Marketing Mashup

I talk to the founder and CEO of ProfitWell, Patrick Campbell in episode 18 of the Marketing Mashup.

Episode links:

• ProfitWell
• Patrick on Twitter
• Video - Brandwagon Episode 7
• Blog - Pricing Methods
• Guide - SaaS Pricing Strategy
• Coffee Subscriptions Pricing Page Teardown
• Slack Pricing Page Teardown
• Zendesk Pricing Page Teardown
• Exceptions podcast by Jay Acunzo
• Book - High Output Management

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by my own company, Striqo. We've launched a new service to help content marketers start their podcast, you can find out more here. If you'd interested and would like 25% off your order, use the code 'MarketingMashup'.

What we covered in this episode

• Intro to Patrick
• What ProfitWell is and what they do
• Why Patrick started the company
• Thoughts on remote working
• Content production while remote
• Why they started to heavily invest in content marketing
• Why does niche content work so well?
• How to produce a video content series for less an ebook ($10k)
• How to your content in front of the right people
• Patrick's thoughts on daily vlogging
• The 3 biggest mistakes people make with pricing
• Did Patrick really give up email for 4 weeks?!
• ProfitWell has impressive Swag, why?
• What is Patrick most excited for in the future, both in business and personal life?

Get in touch with me

• Twitter
• Website

Joe Glover is the founder of The Marketing Meetup, a community of 14,000+ marketers across 14 locations in the UK and US, with monthly events, regular podcasts, workshops and loads more.

As with many founders, Joe created the Meetup as a solution to his need, which was to learn about his chosen craft and meet other marketers but in an environment which values listening and being positively lovely over sales and selfishness.

As a result of the success of The Marketing Meetup, he's also started his own agency - Empath Marketing - helping companies begin to see how the marketing department can be a value driver, rather than just a cost centre.

• Intro to Joe
• Let's talk about The Marketing Meetup which has scaled into this fantastic community of marketers with events across the country (and more). Tell me more about your mission "A positively lovely community for helping marketers get better at what they do."
• Why is community so important? How do you make sure it's authentic and not just 'corporate community' that you mention in the Humans Come First podcast?
• We're currently going through a period of extreme change and uncertainty, lots of people are worried for their livelihoods and their future. It's also a very important time for brands to respond in the right way. How can brands be kind and helpful with their marketing during this crisis?
• How can we as marketers stay kind to one another? Can we do anything to help?
• Due to the circumstances, you've had to adapt The Marketing Meetup. Can you talk me through some of the changes you've made to ensure the community stays strong?
• Your content schedule for the next few months is fantastic, with a bunch of great events set up with people like Rory Sutherland and Dave Gerdhart. What is your process of coming up with new content and how do you ensure it's good quality and providing value for your community?
• Following the success of the Meetup, you've set up your own agency. When did you know it was the right time to set up that agency and what do you offer for your clients?

Links

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• The Marketing Meetup
• Empath Marketing

You can now support the podcast by buying me a coffee here ☕

Harry is the founder of Marketing Examples.

• Marketing Examples Twitter
• Harry's Twitter

We cover a bunch of ground in this episode:

• What it's like being on the Indie Hackers pod
• Harry's first endeavour turning tweets into canvas prints - 140 Canvas
• Doing things that don't scale, sending in handwritten letters to YouTuber mailtime's
• Why you need to market yourself
• Importance of validating your idea
• The story behind Yeezy Dating
  • https://thekanyestory.com/
• Buying billboards in Times Square
• How Harry hustled his way into Yeezy HQ
• Working for Crowdform. Harry lived like a 'real person' for 8-9 months...
• While writing for Crowdform, Harry took those examples and put them on a marketing examples first page
• How Marketing Examples was born organically
• The importance of providing value natively on the platform
• People don't like self promotion, but if you're giving people value they'll react well
• How Harry got banned on the EntrepreneurRideAlong sub-reddit
• What are the best subreddits to post in?
• How Harry lost 27k of Bitcoin
• Best practices to grow a Twitter following
  • Using long Twitter threads and not linking away from Twitter
  • @NoContextHearn; @NavalRavikantBot
  • Using his website to bring people to Twitter
• Why not having a background in marketing can make you a better marketer
• The attention to detail in Marketing Examples sets it apart from anything else
  • Podia's Competitor Pages
• Growing a very nice sized email list (13k)
• Utilising Product Hunt effectively
• Using good copy to increase conversions
• Refactoring UI
• Using GIFs for marketing

Paul is the co-founder of ad agency Mellor&Smith and also started the event series #TakeFuckingRisks as a side hustle - which is now one of the biggest creative events in London.

Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...)

We covered plenty of ground in this episode!

• Should you specialise or be well rounded
• The state of the advertising industry today
• 89% of ads that people see are forgotten - can you imagine if this was any other industry?
• "As an industry we are fucking terrible at our jobs"
• What do we need to do to fix the industry?
  • First admit there is a problem - although this doesn't serve the industry
  • Having a backbone and standing up to clients
  • Stop being addicted to digital and short termism
  • Stop being fixated on data
  • Make advertising based on what people do rather than what the algorithm says
• Why clients don't trust agencies and what we can do about it
• The public don't trust brands, we need to rebuilt that
• Is the market research and insight industry broken too?
  • Serial focus groupers
  • Get down to the supermarket and see how people actually act
• Why we shouldn't approach B2B differently
  • They are still people, it's just not their money they are spending
  • Any B2B brand using traditional media is going to win
• How do you get clients to take risks?
• Why social media metrics are bullshit
• Is traditional media the most effective
• Is it the fact that the advertising as bad or is traditional media broken?
• Why influencer marketing is a con
• The role of advertising is to get you noticed, not to make sales
• What is "Take Fucking Risks"?
• Why there is a lack of honesty in our industry
• Why we need more trouble makers
• How do you deal with disagreements with clients?
• If you're so good at this, why are you only 11 people?

Links

• Follow Mellor&Smith on Twitter
• Paul's LinkedIn
• Follow me on Twitter

Chris Savage is the co-founder and CEO of Wistia, a video sharing and hosting company (and pioneers of the brand affinity movement). After graduating from Brown University with a degree in Art-Semiotics, Chris and his co-founder, Brendan Schwartz, started Wistia in Brendan’s living room in 2006. Wistia has since grown into a multi-million dollar business with over 150 employees (including 1 labradoodle). Before Wistia, Chris helped produce an Emmy Award-winning feature-length documentary and was named a Top Young Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek. I've been following Wistia's journey for the past few years and I'm delighted to welcome Chris to the podcast.

Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...) ☕

• What is Wistia?
• How did it start?
• How did Wistia originally position in the market?
  • They were a private video sharing site and then pivoted to embeddable website videos. Then had to make the decision to fully focus on marketing videos.
  • They then switched back to offering everything as people had lots of different use cases for Wistia, which was a mistake because then they struggled on where to focus and innovate. They had no differentiator.
• When did Wistia take it's first set of investment?
  • Took a year to focus on private video sharing - huge companies. They noticed they were onto something big so took investment and hired 2 people. They then started loosing $30k a month, which felt horrible!
  • Stayed at 4 people for another 3 years.
  • The greatest mistake they could make was not thinking long-term.
• Their last funding round was in 2010, what have they done for the past decade to grow?
  • As they got more profitable they took more risks
    • Invested in content marketing and company culture
  • They got to £10m in revenue with a few million in profit
  • People were saying 'if you're profitable then you're probably not growing fast enough'
  • Thought they were missing out on growth
  • Went from being profitable to running at a loss, hiring people, running ad campaigns
  • Outside the business it seemed like they were doing great but internally they were creating a ton of complexity and a situation was bad.
  • Lost the ability risks because of it
  • Forced everything to be short term
  • Compounding affect of losing $300k a month
• At the point where you were haemorrhaging money, going further and further into the red, what were you thinking? What was next?
  • This was the point where 3 life changing offers where on the table. Their intention was never to sell Wistia, but it got to the point where they were considering it.
  • But they felt that if they sell, they would be failing.
  • Then they started thinking about what they would do if they sold.
    • Start a new company
    • Idea of the brand, the people, the problems they'd want to solve
    • "If we want to build another company, we'd build another Wistia back to the £10m days and we wouldn't have screwed it up by putting the throttle down so hard"
• How has Wistia been since raising the debt? Is it back to being a happy company?
  • As soon as the debt was raised, there was about 6 months of turmoil with staff leaving etc, then they built back up to profitability, really quickly.
  • It was a huge turnaround as they went from a $0.5m loss in 2017 to $6m profit in 2018
  • It gave them profitable confidence again! Wistia could start to take creative risks again, such as One, Ten, One-Hundred and 16 weeks parental leave policy.
• Is it possible to grow a successful business, like Wistia, without taking external funding?
  • Depends on the mindset of the founder
  • You need persistence, lots of persistence
  • You need to have the right market, one that is growing. If the market is not ready for your product, if you don't have funding it will be very hard to keep going.
• One, Ten, One-Hundred is one of my favourite bits of B2B marketing I've ever seen. What was the thought process behind making it?
  • Was born out of a conversation with Sandwich Video founder, Adam Lisago.
  • They had done a big ad campaign the year before, this was to try and build brand awareness, which didn't work at all. One, Ten, One-Hundred was an opportunity to document this ad creation process with Sandwich.
  • What they found with this series is that time spent with brand was up massively, brand search was up and ultimately brand affinity increased.
• Why does long form content work so well?
  • Time with brand is such a hard thing to come by if you think about the amount of touchpoint customers have with your brand currently - cumulatively it doesn't add up to much.
  • A key to any relationship is building trust and the more time you can get people to spend with you brand, the better.
  • It was something people actually wanted to watch. It was entertaining and educational.
• How did it perform?
  • $10k video performed the best, but they all performed different jobs.
  • The $1k video shows how you can make a creative video that showcases your product well, it doesn't need to break the bank.
  • The $10k video showcases the sweet spot of how much you could spend to get a really high performing ad.
  • The $100k video proves that if you need your brand to be this polished and have the money to spend to reflect that, then it is worth it.
• It didn't just stop there with Wistia's long form content. What is Brandwagon?
  • Ended up having conversations about brand, which sparked the idea of creating a talk show which let's the Wistia personality come through.
  • The format means it is repeatable and they know exactly what they are doing, which makes for more efficient production.
• Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell said on another podcast episode that they have got their production of their video series down to about $10k, which is the equivalent to the spend to create an ebook. If it's that cheap to do, why isn't every B2B marketer doing it?
  • Patrick and the team are pioneers
  • Some people don't understand the impact it can have
  • They are looking at how a campaign can go viral, as opposed to thinking about how they can build brand affinity.
  • The biggest brands are now figuring out that making good content that interests people really does work
  • A place we're really seeing this taking off is with Podcasts. Podcasting is one of the most personalised, intimate ways a person or brand can communicate with you. You're building a relationship with your customer.
• Is Wistia going to keep going with the long-form content? If so, what's next?
  • "We're shooting lots at the moment but I can't get into too much detail"
• Wistia didn't have a sales team until 3 years ago. Why didn't you for so long, and what made you create one?
  • It's based on focus. When they started, of course they were doing sales, but they wanted to keep the business self-service and seamless with onboarding. They'd built Wistia up pretty big without any sales team.
  • But things change! They started speaking to different companies and finding some that had bad experiences with Wistia! This was because there were people who liked speaking to people before buying, they need someone to help them through the buying process. This actually was damaging, especially upmarket. A huge pre-customer experience gap.
• From the outside it looks like everyone is happy and Wistia has a great culture - which I don't doubt. But obviously throughout any journey you're going to have to make difficult decisions within the team, how do you stay grounded when making these decisions and how has that changed as you've grown?
  • Sometimes they felt they were holding people back and they won't be fulfilled in staying with Wistia.

The social media marketing landscape is constantly changing, which I why I got an expert in to chat about it. Ellie Hernaman is the CEO of Truffle Social, a London-based social media agency. Ellie has been running Truffle for almost the last decade so it's safe to say she knows her stuff when it comes to social. In this episode I sit down and talk to Ellie about why she started Truffle, the challenges of growing an agency, her favourite campaigns and more.

Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...) ☕

Things we talked about:

• Ellie's time at Red Bull
• What does Truffle do?
• Why did you start Truffle?
• How did you get your first clients?
• How has social media marketing changed since you started Truffle, and how do you make sure you're adapting and staying on top of trends etc?
• What makes an effective social media strategy in 2019?
• Favourite campaigns and why?
• Favourite campaigns you've worked on and why?
• What excites you most about the future with Truffle, business, life?
• Mental health in social

Follow Ellie on Twitter
Follow Truffle on Twitter
Follow me on Twitter

Paul Jacobs is the Managing Partner at Wax/On and oversees the day-to-day running of the agency. Previously, he was Business Lead at Karmarama working with brands such as BT and Porsche and more recently a Director at Edelman, where he led the set-up of their creative services, working on global projects for Microsoft, Asics and Nestle. He also makes sure we all get enough sleep!

Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...) ☕

What we cover in this episode:

• Paul's career, from Ogilvy in Australia to Business Lead at Karmarama (acq. Accenture 2016)
• Why did he (and his 3 other co-founders) start Wax/On?
• What does Wax/On do?
• Why Paul is passionate about startups
• Paul's startup community with The Drum Network
• What makes a good podcast
• Why Dave Buonaguidi and James Connelly are inspiring as entrepenuers
• Some of the best campaigns Paul has worked on (and some he hasn't)

Follow me on Twitter.

Gareth is the guy responsible for making Bulldog Digital Media happen. Way back in 2013, he sat down with the idea of creating an agency which could make a difference in the digital marketing world - and that's exactly what he did! When he isn’t working (which isn’t often), Gareth likes to see new places, go to the gym, and end his days with a Nando's.

Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...) ☕

What we cover in this episode:

• Gareth's background
• Why did he start an agency
• Why he admires freelancers
• How to stay healthy as an entrpenuer
• Starting an ecommerce business
• Why it's important to have different revenue streams
• Not being afraid to let money go as an entrepenuer
• Creating a personal brand and putting a face on an agency

Follow me on Twitter
Follow Gareth on Twitter

Email Octopus
Bulldog Digital Media

Grey Baker is the co-founder and CEO of Dependabot which is a service that makes it easy for developers to keep the third-party dependencies their code uses up-to-date.

Grey has had an interesting career, starting out at McKinsey to then helping grow GoCardless from 6 to 100 people before embarking on a 7 month cycle tour around the world and then settling back in the UK to build Dependabot to $14k MRR. It wasn't quite as easy as that though! In this episode, we talk about Grey's ups and downs of building a bootstrapped SaaS business, as well as a little bit of insight into his time at GoCardless.

Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...) ☕

• Dependabot
• Grey's Twitter
• My Twitter

You probably know Brian Halligan as the co-founder and CEO of HubSpot. Or as the person who coined the term ‘inbound marketing’. Brian is one of the B2B world’s most sought-after CEOs. He took HubSpot from a scrappy startup to a profitable (and enduring) public company. He knows what it takes to not only build a great company, but transform an industry in the process.

Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...) ☕

In our conversation we cover a lot of ground talking all things marketing. We start off with a whistlestop tour of Brian's career and why he started HubSpot, to then getting into the weeds of marketing in 2019.

0:01 - Intro
0:47 - Brian's background and career
2:02 - Why did Brian (and Dharmesh) start HubSpot?
4:00 - How Brian met his co-founder Dharmesh
5:48 - What is the dynamic like between Dharmesh and Brian
7:18 - Do you need to find a co-founder with complimentary skills?
9:19 - How did HubSpot get the early customers? Brians FOB.
10:50 - Was Inbound a thing before they started HubSpot?
11:56 - What is inbound?
13:05 - It's so cheap to start making content these days
13:43 - What was it like introducing a brand new category?
15:51 - Is it still a good strategy to start your own category?
17:25 - Is there marketing buzzword fatigue in 2019
18:33 - The agency partner program - why did HubSpot put so much emphasis on it?
20:36 - Build out an in house team or use agencies?
21:33 - What does the future marketer look like?
22:39 - All marketers should learn how to code
23:33 - Why we're living in a great age for learning
24:28 - The HubSpot Academy. Why did they invest in the acedemy? Give away a lot and use that content to pull people in
25:38 - What are Brian's thoughts on Freemium?
27:30 - You'd be batshit crazy not to use HubSpot
27:47 - What is next for HubSpot?
31:07 - When did HubSpot start to shift to an all-on-one-platform?
33:00 - Adding value to HubSpot instead of competing with tools. "You're either a Hub or a Spoke"
33:58 - How does HubSpot stay agile to compete with smaller companies, or are they trying to work with them?
35:18 - Does inbound marketing still work?
36:47 - Success in marketing is very much the width of your brain, not the width of your wallet.
37:59 - How can new companies use content marketing to grow. It's a quality over quantity game.
40:05 - Why did HubSpot retire the funnel and introduce the flywheel

Scott Brinker Graphic

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jmckinven
Brains's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhalligan