marketing

Talk-Commerce ryan alford

Building Marketing Loyalty Through Community 

The brands winning today are building a community that drives repeat purchases. Loyalty is gained in drips and lost in buckets because there are so many layers of competition. We interview Ryan Alford with The Radcast agency in South Carolina He has been radical about marketing advertising for 22 years.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of talk commerce today. I have Ryan Alford, as opposed to all Chevy. Which we’ve made the joke in the back room. Ryan is a entrepreneur and a super popular podcast host for Radcast Ryan. Go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you do on a day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Ryan: Sure. Brent, it’s great to be here with you. Yeah, I mean I own, my main course of business is radical. You’ll notice the rad theme throughout a lot of things. And I’ll go ahead and give you the insider baseball secret. Ryan offered digital is where that started, but I just like the word radical better.

Ryan: Radcast the agency that I own in South Carolina, it’s a digital ad agency called radical and that’s the day to day and been in marketing advertising for 22 years. Working on some of the largest brands in the world before I started radical. And even with radical now working on large brands and I’m a father of four boys.

Ryan: So my passion seems to align with my children and my wife, Nicole God rest her soul. Who is she? Or bless her souls. She’d say not rest. She’s very much alive, but she’s a assistant principal in a middle school doing one of the hardest jobs in America. In today’s age. My passions revolve around family and when they’re happy, I’m happy.

Brent: that’s awesome. Yeah. We are also a family business here and my kids all worked in the company that my wife and I started. Everybody’s moving on, including myself and my wife, but yeah, I totally get it. Kids are at the cornerstone and I think one of the things we talked about in the green room is how are kids influencing what’s gonna happen into the future?

Brent: Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. 

Ryan: My boys are. 1111 and 12. We’re a blended family. I don’t have twins but we’ve been together since our boys were two and four. So we’ve grown up together as the modern Brady bunch, but I will say this I’ve watched them daily. They’ve grown up in what I call digitally native.

Ryan: I’ve grew up and yourself, probably in what I call analog native. Even though I’ve worn both hats because I’ve grown up in the technology and agency industries, which are very tech heavy and owning a digital agency. I like to say I’m split down the middle, but our kids have grown up in a digitally native first world.

Ryan: What I mean by that is. Both video games, social media, smartphones the medium with which they are both consuming content and being marketed to has all been digital. It’s a world they know, and they place value on digital things that you and I and others probably in the gen X or boomers or whatever place value in physical things.

Ryan: My 12 year old son could really care less what he walks outta the house on, but if his avatar on Roblox doesn’t have the perfect pair of shorts, the perfect Nike digital shoes, and a spiky haircut. He’s not had a good day. And that blows my mind that he cares that much about it, but he’s grown up in that world where they place value very much in digital things.

Ryan: And being digital natives. So our children we’re watching them. We’re watching that value transition from physical to digital doesn’t ma mean that they have no value in physical things. We do experiences as families. We go on trips, but they don’t necessarily care about stuff in the physical world, the way that they do digital things.

Ryan: Especially in video games and social media and other things like tokens and different things. And you see this. And it’s really transitioning into that metaverse slash digital world where you’re gonna start to see a lot of marketing transpire and where marketing’s gonna need to take place.

Ryan: Because again, when things are happening digitally is we’ve moved digitally, the place with which to get eyeballs, to get reach, to get frequency. In the future and already now is in these digital worlds. And so marketing is being very much headed down that path pretty quickly. I’m not saying it’s here and now, and certainly for smaller businesses, they don’t need to be spending thousands and thousands of dollars on speculation.

Ryan: But again, you can see this happening in front of our eyes, in front of our children, with where they’re putting value. And so that’s how I summarize that Yeah. 

Brent: So I think that kind of ties into NFTs and how popular they’ve become or are becoming, how do you see that in relations to how your younger children and kids are growing up and moving into marketing and being marketed too?

Ryan: Yeah. It’s interesting right now it’s a lot of hype and a lot of PR you’ve got digital artwork and things, and so I’m not as. I don’t high on the, the apes that are digital art that are, value that may go up or down. Mine is more in where the basis of the NFT, which is the smart contract that’s happening on the blockchain.

Ryan: And also the data transition for first party data that you’re gonna see happen on the blockchain. And all these things are interrelated. The NFT is the start of it because it’s that digital. A contract that I have a piece of art and I own it, and it’s creating that ledger. And what you’re gonna see is when we move into the future, again, a lot of this advertising and marketing is happening on the web and what’s happening is people are getting more concerned and closing in on that privacy.

Ryan: It’s gotten a lot harder to market on Facebook and other channels, because privacy concerns are there and what you’re gonna see with these smart contracts and your ID, you’re gonna have a wallet. ID on the blockchain, that’s gonna be more you giving permission for data usage. And so it’s gonna play really heavily in targeting in the future in marketing.

Ryan: And so the NFTs are scratching the surface of the technology used. And what you’re gonna see is that transition. And I do think we’re gonna move into a world the next 10 years. Think about. How ridiculously hard it is to get title work done on a house sale, if that was done on the blockchain and that digital ledger was there, you could immediately find that information there and it’s recorded there.

Ryan: And instead of now we’re fumbling around and back offices and paperwork from, 50 years ago on certain transactions, I think you’re gonna see all of this, all these things live within the same data and technology, and they’re all gonna be related to both marketing and just commerce in the future.

Brent: That’s that’s a really good point especially for title work for, so going back to kids what are some indicators that you see that kids are shaping the way marketing is 

changing? 

Ryan: Yeah. The biggest thing is if you start with the fastest growing social media platform in the world today is TikTok.

Ryan: and that started as the teenager platform, 13 to 23. And so they’ve advanced this platform, but now, and I just did a talk about this so they’ve set the standard and set the popularity and set the interest level for this channel of social media and content and really entertainment.

Ryan: And where our source of entertainment, our source of news, our source of knowledge. Our children are setting the standard for things that are taking off. But then I say that 50% of the growth on TikTok today is happening in 30 plus. They’re age 30 plus and 30 and 50% of that engagement is happening.

Ryan: So what started as the 13 to 21 year old platform TikTok 2, 3, 4 years ago is now becoming the mainstream. So you’re seeing the youth set the standard and the knowledge base for some of these platforms. And then it transitions. And it’s not that actually different from like Facebook, Facebook started as a younger platform, 15 years.

Ryan: Even 10 years ago. And now it’s the fastest growing platform for 45 to 65 year olds. Everybody thinks Facebook’s dead. Facebook’s not dead. It’s just older. It’s just graying. . Yeah, 

Brent: definitely. Facebook seems like it’s the place for older people. Let’s just say. I think that I think you’re right.

Brent: Especially on the TikTok front I started using TikTok. I’ve been trying to use it more for business things, but I’ll be honest. My Jack Russell posts on TikTok are definitely the largest viewed items that I could possibly have. How do you think that compares to something like Snapchat? I see my kids still using Snapchat every day.

Brent: But the advertising angle for Snapchat, I think is much lower than it is for TikTok, but Snapchat remains super popular. 

Ryan: Yeah. It’s super popular from a messaging platform specifically. I’m not that high on them as far as they’re long term proposition right now. They’ve gotten passed by as a mainstream content platform by TikTok, Instagram, with reels and different things.

Ryan: It’s certainly a player and it’s certainly used, but it’s primarily messaging from that younger audience. And I don’t wanna discount that value, but I just don’t think they’ve done as good a job. I feel like they’ve gotten on to very trendy like things like AR and certain things that are interesting, but the mainstream appeal of the platform has never really taken off.

Ryan: Where TikTok has grown is growing in a more mainstream fashion with content and engagement and the style of video that it progresses. I feel like Snapchat is faded behind by just remaining that messaging vehicle and not necessarily content

Ryan: consumption and video, I say, content is king, video rules and that’s the problem. Video is everything now. And I think that’s where Snapchat’s gotten left behind. 

Brent: I know that you had you, you talk about some ageless truths in marketing and you started off with your son, I think, and his avatars.

Brent: I think one of those ageless truths, though, especially as kids get into their teens, are they going to point at you as the father and say, you cannot wear that today. Dad, you look so whatever 2010s or something, there, there are some ageless truths truths around marketing and the way our kids are

Brent: influencing us as parents. So maybe speak to some of those ageless truths and the diversity between that digital life and that real life. Yeah, 

Ryan: I’ll go through, I have seven. What I call undeniable and ageless truths are creativity, reach, consistency, distinctiveness, attention, emotion, and motivation.

Ryan: Those are the seven. What I call undeniable truths. They’re all necessary even today, whether it’s digital, whether it’s promoting to children, promoting to adults, whatever it is. And I’ll say this no matter what you do, reach and attention are important. So back to the TikTok analogy right now, that’s where attention is growing there in an Instagram and other channels.

Ryan: YouTube. This is where the eyeballs are, linear TV is certainly not dead, but it’s faded for the number of attention and how much, how many eyeballs are there. And at the end of the day, reach is really a measure of media, which is the number of people that see your message. And no matter what, you’re, whether you’re selling t-shirts on e-commerce supplements, whatever it is, you have to have a baseline volume of reach the number of people that see your message.

Ryan: That’s an undeniable truth in anything that you do, unless you’re in accounts based marketing, and you only need to make four sales a year. You need extensive reach in order to meet your sales goals. Cause me media is divided by reach plus frequency. That’s where it gets into consistency. And the biggest thing I see and the biggest challenges I see today are people that veer off their core messages too quickly.

Ryan: And so people, there’s a, it’s interesting to me on social media, everybody thinks I’ve already posted that. How many times do you see the same commercial over and over again? Because that consistency is what drives. Awareness and consideration and intent, and I’m gonna getting into the purchase funnel here, but ultimately what drives a sale is that consistency of message.

Ryan: And the frequency that it happens. So I don’t know that I’m answering your question exactly, but I think there’s just certain things that even as the medians change, even whether it’s children, whether it’s adult, whether who you’re marketing to, there’s just some age old truths. And one of my other favorite ones is emotion.

Ryan: Even in today, people think with their head and they buy with their hearts. And so emotion can be humor. Emotion can be sadness, a lot of different things, but emotion drives purchase behavior. 

Brent: So when we’re going to some of those ageless truths, I think you had mentioned there’s seven of them.

Brent: You had mentioned reach consistency, emotion. What are some of those other ones 

Ryan: on that distinctiveness? That’s the differentiation. So Again, ageless here. If you want to sell more, you have to stand out. So distinctiveness, consistency, emotion, motivation. So again, this is if you go from the top of the funnel to the bottom, motivation are things like sales periods.

Ryan: What triggers your action that you want the consumer to have and take today. And so even you can have a brand promise and you can have a solution that you provide to someone’s problem, or just a great outfit that someone wants to buy. But what’s the motivational trigger that, that drives them to action today.

Ryan: Lastly, creativity, I don’t know if I mentioned that that will never die in marketing, at least on my watch. 

Brent: So creativity, I think is, that’s always the big one out there that people look for. So the name of your firm is radical. What are you bringing to the table that’s radical that follows along with that creativity?

Ryan: Yeah, the biggest thing is we preach what I call B to H business to human. Whether we work with probably equal parts, B2B and B2C. But what we do is we create it. We drive creativity through the human lens because on the other side of the, whatever, the platform, whatever the medium is, a human that’s buying, whatever you’re selling.

Ryan: And so we use that as a premise for a lot of our creative thinking and what we’re trying to do again, back to those triggers. At the end of the day, what happens when you create an agency called radical. Is your people hold themselves to a different standard. Not only do we hire people that I consider creative, but we also challenge our clients to think out of the box and to know that we’re gonna bring solutions that may not always be obvious.

Ryan: and for example, today in social media, you need to educate or entertain. And so we challenge and we literally have a comedy troop that works for our agency that we’ll do comedic funny, irreverent skits for common sales pair. We had a flooring company that, we did a spoof off of Ron Burgendy.

Ryan: We did the Floor-a-thon, and, it was just irreverent and had a guy up there who was drinking while he was on set and selling flooring. And so again, we when people go left, we go, we just challenge ourselves to think differently and then push the envelope.

Ryan: And again, part of the, I don’t know, the craziness of calling yourself radical is it’s funny what it empowers both your clients and your people to push a little harder. 

Brent: Yeah, that’s good stuff. Do you find it difficult to get B2B customers to think outside of what their norm is and I’m thinking there’s a lot of

Brent: boomers. I’m not a boomer. I’m not quite that old, but there’s a lot of boomers out there that, that were around before computers or before before the internet, let’s just say there was probably computers, but they, it’s harder for them to embrace some of these things in B2B cuz their thing is working.

Brent: How do you push them outside of their comfort zone and get them to do some of those things? 

Ryan: The first thing is back to, when you hire an agency called radical, you’re gonna get what you paid for. So we set the table early, and at the same time, it is difficult. So Brent, so you’ve totally nailed what can be the challenge, but at the same time we do get that license to press them just when they hire us.

Ryan: We’re pretty upfront in the process. We’re gonna push you to consider things. And I also think what’s happened though, is you’ve had this convergence of B2B and B2C channels coming together a little bit, especially with the pandemic and stuff like that. A lot of people are at home on social channels, doing different things, embracing content through different ways.

Ryan: So you’ve had a little bit of a lightning and, or easing of, I call it maybe the executive level content, like everybody’s left their hair down a little bit. And realize that, Hey, I don’t have to wear a suit and tie every day and do stodgy boring content to be effective. So I think that the realities of today have helped lessen that expectation.

Ryan: And, again, B2B companies are seeing, and finally realizing that the age old stodgy Content and overly produced stuff doesn’t work. You’ve had a D social media, whether it’s TikTok, and I’m not saying that’s where B2B brands necessarily belong, but it does have influence. And LinkedIn has even grown as a content platform.

Ryan: People have gotten more comfortable and there’s been a decentralization of content being overly produced. and I think B2B is caught on in the companies that wanna work with us, that we push certainly have caught on. And again, preaching through that B to H business, to human language.

Ryan: They understand that. And that doesn’t mean that, your website can have any fewer legal standards or things like that. But I do think there’s an understanding and a place in this convergence of marketing and media that’s coming together. 

Brent: Just sticking with B2B.

Brent: Do you help some of these companies who’ve come to you and they’ve maybe they have a baseline or they’ve tried something and it hasn’t worked, it’s gonna work cause you’ve seen it work for their companies. Do you create a baseline and then really help them understand how, whatever that audience is?

Brent: Let’s just say it’s YouTube as a simple one for B2B. To explain, Hey, let’s do this and let’s at least try it and then measure it and see how we’re doing. And then they have to also continue on with it for a certain amount of time to see some success. 

Ryan: Yeah. That you’ve nailed it right there.

Ryan: That last part we just won’t, we choose not to work with people that wanna see definitive results in 30 days on anything marketing and the channels and the complexity are too great. It’s not because we won’t hold our soul to expectations. It’s because you have to trial and error, so many different things, and you have to be able to test a lot of different variables so that you see what works.

Ryan: So we like to run two or three tests at a time with different content and different mediums and then compare and cross over those things. And that’s the challenge, but that’s also the opportunity. And I think the brands that kind of buy into that see the success. 

Brent: In our green room, we talked a little bit about that you spoke at a FedEx event.

Brent: I would like to talk about social selling and live social selling. Let’s dive into that. I’m interested in that and I think you’re right. That’s where it’s going right now, or at least a trend. Why don’t you explain what that is to our audience and help us to understand better how people can get into 

Ryan: it.

Ryan: yeah, there’s two parts to it. Overall social selling is just exactly what it says. Leveraging Facebook, Instagram, TikTok Twitter, whatever the platform may be. These all have integrations into the eCommerce platforms. So social selling we press a lot of clients either towards Shopify or Magento when we’re working with clients on e-commerce.

Ryan: And all of them have these integrations built in where your product catalog pushes the social media so that the sale happens within the social platform. So that again, social selling you’re pushing or promoting whether it’s stories, whether it’s posts, whether it’s whatever that content channel might be.

Ryan: You’re but the actual technology that takes place in the transaction happens within the social channel. The biggest trend though, and that’s certainly growing and what’s happened is you’ve had two worlds come together that have allowed that number one, the demand for consumers within the channel, and then the technology’s gotten a lot better.

Ryan: It used to be clunky as heck to try to integrate your product channels within like Facebook and Instagram, like two or three years ago, it’s gotten much easier. As well as the kind of transaction gateways is much easier. So you have demand and technology coming together around the same time. But then the biggest trend in all of this has been live social selling.

Ryan: So this is when you leverage the it’s really, when you think about it’s the QVC effect in 2022, but what we have now is the technology for anyone to broadcast you are your own media channel within these platforms. So whether you’re on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, You can go live and start promoting your products.

Ryan: And so we’ve seen a lot of success for brands that literally built studios, whether they’re a, furniture store or a merchandise t-shirt store, no matter really, whatever you’re selling set up studios within their own facilities that are just small facilities, where they have someone come on, they go live and they’re promoting product.

Ryan: It brings in that human element. So that you’re you put a face with the brand while also just giving someone that kind of channel with which to ask questions. Cause you’ve got messaging that can happen between there. And this kind of started in Asia, two or three years ago started really growing.

Ryan: And I think we’re at the right at the mass kind of adoption here the next year or two certainly a lot of brands have already using it, but I think you’re gonna see more mass adoption and it’s an incredible way to create another channel with which you can market and grow sales. 

Brent: Yeah, I think Instagram certainly started some of that trends in Facebook, of course, in their in

Brent: buying directly from the app. But I think what you’re saying more is you go to the actual eCommerce store and they’re selling it to you live and maybe even doing a studio call where you can, where people are talking to you like on QVC, but you can also interact with those people directly through the channel

Brent: I think that makes it very exciting. And it makes for a broader audience via multiple social channels as well. Yeah, 

Ryan: that’s right. And it’s another way to build community. The brands that are winning today are building not just selling, unless you have a truly differentiated product.

Ryan: The brands winning today are building some type of community which drives, repeat purchases and some amount of loyalty and brand. Loyalty’s very difficult to I say they it’s it’s gained in, in, in drips and lost in buckets because you. There’s so many layers of competition now. So it creates another layer for building community and building again, that dual communication channel on your product services or no matter really matter what you do.

Ryan: And yeah, I think it’s it’s a really big opportunity. And I think the channels the companies that are doing it are seeing a lot of. 

Brent: I like that. You mentioned community and I was at ShopTalk a couple weeks ago and saw a great presentation. I can’t remember the brand right now, but it was a clothing brand and they’re, they built a lot of their brand around a brand building community and having, not just influencers, but the community of people purchasing that brand that are advocating for that brand consistently.

Brent: Do you think a lot of Let’s just say eCommerce only merchants are missing out on that opportunity to build community within that brand. Yeah. Within their own brand, I should say. Yeah. 

Ryan: I, every brand is unique, so it’s hard to pass judgment per se, but I do think it’s a level that with the social channels now with influencers with different opportunity path, It’s a lost opportunity if you aren’t and it’s so hard to stand out and create, repeat purchases, unless you’re doing it again, unless your product is just so differentiated.

Ryan: But if you’re selling cosmetics or t-shirts or any kind of apparel, You better be building community because that’s, what’s gonna hold you up through the test of time is that community channel that it’s glorified word of mouth in a way, but it’s also creating and bringing together like-minded and it’s back to targeting, bringing the right target together and so that you’re building

Ryan: both the awareness channel, but the loyalty factor, because then they’re loyal to you for more than just the product itself. 

Brent: Is there risks in e-commerce merchants or even any merchant embracing this I idea of community and then working on their social channels to promote their products?

Brent: What are, what risks do you see in this. 

Ryan: There’s risk in anything, but I think there’s the upside is much greater. The risk could be you certainly don’t want to alienate especially if you have a broad mass appeal product, so you might risk, bringing together.

Ryan: Certain audiences that are maybe not reflective of your brand, that’s certainly a risk, but I think if you do it right, and you organize around your beliefs and principles and bring the right people along the upshot is much greater than the risk. Certainly with social media, in the live forum and in other things, the risk would be just imperfection.

Ryan: But what’s interesting is consumers sort of embrace that realness and that rawness, I can’t speak towards every legal liability. So you again, need to empower your people with the knowledge and the safeguards that they need. But I think the biggest risk might be.

Ryan: I think it’s more, the fear brands are fearful of imperfect situations or content. When in reality, that’s actually. . 

Brent: Yeah. And I can speak to experience on some of the risks around the idea of trying to automate too much of your social media. I can remember. I’m a very ferocious tweeter when I’m at an event.

Brent: And I can remember setting up some bots that would auto tweet a hashtag if it was. Some combination of hashtags and somebody figured it out and was retweeting some inappropriate content based on the hashtags. And I quickly realized it was very early on, but I realized that was not a great idea to try to to try to promote some of those things

Brent: so I suppose some of the risks are around automating things and not monitoring that automation. And I think another risk too, that I see is is brands embracing social media, but never answering. Yeah, people sending you a message that says, Hey I want, this is, this has been a horrible experience.

Brent: What are you gonna do about it? I think Delta airlines has done a great job for me anyways, on responding to me on those type of things. But there’s other brands that I won’t mention that never get back to you. 

Ryan: yes. If you don’t have support to do this, you’re better off not doing it. So you can’t do things that spark conversation and not have

Ryan: the hands on the other end to then answer it. That’s a total no-no and I think what you’ve also said, you brought up the automation factor, again, these channels are so ripe for customer engagement building community. And so you’ve got to commit the resources to them appropriately to take advantage of that opportunity.

