I speak with Allen Gannet founder and CEO of TrackMaven about their marketing strategy. Allen tells me about how they mange their content, we discuss the gated/ungated debate, how they have run up to 10 events per month in the past, how long their marketing cycle is (longer than you might think) and the strategies that are really killing it for them. They also undertake a lot of paid social media and search marketing. We also discuss Allen’s new book (The Creative Curve) and how MarTech is taking over. This is a fascinating episode with tons of insight into a fast growing SaaS business.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
My best piece of marketing advice is – be human, create that level of an authentic relationship, whether that’s through doing more video work, whether that’s through using more emotional language. Find those ways to get rid of that “I am a professional robot hack.”
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
I’m definitely biased, but other than my book (The Creative Curve), I would definitely say check out The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a book by Ben Horowitz about entrepreneurship. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, I find most marketers are entrepreneurial at least, and I think it has a lot of really good just like life lessons and ways to think about the world that I think are really helpful.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
I love Inbox by Gmail. They’re sort of like Gmail 2.0, which you could opt into, where you have like all these abilities to make to-do lists that are built into their email. I mean, it’s how I run my life.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I love any of the campaigns we’re seeing these days that are incorporating user stories. So I actually think Facebook is doing this campaign right now because obviously they’re going through all this turmoil. They’re doing this campaign around trying to show how Facebook connects people better, and so they hired this really great, amazing director. They’re doing these clips of their profile on different Facebook groups and how those groups have brought people together. And so they have this one commercial, for example, showing a female bike club that organizes on Facebook. And they tell the story of that, and it’s really amazing. It’s well shot and all that kind of stuff. It’s just a very human story. So I love that campaign.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
I’m not a big podcast listener. Don’t hate me.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Allen Gannett, founder and CEO of TrackMaven and author of a new book called The Creative Curve. TrackMaven is a marketing, tracking, and attribution software used by companies such as the NBA, Microsoft, Saks Fifth Avenue, and many more.
Allen founded the company nearly six years ago after starting a number of other companies and investing in a range of other interesting businesses. So to say he has growth experience is an understatement. I’m extremely excited to learn the marketing strategies Allen and his team have implemented to grow TrackMaven, so let’s dive right in. How are you doing today, Allen?
Allen Gannett:
Hey, man. I’m doing great. How are you?
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, I’m fantastic. It’s a real privilege to have you on today.
Allen Gannett:
I always feel good when I’m talking to someone from the Motherland, so this is great.
Matt Byrom:
I love that. So for the listeners, tell us a bit more about TrackMaven. What do you do? Who do you help? How do you work?
Allen Gannett:
Trackmaven is the marketing insights company. What we aim to do is marketers are struggling these days with your job has traditionally been a right hemisphere job where you’re constantly trying to create new brands, stories, and you flex that creativity. But more and more, you’re getting all these left hemisphere tasks, where your CMOs, your executive, your CFOs are expecting you to somehow also be data scientists and to be able to perfectly report on your marketing. And so TrackMaven’s role in your life is to sort of be an outsource left brain for you, where we went to help you any time there’s a marketing, analytics and insights questions; we want to give you the tools, the technology, the expertise to be able to tackle that.
And so we have our own big data platform, where we suck in data from about 25 different digital marketing channels, and we give you an aggregate view. We have reports, visualizations, we have attribution within that so you can understand, for example, how many sales came from what, say, social media post or a piece of content marketing. And then we also have an expert in consulting team where if you are struggling with a particular insights problem or if you want to completely outsource your insights function, we can actually just do it for you. We do that for a lot of big brands. And so we get to be professional geeks for a living.
Matt Byrom:
And who wouldn’t want to do that, aye?
Allen Gannett:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
And what market are you aiming towards here, enterprise or SMEs?
Allen Gannett:
It’s the typically middle market, so companies with over 250 employees, and also we tend to work a lot with divisions of large enterprises. So, for example, Microsoft Office, but we don’t work with all of Microsoft globally. And so we tend to work a lot of times with those divisions that kind of act more like a mid market company in terms of how they make decisions.
We’re not a great fit for if the CIO of some Fortune 20 company wants to do a big global rollout because we’re more of like functional analytics where the best thing is for us to be used by an actual marketing team. It’s not as much of a, “Hey, let’s role this out across the entire world and get this big aggregate view.” It’s more of, “Hey, let’s get the Microsoft Office team to use this so they can start making better decisions.”
Matt Byrom:
It’s really interesting as well because our business, a lot of businesses really struggle, although you’ve got so much insight that you can gather these days with online digital marketing, to actually collate and collect all that data and actually make good use of it is still really, really difficult.
