Inbound Success Podcast

What does inbound marketing have to do with large public sector projects? While it’s not the typical use case we think of when someone says the phrase “inbound marketing”, the same concepts that were developed to attract, convert and close B2B customers can be used to communicate with stakeholders and secure buy-in for complex public projects. Jeff Risley and the team at Saxum call this “social permitting” and it involves four steps: Awareness Appeal Activation Advocacy In this episode, Jeff describes what social permitting is, how it’s used, and the specific steps that Saxum goes through to help its clients with it as they work to build support for public sector projects. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

In my experience, there are few marketing topics that inspire strong opinions as press releases do. It seems most companies treat them as a given when they make a new hire, release a new product, etc. But ask any marketer whether the bang is really worth the buck and you’re bound to get an earful on why press releases don’t work. At the same time, there are plenty of examples of companies that have seen great success from press releases. How do they do it? And when should you invest in sending a press release? On this week’s episode, eReleases founder Mickie Kennedy shares straight talk on when marketers should - and should not - invest in sending out press releases. He also dives into best practices around how to write a high impact release that will actually get you noticed by the press. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode. Resources from this episode: Connect with Mickie on LinkedIn Check out the eReleases website Take Mickie’s free master class on How to Build a PR Campaign Designed to Get Massive Media Coverage

Essential worker recruiting platform Talroo has been posting impressive growth, much of it fueled by a marketing strategy that revolves around telling customer stories. This year, the company is doubling down on the strategy and has a goal of producing dozens of new customer stories. On this week’s episode, Talroo VP of Marketing Martha Aviles shares the details of how her team creates and promotes customer stories, and the impact they’ve had on the business. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

“Let’s make a viral video.” Every marketer has heard those words at one point or another in their career. But making viral videos isn’t easy - otherwise everyone would do it. In this week’s episode, business and marketing consultant Estie Starr breaks down the science of virality to uncover the exact ingredients necessary to make something go viral. But she also explains why making something go viral isn’t always the best strategy, and shares when you should - and should not - shoot for virality. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Stacy Willis is one of the smartest marketers out there. I should know. I’ve worked with her for several years, across four companies. One of the things she’s really good at is content - both strategy and execution. And the content strategies she executes lead to real, measurable revenue. Stacy has found that while many marketers understand content strategy in theory, what trips most of them up is the execution. In this episode, she dives deeply into the lessons she’s learned about executing content strategies. She covers everything from how to work with subject matter experts to get the background you need to produce great content, to how content is best organized on your website and how you can measure the impact your content is having on pipeline and revenue. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

High growth companies turn to Pearmill to optimize their paid ads spend. With hundreds of millions of dollars of ad spend under management, the company has built up a considerable amount of data about what’s working on platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. On this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Pearmill founder Nima Gardideh explains what goes into the company’s experimentation framework, and how they’ve used that framework to drive better results for their clients. In addition, he shares some of their learnings around the ad strategies and formats that are working right now on many of the major paid ad channels. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Lot’s of marketers talk about creativity, but most seem to think it’s a dark art. Stratabeat CEO Tom Shapiro sees creativity as more of a science than an art, and in this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, he explains the process that he’s used to spark creativity and develop powerful marketing campaigns. Tom’s approach includes the use of specific frameworks - including “the opposite” and “cross pollination” - to get people thinking differently. These are approaches that anyone can employ to inspire ideation. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Gated launched its “noise cancelling headphones for email” product in March of 2022 and has been growing its user base at 30 to 40 percent month over month. In this episode, Gated Co-Founder and head of marketing Melissa Moody describes how the company’s “influence marketing” strategy is fueling that growth. Specifically, she details how Gated is growing a network of advisors and advocates to help spread the word about Gated’s product.

Blogging is a mainstay of any content marketing strategy, but with so much content out there - much of it of a very poor quality - what does a world class blog look like in 2022? CopySmiths content coach Sam Boyd works with clients to create blogs that drive search engine rankings, traffic and revenue. In this episode, he shares the best practices that the world’s top bloggers and content marketers use to get extraordinary results. From planning your blogging strategy, to writing approaches, to the structural elements (think headings, images, etc.) that make up a great blog, he covers everything marketers need to know to create an outstanding blog. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

How did one company increase conversation rates by 100% in just 4 weeks? Experiment Zone founder AJ Davis was the head researcher at Google Optimize, where she had the opportunity to work closely with the team working on conversion rate optimization. It was this experience that led her to create Experiment Zone, where she and her team marry those two disciplines — user research and CRO — to deliver major ROI to their clients. In this episode, she shares the process they use and breaks down the detailed steps that anyone can follow to get better marketing results, from conducting usability studies (including the the audience size you need, how to structure questions and find audiences, and what tools to use) to how to analyze the results, conduct experiments, and identify opportunities for using optimization to improve conversion rates. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Sandy Donovan - otherwise known as “The Email Lady” - helps ecommerce brands get better customer acquisition and retention results with email. Her work generates an average 68X return on brands’ investments in popular email marketing platform Klaviyo, and she’s been able to increase revenue by 600%+ in under 60 days. How does she do it? On this episode, Sandy explains why it all starts with proper segmentation of your email list. Whether you’re an ecommerce marketer, or a B2B marketer, the same lessons apply. She breaks down the demographic and behavioral criteria any marketer can use to segment their list, along with strategies for activating and nurturing different segments, guidance on how often to email your contacts, how to craft a winning subject line, and more.