Ryan: But if you don’t embrace it completely and you try to automate too much, that can drive a whole nother set of issues, some of which you’ve just described, but also there’s just an authenticness that consumers now expect from brands. And again, if you can’ embrace that fully and it doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, but it does mean you have to truly have engagement

Ryan: and someone assigned and ready to speak and act and be empowered on managing that.

Ryan: And the other challenge is on the automation side, lot of people get into that and I, there’s a big push in marketing to use more automated tools, but right now consumers really crave that authentic expression from brands and they don’t expect perfection.

Ryan: So if you weren’t set up to have the resources and human people. Responding to these things and empowered to do it. Automation just can’t complete the circle for what’s needed to use these channels appropriately and I’m and look, I love technology and software and automation. Like certainly it’s made a lot of our jobs easier and more manageable, but on social media, it’s social.

Ryan: That’s the name of the word? It’s not robots. It’s social. It’s, there’s a two way channel for engagement. You gotta be able to keep up with that. 

Brent: Yeah. And I think I’m gonna key in on what you said earlier, you said spark a conversation. And if you put that in real terms, like you’re walking into a room and you’re gonna start talking to somebody.

Brent: If you start talking to somebody and then you simply never respond or worse, walk away as they’re trying to respond. It’s the analogy for social media is exactly the same. You’re basically calling somebody and leaving the phone off the hook. And never answering anything they’ve just said , 

Ryan: that’s exactly right.

Ryan: It’s a great analogy. I love that. It’s true. You can’t, spark the conversation and then not be there to answer it. 

Brent: Yeah. And as, as bigger brands get, the more they should think about answering those things that are coming at them from social media. And if they’re not going to, they should explicitly say we don’t answer this channel.

Brent: Or I would just say don’t use that channel at all. If you’re not gonna 

Ryan: answer. That’s right. I would definitely say that or use it in a way that it’s clear that you are pushing out, but not expecting something back in. 

Brent: Yeah. But Ryan, we had a couple minutes left here. I wanna just, if you want to close out on a, something you said earlier about customers need to stick with a marketing initiative that you’re trying.

Brent: Even if it seems like it’s failing after a month or even two months if there’s a plan in place, is there a recommended amount of time that somebody should stick with it or is it pliable by the marketing campaign you’re doing? Yeah. 

Ryan: That’s a hard, one. Marketing is so complex and so specific to individual companies.

Ryan: That’s a hard one to answer like universally, but I’m gonna give it my go here. Again, I believe in setting 12 month plans, but making them very mialable, like bendable moldable as needed, cuz you need to be able to read and react to the market. But what I do think you have to stick with is number one, you need to focus on a target and that target can’t change every 30 days.

Ryan: So you need to spend, because a lot of I do some master classes and things like that. And the first thing you have to do is nail your. Because otherwise even a good friend of mine, Andy Murphy says this analogy that even if you’re five millimeters off, if you plot that out over a hundred miles, think about how off course you actually end up

Ryan: And again, getting that target nailed in getting the message to that target dialed in and sticking with it long enough that you have true actionable data. Because 30 days really isn’t enough. So I like to see 90 day campaigns that are testing across one or two different variables that might be the media.

Ryan: It might be the message, but again, there’s a consistent target and there’s a consistent kind of brand promise and theme across all of that. And so I think campaigns in 90 days, I think years in planning, like as far as a year or 12 month plan. And I just think you have to nail that target and you have to at least nail the overarching solution or brand promise that you can provide.

Brent: I would add one more thing that maybe a lot of companies don’t listen to as well is that there has to be enough traffic to make that data actionable. If it’s a, let’s just say it’s B2B and they have very low traffic. It’s gonna take a little longer to prove whatever hypothesis that you’ve put out there.

Brent: I think it’s a mixture of traffic and time that all merchants have to embrace or at least trust that they have to be able to see it through. 

Ryan: Yes. I think you nailed it. And the reality is we’ve done all this talk about social media. Organic social media, except on TikTok and a little bit on LinkedIn is pretty dead.

Ryan: you gotta pay to play to get the reach and the frequency that you need. To drive the traffic that you were just describing. So paid ads are a necessity unless you really have patience and know that organic traffic and growth is gonna take time, cuz SEO efforts on your website, take time. Organic posts get your about 7% of your followers.

Ryan: See them Facebook and Instagram. Twitter and others have figured this out. They’re just not gonna let you grow a business or a brand without paid approaches again, unless you’re leveraging influencers or other things, but those are paid as well. So again, if you want the volume that you need back to reach one of the undeniable truths and marketing it’s pay to play.

Brent: Yeah. And I think too that it’s not as easy for pay to play as it was 10 years ago, you really have to work on your campaigns and even look at more of those long tail searches in when you’re doing pay to play. It’s not just open up the spigot, but you’re gonna get a bunch of garbage nowadays, I think as well.

Brent: So as a merchant, you should pay attention to making sure that you’re looking at whatever’s happening and changing, like you said, the course to make sure you’re on target to hit that. Exactly. Ryan, this has been such a good conversation. I appreciate you being here. As we close out, I give every guest the opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug.

Brent: What would you like to plug today? 

Ryan: Yeah, obviously, hopefully this has been enlightening. My hat here, the Radcast. Love for anyone to go. Listen, if you look up the Radcast, we do own most of the SEO. You’ll find our show on all the channels. We’re a top 25 marketing and business show on Spotify, top 100 on apple.

Ryan: And then I am launching a master classes, a different in different things and a mastermind under the radical formula, the radical formula.com. So I’d love for you. If you’re an individual or small business, that’s a great place to work with me. And learn from, 22 plus years in the business.

Ryan: And then if you’re a larger brand radical company, radical.company online, Brent really appreciate it. This has been really enjoyable. And you’re a great host. 

Brent: Yeah, I’ll make sure I’ll get all those show notes onto the onto the podcast. And again, thank you so much for being here.

Ryan: Thanks so much.

Looking for the patterns in your marketing with Kate Bradley

In this week’s episode, we talk about everything from entrepreneurship to employee happiness. (@LatelyAIKately) Kate talks about the pressure on a start-up CEO and how it is compounded by trying to run a successful business and raise money at the same time. Kate reveals one really cool new feature on Lately.ai. (You must listen to the end to hear the big reveal!)

What you will learn from this episode and about Kate

• Passion for floating in a pool and listening to 80s music

• CEO of Lately, an AI that repurposes long-form content

• Focus on making fans, not sales

• Educated on Black American perspectives •

White Elephant in the Room: lack of diversity in podcast

• Advice to never assume what any side wants

• Value of lifting others up

• Making a fan creates a machine

• Marketing is about getting a fresh perspective

• Overuse of words leads to dull communication

• Creative use of language to engage people and make them react

I absolutely think that people who are focused on clock punching rather than performance and outcomes are missing out. Clock punchers are focused on the wrong thing and don’t understand the bigger picture. They don’t see how their work fits into the bigger picture and how it contributes to the success of the company. Performance and outcomes are much more important than just showing up and doing the minimum. If an entrepreneur is focused on performance and outcomes, they will be able to make better decisions and find more success.

Kate Bradley

Kate is the Founder & CEO of Lately. The A.I. that learns which words will get you the most engagement and re-purposes video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts containing those words.

Kate is a former rock ‘n’ roll DJ and served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales, and marketing expertise. What she learned in radio about the neuroscience of music helps fuel Lately’s artificial intelligence.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this wonderful episode of lately on Talk Commerce. I have Kaitlyn from lately today. Kate. Please introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role in one of your passions in life. 

Kate: I formally was a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM. So I have a soft spot in my heart for podcasting, of course. I love the theater of the mind so much. I love radio. I love that you Brent have this I don’t even know if you know that you have it, you have this beautiful power to create what I call a two-way street, even though it’s one way.

Kate: I You wield the microphone here, but people listen and trust you and they lean in because you have this ability to create that magical kind of feeling as though they’re part of the conversation. And so that’s what attracts me to radio and podcasting specifically. And I don’t miss it.

Kate: Cuz can I swear in your show? I don’t know. Yeah. Go for it. I had a shit time. there, there’s great things about radio. I met my husband there and his record was our favorite record of the year. And of course, total job hazard. Cause I dated musicians do not recommend, found the one good one, who’ve cut his hair and wears chinos and now he’s. Sales bless his heart, but radio is a boy’s club, of course. And me too, and all that stuff didn’t even exist. And the rewards you got for participating in sexual harassment were large. It was applauded. And so we all did it, and I, not only, and I was a recipient of course, because, I don’t have a phase for radio.

Kate: Yay. And there’s no women either. So of course, like every day my boss would ask. Bradley or your hands queen, meaning could I hold this Dick while he peed? just, it was just the locker room bullshit. So that. Bizarre because what started happening? I don’t know why I’m going down this thread with you, but Hey ladies, listen up the the sexual harassment turned into a hostile work environment because of course I was great at what I did and I arranged.

Kate: The first ever marketing newsletter for any of the channels, it was ours. And it got all of this. This is before MailChimp. Okay. So I was like in outlook having to send multiple copies because you could only send it to 250 people at a time. Remember that there was like no formatting. And I got us. Just a huge amount of press.

Kate: Just because I’m a bulldog, and I was like I think we should do this. And I’m gonna ask all these people to republish it and forward it, et cetera. And they did. And and then I got shit on for my success. So that was confusing because you’re like, I’m killing it. Why aren’t people excited about this?

Kate: It’s because they’re threatened. And I dunno if that’s why I have my own company and I don’t have to deal with. Ego, except for my own. now , the mountain. What were the other two questions you asked? 

Brent: What is your day to day role and one of your passions in life?

Kate: Oh we might have covered the passion but I think at the moment, my biggest passion is floating. I love the weightlessness of floating in a pool and we have a kitty pool and in text one, thank God for those people democratizing this thing, and we’ve had one for a while. It’s 12 feet by four feet, maybe three.

Kate: And there’s just enough room for two people to float. We built a solar heater out of black hose and a black piece of wood and a there’s a pump. And it does when there’s not a heat wave. It’s usually 88 degrees, which is what I like Brent, and me and my noodles are out there just floating away every day.

Kate: I’m allowed three songs, so I bring the Bose out there and I listen to three songs on the radio. Actually, I can still tolerate live radio and by tolerate, I really mean that cause it’s. Fucking terrible. Really terrible, but there’s this one station here that they mostly play 80 songs with and I’m a child at the eighties.

Kate: So I’m like, Hooters, Eddie grant, Steve Miller. Yes. And sometimes I’m lucky and I get three great songs. Sometimes they throw in some, another seventies, crap like BGS, or I don’t really like Harry Nelson, stuff like that. And I’m just like, I’m just waiting for the next good one. But that’s my passion at the moment.

Kate: And then. Who am I? What am I doing? I’m the CEO of lately lately uses artificial intelligence to repurpose long form content like text and video and audio into bite size social posts that it knows very specifically, which parts will get you the highest engagement. . 

Brent: Yeah, that’s great. And I am a, I’m a user of lately for longly.

Brent: It’s been a great tool for us. I do want to just dip back into podcast guests, because it’s not always a two street. And when people come on as a guest that are, that have an agenda that are trying to. They are not a good guest. And I sometimes just look at the clock and think, oh my God, can this 30 minutes be over?

Brent: And now the 110 guests that I’ve had are thinking, are you one of them? Kate, you are not because this is the second time you’ve been on and I really appreciate you coming on. But it is sometimes difficult and it’s, my, my job is made much easier. when the guest holds the conversation, but it’s not a sales pitch.

Brent: And I, there’s nothing more than I hate in a sales pitch from a guest. But anyways, this is my pitch for lately because it is, it’s such a great product. And I’m falling in love with AI. I just signed up with open AI. I would I want want to get into the Dolly thing and there’s so many fun things happening in.

Brent: That I’m very interested in. But I do wanna talk a little bit about some of the entrepreneur journeys you’ve been going through and also, in our green room, I do wanna just bring up the white elephant in the room, which is me. And we did talk a little bit about, and you brought it up too.

Brent: The fact that there isn’t I don’t have a lot of diversity in my podcast and I would like to work on that. I’m part of the entrepreneurial community here in Minneapolis and Kate. I was just educating Kate, when we, before as well, Minneapolis is a city in the middle of the country.

Brent: And I know people on the coast don’t realize that there’s a part. World that between New York and California, but we don’t have to go into that. So I’m on I do sit on the diversity and inclusion committee. and I always ask myself, why should I be on this? And actually if I had some good guess, and they’ve given me some good answers on why me as a white male should be on this.

Brent: And part of it is just awareness and talking about it, because if everybody doesn’t talk about it, then it becomes something that’s back room. And I think it’s always better if we do talk about it. So not to belabor the point, but I know that there’s challenges in that. There wasn’t even a question 

Kate: in there.

Kate: I have a comment though, if you don’t mind. My friend, please, Jen. God, what’s her last name? Vander something, sorry, Jen. Vander. Awesome. I’m just gonna call her that. So she, we were on a panel once and she. express this in a way that was the first time I got it, which is this, when you are the underdog, you can only be lifted up by those who are on top.

Kate: And the mistake many people make is not including the people who are on top in the conversation and we rely on them to lift us up. So in your case, it has to be white men in the conversation because they hold the power in the world. They. For the most part. And not excluding them is just a stopper right away.

Kate: So I get that on the, just a flip side and we should go into politics cuz that’s dangerous. But I did, I was a marketing consultant for a company called the perception Institute for about a year and their mission in the world or a nonprofit is to change the way that black men are portrayed in the media, black men.

Kate: And. . And so I learned a lot about people, about black Americans specifically and how they feel about white people of intervening in their business. And it was mostly not nice, which was interesting, and the overall reaction was like, stay out of it with your woke perceptions. Because what you think is right is not what we believe at.

Kate: And I’m generalizing. So forgive me there, but just a perspective, like it’s the S U right? You have to never assume what the other, what any side wants. Everybody has to be at the table for the magic to happen for the two-way street to happen. Let’s get back to that. And the second comment I had related to that was.

Kate: You touched on what makes for a good guest, so I believe it or not, I was a terrible interviewer on radio for a long time. I would get very nervous and I was young. And so I didn’t have a lot of experience, doing that. I was, it was the me show. I was great at the me show , I didn’t know how to make people shine or ask the right questions, cuz I was so nervous about pushing all the buttons and getting things right at the same time. Cuz you’re in my day you were managing like the whole show, just like you are with your podcast. So there’s a lot to do behind this in the green room, as you’re saying.

Kate: So to tie in what makes a good guess is when you are able to lift others up. Number one a and that’s I think that goes both ways, but as an entrepreneur. what we say is make a fan. Don’t make a sale right now. The value there might sound corny, but I believe in the long tail, this is the radio that I grew up in is all about the long tail.

Kate: The album cuts, not the hits, right? Get people to buy the records, make fans who are loyal to the death. And I saw the power of those people because when you make a fan, they work for you for free and they can’t help the. And so you get multiple banks for your buck because you make the sale and you make a machine, 

Brent: right?

Brent: Yeah. No. And I really apologize for what I’m gonna say now. because I do feel like now I want to change the name of my podcast to ceiling. Because I would love to get ceiling fans but keep going. I know. I’m sorry, Brent. that was so bad. Hold your nose, 

Kate: everybody. 

Brent: Yeah. So I, my wife and I had this conversation about ceiling, the Mar Marcia Beski talked has a song about a hundred tampon.

Brent: And in, there was there, there was the first lady in space. They gave, she was gonna be in space for a week. So they gave her a hundred tampons and and she has a she’s on Ted. She has a Ted talk anyways. So they, she talked about the fact that she has this song. And then all of a sudden, all these men started berating her about, you shouldn’t make fun of these engineers at NASA.

Brent: Like who knows, like you, you need a hundred tampons right. For a week. And it was, we had a very good convers, my wife and I had a very nice conversation about it. And I, for me, I thought it through and I’m like, yeah, that doesn’t really make sense. I don’t, I don’t know any better, but her point was, there was a lot of men that came out and were.

Brent: Hit Eric making her feel bad that she’d come up with this song or not making her, I don’t know the right words, but sounds funny. They were ham whatever social media, what social media does, that’s what they were doing. 

Kate: I have a segue 

Brent: for this.

Brent: Okay. Yes, we need a segue. Yes, go. 

Kate: So one of my favorite lines is Catherine Hahn in. the, we are the Millers when she calls it a Tanin and she’s from the Midwest. She is in this movie anyways, and so around my house, it’s called a Tanin and we laugh every time cuz it’s so funny to us, but that’s that ability by the way to take so.

Kate: and spin it in a new way, which is really what our jobs are about. This is marketing. How do you get fresh perspective? Whether it’s a hundred tampons in space or throwing a hot dog down a hallway, as she says, right? There’s I love that. I love. we, I just did a post on LinkedIn. I don’t know why I was inspired by somebody on Twitter.

Kate: And I said, words that make you like wanna bar. And I said, I’ll start. And the word was trousers. And so everybody piled on with not only just words that they don’t like the way they sound moist, got a lot of votes. For example, salacious got some. But then also biz lab was all over the place. So people were like partners and utilize at the end of the day, like all that kind of 

Brent: stuff.

Brent: I’ll reach out to you later. Yeah. 

Kate: Yeah. So I was just thinking about the, how we. how we can overuse words to death. So they don’t mean anything like awesome, which I am guilty of as well. All of America overuses. Awesome. But the whole point of communicating well is to don’t only communicate well, but to communicate with meaning.

Kate: and to hear some biz bla drive engagement, to make people lean in is to take something very familiar and just turn it just enough so that somebody is you catch the ear and you make them react. It’s the reaction that we all want. And I love thinking about that. I love so my husband is great at this he’ll he has all these isms one.

Kate: The hammer lane and the granny lane. That’s what he calls the fast lane and the slow lane on the highway. Or dirt nap. That’s like obviously dying 

Brent: dirt nap. Okay. 

Kate: Or booger sugar is cocaine , which we were just watching that Tom cruise movie American made, which is a great movie, by the way.

Kate: Even if you don’t like Tom cruise, it’s a 

Brent: great movie. I agree. I’ve seen it. Very good. Okay. Alright, so let’s move into little, let’s talk a little bit about entrepreneur entrepreneurship. My daughter just got a job with a CRM company called endear and they’re based outta New York, a very young entrepreneur lady who started it with a partner and te.

Brent: Did you have any struggles as an entrepreneur? 

Kate: oh, so many. I think the one that’s ever present for me is it’s, I don’t know if it’s confidence I, I don’t have an imposter syndrome per se, but I take things personally, that, that whole. Bullshit about it being work and business and not personal it’s it is bullshit, to me it is of course it’s personal, it affects people’s lives, right?

Kate: I That’s, it has to be right. And I’ve had to make decisions. I’ve had to let people go. I know how all that, how hard that stuff is. But I,

Kate: the pressure that I put on myself is pretty sprint. I perceive that there’s pressure being put on me by others as well. That may or may not be true, but there’s certainly that there’s that perception whether it’s my customers, like I wanna succeed for you. Whether it’s other women entrepreneurs, my investors, my fam, my family my team, obviously Lauren and Brian and Kristen, Jason and everybody, Kristen and Katie, Greg, I think that’s all.

Kate: Did I forget anyone, Emma Alex , and I, the problem is I don’t know what failure looks like. So let me just put this in the ground for everybody. We’re bringing it down. Brian, my CTO is very good at being positive and PR and practical. He’s an engineer. So he, he, he shoots pretty straight and I’m always.

Kate: wallowing in the negative. And he’s dude, like you have to really understand this, the odds of what lately is. So the chances of startups succeeding at all is already ne it’s negative. The fact that lately still exists. The fact that we have revenue, that we have hundreds of customers, we’ve had thousands before, we’re figuring out how to do it all here.

Kate: He’s like lately should have died a million. So you really need to acknowledge this, but it’s not that I don’t acknowledge it. It’s that the road to getting to the next level, like the levels, the goal post move a lot, which is very frustrating to me. Like I’m trying to figure out Brent constantly not how to win the game, how to beat the machine.

Kate: Okay. That’s all I think about how do I beat the fucking machine? Beat it into the ground. That’s what I. That’s all I see. And it’s not enough for me just to have a nice little business here. That’s not the game I’m playing, right? That’s not this game. And when you do everything that’s prescribed and you do it like to the fucking awesomeness of awesome platinum level superstar, galactic awesomeness, which is what we do.

Kate: And you still can’t hit the milestones. That’s defeating debilitating to me personally. I take it personally, cuz then I think, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I fucking do this? And I hang my head in shame, honestly. The buck stops with me. It has to be me. It’s not I can, there’s all, there’s the great resignation.

Kate: There’s, COVID, there’s the market. There’s all these things to blame, of course. But I don’t think of any of them. It’s always hard. There’s always some shit out there. So it’s me. I’m the one where that can control. What’s happening or figure it out. And, I think just generally that’s the biggest hurdle is my, is myself in a way.

Kate: I don’t have an off button, cuz I want this. It’s not that I want this so bad, but I know it’s I know it’s not even possible. I know it’s probable. I.

Kate: And so I also, that means, I know all the pieces are in front of me here already. I know that they are, this is a matter of assembling the pieces. I have the right. Is which is a blessing and a curse. It’s right here. But the fact that I can’t figure it out makes me feel like an idiot , and none of that’s true.

Kate: I rely on you. I rely on our customers. We’re always asking for feedback. I’m terrible at taking criticism, but my team is great at it, which is why I had them, and we’re always looking for ways sorry for rambling but entrepreneurs, here’s a great tip. Someone told me, and you get a lot of tips that are garbage, cuz everybody wants to give you some advice.

Kate: But a friend of mine said, look for the patterns. So if you can look for the patterns in everything, whether it’s the way the funnel works or how much MRI you’re making or what customers click first, right? All these little patterns are macro and micro patterns. You can double down or then fix them.

