The Marketing Innovation Show

Join Andrei and our guest, James Scherer, on today’s episode, as they will dive deep into content marketing trends for 2022. From strategy shifts to AI and SEO drove content production. James is the VP of Growth at Codeless. He's helped 10 figure brands like monday.com or Nextiva dominate categories with content marketing at a massive scale.   𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐉𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬:   𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: codeless.io 𝐽𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-scherer-94709830/ 𝐽𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: @JDScherer    𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢: 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro    𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/   𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro   𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦: ▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube  ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show  ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean  ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify  ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer  ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher  ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox    Useful links: Monday.com: https://monday.com/  MarketingMuse: https://www.marketmuse.com/  Clearscope: https://www.clearscope.io/    Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu   Hi, there! This is Andrei, and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is James Scherer, VP of growth at Codeless. He's helped 10 figure brands like monday.com or Nextiva dominate categories with content marketing at a massive scale. And today we'll dive deep into content marketing trends for 2022. From strategy shifts to AI and SEO drove content production. Exciting times, a very insightful and practical discussion today. James, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show! How are you? How's it going?   James Scherer   It's going very well. Thank you for having me. I'm excited about this.   Andrei Tiu   Yeah, same here. Thank you for being on the show. Let's see. So without further ado, let's bring a bit of your background to the table. So I'd like for you to maybe make a quick intro. Let people get to know you a little bit. Tell us how you started in marketing. What was your journey so far? Maybe a couple of highlights. And then we have some really interesting case studies that we were discussing just before the show, so I'm really excited to get into them and talk a bit about, you know, hands-on marketing.   James Scherer   Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so a bit about me. My name is James Scherer. I'm currently the VP of growth at Codeless, which is a Content Marketing agency. I started marketing in 2013, I was an English graduate. And when I graduated, like a lot of liberal arts majors, I didn't really know exactly what I was going to do. And I fell into Content Marketing and writing totally haphazardly at a startup in Vancouver, Canada, where I was living, and really, really enjoyed it and suddenly had something to do with my degree, which was handy. And I moved from writer at a startup there to editor and then Head of Inbound. So when I left in 2018, that was kind of my role. And that was, you know, a lot of really good foundational understanding of digital marketing because I was writing on a lot of different digital marketing subjects because our agency or the company I worked for, did a broad spectrum of stuff. And then I went kind of remote, my wife and I started travelling the world a little bit. So I was writing. And I, again, kind of fell into writing for this content marketing agency. And then when I kind of settled back down here in the UK with my wife, back in 2019, I moved to Director of an editorial at Codeless. And then just in January, a VP of Growth. So my role here is really kind of revolves around. Initially, it was managing the editorial staff and the writers. And now it's more our internal growth, as well as kind of the strategies that we add on behalf of our clients. And we make recommendations to our clients and how they can grow through contact content and inbound. So that's me.   Andrei Tiu   Fun time. Okay, so you started off with a sort of written content marketing type of activity, and then expanded and grew from there. And during your time when you were the head of inbound, were you guys doing mostly organic stuff Or were you also coordinating the paid channels such as you know, Google Ads or other types of paid acquisition?   James Scherer   Yeah, so I was primarily focused on the organic side of things, though, I was pretty involved in the conversion optimization as well with the site, which kind of did touch on. We had a paid team, who we coordinated with for sure, just to like Target the SERPs they were targeting and vice versa, and then not targeting the SERPs they were targeting. But it was primarily my focus that has always been around inbound organic traffic, leads and sales.   Andrei Tiu   Very cool. Okay, sweet. So, you know, I just can't be patient anymore. I want to go into the numbers because I'm really excited to talk - about it's probably one of the most or more popular case studies that you have been leading on and that you guys have been working on. And that is monday.com. So we all know as marketers, everybody probably saw ads from them or got visibility towards their brands in the past two or three years massively. And I know that you guys were behind their organic success. And more specifically, you were driving the activity there. So it'd be really exciting and interesting for us to bring as much as you can to the table from that case study. And then maybe we can bounce some ideas and make a little analysis on what made this case study be so successful? And also, what can our listeners take away from it to implement or to look at when they're planning their content strategy for this year?   James Scherer   Absolutely. And you are absolutely right, that we all saw monday.com. I think they retargeted us - all of us - in 2021. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. So they came on with us in October of 2020, fall of 2020. And they very quickly wanted to do the massive volume of content. They had been in kind of the market for multiple content marketing agencies. And when we kind of started talking to them and said, like, hey, we could do double of what you want to be doing. In which they wanted to do 75 pieces in the first month. And down to the kind of like 75 to 50, in like the third, fourth, fifth sixth. So, in the first 12 months of working with them, we did about 400 pieces of content, which was, you know, massive volume. So coordinating the right key phrases for us to target and then determining, like, everything that we needed to form an outline creation stage for all of our writers to come in. We had like 35 writers on their account one time. That was all a bit, you know, it was a lot to do. But it was really exciting, of course, because you know, monday.com is one of those Unicorns of the tech space. So, as I said, Yeah, I think 425 Odd pieces were created in the first year,   Andrei Tiu   Was this on-site and off-site or just for on-site?   James Scherer   On-site exclusively. Everything they did was on site. Yeah, so, 425 ranking positions, out of 800 articles. So 750 articles in the first nine months, and then 800 by the end of the year, because they slow down. And I think more than half of those returned 350 of them breaking the first page for the private for the primary key phrase. So massive results, I think a total of like 23,000 new organic key phrases from those articles exclusively. And 825 first page rankings across the board. So yeah, so if 350 odd for the target keyphrase, and then 801st-page rankings for all the articles. So huge results for them. And it was really, really exciting to work with them and do it. And we're actually doing another 93 before the end of February for them. And that's just starting this week. So I am enthusiastic about being on this podcast, but I need to go help.   Andrei Tiu   Yes, it sounds very busy. So can we talk a bit about the strategy behind it? Because this is something that we discuss with our clients as an agency as well. And it's always a debating point, like how much should you write? How much is enough? How much is the minimum necessary? What was the strategy that you went for when working with them? And also what determined them to go all-in on the on-site only content production, as well as the very high volume? Were you optimising articles one per keyword and had a very long list? Were you targeting phrases with more articles at once, or what was basically what informed your strategy together and this case study?   James Scherer   It's a big question. And it's a sort of, it'll be a big, big answer. So bear with me. The answer to the question of okay, let me sort of a bit of context. Monday.com has a massive marketing budget. They're a massive company, and they needed significant investment in inbound or in the creation of blog content, in order to compete with, you know, significant competitors really sizable competitors. They also wanted to break into the CMS spacers they weren't currently in as much as they wanted to be. They wanted to have an entire section on templates was of content which it didn't have its time. Let alone the fact that a lot of primary topics like the key phrase project match marketing software. They did not have content. So the answer to how much content should your listeners be producing, cannot be answered by what Monday did. Monday did the higher volume of content, 75 pieces per month of act 2000 words. Which is above and beyond what most businesses can possibly imagine doing, their marketing budget is significant. I think

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Julius Solaris, as they will be discussing how to best use shared online experiences and events technology to redefine human connection in B2B businesses. Julius is the VP of Marketing Strategy and Events at Hopin, Europe's fastest-growing startup of all time,​​ as well as a world-renowned event influencer.   𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐢𝐮𝐬:   𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: hopin.com 𝐽𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑢𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliussolaris/    𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢: 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro    𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/   𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro   𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦: ▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube  ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show  ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean  ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify  ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer  ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher  ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox  Episode transcript:    Andrei Tiu   Hi, there! This is Andrei, welcoming you to a new episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Julius Solaris, who is the VP of Marketing Strategy and Events at Hopin, Europe's fastest-growing startup of all time. And today, we'll discuss how to best use shared online experiences and events technology to redefine human connection in B2B businesses. Without further ado, Julius is a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? How's the year started for you? I know you are in LA at the moment. So how was the weather there?   