The Marketing Innovation Show

Marketing Automation Strategy and Opportunities for 2021 [with Dan McGaw]

Join Andrei and Dan McGaw on this episode of The Marketing Innovation Show, as they will be discussing marketing automation, personalization, hacks and trends for the upcoming year, as well as how to best optimize your funnels for conversion.

 

Dan McGaw is an award-winning entrepreneur and speaker. He is the Founder and CEO of McGaw.io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy. Coined as one of the original growth hackers, he has led the teams at Kissmetrics.com, CodeSchool.com, UTM.io and more. In 2015, Dan was selected to be a United States Ambassador of Entrepreneurship by the United States Department of State, where he had the privilege to advise the government, universities, and private corporations on how to build entrepreneur ecosystems.

 

Connect with Dan:

Website: https://mcgaw.io/

McGaw on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mcgaw-io/

Resources: https://mcgaw.io/tools/#gs.l5yqs8

Downloads: https://mcgaw.io/resources/#gs.l5yrjz

Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmcgaw/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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

 

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Episode Transcript:

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay. Hello, everybody. This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Dan McGaw, who is the founder and CEO of mcgaw.io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy. He's also known as one of the original growth hackers, and he has led the teams of KISSmetrics and utm.io, to name a few. Today we'll discuss marketing automation, personalization hacks and trends, as well as how to best optimise your funnels for conversion. Hi, Dan, how are you? How's the morning going?

 

Dan McGaw  

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Same here exciting times. Really, really cool to kick off the episode on the sort of marketing technology front right away. I think there's going to be quite some popularity about the subject mainly now, as we are in the holiday seasons, online shopping and online, in general, has been reaching enormous levels. Tell us a bit about yourself. What are you into and what you do at the moment in your company, as well as where you started? How you've been growing in this space?

 

Dan McGaw

Yeah. So I mean, I've been in the marketing and technology space for over 20 years. So I got my start back in 1998, sending mass emails since before there was even mass email. So the easiest way to kind of summarise my careers, I've just seen some shit, right. Definitely have been through martech for a long time. Like you had mentioned, I was the head of marketing at kissmetrics. So it was one of the pioneers in analytics space that worked with them. And I also had a couple more tech companies now. So definitely really busy. Today, though, running mcgaw.io, we're martech and analytics agency. So we help companies pick tools, integrate them, ultimately operate them and then use those tools to accelerate their growth. I mean, I have to say most of my time nowadays is really focused on sitting in meetings, finding out what are the new possible trends are going to come out and then writing about those pilot kind of trends. So I have a lot of content that's out there, I do a lot of interviews and stuff like that. So it's a lot of fun, I can't really complain. COVID, while it has sucked, everybody is going digital, everybody's trying to figure out how to transform. So for our business, it has actually been something that's kind of caused us to be really busy. We doubled our company this year. So we continue to grow. And we're gonna quadruple the company next year. While COVID is still miserable, I'm very lucky that I live in Florida, where it's hot. We don't have as much restriction here. So far, it hasn't been the end of the world for me.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Let's go strictly into this sort of analytics, tracking space, because I think you probably saw everything from the beginning, right? So you saw the technologies coming up, and then them not integrating without one another and then having to solve the issue of tracking source, etc, etc. And mainly, from a marketing leader's perspective, I think you also had felt that pain and the resolution. Tell us a bit about you, let's get to know you a bit as a person and as a professional.

 

Dan McGaw  

To start out with a little bit about me as a person, right. So I live in Orlando, Florida, which is a great place to live definitely is not a tech hub in the United States. It's a cool place, Disney World is here and stuff like that. But I love living here, it's a great place to raise a family, I have three kids, ranging from 15, all the way back to six years old. My nine-year-old, right smack in the middle. So we do a lot of stuff around that with my kids. And we're super big into baseball, which is all statistics-driven, right? If you really look into all sports, like baseball is the one that's most focused on the data all the time. That's a nice blend of my day job and being an analysis and statistics. And then also in baseball, because it's constantly looking at the numbers. So that's definitely a lot of fun. But I would definitely say that my entire career, I've been focused on technology. I mean, I was very lucky as a kid to be given a computer at the age of four years old. So even when I type now I don't use your standard home row kind of typing style. My style is a little bit all over the place, but I can out type most people just because I started so early on a computer. And when I was four, MS-DOS was the only way that you could get into a computer. Windows wasn't around yet. So that was how you had to use a computer was code. So I got good at code at a very young age. And that's kind of what got me into technology so much is that I was always on a computer and that was kind of my passion, was always being on a computer. I mean, I started my first company when I was 13 built that company until I was 19. And then, of course exited that business. It kind of failed but also turned into a success all at the same time. But I got my start in technology, in the music industry. So it was in the marketing of the music business. So I've always been in tech. I've always been heavily involved with what it was. And it's been awesome to see the industry change over the past 20 years, definitely going from "hey, there are no tools to developers like building out in Silicon Valley" to now seeing it where people have software everywhere, and things are growing across the country. It's been a lot of fun to watch. There's still a lot of cool tools to come. And I think that's what gets me most excited is that there's still problems. Now that we have all these tools, there's problems with the tool. So new tools are created on top of other tools. And that process is going to continue to keep happening. And that's what led to the blossoming of utm.io. One of our own products is: there was a problem and on top of Google Analytics and other analytics platforms, and we solve that problem. So there's a lot of things that happened.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Tell us a bit about your work with your own agency at the moment. How do you work with companies, just to get a bit more context for our discussion when we go into the nitty, gritty?

 

Dan McGaw  

There are two times that a company typically comes to us. So the first one is, hey, they lacked visibility into their customer journey, or two: now that they have visibility into their customer journey, or even when they don't have it, they want to be able to engage with people during that customer journey. And those are the primary root causes of somebody really working with us. That being said, most companies come to us when they need us to help them pick their tools. They want to figure out what marketing automation tool should they use, what type of CRM should they be using? How should it be integrating all of these tools together? How do they get all this stuff cohesively working together? We do a lot of implementation. So connecting, whether that be marketing automation with your website, we do a lot of customer data platform work. Connecting segment in with your website and your web application and your product to make use of that data will flow in analytics. And amongst all the other tools, do a lot of amplitude implementation as well, a lot of business intelligence work. So now that you have all this data, we dump it into a warehouse, we provide you with the analysis. On top of that, there's a lot of integrations work, we're known as a systems integrator. And then we also run the tools for companies. So some companies, they don't have the team that can help them manage all of these tools. So we become their outside BizOps, DevOps, marketing, operations, RebOps, any of those operational capacities, we do that for a lot of companies. And then we also have a lot of companies which work with us to do conversion rate optimization. So now that I can see my customer journey, how do they AB test their way to make sure that that is successful? And how do I maximise my conversions in there? All of it is focused on the middle and bottom of funnel of really optimising revenue, but we look at it through the lens of data and the tools to really get that going. Because as a marketer, nowadays, if you're not really technical, you're really dependent upon a company like us, or you're dependent upon engineers. And at the end of the day, if you're a marketer, dependent upon engineers, those engineers don't know what you're trying to do. There's typically an argument or a war there, we very much get inserted in between those arguments to make both sides happy. We become the technical side of your marketing team and manage all of that infrastructure. That's it from a high level in regards to that stuff. But when people want to work with us, we always start out with a diagnostics. So come in, diagnose all the things that are doing it, what's happening, what's wrong, we write a strategy, and then we jump into a multi-month retainer where we roll that stuff out. We always try to make sure that everybody agrees to what the problem and the solution is, first, before we jump into a project, for anybody who's going to be watching this, that runs an agency or anything like that, if you're not doing a diagnostics, and then going into the project, I would recommend really doing that audit stage first. Because if you don't, you're gonna wind up at a programme which you're gonna, you're gonna fail in, and nobody's gonna be happy at the end of the day. That upfront work is really important.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Considering most of our audience here is marketing people, or marketing leaders, or entrepreneurs, as well as a bit of sales. Typically, in the role of a marketing leader, you'd be the one responsible for building up your tech stack and running the marketing department, whether that's a one-man-band or a multi-person type of department. A set of questions that everybody has been having on their minds lately, in the last couple of years, at least, was what should tech stacks contain and how to best make it work together? Most people are probably using some technologies, some will be linked better than the others. But if you were to build up a tech stack from scratch today, for a company, let's say a medium-sized company, what elements would you be looking at? And how would you be looking at integrating them in such a way that it's not too many that is unmanageable? And also as we discussed a bit earlier, you keep track of the conversion path and the tracking that needs to happen through the funnel?

 

Dan McGaw  

I think with any company, the first question you have to ask of course is how much budget do I have, right? How much money am I actually able to spend on this? I think that's a really important thing. That will narrow down ultimately what we need to do. But I think the most commonly overlooked part of your martech stack is your website. Most people don't even think about their marketing site as part of their technology stack or part of their marketing stack. And that's something that I think is really, really important. The first stage you have to work on is with that. If you have a custom-built website, which is built by your development team, for me, that's kind of a bad way to approach it. And the reason why I say that is because there's a marketing team, you need to be able to make changes quickly on that website. They're always dependent upon a development team to do that, I think it's a really bad step forward. And then on top of that, another thing you have to take in consideration is whenever you want to get tracking set up on that website, it's gonna be even harder to do because once again, you're dependent upon the engineers, and depending upon what those engineers are big fans of. Let's say that they're using Gatsby, which is a brand new CMS language out there, Gatsbyjs. It's gonna be really hard to track. And it's gonna be really, really difficult to make sure that you can get all of your tracking setup on those websites. So I think the CMS is going to be one of the most important parts you have to think about. We highly recommend to companies to leverage WordPress, especially marketing teams. It's really cheap, flexible, easy for teams to use and marketers are very familiar with it. It's also built on the general internet, right? It still uses HTML and CSS for the most part. So it's easy to track. Now, I'm not telling you, if you're an e-commerce company, naturally, Shopify is a great solution. So definitely leverage Shopify in those cases. But if you're trying to go like the direction of web-flow, I think it's a cool solution. But at the same time, it's just like WordPress, right? There's really not that much of a difference. And for everybody's  "Oh, it's a drag and drop thing". If you want to create a custom page, you still need a developer, if you want to be able to do custom stuff, you still need a dev. The problem is, with web flow is that it has all kinds of complications into tracking. Nobody is familiar with it as they are with WordPress. And for me, I try to use technologies where I have a large access to people who can work on that for me, at any given time. WordPress, huge access to a bunch of people. I think the CMS is a really, really big component of that. And you can, of course, look at other CMS is like contentful, and a lot of these new headless ones that are out there. And there's a lot of opportunity there. But I always tell people, "Hey, keep it simple, keep it super, super sweet, and go with something like WordPress to keep your life easy". But when we think about building out the rest of that stack, the CMS is something that we're heavily dependent upon, so that CMS is built well makes it really easy for us to be able to lay Google Tag Manager on top of it. And if you're not using Google Tag Manager, you definitely have to, tag manager is really good. A marketer can learn it with three hours of online courses, it will make your life much much easier and much more flexible. So making sure that you use an easy CMS tie with a good Tag Manager is going to be super, super helpful. But I would say the next component is, of course, you need to start figuring out what is the marketing automation tool I'm going to use? Do I need to have a CRM separate from my marketing automation tool? You have to start to understand what analytics tools you're going to use, you can use Google Analytics, which I think is great for everybody, you should probably also use a product like amplitude, which is a free analytics product. But it gives you much more behaviour tracking a little bit easier for people to use, you have to start getting curious around all of these different questions of what your problem is. I can't make that decision for you. But the tools that I would quickly recommend: marketing automation tool naturally, everybody always knows of HubSpot and Marketo. I recommend Autopilot. Hands down my favourite marketing automation tool out in the space, it is purely an automation tool, works as a platform. So I would get that definitely set up. I would highly recommend if you need a CRM, I recommend Salesforce for anybody who's looking to grow their business. As a smaller business, if you're not looking to really grow, I would recommend a product called Pipedrive. Really, really both of those integrate well with autopilot. So I think that would be the next stage. And like I had mentioned with analytics, you always need Google Analytics no matter what. But I would highly recommend layering on amplitude on top of it. Both of them are free analytics products, they provide a different view of the world. And those things get you set up. Now the thing you have to think about what the stack is you have data that needs to flow into all of these tools. And the typical way to do that is to integrate leveraging Google Tag Manager and then sending that data into each one of these tools. But the problem is, when you have to integrate four or five tools, that means you have to integrate four or five different tools and their own native syntax. And when you add in Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Pinterest ads, all these other technologies you're going to have and most companies have over 25 different technologies, a lot of integration time. And then if you need to switch, it's a lot of switching time as well. So there's products out there known as like customer data platforms. CDPs is what they go by as an acronym, I highly recommend getting one of those. Really successful becomes the hub of your stack and everything integrates with that. So your website integrates directly with the CDP you would send all of your event tracking to that CDP, the CDP would distribute that information to other products. The CDP will save your developers a ton of time in regard to implementation. So literally, you're gonna spend one-fifth of the time in implementation. That saves you a ton of money, but it's also going to give you cleaner, more accurate data. Most common companies that you'll hear about segment they just got acquired for 3.2 billion by Twilio, which is a great company. There's other companies out there known as MetaRouter, which is another popular CDP. And then there's also RouterStack, which is a new open-source version of those CDPs. But there's tons. If you're a mid-sized company or a big company. There's a tonne of customer data platforms out there from Blueshift to Blueconic to Axiom. Salesforce has their own CDP now, which it sucks. So just don't buy that one. Segment, of course, I had mentioned already. I think there's 85 different CDPs. We had done a research study on customer data platforms about a year ago for a big company. We had to review all of them. If you were to go to our website, mcgaw.io, go to our blog, it's in the footer. Look for the customer data platform on and we'll explain what is the value, why would you choose them, what are the three different types of CDPs? Because that's becoming the hub of the stack moving forward. So even though we already talked about a lot of tools, that CDP is going to be a big thing that you need to focus on as well.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's very insightful. Do you have a favourite CDP that use?

 

Dan McGaw  

We use Segment the most. And then I would have to say MetaRouter would be second in line from that one, but we use them in very, very different search situations.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I think a natural flow from here would be, let's say we have a company that doesn't use a CDP. So they were using, the top of funnels, strategies or tactics, which would be driving email traffic from Facebook, or Google or Instagram, depending on the industry, and the type of company, and then Google ads. And then they were tracking everything, in Google Analytics, let's say they were using a Tag Manager for this. But I would like to talk with you about this space of marketing, personalization and automation, because I think this would help us solve deep stuff. This is what a CDP does, right? It helps you automate and personalise much better than marketing communications. If you were to jump into or look from outside at this type of company that runs all these strategies. Let's say they're a medium-sized company, how could they could use a CDP, in order to get to an ideal scenario for running their marketing operations in a traceable manner.

Dan McGaw  

I think the greatest benefit with a customer data platform CDP is naturally the fact that it enables you to track all the data, and then store that in a very, very structured way. So it can be leveraged in the future. There's a lot of different ways that these CPSs can be used. But I think the most common one is that once we know certain attributes about a user, we can take a certain action and make something happen. You don't always need to use the CDP to do that we can do a lot of that personalization and managing of the customer data by using products like Autopilot, which is one of the reasons why I really like Autopilot, is it's super flexible, it allows you to do all kinds of automation. But the customer data platform, when I think about most CDPs, the biggest value they provide is, I only have one place to send my data. And they distribute that information out to all the other tools. And this is really, really helpful because I don't have to make five different integrations, I just have to make one. And then they distribute that data to the other tools. And that's where I think the value of the personalization really lies to the fact that it's no longer hard to get all of this data somewhere else. And really, when you think about a stack, the reason why it's really valuable is that it's all connected together. If you want to be successful in modern marketing, and you don't want me or my clients to basically kick your ass in marketing, you have to understand, the reason why we're successful at marketing is because all the tools are integrated. All the data from everywhere is being pulled back into one place, if not being mirrored across all these different tools. So we actually know all of the information about the customer. So when you think about a normal customer record, most companies have little bits of customer data spread throughout all of these different tools. And they don't try to get it all back into one place. When you get it back into one place, you're then able to make a lot more actions on it, you're able to actually know what's going on about the customer. And you'd be amazed the number of companies that don't know the amount of revenue a customer has spent with them in their marketing automation tool. Most companies don't have that known at all inside it, they only have it inside their analytics product. But from when we think about using a customer data platform, we now have every single action, every single, value every single thing they've ever done, being sent into all of our tools. So now I not only know that they've purchased six times and their total revenue amount as my analytics tool, but I also know that same exact answer in my marketing automation tool. I also know that inside of my CRM, I'm able to use that data to be able to send over to Facebook that I want to change this person's audience pool. So the CDP for me is not necessarily just the CDP has the knowledge to do the personalization, it's the fact that you can get this knowledge to every single tool in your stack, where that data is needed. And I'll try to provide a little bit more context. When you think about Salesforce's CRM, the sales reps are working on that tool every single day. Never before have people been able to really successfully get their web behaviour data sent into the CRM, there are some fields that get updated. But if you set up your stack correctly, you're able to take all that information you have from that user's behaviour history online, be able to mirror that even with customer data enrichment, so pulling in third-party data, and then set that inside of the CRM. Now, when a sales rep finally goes to look at a lead, they have all sorts of information. So instead of them just saying "Oh, I have a lead", they now have a lead where they have every single bit of information they could ever need on why they're going to reach out to them, how they're going to reach out to them, how many times they've viewed the pricing page, how much revenue does this company have? So, it really takes your data to a whole new level, and allows those other tools to do the personalization, or the humans using those tools to do the personalization.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So let's take, for example, segment or autopilot, to show how somebody should look at building a tech stack on top of a CDP. If, until today, you are running your marketing on specific channels, you had bits of data from each of them, and then you are maybe running some remarketing campaigns or abandoned cards in e-commerce, or these specific campaigns after your tracking was identifying specific actions from your customers. If you're running a CDP, then you'll be able to use the CDP to distribute the automated actions based on the data that somebody would be attributed from his interactions with your brands. By the way, the type of CDP that we address at the moment, does it integrate with a proprietary email marketing automation tool, or do typically pull that from another place?

 

Dan McGaw  

I typically try to make it so that my CDP is where all my integration is. And then everything else gets integrated with the CDP. So I typically try to make use of the CDP is my only customer data pipeline. And that's where I'm sending all my data. But naturally, these things get set up in a myriad of different ways. But usually, what the CDP sends the data to the automation tool, if you're lucky, that automation tool has a two-way integration with your CDP and they're constantly recycling data, which is a really common thing as we want to recycle data throughout the entire system to get those things connected. But there's a lot of ways that you can integrate these tools. And if you're just starting out, don't blow up your entire stack to roll out the CDP. Use the CDP where you can obviously connect things the quickest. And then, over time, you're going to want to transition those things. But I don't feel like you need to blow up your entire stack on day one when trying to roll out a CDP. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. But for example, for being able to use some of these types of personalization, such as: somebody's viewed my page three times, I want to show them this push notification on web or mobile or something like this. What would be some tools that people could look at in order to get a glimpse of what it would mean to integrate something like that, either in their current stack or with a CDP? 

 

Dan McGaw  

Yeah, well, I mean one thing to help people kind of really understand this: one, I wrote a book on how to build the modern stack. So if you just went to our website, McGaw.io, you'll be able to get a free copy of my book. And the book is called Build Cool Shit. It's your blueprint for building the modern tech stack. So that book will make it really, really easy. It's a short book to read, really, really helpful, but will kind of explain how you should integrate all these tools together to get this set up. So I think that'd be really good. But I think the easiest way to think about it right is: if you're trying to get all these things connected, you're going to need to be able to set up what's known as a data taxonomy to understand what are the actions people are happening, and then what is what are the properties that are associated with those things? And if you're really interested in learning how to design a data taxonomy, once again, just go to our websites in the footer, there's a downloads and resources section. In our resources, you'll be able to find a webinar, which is talking all about how do you build out a data taxonomy. Anything that I tell you today, you can find on our website for free, on learning how to do it, and the data taxonomy will teach you. You need to have the data taxonomy to set up basically all this tracking and understand how it's all supposed to work, that tracking would be rolled out through Google Tag Manager to get it live on to your website, just like if you have conversion pixels for AdWords on LinkedIn, roll them out on Google Tag Manager, get those things set up. And then naturally, that data is going to flow into whatever tools that you then send it to from Google Tag Manager, then build that out. But if you're really trying to create more actions: somebody does this on my website, and I want to be able to add them to this retargeting pool, or I want to send them an email, you don't need a customer data platform, right? That's where autopilot would come in and do all of that work for you. If you set up autopilot, you can build a journey inside of autopilot really, really easy once you drop their JavaScript on your website saying if somebody visits this page, do this action. And they have form trackers and stuff. So if somebody fills out this form, you can see that without having to write any code. And that's where autopilot is super, super valuable. Based upon some of the examples that you're providing, I would say you don't even need a CDP, right? Just use autopilot and autopilot will get you most of the way there. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. I see, okay. Very cool stuff. Now, let's see. Let's go a bit back to the customer that we were talking from the marketers point of view. I mean, it's still from the marketers point of view, but looking at the funnels and the way that a company's customers will interact with its marketing messages, communications, etc. I know a lot of your expertise is in optimising these conversion paths and getting your funnels to convert better. So let's get a bit of into this subject and look also at the different marketing tactics or optimizations that can be done along the way to either growth hack your optimization level, or just to make them convert better, really, at the end of the day.

 

Dan McGaw

Yeah, I mean, I think whenever we think about the buyers’ journey, we have to remember that there's four distinct parts of the buyer’s journey that you have to kind of take into consideration. And you can look on the internet and look up what are the parts of the buyer journey that I'll be explaining. But we try to always follow the four-part process, right? Somebody has awareness, once they become aware of you, they then need to research you, they then need to consider you and then they can purchase. So they have to walk through those four stages. So whenever you think about your buyer’s journey, you want to lay into that framework to make it a little bit easier to understand what are the types of messaging that I need to provide them as they go through that. So when we think about the awareness stage, awareness would be, of course, anything that you're driving off of your website, to get somebody to your website. So any of your advertising channels and things like that, we need to think about where a customer is in that journey. So we're now making them aware. And every business is a little bit different. When you think about Google, people are trying to solve a problem. But when you think about the people on Facebook, they're just viewing Facebook. So even though you're making them aware, in either one of those channels, you have to understand what are they trying to accomplish. So you really want to make sure that your messaging focuses on what are they trying to accomplish on that medium. So when you think about Google to try to solve a problem, many cases. They're looking for an outcome, and you very luckily you can create the outcome that they're searching around. So you really have to think about that. And on the flip side, with Facebook as an example, they're not looking for an outcome. They're looking for their friends posts. So you have to create something that's going to be enticing and as well as something that's going to get them to become aware of your product without trying to necessarily solve a problem you don't know the answer for. So sometimes you have to focus on the outcome a little bit more in that case. And that's going to change on all these advertising platforms, from LinkedIn to Pinterest, to even cold outbound email, you really have to understand the medium that you're reaching out to them is going to change the messaging that you should use for that awareness stage. And then on the flip side of that, when somebody clicks on one of those ads and comes to your website, probably want to have a custom landing page, which is going to be tailored to whatever that outcome that they recently clicked on. If you have people that are coming to your homepage, they're gonna be made aware that your brand exists through that. So you have to match the messaging to whatever your value proposition is, for whatever awareness channel they're going to get there. You really have to take a step back and understand what are your customers trying to do at this moment in time, especially when they're in that awareness stage. They're just becoming aware that your brand exists. So we need to keep it very, very high level and focus on one course, whatever that value is going to be for them. I think the greatest thing that I always try to tell marketers is nobody cares about you, we don't care you exist, we don't like you, we never want to know that you're there. Marketers have to understand this has nothing to do with them. This has everything to do with the customer. And marketers typically only think about themselves. And I hate to say that, but it's true. Marketers always think well, what would I do? And nobody cares about you, you're not the customer, you're not buying this solution. What does your customer want? What does your customer want to do? And that awareness stage is really, really important. Now you have to understand this: once somebody becomes aware of you, they then need to research you,. They have to be followed through this buyer journey. And that's what's really important. I think a lot of companies miss this: they don't try to control the customer journey enough so that way people can properly give research. And you'll see this on every single site you go to, you visit the home site, or the homepage, and the first call to action is by now. They just got there. You sell flip flops: okay, why are you better? You've got to provide that opportunity for them to actually do research to know why you're better. And I think it's really important, we see this happen a lot, where people are just driving for the sale the entire time. Well, they still have to research, they still have to consider you. So provide them that opportunity. And they'll buy. So you have to give them the opportunity to understand and research what you have. So provide that information, deliver it to them and carry them down a customer journey on your website where you're allowing them to give research, explain the value props, give them the pieces of information they need to make a valuable decision. And that's really going to help you. And to optimise that funnel and we see this as an example all the time in online education. The online education playbook is super, super simple. I'm aware that you have a product or course which ultimately is going to teach me something where I have a problem. Okay, great. I hit your homepage. Let me click on a button that says show me courses. Show me all the courses you have. I want to see what you have. I can research and see how you're different. I then get to the next stage. I see all the courses you have. Well naturally I'm researching to see if you have all the courses we have. Part of that research journey is I then click on a course that I care about. I want to learn how to do to stay at home and be a  chef. I then click on that course but I didn't go to that course. Well, the next thing I want to do is: is this content going to be any good? Is this going to be fast enough? Are they going to have the topics we like? Are they as good as Gordon Ramsay? We want to make sure that we have that? Well, the best way to allow them to research that is to give them a video on the page so they can see how the course is structured and then, of course, to give them access to that course for free for either the first lesson or short period of time so they can then research that and figure out if this is a valuable purchase for them. But naturally, they're going to consider that purchase against things they have, whether there are competitors in the marketplace, whether they're going to learn it on their own, whether they're going to learn it from YouTube, right? They're going to do their own research, and then they're going to consider their decision. Your job is to make sure that when they do that research part, that you come out on top. So you want to make sure that you give them good language there, you give them good help, you give them good service. And you stop thinking about: oh, well, I already know this product, so I don't need to explain it. Make sure you explain it. That's pretty straightforward. And last, like I had mentioned, you have the consideration phase. This is really where marketing automation, analytics really comes into play. You should be retargeting them, you should be sending them emails, you need to keep yourself top of Mind during that entire consideration phase. So you have to make sure that you follow the general process. And then, of course, the last stage is purchasing. We need to be able to get into that purchase process. And we want to make that as easy as we possibly can for those people. So going back to the top, awareness needs to be matched to wherever they are in the buyer journey. Are they getting information? Are they being made aware of you, when they're doing their research on your website, you need to make sure that you give them good information, good copy, good images, good explanations, pushing them down that funnel? Don't talk about yourself, talk about how you solve their problems, they need to be able to consider you against what other options they have And during that time, you just need to focus on staying top of mind. And then, lastly, is purchase. So if you try to break it down to those simple four steps, makes it a lot easier to look at each one of those pieces of the buyer journey and understand what type of communications you should be offering. I think that's a basic fundamental that most people just miss. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay. And what are some very often encountered mistakes that you saw from clients when you first started to work with them on this? 

