Inbound Success Podcast

A poorly designed chatbot can create major friction for website visitors. But get it right, and the impact on the user experience and conversions can be massive.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Yiz Segall gets into the nitty gritty details of how to build chatbots. From what his best-performing opening line is, to who should man the chat and how to use chat logs to optimize your landing pages, he provides step-by-step instructions for creating effective chatbots.

Yiz knows what he's talking about, having designed hundreds of bots for clients. And he has the results to show for it, with data showing that website visitor-to-lead conversions increase between 6 and 15% once his chatbots are implemented.  

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear Yiz's advice for designing human-centered chatbots.

Resources from this episode:

• Connect with Yiz on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and today I'm joined by Yiz Segall who is the senior marketing manager at Group 8A. Welcome to the podcast Yiz.

Yiz (00:26): Thanks for having me.

Kathleen (00:27): Yeah, you're coming from, from far away. You're based in Israel, correct?

Yiz (00:31): Yeah, I'm based in Israel.

Kathleen (00:34): It's 7:30 AM my time. What time is it where you are?

Yiz (00:39): 3:30 PM.

Kathleen (00:40): Nice. All right. Well, I love, I love that we're going global and I'm particularly excited about our topic today, which is about creating human centered chatbots. Before we jump into that though, maybe you could tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your background and what you're doing today at Group 8A.

Yiz (00:59): So my background is kind of split into a number of different things. I started off in, mostly in my paid acquisition. I started sort of direct figuring things out myself. I was just going along and then I realized that marketing automation had a lot of like power to it. That there's a lot we could do with that, it to make it more efficient. So I started working with that and as I grew that I realized that I needed to develop more content in order to make it work. So I got more into content strategy as well, and I've sort of been keeping my horizons, always open, sort of looking at new things that can not just not so problems per se, but allow me to do the things that I want to do better. And that's sort of also how I got into chatbots as well. And I only really use the technologies that I know that can actually help me at Group 8A, mostly run paid acquisition, but I also do help the sales team with sales automations and with chatbots. And and I help a little bit also with content.

Kathleen (02:09): So I have a question and we didn't talk about this before we got on, but I'm going to spring it on you anyway. Do you see there being a connection between paid acquisition and chatbots and explain to me if the answer is yes. Like how you see those two working together?

Yiz (02:26): So yeah, I think there is a little bit of a connection between them. And in any case, anytime that you are, that you bring traffic to a website, especially if it's like intent based. So if you're using Google, less so with Facebook, more so with LinkedIn, that's easier to gauge about the intent of the person coming in. And so you can, once you can measure that intent, if that page isn't, isn't really satisfying the intent completely, that's when chatbots can come in and support that. So if they need more information or then that page can provide, or if it's not, or, or if it doesn't really answer their questions, as much as they want it to that, they're covering for a little bit more, a chatbot could definitely come in and really like supplement that and the additional touch to it. And it seems like more conversational is a lot more easier if it's done correctly, it's it feels a lot more like it feels smooth and it feels like a little bit more natural than just reading through a page does. And so it can really help with acquisition as well.

Kathleen (03:36): Yeah, it's interesting because I've observed we, so we, in my company you know, I came on as the first head of marketing about six months ago and we started doing paid acquisition campaigns a couple of months back. And I noticed that when we turned them on our bounce rate went up, which didn't surprise me because all of a sudden we're bringing in a completely different type of traffic. You know, and so, and I had a theory that if I turned on a chatbot and, and made it more about helping people quickly find the content they were looking for, that we could decrease that. And I'm still sort of in the middle of that experiment. So I'm wondering if you've ever like, tracked that, do you know, like, can it help with bounce rates? Have you ever tested that?

Yiz (04:23): Yeah, actually one of the cases that I ran, one of the experiments I ran recently was just for a campaign for actually, for a YouTube campaign that we were running, it sent about, in a bit of like two weeks, it sent, it sent around 67,000 people to the website and all of that segment, about 30% of those ended up using the chatbot, which is, which, which in my experience is really hard. Usually it's between depending on what they want. It can be between like five to 15% like chat, right? Like chat initiation rate. But this was a particularly high engagement rate. And like out of that, we had like 16% ended up closing.

Kathleen (05:08): That's awesome. That's a really high conversion rates.

Yiz (05:11): Yeah. So it, it was because it was because I knew exactly. I, I started off very simple with my chatbots. And then as I saw things move along as I saw more people ask different questions. I didn't, I didn't make it like you see in a lot of bots where you have like specific answers they can click on. And I wanted to do a little bit more exploration. So I allowed a little bit more free writing. And with that, I was able to build up and then use, based on those questions, built out multiple chatbots, a little bit more branches and that's, and then ask different questions, as well as my like trigger message, allow me to build up like a much higher engagement by engagement. And that also did get brought down bounce rate quite a bit. So let's

Kathleen (05:58): Back up for a minute because I think when, if people are listening, I'm sure they've heard of chatbots. Some of them might have chatbots, they might have experience with it, but there's definitely different flavors of chatbot, you know, I think of it like, there's the, there's the fully automated ones, like you said, with the answers already kind of like filled in there's chatbots that are slightly automated and have a lot of human intervention, like do some table setting for me. I would love to hear your perspective on, when do you think a brand should have a chatbot? Like, is it something every website should have, are there certain conditions that you need to have in place to put a chatbot there? And then how do you know what type of chatbot is right for you?

Yiz (06:43): Okay. So my starting point is, and I think I've audited something like 50 to 60 different companies that use chatbots. And one of the main mistakes that I see and is that companies see chatbots and like they focus on either having a chatbot and the type of chatbot rather than what a chatbot actually provides. A chatbot is just a tool that is used, but what a chatbot actually is, it's marketing automation in real time. And if you think of it, it just happens to have that high context and that real-time context of being on the website, but it is marketing automation real time. And if you think about it like that, and you say, okay, somebody is on my website now, how, how do I get them from point A to point B or let's say, I have a landing page, and I want them to fill out a form, but in this case, it's not the form.

Yiz (07:39): It's how do I initiate that chatbot and what I want them to do with that? Or what could I get them? What could I possibly get them to do with this chatbot? Well, and I think of it in terms of, as if it was marketing automation, then the actual type of chatbot doesn't really make a difference. It's just, what would I do in a situation of marketing automation, but sped up a lot. So, so different things, different types of chatbots require different situations. So for example, if it is processing or for something more sensitive, or if something's a bit more complicated than you do want to get a person you don't want to get a person online, also support questions. Chatbots do tend to have, probably around a quarter of them, tend to be a bit more support based questions as well.

Yiz (08:30): My actual first foray into chatbots was to use it primarily as a support tool. And we only branched out afterwards when we saw it, when I saw that was actually quite a powerful sales tool as well. And then and then moving forward to show that I used it to sort of accelerate people's like actual research research journey as they were going through it. And it sort of went in those stages. So it depends of on the type of page that you're on. So if you're on a pricing page and the pricing page is complicated. So then, well, first of all, you have a problem with your pricing page the second, but while you're still fixing that up, having somebody to explain it in human terms and understand like, sort of more of the nuances of what they're really confused about is a lot more appropriate than if you're on like a lead form page and they still, and they still have a question about something, or they're not on the homepage or of their own, a piece of content.

Kathleen (09:28): So do you typically have a different chatbot for every page? Or how do you think about like tailoring that experience based on where somebody is on the site?

Yiz (09:38): Okay. So I started off, I developed my chatbots in three different sprints and it really depends. It really depends on manageability, like, like the size of the website, the structure of the website and and sort of what you really want to be dealing with. Like, I guess that's part of manageability, so you don't want to be managing like 50,000 different chatbots. So I always start off with three to five different chatbots. I create a catch-all across the entire site, and then I create specific ones on important pages. Then I start moving onto channel specific chatbots where I basically say, okay, we have different channels. I can kind of understand what they, the, why they're coming in and what they coming in, why they come to this page and I'll have something specific that I'll also split between people I know, who are already in the system and people who aren't already in the system. And then I'll move to much more content specific context, content specific chatbots, which is more about like either the category.

Yiz (10:51): And this is where it becomes a little bit more advanced and complicated when you develop content. Oh, I guess when, when I did, this should be when somebody should develop content. They, it should fit into a certain place in the funnel or into at least it should fit into an understanding of what your, like your target persona about them and it, where they should, what, what they, what is trying to, what's it trying to answer. And you should know from that piece of content, a what they could possibly be confused about and where they should go, where they could go next. So if you want to, once you get, once you've passed the basic stages, you can create either on a content by content piece or on a sort of like group of content piece. And that's generally where as complicated as I think is necessary, where you move on and you and you have like a grouping of content where, you know, answer specific questions, and then you use that bot to accelerate the process to say, okay, either ask a question about that content or move into the next point.

Kathleen (12:00): Yeah, we did something like this, and we have a very simple chatbot, cause we've only just sort of started this process, but you know, we follow the pillar content, topic cluster approach for SEO. And then we have what I would, we kind of internally jokingly refer to as Uber pillars, which is like category research resource pages on our website, essentially. So we, once we have a piece of pillar content created, then we have a lot of articles in the cluster. We might have some case studies that are related. We'll build a page that literally links off to all of it in one place. So like if somebody comes to our website, for example, and they're interested in e-commerce all of our best content on e-commerce is in one place. And it's not really like a classic resource center. It's more like it's more like the definitive, the definitive page for everything on that topic, if you will. And I found that to be a really handy thing to have when building chatbots, because especially if you have a site where, where you deal with different topics that are very, that are very distinct from each other, it's helpful to be able to say, what are you interested in? And then point somebody immediately in the direction of like a one-stop shop for that thing that they're interested in. So I'm curious, like what kind of content in your experience is important to have developed in order to be able to build a robust chatbot?

Yiz (13:27): I mean, it's a good question. So your chatbot works around your normal content strategy. So, so long as you have so long as you're working in an intentional framework where you built the content with a purpose to answer a question, and they could go in different directions from that point. So then a chatbot is relevant in the case of your new case of your pillar. So you could send, so that's a really long page. So the pillar content pieces, they're massive, especially if the, if the actual page, if the actual topic is complex. And so you could use the chatbot to sort of say, okay, go to this point, but you could also use the chatbot at the same time to, not to point into a point on that page, but to send them to like a segment that you've developed into a separate blog post.

Yiz (14:23): So it actually seems like to your actual audience that they're now progressing to a different point. And it also makes it seem like that it's a new topic, so it's not like they've skimmed through and they didn't see it. It, it, it seems like, okay, I didn't know this before it wasn't on that page. It also helps simplify it by focusing the actual content piece where they're actually looking at. But I've also found that the difference between it, from what I, of successful chatbots and non-successful chatbots, basically comes down to three different things. The first one is your actual opening message. So if your opening message is "hi, how can I help you?" So, so if they need, it's not an engaging message and it's very easily ignoring something. So you want really, you want increase your, your engagement rates a lot, because, because only if they have a problem, but they're not on your page to solve it.

Yiz (15:30): Like they, they haven't read through the content yet. And they don't know if they have any further questions. So, so they don't know if they, if they actually need help, because they're not actually in a, in a, like a crisis mode yet. The second point is, I guess it lends to the first one, is timing. I see a lot of chatbots that as soon as they, the, the webpage opens, they have that opening message. And the problem with that is especially if the messages and engaging is that it becomes now something you ignore. So you sort of, you sort of acknowledge it in the corner of your eye, but it comes one of those elements that you just ignore from the page. And so even if a chatbot could be good for that situation, it won't be because I've ignored that feature of your website they've know that, that message that either closed it and they've gotten frustrated like they would, if there was a popup or they let it be, and they've ignored it.

Yiz (16:23): And I found that that timing is everything. The timing on the actual message is everything with how you actually, when you actually implemented the chatbot itself, when you pop up that message. I found it depends on the page. So I found that the length of the page, it's usually between three to seven seconds or scroll certain specific scroll depth, scroll depth, depending on what platform you use and it's sort of capabilities. I have found generally if you give it enough time, and then you have a really engaging message. The one that I usually, the one that I usually go with, I actually took from Drift. They have some great examples. And then it's just, "can I ask you a quick question?"

Kathleen (17:07): I like that. That's, it's interesting that you bring this up because I have definitely noticed that what you open with is key. And it's not just what you say. It's like how short you keep it, right? Because a lot of these chatbots like, one of the biggest mistakes that I see rookie people make when they first build chatbots is they try to pack too much into one little message and chatbots. It's like, it's like the people who are perfect chatbot, creators and operators are really young because they've grown up communicating by text and they know like you shouldn't write a paragraph for a text. It should be like a snippet of a thought because you want the person you're communicating with. Doesn't want to wait and look at the three dots while you're typing. Right. They want to see your message. And so several years back when I was running a marketing team and, and we built the first chatbot at the company I was at, at the time, our first chatbot operator didn't do that.

Kathleen (18:06): She was writing like paragraph answers and it was terrible. And then we had somebody new come in who was a little younger, who was sort of from a generation that texting is their first kind of, their first choice of a way to communicate. And she just instinctively knew to chunk it out and like break it up into little tiny bits. And so there are so many nuances like that, that I think are easy to miss. And your opening statement or question is, I would totally agree. It's like, it's like the equivalent of the email subject line, right? Like you could have a great email, but if nobody opens your email, it really doesn't matter. Like it's all about the subject line. And it's the same thought. That first message that somebody sees before they click on it and open it up. That's the most important thing, because if nobody's going to click on it, it doesn't matter what, what comes after.

Yiz (18:53): I, I, I would even go further and say that that opening message is like your creative or, or copy on a programmatic ad because then like because then when you're on an email, you're looking for an email to open when you're on somebody else's website, you're not looking for that. You have to be distracted by the quality of that ad creative and copy in order to then not only pay attention to it, but then actually click and engage with it. And you're doing the same thing with your chatbot on your own website. And then, so then you have like, then you have like a third thing, which I think is where also a lot of companies miss. So you actually mentioned something that is part of it, is that sort of the way that you structure, like it has to be short sentences.

Yiz (19:45): And one of the, one of the things that I actually found is that I guess kind of like a myth is that you only can ask the limited amount of questions and the truth is that it doesn't make a difference so long as your questions are relevant to them. And it's not just gathering information. One of the actual things that I found is when I put, when I put like asking name or email, like even like, sort of like, just in case, like we get cut off, like, what's like, what's your email, try to like, make it more natural and introduction to like, for I'm, whatever. This is my name. I'm like, I'm YizBot. And like, what's your name and stuff like that. When I put that earlier on, I had zero follow through. People didn't want to go through. But when I established that later, like five or six questions, I tend to get people answering those questions a lot more, which led to going from about capturing like five emails to catching about 600 emails in the span of like two weeks.

Yiz (20:48): So it all depends on, you don't have to have, doesn't have to be such a short, sort of a short, like small chat. It can be as long as so long as it's engaging so long as you ask like, questions. And that's where sort of like the human side gets to it a lot is because what I did with the chatbot is that I knew why they would come to that website. So I showed empathy straight away. So for example, on, for an example this is a B2C example. It was, it was a medical product and I said, are you, I said, all right, can I ask you a quick question? I asked the question, are you suffering from you? Are you suffering from this? And usually they say yes. And then I also try to add in like a humorous answer as well, to the options that I gave.

Yiz (21:40): And then I was like, has it really, has it really stopped you from living your life properly? Like what had, and then what has stopped you from doing right? So I try to sort of like empathize with the empathize with the fact that I knew what that problem was, but also that it's impacted their lives before I went further. And actually sort of, are you looking for a way to be able to do that again? Are you looking for a solution? What have you tried? And some of that I cut out. I tried different things throughout the process. When I asked for like, have you tried for this particular one? Have you tried surgery? I realized that was a wasted question and I didn't actually need it. And I actually got much better engagement when I, when I cut it out, but I had like seven or eight different steps in my process.

Yiz (22:26): And the length didn't make a difference because it wasn't just gathering information. Or from that perspective, I was empathizing with them while I was presenting a solution at the same time. So when I actually presented that solution, when I, which that solution doesn't have to be a sale, that's the way she just needs to be getting to then next desired outcome. And when I was doing that, I ended up not only getting more leads, but I ended up also getting higher intent sales. Like I said, out of, out of the 600 people I got emails from, I got around about 400 of those were high intent, right? And over that period of two weeks, we closed around 30 to 40 sales. And we closed another 6% later on. So, so it wasn't about the length. It's about like, understanding that problem and understanding why they're there. And that's when having multiple chatbots and understanding, let's say going back to paid acquisition if you know, why there's ads, you know, why they're on that page and why they came to that page, then you can build out a really human chatbot. That is, that is time correctly has a really great opening message. And you have short questions that show that you care, and then you can answer that, then you can provide your solution or that next step

Kathleen (23:53): You mentioned the, the topic of a human centered chatbot. And that's obviously the the, the topic of, of what we're discussing. And I hear people complain about this a lot where they're like, people go on rants on LinkedIn and on Twitter saying, chatbots are the worst. Why do I want to interact with a robot? And this and that. Beyond kind of showing empathy and really understanding somebody's problem, are there other aspects to this that can make a chatbot more human centered, less annoying, less robotic.

Yiz (24:27): So those complaints come down to a few different things. First of all, if the chatbot is really rigid and is, has no branches, if it doesn't have the ability to understand what that person is saying. So if they write something in and it's still very inflexible, then they don't like it. I have chatbots are sort of pretending to be a human and it's really a chatbot then that's really annoying. And the other thing is when it is so certain situations call for human intervention. So if you're somebody who's really confused about, let's say your pricing for your product, you, what you should always have, especially during trade hours, you should always have an option to allow us human, to intervene and to actually join the chat if need be, and you should give them the option to request that or to, or to book a time on somebody's calendar.

Yiz (25:25): If it is, if it is if it is something that's confusing, confusing, or complex, and that's where people also get where they also ranted, one of the reasons why they also rant against chatbots, but ultimately, so as long as it's done, right you have a little bit, your mail, you make it seem conversational. It's not like sort of to, it's not promotional in the sense it's not like way too salesy or even really that tells you at all. It's supposed to feel like a conversation. You acknowledge the fact that you are a chatbot. Like I will have, for example, if somebody puts in a, a message and, and I have no idea, and the chatbot doesn't understand what's going on. So a lot of times I'll implement a chatbot on HubSpot's free, on the service. So service free or whatever it's called, right?

Yiz (26:19): So they're a free chatbot and they can't do any branches. And I have no idea what's going on, but I'll say if I find email or whatever it is, they put something in. And I, and it's not what I'm looking for. I'll say, look, I'm a simple chatbot, icon, understand anything? I don't know what you're saying. I, I, and I can only look at, I can only read things in a certain format. And so you acknowledge that. You use a little humor, a little bit of empathy, and you know, you're not trying to be salesy, and you'll be fine.

Kathleen (26:50): I want to talk about chatbot operators, because you mentioned like, in a perfect world, you'd be somebody who would be able to have a handoff to a real person, right. During the chatbot experience. If they have a complex question or the bot can't answer it. I have a lot of opinions on this, but I'm not gonna say them. I'm curious to know what you think in terms of, what do you look for in the person who's going to man, your chatbot? What, what sort of skills experience, et cetera, do you need?

Yiz (27:25): Are you talking about the, now the person that, that is now handed off to live chat? I've seen different companies do different things. Hubspot has a sort of like hybrid sales support kind of idea. I think, I think somewhere in between you need, like, it should probably be like, you can have like a branch that sort of splits and say, like, use what, they're, what they're actually looking for to decide if it should go to sales or to support, or you have some, or if you can't do that, get somebody in support who's also trained in sales.

Kathleen (28:16): Yeah. That makes sense. And I've always thought again people who are, who really are comfortable, like, like I said earlier, with texting as a format who understand, like, keep your answers short, be quick, send little snippets. And then, and then people who just have incredibly sunny dispositions, bright outlooks, who are, who are, because some of the stuff that comes in through chatbots is not nice. Let's be honest. People come a lot of times they're there because they've encountered an issue with the product or they're frustrated with something. And so having somebody who is able to like roll with the punches is a really, really good thing.

Yiz (28:55): So that's where support comes in. That's why they're the ideal person to run the chat over sales for a number of reasons. Number one, they are, they do have to deal with like the, the worst part of client client's humanity. Quite often, they have to deal with the punches and they have to know it, that they have to take the punch. A lot of the time, they also know the product cold and they're also not motivated to make everything a sale. They're motivated to help. So while they should have some sales training, they, it should, they are, they have like more of a human element to them than like a sales person, which makes them like then the ideal person for it.

Kathleen (29:48): That makes sense. So, any other particular tricks that you've found work really well with chatbots? Like you talked about your opening line that that's worked really well. Do you have anything else along those lines that, that you've discovered through trial and error works well?

Yiz (30:04): So my, what I generally do is that I started, like I said, I work in three sprints, right. I keep it basic and then I get complicated going on, but that's also in terms of the chat itself, I allow for a lot more free writing in the beginning, especially in the beginning to get more so, and then I go through the chat. I go through like the chat statistics in terms of like progression, see where the choke points are, the breaking points are. And then I get rid of them or change them. But I also run through a lot where I run through like, I basically go through every single chat. And one case, it was talking about going through like 2000 different chats within like a very small period. And I go through them and I looked through what exactly they were writing about, what they asking.

Yiz (30:57): And then I will then take that information and I will create new chatbots based off it. I will create new branches. So I wouldn't start by making five or six different branches in any sort of chat. It makes it too complicated. You don't need all of that in the beginning. Just create a few simple ones. Allow more free writing. And then and then adapt. And the other thing is, put energy as much energy, as you can into what you're writing. So unless it's like support, like somebody who's like angry is crazy, but you have to convey passion for what you're doing. And, and add more human elements, like humor as well. And if it, if it's done properly, they'll feel that as well. And then they get excited to progress further. It's like, think of it as like a normal human conversation, right?

Yiz (31:55): Let's say you're talking to somebody else. I'm coming up. I want to talk to you about a given topic. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I want to talk to you about your experience in inbound marketing, but you're having a chat with somebody else, or you're reading a book. I come up to you, my opening line has to be genuine and it has to get your attention. So you stop what you're doing and you start talking to me, but then I have to keep your interest throughout that time, weigh the questions, understanding on the topic that I brought. I understand where you're coming from. And I understand what I'm talking about as well in a way that I can help you while I'm still learning from you what exactly I want to learn from it as well. But I have to also put energy into that. If it's like a dull conversation that's in monotone, then you lose interest and that conversation ends.

Kathleen (32:42): So, okay. That's interesting. And I agree with you, but I think that's one of those things that like, unless you see examples of it, it can be really hard to understand. So I'm wondering, and I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Are there any companies that you think do this really well, any chat, particular chatbot experiences that you've seen that that are great examples of this?

Yiz (33:08): So there are a few, there are a few that, so there's one that has like some sarcasm in it. It sort of disarms, they put it in their opening message, which I don't like. And I don't know the statistics of it if they put that in later, but basically it's a marketing agency and the marketing agency says, it starts off by saying, "I guess you're here to solve a marketing problem, but if you're just here to browse, we don't judge." That's Marketing Envy.

Kathleen (33:41): I'm going to Google them right now as we're, as we're talking.

Yiz (33:42): So I, I actually really enjoyed that because it it's very, I found it very funny that they sort of had a bit of sarcasm. They weren't afraid to sort of say something a little bit, like.

Kathleen (33:58): It says, "Okay, unless you're hobby is checking out random marketing agencies, weird, but no judgment. I'm betting you have a marketing problem you're looking to solve."

Yiz (34:06): Yeah. So I don't really like that as an opening message. It's way too long. But it's sort of perfect in the way that it sort of feels human. That it has like an energy. It feels like a normal person would say that or write that.

Kathleen (34:25): Well, and I suppose that, and I'm going through their bot right now as we're talking. I suppose that it also naturally attracts sort of the right culture fit client, because if somebody was annoyed by that, it's probably not going to be the right fit for the agency. If that, if that chatbot is really representative of that agency's personality, it is one way to sort of screen out non good fits. Now I will agree with you though, like their next, so I clicked something in their bot and then their next thing that popped up, it's like, it's like five different sentences. So I would say, I don't want to do like a chatbot tear down on them so much, but like, it's interesting when you start to look at these things in the wild, you begin to realize like they had so much in their next thing, that it wasn't all available in one, like without scrolling in the chatbot, which I would say is not great.

Yiz (35:17): So, yeah.

Kathleen (35:19): Yeah. Interesting. So I'm curious then all of this is, is so spot on, but at the end of the day, I'm sure what everybody's wondering is like, so what, right. Like, does it lead to any results? So you've worked on a ton of different chatbots. What kinds of have you seen them produce?

Yiz (35:41): So I've worked, like I said, about like about 50 to 60 companies with chatbots and that could span, like each company could have like between 20 to 30 at least like different chatbots. And it depends on the funnel, but I've seen like what the, if it's on a content piece, if it's a pricing page by page, or if it's I've also seen in used chatbots to weed, to like weed out spam, like there's annoying there's annoying sort of contact like emails. You get, somebody submitted a form, but they want to guest post, or they want to, they had not had an SEO agency or something like that. So I've used chatbots. So you have a lot more, a lot less spam in your email. You can also use it to for demo requests to basically just book a meeting straight away. And so I've seen higher conversion rates on that as well. We got a lot more meetings based off that what I tend to see, in general is that the not, I've never seen a conversion rate go less than 10% of people that use chatbots. Your main problem is engagement. So usually your, your rate will be about six to 15, between 6% to about 15% you're doing.

Kathleen (37:08): Six to 15% of the people who come to your website?

Yiz (37:11): Yeah.

Kathleen (37:11): That's actually really good because in my experience, the benchmark for like visitor to lead conversion on a typical website is like one to 2%. And if you're getting six to 15% of people engaging with a chatbot, that's pretty massive.

Yiz (37:27): Yeah. It's because you're essentially in it. It might seem a little bit too good to be true. But if you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense because you're getting the person while they're in that, like I said, it's real time marketing automation. So you're getting somebody while they're in the zone looking for something right now, and you're accelerating that process. You're giving them exactly what they need to know now and what they need to know next. Right. So while they're in that mode, then not what let's say, 20, 30 minutes. So however long they're spending on your website, they have the ability to get everything they need to know in one session or two or three sessions, how are doing so you're accelerating the entire process. So you do see, you do see a lot shorter sales times as well. So right from first contact to actual to a lead being generated or to an actual, depending on your actual like sales funnel itself.

Yiz (38:22): But you do see shorter time like sales times and, and you do, and it also qualifies them so that if you do it right, so you're getting them, you're getting them not only informed that you're also getting them passionate. They're conversing with you right now in a non salesy way about something that they're interested right now, not something that they spoke about two days ago or a day ago, even like six hours ago before they get their first marketing automation, email the sequence. So you get them while they're fully energized for that research. And so you accelerate it and you get higher intent.

Kathleen (38:58): I think one of the, my favorite things that you've said is about what you can learn from the chatbot, because I was really just interested to hear your approach that early on you let people do more free typing and, and there's so much rich information in there about what they're really interested in. Cause I think that's, I feel like what a lot of people struggle with when they build a chatbot it's you kind of have to assume, you know, what somebody wants, right. If you're going to try to supply all the answers and build all the branches and not allow any free typing, there's a lot of assumptions that go into that. But if you're able to do the free typing thing, then it seems like an amazing source for audience research.

Yiz (39:36): Yeah. It's incredible what you can understand and how you can then use that information to, to also tailor your landing pages, because they're asking you, they're telling you exactly what they're looking for. So you get enough qualitative data without actually having to really survey them in a way that feels like surveying them. They're giving you that information and then you can go back and also tailor your landing pages. So your chatbot process can actually help your entire content strategy and your landing page strategy.

Kathleen (40:07): That's a great point. So you've mentioned two different platforms for chatbots. You mentioned Drift. You mentioned HubSpot. Do you have any favorite platforms or are there certain favorites for certain use cases?

Yiz (40:24): So I haven't had extensive use of Drift, but it is my favorite nonetheless. First of all, it integrates nicely with HubSpot itself. So you get that in there, but also they have an an AI add-on that allows you to get like really good like interpretations from like the semantics of what people are writing. So you can actually, even as you develop, you can allow a lot more free writing and still being able to create a lot of sophisticated branches based off that. And then they also have like Drift video and they have like their system tied into that. You can end up sending them back like an actual personalized video afterwards as well. So I do enjoy them a lot more. They are in terms of just shot that definitely. Definitely my favorite. I like HubSpot just because it's one, it's like one interface that I have to deal with. I don't like using multiple programs when I can use one.

Kathleen (41:30): A free tool HubSpot is pretty good. Yeah.

Yiz (41:34): Even the free Drift doesn't give you like a chatbot, like, but HubSpot does. So it is very good for free chat. And it's just that if you want to get, like, I think you need Service Hub or Professional.

Kathleen (41:53): I think Marketing Free has it too.

Yiz (41:53): All of the Free's have it. I think you need, to get the branches, you need either Professional or Enterprise. And it comes out to be more expensive than you would get for paying for Drift, but you do also get a lot more.

Kathleen (42:07): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I guess it depends. I always say to people like what marketing automation are you using? Because if you already have HubSpot professional, start out with it. So with that chatbot, you know, get your feet wet, see, you know, and play around with it. And then when you feel like you're comfortable, when you start to bump up into limitations, then look at Drift because it definitely does have more functionality. But yeah, there's, there's so many tools now available.

Yiz (42:35): Yeah. The one thing that I do like about Drift, which I also saw on Intercom. I, I've never really used, I've only been like I've only been on the chatting end of Intercom, but is that from the user side, you can see your past chats and you can continue them to that extent on HubSpot and Intercom, which means that if you do get cut off, you can just restart where you're up to. And then whoever takes over from that chat, they can just read the chat, going back instead of having to restart your conversation over and over again for support requests, for sure. Even for, even for other requests, like if I'm on HubSpot and then I need to get off the computer for awhile. And so I leave and I come back in an hour, I have to then re-explain to another, to another rep, what I'm looking for, what my question is and and go through the entire process again. Whereas with Drift, I can just click that conversation that I left off with and just basically restart saying, I want to continue this again or ask another question to restart, ask the person to just read the previous chat, to get, to get context. And then you continue from where you left off. And that's an incredible user expense.

Kathleen (43:55): That's a very good point. Well, I think we can talk about this forever, but we do not have forever. So I'm gonna shift gears and ask you the two questions. I always ask my guests. The first one being, we talk a lot about inbound marketing and this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to how they're doing inbound marketing?

Yiz (44:15): So I have a few people that I think so that, that are doing inbound really well. They're actually on LinkedIn. I don't know if they do other things outside of LinkedIn, but the main company is thinking one of them is a guy named Alex Sheridan. So what I like about what he does is that he solves your problems while showcasing exactly what he offers. So he, his whole offering is based around the creativity that he can give you and your business on LinkedIn or in video in general. And what he does is that he has different formulas for a lot of the different videos. So you can see that he's not repeating the same formula. So what he does, he actually educate you about how to use the platform. And he also educates you with his content on video different, different things that you shouldn't shouldn't be doing.

Yiz (45:15): So he uses that, but he also does it in a way that's really creative. So you not just get the information that you need, but you also then see while he's doing that exactly that he can actually fulfill his promise, which is being creative in video in an incredibly intense fashion. He, when you watch his videos, there is an emotion behind the doc. I always use, I, I leave every single one of his videos, thoroughly entertained and really informed. And so, and I, so I, he does also, I'm also subscribed to his email and that was because I really enjoyed his he's actual his, his videos. And I get a lot of information from that as well. So I don't, I don't know what his success is, but I think he has basically put his entire solution throughout his process. So all his, what he offers is throughout his entire, like, is that from the beginning stage, from track, all the way to close, you can see in an action as you're researching what you're looking for. And it also has a bit of demand generation there as well, because he's also talking to people who aren't necessarily looking for his product right now. And you can sort of when you watch his video or a few of his videos, you get this belief that he can do the same thing for you.

Kathleen (46:38): Yeah, that's cool. All right. I'll have to check him out. And you mentioned you might have a few others as well.

Yiz (46:44): So another one is that I really like is a content writer by the name of James Lorraine. I don't know how to pronounce it. So what he does as well is that he rewrites, he has a whole section on LinkedIn called LinkedIn ad rewrites. And what he does is that he takes a piece of copy. That's predominantly boring, and he writes it in a way that's engaging. And again, it's very entertaining. You see his craft, he explains what he's doing, and you can see his craft in action. And you can know, like while you're looking at what he's doing, you know, he can do the same thing for you if you gave him the chance. That sounds great. I love it. So I liked that sort of combination of showcase, not just informing people, but entertaining and inspiring them, and also seeing it as much as an action in time throughout the entire process, which means that connect to what he's doing even while you're in the earliest stages. Yeah.

Kathleen (47:49): That makes a ton of sense. So one of the other questions I'd like to ask is, you know, the world of digital marketing changes really quickly, and it can be very hard to keep up. So how do you personally stay educated? And on top of all of the many changes that are happening

Yiz (48:05): That is a really good question. So I wish I could say I listened to tons of podcasts. I do not. I don't have so much time in my day for that. A lot of it is I read I, I follow like Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Marketing. So I read a lot of that. I listen, I follow a few key influences as well. And I tend to like look at some of my industry industry sort of like articles, like I said, like just search engine marketing, stuff like that. I listened to some podcasts. I like the ones with interviews a lot more because they tend to sort of have multiple different opinions and you can see where they agree that it's where they agree on a single point. You can see that, that it actually, that it's not just one person's opinion. You can see that it's actually spreading a little bit more. So I get a lot of benefit from that and I experiment with different things.

Kathleen (49:06): Yeah. Learning by doing that's the best way to do it, I think, but not everybody learns that way. We all learn differently. So that's great. Well, this has been super interesting. If somebody wants to ask you a question, reach out, learn more, what's the best way for them to connect with you online?

Yiz (49:24): Just message me on LinkedIn is really the best way. I'm there every day. I spend a few hours on it and I'm always happy to answer questions.

Kathleen (49:32): Great. And I'll put the, the link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So head there if you want to check that out. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, 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. And in the meantime, if you know somebody else doing amazing inbound marketing work, send me a tweet at @workmommywork, and I would love to make that person my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me Yiz. This was a lot of fun.

Yiz (50:04): Thanks for having me. It was a blast.

You've invested the time and money to create great marketing content. How can you use it to directly influence customer experience and drive pipeline growth?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, PathFactory COO shares her perspective on how brands can create content experiences that improve the customer journey, shorten sales cycles, and close more deals, faster.

With so many brands now investing heavily in content and inbound marketing, there's a massive opportunity to do more with our content. That's exactly what PathFactory is solving for. 

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear what Helen has to say.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the PathFactory website
• Follow Helen on Twitter
• Connect with Helen on LinkedIn
• Email helen at helen [@] pathfactory.com

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and today I am excited to share that my guest is Helen Baptist, who is the COO of Path Factory. Welcome to the podcast, Helen.

Helen (00:26): Thanks Kathleen. I've long admired you and your, your journey. So I'm thrilled to actually spend some time with you.

Kathleen (00:32): I feel like this is incredibly overdue because I have known you for a really long time and you are doing just amazing work as a marketer. Path Factory is growing like gangbusters, and this is a classic case of, of, I, for some reason it has felt like I must've already interviewed you, but I didn't. And so when I finally thought about it, I was like, how have I not had her on this podcast? So it's about time. It's about time we did this.

Helen (01:00): Yeah. And likewise, I've followed you for a while and I, you know, you're, you're a mighty woman in terms of the things that you do. And I admire you across the board as a single contributor, you know, first person in on a company I'm doing all the marketing that you're doing and coordinating everything and then, you know, standing up podcasts and keeping that running and, you know, your posts on LinkedIn are prolific and I aspire to be like you one day, but I just don't have that kind of, and with an energy is what I would say. You're probably a lot younger than me.

Kathleen (01:30): I actually, I don't think so. I think I'm, I think I'm just crazy. I bite off more than I can chew all the time and whatever I, then I have to figure out how to swallow it whole yeah. You muscle through. But but you're so sweet to say those kinds of things. And I am really, really excited for our topic today because I feel like my audience has a lot of people in it who are pretty experienced with marketing. And I always tell my prospective guests, like the basic topics don't do well with these people. They know what they're doing. Like they, for example, content marketing, this is an inbound marketing podcast. They know a content marketing is they are producing content. And so I always love when I get to talk to people who enable me to dive in a level deeper and, and really think about kind of, so you've mastered the basics then what, right.

Kathleen (02:18): And that is totally what this is about because you guys do some interesting things at Path Factory. The product is interesting. So I'm going to ask you to just start out, first of all, by sharing your story, because you're a unique guest in the sense that you're not just a head of marketing, you're a chief operating officer who, who is also a head of marketing. So if you could talk a little bit about yourself and your journey and how you wound up doing what you're doing, but then also tell us a little bit more about what Path Factory is.

Helen (02:44): Yeah. And I, I think it's an interesting perspective because I actually started as a secretary at an advertising agency.

Kathleen (02:50): Oh my God, it's working girl, the movie. Yeah.

Helen (02:53): You know, I'm not going to start singing, but you know, I think the the, the, the rise to where I am has been a long journey and there've been a lot of people who've lifted me up and helped me get there. The, the, you know, the first position after being a secretary, I helped with RFPs, believe it or not at the agency, we won Ikea at the time, back in late early nineties. And th you know, this idea of one-to-one marketing or direct marketing as it was called back then in the true sense of, you know, it wasn't male, right. Primarily really fascinated me because it was below the line in terms of it wasn't all TV advertising. It wasn't meant it was measurable. Right. And so my career has really been around things that are measurable and outcomes that you can actually point your finger to, and be proud of.

Helen (03:45): Like, yes, it's great that you have a TV commercial, but what, what did it actually do for the business? And so that was my passion coming into this arena when I first joined. And that's exactly what I do now. Right. I think that the difference now is that I see the entire customer life cycle from marketing through to, you know, customer success and churn, which is like acquisition to out of the back door and stopping the leaky bucket. And how does that infinity of going back and forth really play together so that you can scale your organization so that you can become these growth machines that the, you know, the, the, the private equity and the VC firms are looking for. I'm not in the legend status of some of our colleagues in the, you know, the CMO coffee talks, but I have a pretty good track record for the investors.

Helen (04:33): This is my third ride with the same CEO. The same PE firm has jettisoned us in and you know, really helped break down silos that really exist between marketing and sales and CX so that we can be much more fluid and grow the business organically with the ones that we already have customers we already have, but then acquire new logos based on the successes of what we, what stories we have. So that's kind of the view that I have and rev ops reports to me, BDRs report to me like, Oh, the whole revenue bag I carry as a burden for the organization, but, but, you know, I'm proud of the team. We've, we've had record busting quarters, four quarters in a row. Our retention rate is through the roof both on gross and net and, and, you know, that's a Testament to the team that's behind me and working with me and it's a team effort. It's not just an individual sport kind of thing.

Kathleen (05:31): I was going to say, how do you handle all of that? Because I know it can be challenging enough just being the head of marketing at a company where growth expectations are really high, but you're heading up marketing sales and customer success or customer experience. So how, I mean, did you, did you do stints in each of those areas? Like how did you get to the point where you were able to effectively oversee all of that? Yeah, I think it goes back to

Helen (05:58): Agency land, right? I did marketing for customers. In my earlier days, I ran loyalty programs for British airways as, as their vendor, if you will. And some other major companies I've been out on the client side, I worked as a consultant for AARP, and I was an employee there for awhile, large organization for people over 50, because I was going to be 51 day and thought I could change the world. And anyway, that's come and gone 50, by the way,

Kathleen (06:26): Let's say it's 50 felt like it was really, really, really far away until it wasn't exactly.

Helen (06:33): And then hit 55 and it's even more further away. The, the other side of it is, is, you know, on the CX side, you learn that from managing relationships when you're on a bet, you know, when you're a vendor or a partner the, the one thing that is really interesting is tying the sales motions with the CX motions and really understanding the interplay and the levers that you can pull to really drive organic growth. You know, customer advocacy, customer marketing, I think is probably one of the most underrated marketing functions, and probably the least respected in terms of, you know, everybody's looking for DG people or, you know, ABM people or whatever that, that's what the market is hot for. But I think this idea of really leveraging your customer base to tell the story for you versus you shouting that we're the best is the way that we've grown a lot of our business.

Kathleen (07:29): That's so great. So, so tell me a little bit about what Path Factory does.

Helen (07:33): Yeah. So Path Factory is currently known as a content experience platform. You know, we serve up frictionless content experiences that, you know, people can consume as much content as they want. We know people are doing research to buy things. Our customers are B2B marketers, and they're trying to provide an, an, an experience that allows me or you to explore as much as we want to, as frequently as we want to, and then know where you are in the sales cycle. So there's these, there's these intent databases that we can buy, right? That are, what did you look at across the web? That's a source of intent, but I think this idea of what topics and you know, taxonomies are you really looking at really tell you where you might be in the buying cycle? I, you know, one of our big customers or our big customers are Cisco, Adobe, Oracle, these guys are selling multiple products and how do they know what sales motion should play?