Kate: and my, I joke all the time. My, my great skill is seeing the glass half empty. That’s what I do. I look for problems, patterns of problems, so can you imagine being my husband? He’s a nice guy. 

Brent: yeah I am. I am the glass half full and my wife is the glass half empty. So we actually balance each other out.

Brent: We’re either full or empty at the same time empty we’re empty. So I definitely can empathize with your struggle. And I do of want to talk about as a leader that empathy part that you have to have for your employees do you see a difference in differe? Styles of leadership that work or don’t work, or I don’t know.

Brent: I I see sometimes that some entrepreneurs want to like they assume that your employee feels some way and if you feel differently, it doesn’t matter to what it’s not it, the feelings of your employees don’t matter. And I feel like that I’m I believe they matter, but that some of that empathy isn’t there in a lot of entrepreneurs.

Kate: I had a shitty job, so I know what it feels like to have that kind of panic attack and go to work and dread every day. And I don’t want to any make anyone feel that way. I am very lucky because all of those people on my team are very kind and they’re very loyal and they’re also very smart. I forget sometimes.

Kate: That they can’t read my mind. I try to apologize for that. Luckily they have a high tolerance for my bitch. That’s ano very lucky thing, because I can be an asshole. I can be, of course, and I’m so grateful. I have to surround myself with people who have that tolerance because I.

Kate: Always apologize for it. There’s too much to go on, but I have to also obviously reward and acknowledge. And so I need also the kinds of people who either don’t need that all the time can get it from each other. My re I feel my perception is the reward is to provide a workplace that is fun, which it really is.

Kate: It’s we have like unlimited vacation, no one ever takes a vacation. I don’t know why they don’t, but they don’t. You can, you don’t have to ask to go to the doctor or anything. You just, nobody cares. Get the work done. We don’t really care what you’re doing during the day. If there’s. And everyone is very autonomous.

Kate: There’s, some things I’m a micromanager about. I know this, but my aim is to not be that way and to, to a fault, honestly, like sometimes I’m trying to figure out why these people, these two people, maybe aren’t getting along or hearing each other. And then I realize , I don’t bring them together enough.

Kate: cuz we’re all just out doing our own thing. We’re running and running. And one thing sometimes I forget that. Because we’re, know, we are dispersed and we always have been dispersed and I like that because I feel it’s so much more productive. I hate being in office when people are coming in and talking to me all the time.

Kate: I hate that. I can’t get anything done, and. , I will forget how smart they are. I’m like, shit, Chris has really good ideas. I need to ask him these questions more often and then utilize them, or Lauren is, I think she’s 15 years younger than me. I forget, but she’s younger than me.

Kate: And I forget that she is because she’s so 

Brent: she’s 10

Brent: And I talked to Lauren. Lauren is fantastic by the way. Isn’t she great. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. She’s didn’t mean interrupt to you. 

Kate: No, I’m sorry for she’s so smart. And my, for all of them, my expectation is I, these people are on a scale of one to 10. They’re twelves. They’re all twelves. And so when they’re only tens, I get on their asses about.

Kate: Shame on me. Because I believe in them I respect them and I’m so impressed with them. And Lauren is certainly one of those people, and but she can tolerate my shit, which I, that this is also what I appreciate. So the way I try to reward, money is not the thing that motivates my team because.

Kate: We often can’t pay each other or the salary isn’t very high, but I try to create a workplace where there’s like a ton of flexibility and a ton of autonomy, because these are the things that I need personally. And I know there’s people out there like me, and I think to providing a safe place, like I call it where people can be themselves.

Kate: Like we don’t, we don’t really have a lot of rules, the golden rule, our biggest rule. And. a lot. We have two meetings a week, one for sales and one for the whole team, cuz we’re small enough. We can do these things still. And at those meetings we have what’s called the rolling agenda. And so the rolling agenda is a Google doc that goes on and on for years and everyone’s name is on it and you’re supposed to write what you’re doing, what you’ve done and what you’re doing there.

Kate: And everyone reads it an hour before the meeting and at the top of the meeting is the actual agenda discussion items. And the discussion items are the things that we all actually need to talk about together. Cuz I don’t need to have a report of what you’re doing and plus I can see it all in slack. Our slack channel is I don’t I poo threads because I want everybody, I want it to bleed over for everybody.

Kate: It saves me the time from repeating myself from silo to silo and it makes everybody sympathetic or empathetic. And so the rolling agenda what’s so funny is there’s almost never dis any discussion items cuz we’ve already had the discussion. So it’s a hang we get on the phone and we find out that.

Kate: Chris’s son, Zach just performed at a comedy club and killed it with amazing jokes. A couple of Dick jokes, in front of his grandparents, but I guess they were killer. Awesome. Katie’s daughter, Ruby just scored some major role in a play. I think it was beauty. The beast she’s the lead, which is pretty great.

Kate: Kristen’s getting ready to go to Paris with her two children. For the, and her husband. So the first family vacation and maybe the last one, cuz everybody’s going to college, this is what we talk about, I love that about them, Brent, how lucky am I? 

Brent: Yeah. That’s building a team like that is, is like the dream of any entrepreneur.

Brent: It I think you’ve talked to a lot about, about that team building and how you’ve been successful in it. What would you. If you were gonna say something to an entrepreneur who was hung up with instead of that mentality that you have for performance I don’t care what you do all day, just so you deliver what we’re expecting.

Brent: The opposite of that is I, all I care about is that you come in and punch the clock. right there. There’s a dichotomy there and there’s a big swing, right? If you’re just assembling something and you’re punching the clock, you know what you get because you’re assembling something.

Brent: But the same thing is you could come in and assemble something very poorly. Or, if you’re not checking, there’s gotta be a balance between performance. I’m a firm believer in performance and the outcome of that. Do you think people that look at clock punching, miss the outcome part? 

Kate: Sure. I’ve been that I worked in retail in the mall.

Kate: I know what it’s like. it sucks. And I hated it. Sorry, dad. I worked for my dad for a while. I love my dad. I think, so like begets, like when you are around other people who are working at a superior level and you’re not, it’s obvious and you feel bad and you want to catch up. So that’s one thing, right?

Kate: And I’ve surrounded myself. I’m very lucky to have these people who are, these are amazing people. Please never leave me please. And I’m always concerned when, like one of them, if someone’s gonna get married, Girlfriend moves in or something like that. I’m like, is my productivity gonna go down?

Kate: It’s so mean, that’s my first thought. Then my second thought is I want joy for this person. Hello. What’s wrong with you, Bradley. But I think that I think we were saying earlier, like the work life balance is bullshit. Like work is life and life is work. And if you’re not having a great time during what you’re doing, you’re not feeling fulfilled and joyful.

Kate: and like you’re doing something to improve the world or yourself, then you really need a different job. I It’s so important. I think, for entrepreneurs, the objective, I always think, and I think about this, especially when I’m like arguing with my husband is what is money? What is the outcome that I want here?

Kate: What’s the outcome. So let’s back into it is the outcome to make someone feel wrong because they fucked up is that the. that you want, you wanna make them feel bad. So then they don’t sell shit for you all day long. Cause they feel bad and they’re done. I’ve done that before. I’ve done that. I like making PE people feel wrong.

Kate: Like I do. I like calling them out on their shit. I’m trying to go to therapy to improve this, but it’s there, it’s the thing. And I, but I’ve learned not to do that because what is the point now? Now sometimes you have to correct someone on what they’ve done in order for them to improve.

Kate: I’m not great at this, but I, that is my aim, Poor Lauren. She, I like people to write copy for me. So we’re always, we work together on sales. And so she is in charge of the follow up with the sale, right? So we have a call. We have to email them, she’ll draft an email and Google I’ll take 95% of it apart and rewrite it and then be like, okay, here you go.

Kate: Now her feeling can be defeat defeated, like thanks for wasting my time. I explained to her, I was like, you don’t know how much time you saved me just by starting this. And my point of taking a part isn’t to shit on you. My, my point is to give myself something to play, where I can move around.

Kate: And I said, this was a, like earlier last year or something. And I was like, I will do. I promise to do a better job of telling you why I’m rearranging these things and what, why I’m putting these things in here. If you wanna learn how to do it better, but at the same time, I have to remember.

Kate: Lauren came from she. So she has a she’s smarter than all of us. She has a master’s degree in psychology analytics. And she came from working at the cancer ward in a hospital, God. And took the first job at lately as head of customer service, which she killed it at. And then she ran our sales team and now she.

Kate: Chief operations officer. So she has some very deep legacy knowledge of the company, but she didn’t come from sales. That’s not her background. None of us actually have come from sales me the most. I have the most experience in sales and we have a 98% sales conversion. Brent, Kristen come from sales.

Kate: Chris comes from radio like me,

Kate: the reason, of course the product is awesome, but we. Fucked up that demo 50,000 ways sideways to Minneapolis. Okay. I’ve seen it. Me too. And the demo does sell itself, but it’s the people, it’s the people that sell it. And it’s because Lauren, her ability to read the room and by the room, any room in a room, an empty room on a camera, in a zoom call or a room full of 85 people at SAP.

Kate: Like she has those nuances. And that, and Chris has the same thing as well. These guys this is about being nice, right? It’s about being thoughtful. It’s about listening. It’s about they know both of them are, I’m talking about them cause they’re my chief salespeople specifically, but like they can stand on stage any kind of stage, whether it’s just a call or actually on a stage and lead a room, they have that capability to do.

Kate: But at the same time they know when to listen. I don’t have that capability. I just like to be on stage and hear the sound of my own voice. Sorry.

Brent: So what would you say to To an entrepreneur then that is that they’re building this team and they’re, they seem to be getting a lot of turnover. Is there a magic formula in that team building model or is there yeah. Something to create community or is there anything that somebody could start.

Kate: I think the first thing is just to really think about how you wanna be treated. That’s just the most important thing. And that’s very hard cuz like you’re trying to get shit done, so you have to be very reflective constantly and to not just how you wanna be treated, but when you’re at your best, when you’re in the zone, right?

Kate: What are people around you doing to facilitate that for you? And then try to replicate that? I think that’s the first thing I. the second thing is to know this is so important. You have to ask people about their fucking lives, right? There are so many times where I just wanna get the meeting on and get stuff done, but I don’t, I make sure, Hey Brian, how was your trip?

Kate: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, Hey Jason, I saw that me is on Instagram and she’s like doing this whole abs routine. She looks amazing. What is that about? So he’ll tell me. You have to start that way. People want to talk about themselves. Obviously look at me. I’m someone who talks over people, Brent and I have no patience for people who are offended by that.

Kate: Honestly I believe in passion and I believe in the power to express your passion and that an interruptive culture should be celebrated because people are so excited to share their ideas.

Kate: and I don’t believe in democracy. Lately is not a democracy. I’m the leader. Although you have to make people feel as though they bring listened to right now, you can only do that with people you wanna listen to. So if you’re hiring people, you don’t wanna listen to, then you are an idiot, you’re, you have to really think about who you’re.

Kate: And we’ve made mistakes. Lauren will know, and she rolls her eyes and she tells me every time and I still make this mistake. I constantly think we need an experienced salesperson to come in here. And so I hire these fucking dudes. They’re always dudes. And. some dudes. I love they’re some of them are dudes.

Kate: I love some of them are dudes. I don’t love, and it never works out because they’re probably bold 

Brent: white dudes. They’re the worst 

Kate: is that where, how was, yeah. Or so one mistake we made by the way, which I didn’t know, this was, you cannot hire a salesperson to be both a manager and a salesperson.

Brent: Yeah. Very true. Absolutely. You can’t hire anybody to be either to do dual jobs. They’re gonna do two jobs poorly. 

Kate: Yes. And that is a mistake that I made. I didn’t. I do that. So I don’t understand why someone else can’t do that, to be honest with you. And Lauren does that. There are Brian does that.

Kate: I have superior people in the world who can do that. So it’s of like why, but it’s not everybody’s nature, so I think that’s the first thing a very easy tell for us is this is if your company, if the PE, if your employees aren’t saying. you’re doing something wrong. 

Brent: Yeah. If they’re saying you Kate, that then also you, and I’m, they don’t because I’ve talked to your employees.

Brent: If they are though, just always referring back to you, that’s also could be a problem. 

Kate: I do that by the way on purpose. So I rarely, I don’t like it when people call me the boss, I correct them and say, don’t say that I don’t like. I say we all the time, my team I rarely say my employees, I rarely do.

Kate: I need them and I don’t like the word need, this an needy team is needy, but I cannot live without them. And so they know that

Kate: I send them gifts often, like little surprises, even the. Some T all guys like pocket knives, you can give them endless pocket knives. Am I right there? 

Brent: send ’em a box of tampons. A hundred figure out what to do with these . I do, I want to just go back cuz I you talked about re you’re editing Lauren’s copy when she started it.

Brent: And I think that and it sounds like you explained to her. Why you’re doing it, I’m trying. Cause I think a lot of times a lot of times leaders will jump on they’ll just take it and they’ll do it, but they don’t give any feedback on why that happened. And that just leads to narratives in people’s heads.

Brent: And I think 

Kate: I made that mistake actually, because I assumed that she would understand and know right. And I assume that she would take the time to read it and think about it. But of course, Lauren is busy and she’s just trying to check shit off her list and get, cuz she’s the queen of productivity.

Kate: She knows that. I respect that. And so either one of us weren’t both of us, didn’t want to take the time to do what you just said, which is a very important thing to do cuz who can learn if you don’t do that. And. , know, like I said, why can’t someone read my mind? What the fuck when it’s so obvious to me, but I’m sure at the same time, she’s thinking why can’t Kate read my mind. 

Brent: So yeah, I, I have definitely got, I’ve gotten into the habit of explaining I’m always now trying to play chess with Anticipating the way somebody’s thinking. And I realize that people that are happy are more motivated and that they’re gonna be more productive when they’re motivated and that when they’re happy and productive, they’re gonna get a lot of work done.

Brent: So if I’m gonna be critical of somebody, I would like to explain all those reasons why that’s gonna. and I maybe now do it to, is the word in nauseam or something like that where you do it too much. Yes. Ad nauseum, whatever in nauseum I’m nauseous. Just that, that verbal feedback, because I think we do I also suffer from that same thing.

Brent: Of course, everybody should know what I’m thinking and yes, everybody can do this. Everybody can be a great salesperson. They can also be a developer. I fall onto that trap because I used to be a developer and I would. Of course, you can do that in AWS. I can do it in 20 minutes. Let’s watch me do it.

Brent: And everybody’s oh God, this is the worst time of my life. You can see everybody’s eyes are glazing over and pretty soon, like they’re, anyways, so to read the room, right? Yeah. Read the, yeah. And then it makes it worse on zoom, all everybody’s camera goes off and then you get done with your demo.

Brent: And then, so what did everybody think? And nobody’s there, it’s silence. Everybody’s gone to the bathroom. Oh, I’m sorry. And then one person leaves the mic on and the flush sound comes out and your zoom call was ruined or saved yeah. Or saved exactly. 

Kate: yeah, I think I oftentimes I wish people would ask me why I do.

Kate: and they don’t. And so that, that is frustrating to me because I want the initiative to, to be there and that’s, my problem is that’s why I’m the entrepreneur and these other people are not right. That’s a different skill, so I have to constantly readjust my perspective to reality and think about.

Kate: What’s gonna, what’s gonna get the job done. Like you said, like, how do we get people to be happy and motivated and successful all at the same time? I think that

Kate: it’s important to ask people. Do you like working here? Sometimes you, I brace myself for the answer. You still like working here? Are you leaving? I just wanna know. I think that. knowing what your weaknesses are really important. Like I said I’m not a great cheerleader, but Katie Jordan is, she’s amazing.

Kate: She does it for me. And Chris is great at that. Everybody is there everybody piles on, but you need a cheerleader on the team if it’s not you that bubbly. When, when Lauren’s on vacation, slack is quiet. And you feel that energy gone like that. It’s so important. She she doesn’t even real.

Kate: I don’t know. She realizes that she probably does that. How. Much that energy. Slack is our workplace, right? That’s our work environment. And so it’s the, you can see the thermometer of how things going now. When I like last week, an investor who had hard, committed first to a smaller amount, and then to three times an amount hard commit pulled out for no reason.

Kate: I just was like, mother, fuck. I said every swear word of the thing like that could be. And no, I don’t do it in the general channel. I just did it with Lauren, Jason and Brian because I don’t wanna upset everyone else, but I need them to know cuz they’re my they’re. We are running the business together.

Kate: We’re running the numbers, we’re looking at all these things, but Brian and Jason are co-founders like, they do need to know what happened with this investor. And I need the ability in a place to express. Frustration. I also need them to have sympathy for me because like, when I have to ask them to not have a paycheck, they need to know exactly why, and I’m not doing it on purpose and it’s not cuz I’m selfish or I’m money grubber, there’s a real reason and it’s very painful for me.

Kate: So that sympathy, empathy thing here I think is so important. Like I’m just a person, Brent, I’m trying to do this thing. and they are these people’s lives are in my hands a little bit. Cuz a paycheck is a paycheck. I 

Brent: Yeah I want to just jump on that happiness thing. I had a post on LinkedIn recently that I just put out there.

Brent: I meet with every person on my team every quarter. one on one, just for 15 minutes to get to know them. And we have team members in India and Mexico . I do that and I’ve always had this. I’ve always had a question that I’ve asked and I think I’m asking, are you happy in your job or something like that?

Brent: And I been thinking about it and like I was thinking like does anybody ever ask, are you happy? And period, because yeah. Are you happy period? Because there is. And maybe happy in your job or happy, whatever it’s different. And knowing if you’re happy, if you’re not happy.

Brent: Again, people probably aren’t gonna tell me in that short time, hopefully, maybe over time. In fact I recently did have an interview that I did where he said that I’m very intimidating and it’s hard. Like you had said, you want people to tell you the things that like if they don’t understand something and I think people don’t tell people things because leaders can be intimidating.

Brent: I can get very impatient and then become very I can be an asshole. And and especially when something going the way it should go and. I’m gonna assume you can relate with this. This is something that’s so obvious. Why aren’t we all doing this? Whatever that thing is oh my God, this is obvious. We should know this. You always get French fries at McDonald’s what thing? Yeah. Which I don’t, it’s the thing I don’t, I’m just making the insane, but it’s come on, everybody knows that in. As you’re driving on the freeway and you stop and you get a burger, you get fries, right? You get a Coke and a fries. Everybody does that. What the heck is going on with our team?

Brent: You guys are only getting chicken sandwiches. This is ridiculous. Everybody knows it.

Brent: It’s true. So I don’t know, is there, I think it’s a hard that’s, it’s gotta be one of the hardest things as a leader to give that space to somebody to allow to to open up and tell you, cuz it is a little bit of vulnerability from that person. And and maybe that’s I’m dealing.

Brent: Three different cultures. It used to be four. We used to have an office in Bolivia. But we have three cultures now. So I think culture’s a little different, right? 

Kate: Yeah. I think, one thing is I always, and I’ve said this before, like I expect them to go to to complain about me, to each other.

Kate: I expect that happens to all managers and bosses. That’s part of the role that you’re accepting. And so good. Do it complain to each other, get it out of your system, certainly. The same way how many times you be, are you like fucking Brent? I say that of course, about myself, about, oh, whoever it is that’s just your, and it’s not you mean like you, you have to know that, like to and express a frustration.

Kate: because someone isn’t perfect in this second moment. It’s meaningless it’s just this thing, evaporating the world. And when you have people around me sometimes I’ll complain to Lauren about other people and the company and just cause I need that outlet with somebody and the validation that I’m not alone in this thought, and I’m sure they all, I know they all do this to each other, which is fine.

Kate: And I think they’re, that’s part of the culture that you wanna encourage, right? People are gonna vent it’s. This is human nature. And I think of it as if lately if everything about lately was. Just smooth sailing. Boy, we have no fun whatsoever. This is part of the adventure.

Kate: Are we gonna make it, are we not? So it, that ups and downs, it keeps it interesting. Like I, I think that’s why they come to work every day is cuz they’re wondering what’s gonna happen. I don’t know. 

Brent: That’s it’s often said that without stress, without contention, without arguments, that you don’t move anything forward.

Brent: If everyone is always on the same page you could be going in the right direction, but you may not. And having a dissenter, there is always a, it was always, it’s always a having a dissenter there to ask those questions is important. And I think that essential. Yeah, it’s essential, right? We, as a leader we need to make that space.

Brent: I know that we’ve sent people we’ve sent Indian developers to Germany in onsite to work. And one of their, one of their things that they’ve said was that they were surprised that other team members on the German team would. Hard pushback to the boss in the room. And for them, that was an eye opening thing.

Brent: Cause their culture more is more around. And I’m sure I’m gonna get a whole bunch of Indian developers not telling you. No, it’s not like that here. But their culture is more about doing what you’re told. And you don’t often. It’s not a strong cultural trait to question the boss and to say this I’m a white guy anyways.

Brent: I don’t know, concern that because that’s my perception of the culture. I’m gonna I’m making a disclaimer. I’m gonna put a little asterisks in my transcript. Don’t get back to me on this, but I digress. 

Kate: Yeah, I gotta go do shit, Brent.

Kate: I’ll say this one thing, we just released a new feature where the AI is rearranging what it finds to pull out into wholly new content. Okay. it, we just launched it like the other day. We haven’t told anybody. We haven’t even told our customers like so you’ll just start to see it suddenly the surprise you’ll be like, who wrote this?

Kate: Oh my God. The AI. and it’s pretty good. All 

Brent: right, I’m gonna go try it. 

Kate: Yeah. Keep an eye out. Yeah. 