 

Dan McGaw  

I think the first one is always trying to go for the home run on the homepage. Everybody's trying to get them to buy as soon as they hit your website. And I think that's a really, really bad example that we typically see. People start with imagery first, they don't start with the copy first. First, you've got to get the copy written down, you've got to get the value props written very, very well. The next one I would definitely say Is everybody talks about themselves. And as I will always say, nobody gives a fuck about you. Like nobody cares. You've got to start talking about it from the outcome that you're going to create for your customer. We are the best CRM ever, Ha! Nobody cares!  You will close more deals by using our CRM. Okay, now everybody cares. But you have to back that up with research, you have to allow them to be able to see how do you make this statement. That's the number one problem I would probably say that we see everywhere: everybody just talking about themselves, and they need to talk about their customer, they need to talk about the outcome that they'll create for their customer. Don't get me wrong, there's times that you need to say: we do this, and that's super, super helpful. But you need to make sure that you're trying to put it back on the value benefit that you will create for that customer. I would say that, probably the next one that we see the most is over designing a page. A really, really simple one that everybody does is you probably see that staggered content where it's like image on left, then image on right image on left and image on, right. I'm not sure if anybody else knows this. But whenever you read a book, you don't read left page, then right page, then left page, then right page and left page. No, you read the left, and then you move to the right. You should do that for the content on your website, as well. Put all the texts on one side, but all the images on the other side. Don't stagger it, it really makes it hard to read. Yes, it looks pretty, but I'm not in the business of looking pretty. I'm in the business of making money. So I think staggered content is always going to hurt you. Focus on capturing emails, capture emails, capture emails, capture emails, capture emails, your strongest channel will probably always be email. If you focus on capturing enough leads. One of the reasons why our business is so successful and why we consistently stay successful: we've created an amazing amount of valuable content and then we tell people to give us their email. And then we leverage that email to keep them up to date with our content. And we're always putting out content. But we focus on getting that email. If you went to my website, it's not always telling you: Hey, by now. It's saying: Hey, go check out our free tools, go check out our blog post, build that relationship, but capture more emails. That's always the big thing that we focus on: is getting more emails. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

One point that I think we didn't specifically go into but I really wanted to touch on it before the end of the episode was leveraging advanced automation without having to pay loads for it. So two questions here. First of all, I know we were talking about leveraging Amazon automation, but without the budget. And the second was in terms of getting to the next step, what would be like an average or a meme budget that somebody should allocate when they are looking at revamping their marketing stack and just to get a bit of a feel for what it would mean in terms of financial resources as well. 

 

Dan McGaw  

I think the first part: how are you going to be able to create personalization like Amazon, I would definitely lean on a product like Autopilot. Going back to that tool I had talked about. Autopilot does some really, really cool stuff. And it's super, super flexible. From a marketing automation standpoint, it can also create pop-ups on your website. So I would definitely say that would be the tool that I would lean on the most there. But there's another tool that's out there, that's a little bit newer, it's called convert flow. That product is amazing. It integrates with products like Active Campaign, autopilot HubSpot. Enables you to recognise who that user is on your website, and then personalise your website based upon that user. And that's very Amazon-esque. Being able to make it so that the consumer will see what you want them to see, based upon their previous purchasing history. So I would definitely say convert flow is a really, really good product for that, is really, really helpful. They'll do all your pop-ups, will do all those things as well. So autopilot tied with convert flow. If you have a customer data platform, and a tracking everything, definitely some crazy superpowers there. And other tools that I've said so far are all that expensive. With autopilot, you can get started, I think as low as $20 a month with the product, and then it ramps up from there. With convert flow, I think it starts at $40 a month so and then ramps up from there. I know segment you can get started for $100 a month, I know they have a free tier, which is pretty limited. But $400 a month you can get started there. And we work with multiple clients now that their marketing budget is really, really small. So as an example, one of our clients is using amplitude, they're using the free version of Segment, they're using, the lowest version of Pipedrive in the lowest version of autopilot, and there may be spending $100-125 a month. So you can really get a lot done with these products. If you don't have crazy volume. If you have crazy volume, you're starting to get much more expensive. And I'll just use our company as an example. I can't talk about our clients because it's kind of confidential information. But as an example, on our website, we have utm.io, which is one of our products. UTM, which is really helpful for marketers, it will allow you to have data governance on your UTM tracking code. So if you're using a UTM spreadsheet, or you're going online using one of those forums, just go to UTM do the free plan will crush it for you. It has a UTM spreadsheet, we'll give you a Chrome extension. And it's super, super awesome. But with UTM, it gets about 10,000 visits a month to its website, we have about 15,000 customers that are using the product on a pretty active basis. Amplitude for that product is entirely free. So we don't pay any money for that. Autopilot runs in about $500 a month for that product. So definitely add some cost to it. But it's very, very valuable. We have segment installed on that product, as well. About $150 a month for that product. So really isn't all that crazy expensive. And those are the main ones that we would really have to pay for. Google Analytics is still free, Google Tag Manager still free, Google optimise is still free. And we're really only paying for autopilot and segment. Everything else is pretty much-taken care of. Unless you consider Helpscout, which is our customer successful. So to build a marketing stack, you don't need a bunch of money. You really just need to know how to integrate it and how to set it up and which tools are better. And that's where I would say, go check out a free copy of my book, like I talked about, just go to our website McGaw.io, you'll be able to get a free copy through the site. And my book will tell you how do you set up the stack as cheap as you can, and how do you integrate it to create all kinds of cool outcomes that we’ve talked about. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

You know, it's these episodes that we actually talk about practical stuff, and tools and everything that I think are most appreciated, because there's so much information from everywhere, but nobody really does it until the end. So it's always good, even for our clients the same as they hear solutions from us, but it's the first time they hear them. So it's very good to get more opinions about something so you understand this is right, and is the right thing to do and then to be able to also check out information further. So definitely, thanks for the free book as well. I'm sure that everybody that is going to download you they're going to find it insightful, also had a look into your background and everything before the episode and before we got the chance to meet. I know the information is good. So you guys tuning in, make sure to check it out, you have the link in the description of this episode as well. And now since we are getting close to the wrap up of the episode, Dan, what I was thinking of, is discussing a bit about what you guys are doing with the agency at the moment and what's your plan for 2021? What's the type of clients that you work with any announcements that you can give out to the world and you'd like to talk about?

 

Dan McGaw  

Yeah, I mean, 2020 has been an amazingly crazy year for everybody. Right? So COVID has been really, really hard. We were very fortunate at the beginning of COVID, we acquired one of our competitors, a company called Bard analytics. So it's been a, pretty impressive year for us. So we're trying to build on top of that growth in 2021, we're going to be quadrupling the size of the company. So we're about 15 people right now, we're gonna be going up to about 60 people this upcoming year. So definitely a lot of growth is planned. But we're just doubling down on our content marketing. Content marketing, I think, is definitely huge for everybody. I would just tell other companies to double down on content marketing, figure out what is going to be your stick and how you need to do it. But we're focused on hiring. So if anybody here is ultimately looking for a new position, we, of course, are hiring, you can always go to our website, the careers page is in the bottom of the page. That's my number one focus for next year. And I think we're probably gonna roll out one or two more products this year. utm.io has done very successfully, we've had that product public in the market for about three years now, that product is growing at a really, really good clip. And then this year, we're going to launch an AV testing tracking tool. And then as well as an AV testing prioritisation tool. So those products will come out in the middle of 2021. I never meant to start a consulting company, it just kind of happened. And our strategy with the consulting company is to do really good work and solve hard problems for our clients, but to also find unique hard problems, which nobody else is solving, and then to build our own products around that. And we're going to continue to do that over the next few years and continue to focus on building cool products, and we'll always have the consulting business and then we'll always have the software products, that we're going to consistently just roll out. Some of those will possibly be sold, some of those will stay inside of the company, the world is its own oyster, so we'll figure it out as they go. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. But if you're looking forward to following along, definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn. And that's where I'm most active, I'm not a big Twitter fan, just too much garbage going on in there. So follow me on LinkedIn. And naturally, go to McGaw.io, go to our blog, check out our content, sign up for our newsletter, stuff like that. But like I said, get a free copy of my book. It is a real book, I, unfortunately, forgot to bring one into the office today. But, it's an awesome book. Sometime later in 2021, my next book will come out, which it's going to be deeper on how people can do all the things that we do. Because I want to help everybody be good at marketing technology. So that's kind of us in a nutshell.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's so exciting. I think running the consultancy in the software, business in parallel, it's a very healthy business model. And no surprise you've been growing so quickly. Best of luck for next year, really excited to see how things are gonna be evolving. And also for the new tools. Maybe we can organise something like this when you are getting closer to the launch, and actually, you can give a bit more insight into what's the plan with them, maybe if you have something exciting going on the marketing front as well because I'm sure you are probably planning this out over this couple of months. But until then, Dan, so great to have you here. Thanks so much for the time and the insight and for being on the show. Guys tuning in, make sure you check Dan's resources out and also if you have any questions, make sure to reach out to him directly or to me and I'll make sure to transfer them to Dan and see how we can best answer them. Also, if you need somebody to optimise your CDP or things to do with the marketing technology side of things after you have checked out his book, make sure that you reach out to Dan for some advice on LinkedIn. Okay, so until next time, Dan, thanks so much again, really big pleasure, guys. Thank you for sticking around and for tuning in. Hope you found this insightful, looking forward to any feedback that you might have. And yeah, see you soon. Have a nice one! 

Black Friday 2020 - Marketing must-do’s for Ecommerce [with Abbey Schoenberg]

Today’s episode of The Marketing Innovation show brings Abbey Schoenberg, Director of Marketing of Fancy.com, the world's best social commerce platform, connecting over 10M users directly to the most unique creators available. Early investors included Drake, Will Smith and Justin Bieber.

 

Andrei and Abbey will be discussing Marketing Strategies for this year’s edition of Black Friday, as well as ecommerce must-do’s and trends and industry changes. 

 

Abbey is an expert at direct-to-consumer brands, building campaigns, programs, and strategies to drive brand love and generate growth. From launching new stores and product lines at Forever 21 to leading the global digital brand team at Oakley, to driving a direct-to-consumer shift and refocus to brand-building at Contiki.

 

Connect with Abbey:

Website: https://Fancy.com/

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

Fancy on Instagram

Fancy on Twitter

Fancy on Facebook

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Abbey Schoenberg, who is the Director of Marketing for Fancy.com, the world's best social commerce platform connecting over 10 million users and having early investors such as Drake, and Will Smith, and Justin Bieber. Abbey has been working before with popular brands such as Forever 21. So very, very excited for our chat today. We're going to be discussing trends in the ecommerce space and how this whole industry is changing as a whole. So Abbey, hello, I am really excited for today, and thank you for being on the show!

 

Abbey  

Same, I'm super excited to be joining you and chatting through marketing innovation and ecommerce. So thank you for having me.

 

Andrei  

No worries, pleasure is all mine. So let's get the ball rolling. Well, first of all, tell us a bit about you, tell us about your background bit and how you got into that position that you're in at the moment?

 

Abbey  

Of course, yeah, so I've been in a marketing position or a marketing role for the last 12 years. I studied Marketing and Communications in business in college at San Diego State. Eventually, just moved into the marketing world, I started right out of college at Forever 21, which I'm sure you all know, is a major, major fast-fashion retailer in the US and abroad. Very focused on kind of generalistic marketing in that space and in opening up new stores store expansions, really building our consumer base as we scaled as a business, which was a really exciting time to be there and definitely one of those career opportunities for myself where I was probably thrown into a position where I had to wear a lot of hats and had to learn really, really quickly. And it definitely helped my growth, although long hours and crazy hours, it was an incredible team of people and, very exciting to be part of that. That industry when it was so on fire and such a big part of American culture. So an incredible learning experience there for me and did a lot with partnerships, a lot with events, a lot with media, and exposing the new stores, which is obviously what we all want to do: expose our brands and expose the places to shop. And then from there, I moved over to Oakley. Oakley is obviously a sports performance eyewear brand and a general sports performance apparel brand. When I was there I moved through a few roles, I have a pretty solid background in media and spend a lot of my time in a US-focused media role and then evolved into a global media role, and then took on more responsibility in digital marketing generally. So taking over our global society, our global digital marketing, global content, a bunch of different areas of the business to really tell the brand story and really talk about: Why Oakley why, Why buy our products and the innovation that sat behind everything that we did. So that was super exciting. I mean, an incredible group of people that I had the pleasure of working with and to learn from. And then from there, I moved into travel, I just decided I was looking for a little bit of a change of pace. I personally love to travel. So it felt like a really fun opportunity. And I spent two years at consortia before moving over to a brand side, where I spent the next two years as the brand director of Contiki, which is the number one travel company for 18 to 35-year-olds. It was a really fun and exciting time. Obviously, travel is such a passion point for so many people. So it makes marketing really fun. And then obviously sat in a travel role in the midst of COVID. So that was quite an interesting experience. It definitely freshened up my sales skills and crisis management and freshened up how important it is to have a story behind the brand that's not just about your product, so that when you do get hit by those major moments in the world, you have something to lean into, and to really keep your community engaged, which I think was what we had been focusing on for the last few months as we transitioned through this change, which I'm proud to say the team over there has continued to do a great job. I decided in the midst that it was time for a little more change for me and I was excited to get back into the ecommerce space, which is how I ended up at Fancy. Fancy had recently moved their headquarters from New York to San Diego where I'm based. So it opened up a really awesome opportunity for me to join a growing team, a growing business, and really jump into an industry that is really on the rise when it comes to year over year impact of ecommerce in the US, particularly. So really exciting. I've been at Fancy for a little over two months and I am excited to continue my journey here.

 

Andrei  

Super cool. I'm sure that you already found this and you knew, but this is such an interesting time to be in the ecommerce space like the whole thing had been speeding up like four or five years ahead with a whole situation that's been going on. And since we're recording this around Black Friday, and we might actually be able to publish it, just around the time, I think it's gonna be even more interesting for all of our listeners who might be just in the middle of doing exactly what you and I are doing at the moment in terms of marketing and everything, to see how you handle it. And how are things from your perspective as a marketing leader in a global brand that is very fast-paced and rapidly expanding? So tell us a bit about Fancy.com. How is your team at the moment, what are you guys focusing on so that we can give a bit more context to the discussion that we'll have on marketing in the ecommerce space?

 

Abbey  

Of course. So Fancy is basically a social marketplace where we bring together a bunch of vendors from around the world that sell really high quality, unique products. And then we sell them out to our wide community of Fancy shoppers. So we have a primary market in the US, but we actually have a really solid global market, as well. So 30% of our sales do happen outside of the US, which is really exciting for us. So a lot of what we've been preparing for since we do have such a strong established user base is one: making sure that that user base is engaged, they know what's coming, they know what to expect from us, we're setting up certain guidelines and parameters with a lot of our vendors to make sure that we know when shipping cut-offs are going to be happening, when we can ensure linemen on sales or when they're really trying to push during the holiday season just to make sure we're putting the best things for it, for the gift-giving season. So do all of those things, and obviously just setting that making sure our foundation is working really properly. So making sure our social campaigns and our remarketing campaigns are firing well and we have everything optimized and cranking forward, but then also trying to add additional personalization into our email communications and really focusing quite a bit on the personalization and curation of the website. So it's really easy to shop, it's easy to find what you're looking for. But there's still that added layer of joy as you discover new things on Fancy which I think is a really fun and different place to shop because it's not so searched intent-based, it's definitely someplace where you can kind of just fall into it and find some really great products and things based off of a curated list and personalized assortments based off of your behaviours. So I think it's the balance of all of those things. It's the balance of one: putting our existing customers in our database first to make sure that we're providing them the experience, the tools, and the products that they need to make it a successful holiday season for themselves. But then also ensuring that we're scaling out to take advantage of the anticipated boom of ecommerce this season coming off of the heels of COVID, where we're still seeing a lot of restrictions and shutdowns and people a little bit apprehensive to shop in person. So I think that's where our heads have been out of, making sure we're incredibly buttoned up so we don't lose the opportunity to take advantage of the sales that are anticipated for this season.

 

Andrei  

Super. And before we go into it, you said something really interesting that I think it would be nice to just focus on. And you mentioned a bit about the USB of Fancy.com. Can you develop just a little bit around that? Because I think it's gonna be interesting for our discussion going forward as well. So tell us how do you differentiate from other platforms? And what is that element of experience in shopping?

 

Abbey  

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that the coolest thing about Fancy is that we have set the groundwork for creating a really strong ecommerce experience, which I think you see across the board. And it doesn't make us unique, but it's a table stake to make sure that people feel confident and comfortable buying off the site. So frictionless Checkout, a really easy way to browse, strong search are all things that are just table stakes within. Any ecommerce platform at this point, and something that we really pride ourselves on. But when it comes to that unique point for ourselves, it's really around this discovery element. So I think some of the things that we really like to share and lean into is the fact that new products are added daily under Fancy.com and new products that are vetted and curated by a team that we have internally to make sure that everything we sell carries a certain level of quality and a certain level of kind of uniqueness to make sure that it's not just your every other shopping experience. So I think that's the number one thing: highly vetted, very curated list of very cool products that are discovered worthy, and I think that's what we lean into a lot is this concept of discovery and seeking something new, and finding something that you're not just going to maybe think to search if you jump onto an Amazon or to an Etsy, which are very search-based platforms, where we are very much a discovery-based platform where we're really taking cues and understanding of our customers to pull a bubble to the top and surface, the products that are the most interesting and the products that we think our customers are going to love to allow you to kind of have a bit more of a scrolling browse behaviour, and then we just ensure we implement those products that have that scroll stop action. So it's a bit more of a Leanback way to shop, it's a bit more of an inspirational way to shop, but then it still carries all of the core values of a strong ecommerce solution when it comes to filtering and browsing and searching and those things if you want to shop that way. But we're really leaning into this concept of serendipitous discovery and finding something that you love based on your behaviour and really based on personalization and bringing the browse and the joy of browsing back into the shopping experience online. Something obviously know we do when we're in person at a mall or in a shop where you're just kind of flicking through the rack and discovering something you maybe didn't have the intent to buy, but you've just caught your eye. So we're really looking to find that balance between that type of shopping, as well as a really strong ecommerce experience. So I think when you shop on Fancy, that's what you'll feel, you'll feel like you've discovered something, you'll feel like you're finding something unique to you, you'll feel that you're not just building the same identity as your neighbour, but something really unique to yourself, just based off of this plethora of product that we do sell, the assortment that we do have that is such high quality, as well as this really simple and easy way to discover something cool and fun for your home, your wardrobe, or whatever you're looking for.

 

Andrei  

Nice. Okay. So this just got me thinking about: you have been in ecommerce from the very beginning of your career, and you have worked with giant brands, being part of this revolution, really. And then, at some point, you went into travel, and then you came back. But you made that switch in a time where things like marketing personalization, and using data to deliver better assets, as well as the growth of the ecommerce space in general, all have developed very rapidly. So this would be a curiosity of mine. But I would be very keen to hear your thoughts on this, as well. Do you feel you went far from ecommerce and then you came back when you went into promoting or doing the activities around the travel space? Did you find a gap between where you left the ecommerce space and when you came in to eat again? Or were you surprised by anything?

 

Abbey  

I will say it's a great question. I will say that moving into travel was very interesting to see the level of technology that is incorporated into the search and browsing behaviour when you are shopping for a trip in New York, shopping for a destination, and actually, the level of sophistication that exists in that industry, as you think about the price point of the purchase and how important it is to show the right product at the right time and how important it is to be thoughtful of the consumers' needs and wants because travel is such a high research purchase and a big-ticket item. I think ecommerce is obviously when you think about it more in the CPG in the product world, which has been on this path for a very long time where travels seem to have introduced itself into more of an ecommerce shopping behaviour within the last few years. But I think there are a lot of similarities when you look at both in the sense that personalization is critical, that understanding what the consumers want is very critical in the sense of attention spans does drop off very, very quickly if you're not getting the information to the person that needs it as fast as possible. And I think friction is an even bigger component when we think about that obviously need to have a very seamless and clean checkout experience when you're in a product space just to make sure you don't have that you know conversion drop off when trying to move from the cart to the credit card, but it's even more important as you think about travel just because they trust that you need to gain when someone's putting a few thousand dollars down for a vacation or this really impactful moment in our lives is really, really critical. So, yes, I think it was an interesting jump for me to go from the ecommerce space into travel. I think that I got into travel and I really did miss the innovation and the tech that sits in the ecommerce world and I think that was so very, very enticing for me to get back to just with the level of technology and the capabilities that exist not just within your own platforms, but you think about the solutions that a lot of the big behemoths like Facebook and Google have implemented for. Ease of shopping and ecommerce solutions to help make these transactions a bit more seamless and sophisticated, where travel just always seems to be a little bit on the burner behind. So I will say it's been very exciting getting back to the ecommerce from travel, but I will say it was very interesting to be in travel while they were really starting to find their ecommerce kind of evolution at the same time and understanding the power of data and understanding the power of a lot of the standard ecommerce tools that a lot of your traditional product marketers are probably taking advantage or taking for granted these days. But it was an interesting shift. But I think there's definitely still a sophistication into the travel industry around the way they're using ecommerce around the way that you shop and it will continue to catch up to the place that obviously Product Marketing is sitting in.

 

Andrei  

Awesome, awesome, awesome, really insightful. And can I ask you a question? You might not have the numbers at hand, but just maybe approximately, but this is a discussion that we've been having a lot with our clients lately since everybody was trying to benchmark themselves within their industries and trying to set KPIs and objectives for their brands for this holiday season ecommerce speak, which would be like November, December. So this I think, would be really insightful for the other people that are tuning in as well that are in marketing functions, trying to work out their benchmarking and see how they position themselves in the market. Basically, my question is: what would you say are some average conversion rates that you are looking for, specifically because you talked about the website and personalization, which I very much emphasize with you. I think it's very important to look at that as the core metric for optimizing performance, meaning if you run a lot of paid advertising, for example, that drives a bunch of traffic to your website, but then what happens with that traffic? So you're in an upper market, right? Like more expensive products, more luxury? And I guess you'd run integrated marketing campaigns. I'm sure you do pay into Google and social and everything. What are some conversion rates that you aim for, or you consider to be good in your space, in your niche, for example, we can say on the website, in general, but then we can dive into more specific details if you have them. From add to cart to purchase, let's try to start the discussion and then see how we go. 

 

Abbey  

Um, so I'd say from a return perspective on what we're anticipating spending over the holiday season and what that returns back, we're definitely aiming for somewhere around a five to one, from an ROI point of view. So I think that something that we're chasing, and something that we're really optimistic to hit, especially, as you mentioned, obviously, we are a bit higher price point, and a bit more specialized, when it comes to the products that we sell. So there might be brands out there that do sell a bit more commoditized items that might have a bit higher of a return goal than us. But I think for us, that's really what we're hoping to see in this holiday season. When it comes to the conversion rate on the site, obviously, we're always trying to hit that 1 - 3% during the holidays, definitely getting upper towards that 3% conversion rate for traffic driven to the site. So, that's generally our goal. And I think for us right now, and I think where a lot of campaigns and targeting can come into play is really using those add to carts that don't turn into conversions to help you drive forward a higher conversion rate overall. And that data and using those users that obviously had found some product of interest or found something that they were interested in, in almost pulling the trigger on and really focusing on targeting them to increase the conversion from those Add To Cart users. So from that perspective, I don't have a number off the top of my head from what we're trying to reduce our abandoned cart is really what we should be looking at. So we don't necessarily have a KPI set for abandoned cart reduction at this point. But we will be striving for that 3% conversion rate over the site-wide for the holiday season.

 

Andrei  

Hmm, awesome. Very cool. Thanks so much. This was also like a personal curiosity. But so many things have changed. And also, in this period of the year, there's gonna be so much advertising budget put into the most popular platforms like Google and Facebook, and Instagram. So the costs are going to increase as well and I think it's good for everybody to hear as many experiences and insights as possible so that they can draw their own benchmarking and KPI setting and everything. So thanks so much for that. And talking about social platforms, what are you prioritizing? What platforms are you looking at? Have you done anything on, for example, Tik Tok, or one of these more niche platforms, or more uprising platforms, actually?

 

Abbey  

Yeah. Um, so we just recently opened our Tik Tok channel. So if you guys want to follow it, it's Fancy.com. So we have very little content right now, obviously, we're using the benefit of the Tik Tok algorithm, which is very much based on recommendation versus following. So I think that's a really interesting place to be as a channel where you really can be a marketer, can be a creator or an influencer, and really get visibility on that channel much more quickly than you can in something that really puts a lot of emphasis on follower count. So I think that that's something that we're starting to test, test the waters a little bit, and felt like it was something we could obviously, easily do as we focus on taking advantage a lot of Instagram's new creative platforms, like reels. Make one, it kind of works for both channels. So we've definitely been duplicating content across both. I think we've seen some really great results from our experiments with reels. And I think it's a fun platform because obviously, the production quality is meant to be a little bit rawer, it's meant to be a little bit more real and a little bit more approachable. So it's been very easy for us to really kind of test and play around with that channel. And I will say, I have been very, very impressed with the reach results from our organic posts in reels in the sense that it really is reaching a new audience, I was talking to our marketing manager this morning, and she was commenting on how we generally get a lot of the same really high engaged users on our channels, commenting and asking questions, and the comments that we were getting through, the content that we were putting out was all very, very new consumer. So very new eyeballs, very new reach, which was very, very interesting for us and very exciting as we see the power of Tik Tok, obviously, see the kind of addictive quality that that content has in the social sphere, but still taking advantage of a platform that we have a bit more equity on like Instagram, but using that same discovery type model to help get our products and get our brand in front of new people, versus just so focused on the feed or focused on stories, which is very specific to the followers that you already have. So I think that has been really interesting, and something that we're continuously increasing production against. And for anyone that's out there that has a really small team, we're also a very small team. And I think it's just one of those platforms that are tested, you can film stuff on your phone, you can film your products on your phone, you can use the editing tools within the platform, you don't need a videographer to do everything for you. But we've seen some really, really great results from a reach perspective, from that channel and engagement, getting a tonne of likes tonne of comments through that channel, and even some really great ones like Hey, can you send me the link to that product? So that's always the one as a marketer, but as someone that knows that we need to pay the bills, I love to see that type of engagement on posts. So that's been pretty, pretty exciting to see. We're also focusing on amplifying our Pinterest presence right now. So Pinterest has seen some really, really great numbers over the past quarter, I think they released some of their results a few weeks ago, and in regards to users, and engagement, and ad dollars. So we've been very focused on especially gift guides and getting new fresh content on to our Pinterest channel and taking advantage of that. Pinterest still serves as a really top referral source for Fancy, just because of the discovery element of that channel and being able to be very product-centric in that channel. So we are keeping our foot down on that platform and making sure that we have some good content pumping into that over the holiday season. So organically, I would say that's been a bit of a new focus with reels, starting to get the Tik Tok channel up and running and a heavy focus on Pinterest, but obviously not ignoring some of our cores like Facebook and Twitter. So we post daily on every channel but really are focusing on some new content streams to help us increase our discovery for the brand.

 

Andrei  

Love it. This is actually the first time that we managed to dive deeper into the social organic subject, and I love that you brought it up with the discovery elements, because actually, this is also something that we felt and we try to bring towards the table. So it's very nice to hear from somebody that is leading a marketing team for a global brand from the client-side that you have back as well. I think it's really cool. And since you were talking about discovery, and since we were on the topic of the social channel, what are you guys doing with influencers? What's your take on them? Do you do influencer marketing at all?