Allen Gannett:
Yeah. Preach. 100%. Yes.
Matt Byrom:
So I can only imagine that when people come to you guys, it’s almost a no-brainer decision. That’s the way I would see it.
Allen Gannett:
Yeah. That’s what we hope for, right?
Matt Byrom:
Yes.
Allen Gannett:
But I think right now what you’re seeing is that marketers are on different parts of the maturing and evolution curve in terms of how they think about marketing data. And so you have some people which get it, which that marketing is a tool, data is a tool to both prove and improve on your marketing. And you have people who just use data to prove their effectiveness. And you have people who just don’t really use data at all still, which is crazy to me because it’s 2018.
And so it really depends on where people are on sort of that maturity curve, but I think where you’re seeing the best marketers get to is they’re realizing that data is a tool to both prove and improve on their marketing. And so what that means practically is, yes, use data to show, hey, we got x amount of sales. We got x amount of engagement. We got z amount of awareness. Great. We did a good job. Don’t fire us. But you also use data to see, okay, what worked well this time last year? What worked well for my competitors? Or looking at my campaign right now, are there things that I can see within my data to actually pivot and make changes throughout the second half of the campaign to be more efficient and more effective? So you really want to get to the place as a marketer where it’s both about improving and improving using data.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. And are you guys working on a subscription model, so a monthly, annually?
Allen Gannett:
Yes. It’s a subscription model. It’s annual contracts. And some people do two- or three-year contracts just if they want to lock in pricing, for example, but it’s typically an annual contract.
Matt Byrom:
Cool. So what I’m really interested in, tell me about the TrackMaven marketing strategy. What are the channels that you guys are focused on? What deliverables do you really focus on each month?
Allen Gannett:
It’s changed over time. Obviously so the company is about, just to give you some context and the scale, it’s about five years old, so about a 60-person company. So it’s still small, but it’s not tiny. And when we first started, it was all word of mouth and referral just because at that point, if you’re thinking about how do you reach 10, 20 people a month, which is really good growth, doing referral, word of mouth is a really efficient way to do that.
Now we’re trying to reach 100, 200 people a month. We don’t know enough people. Plus, we’ve gone through a lot of our contacts. So that doesn’t really work. And so I always think about when you’re growing a startup, I think about your marketing strategies; ideally you have to line everything up, so you’re sort of scaling the overall marketing pipe as the business is scaling. And those two things are nice alignment, because if you don’t have the leads or the opportunities to sell, even if you can scale a business, you’re not going to be able to.
So marketing I think really is the tip of the spear when it comes to growing a startup. Right now from a marketing perspective, we do a mix of things. I’d say that because our sale is somewhat evangelical in terms of we have a specific point of view and a belief, we still do a lot of events. Events are a huge driver of marketing for us, and so we do events in a few different ways. We do hosted events where we’re actually running an event, so we might run like a customer or prospect dinner. We may do like a little mini conference in a city.
And then we also go to trade shows. And we used to do a lot of trade show, like we used to do a lot of exhibit floor stuff, which worked well for a couple years, but what you find is that usually the shows attract sort of recurrent audiences year over year because you have like let’s say this show is in London, for example; you have the same marketers in the London area who go, and then next year they go again, and next year they go again. And so over time as the business grows, those actually become less effective because the same people who walk the exhibit floor walk it again.
So now at the events, we actually move much more to a thought leadership model, where we’re typically not paying. We’re typically being invited to speak. That is just much more efficient because typically there’s a different group of people than the ones who are sort of the ones who are willing to go walk around the floor and take free chachkies, and it obviously just doesn’t cost … Events can be very expensive from a sponsorship perspective.
And so that sort of morphed overtime to where now we’re doing much more on the sort of conference circuit. We’re doing more speaking. And then we’re hosting a lot more of our own events. And so there’s been times when we’ve done 10 of our own events in a month. We’re not doing that right now but definitely can get there. And then the other things we do are obviously paid marketing. And so we’re running paid social, some paid display. We use some tools like AdRoll, for example, that make it really easy to do some pretty sophisticated retargeting.
And then we also do a lot of content and social marketing, which is good because we sell to those people. And so we do a lot of content, so social marketing, and our main strategy there is we have this asset, which is that we have a billion pieces of marketing content in our data base that we’ve pulled in over time. And so we can look at that big chunk of data and actually analyze and understand more about what’s worked or what hasn’t worked for people out there in the market.
We can look at benchmarks. We can do all sorts of really cool stuff and different ways to slice up the data. So we talk about it as monetizing our asset, which is monetizing our data asset. And marketing is one of the ways that we could do that.
Matt Byrom:
And I noticed a lot of the content that you guys are creating is like reports. It’s data-based. So that sort of talks to a lot of what you were saying there about the type of content that you’re creating. How have you found that performs over the other type of content? I’m guessing that it performed better, and that’s why you’re creating more b2b content.
Allen Gannett:
Yeah, exactly. So the data, since the data content works better, but I think it all comes back to ultimately when you’re thinking about doing any wort of content marketing, I think you really need to focus on sort of two things I think work the best–either entertaining or educating. I think entertaining is hard for a lot of b2b brands, but you can do it. There’s definitely techniques if you want to be an entertaining brand.
But educating I think is much more accessible for most people. And so when you educate, it’s really just thinking about it like, what would be valuable to my customer? And for us, it’s like, we’re selling to marketers who are interested in data, and so providing some free data is a pretty good way to do that, and we actually do that throughout the entire sales process. So I think a lot of other companies in the b2b space suffer a little bit from they’ll send out emails, and they’ll say, “Hey, just following up. Wanted to see if you’re interested in demo.” And no one is interested in demo when you send that. It’s so boring, right?
So what we do is we try and give throughout our entire marketing and sales process, so we’re constantly giving you things as a prospect. So we’re giving you free data in the top of the funnel marketing. Yeah, it’s more generic. In the sales process, we’ll actually run custom reports just for you and actually give you those as the way in which we’re sort of like giving you value throughout because my goal is that if you touch TrackMaven as a prospect, as a customer, whatever, the experience is that you are constantly receiving value, it is a valuable experience.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, and that’s what we do as well in our brands. We create a lot of content, but we’re based in the video industry, and we create a lot of content around video, using video data and things like that, and it’s that exact thing that we feel: The more that we’re educating, the more we’re supporting, the more we’re helping grow somebody’s interest and understanding of video, the more likely they are to feel attachment to our brand.
And I know it’s a lot of the content you create is gated, so the reports, webinars, and things like that is gated. How did you feel about the whole gated/ungated debate, along with say like GDPR, which is forcing us to treat people’s data in a different way?
Allen Gannett:
On GDPR, obvious as an American company we have some European clients but not a ton, and so it’s pretty easy for us–we just have basically like in our app, for example, we have a little toggle where we toggle that their GDPR necessary. And we have certain customer tracking tools that we don’t use, and we do them, which is pretty easy to be compliant.
The more general form gating question, I think what we think about is all of this is strategies that always I like to break down my marketing strategies into three really big metapuzzles or metaphases, which is awareness, engagement, conversion. I think if you make the world that simple, it really is clarifying. And so in terms of things that are focused on engagement or conversion, we always, always gate it. Things that are focused on awareness, we typically don’t gate it. So these are blog posts. These are certain whitepapers that go direct to PDF downloads because we just want them out there. We want people seeing them, touching them, experiencing them, feeling them. And so I think when you think about your marketing strategy, really think about those three.
And then obviously for things that are focused on engagement and conversion, gated, but things that are focused on awareness, often times the best thing is not to gate it and just to let as many people access them as possible.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. The more people that you can get that into the hands of, the better, really. If you’re trying to get awareness for something, then actually you’re restricting it to say a 10%, 20% conversion, you’re really taking four people out of five out of the equation really.
Allen Gannett:
Yeah. It doesn’t work.
Matt Byrom:
So events are really good for you, as you said. How did you find that out? Was it just a case of doing some small-scale events and growing from there?
Allen Gannett:
Obviously since we’re a data company we like to test stuff, so, yeah, we did a couple events, and we looked at the cost per opportunity. We were like, “Oh! This is very good. We should keep doing this. And then basically over time, which you would find with any of these marketing channels, is that as you focus resources into them, they tend to become less efficient, less effective because the marginal dollar in marketing is often much less effective. And so one of the big things we find within our marketing is that we have to have a diverse portfolio of stuff because you know how something’s working really well right now, typically in our industry, which is super, super competitive, new marketing channels get sort of crowded very quickly, and so you constantly have to be moving off to the next marketing channel before the one you’re currently on gets too expensive.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree. Unfortunately that is the case. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find one and just continue to milk and milk and milk that thing?
Allen Gannett:
Yes. Oh my God. Sounds like a dream.
Matt Byrom:
So tell me about the events that you actually host yourself you said. Are they small events? How many people would that normally be for?