Julius Solaris   Thank you, Andrei, thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to be with you. And, you know, the very exciting start of the year, as you know, we navigate through the uncertainty and you know, whatever prospect is out there, everybody's excited. In the marketing and events industry to kind of go back to in-person everybody's looking at virtual as well as a long term solution to the issue. So we're navigating for both personally. The United States is slightly different from the rest of the world. So I've been able been fortunate enough to attend several in-person events, one of those last weeks for 3000 people. So yeah, lots of insights, we're definitely going back to in-person, it's not as fast as we wanted it to be. But at the same time, you know, there's a lot of innovation happening in virtual so I'm stimulated by both parts, I guess, you know, I come from them in person. Ward, I come from analysing in person, the business of events. But I've always had a passion in technology. Therefore, I'm like, drawn into this battle between virtual and in-person that is happening right now. Yeah, so exciting times.   Andrei Tiu   Yes, definitely. And I feel with, you know, with coming from the live space, and now going to digital and are coming back to life I think, however, that some changes are here to stay when it comes to the innovation that has been happening and the way that customers or actually people in general, as well as transposing the b2b space, have adapted to the COVID pandemic, and now going out of it, how they see events as part of their marketing strategy. So I'm really hyped for us to go through the ins and outs and have your insights from a technology point of view, as well as adoption and what you guys are developing at the moment. Let's see if we will go into AR and that side of things as well, if you want to, then that'd be really, really interesting. Because as you also know, this is a very hot subject nowadays, between our marketing audience. So exciting. I think a very good starting point would be to introduce yourself a bit to the audience. Tell us a bit more about Hopin, how you've come to be Europe's fastest-growing startup of all time because that's a huge statement. And I know from our discussion just a couple of minutes before, it's impressive as well. So if you'd like to take over the stage, it is all yours.   Julius Solaris   For sure, so I've been in the events industry for the past 20 years, 15 of those have been in media been writing about events. So I come from a content perspective. And I've been doing a lot of analysis on the use of technology and events. So that's been my passion since 15 years ago, and I've been one of the first looks at the impact that technology could have in events as well as the impact that social media could have in events. I've been sort of defining the trends for the industry for many years, and have hundreds of 1000s of event planners download in my resources website called Event MB that I sold in 2018 to skift. And then, at the beginning of 2020, I got hit like everybody else by the pandemic. And I started doing virtual events. We did webinars before. We sort of elevated the experience of more virtual events and in a space of a year with six events, we got almost 60,000 event planners to attend those events, which is five times the size have the biggest event for the event industry. So quite a sizable audience for our industry. And in February 2021, I made the move to event technologies or working with one company then ended up at Hoppin a few months later. I started at Hoppin four months ago, joining the revolution that this company is bringing along. I don't know if you know the story of Hopin, which is very inspirational. Our founder, Johnny Boufarhat, actually based in London at the time, was sort of confined in his home for autoimmune disease for two years. So we built this platform out of the need to connect with people and to create better experiences for people that are unable to attend in person. So in a sense, he anticipated what the pandemic kind of made us all go through during lockdowns. And therefore, a platform that was built with that kind of experience in mind nearly got a lot of traction and became a sensation, and experienced amazing growth from a handful of employees, three to six, almost 1000 spaced out from some seed funding to $1 billion funding, and incredible ARR. That's been published in different outlets. And you can check it out there. So it's a, you know, incredible story, a trajectory of virtual events that we've all experienced during the pandemic. But also it's a story of bringing that concept of coming together forward into the 2020s. In a sense, I think this is a movement that is going to define the next 10 years. And the way our CEO defined that was by acquiring strategic companies that deliver on that mission of feeling closer to the event, the opportunity, the content by buying first Stream Yard, which a lot of us used, personally saved my life last year when I was running events. And then other companies in the in-person business as well, Topy, Attendify, Boomset, three companies that if you've been in events and use technology for your events, you will know because they are very strong in the in-person business. Therefore, paving the way in terms of what's coming next for the connection, also companies like Jam, there is more sort of meeting oriented type of technologies. So coming together at every touchpoint possible to make sure that you can meet wherever, whenever and however you want. There's no definition in terms of meetings these days that shouldn't be there, we pursue radical inclusion of whoever wants to attend. But also given the freedom to planners and marketers to plan their activations their events, however, they want. There is no fixed agenda, you shouldn't be forced to plan a meeting and personal costs or virtual costs, or hybrid at all costs. But you should follow your audience where they are. And also your situation, your country, the pandemic, all these issues, but also sustainability. You know, these are topics that are on top of the minds of current and future generations. And we feel that at Hopin we're at the core of it.   Andrei Tiu   Awesome! So tell us a bit about your journey through the past maybe two years. So ever since the pandemic started, because this has been, you know, a time of change for you personally and professionally as well. So maybe how did you move through the activity that you had before and now taking the lead on the marketing front with Hopin? What was something exciting that happened there? And how are things panning out for you? Or what were the opportunities that you saw as we moved through the changing market, the changes that were brought by the pandemic and obviously the b2b space that had to adapt as well?   Julius Solaris   So I always tell this story. In November 2019, that was the time when I was Editor Chief and we would write the trends for next year, every time so that's when we will actually publish them. And my top trend for 2020, so 2019 looking at 2020 was trying to anticipate a little bit with my crystal ball that I have here that I use to look at trends all the time. So try to anticipate and to be the top trends of 2020, where virtual events. Right, for all the possibly completely different reasons that what happened, I couldn't anticipate a pandemic. But to me, that was where the industry was going towards, because there was a need to include people that couldn't attend, there is a correlation between attendance online and attendance in person. The more people attend online, the more they tend to turn up in person. And also, there's a sustainability crisis that we kind of forgot during the pandemic, came back recently. But this is not a trend, this is a problem a lot of people are dealing with. This becoming a marketing problem to a lot of events as well with younger generations where they can't afford to

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Igor Fedenkoff, as they will be discussing influencer marketing insights from 2021, trends for 2022, as well as how to best integrate this channel in your overall 2022 digital marketing strategy. Igor is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of brybe.com, a platform for remote professionals and social media influencers looking for brand collaborations. 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐈𝐠𝐨𝐫:   𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://brybe.com 𝐼𝑔𝑜𝑟 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/igorfedenkoff/    𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢: 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro    𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/   𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro   𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦: ▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube  ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show  ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean  ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify  ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer  ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher  ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox    Episode transcript:    Andrei Tiu   Hi, guys! This is Andrei, and you're on a brand new episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Welcome to a new season! Our special guest today is Igor, a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of brybe.com, a platform for remote professionals and social media influencers looking for brand collaborations. Today, we'll discuss influencer marketing insights from 2021, trends for 2022, as well as how to best integrate this channel in your overall 2022 digital marketing strategy. So without further ado, Igor, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. Welcome to a new year, how is January been treating you so far? How's everything going?   Igor Fedenkoff   Thank you so much for having me, Andrei, is definitely a pleasure. This has been a very, very fast start of the year because we are, as a company pursuing, some new avenues of the business. So the developers are hating me already, because they just got out of you know, the partying mode, but you gotta do what you got to do. This is going to be a great year for the industry. This is a great year for the company. Definitely excited about it.   Andrei Tiu   Exciting! So what have you been guys doing? Or do you mention new avenues? First of all, if you want to present yourself a bit to our listeners, so they know a bit about your background, as well as what brybe.com does. And what are you guys preparing for this month or this year?   Igor Fedenkoff   Absolutely. I am the co-founder, part of the four guys that co-founded Brybe two and a half years ago. And this company originally was a pet project, actually. I was working for a different company, I was a CMO for a technology company. And for their marketing efforts, which subsequently we were able to bring him out like 10x, I think almost, we ran a few influencer campaigns very quickly realise that a lot of platforms on the market weren't really serving the purpose of what we had to do. So we started building our own inventory of influencers. And I have a hospitality background is to the club in Los Angeles. So definitely dove into our regular warm network and got a lot of people that when you were to promote the company. It was very, very productive, really cool. So the database has grown over time. And then with additional investment, we sort of came up with an MVP, basically, as a side project. That started enjoying really good organic growth. And when the pandemic - I mean, obviously, for a lot of industries, it has been not the best development - but when anything online, including influencer marketing and freelancer markets, this has been quite an amazing, you know, change in opportunities and systems and platforms. So we were fortunate enough to receive router investments, proceeded with the developments. And basically, last year has been the year of us working on both verticals: on the freelancer vertical on the influence of vertical, gain ourselves positioned in the market. The company name, obviously, it's kind of catchy, so it's becoming quite recognisable in the space. Obviously, we're not up there with the large and huge behemoths of the industries. But I think the cool thing about that is that as a startup, we are able to very quickly change direction or adjust to different situations. I think the paradigm of influencer marketing has experienced a really big shift right now. On so many things that we'll probably get into a little bit later in this conversation, but a company or a provider of the service or the brand that is using influencer marketing that's capable to stay on the cutting edge of everything that's happening is going to benefit tremendously from everything that's going on.   