Brent: Kate, I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug at the end of the podcast. So what would you like?

Kate: Oh Jesus, I’m gonna plug forgiveness today. Forgiveness. 

Brent: all right. Thank you. 

Kate: Yeah, I think we all 

Brent: need a little mark. Kate Laly Kate . 

Kate: This is why just so you know, I’m on the air. I stopped saying my name because I mispronounced my own name once in an interview with the guys from we. And so I never said it again.

Brent: Yeah. Did you wean yourself off that? 

Kate: About a thing on me. Oh my God. I love you. 

Brent: Yes, you’re so funny. Kate Bradley co founder of lately, CEO of lately. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Kate: Thank you, Brent. 

The Real Kid in the Bulk Candy Store with Ken Shenkman

Have you ever felt like a kid in the candy store? Imagine if that was your day job! This week we interview Ken Shenkman, who has been running his family business since 1992 and is on BigCommerce.

Nestled in sunny South Florida, The Bulk Candy Store sees its staff as family and its customers as close friends. Bulk Candy Store has been helping celebrate memorable events with sweets and snacks since 1992. Every day is a celebration, and sharing those moments with the people we cherish is priceless. Whether you are ringing in the New Year or just gathering to make merry, the Bulk Candy Store has all of the sweet treats you need to make the special occasions of your life exceptional.

After all, Candy is Happy

@bulkcandystore

Perfect Peanut Butter Cup ??#bulkcandystore #candyishappy #colossalpeanutbuttercup #delicious #giantpeanutbuttercup #fyp #madetootder #foryoupage

? original sound – BulkCandyStore

The new world of digital with Lewis Rothkopf

Remember the days when you could turn on Google Ads, and the customers would come flowing in the door? Those days are gone, and Lewis Rothkopf walks us through techniques and ways to spend smart and measure often.

Lewis has led global businesses and revenue lines at the world’s foremost marketing, ad tech, and media companies. Lewis has contributed to the demand-side global inventory supply chain, as well as mobile, video, and advanced TV, streaming audio, digital out-of-home (DOOH), social, and emerging channels businesses.

Brent Peterson and Lewis Rothkopf discuss the digital advertising industry from the lens of a veteran digital marketer. Rothkopf’s innate interest in this niche started at a very young age. He exerted all efforts to learn the processes and metrics on how marketers measure success in this field, including artificial intelligence (AI) and media buying. Enjoy this episode and gain insights into digital marketing and advertising that is not just from the book.

Stay tuned and enjoy this Talk Commerce episode.

A notable quote from this podcast:

“So there’s no machine to learn, and then take those learnings and turn them into better outcomes. So AI is becoming more and more entrenched in everything that we do. It’s just more often called machine learning. And, you know, we do it, I’d have to imagine that all of our competitors do it. But it’s the sort of thing that can make better decisions quicker than humans. So yeah, you got to get on board with that.”

Our guest today is Lewis Rothkopf, CEO of Martin.ai, a demand-side platform (DSP). It is a media buying platform for marketers.

Here, Lewis discusses the idea of digital advertising from its primitive days until today, when AI is already making noticeable progress in the industry.

Gain useful insights on how the advertising industry has changed over time, including how marketers measure campaign performance’s success in the past until now. Look at the optimization efforts that can be done these days to maximize the results of any digital advertising campaign.

Key Takeaways

[2:18] – How do marketers measure success? (Click Through Rate, Cost Per Action)

[6:06] – The Technicalities

[11:46] – The Budgeting Scheme

[14:05] – How does Google rule the digital advertising industry?

[16:44] – The Industry’s Changes: Explained

[26:48] – The Role of Martin.AI

[35:01] – Artificial Intelligence in Digital Advertising

Ideas/Quotes by Lewis Rothkopf

  1. In truth, I’ve been in the space, as Brent mentioned, for 23 years. I started at the beginning of digital advertising at a company called double click, which was subsequently bought by Google. I’ve seen it all I’ve seen what works, I’ve seen what doesn’t work. And it’s really been my mission for the last six or seven years to fix the industry. I began by trying to fix it during most of my career on the sell side of that is people who are selling advertising. And you know, not surprisingly, if you really want to fix things, you have to be on the buy side, which is the people who have budgets to spend money on advertising, because of course, those who have the budgets are those who can really help dictate a better and stronger and more accountable industry.
  2. So in the very beginning of digital marketing, marketers measured the success of their campaigns by click-through rate, right, so an ad is displayed, the user a consumer clicks on the ad, and a number of times, and that n number over the number of impressions is your click-through rate 23 years ago, that was really the best measure that was used, there’s only the only measure that was used. But that was a really long time ago. And so things haven’t changed, marketers are still measuring their success by things like click-through rate, they’re also measuring by things like views through so how many people sat and watched a video ad to completion. And if that video complete rate is high, then the marketer goes home happy, except maybe they sat there and watched the whole video, or maybe they were in a different browser tab, or maybe they were in the bathroom, or maybe they were in the kitchen getting a snack. And so that’s not a great measure, either, where you start to get a bit more excited is something called CPA cost per action.
  3. Look, we’re a small company martin.ai, we have a dedicated group of engineers and data scientists who are willing and excited to help you, I mentioned that we’re a small company because we help in many cases, midsize agencies and mid-sized marketers punch above their weight, right companies that don’t have an army of data scientists in the house to do all this measurement and all this optimization that we talked about, they can do it with us, and they are doing it with us.

Resources/Social Media

Martin.ai Website

https://www.martin.ai/

Social Media

Twitter: https://twitter.com/martin_rtb 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/martin-ai/ 

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today. I have Lewis Rothkopf. He is the precedent of Martin DSP. He is a digital media veteran with more than 23 years of experience in the space. And the funny part is Lewis was just telling me that he’s twenty-five years old.   Lewis, why don’t you go ahead, introduce yourself, and do a better job than I did. Tell us what you do in your day-to-day life and maybe one of your patterns.

Lewis: Thanks for having me. Your note that I’m twenty-five years old is absolutely accurate. I began working in digital advertising when I was a fetus, and that’s why it all sort of worked out so well. I also want to compliment you on getting the name right on the first try. Rothkopf means redhead in German. And if this were a video podcast, you would see that I do not have any red hair. So I’ve begun with my name being a lie. In truth, I’ve been in this space, as Brent mentioned, for 23 years, and I started all the way. Back in the very beginning of digital advertising at a company called DoubleClick, which was subsequently bought by Google.I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen what works. I’ve seen what doesn’t work. And it’s really been my mission for the last six or seven years to fix the industry. I began by trying to fix it during most of my career on the sell-side,

that is, people who are selling advertising and, you know, Surprisingly if you really want to fix things, you have to be on the buy side, which is the people who have budgets to spend money on advertising. Because, of course, those who have the budgets are those who can really help dictate a better and stronger, and more accountable industry. That’s why I made the jump. And it’s why I’m really passionate about what we’re going to talk about today. 

Brent: I think the idea of marketing has been out for a long time. And then the idea of measuring what your marketing has been out, you should always try to measure it. And I think the reality is that most people doing marketing aren’t measuring at all what they’re doing. I know that we talked a little bit in the green room about your approach to measuring the marketing and what that means to the person that is spending the money on marketing and how that really helps them, and maybe go into some of what we were talking about where it hasn’t, you know, things are changing in the digital market.

Lewis: Yeah. Great point. So in the very beginning of digital marketing, marketers measured the success of their campaigns by click-through rate, right? So an ad has displayed a user, a consumer clicks on the ad and number of times, and that N number over the number of impressions is your click-through rate. Twenty-three years ago, that was really the best measure that was used. There was only the only measure that was used. But that was a really long time ago. And so things haven’t changed. Marketers are still measuring their success by things like click-through rate. They also measure by things like view-through, so how many people sat and watched a video ad to completion? And if that video complete rate is high, then the marketer goes home happy except. Maybe they sat there and watched the whole video, or maybe they were in a different browser tab, or maybe they were in the bathroom, or maybe they were in the kitchen getting a snack. And so that’s not a great measure either. Where you start to get a bit more excited is something called CPA cost per action. And that is the cost that is imputed from the number of times that a consumer sees an ad. And then it takes the action that action can be buying a product or signing up for a lead gen form on a website or really anything. And while that is eons better than click-through rate, it’s still problematic. And the reason for that is a cost per action fails to separate users who saw an ad, comma, and took the action, so I know I’m going to go out and buy a pair of Nike sneakers.For instance, I see a bunch of Nike ads, and then I go and buy the Nike sneakers, but I was going to go buy those sneakers regardless of whether or not I saw the ad versus somebody who knew they were going to buy sneakers, saw the ad for Nike’s. These are super awesome. And they went out and bought the Nike’s because they saw the ad. And so that relationship between people who saw the ad and then people who bought the product because of the ad is called incremental lift. As opposed to CPA, which only tells you how many people saw the ad, comma, and how many people bought the product. So you’re giving credit to wherever you’re running that advertising as a marketer for people who would have been your customers anyhow. And so I think that’s crazy. We believe I believe that in order for measurement and optimization to be accurate, it has to be. Otherwise,

you’re using these old proxy metrics or vanity metrics where, you know, as a marketer, you pat yourself on the back. You’re like, oh man, a lot of people saw the video. But it’s not really true. And even cost per action. All it tells you is that you reach the right audience. Congratulations. You reached people who buy sneakers but were going to buy sneakers. Anyhow. So you just wasted that money as opposed to crediting the supply source when the action was taken because of the advertising. 

Brent: That’s a great point. And taking on a real-life example, Nike has a, and I’m a runner. So Nike has a type of running shoe called vapor fly that every single one of the major marathon winners are wearing. However, I guess there is a whole community of people that talk about those and then use them. I think at some point somebody’s going to buy them, but you write it. How do you determine, was it me who saw the ad for vapor fly, or was it me that I saw the race where I see every single runner wearing them or the winners wearing them? Like, how do you make that connection? That’s where you’re getting to? 

Lewis: Yeah, it is. And another great point you just made. So I’ll dive ever so slightly into the technical aspect of it, but I promise I won’t go too far. We use a technology at our company called ghost beads. We didn’t invent it. It’s been used by many marketers. But it avoids much of the noise and much of the false positives that are associated with the older forms of measurement like CPA. And so you use these anonymous unique identifiers to create a statistically significant and accurate model of people who were shown the ad and took action because of it. But then critically, you use a statistical model to not show the ad to a holdout group. So think about it like the random control trials that pharmaceutical companies used to understand placebo versus effect and safety of medication. Now, to be clear, we are not saving lives here. This is digital advertising. Everybody goes home alive. And so let me stop the patting ourselves on our back too much. But the difference there is you now understand the Delta between those who saw it and those who took action because they saw it. How do we do it in the case of online sales or being driven to a website where that’s the marketer’s KPIs. It’s always on. It’s built into our platform. We do it by default, and we highly recommend to our customers that they measure that way. If your KPI is brand lift or brand sentiment, if you’re a brand advertiser running a branding campaign, Then we work with a survey vendor that similarly has a control group and a holdout group. If your measure is real-world traffic, so football, we work with a partner that does football analysis and understands test group hold out-group, et cetera. So long answer to your short question is it’s not enough to say, Hey, I think we should be figuring out causation it’s. I think we should be figured out causation. And now, what’s the best way to measure that to the KPI that I want to achieve. 

Brent: Okay. That’s very interesting. At the top level, you’re sir, you’re doing some broad surveys to determine what is the group doing, and then you have, do you have it different levels that you’ll break down those statistics as it go through. How does that work? So in a break it down a little bit,

Lewis: We work with a great company called lucid which is our default partner for serving they’re built into our platform. They’re really good at what they do. And then they have the statistical models to run against their panel of consumers who’ve seen the ad versus not seen the ad and then they derive statistical significance of Whether it had enough responders, whether there were enough impressions that were delivered in order to achieve stat SIG. And then based upon all those inputs were able to understand causation, unlike in some of the older models you do have that delineation between actions taken because of versus  noise. And let me explain a bit what I mean by that? A way of AB testing, the effectiveness of a campaign that is still in use by marketers is DMA based. So I’m going to show this ad to people in these designated market areas. And I’m going to show the same ad to people in these designated market areas and I’m going to work really hard to ensure that the DMA audience population. Is similar. So roughly same number of people, roughly same demographic makeup, roughly similar DMA size. The problem is it doesn’t work. Because there are all these exogenous factors that come into play when you’re using geographic differentiation, what did the consumer in one DMA here on the radio that made them take an action. What stores are located in these DMAs? What TV commercials did they see what’s with road traffic in the area that will lead people to either go to a store or say, you know, what to hell with it? You know, this was my first choice of product, but I’m not going to sit on the 4 0 5 for an hour. So I’m just going to go buy this other thing. And so while it’s a sound idea it’s really imperfect because a lot of the noise that’s injected in. We look to figure out and to be clear, like with any model there’s going to be noise. So the objective here is not no noise. You know, this vaccine is safe and effective 99% of the time. Again, it’s digital advertising. We’re not saving lives here. We don’t necessarily strive for 99 and, you know, five nines statistical accuracy, but we try to get really close. And noise is definitely a thing, but it is much less of a thing than with some of the older models, even models that are better than doing silly things like measuring a click-through rate. They still do have some noise and we are on a mission as an industry. To get the noise out and really help marketers understand cause what’s worse. So you measure a campaign and imperfect way you get your report. That’s bad enough because now you don’t know if or where or why your marketing is working. But you double down on those results and you optimize towards stuff that is irrelevant. And so you create this vicious cycle of garbage data in garbage outputs, and you may feel good about the clicks you see on a thing, but is it really moving your shampoo off the shelf? I dunno, it’s not knowable unless you measure this stuff correctly.

Brent: You’ve talked about some larger things here is this apply to just big brands or can this filter down to medium size and even the mom and pop shops? 

Lewis: Absolutely. I think, look, I think it’s more important for smaller marketers, because their budgets tend to be limited. Like you don’t want the pizza place. We stick their money. Like you just don’t. It works at all stages of the. So whether it’s a brand advertiser and looking to generate awareness, or it’s a direct response advertisers looking to create, I don’t know lead gen or an online purchase it works at all levels and it’s important at all levels, right? Like again, think about the pizza place example. Did someone come in and buy a slice because they’re like, oh man, Pizza sounds really good. This ad was shown to me at exactly the right time and the cheese is bubbling and it’s awesome. Or did they see that ad as they were already on their way out the door to go to Brent’s pizza place? Brent’s pizza place does not have a lot of money to waste. And so it’s really important for them to understand what’s working and double down on it, as opposed to we call it spray and pray where. Sure. Close your eyes and cast a really big net and hope to, you know, DD of your choice that it’s going to work.

Brent: Yeah. And I can guarantee that nobody’s going to go to Brent Peterson’s pizza place and look for a Swedish meatball pizza. You know, I think it’s one of the interesting things here. If you look back like 20 years ago, I can remember that at the time you could spend money on Google ad words, and it was like a faucet. You just started doing Google ad words, and suddenly you’re getting a ton of leads right now, 20 years later. It’s not the case anymore. And I think you make a really good point about wasting your money and the novice person who’s logging into Google ad-words thinks still. Hey, if I’m going to throw $5,000 or $10,000 at this, I’ll get that in return, but double or triple fold. And in lead quality, even maybe talk about the. The flaws in just throwing that money at Google ad-words for the your pizza place and your Lewisredhead pizza place. And that how maybe thinking more about how that works for that consumer and for the for the person doing the marketing helps them.

Lewis: So look, I mean, Google’s a great business. You’re absolutely right. Like you turn it on and you see search is great. Nobody can debate that. But search is really good for lower funnel, right? Like you’re searching for sneakers. Just, you already know you’re going to buy sneakers. It’s what happens when you don’t already know that you’re going to buy sneakers? You know, you see an ad for for Brooks running, for instance, or you see an ad for Nike or seen an ad for Reebok. Mainly those are pretty fly shoes. Like I could really use a new pair of sneakers, like hell yeah. And then you see the ad the second time and you’re like, oh man, my sneakers suck. I could really use some new sneakers. And then you see the ad the third time and you’re like, oh, F it like, not only do I want sneakers, I want Nike sneakers. I want Brookes sneakers. I want Reeboks Adidas, sneakers. And now. Okay, cool. Let me search for Nike sneakers and then, you know what the search people do a good job. They click on the link and all as well, or they just go to nike.com or they just go to Brooks or reebok.com. And they buy the sneakers now, should search get the credit when the consumer already knew they were going to buy the sneakers by virtue of having seen the ad for a sneaker brand. You know, another example is brand sentiment. So let’s say your brand doesn’t have the greatest reputation, or not even something so extreme. You’re known as a brand for Swedish meatball pizza place, but you’re like, That’s not all we do. Like we also have Turkey. And so you want to change, these examples are terrible. I’m so sorry. You want to change the public’s perception that we’re not just a Swedish meatball pizza place. We’re actually a Turkey place. And so getting at Turkey tacos exactly. And tacos. So get it the really early in the funnel. And then get a survey that says, Hey, did you, the Brent sells pizza? Yes, of course. That’s sort of your you know, baseline question, but did you also know that Brent sells Swedish meatballs? Oh man I didn’t before, but I do now. And that’s how you measure lift really high in the funnel. 

Brent: You know, another thing as a conception for a smaller, medium sized business too, is they have this pool of budget money they want to spend. And they devote all that money to Google ad words. They don’t think about this bigger brand and where they should be putting some of that money. Maybe talk a little bit about how some of that should be spaced out for your ad spend and what type spends you’re going to go after it’s 

Lewis: such an easy oversight,. Right because to your point 20 years ago, you turn on the spigot and boom it’s money and it’s not that it’s not boom it’s money today. It’s that consumers have way more choices than ever. And you have this notion of DTC direct to consumer, which really was way less of a thing 20 years ago. And so at that point in time, it was just about I am searching for sneakers. And you know, here’s the only place I’m really going to see it relevant sneaker ad because. Real relevance only comes from the search signal. So Lewis search for sake first for sneakers. And so I’m going to put them in a bucket of people that like sneakers and I’m gonna show them a bunch of sneaker ads. But I like other things too. And I do other things too, and I have my own preconceived notions about which brands are better or even which you know which model is better within a brand. And so when you buttress your lower funnel campaigns with upper funnel brand awareness brand sentiment, as we talked about a moment ago and then understand the brands lift will now you’ve come much closer to solving that classic Wanamaker problem of, I know half of my advertising works, but I don’t know which half, like you can keep targeting that unknown 50% by using only a lower funnel tactics, which is fine, or you can make the pie bigger and get a bit more precise on how much of your target audience you’re reaching effectively by way of your advertising and then optimize like quickly do this stuff in real time. If you sit around, run a campaign and then get a lift report a month after the campaign what do you do? Like that money is spent, you’re not going to get it back. And so all you could hope to do is get it right the next time. Versus if you’re measuring this stuff in flight, you could make the changes right away and double down on what works and pull back on what doesn’t.

Brent: I did an interview a couple of weeks ago with the guy from the Netherlands. Who’s really big into conversion optimization. And he gave the example of booking.com and how booking.com has been a big proponent of AB testing and conversion testing and all that fun stuff. And he gave the statistic of, they have 10% win rates on their hypothesis or their tests. Which leads to say that then they continue to do it. And booking.com is a pretty big company. The idea of the merchant and what they should expect in some of these metrics and then how do they see success after that? Especially if you hire a company to do conversion optimization. And they say, well, 10% of our tests are good. How do you as a marketer, how do you translate that to the merchant? No, this is really successful. 

Lewis: Yeah, exactly. So which channel. That’s awesome that you’ve got 10%, like that’s more than awesome, that’s incredible. But how much of that was caused by the advertising versus coincidental to the advertising? Like you got to know what the, and 10% is and who they are so that you can reach more of them or, similar to a drug trial where it’s just not working and you’re running the risk of hurting people just to stop. Just stop And regroup. And there’s a whole bunch of factors that go into conversion and going to ad effectiveness. One that is very overlooked so much of the time, and it’s pretty surprising is. Like at the end of the day, like you, you’ve got to have creative that resonates with the consumer. And so almost all the time when a campaign is not doing well on a particular publisher or a group of publishers, the marketer, or the agency will pull that publisher off. Cause they’ll say, you know what? Your audience sucks. They don’t click on anything. They don’t convert. It’s probably the wrong people. And so they pull the ads away from that audience. Then they do the same thing with other sites and you know, this is how much optimization runs today. However, Your creative is terrible. Like it’s ugly. No, one’s going to click on it. Nobody wants to see more or it’s obnoxious, you know, you load the page and then you get this like sound on auto start video and it pisses the consumer off. Like you got to remember that all the marketing science-y stuff, that’s smarter people than I love to talk about is so important. But creative is really important too. So if you’re getting 10% resonance on a campaign, you know, sort of statistically, that’s great, but how much more resonance would you get if you tested multiple varying variables within the creative, right? If you dynamically optimize creative based upon what you know about the context and the anonymous attributes of that user. Will you just by so doing, you’re already speaking in much clearer and more appropriate language to your target customer. 

Brent: I think oftentimes, especially as your budget gets smaller, creative gets almost non-existent right. They think that tech stack is going to be, what’s going to sell them. And you’re exactly right. How important creativity can be and how I can think of a brand called the Geek Squad. I, the Geek Squad started in Minneapolis. And the owner drove around Simcas and had all kinds of old-fashioned cars that he drove around and did repairs. And then all of a sudden Best Buy bought them. They’ve kept some of that creative but he started that business on this little creative notion of getting better service and more innovative support for your computer needs. And now suddenly it’s doing everything everywhere in the country. You know, I think a lot of, again, going back to creative, a lot of smaller merchants look at creative, even medium-sized merchants, they don’t, they forget about creative. They just think. I like your idea of the hitting the shotgun, trying to hit everything at once, and then hopefully something sticks. 