Allen Gannett:
It depends. We have a user conference we do that’s 350 people. We just had an event on Thursday, which was a 30-person happy hour. And then we had an event a couple weeks ago; it was a 10-person dinner. And so it really depends on what are we focusing on. So basically the higher up on sort of the org chart, the smaller the event. So when I do a dinner, it’s like we just invite VPs and CMOs, and it’s meant to be very intimate. It’s meant to be, we go to a really nice restaurant.
Last week we did this happy hour that about 30 marketers came to. Super fun. It was the mix of existing customers and prospects, so there’s some social proof. They get to meet each other. You also get to make customers feel part of the community. And so you get to create that feeling. I think one of the big mistakes that people make in the technology business is that they forget that especially when you’re selling to marketers that a huge part of what you’re doing is you’re building a community around some things. You’re building a community around your brand, around your technology, around your point of view or your belief system in marketing.
And so that is I think something that events can actually serve really, really well. So there’s a lot of businesses out there that have done almost all of their sort of community building through events. Very little of it is actually online. And so I think events are one of those things that as techies and as startup people, we can sometimes have a little bit of agita about, we’re a little bit heartburned about because it seems so old school. But in reality it’s still the most effective way to build community and to build relationships. And there’s countless studies about the impact of face-to-face interactions and all this stuff.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. It’s really interesting. I’m actually really interested in this particularly because it’s something that we’re sort of flirting with at the moment ourselves. We’re trying to understand if we can create many events with the very targeted group of people that we want to be in the event and actually build our community around localized events as well, so very interesting. And would you actually have the people that you invite to the dinners, perhaps like the smaller events, would you have those people on file and reach out to them? Or are they like new people that you would just reach out to cold and say, “We’ve got this network and-“
Allen Gannett:
All the above. So it just depends on we have an inside sales team, and so an inside sales team is split into two functions. So we have sales development. Then we have account executives. And sales development are the ones who are qualifying in-bound leads and reaching out to schedule the demo. And they’re also the ones doing more prospecting-type activities. And then every month they get a list of target accounts that our sales ops team generates that is people whom meet our criteria.
And then we’re typically focusing on people there, but obviously if we have let’s say we’re doing an event in September. All of the sales development team will come together and say, “Here’s who we want to invite from our target accounts. Here’s what we want to do.” And then we’ll also invite some people who may be already in the funnel and are maybe really qualified but we haven’t talked to in a while. So it’s just sort of a mix of those different things.
And this is where one of the things that’s really important is if you have a more b2b sales process is people talk about sales and marketing alignment as this sort of thing, like a cliché to talk about, but I think we’ve done a really good job at that, and we have the benefit of they both report to the same person. But I think if you don’t do that, and I think some of the lessons we found in terms of how to make sales and marketing align, align as well, well, if you make a report to the same person, they align. So that’s a easy trick.
Two, you have to meet all the time. Once a week, twice a week, whatever it is, they should be having a head of marketing, head of sales, and maybe even a click down, like some of the different managers; they should be literally working hand and hand in hand. Especially if you have a sales development function, they should be talking to Marketing every day. You should seat them right next to the sales development function so that there’s constant interaction because when you have b2b organization, to get sales and marketing to really function well together, they really have to view themselves as in service to the other.
So the sales development function has to be themselves in service to, hey, marketing is generating all these expensive marketing activities. They’re doing all this work. We have to make sure we really like live up to it and do the best job we can what they’re doing for us. The marketing function has to say, “Okay, we have to give the sales development team the best quality stuff possible so that they’re the most efficient so that they do well, they get promoted, they get raises, they do all this stuff.” So they have to be themselves in service to each other at a sort of personal level, and the way to do that is really to make sure that they’re talking all the time, they’re approximate to each other, and ideally they’re reporting to the same person.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. I love that. And actually I think, I was just trying to find out the episode as well. I think it’s episode two or three of this podcast that I spoke with G from Drift, and he was saying he’s actually got a formula that he uses to actually understand totally that sales and marketing formula really. So you could actually see the flow of people from marketing to sales and the results that then followed as well. Super, super interesting.
Allen Gannett:
That’s cool.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, it’s really interesting. But what you’re saying is the same thing, really, is that the sales and marketing have to be super aligned where one’s got a really sort of relationship and an ownership of the other so that the person is flowing from one person to the next person, and that journey is-
Allen Gannett:
Cool.
Matt Byrom:
… zoned throughout the business.
Allen Gannett:
Love it.
Matt Byrom:
So you say you also do a lot of paid social and paid marketing? Tell me a bit more about how that works for you and what gives you the best results.