Andrei Tiu   Okay, and what are you guys is up to now? Because you mentioned you avenues so you used last year to establish yourself on both of these fees of users. And now?   Igor Fedenkoff   Yeah, one of the biggest developments that we are looking to do is adding another group of users to the platform. The original aspiration for Brybe was to be a true marketplace. I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of the bazaar. So basically, that's what we're doing. We're trying to build a digital bazaar that will help the end-user which in most cases, buyers or individual verses of the services to find almost everything that they need. So the missing link was the educators and the coaches. As you know, at this particular time, there are a lot of coaches a lot of people that share their expertise, and an even higher and faster-growing audience of people that would like to get that knowledge and get it fast and get it communicated to them. So we are adding new coaches to the platform, we will be able to offer their courses for sale from the platform and as the user, you will be able to go on to Brybe, learn more about some conceptual enterprise that you're looking into then have freelancers - basically create your digital assets and then influencers, promote your company or promote your idea. And all of that is with an incredibly large quantity of professionals that are offering their services at very, very competitive rates. So what the previous year has shown to us is that the freelance industry and especially the influencer industry is shifting into the providers that are called the smaller ones, like the Nano influencers, the micro-influencers, the smaller, less-known providers of the new services like NFT's or crypto blockchain technology. Yet, on the same level with your regular logo design, and website design, all those small providers now can find a tremendous amount of jobs because even the large enterprise has shifted to getting more and more and more work, because it's a lot easier to work with, it's a lot more competitive pricing etc. But we should not forget that the most underserved group in this particular space right now are small businesses. Because they're used to doing everything by themselves. I am a small business owner back in the day, I remember, I used to do anything from plumbing to electrical to website design to promotion. But now they must realise that they have the plethora of talent that is available through platforms like Brybe, like any of our competitors, to get a lot of that stuff done from by somebody with expertise, for a lot less headache, and for a very, very, very competitive rate. What we have done, from the very beginning is focused on small to medium-sized businesses, as well as small to medium-sized providers. And I think this is the wave that a lot of larger companies are focused on large enterprises and missing. But also, it's incredibly important to make them realise that they are supported by platforms like ours. And they can actually sell their services as well as have their services bought.   Andrei Tiu   One question here, because you mentioned creating a bazaar for virtual people that need all these areas of service. And there was a question popping into my head, I'm curious whether you guys are looking at integrating that within the platform at any point in the future? And that could be something to the likes of affiliate marketing or you know, having people that are integrating this form of payment as well, apart from just like purchasing courses, but actually having somebody that produces something with people on the platform, being able to promote via the people in the platform, which are influencers and maybe pay a commission. So that side of the business.   Igor Fedenkoff   Now, absolutely, this is a great question, because this is something that we actually have been doing from the very beginning. Along with developing the platform itself, we have built a separate engine that is called Brybe affiliates, which is an affiliate platform. And originally, it existed apart, these two were completed two different things that serve different purposes. But we have created an integration now because we're coming out with these e-commerce solutions. And we're coming out with some different levels of subscription for enterprise buyers. So this will come incredibly handy. Plus, I think, affiliate marketing, to some is the unknown, and to some is, you know, the gold rush over the past 12 years. I think, again, we're getting back to the shift and general paradigm of how you build your business, how you promote your business. And you can invest millions and millions of dollars in Google ads or run TV ads etc. Or you can turn to the online community. Somebody that, as you said, is already present on our platform, or and the affiliates t

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Oliver Feakins, as they will be discussing marketing strategies and tactics for scaling tech startups in 2022 and beyond. Oliver is the founder of Trusted Search Marketing and TrackFive, an online technology company that builds and manages intuitive web platforms where employers and talent meet. 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐎𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫:   𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒: https://trustedsearchmarketing.com/  𝑂𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverfeakins/     𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢: 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro    𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/   𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro   𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦: ▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube  ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show  ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean  ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify  ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer  ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher  ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox    Episode transcript:    Andrei Tiu   Hi there, this is Andrei and you are on the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Oliver Feakins, the founder of Trusted Search Marketing and TrackFive, an online technology company that builds and manages intuitive web platforms where employers and talent meet. Today we discuss marketing strategies and tactics for scaling tech startups in 2022 and beyond. So without further ado, Oliver, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? How's your morning going? Because you are login-in from America, right?   Oliver Feakins   That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So my morning just getting started and your day is just about the end, right?   Andrei Tiu   Yes.   Oliver Feakins   Great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.   Andrei Tiu   It's a pleasure, pleasure, really looking forward to discussing today. I think it's going to be a very dynamic and interesting discussion. It's always nice to share thoughts with a fellow entrepreneur. You have even more experience because you found it more businesses during the past almost 20-ish years, right?   Oliver Feakins   Yeah. 20 years. I started my first business when I was 14 years old. So yeah.   Andrei Tiu   Wow! Okay, let's talk a bit about that one, maybe as a as a warm up.   Oliver Feakins   An appetiser, right? So, yeah. So, um, you know, first off, I come from a family of entrepreneurs, but while mainly my father, right, so I'm actually as a sound here before the show, I was actually born in England, in Southampton, and, you know, grew up in London and Southampton and my father was in the Royal Navy, but he turned into an entrepreneur. While he was in the Navy, he opened up a catering company while he was stationed, you know, in the UK, and then he was stationed in Portugal and he opened up another catering company, he ended up selling it, making some money while he was enlisted, left the military and parlayed that money into other startups. So I got to watch the entrepreneurial process over and over and over again. My father was a somebody that really likes to manage companies. He was the entrepreneurs entrepreneur, he liked to get in scale, a company and exit, which is what a lot of entrepreneurs like to do. And by the way, for your entrepreneurial audience, like that's an important skill to recognise, right? Like, if there's a difference between starting a company and managing a company. They are not the same thing. Those two job descriptions and responsibilities are not interchangeable. They're two different things right? So you have to be able to reskill, refocus for both of those things. But anyway, you see my father do it and work tirelessly and work really hard. I was able to kind of get in to do a similar thing. So at 14 years old I was a DJ, like kids birthday parties and stuff like that, you know, and I worked for a company at 14, and they went out of business, and they were selling, they had like 17 different, you know, vehicles and DJ equipment sets. And they were like, they just wanted to get rid of it. So for like, 3000 US dollars, they were selling a van, all the music and all the DJ equipments and lights, everything you would need to get started, including the vehicle for $3,000 is a great deal.    Andrei Tiu   Nice!   Oliver Feakins   Yeah. So I basically wrote a business plan to my dad and said, look: I and my friend would like to do this. His dad is going to put in $1,500, I want you to put in $1,500 and here's how we're going to make this successful. So at 14 I couldn't even drive the vehicle. And, you know, I, you know, I started working on that right and grew up once I hit 16, you know, really scaled it up. I remember coming home from school and going to my dad's office, and one of our biggest markets was school dances, so looking to get the school. So, you know, I had to go sell this. So I would literally spend all night on the internet, like basically copying all the fax numbers, because this was 20 years ago.   Andrei Tiu   Yeah!   