The Marketing Innovation Show

Growing a modern service business [Sean Campbell]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Sean Campbell, as they will be discussing Sean's background & story, inbound marketing and important aspects for growing a pipeline, Sean's secrets and frameworks used when consulting clients, actionable points for service businesses looking to scale in 2021, and also Seans's platforms and promo.

Sean Campbell is the CEO of Cascade Insights, an author of several books on technical as well as business topics and a well-regarded conference speak. He is the best person we could have in matters of knowledge when it comes to surviving and thriving as a service firm owner or the leader of a practice area inside a larger services firm.

 

Connect with Sean:

Website: www.cascadeinsights.com

LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancampbell/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/seanallencampbell/

Twitter Handle: https://twitter.com/sean_campbell

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  0:13  

Hello there. This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation podcast show. Our special guest today is Sean Campbell, who is the CEO for Cascade Insights, which focuses on B2B market research. He's mentoring companies on how to build a marketing pipeline that won't break the bank and grow sustainable companies with consistent revenue streams. And today, in this episode, we'll discuss growing a modern service business. So without further ado, hi, Shawn. How are you? How's the morning going? 

 

Sean Campbell  0:39  

Awesome. Thanks for having me on. 

 

Andrei Tiu  0:42  

That was short. It's a pleasure to have you here. How are you? How's the how's life? How's the morning going? I know you had a busy one. So how's the energy? 

 

Sean Campbell  1:26  

Yeah, things are great. It's gonna be like 109 on Saturday here in Portland. So which is really, really hot for Portland, like super hot, most of the West Coast of the US is just going to get kind of baked. So I'm hoping our conditioner doesn't die and all the rest of that kind of stuff over the weekend. But things are great. You know, I mean, honestly, it's been a good year for us so far, you know, overalls, business, and, you know, life's Good.

 

Andrei Tiu  1:54  

Good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah, I mean, beach weather all around the globe, I think, you know, we depends on which area of the world you are right now. I mean, you probably have a better time really COVID. And maybe you are a bit more free to travel or there are some areas that things are not that good. But for example, you know, UK is kind of uh, at the moment. Right, right. But some of Europe is doing pretty well. How are things for you, Sean? In Portland. 

 

Sean Campbell  2:23  

Just with COVID? And that kind of thing in general? 

 

Andrei Tiu  2:25  

Oh, yeah. You know, like, travelling restrictions. And, you know, life, in general, isn't back to normal?

 

Sean Campbell  2:30  

Yeah, I mean, Portland's interesting. Oregon, kind of locked down really early. Like, because we were surrounded by California to the south and Washington to the north. Washington had a pretty aggressive policy as a state. And then California just got hit with a lot of cases pretty early. So Oregon kind of followed suit. But that was even before we had a lot of cases. So it kind of kept the overall numbers really, really down here. I mean, and that's not to take away from any tragedies that have happened to families and whatever I mean, any tragedy is, huge, but like, but in terms of like statistics, COVID didn't really hit Oregon that hard compared to the surrounding states. And, and we took a little bit longer to open up same thing, the government here was kind of conservative with kind of its approach overall, I think that worked. All right. And, yeah, I mean, things are, I wouldn't say they're back to normal here. I mean, there's still a fair amount of kind of mask wearing, I think we're only at like 70% vacced. Here, maybe, maybe 60, I can't remember the latest stat. And the other thing that's interesting about Oregon, in particular, where I live is that there's a very kind of Stark divide between the urban area, the state and the rural area, which is extremely rural. So like, you know, you have a very urban core that's kind of well known for being fairly trendy, fairly hip, all that kind of stuff. And then at the same time, you've got another part of the state that is literally cattle ranchers, right, completely different opposite end of the spectrum. You know, probably the closest analogue in the states would be kind of like Austin, Texas versus the rest of Texas. And I'm not trying to say one's right or wrong. I'm just saying we have a pretty big political cultural divide in the state, more so than some and I think that was also one of the things we're still dealing with the COVID. You know, I don't know if you want to call it.  It's funny, I think of a quote from Churchill all the time, when I think of COVID. He said something at the end of the battle of El Alamein, which was in 1942, he said "this isn't the end, it isn't the beginning of the end, but it's perhaps the end of the beginning." And I don't know if it's the end, the beginning of the end of COVID right now, or it's the end of the beginning. I don't really know. And I don't think anybody knows, you know, what the Fall is gonna look like and everything else but right now not seeing a lot of cases, business is getting more and more back to normal people are going back to offices. Lots more people in the streets and in stores and those kinds of things. But that was a little bit like that last summer, too. So, you know, I've been telling my staff, when it comes to like how I think about this, from a business standpoint, I've been randomly saying October 22, which just kind of a made up date. But I basically just say, once we get about six weeks into the fall, and kids are all back in school in the States, because in the States, at least, there's been a little variety there, state by state, whether kids have been able to go back to school, but it's pretty clear in the fall, pretty much every state will have their kids back in school, most people will be back in office buildings. It'll be interesting to see, you know, six weeks into the fall, if we're sitting at 70% backs rates, and, you know, so I, you know, I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic of what will happen in the business community in the fall is what I'm saying. But I'm, I'm, you know, we've been talking about it a lot as it relates to business travel, and when we should get on a plane again, you know, a lot of our corporate clients to larger corporate clients. Most of them aren't really back in the office until the fall, like a lot of move kind of picked Labour Day in the States was falls on the first Monday of September. And so, you know, that seems to be kind of the unofficial day that a lot of these large companies are going to get folks back in the office. But even so, we're going to do in our probably our first business trip as a team, roughly in about three to four weeks just to kind of test the waters. You know, so we'll see, I get a little bit that a sector-specific though, like, from a tech sector standpoint, tech basically was able to work remote faster than everyone else, you know, if you're selling services in the manufacturing sector, y'all might have been in the office a couple months ago, and you're probably on planes a couple months ago. So some of that is unique to kind of who we serve.

 

Sean Campbell  3:20  

And now that you mention about business and tech, let's present people a bit with your background and your story, as a professional entrepreneur, and now CEO of  Cascade. So tell us a bit about you like how you started, you know, in the technical space and how he founded the company. A way back.

 

Sean Campbell  7:15  

Yeah well, I wanted to be a college professor, I didn't necessarily want to be technical. And I didn't necessarily want to own a business. I meet guys all the time, who, since they were two or whatever, maybe they were watching Shark Tank episodes, which is a show in the States, you know, maybe they were doing that. And they've always thought like, they want to be an entrepreneur or whatever. I didn't. I didn't even really want to have any sales responsibilities. My dad was in sales, and he did really hardcore cold calling based selling insurance in the 80s. When it was 100% commission sales. That was my image of it. And I didn't, I didn't really want that. And what happened was, I met a beautiful woman who ended up being my wife and still is, and I didn't want to be a starving college professor, I kind of wanted to provide for us. And she was happy to do it. We always joke she says, I would have followed you to Waterloo, which is Waterloo, Iowa, which is where the PhD programme was going to be that I was going to go to, and so she would have willingly went. But anyway, I left my master's degree where I was teaching. This will date me a little bit, I'm 51, but Windows for Workgroups, and office on like when it used to come on 34 diskettes used to be a stack about this high of little diskettes, you would feed into a computer. And anyway, I started teaching people how to use productivity software, back in the era when like a mouse was new to people. And that was how I got my start, because I still love teaching. And that kind of snowballed into a couple teaching gigs. And then I ended up deciding I wanted to become an independent trainer. Teaching, at that point, networking and databases and programming, and me and two other guys got together and we decided to found a company together so we can kind of co-market the independent training services we were doing. And that slowly snowballs over about four or five years into about a 25 person company that we ended up growing and selling. And then after I sold that company, I took about nine months to a year to kind of decide what I want to do. I even worked for an outfit for a little while, decided I didn't really like that as much. I didn't really want to go work for somebody necessarily. And my one of my two original business partners, Scott Sweigert, we decided we want to found another company. And so we founded a company focused on competitive intelligence research actually in the tech sector because we've been doing a lot of competitive analysis in tech. Kind of taking one technology stack and comparing it to another. And that was the kernel of Cascade Insights. And then Cascade Insights eventually started doing more broader market research based initiatives in tech. So kind of a full gamut of qualitative and quantitative research. And then we've also gone ahead and included some marketing services that we do base off the research we do. And that's now become a company that's that's slightly over 25 people we're in like, 10 different states in the US, because it's all virtual. And, and that's the journey. But if you'd asked me at the start, when I was in college, is I watched the guys that were in business programmes trot off to early classes every morning at 8am, or something like that. And I was a liberal arts major showing up for classes that didn't start till like noon or whatever. I had no dreams whatsoever of being a business owner. It's not like I thought it was a bad idea, I didn't have a problem with it. It's just it wasn't on my radar, I wanted to teach and I wanted to learn, it's kind of a bit of who I am, like, every time I learned something, I want to go teach somebody like just by default, like, I don't know how to stop that, like, if I learn something or read a book, I turn around and want to teach somebody. If I learned something new about fishing, that's a hobby of mine, I want to put six kids in the boat next week that our friends and family and go teach them how to fish. And what I realised is that while the business isn't really just about that, there's a huge component to that to growing a successful business, which is that you have a passion for learning, and that you have a passion for teaching. And you also have a passion for adjusting to what you learn.

 

Sean Campbell  11:38  

That last part, not all business owners have, unfortunately, I think a lot of them kind of get stuck on whatever vision they had for the business originally, or their role in the business or what the business was supposed to do for them. And I've always been able to pivot pretty readily. If I feel like the data, and what I'm learning is showing me we need to make a change. And I just think that's huge. And the other place I think that's helped me a bit is in services firms, you're selling the people that are there. You can wrap around it whatever thing you offer. Sure, whether it's marketing services, or sales services, or PR services or Research Services. But at the end of the day is the people that you're selling. And so those people are trained effectively, and apprentice effectively, then you're going to be really successful. So I don't wanna go too long on all of that. But like, in a weird way, I ended up having a job that gave me a lot of chance to learn and to teach. But I wouldn't have expected that in the beginning. And that's not to say it's all been roses, there's certainly stressful moments of owning a business, there's good years and bad years, there's things that happen. I mean, as a college professor, I wouldn't be responsible for hiring and firing people. You know, that's not always the best joy of your week if you have to let somebody go. But the funny side story on that like not to make light of it. But like, we fortunately haven't had to let a lot of people go over the years. My business partner and I fell into a bad trap of we let a couple people go one year and we had we had the meeting with him to let them go at this nearby coffee shop, which it makes sometimes that'll happen, right? If you have a small office, you wanna to kind of have neutral territory to have that conversation, never really sure how that will go. And we took an employee a couple weeks later said, Why don't we meet you at this coffee shop? And he said, I'm not going to be fired, right? I mean, it only happened twice, but the whole staff and notice that we gone to that one coffee shop twice and let somebody go over like a six month window. And fortunately, again, I can actually count across both businesses, I can probably count on a grand total of two hands, the number of people we've left go, which isn't so bad. I mean, that's at most, you know, one every other year, over 20 years of ownership. So I feel like we've got a reasonably good sense of who to hire but even so that's a tough part of the job. So it's not it's not all teaching and learning but it's incredibly stimulating. I mean, no in a business because there's always something to go solve.

 

Andrei Tiu  14:18  

Sure thing. So in terms of the work that you do right now with Cascade, because I would like to sort of direct the discussion. As we were briefly discussing in terms of our audience, many of them are marketing professionals and marketing managers, leaders in this space. Now, I think it's very interesting for everybody really, right now since we are heading to summer, and it's going to be you know, depending on where you are in the world right now, but some of the countries might actually be more freestyle and everybody going on holidays now that they can. So this can cause a bit of, you know, a bit of a shake up in terms of business or revenue coming into the business. As well as the funnel overall, because it might delay some things. And then marketing, of course, together with sales have to deliver towards the business growth element. So one thing that I wanted us to chat about is the way that you handle and you consult with your clients in terms of building sustainable growth, inbound channels. Looking at the marketing and sales alignment, and then looking at the service businesses, and to have a discussion around, you know, what are the best steps for leaders in the space to do for the summer, or also in general in the post COVID world? To really perform very well.

 

Sean Campbell  15:43  

Summer is an interesting one. I mean, I think for it depends, of course, what kind of services business you're in. If you're in lawn care, or pool maintenance, you know, your summers, like your high season or a buddy of mine does h back repair. So all summer long, he's fixing air conditioners. But for a lot of high end consulting services like ours that are sold to large companies, there is a little bit of a summer siesta of sorts that happens where like these large companies, kind of certain people kind of disappear from the building, and it makes it harder for them to make decisions. There's just not enough people in the building, because of all the vacations and all the time people are out for a critical kind of purchase decision to be made. So, I mean, in short, on that one, I think it has a lot to do with just knowing that's going to happen, filling up your coffers with work beforehand. And then, you know, honestly, having enough cash to ride the wave. So this isn't directly what you asked, I'll get to kind of the marketing strategies in a minute. But I think a lot of service from owners just don't keep enough cash on hand. I think that's, that's the biggest problem I see. You know, one thing our accountant always says is like, you guys keep a lot of cash on hand in the business. And I say, Well, yeah, because I feel we have a responsibility to the employees here. If we have a downturn, we have the ability to basically weather that and not have everybody freak out. And unfortunately, I think a lot of small service firm businesses, the the distance between the company bank account, and the owner's personal bank account isn't far enough. There's a little too much kind of instant transference, when things are going well. And I think you have to be mature enough to watch your business bank account get much, much, much larger than your personal bank account ever has a right to be, and be okay with that. And I've met owners over the years who really struggle with that. The minute that business bank account grows, they feel like they have to kind of reward themselves with some big pull from it. And I would say that's when you really got to go to your accountant, or you've got to go to whoever's doing finance with you, and and let them kind of tell you, when it's a good time to borrow against the equity of that business, not in the literal borrow sense, but to pull money out. And anyway, I think that's a huge thing. I think a lot of service businesses just run habitually cash poor. And that makes them under stress when they run out of things. As far as a marketing strategy goes, though, I think the biggest thing I'd say is have one website. I mean, in a lot of services firms, their websites suck. That is the only way to describe it. And they may suck in a variety of ways. It may be that the messaging is poor, it may be that like they don't have a good acquisition strategy. So the site could capture people well, but they don't have really good SEO, they don't have pay per click, they've never even thought of those terms. Or whatever their writing is somewhat pontificating. That's really common in service firms. Like they write up blog posts and ask their mother and their brother and their uncle and their top three clients "Do you like what I'm writing?" And they go "Yeah, Bob, that's great stuff" And they never asked themselves anything converting off what they have. If you ask most service firms, like how many leads they're generating off their website, you have this interesting dialogue, but always run something like this. You say, hey, how's the website doing for? And they're like, Oh, yeah, it's great. We really like it, you know, tells her story all right. You get any leads off it? Yeah, some of those good leads. No, not always. How many you get a few? Like, what's the view? Oh, a couple of months, right? And they slowly kind of tell you that like the website isn't performing and then they quickly say, oh, but services, it's a relationship business. It should all be referrals. Totally wrong. It's totally wrong, though. It's completely wrong. And I can tell you exactly that. I live I live both sides of it. But go ahead what question you get. 

 

Andrei Tiu  20:00  

No, actually, I just wanted to press like, totally agree with you. And what one thing that I want to ask you from your experience, because we also work in a b2b space. And we've found in a number of cases that this was the case. So I'm curious about the feedback from you. Don't you think that this transition, I mean, you know, the whole COVID thing, and then the stress that came with it for many, many businesses, mainly, we usually work a lot with medium sized businesses as a company, I know that you work also with bigger corporates. Would you feel that, for many, this period of time was a time when they had to look back at their sales and marketing and aligning the two and starting to work around that strategy that many of them maybe never really had? And actually question their website and other elements of the business.

 

Sean Campbell  20:52  

Yeah, 100%. I think a lot of these guys, they realised, well, I can't fly to a client site, I can't visit a client the same way, trade shares are dead, at least in the way they used to be. I mean, yes, trade shows and conferences when virtual, but basically, networking died. I know these people that run the conferences and be like, hey, networking still exists virtually, I'm like, it's not the same. I mean, it's not even remotely the same, right. And not to say walking the trade show floor was the most scintillating experience that anyone ever experienced. Right? That can be mind numbing in its own way. But you at least had these opportunities to connect. And I think a lot of business owners woke up and went, Wow. Our marketing needs to do something for us. And, and it's funny, even in our lane, we watched it happen. I won't say which folks, but like, there was this interesting thing where like, in our lane, particularly like in b2b market research, there's a lot of other research firms that had fairly poor web presence and websites, and SEO strategies and pay per click strategies and everything else. And it was fascinating, last probably q4 of last year, but especially q1 of this year, all of a sudden, we started to notice these other research firms popping up next to us in the ad listings, and their SEO strategies are changing, and you go to their website, and then all been refresh. So even in our lane, we noticed that while we'd been a little ahead of everybody, we've been doing a lot of digital work for a long time now. Clearly, these folks woke up and realise, oh, I've got to go spend some time on this. So I think there's definitely an awareness of that. I think there's some execution issues, though, that people still have with it. But I think, for sure, I don't know how, as, even as other sectors, like as a restaurant, I mean, how a restaurant could think their website isn't useful to them after the last year, it just boggles the mind. Right? So I think there's a lot of enhanced emphasis on the web presence, but I'm not so sure everybody's doing it the right way yet.

 

Andrei Tiu  23:03  

Yeah, I think that probably, from a maturity point of view, or actually, you know, just the core understanding of how marketing plays a role in this, probably everybody should just admit the fact that the website is usually the last conversion point. Many, if we talk about b2b businesses. How about content marketing? Because, again, building on what you mentioned, in terms of blogs, and having blogs / copywriting strategies that are not really funded in any way or not particularly following the direction? How do you guys go about helping the clients that you work with? What sort of process that you follow at the moment? If you want, we can bounce ideas, and I can share some of the things that we do.

 

Sean Campbell  23:51  

Yeah, I mean, from a developing content for clients standpoint,  I think the biggest thing is that there's two things, I guess. Are you writing to Google or you're writing to a persona, that's the decision you have to write out in the beginning, because if you're writing to Google, you can write your average listicle post, you can write, top, whatever kind of posts. If you're writing to a persona, though, you might have to sacrifice a little bit of that kind of writing specifically to Google, right? Google isn't a human being. So it's not going to have the same kind of response to an object a piece of content as a person will, so if I'd say the biggest mistake I see our clients try to drive toward when we talk to them about content, are they seem to skip over the persona, which is ironic, because what's the first thing a writer learns about writing? Beyond all the basics, like have a thesis and you know, don't use passive voice all the time and the grammatical constructs you're supposed to say clear of. Write to someone. And what I would say happens in most b2b marketing, and most of our clients marketing before we show up, is they're writing to everyone. They can't for the life of them pick an audience for a piece. If they're writing to the IT director, they're like, but it also has to dress the CFO, and it also has to dress this person. And, and the same thing happens with company sizes. You see, it's very hard sometimes for these kind of committees that create content in large companies to say, Okay, this piece is just going to be targeted at a developer lead, who works inside an enterprise company very quickly, that will be like, Well, what about startups? And what about mid markets? And can we add that and that". Waters it all down, because inherently, people are a little selfish when they read content. They want it to be about them. They're inherently selfish, it's not a bad thing. But they want the content to be about them. And the more it's about them, the more they'll read it. And when you water it down and try to hit every Google keyword, and you try to hit all the different bases and address all your internal audiences and all your stakeholders who want all the content to address all these needs. You have to say: is our goal to address everything? Or is our goal to be effective? And our goal is to be effective, we have to hit a certain persona, and it's really strange. We will have workshops with clients and I will have to get borderline pokey with them. And be like, no, pick a persona. And then they'll all talk for five minutes. And they'll give me seven personas. And I'll say no, pick a persona. And another thing we ask clients, that's super important, that I think everybody should ask their own marketing 100%, is what am I not serving? Meaning, Am I specifically telling myself as I author content, this is the audience this piece is not supposed to address. And it's a little different than numerating them. Because when you say NO to an audience, you should probably make that explicit in the piece. And I think that's really, really hard for marketers to do they always feel like, well, if I leave an audience, and I say no to them, I might lose sales from them. And I would say the opposite is true is that as long as you have the right mix of content, people love the authenticity of you basically saying this isn't for you. Because in their real life, how often do is anybody say that? Right? How often is anybody selling you anything? Say this isn't for you? Right? And so I think if the world did a little more of that content would be trusted more in general, which would be huge, right? And at the same time, I think people would sell more. So like a really good example there from a concrete standpoint is: we were dealing with this client, fairly large ecommerce site of technology products. And I was talking to their Chief Strategy guy, and there's like a bunch of other people on this conference call. And we're talking about this major revamp to their website and all the landing pages, and we got in this place where I said, Okay, so for this thing, who are you going to serve?  And the guy kind of gave me this really long answer. And I said, Okay, let me just try this on for size. Let me play client with you. And I started out and I said. So who do you guys serve? And they're like, enterprise mid market this way, started this way. I said, No, who are you really good at working with? And he's like, Well, I mean, we serve all those? I said, No, I mean, I really want to know, who are you who are working. And at one point, he cut me off, and he says, Are you being difficult? Just for the sake of it? I said, No. I said, this is the way people will read your content, they're looking for you to say, no, they're looking for you to eventually put an edge to what you offer. And the final thing, and this is that if you don't do this, if you don't do this, the only thing that's going to happen is one of the few possible negative outcomes, which are A, the person looks at your competitors website. And your competitor might define what you don't do. Like they've got a you know, kind of comparison chart, or they go hunting the web through third party review sites or through influencer sites trying to figure it out what is it you don't do? And so I think, if I had if I had a nickel to spend and what I would do to fix content marketing, I would have more pieces that say, this isn't for you. And then all along the way. It's saying who it's for. I think that's the hardest thing we struggle with, with clients. And I think it would just make the world a better place on us. If people did more that.

 

Andrei Tiu  29:51  

And now we're looking I think it's a nice moment for us to divert a bit into the customer journey in the b2b space because I know that you guys from working with the Cascade, you guys help a lot businesses in understanding their buyer journey research and then the buyer personas and building up this sort of framework and understanding what their audiences need from them really how to address that best. So, I was wondering if you have good or insightful recent case study that we could discuss about when looking at the way that the customer journey was influenced lately in the b2b space? You know, because ultimately, it's the person that does the purchase. So how are they looking for that specific service that they are after, differently now than they were in the past. And now, we touched a bit on this, when we were discussing about conferences and live events that are not really happening the way that they used to be. Would you have maybe a concrete example that we can discuss on in terms of business that found through research that actually their customer journey changed quite a bit, and that they had to adjust so that they can deliver, but also that they can get the result that they needed from their marketing and sales activities? 

 

Sean Campbell  31:13  

Sure, sure. I mean, I would say one of the more perennial things we see is, kind of gets back a little bit to the persona thing, but like they will inevitably target too high for their content. This is, I think, it's a little bit of an ego thing. See this across a lot of buyers journey research we do, right, or a lot of kind of messaging research, the client will say, well, we need to produce a bunch of content that targets the C level, or the vice president level, or like, whatever. And what's interesting is, at the same time, they're telling us that they know that in b2b, there's multiple people involved in the deal, right, depending on what number you look at, some people say there are five people in every b2b purchase, or six people or seven or eight or nine or whatever. Currently, it seems like the number that people have settled on is somewhere around seven to eight, right? So what's interesting, though, is that people will tend to write content to basically the most important person with the biggest title. A lot of times when really, I think if they're thinking about the front part of the buyers journey, the discovery part where that person is like looking for vendors and looking for solutions. It's actually someone probably quite Junior. And if you look at most companies content, it's not targeted at Junior people, right? So if you're a SaaS company, and you offer some kind of productivity solution, or let's make it even a little nerdy, or like, it's like financial auditing and compliance, right, we have somebody who works in that space. Sarbanes Oxley, compliance software and stuff like that. And so they might write a lot of content to the, to the CFO, or the Director of Finance, but ask yourself this question. Is the CFO really going to Google using Google as his therapist and searching for new vendors all day long? No. I mean, everybody uses Google as a therapist, but he's probably not looking for vendors. And so like, everybody that, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but we all turn to Google with odd questions, right, at different points of the day, right? I mean, whether they're business questions or whatever. And a number of years ago, I started just saying, we just use Google as our therapist, right? But you know, the CFO isn't shoving those queries into Google. It's probably like a mainline accounting manager, maybe even a bookkeeper, right? They're the one who's experiencing the day to day pain, at some level, that your solution solving, and even if they're not the ones experiencing the pain, the CFO doesn't have time, at 500 bucks an hour or whatever, they're paid, to go search Google, they're gonna delegate that. So there's this weird air gap where, sales and marketing sit in a room and they say, who's the most important person in the deal? And what they do is they do this weird mapping, where they say, well, the most important person is the person that ultimately signed the check and ultimately signed off on bla bla bla bla bla. But that's not the person who did the discovery. And your content should be written to make that person that's doing the discovery go "yes, I trust you. Giving you to my boss will be a safe decision. You've told me what you do and you don't do, I won't look like an idiot for referring you or bringing you in. And you also even showed me how you can help me, little lonely Junior me, way down in the finance team, you showed out you can help me." And here's the test if people went to almost any website, but they should start with their own, and they asked themselves two questions. Is our content written to the person that we believe is actually shoving the query into Google to find us? My guess is the answer's no. And also they should ask is anywhere in our website are we saying what we don't do? Or who we don't serve? market segment persona, whatever, the answer, that will almost certainly be no. And that junior person really needs to see both, because what's that junior person dealing with predominantly, when they make a recommendation on a vendor? Personal risk. That's what they're dealing with. Their job isn't to ultimately decide on all of what you offer. So it's also interesting, the content you would produce for that person is a little different. Do they need a big huge competitive matrix? Maybe not. Maybe what they need is they need basically an understanding that you will be a good partner, that you will work with them effectively. Yes, you have some comparison points with your competitors that are worthy. And I rarely see anyone, particularly in the services lane, kind of right that way. That makes it clear that we will be kind of safe for you to recommend. We've done this research on this before, there's an outfit I, protect client conferences, I won't say but this was an agile training firm. And they wanted to move up market in their selling, they wanted to sell more to, like VPS of product development, and senior leadership, but they were doing training classes with Junior people. And they didn't really feel like they were getting senior people to come to the training classes. And they were convinced that they had to do this kind of full board direct approach, put a lot of content that the senior people want. And when we interviewed a lot of these Junior people as part of research, they said, honestly, what I really want is the confidence that you won't kind of make it difficult for me what I recommend you. You'll keep me in the loop, you won't run around me right? You won't just forget that I brought you in, you know, you will enhance my career just as much as you enhance my bosses and my grand bosses career. Now, and it's not to say companies don't do this. Sometimes there's somebody who does this really well. There's a software company called Tableau who did this really, really well. They went after kind of - I don't know if you've heard much about Tableau as a product but I'll give a brief flyby if listeners haven't heard it - but everybody knows about Excel and an Excel you can make charts and graphs and visualisations but everybody knows that the charts and graphs and visualisations in Excel are average. Basically, they're not sexy looking right? So Tableau comes along and says, we're going to make really sexy, awesome looking visualisations off your data. But we're not going to go target the guy that runs the Blinky light servers inside the data centre, we're not going to go target him or her and we're not going to go target your boss, we're going to actually go target the person building those charts and graphs. And they want to be seen as a valuable member of the company by building these sexy data visualisations and they want an easy way to do it. And they're struggling to do it in the Leatherman tool of the business world known as Excel, right, that does everything the Swiss Army knife. And so they went after them. And they built communities around this concept. And their marketing was targeted at making these people heroes. And they ended up getting bought by Salesforce for like a tonne of money. And they're really valuable. And there are other companies like this, like I said, but it's it's much more common to wrap this up this little kind of section of like, for these companies to target toward the person they felt was kind of the economic buyer, or the person that was the last most significant title they met in the sales process, versus that person doing discovery. So I would go back and tell this, there's check two things on your site. One, is your content written to the person shoving the queries into Google to find you? If it's not, fixed that. And secondarily, give that person some faith in you that you know what you shouldn't do, by putting something around that on the site and the markets you don't serve and the people you don't serve. I think you'll get a lot more sales in the end. And honestly, you'll probably have more fun writing that content than trying to turn the mind if some random CFO any day, at least that's my opinion.

 

Andrei Tiu  39:16  

Yeah. And also save a tonne of time, in the sales process, because you don't want to spend time on, people that you don't really observe. Yeah, very good insights, totally on board with everything that you did. We've been also as a company, like firsthand through this journey when we first launched and we had to pick our market. And then one thing though, as a startup, I think it's one of the hardest things that you that you can do in the beginning because you know, revenue.

 

Sean Campbell  39:45  

Right, right. 

 

Andrei Tiu  39:46  

And you have it there. But once you start being accustomed to it and knowing what you want and what you'd like to serve and what you don't, then I think the journey becomes a bit smoother and trusting that will work out it will usually work out. Super cool. So in terms of your plans for this year, and ways that you work with companies nowadays, ways in which you might be able to maybe help some of the guys tuning in today, who are you guys serving and who you are not?

 

Sean Campbell  40:18  

Yeah, well, let's start with who we're not, that's probably the best way to go it like we work with anybody who makes technology that isn't typically sold in the Best Buy. That's how I used to say it, or like an electronics retailer, or a commerce retailer. We deal with all the b2b technology products that are a little bit more invisible. You know, so like, clients include folks like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. We also work with a lot of startups that sell b2b technology, or b2b SaaS. And what we do for them is we'll basically do what I sometimes say are just two things. Although it's a little broader than that, of course. We ask the right questions to the right people. And that's the research side of the business. So we go find the right people, whether that's in a qualitative or quantitative venue, and ask them the right questions so you can move the business forward. So that can be like, buyer persona research, messaging research, brand research, competitive research, those things. And then, on the other side of the business, on the marketing side, we focus on making sure that you're saying the right things to the right people. We don't try to run your pay per click campaign for you, we don't try to do SEO, we don't try to do those things. We're very laser focused on messaging, and then packaging that up in whatever form makes the most sense. So whether that's something written or something video or something animated. And the reason I think both of them work really well together for us as a business, we're spending all this time it's now like your 16, basically, of just staying focused on the needs of b2b technology companies and researching them over and over and over again, and the problems they have and the journey issues and the persona issues and the messaging. And that's just filled us with a lot of really good, interesting best practices, and just even observations at a kind of meta level of how to get messaging right, for b2b audiences. And so, you know, most folks, that's what they'll hire us for is some kind of combination of those two skill sets, sometimes isolated, sometimes it'll just fires for research, or sometimes just marketing. But it's pretty common for somebody to say, we don't know this problem about our market, or we're losing to a competitor or our messaging isn't resonating. Can you help run some research on that? And then when that's done, can you help us fix that messaging and, you know, get our website better, right? It's a messaging framework, help us author some content, get some sales enablement materials out there. And, and it's a fun, it's a fun place to be because there's way too much bad messaging out there. So as much good messaging as we can create, I'm happy with. And, you know, and, and it's nice, it's nice to come back six months later and say, Wow, now you're getting leads, and you weren't getting leads before or now you feel comfortable about what you're saying to the market you didn't before. So that's basically who we are.

 

Andrei Tiu  43:16  

Great stuff. And if people want to find out more about you, or they want to follow you on one core platform, which one would be the platform that you'd like to direct them to? Is it your website? Is it LinkedIn, Facebook, something else?

 

Sean Campbell  43:31  

I just a website, honestly, just go to https://www.cascadeinsights.com/, that's the easiest. And as far as reaching out to me, I'm on various social networks and platforms. But to be honest, I don't always check the messaging from there, I've got plenty to do, the fastest way to get ahold of me is honestly just email me. So that's just sean@cascadeinsights.com.  And one thing I'll add, I'm always happy to talk to entrepreneurs and business owners of any stripe. My company serves certain people so you may work in a sector and my company can help you. Fine. But there's always a certain amount of like collegial conversation that can happen if you're having struggles as a business owner, and it's always helpful to have somebody to kind of talk to you. So if you're out there listening, and you're like, I don't do anything with b2b tech, but I like what he said, I'd love to be able to just chat with him about business. You can email me too. We won't work for you. But I'll talk to you. Happy to do that.

 

Andrei Tiu  44:32  

Cool, guys. So we'll have links to these in the description of this episode, depending on where you're viewing it, but we'll add them everywhere. And until next time, Shawn, it was really a pleasure in the very nice chat today. Looking forward to staying in touch. And for you guys listening, as you already know, if you have certain questions that you'd like myself or Sean to address, or you'd like us to organise something for the future, always reach out to me or to Sean. You have our address in the description as well. So that's hello@marketiu.com, make sure that you write your question and we'll do our best to answer it together or maybe in a future episode, depending on what struggle you're going through. And Sean, again, thank you for the offer to our listeners to get in touch. I think this would be really valuable for somebody that you know, need the hands to know that they can reach out to people like yourself, like us. For basically free hand of help. I think that's great.

 

Andrei Tiu  45:39  

Well, until next time, have an awesome one. Thank you, Sean again, and looking forward to catching up soon. 

 

Sean Campbell  45:44  

All right, thanks, man. Take it easy. 

Mixing marketing & Sales to grow your B2B business post covid-19 (with Tyler Kemp)

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Tyler Kemp, as they will be discussing effective strategies in meeting marketing and sales to grow your B2B business and sales, innovation in the sales technology space, and also about his FIRE formula that helped others scale their marketing. 

Tyler Kemp is the CEO of LeadRoll.co, a cutting-edge outbound sales agency that replaces SDRs and guarantees high-ticket sales appointments at scale. He's a sales and marketing powerhouse that's built multiple 7-figure businesses and has helped hundreds of high-ticket sales organizations light up their sales calendar like a Christmas tree. Currently, he works with small businesses, Influencers, and sales/service professionals. He's been helping start-ups, small business and personal brands strategize scaling and growth during quarantine, and he's teaching clients to dominate their brands right now.

 

Connect with Tyler:

LeadRoll.co: https://www.leadroll.co/ 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjkemp 

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  0:04  

 

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei, and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Today, our special guest is Tyler Kem, the CEO of LeadRoll.co, a cutting-edge outbound sales agency that replaces SDRs and guarantees high ticket sales appointments at scale. They will discuss effective strategies in meeting marketing and sales to grow your b2b business and sales and innovation in the sales technology space. Tyler is a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? Let's roll!

 

Tyler Kemp  3:37  

 

 Andrei, thank you so much for having me. I think we're gonna have an action-packed podcast today, a lot of really good stuff to share. I'm pumped to dig into the current state of marketing to sales. If you're listening today, guys, you're probably affected by things like iOS 14, by changes in LinkedIn, their connect request, by Google's third party pixel changes or Facebook's retargeting limitations, all kinds of stuff going on right now, which makes this podcast episode important. Andrei, how would you prefer that we take this? 

 

Andrei Tiu  4:22  

 

 I think that we can start by giving people a bit more context around you, around the agency: how it came about and what you guys are doing at the moment. And then we can dive into the strategies and things that we were briefly discussing before the show that I think many of our listeners will hear about some of this stuff for the first time, which makes it exciting. And then also the actionable things that our audience as well as you know, their peers could do in scaling up their sales, marketing activity, the alignment, and overall boost business.

Tyler Kemp  4:57  

 

 Yeah, get it to grow. I'll give you a quick background on me. If you haven't heard of me or you don't know, kind of the stuff that I've got my hands in. I cut my teeth in sales two decades ago, probably in demand for about 10 years. Started my first business in my early 20s, after some youthful entrepreneurial stuff, and didn't make any money. I had run this little business for like three years and no real money. We made money, we scaled, we did stuff, but we didn't make real money. Having said that, I learned a lot. Took these learnings and went into the mortgage sector residential mortgages. I worked with a single loan officer, and he was originating the loans I was bringing in the business, and I applied a lot of what I learned about scaling, systems, about the true sales process. Together, we were doing 120 million in loan volume annually, growing 20% year over year. I went on from there to teach, and train several (about 20) Top Producing teams that were doing somewhere between 50 and 100 million to get to the next Echelon. From there, I went to become on the Marketing Advisory Board of a $16 billion company before the age of 30. I was in my mid-20s, and I was on a $16 billion companies advisory board. After that, I left that to go into startup space worked with a company, get from 60 grand a month to 200 grand a month, in eight months for x growth radical, really fast. And then launched what is Leadroll. At Leadroll, we specialize in high ticket businesses, were a multi-million dollar organization, and I've built several seven and eight-figure businesses at this point. What we do is: we book high ticket appointments guaranteed for sales teams, we take the place of an SDR and we light up sales teams’ calendars, like a Christmas tree. Now we do specifically work with companies that are either in the US or selling to the US trying to break into the US. If you're listening, you're like: "Holy crap, I gotta work with these guys.". We can best help you if you're trying to enter the US market. Otherwise, a lot of what I'm going to share with you is relevant no matter where you are. Now we've got hundreds of clients, and we are launching ever forward. The future is a little bit tumultuous for a lot of people. There's a lot of questionable things happening in terms of data privacy, in terms of platform changes, in terms of what can you do today to be successful. I think that the changes are targeting small businesses. They want small businesses to shrivel, how are you going to do demand if you don't get some of these things solved. If some of these changes are rendering Facebook ads, for many completely useless or rendering paid ads completely useless or outbound automation that they might have been tinkering with completely useless. Today, I think our time would be well spent to share how you, as a small-medium enterprise business, can solve these problems for yourself, and potentially thrive when your competitors are shrivelling up and dying.

 

Andrei Tiu  8:58  

 

 Let's take it from the umbrella view and talk about how you guys are working with your clients at the moment as an agency from the sales perspective. Here we can kind of debate how that might be or might not be different for the record, for people tuning in. We are a marketing agency as well. So, from the alignment of marketing and sales, mainly from this point, as a sort of external party that comes into the business and helps. Tyler, how are you guys doing it? How do you work with your clients, and what's the relationship there? And then I'd like to dive a bit more and in more detail into the innovation, in the tech space, sales technology, and touchpoints because I think those are insightful and can open eyes for other people. 

 

Tyler Kemp  9:51  

 

Completely. So, our relationship with the client is built on a very simple premise, which is that unless you are deep in the weeds, and unless you have a robust and thorough understanding of a successful sales process, it's going to be very hard to continue to iterate and drive actual results. I think that we've kind of taken our stand against some of the brand awareness mantra in favour of really focusing on sales activity that moves the needle, outbound sales, driving leads, making sure that leads are actually worked and nurtured effectively, things like that. When a client comes to us,  they've probably tried dozens of other agencies in the past that didn't yield the results. They caught into some hype, they thought: "Oh, I need to do this new thing, maybe I need to do a lot of social posting, maybe I need to do whatever.". They are a little disenchanted because they did it, they paid a bunch of money, and then no sales were generated. What they were told as well people know your brand more. So, when they work with us? They work with us because they want to drive revenue. We calculate the math with them. They might tell us: "Well, I want to add 5 million in revenue, in the next six to 12 months.", and we work backwards to figure out what exactly do we need to do to hit that number, in terms of outbound, selling, bringing their solution to market, identifying the prospects, doing all the magic stuff that we do, which we'll get to probably in a second. In the end, delivering massive net profit results to these businesses and allowing them to scale superduper fast. They can scale up, they can scale down way faster than they can scale their internal sales team, way faster than they can scale a team of SDRs. We get probably 10 times the result of that, if not dramatically more, with a fraction of the cost. 

 

Andrei Tiu  12:22  

 

So, before we go into the actual tactics and sales process, and the point that we were discussing just before, let's discuss a bit more about the decision-makers. As I mentioned before, we have several C-level people on the show, many of them maybe we're not yet thinking about going and breaking into the US. Maybe some are already there, but they don't know what's out there and how the US might be different from other markets. Can you tell us a bit about what's different? Why you guys are working primarily with the US so that people can understand what might be different in, what they should do locally if they're not from the US. 

 

Tyler Kemp  13:06  

 

Right. Why should you focus on that market? The first reason is that if you're a UK listener, if you are a listener in countries where you've got some very stringent privacy regulations like GDPR, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to try to figure out who the heck you're supposed to market to, and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to market to them. Now, those hoops are not insurmountable by any means. However, they limit your ability to scale compared to a little bit more liberal policy on b2b sales. There's a very small chance that the US whatever Institute's something like GDPR, and if they did, I doubt it would ever be effective to b2b. Right now there is a massive opportunity because a couple of things are happening. I mentioned at the start of the podcast that there are four particular updates that most all of you, if not all of you are going to feel. We feel it in the US, and those updates are as follows. The first is iOS 14 has given people the option to opt-out of being tracked with their ads. So, that means that someone doing Facebook ads, for example, would have just no analytics on these on their performance. It renders their ads essentially useless for targeting and other purposes as well. The second big update is LinkedIn. If you've been doing LinkedIn automation, and you're using tools out there. There's a lot of tools that do LinkedIn automation. If you're using that stuff, you've probably realized that you're not getting any results right now, and you're getting flagged for sending too many connection requests. LinkedIn is limited. The amount of connections you can send in a day is 100 connection requests a day. Now you can only send 100 in a week, and that's in the best-case scenario. In fact, not only that, I've seen folks limited to about seven, and I've got some team members, even who were just looking at too many profiles and got banned by LinkedIn just for looking at profiles manually, no automation whatsoever, on their profile. LinkedIn is coming down hard, and rendering a lot of that stuff, dead in the water, you can still do like open in mail. But I'm telling you now, that much of that world is about to just die a nasty death. And there's going to be a lot of unhappy banned people very soon if you don't get ahead of it. The next update is, of course, that Google Chrome is eliminating third-party pixels. So, they are consolidating data and making sure that other companies are not able to render other data. That's not Google's pixel stuff. The long and short of it is that it's going to render your ads which is also useless for many people. Finally, the Facebook updates. They used to allow you to track analytics around as many campaigns as you want, as many ad sets as you want, as many ads as you want. Now you're limited to, I believe it's five campaigns and five ad sets that you can track analytics for crazy nuts. Just this week, at least in this recording, they have reduced the timeframe of their pixel from six months to seven days. So, if you've been relying on retargeting, and you're saying: "Oh, I can place a pixel, and that person's in my custom audience, and for the 90 days, six months, and I can continue to advertise to them." that is gone. Seven days, you've got to retarget based on a pixel. All of these things, you better believe that advertisers are in trouble, you better believe small businesses are in trouble, that enterprise is in trouble. We have derived solutions to these problems, and we have the secret keys to the kingdom in the US market specifically, which makes it so that none of that stuff matters. So that is also why the US market is the place to go.

 

Andrei Tiu  18:40 

 

In marketing defence. Indeed, there have been some changes, and some of them were impactful, and we saw them across the board. From the insider’s perspective, some things are going to be relaunched, and Facebook, and Google, and all these guys are working very much towards being compliant, and actioning the data privacy policies and everything else, but also some things are going to be improving. Being a practitioner in this space and having clients from across the board. We saw some stability over the optical release was only last week, but changes have started to happen since the beginning of the year. Now things are starting to level down a bit more, but I would say that indeed salesmen in the enterprise and medium enterprise space are a very big component of growing a business. The way that we see them, for example, is complementary in the way that marketing will still be very important for branding and for driving relevant traffic, but sales are actually where you can have a personal contact from the first touch. There are some things that Tyler you guys have that are impressive. So, I would like to discuss these. But before we go into the nitty-gritty and sales technology I'd be very keen to go through your closer formula and the steps that you guys follow and advocate to deliver an effective sales result. 

 

Tyler Kemp  20:13  

 

The closure system is our trademarked sales methodology that basically, is what we follow is our thesis for outbound. It's boiled down into just a couple of steps. Every letter in the word CLOSER stands for something closer. The first one is to calculate the potential. What that means is that you really should never start a sales initiative, until you have a very firm grasp of the math. You need to understand that what your goal is, and what exactly you need to do to get to that goal, instead of just trying some marketing thing, throwing money at it, seeing if it gets you money, and hoping for the best. That's not good stewardship of cash. So, knowing your math from the start, is how you can help ensure a hyper profitable unit case on the back end. If you can take all of your data and run the math and you know your numbers and you know, your average statistical benchmarks to measure against, then you know what's possible. If you don't know those numbers, you're just playing a guessing game. The 'O' and the closure system is an omnichannel foundation. It means that your campaigns should be robust enough to reach people in multiple places at once, not just on LinkedIn, not just on email, not just maybe making phone calls, but trying to have a more holistic approach. The other side of this is that you need to have foundational elements in your business that are going to set you up for success. If you don't have these foundational elements, then you're building your campaign on the sand and it's going to the wind and the waves are going to come around and your house is going to sink. One of the main foundational things you need is to solve the spam box. If you don't solve for the spam box, then you are going to get blacklisted, and you are going to have deliverability in a cold email campaign. Every cold email is slowly dying a death, and if you don't know how to extend the life of that email, then you're in a really bad place. To do that, you've got to do a bunch of stuff on the back end, and we do go through it at lead role dot CEO in a presentation on our thesis step by step and what you need to have. But the long and short of it is that you have to know when you're in spam, you got to get yourself out of spam when you get there, you got to warm things up and have back and forth positive conversations to a degree that allows the platforms to understand that you are reputable. If you don't do that, your campaigns might as well not be doing anything at all. The 'S' is your scripts and personalization. So, you need to design your outbound campaigns and your sales messages around a very particular style. The way that you do normal email marketing is not the same as you do cold email marketing. The way that you do outbound is so different from the way that you might write inbound campaigns. The first step there is to write my messages in a way that's going to be relevant and impactful and lead somebody into a meeting when they don't know anything about me. That is a very hard thing to do unless you understand what needs to do. We just have more data than anyone else on how to do it, we learn from that and we make data-driven decisions on the campaign and now we're masters at it. The other thing there is: automation alone is just not enough. If you start automating and you just spray and pray to 1000s of people and you are not tailoring your message to them. You are going to have abysmal results typically, or standard results. Your standard results are an open rate of maybe 20% reply rate maybe,  1% normally, 2% if someone might be further along in that, and of those how many are positive (probably not many), how many books a call (probably not many), how much was your data total crap (probably a lot). Also, if you don't software deliverability, then still total crap. That's why people think cold email doesn't work. We typically see doing what we do somewhere around 0.05% spam rate, almost no spam. We usually see between 70 and 80%, open rate and between 30 and 50%, reply rate, and ice-cold markets with a very high positive reply rate and a very high booking rate. We're reaching out to 1000s of people a month when we're working with clients anyway. It's high volume and high quality. But you have to be hand touchpoints and handwriting, someone, a customized handwritten message, at least in the first line of your email. At least the first line needs to be just for them, and no one else. If you can do that, you can improve your results. The 'E' stands for execution and process mapping. Know what you're going to do, every step of the way, how you're going to handle positive replies, negative replies, neutral replies. How many times you're going to follow up? How many touchpoints you're going to have in total? If you get nonrespondents, if someone wants to book a call, and they don't book a call, what are you going to do about it? If they say they're going to book a call they don't show up. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? That's your process map. Knowing what you're going to have, and then executing on it with precision. Then finally, the 'R' stands for reporting and optimization. Everything needs to be reported. If it's anonymous, it's pretty much useless. You need to know what are the emails. What are phone numbers? What are their contact details? Did they reply to me? Was it a positive, negative or neutral reply? Did they book a call with I'm doing stuff in other platforms trying to tie that back in? Knowing all of your numbers, and using that data to optimize your campaign over time. Take six months, 12 months, build something that is masterfully crafted with data, leading the way to proper split tests, instead of just leaving something and never touching it for years. Those six steps are exactly what's necessary. For a high ticket business to justify a successful campaign and to execute a successful campaign in outbound and generate insane ROI on the back end.

 

Andrei Tiu  27:47  

 

Can we go a bit back to the execution bit? Step five.

 

Tyler Kemp  27:52  

 

 I forgot the lead list. I skipped 'L'. Let me say, the 'L' in the touchpoints and closure system stands for lead list development. The lead list simply means you can't, if you're relying on outdated, outdated data, you're buying cheap data sources. At one point, we tried that, and we send out emails to bad data, and we were having replies. People saying: "Yeah, I haven't used this email in two years, it was at a company from way long ago. You like, catch up, right?", and ineffective. You have to have really good high quality, accurate data. We're talking zoom info level and above. If you don't, then it's gonna suffer, your deliverability is going to suffer your response rates gonna suffer, you've got to have great leads, and it's also not enough to have firmographic leads, job title, company, size, revenue, industry. That stuff is okay, but you've got to hit 1000s of these people to find some interested and of those, some of them might be qualified to work with you. What you need is intent-based data. You need to know who's actively looking right now, for a solution like yours. Imagine the difference. If you could know the actual name, not the company level, not all intent data is created equal. So company-level intent is useless. You need to know the names, emails, the phone numbers of people actively looking for your solution. If you do this process to those people, instead of just the people who are matching some kind of firmographic filter here are 2 million people that have a CEO title. Then imagine how much more effective your campaigns would be and how much more effective your ad spend would be. 

Andrei Tiu  30:10  

 

Come back to these, because I want to talk about the technology beat, and I think here is the place where we'll discuss most of it. In terms of the execution, there are several people that maybe because they are not yet at that stage, where they can work with an agency to outsource the sales element of this and outbound lead generation, they might try to do it themselves or internally. Would you have some best practices, given the fact that more and more companies are using technology and sales technology to automate some of the things that they do and some inboxes might get cluttered, for example, for CEOs that might be targeted by such automated campaigns without the intent data that you mentioned just in bulk? Would you have some up-to-date best practices that people should implement, if they run an advanced strategy themselves, or internally such as: "How many times should they follow up on a sales or sale? How long should the follow-up sequence be in terms of time? 

 

Tyler Kemp  31:18  

 

It's more complicated than that, unfortunately, because doing sales is not typically cheap, right? First, you have to have a reasonably high ticket offer to justify a sales team. Now, if you're a solo practitioner, and it's just you, without a sales team. You are the business. Well, then obviously, you've got to figure out a lot of stuff, and you got to figure out how are you going to do any of this. The truth is that you can't alone, there is no way to do this right. All you can do is kind of take scrappy solutions and scrappy growth hacks and try to piece together the cheapest way to possibly get results, but then you're not going to get enough results, but you might burn more leads than you create. My advice to someone who is in that position, because connections on LinkedIn, as we said, they're done, you're not going to grow that way. You run the risk of getting banned, and they're very serious about that. The best thing you can do is if you're not in six-figure land yet, you need to hustle yourself to more sales, and you got to get yourself out of the service delivery, focus on getting the service delivery that you're doing more taken care of so you can focus on sales, and focus on it yourself when you get to six figures. Then invest in actually getting good data so that you can use it.  Think of it like this: I sell, I could sell and intent data for the US markets somewhere between $1 to $2, a contact. Margin, if you knew that information, how much are you spending to acquire a customer right now? I can guarantee it's more than frickin two bucks. Of course, it's gonna be more than that, because we sell it in batches. But the idea here is that you don't have to figure out how to become an enterprise with your scrappy solutions. You just have to get to the point where you have enough money to reinvest in yourself. If you can have a sales, another commission-only salesperson, or maybe you can afford to pay the salary of a salesperson, that's fine. Then they need what we do, but whether or not you've got that cadence of emails. It's all gonna depend on how you try to do it. Are you buying a cheap list of 100,000 emails from the 90s, that are completely outdated, and don't do you any good, and you try to email them, maybe you're gonna try to blast email them with a tool like MailChimp and get banned from the platform and it doesn't work and goes right to spam. It's gonna do you no good. You cannot hack your way to the top because the platforms are too sophisticated for that they're getting too sophisticated. You can't just use a Lem list and whatever the to try to automate cold emails because you're just burning leads. You buy cheap leads, you send them automation, you're going to burn your domain and you're going to end up on blacklists. It's going to screw you up. Even if you have a burner domain and you do this, you're just wasting a lot of time and effort to try to get results that you could have avoided if you just made a few phone calls to people. Make a few phone calls, do it manually until you can do it right. And once you can do it right, then you buy data and then you still do it manually. Imagine if you made 100 phone calls or sent 100 manual emails to people that were in the market, you think you're going to make a sale, much higher likelihood that you're going to do that. But if you work with us, we're going to send 2000 in a month to these people. Also, we're going to handwrite the messages, we're going to be on the channel, going to make sure that you've got immaculate deliverability. We're going to do the execution correctly, and we're going to report all of the stuff. You want you can afford to work with a company like us, and we're not cheap. People work with us when they have cash, and they're ready to get to that next level millions and millions of revenues what they want to drive. Like $100,000, who would not trade 100,000 for a million all day long? We would all do that, and that's just an example. That's not for the data that's for done for you. Someone wants data. I can sell you data for rates. It's still $1-$2 a contact, but you think to yourself: "What can I do with that data if I'm targeting the US, it's the US only.". Another thing I can do. Well, I don't want to jump the gun on you here, Andrei. If you want to talk about tech, I got some things to talk about there. But to the small business, my best advice is not to take shortcuts. One of the best pieces of advice I've got is to take the long road because it's faster.

 

Andrei Tiu  36:48  

 

Don't worry! I'm happy to drift away and to focus on the things that are important in our conversation and I think this one is. One thing that I wanted to maybe clarify with you right now because you mentioned it only for the US. As we have listeners from more areas of the world: Would, for example, somebody from Spain or France, who had the data that you own, be able to sell in the US without any issue using that data? Or does it fall into other regulations? As far as you know.

 

Tyler Kemp  37:20  

 

Yes, they could take our data and sell it to the United States. Let's talk about the data real quick. I know who's in the market for just about everything. I know who's b2c markets, who are buying health insurance. I know who's looking to buy real estate and who's shopping on Zillow, and Trulia, and realtor.com, and how is who's on those websites shopping around, and I know them by name. I can action them a week before they're sold on the Zillow marketplace. I get the data, get it fast. I know them by name, and I know that for a vast majority of people, and it's all legal. I purchase data from all kinds of sources, and then I validate the data through a very robust validation engine, it's checked manually by managed services, and they give us a nose on all the data. For context, we process 100 times more information in a day than Zoominfo does. I process 5 million behaviors a second in my data set. I believe Zoominfo has about 115 million contact records, we have 270 million contact records, about 170 to 200 million of those or have business emails. I've got about 100 million direct-dial phone numbers in my database. That's all data quality and size over here. But the other thing that I have is not an identity graph. That is what I mentioned is helping resolve this personal identity that we've developed over several decades. We've rolled up companies that have had different parts of these machines, and then we built an even better machine. It is decades ahead of anything else out there that I've ever seen. The other thing I can do is I can tell you 30 to 70% at the highest end of the personal identities of your website visitors if they're in the US. Let's just say we're talking to an enterprise company. Maybe they've got 2 million visitors on their website a month. How many of the names of those people do they know, if they're not clients, or they didn't fill out a form? The answer is zero, they know zero of the names. I don't care who you talk to, I network with fortune 100, fortune 500, fortune 1000, and they've kicked the can on this issue. They don't even want to solve, it's too complicated. They don't have all the pieces necessary to get it done. I can provide this level of intelligence to the market in a way that no one else ever has been able to do. And I can do it in an affordable fashion. Now, you'd have to figure out where you're going to invest your capital, but in the end, it's negligible. If I can give you information that's going to turn into revenue. If you're just starting, you're in six figures, you're good. Any less than that, it's gonna be really tough for you, and you need to be able to scale if you're just a one-man shop. Every time you get a sale, you got to work for five years on it. It's going to be a lot harder for you because you can't constantly take on new business. Those two elements have to be in place.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Super! I think most of our audience here is in the six figures, and above. I think that maybe we’re not aware of such opportunities. This might have been an eye-opener for you. Also, discussing the level of analysis that is possible in the US is fascinating, because we don't have that in Europe that much. And I think that it's a great opportunity there for somebody that wants to expand and they're looking for new ways of doing so I mean if you can sell in the US from UK or France or Germany.

 

Tyler Kemp   

 

 Advertising and outbound. That's it. You can do outbound, you can send emails the way that I just showed you with the closer system. You can take the data that we provide you to create lookalike audiences and continue to track forever. We can provide you emails and device ID numbers. So, you have that, you can continue to retarget, you can feed that info back into Facebook, back into Google, and all of the limitations of the privacy policy stuff going on right now and not your privacy. It's not about privacy. It's about the consolidation of power. They're consolidating power, they're not keeping you private. That's all they're doing. They're consolidating who has the information away from small business, but we can put that information back in your hands in a completely compliant way with regulation.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Great stuff. Guys, you have all the links in the description of this episode. Make sure to check them out! Tyler, I know we are getting close to the end of the show. So, trying to draw some action points here, because we discussed a lot, there was a lot of valuable information and actionable information. What would be your advice for somebody that maybe hasn't done a lot of outbound yet or has done some outbound, but maybe they are looking to increase their performance? Where would you say they should be looking at first, maybe you know, this week or the next?

 

Tyler Kemp   

 

Number one: my best advice to you is don't take shortcuts. It's gonna sabotage you in the end. You got to be careful about buying a bag of goods, don't go cheap. If you're bound by budget, then you have to just put your feet to the pavement and knock on doors. To make phone calls, do whatever you have to do to get to the point where you can invest in yourself. And don't buy the $100 shit. Like you need to invest in actionable stuff. If someone's looking to work with us, you can go to Leadroll.co, learn more about the closure system, even if you're going to do it yourself. I suggest watching these videos because we give away all of our best stuff. We just give it to you. You can take it. You can learn about how to do all of this effectively. And then, when you are ready to take growth seriously. If you want to start running better ads or you want to just do outbound, you can get access to our data. It doesn't exist elsewhere, so if you have that in hand, and no one else has it, and we're just bringing it to market, and not just trying to keep it all for ourselves at this point, then it's going to be a very unique opportunity. But I will say there is a sense of recency here, a sense of acting sooner rather than later. Because the more you wait, the more opportunities will go away. This is something that your competitors just don't have. If you can afford it, I suggest going to Leadroll.co, take a quiz, and we'll get you a price, figure out if we're a good fit for you, and vice versa. It could completely change your life.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Great stuff. Just as an indicator, this will differ a lot because of, its services and managed services. So this will be very dependent on a lot of criteria. But would you have a starting threshold for people to expect when they work with something like your agency?

 

Tyler Kemp   

 

Yes, we will work with you. There are two options: If you are looking for done for you, on outbound, you can only justify it if you can justify a sales team. Easy way to think about that. If I'm going to hire a BDR business about morale for SDR, then you should look at Leadroll instead. If your lifetime value of a customer is, say 10 to $15,000 or above that can be $1,000 paid over 15 months, could be any combination, then Leadroll will likely be profitable for you, but you have to be able to sell remote, large enough target market for us to find in market behaviors for these people. If you don't fit those criteria, let's just say you're a SaaS company or your eCommerce. Let's say you're listening to this right now and you're from Alibaba, then you want to talk to us because I can tell you who's all shopping for what across the United States. I can tell you who's looking for shoes. I got one guy and he's making $8 million a year with us using our data to sell vacuum parts. We tell him who's in-market looking for vacuum parts. It doesn't have to be complicated. That's the kind of nut stuff that we're talking about here. The low ticket can work as well on the data only or if you're particularly big - 100 million revenue and above, then there are other things that we can do for you that would blow your mind.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

So this was falling not in the done for you, but if you just need aggregate data.