Helen (08:28): Right. they, they manage their partner relationships through us. So they they're really, you know, serving up the right content at the right time and the right stage of the buying cycle or the customer life cycle or the partners life cycle, or even the employee life cycle with people using us for HR engagement as well. And so I think this idea of, you know, making sure that your omni-channel and understanding your content and what's how it's performing and how it's driving revenue really is like the ultimate. We can put all the outbound messaging we ever want, but people have to consume something. Right. and rather than stopping at a dead end or a form, let's, let's do some testing around how far do we let people read a white paper, a Gartner report? Yeah. I said Gartner you know, how, how far do you let people read before you engage them with a form, if you want to use forms. Right. so this idea of really testing and learning where people are and how much information you can collect in the life cycle, that their content journey with you is what Path Factory helps.

Kathleen (09:37): So, as I listened to you talk about this, what comes to my mind is that, and you tell me if this is accurate, it sounds like you guys are like the Netflix or the Spotify for content in the sense that, like, I go to Netflix and Spotify and it's watching what I'm doing. And it's then using its artificial intelligence engine to like dynamically serve up something that makes sense as a next step. And it sort of, it, it like incentivizes me to binge to like go down that rabbit hole and follow it wherever it's going to go. And is that, is that fairly accurate or,

Helen (10:15): Yeah, I think that that's the one side of the coin that we offer, and that has been our primary emphasis. This idea of an intelligent content platform is where we're moving towards and this idea of really understanding the construct of your content, the attributes of your content. So if you go and buy, you know, a can of Coca-Cola, you know, all the attributes of that can of Coca-Cola, there's called what's called the, you know, the, the nutrition panel is on there. And so you really do understand the construct of that can of Coca-Cola in terms of what's in it, most marketers don't know what's inside their content. And so this idea of really understanding the attributes of your content, the effectiveness of those attributes, are you compliant? Are you SEO for accessibility, for example, are you optimized for SEO for your keywords that you're picking?

Helen (11:03): Does your content reflect that? And so this idea of really understanding your content much more holistically first, or even retroactively, because most marketers walk in and they've got hundreds of thousands of web pages and they've got thousands, right. And most marketers life cycle is what, 18 to 24 months. They better pretty ha have a pretty big impact pretty quickly. So this idea of you really don't know what's working and what it's made up of and why it's not working is where we're moving towards. I think serious decision, you know, and released a report recently that said 14% of CMOs understand what content they have, which is pretty scary, the amount of money that is spent on content, right? Whether it's a video, whether it's a syndication or whether it's syndicated content, or even your own people, writing content copywriters, as they were known back in the day now, fancy name of content writers you know, they, nobody really has this good handle on what is content and what is good content. And how long should it be sitting out there in public? What's the decay factor of your content is really the insights that we're starting to deliver for our customers. I'm pretty jazzed about it. We've stolen some plays from the CPG industry and applied those back into B2B markets.

Kathleen (12:17): I think it's so cool because I have long felt, and I've been guilty of this that, you know, when you think about the Pareto principle, the 80 20 you know, I've, I have long believed that 20% of your effort should go into creating the content and then 80% should go into promoting it and, you know, going back and historically optimizing it and just like all the things you do with it once it's written. But unfortunately, I think for most marketers, it's probably the exact reverse. We, we pour a ton of time and attention into creating it. And I mean, guilty as charged, I'm doing that right now, but that's also because I'm kind of early on at a company and we have to sort of now it's about building the foundation, but, but there, you know, a couple, a couple of companies ago, I was working at impact, which is where I first met you. And there is a place that has tons and tons of content. And I, you know, I'll give credit where credit is due to Bob. Who's the CEO there, he's always had a big emphasis on things like historical optimization, but even still, it's very hard, even when you have a strategy to do those things, it's very hard to keep track of it all. And it inevitably becomes an insanely manual process. And so having a tool like this that can kind of figure it out for you is huge.

Helen (13:27): Yeah. And think, think about it like a content audit, right? Like baseline your, do you have alt text on your OG images? Do you have actual titles on your OG images? Like, do you have OG images on your, your assets that you're trying to use for digital and and so this idea of kind of really baseline understanding of what you actually have and is it optimized for step? Is it too hard to read? What's the readability score? And then the topics of taxonomy that are below that and what, how much content do you have in a word cloud in one topic, are you overloaded versus where you want to go? And so this idea of really optimizing logically you know, the content that you have is something that we're working towards. I think the, you know, I think we were on a coffee talk one time, and one person said, well, we have 240,000 pieces of assets, assets of content.

Helen (14:17): And there was a 2005 price list on there. That's not really relevant for my sales team so, so like, how do you make sure that you are decaying, what you should decay? And you are understand when the lifeline is what the lifeline is. A lifespan of that piece of content is I was talking to my product manager the other day. And he said, you know, I, when I was at, you know, the company before this, I was the marketing manager and I'd paid lots of money to syndicate a white paper. And it was $80,000. And I got two leads out of it. The decay on that was two days I should have just stopped paying for it. Instead we went and renewed it again. And so had I had that insight, I would have stopped and saved myself $80,000 and applied that somewhere else. So did he buy it properly in the first place? Probably not. Cause he didn't look at it in relation to what other things were working for him. So I think, you know, content is kind of a, it's not something that people talk about a lot. We talk a lot about the motions, right? DG, ABM, but what is actually behind that is structured content data.

Kathleen (15:25): Yeah, and you pour your heart and soul and your money and your time into creating it. And then if you don't take advantage of it, shame on you. Right. it, I'm curious to hear you talk about like, as somebody who oversees also customer experience and sales, you know, better than anyone, you know, from a marketing standpoint that all of this content creation is in service to those two things, right? Like it's about the customer journey and it's about driving pipeline. So I would love to hear a little bit about how you in your marketing have, and I'm sure you're using some of your own tools, how you have handle that and what your approach is. And side note, if it sounds really crazy while we're recording it's because all of a sudden in April, there is a, like a tiny hail storm happening. So there's like a lot of noise outside my window. So if you're listening and you hear this thunderous sound, that's, that's what it is.

Helen (16:21): You can't hear it. So maybe it's not being picked up, but I'm sure that you'll be safe with a, with a hailstorm in April. Is that an April fool's joke? It's April 1st as we're recording.

Kathleen (16:30): Well, that's a whole nother topic. Crazy, crazy weather.

Helen (16:33): So I think the, you know, the first thing that I do when I typically go into an organization and cause I look at the customer experience from the outside in what is the customer journey that we are delivering. Once somebody raises their hand through to the time that they expire with us and expire is capital E not that they've passed away, but the contract is gone, right. I used to work at ARP and we'd talk about it anyway. The, you know, the, the, the really understanding the touch points and the impacts that you really want to have. So the first thing we do when somebody signs a contract with us is within 15 minutes an email from the CMO goes, Oh, sorry, the CEO goes to the stock, the contract signers on the, you know, the right contact roles inside Salesforce.

Helen (17:20): That was a challenge in its own, right? Cleaning up data in the database so that you can do effective marketing. But I think this idea of not just customer marketing or, you know, dummy branded demand, let's put it up at the front there, whether it's ABM demand gen or traditional ways of doing things. But this idea of, you know, tying the two together for this contiguous sales motion, right. That somebody feels good at any given stage that we're in the sales motion with them. So part of our, our, our, our sale motion is we do a mutual action plan with the customer, and it's not to the end of the contract it's to the end of their first compelling event, whatever that is first campaign, they want to get out in the marketplace, but also for that individual, what do they want to get?

Helen (18:05): Do they want to be on stage? So they want to speak so that we can leverage that for advocacy to fill our pipeline with stories from customers, right? So it's a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The, the, you know, I can't do an AB test with, or without Path Factory at Path Factory. But I was a customer of Path Factory before I joined here at my last company at item master, which got acquired. And we've done some really cool work with some customers where we're actually tying CRM data to you know, be with Path Factory without Path Factory, to really understand the revenue impact for content engagement. When, when people do traditional marketing without Path Factory, we see a slower, slower closed, no loss closed, lost faster close, yes. When they use Path Factory faster, close, no, because, so then the rep can move on to their next sales motion set and sales attack, whatever they want to do.

Helen (19:10): And we're seeing, you know, people really become creative around, you know, does it work for a specific segment, like my SMB, where it's it's product led growth. And I don't want to high touch with lots of sales reps versus an enterprise play, which is much more, you know, journal journalistic in terms of the journey that you're on with them. We, we understand completely which area of the funnel drives, which segment for us. So for example, for example, our customers who buy from us in the enterprise segment typically engage with at least two to three pieces of top of funnel content in over a period of two sessions versus you know, the SMB team is typically middle to bottom of funnel, creative content which, which is really interesting. It helps me make sure that we are building the right pipeline efforts to, to, to create demand and leads and contacts and that kind of thing for the two segments that I oversee. And that's, those insights are pretty profound when, you know, what kind of content people want and what makes them buy.

Kathleen (20:26): So are you using the intelligence that you're getting out of it to develop your editorial calendar then?

Helen (20:29): Yeah. And that, and I think that's the other part is what, what topics, what taxonomy is really resonating with a specific vertical or a specific type of customer or a segment, right. And, and those are the insights and Intel that, that content audit really can help us with and really is helping build kind of this more true marketing campaign, marketing calendar kind of thing.

Kathleen (20:53): And do you, are you able to look at the data that you're extracting from the product in terms of actual content consumption habits? And, and I know you can like retroactively look and say, like, you just had like two pieces of content for enterprise, top of funnel. That's a good lead, but do you, is there any sort of almost predictive element to it where you're like, I'm seeing that this prospect is enterprise and has like started going down that top of funnel path. And so, Hey, that should kick off like some outreach from the sales team.

Helen (21:26): It hasn't gotten to that stage, but that's the desired end goal. Right. I think the, you know, this idea of Netflix is, is that you have a destination that you go to and you, you get served up the right recommendations for you. So, you know, I don't do horrors. I do, you know, Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey and, and Reign, and, all those British dramas.

Kathleen (21:47): Okay, so then recommendation, we're going to digress for one second. You should watch Home Fires. If you're into the masterpiece theater, Downton Abbey kind of stuff, Home Fires, great show.

Helen (21:57): I'm writing it down.

Kathleen (21:58): I'm giving TV show recommendations right now, but this is what we do in the pandemic, right. It's all Netflix and chill.

Helen (22:03): Yeah. Well, not in the true sense, but anyway the, the, the idea that a sales rep can actually see what that person has consumed. Absolutely. That is one of our key differentiators. We have, you know, the ability to send alerts from our marketing automation platforms. And we do when somebody is a fast moving buyer where they've consumed the content criteria, scoring that we've set in Path Factory, as well as met the required that, you know, the lead scoring inside of marketing automation. But this idea of serving up the next best content is based on, you have to go to a destination at the moment, right? And so our website website tools functionality allows for that to happen in more, more and more real time. And I think we have like seven or eight different types of recommendation services based on the account you're coming from, based on people like you, meaning you're coming with firmographic data not necessarily account, right?

Helen (23:02): So people who are in, you know, $50 million companies or even industries. So this idea of serving up content based on your history, based on what you've viewed in the past, there's lots of different ways. Those recommends can work, how you serve them, how you manifest them can be done. Two ways with us. One is out of the box. We have to, you know what I would call PR web promoters, one's called guide. One's called concierge more like a resource center page. Th the other is the, we have an API. So for large enterprise customers, we know that they're not going to buy those out of the box visualizations. They have their own CSS. So we are going to serve them up an API that they can then create, we'll get the engagement data back. We'll tell them what kind of contents working for them.

Kathleen (23:47): So I love the idea of this, and I can totally see the use case. The one question I have is like, when you first put it in place, I'm like, I'm going to put my hat on as though I were still back at impact where we had tons and tons and tons of content. Like if we decide we're going to put Path Factory in place, we want to do sort of more of a content driven customer journey. How hard is it to set up? Because it, like, I am, I can see on the one hand, it could be amazingly difficult where you're like, we have to classify all this content and, and tag it to different buyers or stages of the buyer's journey. Or is it like all automatic magic, press the button, does it for you.

Helen (24:24): Well there's two there's two ways, right?

Helen (24:26): Obviously data ingestion, content ingestion is, is our core competency, right? We've been around for 14, almost 14 years, I think. So understanding content is really one of our core competencies to set up is, I mean, it depends how far you want to go. We do crawl walk runs, right? Depending on the severity and the, and the maturity of the marketer depending on whether they want to integrate with their marketing automation platform, depending on whether they want to integrate with their CRM, there's all these other considerations, but to get going, it's pretty darn easy, especially if it's your website, it's a tracking script. And you know, that's, that's a JavaScript copy paste out of our, our platform and put it on your pages and away we go, we can scrape your data and understand that we can also understand how your, your visitors known or unknown are tracking against that combine the two together. And it becomes very powerful, but this idea of really understanding your content is the first step. And, and a lot of customers don't know that because it's relatively new concept. So we're, we're, we're testing it out right now. And I'm pretty psyched about the possibilities of that stuff.

Kathleen (25:32): I mean, why I get so excited about this in part, because I'm just a big marketing nerd, but also in part, because I, I do talk a lot publicly about how I believe that marketers need to think more like media companies and like your con, you need to treat your content like a product. And, you know, it's funny because like the media world is struggling. Journalists, journalism is struggling, but I think it's for the opposite reason, like they have great content, but they just don't have like the marketing mindset that, that we do. And I feel like if we could all meet in the middle, we would have the perfect organization. But you know, and when I was at impact, I was working on just that building a media company around a company that was selling B2B products. And what's interesting to me about this is at the time I really struggled as head of marketing because like, I got the need to think like a media company, but there were not software tools available to me to support my ability to do that.

Kathleen (26:39): So I had marketing automation in place, and that was great. But one example, like it didn't let me generate reports of content performance by author, which like blew my mind. I just, that was such a, it's such a small detail, but I was like that, that is odd that they don't do that. And it would be insanely useful. Cause I had a lot of writers working with me and I was like, I just want to be able to report to them how their content is doing. So that was like, that was the thing that initially kind of caused me to go out, searching for another solution. And then as I started doing research into all these different platforms, I realized how much more there was that I was missing out on in terms of reporting on what my content was doing for me. You know a lot of what you mentioned, like really, how is it contributing to pipeline?

Kathleen (27:25): What is this? This also blew my mind because I've been a HubSpot user forever and, and HubSpot has all the data to basically tell you if, if it wanted to, what a closed won customer's content journey was, right? Like, you should be able to clearly see that. And you can, if you, if you like manually go into each customer's timeline, but who's going to do that, especially when you're operating at scale. And so this is one of the reasons I love talking about this because the need has to me, at least so clearly been there for so long. And it's fascinating that nobody has come in to fill the gap, but it sounds like that's what you guys are doing.

Helen (28:03): Yeah. And I think the key is, is that there's these early adopters, you know, the Jeffrey Moore book Crossing the Chasm. Right. And I think of you as in that early adopter and really, you know, leaning in forward edge thinking woman, I, I think people have taken content for granted. It feels kind of like the ugly stepchild that nobody pays attention to, but it's kind of the sexiest thing that people put out. Right. and, and it really is definitive of your brand and the personas that you are talking to and, and who you want to be as a brand as well. And yet people don't know what's effective or working. And it drives me crazy that, you know, I've got people creating content for the sake of creating content because we need to build pipeline. Well, what content should we build? And I think this is this idea of sitting between kind of the CDPs. The CMS is right. The content management systems, the DAMs, even sitting between those and the activation layers, whatever you want to call that, whether you want to call that marketing automation platforms, ABM platforms, even us to some degree, we're an activation layer, but this middle piece in between what is my content finished artifacts and what do they look like and how good are they and how do they perform is not really owned by anybody at the moment. And that's what we're working towards.

Kathleen (29:29): Well, and I think I'm just guessing, but I would be willing to bet that there are probably a lot of marketers that actually don't want to answer that question because they're not going to like what they see. Like when you talked about content kind of not getting the attention it deserves. I totally agree with you. And I would liken it to like, the approach we've taken with content is somebody once told us we should do it. Right. And so as an industry, I it's like a game of darts. We were like, somebody said, you should play darts. And so we went and we got to the dark board and we picked up a handful of really pretty crummy, cheap darts that don't work well. And we took the handful and we threw it, all of them at the board at once. It's like, okay, check.

Kathleen (30:10): We've created content. I'm done. Now make it rain. Right. yeah, I would venture to guess it's sort of the same conversation that happens around when you talk to marketers about, do you want to be judged on the revenue or in the pipeline you drive, or do you want to be judged on leads? A lot of marketers are like, don't open that can of worms. That's going to start a whole conversation. I don't want to get into. And and, but it, but it reinforced not talking about it reinforces the status quo, which is, there's a lot of really content out there.

Helen (30:45): Yeah. And I, you know, this idea of revenue marketing as opposed to, you know, to demand generation and then customer marketing as two separate entities. My purview is it's revenue marketing. It doesn't matter. It's sales and marketing together to the end of revenue. And I put sales, you know, CS does, has CS customer success has responsibilities for bags too. Right. in terms of carrying a bag on that, you know, the, the, the retained revenue, if you will particularly in a SAS model. And, and so this, to your point, my, my, my hypothesis is that there is a FUD out there that CMOs won't admit to, which is, I don't know if I really want to open that can totally, what is my content, right? But I think if you can do it in a safe and prescriptive way that they can then make informed decisions on, around building their revising, revitalizing, optimizing their content strategy, sunsetting things that are not working quietly, without everybody knowing that they're sunsetting them paying smarter for contents indication, they become a more efficient.

Helen (31:52): And I think that the impact is both top line and bottom line. They're spending how much money with writers, creating content to what end, you know, I was talking to a customer at an enterprise account the other day. And he said, I have spent more than $5 million already this year on content creation. Wow. And that kind of blew my mind. Cause you know, I work with small that's company just on content. Right. And, and, and I was like, so how do you know what's if he says, if you could tell me what was efficient and effective, I would love you forever because I could slash and burn and put, do outbound activation stuff. So there's this, this two-sided coin of driving top-line and saving on the bottom line. Right. Cost efficiencies in this play that we've got.

Kathleen (32:41): I was going to say, I like, I know it works and I know it's worth investing in because I have, I mean, heck I've interviewed a ton of marketers for this podcast. I've heard a lot of stories, but then I've also done some experimenting on my own. And I've seen countless examples of people who have like done away with 70% of their blog content because they know it's not serving them and it's not performing and they sunset it, as you said, and then what's left actually performs so much better because it's all high quality, it's all directly into the pain points and the challenges of other, other audience. And so like what a, what a low hanging fruit way to get better results. It's like, it's like Marie Kondo saying your, your content.

Helen (33:26): I, I, I think, I think it's, it's twofold. It's making sure that what you do have is discoverable first and foremost, is it hidden so far down in back channels of the, the, you know, the dirt dirty dark alley of blogs or is it a discoverable in its own? Right. And is it valuable? And if it is valuable, then bring it up in discoverability. Right. And, and SEO optimized based on the keywords and the taxonomy that are in there. So I think people, you know, have really what effect story I'll, I'll expose some dirty laundry. When I first walked in, I was like, what content do we have? And it took somebody like, like two months to do an, a content audit. And now if I could run this scraper through your CD, your, your CDP or your CMS, I can give you an answer tomorrow which is kind of, and it's all in dashboards and it's, it's, it's a proof of concept for us and it, but it's pretty darn exciting. I saw some stuff the other day on, on, on our website and it's profound that, you know, the number one word in the cloud in the, in the, you know, the word cloud is landing page. That's not relevant right. For the buyers. So how do we make sure that we have the right words that are, you know, the most prominent ones across things that we're putting out there is awesome. I'm pretty, pretty excited.

Kathleen (34:47): I just love it. I love it. I love, I love stuff like this that like makes it easier to do your job while also like it's like helping you squeeze more juice out of the orange that you already have.

Helen (35:01): Yeah. And I think it's too full. Like for me, there's like three steps in this lifecycle of content, right. First is really understanding what you have the content audit. So, you know, what's the, what's the nutrition label, look of your product. What's the discoverability, what's the SEO optimization path for that content that you have? Is it accessible? Do you have the right alt text on, do your, do your, you know, do you have old texts? The second part is, you know, this idea of content performance in its own, right? So content performance is which content is working in which content is resonating with whom demographically from a graphically, et cetera, et cetera, right. Known and unknown. How big is your buying committee? We can see who's consuming what by account. And then the third is your content revenue performance. What content is driving your revenue for you? So tying that to CRM data really allows us to then start to be laser-focused in terms of what to put into the content hopper, what to remove and when to remove it in the licensing.

Kathleen (36:06): Cool. This is so exciting. I have a feeling, a lot of people listening are like their ears have perked up, and they're thinking about all the past possibilities of using something like this. And so the question I'm sure everybody has been asking is like, who is this right for? You know, and is it, is it a, an enterprise tool? Is it something that smaller businesses should use like an end or is it, is your applicability as a customer determined by the volume of content you have? Or how do you determine that?

Helen (36:37): I think it's all of the above. I think, you know, we have, we have a ton of SMB customers who are using us today, who aren't doing this content audit piece yet. Like I said, proof of concept, it's coming, stay tuned. But this, but we have a lot of people on our platform who are running content, who are either manually curating based on their best intuition or they're using our AI technology recommending a Netflix. And I think the other part of it is our activation side has three levels of activation, right? We have this website tools that I talked about, which is always on recommendation, serve up your content the way you want to understand the journey, et cetera. We have our legacy platform called module called campaign tools, which is campaign centric. So send out an email, you social bounce people back to Path Factory pages, and you have the list of content that's applicable, either curated or manually or curated by a human or curated by the machine.

Helen (37:34): Does it, the other part of it is when we, we had this ask from customers that want it to see this unified vision of my customer in my content journey. So we were asked to build a virtual event platform at the beginning of the pandemic, and that's not our wheelhouse, and there are a lot bigger companies in there. But I think the difference is is that people who are doing campaigns can now see whether somebody is coming for an event. They can see whether they're consuming the same content in two places, two experiences to, you know, to messages. And they can then see if they're seeing it on the website as well. This idea of a unified vision of your customer across all marketing channels.

Kathleen (38:10): Yeah. It's a holistic customer journey. Not like, not like just the part of the customer journey that I care about. Yeah.

Helen (38:18): And it's, and it's a complete comprehensive content journey too. So if you're serving up recommendations on one page or you serving up the same recommendation when they're doing a campaign, the answer should be no, they should be the next best or the most related to whatever that interest was or whether it was their history or their firmographic data. So this idea of, you know, serving up relevant content becomes much more pure in the way that you and I would think about serving it up as opposed to, you know, one-to-one in the 19, 1990s and two thousands with Don, Don peppers and Rogers, you know, peppers and Rogers. I worked with them, they were the, the grandfather and grandmother of one-to-one, but I think this vision is now really coming to life.

Kathleen (38:56): That's really cool. The possibilities are kind of amazing when you think about it. I'm going to shift gears because we're gonna run out of time and I could talk about this forever. So I always ask my guests two questions, and I'm really curious to hear what you have to say first is that, of course we talk, this is the inbound success podcast. We talk all about inbound marketing, and I'm always interested to hear if there's a particular individual or a company that you think is really like setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days.

Helen (39:27): Yeah. And I, I tried to look at it from two lenses. One was, what do I get? Right. But I've worked in MarTech. And so I'm a bit more cynical about what's coming into me. And then I, you know, the, the, I tried to look at it from a customer perspective, cause I'm always customer centric is the way that I look at the world. I don't look at inbound, you know, inside out I look outside in. And so I think, you know, a couple of our customers are doing some really great work and I'm going to shout them out. So Druva is a company that I really respect in terms of the work they're doing. They're doing some really nice things on their website. Druva.Com. Pragmatic and Pragmatic Institute. And a lot of people who are in product management probably know that company, they are the people that you can get your product management certification through.

Helen (40:14): They've been doing some really cool things. They've obviously had to pivot from in-person training to online training and and change their business model. And I think that they've really adapted nicely to that and they still are growing which is a great sign on the, on the marketing technology side or as a, as a purchaser of software, I think there's a couple one would be gong. I think gong does a really nice job of, and, and Panda doc is another one for signatures and we don't use them. So I'll give them a shout out. They, they do a nice job of really making it human. And I think sometimes we get wrapped around the axles in our own terminologies and, you know, it's the, you know, you're creating a new category, you're creating a new topic or you're creating and we need to have the best terminology, but nobody knows what the hell you're talking about.

Helen (41:07): Right? These two, these two companies do a really nice job of putting the human language, basic language that, you know, not Washington post or not the financial times, but it's kind of in between USA today and the Washington Post that the average reader can understand what they're trying to achieve. And I think this idea of, you know, really strong readability scores on content is where I'm laser focused is making sure people understand what we are talking about. I think people need to really sit back and say, is this language that, you know, my fifth grader or my, my five-year-old could understand if I explained it to them while we're pushing them on a swing or something like that,

Kathleen (41:46): Examples, those are great. I'm definitely gonna check them out. And there's a few new ones in there that I was not aware of. So I'll put those links in the show notes. And then the second question is that so many marketers I talk to are insanely busy, overwhelmed, and they, a lot of them say that one of the hardest things is just honestly keeping pace with how quickly digital marketing changes, you know, just when you think you've figured out, for example, Facebook, you know, the algorithm changed, but what have you, so how do you personally keep yourself educated, stay up to date and stay current?

Helen (42:19): Yeah, like I, I think I'm curious by nature. So I Google a lot. Probably the algorithm for Google is really messed up with me, but I think, you know, I have people who are on my board of directors, my personal board of directors, who I refer to who are not in the same industry at all. I think that that's important. So I have a friend, a very good friend who is the head of CRM and loyalty for Red Lobster. She's B2C. She's not in software. She buys from vendors. So I talked to her a lot. So she's doing some really fun things, obviously with Red Lobster going through the pandemic. And you know, I think there are different communities that I belong to as well. Obviously the CMO Coffee Talk and Last Sip Clubs are of interest to me.

Helen (43:07): I belong to probably five other Slack groups that are not my core ballywick, so I belong to MOPS, right. I belong to Customer Success channel. Those are really insightful ways for me to crowdsource intel. But then obviously, you know, there are other books and blogs and things like that that you read. And, you know, you, you've probably heard the list, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time, but I, you know, at the end of the day core principles of operating are the things that keep it grounded for me. So we operate by two credos at Path Factory. Intelligent speed, which means you need to be 80% confident that the decisions that you're making are the right decisions for the company and for the customer and for you that there's no risk to any of those three parties.

Helen (44:01): So 80% nobody's ever going to be perfect. So 80% competent that it's the right decision. So that means that gives us grace when there are changes to algos, to new new things, it allows us to test. Right. and the other one is level five leadership, which is Jim Collins' Good to Great philosophy, which is lead with humility. There are no egos at the door to check them. And I don't, and don't read my emails with Tom. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm straight to the point. It's about moving at intelligent speed. If I write. Yes, it means yes. If I write, no, it means no. But I think those two have served us well. They broken down the silos a lot. And, and the other one is not, everybody's invited to every meeting. Like those are the three big ones for us. In terms of you'll be invited when it's right for you to be invited, you'll be filled in and contextualized and, and we'll move from there.

Kathleen (45:01): Love don't read my emails with tone. So much gets misread in written form.

Helen (45:06): Yeah, I don't write them with tone. Sometimes I do, but then I don't send them.

Helen (45:11): I let them sit for 24 hours and then I go back and clean up the tone. But don't read my emails with tone. Don't read my Slack messages with tone.

Kathleen (45:19): So good. I'm going to use that. Well, I'm sure there are people listening who are really now want to learn more about Path Factory, or have a question and would love to connect with you. What is the best way for them to find you online?

Helen (45:33): A couple of ways, Helen, Helen, at Path Factory. I'll put my email address out there, [email protected]. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. Facebook is personal, not professional. Twitter is opinions are my own, take them.

Helen (45:52): I do post some business stuff on there, but I have an opinion or two about politics as a relatively new American. And yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm happy to connect. We've got a great community of people who would love to talk to you about us. We've got advocates up the wazoo. NPS is through the roof. And so we're happy to talk to anybody who wants to learn more.

Kathleen (46:16): I love it. Well, I'll all of those links to all of those profiles will go in the show notes. So if your listening, head there and you can connect with Helen, you can learn more about Path Factory, and you can check out some of the companies that she mentioned earlier that are good examples of inbound marketing. And if you are listening and you liked this episode as always, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. That is how other listeners find us. And finally, if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Helen. This was a ton of fun.

Helen (46:55): Thanks Kathleen, for having me. I really appreciate your time and as always much respect for you and what you do.

Kathleen (47:00): Oh, right back at ya.

Helen (47:02): Cheers.

How has productivity app Doist acquired 25 million customers without tracking KPIs or using paid ads?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Doist Head of Marketing Brenna Loury shares the company's unusual growth story. An all remote company from its start, Doist has experienced steady growth as a result of a clear vision and mission, a product-led approach, and deep empathy for the customer.

Today, the company is experiencing 100% year over year organic growth, has more than 50,000 email subscribers, and more than 25 million customers. Incredibly, it wasn't until the past year that they began measuring and tracking KPIs, looking at Google Analytics, or using paid ads.

In this episode, Brenna breaks down the three things that are the secrets to Doist's growth.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear what Brenna has to say.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Doist website
• Follow Brenna on Twitter
• Connect with Brenna on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Brenna Loury, who is the head of marketing at Doist. Welcome to the podcast Brenna.

Brenna (00:24): Thank you so much for having me, Kathleen. I'm so excited. Honestly, I have been listening to your podcast all week in preparation and I can't wait to be here. It's such an honor. Thank you.

Kathleen (00:35): I'm really excited to talk to you because I am a big fan in general of not always playing by the rules. And so quick preview. What we're going to talk about today is how you can not play by all the rules of marketing and still get great results. But before we do that Brenna, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and about Doist?

Brenna (01:00): Sure, definitely. So I have been with Doist since pretty much the very beginning of the company. My background. I studied communication and business in college and for one reason or another ended up graduating and then going to live in Chile for a while. And I was working for the Chilean ministry of economy and a program called startup Chile as the head of communications and PR. And that's actually where I ended up meeting Amir who is the founder of Doist. He was participating in the program at the time. And then I left the ministry of economy to go start my own sort of boutique PR firm for tech startups in the Latin American scene. And Amir was one of my first clients with ToDoist. It was about 2012. And he was getting getting ready to launch the first versions of Todoist for iOS and Android. And I was helping on the PR side of things. So that's how I got involved with Doist and have worn a lot of different hats ever since. And yeah, I just, I started taking on more and more responsibilities and eventually became a full-time employee of Doist in 2014 and have been growing the marketing team ever since.

Kathleen (02:32): And tell me more about what Doist is.

Brenna (02:34): Yeah. So Doist well, we're, we're a fully remote productivity software company. We've been fully remote since day one. Today we're about a hundred people in, I think, I think over 35 countries at this point. And so we create tools that help people live more productive and healthier lives. And so our main as I mentioned before is called Todoist. It's a personal productivity app that has been on the market since about 2007. We have about 25 million users of Todoist these days. And in 2017 we launched Twist, which is a team communication app that we created out of our needs to communicate remotely. So yeah, those are our two products then we've been remote since the very beginning. So it's been kind of an interesting ride in the last year with COVID to see, you know, the whole world switching to remote and yeah, it's, it's been very interesting so far.

Kathleen (03:40): Yeah. You guys were really ahead of the curve with with your remote team and and so I think it would be, I feel like we could do a whole nother podcast just on like what companies that are transitioning to remote should know. But but one fun fact for anyone listening, because obviously they cannot see you, but Brenna is literally going on maternity leave. Like what tomorrow?

Brenna (04:10): So today is Wednesday and my last day is Friday and my due date is in two weeks from yesterday.

Kathleen (04:18): So you are just on the cusp. Will this be your first?

Brenna (04:21): My second. Yeah. So I'm trying to combat pregnancy brain at as much as I can. So I'm hope I'm coherent enough for everybody today.

Kathleen (04:31): Oh, I think you're going to do just fine. And that's exciting. So congratulations. I remember the last few weeks they tend to go a lot slower than you want them to

Brenna (04:42): Yeah. Counting down the minutes basically.

Kathleen (04:44): Yeah. Yeah. Well, one, like I said, when we started out, the reason I was so excited to chat with you is that you guys have an unusual story. You've grown considerably, as you mentioned, you have a huge user base, you've introduced additional products. But you really have not followed the traditional marketing playbook. So I guess let's just start out by, by having you share, like what, what have you done for marketing and what do you credit to your success?

Brenna (05:15): Yeah. I personally really love talking about our story with marketing because it has a lot of different aspects that I think today would kind of be impossible. So it's hard honestly, to make sort of a playbook out of it, but it is really fun to look back and see what worked for us back in the day, because like I mentioned so to Doist was created in 2007 by Amir. He posted the app while he was in college. And then a few years later, I think it was in 2011, he kind of started noticing that the app was taking off. People were starting to pay for it. So to be honest, we have been a profitable company from day one which is why we've never raised any VC funds. So that's another part of being against the status quo in our history.

Brenna (06:16): But in terms of marketing, it has been a fascinating ride because we started out super small team and we are still a small team like today we're a hundred people and we manage two different software apps and three different brands. So we don't have like this crazy bandwidth that a lot of other larger companies have at their disposal. So when I started my expertise was in PR and for those of those people listening, like the PR landscape has changed dramatically. Like very, very much since I was working in this in 2012. So PR was a huge portion of our initial success, I think because we really invested a lot of resources in that. And by resources, I mean, like me writing out press releases, which today, like you can't even imagine, you know, writing a press release. Haven't done that in years, but so we started out with PR and a lot of journalists really engaged with Todoist and began writing about it organically, which I think contributed to a lot of our initial momentum. And from there,

Kathleen (07:39): Sorry to interrupt you, but a question. In those early years, when you were working on the PR, you know, I I'm sure a lot of my listeners do PR. My take on it is that it's worth doing a press release if you genuinely have something newsworthy, like, you know, there are definitely things that happen that, that, that are easy to get coverage for because they're, they're big news. You know, that could be well and big news is all relative, but like that could be raising a S a substantive round of venture capital. Like what you said you did not do. It could be you know, integrating with another platform that's more well known. There, there are a lot of different things could be getting a huge client. What was it that you were doing your press releases on that, that enabled you to garner coverage?

Brenna (08:29): Yeah, so I'm, I'm having a flashback right now of like the first few press releases that we wrote. And I think that the first big one was when we launched our first mobile apps and this was in November of 2012. So if you kind of like take a walk back, you know, at that time there weren't like a ton, the app ecosystem just is not what it is today. And so there were far fewer companies that had mobile apps especially for like the personal productivity space. So we were one of the first ones who actually created apps for both of these two platforms at the same time. And yeah, I'm trying to think back to the, to the other ones that we would, that we would write. It was always product based. We've always been a very like product led company. And a lot of, most of our marketing is, is led by the advances that we make in the product.

Kathleen (09:37): Fair to say that the coverage was driven by news around innovation?

Brenna (09:41): Yeah, definitely. I mean, we never had any press release that yeah, like you said before, we never raised any funds or we never had any like fancy people to our board. We don't have a board. So every press release we did was based around product news. But today, you know, I wouldn't even like almost dream of writing a press release for one of our product updates. Even when we do a massive product update, we don't do press releases anymore. But that's partly because we have close relationships with journalists and things are just very different these days, to be honest, like Product Hunt didn't exist back in the day.

Kathleen (10:23): I just did a Product Hunt launch a week ago actually. And it's, it's true. It's interesting. Like we, we wound up number one product of the day and I did get lots of reporters reaching out to me. So it, it's funny how there are these other channels.

Brenna (10:38): Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I mean, that worked really well for us and PR has, you know, it was a huge piece of the pie chart of our marketing, but today it's, it's considerably smaller to be honest.

Kathleen (10:56): So I stopped you, you were talking about how back in the day you were doing press releases, you were getting press coverage and then you were going to kind of go onto something else. And so I want to, I want to go back to that.

Brenna (11:06): Yeah. So I think a lot of, you know, one sort of fun anecdote about marketing and Doist is, you know, this is the year 2021, and it was only in 2020 that we began like barely dipping our feet in paid advertising. So, you know, from when I started working on marketing at Doist in 2012, until 2020, we never spent a cent on paid advertising. All of the other marketing campaigns were really focused on like creating a community around our existing users like announcing these big product updates to tech blogs and things like that. And for us, that was, it worked really well. Like we have grown organically and never invested anything into paid ads. And I'm, I'm looking forward to talking more about like, you know, how we how our mindset around empathy for the user and, you know, putting ourselves in their shoes has helped us grow in this like very unconventional way.

Kathleen (12:18): Let's dig into that because you and I talked about that a little bit when we first met, and I think this is something that I, that I find really interesting because there, a lot of people talk about authenticity and empathy and things like that, but, but there's no handbook for it and you kind of can't fake it, you know? So, so let's break down. What do you mean when you say empathy for the user and, and describe to me how that plays out in your marketing?

Brenna (12:44): Definitely. So it's, it's, it's really interesting because we have these two different brands, right? So we have these two pretty separate apps. So Todoist and Twist. For Todoist in particular, what we've learned along the way is that people tend to download like this, you know, task management productivity app in kind of times of like personal crisis, to be honest, you know, if, if or not necessarily crisis, but like, you know, something big is happening in somebody's life. You know, they're getting married or starting a new job, or you know starting a new semester at school and they really need a way to get themselves organized. So there's this kind of driver that leads people to, to sign up for the app and really putting yourself in their shoes and understanding what they're going through in that moment has been, has been key for us.

Brenna (13:38): And it's similar with our other app called Twist because it's also this sort of like light bulb moment that people have for those who are listening that don't know, Twist is a team communication app. That's based like very heavily around asynchronous communication. It's very much like an anti Slack, anti Microsoft teams tool that allows people to disconnect and spend, you know, a couple of hours working on what they need to work on without getting distracted. And so, you know, when people start searching for this app, it's clear that like something in their workflow or in their teamwork is not working and trying to meet those people at that sort of moment of that light bulb moment or that moment of crisis and providing them the education and the resources that they need to kind of come to this conclusion a little bit sooner and get onboarded into our products. I think has been yeah, pretty beneficial for us.

Kathleen (14:41): So how does that play out in your marketing? Like, I would love it if you could share some examples of say, you mentioned the example, for example, of somebody who who's going to college and they need to get, or getting married and they need to get organized. How do you, how do you weave that into your marketing strategy?

Brenna (14:58): Yeah, so we have a big portion of our marketing is content marketing. We have a blog that I am very proud of. My team is very exceptional. So we create a lot of content that is very in depth and like very comprehensive in terms of like creating a guide for students, for example, or, you know, for Todoist in particular, we have like a bank of templates, you know, if somebody is starting a new semester in school, like how can you organize your tasks to make the most out of your education, for example. So we do work pretty heavily with like we're really into SEO, sorry, I'm having like a brain of disfunction there. Like SEO is very important for us. We have increased the organic traffic to our blog, like a hundred percent compared to like 2020 compared to 2019. So that's great. Just really giving people the resources that they need to like have this light bulb moment and then take action on it as best as they can.

Kathleen (16:17): So to that point, and this is sort of interesting, like we have a lot of content marketers that listen and they get basic SEO, but but the debate I hear a lot is around like how top of funnel do you go? And so I'm curious, we'll use the example of the person who's getting married. Are you publishing content around how to get organized for getting married or is it other topics around getting married? Like what does that strategy look like?

Brenna (16:47): Yeah. So if we're going to use that example it would be something like the keyword would be, you know, wedding checklist or wedding checklist template, something like that. And then we would create content around, like, you know, this to-do is template that you can import into your own to do is and probably, you know, interview some productivity specialists that may be active in the, you know, wedding planning space, who knows. But we, we are pretty particular around like the breakdown of our content attacking like the different stages of the funnel, because we do have a lot of active users of our apps that, you know, want to know what's going on and what is the latest news product updates and to do list. And then also kind of like killing two birds with one stone, I guess, in terms of finding people who are exploring these topics and, and might need a tool to, to them.

Kathleen (17:50): So when you say you're particular about how you break down, I guess I would characterize it as like the customer journey or the steps in the funnel. How, what do you mean by that?

Brenna (18:01): Yeah, so we have different sort of categories of content on our blogs. So for example, a post that we published recently was around how to plan your day. So the keyword there is, you know, I think just planning your day basically. So that's anybody who is looking for some guidance on like how to deal with the work that they have to manage. So that will be the top of funnel, obviously like anybody who's Googling, you know, how, how do I plan my day? And then in the middle, we'll have content that is, you know, more related to our products, maybe some news about like new integration partners or things like that. And then at the bottom of the funnel, we do we do regular product updates as with these like what's new campaigns. So we'll gather, you know, two or three months of product updates and package them into a campaign called, like what's new in Todoist, or what's new in Twist, where all of our existing users can go in and read about what we've been up to and what's new in our apps.

Kathleen (19:08): So is that all on the one blog or do you have separate blogs for your like educational content versus your product content?

