Welcome back. I'm Maia Morgan Wells, host of the Marketing Hero podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We are now heard in more than 50 countries. I was looking at our podcast stats and noticed a lot of listeners in India, Mexico, the Netherlands, even a few in Bangladesh and Japan. We're so grateful for the opportunity to talk marketing with all of you heroes out there. Please make sure to leave us a review so more people can find us. On today's episode, we're starting a new era for the Marketing Hero podcast. We'll be narrowing in to focus on stories from the trenches and advice from ClearPivot founder Chris Strom. ClearPivot is a marketing agency focused on demand generation, a HubSpot Platinum partner and the sponsor of this podcast. For the next few episodes, we'll get an inside look into Chris Stroms brain where there is tons of information on how to become your own marketing hero. Right now we're getting into the five most common mistakes Chris has seen in over 10 years of working with marketing clients in a variety of industries. Chris Strom, welcome to the show.
Chris Strom:
Good to be here, Maia.
Maia Wells:
So I want to start off with the question we ask all of our guests, even though I do know you well already, what's your favorite part of your career and how did you figure that out?
Chris Strom:
My favorite part is definitely the combination of being able to do the technical stuff as well as the business strategy side and the creative side as well. So even back growing up, my kind of two main interests were technical computer stuff on one side and creative artistic stuff on the other side. And in high school, I would go to hand drawn animation classes, and also I was exploring things like computer programming too. To be honest, it was a lot harder to learn programming then than it is now because you basically had to learn just on straight C++. There was no YouTube and of course, and no [inaudible 00:03:19] or Team Treehouse or anything like that. But those are always basically my two main areas of interest and I could never really choose which one to focus on. So my favorite part now is it's actually some of both as well as the business side and the entrepreneurial side as well.
Maia Wells:
So it sounds like owning an agency is the perfect spot for you. You've been doing this for a long time. Haven't you had ClearPivot for over 10 years?
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I started it in 2009. So as of the time we're recording this, it was actually 13 years ago, which is-
Maia Wells:
Wow, congratulations. Yeah.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, we're doing something right I guess here. And basically grew out of a freelance web development work I was doing at the time, you just building websites for people, basically using WordPress, and it was going pretty well. And so I incorporated a business entity and decided to see how far I could run with it. And so that's how it started and then we started moving more into the digital marketing demand generation side, not too long after that, probably about a year or two. A lot of it was from the requests from the customers we were working with. After we would build a site, they would say, "Hey, I need help with running the Google ad campaigns, or I need help making sense of all these web analytics reports. I don't know what they mean." And so it kind of grew into what we do today, which is 80 to 90% demand generation marketing now.
Maia Wells:
And over that 13 year period, how many clients would you say you've had? Now I'm asking you to do math.
Chris Strom:
Oh, man. I mean, I'd have to go back and count. Generally, there's around 15 to 18 clients at any one point that we're currently working with, but literally have to pull our QuickBooks records to check and see.
Maia Wells:
Well, that's pretty impressive. I mean, that's a lot of different types of businesses, I'm sure, and a lot of different personalities to work with and all of that. A lot of different levels of knowledge to work with. And I know having worked with you for several years, you are the most patient, logical person. You have that personality that really is able to work with of anyone. And I couldn't say that for myself. So I find that really impressive. I actually want to get into the juice of why we're here today, which is to talk about some really common mistakes that you have seen in these hundreds of clients, whether that's in the marketing tactics they're doing, the way that they're executing things, the personnel, any of those things. What are some of the really common mistakes that you're seeing or missteps that you're seeing among digital marketing or demand generation clients in this business?
Chris Strom:
I was thinking through, and there's a couple that I see happen fairly commonly. So I wrote up a list of five things that I see companies doing that they could be spending their time doing something else.
Maia Wells:
I really want to know, what's the first big mistake that you see lots of companies making.