Oliver Feakins   Of all the high schools and schools all across Pennsylvania. And I would like 1000s of fax numbers, and I would make a flyer, and I would literally one by one stay till 11 o'clock at night at my dad's office faxing these to, you know, attention to school dance manager, you know, and sending the flyer and you know, all day long, I was hustling it for 14, 15, 16. And I would get like one or two contracts for you know, the years worth of school dances from each one of these schools that came through. And I wrote that business all through school, through college and it really taught me how to grind and hustle. You know, my father gave me a really good piece of advice. He is a consummate salesperson. So he used to tell me, nothing happens 'till you sell something. And I lived those words to this day. And I've seen so many entrepreneurs silo themselves into specific things, whether it be: "We have to have the best product", "We have to have the biggest sales, we have to do this, this, this". And a big mistake of entrepreneurs is not really looking at this as a holistic, you know, a combination of things that have to execute at the same time. So that gave me that sense of hustle, it showed me kind of how to set this up. And you know, I went to go work for some tech companies and some large tech companies and then when I was about 21 years old, you know, I hadn't even finished college and I dropped out of college to work. And I ended up starting my own company scaling that company pretty well going back and finishing college. And then, you know, scaling other companies up as well. So I don't really know what it's like to work in my adult life for a company, I've always been an entrepreneur, so I don't think I could have it any other way.   Andrei Tiu   That's fun and also, as you're saying, grind the hustle. But I guess during your high school, you were probably a bit of a rock star with the music business. No?   Oliver Feakins   Yeah, it's funny, right? Like, you know, and it's fun, but I always tell people, like, you know, I've coached a couple of people through the entrepreneurial process. And, you know, sometimes I just, A. People give up too easy and B. I think that people underestimate the amount of time and sacrifice it takes to launch a successful business. You know, I wasn't going to parties, I was DJing them right, and getting paid, I was going and hanging out with friends, I was sitting at my dad's office, sending faxes, you know, when I launched my other companies, you know, I was coming home and you know, at 11 o'clock at night, because I was, you know, working and growing my business, because I normally did have to manage the clients and create the product. But also, with the sale, I had to do the bookkeeping, I had to do everything. So you know, the amount of sacrifice when you're at that level, and it's, it sounds like a lot of your entrepreneurs or solo operators or kind of just getting started. So I mean, that should resonate. But my advice to your listeners would be to really, you know, it is a lot of work. And the sacrifices are huge. Everybody wants to see the money and the nice cars and everything that comes when you become successful. But there's never a glimpse into what you sacrifice or how much work it took to get there. You know?   Andrei Tiu   Mhm, Mhm. There was a nice thing. I remember I saw it, though it was probably a meme, it stayed with me. It was something like: "The value of anything is the amount of time you put into it." And I think this applies very much to just starting a business.   Oliver Feakins   Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.    Andrei Tiu   And also growing it obviously, because it's not just gonna pick up like this. So what was your next move after you, well, you went through college, and you dropped out? And what did you do?   Oliver Feakins   Yeah, so I basically, I was working for an internet company that basically, you know, it was very early was kind of like very early social media, social networking, kind of like MySpace or Facebook. But instead of one platform, the concept behind this tech company was to create a scalable platform in a specific vertical or niche or location and then create the platform to be able to duplicate these very quickly, almost with a push of a button and give access to people. So you know, if you wanted to come in and make a marketing social network, you could launch an account, launch a social network, and you could populate it, run it, it would be completely free. But then this company was able to run advertis

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Kylon Gienger, as they will be discussing the role great marketing plays in preparing the company for evaluation or/and exit. Kylon is a serial entrepreneur, podcast host and president of Acquira. Kylon’s mission is to build and lead something monumental that increases the quality of life of millions of people.  𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 ​​𝐊𝐲𝐥𝐨𝐧 :  𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒:  https://acquira.com/ 𝐾𝑦𝑙𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylongienger/    𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢: 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro    𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/   𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro   𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦: ▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube  ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show  ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean  ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify  ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer  ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher  ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox    Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu   Hi there, this is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Kylon Gienger, serial entrepreneur, podcast host and president of Acquira. Today we'll discuss the role great marketing plays in preparing the company for evaluation or/and exit. So without further ado, Kylon, and it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? How's your morning going? Let's crack on.   Kylon Gienger   Thanks for having me, Andrei. I'm doing good. It's early here. I'm located in Montana, USA. It's very cold outside. We're starting to get some snow woke up early for this. And I'm stoked, man. Let's do it.   Andrei Tiu   Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Did you have your coffee, yet?   Kylon Gienger   Uh, no. I'm drinking decaf these days. Because we're trying to get away from caffeine for a month or two. See how it goes on a week, two weeks into that. And so so far, so good. Okay, decaf coffee is kind of the Saviour there.   Andrei Tiu   Well, you know what they say the first week or two are the hardest right to cut down on caffeine that you shouldn't be?   Kylon Gienger   Yeah, fortunately, it wasn't that I think it's worse for some people than I had maybe a couple of nights where I kind of woke up with a headache. Besides that, no massive effects. But it feels good to have the self-discipline to be of something you've been on for years for some time that I'm 100% going back, altering caffeine again.   Andrei Tiu   Cool, cool. Okay, so interesting stuff, interesting times, we have a very interesting subject today, as well. And I'm really looking forward to the stories because I know you have quite a few that will go through. I think just for people so you know because we do this in the audio and video format as well. And some people research more than others, I think let's just make it easy for everybody tuning in today, to let them know a bit of your background, who are you really and what you do. And then we can go into subjects and discuss strategies and all that jazz.   Kylon Gienger   Let's do it, man. To me, I'm a jack of all trades, master of a few. I've done a lot of things in the last - I'm 32 years old - I've done a lot of things in the last little over a decade, I was in the military, I got out of the Navy in 2012 and promptly started a residential commercial painting company with a really good friend of mine. The first business I ever started, just wanted to cut my teeth, didn't want to work for anybody else and thought, hey, we'll try this thing. So I gave him 1000 bucks, we bought a van, we started hitting the road knocking on doors trying to paint houses that quickly grew to we had operations in six different states and learn how to hire and manage employees and also not manage employees, there's plenty of mistakes there almost went bankrupt at one point. Through the course of building that business built a couple of other brick and mortar retail businesses got into the house flipping game, I started a podcast called 'Successful drop out' that you know, grew quite popular, learned a bunch of different marketing stuff there, you know how to kind of niche down be a big fish in a little pond and stuff like that. That worked pretty well for me. That eventually transitioned to be working with one of the first guests I had on that podcast, who bought businesses. And that led to eventually over the next three, four years to acquire, I learned a lot about buying businesses, instead of starting from scratch as I have been, and how to identify great businesses and businesses that had great marketing or a lack of marketing that we knew we could add a lot of value to, post-acquisition. And that leads me to where I'm at today. Now I work with Acquira as part of the founding team there. And in a nutshell, we help people buy businesses instead of starting them. So I mentioned house flipping before, I imagine a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with the concept of house flipping, you buy something, you fix it up, you turn around and sell for more than you paid for it or you hold on to it, let it cash flow. We're talking about the same thing here when it comes to business buying just with businesses, which is a little bit more complex all around. But is, especially here in the US, a fast-growing interest among the entrepreneurial community we call the people we work with acquisition entrepreneurs, as opposed to startup entrepreneurs, which everybody's kind of familiar with. So that is me and what I do any kind of background in a nutshell there.   Andrei Tiu   Nice. Cool. So how'd you get into acquiring and how did you change your perspective from starting businesses and growing them, you know, the way that you have done before, versus you know, figuring out there is an opportunity there to first of all to search for businesses that will be good to buy opportunities. And a question here is: How do you find them? And then of course, how to develop a business around that and to leverage your opportunity.   Kylon Gienger   So how do you find you're going? How do you how do we kind of find these businesses to buy? Or how do people discover business buying?   Andrei Tiu   Let's start with: What made you discover this opportunity, you know, like, make the switch from funding the business and growing it to getting something that is already set up?   