Brenna (19:15): Yeah. This is a fun question we really grappled with for a while, at the very beginning, we had separate blogs and ultimately we ended up bringing those under one umbrella under our Doist brand. So it's just you know, the newest blog and that encompasses all of our, you know, everything basically. But we do have separate sites. For example, we have a compilation of like productivity guides and a productivity quiz for Todoist users and that lives on its own site. And we also have a set of guides for remote working and that lives on the Twist domain, but everything else, yeah, it's under the Doist umbrella. And that was honestly like a really, really hard decision to make back in the day. Because the audiences are, you know, while we create productivity software, like the audiences, not aren't necessarily like seeking the same content at the same time. And then we have this other audience on top of that, that is looking for content related to like thought leadership around remote work. So it's, it's kind of a lot of puzzle pieces to fit together and doing that well is yeah, it's, it takes a lot of thought actually.

Kathleen (20:34): So I really want to pick your brain on this selfishly, because I'm in the same boat, I worked for a company that has two products that loosely fall under the umbrella of digital engagement security, but they are very different products for very different audiences. And so, and I'm sure there are people listening that have this situation too. I'm I'm curious, I guess first, why did you decide to put it all together?

Brenna (20:56): Yeah. it's, it was a tough decision. Like we deliberated about it for a long time. And even to this day, I think there are some times where we're like, Oh, should we have done that? You know, would these things live better in their own domains? But at the end of the day, like we use our dual brand umbrella to kind of guide everything that we do. So that means like do us as a company, we are really like, our mission is to help people live more productive, calm, fulfilling lives. And part of that is, you know, the way you work part of that is the way that you manage your day, you manage your time. And so these things kind of like loosely fallen together. And our reasoning was that like, you know, if somebody is interested in being more productive in their day and they're a Todoist user, like what's to stop them from being interested in content that will help them be more productive in terms of teamwork as well. So it was really driven by our company's mission and our vision for the future that we ourselves want to work in. So I think your brand, like the parent brand really dictates, like if those should, should live together or separately,

Kathleen (22:18): That makes sense. And how do you functionally manage creating blog content and also I'm assuming you have some email marketing thrown in there, like how do you manage all that in a way that you don't leave, like part of your audience feeling alienated or, or how do you prevent unsubscribes too? Because that's always a worry if you're creating content for lots of different audiences at different times in their lives, it's very hard to solve for everyone all at the same time.

Brenna (22:49): Yeah, that is very, very true. We have a very talented content team. I have to give all the credit to them to be honest. They're just very thoughtful about this and methodical about how we package our content together to make it as appealing as possible. And in terms of email marketing with our blog like not taking into account the email marketing that we have for our different products, but just for our blog. For example, we only send one newsletter a week, so we're not sending people a newsletter every time we publish a new blog post, because we figured if we did that, then that would be kind of spammy. Like, you know, if I'm a Todoist user and I'm receiving like a an email about a new Twist feature, like what, I don't know, it just, it doesn't compute.

Brenna (23:48): So that's why we decided to package all of those into just one single weekly newsletter. And the way that our team does that is like finding a common theme and then kind of like cherry picking the different content from our products, thought leadership and packaging that together in a way that is coherent and doesn't necessarily feel like, okay, look, here's this section about Todoist. Here's a section about Twist. Here's a section about remote work. It takes like a lot more thought than just, you know, going post by post. And I think that has worked well for us, our newsletter blog newsletter list just crossed, I think the 50,000 subscriber milestones. So that was exciting for us. And yeah, I think it's working and you send it out every week, every week. Yeah. And, and that's new. We had just sent it out every two weeks, but you know, our content team is kind of on a roll these days.

Brenna (24:55): And so we figured it we could, we could bump the cadence and I guess that is sort of another component of our unconventional marketing. Like we are really entrenched in the mentality of like, not spamming our users. Like we don't send people push notifications. We only were like very, very mindful about the communications that we send out to our users and you know, try not to bother them during their day because we know that they're busy and I have a lot of stuff going on and they don't need to be reminded that, you know, Todoist or Twist exists all the time. So that has something that has just been ingrained into all of our brains on the marketing team. And I think it's, it's different because a lot of other companies don't operate, operate that way. And a lot of the marketing playbooks, like, I don't think take that into account.

Kathleen (25:55): Yeah, yeah, yeah. You definitely have to be careful. So you're, it sounds like you're investing a lot of time and effort into content. You mentioned that, that that's a big focus for you. How are you getting your content out in front of your audience beyond, you know, organic search?

Brenna (26:13): That's a great question. And honestly, I think that's something that we could do better. It's the content that we have on our blog is really top-notch. And I think, you know, the, the increase in organic traffic speaks for itself, and that has been really gratifying to see, but at the same time like we also have never experienced with like, or never experimented with running ads based on our content or doing performance marketing with our content. At this point it's pretty much just our, like the email newsletter that I had mentioned are on our social media channels. And then also we do kind of pepper in our, our content into the, like the product email life cycle as well. So we try and find useful places where our content would fit like in the user life cycle and include it there, but it's a challenge for us. Like our team is very small. We only have two people who work on content full-time and they're writers and editors and, you know, coordinators at the content calendar doing a little bit of everything there, right. The newsletter. And it's, it's honestly hard to find the bandwidth to like, explore all these other different channels. But that is definitely on our radar for this year.

Kathleen (27:39): And, and what percentage of your marketing effort goes towards acquiring new customers versus marketing to the customers you already have?

Brenna (27:50): Yeah, that's, that's a great question. Honestly we focus most of our marketing on our existing users because Todoist, for example, has grown essentially organically since day one. Twist is a little bit of a different story that has been more of an uphill battle. But because we haven't had to kind of focus on filling the funnel for new users. We've tried really hard to like aim most of our marketing efforts at people who are already using our product.

Kathleen (28:29): Do you have any referral campaigns? Like where, where do most of your new customers come in from? Are they just finding you in the app store?

Brenna (28:37): Especially before people find us in the app store, we have like many thousands of downloads a day, so it's, we're almost like we don't want to fill the funnel anymore. We have this like very strange problem of like, we have a lot of downloads and new users and trying to figure out how to best onboard them and everything is, is a challenge for us, for sure. So yeah, a lot of our, our users come just from the web, from the Apple app store, Google play, and then for Twist it's a lot more word of mouth and people find us a lot more frequently through our content marketing because it's, yeah, it's a very different user journey that people have to go through. So they're both very different, like you know, marketing to us is, it's somewhat of a challenge because the journeys for the products are so different. And they require like very, very different tactics. And I think it's interesting.

Kathleen (29:42): That you're in the app stores because I mean, I, I have not done any marketing for an app before. And my understanding is that it is very much its own beast. I would imagine that getting reviews is a big piece of that. And so can you talk a little bit about any efforts you've put into increasing your visibility in the app store?

Brenna (30:00): Yeah, definitely. So we have experimented with that more frequently in the last few years before we would just kind of like, you know, throw our screenshots up and have our app description and not do too much about it. Like we didn't have any prompts in our apps, like asking users to, to write reviews. But we do now. And that has been very useful for us to find like this very specific moment in the user journey to ask people to give that feedback. Definitely a trial and error process. But yeah, having the reviews is, is key. And then we also do spend a lot of time on the screenshots and graphics themselves making those look beautiful and it's a science in itself of like, you know, how many characters and, you know, what should, what should be on the, on the screenshot and how much does the app to show. And it's kind of a science and we have started experimenting with Apple search ads. So that's new for us this year as well. And it's going pretty well, but yeah, the app stores are our huge source of new users for us.

Kathleen (31:23): Now, so, so recap for me your results, because I feel like that's what makes the story so interesting. You talked about a hundred percent year over year traffic growth, I think it was from your content. Are there other results in the, in the form of like user acquisition or any other growth metrics that would be good to add to that?

Brenna (31:44): Yeah. I mean to date, I, yeah, we have had like over 25 million people sign up for Todoist. So that has been exciting. Like one really cool marketing campaign that always sticks with me that we did was in 2016, I believe. And that's when our users crossed the 1 billion completed tasks threshold. So that was a really exciting moment. And we created a really special marketing campaign around that, like asking our users, what is the most important thing that Todoist has helped you achieve in your life? And the answers we got were just like, so mind blowing and emotional and really touching to be honest. And, and that it has all been done like organically, to be honest. So, and we're also very much an anomaly in that we don't track our data or ROI of marketing really at all.

Brenna (32:52): We've never really had to, until we started investing money in ads this year. So we've never really been a data-driven company. Like a lot of the work that we've done has been based on our gut feeling and you know, how we want our users to interact with our apps and like our hopes and dreams that we have for them in terms of like living a more productive, fulfilling life. So I guess that is another, another weird aspect of working at Doist is like, we, we just, last year, I think started like looking at Google analytics and things like that. So I don't know, like not a lot. I worry that people can't take much out of this this playbook because it is so unconventional and different than like a regular startup.

Kathleen (33:47): But there's some really important lessons here. And as I listened to you talk, I think there's like three that really stand out to me. And this is a very strong illustration of how you can, you know, follow the classic marketing playbook and still not see results, or you can not follow the classic marketing playbook as you did and see great results. And so the three things that stand out to me are number one, a very clear why, like you said earlier on that you have this really clear vision of the world that you want to live and work in, and that you, and you want to share that with your users and you want to attract the people that, that share that feeling. And so I feel like defining that sort of vision, mission, and values, and being really clear about it and, and putting some emotion behind it is something that every marketer really, really needs to start with, because that makes everything else that much easier.

Brenna (34:46): Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you totally hit the nail on the head, Kathleen like everything that we do at Doist, like any marketing initiatives that we do, we have this like a campaign brief and at the top of the campaign brief, it's always like a section that starts out with why, why is this great for the user? Why is this going to improve their life? And that goes from like even the biggest marketing projects we have to like the smallest sort of like release announcements that we do. So that is huge for us. And I think it's a huge like kudos to our founder, Amir. He has been very clear about that since day one. And so again, like I had mentioned this phrase before, but like, this is just embedded in our DNA. Everything we do starts with why and everything we do is formulated under this umbrella of like, what is the future that we want to live and work in and how can we like fast track this future for more people as well?

Kathleen (35:51): I love that. And that comes through very clearly when we hear you talk. I would say the second thing that jumps out at me is you talked about being a product led company, and I've always said, and I strongly believe that the best marketing in the world cannot make up for a poor product. Right. And so having a focus on the product first and letting the product honestly do the work for you, having a great product, focusing on continuing to improve it, continuing to add functionality that solves for the needs of your users. Like that's big, and that's not just a marketing thing, that's a company thing. And, and I would say the vision mission values as a company thing too.

Brenna (36:27): Definitely. Yeah. And in terms of the product, I think there are a few other takeaways that I could mention that might be useful for people. Like one other sort of unconventional thing that we have done is like, we always translated all of our apps into, I think, like almost 20 different languages. So all of our apps, all of our help center content, all of our lifecycle marketing. Part of our company's DNA is being like a, a global company. Like I said, we've been remote from day one. Our, our team is spread out all across the world. And so we are really passionate about like providing products for users in the language that they speak. So that has been one really important driver of growth, I think for us. And then just in terms of like always trying to like innovate and not rest on your laurels, like, you know, a lot of our competitors in the productivity space have been acquired and or, you know, kind of fallen off the wayside. Like everybody knows that like the, you know, the to-do list app space is very extensive. But just continuing to kind of like keep our heads down, focus on like what we want to see out of the app and not looking at competitors has, has worked out really well for us.

Kathleen (37:54): That the third thing that to me jumped out of this conversation was this sort of like obsessive focus on the customer and the journey that they're on and you referred to it as empathy for the customer. And, and to me, that, and how that plays out in terms of solving for the needs of the customer through content. Like those two seem very married together, having deep empathy for the customer and then creating content that solves for them. I feel like when you add these three things together, the clear vision and why, the product led approach, and then the deep empathy for the customer, how that translates into a content driven approach. Like you have basically thrown out all the rest of the marketing rulebooks, but you did those three things really well and it allowed you to not do the others.

Kathleen (38:47): Like, honestly, that's where your success sounds like it came from. And I love that because the three, those three things are things that transcend trends. It's, they transcend technology and it transcends tactics. So like a lot of marketers get caught up in what's the latest, you know, Google algorithm or what's happening with Facebook ads and what's, what's, you know, clubhouses new, should I be on that? And all of those things are like channel changes and tactics and technology changes. But if you stay true to the three core things we talked about, which are timeless and marketing, then none of the rest of it really matters, it seems to me.

Brenna (39:28): Yeah. I mean, for sure, like our brand you know, since I started at Doist, like, we have been kind of like maniacally protective of our brand. And in fact, I was listening to your podcast earlier today with Nandini Jammi about like the you know, not letting your company's ads run on these like not great websites. And that for us has been like a really great North star ever since beginning. And that allows us, like knowing what we want out of our brand. And like knowing that the products that we create, you know, we want people to be more productive. So for us, that's like, okay, well, productivity probably doesn't mean that like, people are going to be on Facebook all day. So what's the point of like running ads, because that's essentially against like everything that we're going for. So for us, that has been kind of essential in our process of elimination in terms of marketing tactics.

Kathleen (40:34): I love that. I love this whole story. You know, we're going to run out of time, so we've got to change gears now. And I have two questions for you that I ask all of my guests, which you've probably heard since you've been listening. First one being, of course, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on the podcast. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is doing really amazing inbound marketing work?

Brenna (40:57): Yeah, so besides my team, because I am so proud of them, everything that they do I guess my best example, these days would be Peloton. I know it's like such a hot topic. These, you know, with the COVID and, you know, people ordering bikes and stuff, it's like very trendy these days, but coming on the heels of what you just mentioned, like, I don't notice that many brands that do like this Y based marketing as well as Peloton, like as a user. I really appreciate the communication that they have with us. And I feel like it's very authentic. Like there, I find one of the few brands that walk the walk and talk the talk. Like if they say that they are investing in diversity, like you can really tell that they're investing in diversity. And they have just done like this insane job of like building a community around the product. And getting people like super hyped up into like all of the different offerings that they have. I appreciate us as a user. They like do beta testing and invitations that make you feel like you're part of the product roadmap. But more importantly, I feel like it's a brand that I just, I really appreciate their authenticity and their dedication to like putting their money where their mouth is.

Kathleen (42:31): Well, I too am a Peloton user. And so you can ride with me at kathslat, if anybody wants to join. I'm usually on it every morning from what is it, like 5:45 to 6:30 AM? Otherwise it doesn't happen, but no, I totally agree with you. And in fact, I posted something on LinkedIn recently about how they're like a marketing masterclass, because it's community, it's gamification, it's the personal brands of their instructors that they've, they've led with. The instructor brands which I think is really smart because people like to glom onto people. There's so much to the Peloton model that I, I totally agree with you.

Brenna (43:13): Yeah. It's kind of like a never ending story I would love to read. If somebody would be interested in writing like a book on Peloton marketing, I would totally buy that.

Kathleen (43:22): Yes. As would I. All right. Other question, marketing changes really quickly. How do you keep up to date and stay educated?

Brenna (43:32): Yeah, I actually like every Wednesday, I block off a time in my calendar for learning. So this is very important for me. It's very important. Like part of our team ethos at Doist is to maintain like your professional acumen. So there are a few sites that I regularly peruse on my Wednesdays on my learning Wednesdays. One is the blog that Open View Partners writes. So they're, they're kind of experts in product led growth. So they tend to have pretty good content about that. Reforge, which they focus on growth marketing, Brian Balfour. He's really good. Yeah. Marketing examples. Awesome. Just like really bite sized marketing content that's super actionable. First Round Review, which is another VC fund that has a really fantastic blog. And then anything by your previous guests, April Dunford, who I'm like, I think I've read her book like two or three times. So I'm a big fan of hers, but honestly, when I was thinking of this question, I do feel like I struggled to find like really well done content about marketing that is big picture and like, not necessarily focused on like the minutia of marketing. Like I would really love to read more content. That's like bigger picture branding, positioning, product marketing. And I, I find that it's challenging to find that these days, to be honest.

Kathleen (45:18): Yeah, there, and there is a sea of marketing content. There's so much of it. And so we didn't have to find the gems is tough, which is why I'm asking this question and, you know, hearing what other people have, have zeroed in on in terms of the needle in the haystack.

Brenna (45:34): Yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenge. Like there's a lot to sift through. So if anybody wants to share me their gems, you can find me on Twitter at BrennaKL. And I would definitely like to read some new content these days.

Kathleen (45:48): You know, it's funny, I should put together an article with all of the answers to this question that I've gotten from different people and share it out because it is a huge challenge. So thank you for sharing your sources. You just mentioned one way people can find you that is on Twitter. Any other particular ways people should reach out and connect with you online, or how can they learn more about Doist?

Brenna (46:11): Yeah. So Twitter is the best place for me. For the time being I will be completely disconnecting from work as of this Friday, but otherwise you can learn about Doist, Todoist, and Twist at Doist.com. And yeah. Thank you again, Kathleen, for having me on it was a real pleasure.

Kathleen (46:35): This was a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing your story. And, and if you're listening and you learned something new or enjoyed this episode, of course, 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 who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Brenna.

Brenna (47:00): Thank you for having me.

How will Apple's upcoming iOS 14 privacy updates impact your ability to use paid media to achieve your marketing goals?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Loop Club Co-Founder and CEO Tim Keen explains what will happen when Apple rolls out iOS 14, how it will impact Facebook specifically, what it will mean for marketers' ability to use retargeting, and what brands should be doing now to prepare for it.

From simple steps like verifying your domain in Facebook ads manager and doing more testing on ad creative, to advanced solutions like server side tracking, Tim shares actionable steps that marketers can take to ensure their paid media strategies continue to deliver value.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear what Tim has to say.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Loop Club website
• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Tim Keen, who is the co-founder of Loop Club. Welcome to the podcast Tim.

Tim (00:22): Thank you so much for having me, Kathleen.

Kathleen (00:24): Thanks for being here. You guys are doing some really interesting work and I can't wait to dig into the topic at hand today, but before I do that, can you just tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, how you came to be doing what you're doing now and what Loop Club is?

Tim (00:39): Absolutely. So Loop Club is a performance marketing agency. We work with specifically performance, purpose driven Shopify brands. So we're trying to grow brands that have a kind of social mission or trying to do something good or that do something that we are interested in growing. And we leverage our direct to consumer experience to grow those brands very, very, very quickly. We all came from funny backgrounds and I came from, I didn't come from this world at all. I used to play in a band and I was in like a touring rock band that was playing all around the world. It was great time. It was really, really fun. But the thing about being in a band is that it just means you don't make any money at all. No matter, like, unless you're like really, unless you're used to like those mid tier bands of bands that you see play shows, even at like pack of venues, then I'll make it.

Tim (01:28): It's just impossible to me. It's like a labor of love. So that whole time I'm just thinking to myself, I'm like, okay, like I need something. I need to figure out how to add a crack this and started teaching myself how to do digital marketing, started building online stores and, and was seeing some success. Just, just after a little while saw traction. And then I went into an agency called Mute Six, which unbeknownst to me at the time was one of the fastest growing agencies in the country. And I just kind of like lapped it all up. And then my clients grew extremely fast. I grew very fast there and a few of my colleagues and I were just doing well. And then just think it's just kind of continued on our clients, wanted to keep working with us. And now we're here at the start of COVID COVID is a huge part of this as well. Cause we kind of sat down at the side of COVID being like, just they'll take a couple of clients, like have like a relaxing time. Like, and then that was a year ago and now we're here. And obviously having Shopify ecommerce experience has been very useful to us.

Kathleen (02:34): Oh yeah. I mean the data around the just explosion in e-commerce and the massive growth in Shopify in particular is, is pretty amazing. And I just have to laugh because, you know, I, I feel like in the last year I've reflected on this a lot lately because we're recording this on the exact one year anniversary of the day that COVID was declared a pandemic, which is interesting. And when this all first started, there was so much chatter online about people saying they had all this time on their hands and they were going to like take up a hobby and learn a language. And I'm like, who are these people? I mean, I get it. If you, if you've lost your job, that's a totally different situation. But I feel like everyone, I know who didn't lose their job is so much busier than they were pre COVID.

Tim (03:16): Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. If you still have a job, I think that there's an air of like a little slight air of like, Oh, is this gonna work out? Like, am I going to do my job? And everyone is working harder than ever and being more on top of things than ever, like, I mean, we'll take it, we'll take in 72 polls in the last 12 months.

Kathleen (03:36): Yeah. I mean, it counts more than ever now, right? Like making your work count and getting results just to be live at a time when, you know, there's nothing guaranteed for business or in life. And so I feel like there's a lot on the line for a lot of people. And certainly in the e-commerce world, it's something that I talk about a lot that, you know, the core over the course of the last year. So many brick and mortar brands have, have just been gutted and e-commerce has become like the lifeline that's, that's how they've survived. And the ones who've like made that pivot really well have, have one essentially in this environment. And those that have struggled have really, really had a hard time. And so I look at e-commerce as this, this kind of like shining beacon for businesses that want to be able to still be successful at a time when we can't do a lot in person, although that's starting to change now in the world starting to open up, but I don't think we're at the clock is going to be dialed back on that.

Kathleen (04:31): And so I love that you guys do work in that sector. And I know from previous conversations with you, a big part of what you do is in the area of paid media. And you know, not only do we live in an interesting time when it comes to the shift to e-commerce, but we also live in an interesting time when it comes to paid media, because there is so much changing with the death of the third-party cookie and all these different you know, platform specific changes. And, and one of the ones in particular that, that you've spoken about and have some opinions about is what's happening with iOS 14 and what that is going to mean for brands paid media efforts. So I want to level set here and start with, for those who are listening. I think, I think pretty much everybody who's listening is doing some form of paid media. There's obviously different levels of expertise with that, but for those listening, I'm sure there are probably a lot of people who are not familiar with what is changing with iOS 14. So can we start by having you explain that?

Tim (05:27): Absolutely. So I want to, this is going to get very complicated and annoying.

Kathleen (05:33): I love complicated. The more complicated, the better

Tim (05:39): At the highest level, there is a, a fight going on between Apple and Facebook. And what Apple has decided to do is change their privacy settings on the new iOS updates. So everyone's going to update their phones and it's going to change a setting and it's going to require everyone to explicitly opt in if apps can track them across their phones. Because right now Facebook has employed a lot of data out of your phone. It's fully, it's fully like your device ID. It's pulling your IP address. It's following like literally a lot other apps that you use on your phone. Like it's very, it's it's Facebook. They take everything. So Apple has been like, we've got to put an end to this at some point, shut it down. So this will make this, even as I say that it does, like it's obvious that this is a lot of data.

Tim (06:30): They're taking a lot of data. People haven't necessarily opted into having this happen to them. So I'm not opposed to this change. Like, I don't think it's a bad thing to happen, but it will make the difference to everyone's ad accounts because Facebook has an algorithm that optimizes towards engagement. Facebook's a big data system that uses all this information about you to more efficiently place your ads in front of people. So if you are running an advertising on Facebook, you need to adapt. First of all, is very logistical things that you need to do. And then secondly, there's things you need to do that are at a more marketing level. You need to think about what this means and where this trend is going, and then adapt to that.

Kathleen (07:12): So before we get too deep into Facebook, a couple of questions. So this is only going to, well, this only relates to people, obviously who have Apple devices. Correct. and then, and then obviously, I mean, I've seen in the news, Facebook has taken out like full-page ads in the Washington post and other places kind of complaining about this move by Apple. They're, they're clearly not happy, but and they are the loudest voice in the room, but is it only Facebook that is going to be affected? Or is it also, you know, your LinkedIn ads, your Google ads, et cetera, like how, how do the rest of the platforms that you advertise on get impacted as well?

Tim (07:55): The conversation around is that Facebook is going to be the most affected because they're the most dependent on this third party data. Google owns its own data. Like Google, Google is not a benign player. It's like Google is obviously like pivoting to privacy. They're getting rid of the third party cookie as well.

Kathleen (08:12): I was going to say, Google is making its own, you know, efforts to, as people like to say, like, there are all these platforms are building walled gardens. So Google will have its own walled garden and Apple will have its walled garden.

Tim (08:25): Exactly. But Google's world will govern as the whole internet because you browse around all day. So it doesn't matter that like, they'll be fine. They still have a lot of access to data. If the conversation is that Facebook will be the most effective, although all channels need to adapt. But the reason why that matters is because for most small brands, most SMBs and most SMBs Facebook is their largest acquisition channel. It's where you spend the most money, it's when you're acquiring the most customers. And there are many, many digital brands who built, built themselves around the premise that they could acquire customers at low cost and Facebook.

Kathleen (09:02): Yeah. So, all right, it's coming. When is it coming? Do we know exactly when it's going to happen?

Tim (09:07): It's starting to roll out already. We're seeing some changes from some people, anyone who has iOS 14 has that update. So it is trickling in the impact. iOS, Apple hasn't started forcing the restrictions completely yet. So we're not seeing like the full impact, but it will be over the next coming months that everything will just stop changing. And it's my experience so far has been that it's not like big bang, like something explodes. It's like, Oh, this doesn't work anymore. It's just like, Oh, that's a little more annoying. And I'm like, Oh, that number is a bit lower than it should be. And I'm like, Oh, okay. I have to go over here and click this button now that I didn't have to click before. Like, there'll be a million little things that change.

Kathleen (09:50): Like boiling a frog. Which, I hate that analogy, but it is, it does work well. So, okay, so the boiling has begun and the little changes are happening. Let's talk and I feel like there's two sides of this. There's the side. If you're like a person who has an iPhone and there are decisions you need to make about whether you want to turn this setting on or offer, you know, how much you want to be tracked, which I that's just like a personal choice. And then there's the, your, a brand that is advertising. You know, and you, you may or may not already have successful Facebook ad campaigns. So like you started alluding to this, what are the things that brands need to be thinking about and doing now so that they're not caught unawares when this rolls?

Tim (10:34): Great, great question. So I'm going to divide this into two categories of things. And one is like very easy things to do that you should just obviously do. And then the other thing is like slightly more complicated ways of thinking about this that will help you in the long run. So the short term things. You've got to verify your domain. What that means is you go into Facebook, you go into the business manager, you hit like domain settings. You write in the name of your domain. You add a little piece of code to your website that lets Facebook know that you own that. To me, that's very, very, very important that used to not be used to be an option that was available, but it didn't make any difference. Now they'll just turn your ads off. You don't have it.

Kathleen (11:12): Yeah. I think they're putting, I remember I had to do this not long ago. I think they're putting notifications in the ads manager accounts, right?

Tim (11:19): Yeah, exactly. You should have a notification. I've been doing it for my clients. It, at some point in time agencies couldn't do it for you because you needed to be an admin on the business manager, but we've been able to do it for our clients. So I would talk to you, I guess you'd have an agency. I would talk to your agency about it. If not, it is not a difficult thing to do, but you just need to follow your instructions. It is, it's gone from a trivial thing that no one would ever really bothers to extremely important overnight. So that has to be done.

Kathleen (11:48): Yeah. So get that done now. Or your ads might just be turned off.

Tim (11:54): Absolutely, so just do it. And then the other thing you need to do is once you've verified that domain, you need to set up a series of web what's called web of events. So that to me, so what this means is Google Facebook is going to receive data from Apple. Apple is now deciding what's going to be allowed to be sent back to Facebook. And you have to tell Facebook to tell Apple what events quote unquote you're interested in. So in Facebook language an event is like someone makes a purchase or someone views a page, or someone adds to cart. They're all mixed.

Kathleen (12:29): Is this the equivalent of like a goal in Google analytics?

Tim (12:32): Exactly, exactly, exactly. And so you'll need to create these web events, what is what they're called and then prioritize them in the order that you would like them. And that's also in your Facebook business manager and is, is a lot easier to do. Once you verify that domain, you create the series of web events and make sure that you have put them in the priority order. So your purchase event is the most important one that should be at the top. That is confusing. So what this means is previously each conversion, each piece of information about that purchase is sent back from someone's phone with personally identifiable data. So it says like I, Tim Keen, purchased something from this store on this data at this time. So you go to Facebook, Apple is going to give that data back in an anonymized way. So Apple is going to say in this last 24 hour period, 50 people purchased from this store. So you want to know who purchased. You want to know how much like, stuff like that. And that's the level of, that's what they call an aggregated events. So as you can see, there's a lot less data for advertisers to work.

Kathleen (13:42): So I'm just thinking through already, my head is spinning with like, how is this going to play out in real life? So now prior to iOS 14 like if I'm on my iPhone and I'm shopping and I go to a store and I put something in my cart and then I don't buy it, what happens now is like, let's say it's a pair of boots that pair of boots starts showing up all over my Facebook feed and I'm hammered with it until I purchased the boots, which works really well by the way. So are you saying that now that that basically will not happen or it may not happen as much because they can't associate the boots in the cart with me as a specific individual?

Tim (14:21): Well, exactly, exactly. There is talk of what you're thinking about is remarketing. And there is a conversation that remarketing will go away. That's the, that's the level of the, of the extreme change that people have people are talking about. On the other hand, the next tip that I will give is a potential work around. And I think that what we'll start seeing is larger brands doing this all the time. So people will start using, what's called server-side tracking. People already doing this. And what this means is instead of right now, you install a Facebook pixel in people's browsers. That pixel exists in their browser, sends data back from their, a server side of tracking events, sends data from the website's server, and doesn't touch the user's browser. So Shopify, the data goes directly from Shopify back to Facebook, fire and API, same giving information about your visit to that website.

Kathleen (15:18): And okay, I want to get a little nerdy on this. So we're going to go, we might get technical and I'm going to ask dumb questions, fair warning. So I want to understand how that works. I am on my iPhone. I go to a website that's powered by Shopify and I'm looking around I may or may not put something in my cart. I may or may not make a purchase. In the past, the pixel, the Facebook pixel on the website would have fired. And basically, as you said, via the browser that I'm in, which in this case would be whatever browser that I'm using on and on an Apple iPhone would have then communicated it back to my Facebook ads account. And I could then market to the person around that. But because Apple is essentially an intermediary they're, they're kind of like putting up a block on that data coming back. So now I am on a Shopify powered website, if so, I guess there's two sides to this. If I, if I do something that identifies it's me, like if I put something in a cart and put my information in there, that's obviously an easier way for Shopify to communicate back. Oh, Kathleen was on the site and she was looking at boots, but if I'm just shopping around on the site and I haven't done anything to identify myself, how does Shopify tell the brand who I am or give it the ability to market? To me,

Tim (16:47): That's the question for advertisers everywhere. That's the question. Will people solve that? And some people will. I'm sure there are some grants that are matching. So Facebook is basically just like, and this is where it gets really where you see the hotdog get made. Facebook is just like a data sloping machine. They'll just take it all. If whatever you give them, they'll be like, okay, great. I found that person. So if you'll just browsing around on the website, whatever we can give Facebook, they'll use, they'll try to use that information to figure it out. So just say that you clicked a Facebook ad and then went up to the website that Facebook click in the URL, like ID associated with it. So you're in sort once, once you're in your end. So it's not a perfect science. Exactly.

Kathleen (17:35): They will triangulate essentially. And try to figure out who you are. So one more question on this. So there's certain cases where there'll be able to figure out it's me, and then you can still do remarketing bypassing Apple. But then if they're, if they're not able to figure out it's me, does it then become more like what Google is talking about with, and I'm getting sort of technical here with FLOC, the cohort based approach where they're going to be like, Hey, you know, there are people on your site who are looking at boots. And so you might want to do a campaign around boots and, and loosely, it will help you identify a cohort of people who might be like boot enthusiasts.

Tim (18:14): Yeah, exactly. So FLOC is, this is another thing, and this is, this is really interesting to FLOC is Google's response to this. Google is also pivoting to privacy and FLOC is a cohort of people before a particular actions at a particular time.

Kathleen (18:31): Federated Learning of Cohorts, I think is exactly.

Tim (18:33): Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, I trust Google about as far as I can throw them, and they have all of your search data. So this basically is the same thing in my mind. This is the same as what's called custom intent or custom affinity audiences, which are already existing Google, which is just, I can already just target everyone who searched for blank in the last week.

Kathleen (18:52): I mean, and the irony is not lost on me, and this could be a whole nother podcast episode. So we won't go too deep into it. That there's a tremendous conflict of interest on the fact that Google is building this privacy engine. And it is also an advertising platform. So talk about like potential monopoly abuse issues, but that's, that's a whole nother topic.

Tim (19:12): Yeah. I was thinking about that last night, actually, I was, if this is this maybe like an incredible Android, so Google, like they might, we've got this now we have,

Kathleen (19:21): Yeah. They're like, we are going to be the only ones now who have this data. And so you should definitely advertise via Google AdSense and you know, why would you not? So again, totally different topics. So let's go. So coming back to iOS and Apple so there, there may be server side solutions. Are there, I mean, you mentioned Shopify specifically, but obviously there's plenty of people out there listening. Some of whom may be on Shopify, some of whom may not be, is this something that's like accessible to the average business or do you need to be a huge business with your own internal engineering and dev team to build a server side solution for you?

Tim (20:00): It is changing in real time. Even two months ago, two, three months ago. I would've said you need to, you really need to talk to an expert. Like you need, you need a team for it, but I, I spun one off over the weekend. There are a couple of companies that do it successfully on Shopify. I would, I would probably talk, I would probably leverage a partner. I wouldn't just try to do that. It's not something that you should do yourself because it will break at some point, but it's a company called Elevar that does it for Shopify. They're very good at tracking analytics and helping set up Google tag manager containers. There's a company called Little Data, which also has a pretty robust analytics solution for Shopify. And then the last thing is, if you are just starting out with setting up the tracking properly, and you're on Shopify, the newest version of the Facebook sales channel, like when you install Facebook on Shopify, if you, when you set that up and you set the settings to maximum data sharing does actually send automatically purchase events via server side.

Kathleen (21:07): Sorry. So just to clarify on this, so you're not saying that this is built into Shopify, but there are increasingly more ways via whether it's plugins or apps that it might be possible, or you can work with a partner, like one of the ones you mentioned. So this isn't like a native Shopify capability.

Tim (21:25): No, well, no. In the sense that no, it's not you, nothing, nothing is sent from the Shopify without you telling it. I mean, Shopify is really a very basic and robust platform that is very extendable. So they don't usually build most of these advanced features. They build the core functionality of Shopify, and then they leave the extendible feeds and stuff to third party developers. It's a marketplace. Yeah. It's a mechanics.

Kathleen (21:52): The reason I asked that question is that it got my, my sort of gears turning. And I was thinking like, I wonder if going forward, this, this is something that either CMS platforms are going or, you know, call them website engines are going to have to build into themselves, or, or if they're all going to solve it through like a marketplace approach. But it makes me think like this becomes another thing that you need to start to think about as you choose the platform on which you build your website, because that choice it's like, it has such a domino effect on other things. And, and if you build it on a platform that is, that is designed with solutions for this in mind, then it might be easier later down the, down the road for you to have more effective advertising programs. So it's just, it's interesting. Cause when I hear people say, Oh, should I build on, you know, Shopify? Or if you're not e-commerce should I build on WordPress or web flow or HubSpot or, you know, whatever that engine is in the past, a lot of it has been around just kind of functionality as far as the user interface is concerned, ease of use on the backend, but this is like a whole nother set of criteria that people might need to start thinking about.

Tim (23:06): Yeah, it does. It does bring up another set of complications and considerations. And it is, I mean, every system at some level can be extended to send data from the service side. But the question is a really good one because it feels like where should I start? Question impacts a lot of what you do down the line, right?

Kathleen (23:25): How easy will it be? Like, because you could probably do it on any platform, but some are going to be like plug and play. Whereas others are going to require a completely custom dev solution, which is not only more expensive and complicated, but as you pointed out, maintaining that over time is a whole different.

Tim (23:42): Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I would, I would look to, I mean, my instinct is always to look to like new platforms that are growing fast because they're going to have a developer support. They're going to have an influx of capital. They're going to have new users that are heavily incentivized to iterate and grow the platform. So if you, if you grab onto, like, when I started working on Shopify, like I wasn't that good yet. And I was still kind of transitioning from WordPress and I was just like, kind of in shock. I was like a little bit slow, but it was growing so far. And I was like, okay. They just gonna, like the, the rate of growth means that the investment in this, the sophistication is just going to dramatically increase. And the same with the marketplace ecosystem, it's just exploded. And those apps got very, very good. And even in the time that I was walking on the platform and it's now like an incredible ecosystem, like it's so robust and really, really easy to use, but it was the like, look at the rate of growth of the platform, essentially what I was

Kathleen (24:43): You're totally spot on because I wasn't doing so much in e-commerce, but I I'm more involved in it now, but I have always been kind of like on the B2B marketing side I used to own an agency and we did a lot of websites and WordPress was like the platform to build on for so long. And then we happened to be a HubSpot partner and HubSpot built its own website platform. And I remember in the beginning it was the same thing. I was like, eh, this is kind of like basic, but they were putting so much money in and they're so innovative and they started basically building an ecosystem around it. And today I love that platform. It's amazing. And there's so much support and they're adding onto it all the time. So I think that's sort of like a parallel example from the B2B world.

Tim (25:24): Exactly. And it's a really good example in that way, because they have also prioritized user experience and they've done, it's done that in balancing that they've built their products through rigorous optimization and through building features that people needed. It is it's really good. It's very complex, but it's, it solves a lot of problems for a lot of people. Yeah.

Kathleen (25:44): So, all right. Back back to the topic at hand, see, I can go in a lot of directions cause I'm fascinated by all this. But you mentioned in terms of what people need to be doing, we started with number one, verify your business and your Facebook ads manager. Number two was set up your web events in there. And then, and then the potential of like possibly a server side solution. If that is something that makes sense. What else should businesses be thinking about?

Tim (26:15): Yeah. So this is where we start getting out of the, like try to plug the hole situation because on the one hand, there's a bunch of holes you can plug. You can be like, okay, I want to, I want to make sure that we track as much as possible. I want accurate data. I want to solve the problem. And you should definitely try to do that. But at another level you need to think about what the macro trend is. And it is a move away from hyper hyper targeted advertising, which let's be real, very creepy, probably not the worst thing in the world. Going to be more challenging for us potentially, but I don't know if it's, I really don't think it's going to be the end of most businesses and most of the robust businesses. I think, I think we'll find a way around it.

Tim (26:57): So what you need to do is think, just imagine in your mind, a world where there is no tracking, there's no ability to optimize their Facebook. The Facebook platform is just a black box, whether or not that comes in the next two years or the next five years, it will come at some point. So if you mentally start preparing for that, you'll make decisions that lead you in a direction where you're already on the cutting edge. So you don't have to worry about it. So if you're thinking like a cave, forget about these numbers, the numbers are on their way out. The numbers will be replaced with a robot that will do the number crunching for me. They're not going to give me my data. What are the levers that you have? The letters the ad, the copy, the site experience, the value of the author, the onboarding, the, the retention, the SMS that you send, people like you still, you still have a marketing program.

Tim (27:48): You just have to like, not get so obsessed with the data. Like the ad is the biggest thing. I see so many marketers it's so, so many much whether it's in B2B or in e-commerce with low performing static ads or like boring videos, or like, copy that. Doesn't explain what the product is that then clicks through to a landing page that I still don't know what the product is. I have no idea what it's doing and it's confusing. And they're spending all their time in Facebook, like worrying about whether they get an event data app, like this doesn't matter at all, like show me what the product does, show me why I should buy it. And then send me to a page where I can buy it easily. That will do way, way, way more for your business than like worrying about whether one number is going in the right direction.

Kathleen (28:32): So I think you're totally spot on. I actually think this is a problem now, even before this iOS stuff and, and as somebody who has hired paid media agencies, what I have seen is that a lot of them have been designed more around this idea that the data is the prime thing that will drive results. And what I mean by that is when you work with paid media agencies, a lot of them don't necessarily spend a lot of time on the creative or they rely on you for the creative. And they're more about like setting up your ads account and looking at the numbers and tweaking and turning things on and off and this and that. And they also don't really do much on landing page optimization, as you explained. And, and it seems to me that, well, first of all, like I, as somebody who hires agencies, like I find that so frustrating because if you're not focusing on those other things, you, you really are. It's like tying your hands behind your back. They're such important parts of the equation with, or without iOS 14 updates, but as you've pointed out, they're going to be even more important. So I wonder what is your take on how the agency world will or will not have to change in response to this update? Because I feel like they're going to have to start to service that side of things more where they're not doing it now.

Tim (29:57): Yeah. I mean, this is a question that makes me feel, I agree with you. My business is based on the premise that you're right. So I hope that you're, I think that this is true. So my experience at mid six, which is a, a, was a very, very fast growing agency and we all learn a lot from there. And what we learned was that the people who are really performing the best performance, who drove the most growth we're doing exactly that they would not stay in the accounts too much. They were getting stuff done on the accounts, leveraging automation, building landing pages, building feedback loops with the creative team. So there was a creative team in house, and we would work closely with them working in a, in a integrative way with the other channel managers and passing information between them and building a really building a flywheel on the website.

Tim (30:45): And that's what we do. That's, that's what our company does is what my company does. And we do that all day and it works. It will always work. There's no way it can fail because all you do is you, all you're doing is optimizing every channel, making them talk to each other and creating like network effects between you're increasing your paid media efficiency 20%. Then you're increasing your landing page efficiencies 20%. And you're increasing your creative by 20% increases. Like those 20% are multiplied by each other. So you make a lot more money, but will the agency world adapt to this? I dunno. I don't know if it will, like the, there are a couple of ways of running an agency and, and some of the agencies that are more integrated that I scroll up that have teams that speak multiple languages that have people who grew up and learned how to do paid media a little close to the world of automation.