 

Abbey  

We do. Yes, we absolutely do influencer marketing. I think influencer marketing is again, just a great way to expose yourself to a new audience. And I think that's the best way to look at it. I always look at influencer marketing as part of a wider kind of intent word of mouth strategy. So how do we get people to talk about the brand, whether those are people that we're partnering with and paying to do so or they're just advocacy programs through our existing customer base? But yes, we do. We do put a lot of prioritization on influencers. I'm a big believer in that as a channel, I think what we focus on quite a bit is influencers more at the micro-level, and we focus primarily on engagement rates, not necessarily follower count. I think it's really easy to get excited to work with someone with 300,000 followers. But if you get down to it you don't really necessarily know the quality of that if you're not seeing the engagement rates. So we lean a little bit more into a micro-influencer strategy. Definitely always trying to work with people above 10,000 to ensure we get that swipe up capability. But in general, in my career, have found that micro-community to be a really, really high engaged community. So it's where I put a lot of pressure on the team to scale those programs and scale those relationships. And of course, we have some big names that obviously invest in the shop on Fancy, as well. So we do reach out to those people to support us in gaining exposure, but only so when it's already an authentic relationship with the brand. So I think that that's always really important, just because it comes out a little bit more natural and comes out a bit more authentic, and then really showcasing the micro-influencers, as there's a bit more of a mutual benefit between the brand and the partner at that point. We are very, very much in the influence influencer space, ranging from paying people to develop content to product swapping for mentions, to taking advantage of our customer base to give them as many perks as we would to our influencer community. So, we do run it in a bunch of different ways. There's not just one tactic that we deploy, but really the medals of the word of mouth that can come together when you start to bring in staff, influencers, micro-influencers, advocacy, ambassadors, customers, investors on our side as well, which is an extension of our community, too. So that's been pretty exciting.

 

Andrei  

Very cool. Okay. And so you are doing omnichannel marketing in general, you have so many stakeholders. What do you feel has changed or shifted over the last couple of months, in terms of their shopping behaviour online? I think it would be really insightful to hear it from you and to hear your take on it since everybody has now shopped more online in general. So what do you feel has changed? Do they visit the website more times before they purchase? Do they need more time to decide? Are they more cautious with the way you spend their money? What's your feeling?

 

Abbey  

You know, it's been really interesting at Fancy, because I think we haven't seen tonnes of fluctuation in the past few months about how the average order value has stayed about the same. What we are seeing is a stronger female base coming into Fancy and I think that that might be something to do with the holiday season, as we think about women being really drivers of holiday purchases, and sometimes the bigger household spenders, when it comes to shopping for Hanukkah or Christmas or whatever holiday that you celebrate. So we've seen a little bit of transition in that capacity. I would say, from a shopping behaviour perspective we do see some change in search terminology. As you get closer to the holidays, you see, definitely more gift centric type items start to pop up. So obviously, that plays a hand in how we merchandise the site and using that data to ensure that we have easy discovery for those types of products. But for the most part, I would say aside from volume, we've actually seen a lot of consistency when it comes to some of those standard metrics that we anticipate at Fancy. And I think what makes that really exciting for us, particularly is even though we're seeing this scaling of audience and scaling of new shoppers that come into the ecommerce space, we're seeing them actually act and behave in a similar way to the historical and the existing Fancy user that's been with us for 10 years. So it does point us in the direction that either there is a reason to shop on Fancy and there is this desire for this cool product assortment and these quality brands that we obviously sell. And it's just interesting to see the volume of consumers start to change as they come to the site. So not huge consumer behaviour changes that we're necessarily seeing from an engagement on the site perspective, but definitely a volume of change, as we see more and more people coming earlier to the site this year than last year, and anticipating even more people, year after year, based off of obviously, the changes that have been going on across the world.

 

Andrei  

Can I get a bit technical here, but it's one curiosity of mine again. So once you capture a new user, let's say through social bait, they get onto your website, they start to surf, to navigate, maybe add stuff to the cart. What would be a target number of times that you try to reach them in the first two to three days to help them proceed with the purchase in case they haven't finalized the purchase during that initial session? Do you have a strategy around it, does it depend on anything?

 

Abbey  

No. So we do have a strategy around that. We have specific triggers for abandoned browser, abandoned cart that would deploy pretty quickly after a user abandons whatever behaviour that they were previously engaged in. And we send those out pretty quickly after that initial behaviour and that initial action has been triggered. And then we do follow up with that individual a couple of days later, just to continue to try to push them over, they obviously always fall into our remarketing campaigns that sit in a display or social space, even our search campaigns, as well. So we have a bunch of different touchpoints that are hitting that consumer. I would say our goal is hitting a decent frequency around five to seven post-action behaviours, to try to pull them back into the site. And then obviously, we have our separate lists of individuals and how we pull some of that dynamic content into our email content, how we pull that stuff through, to help with the personalization further down so that we do trigger them back into the site, they have kind of what they were just recently browsing just at their fingertips and really engaging them there. So yes, we definitely have a plan of action to try to scoop up as many of those abandoned browsing purchases as possible. And we'll probably scale that up just a bit as we get closer to the holidays. I'm just always being conscious of not being too much of a pest but making sure we're in the face.

 

Andrei  

Nice. And in terms of the website personalization and delivering dynamic content, do you have a tool that you like very much or something that you'd recommend to somebody that has been thinking about this, but maybe they just didn't have the budget yet, or for any reason, they haven't implemented it yet?

 

Abbey  

It's not going to be the answer anyone wants to hear. But we were very lucky in the sense that we have an internal engineering team that builds all of that directly for Fancy. So we own all of our capabilities that exist on the site. So we don't use any plugins for personalization at this point. But I can always ask our engineering team who's maybe they use inspiration and come back to you.

 

Andrei  

Okay, that's super kind, thank you. I was curious because it's a lot of marketing tech out there and sometimes a recommendation from somebody that is actively doing it could be valuable. Super, thanks so much. So, now looking into the immediate future, I know that we are running a bit late, and I'm sure that you have a lot of people that you need to speak to and are probably bombarding you with messages. So we'll try to be brief. But coming into Black Friday now, because it's going to be intense. What's like a checklist of maybe three to five things that you think anybody should go through to make sure that they are readily prepared for Black Friday?

 

Abbey  

Yeah, I think obviously, you're gonna want to make sure that you have a lot of touchpoints to share and explain the aspects of whatever sale. So we obviously are preparing with different teaser campaigns going up to it just to make sure that our consumer base knows that there is something that Fancy is preparing for Black Friday. So that they're keeping their eyes out and keeping their antennas up to ensure that when it drops, we know it's happening. So I think that's obviously number one. I think the standard number two for everybody is: if you're going to launch anything new, you better get it done in the next week or so just because you don't want to be testing as you get into the holidays and making sure that you have everything buttoned up and tested and things are firing on all cylinders and you're not using those critical timeframes to troubleshoot. So I would say definitely do some testing and make sure that you have whatever you're going to be implementing buttoned up soon, if not already so that you have everything ready to go. And I think to engage with your partners, obviously, let them know in advance what you're planning to do, let them know what your sales are, let them know how you're intending to market and ways that they can partner with you to get more exposure for themselves or their products. If you're a direct consumer brand, do you have any influencer, great customers that you want to reach out to in advance and give them a little sneak peek behind the curtain of what's to come? Or if you have brands that you sell on the website, how can you engage with them and start to get those plans in place to ensure they know what's coming, and they know how to participate and help you drive additional awareness around it. So I would say those would be the key three things that I would recommend. One, make sure your comms planning and you have that early awareness of what's coming or at least the anticipation that something is coming down the pipeline, to make sure that you're testing now to deploy the best results when the time comes when Black Friday rolls around. And three: engaging your partners early so they can help you do as much as you can. Once you start running towards that pinnacle of the sales day, which is that cyber weekend time.

 

Andrei  

Nice. Thanks so much for the insights. So in terms of Fancy, any plans you'd like to share with us for 2021? Or for the people that are tuned in to look out for when following you?

 

Abbey  

Oh, of course, yes, always. So we actually have a lot of big stuff in the plan and one would be getting ready for the holiday season, but a lot to come around: shopping gamification, which will be launched on our app in 2021, which I'm super excited about. As I mentioned early in the call, what we are trying to do is bring fun back into shopping and yes, we are always concerned about the transaction. But we also know that there's something to be said about that joy of browsing and the joy of inspiration that you get when you used to go to the mall with your friends but now you're sitting at home by yourself browsing your computer. So really trying to find ways to infuse that kind of social aspect and that gaming aspect into how you shop and how you shop with Fancy. So if you don't have the app downloaded, it'll be the first to launch there. So please download the app and you can check it out, we should be starting to tease out some of that content and some of those capabilities here in the next few weeks, which will be super exciting. But just a way for us to take advantage of the heavy data that we have that sits behind the site and just make shopping more interesting and fun and a way that you can discover like you used to discover and not just always feel like you have to go to a website and know exactly what you're looking for and if you don't know the search term, you're never gonna be able to find it. But really just being able to lean back and enjoy the process. So that's where we're putting a lot of intention in the coming months. So keep your eye out for that. And then obviously, as I mentioned earlier, there is such a focus on the partnerships that we have, especially with our merchants and with our vendors. And we're launching new stuff every day on the site. So if you're ever looking for something very interesting or cool, I think a great first place to start is the daily discovery section within Fancy. So check it out. We're always showcasing something new and cool on the website and really trying to act as a springboard for small businesses around the world to help get their amazing product seen in front of an amazing audience. Last, check out our gift guides, we have about 50 gift guides. If you have any trouble shopping, we do a really well curation of assorted products from around the world. So no one will ever give you the same gift that you find on Fancy, I'll say that. So you can find something super cool. But that's kind of what's coming down the pipeline so I think a lot of focus on just infusing some more fun back in the transaction and that's what we are focused on as a team.

 

Andrei  

That's very exciting. I'm actually gonna keep an eye on the gamification element. I'm really curious what you're up to. 

 

Abbey  

A little teaser there, but something we're super stoked to be releasing, and it'll just be kind of step one in an along plan of innovation.

 

Andrei  

Super. Okay. And lastly, if anybody wants to connect with you in any way, if you guys are looking for new vendors for the platform or any sort of partnerships or things like this, what would be the best way for them to engage with you?

 

Abbey  

Yeah, I would say connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd say: just shoot me a message, send me your request and I'd love to have a chat with anybody that wants to talk about Fancy marketing or any vendors that are interested in getting on the platform. 

 

Andrei  

Thanks so much for being so open to this! Abbey, thanks so much for being on the show today, I really love our chat. Hopefully, we'll be able to do this again after the holiday season because I know you're gonna be working long hours these days. And meanwhile, I wish you the very best of success. We'll keep an eye on Fancy, if we can help you with anything, let us know! Until next time, keep rocking and talk soon! 

 

Abbey  

Thank you so much! 

How to Integrate Affiliate Marketing within your Cross-Channel Strategy [with Rick Magennis]

On today’s episode, Rick Magennis is joining us from New Jersey, discussing affiliate marketing and educating audiences. Rick is the owner of Bearcat Media, an affiliate program management agency. They specialize in strategic affiliate recruitment, activation, compliance, communication, and program optimization.

Connect with Rick:

Bearcat Media: https://affiliateprogrammanagement.co/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-magennis/

The Rick Magennis Podcast Show: https://open.spotify.com/show/5akdi7DoE0sVQDR2Mfypfg 

Email: rick@barecatmedia.com

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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 Rick Magennis, who is the owner of Bearcat Media, an affiliate programme marketing agency helping companies better use affiliate marketing as well as integrating affiliate marketing within their broader marketing mix. So straight out of New Jersey - Hi, Rick, how's everything going? 

 

Rick  

I'm doing well. Thank you, Andrei, for having me. I'm looking forward to talking with you about affiliate marketing and educating your audience. And hopefully they can get some good ideas from this and start an affiliate programme on their own or even become an affiliate and earn some extra money.

 

Andrei  

Super cool. So is the first time actually we talked about affiliate marketing in-depth on the show. So really exciting time for me as well, really looking forward to your knowledge and insight. So tell us a bit more about you, your background and what you've been involved with, the agency that you're on.

 

Rick  

Yeah, so I actually started in affiliate marketing over 10 years ago. I started as an affiliate. So I built a website to monetize it, just because I needed money, I had to be laid off from my job, and I had a newborn baby. So I needed money to support the family. So I built a website. And it was making money actually, pretty quickly. It was back when SEO where you can stuff keywords and do it that way. But then I got a taste of managing a programme just on the side for a little extra money and then that's where I fell in love with the programme management side. So I went on that site, I worked for a few agencies over the next five to six years. And then I decided that I wanted to go on my own and start my own agency, because I was pretty much tired of making money for everyone else. I wanted to start making my own money, grow my own brand and have my own agency to help businesses in the affiliate channel because the affiliate channels are not as popular or as sexy as the others and it sometimes gets a bad reputation. And my goal was to try and make it into a channel that is embraced, that every business should be using.

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. I see. Maybe people know more or less about this. So that everybody tuning in, has a good understanding from the beginning of what affiliate marketing is and what an affiliate network is and you know, everything that you just mentioned now, could you give us some examples of how things were going or what you were doing when you were an affiliate yourself with a website and then the type of programmes that you have run after?

 

Rick  

Yeah, sure. So when I started out as an affiliate, I created a website based on baby strollers. So as I said, I had a newborn baby. So I was pretty in tune with the baby products. So I created a website, just a simple one on WordPress. I wrote reviews of as many different baby strollers as I could, put them on there, I monetized them at that time through Amazon, that's when they actually paid decent money for affiliates. Yeah, I made a few thousand dollars a month doing that. And then, like I said, I transitioned into the management piece but with the affiliate piece of it when I was an affiliate, I got good at the SEO optimisation because you needed to get the proper keywords, you needed to learn how to update a website and even writing. As an affiliate, you gotta know not just how to add links into a website, you got to know how to properly do some SEO work, you got to know how to update a website, basic HTML. So there's a lot that goes into affiliate marketing that many people may not be aware of, or if they are aware of it, they're a little shy because they're not familiar with it. But I learned all this on my own, I was self-taught. So I didn't have anybody teaching me or taking any courses. So this is all something that you can go out there and just Google and find out how to do this stuff. And it's just trying to sift out the good information and the bad information. But affiliate marketing is a good way to supplement your income. I personally don't do it as a full-time income, I manage programmes, but I do have some affiliate deals with certain brands that I still have the money coming in. But it's good to know when it's good to have a background of it so that you can make some side income with it and whether it be a few hundred dollars a month or thousands of dollars a month, you can still make money doing it, as long as you partner with the right brands. And you know what you're doing in terms of running the website or the campaigns you're running. 

 

Andrei  

Just to bring up a bit like a clarity and to summarise, basically, in the beginning, you were part of an affiliate scheme, like the Amazon affiliate scheme, where you had your website where you were writing reviews for products, driving organic traffic to them, which eventually, were using your links in order to get to purchase from Amazon. And you're getting a commission from that.

 

Rick  

That's right. Yeah, I apologise. I skipped over an important piece. But yeah, so I had an Amazon account and I just went in there, found the baby strollers that I reviewed, just took the affiliate link, pasted it in there, and had three or four links within each review. They started ranking in Google and then when every time someone read the review, and clicked through one of those links to Amazon, and they made a purchase, I would get a percentage of that purchase. And the great thing about Amazon is that even if they purchase anything there, you get credit for. Whether it be the stroller, whether it be a computer, you still get credit for so as an affiliate, especially with Amazon, you get the benefit of not just your product you're promoting, but chances are if you're on Amazon, you're gonna buy something else. And then you get a credit for that, too. It's a great way to just monetize your website, if you have a blog, throw some links in there for some products that you're passionate about and instead, it can make you some nice passive income. As an affiliate, I was meeting people that were managing the programmes and I got interested in that and what they did on a daily basis. So basically, what I did, was I: cold-called this one affiliate Management Agency, and just asked her if she was looking for work for someone to help her with programmes and luckily for me, she was. She gave me a shot, I didn't have any experience doing it and she trained me. And then, from there, I worked for another couple agencies, doing the same work, managing programmes. So it would be the reverse of what I was doing. So I was working on behalf of the brand. So for the example of Amazon, let's say I was an affiliate manager for Amazon, I would be reaching out to these different websites that are creating content around products that were interested in monetizing it and then we would provide them any assistance they needed in links or creatives. We may negotiate higher commission payouts. So we were there as a support system for the affiliates that if they needed anything, they could come in and get help. But the biggest part of the affiliate management is recruiting in activating those affiliates. So you have a website, and you want people to come promote it. They're not going to just come to you. You got to go find them. And that's the majority of the effort that goes into these programmes is recruiting and activating. 

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. Got you. So you're with these agencies and then eventually you open your own. Tell us what you do now. Like what are the types of programmes you manage and the types of brands you work with? How do brands use you, in order to scale their efforts?

 

Rick  

Yeah, so I work in both the B2C and B2B space. I primarily work in the B2C space. I have a few clients in the B2B space because in all honesty, they're two different animals with affiliate marketing. The B2C is your traditional affiliate marketing. When you think of affiliate marketing, like I just talked about Amazon and the baby strollers, that's more B2C. Then you have the B2B with the products and you're trying to find other businesses to promote the product for you and to target other businesses for the product. So it's definitely two different niches. But what my agency does is we either do full management for them, or we can do like a la carte services, in terms of recruiting, we can do that solely for them. We can just message them. So there's different things but, a lot of clients just do the full, because they don't know enough about it to do it. So they just hire us to do everything. And that's primarily what we see in both B2C and B2B. But in terms of what I've been seeing as a difference between the two is just the payouts. The B2C tends to be more percentage-based where B2B tends to be more CPI dollar amount. So it's usually higher, just because the overhead is last and then the cost of goods is a lot less so they can afford to pay more. So that's the primary difference I see. But I see the B2B affiliate programmes are gaining steam in their understanding that it's important to be part of the complete marketing mix. And they don't call it affiliates that much, they call more partnerships. So I have a client and their name is Trumpy. They do text messaging, like alerts, text messaging, and things like that, and email alerts for businesses. So you can either do promos through text messaging, or alert your employees about updates for the company, that type of thing. So that's another type. So yeah, the landscape is growing affiliate marketing, for many years, has not been giving the respect it deserves. And I think now, finally, is getting to that point where the brands are seeing that it's such a valuable tool, and they need to start leveraging it and the cost of entry is a lot lower than most of the other channels, as well.

 

Andrei  

So let's try to take maybe case study or a classic scenario, just so that for everybody in here is everything clear. So basically, let's say we have somebody here tuning in, that has a consumer goods brand, or is doing marketing for a consumer goods company. They probably run, let's say, Facebook Ads and Google Ads, and they have some content marketing going on. How could affiliate marketing come into place? And how could they integrate a good affiliate marketing strategy within their mix of activities?

 

Rick  

Yeah, that's a great question. Because it's something that I deal with just about every day and brands I talked to, they're doing the standard Social Media Ads or Google Ads, and they may dabble a little bit influencer and influencer and affiliate kind of go together. And what I say all the time is that affiliate marketing isn't just one channel, it encompasses all the channels, so you can have an affiliate that promotes on social media, you can have an affiliate that promotes on Google, you can have an influencer, you can have an email marketing affiliate. So you can have all those channels, integrated into affiliates that do their own thing in those specific channels. And you can have them help you with those programmes, as well. So if you're doing an email marketing campaign, your affiliates can help you and it can actually get you in front of more people. And then you would get the emails from the affiliate, as well. So it can be a good business building to incorporate affiliate marketing into your overall marketing mix, but also allow the affiliates to know what's going on within each channel, so that they can assist. Not like overlap and take customers away, but they can actually help grow channels significantly, and it's just a matter of managing it properly and putting expectations out there. And treating the affiliates as a marketing partner versus just someone that you're paying a commission to.

 

Andrei  

I see. Oh, this is interesting. Regarding what you mentioned, for email marketing, for example, I know that information products is a big niche where they use a lot of affiliate marketing partners and brokers, joint venture brokers so that they can deploy the programmes and I know that is a whole game around that. But now you mentioned something interesting, which is rarely occurring and I think it should now, that you mentioned it in discussions at the board level of businesses. Basically, you have the marketing department, which does the marketing activities in general. But then would you say that is a good strategy when somebody like a brand would go and say: Okay, who does really well on organic traffic on Google, let's say, and has like a really good website where we could promote through some reviews or stuff like that. And then who has a really good YouTube channel, who is a well-suited influencer that could get us on TikTok or Instagram and go down like that, and maybe have a voucher code for that versus a commission for the Google partner and basically just build out a network like that on specific channels, depending on their objectives. Is that a good approach? Is that what should happen?

 

Rick  

Yeah, that's basically how we work and when we manage programmes. We go and find affiliates, or influencers or partners, however you want to look at it. So if we go out there, and we look for Oakley sunglasses reviews, and they're not monetizing it with the brand, we can reach out to them and say: Hey, you can monetize the link here. And we'll give you x for every time someone makes a purchase. And same thing for YouTube, we go to YouTube, we may not find the brands exactly that we're working with, but we find competitors brands. So we find someone that's promoting a competitor, we say: Hey, we work with this brand, we think you can do a good review about it on your YouTube channel. But this video will give you x percent and then they will do a video review without it and then it will be on YouTube and Google. And then, again, go back to the email list, we find the affiliates that have targeted lists for those specific niches and we can go and target them. And yeah, absolutely, that's a strategy that should be done. Even if you really don't have an official affiliate programme, at least get some kind of software in place to do some kind of tracking so that you can actually execute on these opportunities, because it's kind of leaving money on the table. Really, if you're not doing things like this, because your competitors probably are. 

 

Andrei  

Now that is mentioned about tracking, because this still to this day, can be an issue in terms of tracking the final purchase, mainly depending on the payment gateway. So what's your favourite method of tracking? How do you go about it so you can make sure that the brands you work with always have full visibility and everything is closed-loop?

 

Rick  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a good question. There are two approaches to this. Typically, I like to stay with a network, like a CJ because they do everything for you. They pay out the affiliates for you, they do all the tracking, all the reporting, all that type of stuff. And you are pretty much using them to do all that and it takes a lot off your plate. But there's other smaller programmes like Refersion, and Post affiliate Pro, where you pay a monthly subscription and you get access to the tracking and things like that, but you're required to pay out the affiliates. It just depends on your budget, because those networks I talked about are a little more expensive, versus the programmes like the Post affiliate pro and Reversion. They're typically a low monthly fee. But again, larger affiliates tend to go with the more established networks, because they know that it's secure, they'll get paid, and the tracking centre works. But in the last few years, these smaller platforms have been gaining steam and they're starting to become more popular just because they're not as expensive and they do provide pretty solid tracking in terms of the links.

 

Andrei  

And what's the minimum budget or what's a good budget to start out on this channel if you never did it before, because you mentioned it can depend.

 

Rick  

Yeah, it depends on if you do a network, every network is different but typically they're about $1000-1500 just to get integrated. Whereas the other ones, like the smaller ones, are a couple hundred bucks, maybe just to get started. But I would suggest you got to have a budget for creatives to get started. And if you want to start with any smaller influencers, you're going to have to have a few bucks there. So a couple thousand dollars can get you started at that's at the high end, and then the low end can be under $1,000 can get you started in affiliate marketing, and then from there, you just gotta keep investing in the affiliate programme, because what happens is a lot of brands, they do the initial investment, and then they don't see the ROI, and they just give up and shut it down and that's not helpful either.

 

Andrei  

And now you mentioned ROI, you're reading my thoughts. I want you to get your thoughts on how you measure. Because all these questions, I'm sure are going to be on people's minds right now. How do you measure the return on advertising or how do you amortise the initial cost, because you have the integration cost, which is let's say $1000, and then you need to invest in the programme or the platform, let's say, like X amount of money per month, so you can get the traffic and get those affiliates to work for you. Which you pay a commission, I guess. So what would be the commission, in general?

 

Rick  

The commission just depends on your margins. So the brands have a certain percentage that they have from the profit that they can get back in commission. So it all depends on the margins there. But obviously, you want to be as high as you can with that. So what I recommend is just doing a competitive analysis of the landscape of who's in there and what they're paying, and be as competitive with that as you can. Otherwise you're not going to gain traction. So if your competitors are paying 10% per sale, and you're paying six, chances are you're not going to get as much traction. So you want to be at least 10%, if not higher in that case. But if you can't, then it's something that you're going to have to maybe do something a little different, you're going to have to maybe incentivize affiliates in a different way. Maybe with bonuses down the road, or contests and things like that. So you got to get creative in ways you incentivize your affiliates if you can't really do it upfront. Because the bottom line is: most affiliates are motivated by money, but some are not. So you got to just find out what they're motivated by and then zone in on that and focus in on what you can do to make them more active and more engaged.

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. Okay, so let's say 10% is the commission that goes to the affiliate? What's usually like a good turnover? Or how effective can this be, let's say, if you are on one of these platforms, and you have a couple of affiliates that promote your products through different channels? First of all, would they come to you to offer themselves to you as a brand to promote your products because they know how much you pay or they know the brand, or you have to proactively reach out to everyone? This is the first question. And the second question is, how many sales can typically be generated through these sort of channels? The second question might not be so straight up, but we can discuss it, I think.

 

Rick  

So we'll go with your personal question first. Whether they reach out to you or you reach out to them. It's a combination of both but, good affiliate programmes, the ones that are doing really well, are very proactive in their outreach to new partners. They're always looking for new affiliates, new partnership opportunities, whether it be through Google, whether it be through competitors, links, always doing research and to competitors who're promoting them. So in an agency like mine, we typically spend 60 to 70% of our time recruiting affiliates and activating them. So that's a majority of the time. We do have an occasional affiliate that comes to us, but we're mostly doing outreach and that's what I like to preach is: always be reaching out, always be finding new potential partners because they're not going to just come knock down your door and want to work with you. It's something that you're gonna have to go find them. And it's not easy, really it's not. You're gonna have to figure out your niche. Finding the people you want to actually contact and then contacting is a totally different ballgame. They're not going to respond the first time, most of the time, you're gonna have to do consistent follow-ups to make sure that you're getting in front of them, that your message in your programme is at the forefront of their mind, because they're getting bombarded every day with affiliate offers, and you want to be sure that yours is the best. 

Rick  

Second question. I wanted to go into the second question. If you could just repeat it again, I want to make sure I understood it and completely.

 

Andrei  

Yeah, sure. So, um, how much can this channel generate in terms of the additional sales that can be generated? How easy is it to justify that monthly costs? Is there anything that brands should keep in mind? Like, for example, if you're just starting out as a brand, and have these costs, is it realistic to say that we're gonna sell 100 products per month or 500? 

 

Rick  

Also, I want to just make sure that we're clear, the cost there's no like, $1,000 a month, it's just: you integrate with the network and you pay the fee and that's it. You may have to pay the network, a percentage of each sale, but that's only on performance. So the network only gets paid when you get paid. And the same thing with affiliates. So if you want the affiliate to drive 100 sales a month, you have to give them the tools to do that. You got to give them maybe a product review. Give them some content ideas about what they can do with it. Give them your best practices, what's worked, what hasn't worked. So it's basically up to you how successful the programme is by giving your affiliates everything that they need to be successful. And if that's done properly, your affiliates can drive lots and lots of sales through this and it only cost a percentage of the actual sale, which is a lot less than social, where you have set budgets and you're throwing five, six grand a month that adds Google same thing, where this is controlled by the effort of the affiliate, but it's also on a performance basis. So they make as much as they want and you can have them make as much as they want just because it's pure performance, and you only pay out when there's a sale.

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. Got it. The sky's the limit, really.

Andrei  

Cool stuff. Okay, this was interesting. Would you have any other sort of advice that you consider important for people that, again, are just starting out on this channel, or want to make this chapter work better for them, if they have just tested it at some point in the past?

Rick  

Yeah, for the people that haven't started one, I would suggest they start one. It's so important, really. The amount of brand recognition and sales you can get through affiliates is absolutely incredible and the cost it's minimal compared to other channels. And for the brands that are doing it, and they may be struggling, there are definitely ways you can improve your programme at any cost, whether you talk to me about it, or you can talk to people that are running successful programmes out there. Focus on recruiting, focus on gathering a list of people that you want to be your affiliates or partners, and start contacting them and building a relationship with them, because that's what it's all about. And without that relationship is just kind of transactional, where they send a sale, you send them money. You want to build the relationship so that they will continue to promote your brand at a high level. And it comes down to that pretty much and if you're not showing them the time and the effort on your end, they're going to go somewhere else and find it.