 

Tyler Kemp  

 

Yes. We actually can do done for you with the enterprise as well at a different level. But there's so much you can do with that data. Let's say you've got hundreds of 1000s of clients, and you want to know who's about to churn and go with a competitor. I can tell you that because I know who's looking at their websites.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

The personal name and email address.

Tyler Kemp   

 

And phone number and everything. You can get in front of that reduce your churn, save yourself millions and millions of revenue. Just because you knew who was looking, I guess it's the best business intelligence out there. You won't find anything like it.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Great stuff. Tyler, this was very insightful. Also, I got to find out some new stuff in terms of the technology out there. And I'll be sure to keep in touch. I think there are a couple of cases that we might be able to work together as well off the show. Guys tuning in, I'm sure we found a lot of new information insight into this. Make sure to check Tyler's website as well. We'll have a link to your profile Tyler as well, in case some people want to personally reach out to you maybe for business or partnerships. I know we have a couple of companies here and a company representative that you guys would be a great solution for them. And yeah, until next time, guys, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Tyler, thank you for being on the show. Have an amazing day, and looking forward to speaking soon!

 

Tyler Kemp   

Thanks, Andrei. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

How to craft viral videos for marketing & sales [with Joseph Wilkins]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Joseph Wilkins, as they will be discussing tricks and hacks to increase the view rate of a marketing or sales video, what makes excellent marketing & sales videos and what septs to take in order to increase the chances of your video content to go viral.

Joseph Wilkins founded ProCreative Studios almost 20 years ago where his team produced infomercials, TV commercials and corporate videos. Joseph has directed thousands of campaigns for clients including Google, Linkedin, McDonalds, GoldmanSachs, Chevrolet, Home Depot and other mega brands. As habits shifted from television to online, Joseph launched FunnySalesVideos.com in 2017, where he creates attention-grabbing viral style sales videos that entertain viewers into making an immediate purchase. With two decades experience, hundreds of millions of TV & online views and hundreds of millions of dollars in tracked sales, Joseph has developed 8 simple steps any business can follow to boost online sales.

 

Connect with Joseph:

FunnySalesVideos: https://funnysalesvideos.com/

How To Make a Video Go Viral Podcast: https://www.audible.com/pd/Podcast/B08JJPY549

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilkinsjoseph/

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  0:08  

Hello there. This is Andrei, and you are on a new episode of The Market Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Joseph Wilkins who is the founder of ProCreative Studios, which he's been running for nearly 20 years and FunnySalesVideos.com. Joseph is also a host of the How to Make a Video go Viral Podcast, and today we discuss what makes great marketing and sell videos and hacks for making your content go viral. Joseph, thank you for being on the show. Good morning. How are you? How's the day going? 

 

Joseph Wilkins  0:33  

It was bright and early. Good, though. Thank you for having me on the show. I'm excited to chat with you today.

 

Andrei Tiu  0:40  

Excited as well! A very hot topic today, videos, marketing video, sales videos, and how to get as many people as possible to see them. So I think we have a busy agenda. Insightful things I know, you have prepared an overview from your period that infomercial produced overview from your own e-book, which is for free to download if our listeners here would like to get a more in-depth understanding of what we're going to be discussing today. Can you tell us where they can find it, and the link is going to also be in the description of this episode?

 

Joseph Wilkins 1:15

Sure. So it's a fairly small book packed ebook. It's called ''How to create a funny sales video without hiring us. Eight simple steps anyone can follow" and you can download it at the bottom of our homepage, which is FunnySalesVideos.com.

 

Andrei Tiu 1:32

Sweet, we'll include a link to that in the description of this episode as well. And very excited, to get into the nitty-gritty. So let's see - let's build a bit of context first for our audience. Tell us who are you, how you start on your journey and what you're up to?

 

Joseph Wilkins 1:51

Sure. So I started, as you mentioned, in my intro, 20 years ago, I started an agency that was primarily focused on producing television infomercials, short-form TV commercials and corporate sales videos. And our very first project when I started the company, in fact, the client that helped me to start the company, was Little Giant ladders. And within a short period of time that infomercial produced over $200 million in sales, just absolutely mind-blowing. I always like to qualify, we were one of three production companies on that project. But it gave me a taste of the power of video when you create a very well crafted sales message, and then target a larger audience. So we did that for about 15 years. We were an agency that would do creative for television, and also online. We've worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet. I mean, LinkedIn, Google, Chevrolet, Goldman Sachs, McDonald's, but we also worked with a lot of smaller startups. So we were kind of, you know, always a fairly small shop, but we have clients that didn't make us look that small. Anyway, fast forward to about five years ago, we were struggling because we were kind of basing all of our marketing on old technology - television - people don't watch television the same way that they did 20 years ago, when I started the agency, you know, Divo, TV. And then obviously now online streaming has just not completely but almost completely replaced our viewing habits. I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I watched live, real broadcast television. And so about five years ago, our clients were saying, how do we get back to how the results that we used to get on television, because production costs weren't getting any lower. airtime costs weren't getting any lower, but the viewership was much, much lower. And so that's when we started to look at agencies like the Harmon brothers and other agencies like them that were doing these entertaining, viral-style sales videos, using humour primarily to entertain viewers into a purchase, or at least entertaining viewers into being aware of new companies and liking new companies and getting online social traction. And it's funny the past 15 years before that when a client will call us up and say 'Hey, we saw this really funny video, we want to do something like that. We would say 'Sorry, we don't do funny. Go contact one of these other companies because we just didn't have the tools the team and the worst thing you can do is try to be funny when you're not. And that's when the Harmon brothers were launching their Harmon Brothers University which is basically where they would take on Students and mentor them and teach them how they did what they did. And after going through their course, we started to see just hugely successful results online compared to what we had been doing previously with your traditional, you know, boring style, benefit-driven, call to action, shove-it-down-the-throat-and-try-to-get-them-to-buy-without-really-giving-them-anything-to-enjoy. And as soon as we went through their training - and I recommend Harmon Brothers University to anyone watching- our first campaign hit 7 million views. To give you some context, in the past 15 years, anytime we tried to launch a campaign online, our biggest grossing views for a video was 100,000 views maybe. And so this just catapulted the results that we're getting. Fast forward to today, our last campaign between two videos has 60 million views. I mean, just absolutely outstanding numbers, and more importantly, millions of dollars in sales. And so basically, what we do now, is we try to position ourselves - we're still a very small shop, and so we have fairly small overhead, but you know, trying to produce these bigger budget productions, or at least the look of the bigger budget production, on a much smaller budget than some of our competitors. But even so, some of our clients still can't afford that. And so that's why we came up with the free ebook. And I love to teach people my eight steps, how any business owner, small or large can try to create these kinds of more entertainment style marketing so that they can see much bigger returns on their ads. 

 

Andrei Tiu  6:52  

Super. So is there - before we go into it - is there a certain pattern or a certain type of brands that you thought was more appropriate to this kind of funny video type of advertising than others? The reason why I'm saying this is because for example, from our work with brands in B2B and B2C, and b2b stack and professional services and everything else, you always know it's not a person that purchases that product or that software if we talk B2B. But did you find any brand can apply these principles to a certain extent? Or is there any other context or advice you'd give to people before we go into the actual practice?

 

Joseph Wilkins  7:35  

My standard answer to that anytime the phone rings and a potential client says 'is this really right for our brand?' I always say 'well, is your end customer a human being? You know, do they have a sense of humour? Do they like to smile? Do they like to laugh?' And so the short answer is no, we, it doesn't matter whether you're producing a campaign for a very, very serious B2B audience, or a b2c or even we've done fundraising campaigns. So regardless of what your objective is, the key is you've got to make a relevant story. You can't think of this as let's just go out and be funny. That's one of the last steps, the first step - and we can talk about this later - you've got to identify who is your audience, and what kinds of problems do they have. Then the rest you can create a story around, but as long as you're relevant, you start out with pains that you know, your customers are experiencing them build a story around that it doesn't matter what the current company is, or, frankly, what they've done before. We're all looking to get to disruption, something that's different from what your competitors are doing. And so, you know, I tell everyone, B2B, B2C, serious audience, you know, it doesn't matter.

Andrei Tiu 8:58

Super, thank you. Well, then let's dive straight into it. What's the first step? Where do we start? 

 

Joseph Wilkins  9:04

Okay, so the first step, as I said, is research. Brainstorm, discovering who is your customer? What are the things that your customers are experiencing? Where are your customers? And so the more learning you can do - and this doesn't matter, if you're producing a funny sales video or writing copy for your next brochure, you got to understand who is your target audience. The more specific you can get in creating a customer avatar, the better and more successful your campaign is going to be. And I talk more in depth about that in the e-book. The second step is once you've identified your customer avatar - and I'll just mention really quickly: I'm not just talking about you know, are they male? are they female, how old are they? what's their income? those are demographics and that's fine, you need those, but you need to go deeper than that. Psychographics, what keeps them up at night? what are the pains? what's the cost of not doing something and so that you can really understand the mindset of the person that you're talking to. So the next stage is just brainstorming multiple ideas, a lot of people will say 'Well, I don't know where to come up with ideas’, and the first thing that you need to do is create what I call a brain share, which is basically a group of people that are all invested in the success of your project, some of those people should be your customer avatar. So whether that's employees in your company, family, friends, some of those, you probably want to reach out to professional creative writers. If you don't have those on staff, you can find those online from sites like Fiverr and other freelancers. But basically, once you have a group of people, what Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, in his book, 'Creativity, Inc', calls the brain share, then you just start throwing out multiple ideas, you know, dozens and dozens of crazy ideas in a safe environment, where there's no criticism, there are no wrong answers, because some of the worst ideas can spin off a great idea from somebody else. And so it's really a numbers game. And here, we're all we're talking about is, you know, what's the story about, who's the character in our story? What is the problem that we're trying to solve? and you want to throw it out in creative ways. The more different than what the next person is going to be doing on this timeline or on the YouTube feed or wherever your ad is going, the more different it can be, the better. But again, it has to be relevant. And if you want to see examples of these kinds of videos, again, look at FunnySalesVideos.com, but look at some, you know, go to the Harmon Brothers and go to a lot of these other agencies that produce these really same styles of videos. But it's a numbers game. So throw out as many different crazy ideas as you can. And then you put on your kind of judgement hat and say 'okay, which of these 50 ideas are our top five?' and then really spend some time refining those. And then finally, you got to distil it down to the one. Now you can pick up concepts or little things of the other ideas, but you want to really come up with your one key concept that has a character, that has a problem that's relevant, but an entertaining way to present that problem. Step three is scripting. So there are three different rounds of scripting. The first is the marketing copy. And most businesses have, you know, a marketing writer on staff. But again, if you're a smaller business, there are many, many freelancers that are willing to jump in and be part of your team, fairly affordably. But identify, what are the key selling points, the reasons why your customer buys your product. And one of the best ways to find this is to read a bunch of online reviews about your product or about your competitor’s products. And don't just assume that you know, why your customers are buying. Do the research. Find out. And again, one of the easiest ways to do that is to read lots and lots of customer reviews, dozens and dozens, make lists and figure out what are the most common things people are saying about why they love your products? Or why they love your competitors’ products. Also look for reasons why they don't buy, what are the objections? What are the things that they may be saying after they bought it that they're not crazy about and then first, try to fix those in your business - you can't sell a product with a benefit that doesn't exist. And so sometimes our marketing team will go back to the client and say  'we need to wait a few months, you need to fix this, you need to improve this before we can really launch it because this is what customers are asking for'. But if your competitor has a differentiating advantage that you don't have to figure out ways to overcome those in the sales script. And then you want to go through creating - taking those marketing copy points, and creating a story. So this is where a creative writer would come into the team. And then once you've got your story, and most of the time I tell people we use Donald Miller's story brand structure. So you know, the hero who has a problem, who meets the guy to show them the solution that makes his life better. And again, look at the different videos that are out there and just try to look at those story points of how these videos are taking that problem turning it into a solution and then giving the viewer a very easy way to take you up on an irresistible offer. So the next part is that in the comedy. This is the fun part. And this is the part that I absolutely recommend you don't try to do yourself. Reach out to comedians, to comedy writers, to people who can come onto your team and take that story and make it funny, adding jokes, adding witty lines, adding funny subplots to the story. As long as it doesn't distract you, but you want to find somebody who is experienced in comedy. So go to your local comedy clubs and watch stand up comedians and approach them after the show and ask them, if they'd like to freelance for you on the side, a lot of these comedians work during the evening, but they don't have jobs during the day because they're travelling to the next gig. A lot of online sites, again, like Fiverr have comedy writers. So it's all about numbers - to our scripts will typically go through we'll have five or so comedians that add to the script once the first draft is complete. And it's all about again, throwing out as many good ideas as possible, and then throwing away anything that doesn't add to the story. And that's not genuinely clever, funny. You don't want to be silly, funny, you don't want to be dad-jokes, you want to do something that will make the customer laugh. But also, you know, intelligently advanced the story. So that's, that's step four, step five is the production. And one of the most important parts is picking the right actor to portray your brand character. And so you know, we go through dozens and dozens of auditions, before we find the right character for each video. And to do that just reach out to your local acting agencies. One of the great things about auditioning actors is it doesn't cost a penny. Especially in these days of COVID, most actors are set up with a home studio, kind of like where I am, and they'll do audition tapes virtually. And they'll email them to you. And we'll go through 20-30 audition tapes before we find maybe two or three that we think are a really good fit. And then we'll set up a callback with Zoom just like we're doing right now. And I'll audition them and I'll say 'Okay, that was great, I loved your audition tape. Now, do it faster or do it with this emphasis or think about this' because sometimes doing an audition tape and sending it in is very different than on the day of the shoot, when there's the pressure and the camera and the lights and the strange crew, you want to make sure that your actors can respond to the direction that you're going to give them when they're on set. You also want to make sure that they're good at comedy, right? Timing is everything. So delivering jokes, with the right you know, kind of cadence. And also, you know, speaking fast is a huge thing that we'll talk about in step six. But, you know, make sure that your actor can deliver lines pretty fast because people's attention span just won't stick around if they're slow and have long pauses between sentences. So that's the critical part - getting the right actor. And then obviously, if you have a very small budget, you can shoot these videos yourself. But the benefit, if you hire a professional production team, is that it's going to look different, it's going to look higher production value. And it's going to disrupt better than if you just film it on an iPhone, because all of your competitors, or most of the other videos that people are putting out on Facebook or YouTube, are filmed with your phone. And so if you can look better look different, it's gonna add to the disruption. You also want to make sure that while you're on set filming, you create a fun environment that's not doesn't have stress on it so that your actors feel comfortable to improvise and to add things to the script and just to have fun. A lot of the time, in fact, all of the time, our videos ended up not matching what we wrote. It should always have, additions and fun little, you know, things that happen on set that you just happen to capture on camera. And that won't happen if you're so rigid and structured that you have to stick to that script. Any questions I've got a couple more and then I'll throw it back to you - any questions so far?

 

Andrei Tiu  19:32  

I think it's pretty clear. I was trying to build a sort of practical example in my head and trying to break it down. But basically, one thing that I think it's like an idea that is being carried through is: in order for you to actually be funny and not be cringe or silly, know when to actually look for a professional that can give you that edge rather than you trying to be funny when maybe you're not necessarily a funny person in that sense. I mean, probably you are good at telling jokes. But that's not the same as trying to make a funny video funny.

 

Joseph Wilkins 20:09

Yes, I would say if there are two places if you are shoestring budget, don't have, you really, really don't have any money. The two places that you should invest in are a good comedy writer and a good actor. Everything else you can kind of get away with, you're still not going to get the kinds of results that hiring the professionals that do it day in and day out, are going to get, but you really want to make sure you get a great writer and a great actor. You can get by without some of the other things, but ultimately, it's down to what do you want your investment to return. And so if you put nothing in, you really can't expect a huge amount out, you can definitely expect better returns than running,  whatever everyone else is running. But if you really want to elevate and, you know, get the kinds of results that I mentioned earlier, millions of views and millions of dollars in sales, it's probably worth investing in to do it, right. But anyone can do it, and anyone can improve what they're already doing with these steps. So really quickly, the next couple of steps. So step six is the editing. And again, I hate to keep saying this, but an editor who understands comedy and has experience in timing, with editing those lines is invaluable. So you can even take some video footage that has been delivered a certain way and in editing, you can improve it, you can speed it up, you can cut it quicker, you can overlap lines. I used to - when we were doing infomercials, we would hire out these focus groups where you know, there'd be this one-way mirror, and we'd be watching what people were reacting to, as they're watching our infomercials. And they had this little dial where they had to turn it to a frowny face happy face. And we would see on these charts after the session was done, we would graph it all out. And we would see the moments where the people were getting bored, or they were getting turned off. And I always imagined them, you know, with a remote control about to change the channel if we don't keep it fast pace edited. And the same is true online. In fact, it's even more true because people have less attention span. So keeping it fast, cutting out the breaths, speeding things up. It's critical that in editing, you really make that pace fast, upbeat, or else you're going to lose people who will get bored. We also edit multiple versions of each video. Our hero version, the main version is typically around three minutes long. Now some people say well, that's way too long. People don't click away from a video because it's long, they click away because they get bored. And so if you've got if you've done these steps, right, it will be way more effective than what you know, some of these other agencies or platforms will recommend these 10 seconds short direct get to the call to action videos. Well, that's good advice. If you're really if you really don't have the creativity to hook someone's attention, and then keep hooking them all the way throughout. Our videos will test shorter versions and longer versions. And almost every time the longer versions will out-perform the shorter versions. Because we've created a connection with the viewer, we've created a character that they relate to. And then when that character delivers the offer, they're way more likely to buy than if you just throw out an offer before they've established that credibility. And so we'll edit, you know, short versions, long versions, we'll edit square versions for Facebook, where we burn the subtitles in will let it longer versions in widescreen format for YouTube and desktop. So it's all about making sure you understand 'well, where is this customer watching this video? What's the best size and format to make sure that they're delivering with the most real estate of that video.' So step seven is and I guess this is kind of where I'll pull back the curtain and reveal the dirty secret that - our videos aren't viral. Organically. The days of creating an organically viral sales video are gone. So years and years ago, it used to be that if you would create a funny video like Dollar Shave Club - is a great example. They just went out and created a funny video put it online and it blew up without spending money to promote it as an ad. Facebook and YouTube have got smart, their algorithms won't promote your ad anymore. If it's selling a product because they know that if you're making money using that platform, they want to get a piece of that. And so nowadays, the goal isn't to make a viral sales video that organically goes viral is to create a video that when you spend $1 on it, you get three, four or five dollars in return. And so you're just going to keep doing that. And that's how these views rack up. Is because it's profitable for companies to continue running that as a paid ad. Any ad that you've seen in the past, you know, 5-10 years that has 10's of millions of views, you pretty much can be 100% positive that those views weren't created organically, they were created from paid ads. But time and time again, where we go into a company and do nothing other than just replace the creative with ads, we see a return on ad spend, double, triple, because the effectiveness of that ad is so much more profitable. That's the goal. It's kind of like creating a vending machine that's full of $100 bills, they cost $20 to use the machine. How many times you're going to use that machine? That's basically the principle here. And so every single time you create something, you want to test it and test it and test it. So in the scripting phase, in the comedy phase, in the auditioning phase, test this on your brain share, on the people that are your customer avatar, and find out does this work for you? Is this funny to you?Don't rely on your own opinion, because your opinion doesn't really matter. It's what the customer's opinion is that really matters. And so continuing to test and then you know, step eight is, again, forget going viral, you will get a big boost in organic shares. But that should kind of be the cherry on the top, not the meat. And so those you know, very, very quickly, those are the eight steps that we use on pretty much every project that we go through. And 20 years of experience going from the results that we use to get to what we're seeing today. I mean, we pretty much don't do any other kinds of video production anymore, because they're just not as effective as when we use these eight steps.

 

Andrei Tiu  27:14  

That was insightful. So let's see, let's try to take a practical example. Or maybe if you have a sort of like a case study in mind, and maybe we can discuss and debate a bit from a marketing and video perspective, as well. So kind of look into the applicability of that ad or that video. And let's try to deflect it into what was done right at which point in time. Because, even from our conversations, a lot of marketing managers or directors or entrepreneurs that want to use video to promote their services, a certain way, depending on the end objective of that, of that video, we'd have, the videos that are used for social media ads that are, let's say driving traffic to the online store, versus the case study type of videos and the company presentation type of videos, which they need to be different. And now with the rise of for example TikTok, I think TikTok could be a great platform that we could bring into the conversation to discuss or the purpose of discussing specifically funny videos. Because I think probably 100% of the brands that we work with, including ourselves, it's hard to know how to make a video on TikTok and be sure it's funny, if that makes sense, if you want it to be funny. So this is a bit going back to your point of hiring professional, funny people that can add that touch to it.

 

Joseph Wilkins  28:51  

Yeah, for sure. And I'll say just a word about TikTok. So typically, what we do is we will launch a campaign and just a quick disclaimer: we're a creative agency, so we don't get involved in the marketing. We take a client from concept through completion of the video, and then we hand it off to another agency. Typically, the client already has an agency, or maybe they have an in house team. So this isn't our wheelhouse, but I can speak to the creative side. Typically what we will do is we'll create the full version of the hero campaign, which is always our highest converting video. But then a lot of people won't buy. The first time they watch they're put into a retargeting funnel, and that's where TikTok and Instagram and shorter form content videos work well for us. So they've seen that first three-minute version, and then because TikTok limits the length of videos, will retarget them with TikTok or will retarget them with Instagram. And so you know, it's a multi-touch process, they may start seeing on YouTube or Facebook with the long-form version, and then they'll get retargeted on TikTok or Instagram or Snapchat or other platforms. So we'll edit those versions just like I was saying earlier, the shorter versions for the retargeting.

 

Andrei Tiu  30:19  

Do you have a recent example in mind of a brand that maybe you work with? And maybe we can talk a bit about that specific brand. I'm inclined to take the discussion into maybe E-commerce if you have a good example in that area.

Joseph Wilkins  30:34  

Yeah, perfect example, I mentioned them earlier. But True-Earth Eco Strips is one of our latest big case studies. They're a company that sells laundry detergent in strip form, which means that they don't sell e plastic jugs that pollute landfills. And it's a way for people to do their laundry, without having the consumer waste of plastic. And so it's a mission-based company, which, you know, really helps us online, because people love to talk about good mission-based stories. But we basically created a campaign - if you go to FunnySalesVideos.com, it's the two videos at the very top of our page, one of them, I think the numbers need to be updated, but one of them has 30 million views, the other one has 15 million views. And basically, what they did is they took a problem, which is we all have to do laundry but none of us liked the fact that we're wasting all of this plastic, and it's going into our landfills, and it's not being recycled. And so we created a story around a mom, who, who isn't this extremist, but you know, still wants to do her part. And the video just completely blew up. Within two weeks, we had over 11 million views, it had doubled the click-through rate on any video that they've done before. And this was a company that was already doing very, very well with had a very good in-house marketing team. But the results that they were getting back from these kinds of videos was just way more effective than what they'd done before. And like I mentioned now that between those two videos and the retargeting videos, over 60 million views. Now, that was an agent's or a company that had a very good advertising budget. And so obviously, they were spending a lot of money on Facebook, to promote that ad. And to get those kinds of views. I'll contrast that with another company that came to us, it was one man that was doing a very small business that had a tiny marketing budget. And they said 'we know that we can get much better results if we invest some money and hire you guys to produce a video'. And within several months, they doubled their sales based on what they were doing before compared to adding our video into the campaign. And, again, still not breaking the budget, they were doing manageable growth. If they were to dump in 10s of 1000s of views, like our truth company, or sorry, 10s of 1000s of dollars into ads, like our truth client, they just couldn't keep up with that growth. And so you know, regardless of whether you're a small business are a very large business, if you're currently doing advertising that's breaking even, or maybe giving you marginal results, those are the kinds of companies that are going to see the results with this, because it's just elevating you to the next level. 

 

Andrei Tiu  33:54  

Super. So you touched on something, and I want to go back to it for a bit. And that is the attention span of the people that are online nowadays because more and more brands are producing more video content because everybody knows it's working better than static. And every platform is promoting it now because of the number of videos being produced, not all of it is good, or a small proportion of it is good. And then I think this also affects the attention span of somebody that is used to seeing a lot of videos. So you need to have that hook already to get people to view more. And one thing that I wanted to discuss with you is insights or if you have hacks that you want to share for increasing the viewer rate of a video like say somebody wants to produce their videos for their ads.

 

Joseph Wilkins  34:51  

You mentioned a keyword and that is “hook”. You have to hook people's attention. So back in the days of doing infomercials, we would say we would do studies and found out that you had 30 seconds to grab someone's attention before they flip the channel. Now in the online world, you have five. You have five seconds before somebody will scroll to the next video. And, in the YouTube world, you have five seconds before you can hit that skip button. We know that 80% of the viewers of our videos aren't going to hear the sound, the sound is going to be off. So not only do I have five seconds, but I also have to make it visually hooking. And so if you look at our videos, and a lot of the other videos that the bigger companies and agencies do, they will put most of their creativity into that first five to 10 seconds, because once you've hooked them in five seconds you can lead them into the story in the first five to 10 seconds. So you've got to throw as much visual curiosity into that first five to 10 seconds as possible. And you've got to back it up with graphics, and you know, text or, you know, just crazy things that people like 'what is going on in this video?' My goal isn't to sell you, my goal is simply to make you turn the sound on and engage with the rest of the video. So that first hook doesn't have to be relevant to the problem or the solution, it just has to get your attention. Then I'm going to start going into the problem that I know you have. This will serve as a second hook to ask you a question: do you have a problem with this or show you the problem in action, so that you connect “Oh, this is something not only is it interesting, but it's relevant to me”. And then basically throughout the rest of the video, it's a process of hook-sales-copy, hook-sales-copy etc., because at any point, if I let my video go longer than 15-20 seconds, without giving you another hook, I know that you're not going to stick around to just listen to sales-copy. And so those hooks could be and most of the time they are jokes. Or they could be an extreme case product demonstration. One that comes to mind is the Harmon brothers did FiberFix a tape, an industrial-strength tape that's strongest than steel. And for their extreme demonstration, they use FiberFix to wrap a roll cage around the car and then throw it off a cliff. I mean, those kinds of crazy demonstrations that will get you to engage and be entertained while you watch. But it's still relevant. I think of “this isn't funny, but I think of the guys that do the, I can't remember what the product is, but they seal up, they cut a boat in half, and then they seal it up with this glue. And then they put it back on the water and it still floats”. So think about crazy ways that your customers would never actually use it this way. But it's so extreme that if it works for that it must work for what you need it for. Or it could just be some visual crazy character. I think of the squatty potty pooping unicorn, you know something that visually you like “I just have to find out what's going on her”'. I mean, so many ideas that are crazy will get shut down by executives. But boring is the worst thing that you can do. So it has to be a mix between still being relevant being on brand not being offensive, we don't want to offend people. But we do want to be disruptive, but be relevant. Continuing to hook people throughout that whole three-minute journey is essential, or you'll lose them.

 

Andrei Tiu  38:53  

Now that you mentioned, it just occurred to me that one of the very popular brands, there's a competitor of one of the brands that we work with - a much bigger company. And in Europe, they have just launched their latest ad like the spring ad, they are doing accessories for home and things like this. The ad has no link or whatsoever with their products is just starting weird, because I remember I watched it until the end because I had no clue what is going on. Was a band and he was in the 60s, like the setup. And then they were playing and people were dancing, and it just carried on in what - it was on TV- and it wasn't like a classical 15 seconds video. It lasted for about a minute I think and it was nothing to do with their products or anything. It was just this party in the 60s with people dancing and whatever. And then at the end, there was like this balloon flying with their brand, but nothing about the promotions that we're running or like the hero products and everything else.

 

Joseph Wilkins  40:00  

Yeah, that kind of stuff, to me, that's a waste of money. We always try to get - once we introduce the product - we repeat as often as we can, and we make it integral to the story. Once we have established the problem, the product becomes the knight in shining armour that writes in to save that character from the problem. And so that's the benefit of these kinds of stories is not only is it entertaining, it's memorable. And the brand is constantly hit on over and over again, so that you remember it, even if you don't buy us, our first goal is to make an immediate purchase. And we see much higher results in doing that. But our second goal is to at least make you like the brand so that the next time you connect with them, you're more likely to purchase.

 

Andrei Tiu  40:56  

Fair point. And what about your podcasts? Now, I know we are preparing for a wrap-up, but I was about to ask you. So I guess, the name says it all also, it's all about creating effective videos. But what are the types of subjects that you guys discuss on the podcast? And maybe some of our people tuning in here could find interest in?

 

Joseph Wilkins  41:21  

If you've liked anything that you've heard, we go way deeper in my podcast. So again, it's How to Make a Video go Viral, you can find it on all of the podcast platforms, it's also on YouTube. But basically, we do is have an eight-episode series, each episode devoted to just one of the steps that I talked about today. But then more importantly, what we love to do is interview business owners that have done this and have got significant results. So we look for businesses that have had company transformational sales results by using these steps. Whether some of these business owners were case studies that we worked with, but we're also going to be interviewing companies that we had nothing to do with them, we would love to learn from them. It's a fairly new podcast, I think there are 12 or so episodes out right now. But as we go, you know, I selfishly want to learn from these other companies that have had the same kinds of successes that we have

 

Andrei Tiu  42:28  

Super, so we'll have a link to your podcast as well in the description of this episode. And now, so the thing is when you've got so many things that it's pretty hard to just wrap them in like, one, but fortunately, so we have the ebook, which is free to download, and you guys can find it in the description of this episode if you want to. I think it's going to make it easy for you to regroup all the ideas and maybe structure a plan for your next marketing video. And in terms of some interesting points that we touched on, and I think would be good to just bring into attention as we wrap up: One thing about videos going viral is that actually, by itself, doesn't happen that much anymore. So they always need to be backed up by advertising budgets and have a strategy of how you want those videos to reach the people that you want to talk to. And then a good video will help you decrease the cost per view and increase the number of organic shares and that extra viral element. And then also in terms of the hooks, and how to think about the storytelling? Oh, no. The first first first thing is to get professional help, mainly on the point that actually makes a difference. So if you want to be funny, get somebody that is a professional, funny person. And then also if you want your video to shine, make sure that you have the equipment, you have a good editor that knows how to play around with that, have a good actor that can increase the perceived image of your brand, just by you know, actually being able to successfully deliver what you want to deliver. And the third point is that of using the intro of the episode, or sorry, the video, so that you get people to turn on the volume and to engage with the other senses and just the viewing of the video so that you can communicate better on the other channels such as audio in this case together with the video use and get them a story longer so that they can be the more solid relationship with your brand and eventually purchase or have a good perception of your brand by the end of this

 

Joseph Wilkins  45:10  

Gal is a pretty good summary.

 

Andrei Tiu  45:12  

Is there anything else that you'd like to add? Now on a closing note?

 

Joseph Wilkins  45:17  

I guess the only thing that I would add is companies need to understand that everything that I've discussed today is only 50% of the equation. The other 50% is making sure that you have a digital marketing strategy or people that understand how and what to do with the click. So once my team or you have created the video that gets the click, what do you then do with the click? to make sure that you don't lose it in the back end. A very well optimised sales funnel with a great offer and great opportunities for upselling cross-selling. And then knowing which platforms to run those ads on. That's also so critical. I can create the best video that we can do but if you don't have somebody who knows what to do with that video, then it's not going to be effective.

 

Andrei Tiu  46:11  

Super good insight, right and now turning cheeky, but I think I know with a marketing company.

 

Joseph Wilkins  46:19  

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Andrei Tiu  46:21  

Yeah, no, joking. But you are straight on point. It's very important. And being able to retarget those people, as you mentioned, it's critical because most people wouldn't buy the first time. And it's very important to deliver on multiple channels over a certain period at a certain frequency so that you can facilitate, actually, and help yourself to drive those sales.

 

Joseph Wilkins  46:45  

You gotta.

 

Andrei Tiu  46:46  

Super, Joseph, thanks so much for being on the show today. I know this was a very early morning for you. So the more appreciate it.

 

Joseph Wilkins  46:53  

No, it's good. It's good. And I just finally thought I'd add if anyone wants to talk to me personally about, other questions that they have, or maybe setting up a time to discuss a campaign for your company, there's a form that you can fill out FunnySalesVideos.com, just scroll right down to the bottom. And I'd be happy to chat with you.

 

Andrei Tiu  47:13  

Perfect. Thanks so much. So guys don't forget, all the links are gonna be in the description of this episode. And if you're watching on YouTube, then in the description of YouTube. And also, just if you're up for it, sometimes people share questions or thoughts with us directly. So you guys, if you want us to maybe reorganise something like this, but discuss a different topic or go in a bit more depth on specific areas, Joseph, depending on how you are with time as well, maybe we can try to organise the second episode where we could get back from the audience. And maybe we can go a bit deeper into actual practical things that might help people ramp up the effectiveness of their marketing videos and sales videos in this case. 

 

Joseph Wilkins  47:59  

Sure, I'd love to let's make it happen.

 

Andrei Tiu  48:01  

Super. Well, until next time, guys, thank you all for tuning in today. As always, feel free to reach out to Joseph or me, if you have any feedback or you'd like us to dive a bit deeper or if you have any questions. Hope you found this insightful. I know I did. And Joseph here was a very nice source of insight, being at the core of this for over 20 years now. Joseph, thank you again for being on the show. Looking forward to staying in touch and wishing you all the very best of success going forward.

 

Joseph Wilkins  48:36  

You too. Thanks so much.

 

Andrei Tiu  48:37  

Thanks a lot.

Strategies for increasing Business & Marketing Performance in 2021 [with Simon Severino]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Simon Severino, as they will be discussing strategies for increasing business profitability and productivity, brand consistency, as well as specific marketing strategies that can turn around business performance. 

Simon has worked with leading brands like Google, BMW, Crayon, Roche, Deutsche Bahn, but more importantly, he’s fired himself from operations and enjoys now his life and business more than ever. He now helps business owners like you do the same, via One-To-One CEO Coaching. His 274 templates and swipe copies help dozens of teams every week scale faster than ever.

 

Connect with Simon:

Strategy Sprints: https://www.strategysprints.com/ 

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnSFgJd0CrsEdQdO21txR2A 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strategysprints/ 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonseverino/ 

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  0:08  

Hello everyone. This is Andrei and you're on the new episode of the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Simon Severino, who is an internationally renowned SEO coach and business transformation pro and founder of strategysprings.com. Today, we will discuss strategies for increasing business profitability and productivity, brand consistency, as well as specific marketing strategies that can turn around business performance. Without further ado, Simon, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? 

 

Simon Severino  0:54  

Hey, Andrei, excited to be here. Hello, Marketing Innovation Podcast Show.

 

Andrei Tiu  1:00  

Hello, hello, hello. I like the energy we started well. It's a lot of interesting things that we can dive into today. And I'm looking forward to it. I know you have a wealth of experience working with CEOs across the world. So, it was really exciting finding out more about your work. What we're going to do is try to take as much as we can in this episode of your insights and knowledge, and apply it to our audience, which is in large proportion CEOs and founders of their businesses, but as well as Marketing Leaders. I feel there's a good synergy between the two subjects. And I think it's a lot of transferable skills and insights that can be brought to the surface. So, if it sounds good to you, let's have some fun.

 

Simon Severino  1:48  

It's tough times, Andrei, right now running a business is hard. It always has been hard, but COVID has accelerated stuff. If you don't work sprinting, now you have a problem. If you don't run your company in a very lean and adaptive way, now you have a double problem. And if you're not built like Lego instead of Duplo, in many small parts that you can recombine quickly, you have a problem. So, it was always tough to run a business. Now it's double tough. Let's share with your audience a couple of things that they can do right now, to get back on track. Because sales are much harder right now, and many of us need to change their offer, according to the new needs of their people, because their life has changed. So, of course, their needs have changed. We cannot do whatever we were doing before. Three habits that I use within my personal life, running a business as a CEO of a global company that works in 114 countries. I have certified Strategy Sprint coaches doing their magic every day with companies that are unicorns and are evaluated at a billion but also with solopreneurs running a one-person marketing agency and one-person SAS startup and one-person consultancy - IT consultancy, a management consultancy. What we help them install now is a system to get the right numbers of what's going on. Because most people don't have their data. They don't have market data. Some people have market research, the big ones have market research. But that's not your data. Because the data of if you say: "Okay, there is this market that can be exploited." Well, that's a theory that's not data because maybe Elon Musk can exploit it, but you don't if you don't have these people right now warm on your email list. So, you just won't get to this market. That's why market research is not helpful. What is helpful is having your data right now. By that I mean how many people were today on your website, how many of them are interested, how many of them are engaged, they're clicking a lot of stuff. So what's the one thing in your system that helps you with one click to connect to them, and to move them forward in the next stage and the next stage. This is the system that we need right now, we need to know who wants something from us, and what's the one button that I click that sends out the right template, the right message so that I can do it at times 100 times today. So that in total we will have around 900 conversations this week, and so next week, we can close five of them. That's the system that we need right now. We call it "the value ladder". I have just posted a video on LinkedIn and YouTube about how we do it. It will be a bit long, but let me tell you the core, the core is a daily habit, the weekly habit, and the monthly habit. Daily habit: How are you spending your time? You're a marketing manager, or you are an entrepreneur who has marketing duties? How are you spending your time? Write it down. So, 6:30 - running eight, breakfasts, 9:00 - LinkedIn, write it down, and you will find that not every hour that you put in, is on the highest leverage point. Maybe wasting 30 minutes on Clubhouse is a high leverage marketing activity for you, or maybe not, I guess not. It is only a high leverage activity. If it builds on everything else marketing, and it creates a conversation that in the next 30 days will become a high ticket client. Does it relate, or does it just create 15 Instagram followers? Then you're wasting your time. These are the examples. We go through the time how are we allocating it then in the evening, I asked myself two questions. So five-minute reflection of the day. Which one task should I give somebody else because they can do it better? The second question: If I would live more intentionally and more freely, what would I do tomorrow? That's my daily habit. If you install this daily habit, you have one foot back in control of this crazy ride that is this year, because, at least, you are in control of your time and you have more intentionality on how you spend your time.

 

Andrei Tiu  7:00  

Good insight. How about the weekly one?

 

Simon Severino  7:02  

Weekly habit: get your numbers, collect your data, your data, not the theoretical data, the benchmarks because as soon as their benchmark, this is all the data. Even if it's currently that doesn't mean that you have access to these people. So, forget market research. Collect your data, what's your data? Collect the main three numbers for marketing of this week, operations of this week, sales of this week. Pick your three but usually marketing numbers. "How many conversations did we start? How many engaged people did we have? This week on our website? How many Subscribe to our newsletter or download the periods?" For example, three numbers and you track these three numbers every seven days. We do it every Friday, in the Friday meeting three weekly numbers. What do we learn? Why do we have 14 more subscribers this week? What happened? Was it a video? Was it a person? Was it the process? What is working? Because we will double down on what's working? What's not working? Because we'll stop doing it. Same with the operations numbers - How many clients did we fulfil this week? How many needs did we completely fulfil? What else do they need? How many of that did we build this week? Sales numbers - How many conversations on the calendar? How many sales called were scheduled on the calendar of our people or sales team or my calendar? How many of them did we convert into a client? How many follow-ups did we do with the ones we didn't convert? Can be three very relevant numbers, very simple to track, you can track them in a spreadsheet, we do it in a spreadsheet in a Google Sheet. Simple as that three numbers. But, every seven days, you collect these numbers, you discuss these numbers, what works - you double down on it, what doesn't work - you stop doing it.

Andrei Tiu  9:03  

You mentioned also, I'm just driving a bit to go into the monthly habit now. I just get a feel of something that has been very much in conversation amongst us the marketers, which is trying to automate a lot of the communications that we have, and getting people like through that funnel, and trying to deliver the right message at the right time. I feel there's an element of this in what you are saying as well, and I was wondering if you can give us a bit more insight into how you coach your clients to do it. Well, if they already have a bit of that in place. I know you're doing that already because I received your email sequence after reboot. You are on top of it, but I would like to let people know a bit about the insights into what you're proposing. 

 

Simon Severino  10:04  

Email is a core of the sale system. Because you know that for a high ticket b2b complex sales, you need eight to 14 touchpoints before you close. Now how to create eight to 14 touchpoints? You cannot fly, you cannot go to conferences, you cannot drink 12 coffees with them. So, what do you do? The email comes in really handy because with a good email, funnel, and we implement this with every single client, a sales time, which was maybe 12 months or six months, you can turn it into 12 days by intensifying the relationship. So you want to build trust, expertise, and curiosity. For us the most important piece is curiosity. So we try to always write only about relevant things very respectful, very relevant, very valuable, never selling, and then always inspiring curiosity. We want to shift to an open curious conversation, says: "Oh, I want to know, let's let's discuss.", and emails as often as possible and as vulnerable as possible. Real stuff I never write: "This is the company speaking to you. This is the CEO speaking to you. It's Simon. Hi, Simon. What's going on right now? My goodness. Did you know this? Oh, my friend Nadeem did a video Do you want to see it?"  That's what I sent out one hour ago. I have a newsprint couch, and he did an amazing video. I'm curious what you say about it. In this video, these seven minutes are gold. This is better than an MBA, just the email I sent today is better than an MBA because it's a full checklist of a full-funnel. Other people would sell this. I just give it away to everybody on my email list. This is how important the people are for me on the email. The email is the heart and centre of everything. That's the only place you can sell in this funky year. Everything is changing all the time the Facebook algorithm will change in June. Google algorithm can change whenever it wants. Clubhouse might not be there in two months from now, because there is enough competition, but your email list will always be there.

 

Andrei Tiu  12:37  

 Make it clear for everybody here. We are talking b2b, and also b2b high ticket clients, corporations, and everything, and not only.

 

Simon Severino

 Both b2b and b2c. The video today was about how to apply this for b2c. That's what Nadeem did because he is our SAS and b2c whisperer. I do only b2b, for example, and the same principles apply. It's always a human-to-human conversation. The only difference b2b b2c is that in b2b unit five clients per year in b2c unit 5000. That's the only difference. But you are always hopefully, thinking of one person, whatever you do. When you build a feature, you think of this one person and you care and you do a great job with love. When you write an email, you write to one person. Maybe it goes to 5001 person's, but it's one person you are writing to. Always intimate, it's always personal. So, b2b, b2c is a differentiation but it's not that offer different. If you think from heart to heart, and this is how we should run businesses as entrepreneurs from heart to heart, like you will talk to your kids, to your friends from heart to heart, and something valuable then it's the same b2b or b2c. That was a nice inside bullet. Now let's move to the monthly goal. Because we are Strategy Sprints, so we have to talk about strategy also, but do not spend too much time on strategy. Strategies that, you need just strategizing which means once a month take half an hour and do these two things positioning and mindset. Positioning in this half an hour - with our tools you can do it in half an hour, with other tools I guess you need three days, but you can get our tools at "strategysprints.com/tools", they are open source. So, with our tools half an hour, you think: "Are we selling to the right people? Are we solving the right problem at the right price in the right way?" These are the positioning questions. So, you check your positioning. if it is the case everywhere check, you're done in half an hour here. If not, then you have a one-hour workshop more to go and solve that. The second question is confidence, which is a mindset element: "How confident are we that we are solving these as the best possible solution? Our thing is the best thing that can happen if you have this problem, from one to 100%, how sure are we?" And we need 100% from every single team member, if one says 99% or below, that's what we need to solve next, nothing else matters. But he else will believe in it. There is always a gap between your confidence and what other people believe. Imagine Michael Jordan, of course, he has these kills, but if he goes into the game with just 60% confidence, he can only get across 50% results. That's not enough. At that moment, you need 100%. Because if you are in a sales call, and they ask you: "How you showed it is the right thing for me?", and you are not sure, whatever you say, they will feel it and they will not bite.  You have to be at 100% so that they can get across, let's say 80% or 60%. Because there is always this transfer gap between your confidence, their confidence. Ask yourself this question very truly in the team: "Is this the best solution to that pain? And do we believe 100% in it?". Otherwise, go and improve the product or improve the messaging.

 

Andrei Tiu  16:56  

I feel this goes a bit into what you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, and everybody actually in business, faces this moment, when there might be a problem that seems to be big, or we don't know where to start solving it from. I feel this would help to deconstruct a bit the issue. For example, if there's a lack of confidence across the team, trying to identify where that comes from, specifically which team member or which issue of each team member, and then trying to work it out bit by bit and reconstructing it again. Because, as you said, some, in the beginning, having like this puzzle that you can be constructed a bit, solve the issues, reconstruct marks stronger in a way. 

 

Simon Severino  17:39  

Absolutely. Yes, ask everybody, but when they answer, don't make it a personal issue, don't discuss it about that person, because that person is only the cannery singing the song that is in everybody. That will be a symptom, the person, whoever it is, that is below confidence will be only a symptom. Bring it back on the whole team level on the system level, and everybody owns it. Together, you solve it. That's important. 

Andrei Tiu  18:13  

Also now, there's another thing that I captured my eye when I was reading through your credentials, and I'm wanting to touch on a bit and that was creating, or maximizing your return on luck. Can you tell us more about that and where the concept has started from as well as you know, like a little bit of how we can take it and apply it within businesses and maybe specifically marketing departments?

 

Simon Severino  18:38  

 Jim Collins coined the arrow L, the return on luck, and says that some people just have so much more results from the same resources than others. He started this research, and he said, they execute more. I took it, and I went: "Alright, how can we create a blueprint, a checklist, an applicable piece, so does everybody can execute more? What is it execute more? What does it mean? How you break it down, how can you execute more. The principle is to divide the work into chunks that are so small that they can be built, measured, and reflected upon in seven days. That's the principle of how we build all these templates. The idea of Jim Collins was: there is luck in the world, but it lands on some fields and not on others. How can you prepare the field for luck to land on your field? The idea is simple: If you do just one thing, then it's unlikely that this is a full field, how you create a full field? Well, you try out 50 things, and then one will hit. That's how you do it. The theory is simple, but how you do it in practice. And that's why we created templates that are so small like Lego that you can run 50 experiments in parallel. If you have 50 people, you can do 50 experiments in one week. If you have 25 people, you can do 50 experiments in two weeks, etc. You can do very quick, parallel experiments until you find the one thing that works. That's how you maximize your return on luck.

 

Andrei Tiu  20:50  

Perfect. Again, for the templates, they are for free, and they are on strategysprings.com\templates, right?

 

Simon Severino  20:59  

Tools, strategysprings.com\tools.

 

Andrei Tiu  21:01  

Super! We have a link to that in the description of this episode. Simon, as I know, you are going into a meeting right now and we have to wrap it up. I would like for the people that are on here and would like to find out more about your work as well as. Guys, the templates are for free. So, make sure you head over to this link. I had to look through the website and these and they are helping many If you are not sure about what you're doing now marketing-wise, but also business so, it's always a good chance for you to look from another angle and see where opportunities might lay for you to do better. As Simon said, in these strange times, which continue to happen even one year later from the pandemic started. Simon, if people want to get in touch with you and maybe discuss a bit more their business strategy or things or areas they think you might be able to work together what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you or to find out more about what you are doing with your company?

Simon Severino  22:00  

 I hang out in our Facebook community which is called entrepreneurship in Sprint's you can tag me there with your current sales problems marketing problems, I'm happy to answer there, and otherwise, it's strategysprints.com.

 

Andrei Tiu  22:17  

 

Perfect. Thank you so much. Simon, it was a pleasure to have you here on the show. Thank you for joining us, and until next time, wishing you all the very best thank you for the insights and words of information. This was helpful. Let's keep in touch. Guys if there's anything that we touched upon, and you'd like us to maybe explore a bit further let us know either myself or Simon and we'll probably try to make it happen, Simon, if you offer for a second round.

 

Simon Severino  22:46  

Always.

 

Andrei Tiu  22:48  

 Super, will try to organize. Until next time, guys keep rocking it. Thank you for tuning in today again, Simon, thank you for joining us.

 

Simon Severino  22:57  

Thank you, Andrei. Thank you Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. 

 

Andrei Tiu  23:01  

See you next time. Have an awesome one, keep rocking it, and stay safe!

Trademark, copyright and patent registration insights & best practices [with Devin Miller]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Devin Miller, as they will be discussing trademarks, copyrights, patents, and how to protect your intellectual property as a business.

Devin is an entrepreneur, patent and trademark attorney, and an Intellectual Property expert. He specializes in protecting startup and entrepreneurial companies with IP Legal Advice, setting them up for success in their business!

In addition to founding and running Miller IP Law, he is the co-founder of several startups including a multi-million dollar startup for wearable glucose monitoring. Devin has worked with the likes of Amazon, Intel, Redhat and Ford.

 

He is passionate about helping businesses and has the drive to educate and entertain listeners with years of experience as a calm speaker, and veteran podcaster.

 

Connect with Devin:

His podcast; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-inventive-journey/id1499417283 

Info: https://podcastconnection.org/devinmiller/ 

IP Law: https://milleripl.com/ 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milleripl/ 

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  

 

Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. This is Andrei. And our special guest for today is Devin Miller, entrepreneur, patent and trademark attorney and intellectual property expert. He specialises in protecting companies without legal advice. And in today's episode, we discuss trademarks, copyrights, patents, and how to protect your intellectual property as a business. Devin, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? How's the energy? How do they go in?

Devin Miller  

  

It's going well, so busy as always, that's the way I like it. So life is good. And I'm happy. So no complaints.

 

Andrei Tiu 

  

Awesome. Awesome. So where are you tuning in from today?

 

Devin Miller 

  

So yeah, I'm in the US in Utah, just north of Salt Lake City.

 

Andrei Tiu  

  

Nice. So in the middle of the day for you, as we, as we record now, really excited. So a lot of interesting stuff that we want to discuss today's, it's the first time that we dig into this subject on the show, and I know it will be very relevant for a lot of people. And everybody I'm sure is going to, you know, leave with some important nuggets of knowledge. And before going straight into the trademarks, and intellectual property subject, let's help people get to know you a bit better because you've done some pretty impressive things in your life. You've also been a serial entrepreneur funding and being involved with a lot of businesses, including the one that you're running at the moment. So tell us a bit about your journey, how you got to where you are today, what got you into this niche?

 

Devin Miller 

  

Yeah, and that's a long question or a short question to a long answer. But I'll try and keep it reasonably concise. So a bit about myself. I graduated, I got four degrees, which my wife always jokes is three degrees too many. So I got an undergraduate, I got an electrical engineering degree as well as a Mandarin Chinese degree. And then when I was kind of getting towards the end of engineering school, I kind of had two passions when I thought law and intellectual property was fairly interesting. I also loved entrepreneurship and startups in my own business. And so rather than do one, I went off to graduate school and got both a law degree and an MBA degree or Masters of Business Business Administration at the same time. So I grabbed both of those. And then since then, or even while I was in school, and we can happy to dive into a bit of the business I've run but started my first real startup while I was doing the dual degree. And that's still going and still, an active company that which I actively participate in but knowing have done several startups is kind of side hustles and just second-time jobs, as well as pursuing my legal career. So I did work for some of the biggest law firms in the US, Top 100 law firms for some time. And then about three years ago, I kind of had an itch to want to focus on startups and small businesses with my law firm. So started Miller IP law about three years ago, really with a focus: hey, I'd like to provide the same level of quality, the same level of service I did with the big clients when I was at the big firm, but for startups and small businesses, so about three years ago, I leapt started my firm. And then I also take a lot of what was I guess, you know, side hustles. And I always look at side hustles, it's just a second full-time job because I was working as many hours on my side hustles as I was my full-time jobs. I kind of combine all of those and started to integrate into a lot of the different businesses, my pursuits, my time to kind of have those all meshed together. And it's worked out well. And it's been a fun journey. A couple of other fun notes. So I've been married for 13 years, to college sweetheart, I have four kids that are between the ages of five and 10, that sign and then three daughters. And so I've done several, I have my family, I have my religion and my church. And then I have my business. And I've done three or four startups that have a couple of those have been seven and eight figures as well as now Miller IP law. So lots of fun things a lot. It's the things that keep me busy.

 

Andrei Tiu 

  

Exciting! So at the moment you still run some of the startups, I mean, you know, businesses that started as startups, and then a lot of your focus goes into the IP law. So how is your like, what's your standard, let's say, I mean, I know, two of them will never be the same. 

 

Devin Miller 

 

I'm gonna say every day is if I mean one week, I'll focus a lot more on the IP law, that'll be my predominant focus. Other weeks are on the startups. And so it's every bit is a bit different. I mean, I usually work on any given week, anywhere from on a low week, 50 or 60 hours on highway 80 or 90 hours. So you know, I tend to work plenty of hours and I also try and put a lot of time aside so if I'm not working and with my family and spending time with them, that's kind of my two competing interests. Or you know, two places I spend my time but really, any given week, probably half of my time is on the IP side of the law firm side so about 30-40 hours a week and then half of my time is going to be on the all my startups and kind of running and managing those. And really to be able to juggle all those manage the multiple businesses and that have some great team members, a lot of great people that support me, that allow me to kind of explore and go after all my various endeavours all at the same time.

 

Andrei Tiu 

  

So, tell us a bit about your work with startups and with businesses with the Miller IP law. How do you help them? What are the most encountered things that come with you when they are looking for this type of advice? 

 

Devin Miller 

 

Yeah, so maybe I'll answer I think one of the questions was just kind of how do we focus or what do we do with startups? One thing is backing up a little bit, and I mentioned a bit as in, you know, I work for a big law firm and they had clients, including I worked with amazon.com, and Intel, and Ford and Red Hat, and other companies. And so those were always wanted. But I always found that I loved working for startups and small businesses because they're the fun ones. They're the ones that have one idea, they don't have the multi-billion or million-dollar, trillion-dollar budgets, or whatever it is, they have a small budget there, they got one thing and they're making go off, and you can have a lot more impact, you can talk with them, strategize with them, work with them. And so that was really what I found is a passion. So then when I started Miller IP law, I said: Okay, when I start a law firm, I want to work with the clients, I find fun and exciting, which are the startups and small businesses, and I want to figure out how to focus my firm so that we can work with those and then help them and so everything that I kind of set up from that point forward is really how to help startups and small businesses to compete at the same level as big businesses. One of the things that we kind of looked at and did one them was, we set it all up on flat fees. It makes it easy to understand the costs. Because one of the biggest gripes with most you know, almost every attorneys, including intellectual property, when people go into them, it feels like it's always a never-ending check. I go in, and from the time I walk in the door, they start the clock going, and every time I asked a question, shoot an email, it can be a five-minute question, and they billed me for half an hour and I always don't know what is going to cost me. And it's always more expensive than what they estimated. So I said: Let's, let's help them figure out, let's do a flat fee. So you know how much our fees including governmental fees, how much all in is going to cost me to do an application or trademark. And that's where we started. And then one of the other things that we looked at was the legal industry. It has is up there with some of the worst customer services or customer service, in the sense that you know, you reach out to an attorney, it takes on average three to five days to hear back. So let's say you reach out on Monday, you send him an email, give him a call, shoot him a text, whatever, you may not hear back till Friday or the following Monday. And that's got to be aggravating as on the client side of: Hey, 'm just trying to get to you, this is important to me, this is an investment, I paid your 1000s of dollars, and I can't even get a hold of you. And so we also took a look at that and said: Okay, what can we do differently? Some 80% of the time, we pick up the phone where you respond to calls right away, or an email right away, we 90% of the time within about 30 minutes. And we have a rule that by end of the day, you have to have responded to all the clients’ emails. And so we kind of took that and a lot of different things. But those are just a couple of examples. And we said okay, how can we make it so a startup and focus on startups and small businesses and make that a better law firm? Now, one of the other questions you hit on is a little bit of you know, if you're now getting into a startup or small business, and you're looking at intellectual property, kind of what are you thinking about? What are the important things? Intellectual property is kind of an umbrella term, and it kind of has three different things in that umbrella which are patents, trademarks, copyrights. So patents go towards an invention something that does something it's a widget, it can be software, hardware, a wearable, anything that has functionality. trademarks are gonna be brands and something that's a brand name. So the name of a company name of a product, a catchphrase, a logo, something of that nature, anything with your brand falls under trademarks and copyrights are going to be on the creative side. So more of: Did you made a book a painting, a sculpture, a movie, a TV show, music, any of those are kind of on the creative side, that's how you protect them. Usually, when they come to my office, the first conversation is, it's kind of what do you need is a business? Are you in the brand? Are you building the world brand new and the next Pepsi? Or coke or Disney or whatever it might be? Are you really building the world's next great widget? You're gonna make the world's best smartphone and make it you know, awesome and better than anything else out there? Or are you gonna write the next you know, Harry Potter or Tom Clancy, or whatever the book is that you like, and you got to figure out what is your value? And then how do you go about protecting it and creating an asset around that?

Andrei Tiu 

  

Okay, so one question that popped into my mind, and I know it was I mean, it can be forming an assumption and maybe we can shine some clarity over this. So you know, it's many times in the startup space when you are all in a rush and you just want a large MVP, and you just want to have something out there to test with. And you have a brand name, you probably have a logo and a website and some social media pages, and whatever it is, depending on the business. But I know in some cases, there can be an assumption that once you launch something that is, you know, you are the first ones to launch it, it can be assumed as implicit that you would hold some sort of right upon it, if somebody came and copied it, and launch it as another brand or new technology, for example, or even if it's like a catchphrase or something like that. So what would you say is important and it's not so important for a startup to do before, for example, launching their brand and their website and dispersed assets, that would be like an MVP?