Tim (31:38): Like, have more experience in the automation world. I think they are in a good position to thrive. Agencies who can quickly make creative, or you can keep the creative team close to the data team and who don't really see a big brick wall distinction between those two things. They will be successful. But, and we're even seeing this internally, like agencies that structure in silo, the different skill sets and who train people in a very, very old school analytics. Like here's what you need to like spreadsheets all day for Google. It's not going to work anymore.

Kathleen (32:20): The classic performance marketer, who's a data wonk. I think at the same goes for when you hire in-house, if you want to hire like a growth marketer or a paid media manager, you know, it used to be, you hire that data person who like, is very savvy about how the platforms function and can get in under the hood and manipulate how things are set up. But those people, at least in my experience, it's really hard to find people like that. Who've also have been trained on the creative side and who really understand what it means to like do multi-variate testing with messaging and with imagery and rich media and things like that. Like, I don't see a lot of crossover there. It's already pretty hard to find that combination. And, and so it will be very, very interesting going forward. But I think this is like the conversation we had about your choice of CMS. Where starting now, if you're looking to hire a PA outsourced paid media, or you're looking to hire a full-time person, this is something you have to think about, like that mix of skills and how they approach it. And like you don't, this is just me talking, but like, if you're going to work with a paid media agency buyer beware, if you're shuffled off to like a junior account manager who just knows how Facebook ads work, and you're not talking to somebody on the creative side, who's looking closely at messaging and, and the media that you're using.

Tim (33:45): Exactly. You just, yeah. Via the, where if, if you're not getting that kind of interactive feel, if no one is willing to tell you about your website or if no, one's willing to tell you about your creative or no one will give you genuine feedback other than like, Oh yes, I can run those ads for you. Technical aspect of running the ad state very easy. It's not, it doesn't take very much. And, but it's really hard to find you're absolutely right. And people don't come to me. Very much. People are coming to us, looking for a paid media manager. They come saying, I want to drive X amount of growth while I am looking for strategists. And that is extremely hard to find in the mock-up like a strategy layer on top of a paid media team that outs like, I don't really say outsource to CMR. It's not a value proposition, but I've thought about it. That is what people are looking for.

Kathleen (34:36): No, that's what I mean. I just went through this with my company. And I had to switch vendors. I hate that word vendor solution providers for my paid media and this, this was exactly the thing. Like I was really looking for somebody who would not just run my ad accounts. I wanted somebody who would challenge me and be like, look, you need to try different messaging because this isn't resonating or you need to change your landing page or Hey, you know, the video you gave me, isn't working for your ads. We need to focus on this instead. Like I w I just wasn't getting that. And it is really, really hard to find, especially if you don't have an enormous budget, like you can find a lot of things when your ads budget is huge. And then, you know, the principal of the agency is working reeling to work more closely with you. But if you're not a big advertiser, it can be really difficult. I think to get the level of attention you're talking about,

Tim (35:29): This is a huge pain point, and I completely agree one. And this is I'd love to hear from people. Actually, this is something that we're working on, especially for advertisers who are spending, just spending five to $10,000 a month on paid media. You're in a really tough spot. Like you can't really hire. It's very difficult to hire a very high-end agency. And someone who can rap, you can find on Fiverr or Upwork to run, your ads is not going to, they're not going to give you that level of consultative feedback that you want. So we've been trying to build some more scalable solutions for that, like courses trying to help people level up quickly trying to do coaching and kind of, kind of more like ways of scaling that expertise, because it is, it is really, really hot.

Kathleen (36:12): And not to be like doomsday ish, but I do feel like it makes me a little scared that in the year to come, when all these changes start to happen, it's going to like create this divide between the haves and the have-nots and the paid media world, where the ones that have the giant budgets and are getting that really good advice are just going to, they're going to get even better results. And the ones that don't have the giant budgets are really going to suffer because you could waste a ton of money on ads that aren't going to do well. And it's sort of like a snowball effect. Like when that happens, then people start to say, Oh gosh, well maybe ads just don't work for us. And they stopped trying, or the budget gets cut. And so I'm really curious to see how that's going to play out because I don't see a lot of middle.

Tim (36:56): Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I think it is. It's incumbent on us. Like I like startups. I like small businesses. I like the way that people work when they're trying to grow companies. I think it's exciting and fun. And I don't want to be the kind of person who just ends up only working with people with big established budgets. So it is really nice

Kathleen (37:19): As a former agency owner, I will say, you don't turn those people away.

Tim (37:23): I'm looking at turning that business down. At all? But it is. We want to make sure that we can help. My motive, I learned this industry very, very quickly. I came from not knowing the industry to learning the industry within an extremely short time span. And my real goal was to help other people do that same thing, because I don't feel that this knowledge needs to be protected or in just a few elite agencies. Like I would rather more people are able to drive growth in their businesses profitably. That that's better. That's a better world. Yeah.

Kathleen (37:56): Well, it, what it says to me, and I think you've already alluded to this is that if you are a marketer, which you are, if you're listening to this and you are not already, you don't already feel like you are, you have an extremely high skill level in paid media. Now is the time to start getting educated, because especially if you're not at a huge brand with a giant budget, because it does sound to me like we're going to have to shoulder more of the burden and really start to understand more about creative and about messaging and about, you know, all that whole kind of conversion funnel maybe than we have in the past.

Tim (38:32): Exactly. Exactly. If you, when we're doing a job that was just you a spreadsheet think very seriously, like B try to try to level up a little bit and try to get out of that. The way that I'm thinking about it, it's like any job that any job in paid media, or in advertising that a robot, you could imagine a robot doing robots going to do it, but one of the things that they can't do, and it's understanding what people want, understanding how to build a process, to improve something, understanding how to, what good creative looks like, what a good ad is, what's compelling. Like how do you get a team together? How do you get people to buy into your ideas? All of that stuff is incredibly important to this business and is not in an ad account. It does not live in Facebook ads manager.

Kathleen (39:21): Yeah. Well, I literally could talk to you all day about this. It's a fascinating topic. And I just think it has, like, on the surface, it looks so straightforward. Like, Oh, it's Apple and they're changing the rules. And so maybe your data and Facebook will change. But when you really start to think about some of these implications that you've brought up today, as far as like what platform you're building your website on, and you know, how you educate yourself as a marketer and what kind of an agency you hire to do your paid media, like the implications are massive. So I love that we got a chance to dig into this, and I love that you shared all of your thoughts on it. I'm going to shift gears before we wrap up, because I always ask my guests to questions at the end of the interview. And I'm curious what you have to say. The first one is we talk all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that, that you think is really doing fantastic inbound marketing work right now?

Tim (40:11): Yeah, so I am a recent convert to the cult of inbound marketing. I came up, I came in paid, maybe I came up and paid media. That's how I understood. I guess I learned SEO first, but I got out of SEO. I was like, I don't want to do that anymore. We got into paid media and recently trying to grow, growing this agency, it has been absolutely miraculous. Inbound marketing is, is really what I like about it is this specificity with which you've been captured exactly the vessel that you want to talk to. And because we do a specific thing, we work with purpose driven brands. We want to work with people who are like like us like that. We like it is really important to us that we capture the right person. So I've been thinking a lot about this. It's like, okay, how do we find out people? And I found this guy on LinkedIn, I've been looking for help with my LinkedIn looking for help leveraging LinkedIn as a, as an inbound traffic source, which by the way, it's incredible

Kathleen (41:08): I am a huge LinkedIn fan. Yeah.

Tim (41:11): Just do it. If you're not already doing it. It's amazing. I found this guy, Stephen G Pope, he's just like a LinkedIn guy. He ran a company before and I had one of those experiences where I was just like scrolling. I was thinking, I was just like, Oh man, like, I don't know, I'm too nervous to make videos for LinkedIn, I don't know if I want to do that. Like, how do I, how am I going to do it in a way that's like, feels cool and like, I'm not embarrassed by. I was literally scrolling my feed and he'd just made some video. And it was just like him in front of a black screen. And it was so clear and like a little bit silly and like concise and like told me what I wanted to know and gave me the information I wanted. I mean, literally in one click, I was like, all right. Appointment booked. And I love talking to Stephen. That it's, it's been such a pleasure because we're on the same page. Like his marketing, like spoke to his personality and spoke to the way that he walked. It made it clear to me what I would get out of, out of the relationship. And it's been, it's been a wonderful to me and it's just like, that works. That works so well.

Kathleen (42:13): Oh, I got to check him out. So Stephen G. Pope, and is he Stephen with a V or a ph? Okay. I will. I will find that. And I will put a link to his LinkedIn in the show notes for anybody who's listening, but you can also then go hunt him down yourself with that information. Second question is that a lot of the marketers I talked to say their biggest pain point is just keeping up, right? Like this interview is the perfect example. There's so much that changes so quickly when it comes to the world of digital marketing. So how do you personally like stay on top of it all and, and educate yourself?

Tim (42:44): Oh my God, this, this is an amazing question I used, I started tracking my time a little more effectively a couple of weeks ago. And part of that, I started tracking the tabs that I visited so I can try to get a sense of, okay, how am I actually doing this? And I would say, it's, it's looking at a lot of different sources quickly. It's not so much like having like one publication that I read all the time. It's, it's a lot of like, it's really about the speed of which you can take in new information. So it's like, okay, you're going LinkedIn for a second. See a couple of things that like help you like, Oh, okay. I should probably think about that. And then you might need to read like a Facebook one for a second, because that's what Facebook is saying. You might need to read like someone else's blog for a second, but you kind of have to jump around and like triangulate.

Tim (43:30): It it's really hard without a community. I think this is another pain point that I'm trying to work on, which is like, it would be really nice to have, we have a Slack and we're always chatting. And that gives me a lot of information. My colleagues, my co-founders like push me really hard with always learning. And if you're around people who will also will take things further than what you leave with them, that's, that's a really good way to do it. But I would think about it. Like you. One thing that I do is there's not much time for me between learning about something and testing it, whether that's a new product or a new SaaS or a new, like, like I would just test it, like literally just test things. Like if you have to get a 30 day trial, some software don't even think like, Oh, maybe my boss, like maybe I shouldn't do it because that's how you learn it. Like, if, if, if you can cut down the time that you spend planning and preparing and thinking about whether something is the right option in that time, you could investigate five different options.

Kathleen (44:33): Yeah. That's so true. Learning by doing is really powerful. All right, well, we're coming to the end of our time. This was amazing. I learned so much today. I'm super excited about this interview. I cannot wait to share with everybody. I suspect there'll be people who listen, who will have questions. And so if somebody does and they want to connect with you online, or they want to learn more about Loop Club, what is the best way for them to do that?

Tim (44:57): So you can go to my LinkedIn, which is linkedin.com/in/tim-keen. And just messaged me. Or you can go to the loop.club and learn about our agency there.

Kathleen (45:09): Okay, perfect. Again, I'll put those links in the show notes. So head there, if you want to connect with Tim. And if you're listening and you did learn something new like me and you enjoyed this episode, head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice. And I would love it if you would leave the podcast a review. That is how other people find us. And of course, if you know somebody else 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. Thanks so much for joining me, Tim.

Tim (45:37): Thank you so much, Kathleen. This was a pleasure.

How do you make marketing lemonade out of a pandemic?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, FreshBooks CMO Paul Cowan explains how the company pivoted when COVID hit, and made use of its proprietary data to create content and insights that drove a new marketing strategy.

When Paul joined FreshBooks, he inherited a 45 person marketing team with a strong SEO game. After reorganizing the team, he built on that foundation by adjusting the company's messaging to target an owner/CEO audience, while unearthing new content opportunities within FreshBooks' customer data.

Fast forward to 2020, and when COVID hit, the company was ready to launch a massive new original research series focusing on the financial health of various industry sectors based on their invoicing behavior.

In this interview, Paul talks about navigating an internal restructuring, revamping the company's brand and tech stack, and how its new content efforts have fueled significant increases in brand awareness for FreshBooks.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear Paul's story.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the FreshBooks website
• Connect with Paul on LinkedIn
• Follow Paul on Twitter

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Paul Cowan, who is the COO of FreshBooks. Welcome to the podcast, Paul.

Paul (00:23): Hi, Kathleen. Great to be here.

Kathleen (00:25): Yeah. I'm excited to talk with you. You have an interesting story and you've been at FreshBooks for about a year and a half, and a lot has happened in that time. Before we dive into it though, can you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and how you wound up doing what you're doing now, and what FreshBooks does?

Paul (00:41): Yeah, for sure. So firstly FreshBooks. We're a cloud accounting software platform. So we focus on helping small business owners manage their business, really managing their finances for non-financial managers. So, you know, the key differentiator between us and other folks in this space that you you've probably heard of is that we really focus on the small business owner. So others have built their platforms for accountants. We were started by an owner from a pain point that owner had. So, we kind of started on a point solution 15 years ago and then have grown into being an accounting platform for business owners.

Kathleen (01:19): I so needed this when I owned my business. I owned a digital marketing agency for 11 years and I don't know how other marketers are, but the reason I became a marketer is I was terrible at things like accounting, which I did study in business school.

Paul (01:36): It's funny. Marketers are one of our strongest verticals. So we kind of target service-based businesses or people who kind of their invoice and their client relationship is kind of the core pieces of, of, of of how they operate. And so our software is really kind of built around that. And I was actually a FreshBooks customer in 2013 and 2014 when I was doing some consulting. So I do know the space and the need to actually arrange your books appropriately as well.

Kathleen (02:07): Yeah, it's a big deal. I mean, it's funny. They always joke. There's that running joke about how doctors make terrible business managers, business owners, but I, for me, the same was true of me as a marketer. I, again, I cannot speak for all marketers, but I was just not good at the money side so I can see the need for the product for sure. Now you came in about a year and a half ago and you've done quite a bit of work on the brand and, and on the marketing strategy, let's start by just talking about that. When you, when you got there, what did you find and what path did you start to chart for yourself as CMO?

Paul (02:46): For sure. So, so like most when most companies are looking for a CMO, it's generally indicating that some sort of change is going on. So, you know, I was, I was running enterprise and SMB marketing for Shutterstock and, and so I was selling stock imagery and videos and custom content to marketers. And I was having a grand old time doing it. I really liked it. And then FreshBooks came calling and, and, and they were really looking to go through some growth. And so they'd been investing a lot in product. They've been investing a lot into new channel activation and, and they were, they'd been on a hunt for a CFO for a little while, and hadn't really been able to find the right kind of person. And, and I think part of it was like the founder, Mike, he, you know, it was the founders CEO of a, of a company he wants to make sure you're getting people in there who get the pain points, get the problem.

Paul (03:40): And, and I kinda came in with like, I'd had B2C experience. I had B2B experience. I'd been an owner of three different companies in the past. I'd gone through all the trials and tribulations of what an owner had. So he was like, great. Like you, you know it, so, we got along very well and, and I joined the company cause they're like, you know, we need to, we need to go through this, this, this time of growth. So you know, I came on board to, to, to help kind of get a couple of things right. It, in terms of the, the organization that, you know, there was just some, some, some structural challenges that were there. So, you know, I came in and did the two things that every cliche CMO does. I reorganized the team and I rebranded.

Paul (04:23): And so, you know, the reorg I knew was something that I needed to do. So there was just a lot of challenges within the company in terms of like, not all the marketing kind of disciplines were together as a, as a full marketing function. There were some, some things that the company was doing in terms of like investing into a direct Salesforce, which it really hadn't had, it made a significant investment there before, and most of our business was done through self-service channels. So we needed to have self-serve, we needed to have demand generation. We needed to make sure we were kind of managing those two types of customers differently. And get the structure, the right structure in place. So I came in and did that stuff fairly, fairly early on in my tenure there. The brand stuff was kind of interesting because the company had been going through a two year process, like re-evaluating who it was and insuring and reaffirming its commitment to its customer.

Paul (05:20): So I kinda came in at the tail end of that, like all the logo and the design elements and all that stuff was done, but they just hadn't been pushed over kind of the finish line. And so so my role there, like, I didn't come in and say, Hey, we need to rebrand. I came in and said, man, we've done all this work. Or you guys have done all this work. You really just need to kind of move this forward and progress things so that we're making an indication to the market that we're changing as an organization. And, we're representing something slightly different in the eyes of our customer.

Kathleen (05:52): I have so many questions. In no particular order, let's start with the team, because that's kind of where you started. How big was the team when you got there?

Paul (06:03): Yeah, so I think it was, we were probably 45-ish type of people within the marketing group and in the companies around you know, right now we're at about like just over 400 people globally in a couple of different offices.

Kathleen (06:17): And talk me through how you restructured it. You mentioned not all of the different disciplines work together. So what did that look like the before and after?

Paul (06:26): So really it was kind of a tale of a couple of different departments. So you know, we had an acquisition team that was, was doing a great job in terms of driving top of funnel activity, but they weren't really too accountable to the conversion metric. Within that attrition funnel, we drive a lot of free trials and then those trials convert into paid users. But, but that team was really kind of focused on like optimizing that front end of the funnel. So we needed to do some changes and bring in some folks who weren't just going to be performance marketing oriented. We needed to bring in marketing strategy, the people who got demand, build the actual B2B capabilities. And then get that kind of funnel activity structured right then we had a pretty functioning customer marketing team or life cycle marketing or CRM.

Paul (07:18): However, you want to kind of frame it. The one area that we needed to just get in order was the marketing operation. So we just needed to kind of centralize that and make sure that that team was all together, that we built out like a capability in terms of how we managed our MarTech stack and centralized all that underneath our our customer marketing lead product marketing wasn't in marketing, it was in product. So we said, Hey, let's shift this back over. Comms wasn't in marketing. Kind of critical. So it was sitting within our strategy group. We had an event team that was doing event activity that was not tied to any of our lead generation activities. And they were just kind of off like running more of what I would call brand or community oriented activities.

Paul (08:01): And that was underneath our BD team. So, there was just a lot of like weird stuff going on, but just how the company had, had kind of structured a grown up and done things. So, just first needed to get everybody together and align under, under one marketing strategy, understanding what the goals were that we were trying to drive to and and just bring it all together. And, really, it was like a game of efficiencies in terms of content generation. And in terms of all the types of things that we could, we could generate by just like optimizing against like that, that customer journey.

Kathleen (08:32): Yeah. Wow. That that's a lot of moving parts, but I also am very curious to hear how you navigated just from a relationship standpoint and coming in as the new guy and, and looking at these different marketing functions that are sitting under BD and under strategy and under all these other places, how you navigated the relationships with the leaders of those parts of the company to I'm going to take these people and move them under me.

Paul (08:58): Yeah. I mean, thankfully we had a lot of adults at the table and there wasn't a lot of territory issues. I think most of the folks there were like, Hey, you know, I know that this really shouldn't be under me, but I've been shepherding it. Well, we haven't had someone who's seen the full picture. So I think just like previous regimes of leadership within the marketing group, either leaned maybe towards like direct marketing only, or performance marketing or, or, or in other areas. So they really didn't kind of bring all the activities together. So, so the organization knew it needed someone to kind of do it part of it. Half of like, yes, just like putting it down on a page and doing it. But I think, you know, you're alluding to the whole change management exercise and, you know, it was really more about like, how do we get you know, how do we get all the different people to then work together and make sure that, you know, because we're taking things that they may have built up and it's great within the, their, their portfolio, but it wasn't because it wasn't tied to like a demand gen activity.

Paul (10:02): And we weren't really kind of assessing the ROI of some of these action that we were running. It's like, you know, they were a little bit more under scrutiny, but, but really we're just like, how do we take these things and dose everything with, with gas so that we could just light this whole thing up on fire and, and, and get way more efficient with everything that we were doing.

Kathleen (10:20): Yeah. And you mentioned one of the key areas for kind of reorganization or, or streamlining being around your top of funnel content efforts, it sounded like your inbound efforts really aligning those with your strategy to pull prospects down the funnel. Can you dig into that a little bit more?

Paul (10:41): Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things that were going on really well when I got there was like our, our SEO game was off the hook. Like we had a huge amount of volume and the team had some real solid SEO experts and, and they just were, were focused on, on what we needed to do to build out and to, to just like, make our site magnetic and and make sure that we're covering off, like all of the terms within the invoicing accounting payment space that, that we needed to be in. So, so like all of that activity was going, going really, really well. You know, we have like this performance machine, right. So we needed to, we need to make sure we're filling that machine. One of the things that I think we're ignoring the most previous immediate to me coming in was really the messaging we were putting into that performance machine.

Paul (11:27): So, you know, we had some great kind of stuff going on in the, in the SEO space where, where, you know, we're, we're getting people in our performance media and our ads. We are great in SEM, but not great in any other channels. Mainly I attribute that to just being like the creative felt like everything else in the space. So like everybody's out there saying all in one accounting solutions and you could rip the logo off and it would be for any other company. So we tried to pivot that and just be more focused on like appealing to the owner and the mindset of the owner. So that was a big portion of what we were doing purely from like a top of funnel ad content space, get our differentiation rolling and tie it into everything that we were doing from a branding and brand strategy standpoint.

Paul (12:09): The content game, like underneath there was, was pretty good. Like our blog is, is, is great. You know, we, we get some good traction. We just weren't doing things like webinars or, or, or other types of layers to our content strategy. So we could build a big piece in and you set apart. Or we weren't like taking research reports that we were doing and turning them into smaller blog posts. So a lot of the effort was like, Hey, let's look at all these assets that we currently have, that all these different teams are doing. And then how do we just like, get smarter with them so that we're not going to, we don't have to keep reproducing more and more and more and more. And so a lot of the effort, even now that our blog team does is just like repurposing old posts and just making sure that they're optimized and, and kind of rinse repeat. And now we're, we're taking a slightly different approach to how we really look at the content that we're going to generate and, and kind of put across the whole funnel off of some of the stuff that we really know about our customers.

Kathleen (13:05): So when you say you're taking a different approach, is it just shifting topic-wise or audience-wise, or is there something else to that?

Paul (13:11): Yeah, so a couple of things. So one area that I'm a huge believer in is like, you know, I think every company has some under-resourced assets or some sort of like gold or oil around that it's just not tapping into. And so, you know, one area that I see is like, Hey, we've got like a whole bunch of customers that are using our, you know, doing, entering their expenses and invoicing within our platform. And we have a big opportunity to start to reveal that to our customers or to the market as a whole. And, and, you know, there's, there's some gold within there. So it was actually interesting because through the whole pandemic and when the first, when the first downturn kind of happened in, in March of last year, what we found was like there was a lot of different government agencies that were looking to understand what was actually happening within the small business sector.

Paul (14:03): And so we said, we've got all this data on the small business sector, and we were able to see how much small businesses were actually impacted. And in terms of the revenue that they were, they were they were producing over that timeframe and when they actually recovered and, and so the government was like, Oh, great. We'd have to wait for like a census next year tax time to, to really understand what's going on and to inform stimulus packages and things of that effect. So we're like, Hey, you know, this is really valuable yes. To the government also to businesses, just for them to kind of be able to understand how they're performing versus their sectors, the industry as a whole, and that kind of thing. So what we're really kind of focused on is like, how do we take our data and use that as like a big magnet to bring people in?

Paul (14:48): So let's like publish this data back to the, to to our audiences and to owners, so they can understand different things that are happening within their verticals, within their sectors and that kind of stuff. And, and there's tons of like lots and lots of examples of, of, of companies who do this, like, you know, MailChimp or HubSpot. They do a lot of great stuff like that, where they'll, they'll publish like benchmarks in terms of email, open rates and these kinds of things, but we've got like what might be much more harder to get data.

Kathleen (15:16): Yeah. Now what does that look like for you? So, because I've worked on this too, we have lots of data in our platform, and we do a quarterly report where we sum up, in our case, what's happening with malvertising attack patterns and threat levels. It's very nerdy to the ad tech world. And, and that's something I think a lot about is it's one thing to say, we're going to share our data. It's entirely another to really conceptualize the right way to share it where it's not just digestible, but it's, it's kind of like set up for vitality. And then the question is, do you do it in one big report or do you chunk it out? And so I'm curious how you guys are approaching that.

Paul (15:54): Yeah. So like, I'm a huge fan of, of just like doing indexes, like being able to give someone a tool that they can, they can use and, and be able to understand what's actually going on. So, you know, we've, we, of course first started with reports because that helps us be able to build the different types of things that we would need to build, whether they're indexes or otherwise. And then, and then kind of piques our curiosity around where do we want to go deep and where do we want, not, where do we want to be very kind of general? So, so the first thing we did was we produced like a women's report and, and how how women were, were negatively impact or women owned businesses were negatively impacted by COVID and still are having a hard time performing at the, at the pace of, of their male counterparts. And, and so we were finding really some interesting findings there. We have our general report, we started going into trades and construction. That industry has actually fared really, really well through the pandemic. Like it had a big downturn, but then they've like, they're, they're exceeding historical patterns in terms of revenue generation. And, and, you know, I think the obvious is obvious, like around things like, Hey, there, you know, people are at home or disposable income, they're, you know, trying to improve their home office and all of that kind of stuff.

Kathleen (17:09): We sit around all day staring at all the things that are wrong with our houses and that we want to fix. My husband would tell you that our project list has grown exponentially since COVID started.

Paul (17:20): Yeah, absolutely. So I think from there, it's like, Hey, do we want to do quarterly reports? Or do we want to build a tool that people can just access all the time? And so we're, we're building a tool right now so that people can get there. We have a bunch of reports. But you know, I've looked at other companies that I really like, you know, there's companies in the lending space, like borrow well. And and they've like, they have, like, from an inbound perspective, they've got a credit there, so do loans and borrowing and and so they have a credit score calculator and that thing doesn't matter what else they do. Their credit score calculator is their magnet. It just brings everybody to their site. They fill it out, they use Facebook and lots of other places it's become such a lead engine for those guys that they sell leads to other creditors or people that they would not want to ever loan to.

Paul (18:12): So they've created this like revenue machine that they can go in and refer people to other places. So, you know, I see that as is, you know, that'd be a great outcome for us if we able to bring people in. But I also think like beyond even just our market that we're servicing today, like there's lots of people in the VC space, like who would be really in the investment space, who are really interested in this data as well. So, so I'm also interested in like, Hey, is there other markets that we could actually be servicing with this, the state of two that we could potentially monetize down the road as well.

Kathleen (18:44): Now, do you foresee the tool that you're building as really kind of destined to be a lead magnet like you described, or, or do you foresee at some point that the data or the tool you're building with the data could become a product in and of itself that you sell access to?

Paul (18:58): Yeah, absolutely. Both. So it's, you know, we're, we're kind of the sharp end of the spear to say, Hey, like, let's just show that there's demand for this in market. And and, and we've seen it already. So, you know, both from, yes, the government's interested, but just purely from a PR standpoint, we have like a huge amount of hits on, on just like that woman's report to say to, for us to just talk about it and, and, and go deeper into what's actually what people are, what we're seeing in the data. And, and so, yeah, and then I think that there's kind of two places. One is like, Hey, is there a place that we can actually take this and turn it into an actual product? And whether it's via API or otherwise, like, do we want to sell this data, or also, how do we bring this back into our platform and go a little bit deeper into it?

Paul (19:42): So, you know, if example of like you being a, a marketing services person, and you're kind of saying, Hey you know, what should my billable rate be? And, and us being able to surface those types of things, because we have that like all anonymized of course, but if we're able to say, you know, if you're up in North Dakota and you're doing graphic design work, here's what all the graphic designers are actually charging from a an hourly rate standpoint. And so here's where you kind of should, should really be thinking about it based on, on your business.

Kathleen (20:13): That is awesome. And you sort of answered one of the next questions I was going to have, which is around PR because whenever I think of original data and research, it's like, you know, candy for organic press coverage or earned PR press coverage. So have you, have you, have you done any specific pitching to the press around it or is it just getting picked up? Like, do you have a strategy to support that?

Paul (20:38): Yeah, we're, we're absolutely. So we're, we're absolutely tying it into our PR activity where we're just really kind of getting the ball go in there, but we, we took like, our women's report, for example, is one of the lead things that we wanted to see if there would be some, some market interest in and through January, we got a ton of pickup on it. So lots of people leading into obviously leading into international women's day. Like, so January, February, where some big months for us in terms of getting a lot, a lot of interests really across North America in terms of pickup for it. But yeah, I think, I think where we want to go with this is then turn this in and also, you know, use, use the media as, as a as a partner with us to also help, like, where do we want to interrogate the data and what's next?

Paul (21:23): And, you know, there's some obvious things like, you know, as vaccines start to roll out and travel restrictions get lifted, there's going to be like an uptick in travel. And so we'll be able to look at like the travel expenses within small businesses that they're logging and say, look at like, how are they actually increasing their travel expenditures and where are they actually spending their money? So are they spending money on Airbnb? Are they going to the chains? Are they spending on airlines? Like trains, like how travel patterns changed at all since, since in the past as well,

Kathleen (21:57): This is the clearest indication that I'm a huge marketing nerd, but like, I get so excited when I hear this stuff like, Oh, fun to dig into that data and turn it into things.

Paul (22:07): I think it's one of those things where, you know, we could have easily just kept going down the route of like buying a bunch of buying a bunch of units competing for keywords, doing all that kind of stuff, or, you know, which we still do, but we can also look at other ways that we can, can really kind of create and drive like this organic activity, which all marketers need to be really trying to figure out.

Kathleen (22:28): Yeah, absolutely. All right. Shifting gears a little bit, let's talk about the branding, because you mentioned that you came in and there was a rebrand and you specifically explained that like, logo and a lot of that was already done when I hear that, I feel like, Hmm, that could be a double-edged sword, because if you literally have just come in as a CMO and somebody says, guess what? We just redid the logo and the colors and this and that. I knew that it could be like, Oh, great. Yeah, no, cause then you're stuck with the new one and you can't be like, let's change it again. But it sounds like in your situation, it was not that way.

Paul (23:05): Yeah. It was the greatest way to come into a company. The biggest, the hardest part of it, any kind of rebrand or branding activity is getting, doing the change management and getting organizational buy-in. Yeah. That was done. So the entire brand effort was built up from the ground up. There was a brand council that brand council was like working on like what were the things that we needed to do and represent in the minds of our customers. So we had an agency called son and sons that was, was helping kind of, really kind of do that inward look. And also then, you know, what's what's role, what's the customer's role and how do those things, two things come together and, and getting down into like the, the challenges that every small business owner faces and in their journey of growth.

Paul (23:57): And then what our role is within that, when I came in and the first month it was this big brand fair, where there was the entire company was mobilized and to generate ideas and around, and it could be anything, product marketing, M&A, anything in terms of like, how do we action this for our customers? And it was just basically like a a huge kind of session that where people were pitching their ideas. And so you know, I came into that and so people were bought into it. They had already knew what was the place that we were going to occupy from a brand standpoint and a positioning standpoint. So I'm like, Hey, this is great. All I need to do is like, choose a logo.

Kathleen (24:39): I feel like that's sort of a risky move on the part of the company and it paid off in this case. But like, yeah, when I think about that, it's like, Oh, we're going to hire a CMO. I would be like, we got to put the brakes on all of this branding stuff, because we don't want to do it and then have them walk in and be like, here you go.

Paul (24:55): Well, I think there was part of that, like what I needed to do was like, you know, a lot of the work had been done in terms of crafting a story. But then we needed to get it down into like a strategy. So, so, you know, people got it and got what we doing now. We needed to make it tight and, and, and really just make sure that we can kind of bring it down so that once we engage other partners in, in trying to make this thing come to life, that once we kind of build up our story again, in terms of what we are doing externally, it, it made sense. So like, it was, it was really about like, you know, my it a great thing too, with the company is that like, it's very, very customer oriented in terms of, of, of being able to when you like, so for example, when you come into the company, you have to do four weeks of customer service training and product knowledge.

Paul (25:41): So you you spend basically two weeks doing classroom sessions and then two weeks doing ticket and, and customer support. So you get to know the product in and out and you get to know the customers in and out. And whether it's their pain points, their joys, their hates, it's like everything about their experience with the product. So you kind of exit when you go into your seat, like you, you get it, like you get what these people are trying to do and how they think of FreshBooks in their day in day in and day out lives. And so, so that part of it is like such an interesting dynamic, but I've never been in an organization that is so customer focused like this. So so, so all of this stuff is like, how do we now take this in and externalize it and make sure people understand that, that we get them.

Paul (26:26): And we get them at a, at an emotional level that not a lot of other companies do. And so that's where, where it was like, for me, it's like, how do we now take that and, and tell that story to our customers. And that's the journey that we're on right now. So we've done a ton of stuff there. Like we launched a campaign before, right before the pandemic hit in, in Texas, where we took a bunch of markets and we were looking at the lift that we would generate through through a bunch of different media plan media that we had in market. And we had like a big coordinated, integrated campaign and with OTT and performance media and some traditional media. And, and then of course, like everything got shut down. So it's like plans. So it's like, Hey, now we have to pivot on everything. But but it was great. Like all the early warning kind of early warning indicators are coming in very, very positively. So it kind of told us like, Hey, everything's right. Like we need to launch this thing and just get it out in to prime time. But when, cause the you know, COVID, so, yeah.

Kathleen (27:30): So when you, when you think about that, you know, you talked about, like, we had the, we had the, the story, we had the brand, it just like really, wasn't kind of like delivered to the market. When you think, when you came in and you were thinking about how do we take, what we've, this, this baby we've developed and like, put it out there into the world. What does that look like? I mean, obviously you had a lot of balls in the air and you talked about an integrated campaign. Can you give me sort of a high level overview of how you think about taking a new brand to market?

Paul (28:00): Yeah, sure. So you know, I think you know, most people don't care is like customers don't care whether or not you created a new logo or not. And, and, you know, I come in you know, I came in really with that type of mindset that like, we can go into market. This is more about us than it is our customers. So you know, this was about us just confirming a commitment as a company to what we're doing and, and moving forward. You know, we sure we got some feedback from customers when we launched the logo and things like that, but, but really the feedback that we wanted to get was, you know, if we're saying that we're in, we understand the, you know, the feelings that customers have, the isolation of being a business owner, and if not, we're here to help them through those times.

Paul (28:50): Like, are we credible in saying that? So it was really just testing that, making sure that, that, that message resonated well, that, that, like, it, it ticked off all the kind of key things that we needed to do from a brand tracking standpoint. And, and just go with it and really, you know, we got that feedback. We tried to line it up more with like, you know, kind of market moments and, and the things that we do, because we're a small business, we're, you know, we're a mid-market business, but we have lots of learnings. So everything we do, we try to then help tell our customers why we're doing it and give them a little bit of of an insight into you know, why are we changing our logo and what that actually means to us. So we wrote a big, long blog post about not just like why we're changing our logo, but how we did it.

Paul (29:35): And, and just like, so if you're thinking of changing your logo, here's like the playbook that we did. So everything we do, we try to like, then kind of turn it and take a little bit of a different slant on it. So it's not like, you know, bang the drums. We have a new logo, everybody come here and you'd be amazed with it's with this design. It was really a very like, Hey, we did this. And if you're thinking of doing it, here's like the thought process that you could go through. Here's like the tools and the, the different types of things you can read on, on doing that. So, so we always try to take that from the lens of, like, why would an owner really care about this? Well, maybe they're thinking of doing this type of effort to,

Kathleen (30:11): So it's been about a year and a half, and I'm, I'm sitting here feeling kind of blown away by how much you've done in that time. It's a lot, and a lot has happened in that time, because we've had COVID and all these changes, as you indicated, like, and it was funny listening to you talk about it too, because I started not this job. I started a new job a little over a year ago, January as head of marketing at a company did my whole, like after 30 days, I had my whole plan, my whole marketing plan mapped out, and then the pandemic hit. I was like, well, throw that out the window. You know, and it's, it is, it's incredibly disruptive. And so it's amazing what you've accomplished. I would love it. If you could speak a little bit to, you know, what, what that has done in terms of transformation of your marketing, you know, and I know there's only certain things you can and cannot share, but like, can you, can you get into a little bit of like before and after for me, or,

Paul (31:06): Oh, of course. I mean, as I kind of mentioned before, we're going through this, like a growth phase. So, you know, we were built out like, you know, we're building out our B2B capability and capacity and building up that, that whole kind of ability to just do demand gen do a lot more kind of intent-based marketing, building up our capabilities in that space, along with keeping our, this kind of a tree, this big funnel kind of going on our self-serve side. But, but really it's like it, I mean that the pandemic just like blew everything up because all of the assumptions that we had didn't know if any of them were gonna keep going. So, so we did three different models in terms of where we thought the year would end up, that we took to our board. We got feedback, like there was people coming with nine, 10, 13 different types of bottles for like, well, you might as well, why not?

Paul (31:56): If you're at 13, why not 20? Right. But, but it's, it's so we, we just said, Hey, let's take this case scenario. And then be very, very, very flexible with our cash. So, you know, like most companies, we can track that a bit, like in terms of we thoughtfully just like, let's like remove some costs from the equation. We think we're going to go through a bit of a downturn. Let's you know, pull back on our spending, but be really, really ready to just like open the flood Gates if seeing what happens. And, and really, we didn't see a tremendous down downward impact on our business. We saw some cancels. I think we were kind of pulling forward what may have been some cancels or some churn that that would have happened regardless. But then we stabilized very, very quickly. And then saw like the summer, like last summer was a very good time to be spending cause a lot of people exited the market.

Paul (32:45): The economies in terms of driving CAC were great. And, and so, you know, of course we're then doing re forecasting. And, you know, our August re forecast was then our 2021 reforecast, but then as new people entered the market in the fall, then, then the economy's changed around hot day. Yeah. And so, and so, you know, and so a lot of the assumptions that we made even in our, in our 21 plan are not coming true because we were doing them in a time when, when we were seeing some real, when a lot of people that just exited the market. So so it, you know, right now we're just in this continuous cycle we reforecast a lot now just within the marketing team.

Paul (33:28): I think the main thing that we're doing is really just trying to make sure that, that you know, we're hitting the core metrics that any SaaS company we really mindful of our LTV to CAC. So we look at our costs. We just look at all, all our early warning indicators in terms of people engaging in trials and making sure like our pipeline is healthy and all of those types of things. And it's right now, it's just being really, really ready to shift, to turn, to pivot, to pull back to. And it's, it's at a very, very like a channel by channel level now, like is mobile is our mobile channel working is, do we need to pull that back mobile web versus desktop versus, you know, it's so it's, it's a very it's w the, the folks who are on the controls right now, they're very hands on the controls.

Kathleen (34:11): Nice. Well, I mean, unbelievable. And, and I would love, I know I can't, but I would love to get a look at like how you guys do forecasting and modeling. I feel like that's something that we're grappling with. I'm at a, I'm at a series, a startup, and we're constantly re-evaluating and we've new products launching, and you come up with your kind of, back of the envelope forecast, and then you have to re forecast as soon as you start to see a little bit of traction. And so I'm always fascinated by that process, but that's for another podcast, right?

Paul (34:39): Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'd love it. It's such a fascinating area that I think a lot of people just don't really understand how much marketers spend on, on that and how much are our, you know, database assumptions, how much are WAGs or wild-ass guesses and what it takes to actually make all this stuff come true.

Kathleen (34:58): Yeah. You know, we go into marketing thinking, we're not going to be stuck in spreadsheets and jokes on us.

Paul (35:03): Yeah. That's why I, I love our FP and a team and having some good marketing, finance people are always a, a valuable thing to have within any, any department.

Kathleen (35:11): Amen. let's change gears now because we're kind of coming up to the end of our time. No problem. So there are two questions. I always ask all of my guests. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say. The first is, of course, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really kind of setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?

Paul (35:33): Yeah, so one company that I can really appreciate today is Clear, but, and particularly because they're all over my social feeds promoting their social targeting capabilities. So when we talk about does the practitioner or the subcontractor have a really nice home, it's nice to see a company that's actually promoting its own product through the channels that it's actually promoting. So I'm like good, good for them. I give them a big round of applause. Companies that I kind of, I look at, like, there's a couple of folks you know, within this data space, there's a company. I look to a company called drop loyalty. They they're like kind of a millennial money. It's a little like a latent loyalty and rewards program for millennials. And they built out this product called Cartify, which takes the data. And then they've been able to build out some awesome types of insights there. So I think those guys are, are, are absolutely killing it in that space as well.

Kathleen (36:34): Oh, I can't wait to check those out. Second question. All the marketers, I talked to say that one of the greatest challenges they face is just keeping pace with the incredibly, you know, fast changing world of digital marketing. And so how do you personally keep yourself educated and up?

Paul (36:49): Yeah. so I will never recommend a book because I find books are generally out of date. I've in my career path, I've done a lot of different things. Like if you, if you look at it, you might say, Hey, there's some sort of rhyme or reason to that, but I've just gone into areas that I've been interested in, whether it's programmatic or whether it's data science or machine learning. And so I just find like, I get really obsessed with something and just read everything I can about it, and just try to target subject matter experts in that space. So, you know, I think nowadays, there's, there's so many different forums whether they're different Slack groups or, you know, I haven't spent a lot of time in clubhouse, but, you know, I hear it's the place to be if you want to go and learn some stuff. So there's, there's just like so many places that you could find those subject matter experts. Now, I think it's just like immerse yourself. And in that topic, I find personally, it's hard to do multiple topics at the same time. So I just, I just try to do one thing at a time.