Kylon Gienger   Yeah, good question. I mean, again, the very first guest I ever had on the first podcast, I started business, right, I remember I was so nervous, I'd never interviewed anybody before I chugged a glass of wine beforehand, we had a fantastic conversation and hit it off. And it was a year and a half later, or something, he connected with me and said, Hey, come join me in what I'm doing. I'm buying these at that point, we were buying online businesses, content, websites, e-commerce, SAS, stuff like that. And I quickly realised, Hey, I've been doing this business, starting a business from the scratch game for a while. And here, I can find really great depth, leverage and ways to buy these companies and step right into an existing customer base cash flow, and the returns are much greater and come much faster than if I'm starting something from scratch. I don't have to spend the first two, three years blood, sweat and tears trying to build a customer base from scratch, build a product from scratch and prove the market raise funding. It feels like ethical cheating, you know, in a way, you're sort of cutting in line in the process of owning a profitable business and being working for yourself, right being kind of the master of your own destiny there. So, and a lot of people I think are discovering the same thing here. Particularly in the US, we have an entire generation that we call baby boomers that are reaching retirement age. It's millions of people here in the US. And the majority of small businesses here in the US are owned by this age group. And they're quite literally the backbone of the economy. And we're talking everything from online, SAS companies that were started a decade or two ago to really boring brick and mortar businesses like bat companies, plumbing companies, roofing companies, these are all owned by folks that are reaching retirement age. So quite literally, we have trillions of dollars worth of small business assets that over the next decade are needing to switch hands, or they will cease to exist, they'll just be shut down, they'll die. And they employ millions and millions of people, like I said, the backbone of the economy. So we have a lot of supply over the next decade-plus coming down the pipeline here. And one thing that Acquira is trying to do is raise a lot of awareness that, Hey, you want to own your own business, think about buying one stuff, starting one. And when we started out, definitely big fish in a smaller pond. Not a lot of people had heard about it. But these days, people are starting to catch on to this idea of acquisition entrepreneurship, and that's what we exist to. But oftentimes they don't have the capital, or the knowledge or skill set to tackle buying a seven-figure business by themselves. And that's where we come in.   Andrei Tiu   I see. Okay, so discovered this market through your first podcast guests. And then when business, what are you exactly doing with Acquira right now. So just for everybody to know exactly how you come into the process of, you know, a business wanting to be invested into or sold to either a private investor or company. How do you guys work with, in this case, small to me

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Aaron LeBauer, as they will be discussing tactics and strategies he used to build and scale his business, as well as help 1000s of other entrepreneurs do the same in his niche, as well as insights into how to best run sales webinars and marketing in the health business to the patient sector.  Aaron is a doctor of physical therapy, business owner, author and podcast host of The CashPT® Lunch Hour Podcast. Dr LeBauer is on a mission to save 100 million people from unnecessary surgery by helping other passionate therapists succeed in business and learn how to market directly to patients. Connect with Aaron:  𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒:   www.AaronLeBauer.com  𝐴𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛:   https://linkedin.com/in/aaronlebauer  𝐴𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑛 𝐹𝑎𝑐𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘:   https://facebook.com/aaronlebauer  𝐴𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟:   @aaronlebauer     𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢: 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro    𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/   𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro   𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦: ▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube  ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show  ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean  ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify  ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer  ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher  ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox    Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu   Hi there, this is Andrei and you're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Aaron LeBauer. He's a doctor of physical therapy, business owner, author and podcast host. And today we look at together the tactics and strategies he used to build and scale his business, as well as help 1000s of other entrepreneurs do the same in his niche. We'll also discuss insights into how to best run sales webinars and marketing in the health business to the patient sector. So without further ado, Aaron, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Excited to see where the discussion is going today. How are you? How's the morning going?   Aaron LeBauer   I'm doing great, Andrei. Thank you for having me. It's an honour to be here on your show today.   Andrei Tiu   It's an honour for me as well. I know that you just wrapped up recording for one of your own podcast episodes, right?   Aaron LeBauer   Yeah. Oh, yeah. I did a, it was a solo episode today on the number one asset in your business, which emails your email list. So I went through all the pieces of that. Yeah.   Andrei Tiu   Nice. Nice. Nice. Okay, so you're all warmed up and ready to go, I guess.    Aaron LeBauer   Oh, yeah. Absolutely.    Andrei Tiu   If you want, we can also go into, you know, email marketing at some point, because I'm sure it's gonna be relevant when we are discussing the sales webinars strategies. Right?   Aaron LeBauer   Oh, absolutely. It's a huge key component of that.   Andrei Tiu   Okay, so yeah, I guess let's just rock'n'roll and see where we go with this. So, first of all, impressive background and an impressive roster of clients, numbers and everything. I think a good place to start would be to let our listeners hear find out from you, or read about you, your background, how you started, what motivated you and how your growth look like?   Aaron LeBauer   Yeah, I think the short version is I was racing bicycles in high school in college. And I think one day I was like, I think I was in high school. I told my mom how my legs hurt. I just don't feel like feeling that good riding. And she's like, You need to get a massage. I got a professional massage from someone locally. And I felt so great on my bike. And I was like, Wow, great. I went to college. Really, some of the options were, go into business, be a lawyer, be a physician. And med school wasn't in my future. They didn't know what to do with me. I was like, Well, let me just see if I can race bikes professionally. And I raced a little bit in Europe. And I spent a summer in Belgium, to law racing in France. So but I was super far away from Tour de France level, right. I came back to San Francisco, I moved to San Francisco and tried to get a real job,  in air quotes, a real job. And real jobs weren't for me. I ended up being a temp and I hated it. Temporary employee and then I decided, well, I could ride my bike and get paid if I'm a bike messenger. So I did that for about a year and a half. But long term, it wasn't fulfilling. And I had an epiphany one day if I go to a massage therapy school... My father and uncles, they're all physicians. And so that was definitely a path for me. And helping people, working with my hands, helping people heal was something that's kind of in my blood. And I was like, Well, if I can go to massage therapy school, I can work four hours a day, doing massage, and I can train on my bike four to five hours a day, and I'll make enough money to live. And I did that for six years. But eventually, people were asking me, Aaron, you're the first person to touch me where I hurt. I've been to physio, I've been to the surgeon acupuncture, chiropractic massage, and you're the first person to touch me where I hurt and actually helped me with this problem. And my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife was like, we should go to become a physical therapist. I was like..No. And she: It's ok, you should. She encouraged me to do that. And eventually, we left California moved to where I live now, which is in North Carolina, on the other coast of the United States on the East Coast. And I looked into PT schools, and I went to PT school because it was going to give me the ability to help my patients understand when they would get better because they would say Aaron, so when is this going to finally go away and I'm like, I don't know. As a massage therapist. Our job is to help you feel comfortable and good and recover but it's not to predict when your injuries can go away. So I did that and went to PT school for that. On the very first clinical rotation. At the beginning of my second year I saw 43 patients one day, and I realised that day like 43 patients as a new student is a tonne of people that's four people an hour for over nine hours. I realised that day I already had a massage therapy practice, realised I just need to start my own practice and charge people cash, charge an extra $10 an hour. My clinical instructor was like, no one's gonna pay more than their copay for physical therapy. And I was like, Let me prove you wrong. If you're not, you don't live in the United States, we've got this weird, crazy medical system where everyone has insurance. But just because you have insurance doesn't mean it's less expensive or that things are actually covered. It really interferes with the way we practice therapy or people practice medicine, it just payment drives treatment. And I didn't want that. Because I didn't have that in massage therapy. And I knew there was a better way. And so that's where I started my own practice. Without relying on insurance. People started asking me, How do you do this? And then one day, someone said, what do I owe you for that? I was like, What do you mean, what do you owe me? She's like, well, you just gave me a tonne of valuable information, what can I pay you? And that's the day that I started my coaching and consulting business.   Andrei Tiu   Nice. Okay, so it was sort of you didn't think about it from the beginning, but rather it just evolved organically from you're following your purpose or your passion in the sense, right,   Aaron LeBauer   Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. It wasn't like, I didn't have this plan that I'm gonna sell 1000 courses and put a bunch of people in my mastermind group and write a book and start a podcast. It was like, How can I help people? And it was just the different things that people said, guided me along this path. And that's where I'm at today.   Andrei Tiu   Super. So how do you go about establishing your first practice, the one that really helped you become a full-time entrepreneur to say so, as well as a doctor?   Aaron LeBauer   Yeah, I think you know, and it's been 20 years since I started. I think the very first thing that I did was, well, I had to get licenced and tell people, but it was like, how do people know? So I had to start marketing myself in the very first book I read was Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. And I read books, I read a marketing book. And that helped me out and I moved to North Carolina, and I read a couple of books. And I was like, Okay, I'm on a roll, word of mouth was working really well. But when I got out of PT school, I realised that no one really knew what physical therapy was, they have this idea about what Physiotherapy is, and what it can do. But it's so broad. And what I do is very different from a lot of people's experience, had to figure out how to market it. So that's where I had to get a coach and to get a business coach to help me. Just save time, by giving me a lot of the documentation forms we would need, but coaching me on how to set my prices. And actually this for the next business coach coached me on how to build a lead magnet and build my email list. And that was in 2008, I think?   Andrei Tiu   Wow, you are you were a very early adopter.   Aaron LeBauer   Oh, I built my first website in 1995.   Andrei Tiu   Nice, nice, nice. Okay, so what was your first lead magnet? So by this time you had your practice, you're growing organically? And what did you use as a lead magnet to grow your email list back in the day?   Aaron LeBauer   Yeah, the first lead magnet I used. I think I wrote a blog article.