 

Devin Miller  

 

Yeah, so and I'll probably primarily hit more on patents and trademarks, copyrights are a bit different. But one of the assumptions that are generally wrong is: hey, if I'm the first one to create a brand or create an invention, I'll automatically get it, I'm automatically covered. I don't need to do anything, I'm fine'', right? And the problem is you get in this. So taking trademarks, as a first example, generally, whoever files on a trademark application federally, and is usually the same in most countries, is the first one to acquire those rights. So a lot of times what you'll have is somebody will start a business and say: Okay, we've got the perfect name, and we're going to go spend all these marketing dollars, and we're going to brand it and sometime down the road, we'll get a trademark, but they don't worry about that on the front end. And they go and build a brand. And two, or three or four years later, they say okay, we finally started to build a brand start to get some traction, now let's go and get a trademark. And they'll run into a couple of different things. One is, is that somebody else saw their brand liked it or just happened to be coincidental, came up with the same or similar brand filed on it. And now somebody else owns your brand. So even if you started later, you have some very limited rights and know in your specific geographic location, but they're very limited. And so you're going to be boxed out of balance, you use your brand in most states or most locations because somebody else filed on it first. The other problem you'll get into on brands, is sometimes you think: Oh, I did a quick Google search and I didn't see anybody using this brand, or somebody else was using it, but they're using it a bit differently than how we intend to do. So you start to do that. And then you get a year or two into it, or however long and you find out wait, no they own this brand. Or even worse, as you never even searched out, they're brand new to say: Hey, I'm going to start using this brand, then you come to find out, somebody else owns it. And now you're having to look to rebrand, you're having to go and try and figure out a new brand, let all your customers know which is expensive, or you're trying to go and acquire the other brand if they're even willing to sell it or get a licence from them or any number of things, all of which is much more time costly and expensive, and often is much more difficult. So think of when you look to brands when you want to get started and same with patents is really earlier, the better. Once you know you're going to be building a brand around it, your company is going to be building the next best widget, is going to be building the next best brand, that's what its value is going to be, then you need to invest in protecting that because if the worst-case scenario is somebody else comes along afterwards and grabs that and now you're not even able to use your brand. The other one on the patents side is even more or more difficult. With patents, there's a rule and it's the same in the US and there are different variations in other countries, but generally, is once you put something out in the public, you have a year from which you can go after a patent. So if you put an offer for sale, you put it up on a website, you go to trade shows, you do conferences, webinars, you go and start selling it, whatever it is, you put it out in the public, of you have a year from that time you put out in the public, within which you can file patent you miss that year, open to the public, anybody can do it, it now becomes public domain. And so a lot of times the problem is, is we'll have clients that come in and wait a couple years. They get their MVP, they sell for a couple of years, they say okay, we finally got some traction, we've got some income, we want a patent what we've been doing, and they come in my office and say I just had a curiosity, so how long you've been selling? Oh, I’ve been selling for two or three years and say, you know, that's great, you have a great product business is growing, unfortunately, you're not able to patent it, because you missed that one-year timeframe. The other thing and I'll take a break, but they'll also things you got the one-year timeframe. Another thing with patents is the first file system. The first person to file on a patent, they're going to be the presumptive inventor. So really if, unless you can prove that you're the first inventor, they copied you, they ripped you off, they became aware of your invention, and they mimicked it, that's hard to prove one evolve, even if you can, that's going to be expensive. Unless you can prove that, generally the first person to file is that. Let's say you're in a very competitive market, you are in the and I'll make it up augmented reality virtual reality arena, and there's a whole bunch of things. I'll give you a better one that's competitive as golf clubs. Golf clubs are one of the most patented things in the world. And the reason is, is because you have a lot of rich doctors, you have a lot of rich lawyers that all won’t all think that they can create the next best golf club, they have some expendable income, and they all go and try and get a patent on it just so nothing else. They have bragging rights to tell their friends: Hey, I got my own patented Golf Club. And so you go and try and start a golf club. And let's say there's a whole bunch of people innovating and doing different things with golf clubs. And you happen to come up with an idea that somebody else does. They find you never file on somebody else files on and six months later because it's very competitive. Now you just lost out, now you're not able to pursue, you've just lost your investment. Yeah, I'll do it. So there's a lot of intricacies. The short answer is early as possible, the better. And if you have questions, I'd go and talk to an attorney. So you can get a more specific timeline and strategize.

 

Andrei Tiu 

  

A question here would be, so this I guess the pattern thing applies mostly to software, as you said, and products. But once you have, or does it apply to service businesses? like can you have a patent on a service type of business? Like I don't know, a web agency or a training agency or something like that?

 

Devin Miller 

 

So the short answer is, generally no. Going back 10 years ago, they used to kind of have what's called a business method patent, a method of doing business. And they were, they weren't very good patents. And basically, after they went through enough court cases, the pendulum swung, you can technically still get them, they're incredibly difficult to get. So really, for service based businesses, you're not able to, that's where you'd be branded because you're able to get something branding, you know, you do better customer service, you build a reputation. But as far as a patent goes, now, there are a few exceptions as far as service based businesses. Let's say you have web services and part of your services as you're doing: hey, we got we're gonna take some information, we're gonna have AI, we're gonna do data analytics, we're going to figure something out, we're going to do some different weighting of different types of inputs and information. And we're gonna give you the world's best notification. Well, you know, such as a soft SAS company or software service, some of those, they're doing a lot of back end, innovating, creating things that are new, you can capture that software side, or there's other things that make your business innovative, but has to be more on the functional side. So when you're looking at it, basically the standards for patentability, and maybe that's another good way to answer it. When you're thinking: Can I patent something? If it's functional, that has a utility nature to it, if it does something, then the basic three standards are what's called novelty, obviousness and abstraction. So novelty is basically as anybody else ever invented this. If somebody else has already invented it, you can't get a patent on something that's already been invented. Second thing is obvious instances. Well, not one person's not invented this. But if you're gonna take two or more things that are already out there, you're putting them together in an obvious way, you're really not adding anything new. And people in the industry says, Yeah, you could have put those together, you're not really creating anything new. And so, again, if you're just putting a couple of things together in an obvious way, you're not going to be able to get a patent on it. The last thing is the abstraction where, hey, what you can't do is just take something that's been done in people's head pen and paper and put it on a computer, put it on technology, and call it patentable. And that's kind of where you get into a lot of times with the service space industries. And they want to say, hey, well, there's used to be this process that was on pen and paper, I used to do in my head, and I made this quick, you know, software programme that does the exact same thing that I did for me. Then you're gonna say: Well, you can't do that, because other people have been doing it with pen and paper in their hand, it's not really innovative. On the other hand, you're saying: Hey, I used to take this process, it used to take me 10 hours to do and I made a software programme that does all this analytics on this data processing. Now, it takes five minutes to do the same thing and it does it a lot better and more efficient. Those things you can start to patent. So kind of when you're looking at it novelty or exam and invented, obviousness is putting something together in an obvious combination abstraction, are you just simply taking a something that's people done in their head or pen and paper and putting it on a device? Those are things you're looking at as far as patentability.

 

Andrei Tiu  

  

Okay. And I have just one more question here on patents that I think it's relevant for many of the listeners here, that are probably just funding their business or are in their early days with their startups. How much can a patent contributes to the value of a startup when it gets valued?

 

Devin Miller

  

It really depends on where how the startup uses it. It can be very valuable. In some of the seven and eight-figure businesses I mentioned that I've grown, they have a large part of the valuation has been the intellectual property that we've built around our ideas and have grown it in inventions and whatnot. Because we'll go out, we've got licencing deals, we'll sell that. Now, what I don't want people to get is a false sense of security that: Hey, I got a great idea. All I got to do is go get a patent and then people will be knocking down my doors to get a licence, they'll just want to pay me money and money will fall from the sky, which 99% of the time, that's not going to happen. So I don't want people to say all I got to do is get a patent. What you really have to do is kind of do something in the middle where patents can be valuable, but you still have to do the other parts of the business as well. You still have to show market viability, that there's a demand for, the people who are willing to pay for it. You have to actually go out in the marketplace and sell it, you get a small customer base, and then that's when the patents really gain a lot of value. If you can go out and get a startup you get a minimally viable product or MVP or whatever you want to call it, a prototype and you start to go out and sell it. You show that hey, there's a lot of people that will buy this. It works in the marketplace, you can start to build that out. Then your patents become a lot more valuable because when the company comes to acquire you or take a licence or otherwise do an acquisition or a merger, they're gonna say: Okay, we can do a lot of the same things. A lot of times when you have a business that coming to take a licence required and say: Hey, we can do what you're doing, we can do it faster, we can do it cheaper, we can do better. So they're gonna say: Now what's proprietary about you? And you say, well, we have a customer base. Okay, well, that can have some value, you can see some companies you have a huge customer base or a huge client base that gets you value. The other thing they're going to look at is what's proprietary, what do you have protected? What do you have patented and they can't go and people can just come along and copy us because we have patented technology, or we have a brand, that's a very strong brand. And we have very loyal followers, and now we have trademarks on those, so people can just go and simply mimic our branding. And so those are the things. You can get anywhere from it can be worth virtually nothing, if all you do is you think you're gonna go get a patent or a trademark does nothing with it, and people are gonna pay. Not gonna be worth much. On the other hand, you build a company, show market viability, do some of the legwork, then it can be a great asset to the company, they can increase your valuation quite a bit.

 

Andrei Tiu 

 

There. Okay, and now go into the copyright, like the copyright direction. So I guess this question would apply also to patents. Are businesses or would you recommend businesses to typically register for, for example, in this case, copyright only in the geography they act within? Even if they could, at some point, expand internationally? Or how should they go about it? Let's take a perfect scenario where they are doing this before deciding on the brand. And after, you know, doing the checks and everything?

 

Devin Miller  

 

You say, if I rephrase your question, it's kind of if you're looking at and kind of wherever you're located, whatever country versus going international, how do you bank that balances to which countries to invest in? If you're saying, well, there's a patent trademark, copyright or whatnot? How do you decide what countries are protected? And is that a fair summary of your question?

 

Andrei Tiu

  

Yeah, like, for example, let's say you plan to launch your business in the UK, or somewhere in the US, would you do and you know, you want to expand at some point maybe three, five years down the line in another geography. Would you look at taking the copyright and just securing that from the very beginning or not necessarily, and just doing locally and then expanding. What would be the best approach?

 

Devin Miller  

 

Copyrights are one of those that are typically easier. You could probably wait until you actually expand into those countries because copyrights have a lot more inherent rights. So if you're the first one to create it, and as long as you can show that you can create it, you have more ownership rights to it. And so with copyrights, you could probably, certainly if you have the budget earlier, the better and copyrights are always the least expensive to file on, so they're usually the easiest to go for. But you could probably hold off until you actually expand to those countries. The opposite is not necessarily true for trademarks or patents. So copyrights, I'd say, yeah, let's say you're waiting to expand into three till three to five years, I'd probably wait till you hit that three to the five-year mark until you actually go in there, file your copyrights and get them. Alternatively on the patent and trademarks, just the opposite. Let's say, and the way I a lot of times on patent and trademarks, we'll approach it is where do you see, where is your biggest marketplace going to be for your company?  Or where's the biggest, where's your clientele? So give me an example. I work with some medical companies or medical product companies, and they look and say: US is our biggest market, US by far spends the most on medical devices, medical services, medical products, and you look at per-capita spending the US is number one, Europe or EU is probably number two, and then a probably whittles down to Asia, maybe Japan. But really, if you're in the medical device company, you're probably saying: If I only have enough money, I'm gonna focus on the US. Give you an example of some of the medical companies are saying 90% of our markets really going to be in the US. Let's focus on the US. Yes, Europe has 10% and we may get there at some point, but if we have to decide where our budget goes, let's go with the US because that's where the bulk of our market is. So when I'm looking at the country, because the problem I get into with a lot of clients, as I say, we're going to go worldwide, we're going to go sell in every place, we're going to be International. And then we say we want to get patents and trademarks in every country out there. And they say, okay, we can do that. But each country is different, it gets expensive, and you have to file in these countries and most of the time, you're not going to get the return on the value you want. So usually you're going to say is taking the medical example, let's say 60% of the US as your population, you're a maybe another 30% and everything else is less than 5% then you're probably gonna say: Our market is 10% Europe and US we'll probably get a patent or trademark there because it makes sense, we're gonna have the bulk of our market there and for that other 10% we're just gonna have to go and compete without a trademark. We'll go and compete without a patent because it doesn't make sense, we're not going to get the return on it. So a lot of the times when you look at whether you should file in your country versus internationally, or which countries you file into, look and see where you project your marketplace to be, who your customers are going to be, where they're going to be located, and then go about protecting it in that area.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Okay. And in terms of the trademarks, again, maybe this would be like a tricky question, at least, it seems tricky to me now thinking about it. And actually, this was something that I had an internal debate with myself when we launched the BCC initially, as well. And I had to, you know, to submit the trademark registration and everything else. In terms of trademarks. So for example, let's take the case of the UK because it's a bit smaller than the US. Let's say you have a business starting out there, and then you have the brand and everything else, you checked everything fine. You can register it as a trademark. Why don't you start selling in other countries as well, let's say you start selling in the US as well. But then somebody, maybe one year down the line, things: hey this is like a very good name and very nice branding. Let's replicate that here. Can they steal your brand if you don't have a trademark in that country? Or how does it go?

 

Devin Miller  

 

Yeah, the short answer is typical: Yes, they can. That's a problem that you'll have and there are some ways to deal with it, but they’re usually expensive and they usually protracted and it may or may not be a good avenue. But the short answer is Yeah, typically if you are, let's say you start a business and you take all over the UK by storm, you're the number one, we'll say a restaurant, I don't know, a restaurant, you make the world's best hamburgers, you come out with a way that is just better than everyone, you make McDonald's and Burger King looked like nothing. And you've taken over the UK. And then somebody else in the US says: Oh, that's a really good and upcoming name, I'm gonna go and file a trademark on it. They are within their rights to go file it on it, they can typically squat on it, yes, there are some avenues, you may be able to go do it. But generally, it's gonna be hard, and it's gonna be difficult and you're low likelihood of success. So, unfortunately, and that's the same thing. That's what usually a lot of times used to happen with China, if you'd have a lot of companies, they'll say: Hey, we see a lot of companies in the US that are in that are outside the US that are having brands, they are in go file in the US because the US is a huge market. And then when those brands come into the US and want to start expanding their brand, they bump into these Chinese companies. And then all these Chinese companies are getting all the money for filing in the US first. And so generally, that's what I said earlier on, the better because if you get in there and you want to expand into other countries, somebody else owns the rights or the brand to it, they can or they can stop you from using that. Give you another example that is kind of the flip side. You remember the Apple Watch. Pretty well known and a lot of people have Apple watches, and I think they may have overcome now, but when they first launched, everybody thought it was weird. Why didn't they call it the iWatch? Because you have the iPhone, you have those types of things, iTunes, why didn't you call it the iWatch? Well, the problem they ran into is that somebody else trademarks the iWatch in China. And China was a big market for them and so they went into China, and they couldn't negotiate, they couldn't get the rights to it. So they ended up calling it the branding of the Apple Watch for a long period of time. And I don't know if they find eventually acquired and otherwise, it's all done. For the first several years, they call it the Apple Watch, because they didn't have the rights to the iWatch. And so even a big company like apple, because they didn't have the rights in China when they wanted to go release, had run into that same problem. So, unfortunately, as part of the business game, and you have to try and anticipate that and do the best you can. But yeah, if you have somebody else that gets those rights first, generally they're the owners of the rights.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

That was insightful. Thanks a lot. And another question that I think it's so on everybody's minds, as they looked into this, is regarding costing. So obviously, there's going to be a difference between national versus international. But typically, what would be an average or some budget for this? 

 

Devin Miller  

 

I'll give you kind of, this is generally and it's, it varies in that and it also varies on your attorney. If you're looking in the US to prepare and file a trademark application, our fees would be flat fees would be about $6,000. If you were to take kind of a range on the very low end, if you were to go with a law firm or attorney do yourself as a different thing, but go with the law for an attorney, you're probably at least $5,000. Most expensive firms can be upwards of 10 or $11,000. And that's to prepare and file it. To get all the way through the process of a patent application probably looking at between 12 to $18,000. All the way through the process is usually spread out over two to three years. On a trademark, you're probably looking, in the US... Ah, sorry, going back to patents, here to say the EU you're probably similar on that cost time or cost. Probably in China, it's a little bit they have a different system so it's gonna be less expensive. You're probably more like 6 to $7,000 for the whole process. Japan is going to be a little more expensive, but they're similar to the US. So generally, if you're to here, kind of the US, the EU or Europe and in Japan, those are going to be similar costs and other countries are going to be or can be a little bit more or less expensive. When you get to trademarks, you're going to look so our flat fees are going to look at about 850 to prepare and file it. To get all the way through the process, you're probably around $1,500 and upwards of $2,000. If you go to other firms that range anywhere from about 1000, to get all the way through the process up to 3 or 4000. So that one's a bit less expensive. Europe's a bit more expensive, I'd usually say about one and a half that Japan is going to be similar to the US, China is going to be similar to the US. So that kind of gives you an idea of trading or copyrights. If you were to file copyright in the US, you're looking at 3- $400 similar throughout most of the rest of the world.

 

Andrei Tiu

  

Okay, that's good. Thank you. So do you have any hidden secrets for us or things that probably are not so well known, but you think are relevant for somebody that has not looked at this in-depth?

 

Devin Miller

 

I'll dispel one of the biggest myths which drive me nuts, and so I don't know if it's a secret or not. But one of the biggest things, and I hear its variations and it can sometimes its variation with patents, sometimes is with copyrights, sometimes it's with trademarks, and this it goes something like this, I'll use patents as an example. Really, there's a secret way to get a patent. And all you have to do is you write down your invention, all the details, you get some drawings, you put it in a stamped envelope, and you get the date on it, and never open it. And then if anybody wants to come along, you can just go show him the sealed envelope, with the date stamp and you're fine. That drives me nuts because there's no truth to it, you can if you send yourself an envelope as a postmark. And you know and unseal it, guess what, it doesn't help you at all. I mean, I guess it's better than absolutely nothing but only weighs about this much. So really don't plan on that. So that's one of the biggest myths, what I would really tell people, and it's probably not a secret, I don't know, there's a tonne of secrets. But what your best thing is, if you're a startup, your small business or your any size company, really everything for an entrepreneur to be the company is your best thing is to go in, find a good attorney, and then go in and sit down and get a strategy in place. figure out what the timing is what budgets, you're going to looking at what you're going to need, and when you're gonna need it because even for a lot of startups or work with: hey, I get it, I've done it myself, there's always more things to spend money on than money to spend. And so you always you're trying to figure out your budgets and what costs and so you may not be able to afford it all today. But at least sit-down, figure out what your budgets are looking at what the timeframe is you're looking at what you should be doing and get a strategy or a plan in place such that as you go along, as you grow, that you don't miss those opportunities, you don't create issues down the road, or you don't have other drawbacks to that, and then start from there. So that's probably it's not necessarily a secret, because there isn't a whole lot of secrets in the patent world. But those are probably things to consider.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

And I have another question that appears in my mind that I think is relevant. So you know, there are companies that launch sub-brands that might not be exactly like the brand, but it's like a small company of the company. Would you say it's better for the trademark to be registered as the entrepreneur to register the trademark? Or is it better for the company to register the trademark?

 

Devin Miller 

 

I'll give you the general answer. And there's I'm sure there are always exceptions. Generally, I tell people, one of the first things I would do and I always do when I started a company is to get a better form of business to an LLC, an S Corp, a C Corp, and variations in other countries, they call them slightly different names, but form a corporation. And then whenever you do something, do it through the corporation. And the main reason being and for most countries, including the US is, let's say you went and filed a trademark on your own personal name, you started a business on your own personal name, you just did it as your own, you know, as an individual. And you started to let's say, one, you infringe somebody's trademark or their patent, or you had product safety and somebody gets hurt with your product, or they have an allergic reaction. If it's under your personal name, they can come and sue you directly, they can come and go after your house and go after your car your life savings. Whereas if you get a business and you know, an LLC and S Corp, C Corp, whatever, then you have a buffer then let's say the trademark, you get a trademark you didn't know is infringing someone else, you start to use it, you find out you're infringing somebody else, the worst, and it's so can be bad, but the worst they can do is come after the business. They can't come after you personally, they can't come after your life savings or your house or other things. And so I would always put it under the business as a general rule of thumb because that way it gives you the added layer of protection at least for you personally, and then there's the business owns it. The other thing that's nice is when the business owner, the files that they own it is that way if somebody wants to come and acquire the business, they want to invest in it or anything else is a lot less complicated. You know, it's a lot more difficult to sell: Hey, I want to come and acquire the business.  Okay, well, just to let you know all the intellectual property, all the patents and trademarks, I own personally in the business doesn't own it. And so you're gonna have to make, I'm either gonna have to sell it to the business, or that's gonna be having to be part of the deal, you're gonna have to buy those from me separately. And it makes it more complicated. And so usually, it's always easier to put it under the business, both to protect you personally, as well as to allow for making it a cleaner transaction. If somebody wants to get a licence or acquired or otherwise, do something.

 

Andrei Tiu 

 

What if the business has to close down at some point, don't you lose it or do you transfer it to yourself until you transfer it back to another business? Or?

 

Devin Miller

  

It depends on how you shut down the business. Generally, if you go bankrupt, they're going to come after you either way. I mean, and shield all the assets by putting him in all reality, you have a placeholder business and you're running everything with you personally, then you're really personally liable. You can't just go in: Oh, I'll start an LLC. We'll have it all salving, but I'll keep all these things in my personal name. It's going to likely cause it that they're going to come after you personally anyway. And so if you're shutting it down, and you're not bankrupt, you just decide not to do it anymore, you can still transfer those all to you as a person, as an individual. So if it's a matter of shutting it down, you don't want to keep the doors open, you get lose interest, or he's saying, hey, it's not working anymore. If you're not in debt, you're not going bankrupt, it's pretty easy to transfer that to you personally before he shut it down. If you're going bankrupt, and you tried to hide all the assets in your name, personally, instead of the business, they're gonna come after you either way. So really, in that sense, when you say shut down bankrupt, they're gonna come after you, not bankrupt you can transfer to personally. 

 

Andrei Tiu 

 

Okay, super, this was very insightful. So Devin, tell all our listeners here, where can they find you? If they want to have a personal discussion with you maybe for some of their issues or businesses? In which way can you help them? And what would be the best channels for them to reach out to you?

 

Devin Miller 

  

Yeah, so there are two ways to connect up, if they want to reach out to me directly, they want to grab a schedule, some time to chat, they want to strategize, they want to go through what they're doing. I do a free strategy meeting where they can come we can spend a few minutes, check on what they're going through, and at least devise a bit of a strategy. To do that, just go to strategymeeting.com, then that link that has a calendar links right to my schedule, they can go grab some time. So strategymeeting.com is the easiest way to connect up with me. If they're lucky more just to find out about my law firm in general, more kind of the flat fees, learn a bit about patents and trademarks, and all the other information and kind of go through all that, then they can just go to law with Miller. So Miller's my last name but lawwithMiller.com, and they can find out a lot about the firm and go to the general website. So scratch some time with me specifically - strategymeeting.com, learn about the firm in general, go to lawwithMiller.com.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Super. So guys will have the links to these platforms as well in the description of the episode, as well as in the transcript. So you can find them there as well. Devin, are you up to anything fun or interesting that like our listeners to find out about from you over the next couple of months or this year?

 

Devin Miller 

 

Oh, lots of things I at least find fun and interesting. I'll give you kind of a semi-personal note. So we just acquired me and my wife have always wanted to kind of life on a farm. So I'm always a small-town person. So I like to live in small towns, I like to be more spread out. And my wife and I have always wanted to live on a bit of a farm and be kind of out in the country. So we just recently acquired 20 acres. And I'm just now planning my orchard, I'm planting 100 trees in the orchard and getting that going. So on a personal note, that's fun and exciting to me over the next probably a year to 18 months I'll be getting my orchard started and planting a whole bunch of fruit trees. Business-wise, I've got a couple of businesses that I'll probably keep to myself for now that haven't launched or aren't publicly available yet. I have a couple of additional businesses that are going to be launching within the next few months that I think you'll find it as exciting as well. So personally and business, I have plenty of fun things like at least things that I find finding sunny or exciting coming up.

 

Andrei Tiu 

 

Very cool. Man, wishing you the best of luck. It seems like you have everything going on this year. So I'm very happy actually to get a chance to meet, you know, people like you that we can connect and also, you know, that wasn’t so impacted by the pandemic in the way that they were running their lives and managed to get through and be successful while doing it. Regarding today's episode, I think it was great. Thanks so much for the insights. I really found it insightful personally, as well. I think there were a lot of lessons for many of our listeners here. So guys, if you haven't looked at trademarks and copyrights and patents, make sure to have a deeper look into them because they are indeed important. So many of you are looking at the Nexus at some point. You might find these valuable later down the line but also just to protect yourself and be able to sell and expand and scale up. As I mentioned that you'll have the links to Devin’s platforms in the description of this episode. And Devin, thank you so much for your time today this was very fun.

 

Devin Miller

 

It’s been fun, it’s been a pleasure thank you for having me on. It was a great conversation.

 

Andrei Tiu

 

Thank you for being here. Let’s keep in touch, and meanwhile, wish you an amazing day ahead!

 

Devin Miller

Thank you!

Brand Consistency & Scaling Effective Content Marketing [with Anastasia Leng]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Anastasia Leng, as they will be discussing ways to build better brands at scale in a responsible way, how to make sure that every produced content is meeting the brand’s quality standards, and also top tips on how to take the quality criteria and build technology that automates every piece of content that a brand produces.

 

Anastasia Leng is the founder & CEO of CreativeX, a technology company that aims to advance creative expression through the clarity of data. CreativeX technology is used globally by Fortune 500 brands like Unilever, Mondelez, Heineken, ABI, and more to help marketers build better global brands by measuring creative efficiency, consistency, impact, and responsibility across all creatives worldwide.

Prior to that, Anastasia co-founded Hatch.co, an ecommerce company that was selected as one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Startups to Watch in New York, one of TimeOut NY's Best New Shopping Sites of 2013, as well as one of the four most innovative retail companies by the National Retail Federation.

Prior to Hatch, Anastasia spent 5+ years at Google, working in New Business Development and Product Marketing. She led entrepreneurship efforts in Europe, Africa, & the Middle East and was responsible for early-stage partnerships for Google Voice, Chrome, and Wallet.

Anastasia graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a triple major in Psychology, Sociology, and French. She’s been a nomad all her life and has lived in Bahrain, Vietnam, Hungary, Russia, France, England, and the US. She remains a mediocre tennis player and an aspiring writer.

 

Connect with Anastasia:

Website: https://www.creativex.com/ 

Anastasia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleng/ 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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

 

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei. Welcome to another episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Anastasia Lang, the founder, and CEO of CreativeX, an automating creative excellence platform used by brands to measure creative efficiency, consistency, and impact across all of their image and video content worldwide. Today, we'll discuss the current issues we as marketers face in tracking content effectiveness across channels, measuring brand impact, and how to use data to create better content. So without further ado: Welcome to the show, Anastasia! How are you? Let's do this!

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Hi, Andrei! Thank you. I'm excited to be here. 

 

Andrei Tiu 

 

Thank you. So, let's talk a bit about you because you have a very interesting background, you've done a lot of impressive stuff in the past. I like to let you introduce yourself to our audience a bit. So, all of us can get to know you a bit better before diving into the nitty-gritty.

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Sure, let's see, where do I start? Well, I started my career in marketing, I spent about six years working in Google first in the marketing team then moved on to do some product and business development work, and then after about six years there, I left Google to start my own company, which was an e-commerce business at the time. We were trying to create a customizable retail experience, and that wasn't working, it was my first experience with starting a company that was ultimately a failed company. But through the process of trying to salvage a business, we started realizing that imagery and video were very important, and we wanted a more data-driven way of understanding it. We started tinkering with some ideas and technologies to make that possible, and that led to the creation of CreativeX. So, out of a failed company came a much more successful one. So, I guess for all the different listeners that are tuning in right now. I've been both an entrepreneur and marketer, I have now fused these two things that I'm doing into one, and I'm an entrepreneur building a company for marketers.

Andrei Tiu   

 

 Amazing! So, that's such a fun experience.  Before diving into the subject today, which is crazy backs, I think it'd be really interesting to find out a bit about the transition period, and like from the hatch, what you learn from there, and how you got to discover this issue. Then to develop it into product and service, and the platform and the business that exists today. I think it's an insightful journey, and I think it will be relevant for many of the people that are listening to us.

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

 Absolutely. So, we've been building hatch for about two years, and we had been trying to do everything to make it work. Now, the hatch was a marketplace. On one hand, we had sellers or in our case makers. And on the other hand, we had, you know, consumers who were buying the product from the sellers. One of the things that's difficult about building marketplaces is that you have to build two sides simultaneously, you need kind of both sides of the coin to be there for the marketplace to work effectively. What we found is we had no trouble attracting makers or sellers to the side but had a lot of trouble getting buyers to sort of at scale, and as a small company, a lot of the tools that brands use to drive consumer demand and demand generation we simply didn't have because we didn't have a lot of money. And as a startup, you have no resources. And so the insight that led to the creation of CreativeX was: we started looking at trying to understand where do I best consumers come from, the folks who like our product, to engage with our products, etc. We started finding that a lot of them were coming from ve: Instagram, Pinterest, whenever we put imagery on Facebook, and the thing that was tricky for us is we couldn't understand what was it about some images that got our consumers to actually click and come to our site and experience our products, and others that looked very similar to us and to make it I didn't quite have the same consumer reaction. And so we had this problem where we had this company, it wasn't working, when we realized I'm looking at what is working, where all of our traffic is coming from - it's from these visually led platforms. But we couldn't piece two and two together, we couldn't figure out how to make them work. That's where we basically sat down and thought about how we can be more objective here? We were always a very data-driven team. At that point, we're predominantly engineers. So, we were trying to figure out, we hate the fact that we're guessing here. So, how can we put a little bit more data into the process? That's what led to the creation of CreativeX. We ended up doing actually at that time as we took a spreadsheet, we put every single image or video we were using at that time, and for the different columns, we put in binary questions. So, things like: Is our logo, MD Image? Does the CreativeX have a person in it? And we had someone manually at that time go through and essentially put a zero or one, depending on whether that image had that CreativeX attribute. As we were putting that data in and combining it with our other data, we started to see patterns. I think there are probably lots of stories like this. It was our kind of unwillingness, as entrepreneurs and founders at the time to admit that the other business wasn't working and our relentless pursuit of something that would get it to work that got us to where we are today, even though obviously, the business we're running today is very different than the business we were running when we first started this thing. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Okay, so what were the early assumptions or findings? So, you pulled all these data together, and you saw some patterns. What were some of the patterns that you identified, that enabled you to think about it at a bigger scale and think: "Oh, actually, there's gonna be probably more businesses encountering these issues.", and kind of shaping the new business out of the insights that you got from the old one? 

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Well, I actually can't take much credit for this. Because at this point, we were just trying to make the company work. So the fact that we, all of a sudden had this data, we were seeing patterns, we started making decisions based on this data. So the decision you started making like: "What kind of images should we be creating in the first place?", and "How should we think about our content production?", and "How we photograph things?". We started making decisions in the store that our revenue started going up. So what didn't happen at the time was (this was about the summer of 2015), all of a sudden, the business started doing much better.  We had profitable unit economics, all of a sudden, our growth curves are going up into the rate, and so I went out and started fundraising for the company. Because it was great, we figured it out, we're doing much better, we could sort of competing without having as much money as some better-funded companies. So, I went out and sort of fundraising. Basically, what had happened was that several investors pulled me aside. They took a bit of a deeper look into the company and said: "Well, what's happening here? You know, where's this growth coming from? What are you guys doing?", and I'd explained the methodology that we started applying to the way that we were making an image and video decisions. It was the investors who pointed out that this is a much bigger problem. As a founder, I think the problem you have is sometimes you get tunnel vision. So, I was so focused on our company and our problem, that at that time, I didn't take a step back and think: "Hey, do other people have this problem?". It took other people pointing out to me, and I remember we'd explained to one of the investors that we were talking about what we were doing, and he said: "Every company in my portfolio is struggling with this problem.". That's when sort of the piece of luck came in because at that point we had this company. The stuff that we've been talking about was a bunch of spreadsheets and some ideas, we started automating a bunch of it at that point, but it was still very early, and we had an investor who came and said: "Look, if you want to spin this out into a separate company, I will back you, and I will back the company, but I'm now going to back the e-commerce business.". I remember we received a term sheet, and the term sheet said "new company", because we didn't even have a company name at that time. So, I wish I could tell you that I was the one who sort of saw this, but at that point, I was so focused on sort of saving the existing e-commerce business that it took other people pointing it out to me for me to realize that maybe there is something here. When that happened, and when he suggested that they think this is a bigger problem. I did two things: The first one is I went back to the team and I said: "Look, this is what's happening. It doesn't look like we're going to be able to fundraise for this e-commerce business. But we have a couple of people interested in this sort of side hustle we've got going on. How do you feel about this as a team, and at that point, we were predominantly a team of engineers?" The engineering team said that this is much more interesting. This is a much more interesting problem for us to solve. But because we'd had this experience, the last thing I wanted to do was jump into another business without really thinking it through. So, the thing that we did was: I pinged as many marketers as I knew, and said: "Hey, here's some stuff we've been experimenting with. What do you think? Is this valuable?". The response we got was: "Let us know when you launch a beta because we want to sign up. That was the first time, we’re sort of a light bulb went off because we received various strong reactions to this idea, which made us comfortable as a team that if we were to go down this track, there probably is an interesting product that could be built.

 

Andrei Tiu  

  

Okay, so you were faced with the decision of you worked for this much time on these businesses becoming profitable. Many entrepreneurs find themselves in this hassle of getting something up and running, it starts to work, you start making some money out of it, even if it's not enough, and then it's very hard to let it go for another opportunity, even if that other opportunity might be a more scalable one, or so on. So, my two questions here, one of them was: How big was the business in terms of profits or revenue when you had to leave it for this other one, just for the people that are maybe in the same situations to see that they're not alone? If something like this comes along? Sometimes you have to leap of faith, and trust that it's gonna go well. The other one was: Did you have to completely give it up? Or you start you feel around it?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

 Yeah. So, I can't even remember the numbers at this point, because it's been so long. I think maybe in gross merchandise value we're making a couple of $100,000 a year. It didn’t sort of massive, I would say probably about half a million a year is what we were pulling in terms of GMV. The difficult thing was that e-commerce is tough as space because the margins are very low. So even if you're transacting half a million dollars a year (which again, is not even sort of a gigantic amount) the amount that you get to take back as a company to reinvest back into growth, and all of that is very small, much smaller than that. What was becoming very clear to us at that point in the journey is, we could run the business profitably, but not if we wanted to be a huge business. It felt like the business we created was really a lifestyle business, and that's all well and good, and I think there's a lot of value to building profitable and great lifestyle businesses, but it's just not what we wanted at the time. So when we all sat down as a team, and again, a lot of what our team that early team had in common is, we were a lot of big company conference. Meaning that a lot of us were people who had every intention to leave big, comfortable jobs, to go do something. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to build a rocket ship that could come in the common Silicon Valley. We want to do something that would grow fast, and that would scale, and that would be used by millions, if not billions, of people. What we realized with hatch was that we built a business, and it was a decent business, but it was never going to scale the way that we wanted. I think the other thing that worried us was that if we were to invest in that business and grow it, we could never do it without significant capital at every stage, because of the margins and sort of dynamics of the commerce business. We have this decision to make around and at the time that we started thinking about creating what is now CreativeX, we also thought about sort of selling the company and going in and working somewhere larger that focused on a similar issue, but ultimately felt like we were much more excited about what we have stumbled upon. Now, we did keep the site running to your question. We kept it running for about maybe two years after we stopped working on it, and it paid for itself, it covered all of its costs. But then when creative EQ started to take off, we felt that it was just a distraction. I'm one of those people that need to focus. For example, when I sit down to work, I need to clear my desk before I do something very big because I need clarity and focus, and the hatch was becoming the sort of thing in the rearview mirror that was starting to bother me a little bit just because it's still required a little love and maintenance. Eventually, we shut it down. I think we sold off some of the assets and we reinvested it back into CreativeX. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Okay, super! So let's go into the subject. That is our discussion today, then this was very insightful, I think it helped us all get more context around how CreativeX came about. In the first, in beta or when you first started to put it together and maybe get it out to the first marketers to test. What was the main so the main problem that you were solving? Where was it coming into the marketing stack or marketing tech stack? How are people using it?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Yeah, it's funny. All these questions are making me kind of think back to how we felt at the time when all of this was happening. We did launch a beta in about 2017 we spent about a year building the underlying technology, and a lot of the assumptions mean the beta, we're feeling, frankly, very wrong. The assumption we made for the beta was the assumption that catalyzes the creation of creative x, which is that if we could marry creative data with performance data, we could offer marketers insights about what are the creative attributes that perform better than others from a digital performance point of view. So, we were essentially doing with the beta was it plugged into several social media platforms, it analyzed their imagery for hundreds of 1000s of visual cues, right colors, whether or not it had people, dogs, cats, like tons and tons of visual information. Then they could go in and essentially see if there is any performance difference between images that had dogs versus images of cats, images that have people versus images that didn't have people. So provided them this way of understanding a little bit more what was working in those in those images and what wasn't. That was, again, kind of what led to the insight that led to the creation of CreativeX. It felt like a logical step for us to take. But, when we got that beta into the market, what we saw was, it didn't work. There were a couple of reasons why that beta didn't work. The first reason, and then probably really the most important one was, fundamentally, this is not how creativity works. If I tell you that having dogs in your images, or having citrus or lemon in your photos, increases, click-through rate by a little bit. It's a fun insight, and it's cool to know. But ultimately, you're not going to put a dog or a lemon in every image. That is not how things work. And so what we realized was at that time, while there's a lot of value to helping brands be more data-driven, we needed to provide that data at the right level because we didn't want to build technology that killed or hindered creativity, we wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to build technology and say: "Hey, here are some interesting insights that you can then put on steroids.". But because we were being so detailed about the things we picked up on, it led to the kinds of things where people would say: "Okay, that's cool. It's a cool insight. But what can I do with it?". The fact that having green in my image means more conversions, doesn't mean I'm going to make all my images green. That was kind of the first, and it was a really painful realization because, at this point, we'd spent about a year and a half building this, we've spent pretty much all of the seed investment money we had on this beta, and we were following the assumptions that we started with, but we launched it, and it wasn't something that was aligned with how marketers thought about creativity, or how they wanted to use this kind of technology. So, come sort of end of 2017 in some ways, we were back at square one trying to figure out that we have this technology, we have all this data, but we still haven't found product-market fit or that several cases that align with the ways that the marketers we know want to work.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

So why did you do?

Anastasia Leng   

 

What we did is we went back and talk to as many users as we could, and we went back and we went to every user we had, and we said: "You signed up, you sort of wanted these insights. We've given you these insights, they're not usable. What else can we do? Like when it comes to imagery and video? What are the problems you're trying to solve?." Keep in mind at this point, the people who were experimenting with our products and testing our system tended to be bigger brands. They tended to be sort of Fortune 500 type brands, global in nature, with lots of brands in their portfolio. And as we started asking them what we can do to what we could build for them and what are the problems they were struggling with a pattern started emerging and the pattern that was emerging is a lot of brands had struggled with the same problem, which was as platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, now TikTok, were growing in popularity. A lot of the brands that where they put their media dollars and the kind of content that created shifted to visual. This is gonna sound obvious now and very dated, but in 2017, image and video production were growing about three to 5x year over year, so brands like them could barely keep up with the amount of image of video content they were creating. But the problem with this proliferation of content is that as you create too much content, how do you ensure that your content follows best practice, stays on brand, is utilizing the latest learnings. What they said to us is like, "Look, it's great that you can tell us if the image has lemon in it. What I want to understand before that is like is my brand displayed correctly? Am I following the best practices? My team, there are all these learnings here about creative best practices, are they being applied to all my content at scale, because when I'm producing so much content, you know, standards start to slip."  We heard essentially a version of that story from pretty much everyone that we talked to. What we realized is that the problem is quite a lot simpler, which is: How do we help brands in force, creative quality at scale, in a way that is customized to their specific needs and their specific organizations? That sort of light bulb led to the creation of our second product, which is now what we call creative governance, which actually, was the product that ultimately got us to product-market fit and got us to a place where we were able to deploy it at scale. And we saw a sort of very healthy adoption and very healthy usage across it, but it took we took a winding road to get there.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

As it happens. So guys, if you want to find out more information in-depth about CreativeX apart from what we are going to discuss. Here, you have the links in the description of the episode as well as links to and stages platforms and LinkedIn and everything else, if you'd like to get on a personal conversation in terms of collaborations and stuff like this. But Anastasia, just for the people listening to that may be hearing about pretty much for the first time right now. So, how does the platform work? Or what does it enable marketers to do? Specifically, from my understanding, if I was to just judge by what we discussed right now, is it this new version, sort of like a hub, where you can import your brand guidelines and sort of grade some kinds of templates, and then you get recommendations from the platform, in terms of what you can do better to make that content work better for you, based on other insights from other brands?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Not quite. Fundamentally, if you take a step back, the goal of CreativeX is really to help build better brands at scale, and to do so responsibly. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we call creative excellence, and the first part of what we consider to be the creative excellence journey is: let's make sure that every content you're producing is meeting your quality standard. So what that means is: when we go into an organization, let's say, Heineken, what we want to do is understand what is creative quality, new to Heineken? What are some of the fundamentals kind of that baseline, before you even start to do crazy kind of cool stuff? What is the baseline that every creative has to have, for it to feel like it has met Heineken's quality bar. What that bar is will differ from whether or not the ad is running on television or Facebook or YouTube. Our first job is to take the quality criteria and build technology that automates their detection, such that we can look at every single Heineken piece of content and say: "Hey, Heineken, this does or does not meet your quality criteria.". What we do with that is we then take that detection and apply it across all the content that our brands are running, and we give them several insights back. The first one is we tell them, not only what percentage of their content meets all of their quality criteria, we break it down on a per criterion level and help them understand what are the things they're good at, what are the things they're not good at. For example, they might be very good at branding their content, but they might be very bad at making sure their content is optimized for being consumed without sound. We help them understand how much money is being put behind content that meets quality standards and content that doesn't. We can even go deeper understand where in the organization, again, you have to take this in the context of you know, these are global brands, 1000s, of marketers, hundreds of agencies, where is their budget being spent least efficiently. So who's producing the most content that doesn't adhere to standards that aren’t meeting best practice, etc. Fundamentally, what we think about is that the value of the tool is a lot of brands have these creative learnings, but applying them at scale is difficult. Making sure all of your creative production is efficient, is also a problem that you just can't solve without technology. So, that's the first step in the journey, and we think of this sort of raising the floor. Let's make sure you're meeting your quality standards, and from there, it gets more complicated, more advanced based on the things that you want to do. So when you have your basic view of quality from there, a lot of brands might say: "Okay, great. Now I want to understand how consistently Am I communicating In my brand, am I using my distinctive brand assets? Am I featuring my spokespeople? How often Am I featuring my brand colours, my taglines." Then there is also part some of our brands, working very regulation heavy environments. So, we also help them make sure that they're always complying with consumer rights protection regulation, so they don't get fined for any of the advertising messages that they do. And then the last part, something that we're working on now is helping brands make sure that when they feature people. The people in their advertising are portrayed in a way that is representative, and that is not perpetuating stereotypes. So, we help them understand both the casting choices they're making, as well as the representation of people, and that's a long journey. But fundamentally, the first step in that journey is always: let's help you make sure that everything is meeting your quality standards.

 

Andrei Tiu

 

So in terms of the business model, you appeal mainly to large corporate kinds of clients that have more hubs, and then they have to ensure the brand consistency across multiple countries, or maybe multiple brands in multiple countries. So that would be kind of like your target market that you address mostly, right?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

It depends. I think a lot of our problem is the kind of more and more content, and making sure all that content appears is probably more potent across brands that are these big global brands. But the reality is, anyone who is serious about brand building, and anyone who is investing a significant amount of their budget into creative production can probably benefit from making sure that there is an objective automated standard that helps them enforce at scale those creative production efforts.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Okay. And in terms of the way that you work with brands, for example, if Unilever or somebody would like to start working with the CreativeX. I don't think it's a completely SAS type of model. So, they have to work with your team to get all these parameters in place and the level of the ground that you mentioned in the beginning before building up their criteria, right?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

It's entirely a SAS tool. So, we work exclusively on a subscription as a service basis. And there is our team because again, the brands we work with tend to be to some of the biggest brands in the world, our team is involved in some of these things like guiding them to make sure that we're automating the right things, helping them roll out this technology at a global level, but all the insights are delivered via the product itself.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Got you. Okay, let's talk a bit about this area of creating a lot of content and having to distribute it across multiple platforms, and basically also repurposing the content in that sense, to better get it out to the audience. What are some of the main issues that you may be found from interviews that you had with your clients? Or from this process? What would be some areas that didn't necessarily have a solution before and maybe CreativeX came as a solution to?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

The biggest one is just enforcing all of this at scale is very difficult. The average fortune 500 brand produces over 100,000 pieces of content a year, and that number is growing, and it'll continue to get bigger with things like dynamic creative optimization. So, first of all, it's just kind of a volume problem. The second thing that actually amplifies the problem is when you think about creative best practices, or creative learnings back in the day you had a couple of creatives, you would run them on TV for a couple of months, and that was sort of sufficient. Now you need a new creation every day, and you're running across all these platforms. Now, what's tricky about that is, every platform is its own environment that has its own recipe for success. So what Facebook tells you to do to be successful on Facebook is actually even a little bit different than what you have to do to be successful on Instagram, and it's completely different from what you have to do to be successful on YouTube because the consumption patterns are different, the users have different behaviors different. So, not only do you have to make a lot more content, but because it's being distributed across all these platforms. If you create a video that you want to put on YouTube, putting that same video on Facebook is not going to work because the rules of engagement are different.  It is very difficult for a marketer to remember these constantly changing environmental best practices on top of having to worry about their day job and like building their brand and optimizing for their performance, to make sure that they're giving their content the best chance of success. A big part of the problem we solve is not only that sort of scalable problem, but customizing these learnings in the best practices to every environment. So that we can help you quickly figure out if your content is set up for success, and actually, one of the most popular tools that we have is something that we call preflight evaluation. It's exactly what it sounds l it gives our marketers and all their agencies a way to come into the tool, upload any content that they just created, tell us that this is the platform it's going on, and we will very quickly tell them if this meets all the best practice requirements for that platform, or no, it doesn't hear the things you have to fix to even give your creative a chance of being seen and heard in that environment.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Okay, is there an element of brand consistency tracking or content effectiveness tracking cross channel, because this is something that we find a lot of brands that we work with, as well struggle with? So, we have this bunch of content, we have these channels that we need to be this content on, and then many times, either they use the customer data platform so that they integrate the insights and then try to drop the insights in one place, but this is not so often happening well, or they have to do it manually, and then try to compile these reports, either internally or with our help. Is your platform getting involved with solving some of these issues at any point in the journey?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Yeah, absolutely. We have an entire product just dedicated to brand consistency. What we do for brand consistency is we'll make a brand book, and we'll basically automate it will automate every single element of what brand consistency means to them. So we can tell them very quickly, and in real-time for all the ads are running sort of today: "Here is how often you're using your different brand, that lemons. Here's how that differs by the market by channel, and here's sort of your brand consistency score." All of the data we have, you can combine with performance data. So for every ad or every piece of content that's run live, we pull in performance data associated with that as well. So, in our system does correlations in the background figure out is there a statistically significant relationship between some of these creative best practices or some of these brand consistency guidelines and performance? Now, again, coming back to our earlier conversation, what we're finding, especially when we talk about brand consistency, so let's take a brand like Coca Cola, for example. If I had to guess what some of Coca-Cola has brand consistency attributes, maybe the usage of the color red, and might be the kind of iconic Coca-Cola bottle in my BB, the polar bear, right that they use in their Christmas commercials. So, the way we think about tying brand consistency to performance, it's less about saying: "Hey, here's the impact of the bear on performance". That's not really useful because they're not going to put a bear in every ad, the more about thinking, what is the right kind of amount of branding, in each creative that leads investment, which is why we try and assign a brand consistency score, using all the different elements to figure out how much branding do you need to be successful.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Gotcha. What's your biggest challenge at the moment? Because you grew a lot, and you solve a lot of issues so far. What's one that still is on your mind, and you guys are trying to solve or to figure out?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Well, for me, personally, the big challenge right now is hiring and recruiting the company basically tripled the size, we were very small last year, and then we're due to double, if not more than that this year. I'm pretty much spending all my days hiring and recruiting and in terms of company and business challenges, I think one of the big challenges we have now is that we now have 1000s of marketers 10s of 1000s of marketers actually using the product. We're having to revisit a lot of the earlier decisions that we've made to make sure that those decisions actually now work at scale, which is a little bit tricky, because even especially at our stage, you just want to grow and build an ad and make the platform return better. But there is some tech debt essentially that we have incurred that we have to make sure we kind of pay off sooner rather than later to make sure that the scaling curve is smooth.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

From a marketing perspective or go to market or sales, whichever you think is more relevant. What was a catalyst for success for you because you grew a lot and you grew a lot in fortune 500 companies so definitely a big success there? What's helped you be successful from marketing sales perspectives, in this b2b space?

 

Anastasia Leng 

 

I wish there was some sort of silver bullet. We don't really have a marketing team so we didn't have the luxury for a very long time, we're in the process of building a marketing team right now.  To answer your question directly the number one reason for the growth was customer referral and word of mouth and so a lot of what we saw was that once we deployed our technology at someone like Unilever and 1000s of Unilever marketers and do the product one of them, the CMO Unilever, might talk to their friends at Pepsi or their friends at Modeles and end up bringing us up or talking about some of the things they were doing around this problem of content proliferation, erosion of standards, erosion of brand consistency, and that person would have reached out to us. If someone actually left the company to go from Unilever to Nestle within three months we get a phone call saying: "Hey, I'm in this new company now I'd love to bring you guys in and talk about what you could do for a company here". There is a lot of that comes down to people, which is sort of the dirty secret because it's not scalable and I think a lot of entrepreneurs are very focused on a scale but sometimes the things that don't scale that are the most powerful and I think one of the things that we did right, but that we're still trying to do, is that we treat our marketers as the experts until a lot of the product has actually evolved very much on their feedback and so we like to check in with our customers on a regular basis, we actively ask them to criticize our product, we actively try and understand how do they want to work where can our product fit in better. We don't just kind of pay lip service to it, we then go through and build those things, of course, they have to be aligned with our vision all of that, but I guess that the long and short of it is the secret of is listening but I don't think that's much of a secret.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

I guess it comes down to being very customer-focused in the true way of asking for feedback, listening to, and then implementing it to make the product better to deliver to, right?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Yes, although one of the things that I would say that I sometimes nitpick with my team on is I've noticed this tendency that when we ask people for the feedback we ask for feedback and very leading ways because actually, the process of asking for feedback is to get a confirmation for something we already believe or we want to build a very good median and that doesn't work. There is a way of asking for feedback that really leaves the space open for someone to actually tell you what they're thinking and not in a way that asks them to confirm something you're thinking and I think it's those open-ended conversations that actually yield the most interesting insights. One of the things that I always want when my team says: "Oh, I'm gonna ask the customer this and I'm like well..". Let's think about rephrasing that question because even the way we're thinking about asking what you really ask them to do is to confirm you're not asking for their password they actually want, and the more you do that stuff the easier it is to essentially just have people validate your ideas to rather than listening to them.

 

Andrei Tiu 

  

Good point! Okay, as we go into the end of the episode, which was really insightful and  I hope you already are having a look at the tool and see if it's something that you can use for your business. Personally, I think it's something that a number of our clients could make good use of for assuring these brand consistency because as you mentioned many of the team is big. I think this could erase some of the QA steps that have to happen until the content gets to being actually public or using commercials and ads. We like to bring in tips and tricks and hacks to the shelving from different aspects, so, I guess our niche or area here would be this content production kind of faith so from the top of your head from all this data analysis experience of yours that you had with great impacts. So, from your point of view, what would be some tips or tricks for marketers tuning in that produce content in-house that they could use to ensure or to increase the chances of their content being more effective on specific platforms? Here we can bring examples from Facebook or Instagram or Tiktok or Pinterest.

Anastasia Leng  

 

Absolutely! They're all a bit different and there's a little bit of variation by vertical but generally speaking and some of the best practices are they really get mapped to user behavior. So, the first one is, if you think about the average time the average view length of a video on a platform like Facebook, which it's about two seconds, and on YouTube, it's five seconds. The number one learning is you have to brand super early. I think there's sometimes a desire to want to tell a long story and introduce your brand that sort of second 30 but the vast majority of people won't even get exposure to that because the average length of the video is so short and by the way branding early does not mean you got to put a logo on it. There may be other ways to think about branding. Comes back to our brand consistency conversation, which is if you're Coca-Cola it's not about having a logo maybe it's about having that iconic red, maybe it's about having the bottle, maybe it's about having the polar bear. What are those elements that say: "Hey, this is my brand". How do you build them early and upfront so that right away there is brand awareness happening there? The second most common thing that we see a lot of brands get wrong is around framing their asset correctly so this is again where because folks are used to taking assets that are intended for one platform and sort of recycling them on another. So what tends to happen is that you may create a video for Youtube, now the Youtube aspect ratio that's best is sort of 16 by nine, so you might take that aspect ratio and use it for your Instagram ad. You would be amazed at how many times we see that you know you've got this vertical window for Instagram ad and you've got kind of a horizontal ad running which means there's about like 70 to 80% of your real estate that's actually blank space that you're not making up. So even there you've significantly reduced your chances of being seen and heard because you're not actually using the risk. It sounds so basic but you'd be amazed at how many brands get this wrong the second. The third one that's a little bit trickier is: how do you think about sound right because we've been talking about content production that if we look at the trends the majority of content production today is happening is video. If you look at the biggest platforms which are Facebook and Instagram, which I’m going to bundle into one because they're part of the same family versus YouTube, their rules around sound or their best practice around the sound are very different. So, what Facebook says is: I believe something like 80 to 90% of Facebook content is watched without sound. So, if your message is delivered through sound the user is most likely not going to get it, you have to think about you know whether it's subtitles supers or simply how do we tell a story that doesn't require sound to deliver the fundamental message. If you look at it on the Youtube side, the best practices are completely different because the consumption patterns are different. On YouTube, the recommendation is: if you're going to be running content you should be optimizing for sound on consumption. There it's how do you actually amplify your message through the tagline, sonic identities, it's like that sound, you know that's McDonald's, and l don't even have to say anything. How do you amplify that? There are several other ones there is stuff around product placement so you know show your product, show it early, show it being used, and there are several studies that talk about the importance of having cuts just because it stimulates the user to keep watching. One of the best practices we're seeing a lot is to have at least one cut in the first three seconds because that change can actually entice the user to keep watching at least that's what some research indicates. The last one that's very practical is to keep it short and that doesn't mean you know we talked about kind of the average length being the average view length being a couple of seconds doesn't mean your video has to be but actually introducing some constraints your creative production team. If they give you a 62nd video push them to deliver that message in 50 seconds or experiment with different 15-second cuts because that tends to be about the length beyond which most platforms don't really recommend that that you go.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Okay. I think this one with the cut, sounds very familiar to me, and I don't remember where I heard it, but it was a while ago. I think it's very valid, because indeed, if you use those words to pre-second, effectively, then you have a much bigger chance of people still sticking around. As you mentioned that the attention span on Instagram or Facebook is very short. So, very good advice here to try to show your branding early, and if the engagement after these two, three seconds as much as possible for this sort of tag. It was a very good insight. Anastasia, I think I kept you long enough here. It was a bit longer than we planned, but this was a very good conversation, and I'm really happy that we managed to organize and meet today. Tell us and tell our guys here, where can they reach out to you? Or maybe how can they see the product? Ask your questions, collaborate if there's an opportunity?

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Yeah, absolutely! Our website is just creativex.com, and if anyone has ideas or wants to reach out info at Creative X is the best way to reach our team, and we'll make sure it gets routed to the right place. Then we try and do our best to publish some of the universal learnings we're seeing on LinkedIn and on our blog, which again, our LinkedIn is just our company name, and our blog is on our website. If you want some of these more universal learnings, we try our best anytime we see something that we think is interesting, we try our best to publish it. So just keep up on there, and we'll do our best to keep sharing learnings with you.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Super. Okay, guys, so hopefully you found this insightful and interesting, thank you for sticking around to the end. As always, if you have any further questions or any ideas of how we might be able to direct the discussion maybe further or explore some other topics together, then feel free to email us at hello@marketiu.ro or reach out to Anastasia directly or to the team at CreativeX. We'll try to make it happen maybe if it's something that you'd find valuable. We try to maybe organize other people together and go into that direction in more depth if the NSA tip will be operated well. Thank you as always, for staying around. Wishing you all the success Anastasia. Thank you again for joining us today, and keep rocking it. Have a nice one and looking forward to meeting again soon. Anastasia, thank you, and wishing you an amazing day as well.

 

Anastasia Leng   

Thank you.

Product, Marketing and Sales team alignment [with Jay Haynes]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Jay Haynes, as they will be discussing product, marketing, and sales team alignment in the marketing space and how to plan your marketing strategy around product roadmap.

 

Jay Haynes is the Founder & CEO of thrv.com, the first and only Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) software for product, marketing, and sales teams.

 

Jay’s advancements enable product teams to dramatically increase their effectiveness in using jobs-to-be-done to reduce roadmap risk, accelerate revenue growth, and generate superior equity value. Jobs-to-be-done product management helps CEOs align their product teams with customers and focus their company’s product development on exploiting competitor weaknesses from the view of the customer. 

As an Award-winning executive with three decades of innovation and investing experience, Jay’s customers include Microsoft, Dropbox, eBay, Twitter, American Express, Oracle, Target, and Viacom among others.

 

Connect with Jay:

Website: https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done 

Jay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhaynes/ 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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   

Hello, everybody, this is Andrei and you're on the marketing innovation podcast show. Our special guest for today is Jay Haynes who's the founder CEO of thrv.com, the first and only Jobs-to-be-done software for product marketing and sales teams. And today we'll discuss the importance of team alignment in promoting b2b and b2c products, as well as the jobs to be done method and how you can apply it within your business to increase your return. So without further ado, hi Jay, it's a pleasure to be here. How are you? How's the day going? 

