The Marketing Innovation Show

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, ​​𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐑𝐚𝐟𝐟𝐚𝐧, as they will be discussing turning B2B brands into category thought leaders through little known content marketing strategies. 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤 is the founder and CEO of Content Callout and a successful podcast host himself.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 ​​​​𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://www.contentcallout.com/

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markraffan/

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected] 

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

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Episode transcript: 

Mark  

They realise, hey, the investment for digital is oftentimes significantly less than the investment for conferences and trade shows, and the ROI is about the same or better. And so when you think of it from that perspective, a lot of companies, I think are still gonna go back and add in a conference or a trade show here and there. Don't get me wrong, I think they're still really, really good for a well-rounded programme. But I think that it's going to be less and you're going to see a lot more companies invest in digital, especially when it comes to content and social and trying to leverage social.

Andrei Tiu  

Hi, there! This is Andrei, and you're on a new episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Mark Raffan, the CEO of Content Callout and a successful podcast host himself. He turns B2B brands into category thought leaders through little known content marketing strategies, which is exactly what we'll be discussing today. So without further ado, Mark, it's a pleasure to have you on the show, pumped to see how our discussion goes and what secrets we find from you. How are you? How's the morning been for you?

Mark  

Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much for having me, Andrei, I appreciate it.

Andrei Tiu  

Pleasure is all mine. Looking forward to catching up on the geeky stuff here in the B2B content marketing? Subject line. First of all, let's start with a quick introduction so our listeners here can get to know you a little bit and for them to know you as a person, and what was your journey as a marketing leader, and then entrepreneur. As well as podcaster if not. We can talk about your podcast as well because I had to look at some of the episodes and they are pretty cool. Why not talk about that as well?

Mark  

Sure. Thank you very much. So, my background is actually not in marketing. I actually come from a sales and procurement background. That's where I spent most of my career. And then five years ago started a company called Negotiations Ninja, which is a negotiation training and coaching business, which also has a podcast. And that's how we gain notoriety. That's how we built our thought leadership. That's how we grew that brand, through the podcast. And then just over two years ago, we started Content Callout, because we thought: Hey if we can do it for one brand, but we could do it for other brands, too. We started Content Callout with the intention of building that for other companies. And now we do B2B content marketing, which is basically anything in and around the content space. So if you think of blogs, white papers, case studies, anything that's written on social media, any kind of social media management, and then also any kind of video content, what we do not do is we're not a PPC shop. We don't do any kind of serious SEM programmes. We don't do full-scale demand jams, primarily focusing on content and content production. That's our jam. We've been doing that for just over two years. And we work primarily in the B2B SaaS space and the health tech space. So those are the types of companies that we work with on an ongoing basis. And we also have a podcast for that. It's called B2B Content Marketing,  The Content Callout. And we've had some amazing guests on from Joe Polizzi to Robert Rose to Lindsey Chip Kamma, like a bunch of amazing guests, and they've been incredible. And we've learned so much from them. And I'm really excited to hopefully share some of that information today on the show with you.

Andrei Tiu  

Great stuff. And I know that a good proportion of the listeners, or a significant one, I would say, come from these types of b2b backgrounds. So whether that is services, but specifically tech and software, there's been a couple of you guys emailing lately, I know. And health-tech as well, I think would be also tech for education. I know, we had a couple of conversations last week. So really great stuff. And hopefully, you guys will be able to get some nice insights from our discussion today. And Mark, as you have this background in sales as well, in negotiation, I didn't say to you in our previous discussion, but why not go into this area as well, because as marketers, you know, negotiation happens. And every point along the way, whether you are marketing in an organisation, you need more budget, and I know you had a podcast episode talking about, you know, internal negotiations for that as well. Or whether it's, you know, negotiating with your internal teams from sales or financing or whatever else. We encountered that as well. So, you know, negotiation and sales can also be good, parallel discussion topics that we can touch upon, whenever you feel would be a good opportunity.

Mark  

Yeah, fantastic. And you know what, a lot of people especially those who come from a marketing background, don't immediately see the connection between marketing and negotiation, but they're actually really really similar because both disciplines deal with influence and persuasion. And when you think of it from that perspective, we both got the same foundational aspects into everything that we're doing. Because we're trying to influence and persuade someone to do something on both sides. And so when I can break it down to its most fundamental levels, most marketers go, oh, okay, I get it. And I actually find that a lot of marketers are great negotiators. Once they can understand that there's a connection there. They're like, Oh, I can understand what we're dealing with now. So yeah, happy to get into that discussion, too.

Andrei Tiu  

Perfect. Okay, so first things first. Let's start from now and then go into case studies and the past and everything else. But how do you feel the b2b space as a whole has shifted or changed over the last one to two years? I wouldn't say from the beginning of the pandemic, because some of the things were happening before in this space, you know, white papers and all that, and content marketing to a certain degree. But do you feel there has been any particular change in approach across the board, from the clients that you work with?

Mark  

Fundamental shifts have been massive. I mean, especially if you think of any kind of budget dollars that were associated to trade shows moving to digital. So I think that is probably the biggest shift, although we've seen a big move back, as well. A lot of companies are reinvesting back into trade shows, reinvesting back into conferences. And that's because if you do it right, those things work, as well. So those are the big fundamental shifts. And what I think a lot of companies have found in the process of switching a lot of those dollars, from trade shows and conferences to digital is that they realise, hey, the investment for digital is oftentimes significantly less than the investment for conferences and trade shows, and the ROI is about the same, or better. And so when you think of it from that perspective, a lot of companies I think, arts are still gonna go back and add in a conference or a trade show here and there, don't get me wrong, I think they're still really, really good for a well-rounded programme. But I think that it's going to be less, and you're going to see a lot more companies invest in digital. Especially when it comes to content and social and trying to leverage social to the maximum they can, because social is like a giant conference if you think about it, right? The interaction, the engagement, all of that is a lot of similarities to the conference world. So being able to leverage that is really, really important.

Andrei Tiu  

And going into the content production area. And maybe you can refer here to written content marketing. So having that SEO component. Do you feel there has been an increasing competition here, when it comes to more brands producing more content, maybe to a more professional standard?

Mark  

Yeah, I think there's definitely been an increase in competition. Let me say there's been an increase in volume, maybe not an increase in competition, but there's been certainly an increase in the volume of content being produced. The upside for a lot of us in the content marketing space to that is it's given a lot of eyeballs to content marketing in general. People have started to realise the benefits of content marketing. And now there's a lot of people that realise, oh, my goodness, I've got to be playing this game. The downside, of course, is that you're now there's only one SERP right, depending on whatever keywords you're trying to rank for. So you've got more competition, potentially. So the opportunity for Category development is significantly higher, in terms of like a blue ocean strategy, I think there's a lot of opportunities there. And also, the good thing is that it's, it's allowed a lot of us to really invest in quality content, especially in the b2b space to stand out. Because anyone can throw words on the internet. But it takes really good writing and editing team, and a really good SEO platform to be able to make that writing count. So I guess there's been more competition, there's been more volume. I don't necessarily think it's hurt anyone who's been investing in it the right way, though.

Andrei Tiu  

And you touched upon something which I want to be one of our core discussion points and that is becoming a category leader or creating your own category. So if you would like to talk about some of the examples that you had with clients when you were designing a strategy for this, because I think this may be relevant to this 2 people that I know are listening to us and are in that sort of startup phase where they are putting the strategy together. And I just think this would be super relevant for anybody, but particularly, I know two people that will appreciate us that in touching on this point,

Mark  

When you think of category creation, right, if you think of HubSpot inbound, if you think of revenue intelligence, even Casted, which is a b2b podcasting platform, their categories amplified marketing, they basically created that category. And now everyone's talking about it. The thing that a lot of people really miss with category creation is the absolute requirement for volume. And the absolute requirement for your ability to stick with it. Because you're trying to create a category that no one is searching for right now, right? Like there are no eyeballs, right. So like, if you're thinking of PPC, there are tonnes of people searching PPC, if you think of content marketing, there are tonnes of people searching content marketing. But if you try to create a whole new category, there is no one searching for that yet. So there's no search volume, which means that you have to create a lot of the search volume. So you have to be really, really on it with PR, you have to be really, really on it with the volume of content that you're producing, you have to do things like this coming on shows to talk about the new category that you're creating, and how it's different and why it's different, and why people should pay attention. So your outbound push on what it is, you want your category to appear like to the marketplace, has to be very substantial and very sustained for a very long period of time, so that you can build up the search volume so that you can start getting inbound. Because there's no inbound, right, it's all outbound, to begin with. So that you can get all of that inbound built over a period of years. And it's going to take a period of years.

Andrei Tiu  

So looking at it from a content marketing strategy point of view, this will be the long term component of a content marketing strategy. Okay, good stuff. So do you think this would be something to be considered by anybody? Or are there particular niches or types of businesses that you found this working better for in the b2b space?

Mark  

It depends on what it is you're trying to achieve. If you're a consulting company, you're not creating a category, right? Let's be honest with each other, you're just not, you're a consulting company. So you have to compete on keywords that are already available, you're never going to be a Bain, you're never going to be a McKinsey, you're never going to be a BCG. So don't bother. Compete in your space and niche down, I would say be a very niche on that space. But if you're a tech company, and you have a new platform or a new product that changes the way that something is done, then it may make sense for you to create the category. And in creating that category, you've got to be really sure that that's something that you want to do because it takes a very heavy investment. And if you've got investors, they're going to need to understand that, because they're going to want to see, like a traditional investor is going to want to see ROI fairly quickly, or at least growth fairly quickly. In creating a category, especially when it comes to outbound marketing, that growth is still a requirement. And you also still have to do all of the outbound stuff with no search volume. Right? So when you think about that, it's a substantial investment that you're gonna have to make. It's not something that I would easily recommend for everyone. Now, if you're willing to be patient and invest and do the right things if you look at what Casted has done, for example, like ZACHARY And Lindsey overcast, Holly who's their VP of Marketing, they've done an amazing job, right? They've really built out the amplified marketing, the whole idea. They've built out that whole category. And now everyone's talking about it, I see Forbes articles about it, and entrepreneur articles about it. And it was really them that created that category. And it'll continue to grow more and more and more. But it was really them that created that and they're at the forefront of that category now. So people like you and I are searching, for amplified marketing, there's actually some search volume now. But it does take a lot of investment and a lot of time, so don't go into it lightly. For those of you that want to do this, just be very sure that it's something that you want to do.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so and then of course, if we go back to the theory of having your content organised into pillars and satellites and everything else, probably, if we were to think about it from an integrated point of view, this can be a pillar, but it has to be that pillar that always stands and will be there for years as you mentioned, Mark, to ensure that you build on top of it, but it will require a lot of resources because you need that volume. And then you know having the other content pillars that will enable you to rank for some keywords or key phrases that do have search volume. So in the end, you are able to justify for the business internally, but also for the world, that the content marketing and SEO that you are doing actually gets people onto the website, the relevant people, and then proves, you know, results to the business.

Mark  

Yeah, and you bring up a really very important point, Andrei, and a lot of people don't think about this is like, you still got to compete. Because there's still search volume out there for something that you probably do or part of something that you probably do. So you've still got to compete on that content, too. So you're creating content for the new category. And you've got to compete on the existing keywords of the existing categories that are out there. So those pillar strategies are essential to that breaking out a long-form 4000 5000 words, piece of pillar content and having that sort of hub and spoke model that you can create and do a lot of like internal and external links to create a lot of that inbound traffic is critical to your ongoing competitiveness. And again, it's something that you really do need to invest time and money and strategy into. And it seems like you've thought very deeply about this because a lot of people don't think about that. A lot of people don't think about the strategy that goes behind it, they think, Well, I'm just going to start blogging. And hopefully, some of this stuff gets picked up. No, there has to be a significant strategy that you put into it. Because you've got to think about okay, well, who am I trying to reach? Right? That's the whole idea of who's my ideal customer profile? Who are the target buyers within that ideal customer profile? Who are the influencers to those target buyers? What are they searching for on an ongoing basis? How am I going to reach those people? And then how am I going to differentiate myself from my existing competition who I'm competing with, on keywords? Right? So not only do I have to rank but it also has to be something that's good to read, when you get to the website, otherwise, the bounce rate becomes super high. And then what's the point? Right, like, why would you rank congratulations, but no one reads it. The point is to get someone to read it, not just to rank, we want to get someone to read it as best we can. Because when we get someone to read it, they get engaged, and then they move into our fun. So ideally, you want to get something that is really, really great readable content too.

Andrei Tiu  

And of course, long term if we are to think about it, if you don't have good retention on-page and people just navigate 10% of your page and that they drop or leave, then that will damage your page authority in the long run. So okay, you may be getting a great domain authority as time goes by. But that content that you struggled for, may not rank for too long, until it doesn't anymore, because another competitor may produce a better piece of content that targets those may be key phrases like the main key phrase that you target and you rank for.

Mark  

Yeah, and it's not just about production, right? You've also got to distribute. And that's the second half of content marketing that most people don't think about it.

Andrei Tiu  

Let's go into this one, actually, because I think, yeah, this is very under-discussed, I think, and I would really like to hear your thoughts on, you know, you produce and then what happens?

Mark  

Well, then you've got to have people read it, right? The strength of your content marketing and marketing is a function of two things. It's a function of the quality of the content that you're producing. And it's a function of the people reading that content. Without people, you could write the best piece in the world. But if people don't read it, then it's useless. Because the goal is to get people to read it. So the question then becomes, how do we get people to read it? Well, two different ways. One is organic distribution, right? SEO, social, all that kind of stuff. And the other one is paid distribution. So any kind of paid SEM, or paid social work that you may end up doing? Most people post organically, and then they're like, cool, and we're good, but they don't invest in the paid distribution. And I would argue that a big part of your budget not only has to be around the content that you're the production budget, but the distribution budget as well, if you're not spending 50% of the budget on distributing the content, you're really missing an amazing opportunity, because you're not going to get organic search like and you're not going to rank right away, right? Like you don't, it's not like you've posted and then you're automatically page one. That just doesn't happen. So you've got to start that process with the paid distribution. You've got to do paid social, you've got to do paid SEM. And without it, you're really missing a major opportunity to get people to read your stuff.

Andrei Tiu  

Have you found a direct link between investing whether that is Google or social media? So direct budgets into let's say, blog posts, but let's say a long-form blog post just to be sure that we have the quality element there. So investing or not investing budgets in a blog post and the speed at which it can increase ranking.

Mark  

Substantial. We ran this experiment recently with our own stuff, where we created a long-form piece, 4000 words, it was a guide on a b2b marketing for Sass companies, b2b content marketing for SAS company was the guy that we produced. And we made it ungated. And we just, we did almost like a really rough AB test, we posted on social with one post that looked a certain way, and we made it all organic, and really didn't get anywhere, and it was doing a little bit of ranking after three months, not anything substantial. And then we took that exact same post and just boosted it. Like we didn't even put an intense strategy behind it. We just boosted it on LinkedIn, because that's where all of our customers are. And the click-through rate was substantial. Like we did very, very well on click-through rate because we understand our customers. And the bounce rate went way down because people knew what they were going to read because they're coming in from social, and we ranked a lot faster. So now for the keywords that we're trying to rank for, which is content marketing for b2b SaaS companies. Was page one. And now what ends up happening is we've actually beat out what we believe is our major competitor, I won't say their names on here, but we've beat out our major competitor, and we rank higher than them. So we're number five, page one, within two months of doing that, versus three months of organic where it didn't really count. So a substantial difference that a result of paid marketing does to ranking as a result of that.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. And would you be able or willing to share the budgets? If somebody thinks about doing the same, what would be a budget that maybe you invested or thought would be good to start with at least?

Mark  

Man, it totally depends on what you're trying to rank for. Because if you've got a consulting company, and you're a management consultant, let's just choose the obvious one, right, like, let's just say you have a dental practice, and you're trying to rank for dentists practice in your city, or whatever it might be, the competition is massive, right. So I would say be very, have a good SEO strategy on where you want to rank and why you want to rank there and choose less competitive keywords where you think you're going to get better quality inbound, as a result of those less competitive keywords. And don't be afraid to go longtail because you know, what a perfect customer is going to search for. So for example, in our case, we know that we really only want to speak to people or talk to people that are in b2b SaaS. And we really only want to speak to people in b2b SaaS, who are searching for content marketing. So our long tail is content marketing for b2b SaaS. And so the result of that, of course, is yes, we may miss out on a lot of higher search volume, but the search volume that we do get is better quality. And so we're able to compete on those keywords, and then do much better. Now, if you're in a very competitive industry, it's going to cost you significantly more, and your budget is going to be more now it doesn't cost us very much. I mean, maybe we spend $1,000 or $2,000 a month on any kind of paid distribution of our content. But that's because we're being very strategic about the keywords that we're trying to rank for, and where we're trying to rank in general. But if you sell cacti, and there are 1000 cacti companies in the world that are, you know, or in your area that is doing exactly what you do, your competition is going to be fierce. So, it really depends on what you're trying to do. It doesn't have to be substantial. That's what a lot of people don't understand. Like, when the people hear two grand, they're like, Oh, that's not that much money. You're like, yeah, it doesn't have to be right, like, pick out the keywords that make sense for your organisation and who you're trying to target and work with those, to begin with. Go from there.

Andrei Tiu  

Great insight. Thank you. Okay, and stalking content marketing. Now I mean, one of the big differences between content marketing and PPC, for example, as we all know, is that content marketing, mainly if we talk about reason, content marketing, you need patients to see some results. I mean, they can come sooner or later. Sometimes it takes longer depending on the competition, depending on the topic as well, but it may take a bit longer, As with PPC, you can present pretty soon some initial results. What are some, I don't know, maybe funny stories, or maybe challenges that you encountered in your discussions with decision-makers, let's say, in presenting content market or getting content marketing strategies or plans approved.

Mark  

Thing is, if you're working with marketers, it's never a problem, right? Because marketers get it. So if you say to them, Look, we're probably not going to rank for this for at least eight to 12 months. They're like, okay, cool. But they understand that after that eight to 12 months, you're going to as long as you're maintaining that page on a regular-ish basis, as long as you're updating, updating it, as long as your technical SEO is good. On your website, you're going to probably maintain that position or improve it over time, right, you're going to do very, very well over time. Whereas unfortunately, a lot of people who aren't in marketing, they expect immediate results for SEO. And then they're surprised when those immediate results don't happen. And I don't think it's their fault. I think it's it's I think it's actually our fault, as marketers, because we have done a poor job of communicating the differences between SEO and SEM. And we've done a poor job of communicating the differences between all of the things that we're doing within each of those major segments, and why we're doing them. And if you follow up and make a logical argument of here's what we're doing in all these different areas, here's why we're doing each of these things. Here's right why it's not an either-or situation. It's not like a, like, I would never say to someone choose sem over or over SEO, or like choose PPC, over content in there. They're not mutually exclusive, you should be doing both things. But our decision-makers are going to say to us, well, you have to choose one or the other because the budget is limited, right. And so you have to make a decision, I would much rather you take a smaller budget for both and try and do both, rather than pick one or the other. Because the SEM is going to get you the short term results that you need, in terms of the whatever sem strategy you're trying to run. And the SEO strategy that you're building, or the content marketing strategy that you're building is going to be the long term results that create all of the inbound traffic or a lot of the inbound traffic over a period of years. So it, our decision-makers don't know that. So we have to have a logical argument of why they should do something, then we have to say to them, well, here's why we should do it. And here's why it matters to our organisation. So you've got to tell them, like what's the benefit to them. And then you've got to be able to be credible enough to be able to carry that organisation. If you've screwed up the marketing budget for the last three years in a row, no one's going to trust you anyway. So just making sure you hit those three points is critical.

Andrei Tiu  

With itself. Okay, so now going into or touching a bit more on thought leadership. As we saw in b2b, this is being done in a couple of ways. So what we do here, podcasts is one of them. Then we have the interviews, roundtables, and white papers as well, for SAS, this is a very common practice. What, are some of the strategies that work well for you guys, for your clients, or some of the things that you know, like the hidden secrets that you can share? Of course, not all of them that you think would be worth looking at from somebody that activates in this niche?

Mark  

I think it depends on what you want to achieve. So if, if you're depending on where you think you need to hit all three major stages of whatever your funnel is, right? So awareness, consideration, and action or rare awareness, consideration and intent, however, you want to look at those big three parts of the funnel. I think a lot of people are really good at creating awareness-based content. But consideration content is where a lot of people really struggle. So white papers, case studies, all that kind of stuff, I think really comes into a lot of that middle piece of the funnel. So I would say, as a hedge, I wouldn't go a third, a third, a third, I would maybe go a quarter and then two quarters and a quarter for the bottom and have your intent content be the same sort of set and volume of content you're producing as your awareness content. I would spend more time in the consideration phase because that's where most people are going to be helped. You're going to be helping those people to make a decision. And then don't be afraid, to make sure that you're developing content for other sites as well. So a lot of guest posting a lot of backlinking, any kind of Reddit posts where you want to be available on social media be very present on social media, those are the major areas where I think you should be focusing.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay. And when you say, you know, social media, do you see it just as a medium of distribution for the written or visual content that you produce? Or are there other strategies that you currently implement in the b2b space and seem to be working very well? And we can get channels as well here, like if you have insights from Quora already, that you think would be relevant.

Mark  

I think a lot of it comes down to engagement, yes, distribution of the content that you have, but engaging on the comments of that content. So a big part of our, where that's where we spend, that's the vast majority of hours, the Labour hours in our business, for our clients, where we run social media for them, is based on the engagement, because that's where the quality of conversation improves. And that's where the consideration begins. So yes, you post something on social for awareness that can, that's only awareness, if someone engages on that, they're considering something, could be anything, just could be part of the conversation. But that's where the consideration begins for a lot of people. And then they're gonna say, Well, how am I gonna share this with someone on a Slack channel, or I'm gonna share this with someone on a text, or I'm gonna share this with someone on something else. And that's where you're gonna get a lot of the engagement beginning. So I would say focus on focus on engagement, more than distribution on social and try and create as much engagement as you can. So especially when it comes to social, make sure your first few lines are really, really good, right? That there's a hook. Like, why should someone read this? There's some interesting stuff that someone wants to read, we look at it through three lenses. So is it educational? Is it entertaining, as is it interesting, if you can hit at least two out of three of those, you're in a good spot. And remember that your audience is looking for something that's going to stop them scrolling. And that's what we're trying to do. So the first couple of lines have to be a scroll stopper. And then you can start getting into the conversation and then engage people on social. So if someone has liked it, where someone is one of the target audiences that you're looking for, tag them in the comments and say, Hey, I saw that you liked this. We'd love to hear your feedback on it. Whatever that person's name is,

Andrei Tiu  

the productive workers within.

Mark  

It has to be its people think that social is passive, it's very active. But you have to be very, very, very active. And there's a big downside to that because it just takes hours, it takes a lot of time. A lot of time,

Andrei Tiu  

What's your experience with groups, LinkedIn, maybe even Facebook?

Mark  

Not a big fan. I'm not a big fan of LinkedIn groups, I think they used to be something that was good. I haven't seen anyone being active on LinkedIn anymore. Like not for at least not for two years, three years, maybe Facebook groups, it depends on who's running the group, I find if someone's doing regular inbound into that group, meaning they're constantly building the audience and engaging the audience on an ongoing basis. And it's purely educational for that group. It can be amazing, and it can be incredible. It depends on who's running that group. But LinkedIn has really sucked for the last three years.

Andrei Tiu  

Whether they are kind of following in Facebook's footsteps, or maybe if Facebook is focusing a lot on groups these days, maybe they will want to work something out. I don't know. I was just curious here. Because, yeah, we did not have a lot of success with LinkedIn groups lately.

Mark  

Have you had success with LinkedIn?

Andrei Tiu  

Not much. I mean, not. We had a couple of trials, but nothing really popped out. So we were like, Okay, fine.

Mark  

Yeah, I think I think where if, especially if you're creating a category, going back to that conversation, the strength of the group is, is based on the strength of the community that you're building. And there are better community tools than a LinkedIn group, right? So creating a Slack channel, for example. So if we're going to make the comparison, why have a group to create the community, in my opinion, right? That's why you have a group. So I would much rather be investing my dollars in creating a small Slack community like an active Slack community than I would in a LinkedIn group there's really no reason I would create a LinkedIn group these days.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, agree with that. Okay, another question that I had here, I'm avoiding you. So, you know, if you want to ask back here. But having your background as a, you know, more of an in the sales director, and content marketing in b2b Being a lot linked to the ability of that content to generate leads, or, you know, sales qualified leads in general. How do you or how do your clients find it? How do you find your clients? Make the choice engaging or not some of the content?

Mark  

That's a good question. I don't think it's an either-or, I don't think like everyone's like, Oh, you like there's a big trend lately to say something to the effect of never gate content? And then you've got other people that are like, no, no, you should always get content. And I think it depends on why you're building the content in the first place. So if, if you're, if you're doing it to get ranked, and if you're doing it to build up as your rank overall. And if you want people to read it on an ongoing basis, and it's a pillar piece of content, I don't think you should get it. I think that's something that you need to drive traffic to that you need to constantly develop and build. But if you've got a really technical white paper, that is really important for your business, like a lot of crypto businesses, have really deep technical algorithms that they don't want to share publicly with anyone else. Because it's really important. That gating is really, really important because it gets people who are interested in learning about the technology to download the white paper, or at least to have a conversation with someone to learn more about the white paper. So I think it really depends on why you're doing what you're doing. I don't think it's an either-or conversation, I think you can have both. And I think for a lot of companies, it makes sense to have both agreed, gated and gated.

Andrei Tiu  

One way that we found was working well for some of our clients was, maybe for you guys that are looking at refreshing your content marketing strategy for the summer for the second part of the year. I very much agree with you, Mark. And what we are doing at the moment is working out the content plan. What is it, as you mentioned, what can drive real SEO benefits, a lot of the subjects that we are looking to include do or are links to keywords or key phrases that have either a very targeted search volume, so they are really relevant to the business or have a higher search volume. But it's also very feasible for us to want to rank within the next three to six months. So for those ones will create content, even long-form that is not gated, but then in producing industry status reports, or these types of things that are very insightful for decision-maker, maybe, but there's not a high volume of searches on those specific keywords. Those can be gated, or you can create an excerpt, maybe like 1000 words summary, and then for somebody that wants to go in more depth, hey, you can you know, download this, if whatever. Leave your details or business info. And then we agree. Yeah. Awesome. Man, this was a very good chat, and you know, a record the amount of time.

Mark  

Well, you're an interesting guy, man, you've got great questions.

Andrei Tiu  

Well, you have great answers. So I think it's a match waitstaff. So what are you guys planning for the rest of the year now, to wrap up the episode and maybe get some inspiration from our discussion to our public that maybe the guys tuning in today can start to integrate and look at for the coming months?

Mark  

For us personally, for our business, a big part of what we're doing is trying to make sure that our sales and our marketing engines are in tandem. And just making sure that marketing is arming sales with all of the things that they need to do their outbound work, and then inbound work, and then making sure that they're set up for success. So just that sales and marketing alignment is a big, big deal for us. For the next couple of months. We've recently hired a couple of new salespeople, so we want to make sure that they've got everything they need to be successful. And the Blurred Lines, especially in the BDR roles between sales and market, it's so blurred now where I was almost the same because a good BDR person is going to be a good copywriter and a good copywriter. generally a good marketer. And so I think it's, we're gonna see more alignment over time. And the other thing that we're really, really focused on for this year is just making sure that we're active on social as much as we can because we really think that that's going to be our long term success, at least for non owned organic stuff. That's where we really want to play very well. So that's going to be big for us.

Andrei Tiu  

Great stuff. Thank you. Okay. And finally, for content, call out, tell us a bit about what you guys are doing exactly with companies if we have people in here that would like to have discussions with you, or, you know, connect and ask you questions.

Mark  

Yeah, that'd be awesome. So if you, if you listen to the show, and you want to connect with me, please do connect with me on LinkedIn, you can just search my name on LinkedIn, Mark Raffin, where you can go to our website, that's content callouts.com. And I've got a gift for everyone who's listening if you are interested in pursuing content marketing, in some sort of way, and you know that your company needs to invest in this, and maybe this is something that you've already got freelancers, but you're like, hey, maybe we should try an agency. We will be happy to provide you with a custom-tailored 1000 word blog post, completely free of charge. If you listen to this podcast, and you tell us that you heard us on this podcast, so please do reach out if you have anything.

Andrei Tiu  

much appreciation. Thank you, Mark. Okay, guys. So you'll have details to Mark's LinkedIn profile, as well as to the content cloud platforms in the description of this episode. And of course, feel free to reach out to mark directly if you have any questions that you think we can answer or help in bringing you guys. As always, feel free to email us or ping us on social or write to me directly. As well as any other questions or recommendations for future episodes. Mark. I feel this was a great episode. So if you're up for another debate sometime this year, yeah. Awesome. So let us know guys. Thank you, Mark, for today. This was a really nice chat. 

Mark  

I really enjoyed it, thank you very much for having me.

Andrei Tiu  

Guys. Thank you as always for tuning in and for being with us. Looking forward to your feedback and thoughts on the episode. And until next time, hoping this got a bunch of value to your marketing plans to your content marketing activity, and keep rock rolling. Have a nice one and keep up the good work.

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, ​​𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐋𝐞𝐨, as they will be discussing business growth, strategy, resilience building and leadership development in the current still uncertain global market. 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐭 is the founder and CEO of Waymaker, an intelligent business management platform that helps leaders build a better business in 30 days.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 ​​𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐭:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://waymaker.io/

𝑆𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartleo/

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected] 

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube 

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show 

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean 

▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify 

▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer 

▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher 

▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox 

Episode transcript: 

​​Stuart Leo  

But at the end of the day, the job of a business is to solve a problem for customers go get more of those customers solving that problem and deliver value back to the community, society and shareholders. And that actually is a very fun journey. And the marketing discipline is central to that journey. So I love it. At some point, every business and business leader will get stuck. And we've developed an interesting set of tools and processes and algorithms that help those businesses get unstuck.

Andrei Tiu  

Hi, there! This is Andrei and you are on a new episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Stuart Leo, who is the founder and CEO of Waymaker, an intelligent business management platform that helps leaders build a better business in 30 days. And today, we'll discuss business growth, strategy, resilience building and leadership development in the current still uncertain global market. Stewart, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? Let's rock it all.

Stuart Leo  

Andrei, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Andrei Tiu  

Pleasure is all mine. So let's see where we start because we have so many interesting topics that I hope we'd have time to go through today. I mean, probably a good starting point, actually, would be to introduce you a bit more to the audience. So giving you the stage a bit to tell us about your background, your story and the interesting stuff that you are doing at the moment.

Stuart Leo  

Okay. Well, I'll start with the now and then I'll move back to how I got to the now how does that sound?  Now I'm a startup founder, we have a platform called waymaker.io, which is an intelligent business management platform, there are some fluffy words, let me break that down and make it concrete. It's really four things. It's a method, it's a way of doing high-value strategic decision making. A method that gives you the highest value course of action every single time you go through the process. Two,  it's a software platform that is designed to run that, that process and embed continuous improvement and strategic compounding results across your business. And we might talk about how we achieve that. Three, we're an education community, sitting behind waymaker is a digital Academy, Waymaker Academy. That is a bunch of course content, toolkits, playbook frameworks, and stuff that helps people build a better business. And fourthly, whilst we're a startup, we are now a growing emerging community of leaders who love business and want to build better businesses and help leaders become better leaders in London, the US, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, and what unifies all of us is that passion for working with people and helping them find the clarity, alignment and outcomes to deliver some special results. That's what I do now. For about 10 or so years, I ran my own consulting practice. Before that, I grew up in a corporate world in marketing and management and product development. Before that, I was in some agencies doing classic agency side marketing stuff in advertising and stuff. And it actually grew up in my journey in business, through the marketing discipline. I love it. I'm an absolute sold-out believer in Peter Drucker's quote on there's marketing and innovation, and everything else in a business is an expense. And I know what he's trying to say, and I'm taking him slightly out of context there. But at the end of the day, the job of a business is to solve a problem for customers go get more of those customers solving that problem and deliver value back to the community, society and shareholders. And that actually is a very fun journey. And the marketing discipline is central to that journey. So I love it.

Andrei Tiu  

Looking at the way that you work right now with businesses where exactly are you bringing value into their journey or what type of businesses you guys are working with on a day to day basis?

Stuart Leo  

Our principal customers are business coaches and consultants Who, working with business leaders in improving their business. So we have two types of customers, the business coach or consultant that's using our platform within their business to diagnose businesses find opportunity gaps, and build strategic plans and outcomes. And then we have business customers who are using our platform to effectively run their business with greater clarity, improved alignment, and efficiency of results. That's the reason they would use waymaker. And they tend to be let me call them SMEs sort of five or 10, three to 500 plus ish. And, and we live in a world where we help businesses get unstuck. At some point, every business and business leader, whether they be the senior leader, or sitting on a leadership team will get stuck. And, and that business needs to get unstuck. And we've developed an interesting set of tools and processes and algorithms that help those businesses get unstuck. So we might talk about some of those, that principle tool is a method, it's a way of thinking, built off winemakers leadership curve, which is a really a sense-making framework that helps leaders and their teams make sense of the marketplace and the business they have. And then in doing so, ask and answer is a process, we call the seven questions, which help them find the highest very course of action to go and execute. And we learned that from, from your neck of the woods from the British military, and we, we saw what the British military did to transform their day to day operational thinking and decision making and strategic planning on the battlefield. And that was transformational for the British military. So I might as well tell that story because I think that's interesting as the British military, is that, okay?

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, sure. Let's go straight into it. I was about to ask, before we go into the story, just for the audience to get a feel of the type of situation that these businesses are in and they may find they would be more or less in the same? Or have been or had been? What type of stuck, do you mean, stuck in terms of growth stuck, stuck in terms of people?

Stuart Leo  

Yeah, we talk about stuckness. In three types of stuckness, if I can use that language. The first type of stuckness is and I hope listeners and yourself will align. And yeah, remember that is that moment when you realise you're incredibly busy, you're doing lots of stuff, but you're spinning your wheels, and you're actually not moving forward, you're potentially spinning wheels and sliding backwards. And, and that's the first kind of stuckness. And the second type of stuckness is okay, we've had a level of success with we're growing, we seem to be getting some things happening for us, found our market found our customer, but we've hit a brick wall, we've hit a ceiling. And for some reason, it doesn't matter what we try, or what we do, we can't seem to find a breakthrough in that next phase. It's just a brick wall in front of us. So we, you feel stalled. So we call that the stall stuckness. The first one is spinning wheels, everybody's busy, but not effective. The second one is everybody's busy, but you just you know, breakthrough whatsoever. You've hit a brick wall as a business as a team. And the third is very much around owners or senior leaders, where you may have built a business, a level of success, but you're trapped within that business, you've actually built a business around you, it's too hard for you to get out of it now. So you're constantly stuck in it. And that could be your team could be your function, your discipline as a marketing leader, or as a sales leader or as a business owner. And so how do you extract yourself out of that and move on to the next challenge either the next role or as an owner, move from Doer to the owner, and enjoy those benefits you get lifestyle benefits, the financial benefits. So those three types of stuckness happen to every business at some point, at least for more than once and so we help those kinds of organisations, a stop spinning wheels. If there are 20 people in that team, they're probably going in 30 different directions. We help them get clarity with goals, and clear outcomes, refocus that energy into a sharper focus and get wheels turning and spinning. If you hit a brick wall, our diagnostic in our platform, which picks up to 300 pieces of data across a business will surface gaps and opportunities. And you'll see where your next possible investments in skills and systems will achieve a breakthrough. And lastly, if you're trapped, then our methodology is a great way of embedding and empowering others around you to build the business with you. So you can shift some of that responsibility from your shoulders to others. That kind of makes sense?