Kathleen (37:46): Yeah. And it's funny, you mentioned clubhouse because I can't get sucked into it. Because for me, LinkedIn is the place. I feel like what I always say is you have to pick your platform and like go deep in the platform that you're going to commit to. And maybe, maybe you can have two, I don't know. But like, I, there are people I see who are on, who are everywhere and I'm just like, when do you actually get your real work done?

Paul (38:07): I know, I know it's a lot. Yeah. And I spent a lot of time doing social media consulting in like the late two thousands or working in a SAS company in the social media space. So I've I've, I've, I've let that all become very lax after like 2012.

Kathleen (38:23): Yeah. It's nice to be able to do that every now and then just say, you know what, we're going to turn that one off. Great. Well, speaking of social media and the web if somebody is listening and they to learn more about what you've talked about here today, or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that?

Paul (38:41): Yeah, they could just, if they Google CowanPKC, all of my socials will show up or I'm just Paul K Cowan on LinkedIn. And people can shoot me a note and just make sure you mention the podcast.

Kathleen (38:57): All right. Great. And I will put these links in the show notes so that they're easy to find. And any other resources you want to direct folks to.

Paul (39:05): If you're interested in finding any information about like the small business resource stuff and what we're doing, you can just go to our website. If you could just go to freshbooks.com, just head over to the resources or press area, and you'll find all that stuff.

Kathleen (39:20): I'm definitely going to check that out because I'm working on data stuff. So awesome. I love seeing what other people are doing. All right. Well, Paul, it was great having you here today for those who are listening, if you learn something new or you enjoyed this episode, I would love it. If you would head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a review, that's how other folks find us. And if you know someone 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, Paul.

Paul (39:49): Thank you, Kathleen. It was awesome.

How do the world's top LinkedIn power users get the most out of the platform for sales and marketing?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, #samsales Consulting founder Samantha McKenna shares insider tips on using LinkedIn, as well as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, for sales prospecting and marketing.

From understanding how LinkedIn's algorithm works, to diving deep into the ways marketers can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as part of their account-based marketing campaigns, Samantha shares specific, actionable tips and strategies that you can use right away to get better sales and marketing results.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to get all of Samantha's tips.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the #samsales Consulting website
• Connect with Samantha on LinkedIn
• Check out Samantha's #samshorts courses on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Samantha McKenna, who is the founder of #samsales consulting. Welcome to the podcast Samantha.

Samantha (01:43): Thank you so much for having me Kathleen. So great to be here.

Kathleen (01:46): I'm really excited about this conversation. So for anybody listening you know, we've talked about LinkedIn a bunch on this podcast and coming at it from different angles every time. And I've always thought of myself as somebody who knows a lot about LinkedIn and is pretty good at it. But it turns out I still have a lot to learn. And how do I know that? I know that because I attended a talk that Samantha did on LinkedIn and all of a sudden I realized that there were massive gaping holes in my knowledge base. So I was like, Oh, I have to have her come on because I learned so much. And every time I feel that way, I really want to share it with my listeners. So with that introduction, Samantha maybe you could tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and specifically, you know, your background and experience and how you came to be doing what you're doing now and what #samsales Consulting is.

Samantha (02:39): Yeah, for sure. You know, I think the one you're not alone in that response, I think there's there's so many little nuances on LinkedIn for everything that you should be doing, not only with the free platform, but then with Navigator, you know, and I think that I've spoken to so many people who think I'm a total pro at this, what else can I learn? But then when we sit down together, they're like, Oh my gosh. So I think what's great to highlight for anybody, whether you're a marketer or your sales person, is there is so much just platform can do that. You might not even know just yet. My own personal background, I've been in enterprise sales for 15, 16 years at this point. I have been an individual contributor, broke a bunch of records while doing that and then convinced my leadership to move me to management.

Samantha (03:22): And I climbed the ladder through there. Having most recently run a line of business at LinkedIn for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, where I ran the enterprise sales team there out of the New York city office. And, you know, I think for me, like many of you guys, you probably have these, you know, pie in the sky dream come true companies that you've wanted to work for. And LinkedIn was exactly that for me, I had no plans of ever going there, but after doing a customer testimonial for them about the LinkedIn Sales Navigator platform, I think I almost fell out of my chair with excitement about what it did for our teams. And they said, we need that energy here. You have to come work for us. So I think for me really where the expertise in LinkedIn came from was just understanding early in my career, the power that I could leverage with the platform, the brand that it could build for me, not only as a sales rep, but as a leader and for the products we sold and frankly where #samsales came from was one my very first post giving a sales tip and then thinking, well, maybe this'll take off.

Samantha (04:25): Maybe there'll be something here. So I want to attach a hashtag to it. But where the first posts actually came from was every single time I gave sales advice to my friends, my bosses, my bosses, bosses, they always said, I've never thought of that. That's so interesting. What a great idea. And I was like, well, dang, like if you guys think this is revolutionary, then maybe I should share it with the world. So we did, I shared it my very first post. I added hashtag Sam sales, not thinking it would really go anywhere. And actually on that first post Sales Hacker reached out and said, this was great. Would you come write for us? And I was like, heck yeah. So excited. So we have a little bit of a, of my background there.

Kathleen (05:04): That's awesome. And I love that LinkedIn hired you because you just such a passionate customer. I think that's honestly, that's, that's such a great way to source sales talent, right?

Samantha (05:15): No kidding. Well, and I I'm lucky enough to still be a brand ambassador for them. You know, one of, I think about 20 people that, that have that role, but you know, who wouldn't want that someone who is excited and can wax poetic about your technology forever. Yeah, definitely got that in me.

Kathleen (05:30): That's great. The thing that I think is really interesting is, is the evolution that LinkedIn has undergone in the last let's call it decade because when I think back on it, and this is just my perception, I'd be curious to hear if you, if you've experienced and seen it the same way. You know, I've been on LinkedIn a long time and for, for a while there, it was literally just your online resume and there wasn't as much interaction. And then it was like the interaction happened in groups. Groups were so big for a while and people's posts in the feed were more broadcasting and less back and forth. And then it seemed that groups kind of, you know, died away a little bit. And now the main action is really happening in the feed. And it's like the last two to three years, I've just absolutely loved it. It has surpassed Facebook, Twitter, everything else as my main platform of choice. It's, it's where I really feel my people are. I don't know what that says about me, maybe. But it's really, truly become more of like what I really think of as a social network than it used to be. So that is my perception of it. I'm curious to hear what you think

Samantha (06:42): I completely agree with you. And I think the way that you articulated, how it's grown, kind of the little roller coasters and dips with groups, and then how it's really become this incredible content sharing platform is dead on Kathleen. I think what's interesting too, is that you think about how many members are on LinkedIn. So we're at about 750 million members on LinkedIn that are globally located. And what's interesting to me about that is that half of those members on average log in once a week onto LinkedIn and stay on at least five minutes on the platform. So what that tells me is that maybe they're coming in to update something on their profile, right. But what I think they're really doing is they're coming to look for content, right? They're coming to read that feed. They're coming to see what the expertise is that is out there to learn something.

Samantha (07:29): And the even more interesting number to me, which I hope will grow is that less than 1% of those members, myself included you, Kathleen, I know you post quite a bit on LinkedIn, but less than 1% of those members are actually posting content at least once a week. So for any marketer out there for anybody in sales out there, that's listening to this. This is a platform where you don't have that much competition to see what it is that you're posting and guess what it's free of charge. So you get to go build a brand, get your content out there and get your subject matter expertise and really use LinkedIn to, in my opinion, what it's built for it to be a demand generation machine, which is exactly what it's been for our business.

Kathleen (08:11): I totally agree. And I always tell people, I get a lot of questions about my LinkedIn presence. People are like, you're really active on there. Why do you post so much? And, and I, part of it is just that I enjoy it. And I am the weirdo who has LinkedIn opened, like all the time, if I'm at my computer, it's opened and I'm looking at it all the time. Both because I learn a lot also because I monitor my company social presence, but, but also because like there's so much great discussion there. I don't want to miss it. But I tell people that I do use LinkedIn kind of as a personal marketing sandbox. And it's an, it's a place for me to experiment and, and figure out what's working and what's not. And so right now, my goal is to post every single business day.

Kathleen (08:58): And then ideally I also post on the weekends, but I'm not like pressuring myself if I don't, I don't get it every Saturday and Sunday. You know, just to see like what will happen in terms of engagement levels. And it's funny, cause I was just this morning looking at shield app, which is a third party platform that helps you kind of like, it's like Google analytics for your LinkedIn account, how I think of it. And it was fascinating because I can see and shield app the moment when I made that decision to post every day and you can see all of my metrics, like go up into the right, the engagement, the number of people viewing my posts, all of it increased. And so that's the thing that I find so fascinating as like the true marketing nerd that I am is I get to like run these experiments. It's things like posting regularly or posting with videos or posts versus posting with texts, putting the link in the post versus not like testing out different topics. And you can really see like what's resonating and there's so much gold in there. So now I'm going to stop going on and on marketing talk.

Samantha (10:01): I love the data as well, because I think, you know, data only gets us so far. We need to know what's behind the data too, but it can be so tremendous in terms of guiding us to future decisions. So if we look right, if you look at your analytics and say, well, I don't seem to get a lot of, of, you know, engagement from this post or when I post on this day or this type of content, it helps you refine how and what you post. I'd be interested to see your, your analytics as paired up to what I'm about to tell you guys, but a couple of different things to think about that the ultimate times to post. So everybody always says like, what time should I do it? Well, guess what if we all told you, well, Tuesday at 11 o'clock in the morning is the right time to post and everybody's going to post them and you're going to be competing for that, those eyeballs, right? Because that's when the platform will be flooded with content. But a couple of things to think about, even if you're just getting started in posting one would actually recommend that you avoid Mondays. So Mondays are the day where everybody wakes up and they're like, this is the week. This is the day that I'm going to post on. Right. They're all energy.

Kathleen (10:58): It's like New Years resolutions.

Samantha (11:01): Exactly. Right. So I would stay actually away from that day. Check out Tuesdays. So to give you a good example, our Tuesday posts are through the roof. Of course, now everybody's going to post onto your site and that's going to go down, but that's all right for the, for the greater good. When we posted this just this week on Tuesday, I posted about the fact that we don't do introductions or set agendas at the beginning of demos and how frustrating that is. You know, we've all gotten on those calls where the sales rep just goes into it about 44 hours after I made that post, of course, you know, knowing some of the algorithm tricks and helping the visibility had 23,000 views at that post. And I think about that, just the difference in posting right on a Tuesday versus a Monday is huge as a game-changer, but also all of those algorithm hacks, right?

Samantha (11:48): That I just talked about those things that I know how to do because I've been inside LinkedIn and I've used this for so long. That's also what helps drive the value. So you don't really need to do this that much. If you get on the platform and post two or three times a week and you learn how to do these things that will help. And the other thing to think about is, think about a weekend post. So I'm with you. I try to post on the weekends. I'm not strict about it. And sometimes frankly, I just need the break from LinkedIn.

Samantha (12:15): Read my book. Yeah. So, but I think about this, if you try and post on a weekend on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning, I think what you'll be interested to find is that you get a very different audience. So we tend to have a higher concentration of attendees on LinkedIn that on the weekends that tend to be executives. So we're running, running, running throughout the week. And then once we get to the weekend, we're like, okay, what happened on LinkedIn that we missed? So not only to get a different audience, but you might get to the more senior audience, also one other tip. I love my weekend post to be a little bit more about ourselves. So maybe how we can be better, you know, less multitask, more focused on something, how we can be more disconnected from our technology as I post on LinkedIn. And you know, things that are a little less businessy and maybe more professional businessy like personal businessy. There's some words that don't make any sense that I've used now. So you guys should definitely trust my judgment.

Kathleen (13:07): Oh, that, that makes, I think what you said makes complete sense. And it's funny because I've actually tested the same thing with email newsletters. The traditional marketing guidance is you always send them on like Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. And I have found sometimes sending it Saturday morning is incredibly effective for the exact reason you said, because that's when the people who are super busy and have packed calendars, tend to like kick back and go through their inbox.

Samantha (13:35): Yeah, and we, we, we did that same thing. So we have a a newsletter that comes out on Fridays, which is our mail, which is a really short, impactful newsletter actually. Jeff Rosset and he was the CEO of Sales Assembly was nice enough to announce our newsletter. The other day, we got a bunch of signups from him. We send that on out on Friday and our open rate is through the roof. Now I do imagine hopefully that's because some of our content is decent, but also I think it's the timing. And then we also send out some marketing campaigns on Sundays to talk about BDR, best practices for your, your business development reps. And again, open rate through the roof, I think just because we're not doing it when everybody else is competing for those eyeballs. Yeah.

Kathleen (14:15): So true. When they go right. You go left and there's some opportunities to the left. Exactly. So, all right. I have a couple of questions for you. Number one though, before we do this, is if somebody wants to subscribe to your newsletter, where do they do that?

Samantha (14:27): Oh, thanks. Yeah. Pop over to our website, sands sales consulting.com. And we'll, we'll hit you with a, Hey sign up as soon as you hit the website. So pretty, pretty easy to navigate them.

Kathleen (14:38): All right. Perfect. And we are going to be in a minute getting into some stuff about Sales Navigator, because that was what made my eyes pop open when I heard you talk. But before we do, you said the magic that every marketer reacts to, which is LinkedIn hacks algorithm hacks. So maybe we could just have like a little rapid fire. Like, can you share a list of some of the hacks that you are seeing working right now?

Samantha (15:07): For sure. So I'll give you two, let's say three that are really important. So if you are a marketer and you were trying to encourage your salespeople of how to post better, here's a couple of hints. So number one, you want to think about link in comments. I think that this seems pretty table stakes these days, but again, so many people do this the wrong way. If I have a link, let's say to a company event to a data sheet of white paper or webinar or whatever it is that I want to advertise on LinkedIn, if I put the link in my post, what that's going to do is get LinkedIn to say, huh? So what you're trying to do is take our viewers that we've worked so hard to get to linkedin.com and you're going to take them away. He said, no thanks. And so what they're going to do is throttle your post to make sure it doesn't get as much visibility on average.

Samantha (15:52): You'll get about 10 to 15% of the normal visibility that you will. If you had instead talked about the event and then said, link in comments and put the link in the comments. Now, let me also tell you why, because I know everybody's like that that makes no sense, like who cares the link? Is there no matter what let's say, I posted everything according to the LinkedIn algorithm. And then let's say you, Kathleen came along and said, Oh, this is great. This reminds me of an article I just read. And you posted the link in my comment. Linkedin's not going to punish me because you came along to try and get viewers away from LinkedIn, but they will punish me if I do it. Right. Punish is a hard word. You guys get it though. So throw it in the comments.

Kathleen (16:30): No question about that. Quick question. Cause I think a lot of people still hold on to that notion that their posts, like, especially if they're promoting an event, for example, they're like, Oh, but I have this amazing event graphic. Like if they upload an image in place of the, what I call the unfurl, like the preview image that would come with their URL. So if you need to do that as it is it make your post-sale Lincoln comments attach an image that substitutes for what would have been the preview. Does that work just as well?

Samantha (16:58): You nailed it. That's exactly it. So I can do that two ways when I go to the link and I look for an image that's, you know, on the article or already there, or I just post the link, just exactly what you said in my post. I wait for the preview image to come up. I take a little snippet of that. And then I delete the link from the post because yeah, the image, the image also works. People love image. They love being able to say something in front of them instead of just text. So that's a great one, two punch to make sure you're really double playing the algorithm there. Yeah. Think about to the structure of your content. So when you post something on LinkedIn, you've got about five lines of texts that you can have and that's texts. That's hard return, white space, it's five lines.

Samantha (17:40): And those five lines after those timelines, you will get a dot, dot, dot, a little ellipses there. Plus, see more. So what we're actually trying to is your post will get more visibility if you encourage people to see more so, as soon as they click on that LinkedIn perks up and says, Oh wait, there's something interesting here. If we can get a bunch of people to do that, then you're basically telling LinkedIn there's something really interesting here. A bunch of people want to see more. They're so captured by the first five sentences that they want to see more. Think about like clickbait and what we'll see out there. Right?

Kathleen (18:12): The Buzzfeed titles only don't be like disingenuous is what I always tell people. Like channel Buzzfeed but in an honest way,

Samantha (18:20): The one that I always fall for is what, what do eighties celebrities look like now? I'm like, I'm desperate to know. Right. So I think you're, you're absolutely right. Be authentic. So I hate the ones that are like, it was the most dramatic day of my life. I'm like get over it. I hate them. But so if you go back to look at mine, you'll see that where my kind of clickbait comes in and saying, you know, posing a question and then answering that question. Right. And getting people to think like, wait, that's the answer to it. I have to see more of what she says. Think about it that way. How do we just use that space to hook people into whatever it is we're going to talk about in a genuine, authentic, helpful way. Okay.

Kathleen (18:58): And that's like, what do journalists call it? Don't bury the lead. Like pop it up front and then people want to read more.

Samantha (19:04): Nailed it. Exactly. And I think the final thing, and usually the most shocking, especially for marketers that are like, okay, I've got to get my sales team to share our content is, do not use that share button on these LinkedIn posts. If you do nothing else, just create a new post. So let me again, tell you why, what LinkedIn really values is original content. So let's say today I posted on LinkedIn, let's say all three, 1 million members that are posting on, on LinkedIn every day, come in. And the only thing they do is hit share on Sam sales content. Now, to me, that sounds wonderful because LinkedIn is just filled with sound sales. And I'm all excited about that. But LinkedIn is like this isn't riveting. We already saw this, give us something new. So when you hit that share button, when you and man is that hard to get somebody to do, even like that's the Holy grail.

Samantha (19:52): When for me, when somebody says this was motivating enough to me, that I want to share it. But when you do that, what you're actually telling LinkedIn is I'm repurposing old content. There's nothing new to see here. And again, LinkedIn will throttle that post about 10 to 15% of the normal views. Now, two things to think about one, if you love this post, just copy the link to post, right? Copy the link of that post, write a new post originally by yourself, and then just say Lincoln comments, you know, or tag the person that wrote it. If you still want to do that, but you're still lazy hit share. And then in that post tag, the person's name and say, this was so great by Sam McKenna, yada yada, or by Kathleen loved it. Talk that person, that person will hopefully comment on your post. And as long as they do within the first 24 hours, you'll then get about 30 to 40% of the views that you would. So a little lazy route, but guys I'm like, let's get the a hundred percent of the, of the beers that we can get. Right. Let's maximize this out. So three, three little hacks that should help

Kathleen (20:48): There. Yeah, that's great. So marketers, write those down and share them with your sales team or better give them a link to this interview for them to listen to. Okay. So now let's turn to Sales Navigator because I don't know if I'm representative of most marketers or if I'm just particularly ignorant on this, but there was, so I learned so much. I mean, I know that Sales Navigator is it's a premium option. A lot of sales team use teams use it. There are marketers who use it to help their sales teams. I like, I want to start with some of the basics for those who may not have used it, but I don't want to stay on the basics for too long because you have so many good advanced nuggets. So can you just give us a quick overview and then let's dive into some of the really cool things you can do.

Samantha (21:32): Yeah. Let's talk about what the misperception is of Navigator. And that is that it's just linkedin.com on steroids. It can do more searches. You can see a few more things. It's basically the same thing. Just looks a little different. It has more bells and whistles couldn't be more wrong. So what LinkedIn Navigator really is right? The way I've always described it is you take all of the data and intelligence that resides on LinkedIn and you curate that data and intelligence specific to your book of business. So if I'm a salesperson and I'm going after a mid-market commercial territory in the Northeast, and I'm selling to X titles for X company size, I can tell Navigator, tell me everything that's going on. Not only with these types of companies, but with my specific book of 400 accounts that I'm targeting the thing that's really neat about Navigator.

Samantha (22:17): In addition to all the cool bells and whistles is that I can pop in Kathleen, let's say you and I made, and we made it a conference. And you say, I would love to buy Sam sales, but I'm not interested in buying you for six months, but let's stay in touch. What I'm going to do then is obviously I'll connect with you on LinkedIn. But what I'm also going to do is I'm going to go to LinkedIn and I'm going to hit this really cute little button that says save. And I'm going to save you as a potential prospect. I'm also going to save your company now automatically. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to find your other decision makers within the company. You know, your, your CEO, your C-suite, your president, anybody else on your marketing team, and I'm going to hit save on them too.

Samantha (22:54): Why? Because I've made it my mission now to sell to you guys. And what I can do by hitting save is that I can track what you guys are doing. And on LinkedIn, I can track anything where you're mentioned in the press outside of LinkedIn, and I can see what's going on with your company in and outside of LinkedIn. So if you are somebody in your, C-suite just wrote an article, I'll get notified about it. If you guys are sponsoring a conference, if someone on your C-suite speaking at an event, whatever it may be, I now get that in my feed. So I can go and say, what is happening with Kathleen's company all without you guys, knowing that I've saved you attract you anything. It's very big brother and the best.

Kathleen (23:30): Okay. But all marketing sort of is these days. If we're being honest with ourselves you know, I mean, it's, this is the whole conversation, right? I mean, the interwebs know all about us. There's nowhere to hide.

Samantha (23:41): Well, and I'll tell you, this feature is fantastic for ex boyfriends and girlfriends. They won't know you're on their page. So I had it. Right. See what they're doing. Not that I've ever done that. Yeah.

Kathleen (23:52): All right. So if we use our LinkedIn Sales Navigator powers for good and not evil w you know, you, I know you talked about some really specific searches and things like little, let's call them hacks again, but more on the Navigator side. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Samantha (24:07): Yeah. So one of the, I've got a couple of favorite things here. So in your searches, if you guys are Navigator users at the top of your Navigator page, there's a search bar URL. And just to the right of that, there's something that says advanced search. And in that you get 25 different search functions. So you can set all this criteria of who you want to look for now. That's great. But what I find right is that most marketers and most salespeople are just like you, Kathleen are not totally sure of the full power of what can do what can be done here, or frankly, what you even do with that search. So here are two of my absolute favorites. Number one, you've got this really cool thing on the search that says current company and past company for the past company field, I love to put in our top 20, 30, 50 clients in that.

Samantha (24:55): And what I'm doing is I'm saying, tell me anyone, anyone on LinkedIn that used to work for some of our most important clients. And then I'm saying, okay, great. That's a few million people. Boof, what am I going to do there? And I say, okay, now tell me, who's your buyer persona? Who is your drool worthy title, right? That you would pay, I don't know, two, $300 cost per lead to get to a time to a webinar. Well, who are those people? And so put those in your title field, and then second down, further territory North America, whatever it may be and hit search. What you're going to find is a treasure trove of leads that you can reach out to and say, hello, you used to work for one of our current customers, now you work for a prospective customer. We would love to talk to you about what we can do for this current company. Caveat - t doesn't matter when they work there. I don't care if they weren't there in 2006, in 2002, 1998. Who cares? The fact is they worked for a company that trusts us with work. And so perhaps they could also trust us with some work. I have one more, but that's, there are questions there.

Kathleen (25:56): I love that approach. Especially, I mean, yes, hitting people who've worked there ever, but I mean, I feel like especially people who've recently departed, it's such a gold mine of, you know, I'm going to mix metaphors here off low-hanging fruit, because you know, fruit grows in gold mines, but like, really it is it's, it's such, it's such an opportunity that I think not a lot of marketers or sales people take advantage of it's to me, it's the equivalent of when I send out my big email marketing, like newsletters and things, the, the replies I get when it's like, I'm no longer here I always go and like hunt down, where are they now?

Samantha (26:34): Yeah. As you should. And that's exactly, that's what makes you so good at your job, right? Because you put these puzzle pieces together and you're like, well, this is still a quality lead for us. You on that note too, you can set up a search that says, tell me, anytime people change jobs within my accounts, within my territory within anything. And they're say I have all these little recorded videos by the way, you guys on my website, but I've got a video specifically about this that talks about how, when we want to be the first person to congratulate somebody on a job change, especially in our sector. So whoever does, at first, in, in the sector in vertical, that they represent is much more likely exponentially, more likely to get the business. However, we also want some EQ right. So Kathleen, if you changed shops and I'm like, hi, congrats, do you want to buy #samsales?

Samantha (27:19): You're going to be like, know where the bathroom is? Like, slow your roll. So I think there's a, there's a balance to that for sure. But capitalize on those job changes. I think the other piece of the search that I love so much is the idea of, especially if you work for, let's say a company that has I don't know, north of 250 employees let's even get wild. I have a hundred employees. One of the things that I love to look for is the key buyer persona that we're looking for and past company of my company. So let's say when I worked at LinkedIn, if I looked up you know, VP of sales, CRO that used to work at LinkedIn and now works for another company, either in my specific book of business or in the territory of all the people that I managed, I can find people who love LinkedIn and who are enthusiastic about it and who I can be like, you're an alumnus.

Samantha (28:09): And I currently work here and help us out. Yeah. Did me a warm intro? Oh, heck yeah. I mean, it's, it's amazing. So just those two searches. If you, if you spend the weekend doing that in Navigator, you'll be in such great shape. Oh, one more thing. If I can plug one of the great things that I've got as a, as an ambassador pop over to my website, go on the LinkedIn section under solutions. And there's a 60 day free trial at Navigator. You typically get 30 days, but through me you can get 60. So that's great. Yeah. Pop over there and get it, give it a shot and then set a reminder for 59 days to cancel if you're not wowed by it. And if you're not wowed by it, call me.

Kathleen (28:43): So there's, I think there's obviously so much that people who are in a sales role can do with Navigator. A lot of my listeners are marketers. So as a marketer, what should or can you be doing? Should the marketer have a Sales Navigator account?

Samantha (29:00): So I'm going to give you guys one of the biggest benefits that I see here. And hint, hint that I really think LinkedIn should include in their product development. So think about this. This is a little harder if you're a huge company, right? But you can even segment this down every single time you guys close a deal as a marketer. What I would go, especially if you're in demand gen, go to that sales rep and say, Hey, who was responsible? Who was involved in this deal? Tell me all of the players. On the other side of the business, the key decision maker, who was in legal, who was in procurement, who was our champion, our skeptic, who are those people have the sales reps in those names to pop into your Navigator account, find all those people and hit save. If you just do that one thing and go in every day to track job changes, you will open up a massive SQL benefit line of line of leads for yourself that never existed.

Samantha (29:55): So we talked about this as marketers all the time, right? How do we get more leads in the system? How much do I have to spend? What's my cost per lead? You guys, if you spend $900 on an account for Navigator, this will, I mean, your, your CPLs will be cents, like pennies on the dollar. It's what I love about this is that you can pop in every day or you can get the emails delivered directly to you. And every time somebody changes jobs, you, as the marketer can say, fantastic job change. See where they went, send the lead to that person or pop it in Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever, put an SLA, obviously around when they should reach out to the lead. And now you have ROI tied to a specific marketing activity that you did, that wouldn't be monitored by sales. I want to just think about the reverse of this. If I'm doing this as a sales rep, or if we teach our sales reps to do this one, we're giving them the responsibility and control of tracking those job changes. And to frankly, most reps, if they see that the person changes into another territory and it's not there, assuming they're bothered to look it up, they're certainly not going to look it up 10 times a day. So you guys can do this. And Holy smokes, does this pay off?

Kathleen (30:58): I love that. May or may not be leaving here today to put that in place.

Samantha (31:05): Oh, I can't wait to hear. We do it at #samsales. It's a, I mean, it's, I can't even say how beneficial it is. Go get it.

Kathleen (31:11): Well, it's like an extension of something I'm already doing in a kind of cheap and, and and less programmatic way, which is that you know, I'm, I'm, I started working at the company I'm at probably five months ago. And one of the audiences we sell into is large online media businesses. And I don't have a lot of contacts in that area. So every time I go to an industry event or I do anything and there's anybody else there, I always reach out to all of them to connect on LinkedIn, because I'm like, then they'll see the content I post, hopefully. Right. But this is even better because it's a way of building a relationship. And we talk about that a lot internally where I work, it's all about building relationships, especially when you're taking like an ABM style approach, et cetera. So awesome tool to add into the arsenal. One, one, maybe this is a dumb question, but does, how does Navigator link at all into your LinkedIn campaign manager?

Samantha (32:08): It doesn't. So they're, they are two separate things, which I know is a, is a hassle, but I think, you know, I'll go on the record there. I think there's so much opportunity to really bridge those gaps for, for LinkedIn one day, again, even just charging on the data that we get from that. And then being able to put those together with campaign managers, you can see like, Hey, these are, these are prospective clients or existing clients that we can target. I mean, there's so much value. They're just not quite there yet.

Kathleen (32:32): There is no current way, if you build like a target list in campaign or sorry, in Navigator, to then target those through Campaign Manager?

Samantha (32:42): Unfortunately, not that there was something that came out quite a while ago called stereo for LinkedIn, that they weren't, they were trying to do that. Exactly. That basically reps would save things out in their Navigator and then marketing could see that and be like, Oh, well, these people are important to you. And maybe they're not in our CRM yet we should start marketing to them. But it just seems like a no brainer. There's so much, it seems like a no brainer listening, we're going on record. If you invent this give Kathleen and I royalties.

Kathleen (33:09): Yes. Or, or at least call me and I'll be in your early private beta. Awesome. So, so when you're, if you're a marketer who is first getting started with Navigator, what are the first kind of most important steps you should take to, to get off and running quickly and see value out of it?

Samantha (33:31): Yeah. So one, I would definitely do the saving of your clients, especially if you guys are doing anything with ABM. If you have tier one accounts, you know, the big boys of the world that you're trying to get into, go in and save them and have somebody that's exclusively responsible for keeping tabs on what's going on with their C-suite, with their executive team. And that the company is mentioning in the press. What I think you'll find is that a lot of the missions that these companies have and the things that they're really focused on achieving come from that. So if you want to even think, how can we market to them? How can we use their vernacular in our marketing campaigns, the content that we send out, easy home run way to aggregate all of that together, directly on LinkedIn, and to see what their executives are using their voices to talk about. I don't think it sounds like you,

Kathleen (34:17): I could use that same approach for competitive research.

Samantha (34:20): Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And we, you know, even on a, on an individualized level, we see tons of marketing teams and then tons of salespeople who track their top competitors. So I work with an unbelievable amount of big law lawyers who say, like, I always lose to Bill. Like I want to keep tabs on Bill, you know? And I'm like, well, let's do it. And you won't know. So it's great. But yeah, it's fantastic for competitive intelligence. And then the other thing I would think about is kind of talking back to that search. So where have our most prestigious clients, right? Where are the people that the buyer personas, where are they now, if they've worked for our most prestigious clients and being able to kind of put together marketing strategy that says, you know, you used to use to work with us.

Samantha (35:02): We'd love to talk to you again and figure out how to do that. If your sales reps aren't doing it. The final thing that I would say is, as a marketer, think of how you can use the search to find people who have used, who have previously worked for again, your biggest clients, but now all work for the same client. So think of it this way. If I can find that there are six people who used to work for Deloitte, and now they all work for Accenture and I don't have Accenture yet, I can, I can pull those people together and I can send a little campaign to them to say, Hey guys, you all used to work for Deloitte. You all have used our technology before. I don't know if you know each other, but maybe as, as Deloitte alumni, you guys should be connected. Also we'd love to just have a group zoom with you and executive round table. How can we help you? You guys can put the pieces together with that as marketers build these campaigns. And again, tie it to ROI for you guys.

Kathleen (35:51): I love all of these ideas. I feel like we could go on and on and on forever, but we don't have forever. I want to shift gears for a minute because there are two questions that I always ask my guests, and I would love to get your take on them. The first is, of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing right now?

Samantha (36:19): So I will give a shout out to two different companies. So I think Kyle Coleman at Clari, if I'm sure some of you guys listening know him he, I think has done such a tremendous job of using the LinkedIn platform, building awareness, but the entire Clari team really is on LinkedIn. You see their presence as a whole consistently, they've really mastered it. The other thing that I would say is for the team at Sales Assembly. So this is a company out of Chicago. I'm lucky enough to be on their board of advisors and not only do they use LinkedIn to educate sales reps and leaders about what should be done properly in the market, but I've noticed a trend with them. I actually don't know if this is a fact, but I've noticed a trend where they're really using their voices for the power of promoting other people and finding, you know, really not just, you know, commercial that saying like this isn't really impactful tool. Right. And helping get the word out. So to that together, collectively, those two companies are really on LinkedIn then and on their game.

Kathleen (37:18): Those are great examples. I can't wait to go dig into those a little bit more. Second question is the marketers that listen to this podcast and many of the ones I know in real life, I think one of the biggest challenges I hear them express pretty frequently is that the world of digital marketing is changing so quickly. You know, just when you feel like you've mastered something, the platform changes the algorithm or the rules of the game. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?

Samantha (37:49): Yeah, I think for me, I met I'm bananas reader. I read as much as I possibly can, but I, when I looked at LinkedIn, obviously I like to just see what's being posted there. I also look at some of the more modern publications and see what are people, what are people promoting on Crunchbase, or people talking about on Revenue Collective? What is it that we can ascertain from platforms like that? Where people who are in the thick of it and constantly marketing and doing different things share. And then the other thing that I would say is, I know it seems like it changes so fast, but I think where I could, if I could guide you in one thing is to really focus on, have I mastered the foundations of the job here that I'm doing, whether it's content marketing demand gen, whenever I find this on the sales side too, that people reached out to me and they're like, what's the hack? And I'm like how are your discovery calls? And they're like our discovery calls. They're like, they're not great, but what's, what's the latest hack. And I'm like, well, let's, let's back go back to the, like the basic principles. So thinking about that too, you know, even from, from your perspective, not thinking about all the latest greatest, but have we really mastered the basics and if not, like what a great place to focus,

Kathleen (38:56): I feel like the equivalent of that is when you're trying to lose weight and know that you should just like eat less and exercise more, but you're like, is there a diet pill that would help me lose 20 pounds really fast?

Samantha (39:05): They just want a better body.

Kathleen (39:11): Well, whoever does invent that magic pill will be a billionaire.

Samantha (39:15): Oh my gosh. I can't imagine.

Kathleen (39:17): But it doesn't exist yet. So. All right. Great. Well there are, sounds like there are a lot of resources on your website. So maybe you could share for people who are listening and want to learn a little bit more about you connect with you online a what is the best way for them to do that and be where can they find all these fantastic resources?

Samantha (39:38): Yeah. So there's so much on my website, Samsales consulting.com. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn, come on, come on over. I post a lot of content there. I will say, you know, the most cost-effective way to get even more out of what's in my head check out our website, the shorts section. So it's under our solutions. We have 18 different shorts, including a masterclass on discovery calls, but there are three, four or five minute videos to teach you all of these hacks and practical things about sales, marketing, LinkedIn, and Navigator. So if you find yourself, you know, getting some kind of objection in sales, you're like, what was not that she said about Navigator again, it's not there. You can sign up. And this prescription is in my humble opinion, super inexpensive. So come over there. We'd, we'd love to see you.

Kathleen (40:22): That's great. I will put links to all of that in the show notes. So as always head over there to check it out and connect with Sam and find all of her great content. But if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new, which I can't imagine you didn't because you have so many good tips. If you're listening and you liked it, please consider heading to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review. And if you know someone 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, Samantha.

Samantha (40:59): Thanks.

Influencer marketing is a hot topic amongst marketers, but what does it take to structure an influencer marketing program that will drive real results?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Fancy.com Director of Marketing Abbey Schoenberg shares her approach to building influencer marketing programs that drive double digit results for brands like Oakley, Contiki and Fancy.

Fancy.com is the world's best social commerce platform, connecting over 10M users directly to the most unique creators available.  From launching new stores and product lines at Forever 21 to leading the global digital brand team at Oakley, to driving a direct-to-consumer shift and refocus to brand-building at Contiki, Abbey is an expert in B2B and B2C marketing.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to learn exactly how Abbey has used influencer marketing to drive brand awareness and pipeline.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit Fancy.com
• Connect with Abbey on LinkedIn

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Abbey Schoenberg, who is the Director of Marketing at Fancy.com. Welcome to the podcast, Abbey.

Abbey (00:23): Hi, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Kathleen (00:26): Tell me a little bit about Fancy.com and your background and what you do there.

Abbey (00:33): Yeah, amazing. So I've been with Fancy for about seven months. So I'm relatively new to the Fancy team, but it's been an exciting seven months with a lot of change and progress for what we're working on within the organization. So for those of you that don't know, Fancy is an online marketplace we source and curate interesting and unique brands from around the world. We bet each of them to make sure that there's a high level of quality and, you know, innovation to the products that we put on our website, which I think gives it a little extra level of curation. And we basically bring together an audience that is interested in those types of products. So you can find anything from home decor, to kitchen essentials, to face oils and new footwear and different things like that.

Abbey (01:18): So we have a really wide selection of products on, on the sites but they all kind of have this underlying quality of something, just a little more unique in inherent quality. So that's a little bit about Fancy. As I mentioned, I've been there for about seven months. My, my history has been kind of in multi-industry I've been in travel, like been in retail. I've been in other e-commerce brands, I've been in sports. So I've, I've kind of moved a interesting path through my career but always very focused on direct consumer, always very focused on consumer marketing building brands and, you know, both in the traditional and the digital spaces. So from forever 21 to Oakley, to Contiki, it's kind of been an interesting path for myself. And now landing in a kind of true e-commerce marketplace space, which has been such an incredible journey.

Kathleen (02:08): Yeah. I love that. And I love Fancy sounds like a great site. I now want to go online and go shopping. I mean, it's, it's sort of solving a pain point because it is hard to, I feel like it's hard to find really interesting unique products and I like the fact that you sourced them from all different places.

Abbey (02:26): Yeah. And you know, I think with the surge of direct to consumer, there's so much option and you don't really know what to trust when you get served a million ads on Instagram or a billion ads in on Facebook, or, you know, you're just unsure of what you're getting. I think we're trying to solve a bit of a problem by sourcing all of those and bringing them into the platform, but then still giving you the assurance that a big brand is sitting behind it. So, you know, you can return it if it doesn't work or, you know, you're going to get it shifted. It's going to arrive, which is sometimes questionable when you buy some at a funky step off.

Kathleen (02:55): Yeah. Or if it's even going to look like what you saw in the picture, because there's how many stories of dresses. I feel like dresses are a particularly egregious area in e-commerce where it looks fantastic of the picture and it costs $29 and it shows up and it's like, nothing. Like what you saw online.

Abbey (03:12): It was a huge victim of that. I had seen the dress millions of times. I was like, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to pull the trigger. It took, took like three months to get to me. And then I pulled it out of the bag and it was like a miniature. So I was like, I'm not going to try to return it.

Kathleen (03:25): I actually have a funny story about this. I'll digress for a second. So my son turned 14 in the fall and my parents were getting him a present. And my dad saw he was targeted on Facebook with an ad. And it was an ad. You may have even seen it because it was funny. When he told me about it, I was like, I saw that ad too. It was an ad for this like circular shaped rug. And the rug makes it look like, like you're spiraling down a black hole and he was all excited. He's like, I think, I think he's really gonna like this. He ordered it first. He ordered it and then it never came. So then he called the company and he's like, I want to cancel my order. It never came, but you charged me for it. And they were like, no, no, no. Okay. We'll resend it. So they resend it. He gets to him. And what looked like a five by eight rug or like a big rug on, on Facebook turns out to be this little two foot by two foot. And it's not even a rug. It's like a foam pad.

Abbey (04:21): It was so funny.

Kathleen (04:21): We actually, like, we had so much fun taking pictures of my son holding this little foam pad that was supposed to be a giant rug and like pretending to get sucked into the black hole because it was just so absurd. Anyway, that is my that is my Facebook ad targeting misleading product story. Yes. but I, but I'm digressing. So you guys you're, you are responsible for marketing. And one of the things that you guys have done is use ambassadors to help with your marketing. And I think this is something that you hear marketers talk about a lot. And I think there's a lot of interest in it, but not a lot of marketers have been able to do it successfully. And so I'm really interested for you to kind of break down exactly what your ambassador program looks like and what you think it takes to build a successful one.

Abbey (05:10): Yeah, of course. We're working on our ambassador program right now for Fancy. Having only been there for a few months, but I've pulled together ambassador programs at two of my other roles pretty successfully. So we've built a woman's ambassador program while I was at Oakley. And then we built a travel ambassador program while I was at Contiki. And, you know, I think when going into how we start to roll with ambassadors, I think the most important thing is you have to look at them slightly different than you would look at an influencer relationship. And you have to look at them in the way of how they engage with the community in general, not just online or socially, but how they kind of participate in, have an organic and authentic relationship with their audience. And I think that's the biggest hiccup that I've, you know, fallen into for sure. But then how do you kind of move and start to build a program of people that are really going to be advocates for the brand are really going to be behind. It are going to do, you know, do their best to shine you in a, in a good light, but also be really authentic to their audience. And I think that that's the biggest hurdle that you have to work towards when you're working on these ambassador programs.