 

Jay Haynes   

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Pleasure. So let's go! First of all, can you tell us a bit about your background and where you're coming from, because you have an impressive background in entrepreneurship and leadership and marketing. So I think it would be really good to give our listeners a bit of context into you as a person. 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, sure. It's, I hope it's an interesting story. So I started my career about 30 years ago, when I graduated from college, in the early 90s, right into a big recession. People don't remember that. But it was the big SNL crisis in the US. And I really spent 10 years in the financial world in the private equity industry, buying companies. And that was pretty, fairly interesting. And it was a great, you know, business education. But basically, back in the 1990s, you could buy companies and use a lot of debt and cut costs, which is still, you know, a big chunk of the private equity industry today, but I was always interested in the innovation question. And we never did anything with the companies that were innovative at all, in product or marketing. It was really financial engineering. In fact, one of the companies we bought was Steinway and Sons, you know, the kind of famous piano company, and I always like to joke that Steinway is literally the least innovative company on the planet, they're making the same product they made 150 years ago, and they're selling the same product. So that got me interested in innovation. I went back to business school, and then worked in product management, and really started to learn, okay, what's the state of our art for product marketing and product management and innovation, which obviously leads to sales. I started a couple companies that had some successes and failures. And then I spent that kind of next 10 years in the world of innovation, at big companies and startups, and really trying to figure out, Okay, how does the world innovate? I worked with Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, investors, and large companies, and there really just weren't any good methods out there. There's nothing that's really scientific. And that's about a decade ago, I really got interested in jobs that did innovation. And I'd studied with Clay Christensen who was a big proponent of jobs done jobs theory, he passed away last year, unfortunately. But you know, he's the famous Harvard Business School professor who talked a lot about disruption, which he's really known for. But really the last part of his career, he focused on jobs, he did innovation, and I got really interested in that, because it's just a more systematic way to think about product management and product marketing.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Okay, so tell us how you got into Thrv. So maybe some of the businesses that you founded, or you're part of in the more recent past, and then how these led you to funding Thrv?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, great. So I'll tell you kind of an interesting story about a company I was actually brought in by the venture investors. The company had been struggling and the idea was, there's a big opportunity for what's happening in distributed networking. This was the era of Napster. And people kind of forget, if you're in less or as old as I am, that back then in the early 2000s, the cost of streaming anything over the internet, what we're doing right now would be ridiculously expensive. You couldn't do it. So we looked at distributed networking, and we thought that we could come up with a device that would enable you to collect videos, essentially, it was like a TiVo for web videos. Now, it was interesting that the company did okay, but what happened after that was this other company launched called YouTube. And YouTube was obviously enormously successful. So that got me thinking, well, how did we not approach this correctly? What problem are we trying to solve for customers? And that's what we didn't really figure out. And that's whether you're a startup or fortune 500 company, really getting your team across product marketing and sales, to agree on what problem you're solving for your customer, obviously, that's the most important thing you can do. And that's what we should have done better. But I didn't have jobs, we did our jobs theories, the method back then. And that's what really got me interested in jobs theory, and Jesse Dodd. And so I did work in, in this industry, you know, round jfc done. And what it does is creates a lot of data. Without a doubt, you're gonna get a lot of customer data. And if you combine that customer data with things like segmentation and market sizing, and competitive analysis, use and messaging analysis etc. go to market planning, you get an enormous amount of data. And so about seven years ago, that's when I started Thrvf. Because if you're trying to make decisions with a lot of data, whether you're on a product team or marketing team, software is very good at that. That's why you know, software exists, because there's so much data in the world, and we all need to make decisions. So that's really how I started  Thrv: recognising, okay, job students a very effective method. And we can talk about, you know, what it is why, but it creates a lot of data and the last thing product and marketing teams want is more PowerPoint presentations, and sell spreadsheets or email around, right? So we wanted to put this data together that can really coordinate product marketing and sales on the customer. And you can think about what jobs does is it takes the phrase, you know, being customer focused, which every company wants to be customer focused these days, which is a great thing. And whether you're a startup or fortune 500 company, you need to be customer focused. Okay, but what does that mean? Well, starting with, you might have to get a lot of data about customers, and that's where jobs come in. And then you want to keep that customer focus all through your product, the roadmapping process that your product management teams are working on, all through your product marketing processes, when your marketing teams are focused on, messaging, and going to market, you know, etc. And even through to your sales team, especially if you're in the b2b world, you want to keep that customer in focus across those teams. What's really interesting is you want to organise your company around your customers job rather than around the functions of the company. And we can talk about that in more detail. But really, one of the things you can think about what our software does, is help keep teams focused on their customers.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Okay, that's a very good point. So going from here, let's discuss and explain to our listeners here, what's the Jobs-to-be-done method, I think this will be the starting point. So that we can go into a couple of case studies and then talk with the actual importance of having the things aligned and the communications and planning different phases of communications and sales focus around the product map and journey. So Jobes-to-be done.

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, it's a great question. So for those who don't know what Jobs-to-be-done is, it's core idea is actually deceptively very simple. It's that customers are actually not buying a product. You think you're selling them a product, and they seem to be transacting purchasing something, but what they're really doing underneath it is hiring that product to get a job done. And in today's innovation terminology, you know, thanks in large part to Clay Christensen, we use the term „Jobs-to-be-done” to explain basically a goal that a customer has, that's independent of any solution. And that's really the key. Is that people, every customer is a real human who's trying to get through their day and you know, achieve goals. And good examples of this are: you can look back at products that we've all used, and we've all switched to new products. So for example, I'm old enough to remember the days of records, when I used to listen to music on records, I actually had eight track tapes, that was a horrible format. But you know, we all switched from records to CDs. And then we all switch from CDs to iPods, then we all switched from iPods to streaming services. So why did that happen? Well, if you use traditional definitions of a market, you would say, well, there was a huge iPod market. You know, Apple sold 200 million iPods at 150 bucks a pop. That's a $30 billion revenue opportunity. So companies also make this mistake all the time: they think the product is the market. And in fact, Microsoft made this mistake with the Zune. I don't know if you own the Zune, very few people did, because it was an iPod competitor. And they thought, well, there's a $30 billion iPod market. „So let's make a Zune competitor.” We're Microsoft, we have a billion customers, we have an operating system, we can connect it to everybody oh by the Zune because they want to be on our Windows system. And of course, they sold zero zooms, they may have lost a huge amount of money in it. So what happened? Well, the customer's job is exactly the same. The job is to create a mood with music, and that job has never changed and it will never change. It's very, very stable. And that's the power of the method is that it gives you a stable target to hit whether you're on a product marketing or sales team. And the reason that we switch to new products is because something comes along that gets the job done faster and more accurately. You can use tonnes of examples like we all use Apple and Google Maps today. But I'm old enough when I used to have a paper map in my car, and you would pull it out to try to figure out how are you going, right? And the reason we switched these new apps, in that case, the job is to get to a destination on time. Again, it's never gonna change 100 years ago, getting to a destination on time was the same as 100 years from now. Now, what's really interesting is sure, that's a high level statement, but how does that help you as a product team or market team figure out what to do? So if you were to say „Hey, we're going to help people get to the destination on time, better than Apple and Google Maps.” How do you figure that out? Well, that's the really hard question. And what's really interesting about the theory is that it shows that even what seems like a simple job, getting to a destination on time, for example, actually has over 100 different customer needs. And that is what is amazing. And the goal of every product marketing and sales team is to satisfy customer needs, you know, better than competitors in the market. So even a job like get to a destination on time, we break it down, we call job-steps. And you can break it down into series job-steps. And each one of those steps has variables. And that's really the key ideas. You can figure out those variables and getting to a destination on time and those things, you know, obviously obvious things like the address, the routes to the stops, the sequence of stops, you're going, where to find parking, when to make turns etc. All those things are variables. And what you're looking for, as a product and marketing team is, which one of those things that your customers currently struggle with the most. And that's why we switch to new products, because we struggle to get the job done in some way. And then something comes along, and it helps get the job done faster, or more accurately. And that's the core of the theory. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

So basically, because deconstructing the whole thing, like the job that you need to achieve, and then trying to shape your unique selling point around the current sort of barriers that a customer might have in the product that they're using at the moment. Like for example, maybe you have a Windows and you are not like a Windows computer, not very happy with thumping around it. And then you have the Mac, which is faster, easier to access stuff, I mean, more multimedia focused etc. etc. And then you decide that to be free, because it appeals to something that will be constructed from the main objective, which is the you know, basically dating, let's say, working online or something like that. 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's right. So let me give you a great example. There's a tonne of Apple examples. But let me give you an example of where, if you were to try it, let's say you were a marketing team, and you're trying to beat Apple and Google Maps. Now, that would be a very, very hard thing to do. Because they have about 100% market share, and their products are free, how would you even remotely come up with some marketing message, and certainly even a feature in your product roadmap, that would beat Apple Google Maps? Well, in Jobs-to be-done, the process of doing that would first be to understand the whole job of getting to the destination on time. And, you know, there and people can see this on our website, if they want to go look at all the needs, there's 106 needs to that job, which is really amazing. And the next thing you'd want to do is say, Okay, well, where's the segment of the market that struggles to get to a destination on time? And this is also where jobs theory is really, really powerful. Because if you do traditional profiling, which a lot of marketing teams do, they'll create personas, there's Joe and Kate, who are male and female ones, rural or urban, high income, low income, high education, low education, they create these fictional characters. And those can be useful for some things. But if you're really trying to segment the market, in our example, here of getting to a destination on time to figure out who struggles, those personas may or may not be the reason why people struggle, it might not have anything to do with the fact that you're male or female. And we don't have to get into the details now, but there's very quantitative ways of doing this with jobs-theory. And the way that we do it is: we look for customer struggles, and we run these quantitative surveys and then we say, Okay, well, who all struggle in the same way. And it turns out, we actually have data on this market, that getting to a destination on time, one of the most underserved parts of that job is a huge segment that cannot plan their stops, to stay on time. And those are the people who have to do things like determine the optimal sequence of stops. So if you're a travelling professional or a salesperson or rep or something, and you've got to go to customer meetings, and you've got to unknown locations, and you got to do that frequently. You were like underserved in that market. So that's how we uncover unmet customer needs. And then now you can look at how you are going to message against Apple and Google. Well, first of all, what feature would you build. And in this case, you know the need is to determine the optimal sequence of stops, that's a variable in the job. It's an action a customer has to take with a variable in a job-step to plan the stops, and like the job itself, it's independent of any need, it doesn't mention AI or machine learning, or VR AR, like the hip technologies blockchain. And the reason that's so important is if you're going to build a feature that might use some interesting technologies, like machine learning, you build that so that it helps the customer determine the optimal sequence of stops, in this example, and then your messages would be around the functional thing that customer is trying to do, which is get to destinations on time, fast and accurately, and determine the optimal sequence of stops any emotions that they're going to feel. So you want to take people from feeling anxiety, about getting the job done, to feeling confidence. And that's really important in marketing messages, too. It's like, you've got to get the functional job done. But you've got to get people to believe that they're going to have this change in emotional state. Because if you're a busy professional, you're trying to get to these meetings that matter to your career, that's anxiety inducing. So your messages shouldn't be, Hey, we have the latest machine learning algorithms, because frankly, no customer cares about machine learning algorithms, what they care about, is that you help them get the job done faster and more accurately. So that's in a nutshell, the process, there's a lot there, I'd have to unpack what the basic idea is, you can focus on the job, the independent customer needs, that have nothing to do with the product. And then a message to get the job done faster and more accurately.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Super. So if it's okay with you, I think it'd be really cool if we could talk some practical examples here, also from the b2b space, because many nowadays, like from some of the more recent case studies that we were involved with, they were around this SAS products and software, which is a massive market in the UK has been booming for a while, but not only here. So what we saw was that, okay, the product was launching us, this was happening a lot in startups, when you have a new platform, or you have a new software, typically SaaS and then you launch it. And then you have the product team and the marketing and the sales, outbound sales full on trying to sell the marketing trying to build a lead generation funnel and the inbound marketing side of things. And then the product wanting to push new features wanting the sort of marketing around the product as well, which many times can be a bit different, because it goes many times to customers as well as new potential customers. And in this whole process, mainly, if it's a fast growing startup, things can get miss-aligned, or feedback from somewhere, like sales might not come or arrive in time in the product team in order to be incorporated in a product map, and then, pushed through for development and stuff like that. So it would be really interesting for the people here that might be part of such teams in such businesses, to discuss some of the ways that maybe some of your clients would Thrv or priding itself can solve these problems in this modern, highly competitive market scenario.

 

Jay Haynes  

Yeah, that's great. That's a great question. And we do a lot of work with b2b companies. And one of the reasons is Jobs-to-be-done is great for markets that are very complex. One of the things you can think about the method is it helps you take complexity and make it manageable. And b2b markets are very, very complex. So the way that we generally start this, which is super important,  is who is the b2b customer? And we see this a lot, the team's product marketing, sales team don't really agree on who the customer is, and that's such an interesting problem to solve, and we separate customers into three different categories. The most important customer is the job beneficiary. That is the person who benefits from getting the job done. And in b2b markets a lot of times it's the executive because you've got whether it's a you're targeting CFOs or operating officers or CEOs or VPS of marketing or finance or sales, or whatever it is, in a b2b, in specific industries as well, you've got to figure out who benefits from getting this job done. Right? And then you've got to figure out, of course, what is the job what is what is your customer's goal, what are they trying to achieve? And the second type of customer is the job executor. And the job executor is important. It's someone who is helping the job beneficiary get the job done. Now, let me give you some great examples, because you mentioned SaaS, and b2b has seen a huge change in the past 10 - 20 years, in the type of customers you would target. So before SaaS applications, what did you do as a business customer? Well, you had an IT department and you had IT managers who set up your servers. And if you were gonna instal Siebel, as your CRM or other DRP systems, you had on premise on site, software that you would get installed. And that was the huge industry, you remember, the big professional services firms spent? They were generating billions of dollars a year just installing software. So their customer was an IT manager. What happened in that market? Well, the IT manager, the job executed went away. Because who benefits from SaaS applications? Well, you know, in CRM, it's obviously sales people. So what sales people have to do today to use the Sabbath SaaS applications? They go to a web page, they log in. That's it. No, IT manager no executor. And this happens in every single market. So the first thing for any b2b team is to really understand who your customer is, because we work with a lot of companies, and they're targeting job executioners, which is a huge risk, because someone is going to come along and create a product where the job beneficiary doesn't need a job executor to get the job done. Let me give you another example of a medical market because this seems even crazier. You've probably had your blood drawn, right? Whether it's you know, for physical or your health test, or you need some sort of sample to diagnose or something, and you go to a person called a phlebotomist and a phlebotomist is, of course, a very highly trained professional, who knows how to stick your arm with a needle, and make sure nothing goes wrong. And the job there is to obtain a blood sample. And, obviously, you as the person who's trying to optimise your health obtaining a blood sample, you're the beneficiary, right, the phlebotomist is just executing the job. We worked with a company called Seven Cents, and they've built the device where a patient can take their own blood, which seems totally terrifying, right? I'm not a beetle guy, but I understand the fears. And so you stick this thing on your arm, and it's got a microneedle array, and it's almost painless. So it creates a vacuum and it sucks blood. So even in that case, even that kind of extreme, highly trained professional job, the job executor is gonna go away, there's a patient, you can draw your own blood. There's just so many examples. So in b2b markets, the first thing is to figure out who the customer is. The next thing is, what really is the job? What level of abstraction are you focused on, because every business exists to create equity value. You could just say the whole job domain for business is to create equity value. Now, you've got other stakeholders, of course, and companies are recognising they have stakeholders, including their employees and the communities they work in. But the way that our system is set up in the world today, if your CEO or board and you're not generating revenue and profitability growth, you're going to get fired. That's why business works. And so you have to break that down into different jobs, according to the function within the company, whether it's finance operations, sales, Product Marketing, whatever, or within your specific industry, is it you know, travelling entertainment, is it aviation, manufacturing, you know, consumer packaged goods, finance, whatever. And within those functions in industry, there are the jobs that you should be targeting. And that's, that's the key to the start of the business, the Business Jobs return journey.

 

Andrei Tiu    

Okay. It just occurred to me, I know, we didn't discuss this before. So it would be interesting to see some insights from here if you can share, of course. But how did you use this one you launched, or through the growth of that you guys saw?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's great. And it's a great question. We are building Thrv on Thrv using Jobs-to-be-done. Not surprising, out here in California, we like to say we were eating our own dog food as the saying goes. And that's really what we recognise is a few things. That product teams really struggle to prioritise their roadmap, product teams, companies have tonnes of feature ideas, whether it comes from the product team, the marketing team, or the sales team or customer requests. How do you focus, what in your product roadmap is going to lead to success? So how do you launch things from a product teams directive that your marketing team can successfully market and your sales team can sell. So that's what we looked at, we were like, okay, we have to help improve this process because most products fail. It really is extraordinary. In today's day and age, of course, you still have this incredibly high failure rate for products, and, certainly for new products, but even for new product features. And the other thing is that, you know, product and marketing teams miss-competitive threats all the time. People forget that Blackberry. Blackberry's market cap was four times Apple's. Blackberry was four times bigger than Apple when the iPhone launched. So they had a roadmap, and they thought they were on a path that continued growth, and yet now, they're basically worth zero today. I mean, effectively, a company, I think there's still a business, but they factually lost $80 billion in market cap. So that's what we realised we were like, how can we help teams look into their roadmap and say We're on a path to generate revenue growth? How do you tie your roadmap to your revenue? And that's also a big risk equation for product and marketing teams, because the real dollars that get spent and put at risk are when you start developing a product, and you're going to market and you're going to sell it, that's extremely expensive. So you're taking your company's capital, even if you're a startup, this is why we like to say to startups to you should do this work before you write one line of code, or engineer, the first thing that you're going to manufacturer, you should do all this work, because it's much less expensive, and lowers your risk dramatically to really understand your customers job and where they struggle before you risk that capital. So when you start investing that, and this happens, certainly bigger companies to where you're spending hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars on your roadmap, you have no visibility, is that really going to generate revenue? Blackberry thought it was going to. Obviously it didn't. So that's the way we like to think about it. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

Super. And going back to when we were discussing about the sales, marketing and product team alignment, maybe if we can, or if you have in mind any examples of startups that you were working with, that were using maybe Thrv, as well as other project management tools, and how maybe either they were working with both, and that was helping them accelerate their decision making and processes or whether they chose Thrv for a particular reason? Because, I mean, just for clarity here, I know that many people on the show might be using stuff like Asana, and Trello and all these tools, mainstream ones, but I was curious, and I want you to maybe shine a bit of light in terms of the differences between something like Thrv and Jobs-to-be-done and other project management tools. 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's great. And, and I think they're, they're trying to do different things. And we work with companies that are working with all the different, you know, Product Management and project management tool, whether it's Asana, JIRA etc.,Microsoft Team Foundation Server. The way that you can think about it is, the output of Jobs-to-be-done is the input into those tools. Because let's use the JIRA example, it's obviously one of the biggest tools that people are using, whether it's Asana. You could do anything with those tools, they're kind of like a blank spreadsheet, right? You could type in whatever you want, in your sprint to try and achieve or whatever you're trying to get done in a project management tool. What we do is actually the work even before that. You can think of it, it's sometimes called the very front end of innovation, is really figuring out from your customers perspective What are you going to build? but also, more importantly, why? Why are you going to build that? So if you have product ideas, and you're putting them in these other tools, that's okay, that's great. Ideas are wonderful. But sometimes we like to joke, we have no product ideas. Because what we're looking at is the problem the customer has, first and foremost, even before coming up with ideas. And so that's how you can really differentiate those tools from Thrv and Jobs-be- done in general, is that just saying, okay, independent of any products or solutions or technologies before you try and evaluate machine learning, or AI or blockchain or whatever it is, let's figure out what the customer is struggling with. And that's really the most important decision a company can make is are they in the right market, where there are unmet needs, where customers are willing to pay for new solutions. Especially for a startup. Because the market decision you make and remember, we define markets from the point of view of the customer and the job is trying to get done, not the product like the iPod, and if you do that, if you pick the right market, that is half the battle, maybe even more. Sequoia, this is I love this story, Don Valentine, who was the founder of Sequoia, famously invested in this little company called Apple, and this kind of crazy, unkept hippie named Steve Jobs. And everybody thought, oh, wow, they were such pioneers for investing in this crazy hippie who claimed, who eventually became this kind of visionary product leader and innovator. But if you listen to what Sequoia and Don Valentine have said about what they were investing in, they were investing in the market. It wasn't Steve Jobs at all, it was the fact that it currently when Apple launched, this was in the late 1970s, computers cost $25,000 to $250,000. And Steve Jobs said, Hey, look, I can make this computer that costs $2500. And they knew that computers were really useful tools. And Don Valentine said, we were investing in that market, it just happened to be Steve Jobs was in this really, incredibly important market, and that is true for every company. So those other tools are great, you've made that decision about what market, what customer and what unmet need or satisfy what your product strategy should look like, but you still need to make that decision, that's the most important decision you can make as an entrepreneur or as a fortune 500 company. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

So for example, Thrv or the Jobs-to-be done method, my feeling is that we can refer to either because they are doing kind of the same thing, which is finding the actual job that needs to be done. So how would i be using it and how often in order for it to be effective, because, as it happens at the innovation stage and not the implementation stage kind of where something like JIRA or Asana would come into place. My feeling, but this is just from our discussion so far, is that these things should be managed by only the management team and also not being reviewed, or the decisions that are made on the basis of the insights here, should not be changed on a very constant basis in order to allow sprint's to happen or implementation time to happen. So what, in your opinion, would be a healthy way of applying this method into a business? 

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's great. So that is a really great question. So the way that we think about it, is, we know what's not going to change. So what doesn't change, and that is your customers job, you know, if they're trying to, if they're parents trying to get a babysitter tonight, or they're consumers trying to get to a destination on time, or a cardiovascular surgeon trying to restore already blood flow, or if your sales team tried to acquire customers, whatever the job is, that is not going to change. And figuring out which segment in that market is underserved, is incredibly important as well. And the products and services will change, so some of that, the unmet needs will get satisfied. So that might change. But when you have that stability in what you're focused on, that's how you can coordinate your product strategy across your product marketing and sales team. So the way that we think about it, is, you actually should have everybody from your product marketing sales team, because those teams are customer focused. If they're not, you're in big trouble. They should be customer focused, I mean, your operations team can make your operations more efficient cut your cost, your finance team must do your finance, but your product marketing sales team or your customer focus teams, that means that everybody across those organisations, should one agree on who your customer is, what their job is, what are the unmet needs, what segment are you targeting, and that creates your product strategy. It's interesting, if you walk around companies, we do this all the time, really, everybody agrees that product marketing sales teams that the mission is to satisfy unmet customer needs better than competitors. And people say yes, of course, that's our business. That's why we're in business. And then we asked, you know, what does the customer need? And no one agrees on that. So that's a huge problem. That's why we want to bring these three teams together, because everybody should agree on that. And then the next thing we ask is, you need to have a good product strategy, right? in order to build market and sell your products. And they'll say "yes, yes, we need great product strategy". And we ask, "okay, what is your product strategy?" And teams, they don't even agree on what their product strategy is. They can't simply articulate their product strategy. So everybody at your company, on the customer facing teams should be able to say, what a customer need is, what customer needs your targeting and what your product strategy is. And that's a very hard thing to do. I'm not trying to be flippant about this that is very, very difficult. And that's why we started Thrv, to help teams through this process have agreed on it. So whatever's changing on your product side, and it will change because there's new technology, you want to constantly be launching features, that the whole idea of a roadmap is that you're going to do things in the short and medium and long term, that focus on your customer, but you still you really want to understand and empathise with your customer. And that's very difficult to do, because customer problems are very complex. Like I mentioned with getting to the destination on time, there's 106 needs. So you've got to constantly be going back to that data. When you're making this downstream decisions. Whether you're an engineer, you know, making trade off decisions on the feature requirements, or whether you're a marketing team member who's making analysis of your competitors messaging or trying to figure out your messaging or why aren't you generating as many leads as you should be? Or you're a sales team, and we do a lot of sales team training. We're trying to get the sales team not to sell their features in their product, but first to empathise with where that customer is struggling so that then when they tell the customer here's how we can solve your problems. That's a much more believable story because they understand the jobs and the unmet needs.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Tricky question: How'd you feel about this past year, because from what we saw from the marketing front, but I bet it's the same in sales and product as well, like in almost every business, the needs of the customers have maybe not changed exactly, but surely been out alterated in a way or another. So most likely, using something like this would on a constant basis as we progress through the pandemic would have been a very good health check in order to see whether what we are promoting is still, you know, the value proposition that the customers are looking for. So, what are your thoughts on this?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, what a crazy year. So, we've talked about this a bunch, actually, what's really interesting is, of course, there's some situations where you just need insurance, you need government help, and, you know, part of the role of government is to be a big insurance provider. And if you're a retail restaurant, you just got shut down. I mean, that's just really hard to deal with that. Or if you're a b2b provider who's trying to sell to restaurants, obviously, you just, you've been hit by an extraordinary event that hopefully won't happen again, anytime soon. But then if you look at the jobs, especially b2b markets, businesses still need to get done. What happened was, the jobs are actually exactly the same. But we saw a huge shift in platforms in the way people get the job done. And let me give you a very, very concrete example, because we're sitting here on a zoom cal, today. And we've talked about this even before the pandemic, which is, who actually is your competitor in a b2b market? And we would use zoom and United Airlines as an example. And people would say "Oh, those are two totally different industries. There's web conferencing industry, and then there's airlines, those are just completely different products, different technologies, they seem nothing alike, how could they possibly be competitors?" Well, if you use jobs theory, you can look at that and say "Well, they're both helping salespeople acquire customers." So acquiring customers is a job to be done, of course, it's a b2b job be done, and there's lots of different solutions to do it. And to those different platform, to acquire customers, one is an airline, and airports. So use that platform, you hop on a plane to go talk to customers, the other is web conferencing, video conferencing. And we were saying even before the pandemic, when Zoom used to be worth, its market cap used to be kind of equivalent to the airlines, even though it had much smaller revenue is still the potential growth, we would say airlines should be buying these web conferencing companies. And the reason is that some of their most valuable customers are salespeople who pay full fare to get on a flight last minute to go close the deal. Talk to a customer. And if the airlines lose those customers, because now salespeople can get the job done by using Zoom, then they're in real trouble. And so to answer your question about this last year, what I think happened was it accelerated trends that were already there in some markets. Now, some markets just need to be helped, like restaurants and retailers, small businesses etc. But in other cases, it accelerated the trends, and I would make a prediction, I don't really like to make too many predictions, but I would predict that for enterprise sales, you're never going to get back to the percentage of sales people get on planes to close deals, as you had pre pandemic, it's just never coming back. Because people recognise that Zoom is very good way, it's more efficient, it's not as taxing on your body, we've all probably travelled a lot, where you're at different time zones, and people really want to get back to their kids and see their family and instead of spending time away, so I think there's so many benefits to that kind of accelerated change. Now, the airlines don't like it because they're gonna lose very valuable customers. But if you look at it, it's just the exact same reason that we switched from records, to iPods to streaming services, if the solution can get the job done faster, and more accurately, people will adopt it, customers will adopt it. I think the pandemic just accelerated that change that was already happening.

 

Andrei Tiu    

Thanks a lot. Yes, I agree with that. So let's see what the future brings, I guess. But until next time, what I wanted to ask you while we have people still here on the show, is who are your ideal customers for Thrv? Maybe there's a couple of businesses here that could use this and I'm sure you sparked the interest of many. And I know for a fact that this is one thing that brings a lot of value into multiple startups that we've worked with where we had to actually support in identifying something that should have already been there very clear, which is the unique selling point, the end customer, what are we selling? And this very important that we discussed about, which is what's the actual job that gets done by using the software product if they drop? So who, with the user of Thrv?

 

Jay Haynes   

Yeah, that's a great question. So it is we do have customers, anybody that are tiny startups all the way to fortune 50 companies. And we would say the ideal customer is just broadly, teams who really want to be customer focused. And there's different in especially in startups, there's different types of entrepreneurs, some are just, really focused on technology, which is fine, some have the problem themselves. I think those are probably the best entrepreneurs, they're so frustrated, it's not that they start a company solve a problem that they have. And that's effectively a way of doing jobs to be done, right, you know, how to, you're so frustrated with the job yourself that you're going to start a company to solve the problem. So broadly, it's teams product marketing, sales team that really want to be customer focused. And I will also say that the companies and teams that we work with usually find themselves in some sort of situation. And those situations, generally are they're struggling to succeed. So they haven't hit the revenue numbers, they really projected some sort of revenue numbers is not coming to fruition, or they've got a competitor who's entering the market, they can't really figure out their competitor. Or they're really trying to solve the what's,in the startup worlds, what's known as product market fit. They haven't really gotten that together, they keep launching features, and they keep thinking that next phase going to be their growth phase. And it just doesn't turn into growth. That's such an interesting question, we could probably do a whole nother show on product market fit. But what does that mean? And how do you solve that problem? And we work with a broad range of companies, we like working with startups, too, because we want them to succeed. And if you look at the odds are stacked against any startup. And if you look at venture returns, right, almost every startup fails. In fact, the entire venture industry, Bill Solomon from Harvard Business School, published data on this, that if if you didn't have the outside returns of the Google’s and Twitter's and Facebook's of the world, the entire venture asset class wouldn't be worth investing it, you'd be better off investing in the s&p 500. And for a lot of venture funds you would be because they don't crave returns. And from an entrepreneur standpoint, that's really disheartening, because your chance of succeeding a startup is almost zero. I mean, the number of startups to succeed is incredibly small. And so the odds are kind of stacked against you. And we really like helping those entrepreneurs who want to succeed, and not just fail fast and pivot. Right? I mean, those are kind of terms that startups hear all the time is you should fail fast, and you should pivot, and you should get your minimum viable product out the door. I think those terms, and that thinking leads entrepreneurs astray. And the reason why is you want to reduce your risk of failure, you don't want to keep failing. And you don't even want to launch a minimum viable product, I think that is the wrong phrase. You should launch a minimum valuable product, because your product has to be valuable to customers. Viability is not a criteria these days, you and I could sit here and write some software code and fire up some Amazon servers, and we'd have an app or a piece of software, it'd be viable. If we absolutely can, it's not hard to create technology these days, we could even manufacture something pretty easily. So both installing software and hardware, it's pretty easy to do that something can be viable, it will work. But is it valuable if any customer is going to care that it gets some job done for them. And that is what you should look at is that viability, not viability, but the value you're delivering, even before you invest in development. So those are generally the teams that we work with where they really want to solve these problems, they want to be customer focused, and it got some sort of situation where they want to do a better job.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Very insightful and very true as well. So you guys, you must know that Jay also has a history of successful investments as well as being a successful entrepreneur. So I think this was also a bit of the investor. But very good advice indeed. Okay, so for you guys interested in Thrv and JSay's ventures, we'll have all the links in the description of the episode below. Jay, if people want to connect maybe personally with you or discuss potential partnerships and things like this, where's the best for them to reach out to you?

 

Jay Haynes    

Yeah, great. I'm pretty easy to find Jay Hanes- j a y h a n e s. And yes, you can find me on LinkedIn or certainly, at thrv.com.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Super sounds good. Okay, so guys, as always, thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully you found this episode as insightful and useful as I did. And, Jay, thank you so much, again, for being on the show. Really Nice to meet you. And hopefully, we'll repeat this. I really like your point on product market fit. I think we didn't have the chance to explore that in depth on the show. So maybe we can talk about the next episode. And guys, as well, if you have any questions for us, like for Jay and I or you'd like us to discuss on something more specifically, and you feel that will be valuable for your business, hit us up either us at hello@marketiu.com or Jay and we'll try to make that happen. But until next time, Jay, it was a pleasure. Thanks so much.

 

Jay Haynes  

Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu   

It was a pleasure. Thank you for being here. And guys, as always, keep rocking it and we'll see you on the next episode. Have fun!

Marketing, Blockchain and the Crypto world [with Tom Donohue]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Tom Donohue, as they will be discussing about cryptocurrency, blockchain, and innovation in the marketing space, based on Tom’s professional background in innovative businesses over the past few years, launching and driving growth for disruptive products. 

 

Tom Donohue, is the co-founder and marketing lead of Secure Digital Asset Group, a revolutionary cryptocurrency exchange processor, as well as the product manager for Kitcaster.

 

Connect with Tom:

Website: www.kitcaster.com 

Tom on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/thetomdon 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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

Hello everybody. This is Andrei and you're on the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Tom Donohue, who is the co-founder and marketing lead of Secure Digital Asset Group, a revolutionary cryptocurrency exchange processor, as well as the product manager for Kitcaster. He has been deeply involved with innovative businesses over the past few years launching and driving growth for disruptive products. Today, we'll dive deep into the blockchain space and marketing in the crypto world. Hi, Tom, how's everything going?

 

Tom Donohue   

Hey, Andrei, thank you so much for having me here. It's a pleasure to come on the show and be able to talk about some new tech. It's something I always enjoy talking about and I'm happy to clear up any questions or look into the future of marketing in the blockchain space and also talk about podcasts if you're interested in that as well. 

 

Andrei Tiu 

Super cool. So guys, just so you know, Tom, and Kitcaster are, you probably already know from previous episodes if you have been following us, but he just is one of the platforms that we source, and we establish many of our episodes crew. So, getting guests from there, or us being on different other shows. Tom is responsible for a big part of that. Thank you, Tom, on the obedience occasion. Today's episode is probably mostly gonna be focused on cryptocurrency blockchain, and innovation in the marketing space, because this is something that I know many of you guys tuning in are interested in. Also, it's a very exciting subject, mainly given the current context where you know, like Bitcoin, being all over the news, and people getting more and more accustomed to altcoins and crypto stuff in general. Maybe if I dare to say, probably not everybody knows what this is about. Tom, I think it'd be cool to maybe set the basics first. Let's go a bit in the back. So people can get to know you a bit as a person, how you got into the entrepreneurship space, your liquid marketing and the crypto space. And then from then onwards, you set the basis in terms of how blockchain and cryptocurrencies can play a role in business, in marketing. And more specifically, then we can explore ideas in terms of how this can be a revolution in our space, and what opportunities we have there as marketers.

 

Tom Donohue   

For sure, definitely. I'll be happy to talk about crypto and the state of marketing in that space in a couple of minutes. But first, I'll tell you, I got into marketing because I started out doing digital media as a photographer, videographer, things like that. That's what I went to school for, at first was photography, but then I quickly switched over to Media Communications, and got more into that space, just to find a way to apply my creative skills to something more than just fine art in terms of photography and cinematography. I wanted to find a way to apply those skills, and I landed on, you know, Media Communications, which translates to marketing, public relations, and that's how I got my start. That's what I got my degree in, and throughout college, I got connected with some other young entrepreneurs, and we started starting companies, and we all had a common interest in the blockchain space. We were just investing in buying Bitcoin back in 2017 when things started getting crazy. We all kind of connected and found our strengths with each other. My partner Parker is amazing at ideation and coming up with new products. Then with me, I take those products, build upon them, make them better, and also figure out how we're going to get them out to the world through marketing and other ideas. So, we started back around 2017 with the crypto projects, and since then, it's been going great. I mean, we haven't made a ton of money yet, but as with any entrepreneur, it's always a grind until you get some good investments at first, which is what we mainly work towards right now because with blockchain and cryptocurrency, all those types of projects, you kind of need a fair amount of startup capital to be able to afford to develop and build out very complex systems. As you can imagine, a lot of people don't know about blockchain, what it is, but it's not easy to make. Neither of us is coders. So, we rely on my marketing and both of our product development skills to pitch our ideas, and then go out and find developers who can help us as well. Did you say you wanted some of the backgrounds on crypto Bitcoin? Why is it becoming so popular? Is that what you were asking earlier? 

 

Andrei Tiu 

Yes. But until we get there, because you started laughing about this. What was your first venture in space when you guys grouped? Do you want to apply your ideas? What was the first idea or the first business that you want to put together?

 

Tom Donohue

For sure, the first business that we started fits well, with the marketing innovation show, it was a new blockchain platform that we were building called Fraps. It was a participatory marketing platform. So, it used blockchain to essentially compensate people for displaying ads. A lot of platforms would compensate people for clicking through all these ads, and you'll get $1 or something. But what we wanted to do was connect big companies who are looking to advertise to specific types of people to a network of those very people that could in turn, almost become ambassadors for them. But what we would do, we had technology that could trace impressions, that would install onto the person's device, and they would display the ad, in a public space. We targeted college students, so they would display the ad in a public space, and they would get compensated for how many people were exposed to the ad that they were contracted to display. The reason that blockchain was so essential in this business was because of the technology that allowed very low transaction fees. In Consett are almost non-existent transaction fees, that would allow for these big companies to get money into the pockets of people who are on the ground the very customers that they're looking to advertise to, except they're paying those people to do the advertising for them. So in a sense, let's say, I'm a big fan of Nike. Nike is going to start a campaign and get people who already enjoy Nike to represent them through their digital device and through a display ad that they would display in a public place. As people go by, they make money for the amount of time that they are out there displaying the ad, and it really wouldn't work without blockchain for the sense that there are no transaction fees for the bottle that we were trying to build. If we were to try to do it on a traditional, fiat system, it would not be that easy.

 

Andrei Tiu

And what we're using? 

Tom Donohue 

That's what we tried to do. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice, and what did it take him or what type of?

 

Tom Donohue

We were building a proprietary system. We were going to start using the waves platform, which it's kind of similar to ethereum but it allows for extremely fast transaction speeds and a lot of volumes. It also allows you to create your own coin or token fairly easily with minimal amounts of coding and things like that. So, we're going to start on that but our ultimate goal is to migrate to a proprietary system that was built specifically to do what we wanted to do.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I think this is a nice opportunity for us to discuss the relationship between cryptocurrency and blockchain because even before looking into it, I was thinking they were the same thing, but I think it would be interesting and important right now at this point to clarify the differences so that when we later refer to them, people can understand when is blockchain and when is a cryptocurrency and why they are different? 

 

Tom Donohue 

Sure. So, the main thing to remember is to have a cryptocurrency you need a blockchain but to have a blockchain you don't necessarily need a cryptocurrency. So, for somebody who doesn't really understand or know much about it just yet. That's important to keep in mind. Not every blockchain needs to have a cryptocurrency. But, order for the fundamental technology that makes cryptocurrencies work is blockchain. So, to have a Kryptonian blockchain, essentially a blockchain is just a distributed database. When it comes down to it, let's say, I had a database on my computer here and it held a lot of very sensitive information. If that database was attacked by a hacker or somebody who wanted to abuse that information, say I was running a currency off of it, they could just hack my single computer and say: "Okay, transfer all the money to my account." You don't want that, right? Cryptocurrency is touted and said by all these people to be one of the most secure things even more secure than our Fiat systems. It is because of this sense that that database that holds the transactions is distributed on 10s of 1000s of computers all around the world. Essentially, for someone to be able to do it, you would have to hack all of those computers simultaneously. And it's unfeasible, it can't be done, and it's essential to kind of wrap it all up in a simple to understand way. Bitcoin, for example, the blockchain is a database that holds the record of all of the transactions that have ever happened on Bitcoin. Now, since Bitcoin is supported by so many people around the world, that database is stored on 10s of 1000s of computers all over the world. So, to be able to forge or falsify a Bitcoin transaction is nearly impossible, because you could say, you have the database on your computer, so you initiate a transaction. That's fraudulent, right? All of those 1000s of other computers would check it according to their database, their record of it, and say: "No, that's not legit.". That's why crypto, in a sense, is more secure than a typical Fiat system, because fiat currencies are centralized. They're controlled by a government entity. Blockchain technology is decentralized, it's controlled by the people, and a lot of different people in different places. Does that make sense? I tried to kind of make it easy to understand, even though it'll never be easy to understand. 

Andrei Tiu  

Yes, I think indeed. And I think so, right now, because we have the basis, and the next thing that we can do a bit later, in a couple of minutes, when we go into the sort of case studies I think that a next step would be to look at the ways that you can use cryptocurrency to transact technology or to reward users for using a certain technology. So, let's go back to your story, though, this was the first venture to say so, the marketing platform. What next? Where do you go?

 

Tom Donohue  

Sure. We had realized that the platform that we wanted to build was going to cost an immense amount of money to create, which we don't have because we're young guys, we're just starting out, and we've pitched investors, we've gotten investments, but the fact of the matter is to just build a system that advanced was going to take a large sum of money that we just simply didn't have and we weren't capable of raising at the time. So, from that project, we moved into a new project, which is the current project that you saw on my LinkedIn and mentioned before, Secure Digital Asset group, which in our eyes was a more plausible and more possible startup for us to become successful with without needing all of that initial funding. What we're working on right now, and things are looking great, and we have some other projects on the back burner, too, that we're all just using to fund each other. So, let's say we have three or four projects going on right now. If one of them takes off, we're going to use it to fund the other ones. And we won't stop grinding and making new projects until we can until we get one that eventually works, and that's it does the other ones too because we still believe in that Fraps product as well, even if it might be on the back burner right now. We believe in that participatory marketing platform in a way to change the way that companies reach out to people and build connections with their customer bases. But now we're working on a new project that is a little bit easier and doesn't require as much money to do. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice, but that's the spirit, you know?! I mean, the wall might not yet be ready for it or the investors might not be able to see the opportunity, but just keep at it and surely you'll find the right people at the right time.

 

Tom Donohue

Definitely, without a doubt, it's just a matter of perseverance and sticking to it. Great marketing always helps. Essentially, what we're doing with this new company is a lot of b2b marketing, trying to get financial agencies and things to see what we're doing because the new company, just like a quick, brief synopsis of it. It's a company that looks to help encourage people and educate people on the blockchain space and how they could get into investments like Bitcoin, atherium, and other cryptos safely and securely, and, most importantly, confidently, because as of right now, it's not extremely easy to go and just buy a crypto. I mean, some websites allow you to do it, but when you purchase into that sort of exchange sense. You don't own or control the currency if you're storing it on a website platform, right? Let's use Coinbase as an example. I use Coinbase as a gateway, a Fiat gateway into cryptocurrency. But if my coins are stored on Coinbase, I don't necessarily control the keys. Cryptocurrency works off of a public key and a private key. The public key is the one that you say: "Okay, send it here, this is my address". The private key is the one that allows you to go ahead and spend it or send it somewhere else. So, the private key is the one that you don't tell anybody. When you store your coins on an exchange service like that, they control your private key, and you don't necessarily have it. That's an issue that we are trying to address and educate people on with the Secure Digital Asset group, and show them how they can purchase currencies and hold them themselves without being at the will of a big exchange like that. 

 

Andrei Tiu 

 Like holding them in a wallet, right? 

 

Tom Donohue

Exactly. The AR platform gives the customer control of their keys controls their wallet, which is not very typical in the market right now, and it does it in a way that is extremely easy for the person to understand, and it's almost foolproof in a sense that if you're on an exchange, and you're going to transfer your coins to another wallet, you need to type a 20 plus digit address exactly correct. If you don't, you'll press the send button, and then your bitcoins will be gone forever. So, the way that we have built it makes it completely foolproof, there's no way you're gonna mess up, and it's just meant to build confidence in investors who might want to get in, but they're worried that they're not tech-savvy enough to be able to manage cryptocurrencies like that. We use paper wallets. So, it's a wallet that a person can hold in their hand, it's not on the internet, and it builds confidence in the investor and it allows them to feel good about buying crypto and not be worried all the time that they're going to lose their money.

 

Andrei Tiu

Okay, so now looking at cryptocurrencies, the main ones, but also the altcoins and other possible coins and technologies that might come up. What opportunities do you see at the moment in the market? Like how can marketers look at blockchain as an opportunity to solve some of their problems or innovate in the way that they market to the public that they address?

 

Tom Donohue

Sure. In the sense of marketers and opportunities that they have with this new technology...

 

Andrei Tiu 

We can go both ways..

 

Tom Donohue

I think they could even go hand in hand, right? Because you have huge marketing agencies that could use some technology to help clean up their stuff. I think that one of the biggest opportunities is securing data. So, a blockchain, as we said before, you don't need a cryptocurrency use of blockchain, people very often are using blockchains to secure data rather than, you know, monetary transactions. So, let's say a marketing firm has a bunch of data about their customers and stuff, a bunch of data that they don't necessarily want other firms to somehow gain access to, and I'm not sure if this is an issue in the space right now with, I don't know, people trying to hack in and steal data from a marketing firm, but it's something that could be completely sealed up by having all your data on a blockchain.

 

I think another thing as well, when you're talking about big marketing projects that are doing international projects, working with, or even domestic products as well. One of the best things is that blockchain was created for his transactions and using a cryptocurrency or a stable currency such as, USD t, which is a currency called tether that is pegged to the US dollar, for example. So, it's not as crazy fluctuating as Bitcoin and the other ones, but people can use those types of currencies to make large transactions, say your marketing firm was doing a million-dollar deal, but the bank transfer fee is 3%. You're losing out on $30,000, just to get your payment. That's the thing that blockchain can help with as well. So, that's, in terms of business, especially businesses doing international transactions, a lot of them have started to think about using crypto for that very reason, for that very issue of transfer fees. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

And there were some case studies or cases in which some bigger companies went into blockchain and.. interchange, I don't remember exactly the names, but this was happening in 2019, probably mid 2019. It was just about when Bitcoin was skyrocketing during that time, as far as I remember, and then there were another couple of crypto like altcoins, to say so. Some of them I know, if I remember correctly, I think it was Microsoft, and they were another couple of companies that started to look into developing things on those technologies to improve or revolutionise the way that they were doing business or the technologies that they were creating. So, do you know any recent case studies of bigger companies that have looked at blockchain? And how have they looked at applying it within the business?

 

Tom Donohue  

Sure, I think the biggest thing that we're seeing right now is major financial institutions looking into it. So your traditional banks, hedge funds are not only looking into cryptocurrencies as an investment, but as a way for them to secure their own data. So, the biggest thing about blockchain, when it started was that this is more secure than your bank that holds all of your money, and some random people on the internet made it. So, now you have these big banks, actually looking into blockchain technology to secure their own data and transactions, which in a sense, could be an issue for cryptocurrency but then again, once you look at and see what cryptocurrency was built upon, which is that idea of decentralization. The banks still don't compete with these larger Bitcoin or ethereum cryptocurrency networks, because if a bank like, for example, Wells Fargo, which is looking into blockchain currently, if they were to build their own blockchain, they've secured their data on a blockchain, but also their technology is still centralized, right? It's still all under the control of Wells Fargo. So, you're at the will of Wells Fargo, with a decentralized system like Bitcoin. The entire community has control over what happens. So, you're not able to just have one decision maker go ahead and change everything. It just doesn't work that way. And I think that's a reason why crypto is here to stay, and even if banks and bigger financial institutions do decide to use blockchain, it's still not going to be quite as reliable or secure as these distributed networks.

Andrei Tiu

Okay. Oh, and another question that came to my mind now, I think it was slipping there for a while. What experience do you have? How do you market a crypto product or doctrine based product is different? I'd be keen to hear your thoughts because I encountered a couple of scenarios, and I think it'd be interesting for people to understand, because the crypto products are many times about the community around them. So that's why I'm thinking and I want to pick your thoughts on how you think about marketing your own crypto or blockchain products when they were not necessarily maybe b2b, but rather b2c or when you were thinking about the strategy.

 

Tom Donohue 

Of course, one of the biggest things for blockchain and crypto right now is who's going to get that mass adoption, right? Who's gonna get the attention of everybody? Bitcoin has done great with it. But there's a lot of people out there saying, and there's a lot of facts that just say that Bitcoin would never be able to be the world currency, it would never be able to be the currency that everyone's using for day to day transactions simply because the technology behind Bitcoin wouldn't allow for it. There's other crypto's that can allow for it but the biggest marketing issue is how do you get all of these people to trust you, right? So, a lot of the marketing initiatives in crypto and blockchain are about just building trust and building confidence in a platform. So, one of the biggest things that we had gone down the road of and something that a lot of people do currently is I'm fostering education. So, I'm putting out content and material that educates people about the space about what is safe, and what is not safe, what you should and shouldn't be doing, and ultimately tying that into why your platform either addresses or fixes these problems as a whole. So, I would say that is the single biggest initiative when it comes to marketing blockchain and crypto is building trust and educating because every industry every, every new idea, has those smarter who are not necessarily smarter, but more educated, more specialized, people who know about it. For example, with crypto, it's typically younger people who know all about computers, and they know why they should trust it. But one of the biggest things in crypto right now is getting the attention of those older people who necessarily don't have enough experience with computers to feel confident, to go ahead and transfer $10,000 of their money into some digital thing that they could see on their computer screen. So, that's one of the biggest issues that the industry as a whole is facing, but I think people are starting to come around and seeing the price action of coins like Bitcoin, because it's very apparent now that these bigger banks and institutions are looking into investing and are currently investing in it. So, I think that is helping, in a sense, which kind is free marketing for the entire system or for the entire community. But seeing these bigger, more reliable people that they know names like Wells Fargo, whoever JP Morgan, actually getting involved is helping to encourage trust in the system, and it's helping with these people's biggest initiative in terms of marketing, which is building trust.

 

Andrei Tiu  

And are bunking still think or like when you are in the beginning, and now way back again in the day when I was also working marketing, crypto startup kind of crypto blockchain startup. I know that everybody was going crazy about boundaries and building the sort of communities, equal communities around them around the coin, which was the crypto that was backing up the technology. Are they still going on? How are people approaching?

 

Tom Donohue 

Do you mean bounties in the sense of like it development bounty or? 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, both development bounties and if I remember correctly, they were also those things were if you were amongst the first X that were getting X amount of coins, then you'd get them at a better price, like early investment kind of pre-investment.

 

Tom Donohue 

 Yes. I think what you might be thinking of is an initial coin offering Ico. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

Yeah.

 

Tom Donohue  

Yeah. Which essentially, would be the same as an IPO on the stock market. It's like the first offering of your asset to the community. And that's actually something that we thought about doing, and there's a very specific way that you have to market those projects in order to comply with financial regulation, especially here in the United States where we're at, because the SEC is extremely strict on those types of offerings, and we actually put months and months of research into how we could actually market that type of offering without going against compliance rules. It was a huge issue, and it's something that people are still facing today, when they're trying to do those types of offerings because, in a sense, those offerings are meant for fundraising. For example, XRP ripple as an as a cryptocurrency that's fairly large out there, they're now being prosecuted by the SEC, because of how they ran their initial coin offering. It's a very political, it's a very tough space to be in, but ultimately, we decided to not do it, because we were worried that you know, just one little slip up, and the SEC might deem your offering not compliant, and that kind of just throws your company out the window. We did spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we can market it within compliance. We generally knew what we had to do, but we just didn't want to risk it because the SEC says something today, and they might change what they say the next day. So, we tend to veer away from those types of offerings, but at the same time with Secure Digital Asset group are looking to create a more standardized and compliant way for people to run those types of offerings through our proprietary product, which is those paper wallets that I had mentioned earlier. It just helps to make things a lot more clear and a lot more standardized, which is our goal, to help people with their marketing initiatives to ensure that they are not pushing out an asset that would be labeled as a security by the SEC. 

 

Andrei Tiu 

And another type of product that I think, at least in Europe.. I'm not sure but you guys might have similar stuff, if not the same. There are these apps that get mass adopted these days, where you know, you, you basically earn commission, if you bring somebody on the platform, and they transact a certain amount on the platform on specific points, not necessarily Bitcoin, or aetherium, or Litecoin, or ripple, but some maybe not a well known ones as well. What do you think about that way of promoting and building a community of users around the product? From your perspective, is it healthy? Is it something that either with eternity, although it works, it is sustainable?

 

Tom Donohue

 I think that it is a good idea. We have considered that for our very first project, and it is something that we were going to do, but you have to be extremely careful about how you do it. Like, I think one of the first and best examples of that was PayPal. When PayPal first started, Elan Musk, I think it was peer to whoever else started with them. I think they were paying something like $20 to each new user who got on PayPal, which cost them like billions. Maybe it didn't cost them billions, but millions. But it allowed them to get their initial user base, and even if they went into debt, to do it, now they had people on the platform who were using it and generating them revenue. So, I do believe in those types of initiatives, but I would advise people who are thinking about doing something like that to cross your T's and dot your I's because if you end up not having the funds to do it or not expecting the amount of growth and ultimately getting way too many people, and now you can't afford to pay anybody that's not always a bad problem to have. But it could put your business under, and if you're unable to raise funds to actually facilitate the promises that you make to your customers. One, you're in trouble financially and two, you're in trouble with the customers in terms of the promises that you've made them. So, if you want to do something like that, you have to

 think it through and, and be sure that you're ready to handle any amount of variables that could happen.

 

Andrei Tiu 

Full stop, really nice and actual. So now, going to the wrapping of the episode, but also taking away the things that I think could be, ultimately, valuable for the end marketer, that would be the guys on the show. Also, we have marketers, as well as entrepreneurs. So, I'm sure that for the entrepreneurs, this might have been a very juicy conversation and nice in terms of getting ideas and maybe polishing some of the ones that they might already have, but also for the marketers. If somebody is looking at ways to better security, probably data security is the first thing that would come to mind from our discussion so far, and relating to what you were mentioning a bit before, and marketing agencies having data issues. Typically, marketing agencies don't necessarily hold the data, and basically, the data always stays in the hands of the of the customer, like the b2b customer, but it could be a very good solution for a client to have security solutions around that so that it makes sure that they are compliant, and they don't expose themselves to risks. To sum up, what would be some other uses or case studies that people could be watching out for? Because there might be like this middle country in on, you know, like in Europe, maybe that has a startup that does probably something that would be cool, and it might benefit from the support of some initial clients. How would that look like what would be a nice feasible solution that would use blockchain and crypto?

 

Tom Donohue  

Sure, a big thing that people are out there doing, is using blockchains to tokenize real world assets. So that's something to think about as well. Let's say you own a property and you have the deed or the contract that says that you own the property. Think of this as any sort of contract or business deal or anything using blockchain to hold that and secure it: one, prevents it from being forged or falsified, and two: allows it to be accessed from anywhere just just like on a cloud. As long as you can get access to your blockchain, you can access whatever data you need to get. That's something that a lot of people are doing. So again, tokenizing, assets, deals, contracts, things that you might need access to down the line and things that you don't want to change, you can keep a very safe record on a blockchain. Next would be securing physical systems, for example, one thing that they're talking about doing is electrical grids. These are very large industrial scale projects, but these can be applied to a lot of different things, like startups. They're using blockchains to secure their grids and it's something that can be hacked, as unfortunate as it would be for an electrical grid to be hacked and shut down. But not if it's secured by blockchain, it would, it would make it nearly impossible. So let's say you have a startup that is running a system where you have to store user accounts, user profiles, and there might be some sensitive information, like the user's credit card information in there. There's a lot of services and stuff that help companies and startups do this. But there are also new services popping up that use blockchain to help secure that stuff. With a couple of clicks, you could integrate one of these services into your platform, and start using a blockchain to secure your stuff. It's just as the world moves forward into this digital age, where everything that we do is happening on a computer, or everything that we do is verified by a computer, this is the way that you can be sure that your stuff's not gonna get messed with. And I think that's the main idea of the industry. It's the security layer that so rocks solid, that everybody is confident that it will be okay. If that makes sense. There are endless applications. Another friend of mine is working on a blockchain video game where the in game items and assets will be tokenized on a blockchain. Let's use Fortnight as an example. Let's say you had like skins or like items, they would be secured on a blockchain outside of the game, to where you can go outside the game and traded those items, using the security of the blockchain. And ultimately those items would have some value. So you could sell your stuff from the inside the game, or inside the game, you could go and trade with another player. And then on the back end on the blockchain, that transaction is logged, just like if you were doing it on a stock exchange or something. So that's just an example. There are so many applications that blockchain can be used for. I'm probably missing a couple of big ones right now. But those are just some fun ideas that interest me. So I hope it helps to clear up the use cases that could come out of it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

And one question, I'm not sure if it's silly or not, but I think maybe popped up in some people's heads. Can a blockchain disappear? Can you just count on a blockchain to track all your stuff and use it and then at some point, just for it to stop existing?

 

Tom Donohue

A lot of blockchains have their own sets of regulations and things like that. LI everybody who mines Bitcoin and stores, the Bitcoin network just decided to say, at the same time, hey, we don't want to support this anymore. Yeah, they could go and turn off their rigs, and then the platform would cease to exist, but the community is so committed, and the lead set on making this a thing that I would be hard-pressed to ever see that happen. I could see it happening for some smaller projects that maybe aren't as supported. But say you are, I believed in one of these smaller projects, and we began running a node or, in another sense, storing the data on our computer and running it. Now, it'll never stop as long as you're running it. So it's, it's about the community and the adoption of each project. So like, if, if I made a blockchain and I was running it on a node on my computer, I might be the only person running it. So if I shut it down, then, of course, it would disappear. But if I were to go and turn it back on again, it would be back. So I guess, technically Yes, like a blockchain could disappear. But the more it's adopted by a community, the less likely that is to happen and for projects like Bitcoin aetherium, Litecoin, like these bigger ones, it will never go away. There's just there's just no way that that could happen at this point.

 

Andrei Tiu   

Well, okay, so this was very nice. Where can people get in touch with you? So guys, as we mentioned, this was the crypto episode. But we'll organise another one since Tom's so deeply involved with multiple projects. The other one is Kitcaster which is a cool platform. And we're going to dive a bit deeper into the content marketing side of things, and podcasting, and these other things that are probably a bit more widely adopted than blockchain at this point. And very different. But until next time, Tom, where can people find you and maybe reach out if they have any questions or ideas or proposals, ways in which you might be able to collaborate,

 

Tom Donohue

I'd say the easiest way to send me a message and for me to be able to see it would be to connect with me on LinkedIn: Tom Donohue. 

 

Andrei Tiu 

So we'll have the link in the description as well. So you guys, check it out there as well. Awesome. 

 

Tom Donohue 

Anybody can feel free to message me and ask me about anything podcasting, blockchain Whatever. I'm always down to connect. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Thank you, Tom. So this was very insightful. 

 

Tom Donohue   

Thanks for scheduling this and getting it all set up. I know the time difference makes it difficult. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

I enjoyed it. Looking forward to our next catch up. Thank you for tuning in. If you have questions, proposals, ideas, always feel free to ping them to myself, Tom, send them over to our team and we'll make sure to try to make those episodes happen or come back with answers to you. But until next time, everybody keeps rocking it. Tom, thanks a lot for being on the show again, and wishing everybody an amazing rest of the week slash weekend ahead.

 

Tom Donohue  

For sure. Thanks, Andrei.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Thank you. 

Marketing as a Catalyst for Business Growth [with Jeroen Corthout]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Jeroen Corthout, as they will be discussing how marketing has been a catalyst for business growth in all the ventures that urine has been involved with as both a marketer and an entrepreneur, amongst many other things.

 

Jeroen Corthout is the Co-Founder of Salesflare, the most popular CRM on both ProductHunt and AppSumo.

 

Connect with Jeroen:

Website: https://salesflare.com/

Jeroen on LinkedIn: https://be.linkedin.com/in/jeroencorthout

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/salesflare

Twitter: https://twitter.com/salesflare

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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

Hello, everybody, this is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation podcast show. Our special guest for today is Jeroen Corthout, the Co-Founder of Salesflare, the most popular CRM on both ProductHunt and AppSumo. And today, amongst many other things, we'll discuss how marketing has been a catalyst for business growth in all the ventures that Jeroen has been involved with as both a marketer and an entrepreneur. So without further ado, hi, Jeroen, how are you? How's everything going? How's the day?

 

Jeroen Corthout

I'm doing fine. You. So it's, uh, today, we always work from home. The only thing that changes sort of is the weather today, the weather is good. 

 

Andrei Tiu

So yeah, a bit of sun, bright sky. So really excited for us to get going. It's been a while since we had a sort of software focused episode. And I think, you know, our listeners, I know, some of you guys have been missing this. So I'm really excited because here we have a very nice case study and success story. And also apart from sales flair, I think you're only it's okay to be with you as well, we can dive into some other stories and success stories, case studies, from your experience. Yeah, we can assess, you know, marketing in the context of small and medium sized businesses as well as scale up and then also what's been changing what's new. What are you guys doing? I'm planning for this year mixing, marketing and sales. So let's go, let's go find your background, maybe just so that people can get to know you a bit better.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, in very short. My first experience in entrepreneurship was when I was 15 - 16, building websites, that was amazing. I felt like I was creating stuff for people and I would get some stuff in return. Not much. I was young. And for me, it seemed like a lot. But it was almost nothing. I then spent some time also selling cell phones, doing basically some arbitrage. I would buy them either in the UK or in Germany and then and then resolve at a higher price in, in, in Belgium, which is where I'm based. That was while I was a student, it was a nice hobby. And I made a little bit of money, it seemed like a lot of money to me at the time. Again, it's almost nothing. I studied engineering. Because my, my dad is an engineer and this guy was completely raised like that. I considered Computer Engineering. But I didn't do that then because it just seemed a bit nerdy. I ended up doing electronic engineering together with business and then moved into biomedical, which was a whole new thing to explore. Like, way beyond all the stuff I learned or medical courses, it also felt like I could actually make an impact go into healthcare instead of telecom or energy. And then not that these things don't have impact. Don't understand me well, but it just felt like this extra thing. You know, health care, helping other people be healthy. It's something that I'm still quite passionate about, even though I'm not working in healthcare now. I studied business school, because I didn't really want to take an engineering job, I wanted to do something more with customers. I ended up in a marketing role after Business School, which is funny, I mean, studying engineering and my first job was in marketing. I was basically like a junior Product Manager, you could say, and they call it marketing specialist. I was responsible for vaccines. That was my junior product management position. And I was supporting to order product managers with their more shitty tasks. Really, I thought what I was going to do was put products in the markets. What it ended up to be was me making brochures and teaching the sales team how to use them. It was not at all like those kinds of expectations, reality kind of things. It was very much that. I did that for I think about six months I was about to give up. I think I've found that our job at eight months and at 10 months I was gone. I joined a company which was way more exciting. Basically what I found out when I started in pharma was nobody knew anything about websites. I did and I sort of felt like I knew follow marketing also after some months. I thought it's not too complex. So I figured I'm going to start my own agency For pharma companies, and then I had dinner with a guy, which I knew stuff about that, but I didn't know that he basically took my idea to a whole other level, and included things like market research and strategy and impact measurement and much bigger than just building websites. And he offered to join them, because he said, Well, you're too young, nobody's gonna believe you are. And we'll teach you everything. So I accepted that offer. ended up working there for four years. And I learned a lot of narrow way more than I learned anywhere else, I think. I was basically listening to what most big pharma companies, but also some bigger biotech companies wanted to do in their marketing. And then I would come up with solutions, usually, sort of digital, starting with very simple websites and a little campaign around it to actually, I think the biggest project I sold was around half a million that was replacing a Salesforce on two products for a year with a full scale, multi-channel marketing campaign, really targeting the doctors in all kinds of different ways, so that the products will just stay top of mind. So it's getting quite old products, that if the doctor just keeps the product, Top of Mind, they keep prescribing it, you know. But then I always knew I wanted to start my own company, at a bunch of trials, I can go into all of them in detail, but it probably will take us too far. And the most important thing to take away from there is like, if you're listening and you feel the same, this just get started. I failed a bunch of times. But each time I learned, and I took something away from it, and it helped me towards the next time. And I also met people along the way. And, for instance, my co-founder, I met along that way. And at some points, we ended up working together on his company, basically, I was helping you with the marketing and sales and make a long story short, we had a lot of leads that we got at a conference, we wanted to follow those all up. We didn't find any tool that works, we looked at lots of CRMs. But what we saw is that none of them really stuck with us, we always gave up. And we figured that it was because it was just the expectations that these serums were were imposing on us on. On the amount of work we had to do before they became useful was so high that we just couldn't keep up. And we figured that actually what we were doing was avoidable. We were taking information from one digital system, like our emails, our calendar, phone, email, signatures, whatever, there's all kinds of things. And then you take that and just start copy-pasting it into a CRM, and every time you something happens, you have that reflex of putting it into CRM, we figured that that was sort of dumb. And that we could automate that, that we could build a system that that does that for us. That gives us an insight into all the information we have in all the different systems around the customer, like not just their address book levels stuff, but like, did we exchanged emails, what are these emails, meetings, calls, email opens, email clicks, website visits, files we exchanged, but they say on social media, all this kind of stuff. And we built a system that does that, which is elsewhere today, which after a small roads of trying out stuff, we found out that it fits best for small and medium-sized businesses be focused on B2B to keep it simple. Because if you try to serve too many types of clients, your software becomes sort of fuzzy. And this was a very long story very short.

 

Andrei Tiu

So basically, you started and you met your co founder during your time at Dr Dre when you were there a founder right now let's explore plus

 

Jeroen Corthout

So Dr. Dre is one of my companies that failed. The entity is still there. And I use it for sort of consulting purposes. Like it's my personal where I organize my finances. Let's: But that company failed due to a lack of proper business model.

 

Andrei Tiu

Okay, cool. So anyway, since there is where I want to get to, mostly because this, this actually was a success. So, you know, it would be very interesting to, to dive a bit into your journey when you were starting out when you had to launch the business. Obviously, this goes a bit back. So looking at the way that marketing was done at that time, and the way that you know, your competition was looking like, and you know, the market overall, how did you think about launching it when you implemented your first campaigns like your first lead generation campaigns or your sales activity to get customers?

 

Jeroen Corthout

What we focused on a lot initially, was one PR, this just because, you know, you see all this kind of PR going on, like, companies coming in the press and coming big mean, that's the impression you have. So we thought, Oh, that's the way I must say that we did get actually our first customers and a few after that, we got through PR, because they read about what we were trying to do somewhere. And they approached us and said, this is interesting, this is what we need. Most of our customers after that come through more, more of a sales approach, very heavy sales approach, starting from our own network, but then diverging from there. And we tried all kinds of stuff in the beginning, like, we started off with just going around to everyone who wanted to hear just having meetings just was very random. Then I went back and started doing customer interviews, which was way more systematic, where I would also ask, at the end of each interview, who else they knew that I could interview which was a good way of expanding the network. Then, yeah, we were in a startup community. And we did a whole lot of networking there. So we would pick up contacts here and there and then to them go to orders. We did that for a long while. While we were still sort of searching, who sells rare bit appeal to first of all, and we're still also developing our products to a level that people wanted to pay for it. And it was a quite a long and painful journey, but one that I do believe you have to go through. And then you can't just start marketing to the masses, and just throwing a trial online and see what happens. I think when you really go with customers through this kind of journeys and a very hands on way, that's when you really learn how things work, what these people care about why it is they choose you why they go over from the other thing, what's going wrong in your onboarding, all this kind of things on which you can then later build your marketing. Which then basically means that your, you’re making the whole thing, not necessarily more effective, but more efficient. So you don't have to spend that much energy anymore to make it all run.

 

Andrei Tiu

So basically was a freemium in the beginning. And you were offering it to as many people as possible in order to get, you know, reviews and feedback right.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Now, we did offer freemium at some moments, but that was not very public. So chances are that you have never seen that. We tested that. Just in the initial stages, we were trying to sell it at a price on the site and all. But we would often get people on prolonged trials, or we would have student organizations using it for free or else kind of stuff. We probably should have made it free first. I don't know. It's something I'd wonder if I if I'd start again. But because the first step is trying to see how you can get people to use it. And that's really an essential first step after which you can get to Okay, how do we now get the thing that is used to a level that people are willing to pay for it as well. And I think the fact that we didn't give so much free access to it in the beginning sort of made that we had to take a little bit more time to get people to use it. It took quite a bit before the first enthusiastic user apart from me a beard I think was probably about six months after we started developing, or maybe seven or so. And it's, it's about a year and a month or so after we started developing that we actually got the first person also wanted to pay for it. Gotcha.

 

Andrei Tiu

Okay, so basically, going back to your journey with a company, so you guys made the product first. And then you understood where to position it and how to basically sell it best. What was important to the people that were your ideal customers? And then what was, I mean, what did he take in terms of marketing, and also the way that you are promoting the product and the adoption, so that you guys could get to, you know, the most popular product on Product Hunt, or on appsumo. And all getting all this increase in the number of users as well as retention and expansion in terms of geographies as well.

 

Jeroen Corthout

You could say that is the one thing sort of building up into our, and we didn't really, we didn't really like to go all out or something. So like I said, for a long time, I was doing sales, sales and customer support, and really trying to try to nail that before we even started even thinking about blogging, I think we didn't blog until end of 2016, which is two years in. But for us, I think we didn't start marketing. Like really like putting diamond that until we were like 20 or 30 customers. And now we started with, we did some blogging and all but that's that builds up slowly, we tried to get some quicker things going. I remember at the time, for instance, Cora was still working well like writing a lot of stuff on Quora. That's it's not really super effective anymore. And then we build towards that big product launch, at which point we had sort of build the community already, from customers and from people that we started to get involved with our content marketing. And we were also involved in Facebook groups, which also helped us a lot. And then from that Product Hunt lounge, this showed that there was interest, which made that appsumo then also got interested because they honestly didn't believe that they could launch a CRM successfully, they are staying away from that or like, try to at some point, but you know, it's not really something that we see succeeding, we convinced them by being successful product on that it was a possibility. And then from there, that became successful. And actually, from both of those, we sort of upped our scale quickly. Especially from the appsumo lounge, which made that very quickly, we had a much bigger community or army of fans, that could push us to the next level. Because when you think about what made us successful, it's it's the word of mouth. It's how well we score on review sites, it's being perceived as one of them, the, the more interesting players out there and appearing of lists and all that. It's not because we spend a ton on paid advertising, we don't have the money. And if we did, we wouldn't be able to outbid some of the others out there. So we all grow on based on more organic things on the channel, I would add after the ones I already mentioned, is probably content marketing. But that's a way slower thing to build up. There isn't often an article that I write that, that already properly ranks within six months, the ones that ranked in six months, or that are really the top ones. It's more like nine months, that that is usually start performing. So it's very, very small sort of process, especially when you when you when you do this on a on a continuous basis.

 

Andrei Tiu

I was actually about to ask you, because in your niche, you guys have like massive giants with massive giant budgets that are investing and I mean, I'm trying to recall the cost per click, but for example, I know that in the UK was over, I think it was over 20 pounds per click or you know, CRM software and these types of keyword searches. So it's a very big, big and obviously you need big, big amounts to get competitive there. Okay, so yeah, content marketing. SEO is actually one thing that is recurring in many discussions that we had on the podcast as well. When looking at it Ways to gain visibility online without having to be x exert enormous amount of money to get there. So basically, if we were to look at your growth, and the marketing things that were really, really impactful for you, or marketing activities, it was first successfully launching Product Hunt. And then off the back of that, starting to build a community and spreading this word of mouth more and more, right.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, you could say so but then you're, you're, of course, ignoring all the work that happened before that, and in between.

 

Andrei Tiu

And then some point, some some, you know, some key stages in the journey. Yeah, you know, so so our listeners can identify themselves with one of these stages, and then maybe get a bit of inspiration in terms of what might…

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, definitely no, no, I just want to avoid that people think like, they launched on TechCrunch and lived happily ever after sort of story. And then they were big and no, it all happens. That's that's almost never how it happens. So but we are, we are led to believe that how it happens, and actually that that affected our thinking in the beginning very much as well. So it's really dangerous when you go in with wrong expectations. But those were definitely some of the pivotal moments. Yeah, from there, it's it's been a lot of hard work growing. That's not without any major major inflection points. Okay. month by month, just adding, adding, adding, adding.

 

Andrei Tiu

So how's the marketing, planning looking for this year? What are you guys focusing on? And where do you expect most results to come from?

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, so we keep focusing on SEO optimisation, we are going to be actively looking for backlinks. Now something is something we have never done was more reactive. We are going to keep focusing on something we started last year is really being visible outside our own audience. By being in lots of different places on this podcast, for instance, speaking engagements, all kinds of different partnership possibilities, something we focus on a lot. What else, I mean, let me pop it up, perhaps, because we've actually just decided on it. And we finalized it last week. So presented it to the team are probably going to revamp the websites, we see a lot of possibility there. It's starting to become a bit outdated that we can do way better. Like our website is probably most behind everything we have definitely behind on our application. We're also getting in in more and more CRM listings. It's another way of being visible outside your network, but more of the Google traffic-wise, it's a, it's a good thing to focus on. And then it's in general, we try to do growth improvements, we call it on a consistent basis. So we have our funnel, and we look at where we could improve things. And it's really then identifying these places and thinking, Okay, how can we tweak this, make it better, increase the conversion, make people stick longer, convince people better? And then do these experiments and see how they turn out?

 

Andrei Tiu

Yeah, I think experimenting is a very good tactic when you when you tackle these kinds of situations. So looking at, for example, the paid ads type of, you know, like this, this aspect, are you planning any paid experiments or just focusing solely on organic?

 

Jeroen Corthout

We have in our plans to look at it again. But I doubt that we'll find anything, at least, let's say bait outbound, if that makes sense, like ads that attract people that are not necessarily searching. I see very little possibility there personally, but we keep looking right. You're not going to close our eyes, but it's mainly attracting more of the people that are searching, there are still potentially possibilities but you need to look a bit further than just Google AdWords because as you mentioned, the pay per click rates there are just way too high. Some of our competitors charge way more. While it may not seem at first. In the end, they earn 10 times more on a customer than we do so they can easily outbid us, which then means that in this there, there isn't really a place for us in these places.

 

Andrei Tiu

Yet, soon enough. Cool. Okay, so now because I know you, you need to get into a very important meeting soon. So just to be able to sum up and also show some actionable insights for our listeners, what would you say is, or are of three very important lessons or things that our listeners being on the same kind of journey should be looking at, in order to ensure the biggest chances of success. And these can be practical things or more things within your organization, things to do to do with marketing?

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, I would say, first one, something that we mentioned a few times is taking it step by step, seeing where you are in the journey and then taking the next step, rather than trying to nail it all from the start, like have a marketing plan, and then roll it all out and then see it fail, I mean, rotter, try to learn and learn and go further. experimenting, there is, is important, but it's, it's equally important to just have a clear understanding of where you are in that journey. Secondly, I think thinking from the perspective of your audience, like, how does your audience look for you? How would they like to get in touch with you? What is it that they are would be triggered by what is it that they are, are needing? If you think from that direction, it makes it so much easier to find the right marketing channels and approaches, rather than to try to push something through or you are used a huge bazooka or you know, and you're asking for three learnings, right? I think, and it's something I didn't mention yet. Our marketing is also only successful because of what we do afterwards. It goes beyond just attracting these people. We tried to build very close relationships with customers in an in a number of different ways. deliver great service to deliver a great product, and that's a whole other episode. But it's only by doing these things, that you can make marketing actually work without having tons of VC money. If you have tons of VC money, you can have a crappy product, crappy service, launch a million of ads, which are not necessarily profitable, and show growth and then raise the next round. If you're not in that scenario, then you need to take things the more sustainable way, the more holistic way. So just to say it's your success in marketing is in that case, also going to be defined by your, your, your full growth approach rather than just customer acquisition.

 

Andrei Tiu

Got you. Okay, super insightful. So now, just the wrapping up. Finally, I know we have some people here that are using CRM, and they would find discovering you very useful for them. So just as an invitation to you know, try the software or to maybe link up to you get in touch with you for partnerships, as well as many other like may be other opportunities, where can people best link up with you? And also who would be the people that would benefit most from your software?

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah. People who benefit most from our software is small and medium sized B2B companies that are looking to organize their sales in a better way. Either they're using a sheet, or absolutely nothing, or they have a CRM, but nobody uses it. Or at least it's not properly used to function as a full system that supports their sales follow up. In any of these situations, sales rep might be a good solution for you because we basically make sure that that's going to work by automating a lot of the data inputs and then making that useful by giving you a good overview, notifications, reminders, all that kind of stuff. Sales flare is mainly used by agencies, which means marketing agencies, software development companies, consultancies and this like service service type companies and buy more like tech companies, both in in startup stage and a bit bigger like we have, for instance, a rather large telco company also on our software. That's that that all works. And actually why we see these target groups most is because those are the ones that look slightly further than just typing CRM into Google. And then they actually look for something that works for them. If you want to find out more about sales, where you can go to our site is salesflare.com. You can check out the software. I mean, you can read about it. But you can also see it. If you just click to sign up for a trial, you don't even have to connect your emails to see it. It will give you a walkthrough, if you like. And at the end, you can connect your emails, you get a whole onboarding and we're there to help. But if you want to get in touch with me personally, you can do that through LinkedIn, probably the best place Do not forget to add a personal message. Otherwise, I will not know where you're coming from, you will disappear in a sea of spam. I probably have another thing LinkedIn connections and lunch, which are all spam. So if you include a personal message, I assure you, I will see it, I'll add you and we can have a conversation.

 

Andrei Tiu

Thanks so much for your time today was very insightful and very nice to meet you. I'm looking forward to catching up a bit later as well as and following your journey as well. And yeah, until next time, wishing you an amazing day. All the success and looking forward to meeting soon.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Thank you. This was fun.

 

Andrei Tiu

Same here. Cheers.

Customer Shopping Behaviour Changes in the Retail Space [Shane Pounder]

Tune in with Andrei and Shane Pounder, our guest on today’s episode, as they will be discussing customer behaviour changes in the retail space, online and offline, as well as marketing strategy and processes when designing modern B2C customer journeys.

 

Shane Pounder is an experienced Operations, Strategy and Marketing professional with over 20 years of experience and a proven track record of driving successful results within organizations ranging from technology to healthcare. He is a dedicated team leader that is happiest when coaching his teams through a particularly difficult problem. 

 

Currently, he is the Vice President of Operations and Marketing at Flipp, a leading retail technology company that works with North America’s largest retailers and brands. In his Operations role, he has spent the last five years scaling out the team and processes that operate Flipp’s platforms. This work includes overseeing multiple operations teams as well as the Outsource and Content Design functions (a total staff of 100). More recently, Shane has assumed the role of Vice President of Marketing where he is tasked with overseeing the growth marketing, consumer insights and marketing communications functions. 

 

Prior to joining Flipp, Shane has had experience in many different industries. He started at University Health Network, Canada's largest research hospital, in a costing and process improvement role. A key accomplishment was a full costing of the transplant patient experience resulting in improved funding. From there, Shane completed an MBA before working as a consultant at Bain & Co. completing assignments in many different industries such as recreational vehicles, industrial goods, telecommunications and outplacement services. After Bain & Co., Shane moved to Maple Leaf Foods, Canada’s leading consumer-packaged protein company, progressing to a Director of Six Sigma through project leadership including a growth strategy for the bread division and a massive complexity reduction project in the protein business. After Maple Leaf Foods, Shane moved into a Director of Operational Excellence role at the non-profit organization, Heart & Stroke Foundation. In this role, he led multiple different initiatives including three restructuring projects, which drove significant savings for the organization. 

 

Shane holds a B.A.Sc in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from the Rotman School of Business.

 

Connect with Shane:

Website: http://flipp.com/

Shane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanepounder/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getflipp

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getflipp/

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  

Hello everybody! This is Andrei and you are on the marketing innovation podcast show. Our special guest for today is Shane Pounder, who is the VP of Operations and Marketing at flipp.com. And if you don't know Flipp is a one-stop marketplace for digital savings and deals with over 5 million monthly active users. So you guys are pretty big in North America and Canada. Today we'll discuss customer behaviour changes in the retail space, online and offline, but mostly focusing on online as well as marketing strategy and processes when designing modern B2C customer journeys. So without further ado, hi, Shane, how are you? How's everything going?

 

Shane  

Doing great. Happy New Year to you and hope you're doing well. 

 

Andrei  

Happy New Year to you as well. How are things? How's the start of the year, what is fresh, what is different, how's business?

 

Shane  

Good. We ended last year pretty well. Now, where I am, we're in a bit of a lockdown right now due to the pandemic, and I think you guys are experiencing the same in the UK pretty recently. My area of Canada has actually just gone into lockdown as well, back in December. So although that's not ideal, and it's definitely having an impact. We're still moving along, and then the business is going well and looking forward to how 2021 plays out. There's definitely a reason for optimism looking forward, which is great.

 

Andrei  

Awesome, awesome. That's the spirit. So tell us a bit more about Flipp, because we have audiences that are from North America, Canada and this side of the world but we also have European listeners and Australian ones, as well. So just everybody is on the same page, they understand what you guys are doing and you bring into the world.

 

Shane  

Absolutely. So it's Flipped with two p-s, Flipp. And basically, our mission is to help shoppers provide for their families by making life more affordable. The way we look at it is that we're trying to reinvent the way people shop and help change the world of retail a bit here. And so what we are in particular is we are a shopping app, where we bring circular ads or flyers or coupons and deals right to your phone, or your computer so that you can plan your weekly shopping trip, and save time and money each week. Now a bit of that depends on your geography, but here in North America, there's a big business around what we would call in Canada flyers or in the United States circulars, is where stores will put together different deals on a weekly basis, bi-weekly, whatever. We take that and we make it digital, make it interactive, put it all together and make it a lot easier for our users to shop.

 

Andrei  

Super. So basically, this is pretty popular in the UK as well in Europe. I know, East Europe is big on this. So, you basically scan these booklets or these flyers, and then you put them on the app. And then how do customers interact or navigate with this, they just identify then shops, and then?

 

Shane  

So even going back into the process, it is less around scanning it, we actually work directly with most of our merchant partners, we bring in the files, and we'll work with them around what is the best way to tell their stories online, so so that we can actually add some value to it on the digital space versus just a print piece. And then we pull it all together and we surface it for our users. So they can come onto the app and they can click through picking their favourite merchants that they shop on a regular basis. Then there's a bunch of functionality on the app. So for example, there's a search feature. So if you know you're about to go to your grocery shopping, and this week you're looking for eggs, you put in eggs, and it will tell you where those savings and deals are at all the merchants in your specific area. What we also do is we work with our merchants in order to understand how to distribute those savings and deals. So with Canada and the US, a lot of our merchants will have variable deals depending on where it is in the country that the person lives. And so I can put in where I live here in Toronto, and it will surface the deals that are appropriate for me. So when I put eggs into the search piece, it will tell me for the 510 grocery stores in my neighbourhood. These are the ones that have it on the deal. Then there's another functionality around helping you build a shopping list. We've also got a watch list which will allow you to put in certain items that you want to track, so that it's easy to go in and find those things when you want to buy them. And then we've got other things we'll work with. We'll bring in coupons. So we can match coupons to certain things so you can get even more savings. So there's a lot of different ways that we try and make it easier for people to look at all their different options and do the better job of saving money on their shopping. 

 

Andrei  

Exciting, I have so many questions in my head, I can't wait to go through all of them. Let's see, I mean before anything, let's introduce you a bit more to the audience. So they understand your journey and you know how you are transforming the Flipp environment at the moment as well as contributing to their planning in terms of operations, in terms of marketing, in terms of comms. So tell us a bit about you, who is Shane?

 

Shane  

So I'll give you the quick bio, I am an engineer by education, started working in healthcare for a little while, actually doing finance and costing work before determining that I needed to go back to business school, get a better vocabulary, did my MBA, finish that off, and then I've worked in a few different areas. My first job out was in strategy consulting, working at Bain and company, did a bunch of really interesting stuff there, including a couple of really good marketing cases, one that kind of piqued my interest in the world of the shopper, and how they look at things and branding, did some really interesting stuff around recreational vehicles and customer segmentation that was kind of foundational to how I look at marketing today. After that, went and worked within the consumer packaged goods company here called Maple Leaf Foods, which is a large Canadian manufacturer, mainly on the protein side. But at the same time, we also had a bread company, where I was primarily focused, doing work around customer care, skew, rationalisation, formulation, stuff like that, so that we could do some big network consolidation work. So that was through six sigma. So I was a more pure operations type at that point. And then I did a year doing customer brand marketing within that, where we would work with major retailers, help them get their products out under their own labels. So that was a really good experience on the commercialization side. After that, I did a stint in the strategy world at the Heart and Stroke Foundation. And that was just looking for something different. That was an operational excellence role, it was about going in and helping people do things better. So I worked with a lot of different teams, including a couple of structure projects, and worked with the marketing team around how we can streamline some different aspects of their work. And then after a couple of years of that, I got a recruiter call for flip comm or flip, which was unexpected, I was about to start looking for something, and this was a kind of serendipitous call. So they wanted somebody to come in and run their operations team, they were scaling and growing quickly. And it was also a seven-minute drive from my house, which helped the commute excellent. And took a run at it and fortunately got the job. And so that would have been just over five years ago now came in starting on the operation side. So when we talk about working with the retailers and bringing in their content and manoeuvring it through that, that was my team that would do all the legwork around that. In my time here, I was able to take on some additional responsibilities, we do content production, where we'll work with different retailers, and instead of just giving us all this stuff, we will work with them and help them build. And we're looking at how we can automate and streamline and improve some of those processes there. But also get them the content they want. And then earlier this year, I was given the opportunity to start taking responsibility for the marketing team. So I've dabbled in and worked in marketing and very indifferent elements throughout my career. And so this is my first time kind of coming in and really leading the charge on it.  This is how I got here.

 

Andrei  

Nice. So five years, I think you managed to see many of the very fast-paced environments of, commerce changing and a lot of things that were very rapidly moving. So how was that from the app’s point of view, from the business? What do you feel has radically changed in the past, maybe not five, but maybe three years, as well as maybe focusing on last year because you know, it was an unprecedented one. But you know, a lot of things have changed and maybe accelerated as well in the e-commerce space. We saw that a lot while working with our clients, but I'm keen to hear your thoughts on it. How did you feel from the inside?

 

Shane  

There's a couple of different things I would highlight. First off, we're working both with the merchants and with trying to build an app that is great for the shopper. So we're seeing different things on both sides. So if you come at it more from the merchant perspective, what we're seeing is basically an acceleration from what historically would have been print type publications that would go out, go through the mail and everything to the digital side. A lot of the retailers especially the brick and mortar guys have had to pivot very quickly, and it was something that was already happening, prior to the pandemic, but with the pandemic, we saw them move fast. Where before they would be hardcore brick and mortar, a little bit of delivery or pre-order on the side, but then that moved to buying online pick up in store was almost overnight. Watching some of our merchant partners very quickly turn on the infrastructure to be able to manage through some of that econ work was pretty, pretty extraordinary going from that brick and mortar to more of an Omni play. And at the same time, in terms of their marketing and advertising efforts, we've also seen that shift so before where they were heavily reliant on print, we would see things like: in a grocery store, here in Canada, in the United States, you'd walk into the grocery store, and they'd have the flyer sitting there for you to pick up so that you can browse and look at it. Well, people don't want to pick up paper right now, when they're out there. And so then they're moving faster to Okay, how can we get more of those deals online, get more of those deals into the hands of our shoppers, give them different options to purchase and ways of actually getting that. And then kind of streamline that end to end process. So that's been great for us, because this is an area that we're working towards, and the printed digital pieces exactly where we're situated. And so we're working closely with a bunch of those partners to help accelerate that. So that printed digital is one core thing on the merchant side and then in the shopper side, we've seen some really interesting stuff. So we've done a little bit of analysis. Black Friday's kind of huge shopping day, American Thanksgiving. So we've done some research around how things change there. And we've been seeing shifts to online pretty significantly in the past few years. But this year, it was a huge shift, because people didn't want to go anywhere near a physical store. And so whereas before, we would have seen kind of a slight increase in the amount of online, now it has shifted big. Then a lot of people didn't want to go in-store at all, and would change most of their holiday shopping Black Friday shopping online. So that was a big shift, that we've been trying to support our retailers through seeing how that played out for the major shopping experience.

 

Andrei  

In terms of the shopper themselves, because you guys are very much focused on bringing the deals and the best discounts to the end customers that use the app as an interface. What do you think about price sensitivity and loyalty towards retailers, when people actually have the chance to buy from anywhere and the distance is not an issue anymore, because they mostly buy online and get delivered to the door?

 

Shane  

We've definitely seen across the board that people are spending less than trying to save more right now. And you'll see that even more highlighted in kind of the millennial and the Gen Z or Gen Zed generations because they're already feeling strapped, you see it in the States, people are graduating with more and more debt. And they're struggling to get jobs that are going to pay that off. And so people are becoming a lot more cognizant of how their dollars are going out. They're using tools like ours, in order to find whatever savings they can do in order to put a little bit more in the bank and try and save up for something going forward. So we have definitely seen that shift where people are spending less. Even within Black Friday itself. Through some of our research, we saw that a lot fewer people were planning on shopping than before on Black Friday, and they were trying to spend less. Our target shopper is a savings and deals shopper. So you know if we're looking at what our wheelhouse is, it's those people who are already thinking about where can I find a coupon? Where can I get things cheaper? If I go to a grocery store x versus y, can I save 20 bucks? And this just exacerbated that. So a lot more people are concerned and worried about how the pandemic was going to impact them from a job perspective, so they are being a lot more diligent and spending more time and more effort. And frankly, they've got a bit more time to spend looking for the deals. That includes whether it's going online and finding an alternative through an online source versus going to a physical store.

 

Andrei  

Okay, so let's look a bit at your customer’s journey when they do online shopping. This is very interesting for us and I'm sure for many of our listeners as well because we do work a lot as well in the e-commerce space. So I think this is something that everybody's talking about these days. So if me, the user, wants to plan their grocery shopping for the weekend, I'm going on Flipp, I can find there the best deals from the grocery stores that are around me. And you mentioned you can actually make a basket and be aware the best yields are right?

 

Shane  

What you can do is you can build a shopping list. So we're not building current baskets that you could then transition to an online, we do work with some retailers around how we can surface some of their clicks and collect. But at this point, we're not doing e-commerce within the app, what is happening is, we set it up so that if you've got those five grocery stores, you can do your hunt, and say, you know, I'm trying to decide what I want to cook this week and I've got these three protein sources I'm interested in. Now I'll go to the grocery store and take a look. Okay, this one's the best deal. This one's not, I'm going to check this one, put this on my shopping list. And then I can go to the next one and do a bit of compare and contrast and try and understand where is the best place for me to do my shop for the week?

 

Andrei  

Okay, and I don't know if you have the insights at hand, but I think it'd be really interesting to look at the customer journey from the beginning: they enter on the app, they spend some time there. Which I have a question on a bit. And then when do they typically bounce on to the store? Do you know if they bounce off onto the store? And then they convert there right away through online? Or was there a method of checking out? Do they want to collect? Or do they actually want delivery, things like this?

 

Shane  

It varies here. And I also think there's a difference in terms of how the grocery markets themselves have evolved in the different countries. For us, the lion's share of groceries still done in person, online is still relatively new in the past few years, within Canada and the US. So the North American markets in terms of having delivery options, and in buy online, pick up in-store, that kind of thing. That stuff is relatively new for us. And so for the most part, the person would be kind of going in determining these are the things I want. And then you'll have different types of shoppers, you'll have the shopper that is willing and interested to go from store to store and maybe stop at two or three places. And what they're going to do is they're going to use the app to figure out, Okay, what am I getting at store A, B, and C. And then they will build their lists, and then go to those different places. There are others who will have a couple of specific things that they're looking for. So they'll have their standing list. And they'll go in, and then they'll decide, okay, this is the place where I'm probably going to get the most savings on my week. And I'm going to do it that way. What's happening now, though, to your point is we're starting to see delivery companies, we're starting to see stuff like instacart, here in North America is starting to grow where they will do the pickup and bring it to you. And we're starting to see a bunch of the different retailers do their own version of delivery, or their own version of the pick, where they'll pick it and then just do the pickup in-store. But that's still growing here versus kind of a standard way of doing things. So the customer journey is still very much hands-on grocery shopping, I would say it's different if we start looking at some of the other retailers we work with so obviously Home and Garden, any of the retailers we're dealing with on that side apparel, those different pieces, we are seeing a lot more movement online, where I think there is a bit more of that opportunity to play kind of the end to end game into the conversion side.

 

Andrei  

I see. Okay. And in terms of the time spent on the app, because that's actually where the research takes place, going back to the price sensitivity, and people having maybe more time to allocate and looking at every buck that they spend. Have you found a big increase since March last year compared to the previous period, or not so much?

 

Shane  

It's interesting because it's been a tale of two countries because we're both in the US and Canada. So in terms of the amount of time spent, I don't have the numbers at hand. But what I would say is the way that the pandemic impacted, the two sides of the border for us was very different and did have an impact on content. So in the US, for example, we saw a lot more supply chain instability in the grocery side, which meant that there was less content available because some of the retailers just stopped producing content because they were having trouble keeping stuff on shelves. And so we did see some impacts there in terms of the number of publications that people were looking at because that's more of our standard measure is in terms is how many things are people looking at as opposed to the specific amount of time whereas in Canada, the supply chain, where grocery, in particular, it has a few really big players and very national players. So on that part, it was pretty stable. We actually didn't lose a tonne of content, even though the lockdowns, a bunch of the merchants did a really good job of moving to updating the publications quickly and moving to online e comm type stuff so that we didn't have as big of a content impact. And what we have seen, though, to your point is, we are seeing increases in the number of publications that people have been looking at on the whole throughout the year. And eventually, we saw that in the states as well. Once the supply chain staff was able to recover. So we're seeing people spending looking at more content. So I would presume they're spending more time on the app as part of that.

 

Andrei  

Super interesting. And very interesting that the market response was different. I mean, so different from US and Canada, like you guys are more chill, right?

 

Shane  

Or I think you could answer that a few different ways. But yes, I think that's fair. We're a little quieter.

 

Andrei  

Okay. So now again, going to this mobile versus desktop, you guys are only mobile, right?

 

Shane  

We do have a desktop version as well. Most of our users are working through our app. But we do have a desktop. So Flipp.com, you go in there, and you put in your geography, and then you can still see all the deals on that side. They both are options. Yes. 

 

Andrei  

How do you see one compared to the other: any changes that are notable or inline or expected, as we saw a lot of people just abusing mobile, more and more.

 

Shane  

Not a ton. Like the experiences are very similar for us in terms of desktop versus mobile and how people can manoeuvre through them. The content is very similar, I think just based on what it is, and people wanting to have something in hand when they're in-store, and that a lot of the shopping especially in the grocery side is in person, the mobile app tends to be a little bit more intuitive, a little bit easier to work with. For a shopping journey. 

 

Andrei  

So basically, going back to the shopping, it's more like, this is Friday or Saturday morning, I'm planning my shopping, I'm looking on the app, see what's available, planning my trip, then going to the store, having the app with me, and then just coordinating my shopping experience that way.

 

Shane  

Exactly. And people do it differently. Like for, for me, for example, when I go into the store, I'm a little less planful. I know roughly what I want. And then I'll show up at the store. It's like, oh, what do I want? And then I'll actually spend some time on the app, right at the store. It's like, Okay, what else can I get? Or, actually, one of the things with a pandemic is because the stores are only letting so many people when I'm standing in line to get into the store. I'll be flipping through the app to try and figure out okay, what are some things that I might also want, and then I'll start adding that to my list. So that ability to be able to do it on the fly is actually super helpful.

 

Andrei  

Okay. Oh, super insightful. And now let's look at the other thing, the marketing element. This was more around the customer journey, and really keen to hear your thoughts on how you felt that changed a bit. And also in terms of the shopping experience. But about you guys, as a company, you basically have to market to two different groups of stakeholders, you have the retailers, and then you have the customers? So different processes, different strategies, different budgets, I would assume. So give us a bit into your world, how does marketing look in terms of both tactics and operations? For you? 

 

Shane  

Sure. So there are a few different pieces, I would say, we're probably a little bit more refined on the shopper side, versus the merchant side, I think with the merchant side, we came in, and we've developed really deep relationships with a lot of the merchants over the years. And given what we do, we're a little bit more effective at getting out there, having those discussions and managing those relationships. So what we've been focusing on a little bit more has been on the shopper side and how we are bringing more users on to the app so that our merchants can more effectively tell their stories. So we've got a few different pieces that we think through our funnel. But the main things are the main areas that we consider kind of the acquisition side and the retention, those are the two big focus areas that we've been working on. And obviously, with a pandemic, we've been kind of adjusting things in order to deal with that. So on the acquisition side, it's very much, you know, we're a bit of a utilitarian app. And given that, what are the different ways that we can bring people on? So I think we're pretty effective. When we're kind of mid-funnel, and we've got people who've already shown intent, we know that they're looking for stuff that wants to shop. So those are easier folks to bring online. One of the things that we are thinking through is how do we do a better job on kind of the pure brand side? How do we effectively and efficiently get ourselves out there, build some better awareness so that we can continue to grow people or grow users on the app, bring them in, because once they're in, and they can see all the stuff that they've got to work with we're pretty good at holding on to them? So that would be kind of the acquisition side. And then we've got a full retention kind of lifecycle piece where we're looking at different ways through push through email, different opportunities to kind of continue to highlight, you know, here are the deals that are on. Here are the ways that we can add value to your week and continue to push through on that. So a few different pieces to it. But the big thing for us kind of going forward is, you know, how do you continue to build that brand? How do you build Emotionally resonant messaging for a utilitarian product, how do you get it out there in a cost-effective way, because things like TV, relative to Facebook ads, Google ads, your actual cost of acquisition is going to be much higher? And you may not actually get better use out of that. And so we're still trying to balance what is the right messaging? What is effective messaging? And how do we manage that? One of the other things that we're also working through and thinking about is shopping as a local experience. You will see very variation, Market to Market, even Canada versus the US. In Canada, we've got something called price matching in some of our retailers, where if you go into the right retail, and you say, yes, but it's on the deal at this place, they will give you the price of the other place. So that's actually something that's reasonably prevalent in Canada, well, that makes how a customer or our consumer would use our app very different. Whereas in the US, it's a lot more coupon forward. And so you want to make sure you're providing coupons in a different experience there. And even in states, there's different regions and different pieces there. So it's how do you make sure that messaging that you are doing from a marketing and advertising perspective is resonant to the particular locality? So national marketing isn't as clean as what one would hope in some cases?

 

Andrei  

 And so you mentioned that the acquisition channels, you mentioned something that is very fair, and I'm happy that you brought it up, which is ensuring that you understand very well the customer persona that you're communicating towards, because people from New York might be very different from somebody in LA, or Seattle or another city and region. But what seems to be working best for you in terms of user acquisition, is it organic, and referral? Is it Facebook and Instagram ads? Is it Google ads? Is it something else?

 

Shane  

There are a few different channels, obviously, organic. So again, it depends on where we are, I think we've done a really good job in Canada in particular on product-market fit. And organic growth has actually been a big strength of ours and word of mouth. We started the Canadian app and I think that has helped us a bit here in terms of getting good critical mass specifically in Ontario. And so we are seeing good organic growth that is actually getting out there. So that's been helpful. What we're looking to do is build better on that in the US and try and figure out how to kind of get that flywheel going a bit more effectively. But generally speaking from a pure acquisition perspective, it is a lot more of a couple of channels, you mentioned, Facebook, Google, they tend to be the main areas that we are looking at, in terms of doing kind of more general acquisition spend, and then kind of tinkering with the messaging that we're using through those channels.

Andrei  

And you have a pretty big community, as well. Did you find them shouting about anything specifically lately? Because I assume that there's some dialogue there as well from them wanting stuff or inquiring about stuff?

 

Shane  

There are, definitely a couple of things that one of the ones and we've actually just launched a feature in response to it is the watch list. And one of the things people have been asking about is, how do they track to certain high ticket items, or different items. So they know they want to get a certain laptop so that they put the laptop in the watch list, and they can track the price. So that's something that we've added to the functionality using a couple of different pieces just to ensure that they're able to track things. So that would be an example of something that they wanted. Because before, you know, you'd have to go to search every single time and look for something. And so building that feature, and kind of we're iterating on that right now, another thing that's come out recently, and it goes to your comment on organic growth, is we've just added deal sharing, or item sharing or publication sharing. So as people go into their account, they can say, Oh, I found this great deal on this TV at the electronic store. I know these other three people want it? Well, now it's a pretty simple process to share that deal with somebody and it is great for us because you basically got a referral that says: Hey, we just found this here, come on to the app, and we'll look at it. So those are a couple of features that we've done that have been very much in response to feedback that we've gotten from our users.

 

Andrei  

Super cool. And yeah, it's very good for the retailer as well because you know, three customers that have one so, good move. Awesome. And now looking at 2021 Let's see what you guys are planning, what you guys are foreseeing, what you foresee as a professional in this field and think maybe it's worth sharing with some of our marketing people here on the show as well.

 

Shane  

I think the big thing for 2021 is looking forward is around being nimble, honestly, from a marketing perspective, but an overall company perspective, we are still waiting a bit to see what plays next, relative to the pandemic, how quickly things go back to, quote-unquote, normal, and what does normal look like? So we're tracking very much to our users. We've seen a lot of studies coming in saying that people don't plan on going back to the same behaviour as things were pre-pandemic. So are they going to be spending less? So what does that gonna do for their spending habits? So a big thing for us is making sure we're continuing to do some of that research, continuing to do some of that secondary research in order to pull that in and get an understanding of those users. One another big thing we talked a bit about earlier is continuing to work with our partners to accelerate that transition from print to digital and doing what we can to make it easier for them. The nice thing about some of the digital channels is you can do things a lot more quickly and as things change. So for example, if your inventory changes, well, you want to be able to respond to that by changing some of the stuff you've got on deal. And so one of the things we see happening is that the need for responsiveness is going to become less of a nice to have and more of a need to have from the merchant side, as they continue to move forward. And so we're working on ways with some of our merchants to help accelerate that process. And help guide them through that because we're in a good position, we work with them both on the stuff that goes on the app, but we also work with a lot of merchants on their own sites, and how they surface the deals because they'll put their flyer on their own piece on their website. So we work with them on that. And so we're going to help partner with some of these guys to help them get from point A to point B on that printed digital transition. And that's going to be a huge focus of us for 2021. Because I think there's this huge opportunity here. And frankly, it will help the retailers weather the storm a lot more effectively.

 

Andrei  

Okay. I tend to go back to this e-commerce aspect a lot. But from the retailer side, what proportion of the retailers because we talked a lot about groceries, but then you brought up the laptops and tech accessories as well. What is a split on Flipp at the moment, just so I can ask, so I can identify if it's the right question to ask or not? So you have the grocery stores, and then you have the other ones, what could be a proportion.

 

Shane  

I don't have the proportion right off the top of my head. But what I can say, across all. So I would say a good portion of our users is going to be grocery focused. However, we've got really great content coming in. So we work with all of your major Home and Garden, both sides of the border. So Home and Garden electronics, General merchandising. So across the board, we've got their content, and we're surfacing it. So it depends on the specific user that's in there. So we'll have users that are going to come in and be very focused on just that weekly grocery shop. But we've also got a lot of users who are coming in and trying to figure out what new fridge they would like to buy. And so you're going to get that into your electronics or Home and Garden. So we've got the content from across the board. And we'll continue to do so. So I  think we originated very much on the weekly shop. But it's definitely seeing the utility and you bring somebody in, they're interested in groceries, but then they find out Oh, I can get all this too. And we give them access to everything.

 

Andrei  

Okay, so this question be more looking at that side of the business, you know, like stores that are not so geographically sensitive? And the question is something like it is a more complex question. But yeah, they surely run their marketing and advertising. They have them, digitally, probably have remarketing campaigns and things like this running online on, social media, maybe Google as well. In which way, is there an opportunity for them to integrate with a platform so that they can facilitate the sale for something that they know, a user of the app manifest interest towards? Is there currently connectivity here? Or are you guys planning to do something like this? Is there a demand from the retailers?

 

Shane  

There's definitely a demand for better like closed-loop testing generally so that they can do better sales attribution, and that's kind of across the board. So when we work directly with a merchant, we will depend on the specific elements of that relationship with them. We do have analytics, that kind of thing in behind, where we will work with them to set up how we can do proper reporting, how can we help them with attribution in order to provide that additional value so that they can understand conversion. How many people are going to store our geographically focused apps. So we do understand a little bit of the geography of the people moving around, so we can close the loop in a few different cases. So that is definitely something that is of interest. There are Other ways that we can do that. So for example, if you click on an item, and there is a spot that says shop now, where you can go straight to the website, build a cart, and then we can see that they've converted on a specific item. So we do have opportunities that we can use. And we work with some of our retailer partners so that they do get that measurement and are able to show utility in that. So we definitely have some of those integrations in play.

 

Andrei  

Super. Okay, this was an insightful marketing rep, let's go to operations. So I know that you work a lot with millennials, and you've been in contact a lot with this sort of demographic, let's say. One thing that I would be keen to hear your thoughts on, would be not only working with millennials, and actually implementing processes in this environment, but also, more specifically, have you worked with many millennial marketing teams before?

 

Shane  

So first off, in the interest of full disclosure, I am not a millennial, I miss it by just a couple years. And I'll be honest, coming into Flipp, this is the first time that I have not been one of the younger people in an organisation. Most of my other stuff, I was either starting out, or I was in a fairly established organisation where I was probably one of the younger people at the table. So to your question around have I worked with a lot of millennial teams, in marketing, in particular, I would say no, when I worked in marketing, for example, it Maplelea Foods, I would say there were a few people who are a couple of years younger than me, but early, early millennial and a lot of the tropes that come along with millennialism, probably hadn't landed at that point. So I would say this would be the first time what I would say, though, about working with them, on the whole, and this isn't just from marketing, this should also be from my ops folk, one of the things I love about the generation is the drive for impact. And I think that's really true of the marketing folks, too, as things have changed, like when I first started out, you were happy to have a job. And you did what you were told, and you were excited that they gave you money for it. Whereas now I think there's more of an expectation that, yeah, I'm going to work. But from your side, I'm expecting you to come to the table and invest in my growth and development, I need you to make me better. And I want to do something that's meaningful to me, I want to do something that drives my own passions. I'm not just here to check the time clock. And one of the great things about this generation as a whole is if you can really tap into that, all that extra discretionary effort that, you know, I'm going to go above and beyond and do these things. They're so interested in that because they're so driven. And if you meet them, and I look at employment as a handshake, it's two sides, you know, you've got the employee, and you've got the leader coming together, and you both have to meet in the middle. And if you come to the table and you do your part, those people are going to put in the effort, they're going to do the work, they're going to find that extra insight, they're going to do that extra drive because they're excited about the work. And they're excited about their opportunity to have an impact. So that's been big learning around trying to figure out how to really engage that. I would also say a couple of other things that have been interesting here would be the concept of authenticity, both from the purpose of the people you work with, but also from the brand. I think it's important for the millennial group to feel like the people are talking to them, are being open and transparent. They're not used to that command and control. Like when I started out it was again, here's what you're going to do. Why? Because I told you and now you've got to tell them and that's great because that authenticity gives them a chance to push back and say, Well, what about this? What about this? And they don't have time, the EQ is much higher. They don't have time for bullcrap. And so you've got to come to the table and sometimes be vulnerable, and say, I don't know the answer, what do you think and whatnot. So that has been another change in terms of working relationship, but then also from the brand. So everything is played out over the last year, because obviously we've seen some big changes on the social side around diversity and inclusion, and some bad things have happened. And it is brought to light some very important discussions that need to be happening. Well, working in an organisation like this with that demographic of that age group. They want to have those conversations. They need to have those conversations. And they need to know that you as an organisation are authentically coming to the table and trying to address that and that you as a brand represent certain things. So, for example, coming out of some of the work or some of the stuff last year, we've got an outreach team internally, and they wanted to do some work to highlight areas around mental health due to the pandemic, or to highlight some of the workaround Black Lives Matter. And so we helped to give them a forum to that. But that's because that's something that's important. And so you as a brand need to stand for, and this was our way as a brand to try and stand for that.

Andrei  

Okay, what works well for you, or if you have any processes or things that you're doing internally, that maybe you implemented or you together with the team that made this millennial ecosystem that they work well and stay motivated and stay on track and stay curious in marketing but also in other departments.

 

Shane  

I would say one of the big things that and I'd love to say we've landed the plane, but we are still trying to land the plane on this is we're trying to do a much better job of the cross-functional communication and being a lot more deliberate and intentional about it. We've definitely run into situations in the past where even within the marketing team, you get so caught in the day to day that you can get a bit siloed. And so you'll have a team that's working on some really cool brand, comm stuff, that's not really talking as much with the team that's doing an acquisition, like there's a little bit but not as much as it should be. And so we're not getting kind of an end to end experience. And so I think one of the things we're working on right now is doing a much better job of kind of thinking through how all of those pieces come together. And it's little tactical things. Like, we've instituted some different weekly meetings and giving people more of a forum to talk about this is what we did this week, this is we're going to do not a full Scrum methodology, but kind of that takeoff of making sure that we're having those discussions. Another thing that we're working on is, we want to make sure we're providing better opportunities for things like shopper empathy across the broader organisation. So when we understand things about our shopper, our user, making sure we're getting that stuff out, we're communicating more broadly. And so people understand the strategy and the way that we're doing things. And a final thing that's worked for us because we've grown a lot like we're, we're a few 100 people right now. So we're a big enough organisation, and especially with people working from home, right now, it's a lot easier to not know what the person in the next room is doing. So we've started trying to within the marketing team, bring in other teams to kind of present. And so for example, we did a pitch, we brought in a couple of our external-facing teams, and they came in to show us, here's how we pitch flip to a merchant. And these are the things that they're looking for. And so from a merchant empathy perspective, it was fantastic. Because all of a sudden, you're sitting there and saying, Oh, well, this bit of research that I've already done like six months ago, would really help that slide. And so it does a really good job of helping make sure that you understand that there are things outside of your own walls that you can contribute to you can add to, and you have empathy. This is why these salespeople look like they're so tired. They've been dealing with this. And, and it's fantastic because it's allowing us to be better marketers because we have a better understanding of kind of the end to end value chain here. So a lot of little things like that, and just ensuring that the communication is clean and cascaded. And we're giving people the benefit of knowledge.

 

Andrei  

Awesome. Cool. Shane was awesome catching up today. I was just looking at the time now. And it just flew by. It was really insightful and really fun as well. Now tell us, where can people connect with you? Maybe I mean, if there is an opportunity for people in other geographies, if you guys plan an expansion anytime, you know, this year or next year. And also for the people that are in your geographies, how can you help them how they can help you, you know, just to facilitate communication further beyond this episode.

 

Shane  

Best way to find me as a LinkedIn is actually really the only social media that I do. Welcome to not being a millennial, I spend more time on LinkedIn and pretty much anything else. So that's where you can find me in terms of kind of interest in the app if there are retailers who are interested in coming on board. We've got some inbound opportunities through flipp.com. And so you can go on there, we've got some corporate information there. And people who are interested, there's a lot of information there. And for those in North America, download the app play around. It's a really cool app and gets you lots of access.

 

Andrei  

Super cool, Shane, a pleasure having you today on the show. Thanks a lot. For all the insights for being here. Have an amazing year ahead. I'm sure you guys are gonna are going to keep doing great. And let's think that you guys if you have any questions for myself or Shane, as always feel free to reach out either to Shane directly or to me, and we'll make sure to, you know, transfer everything and see if there's anything that we can help you beyond the inside here would be happy to right chain. Perfect.

 

Shane  

Sounds good.

 

Andrei  

Okay, and until then, everybody has an amazing year ahead. As always, keep up the good work and positive vibes on and Happy Shopping.

 

Shane  

Cheers. Thank you.

SEO Trends & Changes for 2021 [with John Vuong]

In today’s podcast episode, we have invited John Vuong, who is the CEO of the Canada based SEO agency called Local SEO search. The subject for this episode is SEO changes, hacks and trends for 2021, looking back at what has changed in 2020, and what marketers should pay attention to.  

 

John Vuong is a seasoned sales professional and Internet marketer with an exceptional track record helping companies grow their clientele and profits. Through 15 years of experience working with CEOs, business owners, and marketing leaders at some of Canada’s most successful corporations, John developed a deep understanding of local marketing dynamics and consumer behaviour. John’s entrepreneurial spirit and experience working with more than 5,000 local business owners inspired him to start his own company, Local SEO Search, in 2013.

 

Local SEO Search is a full-service search engine optimization (SEO) company. Founder John Vuong started in SEO near the beginning. Back in 2010, he was working with Yellow Pages and the company was offering SEO strategy.

 

Connect with John:

Website: https://www.localseosearch.ca/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/localseosearch

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/localseosearch/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnqrrXnknCW5nii5y4qatzg/featured

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LocalSEO_Search

John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-vuong-205b2917/

John on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/john.vuong.108

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is John Vuong, who is the CEO of the Canada based SEO agency called Local SEO search and today we'll have an in-depth discussion on SEO changes and hacks for 2021, as well as what has changed in 2020, that us, marketers, should pay attention to. So John is a great pleasure and excitement to have you here on the show. How are you? How's the morning going for you? 

 

John Vuong  

I'm doing great, Andrei! Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be on the show today. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Excited as well. So let's kick it. I think SEO is a hot topic. We are at the beginning of the year, so many people are looking forward to how they can best improve their marketing tactics, stack strategy, so let's give people what they want. First of all, I think let's dive a bit into your background. Tell us a bit about you, a bit about your experience about the agency so that we get to know you a bit better as a person. Yeah, definitely. So I started this agency called Local SEO search based in Toronto, Canada seven years ago. So 2013. Prior to that, I studied my studies in business finance. And I worked in advertising sales for 10 years, traditional advertising performance-based affiliate online advertising, to then directory advertising and I was at Yellow Pages for 10 years, where I found my sweet spot, where I really enjoy dealing with the small medium-sized business owners, community leaders, people that resonate with the average person, versus when I was in the affiliate online world. Yes, big fortune 500 companies, SaaS companies, huge companies. All they cared about was CPS, cost per acquisition, didn't really care about the realness of relationships. Fast forward now, I do only with small, medium-sized family-run kind of businesses, dentists, Cairo, physio, massage therapists, restaurants, etc. And then a lot of trades and 20% is more national, international, B2B driven, but mainly service as opposed to product type clients. So that's why I've done and we're a full-service boutique SEO agency, we only do SEO, we don't do any paid ads. We understand and, learn a lot about email marketing funnels journey behaviour ads. In terms of advertising, that's my passion. But we really, as an agency, just focus on search engine optimisation.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Super cool. It's very good that we have a background of your clients now, because I'm sure that there are a lot of people here on the show that can relate to this. So I think it's gonna be very insightful for them, as well. But also, for you guys, working in bigger companies. I think we're gonna keep this very relevant, because we'll also discuss not only local SEO but also SEO in general, on-site and off-site. So just to get into the flesh, tell us how you feel this year was for SEO in general? How does Google behave? Was Google good?

 

John Vuong  

Well, as a SEOer, we're always at the pulse, right? We know what's going on and we've always been doing everything that they tell us to do. As a white hat agency, you do best practice, you understand the foundations, you do make sure that it's all about the users and focus on delivering great content, great user experience, things that it's logical, because if you don't go on Google and you have a bad user experience, What don't you like, right? So think as a customer, and what I really focus on, and what we've seen at our agency is: Yes, there's a lot of pivots and changes in terms of keywords, trends, volume, but as a business owner, we have to be nimble, we have to pivot quickly. People that are stagnant, especially in the SEO world, like big fortune 500, bigger, larger companies that have in-house teams, it takes some time to deploy changes. But if you're small and nimble as a boutique agency, we can actually stop something and transition and pivot fairly quickly within days or weeks, as opposed to months or a couple of months of planning, strategy, implementation case study, AV testing, changing the server over to a different platform. There's a lot more at play when you're moving databases and moving much search volume as opposed to smaller search volume.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Cool. So let's discuss a bit about the best practices. Now, I think we can also maybe have a dialogue here because I'm curious to hear your thoughts in terms of your geography and where you operate mostly. And then also, maybe we can compare these with some of the data that we have from Europe and the UK and see how maybe they compare or some differences that we have discovered working with our clients and then see if there's anything that we can generalise, that applies maybe to everybody that people can take away from the show, and then look at their businesses. So let's take on-site SEO, and look at some of the best practices there. Did you find anything particularly changed this year?

 

John Vuong  

It's always the same right? The title tag, description has to be engaging and you have to really focus on users. Don't clickbait it. People overcomplicate things in the marketing world. And I don't know what other agencies are doing, but because I only focus on SEO, a lot of people moved away from different forms of advertising. Yes, a lot of people jumped into Facebook, but when people aren't spending, what are they selling them? If it's a product, sure. Doing influencer marketing, you do different offers, then you drip them with an email sequence. But as a service base, and that's primarily our type of client. We saw them close for a couple of months here in Canada, we had shutdowns. They didn't have any business. But they stayed with us, because they understood the importance of building authority, building expertise, understanding that you keep producing good high-quality content, positioning yourself as a long term, stable business, because eventually things will open up again. People who do SEO are in it for the long term, they're not in it for testing the market, which is a little bit different. So you have to figure out what you're at, what kind of industry and business you're offering, what is your strategy long term, as well. So I always tell people to get into SEO as soon as possible. If you haven't, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. Because when done, right, it's the greatest lead source out there. Great quality, inbound leads of your ideal type of client. So understanding the whole perspective and SEO campaign, because it's not as simple as people think backlinks content, on-page, off-page, boom, boom, boom, reputation, there's so many other things that you have to understand, as a marketer, you get it: user behaviour. So you have to tie in user behaviour with SEO strategy, and understanding who your ideal customer is, and speak to them, resonate with them, provide them quality content, that will have multiple touchpoints, longer sequences, longer user behaviour, but really solidify why they should choose you.

 

Andrei Tiu  

And looking at this, because I think it's a good moment to discuss these scenes, we have a year ahead of us and I think it's a good timeframe for you somebody that never ran a proper SEO campaign or looked properly at SEO before, I think this year is a good initial time frame to look at. What would you say are some good things that people could look at when auditing whether they are in a good spot, or not to start with? You mentioned your user experience and the other things that go beyond internal linking and content on-site, and content off-site and backlinks.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, a lot of people are very caught up with metrics, a lot of people are looking at analytics, they're looking at timespan bounce rate, user engagement, how many organic traffic, direct flow organic. There's a lot of metrics. And you can track a lot of this, call rail, you track everything. But ultimately, it's your ideal customers, are they transacting, what is the actual revenue? Like it makes sense if it's a product play, because you can actually determine the sales, the volume, the price you pay for it, and then give you a good ROI. But when it comes to service, it's all about the lifetime value, the type of client that comes in. Is it a good fit for the mole of the business? Is he someone I want to serve? Am I attracting it with the type of advertising that is playing, right? So I do things a little bit different in our agency, which is: we personalise, we care and we want to dissect that campaign to see if it's effective. Not only do we want to ask them how much revenue sales have, but it's all about getting good clients. Are you happy with the results? Because the data can show 50-100% organic traffic increase, numbers look great, but why are they not happy? Because the numbers aren't translating to real customers that are your ideal customers. It could be the flaky type of people that you're targeting to your site that doesn't transact

 

Andrei Tiu  

Either that, or maybe the keyword targeting is not good to start with, and you get people on your website that are coming for the wrong type of keywords that drive that traffic organically. I'm curious, have you not discovered this often, when you were maybe onboarding new clients that were getting some traffic organically, and then you discovered that maybe it's only the brand name that is driving traffic, and maybe some of the other keywords, but not necessarily the ones with the high purchase intent? I mean, I'm curious for this discussion that we have, I also want to help people tuning in to think about sound good things that they could apply to their businesses.

 

John Vuong  

Keyword research is very important. Onboarding of keyword research, understanding the customer is by far the most important thing. And if you don't do it properly, everything is going to be not properly implemented. So you really have to get to the root of understanding that journey, understand who their ideal customer is, what their nuances are, what is their behaviour? What is the search intent: navigational or informational? What does the journey look like? How long do they stay to then transact? What kind of client are they? Does it take longer for them to actually take that initiative, to then make that phone call or transact with you? There's a lot more to it than just keyword research content and putting links together. Like that, in-depth discussion, when you're onboarding there should be five pages of exact questions of that personality trait, knowing the persona, avatar, understanding and mapping out, but you have to know. These business owners that are trying to do SEO, they don't really have that information. So you gotta dig it from them. Because they probably never did it before. They've never done marketing.