Andrei  

Yeah, having them emotionally commit to the partnership as well, not just about the percentage and the money. Super cool. Okay. Um, so what we try to do in every episode is summarise what we discussed in a couple of very actionable things that somebody tuning in can take away and can implement right away. So if you can tell us, for example, as part of these free points, the first one, which are the main platforms for them to look at?

Rick  

The main platforms, to summarise that it's um, it depends on your budget. But if you have a budget to get started over $1,000, I would look at something like ShareASale, Awin, there's one called Avant link, those are all good platforms, and they have all the tracking in place, and they pay your affiliates for you. So you don't have to worry about that. And the other ones are the ones where you got to set up yourself and do the managing yourself on that: Post affiliate Pro, and Refersion. Those are some of the really good ones that I've worked within the past.

Andrei  

Legend. Thank you. And now over to you. What would be some really, really actionable things that you think people could take away so that they can best explore the channel, as well as understand it, and potentially implement it, whether it is for their internal teams are maybe coming to you, or a partner to help them implement the tactics on this channel?

Rick  

Yeah, with affiliate, like I said earlier, it gets kind of blended in with the other ones, but it's its own channel and it should always be treated as its own channel, even though it encompasses all the other channels, treat it as you would the others. It can be your most profitable channel and if you're not giving the daily support to it, it's going to just slowly, slowly just die. And that's the last thing you want to do, because you invest a lot of time and effort into it and your affiliates have as well. And the last thing you want to do is see it fail. So treat it as you would any other channel and start with recruiting inactivating affiliates. You may have to go through your current affiliate base and get rid of some of them that may not be quality, but it will be worth it in the end, when you have some real high-quality affiliates that you have great relationships with, that will be driving revenue, consistently, month after month after month. Whether it be through reviews, videos, email, social, however, they do it, got to just build those relationships and if you're going back to your board and you have to have a discussion about this, just let them know that affiliate marketing is probably your best option for incremental revenue, because you are reaching out to affiliates to do your marketing for you and they're going to bring you the new customers and the ones that are going to repeat over time and then it's just a cycle. They'll keep bringing in new customers, and you'll be turning them into repeat customers. That's the kind of way I look at it. Just getting them on board with the incrementality of the channel as well, letting them know that it's very profitable, and it'll be profitable for the foreseeable future, as long as you stick to recruiting high-quality affiliates. 

Andrei  

Thanks so much, man. And now, tell us a bit more about what you do now with the Bearcat Media, some of the fun things you are involved with. What people can come to you and ask your help with?

Rick  

Yeah, absolutely. So we do free consultations for 30 minutes. So, if anybody is having trouble with their current affiliate programme, or they're looking to start one, I'll sit down with them for 30 minutes, no charge just to get their juices flowing and get some ideas in their heads. But we also have a podcast on affiliate programme management. And it discusses a lot of what we talked about and a lot of the basics for starting an affiliate programme. It's called The Rick Magennis Show. It's on all the platforms: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts.

Andrei  

Everything is in the description, as well. 

 

Rick  

Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, and trust me, I go over the basics. It's very simple, easy to understand, and the guests are from the industry and they share their experiences, as well. And in the future., this may not be relevant to a lot of your listeners, but we're in the process of building a recruiting software where we're gonna have affiliates and influencers in there and then brands will subscribe to our service and they will be able to contact quality affiliates and influencers from our platform. That's something we're working on as well, that's gonna be something probably in Q1 of 2021.

 

Andrei  

Nice. If I might ask, what's your network of affiliates at the moment, how big it is? What industries are they from?

 

Rick  

Oh, in my database I have probably over almost a half a million. That goes over a whole swath of industry. So it's from mommy bloggers, health and wellness, fitness outdoors. I can go on and on, like sports and CBD and anything you can think of I have affiliates.

 

Andrei  

Awesome. Okay.

 

Rick  

So, yeah, and then I'm looking to grow that half a million, I'm looking to grow that to over a million at some point next year.

 

Andrei  

Very cool. Actually, I have another note that you mentioned about this. What geographies are mainly your affiliates in? Is it the US and UK? International?

 

Rick  

My affiliates are worldwide actually. So I have a lot in America, I have a lot in Europe. I have some in Australia, down there and APAC, in southern Asia, too. So yeah, they're all over the place. That's what's good about affiliate marketing, it's global. You can be anywhere and promote a product.

 

Andrei  

Awesome, awesome. Awesome. Great stuff. Okay. A lot of ideas here. Man, I know you're busy. So I think our time is almost up. But this was a real pleasure to have you here and very insightful talk. Thanks a lot for the transparency and all the directions and insights, it was a lot of new information for me as well. I'm sure that for the people tuning in. the same. Where can they most easily reach you on or at? 

 

Rick  

My website is https://affiliateprogrammanagement.co. I got a good SEO domain there. Then I can be reached at rick@barecatmedia.com. That's my email address. 

 

Andrei  

Super. So we would have these in the description, as well. Meanwhile, guys, feel free to reach out to Rick, if you have ideas or maybe if you're interested in one of these consultations, discuss with him any opportunities that you might see for your brand. And Rick, thanks a lot for the availability for doing this as well for our guests.

 

Rick  

No problem, it's my pleasure! I love helping people out! 

 

Andrei  

Super. And yes, until next time, let's stay tuned. I think that there's a discussion to be continued here as well off podcast. Thanks a lot again for the insights and I guess it's noontime for you. So wishing you an awesome, awesome day ahead.

 

Rick  

Thank you, Andrei. Thank you very much for having me.

 

Andrei  

Thanks a lot for being on the show. See you next time.

Growing B2C Customer Communities [with Andreea Magraon, Bolt Romania]

On today's episode, we have invited Andreea Magraon, head of marketing for Bolt Romania and together we will discuss launching national B2C marketing campaigns, as well as dive a bit into mobile app advertising and how to drive awareness and conversions in this B2C space.

 

With over 10 years of experience in marketing, communication and journalism, Andreea Magraon is a Marketing Manager for Bolt Romania since 2018. From this position, Andreea develops and implements the company's marketing strategy and coordinates internal and external communication, both in relation to driver and company partners, but also to passengers. 

 

Andreea also deals with the company's Social Media Strategy. Previously, Andreea held the same position at FlixBus, creating and coordinating the implementation of the transport company's marketing strategy for the local market.

 

However, her career in communication and marketing began at TRUST Communications, where she developed and coordinated PR and social media strategies for both B2B and B2C clients. In the more than six years of agency, Andreea has implemented PR, marketing and social media projects for clients such as Intel, Acer, Fujitsu, Saint-Gobain, Băneasa Shopping City, TEDx Bucharest, Reckitt Benckiser, Eaton, IntegralEdu.

 

Andrea's professional debut was as a journalist at Ziarul Financiar, covering there first the political field, and later the Hi-Tech business area.

 

Andreea Magraon is a graduate of the Faculty of Political Sciences within the National School of Political and Administrative Studies, and in 2011 she graduated with a Masters Degree in International Relations and European Integration at the same university.

 

Connect with Andreea:

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

Website: https://bolt.eu/en/cities/bucharest/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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

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▶️ 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. On today's episode, we have Andreea Magraon, who is the head of marketing for Bolt in Romania and together we will discuss launching national B2C marketing campaigns, as well as dive a bit into mobile app advertising and how to drive awareness and conversions in this B2C space. Hello, Andreea, how's everything going?

 

Andreea  

Hi, Andrei. Everything is okay. Thank you for inviting me to the podcast.

 

Andrei  

It's my pleasure. So you are tuning in from Romania. Right?

 

Andreea  

Yep. From our office, actually, in Bucharest.

 

Andrei  

Nice. So in order for our audience to get to know you a bit better and to warm up the ground, I know you started off as a journalist and you went into marketing and you rock and roll there ever since. Tell us a bit about you, a bit about what drove you to this niche and to this industry and then your growth from a journalist to marketeer and so on.

 

Andreea  

Sure. What can I tell? My experience was built smoothly, let's say step by step. So I started as a journalist at Ziarul Financiarul, which is the biggest business publication in Romania. I worked there for four years, I started as a political journalist, because my background is in political science. And then I switched to the IT department, which was one of the best things that happened to me because I met so many interesting people. I learned so much about these IT industries, I met CEOs, entrepreneurs who build businesses, so basically, it was super interesting for me and I love the domain. Then I got this opportunity to go and work in a PR agency. And I worked there with Intel, also with a big it Corporation. It was like a smooth transition from my IT journalist, to an account manager working in a PR agency for a big IT company. So basically, my journalist background helped me so much with the PR activity. I worked there for six years until it closed the office in Romania. And I felt the need to change, because actually I felt like an external Intel employee, Intel was a big part of my life, I learned so many things. I started with the AI and then we transitioned to marketing activities and I focused on marketing after that. And after I left the agency, I worked for Flixbuss, which is a big German company, a unicorn in the bus transportation industry. But in Romania there are only international lines, so no domestic transportation. But then, Taxify came along and I took it in October 2018, and I think it was one of the best decisions of my life because Bolt, back then Taxify is one of the best companies that I work for. So yeah, so in brief, this was my adventure.

 

Andrei  

Nice! Basically, journalism and then PR and then marketing. You've been with Bolt for about I guess three years. Congrats! You had a very nice campaign with Volkswagen, which we will discuss a bit about very soon. Actually, I can't wait for us to discuss it, because we haven't had the chance to catch up on how it went. But Andreea, tell us a bit about how was back then Taxify, when you joined the company. You joined to lead their marketing efforts and departments, how was the competitive landscape and how was the company at the point when he joined?

 

Andreea  

When I joined, the company had a couple of hundred employees. Now it has 2000 employees worldwide. And at that moment in Romania, we were around 10-15, now we are almost 100, because we have the development office here for Central Eastern Europe. We grew a lot, actually, we are joking that one month at Bolt is like six regular months elsewhere. The right hailing company was still competitive. It was the same, actually. But Romania is one of the most important markets for Bolt. It was, as I said, a small, small company, which grew so much, and it went through so many things in the past two years. But yeah, everything is well, now if we can say that. I mean, with this global situation, but yeah, we grew. And I'm very happy that I was part of that.

 

Andrei  

Obviously, it's a market with some big players. So alongside Bolt, I guess, your main ones over the last two years, obviously, there was Uber and then it was the classic taxi services that were ongoing and so traditional in Romania, until you guys came along and Uber and everybody that tried to enter ever since, I think Yango... when did they try to enter? I think they don't exist anymore. Do they?

 

Andreea  

Oh, they are still here. I know that they're still on the market.

 

Andrei  

And then he was also Free Now, which I think they tried.

 

Andreea  

Yeah, actually, the former Clever, let's say. It was Clever and Uber when I joined, and now we have Uber, Free Now and Yango.

 

Andrei  

And basically, this is a market where it's very price-sensitive, and I think that it's a challenge for you to get customers to stay loyal to Bolt, isn't it?

 

Andreea  

Of course, everybody's prices dip, right? I mean they are watching the price and checking it. Our core value is that we are offering affordable rides to the passengers and at the same time, we provide high earnings for the driver. So these are the main points of our business, let's say and we want to stick with this as much as possible. Also, of course, the experience during the ride is very important, we need to provide this to the riders. And yeah, of course, as you said, the price is very important. But also I guess the other things are important, like the good quality, the good communication with the riders, if they have a problem, the communication with the drivers. Basically, to ensure that everybody is happy and to show that you care.

 

Andrei  

So from a marketing standpoint, you came in and you had to lead. So what was your approach to taking the brand and taking it out into the market, in the cities that you are operating?

 

Andreea  

When I joined, the app was available only in Bucharest and Cluj. In my first week, I participated in launching the service in Timișoara. So the approach was just to take the brand and communicate it better to the market. We had a couple of campaigns for riders and for drivers back then. 

Andreea  

So, basically what we did was to try to make Bolt a friendly brand. It was very important for us to make Bolt a friendly brand to the riders and also for the driver. Basically, we communicated through different campaigns, we had back then different campaigns with giveaways in the cars. There were different types of campaigns which we made: giving away free boxes on Halloween in our cars or on Valentine's Day like a single box - we took care of the single ones. So basically, different campaigns in which people can talk about the brand and remember us. We didn't forget about the drivers which are basically a big important part of our business. And we also had different campaigns with that, such as top driver kids. Also, everything to keep them engaged and close to us. After that, the rebranding campaign came, in which we changed from Taxify to Bolt. And we had a big campaign including outdoor, which we do very rarely in, in Bolt, as you know, we are measuring everything and outdoor is usually difficult to measure. But because we had this global campaign in which we rebranded, we chose to have an extensive campaign. What I want to also mention is that social media is a big important part of our strategy, we communicate directly with the riders and drivers. We are keeping funny, personal human language, because usually people want to communicate with humans, of course, not with brands. And we have regular giveaways with different prizes, because we want to give to the community something back, of course. Social media giveaways are part of our planning every time. Basically, when we plan campaigns lately, we try to have one, two big campaigns per quarter, in which we focus on the subject: we want to communicate. For example, affordability. This is one of the most important topics of all, because it's affordable to ride with Bolt. And we built the campaign around the subject. Actually, we are planning some nice, cool campaigns for the next month. Halloween is on the table. A bit different from what we had in the past, but you will see.

 

Andrei  

Nice! Because you mentioned the Halloween campaigns. Actually, that worked very well. I'm sure you already know. But I remember my friends that were taking Bolt rides and they were writing on the WhatsApp group: Hey guys, Bolt just gave me a chocolate. This was so cool. And then it was a little hype around it for that time.

 

Andreea  

Well, I'm glad to hear that the campaign worked. We are planning two or three companies. Last quarter we had a big campaign, it was called Safety Festival. So basically, because of the COVID situation which affected everybody, we tried to educate people to wear masks, because there was a huge discussion in Romania. So basically, we created this fake festival called Safety Festival in which we gave free rides to everybody, to show that everybody is wearing a mask. And no, they weren't obliged to post something in our cars. They could post the photos with them on the street, at home, in the office, wherever they were, but the most important was to wear a mask.

 

Andrei  

And how did you give them the rides? How were they sending you the pictures? What was the mechanism?

 

Andreea  

Oh, the mechanism was to post on our Instagram page. So basically, they had to post the stories with them wearing a mask, tag us and to use #safetyfestival. Yeah, and that was a campaign in which we educated and at the same time, it was the campaign for launching our Instagram page.

 

Andrei  

Awesome. So now we go into my long-awaited subject, which was your campaign from last week. So tell us about the campaign, so the guys tuning in can know the backstory, as well.

 

Andreea  

Basically, during the last week of September, we had the cool campaign with Volkswagen in which our riders could test their new full-electric model ID3. What we did, we organised a couple of test drives free for everybody on our platform. We created a special category in the app in which people could call for an ID3 and ride it in the city. It was one of the coolest campaigns I've worked for, because it was also linked to our green plan, in which we launched a campaign during the zero-emission day, which was very cool, because it was linked to this green message. The collaboration was very, very successful. I mean, we had thousands of test drives and in four cities: in Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara and also Constanța where we have only scooters. 

 

Andrei  

Got it. So how do you plan the campaign? How did you get into the market? I guess he was a partnership with Volkswagen as well, who were supporting you.

 

Andreea  

Oh, yeah. They came to us with a proposal and we gave them the platform for the rides. All the promo and everything was done by Volkswagen together with us. And we used all the possible channels, all that you can imagine from TV, to radio, to online ads, influencers, PR, email pushes to our riders. Um, we also used social media: Instagram mainly, where we also had a small activation with some free rides. Um, and yeah, it was very, very successful, I have to say.

 

Andrei  

Nice. So 1000 rides was the limit that you had to give away? 

 

Andreea  

No, we didn't have a limit. I mean, that was the overall result. At first, we planned it for one week, from Monday to Sunday. And then halfway of the campaign, we realised that it's so successful, and we extended the timeline of the test, right. So basically, from 10 in the morning, and not from 12. And then, at the end of the week, we realised that, hey, we want to extend it for two more days for Monday and Tuesday. So it was a success.

 

Andrei  

Very well done. Congrats.

 

Andreea  

Thank you, actually. I think it's a good example of successful cooperation between brands. 

 

Andrei  

Nice. So I really like the way that you guys approach marketing in B2C. And one thing that we tried to do with each episode for our listeners (they come from various industries, and so on), is to give them takeaways that can be taken away from each episode and apply into specific business, depending on how each operates. So I'm trying to sum up what we have discussed now and transform this into applicable insights or advice for Marketing Leaders that operate in the b2c space. There are some takeaways that I got, and I think would be worth giving away to people so that they can apply them. Do you have any main ones or top priorities takeaways that you'd like to share?

 

Andreea  

So, basically, first, you need to first set what you want to communicate, what are your strong points, how would you like to be known for? So I would first highlight that, then I would target the audience for my product. So basically, to whom I will communicate all the things that I said. So who are your buyers, your clients, your users, right? Then check the channels that you would like to use. I think social media is one of them. If you're talking about B2C, but also b2b, if you can communicate differently, why not? And after you set the channels you also have the budget, of course, because you need to invest in ads. What I learned during the past years is that testing is very important. An approach that works for Ukraine, or Poland doesn't necessarily work in Romania. So, basically, when you send emails, or have an ad or whatever you are communicating in which form, you should have two or three forms and see which brings you a better result. This is one of the things that I learned and we are also implementing here and I think many should do that. So basically, you should play, you should test. Because this way, you will learn how to promote your brand better, or a product or whatever.

 

Andrei  

Awesome. Another thing is that, I think you did this very well by looking at your users in this case, and turning them into sort of nano influencers into their group of friends, or whatever. And I think that you do this very well also for these campaigns, but also for your sort of day to day activity, as you mentioned, with a safety festival or with using people in order to get to their communities better.

 

Andreea  

Exactly, exactly. So basically, you should make people talk about yourself. I mean, if you don't have necessarily a budget to have an outdoor campaign, you can have just some giveaways, where you ask people to tag their friends like it was the safety festival, post a photo with us, tag their friends. So basically, just give them something and make them talk about your brand. 

 

Andrei  

Awesome. Andreea, thanks so much for all the insight and for being on the show. I know you have a very busy day ahead. So really appreciate your time and input into this. And for all the guys tuning in and listening. Where can they get in touch with you if let's say they have a partnership idea, or if they wanted to pick your brains on any specific things that they might be thinking of?

 

Andreea  

Okay, they can write to me on LinkedIn where I'm very responsive. And I'm also on Facebook on Instagram. 

 

Andrei  

Cool stuff. Okay, so guys will have the details in the description below. So if anything is unclear or you want more information, either myself or Andreea would be happy to help you with anything that you might have going on. And until next time. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. And thank you, Andreea, again for being on the show. Have an amazing day. 

 

Andreea  

Thank you.

How to do PR right in the B2B Tech Space [Ed Zitron]

Today’s episode brings Ed Zitron, the CEO of EZPR, a Media Relations company based in San Francisco, Boston and Portland. Join Andrei and Ed on this episode, as they will be discussing how to do PR right in the B2B Tech Space.

 

Ed was named one of Business Insider’s Top 10 PR people in tech, as well as one of Adweek’s 30 under 30. Additionally, Ed is a 2x best-selling author of This is How You Pitch and Fire Your Publicist. 

 

Connect with Ed:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/edzitron

Website: https://www.edzitron.com/

EZPR: http://www.ez-pr.com/

Email: ed@ezpr.com

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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 guest today is Ed Zitron who is the CEO of EZPR Media Relations company based in San Francisco, Boston and Portland. He was named one of BCC ciders top 10 PR people in tech as well as one of a week's 30 under 30. He's also 2x Bestselling author of This is how you pitch and Fire your publicist. Today we will discuss how to do PR right in the B2B and tech space. Hi Ed, how's everything going?

 

Ed  

I'm well, thanks for having me.

 

Andrei 

Thank you for being on the show. You are tuning in from San Francisco today?

 

Ed  

I'm actually in Las Vegas. I moved to Las Vegas. We still keep ourselves slightly in the Bay Area. But I personally live in Las Vegas, I moved here when the pandemic started and well, here we are. I like it. I like it a lot.

 

Andrei  

Nice. How is it out there? How are you guys with everything?

 

Ed  

I mean, it's restricted. But I have a bigger place. I have more room to roam around. And Vegas is great. I'm so glad I'm not in the Bay right now. It's a little bit grizzly over there.

 

Andrei  

How's business? How do you find it?

 

Ed  

Pretty good. I mean, as it's expected, everyone's being hit. We haven't had to lay off anyone, we haven't any danger laying off people. We still have clients coming in. It's working out. Everything is a little bit harder at the moment, but I think that that applies to literally any job.

 

Andrei  

For sure. Okay, so let's see, let's discuss a bit about the ship. Let's share some of your background with everybody that's tuning in today. So everybody gets a feel of where you're coming from, your history with the PR and media relations space, and really get to know you a bit better. Tell us: who are you?

 

Ed  

So I started out when I was  16 as a games journalist in London, I grew up there, I spent most of my life there. I wanted to move to America, I wasn't really sure why I wanted to. But I liked it there. I did a year exchange at Penn State. So I wanted to move to New York, I thought PR was one thing, it was totally a different thing. But I didn't know that before I moved. And then I moved and I wanted to stay. So I stayed in public relations, I was not in a great situation almost immediately, just because no one teaches on the job in PR, you pretty much just work it out. And I realised fairly quickly that no one was good at media relations, which means the ability to talk to a reporter and get him to write about something which a lot of PR people treat as a kind of a one-way street, it's a thing where you have to find a way of doing black magic to get reports cover something. And the talent there is around the ability, according to them, of basically finding the right key and the right lock, which really it's about building relationships with reporters. So I found out fairly quickly that when you actually know the reporter, and you get to learn what they're actually writing about, and you get to learn who they are, you can do a hell of a lot better. So I left that first year, went into another agency, and was a lot better, good people there. And then after a while, I was like- You know what, I can do this on my own. I wanted to start my own thing. So started EZPR in about 2012. And been doing it ever since I was on my own for a few years. And then I hired. We've got four people now, which doesn't seem like much, but we get good clients. We do good business. And it's a lean business that works. It's funny actually thinking about that. It's why we were kind of insulated. Insulated is the wrong word. We were less hit by the pandemic, because when everything shut down, everyone had to go remote. We've always been remote. Because why would I spend money on an office that the person doesn't need, none of the people who work for me wanted to go into an office anyway. So I thought why would I bother with that? I never hire particularly fast. So when it all hit, I was kind of like- Oh, okay, so we just keep being remote, I guess. And actually, in some ways, I don't want to say the pandemic is good in any way, but it helped us. It helped get over a, I don't want to say an issue, but sort of an argument that we can have in sales where they ask: 'Well, you don't have an office, where's your office?'. It doesn't happen anymore, no one cares where my office is, whether I have a big, fancy office or how many people I have in a call. A lot of the aesthetics of PR are just gone now, which is a net benefit to us. Everyone's recovering and it is tough.

 

Andrei  

And so you've always been in PR, right? 

 

Ed  

No, I was a reporter before that, like I said, previously. I never really stopped being a reporter. I was officially a reporter from 2003 through to 2016. I was doing freelance work on and off for a long time. And I loved it! Games journalism was the best job I've ever had, including public relations. Like way better, I would do that job again, in a heartbeat if it paid what I make now.

 

Andrei  

So what drew you to PR, specifically?

 

Ed  

I was lied to, that's really easy. I was lied to about what it was. So when you read most PR books, they tell you that PR is this big, sexy, flashy, impressive job where you do press conferences, and you get put in the hot seat and you go on TV. They build up this belief that people want to talk to you, which is not the case with PR. People mostly do not want to, they will talk to you if they need something, but they don't really want to talk to you about anything, especially in the beginning. And especially when you start out in PR depending on the agency, you could get given the crappiest clients. I mean, just the absolute worst, because when you're hired at that level, you're doing media lists. So literally a list of people who might cover something, and managers don't really do any work. So I went into PR because I was lied to, I thought it was gonna be this big job. We work with big clients. And it's always good and fun. Not remotely, but I stayed in it. Because I like the relationship building with reporters. I'm good at it. It's a rare discipline to be good at, because most PR people are sociopaths. And they say stuff like- I love people. Anytime I hear someone say I love people, my first reaction is: Have you met them? Have you actually met people? How many people have you met? And what were they like? Because if you love people, and you've met a lot of them, you don't have emotions, you just had very surface-level conversations with everyone you met. And so this world of PR is really not relationship driven by the industry. But if you're good at relationship building, you can get very far, because media relations in particular is a tough discipline. It requires domain expertise, you actually have to know what you're talking about to work with these reporters. And when I say that, it happens in marketing too. You get people in marketing saying- I'm a tech marketer, but the truth is their actual knowledge of technology is low. You need to know what you're talking about. When everyone went remote, I upgraded myself. Got a DSLR, got a soundboard. I did that because I know what I'm talking about. And I believe that PR people should be like the reporters they are pitching and actually learn what they are talking about. It's not difficult. I've seen people of my generation and younger, where they're taught to learn the buzzwords and the terms, but never the substance. And that is something that is pervasive. I've given a slightly longer and more complex answer, but it's something that stands out in PR for me.

 

Andrei  

And I think it also applies, as you mentioned, to marketing and in many other fields. And there is another question that occurred to me and I think it would be worth answering, from this longer but more comprehensive answer, which is- How do you feel about understanding what the reporter wants or needs or responds, helping you become more successful in doing PR right?

 

Ed  

I'm gonna be honest, not that much until I worked out what the job was because reporters appreciate it. They really do appreciate knowing you are a journalist. But there are a lot of PR people who used to be journalists. And there are a lot of journalists who moved into being PR people who did so, because they wanted more money. I did it to move to America, which is very slightly different, borderline the same. But on top of that, there are a lot of journalists who transfer. That's something I did early on. When you don't know what a PR person does before you go into PR, the lessons you've learned from journalism aren't that great. They don't really apply. In my early days, you would say- oh, yeah, journalists are always looking for stuff to write about. That's not totally true. It is true, they have to write about stuff, but they're not looking to you. They're looking to the world at large. And if you're good and you actually get a client stable that fits there, yes, they will look to you, but they're not going to come to you and be like- Hey, have you got any stuff for me to write about? No one does that. No journalists do that. Unless you are a White House reporter. Sometimes you might get an inbound request, but that is not the same thing as a journalist blindly going to you and being like- I need a story, please give me things to do. The thing that I brought over that really matters is being able to talk to a reporter. Because a lot of PR people, not marketing people, I'm sure you've seen, they talk in this really weird, stilted way. They communicate like robots. PR people manage to break their brain and be like- Hello, hope you're having a pleasant day, I'm writing a big story. It's 300 words later, and no one's paying attention. I never really successfully broke my brain. Or at least my brain was too broken to fix in the PR way. Where I never did that. I was just like, you know what, I got to communicate how I communicate. And the moment I just boil down, everything I did was how I used to write. I was taught by some really great people like Will Porter from PCs on Graham Boyd from CVG. Graham's now at Microsoft, I believe and Will is a game writer. I mean, those are my editors. And those are the people who mentored me and said: 'Look, write like you talk, don't write like you think you should talk, right? Like you actually talk'. And the moment I started doing that report, started responding to my emails, reporters started actually giving me a minute. And people don't do that. Or if they do, they talk really stupidly, they sound awful. And it's just it's a, it comes back to what people perceive to be intelligent versus what they perceive to be effective. If you talk a certain way, and communicate well, that's effective, it might not sound as smart as the weird architect scene from the matrix. But you actually do work better. And it's confusing to me. But I think it comes down to this aura of PR people that they want to feel important. And they always say 'Oh, PR people aren't the story, but they want to be the star, they want to be important. They want to be told how good they are'. I've never had that problem. Perhaps it's just being a big depressive guy. But I've never really had the problem of needing to feel important. I've always wanted to just get the job done and get paid. Not completely mercenary, but I've wanted to do a good job way more than I've wanted to feel like I'm a big-time, Big Shot type. I feel like the money shows you're the big show guy, not the work.

 

Andrei  

Which are the industries that you and your agency focus on, so that the audience understands where your approach comes from?

 

Ed  

So enterprise tech, B2B, a lot of consumer tech when I can get consumer tech. PR is hard to get because it's a lot easier. And that really is our focus. Consumer tech is my favourite, but not always the thing I get. And that doesn't mean I don't like enterprise or b2b. It's just easier for similar money. You got to be pragmatic. But I really have gotten to enterprise, though. Enterprise is tough because you have to learn so much so fast. And you have to be able to take that and spit it out the other end in a way, that's way easier. But anyway, sorry, you had a question around strategy.

 

Andrei  

Yeah, exactly. So this is very useful. We also talk a lot about b2b and enterprise marketing as well, here. So when you are, let's say, starting out with a new client or you take on new clients on board, and you need to execute a PR strategy for them, maybe they didn't do one specifically before, or they don't know exactly what they are after, how are you looking at PR strategically? Or how do you integrate it in a broader mix of marketing channels, let's say?

 

Ed  

So strategy is an interesting word, especially for PR. When it comes to media relations. There's only so much you can strategize for. If you're a very launch focus company, like I used to work with this company called Wyze, they do sign out with a 1080p camera, and they've done all sorts of stuff, since that's when you can be very specific and strategic around you because you've got a launch. You have these targets, you do these things, but when it's a broader thing, and you're ideating more you're seeing with the client saying okay, what's interesting about you what's interesting to reporters, what relationships can we build with these reporters. That is where a strategy is more difficult, or at least a week, by week or month by one month one is. It's not impossible to do PR with them. But it's a little more freeform jazz, than most people would think. And you can come up with a lot of poison with MPRs. PR people love coming up with big documents, like four or five angles. So the issue with coming up with an angle for multiple people is, if it's very specific, it's not applying to lots of people, if it's very broad, it's not going to be particularly in-depth. So a lot of this comes down to breaking the egg and seeing what comes out. And understanding what the client actually has and at some times in the new business process, telling them not to do it. I had a call last week where I told one company, brilliant story, released, it had already gone out. And I said I don't think you should do public relations about this, I think you should hire anyone. And she was shocked. And this happens to me at least once a month where I tell someone not to do PR. If you have a conversation with someone, and they're able to see a path to success, they need to be specific, like I will get you to Forbes in this manner. Nothing's guaranteed. But I think this will work. If you cannot do that, as a PR person, it's fine to say to someone, I don't think this will work because that person will come back to you. I'd say at least like 50% of the time that person will come back to you when they do have a story and be like, you know what, I didn't spend 10 grand, I didn't 15 grand because of you, you saved me money. That is good business. That is how PR agencies should work. They very rarely do. Perhaps I do it more often than I should. But I can't bring myself to convince someone to spend money they don't need to. It feels greasy.

 

Andrei  

And what are some good examples of when you advise a company to do PR or to exploit opportunities in this area? And also what KPIs are you looking at delivering towards? Is it awareness, is it traffic? 

 

Ed  

If you just raise the round of funding, don't put out a press release, come to me, come to the PR person, that's a great event to do PR around. Absolutely. I also think that like a new launch that's super applicable to a whole bunch of people is a great idea. But if it's really niche, don't hire a PR person. Work out who the one reporter is who would care, write an email yourself. That's it, you don't do the run-up. KPIs, usually we do like a two-week ramp up with a written Q&A or just kind of get the client familiar. We do a medium media list, so like a list of the people we think we can take this to, and then within them, then we start pitching. KPIs usually like coverage. So tier one might be a TechCrunch or Forbes, Business Insider or Fortune. Tier two would depend actually. It really depends because like DevOps might be tier two to some person, but to a heavily DevOps focused company, it's gonna be a tier one. The new stack, same deal. Depending on who the client is, they may not care about TechCrunch. The important thing is the conversation. But those KPIs for us, at least, are based on the actual coverage because traffic is very hard to understand. We have had clients who have had like a Kickstarter launch, where one TechCrunch article led to $85,000 worth of sales. I've had ones where it's led to 2000 clicks, there's nothing else. Now, that's it. That last one is an extreme edge case, usually it sends a good amount of traffic. But the thing I always insist with clients is we cannot guarantee client coverage. And we cannot actually guarantee traffic, because we are not in a media control country. There's a freedom of the press here. It cannot guarantee anything, but we can give you fair odds. And usually clients are, I would say most, like 95% of clients are happy. And because you set these expectations early, if you have these conversations, sometimes the client will say 'You know what, if you're not 100% sure we can get this, this isn't worth it for me'. Absolutely fine. Walk away from something you're not willing to pay for. And it's weird. I'm talking a lot about not taking business, but especially right now. I feel like the companies that are gonna win are the ones that are on both sides. So the companies that don't spend money, but they don't have to, and the companies that tell people not to spend money. Because in some cases, it's not worth it. If you need traffic, you may want to do Facebook advertising, you may have other things that could drive more traffic. If you need brand awareness and SEO, PR is pretty unrivalled for that. I actually think the SEO industry, I think that whole business might die. It's kind of a ballsy thing to say. But I get this weird feeling like Google is trying to stay ahead of them. And when you have giant companies trying to, frankly kill your industry, that's scary to me. I'm sorry for an SEO plus, I'm sure you're a lovely person. But my experience right now is that Google is really, really trying to curb that, like, obviously, high domain authority website is gonna get you. Good SEO.

 

Andrei  

So how are you working with SEO people? 

 

Ed  

I don't. That's really easy.

 

Andrei  

In PR, a very good augmented benefit that you could get from being published and the brand awareness are the backlinks that you could potentially get from Yesterday, or Forbes or Wall Street. So how do you go about it? Isn't there a marketing person on your client's team saying 'Hey, we want backlinks here'.

 

Ed  

So that will happen occasionally. The moment a client mentions backlinks, usually I have to explain some stuff. Because in most cases, you will get a link, Wall Street Journal, oftentimes doesn't link. New York Times will sometimes link, sometimes they will not. You can't go and ask for one, they will get very pissy with you, if you ask. It's not the journalist's job to cover you, they have covered you out of an interest in what you're doing. And they are not gonna they're not gonna play ball. Some cases, they may. But it really depends, you have to ask very nicely. You have no demands here, friend, you have to just ask. Now, that is not the same thing as when I've had clients go 'these are the websites that work for us'. So there is a, I forget, I think it's called an infinity chart or something like that. But basically, it says, if someone clicks through from this website, they are more likely to buy. That is hell of it. If you can get one of those when you would like deep into a PR strategy, or even not. That's a really good way of targeting because then you can say, all right, spend your entire life. And this only works to a certain extent going off to these if there's like 30 of them, or 50 of them, great. If there's three of them, I'm gonna have to just spread it around a bit. I rarely work with an SEO expert. If you write something you pitch, it's like The Next Web or TechCrunch or what have you, you can fit in terms that you want to be known for. But best find a way to write normally as well because some of those terms do not fit nicely into a blog. So it's kind of a back and forth say the least.

 

Andrei  

This is a very interesting debate because you can pay to get in Forbes... 

 

Ed  

No, you can't, not legally. You can pay to get into the Forbes council where you can write your own things. If you find a Forbes person that you can pay for coverage and it does not say pay coverage. You have broken a law. Walk back from that one.

 

Andrei  

What's a good PR budget?

 

Ed  

Usually 8 to 15 thousand a month is what you should expect. You may find people who are cheaper. Always question why. And ask them for more recent results. Any PR, I mean, talk to and say 'Hey, what's something you got recently? Give me a few links to things you got recently.' So within the last three months, because a lot of PR firms love to go 'Oh, yeah, we did this and this and this' and it'll be two years old, or a year old. But it's more than six months old, you are talking about a different airpark. You need recent coverage.

 

Andrei  

We discussed PR fits into a marketing mix and how to think about allocating perhaps budgets towards it when you are looking at your cross channel budget allocation. Would you say that PR is more of a thing that you should be doing at key moments, as you mentioned, like launches? Or is it something that you can constantly do a bit of and then have spikes?

 

Ed  

Depends on the company. If you're a company with a lot of launches, you can do it constantly. If you're a company that does one notable thing a year, do a project. With SEO, for example, you can do contributed content like mentioned you can do your own blogs, you can pitch them to a boss. You can do that fairly regularly and it has an effect. Now for the most part, though, project-based PR is fine. Unless you can find an agency that can continually get you coverage, you have to be aware that there are budgets and there are projects. I love projects. I'd much rather have a happy 45-day project than a three months client where they're pissed off at me. Every time. Clients love it, and it makes people happy.

 

Andrei  

I agree. If you have a deadline, you focus easier. 

 

Ed  

Yeah, exactly. Well, it's just that and it's also you need an inflexion point. You need something to focus on. Now, if you're a consumer electronics company, and you have 12 launches throughout the year, it's probably too many launches, but you've got enough juice there to keep juice in the PR.

 

Andrei  

Is it the launches that are better in consumer electronics?

 

Andrei  

Yes, it's much easier in consumer electronics. It's not impossible with other things. But you have to amend your expectations. You have to say 'All right, I'm in DevOps, I shouldn't expect, like TechCrunch every month'. Now, that can change. I have a subscription API and enterprise and they have, in the last three months, at CNBC, New York Times, TechCrunch, Op-Ed, I mean, Christ almighty, they've been everywhere. And they are a subscription API, because we found the whole Apple epic thing, we kept them. I have Business Insider as well, in three months, then twice. The point I'm making is, with the right story, in the right crystallisation of events, we are able to do a lot of great work, but I'm always month to month. And I think that that's always good if you're hiring a PR firm. Get month to month, get  15-20 days out. Just be able to say 'I'll give notice'. Because guess what, things change, you may do. And you may think 'this is not ok’. Probably not the PR, but just like the story doesn't work, wonderful. Quit, then. The thing to watch out with, if you're hiring PR is long engagements, anything longer than three months, it's crazy to me. Now, if you are a company with a consumer electronic thing that people are going to review, go for it, you could do six months. But if you're not, probably don't. You may end up working with the person for six months. But if it's month to month, you'll be a hell of a lot happier. I had a client once, Hotspot Shield, anchorfree, wonderful company, wonderful CEO, David there. I think I worked with them for four or six years blended into one. At one point, it's month to month with them for that time. We'd like a few months off here and there. Worked really well. Happy client for the most part. You're in any relationship for years, you can have an argument, trust me, I've been married twice. That flexibility keeps everyone honest. And yeah, there is a degree of gun to your head every month. But for the most part, people stick around for a few months, because they know they don't have to.

 

Andrei  

So what's a traditional scenario of you starting out in a project? I'm curious, personally, because I have never been into PR. A lot into marketing, but not so much into PR. I have a degree in marketing and had projects or worked with PR teams, but never had the insider's view into how things should be planned out. And I think this is interesting for our listeners. We also have entrepreneurs here or CEOs, but also a lot of marketing and PR and salespeople. So in order for them to understand what they should expect or how to think about building up a relationship with a PR agency or deploying a PR strategy, what would be a classical scenario, of yours, that would get them to a successful story.

 

Ed  

So, for example, I've had several clients recently, and I'll have several more, I'm sure, but they have a funding announcement. And we do a 45-day sprint, we say all right, two weeks prep time, then kind of four weeks pitching with an embargo. So they raised x million dollars. You spend two weeks, you get all the information and all the prep work done in that two week period. Then you start pitching and you usually set an embargo for x day, which is like week five, give yourself about two or three weeks to pitch. And then you pitch, you get reporters to agree to an embargo, they agreed to the embargo. They all post the same time and everyone is happy. Everyone smiles all around. You get in, you get out. If it's a month to month thing, usually you have that same two-week ramp up, but then you have a degree of like 'Okay, now we're here, what do we do next?'. Now, there are clients I've had where there is just so much fertile ground that it doesn't bother me. I had this 3D printed house company. Last five and a half weeks, we've had Forbes, MBC, Yahoo Finance, Next Web, CNET. I mean, there's just so many places to take them. There may be ones where you have to say 'Okay, we've got these angles, now we're going to go and pitch to reporters', you would then hope to just get stories in a steady flow, as in covering the client from whatever angle. So in the case of the 3D printed house company, it would be alright. This the solution to the affordable housing crisis, or it might just be a TV appearance because they are cool and TV loves specific kinds of cool stories. Very rare, but they do. Then had KTLA as well and that was because they had an LA pop up. So we had a report in LA and went to meet with them. There are ways you work through it with a monster month engagement, where we want to get coverage for this company, you have to work with the client to find stuff to do every month. And if you don't, you have to find the relationships for them to build with the reporter. And there are many reporters you can talk to, and they'll say 'Oh, I find this person generally interesting. I find this person good to talk to, and they'll be a useful source'. So the API subscription company, the CEO, Jacob, has been speaking to multiple reporters, just about Apple's general goings-on, that's a way of doing it too. But you have to make sure you have something unique to say, because there are tonnes of app companies, tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of them. For the most part, it's gonna be hard to rise above the sea there. If you just want to talk about apps in general, if you don't have a thing that you're a master of. If you don't have a, it's not even an angle, it's like a weapon of choice. If you don't have something you are uniquely talented talking about, then it's going to be hard to build that reputation. But it's not impossible.

 

Andrei  

We lightly touched on this, but how do you pitch that? For example, we have a company that has a budget and can come to you and you can help them with everything that needs to happen within the process. Or you might have a smaller company, maybe a small niche that they know, the free publications that they want to get into. But they don't know how to pitch the subject or how to get in there. And now going to your book and some of the insights that you share there, what would be some piece of advice that you'd give to somebody that wants to try to get into PR with a story?

 

Ed  

The client or a PR person?

 

Andrei  

The client, in this case.

 

Ed  

If they don't have a budget for the agency, I would tell them to read. Go and read everything you can. If you want to be in TechCrunch so bad, find the person for the thing you are in. And be honest with yourself. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you are just like a company, you are not. So if you're an enterprise tech, with TechCrunch, you're pretty much looking at Frederick Lardinois, or Ron Miller. In those cases, they kind of diverged, Ron will write about AI. Frederick will mostly write about web RTC. But he doesn't do it much. If he doesn't do something much, either means there aren't many companies or he doesn't really find it that interesting. So you need to go and you need to read what was interesting enough to rise above. Maybe it was a funding round, maybe it was an advisor who was a former big-time Facebook person. It comes down to an honest read of the industry and sending a short like 100-word email to them and saying 'Can I just get on the phone with you? No, I don't expect a story. Maybe I would love that, it would be wonderful'. But, I want you to hear a story. I think you'd find it interesting. And they may still say no, that is not ok. But that's life. Sorry. And I think that that is the easiest way to do it for free. But time is not free. I do this all the livelong day. Even when you don't do much for that two hours. Even if you're reading for those two hours and pitching for one minute. It is still time-consuming and exhausting, because a lot of mental energy is a lot of moving parts and trying to understand 'how am I going to get to this person who is not incentivized to write about me, to write about me'. And it may be as simple as 'I read all of your stuff. And I think this matters'. The way I've done this personally is, in any given report, if you really are 100% sure they'll cover it, you just send the pitch and it's great. There's some we have to go 'look you are about this, you're about this, you're about this. And I think that this matters, for this reason, based on this'. You have to really show your homework and still that won't work. You have to be ready for rejection as well. It's like the thing that you deal with within this industry. You are just constantly told no. I mean, all the time.

Andrei

Can press releases work? Can you put out a press release through a live wire or something like that and does it get picked up?

 

Ed  

Unless you're a big, big, big company press release or big, big waste of time. It's no reason for them. You might want to write one because some reports just like gang information that way. But for the most part, you don't need to put anything on the wire, your investors may push you. That's your problem. But if no one's pushing you to, you probably don't need one. It doesn't help with your SEO.

 

Andrei

I was curious if it works.

 

Ed  

If you have a really big funding round, around 200- 50 million, yeah, but you can get press for that. If you're doing a funding round, maybe put one out, but you really don't have to. It's $1000-2,000 each time, it's money you could spend on investing. 

 

Andrei

And who picks the subjects or the angles? 

 

Ed  

For the most part, the PR agencies should bring the idea in everything. Sure, it's great when a client comes in and goes: What about this? Because there are some companies I've worked with, who just come up with something I didn't think of like that's and it was bloody brilliant. And then you go and you use it and everyone feels good, you feel good, everyone's good. But for the most part, it should be at least the 75-25 split. Your PR firm should be doing way more than you. But, if things aren't working, if you're having tough times, get on the phone with them and hash it out. Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr. He called me, he said: I want to be your biggest client. And I also want you to not lie to me. What's your experience with enterprise? I'm like: not great. I didn't have a lot of spec in 2012. He said: Thank you for not lying to me. I don't need that. I will teach you the enterprise stuff you need to know in b2b stuff. And that's where I got my stuff. He has so many good lessons about so many things that seem like that just about sales, but they apply to everything. And one of my favourite things he's written is Lessons for hiring your first VP. And one thing he says that really applies to PR people, is: no excuses. Just tell me what happened and how we can fix it. And this is a great managerial lesson, but it's great for PR people specifically. PR people love to do cat lettering, they love to hide the errors. Now, you shouldn't be cowardly. Just be like- this isn't working. And I don't know why. Or it isn't working and I think it's because of this. Don't go: Yeah, well, you know, the media is really tough at the moment. And, you know, there's a lot of COVID. Let's find a way through this or not work together. Everyone loves making money. No one likes losing money. But if you have this conversation: No excuses, let's just work out how to go through this. And is there a way to this place? Or is there no, and if there isn't, is there something else we can do to make this work? Have that conversation with your PR firm and you'll be a lot happier. Excuses are a pain in the ass unless they and the difference between an excuse and something that happened is an excuse is usually vague, a reason is usually definitive. If they weren't interested, they might just not be interested, you might never get closure on them. Or they might say: I find this boring. And the answer there may be: Your subject is boring and you have to move on. It's really that simple.

 

Andrei 

I'm totally with you on the no-excuses approach in general in business.

 

Ed  

Indeed.

 

Andrei

Some recent success stories and what made them successful apart from these ones that we discussed. I'm happy that we brought them up before, in the beginning of our conversation. Is there any other case study or success story that comes to your mind, that was recent, and that maybe we can look into and draw some learnings from?

 

Ed  

I mean, I'll talk about Revenue Camp. They're a subscription API company, I mentioned them vaguely, but I'll be more specific. We had a funding round with them. It's really good. It's a great way to start a relationship, then the whole epic Apple thing happened. We then were talking to Jacob fence and proprietary data around the fact that when you go a year into the subscription, with any given user, you go from making 70% on the subscription to 85%. What their data showed that was because of the way that subscriptions churn, very few companies actually see the benefit of that. We took that story to multiple reporters, and we were open op head on it. We pitched that op-ed to TechCrunch. He got put on TechCrunch. Because guess what, it had good proprietary data that told the story. We took it to share a review day of the New York Times, she said, 'That's kind of interesting'. I want to talk to Jake about broader things. She talked to him broadly. He caught a lovely write up in the bloody New York Times because he talked very authoritatively on how Apple interacts with developers and how developers are dealt with. The reason that that worked was partly relationships. I did the entire pitch with the New York Times through dm. But I did that because I have a relationship with her, I've done it for years. I've pitched her twice in the last few months. But I've known her for years because I've read her stuff. I'm like 'Okay, there is a way we're into this'. With Walter over at TechCrunch. I pitched him the op-ed, I've pitched him several op-eds. I've learned that he likes stuff that tells a story and he's fairly direct. And I happen to be a pretty good writer. And thus, I know what writers look for and that kind of stuff. That's great. I know that

 Ryan Browne and CNBC. I know that he writes about these big picture tech stories, the news of the day, so he's going to need someone. And here's the way to be the best source: be cleared spoken, very direct and quotable. Just say x happened for y reason I think this and this and this. Don't try and sound smart, be smart. All of this worked. Because we have good relationships with reporters. Ryan, I got to know him three months ago, via Twitter, because I've read his stuff forever. And you have to take a while to break through with these people. It just happens. This case study, as vague as it may be, grew out of the fact that we learned what the company did and then we pulled out what was interesting. We work with them to find the data internally, but also the story internally that they could apply to. That's why they've kept in the press. Also, Jacob is a dynamite CEO. He is charming, friendly down to earth. He likes talking to the media, but also he talks to them in a way that's not condescending or indeed impenetrable. A lot of CEOs, sometimes they go very high-end buzzword types. Jake is very straightforward, lovely, smart, and a fellow developer. He's just this straightforward, lovely guy. So the learnings there are: read, read, read, read, read, read, learn what the reporters want, and match that kind of stuff to your stuff, but also be direct with all these conversations they refuse. Here's this person, they can talk about this, it's relevant for this reason. Direct. No one's got time for that. And then on some level, they're doing you a favour. It's not really doing a favour because you bring them something they want, but they don't have to listen to you. They'll have to read your thing. So at least through them the solid of responding quickly, and getting them the things they need and being respectful of a no. I've had several experiences from both of those writers. Guess what? Didn't get bought, huh? I was just like, okay, no arguments. That's an important one. If someone tells you No, unless you're like- I have read all your things they know this is so perfect for you which will happen like 1% of the time, just back off. Thank them for responding. Seriously, say: Hey, thanks for getting back to me. Because that's all you can ask. It's so hard to even get a reply in PR. So be respectful. People remember that people remember people are rude, they will remember people are useful. If you are useful and interesting, you can go quite far. So being respectful of people's time is very good for you.

 

Andrei 

Mm-hmm. Super. Okay, so now let's try to do a wrap-up. Because there are so many interesting things, let's try to sort of prioritise them for somebody that never looked at PR in-depth, and they found out all these things, there may be considering it now and maybe they are trying to find their best starting point. I already have five things that I picked up that are relevant, but I would rather let you say which would be your top three, and then maybe add on top of them, because you are the authority in this case.

 

Andrei  

Read, I cannot be clearer enough, read, read, read, read, read, read, get to know everything in your industry. If you want to be in the media, learn the media, build relationships. If someone says no, thank him, move on. Get a conversation with someone, a warm introduction will do wonders. Just have a conversation. Don't be demanding. No one likes anyone who's demanding. If you're hiring a PR agency, set expectations, tell what you want and talk to them about it, find a direct path to that. If you don't do that, you're going to be miserable. But if you do it, you'll probably have a great relationship. I would also think of projects versus month to month, unless you have a lot of launches. If you're in consumer tech, that's brilliant and always ask for recent coverage in media relations. Asked for stuff that's happened at least six months ago, even I'd say three. And if they can't do that, then walk away. 

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. One thing that I want you to add, and I think particularly I found it very insightful, and it kind of validated one belief that I had was this one of having to go and understand exactly what certain journalists write about, that's why I also put the question of who thinks about the angle? Is it the agency? Or is he the client? Trying to be in the clients shoes, I'm thinking: Okay, if I kind of know the publications, maybe try to understand before starting the conversation with the agency, what would be something that a certain writer would be interested in, so I can better communicate my idea to the PR agency. 

 

Ed  

Yeah. But that should also be their job. They should do that for you. They should be doing that stuff.

 

Andrei  

Well, I guess it's much easier if there's already a bidder.

 

Ed  

Yes, have some knowledge, because then, they won't befuddle you with nonsense.

 

Andrei  

So what are we up to with the EZPR, now? Where are you guys heading towards? What partnerships are looking for?

 

Ed  

We just want new clients, we're not hiring generally, we've hired five people in five years. People leave, people enter. Generally, we want things that are evaluated. If we're gonna do a partnership with someone, I need to know how that is going to get me more coverage or more money. You're not going to do either of those things. I respectfully asked you to not ask, but you should be doing that with any sales. Please find a way to actually bring value. Um, we're generally looking for consumer tech, enterprise tech B2B tech. Tech is really good for us, post series, post-seed round, but if you get a big enough seed round, we can help you. Big enough would be over two and a half million, you probably want to raise more up to three to get in the press, but we've done it. And try and think of where you'd be in the media and if you honestly can't think and contact me. I'll give you an honest read. I'll give you a barometer. I've put you in the right direction. If you can work with me, absolutely. I'm not a monster I want to help.

 

Andrei  

Either particular geographic areas where you focus more on? 

 

Ed  

Usually just focus on the US. We do some UK. In my experience of UK genesis, they want someone in the UK with good reason, same way. It just makes more sense. But you can do a lot of stuff with that.

 

Andrei  

Super So, particularly North America, I guess. Right?

 

Ed  

Yeah, North America. I don't believe anyone on our team speaks anything other than English. I tried to be an English speaker in North America from tech.

 

Andrei  

Super. Okay, so I think we have a good bunch here of the people that would be certainly interested to speak with you. So for you guys. I'll leave the details in the description below. And in terms of other platforms, is it LinkedIn a good place?

 

Ed  

I'm on Twitter- Ed Ztron on Twitter. On Twitter, you'll find me there. Awesome. 

 

Andrei  

Sweet. Okay. Ed, until next time, thanks so much for being on the show and the really insightful chat also full of energy. So loved it. Thank you for taking the time, for all the insights and looking forward to meeting again, hopefully soon. Guys, if you have any questions, shoot them over to me to add directly if there are PR related and if you guys want us to maybe try to organise another catch-up, a second time to maybe dig deeper into some of the areas that would be relevant for you, then just let us know and we'll certainly try to make it happen.

 

Ed  

Thank you for having me on.

 

Andrei  

Same here. Thanks a lot, man.

Strategic B2B Marketing & Trends Post-COVID-19 [with Jen Grant]

On today’s episode, Andrei and Jen Grant will be discussing how brands, depending on their sizes, can effectively use marketing in order to scale, as well as post-COVID-19 trends that Jen identified in the past year. More than this, Jen will be sharing with us her experience of transitioning from being a CMO to CEO, giving us top tips on how to lead an innovative brand in an emerging market.

 

Jen Grant is the CEO of Appify, a leading technology delivery agency, specialising in providing digital product development. As CMO, Jen Grant led Looker’s marketing until the 2.6B acquisition by Google in 2019, led the rebrand of Elastic and built the team that took the company public for 2.4B in 2018, and grew Box from a small start-up to an industry-leading enterprise content company with a 1.7B IPO in 2015. Prior to that, Grant spent 4 years at Google leading the Google Apps EDU, Gmail and Book Search marketing teams. She holds an MBA from Wharton and a BA from Princeton.

 

Connect with Jen:

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

Appify on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/appifyinc/

Appify: https://appify.com/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Tuning in straight from Silicon Valley, today with us we have Jen Grant. Jen's the CEO of Appify, a very young startup, as well a marketing superhero, I would say. Jen has a wealth of experience working as a CMO, and Product Marketing Manager for smaller sized companies and startups, as well as medium-sized companies and bigger corporate like Google, where she was a product marketing manager for a very long while. And today, on the podcast, we will talk about how brands, depending on their sizes, can use marketing effectively in order to scale, as well as the trends that Jen saw over the last half a year or so since we were in a weird situation globally, as well as her transition from being a CMO to actually becoming a CEO and leading an innovative brand in an emerging market. So Jen, thanks a lot for tuning in. How are you?

 

Jen  

I'm doing great. I'm excited to talk about marketing, talk about Appify, talk about becoming a CEO, I think a lot of marketers out there wonder what happens after CMO and I'm happy to share.

