In this episode I speak with Nadya Khoja from Venngage. We discuss content marketing in detail. Specifically we discuss how Venngage find content opportunities that they feel they can rank for and their audience wants to see. We also discuss the importance of link building, how Venngage go about link building and how they target their marketing team on new links built. This is a great example of a bootstrapped company who have used content marketing to generate 5,000 new user sign ups per day.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Don’t get distracted by every new strategy you come across. Just because something new is working for something else doesn’t mean it will definitely work for you. Keep focusing on what’s already working and keep testing other channels at a smaller scale and then when something sticks, that’s when you can double-down on that new channel.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Yeah, I’ve recently been reading the book Small Data by Martin Lindstrom. It’s a really interesting look at how smaller patterns and trends can influence people’s behavior on a larger scale. So, it’s a good read for marketers and also UX designers. My side interest is definitely UX design and product design so I tend to read a lot of books on that, but I also read a lot of blogs on product and retention.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
ahrefs and Trello. And Google Drive. I use Google Drive to handle all of my life, but Trello is definitely how I keep organized.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I really liked Rihanna’s launch of her Fenty makeup line. And this is not just because I’m obsessed with Rihanna. But she really tapped into a bigger social issue, which was diversity and she created a makeup brand that was geared for every person regardless of skin color. And the entire focus of her advertising was centered around that theme and showcased a range of women of different ethnicities and skin tones. So, not only did it solve the major problem that many woman of color face which is finding makeup that accurately matches their pigmentation, but the campaign also got a lot of press attention and it wasn’t just about the makeup. It also became this protest for better racial representation. So, any marketing campaign that can achieve that is pretty powerful in my opinion.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
I’m more of a reader. I actually like dissecting the words on a page, but I do like Foundr Magazine’s podcast for entrepreneur’s stories. Also, Amanda Milligan’s podcast for Fractl. And I’ve recently started listening to the podcast Hack To Start. It has some really interesting episodes from some well-known growth marketers. So, the Casey Winters episode was one that I listened to recently and I really liked it. But in terms of blogs that I read, I read a lot on the Reforge Blog, which is Brian Balfour’s personal blog as well. So that’s definitely a go to as well. Brian Dean’s Backlinko was how I started learning a lot about SEO too. So, for anyone who’s interested, that’s a good place to start, I think.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Nadja Khoja, head of marketing at Venngage, an online infographic builder. Nadja has been with Venngage for over three years. She moves from digital marketer to head of marketing a year ago and has helped the company grow revenue over that time and get to a point where they now generate 5,000 user sign-ups a day. I’m really excited to discuss and learn more about the strategies that helped them get there. So let’s dive right in. Hey Nadja, how are you doing today?
Nadya Khoja:
I’m good, how are you?
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic, I really appreciate you joining me today.
Nadya Khoja:
Thanks for having me on the show.
Matt Byrom:
You’re very welcome. So, for our listeners, please tell us a bit more about Venngage, what you do and who uses your product.
Nadya Khoja:
Venngage actually started out as a tool called Visualize.me. Eugene Woo, who’s the founder of Venngage created that tool and that was an infographic resume generator that took your LinkedIn profile and auto-generated a resume and he ended up selling that company and then started building Venngage as well and that in itself went through a few pivots too. Venngage started out as an analytics tool, actually, and then eventually became the infographic builder that it’s known as today and the product’s definitely improved a lot since I first joined, and so has our growth process and our strategy overall. When we started it was pretty much me and Eugene working together on the marketing, but he was also managing another team at another company as well while running Venngage on the side.
So for the most part I started out by trying to build my own influence as this initial strategy by securing guest posting slots, trying to establish my own thought-leadership as much as possible and just get on to more well known publications to help not only build links, but just generate a little bit of buzz around Venngage and then after a few months, we ended up hiring another writer to help us produce content for the blog and we typically try to take a data-driven approach to the content that we create and this has been one of our main strategies for generating inbound leads is to focus on position ourselves as a source for data. So we do a lot of original research with our content and that makes it a lot easier for us to generate organic back-links to that content and thus increase our organic traffic as well as our domain authority on our content. We’ve managed to keep the marketing team to about four people and only recently I actually just hired three more people to join the team. So, we’ve got some pretty big growth goals coming up.
Matt Byrom:
That’s so cool and I’m really, really interested to chat a bit more about your research and data-driven approach. Something that we’ve really found recently over the last few years for ourselves actually, is that creating original data has so many benefits from people linking to that data and using it in their articles, you can repurpose it into all different types of marketing content as well, and it’s original, it’s owned by you so we’ve really come to see the power of it over the last little while and I’m really, really interested to see how you use that. I do just have one question beforehand though, which is, around your product market fit, you say that you went through a few iterations, a few pivots along the way. I was really interested to understand a little bit more about how you found the right direction for Venngage and what really got you there really.
Nadya Khoja:
I actually joined at the point where it was already an infographic tool. From what I understand earlier on with the analytics platform, the target was specifically enterprise users and I think for the size of the team during that period it was very difficult to work with enterprise users because they required a lot more customization of the tool and the resources just weren’t there because Venngage actually doesn’t have a lot of funding. There’s an initial seed-round of funding, but we haven’t gotten any funding. We try to keep it cashflow positive and we’ve managed to become profitable without having to acquire any outside sources or venture capital.
Matt Byrom:
That’s good.
Nadya Khoja:
Which is something that we want to maintain. In terms of the actual tool and the way it’s shifted, we’ve definitely gotten better at tapping into our user’s needs and just focusing more on the user experience above everything. I know before, we were just focusing on getting as many templates out and to be honest, the quality early on wasn’t as great, but we’ve definitely stepped up our game with the type of content and the type of templates that we’re putting out now and really talking to our users to figure out what they need in order to complete their jobs.
Matt Byrom:
You talk about content and marketing content and knowledge, and helping people and research but then there’s also providing templates to help people actually just get up and use the product straightaway and really crack on when they join, I guess.
Nadya Khoja:
After talking to a lot of our users and just looking at the data itself, the template is one of the highest value features of the tool and that’s what typically gets somebody to decide whether or not they want to sign up or upgrade, so we actually track different metrics such as the creation rate of the templates that people are making as well as the completion rate and that’s how we can identify where we need to focus our efforts on, whether it’s retention, whether it’s acquisition and what areas of the tool we can have an influence on.
Matt Byrom:
And I guess that helps you judge whether it’s a good template or a bad temp. Not necessarily bad, but useful or not as useful template for a particular set of users.
Nadya Khoja:
Exactly. We’re getting a lot more specific with the exact types of content that we’re creating.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic, so, I understand from talking to you, knowing Venngage as well that you guys create a lot of marketing content for helping users and various different other things as well. I guess content marketing is one of your core strategies?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, it’s one of our main strategies and it has been for a while. A lot of people have asked us why we haven’t tried to double-down on other channels like social media, but like I said, our team is really small and with the resources we have it just makes more sense for us to double-down on what we know and what we’ve seen work really well which is organic traffic, so, a lot of the team’s focus goes into that content creation and promotion and just trying to increase that as much as possible.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely, and obviously we talked about the research piece so tell me a bit more about the research that you do and how you decide what different research to undertake.
Nadya Khoja:
So, it actually started, one of our earlier pieces of original research content was an article that we did where we looked at Pinterest infographics and we manually collected or manually looked at over 200 different infographics on Pinterest and we tried to break them down into a formula for what is a popular infographic on Pinterest, so we looked at things like fonts, colors, the size and the layout of the infographic itself and we put all that data together and then after promoting that, we found that a lot of marketing bloggers and different publications were really interested in that content and it was really easy to generate back-links from it because once they wrote about it, other people would see that and continue to link to our piece of content. So, that was our first step and then we figured, okay, this is definitely a good angle to take, but in order to step it up, we actually have, I would say three different types of content that we really focus on and we call those viral content or original research content. We also have educational content and inspirational content.
So, the viral content that we create is definitely more, we took a PR approach to how we create it. So, that can be trying to find a way to combine some type of trending topic with an [inaudible 00:09:02] subject so that we can appeal not only to press but to our users as well and this has been a really good way for us to, like I said, generate high-quality back-links from press sites such as Mashable, Wired, The Washington Post or Wall Street Journal.
Matt Byrom:
And how will you actually go and find sort of the trending topic versus an evergreen? Will you have already done the evergreen research, and really just be holding out, looking for trending topic to sort of partner with that?
Nadya Khoja:
It’s definitely hit or miss. We don’t always get it right, but when we do it tends to work pretty well. A couple example I can give you is when the Star Wars movie The Force Awakens was announced, we saw that a lot of publications were writing about the release of the movie, we decided to jump onto that opportunity. So, instead of just creating an infographic about Star Wars, we decided to look at design trends from previous Star Wars movies, since design was something that was little bit more evergreen for us but the Star Wars was something trending that we could tap onto and then we were able to pitch that to a number of publications which helped us generate a little bit of buzz.
Another one that we did is, we tend to tap onto the movies or the television trends, so Game of Thrones was another one that we did and we ended up getting it featured on Distractify. And what happened was they ended up sharing it on their Facebook page and George Takei shared it as well. That drove so much referral traffic to our site at the time we didn’t have the server capacity to handle that much traffic that our site actually crashed. I think we got somewhere close to 60,000 visits in an hour that we ended up having to block that traffic from coming to the site.
Matt Byrom:
Oh no. Well that’s kind of like one of those good/bad problems to have really.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, so that worked really well and we can continue to do that but now we’re trying to focus more on what we call hybrid content, so it’s a little bit of that viral spin, but we try to tie it into a specific need so, for instance, the Game of Thrones one, we re-upped it, but this time we added a layer about creating mind-maps and how we actually put that content together.
Matt Byrom:
So, I guess for the listeners then, in that case, if they wanted to implement a similar strategy to this, they might have an evergreen topic, something that’s relevant to them and their business and then find something that’s upcoming, perhaps it’s a public event or perhaps it’s a new story and then actually combine the two and then perhaps use a tool such as Venngage to create that infographic or maybe write a blog or maybe a combination and then get that outreach-wise to, what, do you pitch that to publications afterwards or will you actually prewarm those places up?
Nadya Khoja:
So, it’s actually a pretty long process with the viral content. We tend to plan it at least a month in advance and we try to start pitching about two to three weeks before anything is actually going to be released, so if it’s a Game of Thrones one for instance, and we know the new season is coming out a month from now, we’re going to start working on the piece as early as possible so that we have enough time to establish a little bit of a relationship and get a conversation going with some journalists.
One of the strategies that we’ve used is we actually try to search for people who have, we try to make it as relevant as possible, of course, and that means searching for people who have already written about this and other subjects. We’re not just going to pitch any journalist or any editor at Mashable for instance. We’re going to scrape a list of people who have specifically written about Game of Thrones, and who seem to be fans of the content themselves, because those are the ones that are more likely to actually push for it to get published and for the most part they’re always looking for interesting stories. Sometimes what happens is these pieces get picked up and then other editors from other sites reach out to us, so, again with the Game of Thrones one, Wall Street Journal saw it, and they liked that data-driven approach to it, so they approached us, to ask if they could feature it and that’s usually how we go about finding the contacts, and then a lot of it comes down to try to establish relationships.
With any type of organic traffic or link-building that you’re trying to do or PR, it really is all about relationships, so what I actually try to do is every time I kind of get an in with an editor and if I know that I’m going to be in the same city as them at some point in the future, I always try to establish that relationship in person if I can and get to know them as a real human being and hopefully become their friend so that down the line it’s a little bit easier not only for me to pitch them, but of course I can try to help them understand a little bit more about marketing as well.
Matt Byrom:
And do you find that’s become more difficult these days with the massive outreach people get these days?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, it’s definitely harder to stand out, but I think if you really focus on creating quality content, it’s always easier when you have a really good piece of content, it’s definitely not as easy if you’re following the same formula that every other site is doing, like here are “Ten Tips for Creating X”, everybody’s following that method so it doesn’t stand out as much. Right? It’s all about testing and reiterating.
Matt Byrom:
It’s so important to create standout content these days more than ever. Speaking with people in this podcast and in my daily job and things like that, we just see it more and more and more that deeper more inspirational content, more thought-provoking content, more research-based content, longer content that really beats what’s out there currently, what’s in the competition for the search pages that you’re trying [inaudible 00:14:33] for. It’s more important than ever these days.
Nadya Khoja:
Exactly. One reason we create infographics and visual content is because we have to eat our own dogfood. But the other reason also is just that it’s a lot easier to share that content without us having to write a ton of new original content as a guest post for another site. They can see the infographic, they can take their own spin on it and write their own story and it’s a lot easier to get it going viral.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. And we talked about the research and we moved on to the infographics, but you’re actually creating new data points or are you doing analysis-based research or a mixture of the two?
Nadya Khoja:
It’s definitely a mixture of the two. We’ve done surveys in the past, another one that’s a bit more marketing focused and more [inaudible 00:15:20] is we did visual statistics. A visual statistics piece just to see what types of visual content people were using, what performed better according to various bloggers. So, we surveyed a few hundred bloggers and marketers to find out what they were doing with their content. So, that was one idea of survey or aggregated data, or collected data from actual people. But then other forms of content, we just try to collect as many pieces as possible from around the internet and come up with our own conclusions and observations.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, because sometimes it’s just a case of analyzing exactly what’s been there previously to bring some new statistics to light, really as well.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, and just adding a new spin to it.
Matt Byrom:
And another thing that was interesting is whether you pitch ideas to places, like say, Mashable or Wall Street Journal or some big publications before you even create the content, that might help you actually determine what’s going to work or what you might be able to place before you’ve even started working on this content. Is that something that you do?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, sometimes. Actually, a buddy of mine that works at one of these publications, I will occasionally just text him and say, “Hey, if we wrote something on this subject is that something you guys would be interested in, would you write about it?” And he’ll occasionally give me tips on whether or not they’ll [inaudible 00:16:37] it or maybe how we might be able to change it a little bit so that it appeals to them better. And that definitely helps. Even with that guidance, it doesn’t always work because they still have to pitch it to the editor and it can work. But it helps, we’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what works. A lot of it is just doing our research and seeing what does get written about and trying to follow that same pattern.
Matt Byrom:
That sounds cool. And I guess at the end of the day, it’s doing anything that you can to get your pieces in there really?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
So we were talking about the three types of content that you create, we said viral original research content was one, educational and then inspirational. Do you want to go across those two a little bit as well?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, so our educational content, this is definitely more focused to our users, our existing users and just helping them complete what they’re trying to work on. So, we really focus on the jobs to be done framework after surveying users to find out what some of the problem areas are and try to create content that addresses those needs. We actually recently hired someone on our team who’s a design evangelist. So, she actually has a background in visual communication specifically and her style of writing really focuses in on how to summarize information and how to take complex information and distill it down to something visual that’s easy for an audience to engage with but also gets that complicated subject across. That seems to be really helping our audience and they seem to be responding really well to that.
And then our inspirational content is more sort of roundups of different types of visuals from presentation designs to report designs, which serve to inspire our audience. [inaudible 00:18:20] the name, but they also generate organic back-links as well, right? Because these are the types of content where you see like ‘101 Presentation Design Styles’, so not only is it easy to generate back-links, but we’re able to touch on a whole theme rather than just specific keywords and therefore rank on a lot more keywords as well that are long-tail.
Matt Byrom:
What sort of specification of articles are you putting together of a particular length or how do you go about determining how big or the size of a particular article.
Nadya Khoja:
It depends. So, we don’t have a specific guideline of what the length needs to be. On average, our articles are probably between 2,000 and 3,000 words, but some of the more visually-focused ones will be a little bit less because we want to place more of the attention on a specific infographic or data-visualization that we’ve created, but something like an inspirational roundup, we’ve done one that was, like I said ‘101 Presentation Design Tips’ and each one of those tips was probably around 150 to 200 words. So that article was somewhere over 7,000 or 8,000 words and it was really long. But it was more so just to have a lot of content that people can scroll through and just quickly get those tips even if they’re not reading it into detail, but it ended up ranking really quickly and it drives probably 5,000 views a week to our site, just one piece of content.
Matt Byrom:
I guess in that case, you talk about back-links a lot is, [inaudible 00:19:50] is obviously clearly very important for you in ranking, are you creating these pieces specifically to rank for certain keywords? And if so, what else are you doing to generate back-links on those, are you just relying on organic back-link generation or are you really trying to generate some back-links yourself?
Nadya Khoja:
No, we do a lot of work generating back-links ourselves. We try to at least, but the type of content definitely helps how many links we get. So, like I said, the inspirational and those viral content pieces are the ones that we’ll focus more of our energy on to get back-links for, just because they’re more engaging pieces of content. But what we do is we do a lot of keyword research. So, it’s two-part. One is depending on what our users have said that they are interested in learning, and then the other part is what our external strategy is, so what other types of visuals we’re creating. So, right now we’re branching out into different types of visual formats, not just infographics for instance. And we’re really trying to tap into the internal communications side of businesses. So, people that are looking to create like a marketing roadmap or business plan but make it visual and finding ways that we can integrate those keywords into the content that we’re creating. So, rather than just focusing on marketing plan or marketing report templates, we’ll try to find other themes that fit within that set of keywords.
So, one example is we’re working on an article about poster design, but instead of just focusing on the topic poster design, within that article, every single subheader is a little bit more long-tail. So, we’ll talk about event poster designs, sale poster designs, and get even more specific into how to create those pieces of content, so we can keep updating it with new subheaders and new chapters and turn it into a bigger piece as well.
Matt Byrom:
That’s interesting, I guess, because you identify a topic of use and interesting to your audience, but then I guess it’s a big commitment to sort of dive into that and then really break it down into its constituent parts because then that is a huge amount of work to create content for every long-tail keyword, long-tail section within there. Is it sort of a big commitment for you guys to say we’ve identified poster design, for example and we’re going to really do everything in that mini-niche?
Nadya Khoja:
So, we actually want release things in small iterations, so if we’re doing this poster design article, we want it to let’s say hypothetically rank on as many keywords that are relevant to poster design and all the long-tail keywords encompassed in that as well. We might write on chapter first, and it might just be about event posters and then the next week, we’ll write the second chapter and then we’ll update the article and then we’ll write the next chapter and we’ll update the article. And with every update, it gets a little bit more of a bump organically, and it gives us another opportunity to re-promote it as well. So, not only do we not have to get all of it out there at once, but we can actually see it on a short term basis if it is performing well.
And that way if it’s not we don’t have to keep going after it and waste our time, we can go after something else instead that we’ve already proven. But that’s been a good way to continuously rank for new keywords with each update without having to necessarily write a new article and promote something brand new, we can just keep re-promoting the same piece that already has some credibility attached to it.
Matt Byrom:
And when you do that will you actually relaunch the article with the new date of the launch date, or will you keep the same original posting date?
Nadya Khoja:
No, new publish date each time.
Matt Byrom:
It’d be great to now move on to talking about the promotion as you do, you talk about that just now. What strategies do you use to promote the content you create?
Nadya Khoja:
So, a lot of it is outreach to people that we’ve either established relationships with already, some guest posting to not only help the rest of the team establish a bit more of a thought leadership and get their names out there, but it also helps to further establish more relationships with other people at different publications. We do very little social media promotion. It’s just not one of our channels that we focus on and I understand that it can influence organic traffic, but again, we just don’t have the resources to really dive deep into it. But a lot of it is just outreach. We do a lot of outreach and promotion and just sharing it with as many people as possible and of course, email promotion to our own database.
Matt Byrom:
In terms of the outreach, you’re actually using relationships rather than outreaching to new people in most instances. I guess that’s a great strategy because it means that you’ll have been leveraging that audience without having to outreach one article or one piece of content to multiple new places which is becoming harder and harder and harder.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, it is and it’s really easy to start to get marked as spammy in that sense or to use a template without somebody calling you out and saying this is a template that you’re clearly sending me.
Matt Byrom:
It got too much at one point, I think.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, and we did a lot of that before, obviously in order to establish new relationships. You need to start somewhere, which is with cold outreach. So, we’ll still do some cold outreach, but I personally don’t like just reaching out and asking for a link straight up or you’ll get the people that pitch that say “Hey, I wrote this piece of content, can you read it, give me your thoughts?” How many of us are actually going to take the time out of our day to read somebody’s article and give you actual thoughts on that piece of content? So, we’re either really direct, or we try to start a conversation in some other way and that might be something like creating a guestographic.
So, a guestographic for us is an offer or an in so that we can not only start by giving somebody something instead of asking for something up front. So, what we do is we’ll pitch somebody and we’ll say, “Hey, do you want a free infographic?” We’ll create them the infographic just so we can get the conversation going. We learn a little bit more about their blog, about what they’re trying to create and then it also gives us an opportunity to get a mention from them and collaborate on some other content in the future together. And we try to use that approach rather than just asking for links or asking people to read our content. We try to work together with them on something, so it’s mutually beneficial.
Matt Byrom:
And I guess you might have a starting point there where they might have some data or they’ve talked about specific thing and you say actually, “Hey, this would be really cool if we could create an infographic about this. We’ll do this for you and then if you want to promote that on your side.” This is just like a bit of co-marketing in the end.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, exactly. And it actually helps us too because for us it’s content that we can use in our templates and we usually let them know that if they’re open to it, we can create it for free as long as we can use it as a template so it’s a win-win for everyone.
Matt Byrom:
That definitely sounds like a win-win when the customers end up getting the template afterwards as well. So, in terms of metrics, what are you really looking to influence? Is sign-ups your main metric or are you looking to influence back-links? Something else? What are your call-
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, so we actually track a few different metrics. Company wide, we track a lot of different metrics. It would take to long to go into all of that, but for the marketing team specifically, we actually work very closely with the product team because a lot of our goals are focused on retention right now and engagement. So, there are certain product metrics that the marketing team has some influence over and those are things like the activation rate of our users as well as how many infographics they’re completing on a daily basis or on a weekly basis or on a monthly basis. But then in terms of acquisition metrics, we have different channels that we look at.
So, one is blog organic traffic, specifically on a weekly basis and we also track back-links per person on the team so as part of the rule, I have a two back-link minimum per person. They have to get two back-links a week in addition to everything else that they’re doing. So each person on the team has a minimum, but then I also have an incentive that if they hit an average of five or more. If they hit an average of five a week, for four weeks, so if they get 20 in a month, they get a 50 dollar gift card to wherever they want. And if they exceed that even by one, they get to double that gift card. So, the incentive to push to that 21 number is pretty high.
Matt Byrom:
So, it sounds like back-links is a big metric for you.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, we track that.
Matt Byrom:
Did it matter the quality of the back-links? Did it matter-
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, quality comes into play, so it has to be two minimum with the specifications of what the DA is and as well it has to be a follow link of course.
Matt Byrom:
That’s cool. And what tools are you using to track that?
Nadya Khoja:
For organic back-links we’ll use a combination. So, we have a lot of SEO tools, but the main ones are [inaudible 00:28:45] Moz and BuzzSumo sometimes for mentions. But each person that’s getting a link, they track their own links in a spreadsheet, and every week that spreadsheet is what I look at, and I count the links.
Matt Byrom:
Sounds like everything else doesn’t matter apart from the links.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, it’s just easier to track that it’s manual links and not just links that are happening organically to see that the work’s been put into it.
Matt Byrom:
Do these have to be new links to new content, or could it be, “I did a piece a year ago and it’s still getting back-links after back-links after back-links?”
Nadya Khoja:
That’s fine too, if it’s an older piece of content, but they’ve re-promoted it and gotten new links on it, then that counts.
Matt Byrom:
That’s cool. Sounds like fun to be honest. I might join.
Nadya Khoja:
But we also are actually in the process of trying to internationalize some of our tool. So those metrics are coming into play as well. So, we’re looking at volume of traffic coming into blog content and websites in other languages as another acquisition channel.
Matt Byrom:
And do you guys do any paid promotion at all?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, we do some paid promotion on using Google AdWords. We do a little bit. It depends, because our price point for the tool is pretty low, so it depends on what the cost for acquisition comes down to, but we use Google AdWords but not really any Facebook or social media promotion.
Matt Byrom:
Is that really on product or is that on marketing content?
Nadya Khoja:
That’s on the marketing side but we don’t really promote our content on AdWords, we try to get more people into some of our higher converting landing pages.
Matt Byrom:
I guess then, if you were to look at your marketing over the past three years and say what strategies have you implemented that have been a runaway success and that you could successfully implement time and time again, what would they be? What’s been most successful for you as a business?
Nadya Khoja:
Definitely doubling down on organic traffic. Like I said, we want to focus and we want to tap into some other channels that we haven’t focused on, such as referral traffic would be another one. But really doubling down on what we know and also our process for testing has improved a lot. We’re pretty agile in the way that we test now and testing in smaller batches rather than trying to run with a huge piece of content or an entire campaign all at once. Running smaller parts of that and just adding onto it and that allows you to get insights earlier on rather than hoping for the best in three months.
Matt Byrom:
And after they’ve become a lead in your database, what does your funnel look like, do you follow up with an email nudge campaign or do you have a sales team that follow on?