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Raul Galera, as they will be discussing leveraging this channel as an eCommerce business and how to best benefit from loyalty and word of mouth programmes. Raul is the Chief Advocate at RefferalCandy, an app that allows eCommerce brands to set up and run customer referral programs Connect with Raul:  𝑊𝑒𝑏𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒:  https://www.referralcandy.com/  𝑅𝑎𝑢𝑙 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝐼𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raulgalera/    𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐢: 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢: https://marketiu.com  / https://marketiu.ro    𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑖 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑛: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency    𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑢 𝑜𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/   𝐸𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑎𝑡 hello@marketiu.ro   𝐋𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦: ▶️Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube  ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show  ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean  ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify  ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer  ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher  ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox    Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu   Hi there, this is Andrei and you're on The Market Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Raul Galera, the Chief Advocate to ReferralCandy, an app that allows ecommerce brands to set up and run customer referral programmes. Today, we'll discuss leveraging this channel as an ecommerce business and how to best benefit from loyalty and word of mouth programmes as well, during the upcoming shopping season. Without further ado, Raul, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? How's the morning going?   Raul Galera   I've got doing well. Thanks for having me.   Andrei Tiu   No worries, it's my pleasure. You look very fresh. How's everything going on your side with the business, with life, with, you know, customers?   Raul Galera   Pretty good. I actually recently just relocated to Mexico City. So this is where I'm speaking from right now. This is my first 48 hours here. I literally just got here like this past weekend. And things are going very well. I mean, in terms of ReferralCandy, as you can, as you can imagine, the ecommerce world has exploded over the past 18 months. So we've experienced a lot of growth. And with that, obviously a lot of new improvements that we've done to our app, to better serve our merchants. So yeah, it's a pretty exciting time for free comments in general. And we're trying to help us make Mitchison as we can.   Andrei Tiu   Great, some great stuff. So, let's start by maybe introducing you a bit more to the audience and help our guys here understand your background and what ReferralCandy does? And how do you engage with the ecommerce players let's say, so that we can dive into discussion in more depth as we go?   Raul Galera   Yeah, absolutely. So about myself, I actually been at ReferralCandy for the past five years now, mostly running the partner programme. So we obviously collaborate with a bunch of other companies in the ecommerce world. Whether it's their ecommerce agencies or other tech companies, or you know, media companies that touch in with marketing or ecommerce in general. I'm in charge of managing those relationships. And ReferralCandy specifically, for those that are listening that are not familiar with us. We are an app that allows e commerce stores to set up and run customer referral programmes. So think about the traditional the world-famous Dropbox referral programme, Uber referral programme in which you, us a customer, get something every time that you refer a friend and kind of like bring new brand new business to the store. So we basically allow brands to set it up and run it on autopilot, just by giving each customer a unique referral link that they can share with their friends. And we're able to track rewards. And it's basically an easy way for merchants to first of all, acquire new customers through a channel that it's completely owned by them, they don't need to depend on a third party platform, and we're talking about leveraging their customer base to acquire new customers. But also it's a way for them to retain those customers that they already have. By giving them an incentive the next time they and every time they refer a friend, they can get a discount on a future purchase. So you're kind of giving them an additional incentive to come back to your store for more. It's overall a good way to acquire new customers and retain your existing ones without having to depend on platforms or other algorithms that might change your entire marketing mix and overnight.   Andrei Tiu   Yeah, it's also a very good way to you know, get people in, like directly involved with your brand not only consuming products from you, but actually having an invested interest in making money with you in a way.   Raul Galera   Yeah, exactly. I mean, when brands typically think of the post purchase a kind of like flow after somebody has left the checkout and acquire the new customer. Something that it keeps seeing, not only as a somebody that works in ecommerce, but as a consumer myself, I see a lot of brands that are just like trying to get you to that second purchase pretty much right away, without realising they literally just made a purchase. You probably need some time until that happens again. So you know, there's a lot of push for promotions to get that second purchase and if you can switch the direction of the conversation after purchase and direct it towards a referral or maybe doesn't have to be a referral but maybe like joining a loyalty programme or leaving a review or like just doing something that's going to engage with a brand other than making a purchase, that's gonna pay off down the line. So it's another way, like you said, another way to kind of retaining people and make sure that you're brand staying top of mind without having to direct people to your product page.   Andrei Tiu   You mentioned something really cool there. And I think this can be an angle for our discussion forward, which is what happens after the purchase happens. So you know, during the podcast, and as marketers as well, we have discussed a lot, and we are still discussing what happens, and how you can bring those people into the community, how you can drive traffic, drive conversions etc. But what's at least equally important is what happens after the first purchase, because mainly with ecommerce, the first purchase, not never, but many times, it's not necessarily profitable for the business. Many, if we talk about consumer goods, the profit lays in the repeat purchase. So how to facilitate that repeat purchase is a question that needs answer, needs, you know, a very good answer. And I think it would be a great framework for our discussion now, to tackle this point of the customer journey. And for you guys tuning in that own online stores, or that are marketers or activate within an ecommerce business, to think in a bit more depth on this topic. Hopefully, we'll be able to inspire you to, you know, take a couple more actions that maybe you are not at the, at the moment, are mainly in preparation for Black Friday, and also Christmas, because it's just around the corner really? Yeah, already, like, it's still a month or a month and a half. But really we should all Prepare from now. So, Raul. What's interesting in the business right now, like, let's talk a bit in the moment, what are you guys up to? How are your clients doing? What are they up to? That will be relevant for our people here.   Raul Galera   Yeah, so I mean, as you mentioned, pretty much everybody is preparing for the busiest time of the year. Although there has been a shift in how these has evolved in the past year and a half. I mentioned this a lot, but I think it's pretty telling in terms of like how Ecommerce has evolved in the past year and a half. I was at a Shopify event in Amsterdam, in February 2020. So literally just weeks away before, everything just gonna change. And the CTO of Shopify was there. And he was showing us a graph up - this is actually his Twitter so maybe is still published there, and maybe people can find it. But he showed us a chart that showed kind of like the peak in sales that Shopify was registering every single year in Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So you could see the entire year just kind of like flat, kind of like the same level of traffic, and then boom, you see that hit, and in around mid November. And  something funny that that happened after that is that - we're in April, as a few months later, after this, he published the same graph and - updated obviously - for after kind of like the the shift between offline and online. A lot of businesses in March and April decided to go online so they could still sell to their customers. And they were registering, at least Shopify was registering Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic every single day after mid March. And so that what's interesting, is that now I mean, last year was still experiencing growth in that holiday season. So it's kind of like gives you a sense of how big the ecommerce world has gone in just a year and a half. I read a stat that it just in a matter of weeks, ecommerce reached the level of market penetration levels that was expected for 2025 in that happen in April 2020. Right, so well, that means for brands is that there's a lot more competition now, there's a lot more brands that are selling similar products, they're at least going after the same target audience. Consumers have limited budgets. So we need to you know, brands need to compete in a smarter way. And in terms of  how they connect with those customers. As you mentioned earlier, the first purchase m

