In this episode I speak with Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer. Kevan and his team have built Buffer to become a household name in social media management software. They have grown their business organically through content marketing, social media and a focus on SEO. Their blog now receives an impressive 20 million visits annually. In this episode we discuss the strategies that have helped them get there. It’s an interesting chat where we explore the wide spectrum of the Buffer marketing strategy.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
We aim for incremental improvement every day. So if we try to get 1% better every day, and as part of that we end up prioritizing roof shots as equal to moonshots. So not only do we take big swings, but we also really celebrate the things that just get us 1% ahead each day.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
First, Break All The Rules
Monetizing Innovation
Crossing the Chasm
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Trello
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
Yeah, there was this post on the Buffer blog a couple years back that had this giant round up of marketing campaigns, which I absolutely loved. One of my favorites from that is from a company called, Wistia, which does video hosting.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
Longform Podcast
Y Combinator Podcast
On Being
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Today, I’m joined by Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing at Buffer. As most of you will know, Buffer is a phenomenal tool for managing your social media. They now have an amazing four million users.
Buffer is an extremely interesting company with a remote workforce and a very transparent culture. Even going so far as to list all their salaries online for the world to see. Buffer has had hockey stick growth and is widely regarded to be a marketing powerhouse.
I’m excited to learn more about that growth and the strategies that Kevan and the team have used to get there. Let’s dive right in. Hey, Kevan, great to have you on the podcast today.
Kevan Lee:
Thanks, Matt. Great to be here.
Matt Byrom:
As I mentioned, Buffer works as a remote team. Where exactly do you work from?
Kevan Lee:
Yes. I’m based in Boise, Idaho, so kind of the Pacific Northwest-ish of the United States.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. That’s a cool place of the world to be in.
Kevan Lee:
It is. I love it here.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. You get great summers and then great winters too.
Kevan Lee:
We do. We get the extremes. Yes, somehow. We’re in the middle of one of those extremes right now.
Matt Byrom:
Oh, really? Yeah. Cold, I imagine.
Kevan Lee:
Yes. Yes. Very cold. Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Tell me a bit more about how Buffer works as a remote team? Do you work from home alone? How do you keep the marketing team connected on a daily basis?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. That’s a great question. I do work from home alone all day, every day and I love it. It’s wonderful. I tend to thrive on solitude. I get as much of that as I can handle on a daily basis. I might be alone in that or at least that’s not the only way that people work at Buffer.
There’s lots of folks who enjoy being at a coworking space or going to coffee shops or even bouncing back and forth from place to place on a given day or throughout a week. There’s lots of variety around that.
Then our team has a lot of variety in it too. We have some folks who do coworking, some folks who work out of the house. We’re spread out all over. In fact, at Buffer, I’d say we are one of the most spread out teams. We have someone in the UK. We have someone on the East Coast, West Coast, the middle of America. We have someone in Singapore, someone in Australia, so really, we span all sorts of different timezones.
Matt Byrom:
How many countries are you guys up to in terms of employee coverage?
Kevan Lee:
Oh, boy. I think it’s been a while since I’ve added, I’d say it’s 15 to 20, probably.
Matt Byrom:
Oh, wow. That’s big.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, it is. We do a lot of asynchronous work, which helps.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Sure. How do you guys stay connected on a daily basis? What tools do you use? How do you communicate? What’s a typical day look like for you guys?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. We spend a lot of time … We keep Slack open for anything that is urgent or we need to get in touch with each other for, but you’re not expected to hang out there all day. It’s just when you’re around and able to hop in there. We do a lot of stuff over email, Discourse, and Zoom is our video chat.
Matt Byrom:
Amazing. Simple set of tools that keeps everyone connected on a daily basis.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. Definitely. Paper is a big one for us too. We end up collaborating a lot in paper. It’s kind of like our version of Google Docs is how we use it. There’s a lot of live collaboration happening in there all the time.
Matt Byrom:
Is that for content articles and content plans, things like that?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. I think our content, oftentimes we just stick it right into WordPress. Typically, paper is more for project planning or team organization, campaigns, launches, things like that.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. In terms of Buffer, tell me about how the company started? I know you weren’t there at the very start. You started at what was it, around 17 people, I’ve read? Is that right?
Kevan Lee:
Yes. Exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. I’m coming up on four years at Buffer, which feels great and exciting. Yeah. The start of Buffer, it was started by our founder, Joel Gascoigne. He wanted to build a very lean MVP-type tool to schedule tweets.
It started gaining a little bit of traction. He brought on a co-founder and the two of them just started running with it. It was very much an iterative process. We’re very into the lean methodology. Lean start up, things like that. Starting with an MVP, finding product market fit and then going from there.