Lewis: You’re a small advertiser, you’ve got a small target audience. You got to reach them and you don’t really have a budget to hire a, you know, top 50 creative shops. You can go on to Fiverr, right? You can go on to, you know, any talent marketplace and find somebody fantastic and tell them here’s what I’m trying to communicate. I don’t know the first thing about, you know, creative or brand marketing, but just do something that is going to result in the consumer being inspired, to take any action based upon it. Do at least that and do it in a way that the ad is not like repulsive or offensive by being so obnoxious to the user. And I can almost guarantee you that with better creativity comes better outcomes. 

Brent: Sometimes it’s noxious to the user. It works, but not very often. So really quick, a B to B, I know you’ve mentioned, I think a lot of these things apply directly to D to C, but B2B is such a huge market. And I think a lot of those, a lot of the people that are on B2B are what’s called legacy. Pre sometimes pre-internet users, even a B2B marketing is kinda hitting its stride now. Does a lot of the supply to B2B?

Lewis: Yeah. So we have one B2B client. We’re hoping to bring another one in soon. It’s re you’ve dealt it, right? It’s very important that you reach the right consumer and in the world of B2B, the Target’s just smaller, right? Unless you happen to be a massive solutions provider or you sell products to, you know, every store owner, every business owner in the world, which let’s face it is not many. Then you’ve got to make sure that you’re reaching the right people. So examples of that would-be doctors in hospitals lawyers in law practices, maybe not even while they’re at home, maybe only when they’re in the practice or they’re in the hospital because they’re in the mode of. I don’t know, boy, these syringes are really terrible. I would love to find a place to buy new and better syringes. So what does that mean in terms of nuts and bolts? Budgets, probably going to be much smaller because there are just fewer doctors in hospitals to reach than there are sneaker aficionados. And so you have less to screw up with, right? Like getting it wrong from a targeting and creative perspective or a measurement perspective when your audience is, you know, 20 million consumers are like, you got a little runway here, you’ve got sort of statistic probability of some of it working somewhere just by virtue of the large numbers. But if you’re trying to reach 500,000 doctors in hospitals who want to buy those new syringes. You can’t screw up from the get-go. Like you have to make sure that you’re getting it right. And if you’re not getting it right again, have those results available to you in real-time so that you can titrate up or down based upon how the campaign is performing tweak, tweak the creative, but absolutely this certainly applies to B2B marketers. You’re just targeting a different mindset. And so the demographics, the psychographics, the geography, right? So remember. You’re able through the use of, you know, a handful of partners to draw these squares or around a map. And, you know, maybe the one square you want to draw is this hospital and that hospital. And just by virtue of doing that, we’ll now you’re able to understand what the footfall is based upon the advertising that you’re running. And a pretty, pretty good sense that you’re targeting the right individual. 

Brent: So if maybe just walk us through, if somebody has some interest in free-thinking how do they talk to you about this and how do you start that conversation? So you can reach out to us and let’s not make it an advertisement, but I think this is super interesting.

Lewis: Yes. We like to help people you go to martin.ai and you see. You know, Lewis sounded really interesting or he sounded like a moron, but what he was talking about was interesting. And the first question we asked, both prospective customers and existing customers, when they want to launch a new campaign is like, what do you want to do? Like do you want to get people to come to a physical location? Do you want people to buy things online? You know, like what’s your objective here? And then we say, who’s your audience. Then we say, how much are you looking to spend? Because that absolutely dictates how much of it you’re doing, but what it should not dictate is quality. So if you come to me or any of our competitors with a $5,000 budget you should get as high-quality properties that you advertise on. And as. Quality results as those that come to us with a $50 million budget. However, what you might struggle with a little bit is achieving statistical significance in measurement studies. So for things like visits to a website or, you know, online dr type metrics or sales online, it’s pretty easy. If you’re looking to do brand sentiment, measurement, footfall measurement, you’re probably gonna have to spend a bit more than 5,000 bucks in order. To achieve stat SIG and take some real learnings from the situation. But again, like we’re happy to help folks succeed. They have to have a good understanding of what good looks like to them. And then we can help them take it from there. And whether that goal is sales, you know, foot fall sentiment we can help tune. 

Brent: People have to wake up and realize as well, is that because the market is so small. I’ll talk about hosting companies. Hosting companies tend to have a small market, but they tend to spend a lot of money to acquire a customer. So whether they’re using a LinkedIn ad or they’re using a Google ad or whatever they’re using that specific ad rate is going to be a lot higher than another industry, especially if you’re talking B2B like this, and a lot of times. I hear from inexperienced b2B owners that don’t understand some of this digital and looking back at some of the legacy B2B, where they’ve always relied on a call center to take their sales. And it goes right in another ERP and they’ve skipped the website completely. Suddenly. It was. W let’s look at their website, and let’s try to acquire some customers. They don’t necessarily equate how much it costs to acquire that customer for that voice. There’s a person that’s making outbound calls. There’s a whole cycle to that. I think one thing that we were saying, or you’re saying here is that there’s this bigger picture that most owners have to see entrepreneurs, whoever it is that’s spending the ultimate check has to see that the cost to acquire this customer is going to be. Somewhat similar if you’re going strictly digital as if you’re going analog over the phone.

Lewis: Yeah. And targeting it’s just so much more precise and it’s so much more efficient to execute via programmatic pipes and right. Digital pipes than it is via, you know, the old, like sending an IO back and forth, you know, using your fax machine, some of the, getting it right stuff for B2B. Is super unintuitive, right? So you know, you spend enough time in this stuff and you start to draw some really interesting correlations things. Like people I’m only making it up. People who are in market for a luxury auto are substantially more likely they over-index on people who like chocolate chip cookies, okay. You’ll never know that before you run a campaign. And the other thing is it doesn’t matter. Just because you can know something doesn’t mean that it makes sense for you to exercise, right? However some targeting is super intuitive. You are a hosting company and you want to reach IT professionals. You want to reach only CTOs. And so we run a digital campaign that runs on a streaming audio channel. You can buy. You know, radio programmatically that is of particular interest to CTOs or buy a podcast spot on, you know, the CTOs who drive to work in San Francisco podcast, right? Podcasts are the new magazines they allow for super precision targeting. It is a misconception that you can only do that by picking up the phone and calling the podcast. It’s just not the case. There are multiple avenues today to be able to run programmatically in audio and the holy grail of all of this is reaching consumers and businesses. In the case of B2B cross-channel. I’m a doctor in a hospital and, you know, I’m looking up new syringes on my hospital computer. And so I see the app, Benny, get into my car and I’m listening to the, you know, doctors who need syringes podcast. And all of a sudden I hear whoa, that’s the same ad. I just heard. That I saw back when I was in the hospital and then they get home and they’re watching, you know, connected TV. They’re watching a program on-demand and they see that ad for that syringe company. And it’s oh my God. They know exactly what I care about. Isn’t that awesome. And you know, you do have to be a little careful not to be creepy about it. You do have to be careful to make sure that you’re not targeting. Individuals because that’s gross and contrary in most cases to industry rules and best practices. But if you’re targeting a group of anonymous consumers, anonymous business owners, and you’re surrounding them with high-quality advertising, well, now you just replicated in, in many senses, the most effective historical analog campaigns. And you’ve done so in a way that it’s pretty efficient. 

Brent: If so, looking ahead into 2022 now what is the thing that a merchant who’s going to spend some money on advertising should be looking at? Is there a trend that you see coming testing?

Lewis: Test and learn like experiments only work when you experiment with them. Don’t go in with preconceived notions, right? Like you’re a very smart person. I promise you, you don’t know everything about how your campaigns are going to resonate. So again, some of these things are really intuitive. Most of them are not. And so don’t be afraid to experiment with creative, with targeting with, you know, all the different apps with. With the kinds of sites or apps or radio shows that you want to get on or connected TV channels. Don’t be afraid to give all this stuff a try and don’t be afraid to give it a try with a modest budget like you may not reach stats SIG on a $5,000 budget, but you may start to get some inklings that would lead you to move budget away from something else in, into this. And for the love of God, like don’t optimized to stupid old things like just don’t optimize to CTR. Don’t optimize to, well, I have $5,000. I want to spend $5,000. So let me just let the supply source run this thing for $5,000 worth and like sure enough, that’s going to lead to success, right? No, don’t do that. Be scientific about that and work with companies that are willing and ready to help you by making data scientists available and saying, this is your campaign, these are your results. But did you know that if you just tweaked the creative like this, or if you just increased your bid amount by 10 cents, you’d be able to win over this whole additional audience that is square within your strike zone? You gotta work with people that are willing to tell you that. 

Brent: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. So one last question while we close out here, where do you think AI is going to bring us into this next realm? And how much of a play do you think it has? Certainly, it’s making a play in the smaller portions of marketing, but do you think some of these bigger things are going to be controlled by algorithms rather than just by people?

Lewis: Great question. The exciting and challenging thing about that question is everyone defines AI differently, right? Like the buzzword of AI. Is probably a bit better replaced with algorithmic machine learning. You know, at our company, we have algorithms that can be customized based upon things we know from the advertiser and things we know about the user. And that helps inform how much we bid on a particular impression opportunity. I think if you’re not doing something like that in 2022. Where can’t you do that? You can’t do that in analog at all. Like you just can’t you’re buying a page or you’re buying time or you’re buying like, you know, a column of a newspaper. But there’s no impact from who’s reading that newspaper or, you know, who is my target within that newspaper readership. There’s no feedback loop there. And so there’s no machine to learn and then take those learnings and turn them into better outcomes. So AI is becoming more and more entrenched in everything that we do. It’s just more often called machine learning and, you know, We do it. I’d have to imagine that all of our competitors do it. But it’s the sort of thing that is able to make better decisions quicker than human. So yeah, you got to get on board with that. 

Brent: And the important part there is machine learning because you know, part of this, everybody does have something they’re calling AI. And if it doesn’t learn from your mistakes, it’s not really AI. It’s just automation. And I’ll just give my last little clothes out. I been trying some of these Jarvis style services and it wasn’t Jarvis that I tried, but it writes, you know, an article for you or whatever that thing is. And as many times as you put it in, it’s going to give you the same thing back out and there’s no way to tell it. It did it wrong. And I remember I tried to do it just to summarize a podcast and it made up all this stuff about a guy that he did, this stuff wasn’t even real, but it gave me a, you know, five, five paragraphs of content. That was completely wrong. I couldn’t use any of it. It gave me some bullet points that were good. The content within that bullet point was completely wrong. And the point of this is that it was automating it, but there’s no way to tell it. No, this was completely wrong. And here’s why in order to make machine learning work, it has, you have to have, you have to tell the machine. When it’s done something wrong so it can learn that’s my little soapbox complaint. So apologize for throwing that in. As we close out, every episode I give you a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug today.

Lewis: Yeah. So Lewis, what would you write to him? Always full of shame in my life. So I will try to be shameless. Look, we’re a small company. Martin.ai. We have dedicated groups of engineers and data scientists who are willing and excited to help you. I mentioned that we’re a small company because we help in many cases mid-size agencies and midsize marketers punch above their weight. Right companies that don’t have an army of data scientists in-house to do all this measurement and all this optimization that we talk about, they can do it with us and they are doing it with us. And, you know, as a smaller company ourselves, we’re super, super proud of being able to help marketers again at all stages of the funnel and all up and down in terms of size and scope. And I guess the shameless part of this is. We’re really the only platform that we’re aware of that has a built-in incrementality measurement, always on. So in real-time is your thing working. And if it is to go back to your immediately proceeding point, like feed that knowledge back into the algorithm, and pretty quickly you’ll start to learn.
Okay. People who come from making this up Chrome web browsers are more likely to resonate with this particular type of campaign. And so bid more for consumers that are in Chrome web browsers and, you know, to close it out if you’re not measuring the right thing, you’re telling the algorithm the wrong thing, and it’s just going to be an amplification of bad decisions.

Brent: And I think those bids for the IE6 users are pretty low Lewis Rothkopf. Thank you so much for being here. As Lewis is the president of Martin DSP, martin.ai is the place where you can find him. I will post a show notes. Thank you so much. It’s been 

Lewis:  I really enjoyed this. Thanks for having me on. 

Pros at Subscriptions with Rob Holthause

Brent speaks with Rob Holthause from Subscribe Pro. Rob focuses on helping businesses improve their efficiency and grow their revenue while building a loyal customer base. Rob is a native of Maryland and is proud to call Baltimore home. When not educating customers about subscription marketing and Subscribe Pro’s products, Rob can be found hiking and playing with his Chocolate Lab mix, Atlas. He teaches music lessons on the weekends and plays bass with the popular Baltimore-based reggae group, Can’t Hang.

Subscribe Pro is a subscription commerce solution that enables brands to offer auto-ship, subscribe-and-save, monthly box, and recurring billing programs on the Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud e-commerce platforms. They provide a thorough interface for customer service personnel to manage auto-ship or auto-replenishment programs and allow customers to modify subscriptions easily.

The importance of engaging content with Jared Loftus

Do you want to create more engaging content in your newsletters? Jared Loftus helps us to understand the importance of a fabulous newsletter.

Rasa enables marketers to create newsletters that engage customers through curated content that helps to build relationships. They give businesses a way to provide a real benefit regularly for everyone on their email list. And not just regularly, but relevantly. Through automation, companies can engage with a new level of frequency without spending more time, effort, or money.

Don’t Abandon Your Blog With Chris Chasteen

Imagine doom scrolling through Netflix, looking for the ideal show to binge-watch this weekend. Not the mind-numbing, watch while playing “Candy Crush” content, but the great shows that you really want to burn through 24 hours watching.

After reviewing thousands of low-budget horror movies and sitcoms, you finally stumble upon a hidden gem that you enjoy… but wouldn’t it be easier if these incredible shows appeared automatically? Or if the entirety of Netflix was customized for your exact specifications? That’s what Content Cucumber does (Well, they sort of do this)

Content Cucumber is a writing company. Their clients are metaphorical directors since everything they create keeps the individual wants and needs in mind. Their subscription-based service even lets business leaders update their blogs without lifting a finger, giving them more time to focus on their company (or watch Netflix).

We speak with Chris Chasteen, the co-founder of Content Cucumber.

Transcript

All right. Welcome to this super content-filled episode of talk commerce. Today, I have Chris chess Dean. He is the CEO of content cucumber, and I had the pleasure of first meeting Chris a long time ago, 2018, maybe at retail, X, or IRC at the time. Chris, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing.

Day-to-day and maybe one of your passions. 

Sure. Yeah. So just recently got the CEO title added on for the longest time it was just co-founder focused on growth, but I’ve actually now I’m working on all areas of our organization. So that means, running a contact, cucumber, running everything from finance to innovation, to growth the operations and making sure everything’s moving in the right direction.

And then as far as passion, I love music. I play music and I’m actually working on recording an album. 

Oh, nice. So you could come out with another service called title turnip, or something like that for your 

albums or? Yeah. I think that my indecision would get in the way of that one, but, 

So just for, so everybody gets some background content.

Cucumber is a service that, that, that writes content for people like us. So I’ve been using your service for a number of years. And you have a staff of writers that help entrepreneurs and business people and content people on e-commerce people, great content for their site. 

Yeah. Yeah. And I actually came from an e-commerce background.

The reason I started content cucumbers, cause I was helping grow an e-commerce store and I realized that we could reduce our ad spend and grow our revenue. If we just had focused a little bit on some organic. 

Yeah. And I can just speak from experience that developing that organic content has been the best decision that we made in the last, four years now.

The the SEO traffic that you generate just from that consistent blog post, or just consistent content that’s being generated is something that Google really likes. Maybe you could speak a little bit to how how that service has worked and maybe some of the benefits that some of your other clients have seen from it as well.

Yeah. So just the idea of posting consistently and like showing, proof of life to Google yeah, I’m still here. We’re still here. We’re still here. That definitely is rewarded. And Google looks at you as a thought leader. The more you’re talking about CapEx, where you’re diving deep on.

And really in any business, if you’re starting to get some traction, content is a really great way to shift the focus away from the short term gains, like advertising and sales, and really start to focus up on long-term because it’s very much a long-term thing. Like I always tell people if they’re like, if they’re really fresh getting started you don’t want to focus too much of your time on content in the beginning because you need to get the wheels moving.

But once things are moving, it’s. Putting fuel on the 

fire. Yeah, I would even argue that beginning phase, when you need to get the wheels moving is a great time to start building your content. It is also going to be the biggest time that you’re going to have a lot of ideas. And I know one thing we talked about in the green room is how you have.

Helped me or helped with Kento come up with some of those original ideas that then turned into content maybe speak to how merchants could use content to drive traffic to their products. 

Yeah. So at the beginning and content totally plays a role in the beginning with the product descriptions, right?

That’s like where you first need to really nail your web copy is if you’re talking about, selling. Hairbrushes or whatever you’re going to go and sell. Having really compelling content about the item outside of just like what its dimensions are like, how is it useful? What have people what are the experiences?

And that’s, before you’re getting tracked and you don’t have reviews, like the best thing you could do is try to talk about this, that whatever product it is at lake. So yeah, product descriptions, I think are probably your first content pathway to take as a numerous. For sure. 

What are you seeing then as a trend right now?

I know there’s some terms called compose, compose of composable commerce. There’s all kinds of now com commerce and headless. And w what are you seeing from adding content? Oh, on top of the regular content you’ve seen on a e-commerce store that content now has just become more important.

And I guess maybe speak to some of the things that you’re seeing in the industry around generation of content and the volume of that. You need to keep relevant. 

Yeah, to really establish a brand authority on top of having your product descriptions well, maintained, it’s also having a blog of some sort and having some talking points that really establish you as the authority of whatever it is that you’re going to sell.

So we see people like the people we see of our clients that are the most successful are very much like you were. We know what our niche is. We know who we’re talking to. We know what they’re interested in, and if you just continually listen to what it is that your audience is interested in, and you keep speaking to that, you’re going to be going down the pathway that you really want to be going.

So I’d say regardless of the trends, always go back to who your target profile audiences and make sure that you’re finding and meeting them with. 

Yeah. And I think to borrow a term from WordPress or some of the other content site, there’s always a pillar page that you’re trying to drive traffic to, or in the terms of a of a website that has a product or that product would be that pillar page.

And the goal is to generate content around that and then drive traffic to. 

Yes. Yeah. And there’s, there’s all sorts of different ways you can do that, whether it’s I’ve seen people do it from a case study pit standpoint, where it’s like this one product can be used in five different cases.

And then your landing page is like, How do I use so construction materials, a great example. So let’s say caulking, which is where I came from and Silicon sealants. You can use silicone sealants around windows. You can use them in the bathroom. You can use them on the sidewalk outside. And the people who are installing those different applications are very different people.

But having, a landing page from the audience saying writing out your content like this is how you use this product in this space, and then you can have another one about that space. So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that too. It’s not just like one category page or one pillar page for all the product types that person might be interested in, but it’s also creating different pages for one product that targets different audiences as well.

So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that content creation. 

So maybe talk a little bit about idiation as well. How you help or maybe talk about how merchants don’t have to have that full idea. You help them dig into it, come up with some more content and then follow on through even more content for.

Yeah, for sure. When you start working with any writer and a contact cucumber writer is a great example. If you have some rough ideas, share them with that writer, or even if you’re building a team make sure to share your ideas with your team. Cause like getting feedback on the ideas will help develop the idea.

And our, our service is a place where you can send us the roughest of sketches and we can help you hash that out, but always being on the lookout for bouncing your ideas off of other people I found is like infinitely helpful. Cause I see a lot of people they’ll be like, I have a thousand ideas, but then they just don’t.

Try to ask people like, is this a good idea? Cause they hold their ideas a little too close to the chest and ideas are free people aren’t going to steal them. And yeah, just 

let the flow, just talking about Combs. I was going to get a subscription to a comb. But my wife said it would be a waste of money, so I don’t know why, but so the I guess the, to go in on that, a lot of, content is so important, but content can be expensive in hiring a full-time staff writer.

Can be can be equally expensive. So how do you help? How do you see helping with your typical e-commerce agency by supplementing that content? Yeah, 

That’s pretty much the exact niche that I went to Phil because I, when I had silicone Depot trying to grow that business there wasn’t really a way to have a writer that was on my team.

But not like a freelancer, not like an intern, but someone who was a professional writer. And I could just borrow some of their time to dedicate to my project. And it was like Hey, let’s do that. And so that’s what contact cucumber is all about, is being able to access that professional writer for part of their time to basically help do that at a fraction of the 

cost.

And you don’t just do blog posts, you’re helping generate content for any type of media out there. 

Any type of written media and there’s some limitations to that. Like we can’t write your dissertation. We’re not going to write your homework. We actually, we actually did one of our first sample requests that we used to have a sample funnel where we’d let people make a free blog request.

Someone said, can you write a book report on where the Redfern group. And they’re like nice tribe, but no. So we’re not going to do your homework, but we definitely had some people, some pretty clever people that wasn’t the first one, because they came back the, I think the next day and put in another one, they’re like could you do a report on hurricanes and have it to me by midnight?

It’s oh, we’re not gonna do that. 

So it does give you an idea if you wanted to help get through school, though. You don’t just say, Hey, I’ve got to write this blog post on. The the geology of rocks. 

Yeah. Yeah, we can do a whole nother business specifically for homework, like homework.

don’t know. What’s a vegetable homework hummus, maybe homework, calmness. There you go. Perfect. Yeah, we just helped you. We help you figure out how to get your homework done 

on time. And watch out for the dog. So it’s not going to eat it. So w specifically written, so helping with social media posts, just Twitter tweets.