For ecommerce brands, nailing a paid ads strategy is critical. And that takes lots of testing and iteration. Brighter Click CEO Colby Flood specializes in building scalable paid ads strategies for ecommerce clients, and in this episode he breaks down the testing process that he and his team use to refine their approach and improve the ROI of their clients’ ad campaigns. In addition to covering his testing framework, Colby shares how he thinks about the role of ads throughout the funnel, what metrics to track, how much you should be prepared to spend, and how the lessons he’s learned from working with ecommerce brands can be applied to B2B SaaS businesses. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Erik Huberman’s company Hawke Media has audited and developed marketing strategies for more than 4,000 businesses. Over time, they’ve distilled their process, along with lessons learned, into a methodology for marketing they call the “Hawke Method”. In this episode, he breaks down how the Hawke Method approaches what they call the “three principles of marketing”: Awareness Nurturing Trust We dug into all of this, plus the problem with using ROAS to measure advertising effectiveness, why TikTok holds so much potential for marketing, and more.

Beyond open rates, what metrics should you be using to measure email performance? AWeber customer evangelist Emily McGuire has dedicated her entire career to email marketing and knows what it takes to craft a good email. In this episode, she explains how email tracking has changed in the wake of recent IOS updates and which metrics you can use to determine whether your emails are actually performing, including: Click rates Click to open rates Conversions She also offers tips on things like formatting your email, whether and when to include rich media, how to write your email to elicit a response, and more (including a KILLER tip on allowing your recipients to opt out of specific campaigns they might not be interested in receiving - don’t miss that one!).

What does it take to build a high performing marketing team? Tim Parkin has built his career around answering that question. His approach centers around the thesis that people times process equals performance. What does that mean? Tim digs into it in this episode. It starts with documenting what you’re doing as a team. From there, the next step is to evaluate the team and identify who needs training, coaching or support - and what kind of organizational change is required to support the processes that have been documented. In this conversation, Tim gets into the details of his process, including what a well-documented process looks like, how to train your team to create processes, the tech stack he uses to support process creation, what a good meeting cadence and format looks like, and resources you can turn to to learn more about building high performing marketing teams. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Bobby Gillespie spent years working in marketing and observed companies making the same mistake over and over again. And that mistake was trying to do marketing without first building a solid brand foundation. To address it, he created his own agency — Propr Design — where he helps companies do just that. In this episode, Bobby describes the process he takes clients through, including: Defining the company’s purpose and core values Identify your ideal customer profile Establishing a brand personality Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

When Eric Stockton took over as head of marketing for SharpSpring by Constant Contact following the company’s acquisition, he immediately set about shifting the focus from outbound to inbound marketing with the goal of building a pipeline of high intent hand raisers. The result was a doubling of the company’s demo attend rate, from 20 to 40 percent, and a 23X improvement in the number of leads that turned into closed won deals. While making that shift sounds simple, in practice it requires top to bottom organizational buy in. In this episode, Eric breaks down exactly what changed, how he built a solid foundation for it via internal communications, what the company’s new demand generation motion looks like, and the new KPIs he’s using to track success. Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

How did Tulip Media Group lower its customer acquisition cost (CAC) by 10X, from $40,000 to $4,000, in a matter of weeks? As a Storybrand certified agency, it was all about taking their own medicine. They started by interviewing their customers to determine their ideal customer profile, along with their pain points and the keywords that they would need to focus on to reach them. What they uncovered in those interviews led to a shift in the company’s messaging away from what they do and instead, towards the problems they solve, and away from a strategy focused on events and SEO to one heavily focused on pay per click advertising. They rolled the new messaging out on their website and in their Google ads and within a week, saw a massive improvement in inbound lead flow at a much lower cost. And they have since applied that same framework to get similar results for clients. Want to learn more about how they did it? Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

How does a website get more than 3 million visits per month with zero dollars spent on paid advertising? For Visme, it was all about an on- and off-page SEO strategy focused on creating great content for relevant keywords and then investing time in promoting the content and building up quality backlinks. The strategy worked so well that they developed a SaaS tool to manage it, and now that tool - Respona - is available for anyone to use. Farzad Rashidi is the marketer behind the strategy, and in this episode he makes the case for why marketers should be spending more time on content promotion than they are on content creation. He also breaks down the exact process that both Visme and Respona use to get backlinks, and shares what other marketers can do to replicate his results.

LinkedIn has undergone a renaissance in the last several years and today is a central focus for many B2B companies’ marketing strategies. But what does it take to do LinkedIn right? Mark Raffan of Content Callout is an expert at using LinkedIn for organic social marketing. In this episode, he explains why you should be putting twice as much effort into individual posts as you do company posts, along with advice on things like: When to use branded versus non-branded content How to create a strong hook How to know what you shouldn’t post Overcoming objections from subject matter experts who are reluctant to build their personal brands on LinkedIn Why responding to comments on your posts is so important How to structure your LinkedIn posts to get the most engagement Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.

Branded content is any marketing content that does not have a direct sales-related objective associated with it. Because it’s not designed to have a straight line relationship with sales goals, many marketers struggle to justify investing in it. But branded content has an important place in the marketing mix, and this week, Human Factor Media founder Zack Slingsby explains why. Human Factor Media specializes in a “branded entertainment” - a subset of branded content focused on video. In this interview, he covers: When it does - and does not - make sense to invest in branded entertainment How branded entertainment can help differentiate you from the competition What good branded entertainment looks like Why you should think about creating serialized content How to measure the success of branded entertainment The channels that you can use to distribute your content The brands that are doing branded entertainment really well right now Check out the full episode to get Zack’s insights on all of this, and more.

The show producer has not yet provided a description for this episode.

With so many new podcasts popping up, how can you create a business podcast that truly stands out from the crowd while also driving revenue? Lower Street Media founder Harry Morton set out to solve for exactly this challenge and on this week’s episode, is sharing his lessons learned. TL;DR - he says it’s not enough to simply do an interview-style show. To get results, you need to lead with narrative. What does that mean, and how can you use podcasting to drive results for your account-based marketing (ABM) strategy? Check out the full episode for details.

Userflow co-founder and Chief Growth Officer Esben Friis-Jensen has devoted his career to providing SaaS businesses with the tools necessary to drive product-led growth. In this episode, he explains why, in what some have termed the “end user era”, product led companies are outperforming their sales-led peers, and dissects what marketers need to know to deliver on the promise of product-led growth. From the importance of making the product the focus of your marketing, to publishing transparent information about pricing on your website, offering an on-demand product demo, creating use cases, and ensuring your content matches what you can actually deliver through the product, Esben goes into detail on the elements of a successful product-led growth strategy. Check out the full episode to learn more.

Seth Erickson started his career in web design but quickly realized that without a good story, the website (and other marketing efforts) would fail to perform. That’s when he decided to become an expert in storytelling. Seth spent months studying not just the discipline of storytelling, but the neuroscience behind why stories are so effective, and shared what he learned in his book How to Hack Humans: Storytelling for Startups. In this episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Seth breaks down the must-have components of an effective story, as well as the neural triggers that happen, and what marketers need to know about all of it to get better results.  

There’s a lot of buzz about TikTok advertising in the marketing world right now. But how can you know whether it’s the right channel for your business, and how should you get started? Reason Agency CEO Will Perry is a TikTok ads expert who has gotten incredible results for ecommerce brands. In this episode, he breaks down exactly how he approaches TikTok advertising, and shares actionable takeaways that any company - ecommerce or B2B - can use to build a profitable TikTok ads strategy.

This week I’m changing things up and don’t have a guest. Instead, I thought I would talk about something I’ve been working on and am particularly excited about — newsletter advertising. Beginning in 2018, when I was at IMPACT and worked with the team there to launch The Latest newsletter, I’ve seen the potential of newsletter advertising to reach new audiences. Since the, I’ve used this strategy at a variety of early stage startups to test messaging and drive new leads. In this episode, I’m sharing exactly how I’m using newsletter advertising, the different types of ads and how they perform, along with what you can expect to spend.

What’s the best way to leverage the content you already have to drive more revenue? Outranking.io founder Pankil Shah specializes in doing just that for his clients, and in this episode, he shares how he does it. From how to identify existing content that needs to be optimized, to matching the way your content is written to buyer intent, improving internal linking structures, and adding strong calls to action or popups, Pankil explains, step-by-step, how to get more mileage out of your content.

When Yotpo’s global team of employees began to feel disconnected during the pandemic, the company made the decision to form a community powered by NFTs. Today, Yotpo’s “Fabulous Flamingo” NFTs are sought after tokens that signal a sense of belonging, but also serve as incentives for the team to get more actively involved in the company and its community. On this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Yotpo Senior Director of Brand Marketing Cris Dinozo explains why Yotpo decided to incorporate NFTs into its community strategy, how they’re using them to bring the team closer together, and what the future roadmap holds as far as leveraging the NFTs for Yotpo’s marketing efforts.

What is Web3, what does it mean for marketers, and how can it be leveraged to build community? Late Checkout is a thesis-driven Web3 community and holding company that is focused on the nexus between Web3 and community, and CMO Vyarda Ndejeru explains what that means, and what marketers should know about how Web3 may change the future of community building. From defining what Web3, crypto, the blockchain and NFTs are (in plain English!), to explaining why DAOs (those are centralized autonomous organizations for my fellow Web3 newbies) are going to fundamentally change how communities operate, to how to monetize your community, Vyara breaks it all down in a way that is understandable and actionable. And, she shares some of the ways, including memberships, access cards, subscription models, and commerce, that B2B companies could take advantage of Web3 and NFTs.