 

Andrei  

Awesome. So our public is formed, I would say, not equally, we have more marketers and entrepreneurs and CEO, and CEOs, but we have a very good mix of both of them. So I think it's going to be equally interesting for everybody to hear your story as well as your insights. And I think maybe this would be a good place to start. How did you get into marketing and what was your journey on this marketing path?

 

Jen  

Yeah, I think that's a great question. Coming out of school, I messed around - many people did lots of different things, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. And what really struck home for me with marketing and the reason that I ended up going into marketing, was that it was a combination of both creativity, coming up with ideas, brainstorming, reaching people communicating. Of course, when I was younger, I was very much into the arts and theatre. It really served that part of who I am and then on the flip side, there's such a lovely data-driven aspect around marketing that it isn't random, it's very much certainly in B2B marketing, you can run everything from a spreadsheet, it's very technology-driven. And that also spoke to the part of me that likes things in spreadsheets and process and how do we pull this and get this to market? So really, that's where it started for me. And I did lots of different things, but my sort of first real learning experience was as a product marketer at Google, way back in 2004. So it was right after Google's IPO if you can imagine how long ago that was, it was a much smaller company then and a very fun company to be a part of. So I learned a tonne there. That was basically where I started. 

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. Awesome. So well, it's not worthy. So let's go straight into this one with Google because I think that everybody thinks about marketing and innovation and Google, being the example. How it was to be a manager, leading a team with Google when the change was happening? To be completely honest, I don't remember that much in terms of marketing from that time, but I know that that was a time of change. So what was happening when you were there? How was everything going? 

 

Jen  

I think the core thing at Google that product marketers, really learned from that time, is positioning. Is taking complex technology, sort of interesting things that engineers had built, and being able to explain why someone would use them, and position them in the marketplace as something interesting. So specifically, the product that I worked on, in the beginning, was Google Book Search. It was an intensely wild ride. Because we announced that we were going to scan all the books in the libraries, and we knew that publishers and authors would end up suing us. So it was this wild marketing challenge of saying - How do you both work with publishers and authors and explain to them the deeply transformational vision of being able to search every book in a library, while at the same time, including them in that vision and saying this is how all books can be found. And it was very, very difficult. And I think the coming out of there, the importance of communicating simply, and really grabbing people at the very clear reason why they should be interested in a particular product, in this case, it was so big, but even in every day marketing, these are critical skills to have to be able to say- How do I reach that person who may not agree with me, or maybe against what I'm saying and how do I reach them with something that makes them go- Oh, Oh, I get it. And in Book Search case it took time, it took about six to nine months before we really consolidated around the clear story and be able to say- If you take 100% of the world books, only about 15-20% of them are in the public domain, which means that anyone can read them, you could search them online, but also only about 10-15% of them are in print and for sale. The whole chunk of the majority of the books in the world's 60-70% of books, you can't buy them in a store and they are not in the public domain. They're in libraries. And so the idea that we would be able to bring books at the same level of webpages so that someone could search across not just the knowledge of the internet, but the knowledge of all books in libraries is intensely amazing. And this isn't something where we're going into Barnes and Nobles and pulling books off shelves, and somehow you're going to do something bad to Authors and Publishers, this is much more about this 70% of books that no one really has access to, unless they're inside a library, walking down the halls and looking for them. And that sort of core positioning was critical in helping people go- Oh, that's what this is about. This isn't about Google is trying to sell books, or Google is trying to take something away from authors and readers. They're trying to help people FIND books. And it was a wild ride, I learned a tonne, I think coming out of there, there was a lot of PR, a lot of positioning, Product Marketing, writing kind of being able to explain what it is that this thing was. And I think I've benefited from that throughout my career, or just that real, great learning experience of how important positioning is.

 

Andrei  

I see. What you just said now sounds like that stage when a brand or a startup tries to figure out the story behind the brand in order to be stronger and bigger than just fulfilling the need. Was this part of your learning that you found so interesting that sort of helped you fuel and deliver much better in your next roles as well as the CEO? 

 

Jen  

Absolutely. I think, taking that to the next. So after Google, I went to Box, which was wild and fun. This is what every entrepreneur and every marketer should really be thinking of, is we could have at Box just say- We make file sharing easy. But what we focused on is- How do we position ourselves against the competition, against what people already know and so in the end, our positioning was simple, secure sharing that IT End users love and adopt. And the reason it's important is that it put us right in between, so we said- Okay, Dropbox is very easy for users to use, but it is not secure. SharePoint is very difficult for users to use, but it's very secure and it has all that IT wants. And so what box is, is that solution that allows for an easy to use experience just like Dropbox, but is secure and it has all the tools that your IT group needs. And so that positioning was from as soon as we sort of solidified around that, it is still the positioning that is there today. There are different competitors there, there's additional functionality on top of it, there's more that it does. But that very crystal clear, simple, and secure, put us right in between these two competitors. And later, I've met with folks who were in marketing and Dropbox and who come back and say- Man, you guys made it harder for us to launch our business product, because we just kept repeating it in every opportunity we could. Dropbox is not secure, Box is secure. So in the end, they had to really jump over a couple of bumps, to really get back the- Yes, we're also secure, we can be for business, we can be for teams. And it was because of our consistency in that positioning. And definitely, that's from the working on Book Search at Google and then taking that to Box and the positioning there. And of course, every company I go to now is stepping back and saying- Okay, what is the positioning that going to get us to the point where people go?

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. And were you from the very beginning involved so much in the strategy beat, or did you have times when you were wearing all sorts of hats, also doing Google Ads or copywriting?

 

Jen  

No, I think that's definitely right. I think in all the companies I've been at, certainly the strategy and the thinking about the positioning, but I am a writer. There are always moments where my husband even said it to me- I don't know how long it'll be, but pretty soon, you're gonna rewrite the website. And then I'll laugh and say- Well, I shouldn't. Sometimes he's right, I'll say- I'll just rewrite this page, let me just fix this one. But it's because I'm a writer. At Appify, we actually changed the name of the company, from Turbo systems to Appify. So it was really excited about the change the name, much more explains what we do. And we were working on the launch and again, I'm back at the small stage, I wrote the press release. I'm running the company, but I also wrote the press release.

 

Andrei  

Nice. So we'll get to this transition in a very short moment, and guys tuning in, just so you know, we haven't planned how the conversation is going to go. So I don't know either what Jen's gonna say and that's why I'm super excited to hear. But just to zoom in a bit on the strategy bit. So we are a marketing agency, and we have these conversations a lot with clients, some of them had the experience of working on a marketing strategy in the past, or maybe more recently, however, others didn't have the chance, either, because they were pretty small, and they didn't have an established marketing team, or they didn't realize that was something that they should prioritize. And we try to push this idea that it's so important to have a strategy so that you know what to do on each channel. What's your process when you think about the strategy? So first of all, we mentioned the position in, which is something that I think you go from, and that's your start is. So then, what's your thought process? Or how do you approach thinking of a marketing strategy? 

 

Jen  

I think that's an excellent point. So I've done it many different ways, I'll walk you through what I did just recently, but I will say that in the least two other cases, I did bring on an agency to help through the thought process, I do think often that is very helpful. Certainly, when you're the CMO or the head of marketing, and you need your CEO to be on board, very often an agency can help bring everyone together around the marketing strategy so that you're not constantly having to convince the CEO that your ideas are right. You have this lovely third party that is in there saying- Yes, this is this the right thing to do and we have the gravitas of being an agency to get it across. In the cases where I've done it on my own and Appify being one example of that, is obviously starting from the positioning. So where do we fit in the market? And where do the competitors fit and how do we secure that position in the middle? And then, the second thing I work on or want to have is messaging pillars. So at least three clear benefits that we can both prove with the product and prove with how customers are using it are real and then resonate and are useful. They're interesting to the customer. So in the case of Appify, we came up with immediate, because you can launch an app in days. So you get immediate results. And then we have proof points that are case studies. And then the second is powerful, so powerful as part of our positioning that you can create powerful apps, not just an air table app, which is a form on top of a spreadsheet, which is lovely and useful. But we actually create powerful apps that integrate with SAP or Oracle or something like that. So that was our second pillar. And then our third pillar, we spent a lot of time thinking about because the other two are so obvious. And the third one, we thought- What do we want to have happened in companies after they start using Appify? And so we ended up with inspiring. Is that we want to inspire people to think differently and go- Oh, I could do this, I could do that, I could do this. In the same way, when Wix and Squarespace suddenly made it easy for anyone to make a website, we want to suddenly make it so easy to create an app that anyone in your company would go- Oh, man, we could create an app that would solve this problem, and we would be way more efficient. And so that was our third pillar. And that's typically the foundation. And of course, you've got your buyers. In the case of a small company, you probably have enough customers that you can kind of step back and say- Ah, these customers are business owners, these customers are leading teams, they're sort of the middle manager type and these are the things they care about. And once you have those, then you basically have your kit. So then you say- Okay, now let's start talking about our channels. So we have, digital marketing, content marketing, what are all the different areas that we think will work and use that messaging as the backbone of what you would put out in all those different channels, whether it's long-form content marketing, or short-form, digital ads?

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. First of all, so you had the positioning, which fuels the three pillars, like the value proposition parts, and from then onwards, you go into the sort of tactics, which would be how you do implement this. And I think, thinking about your third proposition pillar, I think that helps the sales team as well because basically, you are making people feel like they were already using the app and feeling the benefits before they were actually using it. Communicating the vision, very nice. Super. Okay. So now let's talk about your transition from being a successful and recognized CMO to going into the CEO role. How did this happen? 

 

Jen  

Yes, so I was at Looker for almost five years and we were acquired by Google. So I had sort of an interesting moment of saying- Oh, I'm going back to the company that I was at before, effectively. So 10 years later, do I go back to Google? And it was a brilliant outcome for Looker. It was absolutely the right deal to do. I think the technologies of the two companies are very, very complimentary. It was correct in being acquired by Google. Me personally, I had to step back and think- Am I going backwards? Is this what I want? And at the time, any recruiter will know when a company gets acquired that it's time to email everybody in that company and see if they're ready to go somewhere else. So I got a tonne of emails and I thought a lot about it. And I thought I have been there, done that on the CMO thing, I feel quite confident that I've done it enough. And what I really want to try next is that CEO position of running the company. And so the switch was just having the courage to answer those emails and say, thank you for thinking of me, but I'm only looking at CEO positions. And then I started meeting with my network and people that I knew and I would start to say it out loud. And it's funny, you think that's such a simple thing, but it is actually a shift in how you're thinking like I'm saying it out loud and it starts to become real and eventually I got it. Introduce to a VC for Appify. So Rajeev, who's the Mayfield VC, who's on our board, met him, had a great conversation, he introduced me to Hari, who's the founder of Appify. We spent the next six months getting to know each other. Do we agree on building culture, do we agree on sort of core values, do we think the same way around go to market strategies and how he's building the product and what this product could mean to people? And at the end of the six months, it was super clear, he is an excellent partner, we work really, really well together. He is the sort of product and engineering genius on his side like he is in love with the fact that he doesn't have to be CEO and focus on product engineering. And on my end, I have the experience on the go to the market side to really build and grow a team. That was sort of the process of how it happened. I think what is interesting for the marketers, that are your listeners, is - there are so many skills that a CEO needs to have, that is a part of what it means to be a great marketer. Someone might say - Yeah, you're just in marketing, marketers are never CEOs, it's always the head of sales, or it's the head of product. I would tend to disagree because the CEO’s job is to get that positioning right and to be the one out in front of the company, sharing the story of how this company exists, why it's important, how it fits in the marketplace. And so that my CMO ability to basically create the mission and the values and the positioning has been critical and helping to make me a strong CEO. I can lean on that and say - Okay, got this. There are certainly other parts of it, that I'm learning over time that I haven't done before. But as an example, one of the key jobs of a CEO is to raise money when you need to raise money. Well, part of raising money, is telling the story of the company, which is absolutely whatever CMO knows how to do. So maybe I don't know the mechanics of- Okay, now you're interested, here's the data room, here's the financing, here's deal terms. These are the things that I'm learning and of course, I have people on my team and people who are the legal team and the finance team and whatnot are helping me, but the critical component is telling a compelling story about why this company is amazing and why this person should invest and that's something we all know how to do. So I encourage every CMO to go down this path.

 

Andrei  

Nice. And what are some of the challenges that you found? Because the role is very different. I can say from my personal story, which obviously is not so established as yours, but I also made this shift when opening the agency, and I felt there were a lot of areas that had to learn very fast how to lead so that we become and eventually became successful. So what was the hardest for you? I'm really curious, or what did you find was unexpected, maybe?

 

Jen  

One of the unexpected things, which I think everyone will get a little laugh over, is that as I start looking at the budget, it is a completely different way of looking at it. So when you're the head of marketing, you think about how many leads do I need to produce? How do I build and grow this team? Here the goals of the company, I need this many leads, and in order to do that, here are my channels. And you can run the numbers back and then you pitch the CFO and the CEO and say I need more headcount and you more budget, I'm running these programs, we need brand awareness, all of these things. When you're in the CEO seat, all of a sudden, you're looking at the whole pie. So you're looking at, here's the cash on hand, here's the headcount we have, here's how many sales reps we have, here's the quota capacity. Can we even close the deals? Even if we gave marketing money? Do we even have the people to close the deals? And it becomes a much different conversation. And in fact, I've had moments where I've laughed and said- Actually, I don't think I want to put more money into marketing. I need to hire more sales reps, which of course the CMO was always like- No! We want more money on marketing! This is a case where I don't need to put more money into marketing because I need to get more SDRs to really get on the sales floor based on the needs of the business. So that was sort of an unexpected surprise that I didn't realize. So it becomes more balanced, you have to think about the whole picture. As a marker, of course, you know how to build a budget, you know how to do all of those things. This is a budget that also has the bottom line of- here's how much money we have in the bank. It is a much more important exercise because it isn't just convincing people that you deserve the budget. You're literally in charge. So any mistake you make is your mistake. It's not- Oh, we didn't get enough budget so we weren't able to get enough MQLs, it's- we have this much cash, and we are running the business in a reasonable way so that we know we can hire and we can put programs budget together, and we can get enough revenue to get us to the point that we need to be. So I think I've actually quite enjoyed that part of it, to be honest, because I like the data, I like running the spreadsheets and understanding all the letters.

 

Andrei  

Did you think you became more sort of operations-oriented in the process?

 

Jen  

Definitely. Yeah. For example, we changed the name of the company, we created a new logo. And I think of it like - my little candy moments where I ordered the swag for the team. And it made me happy. Those little moments of creativity, the parts of marketing that I do love, where I get a little moment where I get to do a little bit of that. And then I go back to the more operational aspects of the role, which is watching a pipeline, hiring these sales reps, see if they performing. Are we able to get to the revenue numbers? What's a reasonable revenue number for us to project, talking to the board, making sure they know, everything that's going on so nothing comes at us as a surprise. All of these different components of the business are not things that I've done before. So definitely, more operational. But I do take my little moments where I order a little swag and have a little bit of the marketing candy.

 

Andrei  

Nice. And yeah, I have a question, which is not related to the strategy bit, but it's a curiosity. And we sometimes talk about marketing tools, and I was curious now, for revenue tracking - do you use a tool that you find useful, or if you do, what do you like about it?

 

Jen  

Yeah, our current tech stack at Appify is fairly new, meaning we're small. In other companies, there have been lots of other products we've put on top of it. But we're really simple. Right now we have Salesforce, we have Marketo, over switching to HubSpot, which I'm looking forward to, I think that's going to be very interesting. And basically, everything is coming out of those two systems. I think long term, one of the things I miss from Looker is Looker is a BI tool, it is a data tool. And so we had an amazing understanding of what was going on in the business through all of the dashboards. So I had the most amazing marketing dashboard of all time, which showed me all my channels, how things were converting, what the team was predicting, from an MQL standpoint, actuals versus reality. It just felt like we were so on top of everything because we could see everything was going on and we knew that it was accurate. I think today, we're small enough at Appify that we're just running off Salesforce, and now will soon be HubSpot. And I don't know if I have such a tight view of what exactly is going on? Because Salesforce does a lot of things well, but it is a 20+-year-old piece of software. They don't quite have the analytics that you need, you can't quite get it to do exactly what you want so I think at some point, we'll put something on top of it so we have a tighter view of what's really going on in the business, but right now that's what we're using. 

 

Andrei  

Awesome! And go to market strategies. Thank you for your reply. If you do hear about something interesting that you really like, I'd be super curious to hear your insight from a fellow marketer. Now going to the market penetration and sort of go-to-market strategies, because we lightly touched on it, but I know that you have a lot of experience and insight into this. So what was the case with Appify?

 

Jen  

From a go-to-market strategy, right now we're really focused on two things. One is outbound SDR. So what's interesting about that is- if you take the two companies that I came from, Box was the very top of the funnel, it was all about the present brand, the story, the everything we could do to make noise. And then we did have a freemium product. So that was our funnel- was open, it's super wide and gets millions in here and then we'll convert them into business users. In Looker case, they started with SDRs outbound, and really tightly looking at- Okay, in the Valley, tech companies all appreciate data, we're going to go to every VC website, we're going to call every port for the company that they have, and we're going to try to sell to them. That was their first strategy for bringing leads and opportunities in the company, it worked very well. It's not a long term strategy, because eventually, you run out. And you don't want your business to be so much dependent on venture-backed tech, in case venture-backed Tech has a problem and more of these companies go out of business, then, you also have to deal with that fluctuation. So we did, of course, later start to grow. But marketing was brought in a little bit later. So we brought in demand and started doing webinars and email and nurturing and all of that type of marketing. I think the two original SDRs had been there for at least a year and a half, maybe two years. So it was an interesting kind of move into how the go-to market strategy worked. At Appify, we're focusing on a similar strategy, it's starting with SDR outbound, really beginning to have conversations to understand- is our positioning working, are the benefits real? What are the customer, what are the words customers use when they talk about their pain points? And then, layer on top of that, the marketing stack of digital marketing and content marketing, being the main two areas that we're focused on. I would say SDRs is one piece of it, the other piece, which we're still in the middle of executing against is the customer-focused. So being able to customer stories, getting customers to fill out reviews at trust radius. So that kind of virtuous cycle of- you get a bunch of customers deployed, they're happy with your product, you get them to fill out anything you can get them to fill out, you do a use case, you do a video, you get a quote, you have some sales material, and then that all turns around, and then you have content marketing around- Hey, look, we’re rated top customer service or something like that. And then you can use that in your digital marketing because it's such a nice proof point to get people in. So I've seen that we use to very good effect at Looker. And so we're sort of building the capability to do that now at Appify, we're still a little small, you got to have at least 50 sorts of reviews in order to start seeing some momentum from there. But having seen what it can do for the company, it's definitely a big piece that we're focused on. 

 

Andrei  

Super. When we started, we said we're gonna try to sort of look at marketing at different points. So for example, for bigger companies, for smaller companies, and maybe medium. So we spoke about Google where even though there was a big company, were they organizing projects so that they seem to be modern businesses? Did you get that feeling?

 

Jen  

Yes, yeah. At that time, Google organized around the product. So there was a product marketing person, a product manager, and then usually an engineering team behind it. And then if it was something that had BDD or something that those people would be involved as well, but it was all organized either by a product or product category. So after I worked on Book Search for a while, I did move on to work on consumer apps. So Gmail, Calendar. At the time, there was a blogger, Picasa, there were all sorts of apps that Google was launching and so that group of consumer apps was what my team focused on. So it was like a smaller team within a larger company but again, the focus was much more on positioning Product Marketing, landing pages, Google was never much into the email. They were always against email. Even if customers wanted a newsletter. They didn't want to send one. And then, of course, we would do Google AdWords, we sort of bought into the system as a Google product. And we're able to compete in the keyword buying process, like any other company. So we did a little digital marketing, too. 

 

Andrei  

But you guys have had a process that you needed to follow, which was like the standard company culture. And then, later on, when you went into a more sort of medium-sized business, how would that change? What do you feel was different?

 

Jen  

Yeah, it's funny, it's hard to compare because Google is such a bizarro company. And you can't email, you can't do all these things, it's all about their press and your positioning and a little bit of AdWords. And when I went to Box, it's everything. Ne needed to create an entire stack of all of the channels. So what I've seen is in that middle stage,  leaning into the channels that work and typically if your positioning is solid if you've spent that time, knowing who your customer is, and knowing what their pain points are, then your top three channels are likely going to be content marketing, creating some sort of educational material that is speaking to the buyer, your digital marketing, which again, is usually taking that content, and getting it out there and really focusing on those key benefits that you're offering. And just getting your website as optimized as possible. So once you bring people in, does your request demo button look shiny, and people click on it, and then they fill out the form? Great, but most of the time, you need to optimize to get it to a point where people are coming to your website, and you can capture their information. So this is the beginning. One of the interesting things I've seen, however, and I'm sure all the marketers on the podcast will agree with us. But if you're not a marketer, I have found that nonmarketers, CEOs, or CFOs, typically say- Just tell me the one channel that's going to convert and then I'll put all the money in that. Like, tell me that one ad that gets someone to sign up, and then we'll put all our money in that. And one of the lovely things about Looker was we had such a good grasp of the data, that finally, I felt like we could prove that there's never one thing that every time I would say- Oh, we had a great week last week, what did we do? She would say- Well, we sent out an email, we did a webinar, there was an event in this city, there was some press, and she'd go- It is all the things and what that speaks to is- activity is critically important. Just doing things. Now there may be things that you end up doing that don't work at all. And that's fine, stop doing that thing. But the majority of the activity that you do, adds on to each other. And so it's not just- oh, well, we only do this one thing. You have to do a lot of things to really continue to get that activity across the internet, across the press, wherever you can get it.

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. And looking at Appify now and I'm sure that you as well as everybody else felt a bit weird over the last couple of months and things probably have changed a lot. Probably even from your CEO position, is probably a bit concerning as well because maybe companies are more strict with budgets now and they don't maybe want to purchase that easily. So how are you prioritizing your marketing tactics at the moment? Andrei  

The alignment between marketing and sales, because it's a B2B product. So, how are you prioritising things today? 

 

Jen  

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think, every company sort of went through what  I call the March pause, where in March and a little bit of April, everyone just sort of stopped and went- What's going on? What's happening? And in fact, many of our customers said- Don't talk to me for three weeks. So we were in the middle of deployment, they said, hang on, I'm not going to do anything with you right now. And it was a little nerve-racking. And the same thing with our pipeline- hang on, I'll talk to you in a couple weeks. Once we were past the March pause, I think our strategy became really emphasising those things that mattered in this new world. And because we are a lower-cost solution, so we have this nice message. For example, we have some medium-sized, small side businesses that are paying for Salesforce, it is very expensive. And their bottom line is what they're looking at right now is- Can we continue to afford this really heavy piece of CRM software? Are there alternatives? I could build an app on Appify, to cover the majority of functionality that they need, because they're not using all the functionality of Salesforce? It is over featured for that size of the company. And so we did have some customers that we could tell that story to and they would go- Oh, you mean, I don't have to renew this licence at $100 per user per month, for my 40 field technicians who are helping customers in the field? Oh, my goodness, I can just build an app with you guys! And it's half the price. And we're like- Yes, that's the story! Our marketing was more changed in the messaging of really being aware of the circumstances of how people are looking at their businesses. So pushing the idea that we're more cost-effective, and we can help them improve their bottom line by saving them on the software that they buy today, we did find a couple of interesting stories around customers that built PP safety apps. So if they have someone who is going on to a site to maybe create a quote, so they're looking at a construction site. So they go to the site, and they take all the information that they need to say- Okay, this is the quote, we can rent you this crane for this amount of time and this is how much it will be? Well, in order to walk on the site, in the middle of the pandemic, you need to think through- Am I wearing my mask? Do I have gloves on? Sometimes you might need a hardhat, there could be all sorts of safety equipment that they need to wear. And so very quickly, they could create a little app with Appify that says- Okay, just a little checklist. Have I done all the things to protect myself? And in addition, it's somewhat, the customer can use it as an audit to say- Yes! And customer, are people that came on your site are protected, and they went through all of the things you needed them to go through? So that became a really interesting use case that we could start talking about that, of course, we never would have thought of it before, it wasn't on people's minds. So much more of our change was in the messaging than in any of the, channels changing.

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. So I think maybe an insight from here could be that companies that saw a change in the way that people maybe perceived certain problems or so, would be to be flexible and conscious and aware about who are their potential customers, change their priorities and approach to different problems. And maybe their messaging, so that they are marketing in the moment, communicating in the moment? Right? 

 

Jen  

Yeah. What are the concerns and the space that everyone's in and being able to recognise? One of the things I saw was right after the March, April, May, some people switched up their messaging, and some people forgot to turn off their automated campaigns. And so there would be really tone-deaf emails that you would get that just didn't feel right, like- Hey, we'll give away a trip to Hawaii to come get a demo of our product. That's weird. So it's important to not be tone-deaf. And people are scared and if they're figuring out how to save their business, you want to make sure that you're addressing where they're at and not kind of where they were two months ago.

 

Andrei  

True, true. Okay, so as we are getting close to the end of the episode, typically what we try to do for the audience, but I think we did an amazing job at this over the conversation, so thank you for that, is to try to sum up some actionable points that people can take away and they can implement straight away into their business. I think we have way more than three. So we have the positioning, which is something that is very important for everybody, and they should always be looking at that. Then everything that comes from there with having the communication speeders and everything, then we have this thing that we just discussed now, which is the communicating at the moment, and ensuring that you, as a marketer, are present, and delivering to the people's needs. What else would you say from the conversation was something that is very actionable and important for you, as a leader?

 

Jen  

I would say, focusing on customers. So, really taking advantage of happy customers and feeding that into this sort of virtual cycle of filling out the reviews, getting more leads in, getting more happy customers, more advocacy. That, I think is really critical to think about, even at an early stage, it's worth doing. And I think the other thing would be, when you're getting pressure from your CEO, or if you are the CEO or an entrepreneur, understanding that there is not one thing, there's not one ad, there's not one campaign, it is all of the things. What makes marketing so interesting is that it's not just ads and it's not just email, and it's not just educational content. It's the website, it's optimization, it's PR, did you speak at an event? Are you in a webinar? Are you telling your story consistently? There are so many things in it and all of those things together are what make your marketing successful.

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. Super, thanks so much. And now looking at Appify, because we spoke about it and I'm sure that amongst our listeners, there are some people that could find it useful. So tell us a bit about who you guys think are the right customers that could use your product most?

 

Jen  

Yes, I think that's important. So Appify makes it easy for anyone to build an app, I think I said that. You used to actually have to have a developer to build a website. And then you have Squarespace. So in our case, you used to have a developer to build a mobile app for your business, and now you don't. So it's a platform that makes it very easy to do that. Given who your listeners are some of the customers that we have today, are doing things that are very innovative: One it's a very large company that has created a lead capture app. So every single person in the company has this app on their cell phone, they're out to dinner with their family, if they see an opportunity, they are like: Hey, this company could really use our product, they can immediately enter that lead into their phone, and then it goes into Salesforce. So that's one example. We also have plenty of sales teams that work out in the field, they're not just in the office, they go out in the field, and they need that mobile app to be able to take information about the customer, so they can build a great bid for the customers business. So that's another sort of good use case. And then we have a lot of customers that are just in field service. So they are out in the field, fixing LASIK equipment, or fixing commercial food equipment in grocery stores. And then we even have some that ATM machines that you see in a gas station or in any store- well, someone has to take care of them. So anytime you are out on the road, you need an app. And many, many of these companies, they're still paper-based or they're using Excel, or they're kind of scanning things and then emailing them. And it's very, very inefficient. And so where Appify really shines, is for these ideas that people are out and about in the world, they're distributed, they're not in the office, and they need to perform a business process and they don't want to do it on paper or they would like to get away from paper or they have some sort of janky Excel kind of thing that they're doing that just takes much longer than it needs to, so it's really really about efficiently solving some of these needs when people are on the road.