Kathleen (06:17): Now you mentioned you, I'm really glad that you started the way you did because you mentioned influencers and then ambassadors, and there is a difference between the two. So can you kind of explain how you see the differences?

Abbey (06:28): Yeah, I look at, so sometimes I look at influencers as a speeding pool into an ambassador. So I look at an influencer is someone that I'm going to test things out with someone that has strong reach someone who has, you know, on the surface level shows engagement within, you know, whatever channel you're running with them, whether it's YouTube or Instagram or Facebook, or, you know, some other realm, which, you know, there is a million ways that you can engage with influencers. And then I think the next step is taking them towards more of an advocacy role, which is where I point ambassadors. And that's something where you are building a mutual benefit between both where you're building a relationship. That's not just post this for this. It's about bringing them into the fold and really having them involved in the progress and the process of how we communicate the brand to their audience and what we want to focus on with their audience.

Abbey (07:15): And how do we bring them into the fold, even just beyond posting, like how are we bringing them into product development? How are we bringing them into the feedback loops within the organization? So the way I look at it, as, you know, influencers tend to fall for me in a little bit more of a pay to play the testing realm, like which type of influencers are going to do well for this particular brand or this particular product. And then using that as kind of the pool to seed into an ambassador program, that's really built to be an extension of the brand family. If that makes sense.

Kathleen (07:45): Yeah, that does. So, so you say you're building out a new program now and you've done this a couple of times before, so I would love, I have a feeling, many of the people listening, haven't done it. And I like that you're kind of in the thick of it. So can you talk through like your mental and strategic process of like, okay, I know I want to do this. How do you start to put some meat on the bones there?

Abbey (08:06): Yeah, I mean, I think the very, very first thing I do in any program I'm putting together is think about the value proposition. So what am I going to ask these individuals to do for me on a regular basis and what am I going to do for them? And I think that's going to help you set up how you recruit what that process looks like. What are you looking for them from a monthly or quarterly perspective to help you get the plan together? Because I think where a lot of companies fall is they think, you know, okay, well, I'm just going to put a contract together, pay them a thousand dollars a quarter and expect them to do 10 posts. That's fine. Like there that I put that a little bit more in an influencer bucket, but I think if you really want to build these relationships, you have to have this broader value proposition.

Abbey (08:45): So right now, obviously what we're looking at is, you know, how do we bring them in and have them part of product sourcing? How do we bring them in and have them part of product testing? Like, do we build those different funnels and streams so that when they're talking to their audiences and advocate for the brand, they can do it really authentically and say like, I've tried this. I was part of this process. I believe in this because I understand why they're doing it versus here's a brief of messaging. Can you please take this out and try to explore it with your follower, your base to see if it resonates? So I think that's always where I start and every I'll take that back. Probably the first ambassador program I did not start there. I learned second I've started in that kind of process of how am I going to make this as mutually beneficial, beneficial to each of us within and outside of kind of the financials right within like, how are they going to get paid? How are we going to make this like monetarily worth it for them, but also how am I going to make them feel like I care about them as part of this team and part of this family. So I think that's always where I start.

Kathleen (09:49): So now you've done this before and you said sometimes one, one time, your first time you didn't do it that way, but subsequently you've done it. And you've used that approach. Are you able to share any examples of like from your previous companies of how you've put together those relationships so that they are win-win and they really work?

Abbey (10:05): Yeah, I think you have to. So I'll kind of talk about the Contiki one that I put together just because it's a bit was a bit more flushed through and we activated for a bit, a bit longer term on it. I think we, you, there's a point where you, you know, think about the value proposition in general saying, okay, I want to be able to provide additional ad hoc opportunities for them to travel. I want them to be able to earn free travel. I want them to be able to participate in product brainstorming and so kind of setting those up. And then as we started to get influencers in, we started to identify which ones would fit well into which pocket, if that makes sense. It doesn't mean you have to have each influencer ambassador doing each of those things. It's about how you kind of navigate each of their different roles.

Abbey (10:47): So for one example, we had a girl, her name was Patricia and she was just a great talker on camera. She just knew what to say. She was very eloquent, were like, we can really use her in, you know, having a more real and human person, explain these trips and explain this in a real, more authentic level, versus having someone on staff who's a bit more robotic or really what we never want it to go down and do was hire outside individuals who potentially had never traveled on the trips. So we're like, let's take her and let's get her into the mix on, you know, doing some testimonials, asking her questions, letting others, ask her questions and having her feedback to them. So I think that that a bit of is about, you know, defining who these ambassadors are defining the different kind of tiers and levels that the ambassadors will roll into, whether it's okay.

Abbey (11:37): I want a couple of photographers. I want, you know, a couple of really strong spokespeople. I want a few on YouTube. I want someone that's, you know, really crafty and then starting to build each of their paths independently. It's a lot of work. I will say that it does take bandwidth to manage these types of programs. And I've been lucky to have, you know, individuals and teams that have been able to focus on them a bit, always within a shared goal. But I think it's starting to one understand, okay, here are the pillars of the values that I want to be able to provide back and continue with the perfect example of like, let me find ways to get these kids that love to travel, to travel more. And that was a huge motivator for them. But then for me, making sure that I had a business objective to tidy each of those travel opportunities, whether it was sending someone to Italy for testimonial or sending someone, you know, to be a spokesperson for us with the tourism board or doing different things, just so that they had opportunities based off their own skills and strengths.

Abbey (12:33): And I think that that's important when you think, okay, I started with this influencer program and now I've gotten to know these individuals and I know the strengths before you start to move them into this ambassadorship.

Kathleen (12:44): So now I have a ton of questions. Okay. My, yeah, my first one is I like how you broke that down, because you talked about like, in your Contiki example, having some people who are strong on YouTube, having somebody photographers, et cetera. So like, let's say you do identify these different categories of people that you're looking to pull in. How do you then go find the actual individuals? Like what's that research process look like?

Abbey (13:10): Yeah. So a bit of it, it's kind of been twofold in a lot of scenarios, so there's some of it that we'll source directly. So if I know, I want to make sure I have one, you know, videographer that has a strong YouTube channel. I'll probably go and try to source that myself and start to have those conversations. But I've also used the power of media to just basically help with calls to action. So having other ambassadors make recommendations for new ambassadors, having a kind of ongoing campaign that says, Hey, are you interested in joining this program? And then having an evaluation process for getting people on board to it? I think that there is this daunting feeling that every single person you bring in, you have to go out and source or use an agency to go find these, these influencers that have value and credibility, but you would be surprised on how much people are willing to come to you.

Abbey (13:58): And on occasion, I feel like the people that are coming to you directly have a little more enthusiastic about the brand to start with. So in, I would say both my Oakley and Contiki experiences, we actually put a call to action out to our audience. So people that were already friends of the brand who had already purchased the product, who knew about us, you'll be surprised with how many influencers actually probably sit within your own database. So we start there and then, you know, we start posting about it on social. We see who can come to us and we have application processes and forms you fill out so we can understand how you fit into the mix so we can make sure, Hey, we're looking for five new tubers. Let's filter by anyone that submitted that said they have a YouTube channel and that doesn't always work. And sometimes you're always going to have to go out and find and fill the gaps in the holes by sourcing yourself, which does take time and can be exhausting. But at the same time, it can you balance out that work a little bit by just saying, Hey, if you're interested in joining this, come join it with us and taking the time to evaluate it. Then on Hulu, the submissions come from on the back end.

Kathleen (15:01): And that evaluation what are the, what's the criteria you're using? Are you just looking at like audience size? It sounds like with your Contiki girl, it was also just her presence. What, what, what are the factors that play into who you choose?

Abbey (15:12): So a big thing I have always focused on with our ambassador programs has been some connection to a community. So I don't, I'm not a big fan of you have to have over 50,000 followers. I don't necessarily think that makes you the strongest ambassador. What I care about is that you have some authentic connection. So, you know, one thing we found, particularly at Contiki and at Oakley was okay, this person has 10,000 followers or 5,000 followers. We try to stick to the 10,000. So we get the swipe up on Instagram, but if we have something, someone that's a little lower, but they come out and say, Hey, I'm involved in Greek life. I play sports. I am belong to these clubs. I'm very engaged in this type of community. We've found that we can take some of that engagement even offline and see better success with someone who has an authentic tie to a community pool versus just worrying so much about the number.

Abbey (16:04): So that's always been something I keep in the back of my head and something I've always ingrained in my team is don't get obsessed with the count, look and read about their profile, read about how they're engaging, what community they participate in. Do they have an outlet even outside of their social channel? And it was interesting and I'll use Contiki. It's just the most fresh, probably while I'm talking about it. The most an example of that was we had a student that was, you know, decent following probably 15,000 followers. So, you know, would fall into the kind of that micro nano influencer space, but she was really active on her, on her campus community. And she was our best seller because her audience trusted her for audience knew her. So she had this big audience because they were people who knew her from school or knew her from around, not just these random people that started to follow her. So her trust level was higher. So we saw her outperform individuals with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers. So I think that that's always been a criteria that we've put a lot of pressure on is how were they participating in what authentic community do they belong to? Because you can get really lost in the numbers. And sometimes it's just not going to translate,

Kathleen (17:14): Do you ever work with somebody for whom it's their first time participating in a program like this? And, and if you do, I would guess that there's some education and training that you need to do for them as to like how to do it. I don't know. I mean, do you, or do you not just come naturally to them?

Abbey (17:32): No, it doesn't come naturally to them. We, I would say in every program there's has always been someone that's relatively new. That's maybe done a poster too for a brand or, you know, participated at a really small level, but has not necessarily had like a contractor, a longterm relationship with, with the partner training is critical and in both, in all kinds of three scenarios and what we're setting up for Fancy now as well, there is a physical and in-person training exercise that we do with these ambassadors. So, you know, continue, it was very easy because travel was our things to bring people together to travel was very simple. But you know, in, at Oakley, we just had a weekend where we brought everyone together, they got to inter mix and mingle. They met the team, which I think is really, really important to put a face to the team, managing the program.

Abbey (18:17): Cause once you start to show your real person and see that they're a real person, the communication improves but all of those are a hundred percent focused on brand education. What we expect, how you can engage, you know, what to talk about, even how to engage with the others within the community, which has been a really interesting benefit of some of these programs and seeing friendships foster between our ambassadors. So then they start chatting about the brand between, between different influencers ambassadors. And you just start to see this rub up in this really organic relationship forum, but training, I think, expecting someone to just kind of come in and read a pamphlet or know what to do, just because you kind of stamp them as an ambassador is, is unlikely. I think the training access is definitely a critical piece of it and something that should be part of that initial kind of value proposition planning at the beginning of, you know, what could benefit can I give this individual app start even it's this opportunity to come and talk with other people in the program, talk with staff, like meet product developers. And even if it's just bringing them to your headquarters for, you know, two days or a day, depending on if you localize or you want to work a little bit more nationally, but I think that's a really critical piece and it was a great question.

Kathleen (19:25): Are you still going to be able to do in person training with the world that we currently live in? Or do you have a plan B?

Abbey (19:31): We have a plan B. I mean, I think there's virtual training. I think there's kind of the carrot that will always dangle in the sense that we'll want to get back to in-person training and have that opportunity to meet face to face. But we won't necessarily stall the program because we can't necessarily can't have that in-person event or in-person experience. So I think we were optimistic for one we're planning to kind of get things off the ground at Fancy for kind of a opportunity for in-person obviously we'll stay domestic. It's not going to be this fun travel experience, like something like we did at Contiki. But I think that in the meantime, brands can still make a lot of progress by hosting something fun and interactive. I think what you want to make sure to do is again, think about these individuals. They're excited. They're wanting to join to not make things so stale and to figure out a way to make things engaging and fun in a zoom experience, whether that's sending them a box to, you know, unwrap like live on the call or whether that's bringing on someone into the, the meeting that has some sort of influence whether it's, you know, your CEO or if you have endorsers for the brand that have some sort of, you know, equity or clout within the community, bringing them, those people in just to give it something.

Abbey (20:43): So they don't feel like they're on, you know, a work onboarding call to, to say the least.

Kathleen (20:48): Now once you've, once you've identified your people, obviously you talked earlier about how there's the whole contractual aspect of this there's what are you going to give me and what are you going to get for it? Are there Stan, like norms or standards that you use to determine, you know, like I don't even know. I know in the influencer world, there's a lot of standards. Like if you have this many followers, then, you know, there's, this is probably what we'll pay you and how does it work in the ambassador world?

Abbey (21:16): So I think the ambassadors, the way we look at it as in the ambassador spaces, we obviously have additional benefits. So there's, you know, perks and rewards for completing a task or being a part of the program. So whether that's, you know, dislike lifetime, lifetime discounts or commission kickbacks on anything that you sell or, you know, once you hit a certain threshold, the opportunity to earn something I think is ways that we supplement some of that, that program. And I think we also have, I've always added in like an annual kind of get together that always has incentivizing, like stay engaged, continue to post, like, make sure you're participating in this program. Then you can join, you know, maybe the next class, that code ambassadors that comes in and join us on this, you know, fun onboarding experience, whether that be that weekend a week or whatever you do.

Abbey (22:02): So I've always tried to handle kind of a little non-monetary carrots to keep the motivated and in a way that they are no, it's something fun. That's coming down the pipeline. Do we pay them for sure. We pay them via commission. We will usually contractually pay certain people that you know, are doing a little bit more heavy production for us. So in the YouTube space, or if we're asking videographers and photographers to come in and do work for us, we obviously pay them. You know, we're not going to ask them to do their craft for free. So it also opens up those doors of like, Hey, this is also an opportunity for you to continue to expand where you are and where you're going. Those are things that we don't necessarily put in the contract, the rewards and travel perks and those types of things are.

Abbey (22:46): But I think the big difference is it's always crafted in a way that says the more you engage, the more you're going to get, but we're not necessarily going to pay you for every engagement you for a minimum, we'll pay you, you know, 500 bucks to do a minimum amount of postings. But if you do the more you do the more you're going to get out of this. And again, it's just that mutual benefit. So they see like, Hey, I went above and beyond. And it actually was worthwhile for me versus I went above and beyond and they still just pay me what they paid me.

Kathleen (23:14): Now, you mentioned paying, in some cases, paying people, a commission based on sales, that they are able to help generate. How do you track that?

Abbey (23:23): So Fancy, we track it with an affiliate link. So it's just a system that we've built internally with our developers. Contiki. We did it through a promo code Oakley, since it was so long ago, it was a little bit, a little funky. So I won't use that one as an example, but I would say promo codes or affiliate links has been the best way for us to do it. I know there's other, that we've looked into this for management, like, you know, brand ambassador or brand ambassador app that, you know, have different ways of monitoring and tracking performance even beyond just a sales level. So those are things that we're looking at bringing on board for Fancy in addition, just because we obviously want to continue to reward at a higher level for, you know, posting or social engagements and things like that.

Abbey (24:07): So there are different apps and partners that you can bring in to help you track it. The promo code is maybe not the methodology you want to go down, which is fair. I've definitely been part of companies that don't want to discount and then affiliate links. Some people can do it, some people can, but I think that there are other tools and I kind of just mentioned two companies that we've looked into that I think are really interesting in this space that really do help with the tracking and the evaluation of like success in your programs that can help you progressed and, and keep people incentivized.

Kathleen (24:38): So I have a, I have a, kind of a selfish question. This is, this is me doing research for my day job. If you use promo codes, how do you know when somebody converts on that code that it's not coming from Honey or CapitalOne Shopping, or one of these other extensions that scrapes and injects codes.

Abbey (25:01): So we tend to change our promo codes. We tend to change quarterly just to make sure we keep track of those types of things that we also always had an affiliate partner, which helps us kind of identify some of that promo code leakage that we want to make sure we stay on top of it and monitor and do those types of things. And there's also really interesting opportunities where our ambassadors have gotten smart. We had one ambassador who was super, super integrated into Reddit. So he got into a travel forum and said, Hey, if you want to travel to use my code, like, and we saw sales from it. And I was actually really happy about that because it would have been sales that we wouldn't have gotten if he didn't see it out and kind of let his code leak beyond just like a friends and family thing, affiliate, obviously you, you don't necessarily want the scraping happening. So you're getting like misleading information, right? Exactly. But we're not necessarily against our ambassadors, finding ways to mass promote their promos. But I think that that's, you know, incentivizes them where we don't penalize. Like, Hey, you found a really interesting way. You were able to get our brand into Reddit in a really authentic way with that community being very, very suspect of brands being participants.

Kathleen (26:06): Yes, it's a land, it's a land field landmine field, a field of landmines.

Abbey (26:11): Landlines, for sure. So finding a way that we were able to kind of get ourselves authentically and there, we were really proud of him for doing that. And we, you know, rewarded him and use, you know, let others know like, Hey, this is something guidance name was Archie. He's doing, and he's seeing success success with it. So feel free to like find these interesting opportunities. But I think when you have an affiliate partner, we obviously share codes with them that we do not want ending up on, on our affiliate networks. We keep an eye on, you know, usage, obviously if someone's cadencing five orders a week, and then all of a sudden they're at 50 orders a week. We've flagged that. And we're like, okay, something's happening here? And we'll start to dig into it. But generally we just try to change their promo codes as frequently as we can. So usually quarterly is what we do. Some people prefer not to go down those paths because they connect them to old YouTube videos and they want obviously the views to continue to rack up. And they know that there's residual and they don't want to constantly be changing. So we do make exceptions in certain situations where we try to keep them on long-term and then just monitor. So it is a risk. There's, it's just how much you're willing to take that risk. And I guess the level of discount you're offering.

Kathleen (27:14): Yeah. That makes sense. All right. So shifting gears. You've done this a couple of times. Can you talk me through just impact, like, you know, obviously that's at the end of the day, what all of my listeners as marketers care about, like what impact does this have on the business? I would love to hear some, some stories that from your experience.

Abbey (27:34): Yeah. I mean, I'll start, you know, back at, back in the Oakley days we launched the ambassador program as part of the launch for kind of our women's branding campaign. So we always had some women's product, but it's such a masculine brand. It's known for men's product. We were really having a hard time breakthrough. And so the theory and the, and the logic was like, well, let's get women who other women athlete connect with and get them to talk about Oakley and see if we can get some, some traction there. And, you know, this one was a little bit harder because we didn't have as much kind of direct attribution tools set up to our ambassador program. But that year that we did this really focus campaign and we continued the campaign for years until I left and kind of has trickled out since then and moved into more sports marketing relationships.

Abbey (28:20): But we saw double digit growth. And I think we attribute a lot of that to authentic representation of our products, people seeing other women that they respect and care about wearing the products. So we definitely saw some really good traction, I will say there was a conjunction with media and spend and things like that that, you know, also helped, but we were very surprised by the volume of increased during that period that we saw from a sales perspective, Contiki was much more direct. By the time I left Contiki, when we were still, obviously the program is still running, it was accounting for about 10% of all of our sales and all of our revenue which was really impressive for us because we've been, you know, we had never had the program before. It was literally in market for a year before it took that type of share, like that type of share from our other channels.

Abbey (29:10): And it was net new. It was, you know, generally new customers coming in yet. Occasionally you'd see a repeat, but generally it was all new travelers for the brand. We also saw, even with the commissions, we were paying out and with the Burkes and benefits, we were kind of paying it at the end of the pay I'm air, quoting a look can see that, but we were paying the, the ambassadors, a smaller commission than we were paying our travel agents. And they were generating more sales at this point than a travel agent community. So the Contiki one was a major success story. I think it was one that we launched it in the U S which was a team I oversaw from a marketing perspective. And as unfortunately COVID has taken quite the random.

Kathleen (29:54): I was going to say that industry has been hit so hard.

Abbey (29:57): So hard. So kind of during those right before kind of all of that kind of hit the fan, we were starting to roll it out globally as well because of its success. So it was a program that I would say had upfront costs. Of course, I think, you know, between travel and building incentives and any contractual agreements, there was upfront costs, but it was at the end of the day, it ended up being our lowest CPA channel, even calculating all of those upfront costs into it being a major revenue source for us. When we think about the mix of where our sales was coming from, improving that these ambassadors in this kind of social seller was, you know, could compete with the traditional sales person could compete with the traditional sales channel. And I think that was really eye opening because the travel industry can, in some of those respects be very, very traditional.

Kathleen (30:43): Yeah. That's so true. So what advice would you have for somebody who's kind of starting now, or like knowing what, you know, what would you do differently?

Abbey (30:55): You know, what would I do differently? I think start small. I think there is an under people under estimate the importance of the relationship that you have with the ambassadors. And I think trying to jump in and do too many at once. You're never going to create that relationship. And I've been very lucky in the sense that I have, you know, the women that I worked with for the Oakley women's campaign and the Contiki ambassadors I've worked for for travel that I've created relationships with. And I'm pulling some of the really good ones into, into the Fancy program because I've built those connections in those relationships. But if you try to jump too far and say, I'm going to immediately be with 50, unless you have a team of five, that's going to kind of divide and conquer management and relationship handling. You're just going to end up in a kind of hamster wheel of kind of attrition of the ambassadors.

Abbey (31:43): You're not going to see the relationships build, and it's going to be really hard to start to understand the value. Each of them will want out of the program to build something that eventually you can scale, but those learnings you get from some of those initial people you bring into the program are really, really powerful. So I would say that's probably the biggest learning is I think that there is especially from management and I get it all the time. Like, well, if you think you can do this with 10, why don't we just do 50? And that's always a hard, you know, when they're throwing extra money at it and they're saying we can do it, but I think unless you have the team to manage and relationship build with these influencers and these, I call them influencers at the beginning, they eventually their role to the masters as I mentioned. But I think the relationship part is probably the most important piece of making sure you have the bandwidth and you have the resource to communicate, talk to them and build it, versus just having them as you know, someone that sits in a contract that you talk to a month. Yeah.

Kathleen (32:40): That's good advice. It's funny listening to you talk about like somebody saying, well, why don't you just get 10 more? And it makes me think of, I was having a conversation earlier today and I had to laugh because it was, it was an analogous conversation. And somebody that I know said, it's like saying, you know, nine women could make a baby in a month. It doesn't add up. Right. You know, like you still need the there's more effort required. I just thought that was so funny. I'd never heard that phrase before. And I'm like, yeah, that's true.

Abbey (33:11): It's very true. And I think that there's, I think we live in such a digital world where you feel like, okay, you throw more budget at it and you scale, and it's really easy and it's in a dashboard and you just watch it. And it feels simple. But I think that ambassador programs need to bridge that digital and traditional relationship in the sense that you have to scale really thoughtfully, if you want it to be successful. If you start to throw money at the problem and outsource and do all of these different things, I think you're, you're just going to have a disconnect between the company and the individual. And that's where you start to feel where the relationship doesn't feel. It's authentic when they're talking about it. Yeah.

Kathleen (33:50): That makes sense. Well, so interesting. I could talk to you about this forever, but we're going to run out of time. I'm going to shift gears and there are two questions that I always ask all my guests. And I'm curious to know what you have to say the first is we always talk about inbound marketing on this podcast. And so is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing right now?

Abbey (34:14): Yeah. so one, and I think one that I always use as an influence for myself and the way I structure my team is Goop. I think it's, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow's skincare brand, but she's built this organization that pulls people in based off of like her expertise and her knowledge and her content. And she's not afraid to talk about other complimentary products that, you know, I think she now sells on her site, but she does give you a really kind of holistic view of her industry when she talks about when they goop the company, talk about the product. So I think what I think, and they're one that inspires me, I'm trying to, you know, take a little group inspiration. We're, we're working on some editorial things at Fancy as well, and, and taking the success that they've seen from bridging those two worlds really, really well.

Abbey (35:02): I think that that's a company I think does outstanding. Just because it feels very, they feel very user first, I would say, in, in the way that they execute their marketing and how they really kind of pull you in through content and pull you in through storytelling and pull you in through kind of their knowledge of the industry. And you just, you land there and you just trust it inherently, right. Because you feel like you're not getting a full of crap. Right. so I think they do really, really well. I also think Fabletics does, does a really good job because I think they do a really good job letting other people tell their stories for them. Obviously you have the benefit of Kate Hudson running the company, but I think they do give a really good voice to a community of women to talk about the brand. And I think that's a really powerful thing. I think not everything needs to come from the brand itself, but how do you get the, I think it ties back to the influencer and ambassador kind of model of how do you get people to speak on your behalf in an authentic way to a community that's connected to them. And I think they've done a really good job with that.

Kathleen (36:09): I'm not as, I mean, I know Fabletics, but I'm not as familiar with their marketing, but I have to say I I've given a talk a couple of times at conferences about, and I've mentioned goop in it because I think they were brilliant in the sense that really it's, it's a media brand more so than it is a product company, but it has become a product company because the media brand has been so successful in building an audience and loyalty. And what I always say in my talk is like, they could literally introduce any product and their audience would buy it because as you said, people trust them and love it. And some of the crazy products and, and, and then I always sort of say, just Google Jade egg, because they charge a lot of money for this round Jade sphere. And I'm not going to say what it does on this podcast, but you know, it's, it's fascinating to me.

Abbey (36:58): Yeah. It's I, they do. They're huge inspiration for like the way I'm looking at structuring some of the things that at Fancy and I I'm with you in the sense that they've, they've done a really good job kind of keeping church and state and blending church and state between editorial and product in a really interesting way. And it's, it's really inspiring, I would say as a marketer to see how they accomplish that.

Kathleen (37:22): For sure. I totally agree with you. I feel the same way about Magnolia, Chip and Joanna Gaines. This company, it's like the loyalty people. They could start any new business and people would run out and buy whatever they're selling.

Abbey (37:35): It could look hideous, but Joanna stamped it.

Kathleen (37:37): Exactly. It's nuts. I give all of them a ton of credit for what they've built. All right. So that brings us to the end. And before we wrap up, I want to make sure I ask you if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about Fancy, or if they have a question about what you've talked about and they want to connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that?

Abbey (38:00): From a, from a marketing perspective, I would say LinkedIn. I'm pretty active and responsive on LinkedIn. I, you know, love that channel it's place. I do kind of my market research. So it's Abbey Schoenberg. You can see my name in there. You can find me pretty easily. It's not a common name. So LinkedIn is probably the best place to connect.

Kathleen (38:20): Great. And I will put that link in the show notes. So had there, if you want to find Abbey and if you're listening and you enjoyed what you heard, or you learned something new, please consider going to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else 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. Thanks so much for joining me.

Abbey (38:45): Thank you for having me. It was super fun to chat.

Personal branding can be a powerful way to grow your executive career AND your business, but creating content at the scale necessary to see results can be challenging.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Influence Podium founder Marti Sanchez talks about why it's important for executives to invest in building their personal brands, and how to overcome the "but I'm too busy to create content" challenge.

Marti's agency works with countless executives on content creation, and he's boiled his process down to a simple, streamlined set of steps that require minimal time from his executive clients while getting maximum results. 

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to learn more about Marti's process, and how you can apply to building your own personal brand.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit InfluencePodium.com
• Connect with Marti on LinkedIn
• Follow Marti on Twitter

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Marti Sanchez, who is the founder and CEO of Influence Podium. Welcome to the podcast, Marti.

Marti (00:21): Thank you so much for having me.

Kathleen (00:23): I am super excited to have you here. You're my first guest who hails originally from Spain and particularly from parts of Spain that I've spent some time in. And so that's just an aside, but that makes me really happy.

Marti (00:38): You had a big connection there. I'm very, very excited to be here.

Kathleen (00:42): Before we dig into our topic, tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your story and how you came to be doing what you're doing now, and specifically what Influence Podium is.

Marti (00:54): Absolutely. So long story short, I was born in Boone, North Carolina, but my parents are from Spain. So we moved back to my home country when I was about six months old. So all I got was the passport. I don't remember much else, but that passport there allowed me to come back when I was 17 to the United States to play college basketball. Since then it's been a lot of back and forth between the United States and Spain. When I was 21, I had just graduated. I was looking for a job back home in Spain, but unemployment was very high and there was no jobs available. So I kind of went back to what I knew how to do, which was writing. Back in college, I would ghost write my classmates' papers for them for $10 a page under the table, just to make some cash for, to get some groceries.

Marti (01:39): So I started ghost writing online. I wrote on Quora, which is a QA platform, every day for about six months. I got two to 3 million views in that period of time. And then some people started reaching out to me if I could go straight to them. I just, people ended up being B2B CEOs. And that's where I first started learning about personal branding and inbound and content marketing without even knowing what those stamps actually meant. Eventually my career as a freelance writer went pretty well, but it was short. We started getting a few clients and it turned into an agency and that's where Influence Podium was born. Since then, we've helped over 25 B2B CEOs grow their personal brands, create content, scale, and drive inbound opportunities for their companies. And it all really started by writing papers for my classmates.

Kathleen (02:25): I love it. I love sort of like necessity is the mother of invention. And I love that you just stumbled into writing and were kind of doing inbound marketing without even knowing it.

Marti (02:36): Yeah, I didn't, I mean, I started business and, and I had an MBA, but I didn't really know what anything of that or that meant it didn't really get much of that. So eventually it was a lot of trial and error and I stumbled into it. It was fun. But looking back, it all circled back together.

Kathleen (02:53): Yeah. Now it's interesting because B2B content is something we've talked a lot about on this podcast. We've talked a lot about personal branding and why it is so important for particularly executives to build strong personal brands. You know, that's a topic that I love talking about. I believe in it strongly, it's something I practiced for myself. And recently I've had several guests on to talk about it, but I feel like the challenge with that though, I think a lot of people get why they should do it. But I think the challenge they run into is, is the, how, like, it's sort of like saying you should exercise every day and then you're like, yes, I should. But how am I going to fit that into my schedule? How am I going to be consistent? I don't have the time, like all those same complaints I've heard, used to describe the process of creating content. And you have somehow come up with a solution that, that really solves for creating content at scale for executives in order to support personal brand building. So that's what I really want to pick apart today.

Marti (04:01): Actually, it's funny that you referenced that example of working out because I find that it's very similar the challenges of somebody trying to work out and somebody trying to create content. The first challenge is I don't know how to do it, right. I don't know what exercise to workout. I don't know how to do this exercise. It's very similar to creating content, right? I don't know how to create content, so it's not for me. Maybe I'm not a great writer or maybe I don't feel very comfortable in, in camera. So that's something that actually relayed a lot. And it's one of the objections that a lot of our clients, which at the beginning when they're talking to us and because like your audience are convinced that this is the right solution for them, but they don't know how to do it.

Marti (04:43): So for us, I think that main challenge is solved by one being very self-aware and really understanding what are your main skills. And if you are a naturally better writer focusing on that, if you're naturally a better speaker focusing in that maybe it's not even on camera video, maybe it's a podcast. And then using that channel of communication that comes more naturally to you and then understanding that it's not going to be perfect at the first time it's going to be perfect or better eventually. So that's one of the challenges that we face a lot with people of like, how do I do this for me personally, I was a good writer and I didn't do any video content for two years or three years. Right. I was self-conscious about my accent. And only now I'm saying to branch out into that, but I still, I stayed very focused on my core skills at the beginning. So that's one of the first times just that we see with people, right? How do I do this? And how do I work out? How do I create concentration?

Kathleen (05:35): Yeah. It makes a ton of sense. And it's really funny that you just said that because I was interviewed for somebody else's podcast earlier today. And one of the questions they asked was you've been podcasting for three and a half years. Like most people don't get past episode five. How have you been so consistent? And my answer was, it starts with knowing yourself and like, I'm a pretty good writer. I can say that like, I am a pretty good writer, but it's, it's, doesn't come as easily to me. Like, it takes me more time. I, you know, it feels like work versus this format. I'm like, I can jump on zoom and talk to somebody for 45 minutes, no problem. And so honestly there's no more secret to it than that. It's just that it's easy. And I know if it's easier and I feel comfortable and it comes naturally to me that I'm going to stick with it. So I think you're spot on.

Marti (06:28): We're all wired differently, right? That you have different things that come naturally to us again, for me, I was a good writer. That's what I did. So 95% of my content during the first two, three years was winning and that's fine. Right. We have to take ourselves out of the comfort zone, but not at the beginning because then it's too easy to give up. If somebody had forced me to the video content at the beginning, I would have been like, I'm not doing this. I'm like, I don't want to hear my accent. I don't want to do all this stuff now that I have the confidence that I've built up after years now. I'm okay doing that. But it's too easy to allow ourselves to expand too quickly, versus just focusing on what we do best at the beginning. And that's something that we recommend all our CEO clients, like, let's be self-aware, let's see, what is your number one skill and then optimize for that double down on it. And then we'll, we'll explain later.

Kathleen (07:18): Do you have a particular process you use to figure out what their number one skill is? Or is it really just a conversation and then you can land on it?

Marti (07:25): I think they're very, it's very easy for people to know, like a lot of them, once we have that initial conversation during our onboarding process, they're able to decide which version they want to go after. Right. Then if we're creating like LinkedIn content or Twitter content, and then we're like look, for us, it's fine to create through video content or written content because the process is very similar. Just tell her what, what, where do you, what side of the equation do you feel more comfortable with? And they're able to know which side is easier for them. So I think at least of the guidance that I've talked to, and obviously I guess it's the person is different, but for us there, it's very quick for them to know which side they're usually more self-aware to the point of like knowing what comes naturally to them versus the, the one who doesn't.

Kathleen (08:17): So once they know what their strong suit is, then what?

Marti (08:21): Yeah. I think that like the other objection that we get, and I think that's what these two objections are, what dictates the whole process is I don't have the time. Right. And just like working out, like I don't have the time to workout. I don't have the time to create content, especially if you're a marketer or you're a salesperson or you're running a company, you have a nine to five job. If you were running the company, you have a lot of fires to crowd, but every position has their own complications and their time consumption. So the key here is how do we optimize so that we can leverage your time, the better so that you don't have to create 20 LinkedIn posts by yourself, or you don't have to create 20 videos every month. Cause nobody's going to do that. Like, I don't want to do it.

Marti (09:05): You probably don't want to do it. It's too much. It's too time consumption. So the key is how do we reverse engineer that time that you have, let's say it's 60 minutes per month into leveraging that into the content creation. So that the whole process for us, it looks like this and I would get tactical and cover the nitty gritty because I think your audience getting tactical. So the key here is we first start by creating a pillar piece of content. And it can be either a podcast interview where they're the host. It can be a podcast interview like me being a guest, or it can be an interview. Or we usually do two interviews of 30 minutes per month with our brand manager by that 60 minutes that they're either speaking on a podcast, hosting a podcast or speaking to a brand manager and that's recorded.

Marti (09:58): And we record the video. We recorded the audio. The next step is, and this is for clients who work with us, but it can be similarly gone with other people and find out cheaper ways to do it is to create a brief. So break down that pillar piece of condom into smaller pieces of content. So for example, after these episodes, district is recorded that we're on right now. My team's going to go in and find the best one minute, two minute highlights of our conversation and create either video content or reading content. So what that does is it allows me to create content without me being present. All I had to do was show up here, talk about things that I hopefully know that my team does the rest. If you have a team that can work with us like us, then perfect. If you can hire a freelancer, that's probably cheaper way, but even if you can not hire a team, it's easier to find ways to do clips with software than have to record yourself. 20 more times.

Kathleen (10:58): There's so much software out there now. Like I've, I've been in this game for awhile podcasting. And in that time I've repurposed my podcast, video and audio in different ways. And I've been really amazed in the last like six months to a year at the number of new companies that have popped up to solve for that need of like how to repurpose your video and audio assets. It's awesome. And they're very, user-friendly,

Marti (11:23): It's incredible. And they threatened my business. Why I'm super focused on that. Cause I love that these things are coming out because they would save us a lot of time. And maybe that's another topic, right? AI and, and what to acquire manually. I do think there's still going to be manual in both and needed.

Kathleen (11:44): 100% because like I I've, I've used some of these tools to create things like audio grams and video grams and this sort of thing. But it, you still to know how to go in and capture exactly the right piece, like sends the right message and

Marti (11:59): Know what's good content for people, for an algorithm to know that. But like you said, there's ways to do that. That doesn't require a full team like us. And it sounds contrary that I talk about it, but I want to be super transparent. There's other ways to do that than hiring a team. Like it's going to allow you to create that large piece of content into smaller pieces of content that then you can distribute.

Kathleen (12:24): I understand how that works. If you're talking about a podcast or a video, but are you saying you would do that also with like a written along written piece of pillar content or just with audio?

Marti (12:36): Yeah. So you can do it through different ways. We just found it. It's easier when it's a conversation for 30 minutes to 60 minutes, then repurposing an article. The reason why is because when you start with the pillar being audio or video, it allows you to create it's more versatile. So you can create video content, you can create freedom content, you can do many different stuff with it. When you're repurposing from like, let's say a long form article, then you're limiting yourself to reinforce them, which is still fine, but it doesn't allow you that versatility, that audio and video gives you. So we'd recommend to start with that just because it opens the world for more types of content that you can create from there.

Kathleen (13:20): That makes sense. So you're you create this original piece of longer form content. That's really a conversation then you're breaking it up into little pieces. Talk me through what those little pieces look like.

Marti (13:33): Yeah. So it can be, we find three to four main different types of pieces. The first one can be winning content for LinkedIn Twitter, Quora or written oriented platforms. So if those are Tweets, you can turn the best quotes into Tweets. If you've made a point for about 60 seconds, 90 seconds, that can turn into a LinkedIn post and you can even create long form articles from the main point that you covered during the interview or the podcast. So you can create an SEO strategy, create a LinkedIn and Twitter strategy from that. Option two is to create a video call. So you will be looking for one to two minute tips not more than that and turn them into touch with a title that catches attention, subtitles time bar, and you can post that on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, across all social platforms. Option three is if the podcast is recorded with audio only, you can turn it into audio. So audiograms is an image that is still with the sound wave for the people that are listening. And you're using that as video content, but just audio and finally something that we were assigned to do as well now is design oriented content. So we're doing carousels, Instagram decks for LinkedIn. So things that visually give it more appeal that's a fourth type of content that you can create.

Kathleen (14:59): And when you say carousel, like what does that look like? Is that is that carousels with, I know what a carousel is, but is it like paint like individual images with different words on it? Or is it images? Like how, how do you put that together?

Marti (15:12): Yeah, that's a good question. So basically what Instagram and LinkedIn allowed to do is turn it into like a slide deck, like a PowerPoint presentation, how that looks like usually is you have this initial slide with it, which is the main title that kind of tells you what you're going to see over the next few slides. And then slides two, two, seven, eight are usually the main piece of content. So if we're talking about how to repurpose content, so that's going to be the slides for, I talk about why then I talk about pillars and I talk about content repurposing that distribution. And usually there's a final slide. That's a call to action. So either follow for more visit our website. So I think that leads the reader, the consumer into the next steps. So you can repurpose that from LinkedIn to Instagram, we found that to work really well. And it just a different type of content that it's more time consuming because you don't need a designer and that's not something that comes naturally to me. I have no eye for design, then you have to watch source. But if something, somebody that their main skill of communication, which comes back to what we were talking about before is design. That's something that I would double down on that for now.

Kathleen (16:21): And when you, so you talked about like creating all these repurposed assets and then distributing them on social, are you saying that those would be distributed via the executives, like personal social media accounts or by the company account? Where would you put that?

Marti (16:35): Yeah, that's a great question and something that we get a lot. So I started the company because I believe people trust people and people want to work with people. So we think that the content performs better and resonates more when it comes from the point of view of the CEO or leadership or a person doesn't matter, they don't have to be an executive or a founder. Each person has their own personal brand. So my opinion is always, the posts should be posted from the company, from the personal profile, from the individual that said, if you want to maximize the value that you're getting for your content, I always agree that you should, reshared it from your company standpoint as well. So if your CEO talks about XYZ, then you can re share that on the LinkedIn page or the Twitter page or whatever that looks like the company profile to reach a different audience that you built. And say, this is our founder talking about XYZ, and this is why we think matters. So you're getting two for one, but I always recommend that the first wave of posting comes from the, the person from the CEO. We just found from our data to be usually over 300% better reach men, 2.5 more inbound leads coming in through when it supports the personal profile. So our numbers back back that idea.

Kathleen (17:59): Yeah. That makes sense. And then once that initial piece of content is created, do you then kind of establish a rhythm for future content pieces? How do you handle that?

Marti (18:10): Yeah, so we usually work on a monthly basis, so we have a monthly deliverables. So if we're talking LinkedIn, if we're talking Twitter, if we're talking long form content, and then we have one or two pillar pieces of content every month, so it's either one podcast or two podcasts whatever that looks like. And then from there we create the content for the whole month, from that one pillar piece or two pillar pieces, and then we can do it again next month. And then the next month we funded results combined over time. So usually we work in long-term partnerships because it's something that I was you'd probably say that you to see the same thing. You're not going to get results today. It's more of a longterm play, what brand played and you really need to believe in long-term for it to be successful. So it's something that we look for long-term partnerships, even though, I mean, I don't need to get into this because contractually we work month to month, et cetera, but it's when I'm watching a renewal.

Kathleen (19:10): How often do you personally think somebody should be sharing content in order to get traction?