Andrei Tiu  

Yep, it does. Thank you for clarifying. And now we can go into the story.

Stuart Leo  

Sure, yeah. It was interesting. I was coming out of corporate life 10-15 years ago. And I read some case studies and some articles on the British military as they were coming out of the 20th century into the 21st century. And in the 20th century. The theatre of war, and I mean, the world is in a state of flux at the moment. So this is relevant, but sometimes hard to talk about. But in the late 20th century, the theatre of war was changing dramatically and was moving from a very traditional structure. Probably the last traditional war that was ever had was perhaps the first Gulf War, everything since then it's been very non-traditional. And, and as that was shifting and changing from the traditional to the non-traditional. The need to be more agile, to be more adaptive, to be more decentralised to make decisions faster, was a pressing, pressing need, and the British military was, was looking at how they made decisions on the battlefield, has commanders and leaders and realise that the way they did a classic battle plan, you know, as marketers would call those campaign plans, was incredibly ineffective. It was time-consuming. It was resource-heavy, it was complicated and complex. And it was not going to work in this new world emerging. And the way the British military solved that was to step back and say, let's, let's simplify. And they developed a small number of questions happen to be seven questions that they taught leaders from Lance Corporal up to general, to ask an answer. If you were developing a battle plan, just seven questions. And if you asked and answered these seven questions, you would develop the highest value course of action to reach the mission objective, and the tactics to execute. And it was transformational to the way leaders thought acted and behaved on the battlefield. And, and so I was reading about this coming out of corporate life, moving into a consulting life thinking, My goodness, I've come from corporate life. I have loved corporate life. There are lots of zeros on budgets and bank cards and all those wonderful things. But there were also lots of committees and bureaucracy and politics. And I remember thinking, gosh, if the British military, one of the most traditional stuffy organisations in the world, no offence intended to my British counterparts, could transform the way they developed these plans and the way they made decisions on the battlefield, then surely, regular old day to day business could because they have the same problem. In the last 20 years, we have had significant financial disruption, significant geopolitical disruption, significant health disruptions, digital disruptions, you name it. If you've grown up in the last 15-20 years, of business and marketing and leadership, well, every few years, something comes along that kind of waxy across the face saying hello. And, and so businesses need it needs something like what the military had. To cut a long story short. It was how do we do what they did? And if anybody can go and google the British military seven questions, it's a method of developing a combat estimate. But it's designed to blow something up. It's designed to, you know, destroy. In business, we've got different objectives. We're out to build something up. We're out to find a customer who loves them solves a problem and does not leave distractions. Believe the opposite, hopefully, although sometimes you need to do the former. And so we set about building. And that's pretty much where the story starts with the British military. We said what if we could do in the business world what the British military did in the theatre of war? Could we arm leaders with a small number of questions that if they asked and answered regularly, would do what happened to the military and which was a decentralised the organisation push decision making powers to those closest to the problems to flatten the organisation? And, and ensure that if from Lance Corporal to general, there's a language of strategic decision making, and three, create agility and adaption in, in decision making and leadership.

Stuart Leo  

The seven questions can be asked and answered on the battlefield, hunkered down behind some Humvees putting the battle plan together in 30-45 minutes. Or they can be asked and answered back at HQ over 2,3,4 days, and you can put a complicated plan together. And business is no different. Sometimes it hits the fan and you got to stop and you gotta go. Right. In an hour's time. We didn't action plan for the next three weeks. Asking, here are the seven questions, you'll walk out with an action plan. Or sometimes it's the annual end of your strategic planning session, let's go away for a day or two. And let's have some deep thinking awesome, asking to answer the seven questions. So I think you're starting to get what this methodology is, and, and kind of just like the military, when they're asking and answering those questions on the battlefield, they're holding some software in their hands. And so we thought, let's go build some software. Let's go build a diagnostic tool and some strategic planning tools that empower you to more intelligently ask and answer those seven questions kind of like the military. And that's sort of what waymaker is. It helps you narrow and focus on your customer. By asking answering those seven questions. Keeping the organisation clear and aligned around who the customer is the problem you're solving, the value you're creating, and the actions that are the highest priorities in order to realise that value, whether that be in sales, marketing, service, team, employee, HR, wherever. And that's what we teach. That's what we teach people to do. We teach coaches and consultants to ask and answer those seven questions. And we provide the software for them to execute. That's kind of making some sort of sense for you.

Andrei Tiu  

And the natural I guess, the question here would be and I think this forms a basis for the following questions that I had. And I want you to go through with you which were revolving around growth strategy and planning resilience in this current market scenario/circumstances. But just to make it easy for people tuning in that wonder what these seven questions are?

Stuart Leo  

What are they? Yeah, you can anybody can go and get these seven questions from our website, is it we make a die, I hit the Learn tab, two or three options down, you'll see why makers leadership curve, it's got a thing you can download and screen view and see it. At face value, they're not overly complicated questions. One is what is our vision? Is it driven by purpose? What are the roadblocks to achieving it? Pretty simple. But in order to answer that, you got to understand your vision, you got to understand your purpose, and you got to understand the problem itself your customer question what their market is? Who is their ideal customer? What do they value? Therefore? What perceptions do we need to build? Okay? To be able to answer that, what market is to be playing? Awesome. How do we niche and segment into that market to find our ideal customer? What do they really value? That ideal customer? And therefore, what perception should they be holding about us our business and the products we serve the products we deliver? If you can answer that, then you're starting to go excellent. I understand my market, I understand my customers, and they're very drivers. I understand what they think about us already, what they do, what they should be thinking about us what those gaps are, and the gaps. We've got a close. That's classic brand management stuff.

Andrei Tiu  

I was about to say that there is a lot of marketing here.

Stuart Leo  

There is because I firmly believe outside of marketing, and innovation, everything else is an expense. And at the end of the day, our job as an organisation or business is to solve a problem. And there's, I think there are two things. I'm going to go off on a little side rant here and you can pull me back in line if you don't like it, but I think I think the world of marketing has made two fundamental errors in the last 10 to 20 years. One It's made purpose about issues not related to the problem you solve. And to it's through the technology explosion. It's become more about tactics and execution and less about strategic thinking. In Old World marketing words, we would say it's become a one P marketing. It's just about promotions and advertising. We've forgotten about product and place and distribution. Sorry, pricing to get my old marketing four Ps off the top of my head. So those two things have been to scope shifts that marketing has been through one, it's, it's fallen into the trap of thinking about purpose as something outside the organisation. Now an organisation has one single purpose which is to solve a problem for a customer, your purpose exists around that problem. When you answer the question, we exist to your writing a purpose statement. If you're Netflix, we exist, to give a platform for content creators to get to their audience anywhere in the world. That's why they exist, that is the problem they solve. That is their purpose in life. If your Facebook exists to connect people all around the world, this makes sense. And so as marketers, we have to own that, that is actually a central truth inside the organisation. And if we are not thinking about that problem, owning the solving of that problem, we're not being strategic marketers. And I think a lot a lot of times marketing gets caught in tactics and execution because tactics and execution are so complicated today, you don't look at Martex's classic canvas of technology providers in marketing, I remember when they came out with the first one, and there was like 500 on it, and then there was 1000. And then there's 2003 years later, and now they've just even stopped putting logos on the page because it's at 5678 9000. It doesn't even work. You know, as a marketer. When I grew up as a marketer, I had some pretty simple decisions when it came to media, buy print, television, direct radio, signage, you know, it really didn't get much more complicated that got a million dollars to spend, how am I going to slice and dice it? Today, that's a very different world. So I think that the world has allowed marketers to get off being marketers. If Drucker was right, where he said in an organisation, there's marketing, and there's innovation, and everything else is an expense. Then as marketers, we've got to step back into leadership positions and go hang on a minute, I'm on the market in this organisation. I'm the marketing manager, I'm the Marketing Director, I'm the VP of marketing, or I'm the marketing person. Okay. What problems does this organisation so do we solve them? Well, what products are we buying a building? And what services are we building that solve this product amazingly well, and get that marketing conversation going? So that organisations are purpose-driven, that own the problem, they're solving for their customer, and deliver excellence and achieve amazing outcomes? Okay, rant aside. I think there's a wonderful opportunity for strategic marketers to step up and lead. So when we think about the seven questions, we are thinking about the customer, the problem we solve for them, and how we start building the organisation around that. And, and so, yes, there's a heavy influence on marketing, as we build that out. And if I answered your question there, I certainly threw some food for thought on the table.

Andrei Tiu  

Yep. And you set the ground for the first of the not so very long list, but I think it's good that he's not long, because I want us to go a bit more in-depth with the answers and the discussion here. So the first question that I think would be the goal here is, I want you to pick your brains on how do you feel about growth planning and growth strategy in this current market situation? I mean, because we are coming after a pandemic, and we have, you know, the military conflict that is in Europe, which affects a lot internationally. So this is a reoccurring issue that I personally find talking with clients but also us as an organisation fine in the different areas we activate. So how do you feel about it? What's your take?

Stuart Leo  

I think COVID has accelerated, societal, economic, social, and geopolitical changes that were already in place. And what's happened is that sometimes the world changes and it's a bit like boiling a frog. If you have that phrase in the UK or the US, does that make sense? We don't have it. Okay, yeah. So when you boil the frog, you put a frog in the water and you start turning the heat up, and it gradually gets hotter and hotter and hotter until the frog boils. But the frog never knows it's boiling it so it never hops out of the water. That's kind of the point of the site. What's happened with COVID Is the water stopped getting slowly and gradually hotter. And it got hot, fast. And everybody's realised, oh, wow, the world really has changed. And the world of the market has changed so much in the last 1015 years. And this is an I want to get into a bit of detail here to answer your question. If we go back to refer to some of my notes, but if we go back to 2006, there's a publish a report published by brand Z, one of the WPS brand tracking groups, and they published the top five brands by market valuation. And they were Microsoft. Sort of, let's call it 62 odd billion General Electric Coca Cola, China Mobile and Marlboro cigarettes. But that just thinking for a moment, that's 2006. It's not that long ago. It's somewhat kind of I'm looking at you thinking then you're probably still in school. But that's that could sound offensive, but you're motivating University. 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah. I was thinking about cigarettes and how I mean, you know, having Marlboro, one of the top six is like, wow, okay.

Stuart Leo  

That's less than 20 years ago. So 2006, the top five brands, were Microsoft, GE, Coca Cola, China, mobile, and Melbourne. Fast forward five years. And I think these were the five years in Marketing Land that started to transform everything. Facebook was founded, oh, four, iPhone came out in oh seven. So between 2006 and 2012, had this rapid takeoff. The top five biggest brands in 2012. Apple, at 193 billion, followed by IBM, followed by Google, followed by McDonald's, he comes Microsoft, let's fast forward another five years, as societal change is accelerating. What are our five biggest brands in the world, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, I should go and check their most recent because I probably just published last year, early this year, the last five? And you're probably going to see a Tik Tok in there, maybe a Tesla. The point here is if we look at those brands in 2006, that were the biggest brands in the world. And we look at those brands in 2017 that was the biggest brand in the world, you know what's changed. And the biggest change is, is a digital revolution, a new way of working. And so this, this new way of working, a new way of living, has transformed our traditional brand landscape in terms of value. And that has transformed the way we work we have absolutely moved from an industrialised economy to a services economy to an experiential economy, which a couple of economic riders published a book in the 90s called the experience economy. And that has happened that and we see that in brands today. And so it experiences economy. It's a very different way of working. I think it was culture out last week, released their latest report on hybrid and working from home. I think the number was about 88% preference for working from home, or at worst hybrid across employees across the western world. That isn't an astonishing stat. headlines coming out today. Eric Schmidt, former CEO and current chairman of Google, I'm a traditionalist. And in fact, I took a screenshot of this thinking about this podcast that I would be I'd be on and have a listen to this. This is an amazing quote from Eric Schmidt. I'll just literally open it up right now. X, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt on why in office work is better. I don't know how you build great management virtually. Now if that doesn't sound like a dinosaur running one of the world's biggest technology companies. We are in the next evolution and revolution. These were the guys that revolutionised it 10-15 years ago. The market is saying 88% prefer working from home or hybrid and the chairman of one of the world's biggest technology companies is saying Ireland, how you build great management virtually everybody gets back into the office? Can you see the context here?

Andrei Tiu  

There's a new wave coming.

Stuart Leo  

Coming? It's here man. And some of the biggest and best strategic leaders of the last wave are still holding on to the last wave going, how's this gonna work. And so this affects how we think, how we plan how we execute. And, and so we are in a world that is different. And we've got to pick up some tools and some thinking a little bit like what the British military did and think differently. I'll give you an example of strategic planning, and decision making. The most common methodology and strategic planning decision making for organisations in the 20th century was a thing called the balanced scorecard. You've probably as marketers, we're probably provided data up into it. You know, classic vision, mission values, a bunch of strategic KPIs balanced scorecard, the world is stable, everything's organised, let's balance. Okay, when was the last time you had perfect balance inside an organisation? You know, that's, that's we're going back a generation or two now. So balance isn't the thing we should be striving for isn't. What we should be striving for, is the capacity to be adaptive and agile in order to achieve goals and outcomes. Regardless of the balance, that we've got to adjust and move along the way, you know, one of my favourite quotes from one of the old 1970s motivational speakers a guy called Zig Ziglar was it doesn't matter the way the wind blows, it matters how you set the sails. And I still think that's so powerful years later. Because as marketers, we were very good at zigging and zagging. We're very good at tactically moving and moving around. And that is a skill that is needed today, what we have to learn how to do is to shift from the thinking of a world that is stable, where we can plan three, five and 10 years ahead and work backwards from that and say, right, I've got to flip that on its head. In the old way, we'd write a five-year vision or a 10-year plan. And we'd work backwards saying, Okay, if we've got to be there in 10 years, then let's, we've got to be there in eight years, and there in five years. And except, well, that's, that's ridiculous. Most people probably can't work out where they want to be in six months in the current climate. So what you've got to do it, you've got to say, well, maybe in three to five years, a goal where we could be looks amazing, looks like this. But you know what? Now we're not going to worry about where we need to be in two years, we're just going to worry about where we need to be in 12 weeks or 24 weeks. What have we got to do now, that puts us in the best position in 12 or 24 weeks to say, what have we got to do now, in order to get to that thing in two or three years' time? Does that make sense?

Andrei Tiu  

I was hoping you say that, because this is exactly what we are, you know, I will go in the marketing sort of perspective now. Just to match it with your business approach as well. This is exactly what we were talking about with most of our clients because it's so uncertain like nobody was expecting war, when COVID was, seemingly coming to an end. So you know, you can't really count on much these days, especially when it's so much at stake - long term. So the best you can do is just make sure you get the most out of the current situation. And then you know, as you navigate well

Stuart Leo  

But that doesn't mean we throw away principles and how we work together. In fact, those things matter more. So what we've got to do as marketers go, I probably can't write you a one or two-year marketing strategy. But I could put a strategic goal in place for one or two years. And what I can tell you is how we can build an operating rhythm to make effective decisions based on data on whatever the cycle is, we need to operate on weekly, monthly, daily, whatever it's going to look like, starting with quarterly as a marketing operation. What are we going to achieve in the next 12 weeks that get our organisation to the best possible position? Awesome, let's do that. And every week, let's turn the sales to getting there. And so we need to design a way of doing that together. We need to think about the way we work together more than the things we want to achieve together. That's a big difference. In the old way, we'd think about more with thinking more about what we wanted to achieve together and less about how we had worked together. Because the world was kind of stable. And we could, we could apply the same rules that work last decade to the next decade, that don't exist today, we've actually got to get smaller, in order to get bigger, we've actually got to get deeper together in order to achieve greater things. Because we need to learn how to work well together because Long gone are the days of one market have been able to do everything, you have to have collaborative, internal and external hybrid teams functioning well together, which means you've got to step back. And the most important thing a good marketing leader can do today is to define how will we work together so that when we get on the field of play, we can adapt. And if we have that operating rhythm in place, okay, for what happens, will happen, we know how to come together and make decisions.

Andrei Tiu  

It also partly answered the second question that I had, which was around building resilience in this type of business, you know, in a world scenario. So if we were to sum our discussion up to a couple of actionable points that people listening today, can think about or maybe even implement in their routine, or in their approach to planning to help them be more resilient when it comes to unexpected changes or medium-term planning? What would they get from your perspective?

Stuart Leo  

Yeah, 100%. From my perspective, it's the operating cycle, and disciplines you put in place to gather the inputs required for decision making, have that decision-making process and execute those actions, and then rinse and repeat that cycle, which that's what we'd call an operating rhythm. And so the most practical thing you can do is think about that. I'll give you an example of somebody working recently in the tourism space. And they, they said, Okay, realistically, we work on a monthly cycle, thinking about forwarding bookings of 30 days for not sold, we can affect decisions in consumers and buyers, over that 30 day period through incentives, value adds packages, increasing spend, etc. Okay, so we need to actually have a 30-day cycle, where we're thinking about forwarding bookings and turning up the volume and the dials around multiple countries on how we execute that as a team. So if we can see that asset a in England is down and asset B in the United States is up, we need to turn the dial up on England and down on the US, you can get see where I'm going. We need a way of connecting revenue and operations management, marketing, digital media, we've got to have a way of working together that comes together every week or fortnight with a set of data inputs that we can make decisions around that just make sense is the way we work. Or the tactical execution, the thinking the strategy, excellent, that's going to happen there. So one of the most important things you can do to build resilience is to build a system. So my favourite analogy story on this is just a couple of months ago, I was watching something that must have been Facebook feed they go. And there's a NASA scientist up in the International Space Station. And he said he's taking questions from school students. And the question was what, what stops the International Space Station from, you know if something hits a bit of space junk or what stops it from bouncing off into space? And there is kind of simplistically two things. One, it's the Earth's orbit and the gravity that holds towards Earth. But what stops it from spinning wildly? Like it's a pretty big machine up there? What stops wobbling on that orbit? And explain the science of a gyroscope. And so he held up a little model of the space station, here's my Apple iPad pen. Let's pretend this is a gyroscope. There's a rod that a core and there's a space station wrapping around it. And he goes look, and he's in zero gravity if I hold this up, and he could take his hand off it because he was in zero gravity. I'm not so I'll use my other hand. And he goes if I tap this gyroscope like this tap in zero gravity, that little tap causes it to spin wildly off into space. You know, all are the scenes we saw in the movie Gravity with George Clooney and whoever. But he said let me Activate the gyroscope, any of the metal gyroscopes the core as marketers, we all know gyroscopes. That's what keeps the camera stable. When we were filming, he pulled the little cord and the gyroscope activated. And he goes, let me do it again. And he holds up a gyroscope, let me tap it and he just taps it, tap, the same tap just moves slightly. And he goes, Look, I can change the axis. And he goes, I'll tap it again, taps it, and it just moves, but it doesn't change access. He said the gyroscope is the cycle, the strength in the core spinning, that when change happens, doesn't send the space station off into chaos. And I think you're about to connect the dots here, if not already, the operating rhythm you put into your decision making cycles, is the core is the gyroscope holding your organisation together building resilience, so that if you know how to come together and make decisions in the face of change, then change can happen without causing you to spin off into chaos. 

Andrei Tiu  

Very good analogy. Very good.

Stuart Leo  

The and I bet there are marketers listening to this, that, you know, put a campaign plan together. And three days later in walks, the CEO said, Oh, we're going to do this and it changes. And so you go and start working on something else, oh, we've got to do this, and it changes. And so you've got decisions being made outside of an operating rhythm, uncoordinated, creating chaos, with no stability and structure. That's not resilience. Resilience comes from this cycle, of the core structure. So the greatest thing we can do as marketing leaders is to figure out what that core is, how do we make decisions? How do we start that spinning cycle, if there are 12 weeks in a year, and it's we're going to have that spinning cycle on a monthly cycle, we've spent that 12 times that's a hell of a lot better than once writing one marketing plan, isn't it? Sometimes it's a fortnight. So if you can spin that more often in your organisation with stability, and you can bounce off decisions and come back and bounce off more decisions, you can sustain change. And that's exactly what the British military did with these seven questions. They developed a leadership and decision making methodology that was cyclical, continuous, and created stability, for change to happen. Because change can only happen on a foundation of stability. It cannot happen on a foundation of constant change. That's instability. Does that make sense? So we have to as marketers, in this world of chaos and change, come back in and develop that core for our businesses, because that's our job as marketers, we have to go out and communicate, launch products affect change. And the great companies do this. Look at Apple. Every March, every September, drop a July Developers Conference in the middle there, there's a structure, there's an operating rhythm, we're going to launch software in March, we're going to launch the product in September, we're gonna get our partners together in July, we're gonna hang out a year off, that doesn't work. Heck, yeah, it works. Just look at the way they launch products. So the best thing you can do as a strategic marketing leader works out how to build that resilience.

Andrei Tiu  

I love how we made a full circle here and how you get back to the initial story. Very good analogy as well. And I think this is a great insight for every, you know, just to wrap up all of our discussion into a couple of action, actionable points. I very much agree with you. This is also what we tried to do internally as well, trying to be able to make decisions more often and review the strategy a bit more often. And guys, for you tuning in that maybe are depending on more people to make such decisions or such evaluations, probably as you are saying a good place to start to be just to make sure that everybody's on the same page, there is a good feedback loop in place internally. And then you can sync upon making these types of strategic decisions as you implement and as you encounter changes in the economic space or political or anything that might affect great stuff, Stuart. As we are getting close to the end of this episode. What gets you excited for the coming weeks months? What are you guys planning with the business? Any good advice or insights that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Stuart Leo  

I'm a product guy, I love making products in our world, that's digital products and software tools and new features. So we've got some pretty exciting stuff coming up over the next quarter or two. Which if I told you I'd have to kill you so I want to talk about but you know, I What gets me excited. And is the thinking we can do as marketers and all include me as a marketer in this because we all are around, where's the opportunity? Where's the pain? How can we create something that solves that for a customer, and creates value for them? And when you can build those kinds of products, whether you're in tourism or property or professional services, or software and tech, it's the same thing. And, and that's what gets me out of bed. That's, that's what I love to play in, almost to the detriment sometimes. So yeah, I get excited about those things. We're launching, some new products within our platform. So that effectively features I'm also excited, to be honest, there's a lot of change, and there's a lot of chaos in this world. But that doesn't mean we have to be fearful. You know, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the ability to make decisions in moments of fear and take action on them. And so I think, these are the times as humans as people, as colleagues, as friends, as patriots, we step back and we go, You know what, building good businesses matters. It builds good outcomes in society. Good products, make people's lives better, and people's lives are better. They, tend not to fight with each other. That's a good thing. So we as business owners, leaders, and marketers, actually need to have the courage to wisely take the next investments into the next into these next waves into this next period of change. And our forefathers did it. You go back to the 1920s, the 1930s 40s 50s 60s. This isn't new. It's what they say about history, the best thing we know about history isn't the repeats, sadly. And so we have to look forward into the future with a good dose of boldness and courage and go yeah, these, this isn't insurmountable, this is winnable, this is over comparable. Let's figure out how to do it. And that I think is exciting. Because that is why marketers were born under the face of this earth. Because you guys are the problems. solvers, the creative thinking is in the innovators, inside the company. Everybody else's counting numbers, putting widgets together, markets have the best job in the world go and do the best way possible.

Andrei Tiu  

Great stuff, okay. And as waymaker, I know you guys have a free trial as well if there are people on the show that would like to see more of what you do, and maybe start using the tools that you make available.

Stuart Leo  

Of course, yeah, shameless plug, let's go. If you're somebody, thinking of becoming a coach or a consultant, talk to us about an amazing partner programme. If it's somebody who is a coach or consultant, and you're looking to improve the way you do that, save a lot of time create a lot of value, and increased customer lifetime value, then we help with that. And if you're a marketer, or a business leader going actually what you're talking about makes a lot of sense. How can we do that in our organisation? Just go and take a free trial, spin up the diagnostic, ask and answer several questions, and see where you land. Reach out to me, I'll connect you with our team. We'd love to help you.

Andrei Tiu  

Thanks so much, Stuart! Guys, you'll have the links to all the platforms, including Stuart's LinkedIn profile as well. Stuart, if that's okay with you, for people to link in with you directly.

Stuart Leo  

I suck at socials. But I purposely manage my LinkedIn. So if you connect with me on LinkedIn, or connect with you, if you message me, I'll respond. And if you got a question, I'll answer it if I can. Doesn't have to be about, you know, buying stuff from us. But if I can put it in the right direction, I will. So reach out, say hi.

Andrei Tiu  

Appreciate it. Man. This was a great pleasure having the discussion with you. It's midday here. So this was better than the coffee

Stuart Leo  

Andrei, thanks so much for having me. And wish you the very best with the podcast. It's been a joy.

Andrei Tiu  

Same here. Thank you so much for all the insight. Guys, as always, thank you for tuning in and for staying with us until the end. For any questions feel free to pop us an email, write us to write, Stuart as well. Check out waymaker. And until next time, take care. Take action and looking forward to seeing you soon. 

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Vlad Faraon, as they will be discussing building and launching successful blockchain projects, from the idea to the growth through marketing and communities. Vlad is the Co-Founder and CBO of Coreto, a project that aims to be THE benchmark of trust and performance in the crypto and blockchain space. 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐕𝐥𝐚𝐝:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: www.coreto.io

𝑉𝑙𝑎𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladfaraon/

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected] 

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube 

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show 

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean 

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Episode transcript: 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi there! This is Andrei and you are on an episode of The Marketing Innovation podcast show. Our special guest today is Vlad Faraon, who is the co-founder and CEO of Coreto. A blockchain project that aims to be THE benchmark of trust and performance in the crypto and blockchain space. Today, we'll discuss building and launching successful blockchain projects from idea to growth through marketing and communities. So without further ado, Vlad, it's a pleasure to meet again and a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? How's the day going? And how's the market at the moment?

Vlad  

Yeah, hi, Andrei. Thank you for the introduction. Really happy to be here. I'm really excited as well to talk about blockchain, talk about Coreto. It's been a long day up to this point, but I still have some energy, I will always have the energy to talk about what we are building. The markets are looking good. If you are too, if you are to have a look at the charts, it looks promising you are on the right track. But we will get there I believe in our on our call right here.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Nice, nice. Okay. Yeah, I know you guys have a lot of things cooking with the project as well. So maybe we'll touch on some of those as much as you want to share. I won't be very pushy. But yeah, I think just to get started and for the audience to get to know you a little bit as a person as well as to get a feel about the project and potentially as well as the blockchain space in general, since many of the people that tuned in today might not be very much into the space, although I know that many of us here on the podcast are interested about the blockchain space, and we have previous episodes. So I think this would be a great opportunity for us to get a bit of insight from you, since you've been here from you know, like for a very long while. And you also have the history of building Colorado and interacting with a lot of projects as well as with a lot of marketing influencers, people, and communities. So exciting times. But first things first. What's your story? And how did you go into the space? How did crypto come about?

Vlad  

Well, first, like you said, Yes, my name is blood. I am 38 years old, still young, still in power? I said Yes, exactly. So I am in crypto since 2017, early 2017, something like that. Previously, I spent my last 1416 years in corporate business development. And to be honest, I got sick and tired to be sick and tired. Although  I love big companies, especially big tech companies, as we see that they constantly evolve and develop a lot of useful apps or platforms that we are all using. When I came into when I discovered Well, I know about blockchain, I believe, since 2013 2014, something like that. I had some friends that were mining Bitcoin. And they told me about Bitcoin told me the idea of decentralisation. But at that point, my mind was in a totally different place than right now. So of course, like I believe a lot of people did back then I just ignored them and said, Hey, what's this? Nobody's gonna use that what are you going to do a bit and so on and so forth. But fast forward a bit to 2016? Again, because my friends were keep telling me about Bitcoin and decentralisation, I said okay, let me look into this already, this base was beginning to get some traction going. So, when I started looking into it more, more carefully, I saw the potential of the technology. So first, I saw the benefits of a decentralised network then I saw the idea of not having a central entity. And I will not go too much into a basic description of what Bitcoin or decentralisation is, there is a lot of useful info online. But I got into more in-depth somewhere closer to meet and 2017 so that means that I kind of got on the initial Ico boom. That was the period when crypto winter Bit more mainstream. Now, I will be honest. And I will tell you that at that time, I was just like any other new retail investor coming into this space. That means I had low financial literacy, I had lower knowledge about how to invest and how to determine if a project is good or not. So I kind of went with the crowd, which means that I went on Twitter, also known as crypto Twitter. I went to telegram groups, I even joined some paid channels, all with the idea of finding the quickest route to success. Of course, that ended up bad, because back then, and, I saw that it's still the same issue right now is that you do not know how to start. Where do you start when you want to start? Who whose opinion should you follow when you start when you know nothing? Okay, so you try to find those guys that maybe are in this space for a longer time. Or maybe you can find some way in which you can determine those individuals' knowledge.

Andrei Tiu  

So basically, what gives those people credentials to talk about creating? Yeah, exactly.

Vlad

So just like that, I started finding. So I just started to look for individuals that would look like they know what they were talking about. So when everything was blooming, are booming. At the end of 2017, I got some good investments along the way, I also began to understand even more in-depth how blockchain works and the other thing. And then when 2018 came, right before the bear market began, some of my investments started to go down the road as in going slowly, slowly, minus 20 minus 30, minus 40. And I began to question myself, Oh, how did I get into these projects? I even got scammed. How did I end up investing in such poor projects? And my conclusion was that I follow the wrong people. I based my investment decisions were based on the number of followers a particular individual had, I was very, it was very hard for me to identify a track record of that guy's performance, and past performance. So this was also the time when the idea of Coreto came to mind. In so summer of 2018 and 2019, I sat down with Justina Justina, who is my partner, both in life and also in business. She already was a successful entrepreneur she had to one of the first digital agencies in Romania. So let's say that she had a passion for design and a passion for developing growing debt in general. So after a lot of brainstorming hours, the conclusion was that the problem in the space at that time is that there is no place where you can evaluate the people that are talking about crypto investments, all of them are stating this is not financial advice. But at the same time, it's exactly what they are doing.

Andrei Tiu  

So if anything, sorry, for interrupting, but if anything, I think just got worse as the industry evolved, and the crypto became more, you know, adopted, because there's more and more people and everybody that has, you know, one successful investment. Oh, let me tell you how to do it. This is the project I'm following. These are my top 10 things. No.

Vlad  

I was full of videos, Top three coins to invest in. Top 10 coins to invest top five coins that are going to the moon. Yeah, so so then we said okay, it's clear that it would be very useful for the retail investor to have a platform on which people content creators that are joining can prove their worth can prove their knowledge. And how could they do that? Well, they could do that by being more transparent with how they work and being more good Let's say they should give more regarding their knowledge, applied knowledge. And this is the way that Coreto came to life Coreto comes from a community reward token. And the same time Coreto in Portuguese means a bandstand. So, this was a nice coincidence, because if we will, if you are to go even more into branding itself, we would say that we can give the stage for content creators and for influencers, to prove their worth, okay to perform for the audience, and the audience will reward them by applause, or booing, get off the stage, you know, nothing. Okay. So, and then we said, okay, so there are, it's clear that this industry, just because it, there is a lot of money in it, and let's not hide behind the finger. But that's the truth in crypto, there is a lot of money to be made. But at the same time, there is a lot of money to be lost. Especially if like we were back then at the beginning of the road, there is a saying in crypto that says never invest more than you are willing to lose. We all say but nobody. Myself included. Yes. So fast things forward. In 2020, Autumn 2020, we decided to go live. So it's when we started to look for ways to promote our project to spread the word exactly about what we are trying to build and what we're trying to do and how. And it was the first time that I was in direct content contact by being on the other side of the fence, I was not just a retail investor looking for projects, I was a project of I was a project looking for investors and looking channels in which I could fairly promote and fairly send out my message and our vision and what we want to do and want to build.

Andrei Tiu  

I will not make this a long parenthesis but I think it's relevant to the journey. For people out there that maybe have an idea in blockchain, and want to bring it to life. Or maybe they are, you know, setting up the team. What was your journey in setting up the team and creating this core group of people that have built Coreto then?

Vlad  

Well, our core team is made up of four people. Me and Iustina - are the founders. And then we have Vali who is our head of design. And Andrei, who is our head of development. Andre goes back with just enough since the beginning of their time. So they have a long history of working together. They are very compatible in terms of ideas and mindset. So it was very easy for us to send him our idea of what we wanted this platform to do in the end result. And so Andre worked with Justina for more than seven, eight years, something like that, along the way King barley, also the from the agency time. And what we love about volley is that he works very fast. And he does not need a very big brief. So he understands very well, the concept, and very quickly. And that's very important because there's one thing in crypto, which is you need to move fast. There was a saying that one day in crypto is like one month in the real world. So yeah, so this is how we put together the basic theme, the initial theme, and then we outsource part of the development. And in April 2021, we managed to launch our closed alpha version of the platform up to that point. Up to that point. I will get back to how I do the initial idea. Then we're now in the position in which we had to find the right marketing agency to support us although we all have a background in the digital world. It's something else to build for yourself. Sometimes you are very picky in your ideas, you are more of a perfectionist. So we tried to find someone who whether they were freelancers or whether they were agencies that could understand. First, they had to understand what we are building. This was one of the problems that we came across was that everybody was saying, Yeah, we will do A, B, C. D. Sure, very fast. We know how to do it. We did it before we'll do it again. But they did not understand our core values. Having in mind that the main use case for Coreto and its core values are based on transparency on trust in building trust itself. We couldn't use the type of marketing that is, unfortunately, right now being used in crypto, which is a lot of shilling. Are you familiar with the term Schilling in the industry?

Andrei Tiu  

I am, but let's explain it to everybody. 

Vlad  

In short, you see this mouse, the mouse is the best. What makes it the best I say so. So I'm shilling this mouse. And just like me, there are other 1020 30 so-called influencers that are saying the same. And they are getting paid by the manufacturer of this mouse to say that it's the best. And what's so good about it? Well, it has a scroll. Well, this crawl is so smooth. Oh my god is the best mouse ever. So this is something that is happening right now with most of the projects out there. Influencers, unfortunate, unfortunately, a lot of them are getting paid ridiculous sums of money. And the project themselves have no way in which they can track a return on investment. Very few are doing any due diligence on the price of those projects. So that's a big no-no in our book. So we did a lot of tests that were destined to fail. We also ended up paying a lot of money for very low-quality work.

Andrei Tiu  

That was in your trying to shape up your marketing, right as a project, initially, when you're setting up.