They were part of an accelerator for a little bit of time and bounced from the UK to San Francisco, to, I think, Israel and a couple of other spots just while they were initially finding that traction. Then eventually, it didn’t take too long. I think the idea was unique enough that it found product market fit quite quickly, and so the next step was just doing the marketing behind it and keep building a cool product.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, so I guess you guys were really helped, or rode on the coat tails of the growth of social media really as well. Are you saying that really you just asked questions to your users and just found out more and more about what they wanted and what would be helpful and useful in terms of a social media planning tool?
Kevan Lee:
Exactly, and being really nimble and lean with being able to ask a question and then going right over and building that feature. It was so useful, so useful. Started just on Twitter, so as Twitter grew, this was seven or eight years ago, as Twitter grew, the product grew.
The product had a larger market, more need. Then branching out into other social networks. Yeah, it was very much an iterative process based on feedback. We were lucky to be able to move as fast as we could to take advantage of it.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean there’s the opportunity, it’s just grab it with both hands, I guess.
Kevan Lee:
Exactly.
Matt Byrom:
What role did you start in at Buffer? You didn’t start in the marketing director role or …
Kevan Lee:
I did not. No, I’m grateful to have ended up here, but I started as a blog writer, a content crafter for Buffer.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. So I guess you’ve had your hand in all the way through the marketing cycle then from that point of view?
Kevan Lee:
I have, yeah. When I was number 17, I had joined just a couple of weeks after another marketing hire and it was just the two of us for quite a long time. Then our co-founder, he had kind of the marketing mindset, so he did a lot of marketing stuff too, but for the most part, it was the two of us running with things. So I got to do a lot of different stuff.
Matt Byrom:
That’s cool. Then when you became marketing director what did you look at and implement? Clearly you had a strategy that was working well. You were growing, which we’ll come into shortly, the strategies that you use, but what were your first things that you actually implemented and did as marketing director?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, it was definitely a learning process starting up, I was very new to it, just kind of learning on the job. So we had a couple things going real well for us, the blog is and was quite huge, and so doubling down on that, making sure that our blog editor had the support that he needed to run things the best that he could.
I ended up leaving him quite alone and letting him do his own thing, which has been great and wonderful. He’s an awesome, awesome teammate. Just making sure he supported and has the space to do that has been a really good thing. That was one thing we did.
Around the time that I took over we also had a bit of a reorganization, where the community team, which used to either be on its own or was part of our customer support team, they came and joined marketing full-time, so that was a three person team.
My job at that point was kind of to integrate them into the group and find roles that made sense, and how does community fit with marketing? We get a ton of sign ups and referrals from word-of-mouth, and our community is a huge part of that.
So part of my job then was to make sure that the community teammates felt comfortable on the marketing side. We could start measuring things a bit more. We could adjust roles in tweak. I think we ended up in a pretty good spot.
Matt Byrom:
How does the community and the marketing team actually work together from that point of view, how do you define different roles and how you then collaborate to make sure that you’re bigger than the sum of your parts effectively?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah it’s been a big learning process for me. I think one of the things I wanted to do right away was make sure that it wasn’t the community team and the marketing team, but that we were all the marketing team and community was an element within marketing. Just like the blog is an element. Just like our PR person is a teammate within there.
So rather than having community be its own area, it was more of its own discipline within marketing. I think that mindset helped just team dynamics wise. I think it helped everyone feel like we’re all working toward the same goals together.
Then practically speaking we had a couple of different small tweaks, so our three person team, one of those three ended up joining the blog. He’s become a great writer for the blog and is now doing tons more digital and growth things for us.
Then one person took the lead on the community side in terms of the outward facing community, so our Slack community, some of our social media communities that we maintain. The person ended up doing a bit more of loyalty marketing, so the end of the funnel on the referral stage.
A lot of that work was about talking to our existing customers, making sure they have everything they need. She also did Slack for us, so defining those roles a bit more really helped.
Then kind of this overall perception of community is about helping people connect to each other and that is something that is really useful for us because it can really magnify our own impact. We’re a team of eight on the marketing side, so we need to be bigger than the sum of our parts, just like you mentioned.
I think that helping people to … I don’t know, it’s like having a giant community of marketers really on your side, so the community part was really key to that vision and strategy.
Matt Byrom:
Then does that actually filter into customer support then, or is the community team different to customer support or do they work together?
Kevan Lee:
We do keep them quite separate. There are times … so we do a lot of social media as one of our channels, and we have customer support on social media. Then we have community or marketing conversations on social media.