Marti (19:18): Yeah I think the more, the better, as long as it's sustainable. So there's a point where if you try to do more, you eventually give up because you were not, but the more content you can create the better, because you're only one piece of content away from that. Inbounded, you're one piece of content away from that. Ask to get an, a podcast, your one piece of content away from whatever you're looking for, that book deal. So you, you know, all your professional life or your company's life can change from one piece of content that reaches the right person at the right time.

Kathleen (19:53): Is there a frequency under which you think it's like, why bother?

Marti (19:59): It's a good question. I don't think at the beginning. So I encourage people to start, even if it's with one post per week or whatever that looks like and then scale up, right? Because if you start to see traction, even if you're special, so engagement where you start to enjoy the process, which is what I eventually, that's the turning point, and you really enjoy the process of creating content. Then you start seeing results, but even if you start small start that that's my whole thing. I don't think that you need to create as much content as possible, even though as much content as possible is the best thing for me personally, I'm posting about five to six times on LinkedIn just to give some references three or four times sweeter. And then we have a couple of episodes every month, at least. So that's sustainable for might be different for somebody else.

Kathleen (20:49): And what I mean, what a, what a good results look like. Cause you do this for a lot of different people. I'm curious if you can share some stories of what impacts.

Marti (20:59): Yeah, absolutely. So obviously it depends on like length of sales cycles and depends of like average deal size. Usually we work with a lot of agency owners who have monthly retainers as similar or larger than what they pay us. And we're starting to see people get ROI by the month four or five. So at more than four or five, they usually have break. And even for the year, which allows the fall with the rest of the year to be for profit obviously that depends and we cannot go into results. Any content migrated can guarantee leads and revenue is probably a line, but we that's what we're seeing in terms of traction. Some kinds are getting more, some kinds are getting less, but from an art standpoint, that's where we're, that's where we're at right now, which is pretty good in my opinion.

Kathleen (21:49): Yeah. I would say I want to talk about like what good content looks like, because we've talked about why you should do it. We've talked about the overall framework for kind of scaling up content creation, but there's in my experience, there's good content and there's some really, really bad content out there. So what, how do you counsel your clients on what makes for good content?

Marti (22:13): Yeah, so, so we tried to find the balance between content and content that educates in content that empty to entertains without leaning too far on either side. So I think content that only educates is that physios from college that nobody wants to read because it's boring and sure it's plenty of good info, but it's not never going to get structured. And it's never going to resonate with the audience. There's nobody wants to read 45 pages of that, but then content only entertains. You're just posting cat videos at that point shortly, they get a lot of beers and other oppressions, but it's never going to get any actual results. So for us, we try to find a balance of content that really drives the conversation forward. And I hit calling it thought leadership because everybody calls the leadership, everything. But for me, the real thought leadership is ideas that drive the industry forward. That's actually I add value and that people can utilize because they're technical enough for them to be used on a day to day life. And then

Kathleen (23:20): What's that look like in practice? Like give me some examples. Cause it's one thing to say it's content that entertains and educates, but like I'm sure people have said so. Okay. So like what is, tell me what that means.

Marti (23:33): Yeah. So for me, content that entertains it's content that is actually enjoyable to consume. So content that has good spacing that is used, at an English level that is easy to understand and that it allows for that flow consumption of that content. It's hard to explain. I think you can tell, you can tell when they don't have and then content that educates for me, it's about getting as tactical as possible. So if you can share actual best practices, if you can share the themes that only you would know because you've been doing it for so long, those are the contents that people appreciate. So if you're creating content for HR and professionals, right, and you're looking for things about what are the best platforms and what are the threats within those best platforms to go to Upwork this and never use this key terms.

Marti (24:26): So whatever that looks like for your industry, and if everybody can put that content out, it's probably not create content. And so if you actually want to drive the conversation forward, it's about saying those things that only we experienced can tell. So that's why we also vet our clients very hard. And because we don't want to work with people that sell the courses or people that are like new to the industry, you want to work with people who have proven expertise and have done that themselves. So we can actually create content. That means something, otherwise we're just adding to that loud noise that will use the internet sometimes. Yeah.

Kathleen (25:07): And, and I guess the other thing I would wonder is from your standpoint, you know, obviously at some point I'm assuming your clients are looking for this to turn into business for them. And so how do you advise them about converting, right? Like you don't want to be too salesy in your content, but at some point it probably makes sense to have some kind of a call to action. How do you strike that balance?

Marti (25:32): Yeah. So we usually try to do call to actions. We do call to actions in almost all our content, especially on LinkedIn, but those call to actions are never caught, not always call to actions that are meant to drive new business. So sometimes they're call to actions to engage. So questions at the end of the post, those types of things that are going to help engage, have more conversation with your ideal prospects. So we ask questions that if your ideal prospect is like we said, an HR manager, it's helping them as I get answers from them. And then two out of 10 times we do that, what seven to eight times out of 10 and then the rest, which is really one or two times for every time posts, we do a call to action to the next step in the file. So if it's, they have a free resource, if it's go to the website, if it's a free consultation, whatever that looks like that, tell me what, 15 to 20% of the time on the content that we create something that's important.

Marti (26:32): And I encourage our clients to look at the full audit of their funnel and see if the handoff steps are clear. So if it's easy to go from one step from content consumption to the next step, so is the call to action clear if it's about scheduling a call, do we have a Calendly link? If do they know where to go to the next step? So making sure that straightforward and as direct as possible it's something that helps the conversion because you can lose a lot of people in those handoffs. So being that base rate for is important.

Kathleen (27:08): And do you do you generally have your clients create any sort of like purpose-built landing page for the stuff you're doing with them,

Marti (27:19): Which might create something with them? That's a middle point between content and a set score. So something that can help do that in between process. And so if it's a free consultation, but an actual free consultation, not a theme with this guy sales scope, like actually helping people, then we can do that. If it's a free resource via email, and then they go into like a seed email sequence, we can also do that. So something that's in between that's free and that's actually valuable. So something that people would pay for, but you're giving it for free. It's something that has really helped us. And then that also allows for better tracking and better attribution if they don't have it and we cannot create it, we do have some clients that go straight to sales scope, which is fine. But something in between is usually very helpful.

Kathleen (28:12): You raised tracking, which was going to be my next question. So how are you tracking results? What is your preferred way to do that?

Marti (28:18): Yeah, so I think there's a lot of platforms and SaaS software that kind of have improved trackability and attribution with content marketing. I still don't think we're there yet. And I don't know if we'll ever be, have a clear way to fully attribute content marketing and personal branding So I personally, and I know a lot of marketers disagree with me. I really believe in qualitative data. So if somebody comes to a sales call and her said and says, I read your LinkedIn post and that made me reach out, or, Oh, I remember you mentioned that on the podcast, those are the data points that I look for because it's really hard to track higher data just because I called it the dark attribution, which is things that we can just not track. I like me telling somebody that, Oh, that agency did really good job.

Marti (29:12): Or I read that look, you should read that blog post that they wrote and sending it via email or whatever that looks like. You're just not going to be able to track that. So we can go crazy and track everything, track leading indicators, like impressions, engagement. We can track all of that. Sure. But what really matters. And the North star for a lot of our clients is inbound revenue generated. No, it's not even about inbound leads. Cause if they want to get a load of fleets, there's other ways to do that for when you're doing content in personal branding, get less leads, but they're higher quality, which means that they close more and they close faster. So we're just looking for this qualitative data points that show that we're doing our work.

Kathleen (29:52): And have you, have you seen your clients have like ancillary benefits beyond revenue?

Marti (29:58): Yeah. So one of the main benefits that I think is very underrated is the ability to attract new talent. So something that when you're growing your brand as a company or as a CEO, you're also going to get, if you're doing your job, right, you're going to get a lot of people interested in the company that are not clients, but will want to work for you. They don't want to work for the company. They want to work for you. So that's something that we've also seen. And I think sometimes it's even more valuable to attract new people to work with that are great. Then new clients for me in my company right now, we're looking for people we're not looking for clients. So that's something that's, I think it's one of the secondary benefits that are really important for companies that are fundraising and trying to raise money, you've also seen that they can get better traction from investors. So we've gotten people that I've gotten investors for the condom. So that's when it just rambling, like good things happen. You're breathing your brand, use those leads faster, you close more, and then you have all these secondary benefits that are also support how your goals.

Kathleen (31:04): Yeah. That makes sense. So what advice do you have if somebody is listening and they're thinking, I, you know, I know I need to be creating content, so maybe it's time for me to get serious about it.

Marti (31:17): Yeah. The first thing I'd say is you actually have to believe in it. If you don't fully believe in it, if it's maybe then don't do it because you're going to give up too early, it's one of the things that you have to commit and you have to commit for a longer, long time. So that's what the one thing that I would say at the very beginning, like if you're not fully sure that this is for you, don't even do it. Second is your personal brand is your reputation and your reputation follows you everywhere forever. So it's a long-term investment that you're building and yourself, your personal bank will follow you everywhere. You've got for companies as an employee to then a founder, whatever you go that for some Brown follow-ups here. And then third, try to do it in a sustainable matter.

Marti (31:58): Like we created this process right, where you get one pillar piece of content and then you repurpose it and do it at the pace that works for you and works for you, your resources right now, both time and money, and then scale, right. Maybe start with one platform and then eventually go to two, may start with two pieces of content a week, then go to four. So don't burn yourself out doing that and, and just try to enjoy the process because when you do that, then the whole thing is easier and you're going to be committed for a longer time, which is when you were serious.

Kathleen (32:29): Yeah. That makes sense. All right. We're going to shift gears and I'm going to ask you the two questions that I always ask my guests. The first one is, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you would say is really setting the example for what it means to be a great inbound marketing person or company?

Marti (32:49): Other than ourselves? I mean, there's this big companies. I think we've all seen them. Like Refine Labs, like Gong and Drift, that they're doing amazing stuff. I want to give a shout out to this small agency out of Europe called Funky Marketing. The founder is a good friend of mine and we actually ran a book test together and they were one of those companies who get it. I like they understand inbound marketing, they understand content creation and branding, and they don't have the resources of these huge companies, but they're building a community at first in Europe and now they're moving it to the United States. So if you go follow them, they're called Funky Marketing on LinkedIn. You're going to see how people with not that big of resources can actually do very practical stuff and start seeing results. So highly recommend seeing what they're doing.

Kathleen (33:42): I love the company name.

Marti (33:44): Yeah. The guy loves funk and rock and roll, the founder. So it's, it's a good, it's a good company to work with. It's a good company to see what they're doing for sure.

Kathleen (33:54): Very cool. Alright. Second question. Most of the marketers I talk to say that one of their biggest pain points is just trying to keep up with everything in digital marketing, because it changes so quickly. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and stay up to date?

Marti (34:07): Yeah. Twitter is my go-to platform for myself to get educated and to hear conversations. I think if you follow the right people, your feed is basically an education platform straight from the minds of great marketers and great founders. So Twitter is my go-to because then you can engage with them, which I think is the key, right. We can consume a lot of content, but if you can engage with people that created that, it makes it even better. So for myself is Twitter and then talking to people I'm more of like a conversational person to learn. I need to ask questions, followups. So for me, if I can get people on a podcast or have 20 minutes with them, that's how I try to educate myself, just talking to them, having those conversations and honestly just going there and listening because I know they know more than I do. So, so that's how I approach my education.

Kathleen (35:02): Amen. I mean, that's, for me, it's hosting this podcast and talking to people. That's how I learn everything.

Marti (35:07): Yeah, yeah. Probably the best way to pick their brain, like face to face. And you can ask selfish questions. I a hundred percent agree that having a podcast is probably the best way to educate yourself.

Kathleen (35:19): Yeah, I actually had one guest that I interviewed and I'll mention, so it's, Val Geisler, who's this incredible email marketing copywriter. And she now recently has been hired by Klaviyo to be like a customer evangelist. And I love her and she came on and I was asking her all these really detailed questions. And she just sort of like half jokingly said, is this, is this a free consultation? And I was like, absolutely.

Marti (35:45): What's a better way. Right? Yeah, absolutely.

Kathleen (35:50): Well, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more about Influence Podium or they want to connect with you and ask a question, what's the best way for them to find you online?

Marti (35:58): Yeah, I think LinkedIn's probably the easiest way. I'm at Marti Sanchez on LinkedIn. Also same on Twitter and via email at [email protected], probably the easiest and most straight forward way to reach out.

Kathleen (36:13): Fantastic. And I'll put those links in the show notes for anybody. Who's curious. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading to Apple podcasts and leaving the podcast to review. And of course, if you know someone else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much for joining me.

Marti (36:34): It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for so much fun. Thank you.

April Dunford has advised countless companies, from startups to scale ups, on positioning their products and she details all of it in her book Obviously Awesome.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, positioning expert April Dunford breaks down the process she's used to develop positioning that helps her clients stand out and win customers.

April has a long history as a startup marketer, having worked as VP of Marketing for a number of technology startups. It was that experience that taught her the importance of getting positioning right before investing heavily in the development of a lead gen engine.

Today, she works exclusively as a positioning expert and has documented her approach in the book Obviously Awesome.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to learn exactly how April approaches the development of positioning for the companies she advises.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit Aprildunford.com
• Follow April on Twitter at @Aprildunford
• Buy your copy of Obviously Awesome

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is April Dunford who is the author of Obviously Awesome. Welcome to the podcast April.

April (00:57): Oh, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kathleen (00:59): I am so excited to have you here. True confession, I have been a fan girl for a long time. I saw you speak at HubSpot's Inbound conference a really long time ago. It was a really long time ago. And at the time I owned a marketing agency and you talked about positioning and I sat through your session and like the light bulbs were going off in my head and I was like, somehow or another she just made a very complicated topic, incredibly straightforward. And now I'm going to use this approach with all of the positioning exercises I do. So if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then, then I've flattered you tremendously for a very long time now.

April (01:44): Well, that's cool because, you know, back then I was in the early days of working through how to teach this stuff. So you would've gotten the money first version of this on like, you know, unlike the version I'm doing now, which has a lot more polish on it than it did back then. But yeah, that's, that's neat to hear that.

Kathleen (02:03): And, and, you know, it's funny because the reason I started this podcast was that I used to go to a ton of marketing conferences and, and I would go to these sessions by the so-called experts and you know, all excited to learn stuff. And I would feel when I left the session, like they had done a good job of getting me charged up about why I should care about their topic, but not really leave me with enough to go and do anything about it. And so I was like, I'm going to interview people and actually leave listeners with enough information to go do something. And that's what I felt you did in your session, which is why I think I liked it so much. So I will stop now fawning all over you. And what I would just ask is maybe you could talk a little bit about who you are and what you do. So for anyone who isn't as familiar with your work as I am and explain maybe a little bit about Obviously awesome.

April (02:56): So this has been kind a long road for me. I spent the first 25 years of my career being a repeat vice president of marketing at a series of startups. I think I did seven of them. Six of those startups got acquired. About four or five years ago I decided to switch gears and move to being a consultant now. And that's what I do now. I only do positioning work. I don't do messaging. I don't do lead generation campaigns. I know there's, there's a laundry list of things that I don't do. And the only thing on the list of the things that I do do is positioning. I work mainly with tech companies, mainly with kind of growth stage startups and and yeah, positioning is my bag. The book is, is kind of my attempt to take my framework and methodology for positioning and write it down so that anybody can use it.

Kathleen (03:53): Yeah. And it's a great book. I got my copy as soon as it came out and because I do love what you do so much. And I think the reason that I, that I appreciate your work so much is that I'm sort of like who you were before you went out on your own. I am a serial startup VP of marketing. And so every place I go very often I'm the first like true marketing leader they've brought on. And so there's always this exercise of molding the raw clay and trying to help them figure out how to present themselves to the market. So it is a really helpful framework. I want to just start out by actually talking just for a minute about why positioning is so important, because I do think that there are a lot of marketers who come in and they focus so much on demand gen and they, they think of demand gen a little bit too narrowly as lead generation, but there's so much more to it. So what's, what is your take on that?

April (04:44): Yeah. You would know this because what you're doing now is very similar to what I used to do, but like you, you come in as the new VP marketing and, and here's the thing, what everyone wants is demand gen, right? So they're like, get me the lead, fill the pipeline leads, build the pipeline, get going. And what you learn from doing that job a bunch is that you're like, okay, I'm happy to go and build you lead generation campaigns, but there are a set of questions you're going to have to answer for me first. So question number one, who do we compete with? Even that question? Yeah, that question. A lot of the companies I worked for there, you know, they'd say, Oh, well, we compete with this, this, this, and then you go fast. The head of sales, head of sales says something different.

April (05:31): Had a product, says something different. Founder says something different, somebody over in customer success, something different. And you're like, Oh, so we don't really know. And then it was like, well, who do we compete with? How are we different? What's the differentiated value that we can deliver for customers? Oh, by the way, who are these customers? Like? What is the profile of the ideal customer we're trying to go after? What is the market we intend to win? If we cannot answer these questions and clearly I can't build you good lead generation. These are the fundamental inputs. And so, you know, if I don't solve that first, then what I've got is, you know, mushy garbage coming in, mushy garbage is all you're going to get coming out. So if we really want to do lead generation, well, we needed to be focused and targeted around.

April (06:24): You know, we need to focus it on the folks that we're trying to get to. We need the messaging and everything that we're doing inside of those lead gen programs really resonate for those folks, which means we need to understand how we're differentiated, how we're better than the actual alternatives. And so if you don't have that, then you know, all the great marketing, tactical execution is going to save you, right. You can be doing perfect tactical execution, but if you're a little mushy on who you're going after and a little mushy on what you're going to say, once you get them kind of, doesn't matter if you keep foundation

Kathleen (06:59): Yourself effectively, and if you're not differentiated in the minds of your prospective customers, then the only thing you have left to compete on is price, right. You know, become commoditized, which is a terrible position to be in.

April (07:16): And prices, you know, people don't realize it's hard to even compete on price, right? Like everybody can drop the price, right. Well-funded startup up the street, they don't care if they make any money on, on customer acquisition. They've got VCs with deep pockets that are going to pay them for that. Let's drop the price to zero. Well that sometimes you've got big companies you're competing with and they can just include everything in the thing. Because they're going to get the money out of you later with something else so they can drop it to nothing. Like even competing on prices is not easy.

Kathleen (07:47): Yeah. That's so true. And it's just a race to the bottom anyway. So race to the bottom. So positioning, it's a big topic. I think it feels intimidating for a lot of marketers because it feels like, you know, it seems like these days in marketing, there's the science side of marketing like the performance marketing and then there's the quote unquote dark arts, right? Like, do you have to be, you know do you have to be like a creative genius to come up with great positioning, great branding whether that be visual or otherwise, but you, what I liked about your approaches that you took, what some people consider to be a dark art and you made it more like scientific, which is so great.

April (08:33): And you know, I have an engineering background and so, you know, when I approached positioning, I was a bit like this can't we can't just be making this stuff up. Right. It's gotta come from somewhere. And, and that was kind of my driving thing at the beginning, when I was trying to figure out how to do positioning, I was like, it's funny. We have this concept positioning everybody in marketing and about, it seems like it's super foundational, but when I ask people, how do we actually do it? I get a lot of this like art department stuff.

Kathleen (09:07): Don Draper came in and invented a creative position

April (09:12): And that just didn't sit with me and my little engineering brain. I was like, that can't be how we do it. That can't be how we do it. And so I got really obsessed with the idea that, you know, we, we should be able to have a methodology with this with steps, right? Here are the steps we're going to go through. And so, you know, my way of thinking about it at the beginning was, you know, if we look at positioning, can we break it apart into pieces and then solve for the component pieces and then put it back together. And then we get the positioning. And it seemed to me that we could, because, you know, if you read all the stuff on positioning, we didn't argue too much about what the components were. And so the components of positioning, you know, even, even when I started out and all I knew was a positioning statement as a way to get positioning done.

April (10:01): The blanks on the positioning statement are essentially what we, what we agree are the components of positioning. And so there's five things. There's, who's your competition or competitive alternatives. There's differentiated features. What do you got the competitors don't have, there's differentiated values of, so what for customers, why do they care about those features? And then there's customer segments. Like what customers are we talking about? And then the last one is market category, which is, this is the market we intend to win. And so the way I looked at it was all right, we've got five components. We should be able to figure out what the best answer is for each of these components, smash it together. And that's how we're going to get good positioning. And when you

Kathleen (10:40): Talk about the five components, you're referring to what I like to call. I think the marketing Madlibs, that famous kind of like positioning statement with the, with the fill in the blanks that you see everywhere,

April (10:52): The dumbest thing ever. Yeah, yeah. Like that, like that thing just drove me crazy. Like, you know, and again, maybe it's just my engineering mindset. Like people are like, okay, we need to do positioning. And I'm like, all right, how are we going to do it? And they say, well, we've got this thing. And it's like, fill in this thing. And I'm like, what? Wait, like, you know, the first company I ever worked at, we had this product that it was originally positioned as desktop productivity software is going to be like compete with Excel and Microsoft access. And it was a loser. Like we couldn't sell any of it. The thing was a dog. We almost pulled the plug on it, but before we did, we did this experimental repositioning, and we repositioned it as an embeddable database for mobile devices, pretty different market category.

April (11:39): So we repositioned as this thing. And the thing took off and we sold tons of it and it was super successful. We ended up getting acquired. The thing got bigger and bigger and bigger. It was hundreds of millions of revenue at its peak. Anyway, this taught me that, you know, I've got a product that positioned in this market looks pretty bad, but you take the same product position in this market looks pretty good. But the other thing it drove home was, okay if I'm supposed to do positioning by filling in the blanks of a positioning statement well, one of those blanks says market category. So how do I know that my thing is better in this category versus this category? Because as far as I can tell most of the things I worked on and they can be positioned in multiple different categories. So just writing it down, doesn't tell me which one is the best. So how do we get to that?

Kathleen (12:31): I always also hated that. And it's funny because a lot of the analyst firms are big proponents of that fill in the blank framework. If you use that, your positioning statement is going to sound like everybody else's right?

April (12:48): That's what I think is so dangerous about it, right? It's not even just a useless exercise. And in my opinion, it's pretty useless exercise, but it's also kind of dangerous because it tricks you into thinking, well, if this is the way we do it, and all I have to do is write down the market category. Well, the most obvious one or the first one that pops into my mind must be the best one. And in my experience in quite often, that is not true. So quite often the root of your positioning problem is because you're falling into some kind of default positioning. And that default positioning is actually weak and therefore everything else is everything else is hurting as a result. And so that positioning statement exercise has really, really bugged me. You know, first came across that I was like, like this, not only does this not work, I think this will actually mess you up if you do it.

Kathleen (13:45): Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. And it's really interesting to have this conversation at a time when so many marketers are also out there trumpeting this notion of category creation, because like, if you want it to be, and I have mixed feelings about that, I'll just copy cat it. But if you want it to be a category creator and you went to try and fill out that positioning statement, like, again, by definition, you're putting yourself in somebody else's category. So it's cool.

April (14:10): Let's say you're a category creator, and you've just decided, okay, my category I create is floop flummer. And I just write that down in the, in the blank, that's it? We're done.

Kathleen (14:20): Yeah. That makes sense. Right?

April (14:24): What I hate about it is it's not a methodology. It's a, it's a, it's a, at best, a way to write down positioning and not even very good way to capture it. Really. If you wanted to capture it in a way to share it with the team, you wouldn't be putting it into this gobbledygook Frankenstein statement of pseudo English. You would actually want to write it down in a document or something that captured some of the nuance of how did you actually get to where you got to on this. But yeah, no positioning statement, not a fan.

Kathleen (14:54): We could hate on that all day and probably do an entire podcast on it because I feel the same way, but that would not leave our listeners with anything practical. So, so I love that you approach this with an engineering mindset. It, now that you've said that it totally explains the whole thing and like, why, why I'm so drawn to it. So you've in your book, you break the process down into 10 steps. Maybe you could like walk me through how this works because it's very,

April (15:23): So I, I can give you, I could give you the abridged version of it.

Kathleen (15:27): Because there is an entire book on this.

April (15:29): Right. So the, so if you think about it this way, like, so my starting point was, okay, I know that positioning statement is not going to work. Right. And I, I know from trying it, it doesn't work. So again, could we take positioning, break it into component pieces and then figure out how to solve for the component pieces. That was my first idea. So I was like, okay, do I know what the pieces are? Well, kind of, yeah, there, the blanks and the positioning statement. Now, if you go studying positioning statements, there's lots of different versions. And so I, you know, I did the tour through all the different versions, but we kind of circle around these five components, right? So competitors differentiated features, differentiated value, customer segments and market category. Those are the five things. So then I said, okay, all I've got to do is solve for each of those things.

April (16:18): So when it's the best answer for each of those things and put it together, but when you start thinking about it, that way, the first thing you realize is that all of the components have a relationship to the others. So if I pull something out, like let's say value, the unique value add your product can deliver to costumers is completely dependent on your differentiated features, right? You can't, I can't separate those two, one flows from the other, but then I, if I think about it, my differentiated features are only differentiated when I compare them to my competition. So those things are related. And then if I think about it, my best fit customers, these are the people that care the most about the value that I deliver. So I, you know, I can't pick one without the other. And then the last bit is market category, which is a little bit more esoteric.

April (17:09): But if you think about it, the best market category for a given product, this is the category that we position our product in, that makes this value kind of obvious to these people we're trying to target. So I can't really figure out my best market category until I understand differentiated value in the market segment I'm going after. So all of these things are going to relate to each other. So you're like, well, this is a bit of a pickle.

Kathleen (17:36): It's very chicken and eggy.

April (17:37): Right? Like where do I start? And so for a long time, I thought that the way you did it was you, you picked the starting point and differentiated features is usually good one. And you work your way around the circle and you'd get candidate positioning, and then you would go out and test it the market and see if it worked.

April (17:57): And if it did, great, you just ran with it. If it didn't, then you throw it out and you'd develop another candidate positioning. And so for a few years, like literally two, three years, that's what I did was I worked my way around. We can take our best guess at it. And then we would try that problem though, is, you know, I'm working at startups, so we don't have all day to test this stuff out. And if you're doing B2B startups, like sometimes it would take you a while to do a task because your sales cycles are long. And yeah. And so people were getting impatient with me. And so I was like, man, we gotta, there's gotta be a better way to do this faster. And what happened was I actually went way down the rappel reading Clayton Christensen's stuff, and I got really into kind of jobs to be done.

April (18:43): And anyways, and after reading all that stuff, I had a bit of an epiphany where I realized you had to start with competitive alternatives. If I started anywhere else on the circle, I would end up with positioning. That potentially sounded really good in the office, but doesn't actually win out in the market because it's not differentiated. And so you had to start there. So so then I decided the way the process would work, as you would say, okay, I've got something it's out in market already. People are buying it. If my stuff didn't exist, what would the customer do? And that's kind of my competitive alternatives. So that, that sort of includes status quo. You know, like maybe they use a spreadsheet, maybe they hire an intern, but it also includes anybody that the customer might put on a short list when they go looking for solutions.

April (19:35): So that's the first one, the competitive alternatives you'd start there. Well, once I had that, then I had sort of a stake in the ground and I can say, okay, well, here's what we've got to beat. And if I know I got a beat, then I can say, okay, theoretically, let's look at my product. What's my product got that they don't have feature function wise. Right. And I can write those down and there might be thousands of things, but I can write it all down and fill up a whiteboard with that. That gets me to differentiated features. Once I have differentiated features that I can say, well, how do those features map to value? And so for each of those features, I just go down the list and say, so what, so what for customers, we can do this. And then what you're trying to get to is a set of value themes, like two or three value themes.

April (20:21): This is a bottoms up way of doing of developing value propositions. But what it gets you to is differentiated value because you started with, here's what I've got to beat. Here's how I'm different. This is the value for customers in that differentiated stuff I can do. Now, once I got that, now I got value. Then I can say, well, what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really care a lot about that value? And that's literally my definition of a best fit customer. Yeah. That makes sense. So those are kind of a bottoms up way of doing segmentation. Once I get segmentation, then I can say, you know, at that point I can lean back and say, all right, so I need to position this product in some kind of market context that makes this value obvious to these folks. So is it better if I position this as email or chat, is it a database or a business intelligence system? Like, and that's how I do it. So in the methodology, I've got, you go step by step by step through those things. But you start with this idea of competitive alternatives as a stake in the ground, and then you flow through the rest of it. That's how it works.

Kathleen (21:28): You know, you mentioned at the end, they're positioning something in context. And that's the part that I think is so interesting. I feel like that's the part that I really enjoy listening to you talk about at Inbound because you had this like really fascinating way of breaking down the, I think it was, if I remember correctly at the time, at least I know it's evolved since then, but you had like four different approaches to putting your positioning in context, within a broader market. And, and I seem to remember some of the examples you gave were like, you know, you could, you could try to take on Coke with a competing product, or you could be the Coke for dogs.

Kathleen (22:08): Another one was like, you used the example of Tesla with electric cars and just changing the changing the game I think was right. Put it, you know, changing the conversation and changing the focus from like battery life to sexy design and speed for fun. And there were all these different frameworks and I just, I loved, I loved having those mental models to use and understanding the different ways that you could contextually place your own offering within the broader market. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how your thinking on that has evolved. Do you still use those same frameworks?

April (22:43): Yeah, I do. And you know, and there's a section in the book that talks about that. And, and the way I thought about it was I'd always get this question, like, how is it different if I'm positioning in an existing market category versus making up your own new market category? And so the way I looked at it is there's kind of, I used to talk about four, but I've kind of narrowed it down to three now. Like, so basically you either the market category exists or you're going to have to go make it. If the market category exists, you've got two choices. You either position your stuff in such a way that you're going to position in the existing market category. And your intent is to take on the whole thing. Did I call this the head-to-head? So that's like saying, you know, I'm email, that's it I'm email, no qualification on that and not email for a particular sub market or anything.

April (23:33): What I have here is the world's greatest email as basically like announcing your intention to take on Gmail and outlook, you know, the email. So, you know, an example I'm used to that and talk with Coke, like, like I'm Cola and that's it, no qualifier. I'm just the world's greatest Cola. Well, that's like, basically say an ID, declare war on Coke. I'm going to go get those guys. And that sounds stupid, right? Like, like, are you actually going to be Coke from nothing? Like if you're a startup and you're just starting out.

Kathleen (24:04): Although it's funny. You used the example of email and immediately in my head, I thought, well, this is like Basecamp with Hey or Superhuman. Like there still are people trying to take on the Coke of the email world.

April (24:15): They are, they are, but Superhuman's a great example. Yeah. If you look at Superhuman and particularly the early days of when they were like, you applied to get Superhuman and you didn't get it, if you didn't meet their criteria, like they were not trying to be emailed for everybody. They were trying to be email for people that thought email was too slow. There was this component of speed. And if you didn't answer the questions, right, you didn't get home, they didn't get it. So they were very specific about that. They were like, we're not email for everybody. We're email for people that think they wish they could do their email faster. Because that's the only problem we solve because there's all a bunch of stuff that Superhuman doesn't solve. Now, if you look at Hey, Hey's a great example too, right? The Hey folks have come out and said, we're the email for people that actually care about, about privacy and control over who hits your inbox and who doesn't.

April (25:14): And, and even more specific when the thing first came out, they, they couldn't even do business email. It was personal email only because you couldn't do your own domain and all the rest of it. That actually drove me nuts. Cause I didn't, you know, they weren't explicit about that. And so I signed up and paid it and everything else. And then I was like, Oh, I can't use this. It's not for businesses. They shouldn't have told me. Now I think they got a business version, but it doesn't have calendaring and a bunch of other stuff. So it's the, you know, it's not forever.

Kathleen (25:42): That's a tough, that's a tough market to crack with how kind of insidious email is in our daily lives.

April (25:48): I think they're trying to be everything. I think they're more this style too. So the style to it. So head to head is like I'm coming in and I'm going to take on the leader from nothing. And that literally never works. Right? What works better is to say, I'm going to go in and I'm going to shave off a part of the market that is underserved and I'm going to serve those people. And I'm going to eat the email for X right. Email for people that want speed email for people that care about privacy now, because you know, because the other guys like Gmail, isn't going to do that ever. This is so, you know, it, my alternative is Gmail. I got them beat. They can't match my feature. And I'm going to dominate in this sub segment of the market that really cares about that.

April (26:34): And so the vast majority of companies that we know and love today started out serving a sub of an existing category. Like Salesforce was CRM for SMBs, SMBs that didn't have an IT department. And you don't worry, you don't need an IT department cause this one's no software, man. It's a, you can just have it run and you don't have to worry about it. I keep looking after it. So I mean there's so there's loads and loads of examples, almost every startup that later becomes successful, starts out being in a niche in an existing category. In fact, I did a little spelunking around because you know, category creation is hot right now. So everybody likes to think about style three, which is I'm going to create a new category. And then somehow I'm going to dominate that. But if you go back and look at tech IPO's of the past five years, so this is IPO.

April (27:28): So if a company gets big enough that they, you know, they're more than a hundred million revenue, they're going to go public. If you go through that list of tech companies that are YPO in the last five years, over 90% of them at the time of IPO are a niche play in an existing market.

Kathleen (27:49): That makes sense.

April (27:49): Over 90%, which surprises most people because there's this idea that, you know, you can't get big unless you create a category and then position yourself within that category. And it's not to say that doesn't work. That does work in very limited cases, right. That you actually carve out a new key. You say my thing is so new, so different. So I don't know. And none of the existing categories really work for it. So I'm gonna make up a new category and then position it in there.

Kathleen (28:19): Yeah. There's I think there's a lot of BS around category creation. Like everybody says, they're doing it and there can't possibly be that many categories. It's just invented word, word art.

April (28:32): Yeah. And some of them are saying they're category creation when that's not even what they're doing. Right. Like I like, so I had some guys call me the other day and they said, we're a social media man. We're creating a category. And I said, Oh yeah, what's the category. And they said, we're social media management for agencies. Okay. One category, social media management for agencies. That's a niche play. And they're like, yeah, but nobody else does it. So we're creating it. I'm like, yeah. Okay. So first of all, you're not creating a category. You're basically leveraging what we already know about social media management and say we're social media management, but for agencies, that's why it works so well is I don't have to teach you what social media management is. I just have to teach you why agencies need a different kind of social media management. Then the category leader can give you. And then I just dominate my little bit. That's it?

Kathleen (29:26): Your first approach is the head-to-head.

April (29:30): The only time it works is if the, is if you know, if the market is created in the minds of customers, but there is no established leader. So an example of that might be smart glasses, right? Like, you know what smart glasses are, we all, you know, we don't remember Google glass had that thing. They did a great job establishing that category and then they just kind of exited it. So now if you wanted to buy smart glasses, who would you buy them from? No idea. No idea. So that's an example of, we kind of know what smart glasses are, but it's a dog fight out there right now. There's a thousand companies trying to do it. And eventually someone will emerge as the clear category leader there, but it hasn't happened yet. Yeah. So that's kind of wide open market. And if you had a, you know, there was a company here in Canada that raised a pile of money and took a good run at being the dominant player in the smart glasses market.

April (30:22): It didn't quite work out and they got acquired by Google. But if you were to raise a bunch of money and take a big run at it, you might actually emerge as the leader in that space. So we know what it is. And we can say smart glasses and everybody gets it. But we don't know who the leader is. So that's an example where you might do, you'd say like when my guys were trying to do it, my Canadian guys were trying to do it. They weren't saying we're the fashionable smart glasses or we're the smart glasses for manufacturing or the smart glasses for anything else you might want to use them for. They were just like, no, we're smart glasses. Whereas our glasses where everything. So that's, that's head to head Denise plays where you say, no, you know, instead of saying I'm Coke, you know, like, you're, you know, I'm going to say I'm Coke for dogs, right? So you're like, okay, I know what Coke is. So I got a mental image of that, but it's for this chunk of the market that Coke's never going to dominate in and you're going to, you know, your intention is to go dominate there. And the last one is you create your own category, where you stay, you know what? I'm not smart glasses, I'm not Coke. I'm a flu flummer.

April (31:29): And you say what the heck is a flu flummer? And I say, I'm glad you asked. Let me tell you, look, we got email and we got this and we got this. And then there's this space in the middle. And we call this the flu flummer. And that's what we are. And let me tell you why you need a flu flummer. And the hard part about category creation is you essentially fall into this thing where you've got to evangelize the problem. Because if people knew they had a problem, there would be solutions to solve that problem already. And so first you got to sell the problem. Then you got to sell people on the idea that you're the best solution to that problem. The real risk in category creation is that the history of Silicon Valley teaches us that the most likely outcome is you pour all your time, energy, effort, money into creating the category.

April (32:26): And the moment the category starts to emerge, you kind of end up in that style one, don't ya? And then it's a dog fight. There's a thousand other companies show up and they come in and steal the category from you after you've already created. That's why we don't use ask Jeeves. We use Google. That's why we don't use my space. We use Facebook. Like there's a thousand examples. All the companies, you know, in love, they didn't create the categories they're in. They get whipping in at the last minute after the hard work of category creation was already done. So I don't know why everybody's so keen on category creation. It's literally the hardest one to do. But you know, but there are examples of folks successfully doing it. Like in my book, there's an interview in there with Mark Organ, who was the original founder of Eloqua, you know, who did create the category marketing automation. And so he talks about how he did that. So it does work sometimes. It's just, it's rare. And it's fraught with peril.

Kathleen (33:23): And it's funny, cause there's a lot of debate in the marketing world over what really is category creation. Like, because there's, and I was on a conversation.

April (33:32): So a lot of people come to me and they say, they're doing a gray area. And I know you're not. Yeah. I just read this book about category creation and everybody was telling me, Oh, I read this book April. You know, it's going to tell you how to create categories and I'm reading it. And I'm like, tell me kind of a compelling case know, but the first example they give is Salesforce. And I'm like, what are we just going to ignore? What happened for the first 200 million revenue? We're just gonna ignore that part. Like they didn't become a category creator until they were massive company. They were a niche play in the CRM market. There was a 2 billion revenue company publicly traded in CRM when they started create CRM. Are you kidding me? And then yeah, you can argue about, they're creating a category now of like, you know, platform as a service, whatever, but that's different.

Kathleen (34:23): That's like hindsight is 2020, right.

April (34:26): They were a group and company by the time they did that. So most of the examples that people give me, I'm kinda like, well, yeah, like once for the absolute dominant player in your market, then you get the luxury of moving the goalposts and defining what exactly the market is. And that's different. But if you're a little startup and you're just starting out, you don't, you don't get to do that. Yeah.

Kathleen (34:47): Well, one of the things that you talk about in the book is forming a positioning team. And I just wanted to take a minute and talk about that because again, I'm always all about making sure there are some really like practical, actionable takeaways. So beyond the framework that you discussed, like organizationally, what is the best way to kind of get the team organized in order to move forward on an exercise like this?

April (35:10): Yeah, so, so I included a bunch on this in the book for a reason. And it's because I think a lot of positioning efforts fail because the, the marketing team or the product team decides they're going to fix positioning and they're going to do it in their department without involving anybody else, which I think is crazy. So, you know, if you think about it, like, I'll give you an example. Like the one I mentioned earlier, the first I worked at and we repositioned it, like we thought it was basically desktop productivity, sell it for a hundred bucks compete with Excel and Microsoft access. We ended up repositioning this as an embeddable database for mobile devices, which we would sell to, you know, at a much higher level in the organization. We would sell a hundred copies at a pop because you'd be arming your entire sales team with this thing. Or you put it in every device that you had completely different, go to market, completely different pricing, completely different sales model, everything different. Could I make that decision myself as the person running marketing? No, I think the CEO would want to talk about

Kathleen (36:24): Well and the sales team. I mean, it's the same thing. Like with, I just went through a pricing exercise in my company. Like you, there's all these things you can do in a silo, but unless you're you get the buy-in of your sales team to go out and like evangelize it in their conversations with prospects, it's not going to do you any good.

April (36:40): This is it. So a lot of these things end up like a shift in positioning often ends up feeling like a shift in the whole company strategy. And so if you're going to do this properly, I think marketing is in good position to lead a positioning effort, but they're not going to be able to do it themselves. And so what I recommend is you get the heads of the teams together. So you need sales, you need product, you need customer success, you need the CEO, the founders and anybody else who's important in your company and you need to get everybody together. So that's the first thing. So I need to establish a team. And then once I've got that team, there's a few things need to happen. One. I need to convince the team to at least look at it so that the team has to kind of let go of their positioning baggage and say, you know what?

April (37:33): Like I know we've always said, we're a database, but for this exercise, open your mind to the idea that, you know, we could be something else. Maybe we're a data warehouse. Maybe we're a business intelligence tool, maybe we're something else. And so that's, so we'll get to get the team together. I got to get the team to kind of put their positioning baggage aside. And, and then the last thing I gotta do is if we're going to do it, and we're all going to get together, we need to follow a process. We can't just get together in a room and say, okay, so what's our market category. Like that's just going to become a war of opinion. And if it's a war of opinions, let me tell you marketing never wins that war.

Kathleen (38:14): Right. Opinions and some very long meetings that have no end in sight.