Allen Gannett:
So we do a good amount of paid social, paid marketing ads. We definitely find in this days paid social is just the best. We used to do a lot of LinkedIn ads. We found that over time, LinkedIn ads have become really expensive, just, again, sort of that point around marketing dollars. So now we focus more of our paid budget on retargeting, so people that are already in our funnel. So retargeting tends to right now be the best for us.
Our market is a little too competitive right now to use paid as a more top funnel activity. And so just right now it’s not that. I think eventually as the market sort of calms down again, to give your listeners prospective, in the marketing tech sort of landscape, when I started the company, there was 150 martech vendors according to analysts. Right now there’s 6,300. So it’s got a little crazy.
Matt Byrom:
Is that diagram, isn’t that where it’s got the logos of… software company?
Allen Gannett:
That diagram gives me anxiety and panic attacks. So, yes, thank you for bringing that up again, Matt. It’s still-
Matt Byrom:
It pops up every year in some sort of way, doesn’t it?
Allen Gannett:
Yeah, I know, every year, every April. So there’s that, and then one things I’d stay on the paid social side we talk to our clients a lot about and that I think is a really critical thing that most people forget is when you’re doing paid social ads, and, Matt, this is going to sound really stupid, but I promise you no one does it, like literally no one, when you’re doing paid social ads, they’re still social, and so one of the big mistakes people make is one of the reasons they get not the performance they want out of paid social is that they like basically just post these banner ads in the form of a Facebook post. And that’s not how paid social works.
The way to do paid social well is things like we did this campaign a while ago, so we did this campaign once that was like, “Hey, who’s the best marketer you know? Tag them.” And it was an ad. And all of these people tag marketers they knew. And it got this huge amount of organic lift on top of the paid reach we’re paying for on Facebook.
Matt Byrom:
That’s awesome.
Allen Gannett:
And we reached all these people in our target audience. And so that’s how you do paid social. You see a lot of the E-commerce brands do this really well in Instagram. They’ll post these little video things, and then they’ll have like “tag a friend,” or whatever, or they ask a question. And that’s how you do paid social because that’s how you bring down your CPM and your CPC is you get that free organic lift that Facebook is willing to give you if you do it right.
First is if you just use it as essentially better ads, like, yeah, it’s not going to be as that … It’s going to be good, but it’s not going to be great. It’s when you can get that free boost, that’s when it becomes great.
Matt Byrom:
And I guess that’s just taking it away from being an ad at all. Yes, it’s paid, so you get in the reach, but really what you’re trying to do is just get that reach so that you can get a bigger engagement really, isn’t it? So it’s taking it away from being an ad at all in a way.
Allen Gannett:
You nailed it.
Matt Byrom:
Basically what you’re saying is you’ll use events to hit targeted audience, then use retargeting on your site to actually capture people who have been to the site already. Are you bringing people to the site originally, then, not through paid in most ways but through like SEO?
Allen Gannett:
We don’t use paid really for top of funnel right now just because we find that it’s so expensive with how competitive the market is. So right now we’re doing mostly in-bound events, content, direct email solicitation. That’s how we’re doing it.
Matt Byrom:
And how important is SEO for you, then, on the content side? Are you literally going after rankings, and were you thinking about it that deeply?
Allen Gannett:
Yeah. We definitely do. The issue for us is that we have a very tight target persona in terms of what market, what titles, all that stuff. So SEO is helpful. And just inherently being around for five and a half years, there’s certain terms you rank really well for, and we do get leads from those, but it’s a lot less than what you’d think.
And so I think if you’re selling to a broader market, SEO’s obviously helpful. For us, we know the psychographic and demographic profile of our customers so well at this point that it’s actually it’s a bit inefficient because it’s hard to get down to key words that are going to perfectly match: We want people at this size company in these industries, with these titles who are also have intent right now. That’s hard to do, and so that’s why we focus more on other things. That’s why we focus more on sort of more content marketing-type things that we can then, for example, email the people who we know they are relevant for and we know are in our target market.
And so SEO’s definitely a piece of the puzzle, but it’s actually I’d say a relatively small piece of the puzzle for us. Now, if you were marketing to more small businesses where there’s millions and millions and millions of them, then SEO is critical and essential because just inherently you’re not going to get the cost to acquire customer down low enough if you don’t have the sort of “free channels really humming.
Matt Byrom:
So I’m guessing that you must work quite a lot on the nurture side to nurture support and really and really, the word is “nurture,” but nurture those prospects towards being customers, I guess.
