is the best time to send well, yes, that may be when the majority of people are, are the largest number of people are, are most likely to be available, but there's somebody who always has an opening at Tuesday at 10:00 AM, somebody else who only goes through their emails on Saturday morning. And so if you want to get everyone or give everyone a chance, you know, you want to kind of space it out. And so, you know, we, we do 13 to 15 times, I feel like twice a month is, is enough plus with the newsletter. And if there's a BDR outreach on top of that,

Kathleen (27:39): So twice a month for six months is about what you're doing.

Rich (27:44): Well. So we will typically do a cycle of about five emails on a specific topic. And then if graduate that prospect to a new cycle and again, that's, that's pretty customized based on who they are or what vertical they're in or what product or solution they've shown some interest in. So we, we do try to, to change that up. And there, there's typically a pause of an additional two weeks or three weeks or so as we transition. And it's not just the email that changes, you know, the banner ads that they're sent to, if we've got a parallel conversation going on, LinkedIn will change that as well. And after six months we'll rest, and then we've got the rescue emails, right? Like you're never going to stop getting marketing emails until you say, please stop.

Kathleen (28:42): Yeah. so do you, and then, so you don't, you don't stop for disengagement. Like if somebody is not responding, there's not, you don't have a threshold beyond what you, you sort of do a list hygiene purge and say, I'm taking you off my rolls. Okay.

Rich (28:59): For the most part we do not. And that's based on our data when we've got someone who, you know, ignored our emails for six years and then clicked on, I want a quote and the deal closes in, you know, record breaking time. And we we've seen that in a lot of different long-term engagements where, you know, we've got that tracking data and, and, and folks come back. There are, you know, it's a little different by industry and that, like, you know, for instance, cybersecurity after six years, they're probably not there it's going to a bot. So you, you know, there are no absolutes, but for a lot of a lot of our audiences, you know, no news is just no news.

Kathleen (29:56): So talk to me a little bit about some real world examples. And you can, if you can't name names, that's totally fine. We can be anonymous, but like, I, I'm interested to know how, you know, you're getting great results. Like, how are you measuring the results and what kinds of results have you seen?

Rich (30:15): So I can talk a little bit about a enterprise software company that we were working with. And the, when we first started working with them, they were sending out cadenced emails out of Marketo and getting almost no response. Right. And so when we dug into the, the, the list data, and I always believe when you're getting bad results, it's not, it's never because of the creative, right. It's always the list. And so, you know, we, we really started digging in and seeing that, you know, a lot of the list was from conferences that people had attended another sort of pseudo opt in. And so, you know, we started a new and I don't remember the exact number, but I want to say the engagement rate was like 0.2% 0.3%. And so we started a new content campaign with some high-level ebook solutions that were promoting and contents indication and targeted advertising campaigns and the engagement rate for those campaigns.

Rich (31:41): And there was a threshold to, to be qualified as an MQL and the scoring system varied, but essentially you had to take at least a couple actions after that initial action to get to MQL. And we were bringing 35% of the incoming leads to MQL status within a quarter.

Kathleen (32:02): Wow. That's great.

Rich (32:03): And, and that, that went from, you know, essentially no engagement at all. And, and we saw, you know, distinct levels as we increase what we were doing in the marketplace with those. So, you know, that's one of the places that I saw, and it's pretty consistent that when we add those banner ads that are, are synced, it doesn't seem to help if it's just random branding banners. But if they're synced to the campaign that you're, you're hitting those particular prospects with, you see like a 50% lift in terms of engagement. Even though like, I mean, the engagement rates with banner ads are honestly vanishingly low.

Kathleen (32:43): Yeah. And it's only going to get worse, I think as cookies start to go away and, or third-party cookies at least start to go away. So yeah.

Rich (32:51): Yeah. The tracking issue, cause that's a whole nother podcast that I look forward to. Yeah.

Kathleen (32:55): Yeah. Seriously. Well, I just, earlier this week, I just published an interview with somebody about the Apple iOS 14.5 update and what that would mean. And soon we're going to have all the Google stuff coming down and it's just constant fun, getting harder and harder every day. Right. well, I want to shift gears because I feel like we could talk about this all day. But I always have two questions I like to ask my guests. And I'm really curious about what you have to say about these. The first is we, you know, we talk a lot about inbound marketing here. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing these days?

Rich (33:34): Yeah. So I'm going to go a little outside of B2B here. There's a fellow by the name of Cameron Hughes who had his own winery label that was mainly distributed at Costco for many years. And he, his model was essentially buying wine from first rate wineries that was going to go unsold, putting a private label on it and signing, you know, 19,000 NDAs, if he wouldn't disclose where the wine came from and selling it at a discount through Costco. And so for various reasons that that business didn't quite work out, he ended up selling it. But about a year ago, sort of the beginning of the pandemic, he started a winery or winery distribution, I guess, called de Negoce. So I'm not sure totally on how it's pronounced, but essentially it means a wine negotiate.

Rich (34:36): And same business model only he was, he's selling it as futures. So he signs the contract with the winery. I'm going to buy 500 cases of your best wine and that you sell for a hundred dollars a bottle and I'm going to sell it for 12. And then he pre-sales, it collects the money, gets the wine, bottles it, and then ships it to you and the catch is, because it's just been put in the bottle. It's not really drinkable for like between three and 12 months. So, you know, there's that, that pain involved of having to store the wine, which for this particular audience, I think it makes it all the more appealing

Kathleen (35:22): I was going to say. I bet there's people who are like, I can't wait. I'm tapping into it now.

Rich (35:28): And, and so I can hear you thinking, like, what does this have to do with inbound marketing and where it comes is there are bulletin boards devoted to people guessing where these wines come from. People splitting bottles and the, the founder will show up every once in a while dropping little nuggets of hints or, you know, discussion around what happens. And, you know, they don't have any kind of formal ambassadorship program, but I know I have introduced, I think, six or seven people or time to the, the concept because it's such an interesting business model. And he sends out these emails and texts. I actually subscribed to a text telling me about the new wines that I could buy. And I love them. It's the first thing that, like my phone pings and I'll sit there and read through, and the descriptions are amazing.

Rich (36:32): And you don't think that you can read that many wine descriptions. I feel compelled because there's only so much wine a reasonable person can drink.

Kathleen (36:42): I feel like you'd need to have an affiliate code because everybody listening to this podcast is probably like, I got to go check this out now.

Rich (36:50): Well, you would think so, but I, this is what I really love about it because I feel like he has captured that sense of authenticity that is so critical to everybody's marketing efforts. And, and I think that, you know, in B2B marketing, we, we sometimes play this line that, that feels difficult where we want to be salesy, but we know that actually our, our prospects don't really respond well to that. And so, you know, I think that one of the reasons that this, this wine company is so successful is that they are treading that line perfectly and not having an affiliate program, I think makes that ambassadorship and that you see it's kind of rampant that much more authentic. Right. And so it's sort of like, you know, when you think about, Oh, I want to send something to this prospect. I want to add that to my lead nurture stream.

Rich (37:53): Right. I want to give them a physical thing. I want to do a direct mail at dimensional direct mail piece. And it's always like, but you don't want it to look like a bribe or feel like a bribe, right? You want it for them to have a joy, but essentially the worthless, because you could be breaking company laws or company rules, you could be breaking laws if it has a value of more than a hundred dollars say or $50 even. And no one ever wants to admit that they were influenced by, you know, something along those lines. And yet, you know, you want to give something of value. And so that sort of lack of salesmanship makes for really effective sales.

Kathleen (38:44): Yeah. Oh, that sounds like a great one to check out. All right. How do you spell it so that I know how to find it?

Rich (38:50): D E N E G O C E.

Kathleen (38:56): Okay, cool. I'll put the link in the show notes for anybody who wants to check that out. I'm sure we have lots of wine enthusiasts out there who would love to check it out.

Rich (39:02): That's great wine. I have to say like the value is amazing.

Kathleen (39:08): Awesome. All right. Second question is the pain point I hear most from marketers is that they find it very hard to keep up with all the things that are constantly changing in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally like to stay educated and up-to-date on all that?

Rich (39:22): So I belong to a round table of agency owners called the Agency Management Institute. And it's, it's a larger organization, but the, the round table that I belong to is 12 different advertising agencies that are located across the United States. And we get together physically get together when there's not a pandemic going on every six months for two or three days. And, you know, we, we, we both talk about our, our, our businesses, but also, you know, industry challenges and how we're tackling them. And, you know, typically we'll have a speaker or something like that. And so I find that to be a really useful step back from the day to day of operations. And, you know, everyone brings a big idea. We offer a a hundred dollars, crisp a hundred dollar bill. So there's 1200 bucks on the line and everyone brings their, their best idea. And, and any time I travel outside my bubble and turn off my phone for a couple of days, I always feel like, you know, I'm able to reflect and think of something that is useful. And I always come back from those meetings with something that, you know, is of use to many or most of my clients.

Kathleen (40:41): Great. I love those private networks. And I feel like a lot of them have really kind of grown considerably since the pandemic started, because it's, whereas a lot of us used to do so much meeting in person that has disappeared. And so having these peer groups, having these Slack groups, these communities, whatever form they take has become tremendously valuable.

Rich (41:01): Absolutely. And I think, you know, as, as marketing professionals, we, we lean on each other. And you know, I think that that's why the state of the art has advanced so quickly over the past 20 years after really being stagnant for 30 or 40 years.

Kathleen (41:18): Yeah. That's very, very true. All right, well, we've reached the top of our hour. So what I would love to know is if somebody is listening and they have a question or they want to learn more about what you're doing, or what talked about here, what is the best way for them to connect with you online?

Rich (41:37): Just shoot me an email at rich, [email protected]. Or you can go to our website at glasscanopy.com and fill out a form or chat with us. We try to make ourselves available.

Kathleen (41:49): All right, fantastic. And I'll put those links in the show notes as well. And if you're listening and you liked this episode, head to Apple podcasts and leave a review. And of course, if you know somebody else doing amazing inbound marketing work, send me a tweet at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me Rich.

Rich (42:09): Thanks so much for having me, Kathleen.

What are the top three low hanging fruit opportunities that ecommerce brands can take advantage of to drive more conversions, and what lessons do they hold for B2B marketers?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, The Retail Academy founder Salena Knight talks about three marketing tactics that ecommerce brands can implement quickly to drive massive results, and how those tactics can also be used by B2B, B2C, or really any kind of marketer to increase conversions.

Salena says it's all about focusing first on what you don't do well, understanding the customer journey, and where along that journey they are most likely to say "yes," along with the importance of segmenting your database so you can give the right offers to the right people at the right time.  

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear more about Salena's top three tips.

Resources from this episode:

• Check out Salena's website
• Connect with Salena on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Salena Knight who is the CEO of The Retail Strategist and founder of The Retail Academy. Welcome to the podcast, Salena.

Salena (00:23): Hi Kathleen. I am so excited to be on here because I totally love geeking out about all things marketing.