In the past that was kind of where those two areas converged, was this one part were no anyone could do anything, but we’ve become a bit more strict there and said, “Let’s let the customer support heroes do what they do best.” Let’s help them, give them the freedom to be able to do that by taking on some of these other conversations that essentially start out of blog posts or start out of content that we produce, so it kind of makes sense for marketing to continue those on our side.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah and that’s what I mean it sounds like the whole marketing community and customer support really molds into one, almost one end-to-end machine really.
Kevan Lee:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). It does, yeah. Internally it’s interesting because I think there’s a lot of like tracking to do, and response times and things like that, so we come at it from different angles, but at the end of the day it feels the same to the customer from both sides.
They feel this human, personal interaction from a customer support team member. Then they feel a human, personal interaction from a marketing teammate. The fact that we have different Slack rooms and we talk differently and just organize our teams differently, it doesn’t really matter to the end-user. So it’s more about that end experience, you’re right.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely. So tell me a bit more about the Buffer marketing strategies? What channels do you focus on? What deliverables do you focus on? What’s required each month from the Buffer marketing team?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, so a couple of our primary channels that I’ve kind of touched on the already is definitely content marketing through our blog. We have a goal this year of 20 million sessions for the blog. Last year we did, I think it was 15 or 16 million, so we’re lucky to have quite a large amount of reach and awareness through that.
Community is another channel that we do prioritize quite highly. We currently have a community of 4,000 folks on Slack, but I think our definition of community goes well beyond just this the Slack community we have.
So we have a Bufferchat, which is a weekly Twitter chat that we do. Lots of other community initiatives. So those are kind of are two primary ones. We’re starting to treat those as brand awareness and freeing those two areas to kind of do the things that bring awareness and be innovative, and be creative.
Then we are introducing a bit more measurement on the other end of things. Our theory is that we’ll have several folks working toward awareness and then several folks working toward acquisition. Then after the acquisition stage we’ll be able to hand off to product to tackle activation and retention, and all that other good stuff. On the acquisition side we have some growing to do.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. In what sense?
Kevan Lee:
I think it’s something that we haven’t necessarily hired for or have been as focused on in Buffer’s history. It’s been a bit more soft at the top of the funnel. So we’re just now getting stuff built in like funnels and pipelines and the data that we need in order to experiment on pages. So there’s lots of potential there, which we’re excited about.
Matt Byrom:
That’s super interesting that you guys are really focusing on awareness, content marketing is obviously huge for you, which we’ll dive into a bit more in the moment. But you don’t focus too much on acquisition.
I know you guys have a key metric that you track, which is sessions. You mentioned a moment ago, 20 million this year, 15 million last year. Is that something that you measure through the lifecycle of somebody first visiting your site, through to all the different touch points and conversion?
Kevan Lee:
Oh wow, that would be amazing. We would love to. I’ve dreamed about that. At the moment all we have is last touch attribution. So we do know like, last touch, how may people come to the blog. We have that connection, but in terms of the whole customer journey, the whole funnel, we don’t see a lot of that yet.
Matt Byrom:
In terms of last touch attribution, what are your typical referral channels? Is SEO a big part of what you do?
Kevan Lee:
SEO is huge for the blog, it’s about 80% of our blog traffic. In terms of Buffer sign ups, last touch, our biggest one by far is what we call, direct, which I’ve come to label as, word of mouth. So people just coming straight to the site and signing up.
That’s probably, we have maybe 60% of our sign ups attributed that way. I’d say, yes, search is the next one. We don’t do a lot of search in terms of building out a lot of pages geared toward keywords.
If we gear anything toward a keyword it’s typically been a blog post where we can write helpful content, rather than I guess like make a pitch or promote the product too heavily.
So that’s been our strategy in the past, but we do see a lot of people … I think that’s another element of that word-of-mouth, coming to Buffer because they search the word, Buffer. They search Buffer out, or something like that.
We have the name recognition, we’re very fortunate to have the name recognition. Then the way that we measure things we know that a lot of people come that way.
Matt Byrom:
So could we dive a little bit more into your content strategy then in terms from what you just said about SEO, that you don’t necessarily focus too specifically on building pages, but you build content. How do you decide what type of content to create and what topics as well? Effectively, what’s your content calendar strategy?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, we definitely evolved it a lot. I think when I started on the blog it was just like write whatever seems helpful, and it might spread far, which is not a very scientific strategy but it-
Matt Byrom:
It’s quite typical though of what people do.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, yeah. Intuitively it made sense. So I’m grateful for our editor now, he’s really taken us leaps and bounds from where we were. What he’s done is he will often think of content in terms I guess three or four different categories.
I believe this term was maybe one that HubSpot has used in the past, but we label it, some of our content as deep tactical. What those end up being are some really intense guides that cover anything you need to know to get started on this particular topic.