Nadya Khoja:
We have a funnel for onboarding our users. That funnel is pretty specific to what actions we want them to take next and that has to do a lot with our activation and retention metrics, so the first thing that we typically want them to do is, most people sign up because they’ve come in and they’ve seen a template that they’re already interested in, so that’s why they sign up and they’ve already created a template. So, the first step is to try to get them to create something and if they’ve created something, the next step is to get them to take specific actions within the tool whether that’s to edit some text, add an icon, change the background of their infographic and then once they’ve done that, the next step is to actually get them to complete their infographic and that means publishing it, or sharing it or exporting it. Anything that falls under that umbrella of completion for us.
And then after that we try to get them to come back and create their second piece of content and then only later do we push them into a little bit more content engagement. But the first few emails they get are definitely focused on helping them create and learning what they need to do in order to create something effectively.
Matt Byrom:
And does that fall under the realm of your team or is that something that really fits under the product team?
Nadya Khoja:
The company itself is still pretty small. So, I’d say that the entire company operates as one giant growth team with different projects. So, each team has specific metrics that they’re owners of, so, marketing owns the acquisition metrics. Product owns the retention metrics, but we all work together on projects where we each have a different part to play. So, anything email definitely falls into the marketing side, but the metrics themselves that we’re trying to influence are owned by product but the whole company is working towards the same goals.
Matt Byrom:
I guess the signups at the end of the day and the number of people successfully using your product are the biggest goals for the whole team to win then?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, for the most part we’ve maintained our conversion rates. We can pretty accurately predict if we increase our traffic by x number that will also increase our registrations and upgrades by that certain number as well.
Matt Byrom:
You’re using the same tool for metrics and automation or are you running different tools?
Nadya Khoja:
We run a lot of different tools. A lot of our metrics are actually, we use Google Sheets to track a lot of our metrics, but we use another tool that’s our dashboard called Geckoboard. We also use Intercom to analyze behavior and to segment a lot of our users as well as Mixpanel.
Matt Byrom:
So different events in say Mixpanel and Intercom to actually track like you say different segments.
Nadya Khoja:
We have different events. Mostly events that take place within the product itself, but we have some marketing metrics in there as well. But for the most part, Google Analytics is where we look at all of our content, data, the traffic, the upgrade rates, registration rates on specific pieces of content.
Matt Byrom:
Definitely seems to be a trend. Most people just use Google Analytics for everything.
Nadya Khoja:
In terms of organic traffic and measuring that it’s definitely the easiest tool to use. I don’t really like using Mixpanel to measure organic traffic, but Intercom is where we can actually see which users are coming in from different pages. We’ve created specific tracking codes for different landing pages as well. So, we can actually track in Intercom directly when people are signing up from a specific page, what the retention is like, what actions they’re taking in the tool. But, between Mixpanel and Intercom we have a lot of events that we track.
Matt Byrom:
And then do you use the email function of Intercom to actually reengage with those people that are performing different events?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
So let’s bring this back to marketing strategies and what are you going to focus on in 2018. What are the most important biggest projects that are coming up for you?
Nadya Khoja:
Now that we have a few new people joining the team, I definitely want to focus more on referral sources of traffic. So, one thing that we do a little bit of is [inaudible 00:35:36] generation with partners. So, Webinars, e-Books, any type of lead exchange. So, I want to focus a little bit more on that, but more specifically, lead nurturing because we have a little bit of lead nurturing that we do, but not enough and I think that’s definitely a big channel that we can tap into and convert some of those leads as well. Because we know how to get all the leads. The trick for us is actually getting them into the next stage of the funnel.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and I guess that’s a big opportunity then if you guys are getting 5,000 signups a day. That’s a huge amount to actually then bring those into your funnel and improve just by a percent, a couple of percent at each stage. That’s big gains really isn’t it?
Nadya Khoja:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Matt Byrom:
And I know you’ve got a new series called Drunk Entrepreneurs, I couldn’t really pass up talking about that towards the end of this podcast. So, please tell us a little bit more about Drunk Entrepreneurs.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, the idea actually came up with a friend of mine. We were drinking-
Matt Byrom:
That sounds right.
Nadya Khoja:
And obviously he’s an entrepreneur. We had a lot and he started just talking about business and sharing some advice with me, but not only was it really funny because he happened to stop between every piece of advice to start singing Drake, but he was actually telling me a lot of things that he probably wouldn’t have told me if he were sober and it was a lot more of a real conversation rather than something fake that you might typically see on another web series if somebody were being interviewed. So, I felt like I saw another side to him that was the real side of entrepreneurship and I liked that idea.
So, I thought I would turn that into a web series because, one, when you’re drunk it’s easier to talk on camera but it’s also funny and you can get some hidden gems in there as well. I figured I would start by sharing tips on my own, getting drunk by myself and then as soon as I started to get a little bit more of an audience, then I would reach out to some other influences. But I have some pretty exciting guests lined up for the next few episodes, but I won’t spoil it.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic. Well, I was watching the first episode and I was thinking I really shouldn’t be learning here from somebody who was drunk, but I was. I learned about the way you go about keyword research to find new content ideas and it’s cool. It’s good.
Nadya Khoja:
There’s definitely a lot of work to do, but it’s a start.
Matt Byrom:
And where can people find that? So the listeners, where should they go?
Nadya Khoja:
You can just google Drunk Entrepreneurs and you should come across it. It’s just drinkwithnadya.com.
Matt Byrom:
That’s cool. I definitely recommend everybody to check out. It’s quite funny and I’m really looking forward to seeing who’s on there next. I’m going to bring this through to our last five, which is quick five questions as the end. So, the first question is, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Nadya Khoja:
Don’t get distracted by every new strategy you come across. Just because something new is working for something else doesn’t mean it will definitely work for you. Keep focusing on what’s already working and keep testing other channels at a smaller scale and then when something sticks, that’s when you can double-down on that new channel.
Matt Byrom:
That’s definitely good advice. And can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah, I’ve recently been reading the book Small Data by Martin Lindstrom. It’s a really interesting look at how smaller patterns and trends can influence people’s behavior on a larger scale. So, it’s a good read for marketers and also UX designers. My side interest is definitely UX design and product design so I tend to read a lot of books on that, but I also read a lot of blogs on product and retention.
Matt Byrom:
That sounds cool. I’ll definitely check that out and I’ll also put a link to the book in the show notes as well so if any of you want to check it out, head on over to the show notes at mattbyrom.com and you can get a link to that book there too. And what software tool couldn’t you live without?
Nadya Khoja:
Obviously Venngage because I use it every day. Aside from that, probably Ahrefs and Trello. And Google Drive. I use Google Drive to handle all of my life, but Trello is definitely how I keep organized.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and we love Ahrefs here as well. We use it all the time. It’s just unbelievable to be honest.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah. It’s a good product.
Matt Byrom:
And what’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Nadya Khoja:
I really liked Rihanna’s launch of her Fenty makeup line. And this is not just because I’m obsessed with Rihanna. But she really tapped into a bigger social issue, which was diversity and she created a makeup brand that was geared for every person regardless of skin color. And the entire focus of her advertising was centered around that theme and showcased a range of women of different ethnicities and skin tones. So, not only did it solve the major problem that many woman of color face which is finding makeup that accurately matches their pigmentation, but the campaign also got a lot of press attention and it wasn’t just about the makeup. It also became this protest for better racial representation. So, any marketing campaign that can achieve that is pretty powerful in my opinion.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that’s on a big scale when we’re talking about marketing campaign.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah. Big marketing campaign.
Matt Byrom:
Big marketing campaign, yeah. And I’ll find some details related to that as well and I’ll certainly put those in the show notes as well because it would be really cool for anybody to go and check that out if you’re interested in that as well. And finally, which other podcasts do you listen to?
Nadya Khoja:
I’m more of a reader. I actually like dissecting the words on a page, but I do like Foundr Magazine’s podcast for entrepreneur’s stories. Also, Amanda Milligan’s podcast for Fractl. And I’ve recently started listening to the podcast Hack To Start. It has some really interesting episodes from some well-known growth marketers. So, the Casey Winters episode was one that I listened to recently and I really liked it. But in terms of blogs that I read, I read a lot on the Reforge Blog, which is Brian Balfour’s personal blog as well. So that’s definitely a go to as well. Brian Dean’s Backlinko was how I started learning a lot about SEO too. So, for anyone who’s interested, that’s a good place to start, I think.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, Brian Dean’s pretty amazing too. Not too many articles but they’re all just super high-quality, super long, super in-depth, super authoritative. Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, Nadja. I really appreciate the time, and I hope our listeners have got a lot from this. A bunch of links will be on the show notes page, so if anybody wants to check those out, I would really appreciate it. Mattbyrom.com and thank you again for your time today.
Nadya Khoja:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