Of course what was I just thinking of? Oh, email newsletters is a great example of something that’s needs to be done every month and is often overlooked. And I think that email right now, people are thinking is email really important, but Hey, I still get email every day and I answer it and I look at it 

right.

And merchants, like that’s some serious like money on the table. If you’re not, if you’re not utilizing email, you ought to because yeah, that, that’s a really good place to engage with your audience and get people to come back and buy from you again. Or, email is an ex. Excellent source of doing that.

And we, we write tons of newsletters every month and those are really successful and also like on that. It’s not something we do, but something to think about for merchants, if they’re thinking about building. Their content points and how to reach their audience more. Definitely getting into SMS a bit.

I’ve seen a lot of e-commerce companies adopting more SMS marketing, and that seems to be going much better than email even. So something to consider. 

Okay. So just adding on to, on, on what SMS is going to be shorter messages, but yeah, I can see how that was. That is going to help a merchant to.

To increase traffic and help get education around their products that they’re selling. Maybe we can just dive into the ways that merchants should measure some of this. Like how, what is your definition of success or do people come to you and say, how do I judge my success on my content?

Yeah. So there’s a lot of different ways to do that. Of course, in e-commerce conversion rate is king, right? That’s the thing. It’s straw, Kate’s driving traffic, but what percentage are actually converting into customers or it’s I’m sending out this email, but what percentage are actually converting into clicks and going to the website?

And for e-commerce I think conversion rate is probably the area where we focus on and we definitely see some blogs that if they get posted on the first page of that relevant result, they can see anywhere from, a two to 4% conversion rate, which for a blog post is pretty darn. 

Yeah, that’s great.

So maybe talk a little bit about non the more, the broader idea of just developing content and then from an SEO standpoint, how do you measure success? 

Yeah, starting from the topic gets, it definitely gets more and more vague, like the higher up the idea, the more vague it is.

And then the closer to the actual metrics, the, the more it’s relevant, but I would say a good like litmus. To try when you’re first developing your content strategy is look at what everyone else in your industry is talking about in is what you’re talking about. At least as interesting and Mo more ideal, more interesting than what everyone else is talking about.

And if it is then you’re on the right path. But if what you’re talking about, Everyone already knows that, some of that content is good, like reiterating terms. So Google knows that, you know what you mean? But don’t do a 2000 word blog on like how to drink water or something is like everyone already know.

There was like the benefits of drinking the quantity of water. And that’s why you should get our one gallon water thing, because you need to drink a gallon of water. Cause it shows that you’ll like sleep better and like you’ll not have to eat as much and your exercises will be more effective. It’s tell the benefits, not just the features.

And I think that stuff like that is really important when coming up with your 

context, yeah. And I think the underlying idea to that is you want to differentiate yourself from other people. And especially if you’re differentiating yourself from say, Amazon, if you have a specialty product, or if your product that’s crosses over into that marketplace world, where Amazon might sell it, the more you can do to distinguish yourself as a leader in that the better your content is going to perform.

And the more traffic you’re gonna. I suppose the, one of the minimum things that somebody could look at is that their traffic is increasing over time. And also making sure that you’re you’re indexing those pages onto Google, your blog posts. If this that’s where you’re going to do, you’re going to expose this content to and measure.

What is more popular than that? Is this one more popular than this other one? One thing that we’ve done is on some posts put specific call to actions on those posts. And even in the past, we tried doing some kind of little internal ad thing where we’d have some ads rotate through the blogs to see.

Are we getting a lot of clicks and if we’re getting a lot of clicks, that’s a great place that you should be trying to capture some of those reads, right? Because I think was logged. So if you have a blog and you mentioned 2000 words, somebody is going to spend a, five or 10 minutes reading that’s a great time to get somebody to stick with it and then go somewhere else on your own.

Yeah. Always have a call to action of some kind, for sure. That’s a must do for every post should have some sort of call to action for sure. I definitely agree with that. And yeah, I of course. Like traffic is an important metric to keep in mind. But the reason why I don’t go there first is because it can be a little demoralizing because it takes so long.

If you don’t have traction to get the traction that you’re like this isn’t working. And it’s if you’re writing things that are as interesting or more interesting than everyone else writing about the same thing, you will get traction. It’s just going to take time. So that’s a big piece there because I don’t want people to give up early cause this.

Six to 12 months before you’re seeing the results that you 

expect. Yeah. And I think ideally you’d like to do one per business day. So an average of 20 a month, I don’t know I’m being right. Or 

that really depends on the industry that you’re in. Of course the that’s I was just laughing cause that’s our, our pitch, our first offering, was, you can get up to a blog a business day, but really, it depends on the industry you’re in.

And if you’re in a say you’re in the. I don’t know, medicinal space, that’s going to require more like say you’re selling supplements or selling some herbal teas or something. That’s really going to take probably longer form of content because your competition is higher. And because you’re wanting to attract the type of buyer who wants to read a lot about that thing.

Whereas if you’re buying, if you’re selling something a little more surface level, some people will want to do a ton of research on tires, but the majority of your consumers just want to know is it going to work in snow? Is it going to work in rain? Is it going to work in the summer? And that’s really all they care about and it’s not going to go flat very easily.

And it’ll fit my vehicle. It’s okay, great. So those can be shorter. So it depends on your industry. I’d say four. Good average, those at least try to get, somewhere around 15 hundreds, a week, 1500 words a week out at minimum, in some capacity, whether it’s, a combination of 400 word or 800 word blogs or.

One 1400 word blog, but just some kind of mix of content that adds up to that number is probably a good place to be. This 

is Google looking specifically at the length of a blog post, and that was going to be my next question is 400, the best size, or is 800 zero. Is there a sort of a rule of thumb that makes sense for the length of your blog post?

Now you’re really diving into an area where you can. For SEO agency, people masterminds and they will argue that to the, yeah. So that, that one’s a contentious one. I think right now the hot topic is long form content. Like everyone’s more beating the drum of 1400 to 2000 words.

But again, it really depends on what you’re selling, because if you’re selling something that the consumer doesn’t really want to know everything there is to know about it, they just want. To know that it’s going to work for what they needed to work for. I would always urge you to meet your consumer where they’re at figure out who your customer is and always write to them.

If you think that they really want to nerd out about the laptop, then write 2000 words about the laptop. But if you think it’s no, I’m selling to someone who they just want to make sure that they can open Chrome and. You use the internet, they don’t care about gaming or anything. So just know who you’re talking to.

And Google will always reward you for staying on top of your audience. And that’s going to be a, there’s going to be SEO. People who disagree with that. They’re like no, 1500 to 2000 words. Like it really works. It’s yeah. Okay. It does work. But there does come to a point where Google’s goal in life is to figure out exactly what you want when you start.

And so sure right now, the long form content is performing well, but in the end, the Google’s AI is going to figure out every search and what you’re actually looking for. And so just work that out. If you’re going to go write a piece of code. What does the person who’s going to read this one? Do they want to sit down and read a 10 minute log or do they want a, three-minute answer to a very basic question, meet the people where they are, and actually with that advice.

And this is where I pushed back on the SEO. People’s I we’ve seen featured snippets because of that, where people write a short form, 400 word blog, and they’re the featured snippet, which that’s 

huge. Wow. 

We need 

to put that on our website, honestly. Yeah. You need a featured snippet too, on your. So I, what I guess what I’m hearing is, there should be a mixture of sizes of content.

And just, let’s just say you, you work for one larger, long, long form a week and some smaller ones to fill in, or at least get that one blog post a week up there to help the keep things moving. 

Yeah, exactly. Momentum is huge. 

And then I, I know one thing that we learned in just in, in sort of the way you can help to generate more of this content is that out of that blog post it’s officially a long form blog post, you certainly can find tweets that are relevant to that blog post, and it’ll lead people back to it.

So quotes and things like that. And then one thing that I’ve noticed recently there’s WordPress plugins that will help you write a blog post. A podcast about your blog post. And if you were to do a weekly blog post, you could, I would say, read it back. I wouldn’t have, I don’t know how they do that generation, but it would be really annoying if it’s some kind of audio generated from a robot reader, but that, that content would make, usually make a great.

A great podcast or at least put it into some audio. And then what I’ve really seen, a lot of people doing now is turning it into a little bit of a vlog where you get on and you just either read the highlights or talk about the highlights from your post. Then let people go through and read that long post for 

sure.

Yeah. And I think. Again, to dive into some examples of what you’re talking about. Sometimes video content makes a good appearance with like makeup tutorials. We see people who are doing that kind of thing, but then where you’re talking about the more like higher level overview about certain products, I dunno.

What do you think? What are some products? Do you think that audio pairs really nicely with a blog? What kind of products do you imagine? 

Just audio or audio and. 

Let’s just take the audio example where you’re going to, we’re going to write a blog and then you turn it into a podcast. What do you think?

What kind of industries do you think that works really well 

for? Yeah. I think audio only would work, I think, excuse me, obviously, for audio devices, if you’re selling something, excuse me, selling something in the audio world that’s a great example, but yeah. Anything where you can describe it, anything where you don’t have to have a visual of what you’re doing.

So you mean you gave the makeup. That’s a great example, where you have to see somebody doing it, anything where you don’t have to see it, and you can capture somebody while they’re driving or they’re running or whatever they’re doing. And it’s a, it’s something that can be described. And I guess if we look at what’s out there from a blog or from a podcasting standpoint, everything in a podcast is normally.

Descriptive. If you’re talking about strategy of any sort or thought leadership and then if you can boil that thought leadership into what is it, what is Ted talk say 18 minutes or something? That is your, yeah. That’s your ideal things. Yeah. I don’t know how many, eight, how many words? 18 minutes is it must be 2,500 words or something like that.

But if you can concentrate on that and then I would even say you don’t have to do the whole thing. Like people like to hear shorter bits, like two or three minutes of it, and then it gives them a chance to read the whole post. 

Yeah, no, that’s interesting. And something I’ve seen a lot on.

Newscasters doing these days, like you see it on the Washington post and things of that nature where they’ll have an audio format that just literally reads the article out loud for you. And I find that kind of interesting too. It’s if you’re researching a pro like anything and it’s just listen to this in audio form, then you can just click play and.

Open your emails and listen to it in the background. And yeah, that’s a cool idea. I like that. I think that’ll probably start encouraging our clients to think more 

like that. Yeah. I think that’s where this idea that WordPress has that you could turn this this blog post into a, they’re saying a podcast, but I think the idea of just has a sort of a screen reader of some sorts that would read it to you would be a little bit better.

Then having a weekly. Podcasts based on a robot, reading your content. 

And anytime you can try to give your viewers or your users more ways to interact with your content usually you’re going to see performance upgrade, but the one thing I would caution everyone, if you try the, these ideas. Don’t stop iterating.

So it’s if you notice by adding audio, it re reduce the amount of times people click on your call to action, then try it without it, and then try it with it or try it with the call to action in the audio. Always iterate. I think something I see happening with Al with our clients sometimes is they’ll get stuck into their pattern and I’m doing the same thing every week and it’s not doing anything.

I’m like let’s try some new stuff and see what happens. So I think that coming up with new ideas, this is super 

important. Yeah. Testing and measuring is the most important thing anybody could do to ma to see how successful their content is. And I just had a conversation with an email person who said there is a Sending an email for a product is it’s great.

But at some point people get sick of getting your emails and you don’t, you’re not, you don’t have a success as you did before on that newsletter or that email list that you’re sending to because there’s a fatigue in getting way too much. I think from a content standpoint, though as long as it’s relevant content, you can’t, you.

You couldn’t have too much content unless you’re duplicating something across your own site or just plagiarizing somebody else’s 

right. I do agree. I think that what I was the point I was driving home. More that try to change how your blog posts look and feel and mess with your call to actions and that kind of just the scientific testing and try different things out.

Like definitely keep posting content, like you’re right. Like anytime you get deep into a topic, especially if you want to be the authority on that topic, you’ll never run out of stuff to talk about, but just try different stuff on the blog and just see what works. Yeah, 

we 

found that effective sometimes get lucky.

Like I think we got we are, we ranked pretty high on layout shifts, the new web, one of the scores and web vitals from Google. And it was only because we wrote an early article about it and posted it. And then we’ve been following up on eat more of those web viatical, web vital web, what vital web core vitals, sorry, core vitals that Google has.

I don’t get it. I’ll get this right today. Don’t worry. But if you can beat your early on some of those topics, there’s not a lot of penalty you’re going to get from writing about a topic when it first comes out, you have a lot of upside. The only penalty you have is the time it takes to write that article, right?

Yup. If it’s something new, like the core website, That Google has now that’s the score in your website. And there’s some specific things that are, that Google is keying in on. And if you’re early to those specific articles, you’re going to get some early wins and then making sure that you are writing relevant content moving forward, that still has something.

That still connects to that original article. Cause that’s going to continue to show Google that you have some thought leadership on that. 

Yeah, for sure. I think having those like anchor pieces that can eventually link to a bunch of other articles that go into depth as a really great or really great concept.

And we’ve seen that workout successfully for a lot of. 

Just diving a little bit into your into your career now, or your entrepreneur journey, entrepreneurial journey, you started content cucumber when you were still in college. Are you still in college now? No, 

No. I I dropped out of college and then starting to of take it over.

So yeah, I actually met my co-founder and my wife at university went one semester. Met both of them and then, thought Hey, I, I got a home run, so 

yeah, just I can, I had the, I had a similar journey. I, but I went to school for eight years before I dropped out. Okay. So you got your master’s degree?

No, I don’t have any degrees, but I did go to school full time for eight. Oh, okay. Yeah. Full-time student and then decided that I wanted to go into business and here I am, it’s been quite a fuel hit quite a few years later. So how do you, so what does it look like now to content you cover? How you keeping things fun and exciting?

Yeah. Fun and exciting. I think one of the things we’re doing right now, which is really fun is we have this competition going on called the real rumble. And it’s this competition where everyone submits a reel in our slack channel. And may the best real win and the best real winner will get like a custom made real winner of content, cucumber t-shirt.

And we just try to do little things like that to have fun. And me and the video guy who is hosting and judging the competition, did a a sketch to inspire everyone where I played a lawyer basically saying that this real needs to be thrown out. And he played the other lawyer, the defense attorney and the judge.

Like it was really funny, a little bit where we were just going back and forth on whether or not we, this a real. Allowed to be submitted or not. 

Nice. Cool. I know one of the things that I remember that you did at at one of those early IRC or retail X or whatever, the name they’ve changed to this year you had ice cream.

It seems like that. It seems like that doesn’t it, whatever it is this year, they’re 

like, we’re not getting enough 

traffic rebrand again, yearly rebrand again. Yes. Yeah, I still call. I like calling it IRCE, but reaching to that feels very oh, G right? Yeah. Retail X also seems okay now, but the, whatever the new one is I think it’s content retail, something like that, or 

I can’t believe they’ve rebranded again.

I don’t know why they think that’s going to be the solution, but sorry, if you’re listening to this and you organize that conference. I’m sorry. 

I think one of the things that you did earlier. So you had ice cream that you rolled around on a cart, which was, it was a great idea. You had a jazz concert this last 

time.

Yes. Yeah. We had a jazz trio. That was really fun. We always try to do something super creative and out there to show everyone that like we’re creative people. We try to live that spirit because we see a lot of content writing companies. You show. And look like all the other super corporate companies.

And I’m like, what are you doing? We’re literally creatives, get creative. So yeah, we try to have fun with it. Actually the ice cream, there was like blog flavored and newsletter flavored and Facebook posts flavor. And so we made them like all the flavors and then, oh yeah. And then black raspberry.

That was the one that we didn’t give it. One of those silly titles. So we could riff off all the titles and then say, and black raspberry and that all. Usually got a laugh cause they’re like why is black raspberry on its own? I don’t know. He just thought it was fine. 

In case you get a, in case you spam and get.

That’s king blacklist, 

blacklist, respirator. There you go. That would have been hilarious. I have an idea so at and I don’t want you to tell us what your booth is going to be like this year at whatever the new conference is going to be called in Chicago, IRCE slash retail X slash.

Content content retail. But if you were at a corner of your booth, that just says the, my iPad’s that said here’s the AI content creation, people go talk to them and then they have to just talk to an iPad. It’s in the little corner of your booth. And then you have your real people that are talking.

Nevermind. It looked better in my head than it did. It’s 

kind of funny. It’s like comparing the experience, like your here’s the robot. I was actually imagining, like we have like a. Like a little more dramatic. Like that idea makes me think you’d make a robot, how you do with like boxes and silver paint and then just put an iPad on its face.

And you’re like, yeah, try to interact with this and see if you can create something. And 

it’s frustrating. I did try one of those services. I’ve tried a couple of the AI services that write articles for you. And I have had such a horrible experience. I even went for 2.0 of some service. I’m not going to, I’m not going to give their name, but they came out with this 2.0 version and you pay a little bits for every part of the article and it generated this article.

It give you like five different points and it put it. I put a bunch of content in there and it was like, every single point was completely wrong. It was so wrong. And it’s okay, I want to get credit for this. This is like the most useless piece of information that anybody has ever written for me.

Oh no I think I tried it for talk commerce. I think I wanted to just, Hey, let’s break this down. The one of my episodes and write a show summary. And so I had, like I said, it, all this information and then it came back and it said, It gave me all this crap. And I’m like, oh man, this is like the worst.

I can’t use any of this. I can, I could maybe use the outline, which I think I eventually did. And I had to write my own little thing. But I think what that maybe just speak to having a real person write an article for you. So you actually get real content that, does that make sense to people? 

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. A real person, they understand. What people like, they understand that people want things to be accurate and they understand creative writing is very much a a discipline. And so all of, pretty much all of our writers have some sort of creative writing or journalism degree.

So they’ve gone through the pathway of figuring out what it is that people will actually read. Whereas I think the AI is trying to drum up the right thing. Not necessarily focused on what people want to read, but. That it is readable itself. And it’s it’s it actually what AI content generators are good for, I think is coming up with title ideas, honestly, you can, have I wanna make a new title or I want to make some like a paragraph of copy.

It can help you with that. But once you get into long form content, it gets so out there. Cause it’s pulling from every corner of the internet. So it’s it’s also gonna pull from the parts of the internet. I really don’t know what they’re talking about. 

Yeah. And then you need to go and do all the research on where did it find this?

Because I now I’m recalling that. I had a specific guest that I put in and it came back with a bunch of facts about this guest, which it happened to be nothing to do with the guest at all. It was something that was not even true, or I don’t know where it came up with the content, but it took me longer to figure out or to find where did it come from?

Then it did just the right again, just to write it myself. And 

went down that rabbit hole, 

trying to determine yeah, it was like, okay, you have a guest. And if I was, if I were to do something for you and I put it, I put Chris jets chestain and into Into the AI writer and it wants to write a short bio of everything that we’ve just talked about.

And all of a sudden it says, you were born in 1947 and you wrote three successful novels before you founded content cucumber in 2023, okay which part of this is real and what isn’t right now? Logically I know that. That you’re no older than 55, but that would also make you not born in 1947 and I’m now I’m joking.

Cause I can clearly see that you’re 18, but like at some point AI writers are going to make more work than it could be. Somebody just wrote it. 

Yeah. Brent Peterson, the esteemed dolphin trainer from Sweden. It’s what? Wait. Where did you get that? 

Yeah. Yeah, that was my job before.

Yeah. Swedish dolphins. They’re really common. Absolutely. Everybody knows about Swedish dolphins on. Now we have our headline of the show by the way. Sweet dolphins. Definitely. We’ve just gone through AI title generation 

and it will give you stuff like that. And you’re like, okay. That’s good.

Not because it’s good, but good, because it’s not good and I’m going to use it because it’s not good and people are going to click on it. Cause it’s 

funny. Yeah. Maybe we’ve got a few minutes left. Maybe tell us a little bit about what merchants should look at. Let’s just say I’m selling something to do with bathrooms.

What type of content would be the first step that they would take to get started? 

Yeah, so bathrooms and let’s just assume it’s products like showers and toilets and sinks and plumbing and accessories and tile and everything bathroom. You’re going to help build bathrooms. And actually, it’s funny that you say that because we have a company that does something very similar to that.

But yeah, so essentially where you would start is you’d say, okay, who is it? That’s redoing their bathroom. Okay. It’s probably a homeless. Or an investor, or it could even be a renter, that it’s either going to be someone who’s living there or someone who wants to get value out of that because, so you have these two different audiences, so you can talk about how investing in bathrooms can raise property value.

And then you could also talk about how bathrooms are. A really vital place to have looking really nice and also just a better quality of life to have a better bathroom. So I would say like finding out who your audience is. And then figuring out what things are important to them. Also there’s the whole, like my toilet broke crap.

What do I do now? And it’s even if you don’t solve that problem, talking about it and saying, Hey, don’t panic, turn your water off. Call plumber. You’ll be fine. This is what you searched for. If you couldn’t find a plumber. So just providing resources for the people who you think, cause they, maybe they come to you to buy the toilet.

But. Just providing useful resources to the people who you want to come to your site. So you just work out okay, who’s all the people that I want to come to my site. And that’s where that’s your content strategy. And it’s really figuring out who those people are, where they’re hanging out and then writing to that and making sure they can find you.

Yeah. And then also making that little warning bubble that says don’t take a crap in it. 

Yes. Yeah, of course. If it’s. If, yeah, if it’s not flushing, probably don’t try to put anything in it. 

Yeah. I can see that this is, this whole conversation is going down the toilet right now. As we close out the episode, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug it.