Those topics are usually chosen based on keyword volume. We’ll sometimes check out other social media sites out there and see what topics they’re writing about that maybe we haven’t before. Since the blog has been around for six or seven years, there’s a lot that we’ve covered on the site already. So if new stuff comes up, I’ll read about it.
We also have some … One of the other categories is historical optimization, so since we have this deep archive, we’ll go back and grab a post that we’ve written before and update it, and refresh it Then republish it with a recent date and promote it again essentially as new content, but it does have a bit of a history on our site.
Matt Byrom:
Do you look to add more value to those posts to I guess, refresh, you say, bring it up-to-date, but do you look to add more volume of content or quality? Sorry, what I mean is, yeah, are you looking to add more value to those pieces that you’re updating?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, we do. I think we’re lucky in that most of it was pretty high-value when it was originally published. We’ve been kind of a longform content strategy for quite a while now. So when I was writing four years ago, most of my stories were 1,500 to 2,000 words or more, and so it’s less about like I guess adding the value and more just about making sure that what we’re saying is as helpful as can be, and is accurate and up-to-date as can be. I think by the nature that it ends up being more valuable just because of that.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Are you looking to I guess help and support people? You’re very much like a knowledge-based content marketer where you’re trying to educate people in terms of help them do something new, or help them learn something for example?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting to think about the people who read the blog. We survey everyone each December just to kind of get a sense of their role, and their experience of the blogs they like, content they like.
We get an interesting mix. So there’s a lot of people who have been in social media for quite a while, so we need to write some content, a bit more advanced stuff for them because they know the basics.
There’s other people who are brand new to it. This is where some of the larger keyword traffic comes from too, where they are new to a topic and just want kind of an initial overview of things. A bit more beginner level I guess you could say. So we do have kind of a couple different tracks that we have to write toward.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, so you flush out different levels for different personas, or different levels of marketer for example?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
How do you guys decide what content to create from that point of view? Do you put together a range of different titles, separated into buckets for different topics and different levels? Then talk between yourselves to actually approve titles or what’s your process that you go through there?
Kevan Lee:
Yes. At the moment the blog is our editor who’s based in the UK and our writer who’s based in Singapore. So a lot of the work happens asynchronously on a Trello board. What we’ll do is, we’ll add ideas to the board. There’s kind of an idea, a backlog section where we can further flush them out a little bit. See, check on things like keyword volume, check on things like maybe some sources, maybe how may people are asking this question?
If we’re getting strong signals through our customer support team we like to chat a lot with them just to learn about what things would be helpful to write about. We’re lucky that we kind of dog food our own product quite a bit, because social media is such a big channel for us. So we are social media marketers ourselves, and we often end up answering our own questions quite a bit, so that helps set the stage to what content to write.
Matt Byrom:
Then, my next question really leads on to, how do you promote your content? Social media is clearly a big part of that for you, what’s your social media strategy for promoting your content?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. This will be an interesting one. So recently we switched our thinking a bit on social media. We believe it’s less about traffic and conversion, and referral, and it’s more about engagement. So we don’t end up expecting much from our social media promotion of our content.
Some of the content, we might mention once or twice, but by no means as often as we used to in the past. We tend to treat social more as an engagement channel for now. I would say when I was writing for the blog, we would post to Twitter.
We would post the same story when it published maybe seven or eight times over the first couple days with different, various headlines and content, anything like that to see what stuck, but now it’s once or twice, tops, probably.
So our key channels are really our email list, which is up around a 100,000 for the blog. Then search, so we don’t expect a great deal of traffic the first day, but we’re lucky enough to have the domain authority and enough attention that after a couple days we are usually on or around the first page for the keyword that we want to rank for.
Matt Byrom:
So in terms of content promotion you’re put on social media, not as frequently as you used to, but once or twice email out to your user base in terms of a newsletter. Is that right?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. We have a couple different lists. So we’ve built an email list for the blog, which is just blog readers. They may or may not be Buffer users. That one, most people are on a daily … or like whenever we publish cadence. Then we also do have our user list that we send to maybe once a month or so with a handpicked article from there.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. Then do you find that the users that subscribe to updates from your blog, do they become users down the line, and if so how long do you usually see the delay is in from becoming a subscriber to actually becoming a customer?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I’d say it’s about 50/50 at the moment, somewhere, just to ballpark it of customers versus non-customers. We haven’t tracked to see how long it does take someone to come and become a customer of ours.
This is another unique thing about us, we don’t do any sort of lead nurture toward that end. It’s all just sharing our content and trusting the process. I guess you could say trusting that when they’re ready, we will have built an affinity for our brand, and our name and they will come find us. So in terms of specifics, I don’t know, but it is something we trust is working.
Matt Byrom:
So it’s very much a brand awareness piece really isn’t it? To get the Buffer name out there, build some trust and credibility with your audience, help them out, help them learn something, help them do something new. Just trust then that they will come and use you guys when they need a tool like yours.
Kevan Lee:
It is. One of the ways that we’ve described it is, there’s hard sell, there’s soft sell, then there’s what we do, which is zero sell. I mean we sell something eventually, so it works, but yeah it’s not maybe as rigid or strict as other methods.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, but that’s super supportive, isn’t it? That’s helpful to people that are looking for support around marketing, social media, and things like that, for their own businesses. So that help actually then does almost get paid back in the form of a subscription or perhaps somebody signing up to use your free platform for … Sorry, free account for a while.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting, since I’ve become a director of marketing I’ve realized I have a lot of imposter syndrome about this exact thing, where yes, this stuff feels good, like we’re doing the right thing.
It’s working and we know that we might not be able to measure it or track it, or say, “Oh well this percent of people took this long to convert from this page.” But like we know it works. I think I’ve struggled to accept that, that’s okay. It took me a long time to get to that point, but I’m coming around to that idea, so it’s been a good journey.
Matt Byrom:
Are there some things in the future that you’re going to do to implement tools to track these things that are not currently top of mind at the moment?
Kevan Lee:
Oh boy, you’re preying on my imposter syndrome, aren’t you? I know what the answer should be.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So we currently have … we use Looker, which is a business intelligence tool for across the whole company, so product metrics, marketing metrics, all that. So if possible I would love to get some of this stuff into Looker.
We’ve looked into other tools and software too, but I don’t think we’re going to go that route. So yes, at the moment my plan is to lean into Looker, see what more we can do there, or fully lean into the Google analytic side of things and add as much code as we can, and tracking, and get all that into place.
So we’re not have like the most robust and cutting edge stuff, but I think if we can work backwards from what we absolutely need and what we want, I think we can come up with some good solutions there.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s fantastic that you guys can actually promote content, push it out there, and rely on people to come back. I’m sure there’s lots of things that could be done to actually track and improve along the way. How does conversion rate optimization come into that? Is that something that you are focused on, or work on as a team, more than say, the marketing funnel for example?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, you’re really getting the full spectrum of Buffer marketing this pass.
Matt Byrom:
Well I’m trying.
Kevan Lee:
We don’t do any conversion rate optimization. Historically we have done … I shouldn’t say, any. Historically, we have done very little conversion rate optimization. For the longest time our marketing site pages or the Buffer homepage, for instance, was owned by product. They would adjust it when they had time for it, I guess. It was obviously not a priority … as big of a priority for them is inapt things.
So most recently, I’d say September, October, we did get control of those pages and we have them fully owned ourselves now, so that we can run experiments on. So yes, that is actually one thing in our 2018 strategy that we want to do a lot more of is, always having something that we’re testing.
Testing something every day. Testing something, at least learning something. It may not always work, but we want to be learning a lot more about how people use our site and where there are opportunities for us to improve. So historically, no. In the future, yes, we will do a lot more.
Matt Byrom:
That was cool. I mean I think it’s so important for people to actually test and learn, and then understand how things are working in marketing, so you can actually improve as time goes on. I know Buffer has its own reporting features so that people can learn from your own tool.
More so, I think when you’re putting out the amount of content that you guys do, or other marketing companies do, it’s so important to actually test and understand how that’s performing over time. It’s great to hear that you guys, you’re implementing some things like that in the future as well.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. A couple of things we’ve done in the past, we’ve used Hotjar quite a bit on our blog. Just to learn how people get to the blog. FullStory a little bit also. When we started taking over the marketing site pages, we ran several user tests just to have people walk through them and tell us what they thought. We have a good foundation of hard data, qualitative and quantitative data that we are excited to act on, for sure.
Matt Byrom:
Are you actually watching people who use the site, or are you using those tools to get a more statistical view of how people are using the site?
Kevan Lee:
We do a little bit of both. So with Hotjar we’ve done a lot of the heat maps and scroll depth, and things like that. Then especially when we ran out, we rolled out a new design, probably it’s been a year and a half ago, maybe.
So when we did that we watched a lot of the sessions just to see how people actually did use the pages. We do a lot more of the session watching on the buffer.com domain itself just to see where people run into problems, UI problems, things like that.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, it’s fascinating, actually you get kind of addicted to these things, where you watch people, what they do, where they go, how they click? It can be a bit-
Kevan Lee:
It’s bizarre. Yes. I can’t watch too much because then I start freaking myself out little bit. One time I told my mom about this and she was just like blown away that you can even do that. So I think I’ll always have that in the back my head like, “This is terrible what would my mom think of me? I question people who use my website.”
Matt Byrom:
Exactly.