Vlad  

In the project, we're trying to identify the right individuals to work with to find those professionals that are, unfortunately, again, few professionals in this industry and those that are present. Just because they know that in crypto, there is a lot of money. They have huge fees that do not that have a structure. To give you an example, there are some that charge for just the basic ama sounds like five 6000 euros now. It's an AMA okay, but I have 100,000 followers, okay, but how can you prove that those guys are really following you because you are worth being followed? Or they are fake accounts, or they are just in it for airdrops or bounty hunters or sorcerer and so far. And to get back to your initial question. If you guys out there, want to build a project on blockchain. First things first, you have to really look into your product. And, of course, the same questions that need to be answered, answered, If you want to launch it in a traditional industry or if it's for blockchain, they are the same, which is, is it useful? Is it needed? What problems does it solve? What's the def and does it need the blockchain or not? After you have that in mind and said even if you are still at the idea stage, you have to put together your team of course. And then only then try to move into finding some marketing partners. There is a plus right now that there are a lot of Launchpad projects out there. And these Launchpad projects, what they do is that they already have a community behind them or the investors and they can help you out, but all of your ideas on paper, then help you spread the word about your projects inside their community. And with the help of their community, you can have some initial funding to get you started. Once you get started, and once you also your product begins to have a shape to get shaped to get in shape to do whether it's an MVP or an alpha stage, then you can boost your marketing moves in such a way to attract institutional investors. Because there are a lot of institutional investors that are now into crypto because like I said before, there is a lot of money here. And of course, Wall Street is not staying away from money ever. But also you have to be careful. Who do you partner with? Up to this point, we refused any institutional investments, because we wanted to have full control of how we build the direction that the project wants to go. We are strong believers in lean startups. Rather than building on hype and selling false dreams. This is a way that we gained the trust of our community. We were transparent. We are all public. We are not anonymous. So we are transparent. We always kept our promises. We are always under-promise and over-deliver. But just like in any tech startup, there are also a lot of bumps along the way. So we were sure we had to push our deadlines. We had to modify our roadmap twice up to this point. These are things that are normal when dealing with building a tech product or software product

Andrei Tiu  

Of course and mainly in a fast-moving industry such as crypto. I mean, it would be an issue if those things wouldn't occur, right? 

Vlad  

There are a lot of projects that along the way they had to adapt. And so did we, when we first started, there weren't so many options, or let's say, Blockchain protocols out there, or there weren't so we didn't identify the right trends. Well, that is one thing that I'm proud of is that even now after two years, our product is still needed. The issues are the same, which is it's very hard for crypto enthusiasts to identify the right projects or the right people to follow to find educational materials, quality materials, easily organised and with a good user interface.

Andrei Tiu  

So if you were to articulate what Coreto does within one meeting, what does Coreto do in one minute?

Vlad  

Okay, so just as I said, Coreto also means the bandstand. So we are building the stage in which content creators, are not afraid to be transparent with their knowledge and with their portfolios, and also with their own trading. They are not afraid to put it out there and say, Hey, this is what I'm doing. This is my past performance. You can follow me or not, but I'm doing it for myself, we are building a platform that wants to be fun. We are building a platform that is intended to also be engaging with the community because we are building our own community at the beginning right now. But we plan to open the doors and if we have time, I'll talk about that as well. So we are building the stage for you, the content creator for you, the trader, if you are bold enough, come on, collect on building your profile, post your content, and then our users' followers, your followers and so on and so forth. They will have other metrics to decide if you are worth being followed or not other than just your number of followers on Twitter or in your telegram groups. So we are helping the content creators prove their worth and the knowledge

Andrei Tiu  

Those people that are analysing the projects right? 

Vlad  

Yes. We are helping the retail investor, so to say, to identify those sources that work being followed. And we are also helping the project teams themselves, to reach new communities to help them build awareness around the project, to also claim on the official page on Coreto and directly interact with the community that is being built here. And also have a place where they can find content creators whose history can be verified. In short, we want to be the main go-to platform when it comes to due diligence, whether you're doing due diligence on projects, on your next trade or on which influencer or Trader deserves to be followed. 

Andrei Tiu  

One measure here for the people that maybe are tuning in today, but are not active investors, or maybe happened in occurred, like these struggles haven't occurred to them yet, because they weren't active in themselves in the crypto space. Basically, one thing that I know Coreto does, and I think it's really cool. And He does that by using Blockchain. So you mentioned blood that is verifiable and their experience and expertise. Anybody can go and look at their performance in the past and say, Okay, this guy's legit, or this guy doesn't really know what he's talking about. Basically, Coreto is using Blockchain so that it can track how many times people were right in the predictions that they were putting forward.

Vlad  

In time, if let's say you are a content creator, and you love doing trading, maybe you don't necessarily share your trades with the idea of building a following. You just share them because you yourself are now a successful trader, and you like the crypto communities and you want to give back in a way or not. And what we do is that your entire track record, we stored it on the blockchain so that it's immutable right now over there. And it's also transparent because this is another issue that we came across. And I'm sure I'm not the only one is that guys posting on Twitter or on Telegram, something about a new project or an existing project and potential I know, Bitcoin trade, that opinion is being lost in the newsfeed or even worse, it can be deleted, if it went south, or this is most of the cases, if they get it right, they will praise themselves, oh my God, how much they will praise and says, Look how good I am. Look how much money you could have done with my code, join my pain, my paid group and I will make you rich, no, that will not happen. Okay, so there is no easy way to do well, actually encrypted there is a get rich, fast way. But it's not necessarily the right way. So that's why we aim and we work on building a crypto reputation. This is exactly what we are doing. And our future plans are to take our algorithms of reputation building and implement them into third parties platforms. And up to this point, there is one partner that we can freely speak about. There is one forward protocol, they are called and they are building courses. We've also been in a lot of fields. And through our help, we will help them build the reputation of their content creators and of their teachers, let's say based on how their community interacted with their content based on their feedback based on real-life use cases, and so on and so forth. This is something still in development. But we are very eager because they were the ones that approached us. And they were just the first we are also in talks with other two big projects but can say more now. But yeah, our announcement channels and new news will come.

Andrei Tiu  

I know one of them. I mean who it might. You guys follow Coreto will have the links in the description of these episodes. So there's a couple of things cooking there. Also marketing-wise. So I don't know, Vlad if you are up for it. We can look at what you guys were doing lately and some of the plans that you have for the future. Also, a couple of announcements that I know are cooking in the background. So maybe if you want to share a bit of that, just to get give people a feel of how Korea has evolved. So from when you were having those initial marketing activities, so fundraising and then launching the platform in closed alpha, how did the product evolve? And maybe, what should somebody consider when it comes apart from the delays? And obviously, the things that have to do with developing the product in itself? I think it is super important to note that Corrado is actually one of those projects that is life now. So people can actually go in and they can be active on the platform, there is a community around it. But moreover, how are you looking to scale things up, as we were talking, about at the beginning of this episode, briefly, the market seems to be favourable now. So it may be a good time to actually, together with, in this case, correct, or there's going to be a lot of other projects that will claim to be the best, and they will claim to, you know, be the next big thing. So even more than maybe a couple of months ago, people will need, they'll want to get into the space will need to be able to research. And then, of course, it's an opportunity for careers to be there to help them research better in the projects that they want to get into. So what are you guys planning now for growth?

Vlad  

Up to this point, we had a private talk earlier today, and I was we're talking about what is the crypto investor type as a person? And, unfortunately, more than 70 80% of the people that are into crypto give to don't give that much importance to what is that project actually building? They just want to invest $100 now and maybe tomorrow have 1000. We also had that type of user on Quora. They were they did not understand why don't we do marketing like other projects do, which means a lot of hype, and a lot of influencers that are talking about us. A lot of bad, no promises, we're gonna do that. We're gonna do that when we talk about price. Talk about nice changes. So we had a totally different approach on that. We wanted, as I told you to have a Lean Startup, which means that our marketing efforts weren't that much focused on hyping the idea of Pareto, we wanted to keep our heads down and build. It was what we did. The committee that we have right now understood that, and we have people with us, even from the beginning of time, that understood the concept understood our vision, and also understood our way of doing things. And this was by being transparent. By always being in the community and talking with them. It was how we managed to gain the trust. And now that we have a product that, as you said, it's life and it's launched, although it's in closed, closed alpha, it means that you can join only by having your sport reserved on a whitelist. And we periodically onboard users because we use their feedback and a lot of their feedback to improve our product. So the point that we are now we are even closer to a better launch. But up to that point, we want to open up the gates a bit for coding, we want a bit more people to come to see it, to test it to see its advantages. And we thought of doing that by launching a referral programme. The referral programme is somehow a basic marketing tool, but it's very powerful. Because through the word of mouth and just through a referral link, you can organically grow much faster. So this is one feature that we're about to launch in the coming weeks. So up to this point, we kept our heads down and worked. We improved our product. We have now somewhere close to 2000 users, early adopters that are using and testing the platform. And very soon we are going to launch our referral programme. It might sound like it's the basic marketing move, but sometimes it's good to go Get to the basics because it will give you the best results. By always, we always know, tested. And we always listened to our community. It's also a way for which we can show them that their opinion is important. And their feedback is implemented. And we also actually have an exam there was one user that gave us feedback saying that, hey, it wouldn't be nice if I could have correct or something like my trading journal. And that was something that we will take and implement in the next updates in a way in which you can see exactly what was your journey up to this point, as a trader, you don't have to be an influencer, any user can create opinions on quality. But it's a way in which you can also track your growth. Am I a better trader now than I was a few months before? And Going back to marketing moves, we, as I said, we don't do necessarily what crypto does, and we want to take it slow and sometimes slow is good, and sometimes fastest, even better. So we try to combine these two.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, actually, I think, this referral programme that you mentioned, it makes a lot of sense for the community, since you are a community fuelled type of project, having your friends there with you, you know, analysing or challenging yourself or each other on the platform and having this community feeling to it and the social element, which I know you guys are following through with until the end, I think it's that thing that can make it fun and makes a lot of sense to have it. So looking forward to that I guess he's going to be some incentives attached to the whole programme.

Vlad  

Yes, if we are to speak, just briefly about the referral programme, we didn't want to build up a programme just like okay, here's my link, just subscribe, and get a discount maybe to some subscription-based content developed by a certain content creator. Being early in the platform right now, we did not yet publish the monetization modules for content creators. So that means we are still in the stage where you will benefit from Coreto through the learnings that it provides row. So basically, if I invite you, it will help me even more, if you do some tasks on the platform, one of the things that we are going to put a lot of effort into in the future is the gamification part. Everything has to be fun. In order, especially what we are building it's a community or based platform, it's a community-driven project as well. Word of mouth is very important. So if you are to go and talk to your friends about Coreto, it has to also be fun. So we'll put in place a lot of gamification mechanisms, one of them right now is already in place is one of the features that will help you build your reputation. It's called our staking of opinion pools. In short, you have an opinion, another guy has another opinion. Maybe I come along, and I do not agree with your own opinion. So we will create a pool of opinions based on a particular trade, and we'll let the market decide who's best insured. Okay, so like a trading challenge or something like that.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so that sounds good. And then I'm just going through our discussion right now, what it seems to me is that the way that Coreto differentiates maybe from some of the other projects that are launching or are just, you know, just not really adopted as a, at a very large scale is that as opposed to those projects that go for the approach of like the traditional crypto approach of having the influencers, do all the hype, sell the coins, etc, and then build the product or whatever that platform is this interview guys being built. Yeah, it seems as if you can just rock and roll then you necessarily need that many people to invest in the coin and so on. So this is cool. I think it's maybe you taking it a bit, not slow, but you taking the time to do the work before talking about the work rather than talking about the work before doing the work. puts you in a very nice spot and probably the people that you mentioned are with you from way back That's why they are still with you. So probably waiting for, you know, for you to talk a bit more broadly about what you're doing. And I think from that perspective, I think the referral programme would actually be nice because it will just enable people to work and see the utility of what you guys are doing at the moment.

Vlad  

Exactly. We were very careful. Also, for our token, we wanted to give it use cases, not just a coin or a token that can be traded or exchanged. So it will have a lot of utility within the platform itself. And now, our committee or coding committee, they, of course, they also began to question, okay, when are you going to get out there and let people know about what you've been building, and we've won their respect and trust because we constantly delivered on our promises. And right now, we are also one of the strategies that we want to follow, is to reach out to certain content creators or traders that are not, let's say, they are not the tier one influence that they don't have hundreds of 1000s of followers because they will not be so willing to start joining to join a platform and start all over because everybody starts from scratch when they start on Coreto. So we'll be reaching out to certain content creators that we've been studying and we saw know, how they communicate and how they interact and what type of content they are putting out there. And we will be inviting them to claim as an official product profile on hereto. And that will also help them to bring their communities on board. And to prove them once again, although they may be they already done that, they cannot now prove through a clear track record stored on the blockchain, that what they are preaching is also what they are doing and using. So that will also come as a plus. And once that, people will get to see the utility and also the that it can be fun to learn that itself would be a catalyst for new or user onboard things.

Andrei Tiu  

So going in, like judging from a marketing perspective than it can be, just to try to crystallise a bit in front of somebody that is maybe considering maybe they have this idea or are considering applying the blockchain technology to an idea that they had a business and they can see the utility of using Blockchain rather than not. So there are two popular approaches that they may go for one would be that of building the hype and just having the same community gathered, which is the root 90% of blockchain-based startups or businesses go for. And then using that money, whether that is from retail investors, private investors or investment groups, to build a product and to actually do the work and lounge properly. Or it can be the approach that you have, which would be the cloud, the more classical if you want a business approach, which is okay, let's build the product. And then let's market it and make it lousy to do a better fusers and then to the whole mass market. Right? These would be the two main approaches. Okay. But then, there's another thing that tends to be, you know, is not the right thing, but it happens. So many people use the price of a coin. I mean, every blockchain project has a coin. And then when people are looking at the projects available out there, maybe he tells investors looking to diversify their portfolios. Many of them follow the graphs of the coin, increasing in price or decreasing and, you know, judging a lot a project by that specific price and opportunity for growth and taxing their investment and so much, you mentioned just investing 100 today having 1000 Tomorrow, if not, I'm not happy with that. So how do you feel that impacted Coreto? Because obviously, it seems you didn't bring a lot of users and you didn't build that hybrid before building the project. That impact is a bit of fluctuation of the coin price I would imagine and also maybe where you are right now from a maturity standpoint as a project as opposed to other projects that are maybe in the same price ranges core.

Vlad  

Yes, the way that your price charities look, it's important as well. If when you receive when you research for a project, of course, that you also there are two options, either the project is about to launch. So it's something like pre-launch. So there is no price history, or there is a project that you discovered in your own ways. And you are seeing its price chart. And if you see something like there is a flat and then is a bomb, and then a flat as a bomb that well, that's something that could lift up some question marks, but not in the wrong way in itself. So when you identify that type of a project, then you have to go more in-depth and search for the fundamentals of that project and see why. How can you explain that flatline and then just a few bumps, then you can, you can discover that the project was, wasn't marketed very much? And there are a limited number of holders, and there are so many trading volumes. But if you look in-depth, and you see that that particular project is about to launch certain features, or he's about to announce new partnerships, or it's just about to burst, well, that's the best time to get into. There is also something that if that particular project only has a few weeks or a month as history if it's a parabolic growth, and then it goes down. It's something that who would want to stay away, from because it means that that was a hyped project. And then the market itself did its job. And when self when you look into new projects, it's good to see the perspective to have a steady growth to see that it goes steady. But still, it's in an uptrend of price action. It's somewhere that we are at ourselves. So we did not focus on the price itself. A lot of users were constantly asking us why the price is not going up. Why aren't you going? Why are you constant? Well, it's because we do not want to hype the token based on false claims. So we want to prove that the product is good that is needed that it works, and then level up our marketing efforts. And that's the point that we are at right now, like I told you.

Andrei Tiu  

So from the discussion that we had just before the show, I know that you mentioned the big focus over the next couple of weeks is going to be so you have the launches coming up the referral programme. And then there are another couple of features that you guys are working on for the platform in terms of marketing moves that are important being in this space right now be one the focus on community growth, so ensuring that you bring the right people into the project, not only the ones that look for the get rich, quick type of investment, but rather people that are interested in this, you know, the values that you shared, like transparency, and then traceability and so on. And people that will be able to benefit from the features that you make available in the platform, such as you know, staking of opinion polls, and sharing just information that is

Vlad  

yeah, right now as Cornetto, although it's a search hub, it also works as a social platform. Of course, there is a lot of content that can be created either through posts, or social posts, articles, reviews, and so on. But from a marketing standard standpoint, we are now focusing on attracting quality users. At first, we want to focus on attracting quality traders and content creators, because they are the ones that will attract the retail investor, Indian. Being a social platform, of course, your user base is very important. It's one of the reasons that we did not start with one open as far as anybody could join. And we wanted to focus on having people that will test and that will provide feedback. Of course, we had a lot of people that joined and did nothing. Well, we got rid of those and we onboard new people in the stage that is about to unfold right now. We will reach out as I told you to certain content creators, invite them here give them certain perks of course, because what's in it for them in the end, and with their help and with the content that they're building, and also with the features that we're having, and the person to give me vacations and everything, it will make it fun for them to share their opinions on in the social media, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok. It will, it will be like a snowball effect is all we all know the phrase build it and they will come? Well, although I do believe in it, it's also important to give them some boost to help them, to let them know that we've built it. And how can we do that other than through committees, as Coreto is built for crypto communities, it will help it it is also a way for which we are now looking to expand. So we are also searching for projects out there, whether they are already well-known projects are also our projects at the beginning of the road, they will go through our own due diligence because of course, we cannot partner up with somebody that we know it's not trustworthy. And how can you know that? Well, the first sign is are you public, or are you anonymous. It's not a rule of thumb that if you are anonymous, you also have bad intentions. But that's one of the first things that come to mind when people see an NFT or an emoji instead of a public profile page. Now, so to give it a wrap, it's like, we will use the power of community to spread the word about  Coreto, which is a community platform. Because we work for we It's why we are building we are building this because we went through the pain of being robbed, pooled beings can be taking better investment decisions. So at the end, when you yourself are working on solving a problem that you yourself encountered, and for all the feedback that we're getting, we can see that we are not the only ones. And there are a lot of statistics out there. And a lot of media saying that a lot of scammers in crypto are very dangerous is very risky is very volatile. It's something that through Coreto we want to do work on and to provide that needed help that everybody at the beginning of the road really needs.

Andrei Tiu  

So, very good stuff looking forward to, you know, seeing the platform evolve, I've already made an account. So you probably already know that. So  I know it's working, I'm just cool. Looking forward to seeing a lot of activity there soon. Now, coming to the end of this episode. And I know you're a busy man as well. So I will let you go soon. But just want to pick your brains on a final thing. And that would be for the people out here that are you know, are building towards projects. What would be your top three tips or advice, pieces of advice that you'd give them when shaping up or launching potential blockchain projects.

Vlad  

Now, after you get everything done in terms of your team, initially, maybe you find some advisors as well. It's really helpful to find people that are involved in the space that are connected. Networking is very important because it's the way that we will be able to build up partnerships. One thing that I like in crypto is that most projects are very open to partnering up if and this is very important. You bring value to the table. There are a lot of I see community partnerships. They do nothing they just say we partner up with x coin Congress. Okay, but how will X coin help me and how and how will my project help X coin so attending different crypto events. Luckily, now, face to face events are beginning again. So attending live events that will be first because it's a way in which it will be easier for you to network. Also, mingle, always be communicative. Always try to speak your mind in different ways. groups, it's the way that you will see that you can build relationships online. I mean, in the end, come on we are in 2020. Anybody can build up a relationship online. And especially if you find groups of founders of crypto project founders, and there are some out there picking their brains. Well, how did you do that? How did you do that? If I were to start over, it would be this is something that I would do more carefully and more thoroughly. And which is building a network. Just like in any industry, your network is very important. So once you have your network built, then start talking about your vision and your project and your ideas. Because by talking about it, you never know, who is whoever will have a moment like, Hey, I could really help out these guys. I really like their idea. And based on my experience, and the people that I know, I'm certain that I could really bring value to the project. So never be afraid to talk about what you are building. It's okay to have doubts, and it's okay to be unsecured. Again, that's the life of an entrepreneur. I, myself had my own. But thanks to my team, and thanks to the people that have my back. That is something that I managed to move past. And the third one, and I believe that once your project gets some traction, this is the most important one, do not believe everything that is promised to you by different service providers in this industry. There are a lot of scammers among service providers as well. There was one fun fact, there was one marketing agency and crypto marketing agency that did approach the approach us and they said, we can help you build your community, and we have a lot of experience. We've built hundreds of 1000s of communities, they build communities with hundreds of 1000s of users. Okay. And of course, my first question was, please share a portfolio. And I had a pleasant surprise to find our logo in their portfolio blog. And that was like, wow, we already do work together. And this is one case, and there are others that say, okay, I can get your project trending on different sites for the small fee of $5,000. Really, how will that help me to just bring some hype, it will just maybe bump my price a bit. But once those new users that are coming into my project will see that I still have some work to do until I will fully deliver my project. They will sell as fast as they bought in. So that's also a big no-no. So to sum it up, be very careful when people approach you offering services. Again, based on the network that you are building, use them to refer different service providers in the industry. Have in mind that crypto, the crypto industry, unfortunately, also attracts a lot of scammers. So you have to be very careful out there. Okay. And of course, it will be another one. Be careful what you're doing with your private keys. private keys to your wallet are very important. There is no I forgot my password button. There is nobody that can give your funds back. Okay, so this is something that really has to be careful on the security side of both of your platforms or your project or wherever you're building. Make sure that your security guy knows what he's doing. And also this part is also very important based on recommendations. Okay. So I believe this will be my three and a half vices.

Andrei Tiu  

Let's move the last one to the first one.

Vlad  

I think it's very important to always take care of your private feed. Never share.

Andrei Tiu  

super glad it was great having you on the show. Thanks so much for being here. I know it's a busy time for you guys so appreciate you taking the time to come over. Really cool. Where people I mean what would be the best place obviously, I know you guys have the Telegram, and it's the place to be for following crypto projects. So your telegram we have here for people watching the show, it's t.me/coreto. For you guys tuning in for streaming platforms, you can find Coreto following this link. Vlad any other platforms that you think people would be worth following?

Vlad  

My direct messages are always open.  I'm always active in our group, you can find us on our on Twitter, if you go on coreto.io, you will see in the footer, all of our social media groups and channels, you can contact me directly on Telegram, LinkedIn on Twitter. I like to talk. So I hope that if there is anyone out there that has any questions for me or is at the beginning of the road, I will be more than happy to give you some of my own insights. And if I do not know, I will do my best to recommend somebody that can help you in this journey.

Andrei Tiu  

Appreciate it, and things. Finally, I know, we said we're gonna wrap it up. But I think these are relevant. So a question, can people now come on the platform, even if it's even if they need to be approved? It's open, right? So anybody can create an account if they want to first question. And the second is if people with projects are listening, and they would like to claim their project page, can they do that on Coreto? Or what would be the best approach to doing that?

Vlad  

Right now, they cannot create the profile directly from coreto.io. What they can do now they can whitelist their username on reserve.coreto.io. And we will onboard them. This is now but once our referral programme will go live, maybe they will get an invite link from some of our existing users. So the answer to the first question is no, you cannot create a profile right now you need to reserve your spot and your user name using reserve.coreto.io. And the second question, the project module is still in development. But I would encourage any project out there to reach out to us and we can talk and see exactly what they are building and what their stage is in. And if we find synergy between us, we'll find a way in which we can work together in the future. That's for sure.

Andrei Tiu  

Great stuff! Okay, Vlad, that was it. Thanks so much for being here today. Keep rocking it. and looking forward to catching up soon. Guys, thank you for staying with us till the end. Looking forward to your questions. If you have any as always, post them in the comments. If you're watching this on YouTube or otherwise, feel free to tag us DM us on social or write us at our email address. And as always, we'll be happy to answer as well as maybe you know if you need to put you in contact with Vlad although his DMS are always open so we will link those industries from the description of this episode as well and take care of your crypto investments.

Vlad  

Always do your own research. 

Andrei Tiu  

Yes. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Mike Charalambous, as they will be discussing The Metaverse, NFTs, marketing in this upcoming realm, as well as opportunities for early adopter brands. Mike is the CEO of Threedium, one of London's leading 3D technology solutions for e-Comm, display and AR. 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐌𝐢𝐤𝐞:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://threedium.co.uk/

𝑀𝑖𝑘𝑒: 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikechara/ 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected] 

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube 

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show 

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean 

▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify 

▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer 

▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher 

▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox 

Episode transcript: 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi, there! This is Andrei, and you're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Mike Charalambous, who is an old friend of mine, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Threedium, one of London's leading 3D technology solutions for e-Comm, display and AR. And today we'll discuss the metaverse, NFTs, marketing in this upcoming realm, as well as opportunities for early adopter brands. Mike, really nice catching up! It's been a while. How are you?

Mike  

It's a pleasure, man. It's a pleasure. I think last time we were organising to catch up over beers in a physical bar, next time is going to be in a digital bar, in the metaverse. So times are changing fast.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah. See you at the central end? Actually, it's been a couple of years, maybe at least two since we last spoke. So that is sinking up, well not nice. But you thinking up with the start of the pandemic, and everything that came with that. And you have developed some really cool things meanwhile. I was following you mostly on LinkedIn and looking into what you guys were doing with Threedium. And I think this is going to be a really fun episode because it aligns very much with the specific of our episodes here on the podcast, which is getting our listeners closer to the innovation that is happening within the tech space and marketing specifically. And I think it's gonna be a lot of insight and learnings to take away for you guys out there that are looking to see any opportunities or are maybe interested in this web 3.0, the metaverse, NFTs and how the brands that you are marketing or your own companies can leverage the changing customer behaviour or, you know, this space in general. So, Mike, let's talk a bit about you. Let's introduce you to the audience. What's your story was story behind Threedium?

Mike  

We started 3d zoom over beers and nachos in a nice diner in London. But rewinding back, I was very much involved in the consumer electronics, and agency world back in the day. So I used to work with Nokia, on the tech scout team, finding different software and hardware,  solutions that could work for the Lumia phones. Then I changed shapes, I joined Wonder Man in WPP, we were still working with Nokia and some other consumer electronic companies, trying to support them on the brand strategy side about rolling different consumer products across different markets. And that's where we started seeing that e-Commerce, and in general, digital engagement was becoming very critical, very important for the brands. As a side hassle, we were meeting with a few friends, all of them were, experienced in different fields in their own ways. And we were thinking about ways to how we can further elevate the digital experience as to how brands can engage with users from a product display perspective, but also from creating commerce experiences that can elevate the purchase intention and trust for users to put their credit cards and buy products. So this is how Threedium was formed. With our mission to make 3D and AR solutions very much accessible to everybody to all sorts of different brands agencies, small to medium companies, to be able to to use them and elevate their, their commerce channels. Whether that is in e-Commerce or physical or omnichannel. Very recently, we also allow them to utilise them and distribute them within the metaverse. Threedium is a team of five founders. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of the company. Ever since the launch of the company in late 2017, we grew from a team of five to a team of 50 people. We are headquartered in London, but we also have offices in Serbia, Germany, and most recently in the US.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice, that's a very nice growth there! What fueled it? Was it tapping into the sort of metaversy spectre? Or was it the adoption that fueled your fast growth?

Mike  

I think ever since 2016 when e-commerce and mobile-commerce started to become important revenue and business drivers for the brands and retailers in general, we started seeing a much faster dependency on digital channels to be able to exist as brands and to increase market share. And this increased reliance on e-Commerce and mobile commerce allowed the brands to have much more available budgets to spend, invest and enhance their digital channels. But we are also seeing some tremendous talent being involved in this fault. So whole new eCommerce strategy. And we've seen some great teams being put in place from different brands, which helped to drive the adoption of new technologies, and more fascinating innovation in the space. So this is great foundation to see rapid evolution in eCommerce. And fast-forwarding from 2016 to 2020. We've been seeing brands slowly adopting 3D and immersive solutions to pilot a few of their product launches. But also the pandemic has massively, you know, escalated the need for digital transformation. So we've seen many, many brands putting digital transformation at the forefront of the strategy of their priorities. So eCommerce, mobile commerce, digital channels have been important elements that they had to further revolutionise in order to stay relevant in that ever-changing consumer, environment and ecosystem. We've seen massive adoption, acceleration of the need and use of immersive solutions, mainly 3D, because 3D is becoming an important component for creating digital assets, utilising in so many different ways for replacing physical products and the need to use physical products to create content, to sell products and to engage with users. As one can say, we were probably at the right time, in the right space, to get enough attention for all these big brands that they were looking to embrace 3D and immersive commerce solutions. So we had a product that was already quite advanced for its time, and it was able to cater to all these advanced and massive and scalable requirements that the brands, enterprises and agencies wanted at the time. And this is how we started rapidly gaining traction and market share. So right now in 2022, we have more than 3000 individual users, using our platform to create immersive continent solutions to top load and push up to their eCommerce channels. But also to use their physical channels as QR codes. We also have more than 40 enterprises across different verticals. Using our technology at scale, to innovate with their eCommerce, omnichannel and metaverse channels. All these users and enterprises are using our technology to be able to create 3D and AR product explorers 3D and AR configurators, 3D and AR display ads. And very recently, they're also using our platform to optimise their existing 3d models to create 3D metaverse ready, if you like, wearables and products, which they can then sell in the metaverse worlds directly to avatars. And as we typically say to our brands and partners, you create 3D once you use Threedium to sell it thrice. So it's the multiple ways in which they can benefit and utilise their assets and started seeing a great ROI across different channels using our engine. Some of the brands we work with include Diageo, Farfetch, a lot of brands from the LVMH group, some brands from the Richmond group. We also work closely with a lot of creative agencies and media agencies such as McCann and Wavemaker. And we have very strong partnerships with all different metaverse worlds such as Decentraland, Sandbox, Digital Village, and OPR.

Andrei Tiu  

Very nice. To have like a smooth transition towards the metaverse because I really want us to get there. But just so we have a starting point, what's the most popular eCommerce solution that you or your clients use from what you guys offer?

Mike  

Every six months the answer to this question changes. If you asked me that question a year ago, those would have probably been 3D configurators. A lot of the brands were looking to elevate their personalization experience on their eCommerce sites. So creating 3D configurators that will allow users to configure products in real-time, using 3D, using configuration techniques, really drove strong engagement and conversions for the brands. Then the more the brands kind of like mainstreamed the solution, they then started to see how they could elevate their product display pages, the so-called PDP pages. So they were using the platform to create different kinds of designs around 3D and AR viewers and explorers. So they were creating some interesting 3D viewers with different backgrounds and the ability to add hotspots around products so that they can create a more autonomous browsing experience for the users once they would land on the product page and explore the different products. And right now we're also seeing a lot of the brands coming to us asking they can use their 3D products to create 3D NFTs. But we're also seeing a massive request for brands to pilot their 3D products and sell them within the metaverse. It just changes every six months, depending on how much the brands are looking to innovate and push boundaries. We're seeing a huge uplift in the different solutions that one can use to generate from our engine.

Andrei Tiu  

Great. Okay, so just to start a discussion on the metaverse and focus on the solutions that you guys are working on with the brands there. And then let's been some ideas on trends and changing customer behaviour and what's out there for brands that want to tap into this territory in terms of opportunities. First things first, just to make sure that everybody listening to us understands the terminology and we are good on that front. So what is the metaverse?

Mike  

Well, I mean, that's a great question. With a not so straightforward answer. First and foremost, the metaverse can be anything for anyone, right? The Metaverse could be the moment that you go on to your mobile device and you immerse yourself in your screen and all of a sudden you forget everything around you and you're just scrolling and reading the news in your device. That's where you immerse yourself in a different kind of universe other than the one that you present right now. However, how we like to simplify the definition of the metaverse as to how it's shaping up right now through all these different news and publications people are reading. The Metaverse is basically the era where consumers and users and individuals like you and me are ready to spend $1, $100, $1,000 to purchase and own a digital asset, the same way that they would spend those kinds of money to acquire a physical product. This kind of need and demand for people to use real money in purchasing digital assets allows the creation of a fuel economy. So all of a sudden, a brand namely Nike could be selling directly to Mike, us a physical consumer, the Air Jordan sneakers, but at the same time, they can go and attract Mike's digital identity avatar and sell to him digital Nikes for his digital lifestyle. And that's what we typically tend to mean by Metaverse when we talk from a commerce perspective. And then why Mike's digital identity would be keen to purchase the Nike digital version is because he's building a lifestyle and identity of his own. In the metaverse, they want to be whoever they cannot be in real life, they want to create an Alter Ego. They want to go and have a much more gamified life experience that they don't let you have in real life. So it's a nice escape from them. And if you think about it, we are also kind of programmed already to be able to live in this kind of Alter Ego digital identities either through the existing so-called Social Media identities that we have, or either because we have grown up playing games, and we've always been kind of acquainted, and we always had that secret passion of us wanting to leave in the game. And right now, technology and browsers and internet connectivity kind of allows crazy people like us, and like, game developers, and Metaverse developers to be able to build this kind of worlds that allow the users and people to go and start building a second life, if you like in those spaces, and embracing all the different attributes that can come with that.

Andrei Tiu  

And on that note, mostly noting gaming. We are kind of there or have been for a little bit like people have already started to spend money to buy certain items in games, even if there's not a 3D experience in the way that you'd put an Oculus on. And then you are in the new Univers altogether, not seeing anything around you. But the immersiveness is there. So you are fully focused in there and you spend money on a game even if the infrastructure is not necessarily yet or has not yet been because, in recent times, we are getting close to that. How do you see the evolution of Metaverse or the metaverses depending on who looks at them or who defines them? This year over the next two years.

Mike  

Yeah, so basically, the metaverse is one holistic thing. And what we tend to refer to us to the different entities in the metaverse such as sandbox, Decentraland and what have you, those are just different members worlds within this universe. Right. So who's gonna prevail, eventually, whether it's going to be Meta's Facebook metaverse worlds, or sandbox or decentraland? We still don't know. But what is certain and the kind of, you know, notion that we're starting to see is that people and users entering into the metaverse, into these new internets, or the so-called Web 3 internet is that they're coming in with an appetite of decentralisation. And we are seeing a massive transition wave from the centralised web to the Internet as we know it, which belongs to like four companies. And a lot of users, feel that they have a first-class opportunity to be able to reduce the monopoly power that these companies had in the previous internet, owning and controlling so much personalised data. So we are seeing companies that are more decentralised, more prone to giving unlimited to the users to build and grow and flourish in this new internet to have more, you know, more demand, more welcoming kind of vibes from users. And this is why we've seen rapidly the likes of decentraland and sandbox growing in popularity, and people don't really care whether Facebook or Microsoft or Google are going to be present in this new internet because they don't really meet them. They're actually trying to build a much freer and a much more, you know, less scary if you like kind of internet. In terms of why this is going to continue growing, this is because we're seeing some obvious metrics are rising, especially from the younger generations. Last year alone, for the first time ever, we've noticed that children between the age of 10 to 12, asked for Santa's to offer them in-game purchases, and bolt-ons versus real-life gadgets. So we're seeing these new generations of future consumers who have the purchasing power already growing up with this consciousness that for them, digital ownership is powerful, even they understand it, and they want it. So for them, it's not going to be anything different. We're also starting to see with the use of blockchain, that the ability to own digital assets actually has proof to track back to the real owner, and therefore you can show off that you own that asset, and it's certified and it's authenticated. So it already fulfils all the needs that you won't have as a user, that that product, whether it's physical or digital, belongs to you. This is just the beginning. We're definitely seeing massive adoption of users going into the space and, and looking to spend money and wanting to fulfil that need and void if you like to own digital assets and see how they're going to be using them across the real lives and their digital lives.