What would you like to plug today? 

Normally I’d plug contact cucumber, and. We’ve talked about contact cucumber so much. So I guess I’ll stick with that though, but yeah, consequent comer is a really easy way to get all the content that you need generation. It’s a month service.

You can get up to 2000 words a month. We have plans that you can tell us what to write. We write it. Or you could also do a hands-off plan where we do everything for you. We do the SEO strategy. We make the content calendar. We post it to your website, so you can have as much or as little involvement as you want.

And our whole thing is writing. And I guess lastly, to just steal one more shameless plug, check out Chris tasks. Dot com for updates on music stuff, which 

will come later this year. All right. Yeah. And so just now I have to ask what type of music are you doing 

so for this album, it’s going to very much be inspired by like seventies prog rock and eighties, piano 

rock.

Wow. 

So think Elton John Emerson, Lincoln Palmer stuff like that, but I’ll be posting updates and. Yeah. I also have a Instagram that I do all that stuff too. As Chris, Jesse musics. 

What instruments do you play or instruments? 

So piano is that I always say I’m a professional pianist because people have actually paid me to play piano.

But I also play guitar and drums and other instruments too, but people don’t pay me to play those. 

Just a short story to end it off. My, my daughter went and got a degree in or went for a degree in vocals. And so she ended up meeting a lot of music, people, and she had a person over at our house one day who was just getting ready to do his his recital.

He had a piece getting a piano degree. And so he just you want me to play a few things and we have a grand piano in our living room. Granted, it hasn’t been tuned in like 10 or 15 years. It’s been forever. And I, it’s, there’s an electric piano sitting next to it too. Anyways, he plays it and he does about 20 minutes just out of his head.

It’s amazing. And then I’m like, would you ever what if like they asked you to play this? When you, if you went in for recital, he said I would refuse. It was so it was, sounded so bad. It was his recital sounded great, but our piano is definitely out of tune desperately needs help. So if you do come over, there is a, an electric piano.

You can also play in our house. 

Cool. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Are you going to have someone come fix 

up your piano? I was thinking about it. I think the soundboard is cracked. I think that’s the only thing. It’s like a 1940s, a grand piano. That looks really cool. So right now it is, it’s a big, huge piece of furniture that needs to be tuned.

Yeah. A lot of times old pianos just turned into old pianos or Swedish dolphin. And our sweetest dolphins. That’s true. I’ve seen that. 

All right, Chris, Jess, Dane, we are going to see you in may. I’m excited. I hope you’re going to be retail X or whatever. They’re calling it this year. Maybe it later.

If I were to be really clever, I could come up. I’ll look up what it’s actually called and I’ll do a little boy silver and it’ll say.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You got to make it really robotic 

too. This is my AI driven content that I’m going to inject into that into the audio part. And then I could like, if it’s, if we do put the, I’ll put a little thing over the top of our mouse, so people can’t mistake it for some kind of a mouth over anyway.

Chris J chesting content cucumber is the company. You deliver content and you deliver it every day. It is such a great service. I’m happy to be I’m happy to be a customer of yours. I’m excited to see you in Chicago at and I’m excited to see what your booth is this year. 

Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah. W it’ll be good to see you. And I don’t know if you do live updates or anything, but it could be fun to do a live update. Yeah. 

I think last year I saw one person doing a little podcast and I was thinking about, maybe I would just do some little short interviews at the show this year 

and yeah, it is.

It’s a cool way to get to talk to your customers, to get some merchants in there and be like, so what’s been working for you 

lately, yeah, exactly. Last year was like a cricket fan. Hopefully there’s more people this year. 

Yeah. All right. Yep. I think so. All right. Thanks for having me.

Bye. All right.

The Robot That Handwrites Thank You Notes For You with David Wachs

How often have you gotten a handwritten note from an online store or a service that you bought something from? I bet you can remember when this happened last. David Wachs tells us about his unique business and his army or robots churning out thank yous and notes in your handwriting (But written by a robot!)

Do you want to learn more about Product Services? Click here

The psychology of cognitive customer behavior with Guido Jansen

There is a new sheriff in town, leading the charge to Spryker. Guido Jansen tells us about his new role with Spryker. Most interesting is that we learn a little about customer behavior and his role as a community builder and Cognitive Psychologist. Guido is a community engagement specialist using strategic insight and empathy to understand, inform, and strategically engage both a worldwide ecosystem and the internal stakeholders who serve them. He has done hundreds of presentations, workshops, seminars, and conferences in over 25 countries about several topics around E-commerce and Psychology.

Transcript:

Brent: Welcome to this new year today, I have Guido Jansen and he is with Spriker and I’m very excited to talk to him, Guido. You are the global business and technology. Evangelists for Spriker and which in the blue room or the green room, we talked about that you’re the Ben marks of Spriker or the Ben marks of shop where, or the benchmarks of Magento or whatever.

Brent: However you want to say that. Why don’t you do a better introduction than I just did. And maybe tell us what you’re doing day to day and, one of your passions in life. 

Guido: Oh, I have many passions brands. One of wishes now a Spriker indeed. Yeah, my background’s in the. I guess to try to compromise a bit that I have a background in psychology and what a usability part of of psychology optimizing a web shop off the debts.

Guido: The study itself at university I’m done. I don’t feel that old, but at university that didn’t have a lot of online things going on. In terms of examples. So that was mainly about the usability. I could think of thing machine or a way, finding an airports how that works. But I always applied this to align to e-commerce and in, started out with things like mumbo and.

Guido: Wait maybe I am old mama Joomla and a, and I switched gears to to e-commerce and Magento in 2008. That time when we were all playing around with cameras and virtual mark, and those kinds of things that Magento came around, which was this magical thing that was way ahead of its time. And we all add a great fun, I think playing around with that and did that for, 13 years.

Guido: And I think that’s also like 20 10, 20 11 that I met you. I think we met at a. It was the Moscone center in San 

Brent: Francisco. Could be, yeah. Yeah. The fabric comm X dot commerce. 

Guido: This will all be beeped 

Brent: out with the knee, right? Yeah. In fact, I was just going through all my supplies. I was going through my old video just getting stuff, getting my mat cleaned up and I found of a video of the, in the intro or the, welcome from the.

Brent: PayPal slash Magento slash whatever eBay people. Yeah. And it was us coming out of the conference center and they all, there’s huge. Just all the employees lined up welcoming, everybody to the event. So it was definitely a well thought out event and it was fun how could you go wrong?

Brent: I don’t know if if the outcome was what they had expected, but it was fun. And then. A fun event, 2011, definitely. 

Guido: Yeah. Events were a fun ride. Remember those events were fun. Now we had a lot of fun with that with Magento organized, a lot of stuff. For Magento we had the Mimi, Japan and Netherlands kickstart this whole global movement of Magento events.

Guido: And I’ve been lucky enough to to attend many of those those firsts, which are the best I think, to go through like those first events in a country where. People have heard each other’s names online on slack or on the forums, but never met in person. So all those awkward first meetings, or those are great to to, attend to.

Guido: And yeah, I and it’s also a, the Magento ecosystem is also where I met Boris the founder of Spriker and currently co CEO of Spriker. I think we met sills. 20 11 20 12 had a Magento agency. And some six, seven years ago when you started with we kept in contact and yeah, I would have lost a year.

Guido: I was working at a Magento merchants actually. And he approached me and said, Hey, we’re growing like crazy at Spriker and we need someone like you doing community stuff. Spriker we need something like that. So to support that. I don’t think you actually build this, build a community.

Guido: I The community is there and does its own thing. That’s what we see, which has the rights. But we need someone from Spriker to facilitate what’s happening out. There are very similar indeed to what’s. What bandage. And before that, around though, we’re doing a Magento. So yeah, that’s the, 

Brent: yeah.

Brent: And I, I did I’ve interviewed my Miquel Turk for both Spriker and it’s an interesting and fun platform and one of the. I had made early on was about the who 15 and how we’re working on getting sub one second times. And he laughed at me and he said, yes, Spriker, we’re working on sub 400 millisecond times or something like that.

Brent: It is an interesting platform and I’d love to dive into it a little more, but first let’s I know that you have been involved with. In conversion rate optimization, I think from an e-commerce standpoint, that is one thing that is often overlooked, especially. A lot of clients will come to a technology partner and they’ll say, Hey, I want to build a fantastic website.

Brent: Then they leave those either the technology partner doesn’t focus on that or the client doesn’t see value in that. So can we maybe just have a brief conversation around, what does it mean for conversion rate and why is that? And so why is that even more important than the platform you’re on or the store build that you’re doing or any of those.

Guido: I think the conversion rate optimization traditionally it’s in the name. It’s, a bit limiting. It’s the oldest Christian in the Ciroc community. Let’s first define what it is. So Euro it’s about a practice of semi or semi-truck. Practice or figuring out what works for your online store which usually involves doing user research talking to users, doing surveys, translating those into a hypothesis on what could work and what’s, where you expect to be a better for, your store.

Guido: And then validating that through experiments. Usually that’s, an AB test. That’s, very short description of of, Shiro these days. And I think one of the things that was holding back Shiro, it depends a bit on the depends a lot on the area you’re in the business you’re in, but for many companies it’s, relatively easy to say what the ROI is for buying more ads, buying Edwards.

Guido: This is what I put in. This is what I put out. That’s, very straightforward and that’s something that then people try to apply to Shiro and that doesn’t really work zeroes more. Often long-term strategy, trying to figure out what worked for your customer. And it’s really hard to say at the end of the day, at the end of the year what came out of that?

Guido: Exactly. Which is also a bit counter-intuitive because we’re doing an AB test. So we can exactly say, this is what version a is doing. This is what version B is doing, but. The course of the year, like if you do three aunts or a thousand experiments what’s your contribution? I don’t know. And that’s that’s, sometimes hard for managers to get into and also it can also mean that you’re not even growing, but it can also mean that you’re not going down.

Guido: So your conversion rate stays the same. Your number stays the same if you’re in a declining business like a couple of last years with, if you’re in a, in a. Selling holiday houses, like booking.com. It’s going to be really hard to increase refresher rates or to, or avenue. But you really need a team like this to understand.

Guido: Okay, what are people still buying? What are the, changing consumer behavior to last year’s? And companies that do CRO well those are the ones that can survive this. And if you just keep buying more assets, that’s going to be a very difficult thing to, 

Brent: to maintain that. Yeah. I think with the Google mistake or the Google ad mistake or the paid ad mistake has always been, Hey, let’s just throw money at it.

Brent: And money will also always get it there. And sure. It’s true. You can plow enough money into anything to make anything work, but there was a diminish diminishing return on that investment. And I think one thing we learned, I was part of the PayPal mobile optimization program for a year. And we did learn that number one, measuring and doing those tests matters.

Brent: Getting the merchant to get involved and see what’s happening. And then I think what you said is you are either not propping up, but finding what works best for you. And then even doubling down on that to make sure that you’re putting that investment where it’s really paying off, but learning things that are counter-intuitive.

Brent: And I think one of the things that we learned in the mobile optimization. Some of the things that you would think would perform better, perform worse when you think they should perform better. And I think from a from a psychological standpoint or any, type of human behavior standpoint, for me, that’s always very interesting to learn.

Brent: Why and why would something you would think performed better perform worse? And I think for the mobile one, I think was all about we’re going from this desktop. People have a perception of desktop and then people have a perception of mobile. And I’ll just say in the Western world, I’ll generalize.

Brent: Most of the time, we’re still on our desktop computer buying something it’s going more mobile it’s compared to the emerging markets where it’s, maybe they don’t even have a desktop and they’re buying everything online. Yeah. 

Guido: Yeah and that’s counter-intuitive parts saying, okay.

Guido: We think this is going to work with. But it didn’t, that’s also a big part of why CRO can sometimes be a difficult conversation. Because w with management often, Ciro’s also an initially used just to prove whatever management wants it to prove. And that doesn’t always work. For example with, booking that I just mentioned that it’s booking.com.

Guido: It’s you can book hotel rooms there. It’s a big company worldwide. It’s based in the Netherlands originally. So that’s why I use it as an example. There are the example of running experiment. But they, publicly said it. Okay. One in 10 experiments is success. So that even for that company, that’s the pinnacle of AB testing and running experiments.

Guido: They’re really good at this. And even they well fail nine out of 10 times fill as in doesn’t go up doesn’t increase your conversion rates or revenue or whatever you’re optimizing. So you can imagine if, you don’t have your processes in place or you’re not as good as booking yet, that number is not as good as one in 10, but might be wanting 21 in 50 or whatever.

Guido: And that’s, also I think Bartel for whites white can be really hard to start For companies doing this because you really need to be dedicated. It’s not just running a three tests a year and then the hope for the best. That’s probably not going to work for you. So that’s makes it a bit harder than just buy more Google ads.

Guido: But yeah, you need to realize that. The traffic to your website, that’s part one, part two is getting the people on those websites to convert to whatever you want them to buy. And it’s still a very important blocking factor if that’s not, good. And if you’re double the amount of people converting on your websites, that’s probably going to stay there.

Guido: Even if you stop optimizing today, if you double that and you’re stopped today, it’s not going to be we worse tomorrow. Less like things with ads. If you still buy ads today, you’re not going to have any traffic any more tomorrow. So that’s going to be I think Sierra is going to be in the end.

Guido: There’s going to be a better investment, but yeah, 

Brent: I think that looking at at what people are doing there, the op the, alternative is not doing. And then you don’t even know, then you’re really just sailing into a black hole without any knowledge or, thought about what you’re doing. So measuring it.

Brent: And I think I’ve heard is that it’s hypothesized, so you can come up with some experiments, you observe those, you measure them and then adjust after. So even, like you said, one in 10 or, one in 20. Those numbers mean that at least you’ve, found success in that little piece. And normally not normally, but let’s just say in the business world if you get a one and 10 on a stock pick and that stock picked does a thousand.

Brent: The increase in your business or your, return? That one in 10 usually pays for the nine. And I think if, as we dig in to CRO and we work in on those specific things with, clients and learn what is doing better, those that one in 10 is going to give a payback. And I’m guessing booking.com does it because it gives them a payback.

Brent: And of course they know their customer. 

Guido: Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you’re interested, you’re all, if you’re, like I said you’re in an agency you want to sell these things to clients. I think it helps to frame it in a totally different way. Don’t, sell it as optimization senators, risk managers.

Guido: And a way to prioritize your backlog. If you run the experiments and you say indeed nine out of 10 would not have works. That may, that means that you save money on implementing those nine things that wouldn’t would not have worked anyway. So you don’t have to implement them. Just implement the one that does work.

Guido: And, you can also say to the strands that’s maybe you think you’re not experimenting, but you’re changing a little things on your websites today and tomorrow under the author, you still, basically, you’re still experimenting. You just don’t have any idea what the outcome mess of the experiments.

Guido: The overall sum, you know what happens at the end of the month when you’re looking through your books okay, this is what we solve, but you have no ID which. Which of those experiments that you’re, I don’t know that your content team and what your design team, whatever they or development team, whatever they deployed, you have no idea what those individual experiments contributed to the whole.

Guido: So you’re not learning anything. Exactly. It’s something 

Brent: you can build upon. All right, so let’s tie this into Spriker. We, Came on to talk more about Spriker than CRO, but how how we 

Guido: can do multiple episodes of breath is found. Good. 

Brent: Good good So how well let’s, frame it around Spriker and, your role.

Brent: So some of your role is, going to be helping clients and some of your roles building a community. 

Guido: It’s a bit of a it might, feel like a bit of a career switch, so I’m not, I won’t be. So for the last 10 years I’ve been running those experiments, running hero programs and actually building teams that do this.

Guido: So I won’t be doing that. That Spriker at least not, initially. It’s, more about the community part. The thing I’ve also been doing with. With Magento on the side for, 13 years. That’s what I’m going to focus on doing doing for Spriker, but it still feels a bit it still feels a bit similar, so I’m not running AB tests anymore, but I’m still trying to.

Guido: To get the best possible feedback out of that community and use that to make Spriker better. And it can be Spriker the product can be Spriker the services that we offer. So in that sense, it’s not that far from what I’ve been doing is Bombi. It won’t result in an AB test, only commercial websites.

Guido: But I still plan on running some experiments with the community to see what’s working and what isn’t, and then collecting that feedback we are building or expanding, facilitating the community that we have. That’s a, that’s the main goal. Some of the things. That we have. So we have a couple of subgroups within that community.

Guido: We already have a partner advisory board for both the solution partners in the technology part. That’s already running. I’m not involved with that. I’m currently working on seating, a customer advisory boards. So that’s existing customers getting them to get our coupler, like 15 customers, getting them to get R and R on a regular basis.

Guido: And I get feedback from them on how they use system and help them communicate with Spriker in a better. So that’s one thing I’m doing. The second one is regular user groups. So we already had to use a group sets Spriker before the pandemic, those are now being continued on our remote basis.

Guido: So we had our first one last month, which was really fun. Doing that and that’s, more aimed necessarily at at the strategy level. There’s more day-to-day users that are doing that. The, like most user groups are and a third one is that’s working on I’m not sure about the name yet, but like a developer attraction and adoption group.

Guido: So there will be people from, clients, from solution partners and from Spriker itself to she. Okay. What can we do to get, to attract more developers basically to Spriker. We’ve seen that with, Magento that has, can be quite the bottleneck if you don’t have enough developers out in the world.

Guido: So we have a great academy team. That’s a surprise. We’ve got some great courses to onboard people, both for people working in the back ends for developers itself or for people selling selling Spriker those courses that it’s something we have. So also I think learning from I’m not the only one from magenta and the spikers and the LA people with Magento background.

Guido: So Carol making sure that Spriker has really good documentation. So that’s a, this has been thinking. But the academy, of course only works if people know about Spriker itself, you need to get those developers on board first. And so that’s going to be part of that’s that third group that I’m working on to figure out, okay, what can we do to onboard more people more developers and get them enthusiastic about the platform.

Brent: It reminds me of the tech stack on spreads. The, what is that? The platform’s on, tech beach BHP. Perfect. Yes. So a Magento developer could, he could transition a Spriker or fairly, easy. Yup. Yup. And 

Guido: multiple have 

Brent: gone sour yeah. It seems to be. I think we’ve always said this with Magento.

Brent: It seemed like Magento had run the course with eBay and then mark Lavelle and the team came in and, really reinvigorated the community. It seems like red, another tipping point now did an amazing job at that. Absolutely. We’re at an another tipping point. So it sounds like some of your role is to listen to what the community is saying and maybe.

Brent: Not adjust commercial aspects of it, put at least adjust communication aspects. Would that be a good realization of, part of your role of how the community is reacting, not reacting, but forming strategy and forward-looking planning in to involve the community. 

Guido: Yeah. And of course that’s something I experienced in the last 15 years with Magento myself being an active community member, but multiple working on the I’d never worked on the Magento site itself.

Guido: So I’ve seen something that Magento did really well. I’ve seen some things I think Magento could have done better. And that’s, definitely the part. And one of the first things I said two boars, whatever I’m going to do I won’t have sales targets. That’s an important one. For this job to work people need to trust you, right?

Guido: That, they need to be able to come with you with open feedback, open open criticism about whatever they think is important for them to continue their journey with with the products and that shouldn’t result in a call from the sales department next day, saying. Yeah. 

talk-commerce-guido-2022-1-10__22-55-15: Why 

Brent: did you do that?

Brent: Why did you say that? I’ve definitely I’ve unfortunately, or fortunately had those calls. It does get you. And unfortunately those calls do change a little bit of your direction as a, maybe even as an agency head or as a, or a community organizer in order to get money from. The not from the community, but from that entity and Magento was very good at saying, we’re never going to give you money for anything.

Brent: So that was easier. But in in order to get people, let’s just say, get people involved. There was a aspect of, we, you need to tow the line. And I agree there has to be some kind of line that has to be towed in terms of don’t don’t bash us on stage and at a meet Magento event, which actually happened.

Brent: And it should happen when it’s something that’s egregious. But there are I think there always has to be a commercial aspect to things. And again, so just help educate me. Is there a community version of spark or is it completely commercial? 

Guido: It’s completely commercial. It’s the sources.

Guido: But it’s not an open source license. So it the full code is on the, is available and get up for everyone to see and to try and as a and if you’re like me too lazy to install it. So there’s there are demos available for the different markets that we serve. So we have B to B, to C we have we have marketplace solutions so that’s all there for people to see.

Guido: But if you want to use the product, then it becomes a commercial license and that’s fully based on either the items sold order. So it depends a bit on the business model and I guess on what’s our sales team agrees with 

Brent: the clients. Okay. So it’s negotiable somewhat. 

Guido: Now yeah so, they have it’s not necessarily negotiable, but there are levels that you can get to.

Guido: And then of course the better the price becomes lower. Yep. 

Brent: Got it. Yeah. Marketplaces is certainly a, big topic right now. Everybody’s trying to do a marketplace. I think Magento has made the way Magento is, engineered. Isn’t great for marketplace applications. So tell us a little bit about how the marketplace would help a merchant.

Guido: Yeah, and I think w what makes breaker great is that it’s, it really focuses on the non standards business models, protocols, the sophisticated business model. And usually with specifically, I think with, marketplace with B to C it’s, usually straightforward and there are a lot of platforms supporting that.

Guido: And then you go to B2B or to marketplace usually. And like you said, with Magento You often get into the area of a lot of customizations. And then you need a platform that supports that the business models get more and more diverse, more and more when you go to B2B and marketplace and you need a platform to support that.

Guido: So I think that’s one of the, strength of 

Brent: biker a Spriker started in Germany. And it’s branching out to the rest of the world. So what are. What are your plans now for the U S market? I’m assuming that’s the next big market to tackle. 