Kathleen (00:29): Oh my gosh. I'm the biggest marketing nerd. And so we're going to do just fine. Right? Great. Yes. and I, I love, I'm really excited to talk to you because you know, the podcast is all about inbound marketing and for whatever reason, historically, I've tended to have a lot of B2B marketers on my show, but obviously inbound marketing can be used in all different sectors. And, you know, in my day job, I do a lot of work with e-commerce brands. And so I was really interested that you specialize in retail because I think that there are a lot of ways to use inbound marketing strategies there as well. And I think a lot of brands are not tapping into them, at least from what I've seen. So we're going to dig into that a little bit, but before we do, can you just share a little bit about your background and what The Retail Strategist and The Retail Academy are?

Salena (01:19): I would love to, and I think before we jump in, that is so insightful of you saying that you can take away e-commerce strategies because it's so often is the case. When I chat to people who aren't in retail or e-commerce, and I say some of the strategies that we're using, and they say, why are we not doing that? And the biggest one is, is something simple as capturing, like doing a customer database Facebook ad strategy or an ad strategy to get, to build the customer database, rather than just going direct to lead or direct to sale. But we'll talk about, let's see, we already geeking out.

Kathleen (01:54): I know! We're getting ahead of ourselves.

Salena (01:58): So my name is Salena. I own The Retail Strategist, which is a boutique marketing agency for retail and e-commerce brands, but I'm also firstly, the founder of The Retail Academy, which is an online training hub that gives the knowledge and the confidence to retail and e-commerce store owners to build their brands. So I'm a retail growth strategist. My focus is on scaling brands. I don't work with startups and I, I focus on independent brands. And the reason I do is because I had this instinct need for gratification. And when you work with independent brands and I'm not talking to still even small brands, some of these brands are high seven figure turnovers, but they're very agile. And they're always excited to put strategies into place. There's not 27 levels of hierarchy. And by the time they implement it, that thing's been in gone the internet and e-commerce and everything that we do, that's technology based these days is moving so quickly that you don't implement fast. Then you could be lost forever, and you can definitely lose out to competitors because in a lot of cases, it is first to market. Even if it's a little bit messy, even if it's not necessarily the prettiest, but the first to market is the person who gets, who wins the prize and gets that market share.

Kathleen (03:19): I just have to say, I love what you said about independent brands, because I owned a marketing agency for 11 years before going in house as a marketer. And I used to talk about this all the time. Like I never wanted to work with really big companies because I always wanted my client to be the one who could give me the yes. And it was really a yes. Right? Like not run it up the chain. Yes. Not decision by committee. I want to, I want to go to the source and get a yes. And then just act on it. And so I totally relate to what you just said.

Salena (03:49): Yeah. And look, that's me. Other people love working with big brands with, with, you know, endless pockets of money, but I like to see results. And I think that's one of the reasons why my, my philosophy in who we attract as a business is very different to everybody else. So we have a philosophy that is, if you focus on what you're crap at for 90 days, you will see exponential growth. And too often we're told, you know, all the lots of gurus and pace, people like Gary Vaynerchuk, it's like hustle, hustle, hustle, be known for one thing, like just Excel at one thing. But the problem with that is, and I was actually having this conversation. I was at a retailer awards dinner last week and I was talking to a very high eight figure business. They're a marketplace. And we were just chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting.

Salena (04:36): And, and then the question came up, what do you do? And, and I told him, and I told him, I, I, I'm a little bit, I'm a bit contrary. Like I'm a little bit challenging. I kind of go the opposite of what everybody else is doing it. And this is my philosophy. If you do what you're crap at for 90 days, I didn't use the word crap. If you do what you're crap at for 90 days, you'll see exponential growth. And he looked at me and he just said, Oh my God, that is brilliant. And I said, I know. I made it up. No, no, no, no. Now that you've just said that I know the thing that we're crap at, and it was customer service delivery. And he said, I've, it's been playing on my mind for a really long time that it's something we need to focus on.

Salena (05:21): And he said, just wait here. And he went and got the CEO of the company and he came back and he said, you have to listen to what she has to say. And I said, it's not that exciting. It's like for 90 days and you'll see exponential growth. And he said, and he smacked the guy on the back of the back of the back. And he goes, we are crap at customer service delivery. And he said, yeah, we know. And I said, but if you knew it, why, why have you not done anything about it? And he said, well, you know, we're always focused on acquisitions or we're always focused on the sale, or we're always focused on our marketplace experience. And I said, right. So if we tweak those got a growth that you're going to get. And he said, Oh, it's less than, you know, if we can get 1%, it's great.

Salena (06:06): If we got 3%, everybody would be out of the park. And I said, well, I've worked with brands who, when we did this, they got a 30% increase in growth. And he said, yeah, I could see how that could work if we could it's customer service delivery. Let's be honest. If you can fix that, you're probably going to get more repeat customers. Yeah. Yeah. And he said, I could see, we could get 30% growth if we fix this thing. Okay. And it was like a light bulb went off for him. And he said, why, why have we not done? We've known for so long that this is the problem. Why have we not tackled it? And they didn't have an answer between the CEO and the chief growth officer. They didn't actually have the answer. I can tell you the answer. It is safe to work on things that you are good at.

Salena (06:49): It's comfortable. It doesn't push you out of your comfort zone. You've got metrics there. You know, like you said, if they got 1% growth, they were super excited. So your team has a metric that they can work towards. It's, it's no fear of the unknown. And we do this in business. If you're a smaller business, you quite often revert back to busy tasks because they're easy for you to do. You can cross them off the to do list. Like I said, I work with a lot of seven figure businesses. And you think by the time you've got to $7 million in turnover, you've got your crap in a pile, but I can just, they don't necessarily. And even when you're at that high eight figure business, there is always going to be something that you need to focus on for whatever reason. But it's the thing you are going to focus on.

Salena (07:35): There's generally going to be that safe, easy thing. So I'm happy to give you a whole bunch of tips on how we can leverage email marketing, the caveat that only steps into place. If marketing is the thing that you need to focus on, if you know that you need to increase conversion rates, if that is the thing that right now is holding your business back by all means, go ahead, implement this stuff. If not save this episode, come back. When you know that this is something, listen to it, absorb the information, but don't go and implement it as another shiny thing, because we can do that. Especially as business owners, we love hearing all these new tactics and we just want to rush it. Yeah. And implement all the things. And I can tell you is a very horrible feeling to have, but I've made my team cry by doing this and not cry because they were upset, but cry because they will maximum bandwidth with all the other amazing ideas that I have wanted to implement, that they just didn't have any mental space or any hours left in the week to do it.

Salena (08:39): And when you make someone cry because they can't fulfill you, the feeling that you get is just horrendous. Yeah. And so I vowed never to do that again. Like I'm never going to make somebody cry because they couldn't fulfill my dream because they didn't have enough, like anything left in the tank. And so that's kind of where this whole strategy. I mean, when I, when that happened, I didn't have this strategy and it kind of took a few years to work out. But when we did that and we started on focusing on the thing that we were bad at quite often, we had to bring somebody else in to do it because the reason you're not doing it is because you either don't have the skills or you don't have the resources or you don't have the time. And so it actually ended up freeing up a lot of my team because they weren't wasting time trying to work out how to do these things.

Salena (09:26): We just said, all right, this is the thing we're going to focus on. Let's just get somebody to do it for us. And then we can go back and do the things that we're good at. Yeah. And so that's whether you're a CMO or whether you're the CEO who's listening, that's your job is to be the leader and to identify the areas of your business, that your team, or you need to focus on. It doesn't mean that you have to go and do these things yourself. If your job, as the leader is just to identify them.

Kathleen (09:52): I also just, I have to say it resonates with me so much when you said like making somebody cry because they couldn't fulfill your expectations. Because I, I mean, I've definitely found myself in that position as well when I own my own business. And, and, and I'm somebody who's guilty of having a lot of ideas, you know, people listening probably. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think a lot of really good ones, but I'm also guilty of trying to do them all. And if there's one real weakness, I have, I think that that's it it's, and, and that's something that I've had to really work on as I've grown in my career is saying no to things, you know? And that's so hard to do because like, if you're enthusiastic and you love what you do, you want to be able to do it all. You want to try it all. You want to see what works you want to test. Right. But knowing what to walk away from and having the discipline to focus on the things that have the highest chance of getting results is, is a real talent. And it's something that gets naturally

Salena (10:51): No, and look, it tends to be that more visionary role that has all the ideas. We think everybody else thinks like us, but they don't. A lot of people think quite linear. They quite, they need the detail. We're great at coming up with the ideas. We need people to put the detail in place because we just move on to the next shiny thing. But I can't tell you how many marketing campaigns I started. And we actually have a little flow chart that we give to either our clients or our, our students. And it walks you through the steps for putting a promotion in place. Now this could be it's a product promotion, but it doesn't matter what kind of promotion it is. I think there are 102 things on that checklist to do, to, to create a high converting campaign. I can guarantee you most people do about 10.

Salena (11:36): And the thing is, if you actually put the time in, and this is why we say you can't run a really good promotion in two weeks, because it takes two weeks of preparation to actually at least two weeks where the preparation to get all those things on that checklist into place. But when you do it, when you actually say, you know what, we're going to do this, and we're not going to half-ass it. We're just going to put the effort in and give it a try 100% all in and see if it works. You do get huge results because you've put all of your energy and you haven't gone. Oh, but actually let's not do that bit instead. We'll go over here and do this thing as well. Oh, I just listened to this podcast with Kathleen. I want to do that. I want to put this welcome sequence thing in place. That focus is really difficult for people who have lots of ideas, which is why we say 90 days. I mean, someone way smarter than me worked out that 90 days was a great sort of chunk that we can work in. Well, I've worked at, and I had this conversation yesterday with a recruitment agent because we're trying to hire some more team members. They said, what's your five-year plan. And I went, I don't have a five-year plan.

Kathleen (12:38): Who has a five year plan anymore?

Salena (12:40): I know what I want to have achieved within five years, but I can tell you that if we work on the things that we're crap at, I can't even map out 12 months because the things that look like a problem now, aren't going to be a problem in 90 days. We'll have different problems.

Kathleen (12:55): I only can work on quarterly plans, too much changes. And it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous to think. You'll know what you can do throughout a whole year when so much of what you should be working on, especially in marketing is dictated by the results you're getting. And so as you get those results, if you're not tearing your plan up and rewriting it, then you're doing something wrong.

Salena (13:16): I, I, I agree too. And as I said again, technology, and obviously the environment right now move so quickly, your five-year plan that you did for the last year gone, like everything changed. And so you have to, and this is again why I like working with independent businesses. That being nimble being agile. And we have seen enterprise companies do this through COVID, but the wheels of change are much slower. I can pull out so many examples of independent businesses who just went, let's try it tomorrow. Let's just focused on it. Okay, great. That's our next 90 day thing. Let's do it. And, and seen huge amounts of growth, but also huge, a huge amounts of engagement and customer loyalty because independent brands are happy to kind of put their heart on their sleeve and say, this is why we do what we do. And customers resonate with that.

Salena (14:07): And if customers have a choice and we saw this everywhere around the world through COVID, if you have a choice of buying a snack, Nike sneakers from the bricks and mortar store up the road, or from the Nike website in those kinds of challenging times, people opted to go to your local store because they wanted to support local. And so building all of this into your marketing campaign means that, like you said, if you're not tearing it up at the end of 90 days, you have to have a really clear idea of what you want and where you want, you know, what you want to achieve, but how you're going to get there. It's going to change every single, every single 90 days, because the market is going to dictate what you do. You're your clients. If you're a marketing agency are going to dictate what you do and the economy is going to how you react to that. Yeah,

Kathleen (14:52): Absolutely. All right. Well, let's nerd out on email now, because we're going to go into this one topic where there's, it was funny when I spoke to you, you know, for anybody listening. When I first spoke to Salena, there were so many different directions. We could go with this conversation because we're both total marketing nerd, but I was like, we got to pick something to focus on. And, and I thought, what was really interesting was your thoughts around specifically a couple of email strategies that are really like, I would classify them as missed opportunities. Things that we as marketers kind of take for granted. And it's like, it's like undeveloped real estate. Right? Totally. So let's, let's dive in.

Salena (15:30): I can't believe how many people you say these. I was telling you these things. These are not maybe the third one, but the first two are definitely like slap yourself in the forehead, put a big L on your face and go, why the heck am I not doing this? And, and brands aren't doing it. So the first one is going to be your welcome email now, hilariously. And I'm sure this is not the people listening to you, but hilariously 66% of people don't have an immediate welcome email that goes out. When someone signs up to your email list, customers expect that to be immediate. They expect that if they signed up, they'll go to their inbox and that thing will be there. Now your welcome email is the second highest email that gets opened. So your second highest open rate, but the order rate on a welcome email is actually the highest, but how many people actually sell on that welcome email?

Kathleen (16:28): So, so the welcome email is the thing that somebody gets when they first give you their email address, correct? Yes. Yes. And we're talking about e-commerce, but like, honestly, this is a great example of one of those things where like, there's no reason we should even classify it as just an e-commerce strategy, because any business where you're getting somebody's email for the first time, it's about like, it's about what does that onboarding experience look like?

Salena (16:52): Yes. And most people will because I'm quite lucky, I guess, because I get to straddle both lines because we've worked with e-commerce brands, but we are B2B. So how we implement this strategy is how you guys could implement that strategy in e-commerce and retail nine times out of 10, that email is going to be the, Hey here's your 10% off coupon. None of the brands that I work with have 10% off coupons. Just to just a fun fact, an extra fun fact, the tipping point for making somebody buy versus they're just taking the profit out of your pocket is 30, 30 to 35%. So to get somebody over the fence that was thinking, should I buy this? Or shouldn't I buy this? Like, do I really need it? The discount is 30%. Anything less than that, they were already going to buy. If they go ahead and buy it, they were already going to buy.

Salena (17:44): So you are literally just losing profit. Interesting that we're already going to so 30 to 35%, but on that welcome email, two things tend to happen. You either send them an email, telling a little bit about yourself and say, shop now, or you deliver the thing that you said, whether it's the coupon code, whether it's the ebook, whether it's a lead page and you probably some that say something like that, book a call if you're a B2B company. Yeah. But they have already taken that step. And this is a, this is a psychological thing as well. If they've already taken that step to give you their email, it's kind of like handing over money. They know that there's, they know they're getting something in return. It's a very low risk transaction. So why not then give them the next low risk transaction. Maybe this is where you put your trip wire in.

Salena (18:31): It's your $7 product, you $19 product, your $27 product. Smart people do this in their email funnels like smart marketers will do this and have at least two upsells on the post. But like, you'd get the download. And then there'll be, Hey, get our 17 email templates here for $17. So if you're not doing that kind of funnel on the opt-in pages, why aren't you doing it in the email sequence? Because somebody is just giving you their email. They were excited about the thing that you said you were going to give them. So they're in their inbox waiting for that email to come. They get it. What is the next step? Now? Booker call has no instant gratification. People are not doing that. Most people are not doing that. So why not get them ingrained into your business? Why not get them, give them the taste of what it's like to work with you by giving them the next step.

Salena (19:22): Now that next step has to be relevant. If you've said download our ebook and that ebook is three email things that you're not leveraging, go and give them some templates. Let them buy the templates for a really low risk price. Because then you're kind of putting your money where your mouth is. You're saying, you know what? This is the kind of stuff we deliver for $17. Imagine what we're going to deliver. If we buy a $30,000 package from us for a year, like if we're giving this for you for $17 and we're blowing your socks off, imagine what it's going to be like working with us. But I really think, I think that if you give people that, that taste of what it's like to hang out with you and that tastes okay, you've already bought right in inverted commerce. When you gave me your email address, here is the next step.

Salena (20:09): It's already pushing them up the conversion path. Like once somebody spent $17, they're highly motivated to spend more. They're highly lot more likely to book a call with you after they've spent $17. And so putting something to buy on that welcome email is my second least leveraged place in the email funnel. It's not the first it's the second, but the stats show that people buy the highest buy rate is on the email, on the welcome email. So if you're not selling on there, clearly your competitors are, some of your competitors are, and they're their interest away from you.

Kathleen (20:49): All right. So welcome emails. And it works for e-commerce, whether you're presenting products that somebody could sell and it, or it works for B2B where you might have some low, you know, low entry point into your business, whether that's a course or a paid event, or what have you a membership.

Salena (21:09): Yep. Yep. Okay. And you can keep selling to them further down the line. But the whole point is to see if you can get somebody to press, I was gonna say, get out their wallet, get out their credit card from their wallet. But these days, no one does that. We just press like Google pay or Apple pay and do it on the screen. You can get somebody to make that click with the payment details. The chances are that they'll buy something higher from you skyrockets from there. So

Kathleen (21:32): I would say in B2B, even if you don't have something small to sell, like if you, if you only sell things that are very expensive, I do think that like having an offer, even if it's not a paid offer, like a next step offer in that welcome email is really important because it's about getting somebody to say yes, another time it's the same price, right?

Salena (21:51): Yeah. It is the reason I like it to be a paid offer. And it doesn't, I don't give it a dollar is because it is training people to purchase from you. So most, most of our things are more than $1,500, but we have some workbooks that are part of a course. And so we'll sell a workbook for $35 in our welcome, in our welcome sequence. Every person who's ever bought that welcome book has gone on to buy something else. So it's just that low value. So, so my question was, what could you develop? Like what could you speak if you spent one, if one person in your business spent one day developing and you could just reuse something, if it's an email template, go to a client that you've built an awesome email template, take it out, take out any incriminating words, swap them out and it's ready to go.

Kathleen (22:43): Yeah. Templates are great for that because I feel like even some of the templates that you use yourself, we often undervalue how useful they are to other people.

Salena (22:51): Yes. Yeah. Swipe copy is great. Even examples. I've purchased Facebook ad examples in the past to be able to give to clients and my team and say, look, here's an example of what works and what doesn't. So just repurpose what you're already doing. What are you already good at? Package it up into something small, but that will knock their socks off and just put a low value price on it. Yep.

Kathleen (23:17): Agreed. All right. So there's tip number one.

Salena (23:20): Tip number two is my, is my highest converting, but it's not my favorite. It's my second favorite. Ah, it's in the middle. Okay. So I'll get you the stats on this one, the email that has the second highest open rate. I'm sorry. The email that has the highest open rate because the welcome email was the second highest is can you guess, Kathleen, what do you think is the email every person opens for e-commerce?

Kathleen (23:46): I mean, I would think it was your purchase confirmation.

Salena (23:52): It's your purchase confirmation email. Yep. How many people sell on that email?

Kathleen (23:59): I'm guessing not very many. I'm guessing

Salena (24:01): Less than 1%. So order confirmation email has your highest open rate. It has your highest click through rate, which is actually quite astounding because you already know what you want. I tested this out on myself. I bought some stuff from a, a woman's fashion online store and I waited for the order confirmation email. And I knew I was coming on the podcast and I knew I had this stat. And I was like, what is my knowing this as a marketer? What is my behavior when that email comes in? And it was an email that had a picture of all of the things that I had bought and sure enough, I've re clicked on one of those pictures. I was like, but you just bought it. You literally just went through the cart, you know exactly what you bought. Why did you click it?

Salena (24:50): It's clearly a human nature thing. So it is the highest open rate. And it is the highest click-through rate, but nobody leverages it less than 1% of people leverage it. Wow, it's weird. Right. And in this day and age, we have technology that allows us to get people to add back to cart within a certain time period, without having to re enter their credit card details. It's generally about 15 minutes. So there's a couple of things that we can do. The first one is sell on that email. Like honestly, there's studies that show that your endorphins are at their highest seconds after you've clicked buy now and got that order confirmation on the screen. You're excited. Why don't people leverage it now in e-commerce some people will leverage it with what we call post-purchase upsells. So you get all the way through the cart and then it will say, Hey did you want to also add this? The take up rate on those is between 10 and 30%, which is huge. In my opinion, imagine being able to get extra money, the average order value sits between 30 and $50. So imagine if 10% more of your customers added an extra $30. Yeah.

Kathleen (26:07): Because like the average website conversion rate, just even like visit, I think it's it's like one to 3%. I want to say one to 3%. It's super low. And so if you have a chance to have like a 10 to 30% conversion, that's enormous. That's basically 10 times. 10Xing your results.

Salena (26:26): Why wouldn't you do it? There's a few other ways you can leverage this as well. So if you don't want to put that in place for whatever reason, using the order confirmation email, whether you sell back on there and it could be something as simple as, Hey, did you forget something? And you could put the stuff that was in their wishlist, or, Hey, have you got buyer's remorse? Did you really want to add that thing? If you go back in the next 15 minutes, put a countdown timer in, then you can grab that with a simple click. The other option is getting them to go back to the website in whatever way, shape or form, and having a pop-up that comes up that says, Hey, you were just here. Did you know if you add to cart in the next 12 minutes, you can just do it with one click.

Salena (27:07): But the stats show that 10 to 30% of people are going to add more stuff. And it is the highest click, highest opened and highest click through rate of all the emails. So why don't we leverage it? Why are less than 1% of people leveraging it? Like it seems to me that this is just the missed opportunity. It's the one that's kind of the, the one I geek out on because you can get such great results. And even this is sort of another way where we've just that example. We were just talking about where, when somebody, if it's B2B, when somebody takes your opt in that you're able to, or whatever, with your welcome email we can put the offer the offer in there. But imagine if you did this twice, imagine if you worked out your customer journey and you had that offer on the order confirmation, and that goes first, because you can time all this stuff.

Salena (28:02): And then you have another offer on the welcome now, or you do it vice versa. However you want to do it. But again, now we have two more opportunities for you to say to your clients, you know, what, what for you? Awesome. And here's some really good free stuff, but actually the really, really good stuff is what you need to pay for. So you're training your customers to buy the good stuff and that everything is not free because you don't want this giant list of free pool. That's what we call them. You don't want people who just are in there for all the free stuff. I mean, you have a podcast. If they want free stuff, go and listen to them.

Kathleen (28:38): Right. I always call them the DIYers, you know, like there's going to be a lot of them. And yeah. And that's why it was funny. I just posted something earlier today to LinkedIn talking about why I feel like companies should ungate their content, because I'm like, if you ungate it, then you don't clutter your database with all the DIY wires. But the really good people, the good leads will read your content and then they will still want to convert. And so it's, it's funny, like there's, there is that whole phenomenon of people who are never gonna become good customers for you who take up real estate in your marketing.

Salena (29:12): Yeah. And you'd have to pay for them at the end of the day, you're paying for them in your email subscriptions, but you're also paying for them because if they're not opening the emails where you sell, you get reduced deliverability. If they're not opening, you get your overall, they're going to reduce your click through rate. And of course you can segment them out in all different ways and shapes and forms. But do you really want to be servicing customers who will never buy from you? Like really? Is it worth your time and energy? Why not just reduce it by a third, reduce it by half and actually have the people who really love what you're selling and what you're saying and just service them because the other people would be like, yeah. You know? Yeah. Oh, that was good. That was good. But with no skin in the game, they quite often don't get the results.

Kathleen (29:58): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I love that. And it also reminds me a little bit, if we go outside of email again, back to like non e-commerce examples, thank you, pages. Right? Somebody converts on an offer and then they go to a thank you page. And usually people are just like, thanks for asking for this. Here's your link to download it. But very few people then go that next step to like, have another offer on the thank you page. So you've gotten yes. Once. How can you get another? Yes. How can you get somebody to buy from you? And I'd love your point about training them to purchase.

Salena (30:26): Yep. And just book a call. I know it's the easy call to action, but realistically, the person hasn't even downloaded the thing that you've sent out.

Kathleen (30:38): That's right. It going straight from meeting somebody to asking them to marry you.

Salena (30:42): Yeah. Yeah. They have no idea what it's like to work with you. So, I mean, if you're getting a high click-through, if you're getting a high booking rate of something like that, I expect that they would be very low value customers because they have no idea who you are at that point. They literally haven't even opened the thing that you've sent them. So why would they book a call? Like, it just doesn't make sense. It's like asking somebody to review a product before they've even seen a picture of it.

Kathleen (31:10): Yep. Agreed. All right. Now I know you've saved your favorite for last. Hmm.

Salena (31:15): This came about from a client who was a premium brand and didn't want to put anything on sale. They didn't want to sale section on their website because they didn't want to lower the value of the brand. So we were looking at different ways that we could get rid of excess product because in retail, you have to get rid of excess product. You know, it shouldn't be on your, it shouldn't be in your store for more than 90 days. So we had to work out a way to do it. And one of the things we came up with was segmenting out a section of the database who always bought the lowest valued products. And then we created a secret sale section on the website. So the average person, it wasn't in the navigation. You had to have the link to get to it.

Salena (31:57): And we sent out an email saying it was a surprise sale and they were a VIP and they would get access to it. And then I think we sold 70% of the stock in a weekend. Now, the reason for that is one. If you know that you always buy the lowest value products and someone tells you that you're a VIP and you talk to your friend and they didn't get the email, you feel pretty special. And I think a lot of this has to work. You have to work a lot of this on the copy as well, and really work to those. We call them the currency of the customer. So they're very aspirational. Those customers, you should never, ever overlook sale customers. And it's really easy to do that because we have, we call them customer loyalty, your top 4%, they're going to give you a lot of money.

Salena (32:43): But the people who shop in the sale section are highly aspirational. They love what you sell. And they're looking for any excuse to buy it. But cost is a factor to them. And so one of the, well, one of the, one of the first after the first few, the obvious emails, the next segment that we always create in our customer's databases, when we, when we set up all their segments for them is the sale section. So people who have shopped in the sale section, we do it more than two times. You can work it out yourself and then they go into their own segment and they get sneak, peeks into the sales section. So they might be notified the day before stuff drops, or they might be notified of extra things because your VIP customers, there's someone who's spending $1,500 on a jacket. Doesn't want to know that that jacket is now 700. Yeah.

Kathleen (33:35): Yeah. That's so true. That purchase regret. Buyer's remorse. I think whatever it's.

Salena (33:43): Not only that, they're not interested in the sale section. You're people who generally buy from the new end collection, the ones who want to be, you know, they want to have it first. They want to be able to be the ones who seen with the latest thing. They don't care about what was in fashion six months ago. And so they don't even want to see that you are literally just cluttering up their inbox by showing them stuff. That's in the sale section. So having this segment, and this is not an one email, it's a segment having this segment of people who regularly purchase in the sale section allows you to move stock really, really quickly. It allows you to nurture those customers because quite often, those customers do go on to be better customers as, as their income goes up. But it also creates what we call boomerangs and drum beaters. So boomerangs are those customers that come back again and again and again, and drum beaters are the people who will tell everyone about you now, drumbeat, beta customers. Aren't always your best customers. In fact, quite often than not your best customers. They're those highly aspirational customers who, who love hanging out with you. And they will tell everybody how fantastic you are. They won't tell you necessarily that they got this thing in the sale section, that they would say how much they love your product. And they love you. Yeah.

Kathleen (34:53): I would venture to guess they will make efforts to hide the fact that they shop in the sale section. I think sometimes, sometimes you have to, I'm one of those people who are, yes, there are people who are like, I just got the best bargain, but I think there are also a lot of people who want to be perceived as though they've paid full price.

Salena (35:10): Yes. So why not let them, I mean, moving sales stock is such a, like, it's such an important part of your inventory management and constantly having other sales section in your store or sales section on your website. I mean, it has to be there, although we've proved you don't have to have it there. You can just stick it in a sneaky place, but having that place for those customers who love what you sell, and we'll tell everyone about you and, and you're able to fulfill their need on that level. And I mean, some luxury brands will do this by having like a department store brand like an offshoot. That's a department store brand. They have their luxury brand and then they'll have their department store sister brand, but not everybody is in a position to do that. So I'm just trying to think, how could we do this as B2B marketers rather than e-commerce

Kathleen (36:00): I was thinking about this. And I think, I think the fundamental takeaway is about segmenting your database based on how much customers are spending from you and with you rather, and understanding like how to market differently to them based on how you want your brand to perceive, to be perceived. And so I don't know that there's like an exact parallel to like sending them to the sales section. But I do think it's about like, not marketing everything to everybody and, and totally in some things it's, it can be counterintuitive. Cause like on one hand you might think I should let my best customers know about my sale as a reward, but I really like your point that like, they don't necessarily want to have a sale and, and, and alerting them to a sale actually could do more harm than good in some way.

Salena (36:49): Yeah. And I think that's totally about you understanding your customer journey and, and taking the time to, I mean, we do this in our own email database, we will pick a, pick a person and go, what have they clicked on? What did they read? Especially once somebody buys from us, we love to know what the part, like, how long did it take from when they hit that email database. And we'll just randomly pick, you know, once a month we might pick two or three people and go, what was their customer journey? What's that interaction like? And so just spending an hour a month, picking out 10 customers at random and saying, what did they, what did they click on? What is this person interested in? And then what did the next person, Oh, actually these, both these people clicked on this piece of content or both of these people clicked on it.

Salena (37:33): Maybe that's something we need to look at is that a segment of Emma, how many more people clicked on that. And so understanding that customer journey, it doesn't matter what business you're in and then personalizing the messages. So we say the right offer to the right person at the right time. So the offer that you give someone on the order confirmation page, or once they've done, the thank you on the download has to be entirely different to the offer that you give to someone who's just spent $20,000 to put you on an email marketing retainer, right? They don't need the same thing. They already know who you are. They already think you're wonderful. So we, my suggestion in, in e-commerce is you send out at least three emails a week, but those three emails, not everybody gets it all comes down to segmentation. So you might have this week, you're sending an email to your VIP list to your sale list and then a general newsletter next week, it might be to people who've purchased a certain type of product. And so really shelling out that maximum engagement. But in this day and age, people expect the content that they're getting in their email to be personalized. Like if you have different services and I've shown no interest whatsoever in one of them, don't keep sending me 27 emails about it. Like I clearly do not want that thing that you have. So the more you send me the stuff I don't want, the more likely I am to unsubscribe or to just get quite annoyed and just not even open your emails. Okay.

Kathleen (38:55): So you could get marked as spam. They could unsubscribe all of it's going to hurt your deliverability big time.

Salena (38:59): Yeah. Yeah. And so having that, taking that time to personalize the journey and to map out the customer journey, but also taking the time in house. And that's why I said, my caveat came with, don't do this unless you got to do it properly. If you know that you haven't mapped out that customer journey, or you're just sending one email to all your clients, I would rather you spend the time to look at the journey, segment those people out and then come back and implement this stuff rather than just saying, Oh, that sounded like a great thing. Let's add an offer to the welcome email, because do what, what does that offer need to be? How does it, you have to take the time to look at where you want the customer to go after that offer?

Kathleen (39:40): Absolutely so many good tips. And I love how we kind of like drew that connection to non e-commerce because I think these lessons are very universal. You know, and it could be B2C, B2B, B2G. Like there's so many different ways to, to like apply these across sectors. So we're going to shift gears now because we've covered our three email strategies. And now I want to go into the two questions that I always ask my guests. And I'm curious what you have to say. Okay. So the first one is, of course this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you would point to who you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?

Salena (40:24): HubSpot? Words, words can't even describe. I can give you a gazillion e-commerce examples, but every time I download a HubSpot thing, or every time I go to a search and it's HubSpot, I know I'm not going to walk away disappointed either. There's going to be, I mean, you talk about engaging content. I'm pretty sure they've, ungated everything like, sometimes you have to put your download in to get the worksheet or spreadsheet or whatever, but they give away so much amazing content that I know. If I ever click on that link, I will not walk away unhappy.

Kathleen (41:02): That's. I mean, they are, they're the ones who pretty much invented it. So that makes sense. All right. I'm going to challenge you though. I want you to give me one example for me, in ecommerce.

Salena (41:10): Oh, one example from ecom. So many I love. Adore Beauty. There are a company here in Australia and they, everything is on point. Everything they test and measure. I'm going to, can I give you two? Yes. Okay. So I love the fact that they test and measure everything. So whatever you see today could be completely different to next week. And they, they even got, did. They do beauty products and they have a standard. So they're a reseller. They don't sell their own products and they're a reseller, but they worked out that this is the kind of testing and measuring. They did that, even though a lot of their main demographic is women over 40. When they started using models in the picture of women over 40, their sales went down, were all aspirational. No one was. No 40 year old lady wants to look a.

Salena (41:58): Apparently no 40 year old lady wants to look at a 40 year old lady. Depressing. It is very depressing. And, but they were trying to, you know, women's empowerment, all the thing. They were trying to meet the market where they thought the market was at. But the fact was when it came down to dollars, the market wasn't there. So adore beauty would be we use those in, in our test, examples everywhere, but, and you're probably gonna laugh at this next one. The one, the next one that I would talk about would be Vista Print.