Chris Strom:
The first one is, I was actually surprised, I still see this, but it's just as common now as it was literally 10 years ago and that is buying lists of people and then mass emailing them without their consent.
I really thought it would've died away, but it hasn't. In fact, it's maybe gotten more prominent. I know for me personally, every morning like clockwork between 7:00 and 9:00 AM I'm getting multiple emails from people I've never heard of pitching me stuff, and it's almost part of my morning routine, reaching for the spam button in my Gmail. I get the temptation to, oh, let's just buy a list of 10,000 people and go pitch them. And so I see the temptation sounds really easy, but it just doesn't work really. Well, the main thing is it's against the terms of service of every email marketing platform, whether it's HubSpot or Act-On, or MailChimp or Marketo or Constant Contact. And it's against their terms of service because people using their systems for spam hurts them too. So you're violating their terms of service. You can get your accounts suspended, people will click spam, they'll report you. Gmail has the report spam button built right in there, super easy to click. I use it a lot. And every time it's reporting spam, that's a negative ding on your domain authority. And if enough people are doing that, then eventually the email service providers like Gmail, Office 365, Yahoo, Outlook, all of them, eventually they might say, "Maybe we shouldn't trust any emails from this company's domain. Maybe we should just send them all to junk."
Maia Wells:
And we definitely don't want that.
Chris Strom:
And then nobody ever hears from you, so that's a big risk. And then best case scenario is even if that doesn't happen, it just doesn't work. People just ignore it, they delete it or they ignore it. It has almost a 0% success rate.
Maia Wells:
I understand. All right, so don't buy lists. That's a big piece of advice from Chris Strom here on the Marketing Hero podcast. What's number two, Chris? The second big mistake you see companies making in marketing?
Chris Strom:
The second big one we see... So you're doing your marketing, you're working the leads, you're working to get the sales qualified leads or the people requesting consults and requesting demos and things like that. Those are the leads you want to bring into your pipeline. And a lot of times I'm always surprised at how oftentimes there's a lack of process and lack of discipline for actually following up with those sales qualified leads. It's so common to just find a lot that have fallen through the cracks. They come in, their life cycle stage is marked as a sales qualified lead. And then the correct response is then to make a deal for them. And once they do that, the contact life cycle stage will go from sales qualified lead to opportunity. Our rule of thumb is you should basically never have any more sales qualified leads in your system because they've all either been converted into opportunities or they've been disqualified and just removed altogether.
Maia Wells:
Do you see any common pattern on why those are not followed up?
Chris Strom:
It slips people's minds and it slips people's minds usually because they don't have a defined and consistently executed process. If you don't define your process and follow it like clockwork, it'll just happen.
Maia Wells:
So define that process and follow up on it every single time you have an SQL. That's another great piece of advice, Chris. So what's number three? What other mistake are people making out there? That actually was a really big one, just leaving SQLs. I mean, after you've spent all this time and money marketing to get them to that stage to just let them fall through the cracks, that sounds like a really, really big one. So I'm going to write that down at my desk. What's number three that everybody can get ready to write down?
Chris Strom:
Number three is shifting over to the content creation side of things. When you're producing your marketing content, like your webinars, your blog articles, your landing pages, your product and service pages, your email campaigns, all of that is your marketing content. And oftentimes, especially in more technical or medical or scientific industries, you need subject matter experts involved in that. That's much more difficult to pull off than people think. And so the biggest mistake is people don't make a plan for the whole process of involving subject matter experts in the content creation. So you have to define who's going to do what. Is the subject matter expert going to be the writer, or will there be another writer who then interviews the subject matter expert? And after the interview and the draft, does the subject matter expert need to review it again? How many rounds of revisions are you going to plan on? How are you going to block out the schedule for all of those milestones and meetings? That is significantly more challenging from a logistical perspective than people often realize up front. The result is that there is usually enormous delays in getting it finished. Some clients we've had, it gets delayed for literally months.