Guido: Yup. So we got our first clients in in the U S and this is definitely, yeah.

Guido: Western Europe and the U S or for many platforms to go to markets, especially if that’s one of those countries, your, if you use your own country, U S is a big focus. We have already started there this year. Or 2021 last year and this year 2022 will be a big focus here and we will have we already had an exciting events.

Guido: There are last year, I think we’ll have one or two excite events. There are next year for context excites is the spike of fruition of of Magento. Imagine if if that’s, if that helps you with with context So that’s another, we are definitely focusing on that, but for me personally like I said, the one aspect that I find important is to grow.

Guido: That’s a developer base. And specifically for that, I think it’s even more important to be a presence. What is feasible in countries that are not Western Europe and the U S because there are a lot of development communities in south America and Africa in Asia, Indonesia, India. And that those are typical markets where marketing or sales is not active or not active yet, or not as active in, in as in Western Europe and in the U S so that’s going to be a fun challenge for, me and my team to, see outcome are we are, we can visit get visibility specifically in those markets, but in terms of sales we’re growing really fast in in the U S right now, I think this Fastest growth rates.

Guido: Yeah. So it’s going to be definitely a big one for 2020 

Brent: type of merchant. That would be a good fit for Spriker. 

Guido: Yeah. That, that will be the, customer like I said, that has a sophisticated business model and that is a tricky term, I think, because I’ve met a lot of, I’ve also worked agency side and every customer thinks they have a sufficient.

Guido: Business model. So that’s, always a up for discussion but a typical I think the best suit it’s like we just said with B2B and market. Those are definitely the customers that would be a better fit force. Private, I think B2C, although we do have some beets see clients that have more sophisticated mall.

Guido: Sorry if there’s, if it requires more customization then then your standard shop, that’s definitely a good one. Maybe, a good dimension for context that’s Spriker is a password. Oh man. It was on-prem before that we had on-prem we still have some on-prem customers but we only sell the past solution right now.

Guido: So platform as a service and which means we also everything, but there’s still a lot of customization that you can still do that you can either have an agency for, we have a lightness partner now. Our orders. You can do in-house if you have a development team in that. 

Brent: Oh as I think that past solution and just to educate our audience, the past means that it is a single installation, but it is all, it was hosted by the vendor.

Brent: So you’re hosting the platform, you’re supporting the base code. But it’s the single issue, but it’s not shared, it’s not an instance that shared like a SAS solution. It’s not shared with thousands of people. How do you, then 

Guido: you anchor customize it. You can build on top of that compared to with a SAS solution where you can customize some things through settings, but if it’s not in the setting, Then you’re done.

Guido: Yeah. 

Brent: And it’s a big difference there. It’s the only way to customize that is to build an application that’s sitting outside of the application that would con connect via an API. You can’t build it directly into the software. 

Guido: And a nice addition to that is that’s we’re going to release. I think there’s going to be a Q2.

Guido: I think that was announced. I hope I think Q2, we will release our SDK and AOP. That’s the. The application that the platform basically that we will have so then we’re going to have our own marketplace, our own app store for things to connect with. Spriker. So then we can have a shared database of whatever you want to connect.

Guido: If you want to connect your your email, your CRM, your ERP to Spriker. You can do that. And I think that’s especially interesting because a lot of things in Spriker are interchangeable. So w what the gardener calls package business capability. BBC’s which basically means that everything in Spriker it’s a collection of those package business capabilities.

Guido: And that’s, talk to each other through an API. So if you want to, for example remove that or use your own. You can remove practice checkouts and use a third-party checkout or your own checkouts. And that’s different elements in Spriker have. We have I don’t know the accounts, but we have several PVCs that consists of several undoes of modules.

Guido: You can just swap them out and especially with the AOP, that will be really interesting because then you can Israel can be relatively well, even more easy to do. 

Brent: So coming back to the past model one of the complaints with the Magento version of pass is that it, doesn’t necessarily save the client any money on, maintenance because you basically, you’re hosting it on Magento, but they’ll help support your core, but they won’t do anything else then.

Brent: Answer support tickets. So is Spriker taking any different approach to that? Do they, are they doing some of the core updates on the code itself? 

Guido: That’s a good question. And I don’t really, I haven’t worked with a Magental spouse version, so I don’t really know how to compare it to to that. But yeah, the this Riker core is maintained and it’s a it’s the same for everyone.

Guido: And you can then choose to update it for you. Yes or no. For all the different models. There are hundreds, I think we’re currently over a thousand modules of Spriker itself. They’re all versions. You can choose to update. Those were never Whatever works for you. You can you can, of course, ideally update them all when they come out.

Guido: And then that’s all on a rolling basis. I think on average, I heard someone say that on average, we have 10 releases a day. That’s something I’m definitely that’s, being maintained and that you can benefit 

Brent: from. So the I, know that speaking to Mike McKell earlier in the year, he talked a lot about the BDB version and then the scalability and the robustness of the platform.

Brent: Maybe tell it, talk to us a little bit about the type of client that would look at B2B and skew counts and things like that. 

Guido: Oh, yeah. In terms of we have those extreme examples, and last year at at the, excite conference we had one they have over 550 million sq use in their Spriker store, which I find mind boggling.

Guido: That’s that’s, very impressive. And yes, people order dare on a regular basis. It’s not just sitting there but they they sell electronic parts it’s and the case study is actually on my website. If you’re interested, it’s a sociability and this is the name of the. That’s the platform.

Guido: And yeah, I think In terms of, and that’s, why I think Spriker is very interesting to me personally. I was funded and that there’s already, there’s something I found with, Magento. I funded the B2B sites, that those those clients always way more interesting PTC sites because of those those tricky business models and the tricky Details that you need to get right in, B2B.

Guido: B2C can be hard with a lot of customers. Just the sheer volume of, customers. If you have a lot of shopping that those customers of customer behavior change can change fast, but with B2B also have this and the detail that you need to get, right? All those specific things for your business.

Guido: I was Working with a company that did prince and they printed basically on that. And that means that if you print on everything, it’s really hard to get templates for, printing. I know, yeah. Umbrella umbrellas, that’s a different cars. You can mugs pens, everything, all the merchant you can think of that they would print it.

Guido: And which, meant that it was basically almost all manual. For, the depends that some, automation but basically everything else was done manually, which is mind blowing, but then you need to keep in mind when, someone orders it they had their, our local supply was in the.

Guido: But if, you didn’t need a speed delivery, so if you needed a speed delivery, they would do that in a, in the Netherlands. And then you’d have an extra fee for that. But if If you would want to deliver, like in one and a half, two weeks, they would actually ship all the stock that was in the Netherlands.

Guido: Put it on a on a truck, drove it to Poland, and then there are people would unpack everything print it, put it back in a truck, drive it back to the Netherlands and. Because it was so labor intensive, that was actually cheaper to do that than just to print it in the Netherlands, which again is mind blowing, but then you need a system, a backend that supports crazy shit like that.

Guido: And, that’s what I find interesting. Those, clients of debt, those are the things that are holding. Or, things your system is holding you back on? I think that’s those are great cases for Spriker. 

Brent: Yeah, same example that we worked with the eyeglass company that had the same idea where they, want part of the eyeglasses would get done in a factory, in one part of the city.

Brent: And then it would get shipped across town to put the lenses in the frames or whatever. Then they get shipped to the retail store, get shipped back, and then. Then get shipped to the client directly. If that’s that’s the if that’s the model that they had. And that was I know that for Magento, that turned out to be very complicated.

Brent: But, yeah. So I can see how that would from a standpoint of complexity and from a platform where you that’s, where you, the necessity of having a platform that you can modify and make your own. Essentially, 

Guido: if you want to do a. What we call unified commerce. So your terminals in your stores, your physical stores, where people can can order stuff or clients can order stuff locally.

Guido: And that’s connected into your system complexity rises quickly. And also things like in the beginning with, Magento Magento was fixed right now, but in Magento in the beginning it was all already really hard to have multiple warehouses. There’s also, it was also another thing.

Guido: And luckily Spriker fixed that from beginning. That’s, something. We have a lot of clients that’s a doer multiple millions of revenue. That’s the things they want to fix and expect from from a platform to. Yeah, it’s F as a default. 

Brent: There’s a whole bunch of buzzwords floating around in the community on monoliths and microservices and micro blah-blah-blah PWA.

Brent: Where is Spriker sitting in on that. And I guess from a technology standpoint, is it easier for a customer to get into it and not worry so much about the technology? Or are they going to have to. Not worry there’s going to be a certain amount of development needed to get things running.

Guido: It’s a past platform so, there will always be some some development needed to get at the Oregon. Although we do have a. We do have for there’s a front end that you can use if that’s what you want, but you can also add your own phone tents. It will need to be connected to, the data that you have or data that you have needs to be important.

Guido: So those are always things that, that needs. And yeah, there are a lot of buzzwords and it can be complex can get complex really fast. I’m still struggling with it myself. And honestly, the first time I heard the term monolith was with the open letter the Magento Ruthie last summer, they started complaining about how things were going and partially rightfully and that’s where I I formed encountered the term monolith before, but just disregarded it and then, but that, wasn’t the first point. I thought I need to look into this and then, oh, this is what they mean, but yeah for, a Spriker I think Spriker is more something that’s often listed in the.

Guido: Corner of things, a mock standing for a microservices, API, firsts cloud something and a cloud native and and, the headless. So those are also for. Yeah. 

Brent: Excellent. 

Guido: But that’s, like a, term that people use often. We, were not fully onboard with the microservices part of that that equation Spriker believes more.

Guido: And that’s what I just mentioned with, the package business capabilities. Microservices first will mean that everything is a microservice. That that leads to a lot of overheads very quickly. And that’s, not needed for most companies. And there are always exceptions. But it’s not something that you’d benefit from.

Guido: And then on the other end of the spectrum is the, monolith like a magenta was at the. Mainly and then Spriker sits, in the middle, which we find very comfortable and most lines seem to be for most lines. It seemed to be a nice balance between the flexibility that you would get with a, with API first and microservices.

Guido: But to have those package in things that make sense for the business package business capabilities. It’s not a developer term. It’s, business. It’s a business term. Alexa, you’re you to have a package business capability for you can have a CRM or an ERP or your checkouts or your phone tense.

Guido: Those can be different, capabilities of your system. And for, clients that just makes more sense. That language makes more sense and the way at least Spriker has built a, it also prevents the overhead that, you would get with only using microservice. 

Brent: Yeah. I like that term, a package business capabilities.

Brent: Yeah, it gives the I think it, the idea of behind that is. You don’t there. There’s going to be a lot of solutions that would apply, but you don’t necessarily have to do the customization, but if you need to, you still can. So clients or merchants can feel better about. Making their solution work at a lower cost or at least a lower initial investment to get them up and running.

Brent: Yeah. 

Guido: And the Spriker is also not. It’s targeting the local bakery rights. That’d be fair. It’s we’re, targeting a larger enterprise businesses mainly and those usually. Either an agency or their own development team that, can handle this. And that’s also where I think Spriker shines.

Guido: A lot of developers love working with Spriker because it’s so maintainable for them, they only need to focus on those extra things that are the, exceptions basically for their business and not necessarily maintaining the system behind us. That’s also not something I’m not a developer, but a.

Guido: Recurring daily tasks, not something necessarily that you’re looking forward to for doing for most people, at least I’m generalizing here, but most people the new things, that those are the challenging things. That’s what you want to do with most developers want to do. And that’s, what we enable.

Guido: And, along those package, business capabilities, one thing I I think you need to mention that’s not something that’s probably grant funded or something it’s a term developed by by Gardner Spriker was also they recognized Spriker as a, as efficient, airy in their magic quadrants last year.

Guido: And it’s only the second year that we, that the sparkle was even listed. And the magic quadrants. And we’re already we were spoken was the platform. We moved the most distance in a positive direction within that. Within the quite uncertain, there was really nice, but also if you look at this quadrant the market changed so much compared to when we started with Magento.

Guido: Like I said, with Magento, we had commerce where we had virtual mark and there was Magento And we had a couple of like Intershop or those kinds of more commercial packages. But right now the magic quadrants, the market is so different than Demetric wardens already contains like 16, 16, 17 systems.

Guido: And that’s like the creme de LA creme from, what gardeners selectors are the F right now are the hundreds of solutions that you as a company can pick. That’s a huge challenge, I think for both developers, both an agencies and clients to say, what on earth do I need to a, big year? A lot of we saw all of you included agencies that’s select a platform, right?

Guido: And you need to stick to dads and that’s what you invest in. And that’s what you then hope sticks when for, long enough. But also in, in debt, I think. And of course I am definitely biased in this in-depth. Spriker is positioned really well because it’s so open with the API, with those package B business capabilities there’s relatively easy to adopt for you as an agency or develop our work lines that fits really well with with whatever you have, right.

Guido: With the adjacent tools for e-commerce that you need to connect with debts because it’s focuses only on the, on you bringing development through the table for, everything that’s specific to your business and enabling that. I think that positions us 

Brent: really well.

Brent: Five 10 minutes left here. What are you excited now for 2022? What do you see coming on the e-commerce horizon on the technology horizon? Do you think? I think one thing you mentioned is that there’s so many more technology players in that magic quadrant and it’s, you would think that we’d be seeing some more consolidation, but it’s almost as though we’re splitting it between SAS pass and on-prem, and then everybody.

Brent: There’s more of them. So what, do you see happening in 2022? What’s exciting. More and more. Yeah, 

Guido: this is very exciting. I, do think and, actually I had the same thing with magenta. I never looked at other platforms and look the oldest competition that we need to fight. Those other platforms.

Guido: Apparently. The e-commerce market is huge and we all get to play a part in that. And there’s this place for almost all of us or these, a lot of us there is place for, Magento and there’s place for, a shop where there are a lot of business cases, that’s fifth with those, and we don’t necessarily need.

Guido: Bethel each other. And in a ring and the bolt flying everywhere that this was really needed. I think we can all focus on that’s the thing that we really good at. And looking at how fast Spriker is going in terms of clients and employees I’m not worried about that.

Guido: That’s a very exciting thing to be at. I’m actually for the past forever, every ever since I’ve. The works basically. I had this dream once working for like a SAS company, like Dropbox or Evernote that those were the companies I thought 15 years ago, that will be really cool to work at. So I have a, single piece of software and you can optimize debts and both from a usability perspective, but also you have this endless nearly endless world markets and form of your, that you got, that you can conquer that there will be really exciting.

Guido: And that’s, this is what I am excited about. This is my first time working on the platform sites and, doing this and Applying my, my experience with, community building for the first time in actually a professional way. I They actually paying me for this now, especially my dream job that had been doing on the side for, 13 years now.

Guido: So I’m very, excited about that. And it’s a great spot to be in with, Spriker it’s it’s very they’re, remote first. I’ve been working remote first for, but at least pre Corona, but four or five years. But it’s, so natural to the company. It’s everyone is remote first have with limited holidays.

Guido: That’s always nice to have I’m working work from Netherlands. I don’t have to complain and we already. Twenty-five holidays by default. So nothing to complain there, but it’s still nice to have, especially we have to, to kids like I do sometimes you need, you just need some extra because they’re the home again.

Guido: And And, building that community. And like I said, w what I really enjoyed with the Magento community, bringing people together, especially for the first time, I does have a lot of community first next year. And the awkward moments, the recognition. That’s exciting starting point at five that you see where people first meet the immediate charter and then build businesses based on that.

Guido: I clearly remember the first meeting magenta are organized in the Netherlands. To developers came to get our metadata for the first time. And now they have this huge Magento business that they sold a couple of years ago. And, that’s happened multiple times and that’s really exciting to me to see that’s happening and then to be at the start of that.

Brent: Yeah, I agree. So I like the idea of having an MMA. MMA cage match, but you’d call it Magento, meet Magento association, cage match, and we’d get Spriker and shop wire in there. And we’d just get some we just have a Throwdown and see who wins. That’s that’s one way to look at it. 

Guido: That’s one way to look at it.

Guido: Like I said, I don’t necessarily need a cage measure. I think we’re, I think we can all we’re all in e-commerce. So that’s, a really good choice to begin with. And I think if we play at rise, we will all win big. What would be 

Brent: a buydown instead of a Throwdown? I think. So we as, we close out, I always give people an opportunity to do a shameless plug.

Brent: What w shameless plug is just, you can promote anything you’d even a local school or charity or whatever it is that you’re, thinking about the. 

Guido: I feel like I’ve been shamelessly plugging Spriker for us lost at least 20 minutes already. Yeah, but if you want me to continue with that, we have we have for looking for a lot of people.

Guido: As, everyone in the in the e-commerce sphere is, so if you’re interested in in dance and now working for a great European employer have a look at the Sprocket. Hiring people work white likes. That’s where we are remote first and work from anywhere. So a take your pick if you’re interested, definitely take a look there.

Guido: And on a personal note, we started out with a CRO. I have my podcast on the, on CRO still. It’s a weekly podcast interviewing experts in the field and that’s the last hero. So I have looked there and you probably already into podcasts anyway, since you’re listening to this, so might as well subscribe.

Brent: Absolutely. Yeah. We all need to share our subscribers and get people to listen more and learn more. I think that the, at first first this should be education. This should be learning about other platforms is not about Magento or whatever. The place where we can learn about what other platforms are doing.

Brent: And from my personal for 2022, I’m super interested in CRO and I have seen sodas seen the light and, why that’s so important for clients. So I applaud you for what you’ve done over the years. And just as a plug. You did organize the first meat Magento, right way back in 2009, 

Guido: January 27th, 2009. 

Brent: Wow.

Brent: Yeah, that’s amazing. And it’s, been such a fantastic journey for both the community building, which has been the most important part for me. Because that’s when I got introduced to right about that same time, that’s when I got introduced to Magento. And I think that community is what has driven the Magento to where it is.

Brent: And you have to give a lot of a lot of kudos, so to speak to the community for helping move that along. And right now there’s a lot of A lot of communication that isn’t and is happening in the Magento community. 

Guido: Yeah. Yeah, I do think community a, is a huge asset for, you as a company, whatever you’re doing as a as a company community is one of those things that is the hardest to copy.

Guido: It’s all of us can copy your product. They can copy your servers, your pricing model, your business model. But it’s really hard to copy a, community. And I think that’s also the, one of the big reasons magenta was still so big, even with all those comp the competition that’s out there in, in that 14, 15 year that Magento was existing.

Guido: Something better probably has come along. And, maybe it has For that specific business model. But transitioning all those agencies away from, you or the developers to learn something new or clients to switch platforms. Clients don’t switch platforms every year. There’s, a time delay in that and, it gives them that gives you the opportunity to, improve your product again, because you have that community commitment from people through you in the company.

Guido: And that’s Yeah, I think I mean with Adobe taking over Magento right now, they’re well, they’re not investing in the name Magento anymore. That’s I think that’s abundantly clear with removing the name from the website. The logo was and magento.com now redirecting to to the Adobe website.

Guido: But, even for, the product It’s. Yeah, it’s hard to see a little of investment from, Adobe. What we hoped would happen when they took over. But still everyone’s using Magento. And it’s really hard. You, as a business owner, you or the Magento agency, it’s really hard to have everyone trained on a different, platform.

Guido: That’s not necessarily something you’re looking 

Brent: forward to. Yeah. That’s so true. 

Guido: Yeah. And so communities is a huge assets for four years of community. And then for user, as a business and that’s community, then in a broad sense, a sense of the word can be individuals, developers, the companies that, are attached to you and committed to 

Brent: I think I get your name right there, ghetto Yonson.

Brent: Thank you so much for being here today. Ghetto is the global business and technology evangelist for Spriker. I look forward to seeing you in 2022 in person, somewhere in the world. Hopefully in the U S or in Europe maybe even at a race, we can do a race together. We did, we got through this whole episode without talking about running.

Brent: Next time we’ll do more of that. I appreciate you being here today. Thank you. 

Guido: Thanks for having me. 

Brent: Thank you.

Is the Future V-Commerce? with Dick Polipnick

Imagine 10 years ago, you are standing in your kitchen and you say “Alexa order more dried lima beans”. I know what you are saying. Who eats lima beans? Would you have imagined then that this is a reality? Brent and Dick overview where the future of commerce is going. And it’s V but not virtual, that’s V for Voice Commerce. Will Siri get a commission on every dollar that gets sold? Join us for a great episode on marketing and where we are going in the future.

EPISODE NOTES

  • Dick Polipnick is the founder and CEO of Online Growth Systems, and competes competitively in parkour. He believes that the next iteration of commerce is V-Commerce or voice commerce.
  • Based on his research, Siri is going to integrate with commerce and speculates that they’re going to get a commission on every dollar that gets sold through Siri. Voice commerce is going to be big and, most importantly, a lot of Ecommerce companies have already seen traction in those areas. His suggestion? Optimize your current Ecommerce site to be integrated with voice buyers, This, combined with virtual and augmented reality, is going to be the future of commerce.
  • Brent mentions how coaching and business coaching can be done virtually and that the next thing coming from voice reality is voice commerce. Merchants worry about Alexa looking at the amazon store first and subsequently, all the rest of the list. The best way to optimize for SEO is to write it in a way that people would speak as well as ranking your keywords that are written the way people speak.
  • Dick recommends that Ecommerce companies consider subscriptions. Everybody is familiar with dollar shave club, and that’s a company that’s competing for a commodity, it’s disposable, and your lifetime value is greater. Dick mentions that you can put a unique spin on this and make an e-commerce brand or Ecommerce company with a monthly subscription. Part of the value is that you know what you’re going to get every month.
  • The Future of Commerce is Voice
Talk Commerce

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