Salena (42:29): If anyone has been to Vista Print, you're like, Oh my God, how could she say that? I can, I can say that because they spend more than $40 million a year on research and development of marketing. I can say that because putting that horrifying upsell in place, turned them from a company that was losing money to a company that made money over literally overnight, the next morning they had made money. They, when they put the upsell in place, I clearly, I love upsells when I go, I'm terrible. When I go to shops and I get sold, I'm like, I don't need that thing, but kudos to whoever trained you like that, that was good. When they put that in place, they were hoping for a 2% uptake and they ended, and they had a bet. They had like a piece of paper on the staffroom wall and people had to put how many, what the percentage was.

Salena (43:21): And it was 23%, took the upsell. Wow. I mean, I love making people money, but that's my prime goal is pretty much making people money and, and growing their businesses. And so when you can do that overnight and then go on to now, they're the, they're the biggest printing company in the world. And they spend more than 40 million or 40, $40 million a year in research and development. So I love just, this is, this is how much we are marketing nerds. I go through people's shopping carts just to see what happens. I'm so sorry to all those people where I go through your shopping carts and I don't buy anything, but I will go through their shopping cart just yeah. On random. When I feel like procrastinating to see what they're doing, because they work in six week, roll-outs everything has to be in development. So they're like the exception to that enterprise rule.

Salena (44:12): We were talking about everything runs in six week rollouts. So they have an implement, you know, design, brainstorm, phase design, phase implementation, phase testing phase. And then at the end of that six weeks, it either stays or it goes, and it moves on to the next thing. I know. How awesome would it, I mean, I was like, if I was still doing implementation, how exciting would it be to be part of that team? Like six weeks, six weeks. So I always say, look to someone who is bigger than you. It doesn't matter how much bigger always look at what they're doing and work out what you love as a customer, and then what you do. Yeah.

Kathleen (44:46): Love as a customer. Yeah. It is about like experiencing it as taking your marketing hat off and being a human being.

Salena (44:54): Yeah. And then just leveraging the leveraging, both leverage and not copying at all. I don't think you should have a copy, but going, Oh, we, we've never tried that. How could we implement that in our business? Or that was really disappointing. So why don't we make sure we add that in to our customer experience? So that's my big, so I gave you two there, but my big tip is, is going through it with your marketers hat on, but then also going through with your customer hat out and going, what can we leverage? What can we take away? Because people who are bigger than you are spending way more money to see if this stuff works.

Kathleen (45:26): Yeah. That makes sense. All right. I love those tips. My next question is the thing I hear most about as a challenge from marketers that I speak to is just keeping pace with all the change that's happening in the world of digital marketing. So how do you stay up to date and keep yourself educated?

Salena (45:42): I love going to conferences. I, I just love the energy and I know that that's been really, really difficult. I went to my first conference just before Easter and it was supposed to be a three-day conference. I was actually speaking on day three and we got shut down due to COVID on day two. But being around those people reminded me of how much energy I get from being around other nerds. And it was hilarious because my husband messaged me and just said, you know, how was the, how was the day? And I was at the after party. And he goes, how's the after-party going? I said, Oh my God, it is amazing. We are drinking margaritas. And I'm on this team of people who have to pitch this made up product, which was French fry, smelling room spray. And so he said to me, I've no idea what you're talking about.

Salena (46:31): Seems like you're having fun. Enjoy that's how much marketing it in the after party where marketing like that's how much it is we are, but it was just lovely to hang out with those people. So staying, I always think that it is my job in my business. It is that's. My job is staying abreast with what is happening in the market. What's happening in the industry, what's happening with technology. And then I filter it out and say to people, this is what you should be implementing. And the only way that you can do that, I love hanging out on LinkedIn because obviously you see lots of information there, but it's just people. Yeah. Like, hello, like this is, this is even more hilarious. My daughter's friend's parents invited us over for dinner the other night. And he works in the tech industry and he said, Oh, I hope I'm allowed to say this.

Salena (47:18): They're working on this product where it integrates with the banks, I guess. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Anyway, you know, when you buy something from from a, and you're like, it says X, Y, Z proprietary limited, and you don't know, you can do a charge back cause you have no idea with their app, with their code software, whatever it is, it will actually show you the individual products that you bought. It will be like an order confirmation. How amazing is that? The chances of me ever knowing anything about that. So having a glass of wine over dinner, and I was like, I had people I could introduce you to. So people, 100%, it is just hanging out with people preferably in real life, but

Kathleen (48:06): It's been a tough year for that.

Salena (48:09): It really has, and I've really felt it, but there are so many online virtual summits that we and networking and all that kind of stuff. We have. There's a Shopify meetup that went online and I was thinking, Oh, I won't go to that. But actually I was like, maybe I do need to go to that for that exact reason. It's like, I haven't hung out with real people. So what's the one thing that you can do that. I mean, you need to choose how you get your information. Not everybody likes hanging out with people, but if that is the way you do it, don't keep fobbing off all these virtual events. If you can't see people in real life, just say, all right, I'm going to go for an hour. Like, I'm going to jump into that thing, the networking thing for an hour, or I'm going to jump into that discussion for an hour. So I could just feel like I'm keeping up with the industry. Yeah.

Kathleen (48:53): That's great. That's great advice. And I found a lot of value out of groups like that similarly in the past year. Yeah. So, all right, well, we are, we're at the top of our hour. And so my last question for you is how can people find you online? I'm sure people are going to have questions about this, or want to see some of your other tips. What's the best way for them to do that.

Salena (49:11): Okay. If you want to hang out with me and talk about marketing nerd stuff, head over to the bringing business to retail podcast, it is retail and e-commerce related. But like we said, I listened to lots of podcasts that aren't in my industry and I always walk away with something. Generally in social media, hanging out on LinkedIn, I kind of got a bit of social media, Instagram, Facebook burnout. So I tend to hang out on LinkedIn.

Kathleen (49:33): Right there with you, by the way, right there with you. Yes.

Salena (49:36): If you go to my Instagram page, you'll maybe see something once, twice a week. Yeah. You know? But on LinkedIn, I feel like that's where my people are hanging in. I can, I can read stuff that I find interesting. And then if you just want to read about me or look at what we do as a marketing agency, we're over at SalenaKnight.com.

Kathleen (49:52): All right. Well, you heard it there. I will put those links in the show notes. If you want to find Salena online, head over there, and you'll be able to connect with her on LinkedIn and find her websites. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave us a review, that's how other folks find us. And finally, if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me at @workmommywork. Yup. That's my Twitter handle. That's all another story. And let me know about them because they could be our next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Salena. This was a ton of fun.

Salena (50:27): Thank you for geeking out with me at what is 7:00 AM at my time, right? Way to start the day.

Kathleen (50:33): Yes. All right. Have a great week.

What's the formula that Content Guppy founder Greg Digneo has used to massively increase organic website traffic for companies like Time Doctor?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Content Guppy founder Greg Digneo explains how he went from creating blogs that saw short term traffic increases but no meaningful long term impact, to seeing significant and sustained increases in organic traffic.

His big results were the product of a content creation formula based on 8 specific blog post frameworks. In this interview, he breaks down each of the 8 frameworks in a way that is immediately actionable.  

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to learn how you can apply Greg's frameworks to your own content strategy.

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Content Guppy website
• Connect with Greg on LinkedIn
• Follow Greg on Twitter

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth today. My guest is Greg Digneo, who is the founder of Content Guppy. Welcome to the podcast.

Greg (00:20): So glad to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Kathleen (00:23): Yeah. We're going to talk about content creation today, but before we do that, can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, your story and what Content Guppy is?

Greg (00:33): Sure. So content, well, I'll start with my story. This is actually my third company. First one, when I started in college, it was a solar panel company. Second one was a failed marketing agency, which is a story all unto itself. And then finally after a few year hiatus of entrepreneurship, I am I've launched Content Guppy, which is a SEO content agency where our goal is to help people and companies turn their content marketing or their blog into their biggest lead gen channel.

Kathleen (01:11): I love it. And who does not want that? And that's pretty much what we're going to talk about today, which is how you create content that drives, you know, massive increases in traffic and lead gen, et cetera. So one of the things I thought was interesting, cause we talk about content a lot on this podcast. And so whenever I talk to prospective guests, I'm always like, we can't just talk about content, you know, in general, right. It has to right. People who listen to this tend to be pretty savvy, especially about that topic. And so you have a specific framework you use for content creation. And that really intrigued me because I think we all know we should be creating content. But it's more intimidating than it might seem on the surface, at least in my opinion, you know, like do people go to sit down and write and it's like, what should I talk about? What should I write about how should I structure it? And so I would love to talk about this. Can you share, share how you think about content creation and your

Greg (02:10): Okay, so I actually don't think about content, first of all, I don't think about content creation in terms of how much traffic this is going to drive. I think about it in terms of how much, how many leads or sales or whatever your metric is. Excuse me, I'm so sorry.

Kathleen (02:30): Yeah.

Greg (02:31): I, I have bad allergies. So so I think about content in terms of how many leads or email subscribers or signups, whatever your, your key metric is to move somebody down the funnel and to to become a, an eventual customer. So, and I'll give you a quick, for instance, like just on my very own personal blog, I have a a thing called blog names. It's like something like 10 ways to a creative blog name or something like that. And, and then I have another, and then that gets about 2,500 searches per month. So it has the potential to drive like five to 10,000 visitors a month. I also have another site another post on there, like called B2B content marketing agencies, right. That gets 200 searches a month. Maybe the, the, the 200 searches a month, way more valuable to me as a person who's running a B2B content marketing agency or a content marketing agency than the blog view that's going to get five to 10,000 visitors a month. So think about the way I think about traffic is how valuable is it going to be for me? I'd rather have less traffic that's actually relevant than more traffic than has no relevance at all. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So I will write posts that get a hundred visitors a month, all day long, one, they're usually easier to rank and two, they are especially if they're relevant traffic, man. It's just, you're just going to convert every day, all day, every day. So definitely.

Kathleen (04:05): Interesting. You say that because I'll share an experience I've had you know, I've, I've been head of marketing at a couple of different companies and I, and I always call myself like a content first marketer. I really believe in content. Yeah. And so that's one of the first things I always do when I go anywhere, which is like, what's the content we're going to create and how can we do a lot of it? Right. Right. So the last company that I was at was in cybersecurity and they made a very like niche product. And it was interesting because when most people teach you how to do a content strategy, they talk about finding keywords that have certain search volume. Right? Yep. And that aren't super competitive. Hopefully like that's the Holy grail high search volume, low competitive. Well, when we looked at our product, we realized that we, that qualified leads are searching this very, very, very, very specific term.