Andrei Tiu  

You pointed out something really nice there. And I think it'd be worth us spending another five minutes discussing and developing the idea because I think it's very valuable to clarify this. So it and that is the difference between web 2.0, which is our web that we grew up with, and web 3.0, which is the web that these guys, 10 years olds that are asking for digital assets on their birthdays and Christmas are going to be growing with. And here well we talk about metaverse. One clarification or idea that I like us to discuss that I think is going to be very interesting is that when we talk about Metaverse is not only us going into some game-like universe that say a Counter-Strike map or something like that, and then just leaving, they're having these brands there and whatever, by using some glasses, some AR glasses, VR glasses, but also it comes with the component of decentralisation and with everything that like all the values that can be attached to something like Metaverse world which will be you know, Power to the people and digital transactions, non-monetary, like non-fiat currency and all these things. So, what's your view on this?

Mike  

I think it's bound to happen that eventually tokenomics, tokenisation is going to be a core component of the web 3. We are already seeing some interest in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Etherium, Polygon, even currencies from sandbox and decentraland, already starting to be used for people to transact. And we've seen a lot of people also storing these currencies in their wallets. And sometimes they tend to prefer to transact with them, rather than, you know, the fiat currencies, such as dollars and euros. And there are strong indications in the market that in the next couple of years, you know, there's not going to be much difference between which currencies users are going to prefer to transact with. As an additional ad on basically a benefit for the cryptocurrencies is that the tokenomics we're talking about is that we're going to start seeing fewer price deviations within jurisdictions. So let's say a can of Coca Cola, that it's worth 0.01. If in, in Germany, it will still be worth 0.01. If in Ghana, let's say. So, you're not going to be able to see too many price discrepancies in price wars between products and there's going to be much more realistic pricing basically, if you like, in the markets. On top of that, many many brands will now have the ability to create their own currencies, which in turn will allow them to reward their own users. If this engaging with the different brands with the different ecosystems, and this is also a huge component of the web 3, which is all about rewarding your users, either financially, or with different other rewards that can cement and show the respect that brands want to show to their loyal customers, to the loyal fans. So it's going to be an interesting way in how we see that shift of loyalty mechanics that we were acquainted with in web 2, and how we're going to be acquainted with them in web 3. So yeah, all of these things are just an interesting theory for the time being. But we were started saying that users are becoming more and more in demand of this kind of transactional and rewarding behaviours and experience.

Andrei Tiu  

Also, in terms of the attention and where people are focusing, I mean, basically marketing, we as marketers, try to get the brand in front of people where they pay attention to. So considering the specific of the environments, like when you are in the metaverse because you can do a lot of things in the metaverse such as you know, meetings, but enhanced from what we are doing. For example, even right now, when we are recording this podcast, we could be at a table in a Metaverse scenario, sort of like one avatar next to each other and talking as if we were in the same city, for example. So from that perspective, we can almost for sure that the people that are already looking to be present, there are going to spend a lot of time there. And this obviously takes away from the attention capital that a brand could have from its audience in traditional channels from today, and get it to those channels. And this, of course, drives the need for brands to want to be present or to communicate on those channels, or in this environment where people do spend a lot of time in or a proportion of the time depending on their demographic or their other criteria. But certainly, if you know your customer avatar and persona, well, you'd probably know whether they are more prone to spend time in something like the metaverse versus on a bus going to meet their friends for a bind to down the pub. So like for example on a Friday, rather than doing the same thing at their laptop from home, you know, setting that they choose in, I don't know, let's say the decentraland. So given this change of focus that comes with the adoption of the platforms, we believe and here I would like to hear your thoughts as well, that the traditional marketing channels or the ways that we communicate as marketers or brands with customers are going to be diversified or adapted as well. So some marketing infrastructure should come to the table or should be developed so that we can leverage this space using Blockchain probably because everything is happening on the blockchain rather than in a centralised way, as we do now for Facebook. I mean, probably excluding Facebook, and the other guys that are developing, centralised Metaverse is here you can contradict me if you have other data or you know, insights. But just to sum up and to have a discussion here, we believe that there will be some channels that will be available to brands so that we can use all the data that is going to be gathered by analysing the people that are going to spend a lot of time there and then deliver ads better or in a manner that also rewards the people that are viewing them or engaging with them, and then creating another level of brand engagement and relationship in the end with the brands that are going to be there and that can find their customers there. What's your view on this?

Mike  

So my view is that we wait too early to know how this space is going to evolve. But for sure if we see these as the new social media channels or the new social commerce channels, then definitely brands aren't going to take them very seriously and start embracing them. What we typically suggest to brands is that there is no longer a question of if they SHOULD GO into the metaverse, but HOW they should be going into this Metaverse stratosphere if you like. Basically, they should always go in and formulate a long term strategy, knowing what they will be doing once they go in. But in order to keep their feet in the water, we usually suggest they to have a short term strategy but with a long term game, a long term plan. So to first understand the ease, or how they could portray their brands and their products into the metaverse, we always ask them to do something small either to lease a pop-up store, or either try to launch like a wearable into the market or create a small discord group launch and NFT with some utility either in real life or in the metaverse to get people acquainted to understand that this brand is doing all the right steps to go in and starting to reward its customers and users in more web 3 kinds of manner versus the old or more, you know, traditional and conservative web 2 loyalty techniques. And then, once you start building a community, once you start building this kind of momentum, that they're now transitioning into this new era of socialising with their customers or building communities of becoming more Metaversy, that's where organically it's going to start growing for them. And they're gonna be able to make more, you know, mature decisions, more robust, more aggressive decisions as to how they're going to expand their strategy. And they're in their brand footprint into the, into the different members' roles. There are some quick growth hacks basically, that the brands can be looking, to achieve. So even though there are so many interesting metaphors, roles that they're about to go live, there are a few obvious ones that are easy for the brands to go in right now in which they have good accessibility like Roblox, which is more centralised. And it focuses more on children between the age of six age to the age of 1213, even, but it has 15 million users. And it's an interesting environment for the brands to go in. And also, we've got decentralised, which it's more decentralised. And it's fairly accessible from desktop soon from mobile apps as well. Anyone can go in with or without Metamask wallets. It's addressable to our younger audience between the age of 18 to the age of 35, maybe 40 Sometimes, and, and brands can go their lease part of a land or a shop, sell a few wearables, start building some sort of branding, and in interacting with the avatars to be able to synthesise their, their strategy and their aesthetics as to how they want to portray the brand in the metaverse. And then obviously each brand launching a small NFT, which will act as the legacy NFT as a provenance for the first unique set of consumers and users that are going to be owning that. That's also a great way to be able to start building a more long term and loyal community to get them on board on this journey so that they can voyage along with the brand as they're growing their experiences in the metaverse.

Andrei Tiu  

So what is something hot that you are working on right now that you think would be a good inspiration for people here that are maybe leading marketing departments and are looking at ways to be innovative or to reposition their brand and keep it fresh.

Mike  

For us, there are two main elements that we're going to be focusing on our Metaverse strategy until the end of the year. First is that we have created this mini luxury more plazas in different metaverse worlds, that basically enables the brands to be able to lease part of those areas where they can go in reskin them and place some products inside effortlessly without having to worry too much about cryptos and whatever. So it's an easy transition for them to navigate from the traditional eCommerce experience to the meta commerce experience. All they need to do is just convert their 3D models and make Metaverse ready. And this will allow them to start announcing that they have a place in the metaverse and start building a nice marketing and PR campaign around them, but also start extracting some interesting User behaviours and data that will allow them to synthesise a much more holistic meta commerce strategy as they grow and become more mature in space. The second thing that we're testing a lot is, is basically avatar behaviour. So we are looking to play around a lot with different APIs that will allow the brands to be able to see how avatars that purchase their digital sneakers or digital foodies are actually utilising them in the different member roles. Are they wearing them for XYZ amount of days or hours? Do they spend more time doing specific activities with that, and this will then ultimately allow the brands to see how they could reward their users through these kinds of datasets that they're amassing. So we're playing around with different new metrics such as where, where to earn or sweat to earn. So the brands can actually find new kinds of ambassadors and influences in the members which they can be rewarding them with, you know, Ethereum for every, every kind of Avatar that crosses paths with them whilst they're wearing their hoodie. Or if they spend XYZ amount of time wearing that specifically, walking around the metaverse are jumping or engaging into different sorts of activities. Again, they can be unlocking more rewards from brands. So you know, these are all interesting metrics and innovation touchpoints that we're playing around to see how we can further introduce new engagement strategies between the brands and the avatars. And consequently, that consumers.

Andrei Tiu  

So in their directory, for example, for a brand, let's say, fashion brand, to go now into Metaverse, shopping mall, let's say in decentraland, and have a pop up store there or have to lease on a shop that is branded up like where's their brand halves? I don't know the 3D models have one of their collections in there and people in the metaverse can visit?

Mike  

Yeah, so basically, this is actually what we tend to encourage the brands because first of all, we don't want them to spend too much money buying land and not even being sure if that matters, whether which they bought the land in is going to prevail, or it's going to die out. So in order for them to have less risk, but bigger exposure, we tend to be the ones taking the risk of like amassing the lands, and then giving the chance the brands just come in, start playing around the understanding of this is something that works for them or it doesn't work for them or what else they need to do to optimise their strategy without spending too much money without breaking the bank. And having a world-class opportunity to go in and just you know start interacting. So basically, I think that there is no right or wrong. But as I mentioned before, the easiest way for the traditional brands to be able to go into the matters without feeling too easy, too afraid, is to try and extract the elements that they are acquainted with in real life in the high street and just slowly use them using those elements and bring them into the members. So because you are acquainted with leasing premises because they are acquainted with visual merchandising, these are the key elements that we tried to extract from the High Street in real life, bring into the members with more Metaverse vibes, and with a different kind of engagement strategy for them to to be more appealing to the avatars and to the audience. That is right now spending time in the metaverse and we tried to smoothly bring the brands in without scaring them too much. And we got confusing them too much.

Andrei Tiu  

In terms of budgets, what would be a ballpark or an average, maybe the smallest budget that somebody should look at allocating for tests like this?

Mike  

This is really a question that varies according to the size of each of the brands. I mean, we can say 100k and would mean nothing for brands like Louis Vuitton. We can say 5k and it would mean a lot for small to medium retailers in the high street right now. The good thing is that there's a budget that can be catered for any kind of appetite. So Even with as low as $300, one can have a wearable ready and submit that wearable in decentralised. And they can have that wearable ready to be sold to avatars, through the decentralised marketplace, and they can start promoting it both in real life and through their social channels. And they can start generating sales to avatars.

Andrei Tiu  

Positioning themselves into, you know, that kind of brand that is there.

Mike  

Exactly, exactly right. Or they can spend $10,000 or $20,000, they can do a few pop up stores here and there, they can reskin them, they can put a few products as display, they can do in some, you know, events or webinars through those shops to get people in, they can launch some rewards. So, you know, it really, really varies, but a budget should never be an obstacle for them to go in. Because there's something that can be catered for any kind of budget sighs

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Man, this was such a nice discussion. And really insightful is the first time that we actually tapped into the subject on the podcast in so much depth. I mean, specifically Metaverse, we never really went into detail on it. So I'm really happy that we had the chance to do this with you. And also we had a chance to catch up a bit. Hopefully, we'll have the chance to you know, catch up off the podcast as well. Pretty soon, we should organise. But yeah, until next time, if there are people that want to get in touch with you and potentially explore directly these opportunities that we were discussing or they want to propose partnerships or anything to do with that, what's the best place that they can find your link up to you?

Mike  

Well, I would say LinkedIn is the obvious direct channel one can get in touch with. But then there's the CCO is be my email which they can get through you, I suppose. If they want to get in touch. And you know, somewhere here we will have the link to go to Threedium website so they can even reach out across and Contact Us.

Andrei Tiu  

Perfect. Yeah. So, guys, you have already seen the description of the episode or Yeah, depending on where you are streaming or listening to it. But yeah. Also, my thinking is, Mike, as you will have it in the title. So his name is Charalambous. But you have the spelling there in the title of the episode as well. 

Mike  

My alias name is Mike Chara, so I don't need to pronounce the entire surname. It becomes for a lot of people.

Andrei Tiu  

Awesome, cool, man. Thanks again for the time today. Really nice catching up. Looking forward to seeing you guys doing a lot of great stuff being us when you have cool projects, and maybe we bring them on the podcast as well and actually make case studies of them. And looking forward to having a beer also in the metaverse but also we realise that transition

Mike  

Wherever it's more suitable. 

Andrei Tiu  

Thanks again, man! Rock it. Thank you guys for tuning in today and looking forward to catching up soon.

Mike  

It's been a pleasure guys and always remember to have fun!

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Jack Murray, as they will be discussing modern PR and the science behind storytelling in marketing. Jack is the CEO of MediaHQ, a SaaS company of media contacts and a press release distribution platform. But not only he has also released his business book, “The Magic Slides: How to master the art of storytelling for business”, a bestseller in 3 categories in its first week from release.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐉𝐚𝐜𝐤:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://www.murraystory.com/

𝐽𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackmurrays/

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected]

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube 

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show 

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean 

▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify 

▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer 

▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher 

▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox

Episode transcript: 

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Andrei Tiu  

Jack Murray  

Join Andrei and our guest, James Scherer, on today’s episode, as they will dive deep into content marketing trends for 2022. From strategy shifts to AI and SEO drove content production. James is the VP of Growth at Codeless. He's helped 10 figure brands like monday.com or Nextiva dominate categories with content marketing at a massive scale.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐉𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: codeless.io

𝐽𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-scherer-94709830/

𝐽𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: @JDScherer 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected]

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube 

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show 

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean 

▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify 

▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer 

▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher 

▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox 

Useful links:

Monday.com: https://monday.com/ 

MarketingMuse: https://www.marketmuse.com/ 

Clearscope: https://www.clearscope.io/ 

Episode transcript:

Andrei Tiu  

Hi, there! This is Andrei, and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is James Scherer, VP of growth at Codeless. He's helped 10 figure brands like monday.com or Nextiva dominate categories with content marketing at a massive scale. And today we'll dive deep into content marketing trends for 2022. From strategy shifts to AI and SEO drove content production. Exciting times, a very insightful and practical discussion today. James, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show! How are you? How's it going?

James Scherer  

It's going very well. Thank you for having me. I'm excited about this.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, same here. Thank you for being on the show. Let's see. So without further ado, let's bring a bit of your background to the table. So I'd like for you to maybe make a quick intro. Let people get to know you a little bit. Tell us how you started in marketing. What was your journey so far? Maybe a couple of highlights. And then we have some really interesting case studies that we were discussing just before the show, so I'm really excited to get into them and talk a bit about, you know, hands-on marketing.

James Scherer  

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so a bit about me. My name is James Scherer. I'm currently the VP of growth at Codeless, which is a Content Marketing agency. I started marketing in 2013, I was an English graduate. And when I graduated, like a lot of liberal arts majors, I didn't really know exactly what I was going to do. And I fell into Content Marketing and writing totally haphazardly at a startup in Vancouver, Canada, where I was living, and really, really enjoyed it and suddenly had something to do with my degree, which was handy. And I moved from writer at a startup there to editor and then Head of Inbound. So when I left in 2018, that was kind of my role. And that was, you know, a lot of really good foundational understanding of digital marketing because I was writing on a lot of different digital marketing subjects because our agency or the company I worked for, did a broad spectrum of stuff. And then I went kind of remote, my wife and I started travelling the world a little bit. So I was writing. And I, again, kind of fell into writing for this content marketing agency. And then when I kind of settled back down here in the UK with my wife, back in 2019, I moved to Director of an editorial at Codeless. And then just in January, a VP of Growth. So my role here is really kind of revolves around. Initially, it was managing the editorial staff and the writers. And now it's more our internal growth, as well as kind of the strategies that we add on behalf of our clients. And we make recommendations to our clients and how they can grow through contact content and inbound. So that's me.

Andrei Tiu  

Fun time. Okay, so you started off with a sort of written content marketing type of activity, and then expanded and grew from there. And during your time when you were the head of inbound, were you guys doing mostly organic stuff Or were you also coordinating the paid channels such as you know, Google Ads or other types of paid acquisition?

James Scherer  

Yeah, so I was primarily focused on the organic side of things, though, I was pretty involved in the conversion optimization as well with the site, which kind of did touch on. We had a paid team, who we coordinated with for sure, just to like Target the SERPs they were targeting and vice versa, and then not targeting the SERPs they were targeting. But it was primarily my focus that has always been around inbound organic traffic, leads and sales.

Andrei Tiu  

Very cool. Okay, sweet. So, you know, I just can't be patient anymore. I want to go into the numbers because I'm really excited to talk - about it's probably one of the most or more popular case studies that you have been leading on and that you guys have been working on. And that is monday.com. So we all know as marketers, everybody probably saw ads from them or got visibility towards their brands in the past two or three years massively. And I know that you guys were behind their organic success. And more specifically, you were driving the activity there. So it'd be really exciting and interesting for us to bring as much as you can to the table from that case study. And then maybe we can bounce some ideas and make a little analysis on what made this case study be so successful? And also, what can our listeners take away from it to implement or to look at when they're planning their content strategy for this year?

James Scherer  

Absolutely. And you are absolutely right, that we all saw monday.com. I think they retargeted us - all of us - in 2021. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. So they came on with us in October of 2020, fall of 2020. And they very quickly wanted to do the massive volume of content. They had been in kind of the market for multiple content marketing agencies. And when we kind of started talking to them and said, like, hey, we could do double of what you want to be doing. In which they wanted to do 75 pieces in the first month. And down to the kind of like 75 to 50, in like the third, fourth, fifth sixth. So, in the first 12 months of working with them, we did about 400 pieces of content, which was, you know, massive volume. So coordinating the right key phrases for us to target and then determining, like, everything that we needed to form an outline creation stage for all of our writers to come in. We had like 35 writers on their account one time. That was all a bit, you know, it was a lot to do. But it was really exciting, of course, because you know, monday.com is one of those Unicorns of the tech space. So, as I said, Yeah, I think 425 Odd pieces were created in the first year,

Andrei Tiu  

Was this on-site and off-site or just for on-site?

James Scherer  

On-site exclusively. Everything they did was on site. Yeah, so, 425 ranking positions, out of 800 articles. So 750 articles in the first nine months, and then 800 by the end of the year, because they slow down. And I think more than half of those returned 350 of them breaking the first page for the private for the primary key phrase. So massive results, I think a total of like 23,000 new organic key phrases from those articles exclusively. And 825 first page rankings across the board. So yeah, so if 350 odd for the target keyphrase, and then 801st-page rankings for all the articles. So huge results for them. And it was really, really exciting to work with them and do it. And we're actually doing another 93 before the end of February for them. And that's just starting this week. So I am enthusiastic about being on this podcast, but I need to go help.

Andrei Tiu  

Yes, it sounds very busy. So can we talk a bit about the strategy behind it? Because this is something that we discuss with our clients as an agency as well. And it's always a debating point, like how much should you write? How much is enough? How much is the minimum necessary? What was the strategy that you went for when working with them? And also what determined them to go all-in on the on-site only content production, as well as the very high volume? Were you optimising articles one per keyword and had a very long list? Were you targeting phrases with more articles at once, or what was basically what informed your strategy together and this case study?

James Scherer  

It's a big question. And it's a sort of, it'll be a big, big answer. So bear with me. The answer to the question of okay, let me sort of a bit of context. Monday.com has a massive marketing budget. They're a massive company, and they needed significant investment in inbound or in the creation of blog content, in order to compete with, you know, significant competitors really sizable competitors. They also wanted to break into the CMS spacers they weren't currently in as much as they wanted to be. They wanted to have an entire section on templates was of content which it didn't have its time. Let alone the fact that a lot of primary topics like the key phrase project match marketing software. They did not have content. So the answer to how much content should your listeners be producing, cannot be answered by what Monday did. Monday did the higher volume of content, 75 pieces per month of act 2000 words. Which is above and beyond what most businesses can possibly imagine doing, their marketing budget is significant. I think what we should discuss perhaps are the takeaways that like, quote-unquote, normal businesses can actually like learn from what we did with them. So the first step to identify the key phrases that they targeted was to structure everything around categories, which is how I do it with all of our clients and market size. What are the categories of content that your business wants to be found for? A lot of people business, like, think about SEO strategy around like what do I want to be found for when somebody types into Google what I want to shop for? Which is an approach for me, it's more what? What do you want to talk about? What do you want to talk about, in general, if you're a project management tool, like Monday, then it's Yeah, project management? But it's also productivity. It's also teamwork. It's also in their case, CMS is also like sales funnel optimization, because they were doing a lot of like, they added a lead form product. So it's okay, if these are the five categories of content we want to produce let's prioritise search terms within each of those categories. The priority process for them was a little bit more in-depth than I tend to go for, they included the kind of value from a paid perspective, into kind of the algorithm that they use to spit out a priority, a numbered priority for each topic. So for instance, project management software is a bottom of funnel key phrase, because it has the word software in it, they offer software. So that's people who search for that are only interested in the buying process, essentially, they want to learn what's out there and choose one of them. They're not looking to really know what project management is. So yeah, they kind of took those key phrases and ran them through this algorithm based on like, Okay, what is the volume of this key phrase that makes it like a high volume search term makes it a priority piece? What is the intent of this key phrase based on PPC cost? And what is the competitiveness of this key phrase, based on what is the competition doing and how strong are those domains, along with just like, there was like a fourth variable, which is just like, how much we want to rank for it like that je no sais quoi component of a search term that like, we really liked that one, it really lines up with what we're doing this next month plots, release, and etc, etc. So all of those kinds of variables added up to a priority list for each category. That kind of was from 100, down to one. We did all of them. But how they were done in the order in which they were done was based on that kind of structure of analysing each one and determining which one was the clearest opportunity for them. So yeah, then they just kind of did it based on how many can Codeless be producing in a given month. We, as I said, we had a list of 850 within the year. And we did all of them, we did I think 500 or so in the first six months, and then 300 or so 350 or so in the next six. So yeah, it was fun. Takeaways there would categorise the content plan that you have, and then think up some level of prioritising which pieces need to go live first, around, this needs the most love from a link perspective, this needs the most love from like giving it the most, you know, the highest chance to be indexed, and also the highest chance for social media to engage with it and etc, etc, etc. So get those priority pieces up first, within each category that you want to produce content with him.

Andrei Tiu  

Appreciate it. Now it was you know, a very good and insightful answer. One question here would be, for example, when you're thinking about the domain authority, and what you like the tools that you had in the beginning when you started to produce this content, how much did this impact the performance of the new pages and the new content pieces that were published on the website? Did you start off having a very good domain authority or were there other link building activities happening in the background that we're helping you in certain areas as you mentioned, for example, prioritising the pages that need the most link love and then doing that for internal links and external?

James Scherer  

Yeah. So the short answer is that monday.com had existing domain authority or domain ranking on a trend of like 80. And on SEMrush of 75, something like that. So they were already in a very good place, which of course helps. And I'd love to talk about another client as well down the line, which is kind of on the other side of the coin for a lot of those customers who were like, well, this is all well and good, guys, but like, my domain authority is 35. And I don't have any budget. So how can those businesses succeed as well? But yeah, now monday.com, had existing domain authority, they also had an existing link building team. And then they also use so-called this works with our sister company, which is a backlinking agency, called User. And so a lot of our clients also use them because links are such an incredibly crucial part of content success. But determined, so that helped a lot. That said, all the best practices that we executed on top of that existing domain authority are just as valid for a small business as they are for monday.com. So creating search optimised content, using tools like MarketMuse, Phrase, Clearscope, whatever platform you want, if you're an early-stage business, I would recommend something like phrase, it's like a cheaper in and they do a lot good work, MarketMuse a bit more expensive. And also, there's a whole auditing thing, which is a bit more intense, but also a great tool.

Andrei Tiu  

Can we talk a bit about them, like, sorry, for interrupting your flow, but I think it's important for people that actually want to look at them to know, what does exactly each of them do. If we can talk people a bit through how to apply, you know, their, you know, add value.

James Scherer  

So all of those tools, the primary function for content creation is actually the optimization component. They do more. But for our purposes, they basically pull the SERP over the top 20 search results, actually for a targeted key phrase. So you want to write, you want to pick a piece of content for monday.com, targeting project management software. These tools will pull the top 20 search results for that key phrase, identify the headers within them, and the second symmetric key phrases that are associated with the content that's already ranking. So when you draft an article, it will compare what you've written to the ranking content. And say, you haven't touched on task management within your project management software tool, or fundamental software article. And all the competition content does. So as far as Google determining the comprehensiveness of your content you are lacking in that area. So add in that semantic key phrase and that subject matter and you will create a more comprehensive article that Google will reward just from the content itself perspective. What these tools don't do is a review, you know, the size of the page, the page experience, they can't see images, the quality or the or you know, that the wage or size of those images. And they actually don't do headers. So it can't see that. In your draft, you have an h2, which is optimised for search or not. It gives you the formatting really either the kind of can bold the text, which we know is like a very minute SEO variable, but there's something there, that kind of stuff that can't see either. It's just really around like the subject matter you've included in your pieces. So all of those tools can do that. All of them also, actually clear scope and phrase offer you the ability to like run that report, and then send it to a freelance writer or one of your internal writers and have the kind of fill in the draft. And it'll automatically see what you like how it's compared to the making content. And you pay usually based on the number of reports you pull in any given month. Agencies, of course, are on agency plans. And so we pull hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, hundreds, but that's all our systems work. And they also allow you to do content briefs to a certain extent based on again, the SERP. So what are the headers in the ranking content and you can pull in inspiration from that content into an outline that a writer can then fill out? So really handy tools I would recommend people mess around with those. If you're looking to do high volume content, or even just create search-oriented content, those tools can really be helpful.

Andrei Tiu  

Thank you for the insights. Now, back to your original flow, or idea if you remember it if not do because otherwise, I have the other question ready to go.

James Scherer  

Yeah, hit me with another question. I'm sure what I was saying is we'll come back out for sure.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay. The next question was really just like continuing the idea that you started which was okay, monday.com was a very big company. They were already starting off having a big presence and massive marketing budgets. What do you do if you don't? So if you don't have high domain authority, or if you don't have massive budgets or resources to invest into content marketing or SEO, how to go about, you know, in that case, and here, I was keen to hear your thoughts and example on, you know, the other client that you mentioned.

James Scherer  

Fantastic. Yeah. So this kind of brings up another client, Early bird, or get early bird.io, I think or earlybird.com, they are an early stage, financial investment app targeting parents, helping parents invest in their children's, like, financial future. So cool company, cool idea for a business. And again, when they came to us, they didn't have a blog. Talking about domain authority, they didn't have a blog. So we worked with them to build out, okay, how are we going to start building domain authority, creating great content to get it seen how we're going to link back to this content? And how we're going to get this site kind of momentum from an inbound perspective? And turn it into purposes, a lot of the stuff we do with monday.com is similar to what we do with Earlybird. So it's around okay, what are the categories of content we're going to target for this client, and what do they want to be seen for? In their case, it was kind of the idea of gifting money, gifting in general. And then like investment strategy, budgeting for young parents, and in more recent monthly been in the crypto space as well. So if those are the categories, we do a pillar and post structure, which I would recommend people do as well, based, again, on the categorization of content, targeting the highly competitive high volume search terms first getting them written and indexed. And then every article that you do in that category after the fact say, say you're doing 30 pieces of content per category over the course of a year over the course of eight months or whatever. Three to five of those within each category should be pillars, and then the remaining 25 or so should be support pieces that backlink internally to the pillar pieces of content. A pillar piece is just a kind of the more pressing more general or more like broad-spectrum subject within that category of content that has a higher search volume. And inevitably, a higher competitiveness a higher keyword difficulty. Again, all this data you can get from a trash or SEM rush for miles or whatever it is. And so we created their pillar pieces and then started driving backlinks to them from support content. They also did work with a backlinking company, again, the one that we work with quite a lot, User. I think they were on eight links per month plan, which essentially, if Ava's worked with any kind of backlinking agency or service, you know that a lot of them pay, you pay for the quality of the link that you're getting back. So I think they're playing was like 60, plus domain authority, publications and domains that would do a backlink directly to their content with the anchor text that we wanted to be found for. So over the course of that first 12 months with them, which was about November 2020, to Yeah, just a few months ago, they went from zero to 20,000. And they were doing eight articles a month. Which is I mean, compared to what monday.com was doing, that's you know, nothing, it's a couple a week. But target intentionally, linking intentionally, creating bottommost content with high-quality images, customs, like graphics that are branded and specific, no stock images, formatting from flow down the page, pulling people down the page, increasing time on page, reducing bounce rates, all of that stuff based on the formatting of the content itself. And then making sure that page experience was really good, which of course, is an incredibly important thing since the May June algorithm change, which means, you know, little JavaScript light pages, compressed images, you know, are tight and less than, whatever 200 megabytes or kilobytes, whatever. All those best practices kind of came to the fore with them. And another component of it is what I would say to readers is, ambition is all well and good, but momentum will get you farther. So if you're just starting out, starting from scratch with content production, I would say give yourself a bit of a broken target lower volume, lower kg pieces in order to get something live on your page and sorted to get stuff indexed or to get a few backlinks. And I mean, create the pillar content as well. But don't expect it to rank necessarily create it so that it's there and you can backlink to it, but then feel free to focus your attention on those lower acuity pieces and know that SEO is a long game. But once this was taken over, like with Earlybird, once they got some that momentum and the wheels really started rolling, we did start seeing, you know, 50% month on month growth, and then 75% month on growth, and then for like six months in the middle of everywhere, 100% month on month growth. But it took us four months or so to get to 1000 unique visitors per month, and then 1500, and then 3000, and then 10,000. And very quickly, it ticked over to the 20,000 space. And now we have to have a whole conversation about converting traffic. There's a whole different thing.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, for sure. And also until you know, all the new articles and content pieces are being indexed. And then they get the age that they need to in order to I mean, and also build upon their own authority and when there's not bouncing off the pages, and so on. So indeed, it's a bit of a longer game. So the sooner you start, and you do things right, the better and the sooner you'll see results. Yep, totally on point. And I'm vibing with you, this is exactly what I believe as well. Now, let's go a bit into the techy side of things. What's your experience with AI apply this to content, marketing, copywriting. There have been some tools out there.  What's your experience with this? Have you tried to use AI-powered content generation?

James Scherer  

Yeah, absolutely. I've tested a couple of different tools that produce content based on a key phrase that you plug in, Marketmuse has been like the main one that I've messed around with. But it's interesting. The other question is like, are the computers coming to take your job? And the answer is, from an SEO perspective, it depends on what vertical you're in. The financial space is becoming more and more dominated by AI. Yeah, written content, but content that is very much helped by AI. I think that those industries that are far more fact-based, just like especially with, you know, with financial words, like the this is the stock change over the course of the past day, and connecting that piece of data with another piece of data that AI can do, as long as you put in what it needs to pull from your fine. From the kind of thought leadership perspective, the idea that you know, you want to produce high-quality content that readers want to read and bring something new to the table. AI is never going to get there. The idea of novel thought is simply something that's not going to come from these tools. Does that mean that you cannot use AI to create higher quality content? No, it doesn't. It means that you can use these tools and they are effective. And then you have to go away by yourself in the darkroom and come up with something new and find an interesting and put your own voice into it, you know, your own ideas into it, and come up with something original. On top of what that AI has already helped you do. But that's also AI written content and AI-generated content. There's also a topic here around AI helping you create content. And the fact of the matter is that AI and software have been helping us create content for 15 years, I mean, Microsoft Word 96 had that little red line beneath a word that was misspelt. And when I fixed it, that was a piece of software identifying where you had messed up and telling you how to fix it. And that is AI helping you create content. Grammarly, which has been out for however long, helps people create content and write content effectively every day and has been doing so for years and no one's been intimidated by it. The fact of the matter is that a lot of these tools, I think the thing that people are scared by is the idea that content computers and AI will write your content for you and then everything will just be regurgitated. You know, a grey matter that doesn't actually do anything or add any value and also the original creators, their content writers will lose their jobs. And I think for me, we use a number of different tools, including Grammarly, including Hemingway app, we use plagiarism tracking tools like AutoCorrect and writer.com. We use again those content outline creation tools like Clearscope and Phrase, MarketMuse. We use optimization tools. And then we use software to make it all kind of come together with project management software that helps us identify when, when an article has included the number of, you know, key phrases we wanted to include and all the rest of it. And all of this comes together to alleviate the human error in content creation. Which is kind of scary for a lot of people. The fact that matter is that human error is also what makes content, original and real and human. But we all make spelling errors and grammatical errors that we know are wrong, but we can't see them because it's difficult to edit your own content. So I guess the long-short of it is that so long as you are open to creating higher quality content, AI can help you but don't be concerned that it's going to replace originality anytime soon. But there are a lot of tools out there that are trying.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, I agree with you, though. It's like, for example, with music and when you say like, for example, when you hear these perfect music, and but it just doesn't touch you as much as he does. You know, a live song with, you know, having the E string on a guitar a bit out of order, like a band on the guitar is a bit out of tune, but just enough, so it's real. It's not just like everything recording to perfection and fitting it all together, reproduced on a computer. So yeah, I mean,

James Scherer  

That's also there's also is that components of it, which is like, Okay, if AI can create a piece of content, why can't a writer then come in after the fact and like, tweak bits and pieces to make it sound real and whatever, whatever. And talking to it, we have 75 Odd freelancers on staff, and if we pulled them, every single one of them would rather write from scratch, than edit an AI-generated piece of content. And the reason for that is exactly what you say with like, when you hear something AI like, you know, made by computer written by computer music, especially. It sounds perfect, which is weird. And with AI, it sounds close to perfect. But there's no written content that sounds close to perfect, but there's just something slightly off about it, and you're not 100% Sure what and it takes you five minutes of the element to figure out what it is. That's weird in that phraseology, or in that grammar, or in that syntax and structure. Any writer would prefer just to write the damn paragraph themselves, rather than having to find what's weird about it, cuz there's something that just sounds odd to my ear, and I don't know what it is. And then yeah, you explode.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, I can imagine having to go through, you know, like a normal 2000 words piece of content, doing that every day and then trying to figure out what's wrong every two seconds sentences and try to rephrase that. I think it drives you crazy. So you know,

James Scherer  

I just want to say just right.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah. Cool. So yeah,  I'm aligned with you on this one. And, you know, as you mentioned, I think it can sound overwhelming for somebody that has to do you know, content writing or production, for example, for the guys tuning in, that maybe are managing the marketing, but also producing the marketing or they are one band, one band kind of team or two people in on the marketing team, it can sound overwhelming. But again, there are some simple tools that can help accelerate or you know, just take some of the mistakes out. So for example, using a tool that helps you see how good your content is for your desired purpose, as opposed to what's already ranking, as you mentioned, or eliminating the grammar spelling mistakes. These are tools that are accessible, easy to use, and can certainly contribute to producing more quality content, potentially at scale,

James Scherer  

100% per cent. Nothing to add there, you are absolutely right.

Andrei Tiu  

So how do you see things going forward in 2022? We now robots will not take copywriters out. But what else do you see working well these days? Or what are you guys experimenting with? Where do you feel marketers should focus their attention towards?

James Scherer  

Yeah, so what we're doing now we're changing our strategy in 2022, for all of our clients revolves around two primary algorithm updates that came out last year. The first of those was back in January, February. This wasn't a major algorithm release, but a lot of businesses saw the effects of whatever they did. And essentially, a lot of our kind of affiliate clients who were publishing 5000+ word articles, the massive massive listicles saw significant ranking decreases overnight, pretty much. And it looks to be that Google was cracking down on those massively comprehensive guides, which a lot of businesses have been using for a long time to like Okay, well, if I don't have the domain authority to rank for this key phrase, and the article that's already there is good is already on the first page is good, I'm just gonna write something that's like 10 times longer in order to, to rank. And it worked for a while. Because, you know, if we're talking about semantic key phrases included in each piece, and when you have 150 of them. And a lot of people would, you know, link to those because they were comprehensive in scope. Google's cracking down on those because the fact of the matter is, is that the user experience, the leader experience was pretty poor, navigating those his own extra impossible. And so that was a that was the thing that we're addressing. We create your speciality long-form, high-quality content, that's what we do. That's our selling proposition, what is long-form in 2022? In general, I have not scoped out a piece of content that needs to be more than 2500 words in about six months. Because pretty much every subject realistically can be covered in that word count. And if not, you should write another article on the related subject matter, and then link to the original pillar piece. So that's the first one go a little bit shorter. And then kind of tied into that is focusing on paid experience, which again, that was the May, June paid experience algorithm update, which is all about streamlining your pages and your site in general, focusing on reducing the amount of code and the back end, focusing on, high-quality images that are compressed PNG file types that like, look really good, but aren't massive. The idea of when you go into Google Search Console, you should have no errors that talk about heavy pages or, or red flags around like these pages, whatever megabytes, when it gets crawled. And that ties really well into the like: if we're doing shorter form content of you know, 1215 to 2500, then there's no reason that those pages should be massive. And the pages that were massive, and I think this is probably realistic, is that in February, when that initial algorithm, we saw the results of that algorithm that was Google, like pushing out preliminary changes to the algorithm that would tonne of them come in in fall in the page algorithm, the paid experience update in major. So for all those guests like that, what this means is that your content needs to be tight, beautiful, the page experience needs to be a really good name, there needs to be clear interlinking between all content. Again, based on the category of content, you should be tagging within those categories. And there's no reason to go over 500 words on a piece, focus on creating high-quality content that's well linked internally and then driving backlinks externally. Again, I'm not saying anything, that hasn't been true for years, I think that I mean, people used to write long-form articles, and they get really long from articles and used to work. But what I'm saying is that everything that we like has been a best practice is just can't be messed around with anymore. Like there's no possibility of winning if you're creating 10,000-word articles that are poorly linked extremely heavy, it just doesn't happen anymore. So focus on those few things. And you should be okay, in 2022, nothing crazy, nothing. Mostly, Google will probably throw something at us, and then we'll have to scramble to fix it. But that's my expectation.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, and in other words, sort of what you also said is that, you know, we have video and all these other content formats, but in the end, the value of the written content stays there. And sticking to these best practices, and to the way that Google wants content to be produced by humans, is still going to be driving a massive amount of value to brands that are using this marketing channel, right?

James Scherer  

And video is ...even saying the video is the next big thing. I wrote an article in 2014 talking about how the video was the next big thing and that was my like, anticipation for 2014. And it's we've never been wrong. But for a lot of people really high-quality video is out of the realm of their marketing budget. Because it needs to be really well produced. The audio needs to be fantastic. The video quality needs to be fantastic, it needs to be edited really well. And it needs to be cut up into a bunch of different clips that go on YouTube and whatever, whatever it is being hosted by the right place. And those hosting sites can be expensive. So I'm not saying don't do video, in fact, I'm saying you should do video. However, if you don't have the marketing budget to invest in video, don't invest a little In the video, don't do bad video, because the bad video is worse than no video at all. And you can get a lot more bang for your buck with high-quality content that is evergreen and targets highballing key phrases and ranks for a good long time.

Andrei Tiu  

Great. James, we're getting close to the end of the episode together. But this was a very, very cool chat. Really loved the energy. Where can people find you? How can people come to you to help with or connect and discuss things?

James Scherer  

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the easiest way to get in touch would be I'm on Twitter @jdscherer if you want to message me or anything like that. From a production perspective, head over to codeless.io and book a call with us. We kind of do consultations first and foremost because we care as much about identifying if the client is right for us as if we're right for them. So we usually do kind of an in-depth idea, like the discussion around like, what are you doing? What's not working? Why are you even like looking for anybody and then we can help direct businesses to other types of agencies or if we're right for them, then that's great. But if people are interested in doing content production, get in touch.

Andrei Tiu  

Super. James, thank you so much for being on the show today! This was a great chat. This is likely to be the most comprehensive video for this season covering this subject. So really happy that we had the chance to discuss this subject together. Meanwhile, guys, go over to codeless.io, check out what they do, connect with James on Twitter, on LinkedIn, you'll have the links to the tools that we were discussing about as well as to the platforms in the description of the episode or on social media if you watch this there or YouTube in the description as well. And until next time, thank you, as always for tuning in. If you have any feedback or anything that you'd like us to discuss in more depth, feel free to ping us at [email protected] or James. And James, if you're offering we can organise another episode, later on, to see if there's anything relevant to the audience that we haven't covered today.

James Scherer  

I'd love that, that would be great. Get in touch.

Andrei Tiu  

Super. So yeah, until next time, thank you everyone for being on the show. James Thank you again, wishing you an amazing year ahead because we are seeing the beginning. All the best of success and I'm looking forward to catching up soon. 

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Julius Solaris, as they will be discussing how to best use shared online experiences and events technology to redefine human connection in B2B businesses. Julius is the VP of Marketing Strategy and Events at Hopin, Europe's fastest-growing startup of all time,​​ as well as a world-renowned event influencer.

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Episode transcript: 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi, there! This is Andrei, welcoming you to a new episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Julius Solaris, who is the VP of Marketing Strategy and Events at Hopin, Europe's fastest-growing startup of all time. And today, we'll discuss how to best use shared online experiences and events technology to redefine human connection in B2B businesses. Without further ado, Julius is a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? How's the year started for you? I know you are in LA at the moment. So how was the weather there?

Julius Solaris  

Thank you, Andrei, thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to be with you. And, you know, the very exciting start of the year, as you know, we navigate through the uncertainty and you know, whatever prospect is out there, everybody's excited. In the marketing and events industry to kind of go back to in-person everybody's looking at virtual as well as a long term solution to the issue. So we're navigating for both personally. The United States is slightly different from the rest of the world. So I've been able been fortunate enough to attend several in-person events, one of those last weeks for 3000 people. So yeah, lots of insights, we're definitely going back to in-person, it's not as fast as we wanted it to be. But at the same time, you know, there's a lot of innovation happening in virtual so I'm stimulated by both parts, I guess, you know, I come from them in person. Ward, I come from analysing in person, the business of events. But I've always had a passion in technology. Therefore, I'm like, drawn into this battle between virtual and in-person that is happening right now. Yeah, so exciting times.

Andrei Tiu  

Yes, definitely. And I feel with, you know, with coming from the live space, and now going to digital and are coming back to life I think, however, that some changes are here to stay when it comes to the innovation that has been happening and the way that customers or actually people in general, as well as transposing the b2b space, have adapted to the COVID pandemic, and now going out of it, how they see events as part of their marketing strategy. So I'm really hyped for us to go through the ins and outs and have your insights from a technology point of view, as well as adoption and what you guys are developing at the moment. Let's see if we will go into AR and that side of things as well, if you want to, then that'd be really, really interesting. Because as you also know, this is a very hot subject nowadays, between our marketing audience. So exciting. I think a very good starting point would be to introduce yourself a bit to the audience. Tell us a bit more about Hopin, how you've come to be Europe's fastest-growing startup of all time because that's a huge statement. And I know from our discussion just a couple of minutes before, it's impressive as well. So if you'd like to take over the stage, it is all yours.

Julius Solaris  

For sure, so I've been in the events industry for the past 20 years, 15 of those have been in media been writing about events. So I come from a content perspective. And I've been doing a lot of analysis on the use of technology and events. So that's been my passion since 15 years ago, and I've been one of the first looks at the impact that technology could have in events as well as the impact that social media could have in events. I've been sort of defining the trends for the industry for many years, and have hundreds of 1000s of event planners download in my resources website called Event MB that I sold in 2018 to skift. And then, at the beginning of 2020, I got hit like everybody else by the pandemic. And I started doing virtual events. We did webinars before. We sort of elevated the experience of more virtual events and in a space of a year with six events, we got almost 60,000 event planners to attend those events, which is five times the size have the biggest event for the event industry. So quite a sizable audience for our industry. And in February 2021, I made the move to event technologies or working with one company then ended up at Hoppin a few months later. I started at Hoppin four months ago, joining the revolution that this company is bringing along. I don't know if you know the story of Hopin, which is very inspirational. Our founder, Johnny Boufarhat, actually based in London at the time, was sort of confined in his home for autoimmune disease for two years. So we built this platform out of the need to connect with people and to create better experiences for people that are unable to attend in person. So in a sense, he anticipated what the pandemic kind of made us all go through during lockdowns. And therefore, a platform that was built with that kind of experience in mind nearly got a lot of traction and became a sensation, and experienced amazing growth from a handful of employees, three to six, almost 1000 spaced out from some seed funding to $1 billion funding, and incredible ARR. That's been published in different outlets. And you can check it out there. So it's a, you know, incredible story, a trajectory of virtual events that we've all experienced during the pandemic. But also it's a story of bringing that concept of coming together forward into the 2020s. In a sense, I think this is a movement that is going to define the next 10 years. And the way our CEO defined that was by acquiring strategic companies that deliver on that mission of feeling closer to the event, the opportunity, the content by buying first Stream Yard, which a lot of us used, personally saved my life last year when I was running events. And then other companies in the in-person business as well, Topy, Attendify, Boomset, three companies that if you've been in events and use technology for your events, you will know because they are very strong in the in-person business. Therefore, paving the way in terms of what's coming next for the connection, also companies like Jam, there is more sort of meeting oriented type of technologies. So coming together at every touchpoint possible to make sure that you can meet wherever, whenever and however you want. There's no definition in terms of meetings these days that shouldn't be there, we pursue radical inclusion of whoever wants to attend. But also given the freedom to planners and marketers to plan their activations their events, however, they want. There is no fixed agenda, you shouldn't be forced to plan a meeting and personal costs or virtual costs, or hybrid at all costs. But you should follow your audience where they are. And also your situation, your country, the pandemic, all these issues, but also sustainability. You know, these are topics that are on top of the minds of current and future generations. And we feel that at Hopin we're at the core of it.

Andrei Tiu  

Awesome! So tell us a bit about your journey through the past maybe two years. So ever since the pandemic started, because this has been, you know, a time of change for you personally and professionally as well. So maybe how did you move through the activity that you had before and now taking the lead on the marketing front with Hopin? What was something exciting that happened there? And how are things panning out for you? Or what were the opportunities that you saw as we moved through the changing market, the changes that were brought by the pandemic and obviously the b2b space that had to adapt as well?

Julius Solaris  

So I always tell this story. In November 2019, that was the time when I was Editor Chief and we would write the trends for next year, every time so that's when we will actually publish them. And my top trend for 2020, so 2019 looking at 2020 was trying to anticipate a little bit with my crystal ball that I have here that I use to look at trends all the time. So try to anticipate and to be the top trends of 2020, where virtual events. Right, for all the possibly completely different reasons that what happened, I couldn't anticipate a pandemic. But to me, that was where the industry was going towards, because there was a need to include people that couldn't attend, there is a correlation between attendance online and attendance in person. The more people attend online, the more they tend to turn up in person. And also, there's a sustainability crisis that we kind of forgot during the pandemic, came back recently. But this is not a trend, this is a problem a lot of people are dealing with. This becoming a marketing problem to a lot of events as well with younger generations where they can't afford to be non-sustainable. And this is a big problem with some parts of the event industry, especially large trade shows that create monumental amounts of waste. And, you know, if you think about all the travel that it's involved, it's an incredible direct contribution to pollution and all the crises that we're experiencing right now. So, therefore, I was kind of positioned in February 2020, I was looking at the situation being Italian, I was looking at whatever was happening in Italy, like two, three weeks in advance compared to the US. And I put out a tweet saying: ”Listen, we should seriously look at virtual events because I don't think we're going to be able to do in-person events going forward.” And then March came, all the cancellations came. And, you know, everybody started to sort of congregating into virtual environments and the learning curve it's been incredible. You don't join the event industry, because you like technology, right? It's counterintuitive, you join the event industry because you'd like to stay close to people, you're like that offline feeling of co-creating experiences. But you know, through the years, I've seen the evolution of that some of the planners have been strategic about what they do. This is a tiny margin compared to the industry. So the whole industry has been going through a crash course in understanding technology. To be honest, with incredible resilience. I've seen businesses completely destroyed. I've seen people that have worked in the industry for 20 - 30 years to move away and like do real estate, or something else like, which is very, very sad. And we still have to get to terms with the impact of that. Because it's still ongoing with the last waves, we've seen again, and again, the same issues. So, therefore, a very, very tough time. But still, an exciting time on the other end to see all this experimentation from an industry. As much as we all value in a person. We all recognise right when we attend events that some events are better than others. Right, not all events are great, right? We've all attended conferences, there are boring, like with sales pitches from, you know, salespeople that have 10 point font presentation, and nobody could read, bullet, bullet, bullet points, and you just want to die, right? So the level of experimentation has been incredible. I like to think we've been at the forefront of some of that by experimenting with new formats. And then you could see all this attention in event technology. It's not just Hopin, the whole event technology spectrum, has experienced unprecedented venture capital investment, like never before. Like you have to think that the one of the biggest deals I remember before the pandemic was double dutch, raising $30 million, and then another 20 million. That was mind-blowing to us. It was an absurd amount of money. So to think we're now in the regions of 1 billion at Hopin is this incredible. So it's the time of our lives for people that have been in technology for a while in the events industry.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so, then it was 2020, the change was happening. And then how did you meet Hopin and how did you take the lead there on the marketing front?

Julius Solaris  

So I was at another company before in technology. And, you know, one thing led to another I had the pleasure to interview the CEO of Hopin, Johnny, a few times in my previous endeavours as Editor-Chief, so we develop the relationship. And, you know, there was a need from companies like up in to be a thought leader in events. It's a company that comes from technology a lot, there's a lot of people that have worked in Facebook, Airbnb and Google. There's also a need within the company to grow people that have been in the industry for a while. And I was part of that plan to bring me on board is to give voice to some of our wider marketing initiatives being grounded in what the event planning industry is about. So to bring that voice in, and, you know, give more resonance to all the content initiatives we would do. And you know, more companies, I feel this is a wide marketing trend or navigating towards becoming media companies almost right. So there's a clear direction in that sense. And therefore, I feel more and more companies are hiring sort of ex-editors,  ex-content creators to become part of their marketing effort. And I feel that was the thinking behind it. I don't know, we should ask the company about that.

Andrei Tiu  

Well, I'm sure your experience as an editor chief and media person in that sense, as well as an influencer, if you want. As far as your roster of achievements in the back, I'm sure that was counting a lot towards you joining or needing their team there. So if we were to think about the last couple of months, because November is not so much ago, like so much time ago, and it used to be a time when you were publishing this Trends report in the past. I'm sure that you know, the behaviour was still there when the time came so you're already looking at trends for 2022, assessing what was happening, and what was there to stay, obviously, the new Omicron variants and stuff, probably not many knew exactly how that's gonna unfold. But what are you seeing changed forever in the b2b event space? And also what do you see as happening, most likely, in 2022, when we will be able again to meet maybe as much as we want at conferences, and expos and these types of events may be towards the year?

Julius Solaris  

Totally. So the word forever, it's a tough world these days, to be honest. Because it's almost impossible, not even my crystal ball can give me that level of insight into the future. Oh, my god is changing so fast. Everybody's caught off guard, in most cases, you can anticipate, but nobody really knows. You know, you can see like science even changes every day. And when science changes every day, oh, my God, that's a clear signal that business is going to change even more, right? Because we try to shape strategies, and we try to gather feedback from a certain moment in time. So it was October time, we were here in Las Vegas, and one of the largest trade shows where the event industry 12,000 people, everybody was like, celebrating the return of in-person, and then a new variant hit. And you know, cancellations are happening again. So, therefore, it's tough to say forever. Said that there are things that we can talk about, there are practical, actionable, things that your audience specifically can think about. Whenever they're evaluating their marketing programmes, and thinking about their strategy to get closer to their customers, I feel that there's a new category is born. And we're just year two within that category. And that's virtual events. Virtual events have been around for 15 years, they've never been like the ones we've seen in the past few years. I'd like to say that we've seen more change in the past 20 months in terms of event technology platforms than in the past 20 years. The level and speed at which event technology platforms have been delivering features and change have been incredible. So if you think that, you know, virtual event platforms, because you had some experience in March 2020... So my number one tip and action for those listening is to go back and reevaluate platforms. Because there's been an enormous amount of change. There's been incredible feedback. It's almost like these platforms have been co-created with the feedback of planners and marketing professionals. For the past few years, this level of innovation has been incredible. I can think we ship new features on a daily basis and often, so it was just like, I can't even keep track of how many things we're shipping to respond. So the new categories are born and where does that sit? That's the major trend I feel for marketing professionals. So if you used events before as a strategy for your b2b marketing efforts, 75% of them professionals grip on them, or marketing professionals, pre-pandemic said that events are the number one tactic for b2b marketing the most effective tactic. So this is a study done by North America. Let me tell you exactly what's called, North America Content Marketing Institute. Pre pandemic. And constantly events rank in the top-performing tools in the toolbox of b2b marketing professionals. But let's say marketing professionals in general, the problem with events is being they are intangible. They're very tough to measure. Yes, you have the technology to measure the in-person experience with its cumbersome can be expensive. Plus, you have to travel people, there is no certainty. One thing we all know, when you work in events, finger things are going to go wrong. So all at all times, you can expect a crisis. It's not an easy undertaking compared to running a campaign on Facebook, right? And where are you left? Your left in person here at the top is one of the most direct, closer intimate types of interaction with your audience where you co-create the message with your customers, you can change it real-time stuff is incredible, very difficult to do. And then you have probably the next step is social media where you create that persona by your brand. There used to be nothing in between, maybe you have an email list, maybe you have a community if you're really forward-thinking. But that was that right? Now, enter a new category in the middle of the funnel, which is virtual events that are a much closer way to interact with your audience. That is not probably as personable as in-person events as direct as that, but creates an environment of intimacy that removes the noise of social media, and creates a much more direct touchpoint, if done properly, where your audience and the advantages are that is incredible, because if you think about the trend, the wider trend of community and brands becoming communities for audiences to come together, we believe that event-driven community so a community that has multiple instances of events, is probably the best way to kind of channel all that energy that gets created among your customers into content that you can create into closer brand interactions, into better in-person events that require less marketing to be promoted and attended. So that's the new biggest fan, that that we can talk about hybrid, we can talk about different interactions with that I feel the birth of this new category is there and we're just here to like we're just at the beginning of it, then we can talk about the metaverse as an iteration of that. But you know, this is like the beginning of it.

Andrei Tiu  

Got you. Okay, so now talking about this new category, you guys have a tonne of customers that you work with from loads of industries and obviously gather different products at them or them using you in different ways. For the people out there that may be taking some webinars or some basic online events within their b2b sort of marketing strategy.  Do you have some case studies that they can get inspiration from in terms of how they can use events technology to adapt to how things are going this year and are going to go in the future and potentially step up their game when it comes to digital online events in this case or hybrid?

Julius Solaris  

Totally. We work with companies such as the Atlantic, TechCrunch, Paleton, Target and all the biggest brands you can think of use Hopin to extend the level of their content marketing efforts into a more personal direction. So first mistake that I see all the time is using meeting technology to do events. So there's a difference there. Basic difference. So the tool that we're using right now to interact, oh, you know, there's multiple tools that we use every day in an office environment, I don't want to give names, because there's nothing personal against all of these great brands. But you know, a four-way, five-way meeting tool, it's a great tool for Team interaction, but it's not built to run an event. An event is a different game, especially if you're willing to reach scale. And if you run events, say, our customer Paleton, with hundreds of 1000s of attendees, you know, you cannot use meeting technology to do that. But even like at 500 attendees, even 200 attendees, you can't achieve through interaction engagement. So number one mistake is that don't assume that they're using meeting technology to do events is going to deliver on the number one issue that we have, with events, which is engagement. You got to get people to engage, you got to get people to interact, you got to get people to feel connected to what you're saying to the content and agenda you're creating otherwise is just a YouTube video. Right? What's the difference between YouTube and Hopin? It's interaction. People have the ability to get together, the ability to comment up both ask real-time questions, but also visit busy exhibitors booths, creating activations around their being connected in networking. One of the features that I love the most about Hoping is the type of roulette networking that you have, you get randomly assigned to meet someone that creates that kind of serendipity. So we've been seeing a lot of clients using it very strategically, even like matching two separate groups, to investors, and pictures for new startups, for example, you know, that's a great example of mixing and matching. But you know, there's a lot of activations is of all breed examples that we've seen on how people use our platform to create engaging experiences. So we've had people, for example, using Streamyard, and going around in the back of in person, sort of event showing the back end and like what was happening in the behind the scene, almost of the event and getting people to participate, virtually. We had people are limiting, like for example, inviting the audience to say like if you have something to say, say it now and come on stage and talk to us inviting them to a private screen yard link and be on stage doing a breakout sort of follow up session to discuss together, the issues presented. We had people doing activations, we had the National Student Pride of, for example, doing LGBTQ+ transactivation, such as, you know, drag aerobics, gender diverse cabaret, you know, transpose makeup masterclasses. We had people, for example, that disabled all the different parts of the platform to just focus on the content and just create a simple content experience for those that want to just engage with that. We had people that survey the audience before the event and actually asked, What would you like to see and then use that very survey into creating the virtual schedule for their virtual event. We are people that create, for example, premium tracks for their event with multiple tracks and make attendees pay just for one track. So they're able to monetize. We have people that immediately record all the sessions and post an on-demand video library Netflix type where you can pay on-demand to access those or you can access or repurpose those as assets for their social media, and why their marketing initiatives. So a million dollar type of case study that you can think of at the end of the day, gets down to the experience that you have.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, guys, so for you that are working in b2b and are looking at revamping or re-planning your strategy for events, Hopin also has an events Planning Toolkit on their website, which you can download. So you have the link in the description to get onto the website, but go there check out because you know, like these, if there's somebody that you can learn about event planning in today's age, they are your guys. So Julius I'm sure that you know if people want to reach out to you one to one, they can find you on LinkedIn probably as well as If you have any other platforms that you publish content that is relevant. And you'd advise people to go to shout out,

Julius Solaris  

for sure. LinkedIn Julius Solatie, at to Julius everywhere, @tojulius on Twitter, which is my go-to platform other than LinkedIn, and Instagram as well. So yeah, that's where I hang out most of the time, I'm not young enough to do Tik Tok.

Andrei Tiu  

Super. So I'm very insightful, very cool stuff. And I think we could discuss this for hours and still have a lot to go through. But I would like us to actually just me wanting to pick your brain on this. But you know, the metaverse stuff and the AR and everything is going so fast these days. And you know, NFT's are everywhere. I personally had a couple of interesting discussions with some guys that are developing this, like NFT systems for the events industry. And this is just popped up in my head now. But I'm sure that this is on your planning list for new releases and technology for the coming months. So I'm just curious, as much as you can give away. How do you see this space evolving? Like how do you see AR and VR being applied to b2b events? And maybe how soon do you see this happening? As well as do you see blockchain and NFT's playing a part in the way that events are being ticketed or, you know, integrated?

Julius Solaris  

I can't speak on behalf of the company. I'm far detached from product development or acquisitions or anything on that. So I'm sorry, I cannot give you the inside scoop on it. But like if you follow Johnny Boufarhat on Twitter, he tweets on the metaverse and he has a very, very strong opinion on it. So I would definitely invite your audience to check him out and keep an eye on his tweets because he likes to tweet very directly on these issues, and his experiences with them. But I feel you know stuff like blockchain. This is not like a trend of now. I think I covered blockchain in the use of blockchain for ticketing in 2017, for the first time, so it's been like four or five years in the making. There are companies that have been doing it for a while. It's inevitable. And I feel it's a direction that a lot of companies will take for security reasons for, you know, scalping, and all those issues that are associated with large ticketing. I think ticket masters and the likes have acquired blockchain technology companies in the past, therefore, that's not even a trend anymore. I feel it's just an evolution of where the ticketing technology is going towards, in a sense. The metaverse's an interesting topic. I agree with the founder of Meetup when he said on Twitter that meetup.com. He said on Twitter that Twitter is the 3d version of the metaverse and, you know, I agree with that. I feel that social media is already the metaverse in action. That's why the biggest social media companies in person investing in it. They see sort of the 3d version of the metaverse the interactive part of the metaverse as the next iteration of social media platforms. But I think in between those, we've experienced the first wave of what the metaverse will look like with the virtual events, revolutions that happened in the past two years or so. Because we were drawn into an online environment where we needed to interact with each other. And we were forced to do that. That's the biggest experience the world has had so far into the metaverse. So if you like that experience, that's what it's up for you in the next few years. If you didn't like it, then you got to build something to change it. I believe so. You know, it's pretty much in the making, for now, is just a buzzword. I like to reiterate what let me get you the Scott Galloway says that he actually thinks that Apple is the company that will develop the metaverse, not necessarily Facebook, it's very interesting to follow that because he's looking into patents and he says the Apple has a patent for cameras on air pods, which could really change the way we interact with our environment. So yeah, keep an eye on that. It's very exciting for the time being for me is just keeping an eye on things understanding the dynamics. There's a lot of buzzes, there's a lot of crypto bros making taking advantage of other people. Right now also in the NFT words, there are people just there for the money. I think there are concepts such as DAO, they're extremely interesting for the future of communities. So I'm keeping an eye on all of these. But until the market says we like this, you know, it's just buzz words.

Andrei Tiu  

Yep. Cool. Agree. Awesome. So as we are getting to the final of our episode, and I know you're a busy man, so your days start now and is full from now until the end. So what would be a closing note that you'd like to say now, at the end of the episode? Where would you advise our guys here that our marketing leaders are planning for 2022? How should they look at events? How could they find using the best technology? And if they don't have a lot of experience, before, where do you where would you guide them?

Julius Solaris  

So experiment. Experiment with virtual gets on with it. We have a free version of Hopin, for up to 200 people. Just get on it and use it. Streamyard is free to use, up to a certain point. So you can experiment with this stuff with no cost involved, just your time and thinking and creativity, to be strategic about what you do. That's what it takes. We're enabling experienced creators as we call them, to do whatever they want, like you never had this many tools available for free, ever. So it's the number of tools available today to create experiences or content are just incredible. So dive into those and get started with it. Don't overthink it, just get on with the action and do stuff and make mistakes. Now's the time to make mistakes. In like two years time, you won't have that luxury to make mistakes, people will have very high expectations. They would expect you to have figured it out by then. They will have their preferences, they won't be able to discount your inexperience, they're already getting nervous. With some of it, I'm seeing people that are like year three, I cannot tolerate someone to be muted on a call, come on sorted out, you know what I mean? Like you got to be alert now. So our behaviours are evolving. So experiment, make mistakes, get on with it, build the tension with virtual but remember, the only way to release the tension that you build with virtual is in person. So don't forget that meeting in person is never going to go away. The stadium they're building here in Las Vegas, the biggest banners that they're building is for gamers. For Esports. This community meets online all the time. They're building huge venues for them to meet in person, meaning that the more you meet online, the more you want to meet in person. So that correlation, it's incredibly powerful if you know how to use it.

Andrei Tiu  

Love it. Awesome. Julius, this was a great pleasure. I'm super happy that you were able and happy to join us today. I think it was very valuable. And this is also the first time ever in our podcasts when we touch on events and events technology. So it's a premier. And I'm happy to have had that with somebody like you. Great pleasure. Thank you for the time. Guys, feel free to go and check out Julius's platforms, you have the links in the description of the episode. Make sure to check Hopin as well and download their free events Planning Toolkit. And until next time, Julius, thank you for being on the show again, wishing you all the very best. Rock it this year, and I'm looking forward to following your journey as well.

Julius Solaris  

Thank you so much for having me. Let's crush it.

Andrei Tiu  

Yes. Thank you speak soon!

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Igor Fedenkoff, as they will be discussing influencer marketing insights from 2021, trends for 2022, as well as how to best integrate this channel in your overall 2022 digital marketing strategy. Igor is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of brybe.com, a platform for remote professionals and social media influencers looking for brand collaborations.

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Episode transcript: 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi, guys! This is Andrei, and you're on a brand new episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Welcome to a new season! Our special guest today is Igor, a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of brybe.com, a platform for remote professionals and social media influencers looking for brand collaborations. Today, we'll discuss influencer marketing insights from 2021, trends for 2022, as well as how to best integrate this channel in your overall 2022 digital marketing strategy. So without further ado, Igor, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. Welcome to a new year, how is January been treating you so far? How's everything going?

Igor Fedenkoff  

Thank you so much for having me, Andrei, is definitely a pleasure. This has been a very, very fast start of the year because we are, as a company pursuing, some new avenues of the business. So the developers are hating me already, because they just got out of you know, the partying mode, but you gotta do what you got to do. This is going to be a great year for the industry. This is a great year for the company. Definitely excited about it.

Andrei Tiu  

Exciting! So what have you been guys doing? Or do you mention new avenues? First of all, if you want to present yourself a bit to our listeners, so they know a bit about your background, as well as what brybe.com does. And what are you guys preparing for this month or this year?

Igor Fedenkoff  

Absolutely. I am the co-founder, part of the four guys that co-founded Brybe two and a half years ago. And this company originally was a pet project, actually. I was working for a different company, I was a CMO for a technology company. And for their marketing efforts, which subsequently we were able to bring him out like 10x, I think almost, we ran a few influencer campaigns very quickly realise that a lot of platforms on the market weren't really serving the purpose of what we had to do. So we started building our own inventory of influencers. And I have a hospitality background is to the club in Los Angeles. So definitely dove into our regular warm network and got a lot of people that when you were to promote the company. It was very, very productive, really cool. So the database has grown over time. And then with additional investment, we sort of came up with an MVP, basically, as a side project. That started enjoying really good organic growth. And when the pandemic - I mean, obviously, for a lot of industries, it has been not the best development - but when anything online, including influencer marketing and freelancer markets, this has been quite an amazing, you know, change in opportunities and systems and platforms. So we were fortunate enough to receive router investments, proceeded with the developments. And basically, last year has been the year of us working on both verticals: on the freelancer vertical on the influence of vertical, gain ourselves positioned in the market. The company name, obviously, it's kind of catchy, so it's becoming quite recognisable in the space. Obviously, we're not up there with the large and huge behemoths of the industries. But I think the cool thing about that is that as a startup, we are able to very quickly change direction or adjust to different situations. I think the paradigm of influencer marketing has experienced a really big shift right now. On so many things that we'll probably get into a little bit later in this conversation, but a company or a provider of the service or the brand that is using influencer marketing that's capable to stay on the cutting edge of everything that's happening is going to benefit tremendously from everything that's going on.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, and what are you guys is up to now? Because you mentioned you avenues so you used last year to establish yourself on both of these fees of users. And now?

Igor Fedenkoff  

Yeah, one of the biggest developments that we are looking to do is adding another group of users to the platform. The original aspiration for Brybe was to be a true marketplace. I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of the bazaar. So basically, that's what we're doing. We're trying to build a digital bazaar that will help the end-user which in most cases, buyers or individual verses of the services to find almost everything that they need. So the missing link was the educators and the coaches. As you know, at this particular time, there are a lot of coaches a lot of people that share their expertise, and an even higher and faster-growing audience of people that would like to get that knowledge and get it fast and get it communicated to them. So we are adding new coaches to the platform, we will be able to offer their courses for sale from the platform and as the user, you will be able to go on to Brybe, learn more about some conceptual enterprise that you're looking into then have freelancers - basically create your digital assets and then influencers, promote your company or promote your idea. And all of that is with an incredibly large quantity of professionals that are offering their services at very, very competitive rates. So what the previous year has shown to us is that the freelance industry and especially the influencer industry is shifting into the providers that are called the smaller ones, like the Nano influencers, the micro-influencers, the smaller, less-known providers of the new services like NFT's or crypto blockchain technology. Yet, on the same level with your regular logo design, and website design, all those small providers now can find a tremendous amount of jobs because even the large enterprise has shifted to getting more and more and more work, because it's a lot easier to work with, it's a lot more competitive pricing etc. But we should not forget that the most underserved group in this particular space right now are small businesses. Because they're used to doing everything by themselves. I am a small business owner back in the day, I remember, I used to do anything from plumbing to electrical to website design to promotion. But now they must realise that they have the plethora of talent that is available through platforms like Brybe, like any of our competitors, to get a lot of that stuff done from by somebody with expertise, for a lot less headache, and for a very, very, very competitive rate. What we have done, from the very beginning is focused on small to medium-sized businesses, as well as small to medium-sized providers. And I think this is the wave that a lot of larger companies are focused on large enterprises and missing. But also, it's incredibly important to make them realise that they are supported by platforms like ours. And they can actually sell their services as well as have their services bought.

Andrei Tiu  

One question here, because you mentioned creating a bazaar for virtual people that need all these areas of service. And there was a question popping into my head, I'm curious whether you guys are looking at integrating that within the platform at any point in the future? And that could be something to the likes of affiliate marketing or you know, having people that are integrating this form of payment as well, apart from just like purchasing courses, but actually having somebody that produces something with people on the platform, being able to promote via the people in the platform, which are influencers and maybe pay a commission. So that side of the business.

Igor Fedenkoff  

Now, absolutely, this is a great question, because this is something that we actually have been doing from the very beginning. Along with developing the platform itself, we have built a separate engine that is called Brybe affiliates, which is an affiliate platform. And originally, it existed apart, these two were completed two different things that serve different purposes. But we have created an integration now because we're coming out with these e-commerce solutions. And we're coming out with some different levels of subscription for enterprise buyers. So this will come incredibly handy. Plus, I think, affiliate marketing, to some is the unknown, and to some is, you know, the gold rush over the past 12 years. I think, again, we're getting back to the shift and general paradigm of how you build your business, how you promote your business. And you can invest millions and millions of dollars in Google ads or run TV ads etc. Or you can turn to the online community. Somebody that, as you said, is already present on our platform, or and the affiliates they're all over the world always looking for new opportunities. We actually will be presenting some of the stuff that I cannot tell you about right now but we will be presenting it at the Affiliate World Expo in Dubai in March of this year. So stakeholders maybe you can do a follow up with that because we're coming up with some really crazy stuff. It all boils down to just the simple thing. Thank you for asking that question, but I feel it's there to promote the services that we are using, we will be using them. Definitely, definitely.

Andrei Tiu  

So in terms of the markets, where are you focusing at the moment? I mean, what do you feel is the biggest rush when it comes to you know, we can talk about all of them so influencers, freelancers as well, small businesses, obviously, they're everywhere. But where do you feel is the biggest opportunity now for brands to collaborate with influencers and see results.

Igor Fedenkoff  

I think the biggest opportunity, just like I mentioned, is the micro-markets, the micro providers, and there are many different reasons that are completely transparent and very well understood and have been understood. However, the whole concept of influencer marketing still, a lot of times rotates around big names like the Kardashians or Lionel Messi or you know, Antonio Banderas, Jordans. And that's why it creates an entry barrier for smaller businesses or smaller influencers to promote their services. This has been our bread and butter from the get-go, but even if you look at the stats, a lot of companies already released the stats for last year. So micro-influencer business has grown by LIKE 2% share of the general influencer side. So this is actually, it may sound not very significant, but it's a huge huge improvement because the brands are now realising that segmented promotion when you use maybe geocentric or industry-centric groups of micro/nano influencers that have a much higher engagement, as our average engagement rate, is between 4 to 8%. We have nano influencers on our platform, which was like a 12 to 14% engagement rate. And that, compared to 0.8, 0.5 engagement rate over regular megastar. That already tells you what kind of how your message is going to be seen and consumed. Whether you pay the same amount of money that you would spend on one post to the megastar. Or you can run a six-month long campaign with a group of nano influences, which is basically bound to have a much bigger effect on your bottom line, on your return on ad spend. As opposed to running, like just one big and very expensive pose.

Andrei Tiu  

I love that you brought this up because actually, this has been a discussion that we've been carrying, from the agency side with all of our clients really, when trying to draw these comparisons between: is it worth investing let's say 10k dollars, or euros into a partnership that can provide you with maybe like a blog post and an on feed post on Instagram, or somebody super popular that has 5 million followers that are or are not following their content actively and being engaged with that content, and maybe just follow them because they're popular, so everybody follows them. But rather than investing the 10k in, I say six or maybe not six, but three months, campaigns with smaller influencers, that have targeted communities that actually follow them because they have a word to say in that niche. And of course, they can provide better engagement and better brand recall, as you run with more at the same time and have longer-term collaborations. And another thing that we discovered and our clients were able to use very well and I'm curious to see whether this was on your side as well as the same feedback or you will notice the same interaction through the platform in the data that you're capturing, that collaborations with smaller influencers were actually able to provide much better quality assets to be potentially reused in social media, for example, or in a content marketing strategy. And at a higher volume, than maybe, you know, having one blog post that can provide maybe one backlink of higher domain authority, but all right, and then maybe one picture. What have you seen from the other side? So from the data, from the platform front?

Igor Fedenkoff  

You are 100% correct. And actually, not even on the data side, there is an additional development that is taking place towards the word taking place at the end of last year now going into this year. On the legal side, if you look at any kind of agreement, I'm sure you've seen this side of things. Whenever you have a UGC, user-generated content, most of the time the purchaser retains all the rights or they try to build their contracts the way that all the rights are retained. The Creator, just created. And that's it, they're done. The general tendency right now, exactly for the reasons that you mentioned, is because a lot of smaller influencers create, they care more. They create their brand, they're actually building, what is becoming their brand. So two things influences actually becoming brands as opposed to just promoters or ambassadors. But at the same time, there is a general motion to bring in new clauses into these contracts where the use of user-generated content will have that brand or that creator, at least cited for the creation. And I think the similar thing, there's a lot of talk about NFCs, NFS s and everything else. If a lot of that content, even if it's bought as an NFT, and owned completely and entirely by somebody else that underlies my contract actually includes the reference to the creator. So we're seeing exactly the same thing. We actually are finishing up building what's called Brybe Academy, which is going to have several different levels of educational programmes for influencers or freelancers of the brands or anybody else who participates on the platform. A lot of stuff there includes information about what to expect because it's no longer about ROI. ROI and influencer marketing is incredibly hard to calculate. And if anybody tells you they can do it, or they can improve, it's probably marketing talk, not financial talk. Return on ad spend is a lot more down to earth number that you can actually see and figure out for what you're spending on a campaign, your return on ad spend will depend on how impactful the message is. And the message is no longer is mostly impactful because of the name of the influencer, it's also incredibly impactful by the quality of the content that is created. And these guys, they now realise that there is a huge competition out there. And they come up with methods of photography or video creation, or a very original presentation of the products that highly paid marketing teams of large enterprises are still unable to come up with because they're not in the space fully. So the influencers that we're talking about, and freelancers that, you know, just the creators of digital assets, they're out there, they're actually a few steps ahead in the technology that's coming out or in the news that are coming out the colour palettes, the behavioural factors of the audiences, they learn things that before used to be only privy to, like highly analytical departments that ran you know, presentations and the pie charts and whatever. Now regular influencer is completely holding their hand on the pulse of the industry and the developments because this is how they stay alive. This is how they build their brand. And ultimately, this is how they earn their living.

Andrei Tiu  

And in terms of the platforms now, because you mentioned there's something that was very important, which is, you know, them being the brands. So then, you know, earning a living by the fact that they are in tune with everything that's moving and being able to produce high quality, high end, modern content. What have you seen in terms of platforms? So we have all seen Tik Tok increasing quite a lot and influencers on Tik Tok from our experience with the agency and clients that we work with, tend many times to become more expensive to work with. It's not a general rule. But we encountered this a couple of times. Maybe because on Tik Tok, the organic reach can be higher if the content is good, as opposed to Instagram maybe in general, since the algorithm is working a bit more productively when it comes to organic content. So to sum it up, what's the trend that you're seeing on the platform and with the influencers that we're onboarding in terms of their reach, where they are building their brands? What they're advertising what types of accounts like they used to visit Tik Tok? Is it Instagram still?

Igor Fedenkoff  

I think anybody who is getting into this on either side should still have representation across the board or at least across the major platforms. As you know, the whole buzz of last year is that Tik Tok went to 13% market share, so they beat Google YouTube's 10% market share. Instagram is still holding, like 94% market share in providers in general, users and user-generated stuff. And very closely behind is Facebook which everybody already buried and said that it's dead. No, it's not. Trust me, it's completely not dead. It's just you need to know why and how to use all of these engines because, for a company, it gives you a well developed, well-rounded marketing campaign that addresses different sides for you one because even if you produce a product, you can still sell it to multiple different markets, right? One of my favourite case studies was Dollar Shave Club. They just went Instagram, all in subscription razors really cool the visuals. Nothing was working. Then what they did, they redirected their targeting from just men that need to shave to mothers, girlfriends, wives and sisters. Basically say, hey, no more ties, no more books, no more belts, no more socks, your guy really needs a razor, which is always sharp, and you know, it gives some groomed. And you'll need a well-groomed man. So here's your present. Their sales blew up. And this is a subscription-based company. What they did, they ran a Facebook campaign that addressed a more mature audience with more textual information with more case studies, more applications, then they ran an Instagram and the reels campaign, which basically addressed quick, flashy, hey, this is cool, really perceptive advertising. So this is another great example. Then as you can see, over the past three years, the shift went from graphic to video, right. And one of the biggest things that we're noticing right now is that obviously this is called Tik Tok when completely gone around the world because it's a short video, people are becoming more and more like goldfish, so they need, you know, the information right there. And then you can just digest and get hit with it and try not to forget it. But realistically, what we're seeing is still, as a Tik Tok influencer, you now have, obviously an opportunity to run much fresher, cast a wider net for following and run a more impactful message if you're trying to influence the following. But at the same time, for any platforms or any businesses that are trying to work with such influences, A, little tough to reach. B, if you work with agencies, then you're looking at, you know, lengthy negotiation as larger rates. Tik Tok itself has been completely prohibitive of integration with other platforms. So a lot of my colleagues in the space find that it's still almost impossible to tie the Tik Tok to your own API. So what is happening is because Tik Tok has, you know, rolled out their own suite of services where the influencers can run their influencer campaigns. Which is phenomenal, because that validates the whole existence of this space. Because the larger companies like obviously, Tik Tok or Instagram have their own developer suite now, digital creator suite. So all of these companies, all of these platforms are giving you more and more tools to run both sides as a brand or as a buyer of the service to identify who and how you want to work with. But then this is where, you know, we come in, because there's that disconnect. And for the providers of the service to give a larger scope or larger package of services where they can run the video on Tik Tok, where they can run textual stuff on Facebook, where they can run real-life stories on Instagram etc. So use them the opportunity to give to provide more service to earn obviously higher profit on that. And for brands, again, for the same money, you run a much, much more effective campaign like if you were to do it otherwise was just one channel like ads on TV etc.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, and now talking about API's and integrations. Let's talk a bit about tracking. The marketing managers out there that you know, maybe are trying to integrate influencer marketing, but they are concerned with tracking performance or justifying budgets. How are you guys tackling this aspect, this subject? Are you tapping straight into the platform and getting insights from there? Do you have any types of integrations with or feedback loops with influencers? Do you have a workflow management system integrated within Brybe? How are campaigns being tracked?

Igor Fedenkoff  

Well, there are actually a few different things that are happening. Again, the business model of Brybe is very different from your regular influencer marketing platform. Because that's not what we are. We are a live two-sided marketplace. But what we do we run integrations with third-party providers like Hypeauditor, for instance. A phenomenal company, they basically lead right now on Instagram stats in the market. And with their reports, our buyers are able to A) track the efficiencies and the, you know, eliminate the fraud with influences that went before we're working with them. Then while they run the campaigns, there are companies like Q Mocha, which are insane! Like, we'll spend years building something like this, and it's readily available. What these guys have created is an analytical approach to any kind of post, they analyse the post on what's in it, what colours when it was posted, how many people are in it, what facial expressions, they go so deep. And these are the tools that now are at the fingertips of anybody who is ordering such services. What we do, and like I said, we collaborate with providers of analytical stuff like that, because our main goal is to create a platform that facilitates the communications between the buyers and the sellers allows them to control the flow of funds. And by that, we actually lower the amount of fraud that can potentially happen. The promises are fulfilled. And at the same time in that communicative process, they're able to use the third party applications where they would actually kind of check on both of each other, and the impact of the platforms and track the statistics. And most importantly, as I mentioned before, figure out their return on ad spend. Which is incredibly important. For anyone who is especially doing it on a budget.

Andrei Tiu  

Um, can you please repeat the name of the platform that you mentioned? The one with that is analysing the colours and everything within the image? How do you spell the name?

Igor Fedenkoff  

Q letter Q Mocha like, like a coffee drink.

Andrei Tiu  

QMocha. Okay. Nice. So we can all have a lookup there. See what they do. Thank you for the tip.

Igor Fedenkoff  

Yeah, absolutely.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, um, so in terms of now going towards the bigger picture from last year. So looking back. From our discussion so far, it seems that the trend of collaborating more with micro-influencers, nano influencers and brands considering them more and more, as viable opportunities for them to tap into the channel is a continuous trend. Right? Then what else? Oh, what other data trends have you identified? Is there anything to do with the growth of budgets that are being allocated to the channel or range of industries, maybe that can start to consider this channel? Since before it was more towards direct, I mean, directly towards maybe commerce or lifestyle brands? Are you seeing an expansion there?

Igor Fedenkoff  

The expansion goes actually into the industry that is not mentioned, like I said, not very glamorous. But the rise of nano and micro-influencers in very, very different categories, has given the rise to orders from the companies that never thought they could use stuff like that. For instance, I've mentioned this in the previous discussion with another professional like yourself. It's really funny, we traced a rise in one of our categories, which is animal husbandry. And they use it as a case because not a lot of people even know what it is. I didn't know what it was and why the hell we had it on the platform in the first place. But there was one representative back in the day, one influencer that actually specialised in that so we added the category. And we've seen the growth because not only it's an obviously huge industry, especially in the United States, especially those southern states where there's, you know, a lot of cattle, but there is a huge satellite industry that comes with it. Technological appliances, belts, the construction stuff, anything that has to do with you know, animals making babies and certain surrounding industries. It's incredibly, incredibly large. So that was the industry that stayed to very, very niche marketing through just low call newsletters, pharma digest etc. Now, they're able to use influencer marketing, and a lot of freelancers on the digital side to create assets and to actually run campaigns that are geocentric to, you know, their area of expertise or their area of influence, which runs excusing impactful campaigns at the end. So the general trend right now is that, thanks to COVID, and you know, people are gonna hate me for saying that, but everything has changed. And online is some ephemeral space that used to be used, you know, for just jokes and information by a certain amount of people. Now, 98% of people around the world are online for their needs that they never used to have. Medicine delivery, food delivery, any kind of Uber-style services, and obviously more and more business online. So coming to your original question, sorry, for my own deviation. One, definitely huge trend is that more businesses, apart from your regular beauty, lifestyle, sports, and travel, which are dominating basically the influence marketing, the rest of 340 categories that for instance, we have on bread, actually, are seeing, and whether it's incremental, larger rise over the past year and going into 2022. There are more and more like I said, micro and nano influencers that are using the services of platforms like ours, because they're no longer at, you know, number 10, or number 100 page of search. They're able to be upfront right there because now the filtering and the search is a lot more detailed. So by speciality, not only by your followers, by speciality, by geo, by what you do by how you do it. And the filters are becoming more detailed, the industries are becoming wider. And the span of the influence done by these professionals is obviously becoming much, much wider.

Andrei Tiu  

What about the budgets? Obviously, each influencer has their own fees, which I guess on your platform to our you know, showcase, and then there might be some room for negotiation. But when you are looking at us campaigns that you saw were successful, or maybe you received feedback from super happy clients that had you know, maybe their first campaign is the first more integrated campaign and worked well. In 2021, what were the average budget or the minimum and the average budgets that were invested into influencer marketing collaborations?

Igor Fedenkoff  

We are looking at actually your general almost classically standard rate on the microsite. Some even of the larger and more impactful spending was done with teams of nano influencers and micro-influencers. And average, per service, average ranges at about, you know, 200 to $220. So you're looking at either a live post or a story post or two to post with somebody who has more than 10,000 followers. Now, we have run, obviously on multiple network campaigns. So for that, we educate our influencers to price themselves not based just on the following but actually based on your potential return on ad spend that you can offer to the company. And mind you again, we are not an agency. So we facilitate that need but we also offer a lot of educational information and a lot of tips along the way. So if an influencer has about you know, 5000 followers, and they're offering their services for 500 to $900. We do give them a little notice, you are free to post that, but you probably are not going to get as much attention because you should be probably within the 180 to 220 range. So the budgets, well, this will be the pricing. And the cool thing about that from like Brybe is that the professionals can actually post preset packages. Like I do the post for 50 bucks, I do the post and a story for 200 bucks. I'll do a week-long campaign you know for 500 bucks. And then when a company or a buyer comes in, they can just click on that and get going. Or if they want an individualised negotiation then they could get to that. On the side of the brands and the buyers, we've seen actually a huge step. The companies that ran the most impactful campaigns last year, were smaller companies, with a budget of about five to $10,000. But they were able to build campaigns. Like I said, with multiple influencers and multiple freelancers. So they created a really, really cool impact. We had companies that basically the largest campaign for last year was for approximately half a mile. And that was a larger marketplace. We have developed really cool relationships with some of the talent agencies in the US and across the world, that allows us to showcase their mega-stars on Brybe. So they're not self-registered, they're being showcased. And any brand collaborations that come to them from Brybe, we basically facilitate those. But the cool thing is, we're not going to sit, you know, and pray for the fact that Messi or Ronaldo or Penelope Cruz or Antonio Banderas will come to Brybe, self-register and start looking for campaigns, that's never gonna happen. We have all of them on Brybe, represented through their companies. So the marketplace that I mentioned, came to us having been exposed to mega celebs, their presence on the platform. What actually subsequently happened is that budget went into the medium to micro size, segmented campaigns that were run for a couple of months. And they couldn't be happier. Because like I said, they didn't get the exposure of the larger name through us, they actually were able to get it through a direct agency collaboration with somebody else. But they ran incredibly important, impactful social media marketing campaigns that they actually shared, I cannot share the numbers, but they shared with us that they could trace an increase in geo sales in those particular geographic areas where they ran those segmented ads. And for us, that was just like, you know, finally, what we've been talking about makes sense. So we are in negotiations with this company to run another set of campaigns this coming spring. It's a marketplace, so they do a lot of fashion stuff.

Andrei Tiu  

So I love it when I hear these types of success stories, because, you know, you guys are one of the younger companies in the space. And as you mentioned, two to three years, so it's amazing to see such fast growth and, you know, showcasing your value proposition to the world. So big up for that. So, in terms of the smaller influencers, it just popped into my head now a discussion that I had with, they were more like an influencer agency. But they had this issue that was brought forward by some of their independent small influencers or nano influencers. And when these nano influencers were trying to establish collaborations with bigger companies, or like with companies in general, there was this barrier, where it's more like a legal thing, but I'm just curious how you guys tackle this. They needed to, obviously invoice for the services. So they had to create a company and then you know, tackle the tax or, you know, be a freelancer and then again, tackled the tax, but what if some of them just want you to do it as a side hustle? And you know, just have it there? Maybe one campaign once in a while, but not leave out of their influencer career, let's say. How are these transactions through Brybe for example? Can anybody go as an influencer and start collaborating, and you guys help them with tax? Or do they still have to do it themselves? And similarly, from the brand's point of view, you know, invoices and these types of things.

Igor Fedenkoff  

There are a few things that I would like to mention because - thank you for bringing this up, this is incredibly important, especially for nano and micro-influencers that are new to the industry. One of the first things that I want to mention is whenever you get into a car, and you don't know how to drive, chances are things are not going to go the right way. By the same token, if you want to even just kick into the freelancing In industry or influencing industry, you must know what you can and cannot do. How do you do it? First, read the terms and conditions of any platform you're on. They are by the law of their geographical location, they're required to disclose certain things that a lot of them are pertinent to the legal or financial side of things. Like we are a US-based company. So our terms and conditions are longer than usual because they need to include a lot of exceptions, a lot of exemptions. A lot of privacy aspects, as you know, the state of California has their own privacy law, which goes around the world. So read the terms! Don't just check off the thing and like I've read the terms and let's go, let's earn millions. Read. Second, I highly advise finding sources of information that are credible, again, that is related to your legal and your financial rights. In our particular case, we collaborate with Robert Fronts. And I can give you the information later. He is probably the only attorney in the United States, they have put together an educational course for influencers, which gets them probably 90% of everything that they need to know about the legal side of things in the influencer marketing industry. Studying FTC regulations and explaining what they can/cannot do, what they can/cannot claim. What kind of hashtags they can and cannot use. How they can be prosecuted. For instance, in the US, before she did something wrong, the advertising penalty was you know, a couple of $100 Right now it's 46,000 per occasion. So if you're an influencer that ran a campaign, and earn your, you know, 200, 300 bucks, but then you got caught by FTC, and now you're looking at a $46,000 fine, you need to understand where exactly you're sitting in that particular case. So I'm not trying to scare anybody but as I said, this industry is becoming more and more validated for two main reasons. A) large players in Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok. B) the government is getting into the industry like the FTC now has regulations for influencers in the ads etc. And I'm sure companies in international markets are facing the same thing. So it's becoming an officially regulated industry. And while you get into it, you are responsible for knowing what your rights are, or what your responsibilities are. On our side as a platform, we are a double-sided marketplace, we facilitate but we don't create them. So we provide as much information as we can, regarding our geographical location, and as much as we can about GDPR and European regulations for people to know what they're responsible for. As a facilitator, we don't take control of that sale, the sale happens between the buyer and the seller. So they're responsible to know their rights and we provide as much information as we can possibly do. 

Andrei Tiu  

Super useful. So you guys, listen to this. And maybe considering or already doing influencer marketing and wanting to get serious, we did make sure that you know, the regulations of the countries of where your clients or the companies that you work with are within, and also of course of your own, which hopefully, you shouldn't be already having down. Okay, so, Igor, as a sort of a closing note, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the trends for this year. You mentioned NFT's and you know, this is a hot subject is something that we've been discussing quite a lot like in the past two to three months, basically since the metaverse announcement from Meta so Facebook. What's your take on that? What are you what's your take on the industry as a whole? Do you have some highlights that you want to bring forward?

Igor Fedenkoff  

The general trends are actually very obvious even if you look at any kind of influencer campaigns that are run by larger companies or smaller campaigns. As a general topic of our conversation right now, obviously, the rise of the micro and nano influencers should be considered by the buyers and by themselves, because they are becoming a much larger driving force of the space and that's on both sides in finance and freelancer because we work with both. Obviously, the rise of the video that's going to continue the message that is the most impactful right now has to be not only informative but extremely vivid. And there are many companies that run research on that. A lot of influencer platforms come up with their yearly reports, influencer marketing hub is a great resource if you want to look into that. I know that a lot of companies, I think we will be seeing trends of a larger enterprise doing two things. What they do is they use influencers on a smaller scale on their geographical location. So let's say New Balance has a location in Boston, and they will run micro, nano influencer campaigns for Massachusetts or for the Boston area, for their issues in their stores. So it's not going to be a nationwide campaign, not just doing it segmented. But simultaneously, I think there's the rise of the ambassador programmes, a lot of companies, instead of just using agencies or using platforms, create an opportunity for the influencers to come to them and become their ambassador, as long as they measure certain criteria. Which, you know, it takes business from companies like mine, on one side, but on the other side, yet again, a lot of influencers, a lot of professionals that are trying to get into Ambassador programmes, they may or may not get it to them, but don't just focus on one thing. Use many different avenues where you can, you know, send your message to a much wider audience. There's definitely a huge trend, I think, is a universal message. I don't know if you're covering that in your interviews, but it's no longer a gimmick, it's no longer a political statement. It's no longer anything but an acceptable way of marketing. So the universal message was potential, gender-neutral message in many industries is becoming more of a staple rather than something brand new. I think this is definitely one of the things that we're seeing, majorly transforming the creative industry. And I think there's a trend, which originally influencer marketing and Freelancer industries came into existence to remove the rigid HR based departments and employments. But, now on a different spin of this evolution, we are seeing influencer marketing going from individual to the group. So companies are using groups of like multi influencer campaigns as opposed to just one. So now you're in a way the companies are hiring the teams of influencers. And this is where the agencies come in because they definitely want to monetize on that. And there's a general tendency of enjoying working with somebody. And walking away from using many different people for different campaigns, but to do repeated orders, either on the Freelancer site or influencer side. So good and bad, because if it is repeated campaigns with the same team over the same providers, this is cool, because it's going to be to have the same impact, hopefully, with smaller depreciation over time. But that also, we were laughing about this at the office, because we have created all of this, to go back to contractual employments and to repeat it orders to somebody being constantly employed with a company. So I think this is a trend that is happening. But I think both the business well, all three of the businesses, the influencers, and the agencies, slash platforms, should adapt to this particular situation and actually create business practices that will help them to exist, but at the same time to bring, I think this idea, this concept, to a little bit of a different level, so that it doesn't go back to Brick and Mortar and departments and cubes. But it stays on the freedom of expression and freedom of creativity, but on a different business model than it used to be 20 years ago. So I think these are the main trends that we'll be seeing this year.

Andrei Tiu  

Very insightful. I really loved our chat today. What I particularly liked about it was that it was very pragmatic. And I think it was very information-rich for everybody that is on either side of the fence, to say so. So you know, professionals as well as companies, agencies, marketing managers. Igor, thank you so much for being on The Show today. Thank you for helping us have an amazing start to the new podcast season this winter. And for you guys tuning in today, thank you for sticking around to the end. Thank you for joining us and for being with us for you know, so long. As always, if you have any feedback or any questions, feel free to reach out to us. If you're watching this on YouTube, comment below and let us know your thoughts. Igor, if people have questions, or they want to get in touch with you personally for you know, business avenues that you could explore or other types of collaborations? Where can they best get in touch with you?

Igor Fedenkoff  

The easiest way would probably be LinkedIn. My name spelling is in the description of this podcast. So find me on LinkedIn, I can't promise that I'll answer right away. But I do my best in trying to answer all the messages that are coming my way that are not, you know, marketing spam. And for Brybe, obviously, just go to brybe.com. And check us out. It's a free platform. Play around with it.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. So you guys would have the links in the description of this episode as well. Check these guys out. They're doing a great job as Igor was talking us through the story as well. Igor, until next time, wishing you guys all the best of success, looking forward to news in March when you are going to Dubai and who knows maybe we'll organise another session to debrief that, as well as potentially talk about some other subjects that we didn't have the chance to discuss so much. And I think it'd be a nice explorative conversation such as NFT's licencing, creative arts and, you know, more of the fancy stuff in the news nowadays. 

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Oliver Feakins, as they will be discussing marketing strategies and tactics for scaling tech startups in 2022 and beyond. Oliver is the founder of Trusted Search Marketing and TrackFive, an online technology company that builds and manages intuitive web platforms where employers and talent meet.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐎𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫:  

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://trustedsearchmarketing.com/ 

𝑂𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverfeakins/  

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected]

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

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Episode transcript: 

Andrei Tiu  

Hi there, this is Andrei and you are on the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Oliver Feakins, the founder of Trusted Search Marketing and TrackFive, an online technology company that builds and manages intuitive web platforms where employers and talent meet. Today we discuss marketing strategies and tactics for scaling tech startups in 2022 and beyond. So without further ado, Oliver, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? How's your morning going? Because you are login-in from America, right?

Oliver Feakins  

That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So my morning just getting started and your day is just about the end, right?

Andrei Tiu  

Yes.

Oliver Feakins  

Great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Andrei Tiu  

It's a pleasure, pleasure, really looking forward to discussing today. I think it's going to be a very dynamic and interesting discussion. It's always nice to share thoughts with a fellow entrepreneur. You have even more experience because you found it more businesses during the past almost 20-ish years, right?

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah. 20 years. I started my first business when I was 14 years old. So yeah.

Andrei Tiu  

Wow! Okay, let's talk a bit about that one, maybe as a as a warm up.

Oliver Feakins  

An appetiser, right? So, yeah. So, um, you know, first off, I come from a family of entrepreneurs, but while mainly my father, right, so I'm actually as a sound here before the show, I was actually born in England, in Southampton, and, you know, grew up in London and Southampton and my father was in the Royal Navy, but he turned into an entrepreneur. While he was in the Navy, he opened up a catering company while he was stationed, you know, in the UK, and then he was stationed in Portugal and he opened up another catering company, he ended up selling it, making some money while he was enlisted, left the military and parlayed that money into other startups. So I got to watch the entrepreneurial process over and over and over again. My father was a somebody that really likes to manage companies. He was the entrepreneurs entrepreneur, he liked to get in scale, a company and exit, which is what a lot of entrepreneurs like to do. And by the way, for your entrepreneurial audience, like that's an important skill to recognise, right? Like, if there's a difference between starting a company and managing a company. They are not the same thing. Those two job descriptions and responsibilities are not interchangeable. They're two different things right? So you have to be able to reskill, refocus for both of those things. But anyway, you see my father do it and work tirelessly and work really hard. I was able to kind of get in to do a similar thing. So at 14 years old I was a DJ, like kids birthday parties and stuff like that, you know, and I worked for a company at 14, and they went out of business, and they were selling, they had like 17 different, you know, vehicles and DJ equipment sets. And they were like, they just wanted to get rid of it. So for like, 3000 US dollars, they were selling a van, all the music and all the DJ equipments and lights, everything you would need to get started, including the vehicle for $3,000 is a great deal. 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice!

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah. So I basically wrote a business plan to my dad and said, look: I and my friend would like to do this. His dad is going to put in $1,500, I want you to put in $1,500 and here's how we're going to make this successful. So at 14 I couldn't even drive the vehicle. And, you know, I, you know, I started working on that right and grew up once I hit 16, you know, really scaled it up. I remember coming home from school and going to my dad's office, and one of our biggest markets was school dances, so looking to get the school. So, you know, I had to go sell this. So I would literally spend all night on the internet, like basically copying all the fax numbers, because this was 20 years ago.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah!

Oliver Feakins  

Of all the high schools and schools all across Pennsylvania. And I would like 1000s of fax numbers, and I would make a flyer, and I would literally one by one stay till 11 o'clock at night at my dad's office faxing these to, you know, attention to school dance manager, you know, and sending the flyer and you know, all day long, I was hustling it for 14, 15, 16. And I would get like one or two contracts for you know, the years worth of school dances from each one of these schools that came through. And I wrote that business all through school, through college and it really taught me how to grind and hustle. You know, my father gave me a really good piece of advice. He is a consummate salesperson. So he used to tell me, nothing happens 'till you sell something. And I lived those words to this day. And I've seen so many entrepreneurs silo themselves into specific things, whether it be: "We have to have the best product", "We have to have the biggest sales, we have to do this, this, this". And a big mistake of entrepreneurs is not really looking at this as a holistic, you know, a combination of things that have to execute at the same time. So that gave me that sense of hustle, it showed me kind of how to set this up. And you know, I went to go work for some tech companies and some large tech companies and then when I was about 21 years old, you know, I hadn't even finished college and I dropped out of college to work. And I ended up starting my own company scaling that company pretty well going back and finishing college. And then, you know, scaling other companies up as well. So I don't really know what it's like to work in my adult life for a company, I've always been an entrepreneur, so I don't think I could have it any other way.

Andrei Tiu  

That's fun and also, as you're saying, grind the hustle. But I guess during your high school, you were probably a bit of a rock star with the music business. No?

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, it's funny, right? Like, you know, and it's fun, but I always tell people, like, you know, I've coached a couple of people through the entrepreneurial process. And, you know, sometimes I just, A. People give up too easy and B. I think that people underestimate the amount of time and sacrifice it takes to launch a successful business. You know, I wasn't going to parties, I was DJing them right, and getting paid, I was going and hanging out with friends, I was sitting at my dad's office, sending faxes, you know, when I launched my other companies, you know, I was coming home and you know, at 11 o'clock at night, because I was, you know, working and growing my business, because I normally did have to manage the clients and create the product. But also, with the sale, I had to do the bookkeeping, I had to do everything. So you know, the amount of sacrifice when you're at that level, and it's, it sounds like a lot of your entrepreneurs or solo operators or kind of just getting started. So I mean, that should resonate. But my advice to your listeners would be to really, you know, it is a lot of work. And the sacrifices are huge. Everybody wants to see the money and the nice cars and everything that comes when you become successful. But there's never a glimpse into what you sacrifice or how much work it took to get there. You know?

Andrei Tiu  

Mhm, Mhm. There was a nice thing. I remember I saw it, though it was probably a meme, it stayed with me. It was something like: "The value of anything is the amount of time you put into it." And I think this applies very much to just starting a business.

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. 

Andrei Tiu  

And also growing it obviously, because it's not just gonna pick up like this. So what was your next move after you, well, you went through college, and you dropped out? And what did you do?

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, so I basically, I was working for an internet company that basically, you know, it was very early was kind of like very early social media, social networking, kind of like MySpace or Facebook. But instead of one platform, the concept behind this tech company was to create a scalable platform in a specific vertical or niche or location and then create the platform to be able to duplicate these very quickly, almost with a push of a button and give access to people. So you know, if you wanted to come in and make a marketing social network, you could launch an account, launch a social network, and you could populate it, run it, it would be completely free. But then this company was able to run advertising throughout the entire platform of social network sites. And then they could target it based on demographic, you know. If, you know, they had a golf company that's selling golf clubs, for example, if there was a social network targeting older people, or you know, high-end kind of interests or hobbies, they could just run it through that. So the company was founded with a couple of million dollars. We went through that process and ended up not surviving, it didn't do well. But during that time, I met another fellow marketing friend of mine. He had a side hustle, a little bit of a side business. And he was basically an SEO he did internet marketing, like me. And basically, what he did, was recruiting nurses through a little website, basically, it was nothing more than a page or two and a form. And this is early internet, you know, 20 years ago, he was getting nurses that were applying and setting up resumes. And, you know, for travel nurse positions, you know, transit physicians, and he was basically working with one nurse staffing agency and saying: "Look, I'll send you my resumes. If you hire one of these nurses or place them at a hospital, send me $1,000." You know, so anyway, he was running this for about eight months, and he was sending hundreds of candidates to this company. And, you know, he was coming to me saying: "They haven't placed a single nurse, and my candidates must be horrible. My marketing sucks, you know, what am I gonna do?" And, you know, I said: "Man, I think you've got this all wrong. And I don't know how you can scale this, I think I could turn this into a million-dollar business." So he said: "Really? Let's, partner!" So we ended up partnering together on it and completely change the model, from a performance model to a SaaS model subscription as a service or software as a service, where people are paying monthly, and I basically called that one client said: "We're gonna stop the candidates coming through because obviously, they don't work. You haven't placed anybody in a year. We're gonna sell this to your competitors now." Well, I got a call back in five minutes from the CEO of that company saying: "Oh, there was an accounting error. We placed 25 people in the last six months." And they said: "Great, thanks for $25,000. Now you have to pay a subscription fee like everybody else." Which they did. So we ended up growing that to about a million and a half $2 million business, it still exists in our portfolio under TrackFive today, which really TrackFive, my company is really just a portfolio company, we run multiple online platforms that are basically career sites or job boards for different professions. And that's what we do. We sell them and we market them as products and sell access to them, to the companies that need the towel.

Andrei Tiu  

Just a little question here. So we, so it's clear for everybody. So basically, you guys are developing the platforms that are then sold to companies and rebranded or branded according to their company?

Oliver Feakins  

No. So we build the platform as a business, and then we operate the business. So one arm of our site is making the product, but then we're up or we're running them as a SaaS, software as a service where, you know, we make the job board, for example, and then have our company we'll go and sell it to, for example, we have a really large job board in the transportation space, the truck driving space. In America, truck driving is a massive demand right now. Very, very big demand. The UK as well. Yeah, so we have companies that will, you know, subscribe to access to our platform to post their jobs, go into a resume database, get candidates applying to them, and they'll pay 1000s of dollars per month, each one to become part of this platform and receive, you know, hundreds of qualified candidates. So, you know, not only do we build the software and iterate the software, make the software better, and grow it, but we also have to run the business side of it, which is the pricing selling, taking care of the clients, the marketing for both the users and the clients and we sell to, and all the HR legal, you know, stuff that goes in around that as well. So we're launching like, we're basically a little startup company, all we do is launch a little startup and we run them and they're each one of them does, you know, million $2 million each year. So cumulatively together, they do, you know, a decent amount of revenue for us. And then we have a team, which is dedicated to each one of these platforms. And we will grow these platforms and stack them and change them as we need to keep revenue coming in.

Andrei Tiu  

Very cool! So you basically build a model that works and then just replicate it across industries.

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah. So we built the platform. And we basically, you know, we've tight, you know, each platform is geared toward a specific profession, nursing, doctors, truck drivers, pilots, things like that. But the core framework of our proprietary software, we can duplicate or replicate, and we just have to change the way it looks, the words on the site, the database schemas for you know, how the different types of jobs relate to each other. But it's, it's a push of a button, it's very quick. So, you know, making the site is easy as scaling in and bringing in the clients and the marketing and the candidates. That's what takes a lot of time and money.