Kevan Lee:
So I put a limit on myself.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I mean you guys clearly create an awful lot of content and really rely on the content to help people and generate brand awareness. How much content do you actually create? I read somewhere it was up to three articles a day. Is that accurate still?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. When I was doing it was, I was able to write four a week myself, which was probably our high point. I think we’ve added some writers over the years and people have come and gone. So yeah, I’d say between three and four a week has been historically where we’ve been at.
Matt Byrom:
Okay three and four a week. Yeah.
Kevan Lee:
Then most recently we’re down to I think it’s one new piece of content a week, one optimized piece of content a week, so one from our archives. Then one podcast episode a week. So it’s still three pieces but it’s shifted like how much work it actually takes us to ship those pieces.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Why the change? What made you decide to change to smaller numbers than in the past, quality over the quantity, I guess?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, a little bit of that. Then a little bit of we were growing quite well posting less. So I mean we could grow even more if we posted more. I think we were hitting our numbers and our reach with less content, less posting, so it allowed us to focus on improvements to the blog and focus a bit on SEO optimization, and those quick wins that we might not have time before when we were writing as much as we possibly could.
We’re going to start exploring things like maybe a separate blog just for a specific niche of our customer base, and things like that. Yeah, it’s allowed us to try some different things while still maintain our numbers that we want to hit.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really interesting that posting less helps you grow more. I guess that wouldn’t probably be true for the start of the business maybe. What would you say to people who are listening and wanted to follow a strategy like yours, which is content first, really? How would you say that they actually attack that strategy?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, it’s interesting to think back on the history of Buffer content too. I think before I joined our co-founder really started us on the content marketing path and validated it for us. He was guest posting at least once a day, I would say, like he’d have something in the works or something out there. It was hundreds of posts over the course of a few months.
Honestly, that really got us started. It got the blog to get referral links and authority, and mentions, and noticed, it was great. So if you’re starting from scratch that can be a great path to go, even something like Medium where it has kind of a built-in audience, where you’re not just starting from scratch.
I think something that can be a great way to start. In my opinion, looking over the past few years, I think something that was really key for me was that consistency, where yes, there is that element of quality over quantity.
At the same time when you’re starting out you have to have that quantity if you’re going to make something of it. So without the quantity, without the consistency, you’re not learning what’s working.
You’re not iterating on what you’re noticing, and what people are loving and things, so you got to get it out there, and put it out into the world before you can really start optimizing it. So I’d say those things if you’re just starting out are probably the key ones.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, so basically the advice is, post quality content on a consistent basis and leverage other audiences where you can to actually bring people to you really.
Kevan Lee:
Perfect. That as much more succinct, yes. Great pick up.
Matt Byrom:
Do you guys use freelance or agencies, or is everything in-house?
Kevan Lee:
That is a great question. We don’t. We did have a guest posting system for a while, and it worked fine, but we realized that it took more of our time and effort to help those posts reach the point where we wanted them to be in terms of on brand and on message, and depth, and quality, and things like that. So we ended up just taking it all in-house.
Then agency wise, we have worked with an agency very recently on a kind of a branding project, I’d say, but in terms of content, we’ve never really had much of an agency presence there.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. That’s interesting. I guess you can test and try along with different agencies and freelancers for the time being.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, for sure.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. So something that I wanted to touch on, I know you said customer acquisition isn’t something that you really focus, but is there anything that you’ve had that you’ve done in the past, any sort of strategies that you’ve tested or tried along the way where you’ve actually really noticed, this has really given us a jump in new customers, or new subscribers? Is anything along the way that you’ve attributed to that sort of spike in user numbers?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, that’s a good one. I think one thing we did on the blog, we did a couple things on the blog. One of them was I guess kind of a campaign to gain more email addresses, and for that one we were able to double our email addresses in just a couple months.
I think it went from 40 to 80,000 if remember right. That was all about just giving people lots of chances to click and join the list, so it was having one focus on the blog in terms of CTAs. It wasn’t a CTA for this and that, and the other thing, it was all CTAs that went back to email.
Our best performing one was a slide up that you got 60% of the way down the page a little box would appear in the bottom right-hand corner for email. Our second biggest one was, I think it was in the header, it wasn’t a sticky header but it was just at the header of the page, an email sign up.So those went great for us, those were really successful.
Another blog one was on our very homepage, our root page, we replaced the main header, if you will, with a Buffer sign up CTA. So it said, “Sign up for Buffer.” Something about social media management, and then the content started below that.
So it was interesting to look at our Google analytics numbers and see, “Oh the root page is actually always in the top 10. Usually in the top five are our pages on the blog, and yet we don’t have it really optimized for sign ups. So that was one that ended up leading to quite a good number of users for us.