Allen Gannett:
Exactly. So when we think about it, it’s like we’re very comfortable with if someone is talking to us, and it’s a good company but not a fit right now. We don’t mind spending two years nurturing them and inviting them to stuff. Again, man, we found that over time it’s just sometimes it’ll be the right person, the right company, but the wrong time. And then maybe for that company it won’t change, but it’ll actually, that person will move over to a new company where all of a sudden this is the most important thing.
And so having that relationship has a lot of downstream effects, and so that’s one of the positive benefits of being just a more upper market piece of software in terms of we can be more patient. We can take more time. And that’s nice because it makes the whole thing a lot less transactional, where we’re not just trying to sell you, we’re trying to build a friendship build a relationship. That’s for the longterm. It’s okay even if this company is not when you end up buying TrackMaven.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and I guess that was exactly sort of the way I was going to lead this. So it’s not really that you’re actually just trying to get leads in the top of the funnel anymore because you’ve got such a tight target persona. You’re really just trying to build relationships with the right people. Would that be right?
Allen Gannett:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Perfect. In that case, you say two years is a typical lead time for you, or is your [crosstalk 00:26:15]-
Allen Gannett:
No, I was just giving example of sort of a high one. It’s typically like … Well, there’s not really a typical at this point since we’ve been around for five years, there are people who’ve been in the database for five years. So if you look at the average, the average would be kind of crazy. Probably the median is a couple months.
Matt Byrom:
A couple months, so that’s not too bad at all, then. Tell me about how your book The Creative Curve, how does that fit into your marketing strategy?
Allen Gannett:
Yeah, so I have a book coming out, June 12 in the US, June 14 in the UK and the rest of the former Commonwealth. “Commonwealth,” such a fun world to say. So basically I started working on the book about three years ago. And part of what I realized early on was that when you’re in a really crowded market, you ideally want people to come to you. You don’t want to constantly be pushing yourself out there.
And so what we found is a lot of thought leadership stuff we were doing, whether it’s speaking at big conferences or doing a [inaudible 00:27:09] it brought people to us. It made us sort of an expert. And so I always sort of had in the back of my head that doing a book at some point was the right thing to do. And you see like HubSpot, the founders of HubSpot wrote a book around the same size we are. Marketo, Eloqua, they all did a book when they were around the same size we are, Contently, for example. And so I talked to some of those founders about how they used the book as part of the sort of marketing strategy for the company. And it becomes one of the most effective sort of leave-behind things. It’s like, hey, knew someone; you could give them a $30 phone battery thing that has your logo on it, or you can give them your CO’s book that in bulk costs $50 for you.
And the book sort of imply, has a lot of positive implications with it. And so I sort of knew in the back of my head that that was something that at some point I should do, and then I had started giving this talk in marketing conferences maybe three and a half years ago that was really making this point that as marketers, we think of creativity as this like magical, mystical thing that we’re either born with it or we’re not. And if we’re not born with it, we have to hire an agency to give it to us. And this got me really frustrated because I’ve always been someone who’s been a big reader, read a lot of autobiographies of creatives, and that is not the takeaway from the stories of creative genius.
When you read the actual stories of creative genius, the takeaway is the results of a lot hard, smart work–not just hard work, but hard, smart work. So I started giving this talk that was basically debunking a bunch of sort of like flash of genius myth stories and telling the real stories of how creativity worked. And that talk became really popular and sort of snowballed into someone was like, “Hey, this would be a really good book.” And then I started working on it. And then as the book sort of started coming together in the book proposal and all that, I realized that this isn’t just a problem for marketers, but all creatives have this issue where they think creativity is this like results of the genetic lottery. And in fact the science actually shows us really, really clearly that creativity is a learnable, enhanceable, practiceable skill, that you can get better at.
And so for the book, what I ended up doing is I interviewed about … I had sort of three big data imputs. So I interviewed about 25 living creative geniuses. These are billionaires. These are people who have started 10 startups. These are people who have won Oscars, Tony Awards, Emmys. And then I also interviewed all the leading academics who study creativity today, so the people who sort of cross neuroscience, psychology, sociology.
And I also read thousands and thousands of pages of peer review research, and basically from these three, the book came together in this really straightforward way, which is the first half of the book is debunking this idea of the inspiration theory of creativity, this idea that creativity is this like divine thing that visits a select few of us at a select period of time. So it debunks that and explains the science that we know about creativity and how it actually works and sort of giving you that overview of the sort of a quick 101 around creativity.