Andrei Tiu  

Sure, sure. Okay. Interesting. I'm happy that we clarified this, so people know, you know, what you are doing at the moment, which TrackFive. Now, let's go back to the story. So you were saying about the way that you sort of started out?

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, so you know, we basically, you know, I started with this one gentleman, a good friend of mine, and we started with one in nursing. And, you know, we joined together in 2007. So we basically switched the model. And it was crazy. I was 21 years old, I had no money, I was just getting, I haven't finished college, right. But I had an idea, I had a vision, and I knew that I could sell it, I knew I could market it. I knew we could get it where it needed to go. So we started launching it, we started getting really successful. And then 2008, the next year happened. And I don't know if it was the same way in the UK. But in 2008, we had the worst financial crisis in the United States we've had in decades,

Andrei Tiu  

Everybody, I think.

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, so the whole world just got poor, like for a couple of years, right. And when they and recruiting is typical. So when, when the economy goes down, and companies start laying off, they're certainly not hiring. So their need for job boards and recruitment services that we offer, put down. So we, you know, I remember losing half the business, that I just spent every waking hour of my life building, like literally in two months, you know, and we had to go through some really hard times, you know, we weren't getting paid, we were working double the amount of time, I remember calling clients and begging them saying, Look, stay, you know, we'll lower the price stay on here, we're gonna do double the work for you. But we need you to know, I needed to secure cash flow to keep the business going. You know, we had to get really good and really efficient at internet marketing, which is where we kind of started, you know, about 20 years ago. And you know, to get those costs down, we had to really take care of our clients and get them the results so they did stay during downtime. And you know, basically, we were able to grow that back up and add more job boards and add more revenue now we're about a, you know, six-seven $8 million company so, you know, we're able to kind of grow out of that and keep pushing, but it would have been really easy for me to, to fold it up and go do something else or go get a job and would have been way less stressful. But you know, like I was saying earlier that hustle that grit that grinds. And also just knowing yourself and knowing what you can do, and knowing your market convinced me to kind of put in that extra effort, stay focused, and it paid off.

Andrei Tiu  

Super super. Okay, so how were the last few years for you? Because obviously, I don't know if we are heading towards similar scenarios in 2008 or not? It looks like it by some, some indicators.

Oliver Feakins  

It sounds weird, right? Because you're right, like inflation, I don't know how it is over there. But the US has rapid inflation right now, like 30 billion. It's just, I've never seen it like this in my lifetime. And, you know, you're seeing it everywhere the gas, you know, big problem. Bacon is like double the price. You know, that's like, that's what I use.

Andrei Tiu  

It is double?

Oliver Feakins  

It's like $10 or $11. Now, to get a little thing of bacon, it used to be like four or five $6. So that's expensive. Yeah, everything's expensive. So it's, it's hitting our labour markets. So it's making labour more expensive, which is good in America because you know, people get paid more, but it doesn't equal out to the inflation, the inflation still more. And what we're seeing now is that because people are so desperate for so basically, America was asleep for the last year with COVID, right, everybody was locked down in their homes, companies went under, you couldn't even go to a restaurant, you wouldn't stay in a hotel, like certain, you know, cruises were all parked, you know, Disneyworld was shut down, like, everything was shut down. And now with the vaccines coming out, and with, you know, just in general, America is sprung open. And everybody got a lot of stimulus money throughout the, you know, they got a, you know, a couple $1,000 from the government, some also businesses here got to take advantage of what's called a PPP loan, which basically, the government came out and said, you know, if you're suffering from COVID, we're going to inject you know, X amount of money into a million dollars from the government, the company's got hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And if you can show that you were, you know, if you kept employees on and did not let them go, you got to keep the money, it was meant to be a loan, but you ended up keeping it and then even better than that, they were going to tax you on it tax, it is revenue, and then they forgave the tax as well. So it's completely free money. So you have all these, you know, business owners that were that, you know, yes, they suffered, but they were also given some help. And the whole economy has just been saving money for a year, not going out to eat not going on vacations. So once the will say America opened back up, and people were allowed out of their houses and vaccines are available, America went on a sheer spending spree, as we've never seen before. And the rest of the world hasn't really caught up, you know, like, the factories in China are still dealing with it, their backlog, you know, everything shut down, you can't just turn on the global economy really quickly. So, you know, what that's helped for us for is that you know, people are hiring, and they're hiring all the people that they let go. And on top of that, because there's extra demand, you know, we grew 20%, you know, through COVID, you know, right at once we opened up, we grew like a rocket ship. And we've been really trying to keep up with all the demand. So it's been really good for us. But it's been challenged, it's going good from a demand perspective. But it's been difficult because of the challenges related to trying to find people to work, they increase costs, and every cost has gone up for us. But thank God, that demand has gone up as well. So it's just a very challenging increasing environment to work in. And I've never seen anything like it. Oh, you just waiting over there.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah. And Europe as well. Like, I'm not very aware of the situation in China and the sort of Asian countries, but here as well, I mean, I guess it has to do a lot with the increase in gas price and everything that has to do with the energy sector. But as you said, people probably have saved a lot. Certainly, a lot of businesses have gone bankrupt during this time. And now since things have started to open a bit during the summer, now they are sort of going back into a little sort of lockdown. But I guess everybody should be a bit cautious in terms of how they direct their, first of all, how they save up money for what's coming because we don't really know. And then, of course, just spend money more cautiously, then. I have a question. This doesn't really have to do with our subject. But since we are added, how do you see you know, from you guys from America. How are things looking economically? Do you have any predictions or are you taking certain measures to ensure that you'll do well? In a scenario, if you have a scenario even better, like the one that you believe will happen? I think that will be interesting for us because I guess many of our listeners are a bit like us in the way that they have their hands deep into the business world.

Oliver Feakins  

But like its interest are like the top 1% that especially like the business owners and things like that received a lot of capital from the US government during COVID. So the people that have the most disposable income at this point have a tonne of extra money to burn. And especially, you know, right now, with business going so crazy. And the stock market going so crazy in the US. You know, the big earners have a lot of extra cash, unfortunately, you know, people on the lower rungs that don't necessarily have that disposable income, they're getting the brunt of it, right. Because the inflation's here, they're spending more there is wage increase, but it just doesn't match. So, you know, but we are seeing the demand is just so huge right now in the US, and it's gonna take years to go through this demand, they can't even sell cars right now, because they can't get parts, there's a waiting list for just about everything. It's there's so much pent up demand, you know, from the consumers in this country, that everything is going really, really well, if you own a business. But if you're trying to put food on the table, unfortunately, it's a little bit tougher. But for us, I mean, really, with the entrance of COVID. And the variance, and I feel like it's musical chairs like COVID just goes around the world that comes back again, you know, like, well, we'll do really, really good. And then you hear Germany's, like, oh, Germany is doing really good, right? Then now they're having it again, or India's doing good. And then they go to her, you know, horrible or Italy or, or England or when Buenos Aires, Argentina, wherever right? Like COVID just kind of goes down the road, but it always comes back. So we're always kind of going in these little curves where it comes down, and we let our guard down. And then four months later, we have a humongous big spike. And you know, what that does, as a business owner, I think is make it very difficult to forward plan. Planning is almost impossible long term. Because you can't account for things like government shutting down, you can't account for, you know, inflation that's just moving around, you can't account for your office being shut down because of COVID infections and things like that. I mean, you can at some point, but you can't really put pen to paper and say what your business is going to be doing in two years from now, the market is just too unstable. So, you know, for us, there's a lot of short term planning, and really working on being agile, being able to move quickly to opportunities, avoid threats, but a lot of it too, is making sure that we have a lot more money in the bank than we ever did before. Because we want to be able to weather the storm a little bit easier.

Andrei Tiu  

Mhm, mhm, yeah. Good moves. I'm with you here.

Oliver Feakins  

And that's also why we started our Trusted Search Marketing brand, you know, we do, did we do, we've done digital marketing for, you know, 15 years here, TrackFive, we're very good at it. I mean, extremely good at it. You know, we spend millions of dollars with Google, we've been running these campaigns and SEO and everything forever. And, you know, actually used to own in 2010, after he started another digital agency, we grew that up to a $2 - $3 million agency and I sold it off. But we worked with some massive international clients doing SEO and digital marketing. So you know, for me, it's a pedigree, and for any company I touch is usually very marketing-centric. But for us, the reason we opened up this division of our holding company called Trusted Search Marketing, which is a digital marketing agency, is because we were so pigeonholed in recruiting when COVID hit, we lost, you know, 20% of our revenue because nobody was hiring. But I can tell you what, really what went 20% the other way is digital marketing. Because of all the brick and mortar, all the local stores, shops and things like that everybody went online, and they needed SEO, they needed internet marketing. So for us it strategically, you know, it allows us to balance, you know, the recruiting market with a non-recruiting market so that when one's going down, once one stays positive, or it gives us a little bit of a backup or reserve. So that's kind of why we did it. But we're also really good at it, the agency just got a credit credential from Google, or a Google partner agency, we've won some awards already. And, you know, we're, you know, we just have a different take on it. So we've been working with some clients in eCommerce, but surprisingly, because we have such a background in recruiting, we have a lot of recruiting companies that are coming to us, you know, truck driving companies, healthcare companies, asking us to do digital for recruiting talent, you know, so it's been interesting, it's not how we thought it was gonna go. We thought we're gonna be doing eCommerce and working with businesses. And that's what we thought was going to be, you know, that's what he wanted it to be. But as soon as we took our expertise in recruiting, and opened up a digital agency, all the people that use us know us in the recruiting space came over and said: "Can you do digital for us and should teach us how to do it?" 

Andrei Tiu  

Ah cool!

Oliver Feakins  

Its kind of like the market has told us what it wants from us. And although we could do both, we're gonna follow what the market you know, where the demand is.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, sure.

Oliver Feakins  

But yeah, it worked out well.

Andrei Tiu  

Mhm, nice, nice, nice. Okay, so now since we came back to the marketing subject. Let's see how you guys are planning your current marketing and given the sort of shaky environment. How are you guys looking at let's say the small startups that you are running? I don't know if it's fair to call them that. But let's say you are, you are launching a new platform. And it's from scratch. It's a technology product. And what I think would be interesting to do is try to draw up some points where that would be applicable for virtually most of the tech startups out there. So if you were to think through your experience right now of launching a new tech startup, whether that's a SAS or not, let's say it's a SAS, but not necessarily limited to it, what would be the approach that you'd have or maybe you already do, to put it out on the market now, at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022?

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, so some really interesting things have happened in marketing in the marketing world, so to speak, in the last year or two. You know, we've seen obviously influencer marketing and content marketing really become its own thing. It was kind of lumped into, you know, SEO or lumped into just general marketing or PR, but now content marketing and influencer marketing have really matured to break out into their own segments. And that's a really fun space. And now oftentimes, you know, we see, oh, we want to do social media advertising, we need content. Now, we kind of looked at it backwards, where we have a content marketing strategy, and it's going to be fueled and promoted by social media, right. So we use social as an arm to promote the content that we're promoting. So, you know, getting into things like video, it's really huge. We're seeing some great results with some video marketing that we're doing influencer marketing, things like that. But for a tech company, it depends if you're a business to consumer or business to business company, if you're selling to businesses, there are a little bit different markets. So if you're doing that, what we call Account-Based Marketing, or ABM, where we're really working in producing content for that business. So becoming an industry leader in that business and having that confidence high into the solution that we have. So you know, if you're, you know, if you're a product, a tech product in the finance space, or the payroll space, for example, you may be producing content all around the payroll industry and niche and coming to the market with really breathtaking statistics or perspective that really positioned you as the expert for that industry. But you're using social, whether it be LinkedIn, or just even generally, some of the generic social platforms to really promote that. But some of the things that have really been interesting as well as we do a lot of paid ads. So a lot of media buying, whether it be Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, you know, we're in all these. And what we've seen over the last year has been really interesting to this because Facebook, well, and Google pretty much well, they came out Apple came out with that whole iOS update about seven months ago, where you had to opt into privacy right. And that's been a, I think, a global trend, like everybody wants more privacy, right. It basically made it really difficult to place tracking cookies and use pixels to track remarketing and things like that. So across the entire world, everyone's Pay Per Click marketing campaigns became worse overnight, because one of the reasons these mediums work so well is because you know, if I want to find if I'm selling houses, I want to find what we call an in-market audience, somebody that they're looking for a house, I can identify that on YouTube, for example, I can identify that person on Facebook. Well now that the tracking is gone, they're less likely to be able to be as accurate or B. if I want to build a remarketing audience, so people come into my website and remarket to them, you know, not only can I not cookie them anymore, if they're on a mobile phone or an Apple phone specifically, they can also opt-out retroactively so they can opt-out and be removed from an audience that they were already in. So we had an eCommerce client that was selling tanning products, for example, a decent, you know, eCommerce product and decent commerce client. We were, for example, we were using what's called remarketing, right, so we were, you know, doing Facebook ads, Google ads, things like that, and we were killing it on Facebook, we were selling this at a five to 10x, you know, on this product, every, you know, every dollar they spent, they're making $10 in revenue off their product. And remarketing for us for them worked really, really well. Well, as soon as this iOS update happened and all of a sudden there were marketing audience group started getting smaller and smaller and smaller and the cost per sale ended up going from like a 10x to an 8x, to 3x, to 2x. And right before our very eyes, you know, it will happen immediately. Some of our brands that TrackFive is caught, you know, our cost per client acquisition doubled because of this because the targeting wasn't as good and the reporting isn't as good, the attribution isn't this good. So what is you know, so a lot of people went out of business, a lot of people cried a moan and they really upset and it is upsetting. It's very frustrating. But what are your options, right? You can go with it. And you could try to find a way around it or you can admit defeat. So we decided to go with it. So we came up with a bunch of ideas. We tested a bunch of ideas. Not only were we to bring those back inline those costs back in mind, but we even were able to make them even better than before. So I think what it's when challenges like this arise in marketing and changes in the global landscape for marketing, I think it really gives marketing people an opportunity to dust off those skills, and to solve the problem. And I think that's very, very entrepreneurial way to look at it, you know, it's like, you know, for me, whether it's a marketing issue or a business issue, it's, you know, I'm a fireman, all I do is put out fires, right? So like, I have to find a way to win, because I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna quit. So, yeah, right there

Andrei Tiu  

On this note, but you probably have found it as well, just worth mentioning, for example, what we found as a fix to the issue that occurred and was using a lot of the lookalike audiences and creating custom audiences and creating look alike on specific custom audiences. We are still doing it, and it seems to be working very well.

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, we did that, we also use the Facebook API, you know, switch to the API so that we could do that as well. The difference for us in niche products, where it was a little bit harder to get that look like audience once you go down lower in the niche, once you are a little bit broader, and there are a little bit more multi-facets of the target market, then it was okay. But once we got a super niche, you know, super small in the targeting, it just became not as effective. You know, we also found some interesting things too. For example, testing different ad creatives, like video and image ads, and carousel ads. And we would notice that when we swapped the image, the impressions will throttle, right, so like, we went from image to video, for example, the impressions with throttle and the cost, the cost per click, or the cost per lead, or acquisition cost, would skyrocket as well. So we were able to test the distribution network of like Facebook and Instagram, for example, the find out what creatives actually produce because they don't show up in the same places and they're not promoted with the same force, right? So we did a bunch of testing to find out what the combination of you know, we as I said, we tried to look like audiences and things like that. And for our niches, they did better, but they still didn't get us to where we were. We ended up doing some things with video and some creative things work. And also, it helps you be a better marketer, because we took it all the way up the funnel, right? We started looking at our landing pages, like we started, you know, swapping up our ads, working on day parsing, and just getting all the fundamental things and marketing that sometimes we overlook, for the shiny objects like retargeting or, you know, look like audiences or, you know, programmatic, right? Like, you know, sometimes we're so focused as marketers on that type of stuff, we forget that our landing page hasn't been freshened up for a year, and the conversion rate has been falling, or the fact that we could be doing testing. And, you know, we just did a landing page change, you know, during this process as well and we're able to get about a 20% increase in conversion rate, you know, just from a new landing page. So that's without even touching the campaign. So we tie these things all together, we’re able to really bring that cost down. But yeah, I mean, it's been difficult, but it's been good. I mean, as I said, it's forced us - not that we are lazy marketers before, but I think Facebook made it really easy. And now I think it got a little bit harder.

Andrei Tiu  

Yep. But as you said, it's not necessarily for the words, because, again, I think, you know, you are running a marketing agency, we are a marketing agency. I think it helps filter out the good agencies from not, I wouldn't say the bad agencies, but the agencies that shouldn't get that tight.

Oliver Feakins  

It's true, it's true. And like, you know, and even with that, right, like, we've had issues where we're just really weird issues where we've been like, no matter what we do, we can't fix it. We're like, man, we must really suck. Like, we can't - like why is this not like, in theory, what we're doing should work. So we ended up, you know, a good example, we actually reached out to Facebook with a rapper like, hey, like, what are we doing wrong here? Like, we can't figure this out. And next thing, you know, we get a call from a Facebook engineer. It's the only time in my life Facebook has ever called us. Or anybody that I know. It's usually like a live chat or an email. But to get a phone call from a Facebook engineer, you know something's wrong. So they basically said, Yes, you know, you guys were right, it was a bug on the platform, we're gonna address it. So we're like catching bugs on Facebook. It sounds like you know, Facebook's notorious for having bugs and breaking all the time. And right now they're attribution tracking and their reporting is garbage. Like they keep stripping away all these different types of reporting and they keep making it smaller and smaller and then put in disclaimers that it may not be accurate. And, you know, the 20-day attribution is, you know, it's just, it's like, it's crazy. So it's, you know like I said earlier, it's, it has made it more challenging, but as you said, the good agencies adapt, the bad agencies probably don't even know what the bad agencies don't even know that iOS came up with an update that has changed. You know, They're still wondering why their costs, you know, they are calling it seasonality. But, you know, it's, but like, you know, it's the same thing with SEO. Right? Like, SEO is difficult as well, you know, it's just, you know, Google coming out with updates. So it's just, it's just an interesting yeah. But you know what I say this now Android, but like, the, it's always been like this, right? If it wasn't this, now, this is a big one, like the face the iOS change, that's a big, that's a big change. I can't recall a larger change to paid advertising than that in my life.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, neither do I.

Oliver Feakins  

It's a big one. In SEO, we have them all the time. They've been better at it recently, but if you go back in time to like, Penguin, Panda updates, Farmer updates, you know, ‘mobilegeddon’, different specific updates, that were very, very restrictive, that put people out of business penalty related updates, spam-related updates, like, this is how it's been in digital marketing since I remember. And it's a really tough pill to swallow if you're a business owner, right. So if I'm selling you and saying we're going to do absolutely everything, right, we're going to check the box, we're going to execute at the highest level, we're going to be you're at marketing, but then Google can come in and make an algorithm change and wipe out all our gains temporarily, or Apple to come out with a Facebook issue and change your cost per lead and take away all the work we've done for the last three years of grooming your account, you know, or your history is going to go away or your reporting is going to have to wait an extra week now because we need attribution to settle down and get you the right numbers. Like, if you're a business owner, you're probably thinking what the hell is going on? So yeah, that but that's what it is, we've had to be really good with our clients, and just be honest, and say: "This is what's happening. It's not your fault. It's not our fault. And it's not even Facebook's fault or Apple's fault." This is digital marketing. And it's, you know, it never stops, and it always changes and you just have to continually invest in an operational sense that you have to keep going with it. Are you guys seeing that with your clients to where it's just, you know, people could say, like, you know, why is this different, you know? What happened, you know? Why is it this way, you know?

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, I think, you know, the biggest way was then with the update, but then again, we tried to let people know that there's going to be a change, we didn't know how big but obviously, we expected it. I mean, there are some clients that can still feel a bit of a shakeup, that are affected from. It's probably the clients that didn't have the budget to deploy everything that they were doing in a coordinated way. So for example, on more accounts, and they were kind of like taking one and then the other and they didn't have real-time data on all platforms to readjust spend or budgets, and then they kind of had to with us, to try to wing it until we got a glimpse of it and really the essence. But now everything seems to be much better. I think people got accustomed to the new world of marketing, let's say. And I think it's all going well. I mean, obviously, as you mentioned in terms of Facebook. Sorry, there is a bit of noise. One second. Okay, so Andre, when you edit, please, if you can cut out this little bit here. Because we have the video editing. Okay, so yeah, everything has to be everything seems to get much better now. So yeah, we're looking forward to the Black Friday time, and then Christmas. And I feel the platform also tries to, you know, strip out these reporting elements, and the algorithm is not great. But at the same time, I think they're doing their best to try to adapt. In the end, this is where they get the money from.

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, I mean, they have to, right? I mean, I've heard of reading that Facebook is feverishly working on a different way to track conversions, that's going to be more future proof. You know, but we have another layer of issue, you know, when specified on the recruitment side, because we fall into what's known as a special category. So these special categories are obviously things like for those of your audience who don't know, think when you're in a market, like, for example, finance, or employment, or just there's like three or four other things that go into the special category. And I don't know if it's that way, I imagined it's that way overseas as well. But no, it's that way. Yes. 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, it is.

Oliver Feakins  

So the idea being, you know, if I was going to put up a job to recruit somebody, and I said, the only people that can apply are between the ages of 15-30 that live in these neighbourhoods, that are these this segment ethnicity, that would not fly, right, we'd be flagged as discrimination and rightfully so. So the government came out here and that Facebook made the change saying, you know, if you're recruiting you have, you know, zero targeting and essentially, you know, you can try to target to a profession, but not all professions are representative and Facebook's options, right. So, you know, sometimes you have to pick something close and then essentially you would let the cookie or let the tracking, go through the learning process and optimise the conversions based on that, right? So essentially, in a special ad category, you're giving Facebook a jumpstart into the first level of this. But then you have to wait and be patient and let Facebook work through the learning phase of optimising conversions, you know, based on your performance. So the problem with this is that Facebook's targeting sucks. It's not as good as it used to be and the other problem is that they're not transparent with any data, right? So you can't even tell what Facebook is doing in certain cases. Not enough to me when you're in it. Like, for example, us being in a, I give you an example. One of our job sites is in nursing, right? So there are different types of nurses, RNs, LPNs. These are the difference between like the four-year degree nurses have the one or two-year degree nurses, they have very different skill sets, the demand is also much higher for the RNs registered nurses are, I would say, the real nurses, but like the ones that you know, the more senior and the LPN or the more junior, well, when you're targeting nursing on Facebook, Facebook doesn't give you the targeting options to target based on that - it's all nurses. It's too broad and too generic. But that's their only option, the only option they give you, right?

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah.

Oliver Feakins  

But the problem that we have, and we've been fighting Facebook on is that we are, you know, we're converting nurses, but they're, you know, LPNs nurses aides, they're not like the regular, you know, high-level nurses, right? And there's, you know, we can do look like audiences, we've tried that, but Facebook still can't disseminate the difference between these types of nurses. They're having a real hard time with it. So one of the things we're going to do is actually, you know, we're saying, okay, Facebook, you're giving us zero transparency, and you're getting us zero control and everything you're doing is tied to a conversion firing, right to be able to match a conversion. So we're going to play that game. So we actually have started, for example, when somebody comes on our job site and fills out a job, and they're an RN, for example, we actually send them to a different page as a "Thank you page" and we only put the conversion tracking on that page. So now, Facebook is only receiving, you know, signals back from that type so they can refine that algorithm. So even if someone would come in and convert and they weren't an RN, they would, it wouldn't, it would convert on our site, but it would not, it would be you know, not a fraudulent click, but it wouldn't be a targeted clinic wouldn't be a targeted conversion. So we're starting to experiment a little bit with how to train Facebook's algorithm a little bit better within this employment category and within the line of remarketing and things like that, to try and see if we can train the algorithm and then again, mixing up different ad creatives, different mediums. There are different exposures and different distribution networks applied to them. So testing is huge like I can't, you know, I have to let you know how it works. But it's uh, but this is crazy. We never had to do this two years ago, it was so much simpler.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah. And also, now you need far bigger budgets to execute something like what you just mentioned,

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah,

Andrei Tiu  

rather than just, you know, getting those 50 conversions in seven days or 30 days, with a, you know, like, kind of relatively smaller budget, definitely smaller than one required to, you know, filter out the convergence and go through the journey that you mentioned just now.

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah. And even just, you know, the seasonality and the changes, right. So we saw a lot of people swim to Google, when Facebook had these issues with salad mat, and not a mass exodus from Facebook, but a lot of people hanging up Facebook for a little bit, because they just weren't seeing the results and Google became more competitive, once Facebook started getting a higher cost per acquisition, right? So we saw that attribute to the higher costs of the auction within Google, therefore, also translating the higher cost per lead, but sometimes still better than Facebook. So there's just a lot. So that I guess this goes to why you really need an agency, you know, if you're, so if you're a startup company, right, and you're, you know, I speak to a lot of people all day, they're like, I'm doing this myself, I'm doing well. And yeah, you may get conversions, but you don't know-how, how well you're doing. I mean, we do a lot in recruitment, right? So we know what are our campaigns produce that and we work with companies in the industry that are spending, you know, 15-20 times the cost per acquisition that we get in the same channel, and they think they're doing fantastic. So it's, you know, we almost don't want to tell them what we're doing because it'll make them feel bad. But we, you know, you have to have the experience and you know, an agency like yourselves or us, I mean, you have to you just have to be in it all the time, you have to be.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so now, since we are… I'm really glad that we discuss all these issues because I think if we just told people that you really need to be cautious, maybe it wouldn't have waited for that much in the argument of why. So it's good that we may be brought these issues upfront. And now if we were to think about the person that is trying to organise their marketing efforts for the coming months, and maybe they don't have a large budget, and now to filter out even more because you mentioned the split between B2B and B2C. And I think at least from what I see in the market, there's a lot of B2C tech platforms that have gained momentum from platforms to, you know, selling eco-bio groceries to, you know, you name it, it's pretty easy to launch a platform nowadays. So or an online store, because it's still a tech product. It's B2B, B2C sorry. Yeah, I mean, yeah, let's not even go there. But let's say, you know, a software product that is B2C. What would you be your three points or three pieces of advice that you'd give an entrepreneur or a marketing manager in a space like this to look for when planning for next year?

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, so I would definitely, so I would kind of, I tend to look at things in buckets because it's easier for me, it's easy to organise them in my mind from a sense of strategy than it is to kind of put this into one bucket of marketing, right? So I would tend to look at things like, you know, long term marketing, short term marketing, and also new sales versus recurring sales, right? So, you know, because they would have different strategies and different tactics and mediums, you know, long term, you know, you got to put SEO on play there, you can't really put SEO as a short term. You'll see short term gains, but it's really a long term endeavour, it's something especially if you're in a really complicated niche, it's gonna it could take you years. And to be honest, a good SEO firm would tell you that at some point, it's not even worth it, you know, if you, you know, we have we had somebody that came to us a couple of years ago, and they wanted to rank number one for skincare. And that was their, you know, pet term, and it doesn't matter what budget, they come to the table if they're not going to do it, you know, not, not within a couple of years. I mean, they're 10 years behind, you know, the biggest companies and billionaire brands, you know, have been doing that there's just there's, you know, so we tried to get them to focus on some more meaty middle type of keywords and longtail keywords to social short games. We call it a vanity metric, where a vanity metric for us is when the owner of the company just wants to tell his friends that he ranks for skincare, but doesn't really care how much it cost to get in there, or what business impact it has. So you know, we ended up not being a good fit, because we're just not gonna lie to anybody. But, you know, SEO is a great long term instructor you got to be in it for the long term, they got to go with the algorithm updates the changes, under that you're gonna be producing a lot of content and online PR that you can also recycle into your social campaigns. You know, pay per click, paid social, I love as a short term. I also like to do it before I do SEO, I like to do paid search and social first, specifically paid search because I get real-time, kind of real-time… What's the word I'm looking to validate?

Andrei Tiu  

Feel?

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, real-time data, but real-time validation, on my keywords, my ad copy, my click-through rate. So I can actually start experimenting with things like a click-through rate right on an ad, I can have several ads targeted, and I can find out which ones produce better. Well, guess what those become my meta tags, or get my men and title tags on my website when I do my SEO because I have proven that I can optimise that that language for SEO keywords. But I've now done real-time experimenting to find which one has a better click-through rate. Again, as CEOs and internet marketers, sometimes they focus so much on the shiny things in front of them, they forget to look at all of it, right? So what's if I rank for number one on whatever term right I'm getting, I'm showing in front of millions of searches, but my click-through rate is half of what it could be, I'm losing half the amount of traffic and that you know, 1% click-through rate with 2% click-through rate on a head term that brings in hundreds of 1000s of clicks. That's a lot that could result in millions of dollars worth of sales. So from an SEO perspective, taking it a full stack of full-funnel, and really, you know, going from there using paid search and social and really experimenting there, I tend to bring content marketing at this point as well because I need it for SEO, I need it for paid search and social and I'll typically try to produce a content calendar with that mirrors all of them together so that they're all kind of talking about the same thing it's not kind of a schizophrenic type of like content strategy where it doesn't make sense together right? And they should all be pushing kind of what your goals are for that time frame. So Search Social PPC definitely rolling out with those and I would say also you know a lot of people there are startups are so focused on getting the sale. They sometimes again shiny object they forget to focus on you know, keeping the sale, upselling the sale, referring other people from the sale so having things like you know retargeting, good Account-Based Marketing where you're going out using things like email or social you know, retargeting throughout the social networks to get people to upgrade upsell keep them going and things like that cross-sell amongst other products, you know, things they left in the cart, that kind of thing if you're talking eCommerce, and so those are the things I would really work on for starting up, you know, content SEO, PPC and retargeting, things like that. I mean, those are my go-to is for those.

Andrei Tiu  

Love it, super cool! And also two things that I would mention and you can you know, you can argue with them if you feel like you don't agree. One of them would be there's nothing wrong with because we saw people that, then you'll see Google ads, for example, and SEO as not complementary, but rather having to choose from, from the two, one is nothing wrong with actually, it's good to have the two done in parallel because one serves, as you mentioned, in terms of buckets, the short term goals, and the information and data gathering while as the other one is a medium to long term activity. So you can you probably should do both in parallel, so…

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, they also it's kind of saturate that first page of Google, right? Now you're taking up double the amount of space, you're pushing competitors down. And we know the click distribution from the top of the Google search results to the bottom right. We know that you know, once you get past page, you know, you know, position 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, so to speak, you know, it shrinks, right? So if you can get top positioning and a PPC positioning, you're really capitalising on a lot, but I would also just throw in the SEO stuff, too. You know, there's a lot more now than just ranking right. We got featured snippets, Rich Snippets, we have ads, we have, you know, videos, we have rich media, universal search, we have so many different ways to show up in Google right now. So SEO has kind of turned from this, like, we just want to rank number one. And I keep telling clients like, that's, you know, what way and not only that, but you have personalization, right? So I would say you want to rank number one, and whose search results like, you know, everything is so personalised right now. So, you know, we tend to look at things like page metrics over ranking and vanity metrics, just because it's a better conversation framing to have. Is more in line with goals. But I can't help it. Everybody still wants to talk about rankings, you know, it will never go away.

Andrei Tiu  

Time will come, time will come. Yeah, and the second one was with content marketing, very on point, to what you mentioned, and the way that I feel about it is that, because we can't really plan long term, what we tend to advise is to have an integrated content plan, but rather than having it for the full year, let's say for the fall of 2022, rather try to focus on quarters, maybe and then monthly plans, right? I mean, do you agree with this?

Oliver Feakins  

Absolutely. Because, you know, with especially with doing that you allow you if you've planned too long again, especially in COVID right now, the markets shifting so much, we need to allow your time, that time flexibility, but also being kind of nimble, and agile allows you to take advantage of opportunities, like a tactic called newsjacking, right newsjacking for us. If we find something in the news that we can bring our clients products to and take advantage of those searches, that's something we can spend together really quickly. So keep it short, like that allows you to you know, as I say here, roll with the punches.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice, nice, nice. Oliver, this was great to have you here on the show really, really enjoyed our conversation. 

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, me too.

Andrei Tiu  

Tell us where can people find you? Or how people find support with you or with your companies.

Oliver Feakins   

Yeah, so right now you can check out our agency offering which is trustedsearchmarketing.com. I can check out our other portfolio brands over at TrackFive that's T R A C K F I V E.com and Oliver Feakins - you can find me on LinkedIn. Feel free to link with me, shoot me any information or any questions you have, I’ll be happy to answer them. So yeah, that's it.

Andrei Tiu  

I love it. Awesome. Oliver. Again. Thank you so much. This was a very, very nice conversation. Looking forward to you guys tuning in today, hearing your thoughts, comments, sharing your insights, if you have any or if you agree or not with us, let us know what are your thoughts, all of them are welcome. And as always, if you have any ideas or things that you'd like us to focus on, maybe even together in a future episode, let us know you can email us at [email protected]. Or just post in the comments on YouTube if you watch this on YouTube or otherwise, you know, any way possible you can LinkedIn me, LinkedIn with Oliver, and maybe we can sort something out to serve better your needs. Until then - best of luck with everything. Oliver, thank you so much again for being on the show.

Oliver Feakins  

Thank you so much!

Andrei Tiu  

I look forward to hopefully meeting you in person someday, in America or the UK.

Oliver Feakins  

Will see. Have you ever been, do you get to come to the SEO conferences over here at all? I guess now they're shut down, but.

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, no, I haven't had the chance yet. I was planning a problem. I mean, previously, I was staying for this year, but now I think it probably will be next year. I saw America is now open. So hopefully it will stay like that.

Oliver Feakins  

Yeah, they're starting to bring conferences back so slowly. But uh, but yeah, but there are some good ones like Traffic and Conversion Conference. There's obviously like SMX, SCS. The mas conferences are great. I mean, there's, we've got some fantastic so offerings over here. So definitely anyone who's interested check them out. I mean, there's, you know, try to find one in Las Vegas. You know, it's a fun place to go. So I guess. That's my recommendation. You may not go to the conference, but you will have fun you know, so.

Andrei Tiu  

I just have to get it.

Oliver Feakins  

Yes, yes. Great.

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. Thank you so much, Oliver. Have an awesome day. And you guys as well for tuning in today. See you on the next episode.

Oliver Feakins  

See you!

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Kylon Gienger, as they will be discussing the role great marketing plays in preparing the company for evaluation or/and exit. Kylon is a serial entrepreneur, podcast host and president of Acquira. Kylon’s mission is to build and lead something monumental that increases the quality of life of millions of people. 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 ​​𝐊𝐲𝐥𝐨𝐧 : 

𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒:  https://acquira.com/

𝐾𝑦𝑙𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylongienger/ 

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢:

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro   

𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency   

𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  

𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 [email protected]

𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦:

▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube 

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▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean 

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▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox 

Episode transcript:

Andrei Tiu  

Hi there, this is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Kylon Gienger, serial entrepreneur, podcast host and president of Acquira. Today we'll discuss the role great marketing plays in preparing the company for evaluation or/and exit. So without further ado, Kylon, and it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? How's your morning going? Let's crack on.

Kylon Gienger  

Thanks for having me, Andrei. I'm doing good. It's early here. I'm located in Montana, USA. It's very cold outside. We're starting to get some snow woke up early for this. And I'm stoked, man. Let's do it.