Kathleen (04:59): And when you go to do your research on it, there's basically like no traffic that shows up in Google. I mean, people are searching for it, but not enough that Google even picks up on the numbers. And we decided to go after it because we were like, nobody's targeting this. Right. The in fact, I think the only, the only result for it was like Wikipedia. And so we optimized for this particular search phrase. We were, we did a pillar content topic, cluster strategy, which people listening, probably know what that is. We immediately owned all of the search results for it. I think we even beat Wikipedia. We beat that one of the U S government results for it. And it was because nobody else was going after it. Right. But literally every single person who searches that term is an amazing lead for that company. And it's funny because it did like really produce business for them, but it flew in the face of the logic that everybody teaches you and they teach you how to do content strategy. So I love that you talked about like a hundred is better than a thousand all day long if it's the right topic.

Greg (06:04): So there's actually, so most people teach two two key ingredients to that. The two things you were talking about, keyword difficulty and search volume, right. More searches, less flow. But the one that we actually found that we, when we score content in terms of our prioritization, we actually factor in a third term and we call it business relevance. So how relevant is this to your business? And then on a, you know, on a scale of like one to 10 and 10 being the highest score, obviously. And so that if you actually factor in that third ingredient and you're gonna, you're gonna see just such a change in the prioritization where you're going to downplay the difficulty and the search volume and see, okay. Like, okay, this, this is really important for us. We should go after it.

Kathleen (06:52): And so is business relevance, essentially a proxy for search intent, meaning like this shows hot or purchase intent rather, I would say like high possibility for purchase intent.

Greg (07:05): Not necessarily. So because there are some instances where you're gonna like, so some people are like, the buyer intent is, is usually a a metric that people get from like how much are people spending on this? And sometimes that's not always a good indicator of, of is this relevant to my business. And I'll give you another example. I'm sorry. At a, at a company that I worked with, it's called Time Doctor. And we built one of the features inside of the app was time sheet, time sheets software. Okay. So what we did was we said, we're going to create a, a, a a blog post with a template called free time sheets free time sheet templates. It gets a lot of traffic, but if you were to look at free time sheet templates at the time that we were doing it, I don't know what it is now.

Greg (08:00): The cost per click for that was very low, because nobody wants a free, like, people are selling free time sheet templates, right. Nobody wants to buy that traffic. But what happens is, is when people go to that page they get the free time sheet template, and then they say, I don't want to do this manually anymore. Let me try, let me buy the software. Right. So that business relevance was very high, even though the cost per click, which would have been the buyer intent that which is kind of what's synonymous with buyer intent was pretty low. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So it's not always, it's, it is a good indicator at a lot of instances, but it, you know, you have to look at like, it's more internal to you than external to what Google is saying. So is there a direct relationship between this post and then leading somebody down your funnel versus, you know, just that traffic makes sense.

Kathleen (08:57): All right. So let's talk about your frameworks.

Greg (09:00): Okay. So we can talk about all of them or a couple of them. It doesn't matter. So we'll see what we can talk about.

Kathleen (09:06): All of them.

Greg (09:09): Let's do it.

Kathleen (09:10): Let's not leave anything off the list.

Greg (09:12): Yeah, absolutely. Then let's do that. So first one I have is a tools posts, and I'm going to explain why I like each of these frameworks when I go through them. So a tools post is literally a list of tools that you are that you are, that your customers use that your ideal customer uses. So the thing I love about this framework is there's three things, actually, one there it's really easy to promote. Two, it actually gets to your ideal buyer to your site. And three, it generally drives leads, right? And so what do I mean by your ideal buyer? Let me just it's people who have money and need your product and service. So for instance, if you're like an if you're in the content marketing, if our content marketing agency like myself, you know, even though I don't sell a tool, like, you know, I want to do blogging tools or content, marketing tools, SEO tools, things like that, right.

Greg (10:11): Because those are people who need my service, right? If you're in, let's say productivity software, then you could do things like best online collaboration tools, right? Best tools for productivity, obviously things along those lines and get people to your to your site. Now, the beauty of this kind of a post is that if you have a huge list of tools like this, you have a huge list of people who within incentive to promote it for you. So what you could do is literally go and find the social media manager or the, or the email marketer, whoever of each of those tools, shoot them an email and say, Hey, I've written about your tool here, or even better. Hey, would you like to add your tool here to this huge list that I have? And then if they say, yes, they're going to promote it for you. Right. So you can get an instant surge of traffic, you know, straight away.

Kathleen (11:09): I like that. And so, and it sounds like that type of post it's equally as important, how you write the post as how you then like, do outreach and promotion for it.

Greg (11:21): Correct. So you want to, so you're going to structure it in a list post and as a list, but it's not going to be like you know, let's say we're doing like email marketing software, right. I'm not going to just say, you know, MailChimp and then get response and so on and so forth, but it's going to be, you know, a couple hundred words per you want to list the features, the benefits, why somebody is going to want to use that tool, you know, who it's made for that kind of thing. Even throw in some pricing in there as well. And then what I always love to do is put in some customer testimonials and things like that from the from the the website or something like that, throw them in there as well. And each post in each little blurb is probably about 300 or so words long, and it makes people want to share it. And that's kinda like the idea, right? Like why would somebody want to share this? It's because you're talking, you're, you're making a really great post about them. And you're kind of really talking to them up

Kathleen (12:26): A question for you. So you're obviously highlighting other tools in these posts, which makes complete sense. How do you build in a way to, to drive people down funnel towards your product? So is it placing CTAs in the post?

Greg (12:43): CTAs. And we could get more into that in a couple other posts as well, but yeah, you're going to put a CTA. We'll have pop-ups and things like that throughout the, throughout the the blog and stuff. And, you know, so we will do that. Depending on your strategy, are you driving people to a guide or are you driving them straight to a trial or are you driving them to a phone call? You know, you're going to want to put a, some sort of inline popup or a sorry, line, a CTA or a pop-up or something along those lines. Yeah.

Kathleen (13:12): All right. That's framework number one, let's go to framework number two.

Greg (13:16): So best product like category type of post. Nobody writes this. So what happens is, is your, your homepage is usually optimized for your for, for your product category or your service category, right? So your homepage, a lot of times companies will be like, whatever it is, you know, world's best productivity software or something on like that content marketing agency whatever it is. But if you write a blog post around your product category, so something like 21 best productivity apps or 21 best employee monitoring apps, whatever it is you're going to be, it's easier to rank those posts than it is to rank your homepage in a, in Google, especially if you're just getting started. And you're not like the big player in the space. So what you would do here is you would literally list you and your competitors.

Greg (14:18): And don't worry about this because you're going to put yours first, and nobody's going to read past the first two. Anyway, we've put all kinds of like apps on to monitor how far people read down, nobody reads past the first two or three, and if they do, then God bless those people, but you put yours first put, make yours like really comprehensive, like your, you know, sell your, sell your app, your business, your whatever it is. And that as your first thing, you know, put a call in inline, call to action, try us out or whatever you want to do. And you could rank for, and you could create a ton of these types of posts around because most people are fit in the multiple categories. So you can create a ton of these types of posts, right? So, so you know, if you're an accounting software, best small business, accounting software, best P&L software, you know what I mean? All these kinds of best enterprise accounting software find all of these keywords around the accounting software, because everybody fits in the multiple categories and you can start build literally building tens of pages around these types of category posts of like really low hanging fruit content.

Kathleen (15:31): Now I've seen the same thing that, that, that those best keywords really get a lot of search volume, but I will say I am very skeptical of one thing you said, and I want to, I want to debate that a little bit, which is that, which is that you should rank yourself first, because I feel like people reading that will see right through it, because they see it on your site. They see you listing yourself first, and then they like don't trust it. So the way I've always, I've always approached it is you have like an opening call. It set of paragraphs where you say, as a leading provider of like call it small business accounting software, you know we get approached a lot by people asking who are the other players in the space or something. And like, so then you list maybe the top 10, you're not in the list, but you're starting out by kind of establishing yourself as a leader. That's how I've always approached it. I'm curious. I'm curious though, like how you've seen it work because I, we, I don't usually swear on this podcast, but I'm going to say, I think a lot of people would call if you list yourself first,

Greg (16:34): I'm sure they do, but I have no doubt that they do. But I also think that while I also know that a lot of people that, that post converts a lot of people. So no doubt that a lot of people are like. Like, yeah, of course this has manipulated. This has manipulated, but, but I think, but I think people are, I think people in general are coming around to the fact that yes, there is this multi-trillion dollar industry of people like me manipulating Google to get there.

Kathleen (17:04): Well, and I think it's interesting because so like one of the people who evangelizes the approach I talked about is Marcus Sheridan. And he's always like, you don't list yourself. Now, the only thing I will say, which I'm going to counter my own argument on this is because I love playing devil's advocate against myself apparently is that since he espoused that approach, Google has introduced featured snippets and the danger that I could see in not listing yourself in the list is if you get picked up as a featured snippet and the snippets will just list usually like the title and then they'll list your, your, your header tags. And so if your header tags are the names of your top category providers, and you're not in that, then all of a sudden, if somebody is doing a no click search and they see the list in the featured snippet and they don't see you on it, I could see where that would really hurt you. And so I guess I'm intrigued, and maybe I'll have to test this now that I'm thinking about it, because

Greg (18:06): I was going to say two things. One is absolutely test. And second don't like, when we write these posts, it's not like, Oh, we're the greatest. And everybody else's crap. Right? Like everybody gets a really good review in our, like, if you read every, you know, every, all the, the, the, the the, the, the entire list, everybody gets a glowing review. It's not like we're, we're trashing anybody and whatever.

Kathleen (18:33): It's supposed to be easy to write, because the information is usually all out there and like, Oh my gosh,

Greg (18:37): That's why I love them. You can write, you could write 10 to 20 of them, and you could outsource almost all of them and not have to worry about, like, you know, somebody could do the research and everything like that for you. And then you kind of come back edited and all that good stuff. Yeah.

Kathleen (18:52): So that's interesting. You're now causing me to rethink, now that I thought about this featured snippet angle, I'm rethinking my own advice. I'm not sure where I land yet, but I will have to test it.

Greg (19:02): It's a pretty easy test.

Kathleen (19:04): Yeah, for sure.

Greg (19:06): But you're right. People will say and this yep, absolutely.

Kathleen (19:10): Okay. Framework next up.

Greg (19:13): Alternatives post. The thing I love about alternatives posts is if you have like a gorilla, like an 800 pound gorilla in your space, you could use that momentum to your advantage. So if you're an email marketing software, like 21 best MailChimp alternatives or something like that and every single product or service category has an 800 pound gorilla in their space with a very recognizable brand with people looking for their competitors. So two things are gonna happen here. You're going to get two types of people to this post. One is people who are using that product or service and are looking for somebody else or the other per the other type of person is I'm I know a very little bit about the product category, and I know that this is the big player in it, but I want to see who else is in there. Yeah. So you're going to get very great, a lot of buyer intent.

Kathleen (20:11): I like that. And I assume that works kind of like the, the prior framework where you're doing your writing relatively unbiased summaries of all of the different players.

Greg (20:23): Yes, absolutely. Always, always unbiased. And if you don't think you can be unbiased, like if you don't think you can be unbiased about it. Honestly, even if you can be unbiased, can be unbiased, just hire somebody to write it for you. And then they will give you an honest, it'll be an honest to goodness post. Right?

Kathleen (20:40): Well, the, one of the tricks I always find that's helpful for those kinds of posts is go, if there is a software review site that has information about who you're writing about, you just like literally pull quotes from the reviews.

Greg (20:51): Yep. Absolutely love it. Yeah, we do that all the time. The other thing that you could do is in your post again, if you want to be like re and we do this too, if you like to be like, totally upfront, just to tell people, this is who my content is, this is who my business is for. This is who my app is for. Like, we service small businesses doing 1 million to 5 billion in revenue have 2010 plus remote employees, whatever it is. Right. Like just be super specific. And you know, you're going to be, you're going to have a filter right there and just get people to do that.

Kathleen (21:29): That makes sense. All right. So that's the first, how many did we do? Three.

Greg (21:34): Three. Yeah. I'm trying to check these off now. So you have the tools posts. We had the category, post alternatives alternatives. All right. So next one is one that is meant to wow people. And it's a 101 list post. You're going to put, they're going to make a huge list of, of a type of thing. So it could be any one of these things like email marketing software could be tips. It could be whatever it is, but you're going to put 101 items in the list. Why 101 I've tested a hundred and they don't work quite as well as 101, that's the only thing I could tell you, Hey, whatever works, right? Yes. That's the only, I don't know. I don't know if that's an empirical test. I don't know if that was like, there was nothing. I wrote like three posts. Two of them were one Oh one, one was a hundred and the two that were 101 words.

Kathleen (22:34): There is actually data. That odd number listicles work better, even. So even if it's like a lower number, 13 is better than 12. Nine is better than eight. It's like the most bizarre thing. I don't know why it's must be something psychological, everywhere.

Greg (22:51): Okay. So but each, so each one just write like maybe, you know, 20 to 50 words like this is, this post is a bear to write. I will give you that, like, like these things could take weeks to write. So if you could hire a researcher to do this, this research for you, put everything together, an Excel spreadsheet and a spreadsheet, whatever it is. But you know, because you're going to write 101 times let's say 50 words is, you know, 5,000 words right there, plus an intro and outro and, and all that good stuff. So, okay.

Kathleen (23:25): I suppose you could also crowdsource that, like, I've seen people send out Google forms to, you know, everybody they know and be like, share your top tip with me. And then they just basically like copy and paste what other people have said and plop it in. And then it's less work, I suppose.

Greg (23:39): I, you know what, that's actually, I like that a lot better because then again, they have a built in excuse to share for you. Like, not that the other folks don't, but if you've already got them engaged on the, on the creation, they're either, they're much more likely to share it on the promotion side versus just listing people. But again, it's one of those things where after you have, now you have 101 accounts to reach out to, and just, was it after hitting publish? Yeah, exactly. So we have 101 accounts to say, Hey, so-and-so, I I've mentioned you here in my big post. What do you think about it? And you know, that 10% of the people are going to share it.

Kathleen (24:19): Yeah. So, all right. Yeah. That's another good one. Yep.

Greg (24:23): All right. So the next one is what I call a tips post.

Greg (24:29): And basically these are going to be 17 to 22 tips. And when I say tips, we're talking step by step by step tips. So each quote-unquote tip is going to be five to 700 words. There are many blog posts in between each each tip. So let's say it's going to be I don't know, 17, 17 ways to build high quality links. So tip one is going to be resource page link building say right then under resource, page link building, and it's going to be step one, find resource pages. Here's how to find resource pages. Right? Step two. Here's reach out to these people. Here's here's the email templates or reach out to them. Step three, negotiating the link. Here's how to negotiate the link. Right? So each one of these is, is a mini blog posts. It would it like each one of these, think about this.

Greg (25:24): If you were around in like 2006 to 2008, each one of these would have been a blog post back in 2006 to 2008 when people were writing, you know, 600 word posts.

Kathleen (25:35): Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So next one.

Greg (25:40): All right. So next one is like, we kind of touched on it and it's like the jobs to be done type of framework. So what is something that you do that can be done manually that your business automates for the person? So for instance, we did time sheet templates, free time sheet templates got a lot of people to that post. And then people were like, I don't want to do this manually anymore. Yeah. Another good one is there's a PR outreach tool. Oh gosh, I forgot the name of it. Outreach Ninja. I believe it's called, they'll kind of run the scene to me, but what they did was like they said how to get pressed through, Hey RO help a reporter out.com. And then they went through this super manual way to go and get pressed through through help a reporter out.com. And then at the end, like throughout the, the blog post, they have like several calls to action that are basically like, you know, do you want to automate your PR your outreach? You know what I mean? So just hire, just use our service or our tool or whatever it was. So whatever.

Kathleen (26:48): It's not so much, because there are like, there are a ton of people out there that are going to search that stuff, but very few people are going to want to take the time to do it themselves. And the ones who truly are going to do it themselves are not your, usually your ideal customer in my experience, like usually those are the people who are not, not to be crass, but they're cheap. They don't want to spend the money. And so like sometimes I think people are like, I don't want to tell people how to do it manually because I'm gonna lose customers. You're not going to lose customers. You're going to lose poor fit prospects. And you're going to save yourself time because they then will not call you because you've told them how to go out and DIY it. And they're not going to waste your time asking you for pricing information when they can't afford you.

Greg (27:30): Exactly. So it's kind of like one of those things where 90% of the people who come to your site and search that kind of term are going to be looking for something for free. Right. Right. So they, they're not going to buy, they're not going to want to hire you anyway. So you're going to get, it's kind of like the thing with like a lot of traffic, a little buyers. So you're going to get a lot of traffic to these posts and not a lot of buyers. Got it. But the ones who do, like you said, super qualified. Yeah.

Kathleen (27:59): Okay. What else you got?

Greg (28:01): All right. Ultimate guide. This is kind of like a there's there's like the, how to post, like the tips or like the, how tos, like the mini, how tos the ultimate guide is to take something super specific and right. You know, it's going to be like a 5,000 word. Here's everything that you, sorry, I hit the table. Everything that you need to do to accomplish this task.

Kathleen (28:29): Okay. So sometimes like we might call that pillar content, like the most authoritative source of information on this topic, on the internet.

Greg (28:38): Exactly. I want to leave absolutely nothing out. And then even from there, you're going to link out to your own pages and all that good stuff. So a lot of people are even going to, you know, create beautiful designs or infographics things around those things like that to make this, like, like you said, that single most authoritative thing on the web,

Kathleen (29:00): Now, these consume really intimidating for people. Like, I feel like a lot of people know they should do them, but they're like, Oh God, it's like writing a term paper or a thesis, or what have you. It is. So how do you break it down and make it less intimidating?

Greg (29:13): Okay. So here's what you do. You create a very detailed outline. I mean, super detailed. So it's going to be, you know, A, B, C, D all the way down through, right. And then what you do. And so that's going to automatically break it up. You fill in your headlines, your sub-headlines, your H3 tags or whatever, and that's just going to break it up into much, much, much smaller pieces. And then what I do is I'll write, you know, one each, you know, one or two pieces each day or whatever it is, you know, until it's done. And again, this is, this is one of those that is going to take, like, you're not going to probably finish this in a day or two, right. Like this is going to take, you know, two weeks to kind of, especially if you're doing it by yourself two weeks to put together, because you want to get all the images and stuff like that together. But yeah, it's it, it is, it is a little bit of a bear to write. So, you know, I recommend five to 700 words a day on it and then put it down for tomorrow. And just, if you kind of get into that habit, eventually you're going to get it done.

Kathleen (30:18): Yeah. All right. So we've got our massive guides and then, how many do we have left? Two?

Greg (30:25): One. So we're going to do two because I have a bonus one. The first one is going to be a case study. And again, I don't mean like, you know, the little thing on like, the little blurb case studies. I mean, like, you know, you're going to want to tell a full-on story of, of, you know, beginning, middle end hero, problem, problem solved what it looked like when the problem was that has ended. Right. So, and how they accomplished it as well. This is very similar to a guide or the most authoritative piece kind of thing, but it's a little bit more powerful again, in that you're telling a story, you're not just saying how to do this. Like you're saying, you know, Kathleen started here and then she did this and this, and this used our tool or our business to do this, this and this.

Greg (31:15): And, you know, now she has a, a full working solution to the problem. That makes sense. So, yeah, again, it's, it's going to be another 3000 word kind of piece, very in depth. Okay. And then the bonus that works really, really well. And they're, they're kind of hard to pull off. So I've only written like three of them or four of them in my entire career. And that is a pattern interrupt case study. So what, I'm going to give you a very specific example, if you Google something like if you Google, like how to use an employee monitoring software, right. You're going to get all of these case studies into like, you know, here's all these articles like how to use employee monitoring software and, you know, step by step by step. Just like we talked about, I know how to find how, how to find like people who aren't working and things like that.

Greg (32:15): I don't want to get into the morality of an employee monitoring software, but just go with me for a second. I'm sorry. So what we did was we've wrote why employee monitoring software doesn't work, which is a very big pattern interrupt. When you're looking in Google, like, wait a minute, I was looking for an employee monitoring software. What do you mean it doesn't work? And then what we did was we started and we listed all the flaws of an employee monitoring software and how we, as an employee as, as also an employee monitoring software solved all those flaws. So one of the, so one of them, so one of them might've been like, you know, automated mouse movements, like most employee monitoring software can't detect automated mouse movements, but ours could that kind of thing.

Kathleen (32:59): That's interesting because I, so I it reminds me of like two other formats that I've used. Sometimes one's called the problems post, which is like, here are the problems with the thing that you're searching for. Right. Calling it out and being super honest about it. But it also reminds me of like the concepts behind the challenger sale, which is basically like you ever, when somebody is looking to buy something, everybody's going to try to say, yes, I have that thing you want to buy. And so therefore, everyone selling, it sounds the same because they're all using that same narrative of, I have the best of those things. Whereas if you come to the table and you say, you don't really want that thing, because there's all kinds of problems with that thing, but here's what you want instead. Like that's, I'm way oversimplifying it. But when I think of the challenger sale, that's what I think of. And, and it is I like that you called it a pattern interrupter, because that's exactly why it works. If you're one of five competitors trying to get somebody's business and all the other four saying, yes, I know you want that. And I have the best one. And you're the only one who says there are a lot of problems with that. That is a pattern interrupter. And that makes you stand out.

Greg (34:06): Absolutely. Absolutely. It's like, kind of, and I'll kind of get back into a little bit more into that in a second, but it's kind of like, you go to the grocery store and you see milk, milk, milk, milk, silk, and you're like, huh, what is this? Right. Especially when people weren't, didn't understand what soy milk was. Right. So it was kind of one of those things that, you know, it was not that soy milk, I don't even think needs to be refrigerated, but it was in the refrigerated section of my supermarket because it was the pattern interrupt. Right. But going back to the problem thing now, if you actually put a face to the name of that, of the of that pattern interrupt case study, or a face to the problem of that pattern interrupt case study, and you're saying, you know Kathleen used a timesheet software.