We'll do one initial interview with the subject matter expert, we'll write up the draft. Subject matter expert wants to take a look at it again or review it first, but they have their job doing the actual subject matter, and so it gets on the back burner for them, yet the delays can turn into weeks or even months very quickly. So not making a plan up front for the process of involving the subject matter experts is a very big and very common mistake. It's almost mandatory to have the subject matter expert involved because you just can't have the company risking publishing something that's off. So it's almost mandatory for the subject matter expert to be involved in some of these areas
Maia Wells:
And to plan ahead for that process to happen.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. You can't get around it, so you're just going to need to plan for it and just winging it is not going to work.
Maia Wells:
Yeah, I definitely identify with that waiting period on hearing back from the subject matter expert with their final approval. And then your content train just kind of comes to a screeching halt while you're waiting for that or you try to do the best you can, but like you said, certain cases you really just can't. That's why the other person is the expert. That's why they're doing their business. Well, I want to come to number four now. On the fourth big mistake that you see a lot of companies making with marketing, digital marketing or demand generation, what do you got for us at number four, Chris?
Chris Strom:
The fourth thing I oftentimes see is companies getting too excited about automation and automation tools and getting too wrapped up in automating everything. So one common area I see this in is in marketing automation workflows. We work a lot in HubSpot, and so we build a lot of automation workflows in there. It's very easy to get very, very starry eyed on them. And especially if the company has just signed up for the platform and they got the whole sales demo from the sales rep and they're like, "Wow, look at all these rules and branches we can set up." And a fair amount of that is oftentimes very useful, but some people have... One of our recent clients, we went in and they had about 200 separate automation workflows set up in their HubSpot portal, and they didn't even remember what they were for or why they were set up or how they're set up.
And so it's taking us hours just to go through it to make sense of what's going on in there. And so marketing automation workflows, sometimes you can get over excited with things like forms and setting up logic independent fields in the form. Well, if they choose this option in the form, we want this additional thing to fly out. And if they select that option on that thing, then this text box shows up. So that's another area too. It's very easy to just get very excited about all the things you can do, but it's sometimes is just not worth doing it. You're spending more time building the automation and then troubleshooting and maintaining the automation than you would just doing a little bit more manually.
Maia Wells:
Where do we draw the line on too much automation? Because of course, automation in certain ways is really helpful, that's why it exists. But when you're getting into this territory of automating or being overly excited, how do you set up that guardrail or what are the questions you ask yourself to make sure what you're doing is actually valuable?
Chris Strom:
Kind of one general rule of thumb I have is just thinking through how many people are actually going to be going through this? We worked with one client where we were setting up about 20 different automation workflows, and each workflow probably had about 10 to 20 branches within it, and they really wanted it, and they insisted it to be built that way. So we were building some of them. And then I was just thinking, is this going to be a case where we set all these up and then six months later only three people have gone down this particular branch and four people have gone down that branch and there's only a single digit amount of people going through it? I think that's a pretty good indication that you're probably making this too complicated.
Maia Wells:
That does make sense. So ask yourself, is this automation really needed and how many people are going to be going through it? That's really good rule of thumb. All right. So we've come to number five. The fifth common mistake that you're seeing lots of companies making with digital marketing and demand generation, what's this last fifth big mistake?
Chris Strom:
So the fifth one would be basically inflated expectations of your digital analytics tools. You can get a lot of data from your web analytics tools. So that's the cool thing about it, but you can't get everything from it, especially these days people are switching between devices. They might be on their work computer, then they're on their home computer, and then they're on their phone. Maybe there's a tablet in there. So they're moving between different devices. And so that is a big roadblock to the analytics as they're switching devices. More and more, there's a cookie blocking, iOS is the most famous for cookie blocking, but Firefox has been doing that for even longer themselves. And at some point, sooner or later, Chrome's going to be blocking third party cookies. So those are challenges and obstacles on a technical level. And then just behaviorally, actions like word of mouth, what gets called dark social like direct messages, Slack chat channels, Discord chat channels now, emails internally between people at the same company on the behavior side.
So there's a lot that you can track of course in Google Analytics and HubSpot Analytics and Act-On, Marketo analytics and all of that. But you just can't track everything. It's easy to think you can though because for the last 10 years, the biggest voices in the marketing world have been the technology platforms themselves. Basically, they have the biggest budgets to promote their point of view. So they go around talking about how wonderful and great and perfect digital analytics are. And so I think that's what's led to the inflated expectations. There's a lot that you can't track, especially in the last year, I've really come to appreciate more and more accepting how much you can't track.
Maia Wells:
Yeah, I was actually just reading a small thing from Rand [inaudible 00:20:58] the other day about this, where he was talking about somebody may see a post, not even interact with it, they just notice your brand name, they know that you do what they need. They've maybe seen you around in other channels and they end up searching your brand name in Google, so that'll come through. In your attribution tracking that'll come through as branded keyword search, organic traffic, but really it's from a LinkedIn post that you did or a podcast that you had. So I thought that was really interesting. I'm actually curious, Chris, do you think there's a place for attribution in marketing reporting anymore?
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I definitely believe there's still a place for it, especially oftentimes by combining the web analytics with more of the self-reported attribution, asking them how they found us. You can usually get, overall, not a hundred percent, but you can at least see the main trends.
Maia Wells:
And does that help to inform where you invest?
Chris Strom:
Yeah, it definitely helps to inform where you invest and we look at that every day. Of course, things like the paid advertising platforms probably are the most granular in terms of the data they report. So it is very useful, and we look at the analytics continuously, but just kind of accepting that they won't tell everything. In particular, they'll over report organic search and direct traffic in particular.
Maia Wells:
Right. Do you ask leads where they heard about ClearPivot?
Chris Strom:
Yeah, we just started to about two months ago.
Maia Wells:
And has that shown different results than some of the analytics tools?
Chris Strom:
For us, we have done a lot of SEO focused, content marketing, and so we do get a lot of leads directly from organic search. And we know it's from organic search. We wrote up a big guide on senior living marketing, and that gets good search rankings. And we can see, when we look in HubSpot, we get a lot of people coming. They do an organic search and they land on that senior living marketing guide. And so that's pretty clear they found us through the content that we wrote. It's more when you get into, you see people Google searching and landing on your homepage. They're most likely coming in, not because they were searching for you by name. And that's the part that takes a little more intuition and you can't get it immediately from the numbers.
Maia Wells:
So the numbers are important, but not everything is what I'm hearing you say.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Yeah. They're about 65% of everything, but not a hundred percent.
Maia Wells:
What you're saying is really important because it's not possible to attribute every single action, and we are marketing to humans, so we can't forget about that. So as we've talked, you've kind of thrown out a few solutions to each thing and how we can overcome those mistakes. Do you have any advice out there for people who might find that they're doing some of these things?
Chris Strom:
You can understand that you're not the first one to do it. You don't have to beat yourself up too much. You can change directions and stop doing any of those things. Some of them, if you kind of over-automated things, you're not going to ruin things by that. You just maybe spent more time that could have been spent better elsewhere. So don't beat yourself up. You can move on, change directions. And honestly, more and more, the best advice I can give is just keep going. Don't give up. You can pay attention to the analytics and do your research and plan your strategy. But oftentimes the best thing is just not giving up.
Maia Wells:
Well, there you have it. Just don't give up. This marketing thing is always a process. We're always learning, trying new things and iterating. So we can think about that on the micro level or the macro level for our entire career. So I think that that was a lot of great advice, Chris. Thank you for sharing with us the five common pitfalls that you see lots of companies making in marketing. I hope that a few of us can avoid those pitfalls in the coming months and just keep on moving forward. Thanks for joining us on the Marketing Hero podcast.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, thanks, Maia.