Andrei Tiu  

Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Did you have your coffee, yet?

Kylon Gienger  

Uh, no. I'm drinking decaf these days. Because we're trying to get away from caffeine for a month or two. See how it goes on a week, two weeks into that. And so so far, so good. Okay, decaf coffee is kind of the Saviour there.

Andrei Tiu  

Well, you know what they say the first week or two are the hardest right to cut down on caffeine that you shouldn't be?

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, fortunately, it wasn't that I think it's worse for some people than I had maybe a couple of nights where I kind of woke up with a headache. Besides that, no massive effects. But it feels good to have the self-discipline to be of something you've been on for years for some time that I'm 100% going back, altering caffeine again.

Andrei Tiu  

Cool, cool. Okay, so interesting stuff, interesting times, we have a very interesting subject today, as well. And I'm really looking forward to the stories because I know you have quite a few that will go through. I think just for people so you know because we do this in the audio and video format as well. And some people research more than others, I think let's just make it easy for everybody tuning in today, to let them know a bit of your background, who are you really and what you do. And then we can go into subjects and discuss strategies and all that jazz.

Kylon Gienger  

Let's do it, man. To me, I'm a jack of all trades, master of a few. I've done a lot of things in the last - I'm 32 years old - I've done a lot of things in the last little over a decade, I was in the military, I got out of the Navy in 2012 and promptly started a residential commercial painting company with a really good friend of mine. The first business I ever started, just wanted to cut my teeth, didn't want to work for anybody else and thought, hey, we'll try this thing. So I gave him 1000 bucks, we bought a van, we started hitting the road knocking on doors trying to paint houses that quickly grew to we had operations in six different states and learn how to hire and manage employees and also not manage employees, there's plenty of mistakes there almost went bankrupt at one point. Through the course of building that business built a couple of other brick and mortar retail businesses got into the house flipping game, I started a podcast called 'Successful drop out' that you know, grew quite popular, learned a bunch of different marketing stuff there, you know how to kind of niche down be a big fish in a little pond and stuff like that. That worked pretty well for me. That eventually transitioned to be working with one of the first guests I had on that podcast, who bought businesses. And that led to eventually over the next three, four years to acquire, I learned a lot about buying businesses, instead of starting from scratch as I have been, and how to identify great businesses and businesses that had great marketing or a lack of marketing that we knew we could add a lot of value to, post-acquisition. And that leads me to where I'm at today. Now I work with Acquira as part of the founding team there. And in a nutshell, we help people buy businesses instead of starting them. So I mentioned house flipping before, I imagine a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with the concept of house flipping, you buy something, you fix it up, you turn around and sell for more than you paid for it or you hold on to it, let it cash flow. We're talking about the same thing here when it comes to business buying just with businesses, which is a little bit more complex all around. But is, especially here in the US, a fast-growing interest among the entrepreneurial community we call the people we work with acquisition entrepreneurs, as opposed to startup entrepreneurs, which everybody's kind of familiar with. So that is me and what I do any kind of background in a nutshell there.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Cool. So how'd you get into acquiring and how did you change your perspective from starting businesses and growing them, you know, the way that you have done before, versus you know, figuring out there is an opportunity there to first of all to search for businesses that will be good to buy opportunities. And a question here is: How do you find them? And then of course, how to develop a business around that and to leverage your opportunity.

Kylon Gienger  

So how do you find you're going? How do you how do we kind of find these businesses to buy? Or how do people discover business buying?

Andrei Tiu  

Let's start with: What made you discover this opportunity, you know, like, make the switch from funding the business and growing it to getting something that is already set up?

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, good question. I mean, again, the very first guest I ever had on the first podcast, I started business, right, I remember I was so nervous, I'd never interviewed anybody before I chugged a glass of wine beforehand, we had a fantastic conversation and hit it off. And it was a year and a half later, or something, he connected with me and said, Hey, come join me in what I'm doing. I'm buying these at that point, we were buying online businesses, content, websites, e-commerce, SAS, stuff like that. And I quickly realised, Hey, I've been doing this business, starting a business from the scratch game for a while. And here, I can find really great depth, leverage and ways to buy these companies and step right into an existing customer base cash flow, and the returns are much greater and come much faster than if I'm starting something from scratch. I don't have to spend the first two, three years blood, sweat and tears trying to build a customer base from scratch, build a product from scratch and prove the market raise funding. It feels like ethical cheating, you know, in a way, you're sort of cutting in line in the process of owning a profitable business and being working for yourself, right being kind of the master of your own destiny there. So, and a lot of people I think are discovering the same thing here. Particularly in the US, we have an entire generation that we call baby boomers that are reaching retirement age. It's millions of people here in the US. And the majority of small businesses here in the US are owned by this age group. And they're quite literally the backbone of the economy. And we're talking everything from online, SAS companies that were started a decade or two ago to really boring brick and mortar businesses like bat companies, plumbing companies, roofing companies, these are all owned by folks that are reaching retirement age. So quite literally, we have trillions of dollars worth of small business assets that over the next decade are needing to switch hands, or they will cease to exist, they'll just be shut down, they'll die. And they employ millions and millions of people, like I said, the backbone of the economy. So we have a lot of supply over the next decade-plus coming down the pipeline here. And one thing that Acquira is trying to do is raise a lot of awareness that, Hey, you want to own your own business, think about buying one stuff, starting one. And when we started out, definitely big fish in a smaller pond. Not a lot of people had heard about it. But these days, people are starting to catch on to this idea of acquisition entrepreneurship, and that's what we exist to. But oftentimes they don't have the capital, or the knowledge or skill set to tackle buying a seven-figure business by themselves. And that's where we come in.

Andrei Tiu  

I see. Okay, so discovered this market through your first podcast guests. And then when business, what are you exactly doing with Acquira right now. So just for everybody to know exactly how you come into the process of, you know, a business wanting to be invested into or sold to either a private investor or company. How do you guys work with, in this case, small to medium-sized businesses?

Kylon Gienger  

So at its core, I would say Acquira is an investment fund and an accelerator for business buyers. So if anybody listening is familiar with the concept of the company Y Combinator, they're an accelerator for startups and startup entrepreneurs, you get into their programme with an idea, they help you prove that idea. They fund you the launching pad for starting your startup, right? We're very much the same thing. But we're a launching pad and an investment fund for buying your first business. And how we help is we're training, we're very good at training. We're also very good at digital marketing, which means we can get a hold of a lot of people that are wanting to sell their business and also attract a lot of people that want to buy these businesses, aka you know me on this podcast is one, one way of attracting people through our funnel to help them buy a business right. We're also very good at trading. So we bought a lot of businesses ourselves. We understand on a deep level every part of the process of buying a business which broadly speaking is first you got to know what you're looking for. We call it your investment thesis. There's a lot of different businesses out there are a lot of different industries. Each business no business is the same every business is absolutely unique. To me, it's like getting to know a new person when I approach buying a new business. Each business has a personality that got to kind of dig in. There's a lot of different facets and nuances to understand there. So define what you're looking for. So you can kind of sort through the mess and qualify and disqualify fast, you know, the next step is to actually then find the business to buy sourcing. Where do you look? Who do you talk to? After you find a business that's intriguing,  how do you know it's actually a good business to buy, and it's not going to bite you in the ass after you put $100,000 on the line? So there's diligence there to think about. There's a legal aspect to it, there's a very, very heavy people aspect to it. After all, all the businesses at the end of the day, it's a collection of people working towards a kind of a common goal and rowing in the same direction working in unison. So you're talking to sellers, you're talking to brokers, you're talking to lawyers, there's financing, not everybody has, that the types of businesses we buy, they're larger, the smallest business we buy might be worth 1.5 million. Nobody has just 1.5 million sitting in a bank account. Well, some people do, but very few people do. Especially if they're smart with their money. They've got it. So how do you find the money to buy these businesses and leverage them right? And kind of have that capital stack correct? So and then anybody can buy a business? But once you buy one, how do you then operate it? How do you optimise operations so it runs smoothly? And then how do you grow it? Right? And how do you think about marketing and a lot of businesses we buy, have almost zero marketing. So these are all things we know very well, we have the training, we have vendors around them, you know, we have legal, legal folks diligence folks that we connect with, we've got well-packaged training that kind of outlines every step of the process. So that's where we come to help folks that are looking for businesses. On the flip side, we do have marketing funnels and landing pages, stuff like that, for folks that are looking to sell their business. But we're experienced in helping coach those folks on how to prepare their business for sale. But for the most part, we're very focused on the buyers, as far as if we're talking marketing, how our funnel is built, and our business works.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay. So here, I see, we have two categories of stakeholders or stakeholder groups, if you want, that I know our listeners would be falling within. So that one would be the entrepreneur - potentially the investor, in this case, that would potentially want to acquire a new business, and then the Marketing Pro, which will be the person that is responsible for the marketing department. And now in a way what you do as well, to ensure that the company has a sustainable approach to this sector, and you know, just helping the company grow for marketing. Since this would be more of what we have discussed. So far, I think, not not the last one. But the first thing which will be, you know, acquiring companies and this stuff. Let's focus a bit more on this so we can get to some actionable insights. And to build a context around the bit further. This is also very interesting, you know, just from a curiosity point of view, I think this is a very fruitful conversation. And the question that I have here, personally, but I think it's relevant to many is how do you find businesses to purchase? Or where are these folks that want to sell their businesses? How do you guys go about it?

Kylon Gienger  

So again, I'm going to be really talking from the perspective of somebody either based in the US looking to buy a business or looking to buy a business in the US, because that's where the majority of our experience is, and it's interesting, I don't quite understand the business buying scene in the rest of the world. I just haven't a lot of focus on looking in on it. But I know for a fact that in the United States, there is a unique large supply of these businesses to buy. And a lot of that has to do with this generation of baby boomers retiring, right. So if you're looking for business in the US, right, in terms of sourcing these deals, there are two routes you can go broadly speaking. There's on market sourcing. So through brokers, people, you know, third parties that have lifted these businesses and there's off-market sourcing, which is you connecting directly with business owners and asking them: would you like to sell your business? Figuring all that out yourself. We focus a lot on both. We have a lot of experience with both in terms of on market sourcing. There's a lot of business brokers out there. Since business buying is a new space. The business broker space is not well consolidated or standardised. They're just small Business Brokers are some large firms and stuff, for the most part, a lot of small, small firms are dotted everywhere, each has their own approach to finding and listing these businesses for you the prospective buyer to look at doing diligence, stuff like that. Not all are created equal. Some are great, some are bad. A lot of the businesses they list are found through a website called bizbuysell.com, which if folks are familiar with zillow.com, and what that is too real estate bizbuysell.com is for businesses for sale. So you can go to bizbuysell.com right now and see hundreds and hundreds, 1000s of businesses for sale, all different types, right. And most of these are listed through brokers. Brokers are incentivized by getting their fees at the end of the day. So they'll do a certain amount of diligence. They'll have prospectuses basically large PDFs they put together on here's what this business is earning and the risks and the opportunities for growth. Take all that with a grain of salt, you need to do your own diligence, right? Off-market deals, this is a little bit trickier. And we can coach people through this but if you like cold calling, this is essentially where you're calling up or hiring somebody to call up businesses and ask them Hey, do you want to sell your business? and the benefit there is you're not going through a broker you can connect directly with the seller, you can often even negotiate a better deal get a little bit more creative, stuff like that. But the con, the downside is you're doing a lot of education and you have to be good with people. But often sellers think their business is worth 10 times revenue, a right which in reality, it's maybe worth three to four times their seller discretionary earnings, SDE we call it or what they're actually taking home. Or, you know, another close proxy is like the net profit of the business. So there's a lot of education there. Oftentimes, these small businesses, could be multimillion-dollar businesses earning a couple of million dollars a year, but highly, highly disorganised and under optimised, you know, zero technology in the business, no marketing, finance is done on the back of a napkin. So having to sort through all of that and understand it is a chore by itself. So those are kind of the two approaches. And we can help coach people through that. And you want to do, again, there are some boxes you want to tick when you're first looking at these businesses. You don't want to buy or engage with a business or spend too much time looking at a business that has some very large red or black flags, we call them which are deal-killers, things that just make it extremely unattractive. And it's just going to bite you in the butt after you buy it, right.

Andrei Tiu  

So you mentioned there, the way that you look at valuating a business and I think I'm very aware that this is a very broad spectre of, you know, like, what things should you take into consideration when you try to put a value on your business, there are a number of ways I can beat that and what you mentioned there as well with, uh, you know, actual earnings that you take home, so the net profits and multipliers, but would you have some examples of certain business that was coming up for sale and the way that you were thinking of its valuation, in terms of things that you were considering. And, you know, maybe numbers as well, when it came to revenue versus profits and number of people in the team, accreditations and certifications, stuff like that.

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, valuation is always a very nuanced subject. It's an art and a science, right? At the end of the day, the business businesses value is what the seller agrees to sell it for, and the buyer agrees to buy it for. Right. But having said that, I will say the majority of the types of businesses we target just to give folks some quick context, we generally they're doing over 500k per year. And this means they have anywhere from, you know, eight to could be 25, 30 employees, 60 employees, if they're doing more like one to 2 million in EBIT the per year, and you know, 10 to 15 million in revenue. The industries that we operate a lot in these days is home services. And I can go into why that is but things like plumbing companies back up, I bought an a plumbing company here in Montana. That's why I'm here, back in because almost six months ago now - roofing companies, the sort of steady stable businesses that are really recession proof, urgent, active problems that customers need, and while we seem to pay for it, the plumbing in your house is your most used utility probably and people take it for granted. But if your toilets broken or your your faucets not working or a pipe is leaking in your house, you will call somebody out there to fix it and you will pay that person to fix it. Even if you have a vacation coming up or other discretionary spending you want you have to get that that urgent act of problem fix. So that's why we like these businesses. More often than not when it comes to valuation. We're buying those businesses at between two and a half to five multiple of that yearly EBITDA. So it's earning a million dollars a year, you're probably buying it for somewhere in the neighbourhood of three $4 million. Right? If it's earning the owner about a million dollars a year. Now, there's all sorts of factors that go into that. How risky is the business or how turnkey is the business is it running really well does have a lot of systems in place, good marketing, is it on a growth trajectory, then it's going to be valued at probably a little bit higher on that multiple scale. If it's a, if it's a little bit risky, it could be valued a little bit lower. Or there's a there are ways it still could be valued higher, but maybe you're looking for ways to mitigate some of that risk directly into the deal structure. So for example, we've had some deals where they have some large customer concentration, right, and this is part of our diligence process, one thing we want to look for is, Where's all this revenue coming from, if more than 30% of revenue is coming from a single customer, that's a red flag, potentially a black flag,  because you have a large single point of failure, that customer goes away, that relationship goes away, the business is cut by 30%, all of a sudden, so something like that makes us a little bit nervous, you could argue that values the business a little bit lower, but the seller might not think so. So maybe another approach. And this is again, where the art of nuance comes in, would be to mitigate that risk straight into the deal structure through what we call earnouts, which is you just take a portion of the purchase price, if you're buying that business for a million dollars, say to mitigate that rescue say but I'll pay you 200,000 of that in a year after we buy it assuming the business continues hitting these certain benchmarks, right. And so that and if it doesn't, because maybe these risk factors are activated and business tanks a bit you don't get that out. So that's some ways to think about it again, a subject we could discuss at length for a very long time and every deal is different as part of you know, the art of the deal, right? The art of negotiation. But that's some quick context for folks. Not saying that you know, two to kind of four or five, multiple of EBITDA is pretty common for businesses earning 500k to 2 million in EBITDA per year, and here in the US right now.

Andrei Tiu  

So that would be total profits, the stakeholder’s salaries plus dividends, just for the people that don't know what EBITDA is.

Kylon Gienger  

Correct. There's, there's a thing called add-backs, right like that owner, often they could pay, they could pay themselves inflated salaries, maybe they're paying himself a 200k salary per year, right. And so that's taken away from the EBITDA on their books, but when they're going to sell it, they may add back and they brought probably rightfully so they would add back 100,000 of that salary back to the profit of their company. Because a new owner, if you're gonna step in and hire a general manager or something, you probably won't need to pay him 200k if you put maybe 100 - 120k per year. So there are even ways in which when these sellers go to sell their business, they are adding back certain expenses that a new owner would not have to incur moving forward, which inflates that EBITDA as well. And you do have to watch those. As somebody's stepping into the business, not every expense they're trying to add back is justified, it might be actually a necessary expense moving forward like I've seen sellers try to add back. And I'm kind of going off a tangent here. But hopefully, it's helpful. I've seen sellers try to add back certain random bonuses and holiday bonuses and stuff that they give to employees, they try to add that back to the profit of their business to get a higher valuation saying that the new owner won't have to do that it's not necessary to operate the business stuff like that, I would argue against that, right? If the employees are expecting that every year if it's part of the culture part of them staying happy, that's certainly part of operations moving forward. So we're not going to add that back and your business will stay at a slightly lower valuation maybe so there's a lot of stuff to this right. And that's a lot of what we do at Acquira, you're doing the work right this is your deal in our ecosystem, you are taking the action pursuing this thing, but we're there alongside you as sort of your Sherpa up this mountain, you know, of what it takes to acquire a business and we can help you navigate all those complexities.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, super, this was very insightful. And now let's try to move a bit into the other stakeholder group which will be the marketers. So, there is a certain variation that can happen in terms of the way that the company is being valued, depending on a number of metrics, but marketing and the sustainability of their inbound leads funnel and so on. So the appearance albeit being on a growth trajectory from a marketing standpoint, and their ability to bring in leads that can potentially translate into sales so that they can grow their customer base is certainly one. So, from your experience so far, what are some marketing areas or things that have influenced positively the valuation of a company? And further, what can marketers do to help their company get better valued or be more sustainable from that front?

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, so if you own a business, and you wanted to make it more valuable from the standpoint of marketing, and again, the best context I have is in these home services, brick and mortar businesses where buying and marketing might look a little bit different there as opposed to marketing on a blog, or E-commerce or any kind of digital property right. In here, a lot of that comes from, you know, we've got PPC, we've got SEO, these businesses get a lot of business, just word of mouth by just existing in the local community for, you know, two, three decades. Reviews, customer reviews are massive, when it comes to these businesses, Yelp, Google My Business, Angie's List, are all platforms.  There's a lot of room for optimization there that a lot of folks don't typically focus on- conversion rate optimization on those platforms on your website, you know, having your number right there, at the top, you have calls to action there. A lot of these businesses have websites that go back to the early 2000s. Right. So typically, we're seeing if somebody owns one of these types of businesses, there's always a lot of room for growth and marketing. So if you're a business owner, getting those things shored up first is pretty key, like practice, good SEO be pushing out, you know, at least a couple, you know, good, targeted articles of a month PPC, conversion rate optimization on your website. The thing that immediately comes to mind, though, for a lot of these businesses is with more marketing comes more growth, which means your operations have to change. And that's where we see a breakdown a lot of the time. A lot of the folks that we're buying businesses from don't want the growth that comes along with the marketing because it essentially means that they need to hire and train more people. And as they hire and train more people to do business to handle the growth of the business, they need better and better systems, and they need to run that business and build it like a well-oiled machine. And a lot of people just don't know how to do that. Or because of their age, they're just done there, let the business just sort of hum along and they're willing to sell it for whatever it's worth and go and retire. So that's the other thing to think about. I'd say when it comes to these businesses, we just don't see a lot of great marketing practices. Like I'm currently negotiating with a deal. That is it's a $6 million deal. These folks, they do 14 million a year, they spend 10 - $15,000 a year maybe on their advertising and marketing, their website is from 2002 all their businesses are relational and comes from word of mouth. Now one of the first things I'm going to do and I step in there is work on that marketing. But even that will take some time. And I have to sort of building the operational base up to the point where we can handle the additional business because right now they just don't need it. So I don't feel like that answer was as straightforward as it could have been. Because, again, a lot of the businesses we talked to just don't focus on it.

Andrei Tiu  

No worries. It was a very good context building insight. And maybe the question, the question could be put in another way. Do you have situations where you were negotiating a business and you were looking at this marketing department activity, and you were looking at other assets, saying, you know, I know you that if they had, I don't like x social media follower base, or if there were ranking through SEO on top positions for these and XYZ, you know, things that you know, marketing-wise, would be valuable for the business, I would be able to value them at, let's say five, the multiple of five but because they don't have them, I'm able to get their valuation down and to get this business for less, let's say 3.5 or something like that? Knowing that if you apply a certain recipe of success through marketing, then you'd be able to increase the valuation of that business a lot within a short period of time.

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, 100%. Like, look, if you're a business owner, and you're focusing on those things, your social media, you got to be a great PPC campaign out there with proven results and low customer acquisition costs. And you've got SEO humming along. And you're ranking organically for, you know, if somebody types in again, you know, situation: plumber, Missoula, Montana, right, and you're ranking up there on top. That that speaks volumes. And at that point, it's like I was saying earlier, you have a lot much more turnkey business. So the buyer is not going to want to value us more, but you as the seller can certainly have an argument for being valued more, right. This, but again, me as the buyer, I'm also thinking like, it's great you could have, because actually this business that I bought, they were focusing and investing pretty heavily in SEO and PPC about a year ago. But it was basically a waste of money, they were doing a good job at it. But the actual business wasn't set up to serve all the new customers that were calling the phones. Right. So it was they were literally just throwing dollars away, and just marketing to the market. But the business and the operations were just not set up to handle the customers, the extra customers coming in. So as a buyer, that's also something I'm looking at. So you're great at marketing, great. Are you actually taking advantage of those leads you're getting and serving those customers? And is your business set up and your team set up and systems are they optimised to serve those folks so that business can grow as the marketing does? So I'm looking at that too. And those things just need to go hand in hand together. And that's more often the case with again, businesses we're experienced in which are brick and mortar, physical businesses. With online businesses, it can be a little bit different story, if you're selling digital products, right, you don't need a massive operations team to bring in a lot of new customers and make money.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, cool. Yeah, this is interesting. So basically, to sort of getting into an actionable point or a conclusion for, you know, the marketing leader that is out here looking or listening to the podcast would be, certainly make sure that you know, the targets when it comes to marketing to fulfil the capacity of your business right now. So you know, your numbers, and you're able to get there for a scalable model of maybe lead generation or you tackle the SEO bit so that when, let's say operations changed, and maybe you get new colleagues or the management changes a bit, you as a marketer would be able to bring in leads to fulfil the need for those new clients so that you can fill up the roles. And then for the entrepreneurs/business owner, if you're looking at selling your business, certainly make sure that you know, you have your operations in place and everything clear. And also you can I mean, you can use marketing to ask for a higher price or valuation. Because you know, you can use that to your benefit, right? 

Kylon Gienger  

Yep, that's exactly it. Yeah, well said

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Okay. So I know you have a mental model, you've implemented into your life. Tell us about this mental model and how it's impacting you and the business.

Kylon Gienger  

I've got a few I could probably, I could probably go through if you want. I like mental models a lot. Think about them a lot. There's several, you know, there's the kind of 80/20 mental model. For Pareto Principle, right? That 20% of the work you're doing typically gets you 80% of the results or at it's the other way around, like 80% of the results you get can kind of be traced back to 20% of the work you're doing. So that's one in a nutshell. When it comes to creativity, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're always needing to bethink creatively, right? And often people think that to be creative, you need to have no constraints, the world's your oyster, you can kind of think of do build, create anything you want. I like to put in place creative constraints as sort of a mental model mental hack to create a trigger to creativity. So for example, don't just say I want to start a business, right, that's too broad and you'll be slow to make progress. Instead, give yourself several constraints. Like I want to start a business but it should only cost me $1,000, my timeline is three months. And in three months, it should be earning me, you know, 3000 per month and only take me three days per week of my time. And the business, the product needs to start with a P or something. These types of creative constraints will actually help you be a lot more efficient in coming up with a creative solution than if you have zero constraints so that's certainly another one. There's another concept I like to use I think it's helpful for marketers as well when you're testing new things - it's a concept from Jim Collins, if you've ever read any of his books would be great, Built to last, Fall of Giants, I'd highly recommend those but because the bullets and cannibals basically and it's sort of like the concept of minimum viable product as well. But if you have an endeavour or something you're wanting to test, right, he says fire bullets first, right and these are low risk, low-cost actions basically to take to test your theory. And once you start hitting the mark with those, you can then fire cannonballs, which are the higher risk, higher cost things to actually make this a reality. So I find myself constantly using that as well. So those are a few that are kind of up in my head that I use on an almost daily basis.

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. And also going to so we are now stepping away a bit from this very numbers-oriented discussions, you know, on business valuation and marketing and the first part of our conversation and going a bit softer now into you know, the sort of the mental models that you have discussed, which I very much agree to, I think that they are always great to take into consideration in your day to day life, you guys listening to as well, because this can very much ease your job, or guard you against investing heavily into stuff that you're not very sure is gonna work. Kylon, I know, you are looking at the company culture a lot. And one question that I had for our discussion today was how do you understand the company culture? And what are the ways in which you can establish and control a healthy work environment, from your experience with different companies that you have been working with so far?

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, I like this subject a lot - the subject of culture. And it's certainly part of the art part of due diligence, when you're looking at a business, one of the scariest things in terms of buying a business is stepping into a business with an unhealthy culture. Because that can actually be it's just a bunch of people problems that can actually be very hard to fix. Without, you know, getting the right the wrong people off the bus and getting the right people on the bus, which is firing and hiring people. And that just takes time to retrain people. It's kind of a nightmare to get into a business that has a really, really unhealthy culture. So there's definitely in the diligence process. There are queues that we look for. One of the first things you can do, for example, is looking at customer reviews. Often customer reviews of the business will tell you a lot about the business's culture, In some reviews, you'll notice or mention certain people or positions in the company that are performing or treating the customer badly. That's always an indicator getting to know the owner of the business is also a big one as well because they're often an extension of whatever that that culture is. But in terms of the there's actually there's a great book out there called - I don't recall the author- but it's called 'The culture code'. If anybody wants to learn more about culture, and actually break down the science of it, I would really recommend that book this author, he interviews and studies, some of the most well known and healthy cultures out in the world, that is they're very productive, including Navy SEALs, the kind of Pixar and Disney creative teams and he, he breaks down what makes these cultures so successful, and the science of it and a few takeaways from there that I've always remembered and apply to the businesses I buy, in terms of building that culture is, first of all, it's under, it's helpful to understand just at its root, the word culture in Latin, it's a verb and it actually means to care. 

If you break down what a healthy culture is, right, it breaks down into a kind of three components. There's safety, vulnerability, and hype high purpose. So in terms of safety, a good culture is a place where people feel like they can belong, right? And he talks about these things called belonging cues- a pat on the back or gets a slap on the shoulder or, you know, a fist bump. These environments where you're safe here like this is family, you belong here. There's vulnerability, which is, in a company, oftentimes, it's just being honest about performance, it's the ability to sit down and talk very transparently about what's going right. But also what's going wrong, and how can we fix it, let's talk about our mistakes without attacking each other as people, but let's attack our poor performance in the systems behind that and look at fixing that. So, you know, he talks about Navy SEALs, they have, after-action reports they go out into they do training missions, or they do actual missions. And afterwards, they have after-action reports, which is where they critically break down everything that went right and everything that went wrong, and how that's gonna change what they do moving forward. And I do that now with our technicians out in the field, you know, every week, we have meetings, and we talk what's going right, what's going wrong, what's confused, don't have really transparent discussions about that. And everybody knows they're free to make mistakes, to admit mistakes to work through what went wrong. As long as we can learn from that, there's no judgement, right? And then there's high purpose. People have to live for something bigger than themselves. Everybody's looking for that at a fundamental level, I think including the employees of your business right there. You know, a business you could argue, it's there to make money to serve people or whatever, but what's the higher purpose you can draw out from that business, that's really going to get everybody on board? You know, for us with plumbing company here in Missoula, Montana. I told these guys day one, I said, I want to make this company the most highly sought after plumbing company in the city, I want to be actually one of the most expensive because we're the best, and people know what they're paying for. And I want our technicians to be some of the highest-paid and have some of the highest quality of life, as opposed to all the other plumbing companies in town. And so they're starting to cast this vision. And then we talk a lot about serving the folks in our communities, these guys are like, again, I call them the Navy Seals of plumbers in the area I call them the kind of the firefighters of plumbers in the area. They're coming into folks homes, much like a firefighter, they're having an emergency their basements flooding or something, they don't know what to do, they understand how their plumbing system works. And these guys are coming in fixing it kind of saving the day. So it's turning what's kind of an ordinary boring job into something with a higher purpose that gets them excited and gives them a bit of a vision. So that's another really strong component. And how do you tell that story over and over again, in your marketing, in your internal meetings, in your business systems? So that's sort of a bit of a breakdown on how I think about culture and 'The culture code' is a great book to read.

Andrei Tiu  

So birth, thanks for sharing. Sweet. So now as we are preparing to wrap up, I had a number of another couple of questions, specifically to do with your approach to marketing with Acquira and you know your plans for 2022. If you'd like me to share a bit on what you guys are looking for, at the moment, in terms of, you know, your plans for next year, some channels that you are considering for your activity, and then I think we can, it's going to be hard to just draw one or two main action points for each stakeholder group but I think it'd be nice to help people go away or go home with some actionable points that they can think of, or implement straight into their businesses or their approach to business/marketing post this episode. But let's start with what you guys are doing at the moment and what you find interesting or plan to do with their marketing further than your future.

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, sure. I think moving forward, we're looking to do more of what we have been right, which is connecting with more buyers, we've had hundreds of buyers now go through our training we've talked with 1000s. So we want to continue to do that and just provide education to folks looking into buying a business. I think in terms of marketing. A lot of our efforts next year are going to go into connecting with more business sellers. Right. As I said, your first step is finding that business and oftentimes that can be difficult. And when you do find really good businesses, oftentimes you're competing with a lot of other buyers, especially if they're on market deals, through brokers and such they're being marketed. What we're trying to do is connect with more off-market businesses, which means we're building digital marketing funnels to connect with business sellers rank for certain keywords like I want to sell my business or how do I sell my business or how to prepare my business for sale. These are leading to a landing page where we talk them through our process, that we have this whole network of really qualified buyers to buy their business that they don't, they're not going through a broker so they can save on brokerage fees. And the kind of call to action there and how we capture information is through we give them a business valuation a very rough ballpark, and we explain that but we say here, give us your business information. And we have a calculator in the background that spits out a bit of a valuation. And that's how we stay in touch with them. So, you know, early testing on that is going really well. And moving forward, we're hoping to build that funnel up more, so that we already have a strong funnel of buyers coming through if we can get a very robust funnel of sellers coming through those to meet in the middle and Acquira can facilitate that. And so far, that's going pretty well. So that'll be a big focus. As far as actionable advice for some of your entrepreneurs and business owners out there. Look, the advice I have to give where I'm in the trenches right now is buying businesses or talking to people who want to sell their business. And if you already own a business, unless you know for sure you want to keep this thing is it as a general generational business in your family for decades and decades, you should be thinking even from day one on how do you prepare this business for eventual sale, right. Because, if you do it right, you can make a lot of money and use it to retire or start the next, you know, three businesses or something with the proceeds. But people often don't think about this, I talk to sellers every day that have owned these businesses for 30 years, and it's only been in the last six months, they've started thinking about selling this thing, and they've got,  they could have had years to pair it and everything's a mess. So it's simple things like just putting yourself in the position of a brand new owner that may not even know much about the industry may not have run a business like yours, what can you put in place now in your business, that's going to make their job easier, and your business more attractive, which is going to increase the valuation. So it's things like system, like have job descriptions have to have systems for all the different roles and responsibilities and things procedures that are happening in the business document those, organise them well. Do a good job, you know, keeping your books-  have your finances done correctly, and clearly and have all those up to date your tax returns, that's a big one as well. Keep all these things updated, I'd update them every quarter in just a data room somewhere. So you're always prepared. If somebody wants to potentially look at your business to buy it, you can shoot them a link that's been updated within the last quarter last three months. And all your information is right there. Work on your marketing, work on your growth, work on your culture, have a really healthy culture and some great customer service. Again, put yourself in the shoes of a prospective buyer that doesn't know anything about your company. That's looking at it and stepping into it, the more turnkey you can make that business, the higher valuation you're going to have when you want to sell it and start that process. Just please start earlier rather than later. It could literally mean the difference of a million dollars in your pocket. I've seen that. Yeah.

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. And do you already have the calculator, you know, working on the landing page, because I think if you're okay, and you'd like to, we can also include this in the description of this episode? So people that maybe have, you know, their business and their activities that you opportunities out there. We have quite a lot of listeners from America as well. So you know, people can maybe access it and start a conversation through there with you and Acquira.

Kylon Gienger  

Yeah, so I mean, if you are a person who owns a business that wants to sell it, that URL is acquira.com/business-sellers. So Acquira.com forward slash business dash sellers. And you'll see that that landing page.

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, I made over it as well. And you guys will have the link in the description of this episode. So to check it out.

Kylon Gienger  

Yep. And if you're a buyer, you can essentially just go to acquira.com. And you'll see plenty of options there and some videos and some stuff. Our team's ready to talk to you as soon as today on what business buying is all about. And if it's something you want to get involved in, we've got some programmes you can jump in right away. Actually, the very first thing you'll do is go through sort of a business buying test drive, we put you in the driver's seat of a prospective buyer, and we give you all the data on a business we've already acquired and we kind of take you through the steps of diligence on that and so you can kind of test drive the idea at first so if you're interested in buying there are opportunities as well.

Andrei Tiu  

That's very cool. Okay, super. So anyway, the link to the website is going to be here as well. So you guys will be able to find all this information in the description of this episode if you are either watching it on YouTube or streaming on any of the other platforms. Kylon this was a very, very insightful talk. And I feel we covered a lot of interesting topics, it was very interesting to me as well, since we didn't have these topics covered on this episode before. Very good insights on the culture of the company as well. I always thought this would be one of the most important things that business owners should be looking at from day one. Really happy that we managed to touch upon it. In this episode, even if we only spent a couple of minutes, maybe we'll be able to potentially organise something in the future, tackling more of this topic and how you- I mean success stories from the companies that you own, owned, or have been involved with when it came to buying and selling and, you know, transformations that happen for the process.

Kylon Gienger  

Absolutely, Andrei. Well, it's been a pleasure, man. Thanks for all the great questions that I've enjoyed sharing what we do here.

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Yeah, this was great. So last question. If people want to personally reach out to you or connect with you, or you know, discuss specific subjects, where's best to get to you? Is it LinkedIn or other platforms?

Kylon Gienger  

Feel free. I have a personal website. So my name is Kylon Ginger. It's just kylonginger.com. So it's KYLON GIENGER. And on there you can there are links to acquire. There are links to other stuff I'm doing personally, as well as my LinkedIn and those are good places to reach out

Andrei Tiu  

Perfect. Okay, so you guys will have these links in the description of this episode, Kylon's website and LinkedIn profile as well. Kylon, again, very big pleasure. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for the insights. Very, very interesting and very inspiring. Looking forward to catching up soon. And meanwhile, best of luck with all your ventures and with the new business that you're discussing right now. I'm sure things are going too good to go great.

Kylon Gienger  

Appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me. Cheers.