April (38:19): Right? So what we need to do is follow a positioning process that for as much as we can takes the opinions out of it. So that's what my process attempts to do. Like you know, we could get together in a room and we can agree on what's the status quo in all the accounts. Who else are we competing with when we are in a competitive deal? So that establishes who our competitive alternatives are, that we're going to work through the rest of it without kind of asking for your opinion. It just sort of is what it is. Yeah. So, so those are the things I think you need to have in order to have success. You know, I need to, I need to get the gang together. I need to get everybody to kind of leave aside their positioning baggage. And then if we're going to do it, an exercise, there needs to be a structure and a methodology to that exercise that kind of takes the opinions out of it. Otherwise, we're just going to get, well, I think it's this one off. I think it's this. Well, if we all have an opinion, I like mine the best.

Kathleen (39:17): How long do you generally, like when you're setting expectations with your clients, how long do you generally tell them that this process takes

April (39:24): Well in the work that I do? Like? So if, if the company comes and hires me, I act as the facilitator for this exercise. So there's a bit of prep that happens ahead of time. Like sometimes we'll pull some data depending on what the company's like. Most of the prep is literally for me to get up to speed enough on the market and the product and the landscape so that I'm not so that I'm able to facilitate the exercise without slowing everybody down. And then we used to do this as the, as a two day thing. I used to fly to you. We'd all lock ourselves in the boardroom and we just bang it out in two days. Now since, since, since COVID hit, I've gone to doing these things virtually. And one of the great things about that is we can take a bit more time about it because I'm not flying in. And so what we do now is we spread it out over a series of sessions across a week, but we get it done in a week.

Kathleen (40:18): That's great.

April (40:23): Efficient, right? Like doing it yourselves, the companies can, you know, again, get into big arguments and fresh around on that stuff for months. And when I was internally at companies, it was not unusual for us to thrash around in it and his mom for months. I think, you know, one having a methodology and process to having an outside facilitator that can walk you through it and help you through it. You know, again, not everybody qualifies to work with me. Like some people come in, I don't think they're ready to do it, or I don't think positioning's even their problem. But if you do have a positioning problem and you look like somebody I'd work with that, we get it on the counter. And yeah, we, we bang it out in a week. And then what do you do?

Kathleen (41:02): To tell your clients about like, they spend that week, they come up with their positioning? What then, because I would venture to guess, I mean, you already talked about Salesforce and how they started out being kind of niche, and then they moved to category creation, quote unquote you know, do you have like defined points where the group gets back together and evaluates and checks in and the process evolves?

April (41:27): Yeah. So, so here's, here's how, how I instruct everybody, like, you know, what should happen? We're done. So we get the position and we do two things in these workshops to actually, so we do the positioning and then we do an exercise where we take the positioning and when we translate it into a sales narrative. So how do I actually tell the story of this product? If I'm sitting across from a prospect that doesn't know too much about it yet. So, you know, this is how we tell the story, and then that's what we do in the workshops. So we got positioning, we got the sales narrative. Then I leave now what other people do when I'm gone is they take that sales narrative, they turn it into a sales pitch. So it's usually slides and a demo or some kind of a script. So they worked that into a sales pitch and then they go test it with some prospects.

April (42:16): So that's the first thing I recommend. I'm going to take it out and test it. Usually it works. I got the smartest people in the company sitting in the room. We don't usually get it wrong, but it often needs a bit of tuning because customers are weird. So, you know, so we tune it up and then once we've got a tune, then the positioning plus that sales narrative together goes over to marketing and then marketing can work on messaging. And so I recommend you build a, make a messaging document, but most folks will do that, or they'll work on the messaging for the homepage and off they go. Now let's think about positioning is we don't get to just set it and forget it because you know, everything's changing. So our product is changing as we put new features into the product and new things happen.

April (42:57): Sometimes we make an acquisition. So our stuff is changing at the same time, the market's changing. So we got competitors coming in and out of the market. We've got you know, the landscape itself has changing. Like COVID is a great example where all of a sudden your buyer's priorities might have really, really shifted and positioning that didn't work pre COVID maybe does now or vice versa. So so because everything's changing, you need to check in on the positioning. You can't just set it and say, well, that's it. You know, we're done positioning. Don't have to think about that anymore. So my recommendation is about every six months. So when I was a VP marketing, we would do the workshop. We go through the process of testing it, get the messaging sorted out and everything else. And I wouldn't have a standing meeting with the same group of people every six months.

April (43:46): And so we'd all get together every six months and we get together in the room and say, okay, has anything changed? So if we think about competitive alternatives, do we have different competitors? Are we seeing different things in sales accounts? Is the status quo the same as it always was. What's changed there. And we've got new stuff in our product. Has that changed our differentiated features at all? And if so, you know, does it change it enough that we actually going to have to update what we're talking about in terms of value? And if it's really updated, does that change our target customers that we're going to go after? If so, it may even change our market category. So we've got to check in on that regularly every six months, sometimes we all just get together and we're like, Nope, Nope, Nope. Everything's the same. Okay, good. And then, you know, it's a short meeting. Yeah. Sometimes you get it together and you're like, Ooh, actually stuff is changing. If we have the standing meeting, then we'll catch it early and we won't be caught flat food and trying to react to something that is actually causing us pain revenue wise. We'll get to it earlier. Cause we, you know, we had the standing meeting over six months to go in and review it.

Kathleen (44:52): That makes sense. I like having that kind of cadence already. Pre-Planned. Well I could talk to you about this forever, but we're going to run out of time. So I'm going to shift gears and ask you the two questions I ask all of my guests the first and they're softballs. The first one is, you know, the podcast is all about inbound marketing. 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?

April (45:18): Well, you know, the one that comes to mind when you say that and you know, and, and I think they're just killing it in marketing in general is I sit on the board of a company in there called Samplr and I've been super impressed watching the way that this company has reacted to the change in the market that had happened because of COVID and how they've managed to shift that and turn it into this massive opportunity for them. So what sampler does is they they do digital product sampling. So if you think about, if you ever remember when we used to go to the grocery store. People would hand out samples at the grocery store or they would have, you know, people on the street corner giving you samples of granola bars or snacks or something. Consumer packaged goods brands spend billions a year on product sampling campaigns.

April (46:11): What Samplr does is it is a digital way of doing that. So they match people with samples and then the samples come in the mail and they can actually, you know, survey the people afterwards and find out did you like to sample, did you buy this stuff later? And so it's just a way smarter, digital way to do it anyway. So that's what they've been doing for years COVID hits. And what happened in COVID was the big CPG brands were just like, we can't sample anymore because all the things are thing. And so we're just not doing sampling at all. We're done.

Kathleen (46:48): I would think they're tailor made for this.

April (46:51): You can imagine they had all this stuff in the pipeline, all this stuff, and all their customers were just like, yeah, no.

April (47:02): What Samplr did was, you know, they are clearly the solution to product sampling if we can't do it in the store. Right. So, but you know, but at the beginning, the customer companies just didn't want to hear it. And so what they did, they did a very good job of crafting a message around contactless product sampling and the future of product sampling. And what would it, what was it what's product sampling gonna look like if we truly digitize it and do it in a way that doesn't involve direct face-to-face human contact and they dominated the story around this for months where you, you know, when every reporter in the land was looking for a, what's going to change because of COVID story. And there was Samplr saying, well, let me tell you about this thing. We're never testing the lipstick tester at the Sephora ever again. Oh

Kathleen (47:56): Yeah. That's so true. I can't even.

April (47:58): Let me give you a different way. We could sample lipstick, right. We could send you a sample in the mail and here's how it would work. So they do this really good job of being everywhere. And then within two months, their business was absolutely taking off and they raised around and financing and, you know, in the early days of COVID, which was, you know, again, pretty fantastic. And if you look at what they've done is just amazing. And so I think they've done an amazing job.

Kathleen (48:24): Ooh, I'm excited to go check them out. That's my favorite part. One of my favorite parts of these conversations is learning about new examples like this. My other question that I always ask guests is that marketers commonly cite one of their biggest pain points. As you know, the landscape of digital marketing is changing so quickly. It's really hard to keep up with it and stay on top of everything. How do you personally kind of stay educated and keep yourself on the cutting edge?

April (48:48): Yeah. You know, so I, so I read a lot of books. I'm, I'm big on books and, and so I'm reading a lot of books. I'm also kind of, you know, one of the things that I think is really interesting about COVID is there's been sort of this emergence of these kind of neat online communities. I feel like that's really accelerated. And so in particular I'm kind of on the product marketing side of things like positioning a sort of product marketing thing. And so one of the communities I'm kinda active in is the there's these folks called the product marketing Alliance.

Kathleen (49:21): I'm in that group. Yes. It's great.

April (49:23): It's cool. Right. And that thing came out of nowhere. Like that was like, that was like not a thing. And then all of a sudden they had 12,000 people in a Slack, in a Slack community and I'm like, well, how the heck? And so I've been really enjoying the stuff going on in that community. The other one that I, that I've, you know, more recently been engaged with is and I was engaged because they reached out to me and asked me to write a thing for them, which I did. And then I was like, Holy cow, look at this thing. Which is more on the product management, but again, product marketers side is there's this guy does a newsletter called Lenny's list. And so I, he reached out to me last year and said, Hey, do you want to write an article for my newsletter?

April (50:04): And I was like, Oh man, I'm really busy. And he kind of pestered me and I said, well, you know, I got Christmas break coming up. And so maybe I'll write something when I'm on the break. So I wrote this thing and then it turns out he has this massive community. These is huge subscriber lists. He started a Slack community. And so that's been neat me and just sort of crack into these communities where smart people are hanging out and doing things. And there's a lot of neat ones popping up now. Yeah. I couldn't agree more to a lot of paid newsletters now just because I think they're cool. And there's a lot of qualities.

Kathleen (50:41): Yeah. There's a lot of great innovation on the product side. I'm going to have to check them out too. I have so many good new ones now. Well, all right. Before we wrap, if somebody wants to learn more about you and what you do, or if they want to buy the book what's the best way for them to do that. Yeah.

April (50:57): The book's available wherever you buy books, like there's a, there's a paperback book or an ebook or an audio book, if you want to, Oh, you can listen to three and a half hours of my Canadian accent. So yeah, most people just buy it off Amazon, but if you've got a local book seller, usually they've got copies too. So I'm in distribution all over the place where you buy it online. My website is Aprildunford.com and if you're interested in, you know, if you think you need a consultant or something, you can find me there and then I'm not too active on social media except Twitter. So I'm @Aprildunford on Twitter. So if you want listen to me, I don't know, listen to me talk to them about cat jokes or whatever you can follow me on Twitter.

Kathleen (51:46): Great. Well, the book is Obviously Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me April Dunford. This was fun.

April (51:51): I'm glad. Thanks so much for having me.

Kathleen (51:54): Yeah. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard, or you learned something new, you could head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a review. And of course, if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, and I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thanks April.

April (52:10): Thank you.

Working with an agency can be a great way to get valuable strategic advice, get more done, and get better marketing results—but finding the right agency partner isn't always as easy as it might seem.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, YouShouldTalkTo founder Daniel Weiner digs into the dynamics that make for a successful agency-client relationship.

Daniel has built his career on helping match brands with the perfect agency for them, and he's seen what works and what doesn't.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to learn more about the factors that you should consider when searching for a marketing agency.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the YouShouldTalkTo website
•  Get in touch with Dan at [email protected].
• Connect with Dan on LinkedIn 

Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Daniel Weiner who is the founder of YouShouldTalkTo. Welcome to the podcast Daniel.

Daniel (00:24): Thank you for having me. I'm pumped to be here.

Kathleen (00:27): Tell my audience a little bit about what YouShouldTalkTo is. By the way, I love the name. And also about yourself and your story and how you came to be doing what you're doing today.

Daniel (00:37): Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you liking the quirky name that I wish I could say there was a, a genius behind that, but it came to me one random morning and the URL was available. So I started that.

Kathleen (00:47): You know you've got a name when you can find the URL.

Daniel (00:50): That's what I'm talking about, but yeah, YouShouldTalkTo essentially pairs brands and marketers for free with vetted agencies or freelancers for virtually any marketing or technology need. I was VP of sales at an agency here in Atlanta for the last, roughly seven and a half years. So I led new business strategy, all that sort of stuff for many of our clients. And after resigning in July amidst the madness of COVID and trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, I was still getting contacted by former prospects and clients and stuff like that. So it was kind of dipping my toes into referring business, out to people I trusted and yeah, it was successful in the short term. So I decided roughly around September to go full steam ahead and I officially launched with a brand name and all that sort of good stuff beginning of September and been very exciting, stressful and everything in between ever since.

Kathleen (01:46): Well, I love it. And you know, I, I spent 11 years as the owner of an agency, so I've been on both sides of this. I've been an agency owner who is looking for companies to work with. I've been an in-house marketer for the last several years that works with agencies. And so I've definitely seen this from both sides. And this is going to be a little bit of a different episode for us because normally in these episodes, we talk about like how to do a certain kind of marketing, but that's not exactly what we're covering today. And I'm actually really excited about what we are going to talk about because I think it's so important, which is how do you pick the right agency? And I say it's so important because most of the marketers I know, at some point or another, will work with an agency, whether it's for a very particular niche, like project or a particular aspect of their strategy, whether that's paid media or, you know, social or ABM, what have you, some marketers will work with agencies for all of their marketing, either way.

Kathleen (02:49): It can be either the greatest relationship you have that is a total game changer for you, or it can be the most horrible experience you've ever had leaving you feeling as though you have poured money down the toilet and gotten nothing for it. And I have seen both, I have experienced both. And so I think it's super, super important to talk about if you are thinking of working with an agency, how do you find one that is right for you? And so like you do this for a living, you pair people. So I really want to kind of like dig into your head on, you know, what is that process you use to try and determine what agency or freelancer is going to be the right solution for a particular client?

Daniel (03:35): You bring up a lot of good points and it's definitely you know, the more marketers I talk to, it seems the norm is it's usually a pretty polarizing experience. It's either really good or really bad. And, you know the in-between doesn't exist as much as you would kind of hope it was. You know, I think it's obviously better to have no feelings about your agency than super negative about your agency. But the, the short answer to what I do is it's, it's honestly not a perfect science which is probably counter to what I should say from a sales perspective. It really depends on the personality of the person I'm talking to. And the marketer and the company and their goals. You know, somebody could say five different things on a call that makes me switch, you know, who I think is the best fit for them from an agency or a freelancer standpoint.

Daniel (04:24): But to me, the, the biggest thing comes down to who do you like the most? You know, unfortunately it's a bit of a popularity contest in that, in my opinion, you know, doing great work is the price of admission. You know, if you're an agency and you don't do good work, the rest is not going to come. So, you know, there is no agency or freelancer or anyone that I would recommend, or hopefully anybody making a recommendation would give to someone if they didn't think they did good work, but it's, what do you think you can get the best work out of your head from to be completely honest, you know, who do you trust the most with potentially astronomically large sums of money from like a suspense standpoint, who do you trust when undoubtedly something goes wrong or there's the scope creep, you know, to help you get through it in the most efficient way possible, those types of things. So it's hard to say like, you know, one exact thing that leads me in the right direction, but I've intentionally built out my agency network to theoretically be able to help virtually any type of company in any type of vertical and have several resources for them to chat with.

Kathleen (05:32): So let's break this down because I like that you brought up kind of doing good work as being table stakes. So in my mind, when I think about this topic, having been on both sides, there's like three categories of kind of evaluation that I would do. If I were going to work with an agency, one is like you said, will they do a good job? Do they have the expertise, the, the track record, et cetera. The second one is, and actually, maybe there's four. The second one is culture fit. You know, I, I do think there's some intangibles around like just culturally, are they aligned with me? The third one is what I would call like operating styles slash communications, you know, like, is it an agile shop or is it a waterfall project management shop, but also like overall, how do they communicate with their customers? You know, and what am I going to find that, that communication, cadence and style works for me. And then the fourth category is like, who you're going to be assigned to, because this is a big one. There are lots of agencies out there that do amazing work, but if you're shuffled off to like a junior PM who doesn't know what they're doing, you may not get the benefit of it. So to me, there's like, those are the four categories. I'm curious to know what you think about that taxonomy that I just rattled off.

Daniel (07:03): I completely agree. I actually wrote a blog post right when I launched about, I think those were four of the five that I have in the blog posts to me three and four that you listed are arguably the most important. So we, you know, we both agree that everybody's got to do good work to get good work though. It's a, you know, a two-way street of communication between the marketer and the agency. You know, I think a lot of people, which is, you know, a misnomer is if you hire an agency, your problems are fixed or you're automatically getting, you know, amazing work. And you know, you only get as good, you know, if the, if the input isn't good, the output isn't going to be good either.

Kathleen (07:43): Right. And let's be honest. I just want to say this for the record. It's not always the agency's fault. There are many clients who make it really difficult for an agency to help them.

Daniel (07:56): Yeah. So, you know, you bring up a good point. I'll, I'll get back to the four things you mentioned, but you just made me think. Yeah. You know, I hear from part of what I take out of this process is if you, as a marketer ask somebody, you know, one of your friends or colleagues, you know, do you have a good agency? You know, you're either going to get, yeah, I have a great agency or you're going to get a no don't ever work with these people. And neither of those are objective, you know, just because you had an incredible experience with an agency, doesn't mean they're the right fit for your friend. And if you had a completely horrific experience, you know, it doesn't mean they wouldn't be the best fit for your friend as well. You know, there's, what is it, two sides to every story and the truth, you know, typically somewhere in between.

Daniel (08:35): But I think number three, a number four communication style and the team you're working with are the most important, because I think that's the quickest way to tarnish or end an agency client relationship. If the work is incredible, that's great. If the communication sucks you're just going to be miserable. You're going to be annoyed and you're going to, you know, it just breaks down. If you're not, I would argue that's more important than the work, knowing where they're at, you know, in your project, knowing what milestones are coming up, you know, which makes to me a project manager is one of the most important roles or the account lead, you know, with, with, depending on the type of agents to be.

Kathleen (09:13): I would go so far as to say, you can't have great work without good communication. I just, I think marketing is so collaborative and I just can't imagine a scenario where your agency wasn't communicating well with you and, and the work product could ever be what it needs to be.

Daniel (09:29): It's what makes people the most angry too, from my experience, you know, like at my former agency, we did a lot of big website projects, you know, that were six, nine months long, sometimes stuff like that. And very rarely when it was what I would call a successful project, would we get to the end? And they'd say, wow, like the website is the best thing I've ever seen when they were really happy. It was like, wow, like you made this stressful thing, supremely less stressful. And like, you know, we knew where you were at. So we could report to our board and our C suite and that type of stuff. So I, I completely agree there, but yeah, if there is a communication breakdown, regardless of how talented the team is, you're never going to get what you want from your agency as well.

Daniel (10:10): So I think that's first and foremost, if I had to tear them, even being able to, you know, eloquently and appropriately communicate the ask, you know, you can, anybody can say, I need a website or I need a logo. Those types of things, when creative is getting involved at such a personal thing and, and a good agency is going to be able to take what's in your head and put it to paper, which is like, sometimes when I've been involved in those projects, I'm amazed by creative people because I'm like, how the hell did you do that? You know, they gave you a bunch of statements and you turned this into something awesome that they were like, Oh, that's exactly what we wanted. One of the most common things I do here though, is, you know, when I'm making introductions is, yeah, we want to make sure we're, we're dealing with the, a team or you know, senior level people and stuff.

Daniel (10:57): Which, to be honest, I don't have a good answer to that. You know, the hope is everybody's the team. Even though that's not the case probably, but it is really important. I encourage everybody I talk to to ask those questions, Hey, I'm talking to you now. If I sign a contract with you, am I still talking to you or am I, you know, getting passed to, to other people? Those types of questions, because yeah, when you sign a contract with an agency, you should be a really excited. That's one of the things that I tell every marketer I talk to. If you're not excited to sign this contract, you probably need to talk to more agencies.

Kathleen (11:34): I would say, and I'll jump in there because I would say when you, you know, when you talked about how do you know if you're going to get the A team, right. My take on this is that if you, it depends where you are in your evolution of work. So I'll give you an example. Pay-Per-Click marketing. I I've been going through this for the last several months, trying to like get a new pay-per-click funnel built. And I went with an agency and I didn't know a lot about them. They were, I was introduced to them by somebody and clearly a great agency. The person that was assigned to me was lovely, great communicator, but I think she was, she wasn't like the top subject matter expert in the agency. She was doing the best she could. But I think when you're first, like in my case, when you're first developing your funnel, when, when, what you're looking for is much more like thought leadership and strategy at that stage.

Kathleen (12:39): Sometimes it might make sense to go to a much tinier agency or even like a freelancer. When, you know, you're going to get the senior level person who's been there, done that. And that's actually what I'm doing. I'm going to, I'm going to move to an agency that is an agency of one, essentially. It's a, it's a person who is an incredibly experienced PPC person, because I know I need that senior level attention on my funnel because we're just building it. Once it's humming along, if I have a well running funnel and it's just a matter of like checking in and tweaking and introducing some new creatives now. And then like, that's, when I think I could, I could go back to an agency like the first one I had because it's more of a maintenance project. So I do think there's this element of, like, you have to understand what it is you're looking for out of the agency you're working with and kind of match your solution with that. If that makes sense.

Daniel (13:32): It does a hundred percent, I think that comes back. You know, I, I kind of skate sales and marketing. So I think, you know, the biggest thing for me when I was doing straight sales was you know, expectation management. Like what are you expecting, you know, in terms of communication and who you work with, but that, you know, you bring up a good point. That was when I first launched, I didn't intend to do this on the freelance side as well. And the very first call I took was with a large company in Atlanta that had a tiny need. And it was similar to your situation, you know, if they had gone to an agency, they probably would've paid substantially more and had not as intimate or senior of an experience than they needed. So I started doing this with freelancers as well.

Daniel (14:17): And I, it, a lot of it's so situational, right? So a lot of times I'm talking people out of working with agencies at a particular stage, because I don't think they're ready in my opinion, or they're not going to get what they want, but yeah, it depends a lot on the personality. I find a lot of marketers have in their mind, they have to hire an agency and they don't necessarily, you know, I love all the agencies that I partner with and work with, but if you get them to a client at the wrong period of time, it's never going to work.

Kathleen (14:45): Yeah. And if your budget isn't like, that's the other thing. If you have a small budget and you get, you go to a bigger agency, you are going to be given very junior level person. Like you just are

Daniel (14:55): No, you're right. And I intentionally like, I'm most likely not the solution for a you know, really big holding company agency or anything like that. I I've intentionally tried to only partner and work with agencies from like 15 to 40 head count. Because again, now that I'm in the middle and I remain objective, I really do want to give the brand, you know, my promise to agencies are, I of course, want you to close. And I think you're wonderful, but before anything, I want to be an objective advocate for the brand to get whatever they want and get the best work and all of that stuff. And it's it's interesting. Every marketer I speak to, I've learned more in the last five months, I feel about in terms of marketing now being in the middle between agency and brand, because once they hear that I'm free to them, I get all this information that I never got when I was selling and beating my chest, that our agency was the best. And it really is. People just want to work with people. They like who are trustworthy and can, you know, help them look good to their peers and their, you know, their colleagues and stuff, pull it down.

Kathleen (15:57): Well, let's, let's actually break this down and get really specific now. So we mentioned a bunch of categories of, of like, or factors that play into whether it's the right fit. Let's go back to the very first thing we talked about, which is they have to do great work. If somebody is out there shopping for an agency, that's obviously going to be their number one question, do they do great work? How do you figure that out? Because every agency makes it sound as though they do. I mean, we're all in marketing, let's be honest. We know how to make ourselves sound really good.

Daniel (16:26): I was going to say like, contrary to popular belief, I think it's a little bit impossible because again, you're going to get case studies that look great. You're going to see former, nobody's going to send you something that you think you hate. So I almost recommend, like, I think saying I hear it all the time when people say like, Oh, I want a company with a proven track record of success. You know? Well, they're going to only show you the case to every, any agency who says they have no negative, you know, case studies or they've never done a campaign that didn't perform well is, you know, respectfully lying. So I would say, you do the best you can. If you see work that you like, that shows you that they are capable of doing that, but you still don't know the story behind it. So I think you go in with a little bit of an open mind.

Kathleen (17:13): Do you check references? Do you read review sites? Like, are there other proxies for that?

Daniel (17:19): I think references are great if you can get to them that aren't provided by the agency, because again, they're going to give you the people who love them, which again, you know, not to poo poo on agencies, but if you want to get the real story, that's why I like to think my service is super valuable because I'm giving you my 2 cents and I'm pushing you in one direction and you get to make your own decision, but yeah, references are great. I think were view sites. Again, I take it with a grain of salt, you know, to equate it, to like the restaurant industry. You know, if you go a Yelp and you look up a restaurant, probably gonna see a lot of negative of people that you don't know the context around what happened. So asking colleagues is a good thing and asking for companies that have worked with them, if you're able to have access to it. But I think as a marketer, the more you go through your career, you get a good feel for who you think is is, you know, full of it. And who you think is going to give you a good performance and all that sort of stuff.

Kathleen (18:13): All right. So some of the other factors let's talk about communication. How do you, as a marketer, who's looking to hire an agency that, you know, are they going to be good communicators? Are there questions that you can ask as in the evaluation process? Like what are some ways you can suss that out?

Daniel (18:31): I always recommend marketers put that a hundred percent on them of what they want and a good agency, theoretically, unless it's something, you know, insane will potentially push back a little. But I think the marketers should drive that ship. What makes their life easier? And put it to the agency is that, you know, within the realm of possibility and if possible to take it a layer deeper, I would put it in the contract. If there's anything you can contractually obligate yourself to have check-ins or reporting and stuff like that of when you expect it. But again, it's a feel thing too, you know, as, as a project manager and somebody in sales as well, like you can tell when someone needs a touch point, you know, and it's not a tangible some of the time, but as a marketer, I always recommend they go to the table and give the agency as much as they're comfortable giving, you know, we expect a weekly check-in.

Kathleen (19:22): I was going to say, what are some examples of things that you could ask for?

Daniel (19:25): I, you know, for bigger projects, I'd always want to know where we're at in the project. And I think like an end of week check-in, depending on how deep the engagement is, it's not too much to ask and it can take two seconds. Like, you know, the stuff that we talked about a lot at my former agency in terms of communications was some of these things really do take two seconds and they don't have to be super detailed and crazy reporting and stuff like that. I think a monthly check-in is normal, I think, or quarterly if you're doing reporting or anything like performance related, I think you know, monthly reporting and then a quarterly like QBR of sorts to look at the whole program. Looking at stuff for 30 days doesn't oftentimes tell you the entire story. But yeah, I mean, I have plenty of people for like bigger spends that I talk to, you know, if you're spending, you know, half a million dollars a month, they want to see live reporting and some sort of dashboard, which at that type of spend level, I don't think is, you know, overkill. And if an agency is not willing to do that, then that doesn't work for you. And to me, that's an amicable way of saying this isn't gonna work.

Kathleen (20:34): Is it reasonable to expect access via Slack, you know, like, or real time responses?

Daniel (20:43): I think it's unnecessary because if you have a good relationship with your agency, to me, Slack for the company is like a safe space to to, you know, you, you've got your day to day, but if you have a good relationship, you know, you're typically getting the cell phone of your account lead or your project manager. And if you shoot a timely email, like they should be replying in a timely manner. But you know, it depends, I know some agencies who have their clients are one person from their client in a Slack community with them, for, you know, quick communication and stuff like that. So if that, again, I go back to the beginning of that's the expectation of what you want, whether it's right or wrong, you're, you're in control of the budget and then your expectations. So as long as you tell them that upfront, I don't think that's a bad thing.

Kathleen (21:26): Now what about like project management styles? Because in the last several years, I feel like there's been this movement within the agency world to adopt agile for marketing. And I've worked at companies that have used it and companies that have not, my experience has been that it, for it to work, you really have to have a lot of communication and education because most clients don't understand agile. Certainly not as it applies to marketing. I think if you do that, well, it can work, but it can also lead to a lot of frustration around like, well, why, what do you mean something's not in the sprint? Or what have you, so like what do you think people should know about that? And does it, maybe you, maybe you think it doesn't matter, but I'm curious to get your take on it.

Daniel (22:17): Yeah, I have. Most of my answers will probably be somewhere in the middle, but I think it matters in the sense that you think of it like this. If you hire an agency for a bunch of money and then you tell them to do a different project management style, like, you know, you, you want them to do what has worked. You've decided they've won and you're going to work with them. You want their process. If that's something insane, you should probably know that before, you know, you engage with them. In my seven and a half years at my former agency, I don't think our project management style came up once or anybody asked for a specific, you know, a type of project management. It was more the frequency like, Hey, it would be great if you could send a weekly recap of what's going on in the project, or if we can have a weekly 10 minute check-in that happens, you know, 45 times a week with everyone I talked to.

Kathleen (23:11): I do find, I do find that project management comes up you're right. Like it never came up when I had my agency, but when I worked at the agency that used agile, it came up all the time because people didn't understand, like, what do you mean if I want to do X that it's going to be this many points? And what do you mean I have to wait until the next sprint? Like, there's, it just, it was like a complicating factor that I think could it introduced friction a lot of the time. And I actually like agile. I just think, like, I think it can introduce friction if you don't handle it well, and you don't educate your client.

Daniel (23:46): My experience with sprints and stuff of that nature too, is it it causes friction because I think sometimes it's arbitrary. Like, you've put, we're going to do this in two weeks because that lines up with something else, but it really might be like something that should take three or four weeks, you know? So you're, you're speeding things up and putting them in a box that don't necessarily need to be. I know a lot of product companies I talk to bill based on sprints and stuff like that. And it's easier from their development team standpoint to see where things are at with a project. And, you know, once they finish one sprint, they can clearly move on to the next. But you know, it, it all comes back to, again, like if you're the client and you're controlling this budget, you know, you're, you're not necessarily doing the agency a favor, but I tell people all the time, I give them the answer. If you want this thing, ask for it. The worst they'll say is no. And if that's a deal-breaker don't work with them, you know? I don't, for me personally, like I want whatever the agency, if I was the marketer, I want whatever the agency does best. I don't put them into some situation of like, figuring out how to use some other system or tool or project management style. So

Kathleen (24:51): Most agencies will just turn you away as a client if you want them to do that anyway, because it's not really realistic.

Daniel (24:56): The good ones I think what I find is a lot of smaller hungrier agencies will just say yes.

Kathleen (25:03): And that in and of itself could be a red flag. If somebody is saying yes, and you're making that kind of an ask, maybe you should walk away.

Daniel (25:10): Yeah. A hundred percent. I think that's one of the biggest thing that separates good agencies from the bad or good from great is willingness to say no to stuff and, and push back respectfully on stuff that they don't think is going to work. You know, I, I hear that line all the time that, you know, clients want agencies that will push back. And I, from my experience clients, they want it to a certain degree, not uncertain things. And there, there is a line of well, we're paying you now, like don't push back too much. So I think coming to a happy medium between client and agency pre contract signature is super important.

Kathleen (25:45): Yep. Agreed. all right. I think the one we haven't covered yet is culture and it sounded like you didn't have that high on your list. I't not as much of a deal breaker as some of these other things, but I do feel like there's like a culture fit aspect to, can we work well together? I'm curious to get your take on that.

Daniel (26:08): Yeah. I think it's moved up the list of priorities in the past few years and stuff like that. And the biggest thing I can tie to it that I think is a really good example of it is diversity. You know, if you're, you know, a company looking to increase, you know, visibility around diversity and stuff like that, you do want a diverse agency and you want people of all shapes and colors and size and fit and all that sort of stuff. And that aligned there. You know, if you are a non-profit like, you may not I'm trying to think there, you know, like you may not want an agency that's working with stuff super counter to your nonprofit, or, you know, when I think of like hotbed or guns and cigarettes and stuff like that, like there is a line where culture comes into play and it's different for every person. But when I think of culture, I think it's super important. The team makeup of like, you know, if you're a fun, cool brand, like you'd probably want a fun, cool agency.

Kathleen (27:06): Yeah. That's kinda what I'm thinking of. Like there, there's also like if you're super buttoned up and formal, you know, like, I don't know. I'm just guessing, like if you're IBM, you may not go to an agency that, that is really like young and casual and hipster. And like, there's that aspect too. And, and I guess that's where culture kind of also veers into like aesthetics and design sense and things like that. But but I do think there's something to that of like, you want an agency that's similar to you so that they just get you more easily.

Daniel (27:40): Yeah. And I think it comes back to the work to look like it's easier and you don't have to be like, you know, exactly the same as the people, but your, your personalities can't clash to get good work. You know, they have to align in some capacity. And the reason I say it's a little bit of a, you know, a popularity contest is because if you just actually don't like the people and you don't mash well, like you're probably not going to look forward to working with them. And it's, you're, you're, you're starting off, you know you know combating rather, rather than being super excited and ready to create whatever awesome work you're trying to do with them.

Kathleen (28:15): Yeah. So we covered those four categories that I mentioned in the beginning. What did we miss? What else should people be looking for?

Daniel (28:22): I think budget and just transparency around budget, which is something I try to take out of the process as much as possible for both sides by talking about it is something that's like a dirty word. A lot of the times, you know, I've in my experience in my former agency, very rarely were we given a budget, it was always, you should tell us what, you know, our budget should be with something I heard a lot which I think is a little bit of a time waste for both sides. So I really attempt when I'm talking to the brand to tell me and think of their budget it just takes out so much of the back and forth. And I think it gets you to a better place with your agency earlier by saying, look, we have X amount of dollars, or we would hope to spend X amount of dollars.

Daniel (29:07): How do we use that the best, you know, rather than this, you know, the thing I hated the most, the few times it occurred is if you send, you know, a proposal for a hundred thousand dollars, and everybody has in their mind what something should cost, and they were thinking $50,000, you're automatically disqualified. Because they you know, you didn't have those conversations upfront where there probably is a spot where you could have done something for $50,000 that they liked. So I try to take encourage people to think really deeply about their budget. And then the biggest thing I encouraged that we didn't talk about is whether or not you're ready for an agency. Like you have to, it's a lot of time and effort on yourself as well to make an agency successful.

Kathleen (29:52): You know, we talked at the beginning about having an intern. It's so funny, like everyone's always like, yes, get an intern, you'll get help. And it's like, no, God, sometimes interns just take so much work, you know, to organize and train and manage.

Daniel (30:04): It is a full on relationship and marriage and my, your agency can't be successful if you're not providing them a ton of information, feedback, strategy, you know, agencies, there's just no way at the beginning that an agency can know a brand as well as the brand knows itself. So at least at the beginning, there just needs to be so much time and energy spent in making sure your investment is protected and going as far as possible. So when people immediately jump to, I want an agency, I encourage them to take a step back and say, are we ready to make this investment and make it successful?

Kathleen (30:43): Yeah. That's, that's great advice. What are any other advice that you would give if somebody is out there thinking of re-evaluating their agency process like during that vetting process, any other best practices for them to be aware of?

Daniel (31:01): I'm very anti RFP. I think it puts a lot of stress on the entire situation. You know, I know for bigger companies, oftentimes they have to for procurement purposes and stuff, but when people are thinking of going through RFP, I really encourage them to just put together a very neat brief so that they can compare agencies, apples to apples without putting them through this gauntlet of you know, sometimes free work and stuff like that. But I think it's also really difficult in an RFP process to get to know some of these agencies as well, the things that we talked about, personality and, and that thing, because it's a, it's a competition and you're, you're giving what you think they want to win this thing. And then oftentimes you're figuring out what you're actually doing after the fact.

Kathleen (31:47): Yeah, that is such a great point. I could not agree with you more for two reasons. Number one, some of the best agencies flat out won't won't compete for an RFP because they don't need to because they get so much work without it. And RFPs are a hassle and a lot of work. And so if you have an RFP very often, you, you eliminate your ability to work with the top agencies because they don't have the time for that is number one. And number two, you're absolutely right. Like you're going to an agency because they're the experts, especially, especially if you're going to an agency like that, and you're asking them to develop your strategy, like going in thinking that, you know, what you need and writing an RFP is going to tie your hands and prevent agencies from being and telling you what you need, as opposed to just catering to what you think you need. Like, that's my experience 100%.

Daniel (32:48): No, I agree. And I work with several agencies who will not compete in blind RFPs, you know, at my former shop, you wouldn't either in less, we knew someone there and it was a formality where they'd had to go through RFP and we already had a relationship, or we were able to have a like regular hour long meeting prior to submission, you know, some have the question and answer phase and stuff, which still doesn't oftentimes give you enough information back and forth. But yeah, I just think it's a an antiquated system for picking agencies. It might apply more for whittling down like a short list, say if you've got 10 agencies and you want to get to five, you know, that could be a decent first step in my opinion, but it oftentimes just turns both sides off. In my opinion, I've seen plenty of RFPs where they're asking for free ideas and strategies and creative work, and it's just a stressful process for for all involved, I would say.

Kathleen (33:43): So my last question is, is this so often when companies go and look for agencies, their mindset is very much around, what do I need the agency to do for me? What am I looking for in the agency to be able to deliver value to me? Selfishly as somebody who used to own an agency, I'm going to ask you this question, which is what should we, as the potential client of the agency understand is our obligation and what is the part that we need to play in making an agency relationship successful?

Daniel (34:18): Yeah, it comes down to communication. I'd say as the first step, step one, one a of a million steps would be to clearly and concisely communicate your ask of what and I would put it in two columns, one being tactics slash services. What do you think you want them to do? And what is the home run outcome or performance metric that if you're trending in that direction, what makes this a lifelong relationship? Those two things to me are the most important cause that kicks it off. And then, yeah, just thinking about your own time, you know, if you're a VP of marketing CMO, your day is probably crazy busy. You know, once you hire an agency, if you're going to be the one managing it or being involved, I would make sure you have time. I'll audit to have those conversations and give the agency at the beginning, at least truthfully, whatever they need to be successful, you know, access to certain platforms and data and all those things.

Daniel (35:23): And then, you know, I typically encouraging if you are a VP or a CMO that you have somebody else managing the day to day, you know, the, the agency isn't just going to replace everything you do for most engagements agency. If it's a straight execution thing, somebody is creating, you know, 10 blog posts a month for you or whatever that may be. It's a little different, but for bigger agency engagements, I would think just being realistic with your own time is an excellent, a way to make sure at the beginning that you're getting the most out of your agency.

Kathleen (35:56): Yep. Absolutely. All right. Well, speaking of time, we are coming up to the end of ours. So I have two questions. I always ask my guests and I want to make sure I check in with you on these first one being, we talked all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular person or company or agency that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing these days?

Daniel (36:20): From the company side, honestly, it's timely. I would say RobinHood's had an embroiled a couple of weeks of I don't know, good or bad publicity however, you look at PR. But I would say their podcast Snacks Daily is my favorite, one of my favorite podcasts. It's daily, it's 20 minutes long. I think it's three investment stories, pop culture related. I think they do an incredible job at that. And then Morning Brew I can't say enough good things about. I think they do an incredible job you know, just making it as relevant as it is. And I look forward to that every single day, honestly.

Kathleen (37:00): That's great. Second question. Marketers always I think suffer from this drinking from a fire hose problem where digital marketing changes really quickly. It can be very, very hard to stay on top of all of that. How do you personally keep on top of that changing landscape and make sure that you stay educated?

Daniel (37:20): I read a ton. I consume a ton. I'm sad to say I don't read a ton of books anymore because I didn't want to content. I read per day. That seems daunting at the end of the day. Can't believe I'm saying this and this is forever on the internet, but Tik TOK has become a central point of truth for a lot of marketing and news-related items. So digestible. And Adweek does a really good job in particular on there. They do a I think it's weekly, a weekly 60 second segment of what you missed in the world of marketing and advertising, while you were doing everything else you need to do. Mashable, I've been reading for like the last 10 years and stuff like that. And then yeah, Morning Brew, The Skimm are how I start my my day. And they both typically have either subsets of their newsletters or separate newsletters. The Morning Brew has Emerging Tech. I think it's called that. I read almost every day as well. So I try to control as much without making myself go blind by reading all of these things. What's what's, what's your go-to?

Kathleen (38:25): Well, my go-to is hosting a podcast and learning from all the people that come on as my guests.

Daniel (38:30): That's the best answer you could give.

Kathleen (38:36): Some of the newsletters you mentioned are on my list, but I, yeah, I am a voracious consumer of content and my LinkedIn feed and Twitter feed. On Twitter I am ruthless in how I curate. I don't follow a lot of people and if I'm not getting value, I unfollow. And so my Twitter feed is extremely helpful to me. Linkedin, I have a much bigger network, but I still find a lot of value there.

Daniel (39:00): Well, if you ever follow me on Twitter and I see you unfollow me, I'll know I'm not a curator for you.

Kathleen (39:10): Yup. All right. Well, thank you, Daniel. This has been so great. For those listening, if you enjoyed this episode or you liked what you heard and learned something new, please consider going to Apple Podcasts and leaving the podcast a review. And if you know someone else doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork. Last question, Daniel. If somebody wants to find you online, what is the best way for them to do that?

Daniel (39:35): Www.Youshouldtalkto.Com or [email protected]. And I'm also a very active on LinkedIn if anyone wants to connect there.

Kathleen (39:46): Awesome. Well, I will put all those links in the show notes. So head over there to get in touch with Daniel. And that's it for this week. Thanks so much, Daniel. This was a lot of fun.

Daniel (39:55): Thank you. I appreciate it.