 

Andrei Tiu  

You are talking about the small, local businesses, right?

 

John Vuong  

Yeah. So if you have a marketing company, again, what worked and what didn't? You have to really have a grasp of what your competitors are doing, understand where you are playing the field of expertise, and where you want to position as a brand, and then go after and test it. Always testing and pivoting. And that's the biggest thing with SEO, you gotta be nimble, right? It's not like this one strategy is gonna work for every single company. Because there's so much competition for every single industry. Every business has 10-15-20 other competitors competing with you. What are they doing well, what aren't you doing? Well look at the gaps, look at opportunities, just the strengths that you portray, and push it out there. And this is marketing and marketing is a big umbrella of it all.

 

Andrei Tiu  

What do you see SERP features coming into play? Because they are an element of organic ranking and they somehow relate in a way to offsite SEO. But when looking at the recipe for increasing the chances of success of an SEO campaign, where do you see these things coming into place?

 

John Vuong  

Yeah, snippets, knowledge panel, discovery, there's a lot of search features out there. Understand the best practices, laying it out so that it's foundationally done properly. The challenge with my type of client is small, medium-sized businesses unless you got a lot of budget on PR, where they get amplified for that specific blog or whatever page that they're trying to promote, they're not gonna get that traction, which gets a lot of reviews or a lot of shares and comments. So I would say do best practice for everything. Because you never know. If it gets picked up by mainstream media that gets amplified. When you are that featured snippet, yes, you're gonna get a lot more exposure, but the quality is what's in it. It's usually an informational base. It's not a transactional base. That is a featured snippet. It's more like people want to drill deep with, they have a question. They Google Home it. They ask that question, they dig deeper. So it's good that your reference here, you might get a lot of traffic, but is it transactional traffic? Is it actually generating you business?

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool stuff. Okay. So let's look at off-site, then. Looking at the 2021 marketing strategy. First of, all of us look back to the best practices and make sure that we implement not only on one specific niche, such as producing content for our blog, but rather have a look again at our customer avatar, and then make sure that we produce it and we target the right types of keywords for the content strategy and the best practices in order to increase the chances of the content that sits on our platforms to rank a bit higher or to maybe make it in specific places in the world where you can drive traffic. And this can be a good starting point to then consolidate an SEO campaign, and to track it over, let's say, 6 - 12 months. What about off-site Seo? Depending on who you're talking, there are different opinions based on the off-site SEO done with more popular websites. Generally, 98% of the results that we saw were very good results coming from publishing on high reputation websites and making sure that you have a good amount of backlinks coming from trustworthy sources in the right industries to your website. We generally saw really good results this year, which was a continuation from 2019. So not much change in terms of this. What are your views? Is PR and backlink generators working as it used to be? And also, after we answer this question, but just because I have it in my head and I don't want to forget it. How do you then apply this best to local SEO? I would like to get your thoughts on this.

 

John Vuong  

Yeah, so backlinks, PR strategy, guest posts, skyscrapers. There's so many different types, there's probably 100 different backlink type strategies out there. My thoughts on that is yes, you got to position yourself as a thought leader, you need to be exposed in more influential sites that are within your industry within your niche within your region that will amplify you to become that thought leader. And that's the best part of backlinks: do trust flow organic traffic, look at the metrics, that's where the tools and software actually help you, assist you. But the challenge is, if you're doing it in house or you don't have a team, it's very difficult to do and implement things. What's the scale? What's the budget? And what's the performance metric, because most of these sites will require not just good content pieces that resonate with audience members, but you're pitching them. So what's in it for them, you need to really understand the whole sequence and pitch relationship building. It still applies for local as well, where links are a hugely pivotal role. Also city pages, service pages, understanding semantic keywords, keyword variation, long-tail keywords, all that matters, right? It's pretty straightforward if you're in this industry. But if you're not, as a business owner, it's very difficult to do all this and rank well. That's why you hire people to do it well for you. Because it's overwhelming, especially because as a business owner, you have so many other things you have to worry about. On top of that, there's this pandemic. And you don't even know if people are even shopping for your product or service, because they're shut down, especially if you're a restaurant where you're in the travel hospitality industry. So you need to figure out where are the opportunities, where are the gaps keyword research, understanding how to position yourself so that when things open up again, and get back to normality, at least you're there in position well. So you have to continue investing in long term strategies. Paid strategies work if you're looking to acquire quick wins sales. But long term SEO is a lot of work: creating content pitching, getting backlinks, it's not easy. But that's the whole purpose, right? If business was easy, everyone would be doing it. If SEO was easy, everyone would be doing it. But it's not.

 

Andrei Tiu  

No, I totally agree. You need a team to be able to implement SEO. You can't even say that if you are a small company, it's easier, because it's not. It's the same competition for the same keywords and you might be fighting against competitors that are 100 times bigger than you, if you are a one-man band. Even if he's just local. And also, you mentioned something before, that is also something that I'm empathising with a lot. And is: start to look at SEO as soon as possible, because you will need to at some point in time, and also, this is something that we always say to everybody that we speak to, in general: this is a part of the marketing mix, whether you want to consider it at this point or not. So you will want to do it later on, at least, make sure you implement best practices right now, even if you don't have full resources, and maybe 10 K to invest in SEO per month, every month. But just make sure to stick to the best practices so you can build as much as possible for when you will be ready to scale everything up and really be aggressive with it. Because you can save a lot of money. We have clients that save maybe double the paid ads within six months budget because of a good SEO strategy. This is why I'm curious to also get your thoughts on specific things, because I think that many questions are on many people's minds and I think that us, having this conversation really upfront is going to be useful for them when they are looking at their marketing budgets, marketing, planning, content planning, because content marketing is on everybody's minds now. And it's gonna stay here. So it's really good to look at it. Let's take a scenario. We have an accounting firm in Hammersmith, in London. How could they look at SEO and then be certain that they are combining the local SEO tactics and local SEO building for ranking well with other types of general SEO? Is there a recipe that you usually advise clients to apply? 

 

John Vuong  

Yeah, it's a good question. Because not only is it boutique, which is all situational, we need to benchmark it, figure out where the gaps are, opportunities and figure out what the competitors are. Because there's no point, generalising it. Everyone is unique in their own situation. They might be hyper-competitive in the region, or they want to dominate for the Bachelor top in London, which is a huge marketplace. But in Google SERP does that niche or category display a radius of five miles, or is it 25 miles as well? So it all depends and there's too many variables. But best practices create a good website, create good content, resonate, understand your community, locality, understand that schema, set everything up so that it's properly deployed, speak to the persona avatar as your ideal customer, start creating good asset pieces from social to bookmarking account profile counts, start populating it. Get a good reputation out there. Start getting third party reviews, start implementing on your own site. All these are best practices, but business owners have no idea what I'm talking about. The challenge is: how do you educate them to then get them to take action? Because they're so busy running a business, that you want to do a lot, but you need them to understand the importance of them, just taking care of their clients and game reviews. A lot of people don't even do that. So reputation is a huge signal today. Because if you go to Google, that map is always there on the first page. And right now, it's a three-pack. I don't know what's gonna happen next year, year after because Google is always changing the layout. And for me, it's always focused on what is out there today. And do best practice and yes, they're gonna pivot, they're always going to be added somewhere. Either play to pay or you want to earn it yourself. Organic is earning yourself without paying, you're gonna get a lot more quality clients because you and me, we might not even be clicking on ads, most of the time. 70 80% of the users, myself included, click below the ads knowing that that business owner paid for the ad. So if I'm the average customer, I want to be found on the map and below, because that's earned. And understanding that and business owners just want to be on the first page of Google, they don't understand how it works. They don't care. So the whole challenge is education. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. And I'm thinking because there's another case that I'm sure you encountered a lot. Mainly in the startup world, or when the business is small, and they try to get the most off their back, and maybe the first website that they have put up, I'm sure that this happens a lot for you as well, when you work with local businesses, many of them would many times go for the cheapest option, or one of the cheapest options in terms of website providers, and they end up having maybe like a nice looking website, but probably not SEO optimised at all. What would be your favourite tool that you'd recommend people tuning into you to audit where they are from an SEO perspective?

 

John Vuong  

So not just an audit, but just building a website, there's a lot of options. You can go with Shopify Squarespace, then you can go WordPress, Joomla, you can custom. So depending on if you have a budget, do it properly, own the asset. Make sure you set it up properly so you have full ownership. When you're renting space, like on a Wix or Squarespace or Shopify site, you don't have full back end access to do the things that a full SEO agency can actually implement and do. So that's the first thing. If you're serious, do it properly and be serious. In terms of audit tools, there's sem rush, there is  Ahrefs, there's Moz, there are so many different tools out there for SEO purposes, but each of them will have it for different purposes. Once for links, once for on-page, if you want to scrape for title meta tags there are other tools. The only problem is: which tool would be beneficial for you and how do you utilise it and what are you going to do once you figure out what's wrong with the issue? Do you have a team to implement the changes? Do you understand what these tools actually mean and how do you deploy it across the board? Because a lot of SEO companies might show you the tool, but what's gonna happen? Are you now accountable and responsible to make and implement the changes? If so, do you have people that actually can do it? Do they even know what to do? And then it's the team versus an agency which includes a team of people that do content, SEO strategy, link building, development, graphic design. Everything is for SEO, which is strategy consultants, versus someone that is trying to do all those things very well. And it's very hard to do that. So how can you compete with someone or an agency that does everything really well?

 

Andrei Tiu  

For sure. But the reason why I was asking you is that, since the pandemic is becoming even harder in medium-sized companies or larger corporations when they need to approve budgets for specific things or initiatives, including SEO in this case, they need to be able to justify the claim and to showcase the benefit. I know that many conversations that had lately revolved around this challenge, so that's why I want us to be able to help people listening to maybe get a better pitch, if they feel this is what they would need. Because you're right, you can't do everything right. And mainly, if you manage five channels and maybe a team, is going to become impossible. If you don't have Google Search Console set up, then maybe this is a good thing for you. Initially, in order to see what keywords drive traffic to you, what pages get traffic organically and maybe if you have any issues in signals in Google. And then, personally, I like h refs a lot, but it's pretty complex and it's gonna be hard to learn it quickly. But you have a $7 trial that you can try for seven days. So that's one good tool. Also the Neil Patel too, which is pretty okay and it's free, or it has a free trial. So if you guys want to look at that in terms of seeing what the backlinks are to your site and things like this, you can compare the data from Google Search Console and one of these tools. And I think, if you have these two points of reference, you might be able to get an overview of where organic traffic is coming through, if you don't already, and then to identify what could happen if you were to pursue an SEO strategy for the next year. Also, you can use the Google Keyword Planner, if you are curious about search volumes and things like this, Google Trends is also good, because you can see the trends in searches for specific keywords that are relevant to you. And then also, as John, you were saying about combining more broad keywords, maybe or key phrases with key phrases, that can indicate better or higher purchase intent.

 

John Vuong  

Yeah, I think the biggest challenge for marketing teams that are representing a fairly large brand is: all the time, you have to pitch your case, right? What's the benefit, versus doing what we're doing now? What are the pros and cons? What are the case studies? What have other people done? Even if it's a big ITM of structure, you need a case. And the reason I focus on small, medium-sized businesses is decisions are made really quickly. When it comes to budgeting, it takes time to implement, to pitch to see if it's approved, there's a lot of middle people, a lot of things never get done in a timely manner. And as an SEO agency, we always focus on being proactive, because by the time that pitch is done, 3-6 months down the line, things have changed. The whole proposal piece is different, because now Google changed their angle, right? There are keywords that are different, there are competitors that have already overtaken you that you don't even think that we're going to and they've invested heavily. So with SEO, I feel it has to be a part of the marketing mix. You need to make it a vital part of every marketing campaign. Because if you don't, you're going to be left behind, and it's going to take you longer, and it will be more expensive to start later.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. For sure. And also being consistent is key. Once you started, I think you guys should really stick with it, even if there's one month that you feel is not going particularly well or you feel 3 months is a lot for you to have the patience to see some results, I think that you should really be consistent and as John was saying, build everything that you need around your brand, from an SEO point of view all the time. Because when you're tracking competitors, even if you have a good content strategy, and maybe two weeks, for any reasons, you are not posting those new articles, or you are not creating those backlinks or certain activities that are best practice, and you need to do in order to stay competitive, mainly, if you are competing against very popular keywords, then this can have a very big impact on your performance and as John, you were saying, there's probably always going to be bigger competitors that are fighting with you or against you for those keywords. So it's gonna be easy for them to take you over. So this is a long term thing, you should start as soon as possible and stick to the best practices and don't interrupt it as much as possible. Because a paid campaign you can implement now and you can run for three weeks, and then you can stop it for a week and restart again. And you might be losing a bit of that algorithm optimization, but then you can get it back. Well as with SEO, you probably have to work a bit harder in order to get back to where you were at if you stop it. John, what are your thoughts for 2021? Any insights that you found and think would be good to bring forward?

 

John Vuong  

Just be careful. Understand where all your asset pieces are. Understanding your biggest asset, your website, your community, and don't play in the community of other channels like Facebook. You don't know what's going to happen. If you have a Facebook group, be careful. Anything that's not your own database, be careful. I always say: own your tribe, own your community, get those email lists, get those contact information, so that you can then market to them or inform them, educate them, because it's your database. As opposed to SEO driven. Yeah, continue to produce good quality content in depth. Understand your avatar, understand your client. SEO will not change if you're doing things right for 10 years. So I forecast to keep doing the right thing, there's always gonna be people trying to hack the system, thinking they can get things done in a month or two months, and slowly and steadily wins the race. Everything is earned. Yes, you might suddenly get someone that buys 1000 backlinks on Fiverr. They're gonna get hit. Don't worry about what other people are doing. If they're not real competitors. Look at what your true competitors are doing and if you're not following the footsteps, you should. Mimic exactly what people that are ahead of you are doing. And once you're at the same level, do a little bit different, unique. But until you're there, that someone you should replicate, follow it. It's not rocket science. For me, it's just learning, understanding. There's a lot to be learned. I didn't know much when I first started. Now I know a lot more and I'm comfortable speaking it, because now I speak in front of people. Because I know what it takes, I know what happens, how it's happened, I have a team that's educated me every single front with hundreds of campaigns that we've worked on. So we actually have proof of what works and what doesn't. So again, it's different when you're working in house versus a company that's seen with so many other best-case scenarios, as well. So look at what you're planning on doing for next year or this year. Work with someone that you can trust that's in it to help you assist in whatever direction that you want to go with. Because there's a lot of good agencies out there. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Would you have any information hub that you'd say people should be looking for news or for advice?

 

John Vuong  

Yeah, I still rely on blogs Moz, to Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Lan, h refs is great. SEM rush has its own. I mean, there's tonnes of information on SEO, I go to a lot of conferences. So now it's more about the relationships right. I'm part of some private slack groups as well. It's all about knowing what's out there. Building your own community of people that you can trust, they're giving real information. And once you are comfortable with whatever you're doing, it's okay, because you're never going to be learning everything and it's okay. Because it's impossible to know everything. Just know what you can, control and do the best you can.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Sounds good. So John, if people want to reach out to you directly, or if they want to connect with you guys, what are the best platforms? Where can they message you?

 

John Vuong  

Yeah. You can check out www.localseosearch.ca. We're based in Toronto, Canada, but we service clients across North America, Europe, as well as Australia. If you want to connect with me on a more personal level, you can check me on LinkedIn, you can find me on the team page of the company site and just find my name. We also have social channels. I don't know what they are. I have a team that manages all the social and for me, that's not our biggest driver of leads. I mean, just do good work. We got a few referrals and word of mouth and we enjoy and we're passionate about helping good businesses become great businesses.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Love it. Okay, so we'll have the links in the description below as well guys, check them out there. And John, until next time, it was a pleasure to meet and to discuss. Wishing you all the very best for this year and really keen to stay in touch. Guys, as always, if you feel that you'd like us to organise a second episode together where we would dive deeper into a certain area that you felt was particularly interesting, let us know. Either join me, ping us on our team email we'll try to make that happen and until next time, John, thanks so much again, have an awesome year, rock it, and look forward to speaking soon. 

 

John Vuong  

Thank you.

Cross-Channel Marketing & Business Process Automation Insights for 2021 [Sam & Josh Ovett]

In our first episode of the year, we have invited Sam Ovett and his business partner and father, Josh Ovett, Founders of Mobile Pocket Office. Today’s episode includes subjects such as the changes that have happened in 2020 in terms of business processes, trends in sales & marketing automation for 2021, as well as designing a future-proof business infrastructure for this year and a touch on multi-channel attribution and how to implement this correctly in both sales & marketing.

 

Mobile Pocket Office helps new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity.

 

________________________

 

Connect with Sam & Josh:

Website: https://mobilepocketoffice.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mobilepocketoffice/

Sam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samovett/

Josh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshovett/

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Sam Ovett, who is a Co-founder of Mobile Pocket Office, and is leading the way in helping new and established businesses augment the human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity. And today, as we are just kicking off 2021 New Year, we'll look at how to best automate business and marketing processes this year in order to have your business or your department bring better results and rockin’ basically for the year. So Sam, how are you? How's everything going? Very happy to have you on the show.

 

Sam

Doing good,  can't complain, thankfully. And you know, even though the pandemic is raging right now I am doing good. And everybody wants to get online still. So that is keeping us very busy.

 

Andrei

Nice. We also have the weather to go with it. I see the skis in the background. 

 

Sam

And the skis are right here, eight miles from the nearest ski area. So we keep very busy outside along the way. And so it's a nice way to break up being on the computer with going outside and playing. You know, so we're very we're like at 500 feet for what would that be in metres for the non-metric listeners? 

 

Andrei 

Oh,  I’m not good with these translations either.

 

Sam

But it is really hard to metres. I'm gonna google it real quick. It's 2590 metres. 

 

Andrei

Oh, that's cold.

 

Sam

It's cold and high, but it's beautiful. We're up here in the mountains in just about Boulder, Colorado, in the United States. 

 

Andrei 

Nice. Nice, nice. Super. So I think to you know, build the report and to get people to know you're reading. Let's Yeah. Tell us a bit about you. Tell us a bit about what you do with you know, with the company with your father with you know, the projects that run at this point in time. 

 

Sam

Yeah, so I think I'll share my background for a bit because I think it's interesting, it's a little different is I went to school for environmental sciences. And then after that started into the world of the outdoors, and ended up guiding and being a professional athlete in the outdoor world as a whitewater kayaker, and funnily enough, what I realised in that, as you're a professional athlete, that primary aspect of what you realise is, as a professional athlete, one of the primary things you are when you work for when you're sponsored by different companies, you're part of the marketing team. You may have physical talents, but really their physical talents that you're videoing or posting about or sharing what you're doing, and you really are a part of the marketing team. And so there's a couple of things that came out of that, that I pulled over into the business world when I made my transition a little while ago now. And I think that's a little bit unusual, but I think people can relate to that from the physical things they do. And if they also look at that, and then that brought me into the world of realising: wow, there's so much that can be automated from the marketing side. Because hard work and marketing are done, and getting people interested. Would you agree? 

 

Andrei

Yep. 

 

Sam  

Like that's the creative work. That's what the athletes are doing. That's the stuff that's, you know, you're thinking, what can I do to get people interested in my company, right, no matter what your company is, you got to get people interested in that largely can't be automated super well. And we talked a lot about automation in our company, Mobile Pocket Office, because our whole focus is to help people be human where it counts, and otherwise automate, right, free up time, for your resources, to scale. All those wonderful things that we talked about. We talked about automation. But somebody's got to do that marketing work to get the interest going. And then once you have that lead, it's a matter of what do you do with it? So that's the background, that's where I came from at it. And also, the other thing we found out that I think is interesting, because I was participating in these very high-risk activities, right? Where I could die, or get very seriously injured or drown. I was paddling off of large waterfalls and down steep riverbeds. And what's interesting about that is if you take that and people think about what are those things that I do, right? Do I do anything outdoors, it's kind of a higher risk activity, right? Take those lessons and apply them to business because you wouldn't go jump into something that was super scary or super big for you without stepping up incrementally. And the same thing we do when we think about business with people when people want to make changes in automation. Don't make massive change all at once. take it to step by step, do little pieces and then track the effectiveness so that you don't take your business along the way because a lot of people are going from a fully manual business almost entirely to automating pieces of it, but you got to be careful, right? You got to do it step by step. Because if you don't, and you automate everything, you may realise: Wow, those human touches that we just automated, had a significant impact on bringing new business or referral business.

 

Andrei

If you were to extend this, there was saying, which I don't remember exactly, but I'm just gonna say, the idea of it, which was to do with automating the right, or the wrong thing. So you have to be able to choose what you automate because you can automate and amplify the right thing or the wrong thing. And you don't want that. So definitely, okay, getting it into small steps. and choosing wisely, I think, is very, very important when you look at revamping.

Sam 

And look at the risk to right, what's the risk to your business if it goes wrong. And so if you assess it, and you go, what's the risk, if it goes wrong, if the risk is low, and you want to try it, go ahead, if the risk is high, try it in this smaller segment of your business with a certain segment of prospects and customers. And then if it goes, well apply it to the rest of the business. And so take that experience of judging risk that people do in the rest of their lives and apply it to business. I think it's a really good way to roll new, exciting process and automation out, especially when it comes to following up with all that hard work you've done on the marketing and getting those leads, and that interest in your business to happen. Now you got to get them into customers, right, and you got to fulfil the promise. And then hopefully, if you do, right, you'll get referrals. And we have a framework that people can use, that we work with, with folks that I can share. But that's a bit of the background, it's different. So I like to share it, because it also means that, you know, we work with businesses across all different industries, and to help them become very successful in what they do. And give them the ability to scale and track their effectiveness and their marketing. And what I think is really interesting here is that you know, you don't have to come from a traditional business background. You'll learn it along the way, if you're interested, you know, you'll pick it up, you got to do the work. You got to figure it out. But I just like to show that anybody can come from any background in this stuff. And really pick it up if you're motivated to figure it out. 

 

Andrei

Sounds good. So let's actually, before diving straight into it, how what's your take on 2020? Like, what do you think has really happened in terms of businesses, you know, using technology, automating stuff, you know, online things?

 

Sam

So I think a couple of things that popped out for me in 2013, obviously, it's been really challenging for businesses has been regulated out of business, right? Hey, you got to shut it down. That's tough, right? That's the challenge, where you can't open your storefront. There are alternatives, though. And for the businesses that are adapting quickly, that technology is more readily available than ever, to adapt, because I think the one thing we all realise is, wow, if we can't be in person, right? Like, let's just be like that, you know, there's a pandemic, it's real, it's affected the world and shut down a lot of businesses in the traditional way they operate it. However, there are a lot of opportunities to adapt, but you have to be quick about it. And you have to make that transition to stay with it. What we realised in 2020, is that many businesses that didn't think they could be online, are now online. They do they generate revenue, digitally. They do something or they've adapted their process to become digital. And so what I think is really exciting. From this, obviously, there's a lot of pain, but what's really exciting it's, it's brought so much to the world online, because they had to, and it's forced people to get online that otherwise weren't. So now the number of people who are familiar with using the internet and doing business digitally and are comfortable with that has gone up enormously, which also means your customer base has gone up enormously of the prospects and people who are comfortable working with you, people aren't afraid of it anymore. They don't have a choice, it's the new way of operating. So there's another piece there. And the other piece is that you can automate stuff, you can create revenue streams digitally, and even like a brick and mortar company, for example, restaurant, you know, think about the to-go order experiences and how much those have improved. If you just think about it. That single focus aspect of it. Right? It's way better now than it ever was, it's way easier. Because it's innovation was forced, you know, everybody had to adopt it. The other aspect of it that I think is really important to recognise is people still crave human interaction. And I think that's the biggest lesson of 2020 is that automation, digital stuff can totally change the way that you get revenue, right, it can secure your place in business, to make it so you're stable, no matter if you can open your doors or not physically, but people are still hungry for the human touch. Right. And we don't necessarily that touch doesn't have to be physical in person. But the more we can do to create a personalised, lovely, great human experience, where we are showing that we care about that customer that came to us, that human that came to us and chose to spend their money with us and use our services or buy our products, talking in general. That is where you can win over the competition because now everybody's online. I mean, not everybody, but like the majority of businesses are online. In businesses, we didn't think we'd be online. It's the experience that makes the difference. So if you can use technology, and automation, to create a better experience, not only for you internally to make business easier, but for the person doing business with you, and make it more human, and like, show sincerely that you care more about that customer, you're going to keep winning that business, and people are going to keep referring business to you. And that I think is what we learned in 2020 is that there was this massive push for automation, right? And it was like, we were getting humans out of the equation. But what we realised like we need to be around other people, we need to feel the energy that comes from people caring about other humans. If you can automate that into your process, man you and

 

Andrei

Yeah, I think it's, it's really about finding that sweet spot, isn't it? Okay, this is everything that we can automate. And this is why it's gonna be good for us. And then it's: Hold on a second, maybe 70% down the line, actually, we need to deliver that personalised that or that personal email or that nice follow-up in order to facilitate the next steps in the direction that we want to really?

 

Sam

Yeah. All right. I'll give you a really cool example, right? There's a company that we did a recent webinar with about this, called Ignite Post. The founder's name is Arne, you should interview him, his cool guy. And he started a service that allows you to send handwritten thank-you notes. I have one here at my desk because I was 

 

Andrei

Oh, yes, I heard about one of the last things you can do.

 

Sam

It looks like this. Yeah, there's a couple out there, for sure. It comes like this. It looks so totally handwritten my name on it. And then you can put your logo here, it's not a pitch for it. I just have to have it in my deck because my desk because we did that. And this is what the letter looks like. But here's the thing, right? Can does that look handwritten to you?

 

Andrei

Yep, it does.

 

Sam 

It's completely automated. So you're taking the value of the and people will have differing opinions on this. And it's controversial, which is fine. But you're taking the value of creating a handwritten letter, which shows that you care. And this doesn't mean you care any less, but it just allows you to do it at scale, and touch all of your customers consistently. So if you work that into the automation, to where it goes out at the right point in the customer journey. Imagine if every time someone bought you sent them a thank you note, and it was handwritten. And you had the option of typing in what you wanted to send. And it automatically sent like, you didn't have to write it, stamp it go to the mailbox, do all that work. It just went. And then you followed-up and said: How are you liking me? The thing that you just bought? Right? Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks later? Automated. So that's what we talked about. We say like, keep the human touch but automated.  That's a beautiful thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's a cool example.

 

Andrei

It is. Actually, I was trying to remember where I heard about this first, and he was a B2B Tech company, and they used to do this. They weren't doing this post-purchase. I think They were doing this just before closing the deal. 

 

Sam

Yeah, I can get a bunch of ways, right. Like you can insert it into the process.

 

Andrei

Yeah, I think it was something like sending these letters. And then the letters were containing also a code for free coffee from another partner. Do you know? 

 

Sam

Absolutely. 

 

Andrei

Yeah. I mean, he was phrased in a way that he was like:  Oh, yeah, I know, we're gonna be working together. So this is just a coffee that we'd have together right now signing the deal kind of thing. But yeah, it was cool. And I'm happy that you brought this up because I think, you know, mainly now since we don't meet that much anymore. Things like these are probably not very, not happening very often. 

 

Sam

No, I mean, think about like, when was the last time you got a handwritten thank you note, just like sad per second, where there was a birthday card or something? Not just from a company. But when was the last time you got a handwritten note from someone? Yeah. Do you remember it?

 

Andrei

Unless it was like a close person to me? I got one from a company that was a business partner at that time, and we are still in very good relations.

 

Sam

And how did it make you feel when you got that? 

 

Andrei

Well, he was cool. He was unexpected. He was a Christmas actually a note and it was last year. And it was from Bart who was on the podcast. In our first episodes together, so yeah, that was cool. 

 

Sam

And you remember it right? Now think to like, for example, not that you shouldn't send an email, write emails, very powerful marketing tool, like and conversion tool. It's awesome. But can you remember the last email you got from the same person? 

 

Andrei

Um, well, it was to do with work. I mean, yeah. He was certainly stomping around that. But yeah, you're there's a fair point here. So definitely, yeah.

 

Sam

So it's like the power or the experience is more impactful when we can do those things that are physical, inhuman, but if you can automate it, and they happen like they happen perfectly in the process every time. And that's the cool part.

 

Andrei

So let's try to look them because I'm excited to have a, you know, like a dialogue here. Because you have the sort of processes background, and I know that you guys have a lot of projects on helping businesses better their processes around automating sales and marketing, like this. We also have a lot of projects that focus mostly on marketing, but then when it's about, like, we don't work with sales teams directly, but I know that you guys do. So it'd be really interesting for the people tuning in today, as they are just going back into work, and maybe they are having that all-hands meeting, trying to try to improve the way that they work together as teams as well as you know, as colleagues for the year, what would be some common causes that you think are easy to optimise, and then maybe automating a certain, you know, percentage, Like, take a medium-sized business, let's say in, it can be Tech, it can be SAS, it can be serviced, and just go for some of the keys may be case studies or scenarios that you encounter on a more frequent basis., and let's see how we can inspire people that are listening to us right now to instigate some changes in their organisations as well.

 

Sam 

So I think that I love that, that way of looking at it. And I'll give you actually, we'll do some case studies. And I give you a framework that people can go and do right now, with their companies to actually do this. Because the main thing we look for is where are the disconnects? Right? So if marketing is doing all this work, I would put it in context them and apply the framework of marketing is doing all this work to go out and attract interest. And hopefully, they're getting they're also like capturing those leads and send then at that point, that's usually where it starts to break down, right? There's a focus on going out if you have mortgage department getting interested, but then when the lead comes in your database, whatever you're using, right, you could be using HubSpot, Infusionsoft, like, whatever it MailChimp like whatever you're using to get that person's information on your website, right digitally, somehow. It's what do you do at that point? Does it just sit in your database, does it go through a process and then get scored and hand it off to the sales team at the right time with information that's valuable to them that they can act on? And so it's looking for where those disconnects happen, and then it's kind of doing that all the way through. So If we take a step back, I'm going to give people a framework to do this. And I'll give some examples of where, how we've done it before people. So people can start to think, Okay, this is how I would do for myself, the first thing you have to do in every business five pieces, no matter what industry you're in, it's applicable everywhere. If the attract business, you have to convert that business to leads and sales, then you get to fulfil whatever you promised with the sale, otherwise, it's a quick way to go out of business. And then you've got a fish after you've fulfilled it, that's where most people stop. The next is you delight a customer, this is what good companies do. Right? And they give you upsells that can get more out of a product or service, or they give you some training, or they share complimentary things. Or they ask you, you know, creative ways that you're using their product or service they share with other people that are using it. So you got to delight the customer. And then most people this happens, if their cost if their product or service is good, it just happens. But it could be better, and at that rate that it happens, that could be higher referrals. To attract, convert, fulfilled the light, refer - those are the five pillars, if you will, you got to optimise. So that's your big picture systems that run a business, then you've got to go in and look at those and go: What are the processes within this? What do we do to make this happen? And this is where you can start to identify the disconnects or the opportunities. So the first thing that you do is, and this is a really easy thing to do, but it's also kind of hard because you have to have everybody do. You give everybody just a spreadsheet? And you say okay, for the next two or three days, write down everything you do every about every 15 minutes, check-in, have you done something different, have you done an action? So if you're marketing, what are you doing? Right? Are you publishing ads with running ads? Are you setting something up? I make a UTM. If you're converting what are the different pieces that you're doing to convert, even if it's some of its automated, usually we have some kind of thank you email, and they're welcome. When somebody opts in, automate, automatically. If you don't have that, then you're you know, starting base level. But a lot of people have that at a minimum, and then to fulfil, what are all the processes that go into fulfilling? Do you delight your customers? If you do, what do you do? Right? Even if it's not, even if you just have to write down the things you're doing, you'll start to see you have patterns of process. And then refer when you do ask for referrals or get referrals, what do you do? What's the process? So once you have those over two or three days is a good starting point. Now you have an idea of the different busy work the tasks that make up your business.

 

Andrei

Okay, guys, so we just had a little tech glitch, but actually, you don't have to. So you remember Sam here, who was with me just a minute ago. And now he made us all a surprise. And he brought on his business partner, not only business partner, but father as well, because Sam and Josh were together, they run the company together, and they are father and son. So Josh, Hello, nice to meet you!

 

Sam

You know, it's like, it's like that whole idea of like, bring your child to the workday. But it's the reverse is like bring your parents to the workday. And so, you know, Josh is a ball of energy and super fun. And he tells stories like nobody out there that's kind of, you know, wired right around because he can relate these case studies of what we've done for people better than anybody I know. So I think that'll provide a lot of context for how people can dive in and like grab onto this and do it themselves and start down the process themselves.

 

Andrei

Sweet, let's kick it then. So basically, a few minutes ago, Josh, where we left me to go Sorry, I was looking at the daily activity of you, your team etc, like of a person and then mapping of trying to work out the processes so some pass it back over to you and then we can expand from this and Josh, feel free to interrupt us.

 

Josh

Don't worry, we're not afraid. We're not afraid to talk and contribute.

 

Sam

You know, to pick up where we left off is the idea that basically that you know, you have these five areas of your business so you focusing on you attract, convert, fulfil, delight and refer, and you have to look at those, how they work together, and then independently the systems that are involved inside of each one of those and then the processes that make up the systems. And then from there, you figure out. Based on what I've learned, and remember, we talked about that personal activity log, going in and making note of what you actually do to run the business, the busy work of business. That brings you to the step of what can I actually automate, which is where I'd like to actually Josh to pick up and talk about some of the examples of where we've done this with people because here's the deal. That is all well, and good to discuss it in that way. But it's pretty high level. And it doesn't feel like Josh's dogs are too - it's like, extra special. And, and so I'm sure my dog will come in at some point. And so, you know, we live in a world where everybody's word of mouth, and you got all these beautiful animals, and it's wonderful. And so that said, one of the things that I think is important is that understand in context, how this can work for you and what you actually do with it. So Josh, why don't you pick up? I think one of the most recent examples, that  I feel like it's really applicable to a lot of businesses is the case with consulting, an educational firm that does consulting like they help children with their education. So it's kind of like tutoring, but they have a process. And they have a lot of volumes, and they were limited in their ability to scale. So, let you take it from there. And that's the key.

 

Josh

So just to kind of give you a little background with it. I got a call and said, Hey, we heard you're an expert at this. And I said, Thank you, and how can I help? So I need a little thing. Okay, what's the thing? I get all these inquiries that come in, right marketing. And those her advertising and promotion are working. And now it's working too well. So she was getting 20 to 30 emails a day from her, you know, lead magnet, through an email comes in with all the details No, like, not 20 different questions that people filled out because it was that part of the funnel? You know, she's doing it, you know, advertising tool or webinar to a pretty standard consulting world and somebody who's doing services or as opposed to products. And it's going gangbusters. She teaches children, guesses what, in this time of that we're in, children need lots of help. So they are yeah, they do. So there's this really cool culture coaching. service as well, you don't have this problem, I want the data to go into my database, my CRM system, so I don't have to copy and paste all these, imagine copying and pasting 20 to 30 bits of data into one by one every time a leak came is in your database, so that when you actually then had the call with the person, you know, all that's right in front of you. It's pretty straightforward and simple. But you know, there was a copy and paste. And then it was like, then I need to send them a contract, and then I need to enrol them in all these different pieces of my process, you know, different systems, like, you know. So, let's just sum that up in real one quick thing is, she had to take the lead the system, then take that, but then have the appointment. And then once they bought, you know, take money, do contracts, and get them all inserted only stuff. Well, she was shy about 90 hours a week of being able to get all that little girl literally. So our first step was okay, let's make your league go from when they go and get an appointment that you ask them these questions. That's straight in the database. And that sounds pretty straightforward. But that wasn't happening. So now I eliminated all that copy and paste, that was gone. And then we set up the processes to automatically enrol them and everything else after they paid money. And she was taking money in one system and then putting the information in another. So I said why don't we take it? Why don't we do this? Get the information, have the appointment, you know, take money online while you're on the phone with them. And then check off the box that says enrol. And that sends him a contract which gets a sign and it comes back and merges all information out, signs them up into four different systems assigns all the work to the primary person who's responsible for that, who she's assigning that account and sets up everything in less than 30 seconds. That little process I just described, took 40 hours of work every week off her plate.

 

Andrei

That's a very good tie, literally.

 

Sam

And Josh, let's talk about the alternative, right? Let's say she didn't do this if she didn't figure out automation, what was her alternative to scale, to grow actually to grow the business?

 

Josh

Throw more people at it, which means throwing more money at it, throw more training at it. You know, management is not wrong with anything with the people part. But all of these tasks and they were literally tasks were something that was: A or B or done or not, it wasn't anything that you have to interact as a human with, somebody just had to do with, it would just know it to onboard a new client and all these steps was roughly 30-45 minutes after a sales call. And you're doing six of those a day, you know, your day is shot.

 

Andrei

So just to get into the details of how or what you guys use to implement this process because I think it's you know, it's an optimization that can be done for many companies in general, like the sales element of you know, like getting the inbound lead and getting it into the CRM, and then onboarding it and follow up etc. It's a process that usually for everybody takes some time and is automated, maybe more or less. So in this case, he wasn't automated at all. What were the exact steps or maybe if you can share some tools that he used in order to implement this automation? Maybe some people on the show can actually look at them, and see if they're fit for the businesses or try to get inspired by how they could work around their internal processes.

 

Josh

So the most important thing, okay, the tool, there are plenty of tools, we'll talk about the various tools. So we pulled tools that we need, anywhere to create, whatever is needed to do. But let's, let's talk about the bigger picture, okay? I come from a manufacturing background and this thing called lean manufacturing, there's a process called Kaizen, it's a Japanese process, it's very well known in manufacturing, we apply that the software, okay? Kaizen means continuous improvement, you're always looking for a way to make things better. Because software always changes things get faster, easier, better, whatever your processes change, they get bigger, you know, more complex, but you always have to load your continuous improvement. And then the second thing, the terminology in Japanese is called Poka Yoke, okay? And that's important. This one's very important. Figure out where it breaks, so it doesn't break anymore. Okay. So the idea here is, and I'll use this comment is, if I hand you a bag of chocolates, right, let's say M&Ms, and you put it in your pocket, and we never seal the chocolates, and you know, you sit down the chocolates rolled out, whatever, that's a hot day, now you get that pocket, right? The way that you prevent that, say: Okay, how do I fix that? A ziplock bag, you know, at least the chocolates will stay in the bag, they melt, they don't get in your, you know, on your clothes, in your keys and all that stuff. So, thinking about what happens in the process, that can muck it up. Because then if your process gets mucked up, you have rework, you know, but you know, people don't like the experience they had, it wasn't good. You know, and then if you can't do it right the first time, we need to find time to do it again, it's just so busy. So the idea here is, you know, always be looking at your processes, right? And now, there's a couple of tools, these are tools to think about. One is if you hire somebody new, is the greatest opportunity to figure out what screwed up in your organisation. Why? Because you got to teach that person exactly what to do step by step. And most of them, please and go. After you tell them everything you do. They sometimes go, Well, why did you do that? When you could just why do you walk around that table and go over there and do this when you just walk straight that way. And the usual statement is because that's the way we've always done it. They don't take the time, you're so busy, you don't take the time to look at each little study, you got to break down the section, you can do this as a big monster, you can't eat the more elephant all at one time. One piece of that. So you look at a piece of that process and you improve it. Okay, make sure that you and sometimes you might not know what you could improve with. That's why you hire people like us sometimes to say, Okay, what couldn't be done? Or what are you doing now? what's available? So you need some sometimes some outside input if otherwise, you're kind of breathing your own exhaust. You know, you don't know what you don't know. So you kind of do it the same way. So some of the simple tools that we use, okay, one is called diagrams - Dotnet. Okay, it's a diagram. Is free. So you can run an experiment with it. But you actually make a diagram and you know, this is gonna be on video when we do this, this is going to be, I'm just saying is, we can show you when it's published. Yeah, when it's published. Is it gonna be a video was published?

 

Andrei

It's also going to be a video. So we have Spotify, iTunes, Apple.

 

Josh

So if you happen to be looking at this as a video sample. Right now. Yeah, so you can see what it is and what one looks like. So in the grand scheme of things, right. Some of our customers, when they describe when I say, you know, describe your process to me, and write it down and maybe, you know, on a piece of paper or whatever. And sometimes I get something that looks more like a flea, flicker, football. Play, you know, why is it arrows and all that stuff, and I'm going, Okay, walk me through it. And this is an example of is this happens to be an online university accredited university. And this is all the processes that they run people through to enrol and go through courses in the university. This all used to be manual, step by step, they had a team. Now it all happens automatically. Another team, about five people were freed up to do a lot of other things.

 

Sam 

And this is just the enrollment aspect of the process. These are different pieces of it. And for those who are watching this, we're just looking at diagrams online of the actual process that we built for people. So that to represent very clearly what this is, what is the outcome of this stuff actually looks like? How do you do it, and it's really, you think about like a pinball machine, you know, this happens, then this happens, and this happens, and this happens, and this happens. And you and you document all of it. So that you know really clearly what's going on.

 

Josh

But there's one problem with a pinball machine. happens the same way twice. Okay. And in business, you want consistent processes that happen the same way every time because you have a consistent outcome, like plumbing, right? And I use this phrase, some people cringe, when you press the lever, you expect it to flush. If that process doesn't happen, you know, nobody's happy, right? Um, when we talk about a process is making sure that when you fix one part of the process, okay, you also then think about, okay, this parts working really good now, look downstream because now you've caused a problem for the person who now has to catch what you've done. So, you know, I, in this case, we increase the process by almost tenfold. Now, we didn't I knew what the next part was, because the comment people say is, well, you're already two steps ahead of me says: Yeah, I know, when we fix this one, where that's going, now who's responsible for it? Because that's my neck, you know, that's the next person to say: I got too much now, what do I do? Okay, how do we automate that? So there's a cause and effect when you improve things, okay. It's like, you have a big diameter pipe going into smaller, if you increase the pressure, it may not be good, or if it's not good, it's gonna leak, and things go. And all the good work you did here is gonna fall on the floor over here. So you know, the idea that those tools are, and one simple tool that we use, it's really crazy simple. Through the Kaizen process, and we send people this on Amazon, is literally a roll of brown paper, okay, that you can tape on your wall so you don't mess up your wall. And then a bunch of multicoloured sticky notes. And each of these sticky notes has a different colour for because they mean something different, like the beginning of a process, the end of a process, you know, a transition from a process or this is an action. So we actually have a document and a link to buy it on Amazon and resell it. But you know, you buy a box of sticky notes, certain colours, and then you have these and then you can actually then line them up and work as a team that's in it. Each one has a different meaning. So everybody's on the same page. No. And that way you can really stick them up and then make a process that people can follow. And you know, because the sticky notes you can move around. And then you just writing on them or, you know, then drawing a line says, Okay, this does this, the second,

 

Sam

Let me jump in for Josh, what happens is, in manufacturing, when people do this process, where is where it originated from, you can see it's such a visual process, right? You can see the steps in manufacturing, it's physical, it's real. And you can tell and you have to physically move something. A lot of times, when you get into the digital world, there's a lot that happens that we forget about, we don't think about, right? Oh, yeah, just we get some leads? Well, there's actually a lot that goes on in getting some leads, right? And we follow up with them. Okay, well, manually do you have to export some data out of one system that you use to capture them? And then put them in another to follow up? Is it done all the time? And then when they buy, is there more manual work that has to be done? Right? If that was in the manufacturing, we had to, you know, lead you to pick up the person that you just attracted and move them into the next bucket? And then you know, okay, now you're going to sit in front of this other salesperson, and they're going to talk to you about this thing, they there's videos, you know, okay, now we're going to put you in front of the product people, and they're going to talk to you about a video, right? That would be very real, it would be very visual. But what happens is it's not it's an email that shows up on your computer, right? It's sent out of a system that's triggered by automation that was connected to hopefully a form that you didn't have to export and import it into somewhere else. And along the way, you have to know where these people are coming from. Right. And where the leads are. So that's the idea. Go on. with that. I just want to put it in context, because like, why do you do this, in this way is because you're trying to make a digital thing physical, so you can really get a handle on what's going on.

 

Josh

And I'll give you the kind of follow-through. So the coma, we freed up the time to do for her to do more stuff. Right? And so a call that we had just a week ago was okay, I ramped up my marketing, I'm getting more leads. And I have too many leads to talk to. I think that's a good problem. Right? Yeah. Okay. Well, now what? I said, Well, tell me about why they're, you know, tell me about them as well. They're not all qualified. Is it? Okay, so you're advertising and marketing, and the whole process is driving you now, twice as many leads as you had before, which is awesome. But, you know, the complaint was I spent my whole Saturday following up with people, and none of them was qualified. Okay. And, you know, she was thinking of how we do this, and, you know, okay, we won't take as many we'll have less, I mean, her schedule is full. I said: Why don't we do this? Why don't we filter out those who and do some, do some more qualification than you already do? And, you know, sometimes you want to, sometimes you want to tell somebody, in this case, is, you know, are you a good prospect? Tell me, so we have these crazy questions. So we designed a set of questions says, you know, what, do you feel, you know, 1 to 10? What do you feel about this, this and this, and depending on the logic, it's either you get to make an appointment, or I appreciate your opportunity, but I don't think we'd be a good match. Right, and, you know, cut down the flow, so that you're talking about talking to the right people, we had this problem happening with another customer who's a tech business. They were getting 500 leads a week. It was amazing. But they only have three people in the department. You know, so, and they and the funny part is, we're doing no advertising, this was word of mouth, and just, you know, marketplaces that people were inquiring. So, you know, the counter was is, you know, the people that couldn't keep up with it. A lot fell through really tough on people. I said, Why don't we ask them a few questions before they make an appointment? Well, the 500, those 500 leads went down to like 300 we write and the 300 because we qualify them, some people can write to doubt, you don't hear just don't get some demo. Some people like: okay, you need to talk to us. And some people's like: No, we need to make an appointment to read those larger accounts. So we're really qualified. But over a period of 90 days, they had more sales than they had ever had in the compared to the last two years combined. Because now they were talking to the right people. Because they said: you know, if you just if we layer advertising on top of this, your problems not going to get better. All right, and then, you know, you take the next step as well. They're their support. People weren't salespeople, they're a good implementation and not if somebody wanted to buy it was good. And so, you know, the missing piece was they didn't have a sales team. They didn't need one, they've been business 10 years and have 10,000 plus customers. And haven't had a salesperson this far. Why don't you know, right? So I said, you know, you address the questions that these people have, well, why don't we do a webinar, an automated webinar? So that way, you know, people can watch, have a sales presentation, answer all the questions, and have one on every single different product, they had 44 different products. So you know, is complex, depending on they were a connector type thing. So they connected A to B and depending on what she was on each side, there were a different methodology and different reasons to use it. So we created a webinar, which then had, you know, all the commonly asked questions that were done through there. And then they either got bought the product right away or if they were qualified, they made an appointment. You know, the call was, this was a January of this year, they doubled what they did in the last 90 days in a month. And we found out that they were getting 40 hours of people a week watching webinars. That's a full-time salesperson. You didn't have to, but you only had eight, we have built it once, and it plays many. And guess what, you know, it's still running. So now I have, you know, they got smart, because instead of having their support team, and having more employees and more, you know, there's nothing wrong with having employees, but be human work counts. Otherwise, automate their case. 

 

Sam

Let's actually bring that up after this story. Yeah, at the end of this, because I'm going to talk about that.

 

Josh

Sure. But the idea here is, we took the, we identified the problem, using that Kaizen and Poka-Yoke type thing is, where's the problem? And then we had to think about how would we go about fixing it? You know, their comment was originally a webinar, what kind of the webinar was I, you don't have a salesperson, you know, you tried doing a group meeting and you get 50 people to sign up, and 10 people show up, and then we're disappointed that I said, people are interested now, let them decide, it'll help them qualify, it takes it off your back. So you know, that success caused other problems. So you know, that pipe keeps going, Okay, now, we've got too many of these. Now, when we do them, it also means we had to go back into their processes and get them to fix. So there was a lot we did, but you know, we look at how do we generate more revenue? You know, how do you get more leads and more prospects in? And then you got it? 

 

Sam

How do you do it with less human resources to make it happen, and use technology to handle the busywork of it?

 

Josh

Here's the philosophy, the best business model, there is the one that doesn't need you. Okay, in the business, world, you own the business as well. And the other. The other process is you also own the business, you know, can you take a six-week vacation with no phone and not worry about it, you know, there's automation involved and proper processes to follow. It makes it easier. I did it this year, I took a six-week vacation, I disappeared. Deep last night. I went on vacation, I said I'm not I'm taking a digital holiday.

 

Andrei

So before going into the subject that you wanna, you want to dive in, I want to go back a bit into because I want people to be able to touch on some actionable bits for their teams or their processes or their businesses. So for example, from our discussion so far, we know that one of the places where we can automate more things are in this lead capturing and then following up or filtering or scoring, so things that we discussed until now, and this goes into aligning marketing with sales as well. So it's a very good point, it’s, you know, it's somewhere where everybody or almost everybody can do a better job at you know, filtering these automatically. Now, what are some tools that you found useful apart from the diagram? No, sorry, I have it written down here. So yeah, Dotnet diagrams.

 

Sam

I tell you what we intentionally stay out of talking about tools we, and here's why. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna flip the script on what you just asked for a reason. People get caught up in their tools, and they don't think about their process. tools are great. The main thing you need to do is figure out what do you need the tool to do? Not what tool should you get, figure out what you need the tool to do. And then reach out to whatever the software is that you're using, and find out if it does what you need, specifically, very clearly understand the specs that you need that to do to pull off the function of automation. But don't get caught up in the tools because tools are tools. It's like if I were building a house, and we're pretty, pretty adamant about this. And you're like, what tool do you use to build that house and I got a toolbox, you know, and it's like, I got a bunch of different types of drills, and like they all drill, the main thing is that the battery stays charged long enough and that it works to go in. If it accomplishes that function, then I can put the screws in the wood and build start, you know, do that function to building the house. So the thing is, does the drill work? Does the tool that you're getting work? Does it work reliably? Does it have a good support team if it goes wrong, that's how we look at tools outside of that. Josh, you can add to it your thoughts, but we're pretty like very much, it's just tools. People go about the tool, this tool, that too. And it's like: Look, there's a lot of cool tools out there. But if and the other thing is, people get in, I'm giving you a little bit of monologue on my, you know, is my tool rant. This is people get all caught up in their tools. And then they have way too many tools and half the tools they have overlapping the other. And now their data is in all these other tools because they're buying tools like it's going out of style. And I don't try it, so I'm trying this. An nd then before you know it, you've got this mess of tools, and you still don't have your process fixed or dialled or automated. That's my take on tools, you know.

 

Josh

When you start a project analogy, what do you got?

 

Sam 

And they should do, everybody should write down everything that you use, okay, you know.

 

Josh

We make a Google Sheet or Excel sheet, whatever you use a piece of paper. We had one client that had 96 different software, online tools they were using to run their business. 

 

Sam

That's actually not uncommon, when you actually look at all the tools, not just one core tool, but all the tools you use to run a business. Literally, if you took one away, you would lose a function of what you do.

 

Josh 

So in this case, when we were setting, then there was so much overlap, we were able to eliminate down to 36 tools. Okay, and there was one tool I use as an example. They told me, you know, we get, in this case, there are 500 new leads every month, this is an awesome tool. Like really, I want to know about that, you know, somebody else that we work with, it might be a good tool. And I said: let's look at that. I'm curious guy, I don't want to generate leads, you know, especially when a lead is worth 1500 bucks apiece to them, as you know, that's cool. Um, we went to the tool. And then we looked at this month and notice that we look, we went four months back. And then there was a 500. And I said: so what happened from last quarter? Says: I don't know. Said: you pay for a credit card. Right? Why don't we check there, see if it's not expired? And he looked at it, and when you're right, it's not working. But they didn't tell me or I didn't see the email, you know, I said, Let's see 500 leads your conversion rate is just $1,000. Right, your conversion rate is 30% of those. So you know, that's 15,045 grand over the last 90 days, you're missing. It's not in your cash register, so to speak. I said: How much is it all? This is 100 bucks a month. I said I pay for it annually and make sure it's on your calendar in the future. That $12.100 just cost you 45,000 because you missed the renewal, or somehow it stopped and nobody called up and said: Hey, dude, you know, you want to keep this going. So I would blame so to speak the Software per company that selling it that says they don't have a process since it, you know, they lost their customer pain, you know, in that case, but the customer lost a really big benefit. So that's when processes break when you get too many and or, in some cases, when you have all these tools. I look at it this way, if you want to dig a hole in your backyard, you can use a spoon, a shovel, a backhoe just depends on how big the hole needs to be. And how quick you want it done. Right? A backhoe, dig that hole in one scoop? No, it might take you two days to dig the vein with a shovel with rocks and everything else. And a stone it might take you six months. So it depends on how quickly you need to move that.  Oh, what's the urgency? People come to come to us and say: I have an opportunity. And I need something to do this. Yesterday, one of our customers came to us and I did a big presentation in front of 5000 people. And everybody wanted me to everybody wanted to buy, were willing to pay for me to put it up there so that I want to put up there for 30 days and have it disappear. And they can pay access. I can't figure out how to do that. I said okay: how much is access? Just curious, 185 bucks to see this series of videos that are all that she presents. I said: okay, give me 30 minutes. Is it just how much is gonna cost me? Nothing. No one, she sent me a tip she sent me she said I'm sending you a holiday tip. She said $500. Like: Thank you. You know, we'll celebrate, you know, we'll go out to dinner or whatever, we'll have a fun time. But because we knew what needs to be done, and I didn't buy any tools, I use the tools we already had and just kind of figured it. When the email that for me was I tried doing this for a couple of hours, couldn't figure it out. Can you? Can you look at this one? Yeah, here it is. Because we knew what to do. And we knew which tools and how to configure them. So knowing what the capabilities of your tools are as equally as important rather than going let me go on in it. I need another thing. And you know, you gotta say: Oh, this solves that problem. You know, and you've now just added more complexity when it breaks doesn't get paid for? Or who knows. I mean, if your audience is business owners and marketing people, you know, if somebody leaves or takes a vacation, and nobody knows how to fix that tool, or, you know, how did that tool work, and it stops, then sometimes you don't even know why is stopping. Anyhow. So there are many tools, and there are tools that we use, we'll be happy to have a list of them at the end or whatever. But I think that the biggest challenge that we see when we're working with clients, is this take a step back and say: Okay, let's look at the process. What needs that actually happened? And what can where can we remove errors, rework, okay, and speed up the process.

 

Sam

And you have a saying that kind of encapsulates that whole idea. Where you take the focus away from tools and put it on the business,

 

Josh

Oh, be human word counts. Otherwise?

 

Sam

Well, there's that one, there's the other one that you've used for, for even longer, you know, that you actually taught me is to say, look, we're business people, first technology, people second, in that in that order versus technology people than business people. Because if you try and solve, if you try and just find technology to solve business problems, that's different than solving your business problem and then applying the technology to the problem to make it work.

 

Josh

So you know, you need to find out and figure out why before you do your house.

 

Sam

Yeah, yeah. And if you try to solve the problem around revenue or something like that, you got to figure out what is it that you have to do, or that you want to try and then apply the tool to get to your endpoint, the tool is just a means to an end. It happens that tools are amazing. Now, they're incredible. And there are lots of different nuances to talk about. And I think that's a wonderful thing. And I don't mean to shut that conversation down. But I think for the marketer, and the business person, and the salesperson and the people who are involved in this kind of automation work, you shouldn't have a hard time going on G three, and looking up tools to solve your problem in that space. I would say we'd encourage people to do is make sure you don't lose track of your data. Keep your data in one spot and be able to track the effectiveness of what you're doing very, very clearly, because the lack of effective tracking is an enormous problem in the automation, rather, to say I made a change globally, there's a difference. I don't know what actually caused that. So I don't know what to work on what to improve. Whereas my process, could it be made better? Right? I ran a bunch of ads and made more money, I spent money and I made more money they match. Well, guess what? We had a gentleman that we worked with, spent 100 grand a year on advertising, Google ads, Search ads. He came out ahead every year as profitable. That's cool, right? We all would like everybody who runs ads would love to do that. But, you know, in the dirty secret is that's not the case. And that, and that, the deal is that once we actually put tracking in place, in addition, automation for that project, but once we put tracking in place to find out what ads were doing the work, right, because what, when we talk about marketing, you got to find out what's doing the work. And when you ask yourself, what's doing the work. The work is sales, closing new business. So what ad originated, the business that actually gave you money, not just leads are great, clicks are great, they can make you broke. And so you need to be tracking that stuff. And know which one you're driving says. And we found that $20,000 of his 100,000 drove all his revenue.

 

Andrei

As it happens, the 8020 rule, right?

 

Sam

Yeah. And so this was like a, you know, and I'm not kidding about that, though, that isn't just like a blanket, you know, it wasn't exactly 20, right? It was like 20, whatever was the number, but on average, $20,000 of the revenue he did wasn't a very creative advertiser, he just was a consistent advertiser. And he found something that worked, and it worked for him. It was a national movie company, across the United States. And then, so when we found that out, he was able to save $80,000 a year. And put that, you know, at that point, you can do whatever you want with it. The smart person, if they had an assistance to scale the business, they say, well, the $20,000 that's actually bringing customers and not just leads, why don't we take that other $80,000 and put it towards that. Now your business is growing, you're tracking it, you see the effectiveness, and you can see if that as you invest that, you know, if you tap out the market potential or whatever, but the key is: know what's happening, because very few people, citizen, they're good, but people I got the data. And when I ask people, can you make a decision? Like, can you make an actionable decision to improve your business, meaning generate more revenue, or get whatever action you want, you know, get more conversions from leads? And if you can't, then you're you don't have good data, or you or your data is not organised in a way that you can use it. The key is that any of these systems you put together for automation, make sure you can look at it and go, what does this mean? And what action do I take with the data?

 

Josh

So there's two and two are going all over the place. 

 

Sam

In that case, you know, the original problem was, you know, I asked: do you know what makes a sound? So you can we so you can track what we're spending on? And the answer was, he couldn't tell me. So is it alright, let's look at the data. The data doesn't lie. So he took 10 years worth of data, right and stuff that we had some tools. They said: Oh, hey, Stu, did what can you do with a million dollars? Could you buy a small island off the coast? But that? He says: yeah, I said: well, over the last 1012 years, you spent a million dollars and you've just kind of throwing it out the window? No, I said: Would you like to know how to take that and you know, if you knew you could only have to spend 200,000 7 million to get the same result. Would you be interested? He's like: Yeah, what am I dumb? I'm like, No, okay. Let's look at the numbers. When conversely, we have another scenario where people are advertising, okay, let's just go down this pipe of technology, right? multichannel attribution. Okay. In other words, you're advertising on Google, sending emails, Instagram, Facebook, you know, people are seeing you all over the place. But the common is how do you know what started the sale and what closed the deal? The whole customer journey. Are you tracking all those pieces? An interesting scenario is one of our customers, they spend a couple  $1,000, six months earlier. And they said, you know, that campaign suck, we didn't get much out of it. Literally, it was not even returned or clicks. And then we'll put some tools in, they said: Hey, that campaign was interesting. Look at all those $200,000 of revenue that came in from that, that came in that had no attribution on it. But we tracked it back to that original campaign. That campaign started out with an ad then I went to a couple of emails. But I said: you know, what, why don't you try running that again, but the difference is that if you put money in and you know, you'll get it out in six months because that's how the processes. And we saw that what we saw the seventh email, after the retargeting etc, actually close the deal. But in the tool, it said: You made a sale, and there was no cost to it. How'd that happen? Let's look at the customer journey, and say: Look, you know, you tried something, but there was a delayed reaction. And that just proves the fact that customers take time to buy sometimes.