Matt Byrom:
So you were looking at the analytics and actually sort of thought, “Right, we need to put our sign up boxes where our users are going.” Which makes total sense.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
But it’s not something that’s always as straightforward as that or as visible when you’re actually in the mix.
Kevan Lee:
Exactly. Yeah, we picked it up from another SaaS company, I don’t remember quite who it was, but yeah, just thinking, “This page is in the top five year after year and all the other pages change around it, so we might as well optimize that one the best we can, since it’s always going to be popular.”
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and we did a similar thing with some of our content in the past. We do what you say as refurbish all the content that’s performing well. We actually decided to create a bunch of guides and helpful resources and sometimes books, or checklists, or downloads that would actually help people get more info, more support on that particular topic.
Things that were already performing really, really well, and we just added more value to those. Actually, some of them were actual downloads, which helped us generate more sign ups, generate more leads as well. Yeah, that’s something that’s worked particularly well for us as well.
Kevan Lee:
That’s great. Yeah, that’s a good one.
Matt Byrom:
I was quite interested to know how, as I mentioned at the start, openness and transparency is a huge thing for Buffer, where you post things like your salaries, and how you work your processes, the questions you ask in interviews, all sorts of things you post online. Do feel that works well as a marketing tool? Is that something that is quite unique to Buffer, or at least it was a few years ago? How does that work for the marketing team, and the marketing of Buffer?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, I had an interesting realization a couple years back. We read a book called, Traction and it lists a number of different marketing channels that you can choose to get traction for your product.
One of them was unconventional PR, and I didn’t really know what that meant when I read it, but after reading I realized, “Oh a lot of these things that we do on the culture side unintentionally have ended up being unconventional PR.”
So we have something like a salary formula that we promote and publish, and we publish all of our salaries individually so everyone can know exactly what everyone makes.
We do stuff like customer support, we invest in customer support to the degree that it actually is so great, people end up talking about it and spreading the word-
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic.
Kevan Lee:
… through there. These things become PR, even though you don’t necessarily intend them to be. Yeah, they’ve had a huge difference for us. They put us in conversations that we wouldn’t have been otherwise. We have people stay with the product, even if it might not be exactly what they need because they really value all this other stuff they know about us.
We have people find us because they know about this other stuff, so that has absolutely paid off. We’ve even gone as far as using a portion of other team’s salaries and expenses as part of our CAC cost, our cost of acquisition.
So when we calculate that we include a bit of our customer support folks in that, just because we do really believe that they have an impact on our marketing efforts.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I actually wasn’t going to ask about your customer cost of acquisition because you mentioned that you didn’t track so many things. I was wondering if you had even calculated that, but you do calculate cost of acquisition?
Kevan Lee:
Yes, believe it or not I know that one. We’re around $35 for that one, and we’re around 350 for lifetime value.
Matt Byrom:
Wow, so that’s a good margin in terms of-
Kevan Lee:
It is. [crosstalk 00:40:54]
Matt Byrom:
… of what you’d normally get. Yeah.
Kevan Lee:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. What other metrics do you track? What are the core metrics? Sessions is one, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value. What other metrics are on your radar?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. This is going to be a bit new for us in 2018 to be as explicit about what those metrics actually are, which I think will be good. So we’re going to have our two focuses. One on brand, brand awareness and one on acquisition.
So one of our numbers is going to be reach, which will be a composite of blog sessions, we have two blogs, so sessions from both blogs, and campaign reach. Campaigns is a bit general, but like whatever campaigns we end up with this year, we’ll calculate reach as our primary one there.
Then in terms of acquisition we’ll have that broken down into free sign ups, trialists for our Buffer Publish product, which is kind of the traditional Buffer that everyone knows and loves. We also have a product called, Reply, which does social media engagement and will also be accountable for driving trialists to that product.
Then we also would love to track what we call, or what I call, constraint metrics or agreements. So these are metrics … the constraint metrics are ways that we aren’t just getting reach for reach’s sake. There’s lots of things you can do to get more reach that might not actually be good reach or reach that you want, or tactics that you want.
In terms of constraints, we’re going to be looking at metrics like bounce rate, percent of new visitors versus returning visitors, and on the acquisition side we’re going be looking at trial conversion rate, we’re going be looking at …
This is something I need to chat more with our support lead about. I want to look at something like emails that come into our support desk that are from who we call, prospects or non-users.
So basically are our landing pages descriptive enough to answer the questions for people or do we see that a lot of people are having to email us in to ask us anyway. So a few metrics like that, that kind of keep us honest, and keep us on track, and doing things the right way toward those goals.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that makes total sense. These are the things that you’re looking to track in 2018, are they? Effectively, if I was to summarize it, you’re looking to get as wide a reach as possible, but within the constraints of making sure that it’s quality, reach quality people that you’re reaching, that are engaging and enjoying what you do
Kevan Lee:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly. Yeah, and hoping those people end up converting.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Awesome. I wish you all success, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. So I’m going to move on to our last five questions, if I may?
Kevan Lee:
Great. Yes.
Matt Byrom:
So what is your best piece of marketing advice?
Kevan Lee:
Yes, that’s a great one. This is one that has resonated a lot with me. We aim for incremental improvement every day. So if we try to get 1% better every day, and as part of that we end up prioritizing roof shots as equal to moonshots. So not only do we take big swings, but we also really celebrate the things that just get us 1% ahead each day.
Matt Byrom:
That’s great. That makes sense because if you’re reaching for the stars it’s going be a long way to get there, whereas if you celebrate all the small things along the way it’s incremental improvement that’s going to get you there at the end of the journey.
Kevan Lee:
Yes. Exactly right.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Kevan Lee:
Yes there are a couple that came to mind. I wanted to say if you’re managing people, one of my favorite books for that is a book called, First, Break All the Rules. That one was incredibly important and useful for me when I started in this new role.
If you happen to be doing a pricing project, one of my favorite books on that topic is, Monetizing Innovation. If you are on a marketing team and care about vision and strategy stuff, one of my favorite books on that is a book called, Crossing the Chasm. It talks about the cycle of a company’s lifecycle and how that all works together, where marketing fits in there.
Matt Byrom:
That’s great. I’ll put links to all those in the show notes so people who are listening head on over to the blog where you can actually see links to those and go check them out, buy them for yourself.
What software tool could you not live without?
Kevan Lee:
I could not live without Trello. I think I could make every single project, every single thing into a Trello board somehow, some way. I’d get rid of Zoom. Get rid of paper. Get rid email, just so Trello and I could figure it out. I love it.
Matt Byrom:
Just work in Trello all day, every day?
Kevan Lee:
All day, every day. Yes, I’m sure I could pull it off, so yes.
Matt Byrom:
What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, there was this post on the Buffer blog a couple years back that had this giant round up of marketing campaigns, which I absolutely loved. One of my favorites from that is from a company called, Wistia, which does video hosting. I’m sure your audience is familiar with that one?
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. We love Wistia.
Kevan Lee:
I love so many things about Wistia. I love their brand. I love how happy all their videos are and things. They tend to put videos in such cool spots. So this was about … I believe that campaign was about lead nurture and creating videos during that lead nurtures process.
But a couple of things that I’ve really enjoy from them recently is they come out with have a new standalone product. It’s browser extension that lets you record quick videos-
Matt Byrom:
Soapbox.
Kevan Lee:
… you can use in a sales pipeline or something. Thank you, Soapbox.
Matt Byrom:
Soapbox, yeah.
Kevan Lee:
So I love the strategy behind that just doing something quick that has such a neat product tie-in to their core business model and product. Then I also love when you sign up for their product, they kind of have you opt in.
They have you self-identify into a different segment of how you’re going to be using their product. Then send you onboarding campaign emails based on that. When you unsubscribe you have lots of options of how to stay in touch, so it’s not just a quick, “Okay you unsubscribed everything.” But it’s choosing different sightings there. So I love the way that they thoughtfully approach all listings.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, Wistia are supercool, they literally had a great video player. Then they grew up, got tons and tons of users and then they’ve become really super marketing focused, where they’ve now, like you say, segment and users. They’ve changed their pricing a million times, but not really settled on what works.
It’s clear that they’re doing lots of testing in the area. I really encourage people to check out Wistia as well. We’re also linked to that video. I know the video that you mentioned is the Soapbox video, which is really down to earth and supercool.
Kevan Lee:
Awesome. Thank you. Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Last question is, which other podcasts do you listen to?
Kevan Lee:
So this might be a weird answer. I don’t have like … What’s the best way to say, I don’t listen to podcasts, but I listen to podcast episodes. I listen to podcast episodes that people recommend to me. So I might be totally cheating.
In fact, I will give you a couple of recent ones that I have listen to is the Longform Podcast, which talks about longform writing and longform journalism, it interviews different authors.
The Y Combinator Podcast has a lot of great guests on it and in a podcast called, On Being. They do really great interviews and talk about some really wholesome, lovely, encouraging, optimistic topics, which are great.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. We’ll put some links to some of those in the show notes as well. So thanks very much Kevan. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, really interesting to learn more about Buffer and how you attack content. How you’re looking to track different things in 2018 and grow your user base. It’s been a lovely chat and I really appreciate your time today.
Kevan Lee:
Great. Thank you so much for having me. That was super fun.
Matt Byrom:
Thank you very much. I’ll speak to you again soon.