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Elzie Flenard III, as they will be discussing podcasts, as part of a comprehensive content marketing strategy, as well as tips and strategies to run a professional podcast show. Elzie is the CEO of Podcast Town, the podcasting agency through which he helps people and brands connect, communicate and cultivate relationships with their audience through podcasting, coaching and training. Connect with Elzie:  Website:  https://www.podcasttown.net/about-us  Elzie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elziedflenardiii/    Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox Episode transcript: Andrei Tiu   Hi there! This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Elzie, or, as many know him, ”The Mayor”. He is the CEO of Podcast Town, the podcasting agency through which he helps people and brands connect, communicate and cultivate relationships with their audience through podcasting, coaching and training. Today, we'll discuss podcasts as part of a comprehensive content marketing strategy, as well as tips and strategies to run a professional podcast show. So without further ado, Elzie it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? How's the morning / almost lunchtime going?   Elzie Flenard   Well, first of all, Andrei, thank you so much for having me on the show. I am doing fantastic. It is around 11am. Almost lunchtime here in the US. So I'm excited and full of energy and ready to talk about podcasting.   Andrei Tiu   Love it, super. So let's go! We have a very curious audience here. I know that podcasting has been, you know, on the marketers mind for five years now and things are moving forward in many cases. But I think the way that we will approach the subject today is going to be super relevant and super interesting. I'm excited to get to it. However, I would like to start by letting you tell us a bit about you and about your journey and how you started on this path. Are you up for it?   Elzie Flenard   Let's do it.   Andrei Tiu   Super, over to you.   Elzie Flenard   So my journey started, pretty much by accident in terms of how I got into podcasting. I'll spare you the long version of the story, but essentially, I was looking to learn, and I was stuck in my side hustle and I wanted to quit my day job. But I didn't have the knowledge, I felt I needed to know more about business and how to run business in order to get over that hump. And so my bright idea was I was going to start this show called ”Enterprise Now” and I was going to invite these brilliant business minds onto my show and learn from them. And so that's what I did, I started my show, I started learning so many concepts and principles from these business owners that eventually, it worked! I was able to quit my day job and do podcasting full time. So that's the long and short story, but it was totally not my intention to start a podcast business, it just sort of happened.   Andrei Tiu   Okay, so you initially just wanted to be a podcaster?   Elzie Flenard   I wanted to do anything other than my day job, quite honestly. I'm a business guy, I love entrepreneurship, solving problems, and helping people get to the next level in their business and in their lives. And so I really saw an opportunity in the podcast space that it was growing, that the on demand culture was increasing. And this still continues to do so. And so it was kind of a timing thing where the problem presented itself at the right time. I had the skill set, and I jumped in both feet.   Andrei Tiu   Very nice. Can I ask what was the job that you were hating before?   Elzie Flenard   Oh, all of them. I've never had a job I liked, Andrei, like ever. I've had jobs that I could deal with, they were okay. But I've never had a job that I loved, until now, of course.   Andrei Tiu   That's very cool that you managed to, you know, find your place here. So how long was the period of time when you were hating your jobs? And when did the switch happen?   Elzie Flenard   Yes, so I've worked since I was 15 years old, Andrei. And I'm 39 now. So quite a long time, I probably worked my side gig in my adult career for about 15 years before I was able to make that transition. And, quite frankly, it was scary, you know, you're going from, and at the time I was making six figures, so it wasn't like I was making a job that I couldn't pay the bills with. Financially, I was doing all right, you know, and so, I made the transition and I could say I wish, in some ways I wish I had done it earlier, but in some ways I'm glad it happened when it did because I learned so much from how larger  corporations operate that helped me in my business now.   Andrei Tiu   Sweet. So just for our audience to know in terms of the timeframes. How long have you been having this business and when did you actually move to being a full time podcast guy?   Elzie Flenard   Yes. So my business started in 2011. So I think, if I'm doing the math, 10 years ago, and I've been running Podcast Town for about four and a half years.   Andrei Tiu   Nice. So you're still a bit of an early adopter in that sense. Because in 2015 - 16, there were a few, but there were not too many podcasts.   Elzie Flenard   Yeah, it's interesting, because podcasting has been around for quite a while. But  there'll be these ebbs and flows in popularity. When I started, not a tonne of people have podcasts. Now, that's not the case, a lot of people have podcasts now. And so, it's really cool to see the industry sort of grow and become an actual industry with an infrastructure and in some ways, rules and things like that. So it's been a pretty cool thing to watch.   Andrei Tiu   Okay, so then, so that we can drift easily into the actual, you know, tactical side of the discussion. What's your day looking like right now, what are you doing?   Elzie Flenard   Okay, so my day includes I did a little bit of bookkeeping this morning, onboarding a new client. I'm here now doing this podcast interview. So that's content creation / marketing / relationship building. Later today, I have to prepare for a webinar that we're doing in a little bit. And then I have to move to my to do list, looking at my operations to make sure that that's efficient. There's a platform that I'm thinking about switching over to. So right there, I've done let's see marketing and sales, I've done operations, I've done finance. Did I leave anything out of the four major areas of business? It's a mix of a lot of different things.   Andrei Tiu   Okay, but your main activity now has to do with your agency and with working with people to have successful podcasts, right? So now let's put on the marketing / business hat. And let's look at this through, what I think would be our audience's eyes when we approach the subject of content marketing / podcasting. I think we can start with defining how a podcast can help a business and how we could bring value to a content marketing strategy. And here we have two angles through which you can integrate podcasts into a content marketing strategy: One of them is as a company or as an individual that wants to be the personal brand, to have your own podcast and to invite people and to associate yourself with these names and you know, sort of building on what you need in that direction, and create content on the way. Or you can look at being present on more podcasts so that you can, again, be the thought leader to say so by being invited to all these shows and stuff. And now, what are your thoughts on this? Or how do you approach this angle with your clients? How do you feel that podcasts can be best integrated into this content marketing framework?   Elzie Flenard   Well to answer your question, the three things that I always think about whether you're guesting on a show, or you're hosting a show, is building relationships, growing your influence, and building authority. Those are the three things that whether it's a personal brand, if it's a corporate brand, you're going to want to do those things, right? You're going to want to build relationships, you want to raise your profile or your authority, and you want influence because those are the things that are going to segue into building your know like trust factor, which is the ground level. That's why people do business with people they like know and trust, right? So I'll start there, but I think, on a drill down level, you really have to understand who you want to talk to. I think if you're in business, the fact that you need a podcast, that's a foregone conclusion. You need to be in the podcast space. I mean that's, to me, my opinion, that's not even an option anymore. If you're not in a space, you're already falling behind. So let's just get that out of there. So, Mr. / Mrs. business owner, if you're listening to this podcast, The Mayor has declared that you need to be in the podcast space. Now, how you show up in the space varies depending on what your goals are, what your brain is, right? So not everybody should host a branded show. But you should at least be guesting on shows. Why? Multiplication. Y

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Tyler ”Sully” Sullivan, as they will be discussing how to best prepare your online store for the upcoming shopping season as well as email marketing strategies to boost revenue and profits in eCommerce. Sully is the founder of BombTechGolf, an eCommerce store with over 20 million sold online since 2012. He also runs Ecomgrowers, helping Shopify store owners ramp up their online revenue and profits.    Connect with Sully:  Website:  http://Ecomgrowers.com Sully on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/tyler-sullivan-494b5426 Sully on Facebook: @bombtechgolf Sully on Twitter: BombTechGolf   Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox   Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu   Hi there! This is Andrei welcoming you to our new season of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Tyler Sullivan, also known as Sully, who is the founder of BombTechGolf, an eCommerce store with over 20 million sold online since 2012. He also runs Ecomgrowers, helping Shopify store owners ramp up their online revenue and profits. Tyler here is hyper-focused on the customer experience and operating a lean business that doesn't just drive revenue but drives serious profit and cash flow. Today, as we are getting into the frenzy of Black Friday preparations for eCommerce in general, we'll discuss how to best prepare your online store for the upcoming shopping season as well as email marketing strategies to boost revenue and profits in eCommerce. Without further ado, Tyler, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you how's the day going?   Tyler Sullivan   Good, man, living the dream. You know, drinking some coffee needs some more math to switch to whiskey in preparation for Black Friday. But life is good, we got to update that deck, we're at over 30 million sold. So we're doing you know, right around I think our trilling twelves, almost 10 million, and my own brand and the agency. I think we've got 40 clients right around that. So it's been cool to be on both sides. And both businesses, I kind of started with no real intention to start them, they kind of found me. And then kind of go into my founders store and how I got started if you like.   Andrei Tiu   Perfect, yeah, I was about to pick your brains on that. And to actually, you know, help people here understand, as well as me, how you started out, and mainly, you know, running an eCommerce back in the day in 2012 - that was pretty early. So it will be interesting to hear your story and how you made a start on this.   