Greg (34:51): That's actually software a, an employee monitoring software to try at, because she had a bad feeling that this person wasn't working or whatever, and, you know, but the mouse was still moving. And then she tried our pro our, our employee monitoring software and realized that, you know, that we were able to detect somebody was using an autumn, a movement software, that kind of thing. Like now all of a sudden you're like, Oh, wow, this is a real, this is a real person with a real problem that I have. And, you know, so, so yes, you don't want a regular time. You don't want an irregular software. You want, you know, this specialist.

Kathleen (35:25): Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. So we have now nine frameworks, not just eight by cause we got a bonus and I want to talk for a minute about conversion. So you've mentioned CTAs. Obviously you're going to create all this content and if you do it well, and if you play your cards, right, you're going to get traffic and some of it's going to be qualified traffic. So how do you approach turning that traffic into leads?

Greg (35:54): So there's a couple ways. One is if you, if you create the structure of the content, right, it's just going to naturally convert people into leads. So, you know, any one of these tools, alternatives, whatever it is, like, you're getting pretty qualified buyers to your site. And you're going to be talking about your product or service within the context of the, of the content anyway. So that's one way to do it, right? Like just so structure the content that features your business. Atrust is so good at this. I don't know if you've atrust.com/blog. Check out any one of their articles. They are amazing at it. Second one is, the second way is you, you create lead magnets or like popups to lead magnets, things like that. And we, I am not one who likes to gate a whole lot of content.

Greg (36:46): So what I do is I will, I personally just create a very long case study to give to people when they sign up. And again, the case study, once they sign up for my quote unquote lead magnet is designed to sell using basically one of these frameworks that the case study framework. So those are the ways that I like to do it again. I'm not really one to create like white paper guides. And like, I ungate as much content as I possibly can. I'd rather get the traffic, the qualified traffic via search or SEO or referral versus gated content. And, you know, have people kind of opt into there.

Kathleen (37:30): I'm the same way. And I found that that honestly, if you give the content away and then you say, Hey, do you want a PDF version that you could print? Like, and you just say, all you have to do is say, give me your email address and I'll send it to you. A lot of people convert because yeah, because what it does is allows them to see that the content is good and therefore they are more willing to give you their email address than they might otherwise be

Greg (37:53): Like me in that I've become a super jaded. Like, I, I am so judicious with who I give my email address. So like, it's free, but it's like, yes, but I don't want to go into your sales funnel. Right.

Kathleen (38:11): I'll be honest. I have a throwaway email that I use for this purpose. It's like, that's what drives me nuts about gating is you're going to get so much crap because there's so many people who don't want to talk to you, but if you just give the content away people that are like, that's actually really good content. And so I don't mind giving them my email address because they're going to send me more, really good content. That's exactly right. Yeah.

Greg (38:40): Yeah. So lesson. Gate as little content as you possibly can.

Kathleen (38:48): When people get their case studies.

Greg (38:51): I guess. Yeah. I don't get a fit either.

Kathleen (38:55): Practice ever for a marketer because case studies basically are what people want when they're trying to decide whether to buy from you, they've already realized they want to buy something and they're like, should I buy it from them? Or that other company,

Kathleen (39:09): You get your case study and you're making it harder for them to pick you. Like why?

Greg (39:13): I don't get that either. I don't get like, like my, I do get my one case study, but it's literally, but I will, you don't actually have to go. But like, but that case study is published everywhere else on my blog. So you don't have to like, actually sign up to my email address if you go there. Like you're going to read that story a hundred times on my site. But yeah, I don't get it either. I just don't understand the marketers.

Kathleen (39:36): We, I always say when we put on our marketing hat, we lose our people brain.

Greg (39:41): Right.

Kathleen (39:44): Anyway, I could go on and on about that. So, so give it, ungate everything. How do you use CTAs? Like, do you people have different theories on where CTA should appear in blogs?

Greg (39:56): So I do inline CTAs. I don't know how many paragraphs down. I usually just kind of guess it's usually like five, six paragraphs down. Let me just note though, my paragraphs are typically one to two sentences long, so I have a lot of white space okay.

Kathleen (40:14): Tested and it's like, it totally flies in the face of what you're taught in English class growing up, but I've tested it. And the short paragraphs always perform better. Yeah.

Greg (40:23): I never have a paragraph. My paragraphs aren't so much as like breaks in thought process as they are breaks in text, blocks of texts.

Kathleen (40:33): Yeah, because content, when you're content marketing, writing. Yup. Completely different and expository writing.

Greg (40:40): Yep. Absolutely. So five, so five or six paragraphs down. So basically five or six sentences down. I put an in-line call to action, just like, you know, a little blue, you know, my brand is blue. So a little blue box that says, you know, sign up here. And then I also do an exit intent pop up and that's it. That's all I do. So my eat, my like blog is like most of I always again, because I want to focus on creating content that converts, like I'm not going to have multiple columns with multiple CTAs on a side column or anything like that. My, my blog is always one column. It's just, there's nothing on the sides. It's white background, black text, that kind of thing. Very simple. So yeah.

Kathleen (41:29): So let's switch gears now and talk about results because you've used this a variety of times. What have you seen in terms of results? And you said you measured results based on leads or by revenue. So talk to me.

Greg (41:42): So I measure results based on trials and I could get into a couple specifics trials basically are pre, like, lemme, let me define trial in the context I'm talking about is basically no credit card added trial. Okay. so you don't need it. You could just sign up and give her your email address and give it a shot and set it up and all that stuff. So if you write a tool, an alternatives post, like, so we, so if you're one of the, one of the posts that we wrote is toggle alternatives. And again, it's one of those posts where it gets so little search. I think it gets maybe 10 to 10 to 50 kind of things, you know, in your keyword research tool, but it brings in like four to 500 visitors a month kind of deal, but that that'll convert 2% of the people into trials.

Greg (42:35): So that's you know, the, the cool part about these is, like we said before, super easy to write really easy to rank. So you could do you know, you can write 10 to 20 of these and they're all going to get anywhere between 50 diff you know, up to the higher end 500 searches, 500 visitors a month. And they're all going to convert in that one to 2% range. So yes, it doesn't sound like, you know, those four or five customers per month, that you're a four or five trials per month that you're adding sounds like a lot. But then when you multiply that by 10 to 20 start, start to pile up the trials.

Kathleen (43:11): I mean, honestly, like when you consider the fact that it's a one and done, you write it once and then it's like a dividend, it just keeps paying you.

Greg (43:19): Absolutely. Think about thinking about your content in a term. I don't want to say exactly the same as, as an ad because in an ad it's like, literally today you're going to put in a dollar and today you're also going to get $3. But think about it like this, let's say it costs you, I dunno, $500 to write the article and then $500 to promote it. We'll make it easy math. So it's a thousand dollars to create and promote a piece of content. The question you have to ask yourself is, and I like to ask this. When in six to nine months, however long, I think it's going to take the rank. Will I get 3X the, will I get 3X the ARR per month? So what is the lifetime value of a customer? Will I 3X that every month? So at a thousand dollars, I need, I want to try to get $3,000 in additional ARR every single month. And that's how I think about it.

Kathleen (44:16): Why 3X?

Greg (44:16): I don't know. It just seemed like a good number at the time and I've just stuck with it and it works for me. So, yeah.

Kathleen (44:24): All right, cool. So, so I love this. It's a super easy framework to follow. And you know, as you said, you can either use your in-house team to write this stuff, or you can outsource it if you feel like it's too overwhelming. I'm going to shift gears now because I have a couple of questions I want to ask you that I ask all my guests. First one is, you know, you've worked with a lot of different companies and you're, you're squarely in the field of inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or a particular individual that you think is really setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days?

Greg (45:04): Yeah, there's a couple of them. I'm going to go with, I'm going to actually go with so-so for, from what I see too. So company, I'm going to say trust. I absolutely outside of Time Doctor, cause I, I know we talked about them, the inner workings of what they do, but Ahrefs is a keyword research, is a SEO tool, SEO suite of tools. And I love what they do from an inbound marketing standpoint. They are able to combine their their, they have three things that I really love. One is their content converts. It's very heavily focused within like these frameworks and I'm biased to these frameworks. Second, they have a really cool YouTube channel. That drives a lot of SEOs. It's almost my squash in the SEO industry. And then the third thing that I really love and I think is so underrated, they have a personalized face to the brand.

Greg (46:00): When you think of Ahrefs and in the SEO space, if you're not familiar, you think of a guy named Tim Soulo or however you pronounce his name. And yeah. And I think having that pur that, that face, that brand is super important a lot, you know, because they're, that's, that's what I think like inbound is it's about connecting to a person. I actually don't even know who the founder of Ahrefs is, but that's unimportant. It's I know who Tim is. I've talked with Tim, you know, Twitter, email, whatever, and he's just out there all the time. And I think that's, that's really critical.

Kathleen (46:34): I feel like that's how Rand Fishkin was at Moz when he was.

Greg (46:37): Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. You want to, like, there's, there's a guy there, you knew you weren't just buying from a company. You were buying from a PR, a set of people who, you know, you believed in their work. And I think that's a paramount to the success. The other, the other guy is a guy named Noah Kagan. And this guy, he's, he, he's the founder of a company called AppSumo and they in and of themselves are okay. Inbound, like, but they built a big company. What I love about Noah is, again, he's just creating so much content, the videos that he, that he creates, if you're an entrepreneur, you're just getting started. There, that's a much watch video series. So I, I really, and again, he's super personable. He's just always out there, you know, who he is, you like, you're friends with him. And so I really like what he's doing with with, with inbound in that sense.

Kathleen (47:36): All right. Those are two good ones. And I'll link off to those in the show notes. Before we wrap up, I'm sure there are going to be people who listen to this and have questions or want to connect with you online. What's the best way for them to do that.

Greg (47:51): Twitter @gregdigneo is the best way. And then if you want the frameworks kind of just give you a link to this. Yeah, of course. Content Guppy.com/frameworks. Awesome. And you could, they're not going to be gated. So as we've discussed yeah. Not gated. And yeah. So that's where you could grab those and yeah, that's, that's basically it.

Kathleen (48:19): All right. Well, head to the show notes, I'll put those links in there. If you want to get the frameworks or connect directly with Greg, thank you so much for sharing all this with us today. This was great. You made it really simple and actionable, which is what I always love.

Greg (48:32): Oh. So much. I hope, I hope everybody gets some value out of it.

Kathleen (48:35): Yeah. I'm already planning my first pattern interrupter posts. So I'm excited about that. I'll I'll let you know how it goes.

Greg (48:41): Absolutely. That sounds great.

Kathleen (48:44): All right. Well, if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice. And I would love it if you would leave the podcast a review. That's how we find new listeners. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork. Yes, that is my Twitter handle. That's a whole nother story and we can make them our next guest. Thanks so much for joining me this week, Greg.

Greg (49:09): This was great. Thank you. Take care.