 

Andrei  

Mm-hmm. Super. Awesome. And if people want to get in touch with you to find out more about it, and maybe book a demo, obviously, we put the link of the website in the box below. Guys, make sure to check it out. And also, can they get in touch with you directly on LinkedIn? Or what's the best way that they could maybe get in touch with you? 

 

Jen  

Sure. Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place. So Jen Grant on LinkedIn, you should be able to find me pretty quickly right there.

 

Andrei  

Super, super. Okay, Jen, it was an amazing pleasure to have you with us today. And very good, fun. I enjoyed it. Thanks a lot for all the insight and for all the input. Keep rocking it because you're doing an amazing job. And keep us posted with everything that you do. And guys tuning in, if you enjoyed today's episode, and you'd like us to maybe try to organise a second session where we could go and zoom into a specific subject that you feel would be valuable for you over the next couple of months, then let us know and we'll try to organise depending on Jeff's availability, as well, so we can answer all your questions. Jen Tang, super happy you're on board. Sweet. So then, Jen, I'll let you crack on because I'm sure that you have a very busy afternoon ahead. Keep rocking it, we will stay tuned with you guys ao we can see what the how the growth is gonna be. I'm sure it's gonna be a very good journey, no doubt about that. Speak soon. Thanks. Okay. Great.

 

Jen  

Great to meet you.

Launching a SaaS Business and Content Marketing Trends post-COVID-19 [with Xenia Muntean]

Today’s episode brings Xenia Muntean to The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Xenia is the Founder of Planable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 5,000 teams at brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, Viber, Siemens, and United Nations.

 

Xenia and Andrei will be discussing Content Marketing Trends after COVID-19, as well as how to launch a SaaS Business, bringing her recent experience to the table.

 

Xenia was recognised on Forbes 30U30, spoke at Cannes Lions, and has been a guest on Growth Marketing Today, Social Geek, Social Minds and many other podcasts. She has also published a book – The Manifesto on Content Marketing Teams, and has recently launched her own podcast – People of Marketing.

 

For the past four years, she has worked with hundreds of marketing teams, helping them collaborate efficiently from across the room or across the globe. With thousands of marketers suddenly working from home, Xenia will share some powerful insights about remote marketing teamwork.

 

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

Connect with Xenia:

Planable: https://planable.io/

Follow Planable: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planable/

Connect with Xenia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xeniamuntean/

People of Marketing podcast: http://bit.ly/PeopleOfMarketing

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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

Episode Transcript:

Andrei

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Show! Today's guest is Xenia Muntean, Forbes 30U30 and the Founder of Planable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 5000 teams and brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, Viber, Siemens and United Nations. Well done, Xenia! Today we're going to have an insightful and exciting conversation about Social Media Marketing and Content Trends, and how technology can help brands better use online channels to grow communities collaboratively. Xenia, thank you so much for being today with us. How are you? How's life, how's the day been?

 

Xenia

Busy, good busy. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to kick off this conversation.

 

Andrei

Awesome, me too. I think maybe a very good place to start for our audience to better understand your journey which is a very exciting one and you entrepreneurship at a very early age, you have a lot of achievements, which I think are worth talking about from an inspirational point of view, but also positioning you in a sort of authority way, so that people know what you're talking about. So tell us, how did everything start? How did you start on this journey and what got you into launching Planable?

 

Xenia  

Yeah. So it all started with me building my first business, which was a Social Media Marketing Agency. I started it during my second year of university and I was actually dreaming of working in the advertising industry since I was a teenager. I was obsessed with everything in the ad world and I started my agency at 21 years old. I was building campaigns for brands, a lot of content for them, managing their social media pages, but also a lot of other digital marketing work, such as branding and web design and so on. I say that it all started with me building my first business because, during that agency time, that's when I discovered the problem that I'm currently solving with Planable. And so for those who are not familiar with how social media marketing happens, every single post for major brands that you see online, every single tweet or every single Instagram post, behind that post, there's a bunch of people that work together on that post to plan it, to collaborate, make sure that it's on-brand, to make sure that the tone of voice is correct. Make sure they're using the proper hashtags and proper jargon about their product or about their service. So there's a lot of planning that goes into one single post and there's a lot of cooperation and a lot of workflow. There's even approval systems in place when it comes to an agency working with clients, but also when it comes to larger teams, right? If you have teams that are bigger than two people, there might be some approvals in place where the head of social, for example, might approve content that is built by his team before it goes live. 

 

So how do you manage it all, right? That's the question that I was asking myself when I had my own agency. I was asking myself: what's the proper system, and I ended up actually building the same system as everyone else uses today, without talking to other agencies or with other professionals in the world. That's spreadsheets, it's all running on spreadsheets in the Social Media Marketing World. You have this huge spreadsheet, where you have one row for the text of the post, one row for link that takes you to a file somewhere on Drive or Dropbox, then one row for each thing like, what category does this pose belong, notes and comments, when is it going to launch, what hashtags are you going to use with it and also maybe particularly one specific role for feedback from your teammates or from the client. You can manage it, but it's extremely hard work. And there's a lot of copy-pasting, a lot of room for mistakes and then, at the end, you also need to schedule it in advance and you go to some scheduling tool to do that, to something like Hootsuite or Buffer or TweetDeck, or some other tool. The idea is that this is a very clunky and a very broken process, and the teams are trying to make it work, but it is really hard work.

 

Andrei  

And very time-consuming. So you started with the agency and then you got to know about all these problems, interact with other big companies as well with the agency back then. And, by the way, what year was the scene? What was the year when you started being active on the agency side? Was is before social media technology became available or popular?

 

Xenia  

I remember back then, we were still in that phase where we had to educate clients about social media marketing and the importance of social media and it was a bit of a pioneering in a way of social media marketing. And obviously, tools back then were not necessarily a thing, people were not using. People were using just generic tools, but it's still the case nowadays. It didn't evolve that much as you'd expect it to.

 

Andrei  

Mm hmm. Okay. And then-Planable. Did you do it yourself, were you a bigger team? Now we know how the idea came along. But how did you put it all together? How did you launch it as a product? How do you market it to the right audience? 

 

Xenia  

I started it together with my two co-founders: Vlad and Nick. They both worked in the agency world, so they were familiar with how everything works. And we got together and we realize that this entire process and the entire workflow that happens behind the scenes of content could be simplified and there's a lot of time that could be saved, and we got together and we did just that - we built Planable to solve this problem. We went through pre-accelerator in Cluj, Romania, and during that accelerator, that's when we learned the bulk amount of what it means to lead a start-up, what it means to build one, the product development part. Nick, our CTO, built the product by himself in the early days of Planable. We had about three to four months to build the product, because, at the end of the program, there was a demo day so we had to present it during a conference, actually. So it was a demo day and also at the same time, it was a competition. And if there was an incentive tool to build it fast, which is really hard to build a good product and also build it very fast. So we did in about three to four months and we launched it first in beta, because we knew that. You make the product in three months - it's a very stripped down version of where you're dreaming of building in the future. So we built a minimal version of what Planable is today. And we launched it with a couple of hundred of beta users and we got those users from social media mainly, but also from our own connections, our own network. And beyond that, we also launched on places such as beta page and beta list, which are really great to get very early stage users, early adopters. We got them from forums as well. I remember we were spending quite a lot of time in community and in forums, trying to find potential better users. It was a lot of what today is called growth hacking, trying to figure it out in the beginning and we nurtured that community of beta users for about a year. And then coming out, we were also building the product, developing it. And I think we launched the product and the pricing plans, and we started monetizing the product in a year and a half, after we started building it, and I remember we launched on Product Hunt. It was quite a big splash.

 

Andrei

Okay, so I just got the idea now. It wasn't in the first chart that we wanted to discuss, but I think it's going to be insightful for the guys listening or tuning into today into the episode. So we have the entrepreneurs and then we have the marketing people and the business passionate, these sort of groups of listeners, let's say. So, what I know from the feedback that we got in the past, was some of the people tuning in would be interesting to know- basically, we have the 30 days entrepreneur, the person that wants to launch a tech business and maybe it's the first time that thinking about it or trying to put together the value proposition and the technology and everything themselves or with a small team. What would be something that you found essential understanding or some hacks that you found along the way that you think would be worth mentioning in our discussion that might help them accelerate the learning process being in this pre-launch or launch phase?

 

Xenia  

I think something that I didn't know back then was how to do proper customer development interviews. And I realized in time that they were extremely crucial. We were doing it, based on our intuition, we basically had a few mock-ups. We had them in envision and we were simulating the experience. It was pretty well made, actually now looking backwards, I realize it was not bad at all. We were simulating the experience of the app inside envision servers, you're clicking on something and it was taking you to a different mock-up page. And that was actually pretty cool and it gave people a good experience. So we had the tech part of the customer development interviews, often we had the props, the materials, but the questions, that's probably something that could have been improved quite a lot and there's this great book, called "The mom test" and it's basically - how to do customer development questions, how to ask people the right question so that they give you unbiased replies, or honest replies. Even if you're showing them product that is not yet ready, how do you get the honest replies even if those replies might hurt you? And they might not be the ones you want to hear, but you still need to hear them. Because people want to be nice to you. Right? Who wants to put an entrepreneur down?. No one, no one wants to break their dreams. But you need to find ways to ask those questions so that you actually build something that people love. And we were lucky in a way, because we were our ideal users. So it was hard for us not to spot things that might not be most honest. So it was easier for us to ask questions that are relevant and get the best answers for that. But I think, reading up quite a lot about customer development and what type of questions to ask and how to get people committed to something: what's the problem that you're struggling with? How did you try to solve it, right? If that person you're talking to never tried to solve their problem, might not be a problem at all. How did you try to solve it? And then how did your solution work out? And if you would get a solution that would actually solve your problem, would you pay for it? Because that's another part of it. They might have a real problem, they might need a real solution, but they might not be willing to pay for it. So you need to check all of those boxes, and then you need to get a commitment from them. Well, are you gonna do a trial? Are you gonna give me page of feedback? Are you gonna give me a bullet lists of feedback, something to actually commit them, because then, there's another part of it like: "Yeah, I might be willing to pay." But then, when it actually comes to them committing to something, that's where the real deal happens. And you need to get some kind of commitment as minor as it could be. Even if they pay you like $1, there needs to be some kind of commitment from them. So you know that they're serious about your product, and you're building something with potential.

 

Andrei  

This is nothing not related, but it's a curiosity that might be in other people's minds as well. What were you charging from the beginning? Because you mentioned the beta testers and the beta users. Did you charge companies in the beginning? Or did you go on a freemium model in the beginning, because I know you have a freemium as well now, but how did it work? When did you make the switch and you realize: "Hey, we actually can charge as our competitors do in this space."

 

Xenia  

Funny story. We had a freemium in the beginning, then we took it out. And this summer a few months ago, we did the freemium back, but in a different version. And so I'll tell you a bit more about that why we decided to go back to freemium. In the beginning, we had a freemium model, and everyone in the beta group has free access to everything. And we started monetizing, when we launched it outside of the bet group. And everyone who had the product for free in some form, was grandfathered and some people are still on the free plan, even today. I think that's extremely crucial. The product was not ready, I wouldn't have paid for it, it was very minimal. It was buggy, it was minimal. But it did provide some minimum value. At least when you're in beta, it is important to give the product for free. But at some point, you've got to introduce pricing, because that's the moment of truth for your product.

 

Andrei  

Just another question, but now for the marketing people. How did you think about the launch? Because it was a new product in a market that was still learning about the issues that they would use social media in the right way. And you had to both educate, but also monetize and then you were part of an accelerator, so you had the pressure. How did you think about the launch? I guess you didn't have too much money either to make a global launch or anything like that. How did you think about the right way to launch the product?

 

Xenia  

That’s right. So I'll talk about the real launch, the one that we did on Product Hunt when we launched out of the beta program, because I wouldn't say that when we initially launched in the beta program, I wouldn't say that there was a big launch there. We didn't do that much in terms of the launch. But the real launch when we launched a Product Hunt, and we started monetizing and introduced the pricing plans. We took it very seriously, we prepared so much for that launch. here's a bunch of tips and tricks on how to successfully launch on Product Hunt. There are tons of articles and ebooks on that specific subject. We had a hunter, someone that launched us on Product Hunt, so we asked Murat, who's the CEO of Marvel app. Marvel app is a collaboration tool for designers and we asked him to launch us, to put us on Product Hunt, on that specific day, and we agreed the day, we gave him all the materials so you got to prepare a bunch of designs, a bunch of visuals, copy- what to say about the product itself. And we had an army of friends prepared, standing by waiting. You need a big bump in the beginning so that Product Hunt is like:" Oh, what's this thing everyone votes?". So we have an army of friends, sending an invite just waiting to vote, to support us and tweet about us. It was really great. It went very well, right? In the beginning, we got  100 votes or something, from everyone that we were asking to vote and then naturally snowballed and started going and people genuinely were voting us and asking us questions. So that was the main launch. And then, together with that across the next few months, we also invested in our blog, started doing a bit of SEO Optimisation, we were very content marketing-driven from Day Zero, we knew that this is going to be something, product led growth and we need to market the product in a way that people understand us and in a way that positions us well. One of the struggles even, today is how do we communicate our value in a way that separates us from a class of products that we consider indirect competitors. And that's social media management tools, such as buffer and Hootsuite and Sprout Social and Falcon i o and a bunch of other tools out there that do social media management. And the main challenge was how do we communicate this in a way that people understand that we're not in the same category as them? We do have something to do with social media, but it's not about the publishing side and it's not about the scheduling side, it's not about analytics and managing the channel, it's more about managing content and how do you work as a team on that content? That's a struggle even today, because marketers are very familiar with the social media management list of tools that, when you say social media, they go: "Oh, Hootsuite, Buffer and so on". It's a new thing and, at the same time, because, the entire category of collaboration, for content, for social, it's pretty new and there's an explanation of why this entire category of tools is new. But it's challenging to make people understand it.

 

Andrei  

Okay, as a quick summary, from our previous conversation, and for everybody to be clear on what Planable does and why is different from the other sources? Actually, it helps teams manage the content and the decision around pushing certain types of content on certain types of platforms, right? And what post has to go where and then enables the whole marketing team or management team to collaborate on producing that end post on a specific platform, right? 

 

Xenia  

Yeah. 

 

Andrei

Super. Okay, so now we get into the content side of things. And I think it's a good time to look at what we initially wanted to discuss before this long parentheses, which were changes that we saw over the last couple of months, and then what you feel the word is going to look tomorrow when it comes to content and social media, sharing and everything else to do with this area. So looking back on the last, let's say, six months, ever since COVID came and more brands started to go digital, started to pay more attention to their online communities. Do you feel there has been any change or anything shifted when it comes to social media and content?

 

Xenia  

So there are three points of change top of mind that I saw. The first one is just the acceleration of content production. I feel like it exploded. The entire content marketing industry is in the future. Basically, it's where we expected it to be in a couple of years. Just the amount of content brands are producing nowadays has doubled probably compared with pre-pandemic days. And that makes sense, because you can't do ads. People don't want to be sold, too and so many ads budgets have been cut. Content is providing value, providing entertainment, providing meaningful information to your audience is the best way to go during this time. So it does make a lot of sense. The first thing that I noticed is the colouration of content. And then the second thing is the production of content in a more low key way in a more authentic way, right? Brands have ditched the studios because no one goes in a studio with a team. that's not really possible, right? You got to improvise it, you've got to do it in a startup way. You better shoot videos and produce content in whatever your way you can. Do I like do content over zoom and stuff like that, not 4k, not fancy. And I think that's actually an interesting direction the content took, in a very well fits with the trends that we've seen in the past years, and what consumers might want during this time- more humane approach to marketing, a more relatable one. And I think that works together well what I mentioned before- the people don't want to be sold to during this period of time, and seeing content that is authentic and relatable and recognizable, it does have this more empathetic nature. And then the first change that I mentioned and that I noticed, is related to the empathy factor about brands trying to build more of a personality or more values in their core marketing. And by that, I mean that brands that already had a soul, had values and had personality and had empathy for their audience, a social side to it, they’re accentuating it more and more, they're highlighting it more and more than other brands that didn't have a rushing to create it, and we're trying to slowly build it now, at least. So kind of highlighting that the values, the care about communities or whatever values that fit well within this current environment, either highlighting them or trying to build them now, though, it's really hard to build them because, the audience is going to notice that you didn't have that specific value, not talking about that much and suddenly it's all about that. You need to slowly build it, and it needs to be authentic, and it needs to make sense with your brand. Those are the main three changes that I, I've seen in the content world recently.

 

Andrei  

And if you were to look at tomorrow and see how these trends really will survive, or what are the changes could we expect to see over the next couple of months because hopefully, the pandemic it's not gonna last forever and again, we don't have some financial difficulties for a couple more months, but there's a future there. So how do you feel the social media world is gonna be transforming next? What's good quality content today? How should brands look at producing good quality content if they just started out now or if they just started to focus on it now?

 

Xenia  

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's no right answer to this question. Like what is good content, good content is the one that works for your brand, that brings results, good content that is aligned with your brand that is genuine. And I think the only way to achieve that is if you have diversity in your marketing team. Because there's so many times brands publish something or launch a campaign and you can see that not too many people have looked at it because it's tone-deaf, it's not relatable, it doesn't match with the current reality. That's only possible if not enough people have taken a look at it, if it was written by a copywriter and no one else, checked it, because I can hardly imagine that if a team of 10 look at ads, no one raises a red flag about specific campaigns we've seen. No, I don't want to point fingers but I think that's the only way- if you bring your team together, and you have to have a diversity of views on culture, on the social part of the world, and politics and everything, if there's a diversity of points, and if there's more people involved and there's this open cooperation inside a marketing team, and if more departments are also involved, that's something I championed quite a lot on. Social media is not just about the marketing team, it is about the entire brand, it is about the entire company. And whenever you have the chance, if you're doing a product launch, you've got to have your product team involved. If you're doing employer branding on social media, you've got to have your HR team involved, and so on and so on. So the more people you can bring on, and the more diversity you can create your, you're going to get better and brighter ideas, which eventually is going to lead to better quality of content. I've seen brands, I've seen clients that use videos which perform well on social media, and could work, but it really does depend on your brand, maybe static, maybe photos is one of the works even better to you. In the end, the format is just the vessel. It's not necessarily what makes a piece of content a good content, its brand alignment if that specific content resonates with your brand, it could make sense for your brand. If it's really built in a collaborative way, which is probably going to lead to a better idea, and also if it's meaningful for your audience, if it's something that actually brings on more value, because that's what content should be. Content should always be something of value for the audience. Otherwise, it's probably an ad.

 

Andrei  

Got it! Okay, and another thing that was on my mind, and we had a lot of discussions with clients as well, which tended to be a bit concerned and I was curious to see how you got this vibe from maybe your clients or from the industry from software provider point of view- in terms of the organic side of things. So we have the content and we publish it to bring value to the community and, there are brands with big communities out there. However, there seems to be a feeling in the market, even brands being afraid of the fact that the organic algorithms have started to decrease a bit in terms of efficiently and reach and then getting worried about the fact that maybe their content doesn't get as far as it could go. What's your feeling there, maybe if you have any tips for companies with this worry to amplify the results that they get from their organic content, apart from it being good quality in terms of aligning with the brand and everything that we discussed now which by the way are very good points. And I totally agree with you on all of them.

 

Xenia  

Yeah, glad to hear it. Well, in terms of what works on social media, and what tips and tricks as you mentioned... different platforms encourage different format, obviously Facebook encourages video, other platforms might like different formats of content, looking at the time your audience is most engaged, that's something else again. But in the end, yes, the algorithms have changed in a major, major way. And if you're not the type of brand that is building content that is super engaging super, has some kind of virality, it has some shareable factor to it, then yes, it is, pay to play in the end. You either got a sponsor the content and build that around that specific content, or you've got to switch to strategy and invest in maybe less content, but more meaningful and more shareable potential, I'd say. So that's the only way you can make it work. But yes, organic is not the same as it was.

 

Andrei  

Okay, cool. So then I think we covered a lot of points. Actually, I think that everybody tuning in has at least only one thing to get away from this or three or five, but let's try to sum them. So we talked about so many things today. And from the entrepreneurship part and point of view, from the social media and content side of things. Now, a very tough thing that we'll have to do and we usually do it in every episode is, we try to summarize everything in three maybe four points, that the audience can take away and they can try to apply straight away into their business or their strategy, because in the end, information is only information until it is applied to standardable results. So, for somebody that is maybe working in marketing, looking at reevaluating their content marketing or social media strategy, or even the tools that they use for planning content and organizing content, what would be the main takeaways from our discussion that you feel they would be able to apply to their business?

 

Xenia  

I think thoroughly researching and knowing your audiences is definitely the first thing and that takes me back to the customer development interviews that we discussed, right? That was about knowing our audience, as well. Doing a lot of research and doing survey and talking to your customers, to your audience, and really understanding your audience is probably the first takeaway I would take from this conversation. And the second would probably be -  know yourself as a brand. It's all about knowledge. Knowing yourself and being self-aware as a brand, what do you stand for a figuring that as early as you can. Because you build your brand and if you do not have a set of values for your brand, when you try to implement those, it's going to be hard and it's not going to be authentic. Figuring out who you are from day one as a brand, and doing some introspection in yourself as a company and figuring out your values and what you stand for, what's your flag that you stand by? That's the second takeaway. I guess the third one would be to pick your strategy. Especially for social media, there's two paths. If you want to go the path where we're going to create a lot of content and we're going to invest in it or we're going to create less content and we're going to go the organic route, and we're going to invest a lot in one specific piece of content. Are you going to put all your eggs in one basket or diversify? That's your strategy that you got to pick. If you're in the middle, that's probably the worst. You either create a lot of goals and you sponsor them and you create a lot of word of mouth and a lot of vibe, or you create one and invest in the quality of that content. Picking your strategies is probably the third takeaway.

 

Andrei  

Thanks so much. That was awesome. So tell us more about Planable. There's a lot of cool stuff that you do. And I think that you're helping your customers a lot. Obviously you work with some big names, but I guess smaller ones, as well. So tell us what's in the pipeline? What are you guys planning to do next? What do customers appreciate more about your platform that maybe some of our listeners would find the value in as well?

 

Xenia 

Yeah. So look, the fourth trend that I didn't mention that happened across the past six months, was just the amount of digitalization and building up the tech stack of things that happen in the meanwhile. Because everyone else is working remote and everyone is working from home and trying to make it work. Teams have consistently built up their tech stack from what they had before. And us, being a tool for collaboration, we're very well-positioned for this remote life. That's the way we're currently helping most of our customers by just trying to bring everyone else in the same room as they were before, but digitally, and in a way that they don't feel they're working from different places on earth, but that they're really working from across the whole as they were working before. And if anyone is interested to learn more about Planable, the website is Planable.io. So check us out, we're more than willing to talk to you and see if there's anything we can do to help you with remote work, we certainly helped hundreds of teams in the past half a year. Yeah, that's kind of what we do at Planable. 

 

Andrei

Tell us a bit more about your Podcast!

 

Xenia

Yeah, of course! It’s called People of Marketing and every Wednesday we launch an episode where we interview an inspiring marketer. someone interesting and someone that had a very aspirational journey in his career. CMOS, heads of social, digital marketers with years and years of experience. We basically get an insight into their lives. Tune in, we are on every major podcast app. Check us out! 

 

Andrei

We’ll leave the details of your podcast in the description below, also with the contact info in case anyone wants to get in touch directly to ask about the platform, your podcast or anything that has to do with social media. 

 

Xenia

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, give me a note that you’ve heard me in this podcast and I’d be more than happy to connect. We can talk about anything on social media or something else. 

 

Andrei

Super! Xenia, thanks so much again, it was really great to have you on the show! I am super happy that we managed to organise today and for everybody tuning in, thanks for staying until the end. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us directly or to Xenia! I am sure she’ll be happy to answer your questions and help you out if you have difficulties with your social media. 

 

Speak soon! Have an amazing week ahead! 

Celebrity Marketing & Endorsement [with Aaron Zack]

On today’s episode, Aaron Zack will be our guest on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Aaron is the founder of Revolving Mind Media, a Texas-based agency specializing in sport marketing. On this episode, Andrei and Aaron will be discussing Celebrity Marketing & Branding, as well as Sport Marketing.

Aaron attended the University of Texas at Austin and followed that up by obtaining his MBA. While at UT, he started working for an NFL agency in Texas and worked his way through the ranks. He has utilized those skills to grow businesses and athletes, brands and presence in the marketplace.

 

He became the youngest NFL agent at the age of 25 years old which is when he launched Revolving Mind Media. Some of Aaron's notable clients include NFL players like Dez Bryant and Jaylon Smith and NBA players like Dennis Smith Jr.

 

Connect with Aaron: 

Kitcaster: https://kitcaster.com/aaron-zack/

Revolving Mind Media: http://www.revolvingmindmedia.com/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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

 

Episode Transcript:

Andrei: Hello, everybody. This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. On today's episode we have as a special guest, Aaron Zak, who is the Founder of Revolving Mind Media, which is a Texas-based agency specializing athlete and sport marketing and today we will look at both of these, as well as celebrity marketing branding. Hi, Aaron. How's everything going? Thank you for being on the show.

 

Aaron: Yeah, everything's going great. It's so nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

Andrei: It's a pleasure, really. So you're tuning in from the US, from Texas?

 

Aaron: I am in Dallas, Texas. No horses out in the backyard, things like that. No cowboy hats. No horses.

 

Andrei: I was hoping for that. Okay, cool. I think we'll do without the horses then. So how are you? How is your morning? How was the day? How's everything going in Texas?

 

Aaron: It's been non-stop. So right now a lot of my athlete clients are in training camp. They're focused on the football field. So now I finally don't have my phone ringing every minute of every day from my clients where I could focus on a lot of the work right now. I've been working from home during this crazy time, but everything's been really good. I can't complain, business has grown and people are looking to leverage athletes on social media platforms and things along those lines. So we've had steady deal flow and we're very, very fortunate.

 

Andrei: Very nice. I'm so happy to hear many things. You know, it's this weird time we're living in, so very happy to hear about a business like yours that is doing well and you guys are growing. Congrats for that! And I can't wait to actually get into the subject of what you guys are doing. We're going to be discussing a couple of case studies and ways that you have been working with both athletes and personal brands, as well as companies. I'm really looking forward to these stories, guys, that are tuned in. Make sure to stay all the way to the end, because we have a plan of discussion that is really, really exciting. But I think before going into the actual nitty-gritty of everything. Aaron, tell us a bit more about you. Tell us about how you started and your early beginnings, because I think it's a very inspiring subject. And I think it's something that will help us build from when going to the marketing stuff.

 

Aaron: That sounds great. No, I appreciate that. And I'm born and raised in Dallas. I grew up in the retail business. So men's apparel is the industry that I started in the Dallas area for over 20 years. So, I started when I was 11 years old, going to a store and learning the ins and outs and what it takes to communicate with individuals much older than me, looking people in the eyes and having a true authentic conversation. So I started a lot earlier. Throughout Middle School in high school, I was going to my father's clothing store and helping sell. And this was everything from sports, sport coats down to socks and shoes. Really everything in the business was about 75% Men's, 25% ladies, so I developed a passion for sales. This was right around the time that businesses needed to get online and have a digital presence. So I was observing what a lot of competitors and individuals in the marketplace are doing at the time in the retail industry and really just trying to stay ahead of the curve on that. But I had a passion for sports early, early on. So I knew I wanted to combine both of those worlds or passions of sales and marketing with the athlete-driven mentality that I had. I played sports up until ninth grade. Then, I didn't have the athletic ability to play on the football field, so I knew I needed to get on the football field a different way. When I was applying for colleges, I was looking into sports management majors. I applied to two schools and I chose the University of Texas at Austin to major in sports management with a minor in business. While I was a freshman at UT, I got connected to one of the largest NFL agencies in the southwest and I got an awesome internship opportunity. I was an unpaid intern for two years at that agency, but it gave me that opportunity because there were so many people trying to get in the sports industry because they liked sports.