The second half of the book is from these interviews I did with this creative practitioners, I break down four things I found that they all did to actually enhance their creativity, to actually get better at it, to practice it. So I explained those through stories, and I also give the science of why those four things work. And so it’s very much in these sort of top psychology category, but it has a lot more science than I think a lot of the other books sort of in the genre.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. And the people that you’ve gotten to interview are really impressive as well. It’s quite amazing. I’m really looking forward to taking a read and then-
Allen Gannett:
Yeah, it’s fun. We interviewed a ton of big names. So we interviewed David Rubenstein, who’s a billionaire. We interviewed Kevin Ryan who started MongoDB guild, who’s CEO of DoubleClick. Interviewed Pasek and Paul, who they’re the team behind Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land and The Greatest Showman, and so it was a fun project.
Matt Byrom:
It’s really cool. And also the trailer that you’ve done is really funny as well. Anybody who’s listening now should head over to thecreativecurve.com and check out the trailer as well. It’s quite impressive. It’s got a [crosstalk 00:31:22].
Allen Gannett:
There’s, Matt, you know what I’m talking about, so we won’t ruin the surprise, but there’s also a cameo by a certain British relative of mine, and so-
Matt Byrom:
Check it out.
Allen Gannett:
So yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. It looks great and I really am looking forward to it. It’s one of those books that just looks like you must read it, so I really encourage everyone to take a look, thecreativecurve.com.
Allen Gannett:
Thanks, man.
Matt Byrom:
To follow on from that, you used LinkedIn a lot. You’ve put a bunch of videos on there, really, really impressive, really interested in them, again, a lot of personality in your videos, which is cool. You’re like 60,000 followers. How do you feel like personal use of social media actually helps your business brand?
Allen Gannett:
I think these days it’s literally the only thing that is … It’s mixed price media in a good way. When you think about marketing, you constantly want to be looking for mispriced media, which are things that have a really high ROI relative to their effort. And so right now CEO marketing and leader marketing is like by far one of the most effective things. And you see T-Mobile’s CEO in the US has done the sort of thing this. It’s super effective for him, and that’s a very consumer brand, which you think it wouldn’t work well.
But what we found is that for me it’s like the videos I do on LinkedIn, they’re 90 seconds. They’re literally 90 seconds, Matt. They are unproduced. I shoot them on my iPhone. You know what I mean? There’s no magic there.
Matt Byrom:
But it goes to that point, and it tells people the message that you’re trying to get across straight away, and it’s-
Allen Gannett:
But it gets to the point it’s very straightforward. It’s very clear. It’s sometime very comfortable doing. And so what’s cool is that they create, again, this sort of pull factor where now people look to us as, “Okay, they’re not just advising marketers, they’re actually effective marketing.” And so now we have clients who will call us and want specifically to learn, “Okay, how can we do this type of stuff for our team? How can we get our CEO to do this stuff?”
And so it creates this sort of expert and thought leader sort of cycle where by doing what’s right now the most effective type of marketing, which is, again, sort of leader marketing is right now the most mispriced media out there, it shows people what’s possible. It shows that you can know how to do it. It also sort of inherently proves your credibility of someone who we market to marketers. And it has this sort of really nice positive feedback loop in addition to like the leads it brings in and all of this kind of stuff.
It’s definitely interesting to me. It’s definitely we’re definitely entering a different time, and I think the reason why leader marketing is working right now so well is that inherently, A, digital media, it’s easy to be inauthentic. You could have a CEO’s name on a blog post, but who knows if they actually wrote it. Video, it’s like, no, no, I’m like staring at you right now.
I’m here. This is me. And so I think there’s an authenticity element, and I think also we just inherently are as we become such a digital culture, we also are seeking out very human connections. And so I think video is make the brand very humid. It used to be that everyone wanted those cute little animated explainer videos. And now I think we really want human brands. We want to buy from other people. We want to talk with other people. We want to be more connected.
Matt Byrom:
And I’m just going to ask you one question before I bring this to our last five, which is if you look back over your business over the last five, six years, what customer acquisition strategy, so what strategies have you implemented that have just like head and shoulders above the rest, you’ve gone, “Wow, that has been successful. That’s work for us?”
Allen Gannett:
I think one of the things to think about when you’re building out your strategies are really, really, really, and I know this is going to sound cliché, and it’s not meant to be, but you really have to constantly reassess your position relative to where your audience is. And the more you could put yourself in your audience’s shoes emotionally, understand what are they feeling emotionally, and how do we build marketing sales, product processes related to that?
I think the biggest mistake you make when you’re building a b2b company is you take the emotion out of it. If you go to our website, for example, trackmaven.com, you’ll see it’s actually a lot of emotional language. And we got really into that about a year and a half ago, and we saw this huge lift from doing that because that’s what gets people to make that like immediate decision, to jump in, to take that leap of faith, to do something earlier than they might do otherwise.