Tyler Sullivan   Probably very different than if someone has started recently. I started in 2012 - I was an accidental entrepreneur. I was just obsessed with golf and trying to hit the golf ball as far as I could. And in doing so, I ended up breaking a lot of golf clubs, right? It wasn't from my pure power or muscles, which I wish it was. But this local club builder was assembling these special clubs for me. And I would go around trying to compete in what they call a world long to drive. It's like the homerun Derby of golf. And I just did it because it was fun. I had a full-time job. And then in 2012 it is much harder to make a website, let alone a website that you could sell something off. And I just for some reason really just became obsessed and want to learn more and made a really bad website. But after six months, which may seem like a long time, I had no goals of making money with it was just for fun. I finally had a sale. I was on my boat and it wasn't a yacht, but it was on this boat I had. And I got an email saying ”hey, you sold something.” And that blew my mind. That was my first epiphany like ”Oh my god, I'm not at work. I'm not in front of my computer. But I sold something.” So I said,”Well, how do I do more of that?” And really, this is 2012. So it's a very different well budget started documenting what I was doing on Facebook, just kind of saying ”Hey, guys, this is what I'm doing today, what kind of clubs you play” and really having a curiosity and asking my potential customers. And during that process, I grew the following. And I had the crazy idea to design my own golf driver, which is not an easy feat. So I worked with, I actually called one of my buddies and we were just talking about what I was doing. And I had this idea and he's like ”well, you're not that smart.” And I said,” You're right. I'm not that smart. So I can't design a golf club myself”. But I ended up applying for a programme at my local College, the University of Vermont. And I worked with four students, and we engineered a golf club for a year. So we are actually part of the UVM engineering programme. And it was kind of a big risk. But I was confident in the design. I found a manufacturer through a very painful process that took me about six months, and cashed in my 401k and made some golf clubs. And during that process, I just was telling people what I was doing inviting their feedback on Facebook. And that allowed me to build a platform. So when we did launch we didn't do a tonne of sales, but I think we did 10k in a day. And I was like ”let's just do more of that.” So really, I was just going where the traction was early days like if something worked I've just tried to do more of that. And I think our next inflexion point, and there have been many epiphanies over nine years, but the big one was for us was how to scale right. It was a side hustle, I was doing like 15-20k a month, which may sound decent, but when you're making a product yourself, it means you're broke. Because you have to pay to make more. So cash flow was nothing. And then I had a big moment. I call it the, you know, go for a moment where I was fired from my day job the week before Thanksgiving, and I just found out my wife was pregnant. So I could not explain how much stress that year was because she supported me it was like ”Hey, you know, if you think you can do it, do it.” And she pretty much said ”Hey, you make BombTech work or not” and was supporting me. And we had a newborn on the way. And it was tough because I was working 20 hours a day, seven days a week. And I did that when he was a baby. I was doing all the wrong stuff: I was building clothes, myself, shipping them myself doing everything by myself. And then I was able that year out of the pure hustle. And Brian was able to scale it up enough to pay the bills and not be totally broke. And then next year, we went from one mill to like four mills. And we were able to use paid traffic. So we were able to figure out Facebook ads, I hired someone smarter than myself and that now we do, you know, around 10 million, and I only have two employees and I work about four hours a week. But it took me nine years, getting fired from my job to kids to realise like I don't have to be in the business now. I can hire people smarter than myself. So I think a lot of my advice and my experience, depends on you where you're at, in your own business and what life events you're at and dealing with.  If you talk to me five years ago, six years ago, and said, Hey, you can only work four hours a week, could you do it? I'd say no. So it all worked out, you do a lot of things wrong for a long time, and you figure out what you really need to work on. But, yeah, that's kind of where I'm at now, you know, I've worked on a lot less than half an agency, which is dual income, and I'm living the dream, and I'm just trying to find stuff to work on.   Andrei Tiu   Nice, that's a very good problem to have. So you touched on something that I think is really important that is recurring in successful entrepreneurs, and that is burning the boats, whether you intentionally do it or not. So how do you feel burning the boats at that moment when you basically got fired from the job...   Tyler Sullivan   But was burned for me. My philosophy is really like if you're in the startup phase, and you need an income work a day job. There's nothing wrong with that. But for me, that was just a moment where it was so much pressure from the family side, income, or lack thereof at this point, that I just had to make it work. You know, it wasn't like an option. So really, that was, I'm glad to happen. But at the time, it seemed like the worst thing in the world. And I wouldn't advise someone like ”Hey, you have a startup idea, you're doing some revenue, just go quit.” I don't I don't necessarily believe that everyone has their own journey. But for me, it was a lot of these things that have happened were right time and right place just for my journey. I don't know, maybe the business would have never taken off if I wasn't fired. That's what probably would have happened. So yeah, but the immense amount of pressure, and then having a kid. I mean, I don't advise you to do that.   Andrei Tiu   Right. Okay. So you mentioned the sort of mini lounge that you made for the brand and then discovering paid advertising a bit later down the line. How was your marketing mix when you were small? And what changes did it suffer as you looked at ways to scale it up? And when you eventually had that second inflexion point.   Tyler Sullivan   Yeah, s

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Tom Donohue, as they will be discussing secrets of product marketing, and Tom's journey with Kitcaster, launching it into the market and growing it as a company. And in parallel, they'll also be looking at podcast marketing, and how you can market your podcast show if you do run or are planning to run a podcast in the near future.  Tom Donohue, is the co-founder and marketing lead of Secure Digital Asset Group, a revolutionary cryptocurrency exchange processor, as well as the product manager for Kitcaster. Connect with Tom: Website: www.kitcaster.com  Tom on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/thetomdon    Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu   Hi there! This is Andre and you are on the marketing innovation podcast show. Our special guest today is Tom Donohue and you might already know him from a previous episode on our podcast when we were discussing blockchain and crypto technology. However, today, things are going to be a bit different and very exciting because today we'll be talking about actually the company that Tom has been a core member of, since the beginning. And there is also our main podcast booking partner, Kitcaster, which have been along the journey with us for the past year or so. So we'll be talking about the secrets of product marketing, and Tom's journey with Kitcaster, launching it into the market and growing it as a company. And in parallel, we'll also be looking at podcast marketing, and how you can market your podcast show if you do run or are planning to run a podcast in the near future. So, Tom, it's such a pleasure to reconnect them to have you again on the show. How are you? How's the summer treating you so far?   Tom Donohue   Yeah, it's great to be back on here. Had a great time last time and look forward to talking to some more podcast marketing topics this time. Yes, summer over here in Denver. Everybody thinks it's always cold here. But the other day we hit like 104, we had a couple of 100 degree days. So we're sweating out here. We got the air conditioning turned down to the max.   Andrei Tiu   Summer weather.   Tom Donohue   Yeah.   Andrei Tiu   Super. So let's get started. I think cause I've been thinking about the best way to build the context. And I think even though some of the people might already know you, as you know, the smart tech guy that was part of all these multiple projects in the past, including blockchain and other types of technology, I think this is a great opportunity for us to talk a bit more about you like the product guy, the product marketer, and entrepreneur that in partnership with Ryan and everybody else built, what is today Kitcaster. So if you'd like to share a bit of your journey with the company, and how you guys went about launching it, and where you are with it at the moment?   Tom Donohue   Sure, definitely. For anyone who doesn't know, the way that I've been in contact with Andrei here is through our company Kictcaster that we've got here in Denver. We're a podcast booking agency, and we focus on booking top entrepreneurs, coaches, executives, on very targeted podcasts that can help them to promote their brand to the right types of audiences that they want to reach and network with. So basically what I do at Kitcaster, my entrepreneurship background had helped me to get into this position. And just to be clear, I'm actually not a founder of Kitcaster, but I was hired pretty early on. So you know, within like the first few hires that we have there. And I was brought on to be a product manager for the PGL service that we do, which is it's called the Podcast Guest List. It's an online platform where hosts can go to find suitable guests for their show. And it's pretty simple. It's an invite-only programme right now, Andrei, I know you've used it before, you're actually on there as a guest as well. That's something we like to do with the hosts is get them listed as guests as well as encourages a lot of podcast swaps and things. But basically, it's for hosts to go on, and send an invite to any particular type of guests that they might be looking for, that we might have access to. So it's basically just a networking platform that helps people connect, you know, we have a lot of guests who want to go on podcasts. And we know a lot of hosts who are looking for guests. We just built this platform to make that connection. And yeah, that's how I started working at Kitcaster to work on that. And now I’m also on the back end, like support email and database manager for the company as well while being a Product Manager. It's a lot. I do a lot of podcast stuff all day, every day. So yeah, just being on the podcast as well as another thing, too. It's another job.   Andrei Tiu   To complete to the full circle.    Tom Donohue   Yeah, definitely.   Andrei Tiu   Cool. So what's your feeling about the market? I mean, essentially, this is a platform to connect guests with hosts and essentially build up this online community, in a way. It's also a bit of a SAS in a way that people can use it themselves. