Data Beats Opinion

Potent Quotes:

Steffen Hedebrandt:  No. Even just for ourselves, I know, obviously, we do multi-touch tracking all itself, and just for a demo call to be booked on our website, normally, it takes five sessions. And that typical pattern will be the true referral source initially, which could be an ad or something else, then it could be an organic visit, and then maybe you see three direct visits afterwards. And if you want to look at the original source fields in your CM system, it'll tell you, "Oh, this is one converted from a direct visit."

But, what you're not seeing is that you actually spend money on starting that journey, which means either you're growing a lot slower than you could do, or you're just wasting a lot of money because you can't really connect your spend to the business outcome that you're trying to achieve.

Keith Perhac:  Right, exactly. And what I've seen in a lot of ... Because I think CRMs are starting to ... They want to have the bullet point of, "Oh, we track attribution," right? When they have the bare minimum that they need to be able to say that. But even something like ads, where you're looking at, now, branded search where ... Essentially, the Google tax. You have to be spending all this money in order to be ranking high in Google, and the CRMs are attributing that as paid traffic, even though, really, it shouldn't be paid traffic, because it's not, right? It's a tax. So, that's something where a system like yours, or what we do, becomes more important because you need to be able to drill into that more than just the top level, like, "Oh, it was an ad."

Steffen Hedebrandt:  Yeah. But I think we can at least see, typically, when we look at, for example, the paid channel, there's 3 to 5x difference in terms of you understanding the world as a last touch world, or the true first touch, which means if you can invest 5x the amount of money into your marketing, then you're going to completely outgrow your competition.

Steffen Hedebrandt:  And we just released some benchmarks from our own customers now, and we can see that, on average, there were 32 touches involved in an account from first touch to a deal being won, and you know, I really, honestly don't think that one touch makes a difference except that, actually, I think if there were one touch, it would be the first touch that you are actually able to get in front of the person who started that journey with you.

Steffen Hedebrandt: Forget about that funnel and just focus on getting quality touches in front of people every week. Do high-quality content, do high-quality calls, do high-quality meetings. Just pegging those high-quality touches along the way. It would be nice if there were such a thing as a data recipe for what to do, but I fear you would end up in a too-average place to say something smart.

Keith Perhac:  I think that's always the challenging part about analytics, especially in the agency world, because there are always 800 ways to slice the data. And whether consciously or not, you tend to go towards the one that makes you look better.

Steffen Hedebrandt:  I think there's a lot of things that are interesting, but one of them is an average journey from the first touch to a B2B deal being won is 192 days.

Steffen Hedebrandt:  Yeah. There's nothing as dangerous as a pretty graph.

Steffens  go-to-market benchmark 2022 

Keith Perhac: Hello and welcome to Data Beats Opinion. I am Keith Perhac. And I'm here together with Alan Silvestri. He is the founder and director of strategy at Growth Gorilla. And in your own words, Growth Gorilla is a no BS content promotion and distribution agency for B2B SaaS companies. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Alan Silvestri: Hi Keith. It's great to be here. And so yeah, the no BS part, I actually took it out of the name and I was listening to one of your older episodes where you were talking about and making fun of people that have the no BS part in the name, so it's appropriate as well. We don't have that anymore now.

Keith Perhac: It's hilarious. It's so funny how quickly that whole... The view of those things changes. Eight years ago, nine years ago, that was like, okay this is something that's brand new. People are BSing us all over the place. Putting that in, it's like, "Yes, this is a straight shooter." And then as soon as something gets popular like that everyone's like, "Wait a minute. We're all no BS." And it becomes noise at that point. And then you have to find the next one to go onto.

Alan Silvestri: Yes, exactly. That's the main reason we didn't want to. We had that for a while. I think we were in the batch of people that were in the first ones to do that, but then it becomes trendy and so yeah, we said just let's leave it.

Keith Perhac: Yeah, before that it was, you remember when everything was named Sumo for some odd reason.

Alan Silvestri: Oh yeah.

Keith Perhac: And then after that it was Sherpa and it was like content Sherpa and all this stuff. And I found out later that Sherpa is a people, in English we always thought, it's a guide, but it's like saying, “Content Indians” or “Content Polish”. It's a group of people. And I was like, "Oh, that doesn't work as well anymore."

Alan Silvestri: Yeah. That's one of those SaaS trends, like having the name that finishes with LY.

Keith Perhac: LY yep. Yep.

Alan Silvestri: Like Calendly basically. Everybody started doing the same thing, yeah.

Keith Perhac: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I want to talk today a lot about content promotion and that strategy. I mean, most of us follow the, “Build it and they will come” from Field of Dream strategy and you've worked with a number of people like Podia and UpLead and a bunch of others. And just wanted to talk about how people generally go around content promotion, how they generally think about it and then why they're all wrong - and what you would recommend in those cases.

Alan Silvestri: Yeah. So I wouldn't say that everybody is wrong. The main thing that we notice with SaaS companies is that they're very good. Well, for the most part, they're very good at content strategy, content production. So they're really good at knowing the types of keywords that they need to rank for. They are good at knowing the different types of pages that they need to publish. So feature pages, the alternative two kinds of pages. But the problem is that, basically once the content is published, they don't really know what to do with it for the most part. So some of them, what they do is they just do a little bit of social media, reposting content into maybe Infographics or articles or podcasts or stuff like that, which is what I would say is the more classic “content distribution”.

Alan Silvestri: So, the way that we see content promotion is a proactive way of taking the content and putting it in front of the right people. And for us, what we do is more content promotion with the main focus of ranking pages higher in Google for the target keywords. So it's content promotion/link building essentially. But yeah, the way that we see it is link building done the right way. So for the main purpose of increasing rankings for your main target pages, that can be the pages that can give you the best ROI in the shortest term possible. So this is the difference here between what we do and the standard link building just randomly building links to pages. We have a very strategic approach that we use to identify these pages that are the best pages in terms of ROI for you.

Keith Perhac: And how do you go about that? I think one of the problems a lot of places have is they have so much content and they're like, "I don't even know where to start." We have these things that we've spent a lot of time on, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're good for that type of content promotion. So what's your filtering process?

Alan Silvestri: So first off, I like to talk about what I call the “Content Graveyard”. So content graveyard is essentially where content just sits on the website and does nothing for the company. So like you mentioned before, people think that they can just magically keep publishing and pumping out content in the hope they will magically rank, but sooner or later, you will get to the point where you hit a threshold and you will need more backlinks or better on-page optimization, so better keywords and better improve them that way. But the problem - what most people do is they try some link building. They get to a certain point where they think they have worked very hard on it and didn't get very nice results. So they just stop and decide to quit and just keep publishing content in the hope they will magically rank.

Keith Perhac: That something's going to magically pop up there into the social almost like Geist.

Alan Silvestri: Yeah. Yeah. So this is what we call the content graveyard. So what we found out is the best way to fix this problem is to essentially make it in a way that your content production efforts are supported by a constant flow of backlinks to your most important pages. So the way that we do it is, we identify the pages that are already ranking quite well, maybe page one, page two, page three of Google. And we start building backlinks to those pages in a way that makes sense, obviously. And we have a whole process for that. But the main idea is to try to push those pages higher in the rankings first. So that then once they rank higher, they start to also get backlinks naturally from people that are looking for information on the web.

Alan Silvestri:  And so, all of these efforts start to snowball. Sorry. So in a way it looks natural to Google because Google sees that your page is ranking higher, it started getting more backlinks and then more pages start ranking higher, the overall strength of the website in terms of links. So the domain rating or domain authority starts to increase and all of this contributes to making the site rank better for all of the keywords. So yeah, the whole idea is to get this constant flow of backlinks in a way that looks natural to domain and the most important pages essentially.

Keith Perhac: Is this something that you see? I think a lot of people when they start thinking about getting pages to rank or SEO, they feel... I think that there's a hurdle because everyone's like, "Oh, it's going to take three to six to nine months before I even see any results." How do you overcome that hurdle when talking with clients or with any starting a new project where you're coming in and it's like, "Is this going to take six months to see anything?"

Alan Silvestri: Yeah. So first off, yes. For the most part, it does take a long time. For this reason. We only work with clients at 12-month engagements. So we don't do the three-month test because essentially that doesn't work. So we only, yeah, we only want to work with the clients that know that this takes a long time. So typically what I say is if you are an established company with a high domain rating and a lot of content published already and some traffic and some momentum, then you might be able to even see results in two, three months, depending on the types of links that we do. And on the types of pages that we decide to focus on. So if the company is newer, that typically takes in between six and 12 months to start seeing some momentum. So these are, I will say the typical ballpark numbers that I give to new clients that come to us.

Keith Perhac: So when you say high domain rank, what, so that people listening under have an understanding, what is high domain rank in your mind? Because I know a lot of people they look at Ahrefs and everything and they're like, "Oh, I'm doing great." Then they look at their competitors like, "Oh my God."

Alan Silvestri: Domain rating for stuff is a metrics at Ahrefs and there's also domain authority, which is by Moz. So it's two different software companies. Each one is slightly different. We focus on the Ahrefs metric. The main reason for this is because the Ahrefs metrics is built mainly on backlinks while the Moz metrics use a few other different factors in there. So it's slightly different, more comprehensive. But since we only work with backlinks and content promotion, we prefer to use Ahrefs metrics. So the way that you typically can identify the domain rating and your need of increasing domain rating is that you need to calculate what we call the link gap between you and your competitors. So you can do some kind of analysis where you essentially determine how many links your competitors have more than you.

Alan Silvestri: And you can do this across multiple competitors at the same time. So once how many total links their website has more than you, then you can also calculate how many new backlinks they are building every month. And so all of this data is available in Ahrefs. And so essentially you then sum the two numbers, so the total link gap, plus the new backlinks every single month. And then you can do, for example, let's say that you want to focus on a 12-month campaign, then that you need to close the gap with

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