 

Andrei

I'm very much with you on this one. And it's also something that we discussed with, like every occasion with our clients as well. And everybody has been very positive about, you know, validating this. But indeed, and we can also like Google Analytics is the simplest way where you can look and see, you know, the challenge, and see how many sessions average word happening per hour.

 

Sam

Yeah, I'll tell you there's one little problem. It's good. But it misses one key thing. The recurring sale?

 

Andrei

Yes, no, I'm talking about tracking.

 

Sam

The attribution back to the recurring sale, which, if you're a smart business, and most businesses can do this, there is an opportunity to create some kind of subscription or recurring sale in your business. And if that sale, you got to obviously know a couple of things, how long do they stick around on average? Once you get it going? Right? What's churn? What's it cost you to get that in the door? And then how long does it take for you to make that money back and make it profitable relative to that advertising? Basic stuff, hard to track, largely, you know, like, we all talk about it like it's just so everybody knows their tack and their, you know, lifetime value in the churn rate. They don't, is the reality? A lot of people don't, they're missing that data. They have a sense of it roughly, anecdotally, but they're large can't point to numbers on a screen and go, and being able to track back there, tie back the recurring revenue, to where you can look at a dashboard and go, that ad brought someone in four months ago, we've made this much money from that ad spend. That's a big deal.

 

Andrei  

It is. I mean, it's very different from services, or B2B to B2C. So I think the platforms are a bit different when you can go to.

 

Sam

Unless. I mean, how many services do you know that have retainers? Yeah, would that be a recurring sale?

 

Andrei

Um, depends on how you put it. 

 

Sam

Well, look, did you have to pay to get that money again, through another advertisement? Or a new need? That's recurring? So? The track that backs to the original source. I'm not beating up on you. But I'm saying there's recurring revenue in this as a company, you know, where did that come from? What did I do to get it? If you don't know? Then you're blind.

Andrei

Basically. So to finish off, the idea was for services, you can link back to your CRM, and then you can track their the customer lifetime value. And you know how long they have been lucky. 

 

Sam

You know exactly which ad that came from? 

 

Andrei

Yes.

 

Sam

And you help people do that, right. Instead of like, if people don't, though, in their business, it does not attack you. But if people aren't doing that in their business, they need to talk to you. It's up to you know, where they need to go figure it out themselves on the internet, how they do that? Because if you don't know exactly what advertisement or content is driving these new sales, even if it's a combination, but there's something that people started on, and then there's something that closes the business, and there's the in-between, what's the mix, what's the cocktail, you don't know what did it then you're blind to where your business comes from.

 

Josh

There's one thing to do is one thing that I've seen, and I had this happen, we worked with one of our customers. Yeah, they did a television ad across multi markets across the United States. And that went into, you know, a, you know, automated phone system that would take your money or send you to a live operator. And they had internet advertising driving leaves, they had average or they had, what was happening was is we had people doing Facebook, people doing a search, people doing TV ads, people doing radio ads. And the interesting thing was, we put together some tracks and we talk about technology, what's the pipeline? And say: okay, you were the sales for the week. Every one of the different advertisers claimed that they made the sale. I said: How is that possible? Well, because when it is because it was a touch to every one of those attributions along the way. It all claimed close the sale. But in some of the type of technology that we use, we can see which one started which one followed up with it. And the funny part is, I said: Guys, Monday through Wednesday, I can tell you who started the sale, which and from which source they came in first from. It's a bit I can tell you that on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, what closed the deal was the follow-up emails, and some of the retargeting, so you may have started the interest you that's the marketing part. But your spend, the biggest spend was hundreds of 1000s of dollars in TV advertising. And then we're just trying to push, you know, a couple $100,000 a week. Yeah, it's good. It said: most of your ads are not close. I said: the cheapy Facebook ads, and the Instagram ads are doing gangbusters. You know, but you know, the markets that you're working with, you know, I said, you know, they thought they would they took an ad out on the football channel. And I was like: You spent a lot of money, but we got no sales from that, you know, home shopping network and home, you know, the Home and Garden TV, it made more sales in the football show. But it took three weeks for those sales to close. So you know. But if you have data and you know that in the marketing game, if you have data, then you say this is what happened, and you can then repeat it. But the idea here was all those sales, you know, when they add ran and all that stuff, the automation drove all the systems, no humans needed. In most of the case. 20% were had to go to an operator, the other 80% of the sales happened automatically went into the sale system, then you send over, it was like: Okay, we got all these sales. Now, how do we ship them? I said: Well, what do you use the shipping system? Let's connect the pipes, or the sale when it's done goes into shipping. And then the next comment I got was that it was obvious, I knew it was coming and they just weren't interested in listening at front. Firstly, they said the accounting processes: how do I extract the data from the sale system and can account for it? It's like, well, why don't we just put it in the accounting system, sales, shipping accounting, so simple. And this is an old wine company been around for 30 years. And, you know, their idea of integration was download, upload. You know, I mean, they had factories, manufacturing product, but technology-wise on the internet, they were it was really just an email, you got an order, you know, type scenario.

 

Andrei

I think also very important for you guys tuning in probably many of you, I'm sure you do this already. But when you look at, for example, this case study, and some of you I know are running TV ads, radio ads, to get a read online, or maybe even magazine ads and stuff like that in print, or outdoor, I think this is the best time where you can look back at your marketing mix and your campaigns and everything that you have done for the quarter or for the half-year, and try to map everything, again, to the customer journey and how or what you want that ad to do. We've just done this with our clients. And it was very, very useful so that they can track the right KPIs together with us together, with the agencies that they work with. And then, you know, if you run a TV ad, certainly that's not going to be converting the same as remarketing ads on Facebook, but that might trigger a surge in Google that you want to be ranking for, whether it's online or like organically through SEO and then you have to make sure that the keywords that you are on that you want to rank for. You do If not, then run Google ads so that you can still be in the first results for that category of product or service or services, and then you know, try to map everything according to the customer journey and see where like, you basically work a process around the lead generation element of marketing. And then, as you guys were saying, to try to automate as much as possible across the board, so that you can scale that up when you have the recipe and is working.

 

Josh

So when you take that type of recipe that you're talking about is, you know, let's talk about that. I'm talking about three types of touchpoints, if somebody comes to your website because it drove that, right, you can retarget them with a message to come back, right? Regardless, depending on what source you're targeting another one platform. And then the next thing is they give up their email address and you've got a lead magnet, you know, stop sending that same return, you change the message of, you know, come take a taste, I can try to get

 

Sam

Move them to the next step in the process in the customer journey. But it was something we really talked about the idea of a customer journey, relative to the rest of it. 

 

Josh

The next part would be is if they have taken that next step, and given up though some information, they've taken an action. Alright, so now they did a demo, maybe they finished the demo. You're doing retargeting, so you know how to do cold ads, that same person, you should now be helping them to say you should be buying, you know, this is a great thing. I know that as an example, I use this as an example. If you buy something from Zendesk, they may have changed your policies from a year ago, but I noticed this, you buy something from Zendesk, alright. And you're gonna get retargeted for you know, months, he buying Zendesk, and they don't upsell you and say: Hey, you should try another service or shoot for somebody I already bought, why do I see your advertisement? You should know that I purchased already.

 

Andrei

That's the data integration issue like you know, just the way that they manage everything through by the way are you guys using any CDP at the moment or oil helping your clients integrate CDP is. Do you have any recommendations or thoughts on these for our listeners?

 

Sam

When do you say CDP? There's a lot of acronyms in this world. Oh, yeah, by CDP, that acronym, maybe I don't live under a rock.

 

Andrei

I'm sure you know what I mean. So is the customer data platform, so where we can run omnichannel marketing from. So basically, the single thought, they are very useful in order to get the single customer view, and to be able to integrate your multiple data touchpoints, from from from all channels, and to basically know which customer went through? Or saw which types of advertising from you? What was their journey with you etc? So you can remove that?

 

Sam

For sure. Okay. Yeah, I'm familiar with what you're talking about. Good. Josh.

 

Josh

One of the tools we use that can attach to any of those front end systems is a tool called Wicked Reports. Alright, and we're going to we're talking about, yeah, that that is a multi-channel attribution tool that allows you to see your customer journey, and also see the cost of you know, every metric that you want to see along multiple channels, and it can feed it also straight into multiple CRM systems. Okay, it's integrated. Now, yeah, it's simple. Once you learn how to use it, green is good. Yellow is not so good. And red is terrible. That's, you know when you set up your dashboard and say: Okay, this is working, and you can actually see your ROI and over what timeframe and where it's coming from. And you know, what actually started the deal, what close the deal, and how they went through the journey. So that is one of the tools were certified partners, and that we actually came upon that kind of the backwards version, and we help people understand their data. But the idea is that data comes out of your CRM system for names and sales. And it can be connected to e-commerce stores and webinars and everything. I can track the fact you mentioned billboards and stuff like that. If you're getting clicking billboards, and a code is going into a system, we can send that information back to those reports and say, you know, it started from a billboard and it wound up on a retargeting ad, and then it wound up from an email and then it went up for sale. What was the journey and you and you see these cockamamie journeys that people take to get there? And so the idea is if you can figure out where they start, and what actually helps close the deal and what timeframe it is, you feel better about: Oh, happened. Integrate all kinds, you can track everything with a script that you put on there. And it's like: boom, it just, you see more information coming into your system. You know, the challenges and you think, you know, that is evil that no need to learn how to drive that dashboard? What's the data there? So those people who are experienced with it, I go: aha, those people never done or forgot where I start.

 

Andrei

So now going back, like a beat back, but we might have already discussed what Sam wanted to say. But you, Sam, you want to say something and I interrupted you. So this discussion? 

 

Sam

I think I want to talk about is the idea of being human where it counts and otherwise automating, obviously, that's our tagline here at Mobile Pocket Office. But that's not why I'm bringing, you know, we have it for a reason. And it's the same reason why I bring it up, is because I think one thing, and we talked about this very early on, when we were in the podcast here was that I think the thing that we learned through the pandemic, is that, you know, it's still happening, but that we really learned is that, yeah, you can do most of your stuff online, but people are still hungry for human interaction, they want that they appreciate that. And now people are getting it less and less. And so the idea is that if you can integrate into your automation, and design into your automation opportunities to remind you at the right time when to be human or automated, so it feels very human, and it gets literally the same effect. That's a really good thing. And so there are examples of that. That is really exciting about what you can do. Right? Did I already mentioned the thank-you card? 

 

Andrei

Yeah, we spoke about in the beginning.

 

Sam

Yeah. So we spoke about that. It's one example. The other example is, you know if it is not free to send a thank you card that costs money, right. And it's a cost, you have to factor into your, your total cost of acquisition. But one thing that doesn't cost that much money other than just having them a platform to do it on is sending a video, a personal video to people, thanking them, welcoming them, whatever you want to do at different stages of the process. Josh, you've probably got it up on your phone there I do. We use a particular tool to do it. And again, the tool is not important, an important tool is called Bunge, they happened to be cool people, we like him. But we can give you that link. People buy differently. show people how it works, Josh, real quick, because I think this is cool. This is human. And not only is it cool and human, but it’s also helped people generate a heck of a lot more revenue. Okay, and I'll give you some numbers, while Josh is showing you how to do that like it's incredible.

 

Josh

So it's an app, every time a certain type of lead comes in, or a certain type of thing comes into our systems increase revenue versus: Hey, you have a new lead. And I know on this where they came from, where they came from, all the data is collected is putting in here. So I think and push that person's name, it says record now. I say: hey, Sam, I'm so glad you replied to our website information about doing automation, and specifically X, Y and Z. I look forward to talking to you and I know you made an appointment, and then we're going to talk on Monday. See you there. Actually, I didn't record it. I had a little hit the little record button. Hey, Sam glad you made appointment. I'll see you on Tuesday. Look forward to helping with the automation. Boom, I hit stop.

 

Sam

Let me give you an example.

 

Josh

And now Sam is gonna get an alert that he's got a message Yeah. didn't reply to me too.

 

Sam

So let me give you an example. Right. Let's say you have a product that's a consumable like coffee, right? You have an e-commerce store. Not a crazy idea, right? I think people can relate to that. There is a company out there called Ojo coffee. They used Bonura 14 weeks they went from $35,000 a month in revenue from subscriptions to 75,000 a month, revenue from subscriptions. And they found that in their case, their subscription customers averaged 20% more revenue than non-subscription customers, so that as strong incentive to, you know, improve the number of subscriptions, that's meant to mention that it helps stabilise, you know, what you can expect each month in their case for the business. And the owner of the business took people into where they were roasting coffee. He's already there. And he just recorded a video of him doing it, saying: thank you, you know, wanted to show you around, and thank you for your business. And it was literally that simple, in addition to educating them that they could actually do a subscription that was an option. People didn't know it, he just explained, hey, if you want to do subscription, that's an option. So that helped people move from non-subscription customers to subscription customers. And those numbers are again, $35,000 a month to $75,000 a month in subscription customers. I mean, if that doesn't sell a tool like this and the little bit of time it takes to be human and investing in this. I gave up on you, right?  

 

Josh

You know, another tool that we're experimenting with... 

 

Sam

But let me just add one more thing in there, Josh, like the key piece, is that, well, how do you know, right, you've got to send that at the right time somebody purchases, they didn't get a subscription, you want to convert them to a subscription. As soon as they make that purchase, you want to thank them and educate them on the subscription and make sure that it's easy for them to take that action. So you need automation to tell you when to do that. And that's the key, then you are human it sends it’s automated, they get it. And they can go take care of setting up a subscription. So that's what we talked about when we say to be human where it counts, otherwise automates things like that. Because they are not just for fun, but because they grow your revenue, and they make for better customers.

 

(...)

 

 

End of Year Special - Personal Branding & Using Law of Attraction Tactics to Build a Better New Year [with Andrew Kap]

Our last episode for 2020 brings Andrew Kap, #1 Bestselling author of “The last Law of Attraction book you’ll ever need to read” and today, as we’re getting closer to a new year, and therefore a big opportunity to make it amazing for ourselves, we will have a special episode - looking into both personal branding marketing and promoting information products, but also into how we can shift our perspective and build an exciting future by looking into mindfulness practices and how to use Gratitude to anchor your mindset for automatic success, using Andrew’s Time Lapse Method.

 

Connect with Andrew:

YouTube: Andrew on YouTube

Amazon: ”The last Law of Attraction book you’ll ever need to read”

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  

Hello, everybody, this is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our episode for today is going to be a pretty special one since we are getting close to a new year 2021. And I think everybody is apart from the professional matters looking at ways of improving their lives and making it a far better year that may be 2020 was for some of us, so, or for some of the people that are tuning into us today. So our special guest for today is Andrew cap, who is the number one bestselling author and speaker, his most popular book being the last law of attraction book you'll ever need to read. And today we are getting, as we're getting closer to a year and therefore a big opportunity for all of us to make it an amazing one for ourselves. We have a more special episode, as I mentioned, looking into both personal branding, marketing and how to build your personal profile more as a, you know, as a professional. And we'll discuss with Andrew here, tips, tricks and strategies to enhance your personal brand. But also I'm looking at ways of promoting information products. And we'll also look into ways you can yourself use the law of attraction to your benefit and maybe get insights from this when you are looking at shifting your perspective towards building your life in 2021 and beyond. So Andrew, really excited to have you on the show. Thank you for being here. Really exciting times ahead.

 

Andrew Kap  

Thanks for having me, Andrei. I'm really excited. And I'm sure people listening like wow, that book titles a mouthful. And I'm sure we'll get into that as well. But thanks for having me. And let's see where this conversation goes. Amazing. Amazing.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So I think as always a good starting point for the conversation would be a quick intro to you. Tell us who Andrew is? What are you doing professionally how you got into the law of attraction and publishing the book? What's going on in your life?

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah, wow, let's see if I can make sure the answer doesn't take up the whole interview. Right? Well. So I, I'm an entrepreneur for 20 years. And I think when you're an entrepreneur, you kind of have to kill your own dinner, so to speak, you're gonna find yourself looking towards certain modalities, positive thinking things of that nature, I found out about the law of attraction probably 16 or 17 years ago at this point. And for me, it kind of like it resonated, but I was very push and pull about the whole thing. I was inconsistent. When I used it, it would work. But then when I didn't, it wasn't like I was, I used to think the law of attraction wasn't consistent. It was me who wasn't consistent. And I'll give the short version I went through about 12 years ago, where I lost my first business and girlfriend all within like the same week. And not fun, obviously. And at that point, I'm like, Listen, something's got to change here, this law of attraction thing kind of works, I'm going to be really stubborn and indignant about the whole thing. And just go all in and just do five or 10 minutes every single day. And some people here in this like, will get what I'm saying here. And some be like this is not true. But like the results were miraculous. Within two weeks, I felt better, which is saying a lot with a broken heart. Within three months, I'm in a brand new healthy relationship and completely over my x. Within four months, entrepreneurs like this part, I'm making more money than at any point in my life before that, and within six months, like everything's different, in the best shape of my life and waking up happy and fulfilled. And it wasn't even until 2019 that I decided to even write a book about this just because I was at this point where I'd been using those lessons like, if you work it regardless of whether you believe in it or not. I'm like, Listen, I want to do something new in my business where I'm enthusiastic and excited to interact with customers. When those emails come in, I'll be answering them with enthusiasm, I won't be bored. And I'm like, What can I do with this? Well, law of attraction is just as huge of a thing in my life. Let me follow this thread and see if I can make an impact in something that actually, you know, speaks to me and resonates with me. So yeah, I kind of like to go about my experience as an entrepreneur and marketing and said, like, Okay, let me hopefully put out a good product here. And let me find a way to get out to people and hopefully serve them. And that, by the way, governs everything. For me every strategy in terms of like how do I title something? How do I put a subject heading? How do I put a YouTube title for a video? It's only an angle of like reaching the right people who will be served by the content? Because why would I be very, you know, strategic about something that's going to go to everyone when not everyone is going to resonate and be served by it, you know, to say nothing, the fact that you want to hopefully have integrity in your business. They're not going to spend money on you anyway, so why even bother? Mm-hmm.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so what were the businesses that you mentioned you started off then you just form and build. 

 

Andrew Kap  

That first one was an art production studio, I was actually trying to be a cartoonist. But it turns out, the cartooning part didn't work out. But all the stuff I did a market myself was like having more ways to do it. But um, I mean, the real business like I've been a copywriter, which really serves me in terms of my communication style. I've been a marketing and business consultant. And I mean, I've done other books here and there, you won't find them on Amazon or anything because I took them down. One of them I actually repurposed as something to help people with this book right here. So I've been all over the place in my businesses, but mostly in terms of marketing and copywriting.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super cool. Okay, so we have that pro copywriter point of view, then when we are looking at the personal branding strategies and things that we can bring forward, in order to help the guy singing today to maybe reshape their presence online or think about some quick actionable ways in which they can better their profiles or their company's profiles. Oh, sounds good. Cool. So what are you up to today? Are you only an author? Do you still have the business? What's your life like? Today?

 

Andrew Kap  

Um, I have actually one client, right, I basically pushed all the clients off, I have one right now who, um, I just want to help him if I can, I do very little copywriting work for him. Just because for me, it really is all about, and even my business, that's all about the book. And it's all about the YouTube channel that supports the book, just because it's, it's fun, and it's fulfilling. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs resonate with that idea of like, Who doesn't want to do what they love and make money doing it. And if you can serve people on top of that, that's like the cherry on the sundae. So yet, for me, it's like all about the book in the YouTube channel, and nothing else really.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Okay, so let's talk a bit about you as the personal brand, and about the professional entrepreneur. Where do you start off? or How did you start to look at yourself when you are becoming the business re? So transitioning from you, as Andrew to you, as the entrepreneur and copywriter? And then later on you as the author? 

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah, well, for me, it's, they're all one and the same. And I mean, obviously, like a huge part, just on the author part is you have to give yourself permission. Because a lot of people might be thinking like, well, who am I to write a book? Or who am I to do X, Y, and Z? Well, it's like, Listen, you know, if you have, hopefully, some value to communicate, put it down, and the market will decide for you. Like, if the market is giving you five-star reviews, then who are you to tell them that they're wrong, and that you're not an author, you know, or anything like that. I say, you know, everyone should be giving themselves certain permission to be whatever they want to be. And if they're wrong, the market will tell them, but until the market tells them, there's no reason why they should doubt themselves. And that's the mindset that I take. And I don't even know if that's answering your question, but I think in and as I move forward and do anything, it's just about making that decision of, well, what are the skills needed for this? What are the results that will validate this? Let me go from there. Like, for me, the result that validates a book is that you completed it, and hopefully, you know, it has some kind of semblance to it. I mean, there's so here's the thing. And now we're going off all over the place. I didn't say I'm going to be an author and just try to follow all the rules of authors. I didn't go through a publisher, I didn't go through an agent, I wrote my own book, and I just published it on Amazon. And part of it is because I've been writing for years already, I've been writing copy. And that's no small thing in terms of writing a book because I remember like, even as a kid, but more even as an adult when you get those, those solicitations in the mail. And it's like these really long-winded things about like, here's this health supplement, or here's this magic thing that's going to help you read people's minds. And here's how you can tell your future whatever. I remember reading those things in those things were like mini books in and of themselves, because they had to make sense because they had to keep the reader engaged, I think you could learn a lot more and be a lot more as a copywriter throwing those skills into a book than anything else. I mean, I'm not using the book to sell someone on a product. But the principles are the same, the principle is, I have to have, from page one to the last page, it has to be an experience but journey for them. That's basically following them through on certain points for whatever I want to do. Now I'm teaching law of attraction. So strategically, I first have to build the foundation, make sure they're really on board with it, and then give them methods that are user friendly. Whereas someone that's like, there is a book on math? Well, you essentially want to find, you know, communicate the value of math how it fits in with real life. Maybe you have some really cool formula that you can use to wipe out debt and increase profits at the same time. Like something where I don't know if that's possible. What I'm saying is you want to basically give your value proposition and everything you do, including throughout a book or anything else. So I apologize for the long-winded answer that might have answered other questions, not your legit one, but that's what came to my mind as you asked it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

No worries, that's all he was a very good answer. And this gets me thinking now, since we have people from, you know, very different industries here, we have also solo entrepreneurs, but also Marketing Leaders and, you know, top performance in top performers in international companies. So, you know, everybody is probably looking at getting different things out of their personal branding, or the branding of their products. But what I think we can try to do is, can we try to work out a way of thinking or sort of like a little process that people can go through, when they are looking at maybe what would be the best way for them to communicate to their audience based on your experience? So for example, right now, how are you looking at the online spectator and channels and we can choose which one is best for you? How did you get to communicate mostly on YouTube? How are you communicating on other platforms? Tell us a bit about your, your own marketing strategy.

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah, so just a huge disclaimer, for me, I don't even know if this is the most strategic way to do it. But a lot of this comes down to bandwidth. Like I, I'm a huge proponent, unless you're hiring someone who's doing the heavy lifting for you. I'm a huge proponent of being a master on one or maybe two platforms versus all them because you'll spread yourself out too thin. And for me, it becomes a question of, I think a lot of people they view themselves as, as boring, or one dimensional. And oftentimes, it's only because they're not actually tapping into who they really are. I think this sounds cliche, but there's a real power to tapping into who you are your personality, for example, I'm using YouTube because I think organically that will bring a lot more people to the book, because it'll, it'll get video watchers and video watchers that don't read the book, they might want to listen to the audiobook. And those don't listen to the audiobook. Well, the channel in and of itself can be monetized. So no matter what, that's a good little, that's a good piece for me. But the main thing about it is like I have a really, and you don't hear it in this because I'm just trying to get value, but I have a really silly weird sense of humour. So in my YouTube videos, I put that sense of humour on display, some people are gonna resonate with it, some people aren't. But what I'm not going to do is make up a different version of a sense of humour. That doesn't even represent me because I'm not going to do that. Well, no matter what. Let me tap into what is it about me? That's funny, what is it about me that's deep? Am I emotionally intelligent? Or am I more like a stiff upper lip, like whoever I am, let me push through that specifically, because I'm a huge again, apologies for going all over the place, I was a huge wrestling fan as a kid. And even later, as an adult, I worked for WWF, before they became WWE. And that was at the time of like stone cold in the rock when they were really making their name. And what they would say that that point is, listen, I'm not some gimmick, I'm not some pretend thing. I am who I am in that ring. And on that microphone, only I turn the volume way up. And I think a really good thing, even if you're selling toilets, is whatever personnel you want to put, that it's gonna be your personality, and doesn't have to be the volume turned up. But it has to be the volume turned forward to like lead with actually who you are. Because when you're in step with that, all of a sudden, you've started answering other questions with a lot of stuff autocorrected? Because like, you might say, what does my audience need to hear from me? In order to know that my product or my service has value? Okay, well, I want to figure that out, after I figure out how I'm communicating already, because I might come up with some, let's say, have a really loud personality, if they need to hear something a little bit more like, you know, under you know, understated, well, then maybe I'm not the person that I'm going to have on video, I'm going to hire someone to do that for me, or whether you have to make another decision. So first, you really want to understand who you are as a human being, and what personality traits you want to kind of amplify. And then you want to make a decision, oh, what do people need to hear from my company, not from me, from my company, and then you can decide whether they need to hear that from you or from somebody else representing your company.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Gotcha. Okay, that's a very nice split there. Because I think we always have to remember, you know, that, you know, being the best CEO doesn't necessarily mean you need also to be the best CMO or, you know, the voice of your company. So it's really important. We know a lot of people that they, you know, in the front of their business, and they are driving it like maybe some of the people that our listeners here might be accustomed to are maybe Gary Gary Vee, since he's like a marketing guy. He's very loud. And he's running his companies, but they're also like the people that are running the companies or they're running the marketing departments, but they might not necessarily be the ones on the screen, but they are coordinating all the activities that happen through so very well inside there. So how are you using, in your case, YouTube, to do To get the most out of it, do you use any tools that you find particularly useful? Do you have any strategies to make sure you optimize the content as well as possible?

 

Andrew Kap  

Mm-hmm. So again, this is where I break so many rules. And by the way, people listening for like, how's this guy even successful, he's like not doing all these classic things. Like, I use vid IQ, but not really a lot. I so for me, it's like, rather than being an SEO expert, I just like, when I type in a Youtube description, I'm just using words like law of attraction manifesting, and they're only if they fit in with the sentence and the content and the theme of the video that in and of itself, I am a proponent, again, don't quote me on this and don't think it's the best strategy. But I think platforms like Amazon, and YouTube and Google and Facebook and Instagram, they have algorithms set in place that will do the heavy lifting for you. If you work in cooperation with that, if you're always trying to game and hack the system, you may be successful, but their algorithms are always changing. So it's a lot for me to try to keep up with the algorithm. What if I am steading really on point and really focused in my message and who I am and what it actually is, and let their evolving algorithm do the heavy lifting for me. So for me, a more intelligent YouTuber would look at their videos and say which are more popular. And let me do more videos about that. And maybe I'll do that one day. But the restless, impatient, frustrated version of me is like, we’ll know what content about the law of attraction that I am comfortable speaking about, do I feel like doing today, because for all I know, maybe I'll come up with an even more viral video, or more viable version of content that I would not have come up with, if I was already looking at my metrics. So don't quote me, I mean, look at your metrics, be intelligent, but understand that me, I'm a real breaker. And for me, I'm more about firing bullets in all different directions. And eventually, maybe a week from now, or maybe a year from now, I'll look at where the bullets penetrated most. But right now, I'm even still just, you know, finding myself and in my message, and communicating different ways I give answers on podcasts, that it's like the third time I've given it, it's more refined than the first time I gave it, not because I'm being more strategic, but because I heard in my head, and I automatically figured out a better way of saying it. Obviously not more concisely based on this interview, that that's just it's better and will resonate with more people and better. So I'm, I'm just an iterating machine. But I'm also not too worried. As long as I stay on point with who I am and what my product or services, and I cared about giving value, a lot of stuff takes care of itself for me.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Hmm, super. And now that you mentioned, actually, I just realized, basically, we can say you are a content creator, and then just an entrepreneur because of all the content that you're creating. Pretty much. So. So looking at this, from this perspective, basically, you have everything that you do on the written content side of things. So you know, the book being the primary focus object, and then you have YouTube where you are creating video content and you are amplifying that. But the thing is podcasts, where do they fit in your marketing strategy? or How are you looking at your presence in the podcast space in order to maybe grow your reach as a professional, I'm asking this so that we can maybe inspire some of the people that are tuned in to think about maybe them becoming podcast guests or having a podcast in order to amplify their content marketing effectiveness?

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah, well, I mean, I think podcasts are a really important thing. And it doesn't matter where it's a small podcast, or big or somewhere in between, because by the way, you might do a podcast tomorrow. And the person's got like, you know, five listeners, but a year from now, they'll have 500,000, but you'll be one of their first episodes. So all those new people coming are gonna go to the beginning, and they'll hear your message. So I think there's a lot of power and leverage and value to podcasts that you may appreciate or realize in the moment, or you may enjoy afterwards. But for me, I think podcasts are important for me specifically because it helps get the message like your podcast right now. This isn't a typical podcast for me, like a typical podcast for me is more of like a, you know, mindset or even a law of attraction theme Podcast, where I'm specifically talking about the book, and I'm specifically giving tips about the book for that audience. But I think this is an awesome podcast, and I want to give value and that attitude of wanting to give value, not only bleeds over in this message, but it bleeds over in those things. I'm actually earnest. It isn't like some act like I want to give value. That's how I live my life. And I believe things come back to me that way. Now, maybe one person in our interview might buy a book or maybe I am completely underestimating the receptivity of your audience to the law of attraction, maybe 200 will buy it for me it's not it's all about putting myself out there and refining my message. And you Andrei might ask me something and I'll give an answer. And it's going to be absolute gold on those laws of attraction podcasts later on. I just haven't realized that yet. But that's my way of saying like Go on podcasts like, not only are they good for the sense that you will have awesome guests like Andre, sharing you with the world. But you basically are having this opportunity to continually refine your message and maybe even discover something about yourself that you didn't realize you might be in a conversation with someone and maybe it'll be like a Cohen podcast, and someone will ask you to do something with your product or service. And it'd be like this brand new insight that you never would have even thought of before that will make you a lot of money. People don't I mean, all the Gary Vee people know because Gary Vee used to talk about all the time, but Instagram wasn't about photos, it was like a million different things, or maybe 10 different things. And they finally like to realize that people are only interested in the photos. So they really push that button. But they wouldn't have known unless they went out there and went on their proverbial podcasts of pushing all those different things and seeing what happens. So yeah, I've probably appeared on 40 podcasts since the summer, which I don't know if people think it's a lot or a little, it's a lot for me, because I'm doing a million things. But um, those bring readers and viewers to me every single day.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Amazing. And thank you as well for the kind words, I really appreciate it. And it's a pleasure having you as a guest also, because it is the same as I, as I mentioned in the beginning, I feel that now we can go a bit forward from just talking marketing. And actually, I'm really excited to get into the law of attraction subject because, well, you discovered it a bit before me. But also, this was a big life-changer for me about 15. Now, kind of 12 years ago, when I discovered it. So that's why I'm excited to have the chance to discuss this with you and hopefully, get more people on the show inspired either to look further into it, get your book and read it, or the people that already know it, get more practical with it. So

 

Andrew Kap  

If I may, Andre, just a really quick before we get into that to talk about the elephant in the room, because I think there are certain people listening that are way on board with it and other people that aren't, and I want this to be a conversation that's worthwhile for everybody. So just to give the people that are not into law of attraction, a quick, maybe paradigm shift here, I just want to give a quick example of how I relate the law of attraction practically, of lifting weights to get muscles. And I know that's an oversimplified thing. But everyone can relate. You lift weights, you get muscles, right? But it begs a very important question. What's the explanation behind those muscles, I'll give you two, we'll see which one's more accurate. explanation. Number one is when you lift weights, and you go to sleep at night, the muscle fairy comes out of nowhere and gives you muscles or explanation to when you're lifting weights, you're putting so much stress on your body that there's actually their muscles are tearing in little different areas from that stress. And then your body responds by healing by filling in those gaps with more muscle fiber. Now, most people are probably like, well, that's a butchered explanation, Andrew, but that second one's probably the answer. But I would say it doesn't matter. What matters is you lift weights, you get muscles, you put an X, you get Y, and you do the law of attraction techniques that I described in my book. And whether you believe in the law of attraction or not, or whether it's your subconscious mind, or whether it's something else, you will get these miraculous results that will just come and they will blow your socks off. And maybe even then you won't believe in the law of attraction, you won't believe what I'm saying is true. I don't care, all I care is that you get a result. So I would suggest that a lot that you don't like the gratitude methods that I describe, they will lead to results that you can't explain. But it doesn't matter whether it's the muscle theory, or it's your body healing itself, what matters is you get a result. So I would ask people that don't take the law of attraction to keep that perspective in mind as we go over any other content in this interview?

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Super, thank you for explaining that. I think you're right. I think that, you know, there are people that might not necessarily vibrate with this, but with rather more maybe scientific explanations of, you know, like, our reticular activating system or other things that we might be thinking of. Basically, by the way, for you guys that don't know what this is, basically, it's just that mechanism that helps us focus more on the things that we know actually observed things that we have in more freshness in our minds or in our subconscious minds. But I'll pass the mic back to you, Andrew. So tell us a bit about the book. Tell us a bit about the concept. Maybe like a little introduction before we go into the nitty-gritty. Yeah, for sure. 

 

Andrew Kap  

Well, I mean, the title like you know, the last law of attraction book you'll ever need to read. One copywriter must have written that but it's a very important bold promise that I have to make sure to maintain because, you know, Amazon reviews are going to be honest about whether they like you or not. And the whole thing is, you know, I've read so many law of attraction books, and I've seen so many videos and everything again, I've been on this journey myself, and I'm no better than anybody else. Hopefully I'm just a little bit better at articulating things. But every law of attraction book worth its salt is going to have an explanation of the law of attraction that's going to make it clear to people Every law of attraction book worth its salt will hopefully have, you know, methods or techniques that people can use. where I want to go in my book is explained, why do people read a book and then put it down? And then rather than using it and implementing it, they just go on to another book? Why do they procrastinate? Why do they hesitate? Why don't they get the results that they want from it? So what I want to do is use the book as in addition to explaining the law of attraction, in addition, to really use a friendly, easy, fun methods, I want to hold a mirror up to people to explain their psychological process that they're going through, so that they can catch themselves in the act and make a real choice to finally instead, do something fun for just five minutes a day and actually get a result rather than having to go on to another book, or another $1,000 program, or another YouTube channel or another, anything else that's wasting their precious time. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so if we were to put this into a more like a little practical exercise, or practical, actionable discussion, really around the book and the concepts that you promote, what can people look at or into, or do now in maybe the holiday season and see if they have a bit of time off to reflect and maybe to plan for next year? What would you say would be some core starting points for them that they can start to implement whether they believe or not into the law of attraction, so that they can stand more chances of building a nicer year for themselves, no matter, you know, like this comes from within. So either they can attract more things towards them the right things that they want, and to spot the opportunities better, or just, you know, live more fully and content and fulfilled.

 

Andrew Kap  

So the key thing here is, I'm a strategy guy, we have to be strategic in terms of understanding human nature. The real magic and power of this, whether it's the law of attraction, or anything else, and entrepreneurs understand, it's all about consistency. What can you do consistently, every single day, and for me, if it's something is an uphill battle, if it's something you don't enjoy, you're not going to be consistent. So to start with the whole key about like these methods, methods of, you know, gratitude, for example, it's got to be something that you actually enjoy, that you even look forward to, and it doesn't take a lot of time from your day, it's got to be something that it becomes a choice rather than a chore, it becomes something that you get to do not something that you have to do. So just to kind of say that in the beginning, whatever people are going to do to take themselves into the new year, because these new year's resolutions that people often stop for a number of reasons, but one, because the things that they want to do are actually fun. It's all about finding ways of enjoying yourself and building positive habits. So for example, whether you believe in the law of attraction or not, I'm telling you, gratitude will invite so much into your world law of attraction that people understand it's going to reprogram the universe literally to give you more things to be grateful for. And people that don't believe in the law of attraction, understand that you're programming your subconscious mind, which doesn't go on autopilot as a supercomputer. And really help you move things into your life without you even realizing you're doing it, you're going to get that job promotion, and we're talking entrepreneurs. But just as an example, you get that job promotion, because your subconscious mind is making a more attractive cadence to your voice, you're going to be standing more assertively, you're going to come up with more ideas, you're going to impress the boss all because you've programmed your subconscious mind to do this without realizing it. Now, with that said, if I may, Andre, let me teach one of my favourite methods from the book. And people can actually experiment and try this and see how it feels for them. And I call this the time-lapse method. And it's pretty simple to do a gratitude exercise where you're basically going to write down 15, things that you're grateful for. Five of them are from your past, five of them are from your present, and five are things that you want in your future. And the key about this is they are all going to be written out in the present tense. Again, we're programming our subconscious mind or the universe, we're both here, we're writing this out in the present tense, we're going to write all 15 down, and then we're going to jumble up the list. It may be the first things present, and then a future and then the past and who knows what. Now, the really cool thing is you're going to read through each item on this list, and just give yourself maybe 20 to 60 seconds to feel gratitude for this thing. And the awesome thing about this technique and about this process is that two-thirds of that list is real. It's something that's already happened for you or is happening, meaning there is a confidence and a certainty and a power in your gratitude and appreciation that you feel that you just can't manipulate or replicate. It's there. But because again, psychologically we as humans don't downshift when you read those five future things and the present tense, that certainty and confidence and enthusiasm also carries over into your feeling for that they are by inviting it so even if you don't believe in the universe, or don't believe this is gonna work even though try this and you'll be pleasantly surprised. There's something to take five minutes out of your day away from all the stress away from all the marketing concerns away from all the work And all the things that you've got to do, and taking five minutes yourself to do this and just feel good and feel ease in the moment, because studies will show you that gratitude, whether or not it energetically brings more to you. It increases confidence. It reduces stress, it reduces anxiety, it improves sleep, there's so many different things about this. But I would suggest that people might want to try that method for free, then have to pay for it right now. See how they feel. And maybe they'll enjoy it so much that they want to do it again tomorrow as well. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. I think this links closely to meditation with which I think is becoming a more popular subject across the board. So is this a way of many citations?

 

Andrew Kap  

I believe so, we define meditation in certain ways, like it has to be you sitting in a silent room with your legs crossed, or whatever. And I think meditation is so much more expansive than that. I mean, meditation is just a focus, whether it's a calm, subdued focus, or it's a heightened, intense focus. It's just a focus in some direction, or even a focus on nothingness, depending on your definition of meditation. But it certainly for me, is a meditation that people can follow through, and hopefully an enjoyable one at that also.

 

Andrei Tiu  

And how important is the mind-body alignment? Like, you know, the vibration that you bring into this exercise? Or would you have any directions or things that can help people be successful with this exercise when it comes to them getting into the right vibration, or aligning their hearts with their minds and things around this area? 

 

Andrew Kap  

Right. So there's two answers to this question. The first one is my favourite one. And this is also an answer to the question of like, How do I know if I'm doing these methods, right. So first, there's no wrong way of doing this. Even if you only feel a little good, it means you're not feeling bad, it means you've already got a positive momentum, like any kind of just feeling, anything you can do, whether it's this method or another of thinking about what you have, or what you want, or both, while feeling good. That is a tremendous benefit free for you. But I know again, we're speaking to entrepreneurs, we're speaking to motivated people and they're looking for boosts, I would suggest that there are little hacks that you can do to amplify your feeling and appreciation, for example, as you're feeling gratitude, picture a warm, white light extending from your chest or solar plexus or heart out into the world, who you're thinking, are you thinking yourself, your higher self, the universe, anything in particular God, like? picture that white light, just vibrating and emanating? And that will give like, enhanced enhancement of what you feel, but also saying why don't just say I'm grateful for this awesome a partner, maybe say why one or two, or even three or four things about why are grateful for it, because that will also reinforce and enhance the feeling of gratitude and appreciation that you're having in that moment.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. So we have this exercise. Now. people that say they're planning for you know, that they're making like the resolutions least, and maybe looking at changing there, as you mentioned, changing their jobs, if they are working, you know, in a bigger company, or maybe they are looking at the next thing, their business. So this is a good starting point, exercise and actually attaching emotions to their goals, really. And this can be like a little hack where you even if you don't believe that this is working, at least you get into the mindset where you are sure that some of the things we're working or they are existing at the moment or have happened in the past. So you get your mind in that state where it can't really shift that quickly from something that you know, maybe, you know, it's right, but you don't trust the other things yet. And then you are just, you know, kind of, it's too quick for you to change the vibration of your thoughts. And then you just go through them and then see what happens, right?

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah. And you can't feel bad and good at the same time. So even if you feel a little good, it means you're not feeling bad, and that carries incredible power. I began to believe energetically but also just you know, just in terms of how you're going about your day, the confidence and enthusiasm with which you approach anything. Whether you're writing a sales letter, you're recording a VSL you're reaching out to potential clients, you're prospecting, like whatever you're doing, there's something to be said about starting off on the right foot and having a better vibrational or emotional tone to what you're doing that's going to carry over into your confidence and choosey as to how you do and then you look back on your day like wow, that this is a good day. This is one way better than the day before this. I'm on board. Let's see what happens tomorrow.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay, so now because I'm really curious to hear this from you. Obviously, I researched into the book and in terms of interest in the subjects but I'm curious to see. So you know, some people might have already read the secret or other books related to this. Some of them might already know Bob Proctor and He's laws that go around this idea of paradigm-shifting and the law of attraction. What would be your thoughts on why some of the things related to this were not complete? And why is your vision and your book, the last one that somebody might need?

 

Andrew Kap  

Right. So I think those things are complete, I think people's interpretation, understanding and application of them are incomplete. And I actually know why. And this is what I put in the book, which I think really aids and hopefully making, not the last one they'll ever read. But the last one they'll ever need to read, and then they could decide for themselves. But here, here's the key part. And by the way, this is very applicable to just entrepreneurs and what's going on with them. I define that we have like three minds, we've got the conscious mind, and we've got the subconscious mind. And we've got my explanation and my definition of the ego. The ego is right there in the middle, it's way stronger than the conscious mind, which is why there's fear, uncertainty, doubt and things of that nature. But the subconscious mind is stronger than everything. Meaning if you access that you are home free. Now, here's where it gets interesting. The ego, that part in the middle, that part that's stronger, new consciously, it only has one job in this world. And that's to keep you alive, all cares about is that you're alive right now. Which means your money problems right now, your relationship problems right now, your career, your business, even your health problems right now, because it doesn't think that deeply. All the ego knows right now is you are alive. And the last thing the ego wants to do is risk or change the status quo. Because maybe someone out there listening, you want to be rich and famous, but for all the ego knows is if you become famous, you're going to get stalkers. And that's a threat to your survival. For all the eagle noses, when you get a lot of money, you're going to have a distant family coming out of the woodwork trying to take it from you, another threat to your survival, right? So the ego doesn't know for sure whether that new state is going to up the odds of your survival. But it knows you're alive right now. And it doesn't want to mess with it. And that's why people screw up their new year's resolutions. That's why when they try to do something, and they like they talk themselves out of it, or it feels too hard on day number two, or even day number one, it's because the ego, which loves you, by the way, is only looking out for you in a misguided way. It's just trying to keep you stuck in place because it doesn't know what's going to happen. If you improve. It doesn't realize that when you get that house that you've wanted, you're gonna have an even better rate of survival figured out then when you get there, the long and hard way. But anyway, the long-winded way of saying here's these methods, I talked about this gratitude, or scripting or visualization methods, they bypass the ego and go to the subconscious mind. And it doesn't matter what kind of fear or uncertainty or doubt your ego throws in a way, when your subconscious mind is behind the wheel. He'll just knock everything aside like no, we're doing this we're getting it done come hell or high water. And part of which includes, you know, again, dictating or governing certain activities that you're going to do, you're just going to find yourself like, wow, I'm right. After 30 days of meditating about how awesome I am at calling leads, I'm just doing it automatically. I don't have resistance anymore. You don't have resistance, because you access the subconscious mind and slap the ego around saying, Listen, we're doing this whether you like it or not. That's me like that explanation. Those things are why I think my book is the last one because it explains to people, you no longer have to keep looking for the answer. The answer is you. And now you have the confidence and enthusiasm and understanding to use these user-friendly methods and just do it. And then since you enjoy the methods, it doesn't feel like an uphill battle to do them. It's only five minutes out of your day, your probability of actually doing it this time just shot sky high for yourself.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay, very insightful. So, I was thinking in terms of your journey now as an author, um, how did you get so successful? Like, what was your journey to becoming a best selling author and staying there for so long? You mentioned a lot about the positive reviews and people actually getting results. But behind the scenes, what was going on? How did everything evolve?

 

Andrew Kap  

Right? So again, it is a big thing where I'm, I'm hoping the book lived up to the promise. And it was hopefully high quality because here's the thing. I'm about to tell you how I got a lot of people to go to it. But if your product or service doesn't make its promise, then you're, you're you know, you're straight out of luck. I'll put it that way. So I did two things when I launched the book. One was organic, and one was pay. So what I did for the pay version is because I put the book on Amazon. I didn't do my advertising on YouTube. I didn't do my advertising on Facebook. I didn't do my advertising on Instagram. I use Amazon's advertising platform actually paid so that when people were on Amazon, and they're looking at the secret, mine would be one of the books that came up like if you like this, you might be interested in this cold but I basically put it in front. I put it in front of not people browsing I put in front of people that were bought that were in a mood to get a book like this, that we’re even on a page where they're going to click the Add to Cart button, I put my book in front of them, which by the way, also people that look at the cover. I hope it looks beautiful to you. It looks beautiful to me, obviously, I'm biased, but the really key part is, I didn't say how this book looks as a poster? How's it look really small on the screen? on Amazon? People read the title, Can people spot it? Because you have to think like, is your title? And is the cover? Are these good enough that people are going to notice to even click to begin with to even read those reviews or read the book description? Anyway, I just went into the organic party when I was talking about the payment part, I used Amazon's platform, because what better place to put it right? Mm-hmm. organically what I did was I went on Facebook groups related to law of attraction. And I just added value. And here's the thing we already know, we know how Facebook groups are, you can't promote yourself, you can't say I've got this book, you can't say check out this link. Or you can use a post. So what I did was I posted huge, huge, huge values on it right. And then if people are interested, they can click on my profile. And then they'll see stuff about the book, then they'll see me posting the five-star reviews and giving more information, whatever. But basically, I gave value in a place where my customers were already at. And then they made the decision of whether they wanted to buy the book. And like oh, Andrew, you had to rewrite all these different posts. Will some I wrote from scratch. But some will just repurpose content from the book because, in my opinion, the book was already good with already great insights, why would I not repurpose that, and give that to people for free? Mm-hmm. So those two things, that's all I really did in the beginning to get some things going. And it was a number one new release that week. And it was number one bestseller by the following month. I don't even know how long it took because I wasn't looking every day, I was so busy just trying to get things going. One day I looked within like three weeks later, and it was number one bestseller in that category. I'm like, cool. I wonder how has this been going on a day or a week? I don't even know. But I just kept doing my thing and kept giving value? 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. So on the paid ads side of things. Can we talk about the budgets that he invested or your return on advertising? Spend metrics like these? Yeah.

 

Andrew Kap  

Wow, I don't even have numbers in front of me. I will say this. I'll give, I'll give free advertising. I used a tool called the KDP Rocket at the time. Now it's a publisher rocket. And it just helped me choose better keywords. Like what keywords that I want to put in my, in my advertising life? I will say my A cos. In the first couple weeks, I was actually losing money. I was paying. I was probably Forgive me, I'm going through numbers in my head to try to give you something that's legit Not, not just made up here. Yeah. I mean, I'd say this, I was probably the A cos which you want as low as possible, definitely beneath 100%. Because 100% means that you're paying more than you're making in terms of sales, not, by the way, not even profits, just sales, because Amazon still takes their piece of the A costs in the first month was probably 107 to 120%. And it was navigating, but I didn't care. I just all I wanted was people reading the book, and hopefully loving it and putting reviews because as the reviews got better. And as more buzz around the book came, I relied less on the Amazon advertising more on word of mouth. So, I had a budget where I can lose money on getting people just to see it. Because I made mistakes, I would bid $4 as an example, just for one click on the secret. And that's ridiculous. You know, it should be bidding 60 cents tops, at least at that point in time. But I was like, let me just get people to look at this thing, right? So I don't know if that answered your question. But I was willing to lose a little money on the hope that the product would speak for itself and would get good reviews and would generate word of mouth because you know, everyone's different. This is a book. So maybe yours is, um, maybe you're a landscaper, but what you want is you want to do such a good job in your company, what you're doing, that the customer will refer you, the customer will sing your praises, the customer will buy your books for their family or their friends or start a book club or something like I never expect someone started a book club. I didn't know, I didn't realize what's gonna happen. I noticed like, wow, all these extra copies are like coming in. Like, reliably, someone started a book club and everyone bought the book and they did their own thing on the side. I'm like, cool. So when you get value, your marketing efforts will kind of snowball, and a lot of good things will happen for you on autopilot that you could not have predicted or manipulated yourself.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Cool. Yeah, definitely asked to answer the question. So in terms of the paid ads, eventually, they started to I guess you started optimizing better. And then you also, how did you get people to write the reviews? Actually, because I know that this can be a tough one. Like even if you have sales, getting them back to write the review can be a bit tricky. Right?

 

Andrew Kap  

So you said something really important there? And I think this is really important as to how did I get people to do it? And the answer is, I didn't get people to do it. I invited people to do that. And what I mean by that is, again, hopefully, it was a good product. I basically, I invite reviews indirectly. And what I mean by that is, when you're in a, when you get my book, there's free bonuses, when you sign up for the free bonuses, you get emails from me. And obviously, you know, I'll tell about my other products, but I just give the, you know, emails where I'm not selling anything, I'm just giving value on value and value I. And again, this is not an act, it isn't me just trying to seem like I'm giving value. This is my approach. When you are an author and you have a follow-up system that you're giving value on top of the book, it sends the message that you're not just here to make a quick buck and move on in your life, it sends the message that no like, I really want this to be the last book you ever need to read. And the book should be enough, but just in case it's not. I'm gonna keep dumping more and more and more value on you. For me, I hope and believe that alone, a lot of those reviews come from the fact that people see that I'm not a one-trick pony. And I'm not just here to make a quick buck, but I'm actually here for them because I want to see them succeed. Because we all think this sounds so cliche or maybe even, you know pretentious, but the last thing I want to be is a billionaire in a world that's in ruins. Because if you're a billionaire and the world's in ruins, you still can't go to your favourite pizzeria. You still can't go on dates with bars because they're all closed down. You know, you want to lift everyone up around you. So I take this approach of lifting every single reader up around me in any way that I can through my content because that's the real victory. The victory isn't me making a quick buck and then going off to another book and being lost. The victory is in this actually being the last book and I think through my efforts for that it sends a really powerful message that I believe leads the reviews

 

Andrei Tiu  

Very, very good. And I mean, I totally empathize with your answer. And I think it's such a good approach. And I hope more people would have this approach too, to the way that they are thinking about their businesses and about their products. And, yeah, definitely keep up the good work. And thank you, and your approach.

 

Andrew Kap  

So one more thing, Andrei, I'm sorry, I thought of this. Nor is this valuable for them. Sorry to interrupt you. One thing I do, and people on your side of the pond won't notice this, but in the States, because Amazon lets me access it. When someone left again, from the mindset of caring about people and actually wanting people to win from this, when I got reviews, I didn't just like sit there and be all proud of myself and say, cool, actually, I comment and reply to all the reviews. And I didn't believe I didn't realize at the time, I was just being enthusiastic. But someone told me, dude, you realize you're that's a strategy, right? You realize you are inviting more reviews by the fact that people see that you're answering reviews, so they're gonna be more likely to do it. So just an extra piece that came off the top of my head because that's more tactical than philosophical. I didn't realize at the time when I was doing it, but I responded to all the United States reviews. And if Amazon would let me, I would respond to worldwide reviews also, because I think, to have the author care enough to reply to you, set something also. And that might, that might be the difference between someone leaving a quick one sentence or not doing anything at all. So sorry to interrupt you on your thoughts. But that came to mind. I want to share that for your marketing audience.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Very good point. And now looking at you and what you have in store for 2021? What are your plans? What are you? How are you looking to grow your business? grow to grow your YouTube channel?

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah, so for me, I again, I keep things very simple and very implementable. if that's a word, I'm gonna keep pumping out YouTube content to let the channel grow and basically do a lot of the heavy lifting for me, I'm gonna keep going on as many podcasts as I can, you know, I'm glad doing these but more and more law of attraction ones, again, telling people more about it. And opportunities are finding me where people are asking me to speak at certain summits and things like that. So as those invites keep coming, I'm just gonna keep doing that also. So I'm basically going to keep talking about this. I mean, no one else is going to be an advocate for this book, but mean, so I'm going to be the one that's going to do it. So there's no grand strategy or anything like that. It's just following on the thread, building on the solid foundation, and hopefully serving more people. And that's the mindset that I'm taking with me into the year.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Okay, and now one last point before we go to the wrap-up and the actionable points just to refresh them for everybody that is going to go away and hopefully execute on these actions. But where can people connect with you, if they want to maybe, you know, talk more with you directly, maybe they know about podcasts that you might be interested in joining? Or, really to find out more about books, obviously, we'll have the links in the description of this episode when it comes to, you know, links to the book and to the platforms like your YouTube channel. But what other places are good to connect with you?

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah, so I keep it pretty simple. Um, it's really the book and the YouTube channel. So I'm not sure how this will forward and out forwards to the US sight here in the US. But the last law of attraction book.com forward to the Amazon, US listing, whether it's paperback or audible or Kindle, but people can just go on their Amazon and type in the last law of attraction book you'll ever need to read. But also my YouTube channel is youtube.com/andrewkap. And of course, that's gotten a bad thing where people can click the email if they wanted to. But for the most part, while I invite people, I'm really trying to give people more access to the content and to me, because it's the content that's really going to serve them and help them. And again, get the Amazon book, check it out if you want. But if you don't want to put out your wallet, the YouTube content is for free. So please check it out. Maybe it'll resonate with you, I try to keep things really versatile with it, you'll see my strange sense of humour on some of the videos and hopefully, more importantly, you'll get a kick out of it and find a reason to use the content for your own advantage.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super, thanks for that. And now the last thing is to create this sort of wrap action bullet. So we were looking at one's personal branding and how to be more intelligent with your content and positioning one as an authority and then in the nation in the industry. And then looking at this more oriented to the self subject which is applying the law of attraction and concepts of well being and self fulfillments to better the new year. So the personal branding side of things so some of the key things that I think we agreed on we're one of them to make sure you know how you position yourselves and like the value proposition either yours or Your businesses so that you can choose the people that you want to resonate with best. Then focusing on maybe one, two platforms first in order to make sure you master those ones, and you don't go thin over too many of them. So creating content that is fit for these platforms, and then maybe repurposing some of that content. By the way, one thing that I want to ask you is, what do you think about Instagram or Tiktok? Since they are platforms that do promote video.

 

Andrew Kap  

So I haven't intelligently used them very well myself. But my answer is, if you can do it, like if you can put your message in a TikTok video in a way that will get attention, but also get people to find you. Please, by all means, go for it, like any kind of platform that you can use, we'll do it, I just haven't done it very well, myself. And again, my bandwidth, I'd rather just even though Tick Tock might be a huge thing for me, I'd rather just due to YouTube personally, because it resonates with who I am as a person. So there's power behind that.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm, super. Okay. And then making sure I think this goes across the two subjects, just be sure to be consistent and to communicate in a genuine way. And to really connect with yourself when you are producing the copy or producing the videos or the content that you put out. And, you know, spread across the channels together with a message. And then going into the sort of future building activities. One thing that would be very important is this exercise. So Andrew, would you like to summarize again, what are the actions that people should take in order to compile the exercise correctly and execute?

 

Andrew Kap  

Sure. Again, it's 15 things that you're grateful for five past five, present five future, write them in the present tense, jumble them up, read them one at a time for then give yourself 20 to 60 seconds or 10 minutes, whatever you want, feeling gratitude for that thing. And, I mean, there's, there's so much to be grateful for just the heart beating in your chest right now has been beating every single second, not only since the moment you've been born, but since the moment before you've been born while you were still in the womb, who would not have gratitude for the heart that's been beating every second for decades, to send blood and nutrients to the rest of their body, which is also serving them. Like it's so easy to be grateful for things if you just think about what you have everyone out there, no matter how hard things are, you have more than you realize. And the more that you focus on that, the more you'll actually have as well.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. And one other thing that just came to my mind that I think it's so good, from the very beginning of our conversation, I think, for the ones of you that really wanting to do something for a long time, and maybe they just didn't get around doing it, or you have the courage to give themselves permission to, as Andrew was saying, this might be the second next best moment for you to I mean, if you didn't do it so far, this is the next best moment for you to start doing it. And to give yourself permission to write that book, go on that podcast, have that podcast, launch that business, or whatever you want to do, and then just go all-in with confidence. And, you know, let the market decide for you. And to either validate, you probably validate you since this would be something that you're always wanting to do, you're probably good at it. And you just need a strategy to start producing and executing towards it.

 

Andrew Kap  

Yeah, my little piece, one hater not liking you doesn't mean that the market has put a thumbs down on you. So as you get bigger, what you have to expect haters, also, there's going to be some negative feedback no matter what you do. You don't look at one person and make a decision. You look at the market as a whole. And you'd be honest with yourself, don't use one hater, who's just having a bad day behind a keyboard as a reason to quit your dream. Fair.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super, Andrew, such a big pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much for the time for the inside for everything really. Wishing you an amazing new year ahead. I know you'll be busy. And I think you're doing a great job. So you're really really keen to see how your journey is gonna unfold. Definitely let's keep in touch for you know, new books that you might be having coming out, or things that we can communicate on for the guys, guys that you that you're attending to if you have any questions or would want us to maybe organize a second episode on some specific things of which we discussed today. Make sure to reach out to us or maybe to Android directly if it's something that you guys can directly work on onto or towards and we'll make that happen. But until next time, Andrew, such a big pleasure again, thank you for being on the show and for being with us and wishing you an amazing year ahead.

 

Andrew Kap  

Thank you so much for having me, Andrei. Wishing you a wonderful year ahead and also quick props to your audience. They're obviously listening to a really good show here. They made a good call. Thanks for being such a great facilitator on this information man, I'm It's been my honour and pleasure to be on the show.