And so whether that’s in your marketing, whether that’s in your sales, whether that’s in your customer success process, really frame what you’re doing around emotions. I think it’s even valuable to build out a table of emotions. Are my customers frustrated? What are they frustrated about? Okay. Let’s talk about their frustration. That’s how you break through the noise. And I actually think what’s interesting is that in b2b, those are some of the most effective strategies because so few people do them well, and they’re actually pretty easy to model because you can just look at consumer marketing is great at this, so just look at what great consumer marketers do, and just study it and see what’s the structure of it? How do they appeal to emotions? How do they do that?
Read a bunch of books on consumer marketing and bring those over to b2b, because in b2b, it stands out, and people are still people–they still love that stuff. And so I think that’s sort of the meta thing that if I had to say there’s one thing for people to do or take away, it’s making your marketing more emotional and more human.
Matt Byrom:
That’s awesome. And it just takes that away from being like on the fence, straight forward, straight blog post, straight article, to actually being an emotional, controversial piece that actually might stir up a bit of a controversy really.
Allen Gannett:
Yeah, and you don’t want to be boring. No more boring. We’re over that.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, stop being boring.
Allen Gannett:
Stop being boring.
Matt Byrom:
Well, thank you very much. I’m going to take this to our last five, which is five quick-fire questions. The first question is, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Allen Gannett:
My best piece of marketing advice is I think what I just said–be human, create that level of an authentic relationship, whether that’s through doing more video work, whether that’s through using more emotional language. Find those ways to get rid of that “I am a professional robot hack.”
Matt Byrom:
Love it. And can you recommend a book to our listeners? I might have an idea what this could be.
Allen Gannett:
I’m definitely biased, but other than my book, I would definitely say check out The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a book by Ben Horowitz about entrepreneurship. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, I find most marketers are entrepreneurial at least, and I think it has a lot of really good just like life lessons and ways to think about the world that I think are really helpful.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. And also check out The Creative Curve for everyone that’s listening as well.
Allen Gannett:
Your words, not mine.
Matt Byrom:
And apart from TrackMaven, what software tool could you not live without?
Allen Gannett:
I love Inbox by Gmail. They’re sort of like Gmail 2.0, which you could opt into, where you have like all these abilities to make to-do lists that are built into their email. I mean, it’s how I run my life.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. I don’t use Inbox, but I love to use my email as a task list. I think it’s [crosstalk 00:38:07].
Allen Gannett:
Dude, you have to use Inbox. Come on. Come on. Do it.
Matt Byrom:
I’ll check it out. So what’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Allen Gannett:
I love any of the campaigns we’re seeing these days that are incorporating user stories. So I actually think Facebook is doing this campaign right now because obviously they’re going through all this turmoil. They’re doing this campaign around trying to show how Facebook connects people better, and so they hired this really great, amazing director. They’re doing these clips of their profile on different Facebook groups and how those groups have brought people together. And so they have this one commercial, for example, showing a female bike club that organizes on Facebook. And they tell the story of that, and it’s really amazing. It’s well shot and all that kind of stuff. It’s just a very human story. So I love that campaign.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. And that comes back to like what you were saying before about your emotional language and things like that as well.
Allen Gannett:
Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
Make it personal. Cool. So last question is which other podcasts do you listen to?
Allen Gannett:
I have a confession for you.
Matt Byrom:
Go ahead.
Allen Gannett:
I’m not a big podcast listener. Don’t hate me.
Matt Byrom:
No, that’s cool. I’m glad that you [crosstalk 00:39:11] my podcast, though, even though you might not listen to it.
Allen Gannett:
I’m not a big podcast listener. It’s just it’s not me.
Matt Byrom:
Are you a book reader?
Allen Gannett:
I’m a big book reader. I’m one of those I lucky am just quick reader, and so for me reading is the main way that I still consume information. But if I had to listen to a podcast, it would be this podcast.
Matt Byrom:
Of course, the Marketing Strategies Podcast. What other podcast would there be? Cool. Well, we have gotten to the end. Thank you very much, Allen. Like I said at the start, actually it’s been a pleasure talking to you, so I really do appreciate your time. And thanks very much. I encourage everybody to check out The Creative Curve, Allen’s new book, creativecurve.com. Check out TrackMaven at trackmaven.com. And if you go to mattbyrom.com, you’ll be able to get all the show notes and links to everything that we’ve mentioned in this podcast as well. So please check those out.