But how are they making an impact in sports, right? So I had to really differentiate myself from every other individual in my sports management classes that all wanted to get into the sports world, but really didn't know how to. A lot of what I was doing, was focused on what I was previously taught and learned in the retail industry, is building relationships and thinking a little bit outside of the box on how to create partnerships. What I was doing as an intern, is I was helping out with charity golf tournaments, and really helping athletes start on the branding and endorsement side. During those two years as an unpaid intern, I wanted to also see another part of the sports arena. I got an internship with Fox Sports just to learn the media side of the business. And I learned a lot, but I also realized it just wasn't for me. I didn't want to just be holding a microphone. There weren't truly authentic conversations. I didn't feel like I was bringing true value, even though I was getting news out to the listeners or to the viewers.

It wasn't the true impact that I was looking for. So I left that internship and I went back to the agency and told them this is where I want to be. I love the company. And it was right around the time they had transitioned out of their previous events manager at the time. I was a senior in college down in Austin, Texas, and they said: "Well, we need you to start on Monday". I was like: "Well, I graduate in May and this is December." and I took the opportunity. I didn't want to pass it up. And I became the events manager for the agency and what I was focused on was educating athletes about life after football, a huge passion of mine. We always see these stories of athletes going broke and not preserving their assets. And I felt like this was a mission of mine that I can assess with. What we would do is, we would bring eight athletes or eight businesses to network with 20 athletes over a weekend. During this time, this is really where I found my niche in the market, where I had a passion for the business side, and I had a passion for the athlete side.

And so I was the events manager while I was obtaining my MBA, my whole focus since I was a kid was to become an NFL sports agent and while I was an events manager, I then also took over the marketing and PR division. So that's where I really started learning the athlete branding side. And then I became an NFL agent. I was the youngest NFL agent in the business at 25 years old and I left that agency and started Revolving Mind Media. They wanted me to stay in my previous roles, and I didn't want to be held back. So I left, started my own agency and really haven't looked back. And I've been able to utilize all of those basics of the event side to the marketing and PR division to learn the agency side as well. I really tried to bring all of those components to my agency and my business partner and I have, really scaled the business. 50% of our clients, our businesses and brands and the other 50% are athletes. And we have done a lot of unique cross-marketing things that we'll talk about later on in the show. But that's kind of a little bit about my journey. I had to put in a lot of time not making any money, but it was relationship building, and I was building my base to reach where I am today.

 

Andrei: Mm-hmm. Very, very good moves. So how long have you stayed in the agency before launching your own business?

 

Aaron: I was at the previous agency for five years and I've had Revolving Mind Media now for four years.

 

Andrei: Good. Awesome. So because you have you see both sides of the, of the, of the boat or the story. So what do you feel are some unique things to sports marketing, because we never discussed this before on the show. I think it's a really interesting subject and I'm sure that we can dig some very good insights from it. Why do you think it's different when marketing sports or athletes as opposed to other brands?

 

Aaron: NFL or soccer are some of the biggest sports in the world, right? And people idolize these individuals. You see individuals buying LeBron shoes because they love LeBron, they might not even like how the comfort level is, but they see individuals wearing it and promoting it. So we've seen that we can leverage large athlete platforms to help small businesses, middle-sized businesses, large businesses grow. Just based on the fan base, certain types of deals that I think differentiate revolving my media, then the rest, is we really don't do a whole lot of just cash deals for posts. We look at it like long campaigns: one year, two years, three years of partnerships, but we focus on equity and shares. So when my clients get involved with different businesses, they don't want to just be paid posts, and that's it. They're looking for a long term relationship. And so we focus on obtaining equity of different businesses on behalf of my clients. One client specifically that has taken it to the next level is Jaylon Smith of the cowboys and he is on the wall behind me, but he has equity in 19 different businesses and he's only 25 years old. That's diversifying himself, it's that long term wealth mentality and that's a little breakdown on why I think athletes are utilized for marketing and branding purposes with businesses, but as well as the types of partnerships we're executing.

 

Andrei: I see. Okay, that's a pretty good insight. You have the roster of athletes, and then you have the brands? How do you work with both of them? Do aces come to you so you can help them get equity into businesses or established partnerships, or do you go after them?

 

Aaron: Great question! When I was 21, and just starting, I was out trying to network and meet these guys all the time. I was recruiting, I was going, going going. Now everything is referral based. We do not have cold calls. Everything comes to us. So it's a testament to not just myself, but really my entire team. We've built a really, really strong internal team to be able to scale. And that's really the backbone of the business. To answer your question it's really a lot of athletes are finding us and they're all looking for off the field financials, right? They're getting paid to play on the football field, but they know that having that cowboys logo on the helmet, carries a lot of weight. They know they can leverage that. So I actually work with all of my clients on all calls, partnerships, etc, where it's not just me being their agent speaking on behalf of them, but they're not going to be playing football forever.

So I really bring them in to be involved in conversations with those businesses. The second part of your question is how both sides kind of work together. The business and brand side which my business partner overseas, he is full-on digital marketing, creative, he's a rock star on that side. I know that having these athletes in our roster, we can leverage to help these small to mid-sized businesses grow.

From there, it's just making sure that the athlete truly believes in the business and brand. And they're not just going to do it for equity in a business they don't believe in. So that's really how both sides of the businesses work together, because the athletes really help grow the visibility of the businesses and brands and the athletes are looking to associate themselves with minded businesses and brands. That's really how they work in tandem.

 

Andrei: I see. And how do you got to think about this approach? Because, from a marketing agency perspective, when thinking about marketing, brands or personal brands, in this case, and celebrities, you'd tend to just think about communications, but is this an element that you came with from your experience as an agent or how'd you get to this business model in the end?

 

Aaron: It really started just observing everything at my previous agency and seeing how the industry works. And everyone talks about Nike and the Gatorade because they're on television all the time. But nowadays, we know the power of Instagram and social media as a whole. And there's a lot of businesses trying to grow, especially during these times where a lot of people are at home, the usage of your phone is through the roof. I hate getting the alerts of my screen time on my iPhone every week, where it keeps going up. I get that's good, because I'm working a lot, but everyone's in front of their screen all the time, and how can we convert that? How can these businesses grow? It's really just my background of observing the industry over the past.

I started when I was 18 as an intern, so it's been 12 years in the industry, just seeing how it's gone and that was before Instagram was a thing, right? I've seen the evolution of Facebook to Instagram to see the value of Twitter, to even now really utilize LinkedIn, a lot. A lot of my clients have their own personal LinkedIn pages and are connecting with CMOS of businesses to connect with based on their interest level.

When my business partner and I launched Revolving Mind Media, I had four athletes that I started with, but there was no basis for the agency. They're not monthly retainers, so on a financial side, I knew we needed to get businesses on a monthly retainer on a marketing side, to really be able to budget appropriately for the agency. The way it works on endorsement deals is: the agency makes a percentage of the endorsement deals that are negotiated, but those come and go, right? They're not all the time, it's not consistent revenue, so we needed to really create that consistent revenue stream. 

 

Andrei: Mm-hmm. I see. And I'm going into the personal branding of the athletes that you work with. Do you guys manage their social platforms? Or how is the collaboration going, what's usually the vibe? How do you get involved with them? Do they prefer to handle everything themselves? Do they come to you for advice?

 

Aaron: Yeah, it's really a team mentality. Each client is different. There's a few clients that manage our social pages, there's a few that don't want anybody to touch their social pages. There's a few that have an assistant that we work with to schedule out content. So I would say it's kind of those three verticals: is either us managing the athlete managing or an assistant or internal manager is typically how that works. We on the agency side are typically creating the roadmap and the game plan and the strategy with the business and brand. And then we utilize different social platforms for scheduling out posts. So we're ahead of the game. Every partnership is different, right?

There's some partnerships where the athlete has to post once a month, there are some that it's twice a year. So it's really just being organized, but we lean on the athlete and influencers specifically to advise us on what they prefer.

 

Andrei: I see, okay. And do you have a case, maybe in the past where there was not yet a popular athlete, but eventually they were on the road to becoming a popular celebrity and you had to consult with them and build their personal brand. Do you guys do this as well? And if so, what are some things that you think are worth discussing?

 

And especially in football, individuals are not as recognizable, right? They're wearing a helmet. So the partnerships are a little tricky. In the NFL, the NBA, where there are a lot more recognizable, and there's a lot less players. So when DeVonte and I sat down to talk about personal branding, I was very blunt with him. People in Dallas don't know who DeVonte Holloman is, you're a sixth-round pick and the Gatorade and Nike are not the businesses that are coming to call on you, and you need to help build your own business and internal business. We would go to networking events together, he would pull business cards, he would send personal emails, but that's the type of proactiveness that is needed for not a star Tom Brady type of athlete, right? It's the unknown, but he still knew the power of having a star on his helmet. Playing for the Dallas Cowboys carries a lot of weight. They are the number one valued business in the world at 6 billion dollars on a soccer team is at 5.5. But they're the number one valued business in the entire world. So we knew there's opportunities. And you don't know when he's going to be cut or injured, etc. On the last game played of the season, he ended up starting for the Cowboys, got 13 tackles, had a remarkable game, going into the next year, he was going to be the starting linebacker for the team. Well, in the preseason, he had a freak neck injury and was forced to retire on the spot. 

 

And he is my case study in the sense of - if you handle your business right, not knowing when you're going to be forced to leave the game or retire or not be signed, he ended up with four job offers right after he announced his retirement and handled business the right way. So I always love that story just because it's the unknown, especially on the football field. You don't know how long you're going to play. So going above and beyond, is a very important key. And it's something I talked to all of my young athlete clients about is you need to start now. And you can't wait until you're that star player to be building your business. So that's a case study on an individual that was unknown, but really knew he needed to capitalize on his business. I'll talk through another case study of how I brought both sides of our agency together and how that development works. So one of our business clients is one of the fastest cryotherapy businesses in the country. They have over 80 sold locations around the entire United States, and they plan to go overseas in the next couple years, as well. We started just managing the CEOs LinkedIn page. That was it. We started off just interacting with potential franchisees, we built an awesome relationship and we then took over his national PR. The list goes on and the content and articles that were written about the CEO Kyle Jones of I cryo, but then we also knew this is a recovery and Health and Wellness Business, right? And he knew about our athlete roster. 

 

Well Jaylon Smith with the Cowboys who I mentioned briefly earlier, he's all about rehab. He had a freak injury, his last game in college, and he was supposed to be a top-five pick in the draft, he ended up going second round, still a household name, but he's looking to build his portfolio. He had nerve damage. He had dropped his foot. He wasn't able to raise his foot. He ended up fully recovered, but he Utilized cryotherapy during his recovery. So I felt like it was a match made in heaven where I'm representing two individuals and I was able to help bridge the gap, rather than having so many individuals negotiating. And we really brought him together. So not only did Jalen become a brand ambassador, but he also is now opening up his own clinics and his own businesses in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he's from. So he believed in the business so much that he got equity in the business, but he's also helping scale their business and opening up in the Midwest. It's really cool how starting off is just a small little relationship managing LinkedIn, but showing revolving my media's value on bringing both sides of our businesses together. Those are two different scenarios on that unknown player or lesser-known player. So those are a couple of examples that I wanted to share with you today.

 

Andrei: Yeah, very cool. Very interesting. And looking now at the brand side of things. So for example, because we all know that the big brands afford to have partnerships with the popular athletes, and then it's all good and everybody is happy. But what if there's a smaller brand, maybe we have a marketing manager from a medium-sized company here on the show, and they have considered doing this sort of endorsement, partnerships and so on, but maybe they weren't sure about the budget that they invest into it, or how to best tackle it if they should maybe approach directly the people that they want to work with or if they have to go for an agency. What are your thoughts on this?

 

Aaron: Great question. And I would say, if you look at my business right now, about 75% of our business are small businesses. As I said, that's what I grew up in, so that is a passion of mine, mainly because they can show profit, right? One of our clients lift transportation. I know I'm doing good work, but people are going to utilize their vehicles regardless if it's me or something else.

 

 So I like working with small businesses because I can show that value. The way we look at working with small businesses is very creative. A lot of small businesses think they need hundreds of thousands of dollars to work with athletes. It couldn't be farther from the truth. We do a lot of equity partnerships. We do a lot of shared partnerships, and a lot of these small businesses love that, because it allows them to work with that athlete without laying out a lot of capital, but also the athletes really like it too, because they now are a business owner of different businesses, right. Well, now they're equity owners and they want what's best for the business. So they're willing to go above and beyond, whether that's social media posts, or stories or video content or testimonials. It's a lot more hands-on.

Andrei: Mm-hmm. Super, thanks a lot, very insightful. So what are some KPIs? Or how do you track the performance of the partnerships that you establish with the athletes? So, if a brand comes to you, and then eventually ends up being a partnership with one of the assets on your roster, how do you track performance of specific campaigns or partnerships that go over the longer term?

Aaron: Yeah, I'm a big numbers guy. And that's why I love the SEO, SEM and social media components of partnerships. It's quantified. I can say- this post on Instagram converted to this many likes, and this many clicks to the page, right? So I'm not a big guy. Now, on a different side, if a consumer or follower goes to a website and is spending time on a website, I look at that as a conversion. We got that consumer to take that next step. So we look at impressions, we look at likes, we look at comments, but my biggest thing that I look at is clicks back to the website, as well as on the business side of our agency. I'm huge on the SEO and SEM side. So search engine marketing, and Google Ads and social media ads. Those are so quantifiable, I can also then see how long the user stayed on each page of the website. So we're able to then analyze if something is missing on the page, why are they falling off? Or we look at the bounce rate. That's another thing- they stayed under a few seconds and then left the page. Why? Do we need a call to action at the top? I'm a huge numbers guy. And we turn over that data to the business owners from the athletes posts. We're looking at the numbers, because if a business paid $1,000, that athlete needs to be generating $3-4,000 of revenue to that business for it to really make sense, right? They don't want to run their tires in quicksand. That's really a couple of those KPIs that we look at, to really make sure that we're providing that value to both sides.

 

Andrei: Mm-hmm. Got you. Um, okay, and now, take all this insight and try to compress it into some actionable points. So as I mentioned, most of our public is into marketing and sales. We have some entrepreneurs here as well. What would be some actionable things that you think these guys can take away and they can try to implement in their businesses looking at using influencer marketing or celebrity endorsement, as part of the marketing mix for their products or for their services. What would be your top three picks?

 

Aaron: I think influencer marketing is prevalent now, but I still don't think we're scratching the surface. I would tell your listeners that just because they play for a professional sports team, whether it's soccer, football or basketball, don't be scared to reach out via direct message or figuring out who their agent is, and really digging into their agency, because there's a lot of agencies that are looking to connect with brands that are looking to leverage a platform. Number one is: really utilize influencer marketing. Number two, I would say is utilizing ads, whether that's on Google or social. Nowadays, especially on Facebook, you have to really pay to be seen, right? Otherwise, you're just hitting your same individuals and you really need to take that next level. And a secondary component to that, that we focus on as an agency if we're doing social media management, is outbound engagement. Meaning we are commenting and liking on like-minded brands, what does that do? Who is revolving My Media commenting and liking on this page, and it gets them over to our page. A lot of businesses are focused on just posting and hitting their same target market and their same demographic, you need to be proactive and get consumers to your page. That would be number two. And number three, is if you have a passion for sports, don't think it's an insurmountable mountain to climb. I was very fortunate to get introduced, but there are internship opportunities all the time in the sports realm. Again, I did it for two years, it was unpaid, but you had to put in the time to break-in. Our agency is always hiring interns all around the country. We're doing a lot. Now, obviously, everyone's working from home. So even if you're not located in Dallas, feel free to reach out to me on that end. But those would be the three pillars that I would say, from influencer marketing, to utilizing ads and outbound engagement to chasing your dream, whether it's in sports or something else. Don't think that any mountain is too tall to climb.

 

Andrei: Super, thank you for the inspiration at the end as well. And now, I just had an idea. Let's for some extra points, value here. Because you mentioned you are one of the happy cases of businesses that have been growing over the past couple of months where not so many did. We're looking at Business wise right now. Where are you going? Which direction are you going? What have you changed in the way that you are doing things before with the agency, so you can continue to grow in these changing times?

 

Aaron: I would say the health and wellness spaces are our go-to, but I'll be transparent with you. The way we built our agency is we don't have any two individuals in the exact same business. If I have four Italian restaurants that I represent, I'm not giving them 100% value each, right? So we dive into a lot of businesses. We have an OB-GYN doctor, we have a winery, we have a cryotherapy business. We have no niche market. All we do is we dive into who each business is trying to hit, and how we can get you there. So I like that, because I'm constantly learning about new businesses every single day. Hitting a female demographic of 30 to 52, hitting the 18 to 30-year-old sports consumer, right? It's all across the board. But I love that because I have new conversations each and every day. During this time, we've converted a lot of businesses that might have been stubborn previously, to go on to a digital presence. You have to, right? I'll even look at my father's business. He was previously focused on just in-store retail, he had to move on to an e-commerce platform for selling and that's a good pivot. Same thing with doctors, telemedicine, she's doing a lot of virtual visits now for telemedicine purposes. We have the winery client, bars aren't open so they've pivoted to a wine delivery system. Every business is pivoting a little bit during this time. The businesses that are folding are businesses that have had issues for years and weren't innovative over the past few years and now this time is just exemplifying. This is how I kind of interpret businesses right now. But everyone's pivoting and trying to figure out what that right opportunity is, and how they can generate sales. And that's my main focus. We want to generate that revenue and we want to show those numbers coming in and that's why we don't lose clients. We really handle our business the right way and every business that we work with has been a referral-based business. It's really a testament to the team. We've scaled the right way and we have the right individuals on our team.

 

Andrei: Love it, love it, monetizing marketing. That's a very important thing nowadays. And just as a wrap-up, how can people find you? Who can you help? What's the best way for them to get in touch, obviously, we'll have the links in description below to your agency, as well as your profiles. But, if people want to reach out to you directly and maybe explore a partnership or, the internship that you mentioned, what was the best way for them to reach out to you?

 

Aaron: I'm at ErinZak21 on social media platforms and feel free to reach out to revolvingmindmedia.com. We have a Contact Us page and I'm happy to answer any and all questions, whether it's internships, whether it's a business that just wants to ask questions on how to leverage athletes, or just want to see our athlete portfolio. I'm happy to share that with them. But this was, this was really, really fun. I really appreciate it.

 

Andrei: Thanks so much everyone, the same here. It was very insightful. And as I mentioned in the beginning, this is the first episode that we did in this direction. So I'm really happy that we managed to organize, thank you again for the time and for the insight, for the energy and advice. Until next time, guys, thank you as well for joining us and for staying all the way to the end. We hope you found it useful and interesting. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to Aaron directly or to us and we'll make sure to transfer them on to Aaron. If you think that Aaron can help you further, then you'll have his details in the description of the episode. And as always, if you have suggestions, recommendations for us, or you want us to organize another episode together, us and Aaron, on a specific subject linked to this, let us know and Aaron, I'm sure that we will be able to organize it.

 

Aaron: That sounds great. I really appreciate this. This was a lot of fun. Thank you.

 

Andrei: Thanks a lot, Aaron. Thanks a lot, guys. See you next time.

Tips & Hacks for scaling up sustainably using Marketing as a powerful enablement tool [with Bruce Eckfeldt]

Running a service business? Keen to find the tips & hacks for scaling up sustainably and using Marketing as a powerful enablement tool? 🚀

On today's episode, Bruce Eckfeldt and our host, Andrei dive deep into the subject, discussing Lead generation, strategies for reducing costs per sale and using resources effectively for amplified results - as well as how businesses should rethink their positioning and targeting in the post-COVID-19 world.🏆

Bruce is an Inc.com Top 500 CEO, consultant, coach, author, and speaker on organisational development and performance management in the US. He is currently focusing on helping high-growth companies scale more quickly with less drama. He is an expert in business and operational growth strategy, talent planning, performance coaching, and using Lean/Agile to achieve operational excellence.

Bruce has been a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organisation since 2007 and has served in many chapter and regional leadership positions including Learning, Forum, and Accelerator. Bruce has served as the US East Regional Forum Expert and the US East Regional Accelerator Expert.

He also hosts two successful podcasts: Scaling Up Services provides insights and strategies for how to successfully scale service-based businesses and Thinking Outside The Bud explores innovation in the business of cannabis.

 

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

 

Connect with Bruce:

Website: http://www.eckfeldt.com

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

Podcast - Scaling up Services: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scaling-up-services/id1408586925

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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/

SEO & PR Strategies, Tactics and Trends for 2020 and beyond [Chris Dickey]

Keen to know how to gain your brand an amplified organic exposure, sky-rocket your SEO results and implement PR in the modern, post-2020 age? Grab a pen and notepad, and tune in!

On today's episode, Chris Dickey and our host, Andrei will dive deep into the strategies that lay the foundation for building a strong, sustainable SEO campaign plan as well as Digital PR.

Having a career of over 10 years in PR & being a pioneer of SEO Growth Marketing, Chris is the founder of the US-based Purple Orange PR Agency & Visably. Visably is the world’s first platform to manage brand visibility in search. Using machine learning to classify over 100 million domains and websites, Visably is poised to be an indispensable tool for PR and Digital Agencies.

 

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

 

Connect with Chris:

Visably: https://visably.com/

Learn more about Chris: https://kitcaster.com/chris-dickey/

Purple Orange PR: https://purpleorangepr.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-dickey-6619b712/

Connect with Andrei:

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

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/

B2B Marketing Lessons for SaaS Start-ups [with Alan Gleeson]

Are you a Marketing leader working in the B2B SaaS / Tech space, and are keen to ramp up you Inbound Marketing / Acquisition performance? On today's episode, Alan Gleeson joins us on the show as one of the most recognised B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy Consultants in the UK, diving deep into the subject. 

 

Andrei and Alan will be discussing the importance of having a spot-on strategic direction to Digital Marketing in the SaaS space, Aligning Marketing & Sales, Marketing Tracking & setting the right KPI's - as well as tech stack favourites.

 

Alan is one of the most recognised B2B SaaS Marketing Consultants / CMO's in the UK, Founder of the Digital Marketing Consulting firm "Work With Agility".

 

Alan started his career in financial services, joining Barclays on their graduate programme. On completion he spent some time at Freeserve, then one of the poster boys for the ‘dot com’ boom. He joined Palo Alto Software, a leading Software as a Service (SaaS) company in 2004 where he acted as the Managing Director for the European subsidiary for a number of years.

 

In the recent years, Alan has worked for a number of leading SaaS startups, in a mix of full time and consultancy engagements, supporting their scale-up and / or helping them build strong Marketing departments in preparation for funding or acquisition. Some of the companies he has been working with include Endimo.com; Akroo; Xpenditure.com; Cognism or Kleevar.

 

Alan is based in London, is a patron member of the Irish International Business Network, and coaches at Ealing Trailfinders Rugby Club in his spare time.

 

He has an MBA from University of Oxford, and an MSc from University College Cork, Ireland.

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

 

Connect with Alan:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alangleeson/

https://www.workwithagility.com/blog/create-great-content

https://medium.com/@alangleeson/has-your-saas-startup-achieved-product-market-fit-fb708b3e0604

https://exposureninja.com/review-upgrade/

https://tomtunguz.com/most-frequent-mishire/

https://app.growthmentor.com/alan-gleeson

https://www.workwithagility.com/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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/

Launching and Marketing a Food & Beverages Business [with Laurie N.]

In this episode, Andrei Tiu and Laurie Nadeau will be looking at how to launch and scale a B2C Food & Beverage product - starting from Branding & Logistics, and going all the way into Marketing Tactics, and generating customer demand. Laurie will also share insights into "tricks" you might be able to make use of, to gain brand exposure in large retail chains, as well as how to use E-commerce, Social Media & Influencer Marketing to generate sales.

Laurie Nadeau is the owner of Smokin’ Mary - a popular US Smoked Bloody Mary Mix. And she may be all dolled up in her signature red-and-white polka-dot dresses, but don’t let the pinup girl persona fool you. Nadeau is a savvy, successful businesswoman, who has managed to grow Smokin' Mary from a small family business to a National (US) recognised brand.

She and her husband of 14 years, Marc, pour about 500 to 1,000 samples of the competition-winning concoction at the 45 or so food-and-beverage shows they attend each year, and have grown a large national distribution network

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

 

Connect with Laurie:

Web: https://www.smokinmary.com/

Twitter: @SmokinMaryMix

Instagram: @SmokinMaryMix

Facebook: @SmokinMary

Pinterest: smokinmary.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smokin-mary-8181b9128/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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

Challenges for Small & Medium sized businesses Post-COVID-19 [with Alex M.]

This week on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show, we have invited Alex Mitchell, Founder of the charity KitUsOut, the co-founder and UK president of G20 Young Entrepreneurs Alliance, and Chair of The Institute of Directors in the UK. 

Being actively involved on a daily basis with a community of thousands of start-ups and scale-ups, Andrei and Alex are going to discuss marketing & businesses changes in the current economic space for both UK and international businesses - as well as the art of spotting opportunities that come with change. They will also be touching on the mental health subject, and issues that can always come into the equation in high-stress scenarios - and how to empathetically lead teams, applying a healthy leadership approach.

 

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

 

Connect with Alex:

Website:  https://alexdemitchell.com/

Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrwWUg80N30nxfTFOAi-Tzg

KitUsOut: http://kitusout.org/

Institute of Directors: https://www.iod.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexDEMitchell

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

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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

Marketing to Millennials [with Roland G.]

By working with a number of clients in the past years, Roland Gavrilescu and Andrei Tiu have seen that more and more businesses try to target the younger audience. In this episode, Roland Gavrilescu, advanced technology professional, and Andrei Tiu, founder of Marketiu, will be discussing Marketing to Millenials, what to do and how to use this strategy to target the best sub-groups for you while growing your business in a sustainable and a profitable way.

 

Roland is an advanced technologies professional, passionate of cutting edge technologies and disruption in the digital space. Some of the areas he has been specialising in include Voice Technology, Deep Learning (where he was also awarded a Facebook Scholarship) as well as robotics, AI and IoT.

 

▶️ Listen to the podcast on your favourite platform:

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

 

Connect with Roland: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roland-gavrilescu/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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

Marketing post-COVID [with Stefan Gergely]

Today’s episode brings Ștefan Gergely for the second time on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Ștefan and Andrei will be focusing on how Marketing channels and tactics can be changed post-COVID and how this might affect the traditional Marketing Mix, the traditional ways of advertising and so on. 

 

Ștefan is a partner in Under Development Office - a product-oriented development agency, focused on mobile technologies, web technologies, cutting-edge technologies, being one of the first companies in Europe to develop blockchain technologies as a service. Ștefan founded Aurus.io, a fintech company that built a 100% gold-backed cryptocurrency and ATA, the Romanian Association of Advanced Technologies as well as other tech startups where he works on Product and Growth

 

The latest venture he’s embarked on is Dime.ly, is a data platform that enables people to transparently monetise their data and very easily promote their businesses, even for free. 

 

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

Connect with Ștefan:

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

Under Development Office: http://udevoffice.com

Aurus.io: http://aurus.io/

Dime.ly: http://dime.ly/

 

Connect with Andrei:

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

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