 

Andrei Tiu  

As always as mine. Thank you and thank you for everybody that's been tuning in. See you next year.

 

Improving Online Ads & Ecommerce Campaigns’ ROI in 2021 [Matt Gillis]

Today’s episode of The Marketing Innovation Show brings Matt Gillis, the CEO of Clean.io, a company that leads in the prevention of cross-platform malvertising, protecting website publishers and online businesses sites from malicious ads by blocking coupon provider extensions.

 

The main discussion points of this episode will be the issues that malvertising or malicious advertising brings to performance marketers brands, eCommerce websites, and publishers, as well as how advertisers can increase their budgets, return on investment for 2021, and how to maintain a good customer experience on websites in the upcoming year, by leveraging software like Clean.io.

 

Connect with Matt:

Website: http://Clean.io/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillisusa/

Email at matt@clean.io

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

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  

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Matt Gillis, who is the CEO of Clean.io, a company that leads in the prevention of cross-platform malvertising, protecting website publishers and online businesses from malicious ads, by blocking coupon provider extensions. Today, we'll discuss issues malvertising brings to performance marketers, brands, eCommerce websites, and publishers, as well as how advertisers can increase ROI, as well as maintain a good customer experience on sites in 2021, by leveraging software like Clean.io. And here we have Matt Gillis. Hi, Matt, how are you? 

 

Matt Gillis  

Good, good to be on with you and this is truly a global podcast with you on the other side of the planet, right now.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yes, that's true. A pleasure meeting today, as well. Really exciting for our episode together and for the discussion. We briefly had the chance to quickly catch up now and I think it's going to be a really insightful and really good one. It's the first time on the show where we actually dive deep into these issues that many advertisers face on a daily basis. So really, really, keen to hear your thoughts, your experience, maybe some of the case studies that you were faced with, and how you were able to help these websites and these marketers to make better their marketing results. So let's see, tell us a bit about you. Tell us who you are, where you're from, what's the journey with Clean.io, and what you guys do?

 

Matt Gillis  

Excellent. Well, thanks for having me on. As you mentioned, I'm the CEO of a company called Clean.io. We protect digital engagements and we'll talk a lot about that over this podcast, my journey to this role has been pretty fun and interesting one, I've been in mobile my entire career. So I'm as old as dirt. And I started in this business, back in the early 90s, working for the cell phone operators. So I've had four distinct areas of my career. So I worked for cell phone operators in the early days of the mobile internet, on your cell phone, days when you would download ringtones or play games, or do any of the things that you do other than make phone calls. And then I've gone on this entrepreneurial journey, for about five years, I was a mobile games publisher. So we created games and entertainment content on mobile devices. I then left that and went into the ads business. And so we did ad monetization for publishers. And I did that for probably the better part of eight years at a few different companies where we were a startup and then we were acquired and I closed out that at Verizon media, which is a big telecom company that owns a conglomerate of advertising technology. And one of the biggest challenges I had, when I was responsible for websites and helping them make money is that we had these things called malvertising. You may have experienced it yourself as a consumer. When you're sometimes on your mobile phone, and you're scrolling up and down, and all of a sudden, it kind of redirects to a page and it says congratulations, Andrei, you won an Amazon gift card, or click here to spin the wheel or take this survey and once you complete it, you'll be entered to win something. That's called malvertising. It was one of the banes of my existence in my last role. And when I had left my job at Verizon media and was taking some time off, I ran into a few guys that had started to build this company called Clean Creative, which was the predecessor to Clean.io. And they were headed out to solve this problem of malvertising. And so very curious and obviously had never seen anybody really, truly solve it. And that's how I landed where I am today. And our company has been around for about three years. I've been in the role of CEO here for about two years now. And it's been an amazing journey to see a team and a product kind of build over time. I'm Canadian, so I love hockey sticks. And we've had hockey stick-like growth. And so it's been super cool. And it's really just the start of our journey in protecting websites and user engagements from malicious and untrusted code.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I see. What challenges do you see today? What are some of the most encountered scenarios where somebody will be the victim of malvertising? Maybe depending on industries or depending on the niches, what's the most occurring case for you, guys?

 

Matt Gillis  

Yeah. The one thing that I love to do is to take a step back and remember that we're all consumers. So even though we work in this business and you work in marketing and I work in cybersecurity, we're also consumers. to rely on our mobile devices, we're on them all day, every day. It's the first thing we wake up and look at in the morning and it's the last thing we tune out in the evening. And this challenge related to malvertising‘s been a long-standing issue. You go to many websites, and it's not something that happens all day, every day. And I think the reason behind that is you need to look at the motive and who is actually the person that's behind these malicious campaigns that are destroying user experiences and destroying revenue. You represent a lot of good marketers, and there are tonnes of good marketers on the planet. The reality is: malvertising is really conducted by bad actors who are also advertisers. And they're bad advertisers, they're advertisers that are seeking to engage with users, they've got offers that they're trying to get users to complete. And they're using malicious technologies to really establish those connections. If you think about normal marketers, normal real marketers, they'll buy 1000 ads on a page, and they'll hope to get a half a percent click-through rate and a half percent click-through rate, 5/1000, that would be amazing. Right? Well, malvertisers, because of their sophistication, they have figured out how to buy that same ad, and effectively get 100% click-through rate. So this problem exists because of economics. These folks can figure out how to buy an ad, how to get 100% click-through rate, and how to get that user to land on that page and they can target them very effectively and they can put beautiful looking creatives in front of them and really inspire engagement. Probably not from you or from me, but my mom probably would click on those sort of ads, she would be deceived to click on those sort of things. So in that sense of what is malvertising, what's happening, a lot of it kind of rears its ugly head in these form of malicious redirects, where it takes over the page, takes over the user experience, either drives the user to fill out a survey, give their personally identifiable information, either give their email address, or their phone number, or some sort of information that they want to capture, or usually drive the user to click into the app store in an automated fashion to download an app. So it's usually kind of one of those behaviours and the behaviour of choice really depends on what action the malicious advertiser is trying to engage.

 

Andrei Tiu  

And what control do companies have over limiting this? If they are not using any software, they just have a website, how are they falling victims for this?

 

Matt Gillis  

That's the challenge of the programmatic media ecosystem. I'm sure you're familiar with programmatic, where impressions are bought and sold by algorithms and it's really an open ecosystem. So anybody can go and get a seat on a demand-side platform, and set up campaigns and start to buy ads. And you can buy ads on some of the biggest websites on the planet. If you are a publisher, and you're trying to monetize, you have ad placements set up on your website, and your goal is to bring in the maximum amount of demand, because when you bring in that maximum amount of demand, that creates demand density, which drives the price up, which obviously creates fill rate, and all of the metrics and the KPIs that any website publisher would live by. It's their livelihood. And the programmatic media ecosystem has created this backdoor, where bad actors now have open season to be able to access end-users on some of the biggest websites on the planet. Websites that you would normally have thought back in the olden days, where you would have had to write an insertion order, and you'd be clearly vetted before any ads run and usually, it's big brands that are writing insertion orders. These bad actors now with a dime, can go and get a seat on a demand-side platform and just start buying and inject their code. And usually what these guys do, is they have very sophisticated economics, where it's a game of arbitrage, where they know that if they can buy a certain amount of ads for a certain price, they can usually get a multiple of that number in a return on their investment. There's a tonne of great things that have come from the programmatic ecosystem. Obviously, publishers and end-users that are getting very targeted ads, and that makes the user experience much better. But it has created this window of opportunity for bad actors to really creep in the back door and start to conduct malicious actions.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so let's say somebody identifies that they are the victim of malicious software like this or malicious actors that damage their users experience on their websites. So you identified this problem, and then you together with the team grew Clean.io so that you can help these guys clean up their platforms. How do you do it? What's the journey? How does the system work? Maybe even start from the general scenario and tell what you do, and then specifically what you guys do, so that we can all have a good understanding of how to best think about protecting ourselves when it comes to malicious software or malicious actors like these ones.

 

Matt Gillis  

Maybe I'll start back where how people used to do it, and how some still do it and how it's ineffective. And that's how we ended up where we are. In the very early stages of folks that tried to prevent these malicious behaviours, what they would do is they would scan creatives in an offline environment, to see if it exhibited malicious behaviour. And by the way, back in the early days, when the bad guys weren't so sophisticated, they would be able to catch that sort of stuff. Well, what happened is, bad actors have figured out how to fingerprint and understand if they're in an offline environment, or they're being scanned, to not exhibit the malicious behaviours. That methodology kind of proved to be an ineffective way to try to solve the problem. The next wave of folks that really have tried to solve this problem, really trying to anchor it around what we would call like URL blacklisting. Basically known malicious URLs, you would put them onto a block list and if a buyer was exhibiting behaviour that is tied to that malicious URL, you would prevent that person from buying that ad, and therefore, obviously, block any hopefully block malicious activity from happening. The bad actors have figured their way around this. Obviously, they can change their URLs every five minutes now. Bad actors can change their URLs and make them unique for every end-user if they wanted to, which makes that approach ineffective. The challenge with URL blacklist means that something bad has to happen and the software provider has to capture that URL to put it on a blacklist. And by the way, if you are trying to automate or become what I would say, probabilistic methodology, what happens is you end up with a tonne of false positives, and then you're actually blocking real revenue. There's a whole bunch of concerns around URL blacklisting, that make it ineffective and make it predisposed to false positives and actually costing real revenue. The solution that we came up with, which I think was obviously very unique, it's behavioural analysis. What we do is we give our partners a single line of JavaScript, they put it at the head of their page and that is the first thing that loads when the page loads. And by the way, everything that we do is on real humans, real devices, real networks. That's the only way to catch bad guys. Marketers that probably listen to your podcast, the fraud that they think about are things like invalid traffic, and bots, and viewability, and all these other things, right? Well, by the time our software is running, all of those technologies have basically run their processes to determine that everything that we're running on is, generally speaking, a real human real device, real network. Bad actors, as you can imagine, they're sophisticated, they wouldn't want to buy bought traffic or invalid traffic, because they're looking for a real user engagement. And what our solution does, is a single line of JavaScript, we're analysing the execution of JavaScript at runtime. When we see an ad get purchased, and then an ad start to render on a website, if that ad starts to do a malicious activity, what we do is we block the malicious activity. We don't block the bad actor from buying the ad, one of the big things that we felt that the only way we were going to be successful with this technology, was that if there was a financial disincentive for the bad actor to do what they're doing. In every other solution prior to us, there was almost a free at-bat. The bad actor could try something, and if it worked great and if they got blocked, it didn't cost them any money. So then they could change their tactics and try something new. With our software, we actually let them buy, that means that they bought an ad, that means that they are committed. That means that that ad renders and the thing that they truly bought, which was the impression and the and the render, they have to pay for that. That actor, because they've paid for that, they are hoping to get ROI. What we do is we block that malicious activity from happening after that ad renders. And because we do that, the user never gets redirected to that malicious page that says congratulations, Andrei, you won an Amazon gift card. So first off we've made sure that the user experience has been preserved, that the user experience is awesome. Because the user never lands on that congratulations, you want an Amazon gift card page, the bad actor doesn't get an opportunity for ROI. And so earlier in the podcast, I said these guys are the most sophisticated performance marketers on the planet. Anyone that's a listener of your podcast, that's a good advertiser, what you're hoping for is ROI. You're hoping that if you buy an ad, you get an engagement. And that engagement turns into either a sale, or a click, or a call, or whatever the metric is that the advertiser is seeking. In this case, because these guys are the most sophisticated performance marketers on the planet if it doesn't turn into an engagement, what do sophisticated performance marketers do, if they get no engagement, they actually change it up, and they block that site, and they no longer buy from that site. If you were a performance marketer, and you were buying media across a whole bunch of sites, and a whole bunch of them were giving you no engagement, you'd actually say: Let's stop buying on those sites, let's start buying on these sites. And what truly our software does, is that the bad actors actually go elsewhere. And that's the secret sauce about what we do and why it works and why we're different than anybody else. We do a 30-day free trial, so any website can come on that has ads, and they put our software on their page for 30 days. And you'll see that during that first 30 days, there's always some malicious activity. There's usually a pulse of malicious activity. Sometimes there are spikes, like this past weekend, which was the weekend of Thanksgiving here in the US and bookended with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. On Sunday, there was an attack. And many folks saw an escalation in threat level on Sunday. But generally speaking, what they'll see is that over time, the longer you have our protection, the less it spikes a malicious activity that you see on sites that are protected by us.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, because the malicious advertisers would lose money and then they would go to another site. Okay, that makes perfect sense. Super. So let's see. Now we presented to everybody how this thing works. Would somebody know already if they had such ads? Can they fall victim without knowing? How is typically this issue being detected? Is it the customers that complain? Is it somebody randomly discovering it? Are there tests that should be carrying out on a frequent basis to ensure you don't have such advertisers? 

 

Matt Gillis  

I would say all of the above. Let's tackle in two areas. If you're an advertiser, you're hoping that the websites that you're buying on have various levels of protection, whether that's invalid traffic or prevention from bots, or hopefully giving a high level of viewability. When one of these things happens, as you know, if you're on a mobile device, and you're on your favourite website, and you're scrolling, there's usually not just one ad on the page. There are multiple ads on the page. If there are four ads on the page, the bad actor isn't buying all four. Right? The bad actor is intent on arbitrage in the site. So they're going to buy probably the lowest cost one that they can, that can create that unique takeover of the device. That means that there are three other advertisers that bought ads on that page, that because that user was hijacked and taken away to another website, those ads are no longer engageable. Because as you know, you can't hit the back button, because the bad guys have disabled the back button, you can hit the close button, you can't get back to where you were very easy. Sometimes you actually have to reboot your phone or actually close your browser down and get back to the page that you're on. And so for advertisers, my gut says that during times of increased malicious behaviour, you would probably see a deterioration in things like your CTR and those sort of KPIs. As a website publisher, there's probably more metrics that you would know. Some of our folks that actually are our customers, when we first launched, we didn't even have a reporting dashboard. Publishers, when we asked them what were the top three things that they wanted us to do, they said: I want effectiveness, effectiveness and effectiveness. A dashboard that gives them you know, a CT scan of what's going on in the website, they've got tonnes of dashboards. They've got Google Analytics, they've got tonnes of places they can go to check out what's happening on their website. And so the first folks that we actually partnered with, what we said to them was: look at your KPIs. When our software is not on your page, when our software is on your page, look at the KPIs that you would actually look at every day. What is your session time? What is your session length, number of ads you serve per unique user? All of those sorts of KPIs that actually power the economics of your website, tell me when those are disrupted. And when those are disrupted, then put our software on your page and watch them recover. So we had folks that had a typical time on site of eight-minute. And that means that a user would spend eight minutes scrolling, three or four stories and reading or consuming photo galleries, or whatever users do on their mobile phones. During that eight-minute period, you would serve an average of 42 ads per session. When these sites were under attack, they would see those KPIs decline, they would see the average time on site go from eight minutes to one minute. They would see a number of ads or per unique user go from 42 to 6. The very sophisticated folks in the ecosystem understood the economic damage that this can do to your website, not to mention the almost irreparable harm of the end-user experience and how destructive that is, right? There's economic harm and end-user experience harm. Economic harm- we can all recover from that. And user experience harm, it's hard to put a price tag on that. That person may never come back to the website. Creating content is very expensive. Driving user traffic to your website is very expensive. If you've done those two really hard things, and you now have that user on your website, preserve that user experience and make sure that that's not disrupted. You asked me how do I know if I have a problem or not? Well, one- we'll give you 30 days, and you can figure it out. We'll show you all the things. And we have a dashboard now. But I think some cases, one-your users are going to tell you. If you have a problem and it's bad, your users are either going to send you emails, they're going to flame you on Twitter, they're going to do whatever they can to let you know that you have a problem. Some folks have traffic that comes through Facebook, Facebook obviously has a great ecosystem where people can type comments, and they'll get comments of the crazy ads that are disrupting your user experience. The second thing is: most people tell me: my CEO is on our website, and he saw this. It usually happens in that way where the CEO is on there and she's surfing around, and she's like: Oh, that's a terrible user experience and then someone gets yelled at. It's either users are yelling at you or your management team is yelling at you and you can't win either way unless you have our software.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Got you. Okay, so this was very insightful in terms of the advertisers. Now, let's go a bit into the extensions and the other side of malicious software that can occur or disrupt the user experience. I know we were discussing it a bit just before we started recording, but I would like to hear your thoughts and your insight into what's out there, and what's bad and why, and how can businesses limit it?

 

Matt Gillis  

Our software runs on about 7 million websites right now. We have senses of the internet level data, we know what's happening out there on big massively global and we know what's happening on the body and tail. So we protect everything in and everything in between. Our core business started out preventing malicious ads originating from malicious ads. In that business line, everything is deterministic. Meaning, we know exactly the place of origin, what the supply-side platform is, where that bad actor bought their ad. We call it a smoking gun. We have a smoking gun on every bad threat that happens in the ecosystem, where our software is. What we started to see was bad actors start to shift their behaviours, not necessarily from buying through programmatic media, but also using what we would call client-side injections to initiate their malicious behaviour. Those client-side injections could happen from a rogue Chrome extension that you've downloaded and you forgot about it and it's sitting on your laptop and all of a sudden, it's been hacked or hijacked, and they're using that as a slave to inject malicious activity through Chrome extensions or whatnot. We started doing a bunch of research around these extensions. And what we started to see, not every one of our partners only monetizes through ads. We've got folks that monetize through ads, we got folks that monetize through eCommerce, in the same sort of site and some sort of environment. And we started seeing these client-side injections happening through these compromised Chrome extensions. When we started to do a whole bunch of more research, what we actually noticed was, there's a whole bunch of Chrome extensions and Safari extensions and Firefox extensions, that one might deem to be "trusted". The end-user really wanted that Chrome extension on their laptop, but the website owner may not want that Chrome extension to be interacting with the user experience on the website. We firmly believe that if you are a website owner, whether you're a publisher, whether you're an eCommerce site, you own your website, you should be able to control everything that happens on your website. You should be able to control the user experience, you should be able to make sure that, things don't happen that impact your revenue, or your brand reputation, or any of that sort of stuff. It's your website, you know, you should have those controls. What's happened is, there's a lot of software out there that actually takes that control away from you. And one of the things that we've noticed, specifically in the eCommerce ecosystem that takes that control away from you, is these extensions that power the automation of discounting. Things like Honey and Wikibuy, they're Chrome extensions, or Safari or Firefox extensions, that sit resident on your laptop or your PC and when you get to the checkout at an eCommerce merchant, up pops a little box, and it says, hey: It's Honey, I'm here, hit OK. And I will try and throw in a whole bunch of promo codes at checkout. And hopefully, I'll save you some money. As an end-user, this is awesome, right? It's kind of rolling the dice, and you may get a 25% off discount, or you may not. But it's kind of fun to watch it do its magic. What this has done to merchants is almost irreparable harm. Merchants have lost control of discounting. Honey and Wikibuy and the various other extensions are now scraping codes up to off the internet. And when you, as a merchant had given a code that you really intended for a single purpose, for a single user to experience. Codes that are designed for first responders. We're in COVID right now, it's December of 2020 when this podcast is being recorded, and many websites have said: if you're a first responder, come to my website, and you'll get 20% off and use that code of first responder-20 or whatever that unique code that they've given. Well, what Honey does is let's just say I am a first responder, and I go in and I've got Honey on my machine and I type in first responder 20 at checkout, I deserve that code. That's great. I should get 20% off. The first thing Honey does is it pops up and says we got more codes, would you like us to try them? When you hit OK, the first thing they do is they scrape that code out and they catalogue it. And they use it for everybody else that comes after me. And so that means that people who aren't first responders are now eligible to get a first responder 20% off discount if that's what the merchant had gone out the door with. What that really does is one: it becomes the wild west of promo codes. Any promo code is now available for everybody. And the worst part is: it's at the highest level. When we're in closed, beta right now, by the time this podcast gets out, there will probably be in general availability. But we've heard horror stories from a tonne of merchants about the damages that Honey and Wikibuy and the various discount codes have done to their business. Many folks buy ads and use exclusive or unique promo codes to try and track where a lead or where a purchase came from. This actually clouds all of that. It actually makes most marketing immeasurable. Because that code that you used for that podcaster or that code that you used for that YouTuber or that code that you use for that Instagram influencer, is now available to everybody. Let's just say you're a vitamins company and you wanted to go and partner with the most famous triathlete on the planet. And you go and partnered with a triathlete who has 50,000 followers on Instagram, which is pretty big. That person put that code in and probably one of their followers actually use that code. That code then got sucked up by Honey. So it got scrapped and put into Honey. And so what they were doing is they were looking at their analytics for their marketing campaigns and they're like: holy Geez, like, we really figured it out. This guy has this many followers, and he generated 400 sales last week. How do we go and repeat this? Well, lo and behold, it was Honey that took the coupon, and now applied it to anybody who came to their site, regardless of whether they were, connected or knew of this influencer. And so it really has destructive tendencies to revenue, because now everybody gets access to that discount. So let's just say it was a 20 or 30% off discount, and your average order was 100 bucks, you've now lost 20 to $30 per sale, you're probably now paying affiliate fees. And you've got to pay fees to these influencers, who've actually "driven the sale" when they truly didn't drive the sale. And then not to mention, you sit here and you go: Oh, my gosh, how do we plan our marketing? What podcast should we buy that are effective? Or what influencer should we partner with that are effective? It really makes it impossible from a measurement perspective for marketers.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's very bad, actually. Is there a way for the folks out here that are tuned in and maybe they are responsible for eCommerce websites or eCommerce businesses, to audit if their codes are maliciously being used by Honey? Because Honey is popular in the UK. I think most people know about it, I think there is a chance that if you have a medium-sized, at least if not being eCommerce, your users might be using that for your website. So what are some ways to audit and see if they are safe?

 

Matt Gillis  

Well, listen, there's no better way to audit them become a user of each of those services, right? So it's free to download. Download the extensions, and put them on your PC and go to your own website and have a look at what Honey is applying and how it's applying. We said earlier in the podcast, but on the malvertising side, have we launched without a reporting dashboard, right? Most of these marketers have reporting dashboards. They're probably looking at something every day. One merchant that I reached out to, they had a code that was tied doing sponsorship of a basketball team. And that code was only ever spoken about in a very small crawl that ran across the bottom of the screen. And it said: Hey, go and buy get 30% off typing the code magic at checkout. Well, guess what? Guess what their top redeemed code was in the month of July of this year. Of course, it was magic. Now, guess what? That basketball team does not have that many fans. If you've got codes that have taken off if in your gut it feels a little weird, it looks wrong, what you ought to do is to maybe turn some of them off for a day. Now what this merchant did was, they shut that one-off. Well, guess what! When they shut that one-off, that like that was 30%, they had two other codes that were valid, that were 25%. And those then popped up to be the most used codes. And so that will start to give you an understanding. With us, we're in a closed beta right now. We've got about 20 merchants that are using our software and we're giving them reports so that they can understand, we give them analytics so they can see what are the most impacted codes. What are the most prevalent discount engines that are loading on your end-users machines, when they're at the checkout and how is it impacting conversion rates and all that sort of stuff. What I would say is: go to our website, if you're a merchant, and you want more information, and you want to actually go into our trial you can go to blockcouponextensions.com, and that will redirect you to our website and that will take you right to the point where you can actually see more and hear more about what we're doing and, and how we're helping merchants really get control of the website that they own, and also get control the revenue and their discounts. There are very few things out there that can help you grow your revenue without actually growing your sales. And I think we're one of them. The person that checkout, they're probably going to convert and I know there's a whole bunch of folks that abandon carts at checkout and that sort of thing. But think about this analogy: if you're at the grocery store, and you've got your groceries loaded on that conveyor belt. Imagine if there was someone standing beside the checkout that had a mitt full of coupons that were going to hand them to you at checkout. You'd be like, oh, okay, yeah, I guess we'll try all those coupons. And if you save 30%, how great would that be as a shopper? Well, if you're the grocery store, you would not let someone come and stand right beside checkout and start to redeem and destroy your revenue. So I think really, it's about merchants getting control of the user experience on their website and really growing the revenue without actually growing sales.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, big time. And also, if you think about traditional eCommerce like goods, probably even if it's 5% - 10%, is your cost of acquisition for a marketing effort to think about it that way. Certainly, it's a big-budget saver here. I would actually recommend you guys tuning in that have eCommerce websites to have a look at this and I guess even if you identify one code that has been much easier to use, you probably have saved up for a lot of money.

 

Matt Gillis  

I think you're spot on Andrei. Let's just say it's 20% off. If you have $100 order value and you can prevent a $20 loss of revenue, that effectively is $20 more than you can then go out and spend to drive incremental traffic to your website, incremental purchases. And some of what Honey is doing is that they're stealing attribution for the sales that may have already or would have already happened on your website. You're getting hit with that revenue reduction, and you're paying affiliate fees and whatnot on that transaction. Get control of your website, you'll have $20 more to go out and market and drive real net new incremental users to your website, that's a lot of money for a merchant.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Super. That was a very good talk. Most Marketing Leaders on the show and probably also entrepreneurs are looking at sketching their strategy or finalising the strategy for 2021, we are living very different times than previous years, so I think it's very important for everybody to be able to have a plan that they can stick to, at least for the first couple of months, until the world hopefully is going to get back to some sort of normal. So let's see how we can help them best inform their decisions further. So we have discussed some actionable points here already about what they can do to audit what's going on in parts of the business, or the marketing system that maybe they haven't looked into in-depth so far, maybe. So let's see if we were to have a free point checklist or very important things that they can do this weekend, or this end of the week, to maybe improve their performance for 2021. What are your top three advice points? 

 

Matt Gillis  

Probably number one, two, and three is what gets measured, gets managed. Measure everything, whether you're a publisher and you're looking for malvertising protection. Measure impacts to revenue and to user experience and all those sorts of things and then solve those problems. And the same thing on the marketer side. What gets measured, gets managed. I would say ask lots of questions. Ask lots of questions of your agency, or your affiliate agency, or anyone that you're working within that transaction flow. Questioning everything, I think you're probably going to get a lot smarter about what is really happening on your website. As we've kind of ventured into this new business for us, we're learning a tonne about the varying sophistication of eCommerce merchants. And we're learning that there are some that are incredibly sophisticated, and they understand everything about what's happening in their user journeys that are on their site, and they know exactly the harm that things like Honey and Wikibuy and whatnot are impacting on their site. And then, I think that there's another class of folks that believe the data. One of the merchants that we spoke to, they were getting ready to make their 2021 plan as they started partnering with us. They actually had sponsored a podcast, they had a code for the product, on the podcast, and that podcast, in their mind, was magically successful. It was driving tonnes of sales and they sat down and they were about to make a very big decision for the rest of their marketing plan for 2021 to take out sponsorships on a whole bunch of podcasts and lo and behold when they actually started questioning the data, and really understanding the whys around the data, that's when they really uncovered that: Oh my gosh, Honey and wiki bi are really the culprits here. This podcast is not that effective of a marketing platform for us. Wishful thinking, as a marketer, you always hope to find that silver bullet. I've been a marketer in my past, you want that one thing that shows that rapid take-off of your product and your sales and you can make repeatable. And I think the challenge that we've seen with merchants that are impacted by Honey and Wikibuy is: the data is somewhat lying to them. The data is somewhat telling them a story that leads them to believe that what they're getting is incremental and you're truly tied to the performance of how well those things perform. And I think it couldn't be further from the truth. So I would just say: what gets measured, gets managed, and ask lots of questions. Doubt everything, challenge everything, because I think that's the only way you're going to truly get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Hmm, super, super good advice. For the people that would like to find out more about you, maybe personally or about the business, obviously, we have the links in the description of this episode, as well. So you guys tuning in, you can go and check out directly Clean.io, maybe sign up for a free trial to audit what's going on on your website. But Matt, if somebody wants to discuss with you personally either for business purposes or to pick your brains on some sort of idea that maybe you can work together on, what's the best platform that they can reach out to you?

 

Matt Gillis  

By all means, I'm an active LinkedIn user. So I think anybody ought to connect with me on LinkedIn, I welcome all those connections. And if you've got opportunities that you want to discuss, you can send me a LinkedIn message on thereafter we've connected. Or you can just send me an email. My email is matt@clean.io. So it's super simple. I would say: love to hear from any and all of your listeners, and if there are ways that we can help, and if you've got a problem, we love big meaty problems. Let us know how we can be helpful.

Andrei Tiu 

Awesome. Matt, thanks so much for being on the show. So, guys, we hope actually, that you had a good time here and you learned something new. Everybody that we discussed in terms of companies and add ons and everything they are good for maybe the consumers, but for your business, they might not be so good. Trying to be objective here, but have a look because you might be able to increase your bottom line profits and why not, make 2021 the best year that you've had so far. So, Matt, thanks so much again, for all the insight. It was a real pleasure. Let's follow up on the discussion and you guys if you'd like us to cover something in more depth, or you have questions for Matt or for myself, as always, be comfortable getting in touch. We'll have the details for Matt and for Clean.io in the description of this episode, as well. Best of luck with all the planning and all the fun for 2021. And for Christmas, why not? Because it's just around the corner.

 

Matt Gillis  

Right on. Best of luck to you. Maybe we'll come back once we're out of closed beta. As I said, we got 20 merchants that are experiencing the benefits of it right now on the eCommerce side and I expect it to be a very successful product, that I think we're gonna have a lot of great insights to bring to your marketers and talk about, and ways that they can grow their revenue and really own the user experience that users have on their various websites.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Sounds good. I'm really excited. Let's stay tuned and let's stay connected on LinkedIn, as well. Best of luck with everything. Thanks again for being on the show. And until next time, keep rocking it. Have an awesome one. 

 

Matt Gillis  

Cheers, Andrei!

 

Andrei Tiu  

Thank you.

How to Use Videos in Marketing Communications in 2021 [with David Jay]

On today’s episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show, we have invited David Jay, Founder, and CEO of Warm Welcome, and a Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer. Join Andrei and David on this episode, as they will be discussing best uses for videos in marketing and business communications in 2021, giving us top insights and action-points, ready to be applied to your future communication and business strategy for the upcoming year.

 

Warm Welcome helps businesses upgrade from boring text to personal video so they can build meaningful relationships that drive real revenue. David has bootstrapped several startups into multi-million ARR. Revenues from Warm Welcome, along with his other four companies, will exceed $6 million in 2020.

 

Connect with David:

Press kit: https://kitcaster.com/david-jay/

Get 3 Free Months of all the Warm Welcome goodness with the code „MARKETIU”: https://www.warmwelcome.com/marketiu

Warm Welcome: https://www.warmwelcome.com/

David on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/freedavidjay/

Agree: https://www.agree.com/

 

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 hello@marketiu.ro

 

Listen to the episode on your favorite 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  

Hello everybody, this is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is David Jay, who is the Founder and CEO behind Warm Welcome, helping businesses operate from boring text to personal video, so they can build more meaningful relationships as well as drive real revenue. David has bootstrapped several startups into multi-million dollar businesses and this year, his five companies will actually exceed $6 million in revenue. So big up for that, David! And David was also recently named the Top 100 Tech Innovator and Influencer. Today we will discuss how to best use video across your marketing and business communications in order to be more effective, as well as starting from your passion, how to get your startup to that $1 million mark. So, David, I am really excited to have you on the show today. How are you? How's everything going?

 

David Jay  

I'm doing great. Andrei, thanks for having me.

 

Andrei Tiu  

No, thank you for being on the show, for joining us. Really exciting time. So where are you tunning in from today?

 

David Jay  

I'm coming in from Bend, Oregon.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. So still morning on your side, right?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, it's morning here. It's a beautiful morning, we've got a little bit of snow on the ground. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. Okay, so I think we're gonna start this morning on a more energy level and dive straight into the subject, because I know many of our listeners here would be keen to find your thoughts also on the content marketing and video side of things, but also into the business scale up and business growth area. Mainly, since we are living through tougher times for some of us. So just to get to know you, really. So if you could please tell us a bit more about you, how you started, and how you grew your first business or businesses?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, so it was back in 2001, I actually dropped out of college. So I've kind of a typical tech Founder story, a college dropout. And at the time, I was really excited and passionate about photography. I had the choice: I could either be considered a college dropout or I could be an artist and I chose to be known as an artist and grew my photography business, which is a great, great part of my life, learning how to run a service business, that really can't scale that much. I think it really prepared me well for starting software companies and getting into businesses that do scale. So from 2000 to 2005, I was doing the service-based business of photography. And in that, I started to build online communities. So this is before Facebook, before Twitter, this is kind of back in MySpace days and online forums. I would start those and get photographers in them. And they would all share their problems, with questions as Hey, how do I start my business? How do I take great photos? How do I deliver them all these typical problems? And through that, and through understanding that there were quite a few common problems for these people, we started to build technology to solve them. And that's how we've grown all of our businesses: create a community, listen, understand their problem, create solutions that solve the problem, and work on the business and scaling it. So that's kind of been it. I've just done that one time after another, with different problems at different points in time-based on what other solutions are out there for industry,  just taken it organically, bootstrapped everything and grown one business out of the other businesses and kept going.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool. So what was the first one? What was the first thing that triggered you?

 

David Jay  

So the very first piece of tech that I built, was for photographers. It was a slideshow product, and it came from a wedding that I shot. I shot a wedding for a guy named John Foley, and it was in Santa Barbara where I'm from, and at their wedding reception, I used to put up a slideshow, I download all the photos onto my computer. Editing really quickly, and then take that computer and put it over by the bar at the wedding reception. And as people would come up to the bar to get their drink, they would watch this beautiful slideshow. And the more they drank, the better the pictures got. And they would refer me like crazy. And it was awesome. This is how I grew, through word of mouth. Well, after this wedding, John called me up the next day, I was already shooting for another wedding. And he said: David, that was a beautiful slideshow that you put up, is there any way that you could put that online? And nowadays we think of that as being something normal, everyone has slideshows online everywhere. But back in 2004, it was very difficult. There weren't a million slideshow makers to use. And so I found one, it was pretty janky, I put it online, I sent it to him. And within hours of me sending it to him, he forwarded it on to all of his friends. And it just said, David J, our photographer rocks, I still have the email, a little screenshot of that email today. Because of that one email, where my client said five words about me, I booked five weddings all over the world. Really high dollar weddings. And I realized that it was word of mouth put online, turns into Word of the mouse, right? So it's scalable marketing. And I learned how to tap into other people's networks. And so I looked up this guy: Who's this John Foley guy, whose wedding I shot and who's kind of taught me how to tap into other people's networks. And he was actually the CEO of E-vite. And a few years ago, he started the company Peloton. And so you see how he's done this. Peloton is a billion-dollar business. Today's Evite is huge. And what Evite did is to tap into the client’s network. You have an event, you want to send an online invitation, send that out, bring all your friends and family to our site, and we'll get paid by some advertising on that site. A strategy that we've used for almost all of our companies is: don't just focus on your customer, but create something for your customer that would be beneficial to their customers, this kind of this b2b to C started the market. And by doing that, you turn your business from just a wheel to much bigger steps. You're not having to grind to get every rotation. And that helps to scale up in a healthy way.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Very insightful. So basically, you use them as the word of mouth propagator, in a way. Helping your clients tell nice things about you to their networks, knowing that they are probably high net worth individuals that would have high net worth networks, that would afford, in this case, your professional photographer services, and then just basically scale it out like that.

 

David Jay  

Right. Yeah, so that was for photography. And with tech, it's the same thing. And most tech and software companies, SAS companies, spend so much of their money and so much of their time in sales marketing, right? And they do a lot of Facebook ads or Google ads, and they have these big sales teams, right? That insane venture capital money that usually goes into building a sales team can be really prohibitive from somebody trying to bootstrap or somebody trying to organically grow their business. I was able to take one person and get five clients from that. From those five, got five more each of those, is 25 clients. Same thing with SAS. You can get 50 clients pretty easily if you have even a bad product. But if you can leverage those 50, it will bring you, five people. Now you've got 250. Leverage those 250 and you can see how you can scale it up without having to go out and get venture capital or giveaway a huge part of your company to do it. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

So what would be some tactics for doing it? I mean, maybe not so much for the first business, which was the photography business, but more for your future ones. What would you say were some tactics that you used that were crazy successful in this organic growth? I think it's a really important and interesting thing to discuss because most of us look at the paid acquisition channels first. And I think this would be a nice growth hack in a way.

 

David Jay  

Yeah. Yeah, one of the key ones in which Warm Welcome is really built on this foundation, is video testimonials. And it's one of the easiest and funniest sorts of marketing. And the reason why it's really fun is that when you go out and you get these testimonials from people, it feels really good, right? They're reminding you of the value that you added, of the contribution that your product brought them. An example of this is, you go to your clients and ask them: Hey, would you mind if we got together and I recorded a video testimonial of you talking about what it's been like to work together, or what it's been like, for you using our product? And you can do it in person, that's great. Or do it online, do it in Zoom, do it with Warm Welcome. Send them a video and say, click the button and send me a video back. It's super easy to do. And so you make that request. And not everybody's gonna do it. But let's say 10 people do it. Well, these 10 people now, are going to sit down, and they're going to take a second and they're going to think about something nice to say about you. Maybe you can prompt them, or you can give them some ideas or whatever. But when they go and they say that, when they go and they record that video talking about your business, what they have now done is, they've done the hardest part of referring you, which is thinking about what they're going to say. And it's just like a business. The hardest part is getting started. It's the same thing with referrals. It's the same thing with building promoters are evangelists for your business, the hardest part is getting them started, this is a very easy way to get started. When they record that video and they say those words, now you've trained them how to talk about you, how to refer you. And now, when they talk to their friends, all those barriers are broken down, they already know how to do it, they've practised it. Maybe three or four times, some will record once, and record again, and record again. And now they practice three times how to refer you. And they're going to go out in their normal daily life and be much more confident in referring you as a business. So you've now activated word of mouth marketing, which is them going out and doing it on their own and you've captured a digital version of that which you can put online, sharing ads, put on your Facebook page, put on your website, which starts the scalability of that. The word of mouth marketing. So it's a growth hack, it's very simple, very easy, free to do. Again, this is one of the foundations of Warm Welcome: capturing video testimonials, because they're the most powerful form of marketing that we have. And we want to make it really easy for people to capture.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Okay, so your journey as a business leader started from photography, and then what did you do?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, so from photography, I got in the photo world right as it was transitioning from film to digital. And what happened was, there were a lot of new photographers coming in, and they were all wondering, how do I start my business? And that's when I started to build these online forums. Online forums were really just a way of scaling information. Instead of having 100 people call me every day: how do I shoot this type of photo or how do I start my business? They could just ask me the question online, I'd answer it once and 100, and then 1000, and then 10000 people could read that one answer. And that grew my network. And at that time, a mentor of mine, Tim Sanders, who wrote the book, Love Is the killer app, one of the best business books of all time, in my opinion. He said, your network is your net worth. And we all know that now as we're building networks through Facebook, or Twitter or Instagram, or I think right now, the best way to build it is direct to you, actually, off of the social networks. Because I think we're all seeing how social networks aren't exactly playing fair. Build a direct contact with your network, build that network, own it, because that's your net worth. That's what you're going to be able to leverage, those are the people you're going to be able to ask questions to and say: Hey, what problems are you experiencing in your business? And then they share those problems with you and then you'll be able to go out and create solutions for those problems.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I see, when you say directly to you, do you mean an email list? How do you see building such a community?

 

David Jay  

Definitely, I think there's gonna be a resurgence in email lists, just owning your content, instead of putting your content up and spraying it all over social media, you're going to host it on your website. So people are going to come back to your website to experience your content. They're going to get emails from you, or messages from you. You can create a mobile app quite cheaply nowadays. That's more or less a version of your website. And as you post things to your website, go right into the mobile app and get a notification. You do a post, and it notifies everybody. Well, it's getting cheaper for the everyday person to have that same capability, starting a Kajabi site, or selling your information that way. But you own the network, you control it, you know, when you make a post, those people are going to get that information. Lots of ways and Warm Welcome is one of them, obviously sending videos to people communicate so much better than just sending a text-based email. And transitioning all these things from text to video gives people a huge advantage. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. So tell us a bit more about Warm Welcome, now. And also, what's your business infrastructure at the moment? So you run five businesses at once? Obviously, all of them are super successful. What are you doing right? How is every business working with the other? How have you made the system fit into itself?

 

David Jay  

Maybe one thing that I would say I'm doing right and missed many things I'm doing wrong, is that I don't run all these businesses. That was actually one of the things that I had to learn is that I'm actually not very good at running any business. And I don't like running businesses, I hate management, I hate finance. And those are all very necessary things, especially as a business gets bigger. But I noticed as my business has got to a certain point, that I was a detriment to them. Because I'm a startup guy, I'm an innovation guy, I love new stuff. And in an established company, something that needs more finance stability structure systems process, I don't bring that, and I don't like that, I don't operate well in it. I hired a CEO who is more finance minded, and then I went and started new companies. And so that's the model that I have: start things, take them from innovation to market, and then I stay involved until the 1 million arr mark, that's probably as far as I like to go in a company. After that, you need a different set of skills that I just don't enjoy. I'd rather go start something new and go through the pain and the struggle of the startup process and let someone else deal with the pain and the struggle of growing something and scaling it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, cool. 1 million is not so little. I mean, for most of us, it's a long way to get into 1 million arr. How quickly did you get there? What were the tactics that you use to reach that point because it's a long journey? It's a lot of things that need to happen on the way. So talk us through some stories that you have and some things that you've been challenged by?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, I think that a key thing to point out is that it takes time and sometimes you get lucky and you have the wind at your back. But most of the time, that's not the case and you have to stay around in the market, wait for the wind to come, or just continue to plow through. And that's okay. We often put expectations on things and we talk about product launches. And I think it's a bad analogy because almost never does a product launch. Right? It's more like a seed, we plant a seed, and it remains underground for years, maybe it's growing, you don't even know sometimes. And then, you get to see a little bit of it, and then it grows, and grows, and grows some more. And I think that's more real than a launch, like a rocket launch. We've spent a year building this product, and we put it out in the market, and everyone loved it, and it just took off. Those stories are so rare and it's usually like: they were working on that for 5 - 10 years, and then the market hit boom, it took off. You look at Slack and these other companies. They exploded. Second, again, they were around doing nothing, serving a very tiny little group for years and years before they really launched. And that's what I would say is: patience is really important. It's one of those things that were in the early stage, so let's say 0 - 100,000, or 0 -  500,000, trying a lot of things and getting things to market quickly, helps. And the reason is: because when you take a lot of time and you build something, and you think about it, you have meetings about it, you strategize about it, you think you've done it right. And you stick to that for way too long. And you get this arrogance and pride: this is the right way and you're not flexible, you're not going to adapt once it hits the market. And the fact is, the market doesn't care about your product, they only care about their problem. And when we spend all our time in an office or in our cave, or in our garage, building a product, and not trying to understand what the customers' problem is, we get further and further away from a business. Because the business is in place to solve their problem. It's not like you just build whatever they want. You have a gift, you need to discern, and you need to figure out how that's gonna fit into a product because the market doesn't understand how the product is built. Or they'll just say> I want this, this, this, this, this, this and try to do all that you're gonna die. But listening to them and understanding their problem is something that I think most founders don't do enough of as they're building a product.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay, so what was the case with Warm Welcome, then? Is this, at the moment, the biggest business that you run? 

 

David Jay  

No. It's one of the smaller ones. It's just started. Warm welcome's pretty new. And we built a lot of it, we built the video email side about a year and a half ago, and then show the whole project. And then 2020 hit, pandemic, everyone was obsessed with video. And we went all-in on it. The time's right. The sailboat analogy, where it's like the wind is coming and that's when we built video business cards, video pages, video email signatures, video bubbles for your website, every way that you can personalize your business through video, is what Warm Welcome is being built to do. So it's not just the video emails that has all these other components to it. Warm Welcome is one of those new businesses that is very exciting. Timing is everything. And we're really fortunate to have a world that's searching out video solutions like this and wanting to personalize their business. Everyone's depersonalized, dehumanized. And to build a business that is meant to create that human connection, to communicate in a much better way than text. Look at Facebook, look at Twitter, I think it's obvious to everyone that text is probably the worst way that humans can communicate. It just turns into a war. When you have a video conversation, we can disagree on things, but actually have a civil dialogue. That just doesn't happen with text. Nowadays, everyone reads the text with this negative slant. But when I see you on video, I'm like: Oh, another human, a brother. I can chat with this guy, even if we don't agree on everything. And that's a good thing for society.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. And before we go into the video side of our discussion, because I'm really looking forward to getting into that and get your thoughts on things, as well. Just to exploit a bit more this area of sustainably growing your business and really being on the right track to this let's say the 1 million marks. Through the perspective of a start-up, what's your strategy to make sure you are going in the right direction with this, and also what's something that maybe somebody else could take away and implement it to their business, to make sure that they are on the right track with theirs?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, well, I think the market dictates what the right track is. But I also want to point out that in business, you don't have to be right in order to win. And this is something that we get obsessed with. What's the right decision, right? When you're starting a company, there are a trillion decisions you're trying to make. If you're obsessed with making the right decision with every single one, all that does is slow you down. The most important thing in the startup stage is to be decisive. And to make decisions quickly, which then gets to the market, the market gives you feedback, and then you can adjust from there. But when we get to focus on making the right decision, you spend too much time in meetings, too much time debating this and that. And it's far better to just make a call, make a decision, move forward, get feedback. You got to be humble and listen to that feedback and realized that that was the wrong decision, then switch it. You have to be flexible, you have to be constantly doing that. That's why I think most companies take years and years and years to really even get any sort of momentum. Most die along with that way because they don't listen, they don't take that feedback. They just keep building what they think is right. And it kills them. If you keep listening to the customer’s problem, and you keep iterating on your product, you keep shipping stuff trying to fit that, not only do you create a better product, but you create evangelists for your product at the same time, because they've been part of the process. So that's been really key. Get your product to market quickly. Whether it's an alpha, whether it's a prototype, alpha, beta, MVP, whatever you want to call it, just get something to market quickly. Get feedback and keep iterating on that. You'll find you create a lot of evangelists along the way. That's the key to getting traction and to getting to 100,000 - 500,000. You're not going to get to that sort of revenue without some early adopters that are really passionate about solving the same problem that you want to solve. Again, don't try to make them passionate about your product. They don't care about your product, make them passionate, and show that you're passionate about solving that same problem that is their problem.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay, super. So I'm shifting now a bit towards the video side of things, because, as you mentioned, content in general, has been going a lot in this direction lately, not even lately. It's been years now since people have started to use video more. Is just this year that has ramped up everything four or five times from our perspectives. How do you see video integrated into the business, in content marketing? We've already discussed a bit about testimonials. But let's go a bit more into it.

 

David Jay  

Oh my gosh, in every way. We're on a 600-year shift when it comes to video. It was 600 years ago that the printing press came out. And it was at that time everyone got obsessed with the written word because it was maybe the first thing in our world that scaled. And we love things that scale, right? I can write something once and print a million books. For the last 600 years, everything has been geared towards the written word. We have so many different varieties of it, right? We have notebooks, we have books, we have text messages, we have emails, we have Google Docs, we have notepads, post-it notes, we have so many iterations of it because there are a lot of different ways to communicate with the written word. Now, we're seeing that same thing happen with video. If you want to do a live video like this, you can use Zoom or Google meeting, or 50 other solutions. When did some of these first video calling technologies come out? We're talking 20 years ago or more, maybe, and it's just now today, where they're beginning mass adoption. If you look around, you're starting to see all these different iterations of it, whether it's a little video bubble on your website, that's one way to communicate through video, or a video email, or a video business card. All those are iterations of taking the old model and transitioning to the new. We're at the early stages of this because it's a 600-year shift in the way that people communicate. It's not just a new technology that's this year, we're all going to do this. We're shifting everything. People are just not going to communicate the way that they did before. Because video is so much better. If you get a video, and you can see someone's face, you can see their smile, they're waving at you. Think of how much more you communicate through video than you do through an email. When you get a video version of that, is like: Wow, that's cool. I like this guy more, I trust this guy more, I can see his face. He's smiling at me, he's waving like. You get a lot more of the nuance, which there's a lot of power in that and a lot of trusts is built to that. So that's an exciting time to be in the video.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, okay. I might push the limits here a bit, but I just got an idea. You know how Joe Rogan always creates these scenarios and stuff. I think this is an interesting thing that we could fantasize about. Or not even, maybe that's not the word. But let's say that we have a business that currently has a website that is all text and images mostly, maybe some videos about the product or about the team, but not so much video in general. Do you see any future where a business could run, and basically expose itself and sell almost entirely through video? Have a website that communicates mostly through video, their communications are mostly through video apart from these live ones? Have you thought about a scenario like this? I'd be super curious.

 

David Jay  

Absolutely. I think the video is the driver for communication, whether it's communicating with words as humans, or even communicating with content. So an example of communicating through content would be a contractor. We have contractors and developers that use Warm Welcome. And they'll go out to the job site and what they need to communicate back to their client is the progress, a progress update. Every week, here's what we built on your job site, or here's the repairs we did at your house. Well, I think if you got a text email from a contractor that said: We repaired the broken wood on the door, and we did this and we did that, it kind of communicates it, but if they show you a video, you're like: Okay, cool. I trust that that's done. Right? Because you get to see it. If you get a text email, then you come back and say: Yeah, but you painted the door the wrong color. There's a big problem there. The picture says 1000 words while the video says a million words, right? You've got the ability to communicate so much more and so much faster than you would if you were doing the written word. And so there's a lot of implementations of video. And putting that stuff on your website is just so much more engaging and our human minds can capture so much of that. You have to read documents and documents, and documents to get the same amount of information across as a short 10-second video.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. It's also this other debate of: should we have videos that are very well-edited and polished and everything, or can we just keep it raw and real? Many marketers now agree to the fact that it's better in many cases to keep it more unedited and being real and high quality and bring value with videos in general, as in the case of any other content marketing piece. But what's your take? Do you think that in a context where more and more people have the opportunity and the tools to create high-quality videos that are fairly easy to edit, or do you think many of these will be rawer? Or do you think it would be better to have most of the things more high quality edited and sharp and polished?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, yeah, well, I would say it's not binary, I don't think it's one or the other, I'd say it's both. And, and I think it's great to have both, and I don't think it's one or the other. But the real and raw really lends itself to more content. And we're seeing that people just want more consistent new content, then one perfectly created a video that they see over and over and over and over and over again. If I'm wanting to get to know a company or a person, see if I trust them, or I align with them, I just want more content from them. Trust isn't going to be built by watching the same perfectly produced video 50 times, trust is going to be built by getting to know somebody. It's more through relationship. I think the relationship is the driver, not this perfectly produced brand image. That's why I think this type of video is allowing people to do it. It's allowing them to build a relationship as a human or even humanize their brand or personalize their brand, which is way more powerful than a very perfect, pretty brand or website.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. As we get a bit closer to the end of the episode, and this is something that we try to do with each of them, would be to try to help them get some take away points that we discuss here and actually apply them into their business so that they can see some tangible results. I think we discussed a lot of very insightful, important, and applicable things so far. What would be the first three-four things that you think could be easily taken away from the video discussion that we had and sort of applying this more personal face to your business, that people can take away and think or even implement straight away into their businesses?

David Jay  

Depending on the stage your business is in. If you're creating your product, then I would start sending video emails to people who are your potential customer base. If you're creating a product for real estate agents, send video emails to 100 agents a week, because you're still building the product. Once you've refined the product a little more, send 100 a day. But at the beginning, send 100 a week, it's not a big deal, maybe 15 a day. It'll take you probably less than an hour to do that. And send video emails, explain the problem that you're trying to solve, and then ask for feedback on it. Align with them as experts. Say: Hey, you're the expert in this industry, I'd love to learn from you. I'm building this to try and solve problems that I think you have, would you take a look at this? A lot of them would be willing to take a look at it. And as they take a look, they invest in it a little bit more, they give feedback and that gets them aligned with what you're trying to do and they will become your early evangelists.

 

Andrei Tiu  

How should they do these videos? For example, with Warm Welcome, can they create something like this? And if so, what's the form when it gets into a video?

 

David Jay  

With Warm Welcome, you can send a video email, and then we have video playlists. So what that is, is a pre-recorded video that will automatically play after the personal video. So for example, I would click record on my phone or on the computer, say: Hey, Andrei! I'm creating this product and it's meant to solve this problem. And I just love to get your feedback on it. I'm going to show you a little preview, a little screen grab of the different things that it does, and have a look, if you want, you can go create a free account, and you can check it out there, just know that it's in beta, but I'd really value your opinion on this because I hope this is going to help a lot of other people like you. And boom, then you hit the playlist and it plays the other video. You see how you only have to take a few seconds, a personal introduction, explain the problem, and play the playlist, which will show them the product a little bit more. And then right from that video email, they can click reply and send you a video back or an audio message back, or text back, whatever they want. But it starts to build the relationship and it builds the relationship around a problem that you at least hope that they have. It's a very easy way to go out into the market and start getting feedback from your potential customers. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Nice. Okay. And maybe another thing that they can think of? 

 

David Jay  

Video testimonials. The first piece of advice was getting feedback as you're building a product. The second would be: if you're already in the market, and you're wanting to generate that word of mouth and word of mouth marketing, go to whatever customers you have. Maybe only have 10, that's fine. You can do a lot with 10 excited people. Look at the religions of the world. Those religions in the world were founded by one person who had this small group of really passionate, loyal followers. They've changed the world. So go to those 10 and say, Hey, would you take just five minutes of your time and click this button and record a video testimonial for me? And you can do this through the video emails. Send them a Warm Welcome video email, they watch it, it's a testimonial request, they can click the button right there, send you a video back. Super easy. And by doing that, you've trained them how to talk about you, you've taken the hardest part out of it, which is getting started and you've created a more scalable marketing piece at the same time, which is their video testimonial.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Cool stuff. Nice. And now, let's talk a bit about you, as we wrap up. What exciting stuff are you planning for the next couple of months? Now, since you have identified opportunities with Warm Welcome, probably many of them linked to the other businesses that you run. Where's your focus at the moment? What are you planning? Any announcements that you feel you could share?

 

David Jay  

With Warm Welcome, we've just added in the four widgets. We started a video e-mail but then we added in the video business card, we added in video email signatures, so that you can put those in every single email that you send. The video pages are another cool one, because that you can just embed them on your website. You were talking about a video-driven website? Well, it's great to have broadcast videos that are communicating a lot on your website. But what the Warm Welcome video allows you to do is make it engaging, where the customer can respond back through that video. And it's not just pushing messages out, it's helping pull people in. That I think is the best sort of marketing. And then, the video bubble. Adding that video bubble to your website, where the minute somebody sees your website, they see you smiling and waving at them. I think is a really, really powerful thing. And what we're going to do now is create more and more of those widgets that are just transitioning Old World types of communication to new world types of communication, which is obviously being done through a video. We have lots of creative things planned. But for the most part, people implementing just those few things, which you can do in a matter of minutes, will definitely help move the needle.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Very cool. You've convinced me about the video widget. Basically, how does it work the one that the customer can reply to you? I had a look on your website, but I just didn't try them yet. So how would it work for the people tuning in as well? Because I think that there might be some more edgy marketeers here that would be keen to see how this would work and maybe try it out. I'm one of them. So basically, you implement this widget, which would contain a video of you talking about one of the services, right?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, you could use it for a service, you could use it for a product, you could use it as a customer service tool.

 

Andrei Tiu  

But how is the interaction going on? Somebody views the video and then how did they send you that video back?

 

David Jay  

It's super easy. All they do is click the button. It asks them, Hey, you wanna record a video? Yep, boom and it pops open their camera, and they can record a video and they send it to you. And so it's asynchronous, it's not live. They record a video, send it to you, you watch it when it's convenient for you. And you can send them a video back, and they can watch it when it's convenient for them. For example, a video about page or a video contact page, on your website. Most contact pages are formed. Which is the worst idea ever, right? When you think about it, you create this website, and you have the sales funnel, and you have all these things that move the customer along, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And then, when you've done all the hard work, you put them onto a page the tough form. That just makes them feel like a number. They might think: you did all this work to get me to a form? I'm at a doctor's office, I got fill this out? Nobody wants that, which is not good for the relationship. Why not have that final page be a video saying, Hey, I'm so thankful that we're gonna get the chance to work together. The best thing you can do in sales is to assume the sale. Got them all the way down the line, assume the sale. When they're on your contact page, assume you've already closed them. Talk to them in person from you, about what it's going to be like to work together. Not fill out a form and we'll get back to you when it's convenient for us. No, talk to them, thank them for doing all the work getting to this stage, share how excited you are to work together. And then they can click a button and they can send you a video if they want or they can just say: Hey, contact me back and we'll get working together. That's another example of using this interactive, engaging video to solve a problem that previously was done through text in a really poor way that really didn't help the relationship.

 

Andrei Tiu

Mm-hmm. Yeah, the contact page is the one that I was thinking of, as well. So I will let you know how it goes. I will schedule this for this month to try to test it. I'm really excited. 

 

David Jay  

We wanted to handle the entire customer journey. There are other companies that do video emails and that's great. There are other companies that do little video bubbles. At least one that we know of. And that's cool, too. But, if you don't take the entire customer journey and personalize it, and you're strapping all these different tools together to try and do that, it becomes disjointed and disconnected and the customer experience falls off. When you think of the flywheel or the customer journey, you want every touchpoint to be personalized, every touchpoint to be consistent, every touchpoint to be moving the relationship along towards, what everybody wants, which is a solution to that common problems. That's what we think is really important, is having those all within one tool and not using this for video emails and this for a bubble, and this or this. That creates chaos for everybody.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Very cool. Very exciting. So, David, a big pleasure having you today on the show. Really enjoyed our chat and found out new things. Got new ideas myself, and I'm sure that people are tuning in as well. Guys, let us know what captured your attention most. And David, if there's somebody here that wants to reach out and connect directly to you, which would be the best way? Is it LinkedIn? Would it via email?

 

David Jay  

Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I'm on LinkedIn, Warm Welcome is there. Or david@warmwelcome.com. Feel free, send me an email, I'd love to chat or send me a video, even better, I'd love to see you and get to know you. Those are all good ways to do that. We'll send over a special code for all your listeners where they can get hooked up and get a few months free of Warm Welcome, they can try out all the features, play around with it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's super kind, thank you!

 

David Jay  

And the video business card and the video email signatures, they're free for everybody all the time. So anyone can go now and grab those. And then if you want to try out all the other stuff, then we'll get you that code.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super, thanks a lot. So, guys, you'll most likely find this in the description of the episode together with David's details, as well as links to his businesses. But until next time, David, really appreciate your insight here, in both areas. I thought equally interesting to both discussions. And I'm sure that everybody tuning in got value from them. Really enjoyed the dynamics of our chat, as well. I'll let you know how we get along with the videos, as well. This is going to be a very nice test. We never did before. Let's keep connected. Maybe do this again early next year. Really excited to hear how things will go for you and the growth that you're gonna see over the next couple of months.

 

David Jay  

Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks, Andrei. I appreciate it and just really excited about what's ahead.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Same here. Thanks a lot. Have a nice one. Speak soon.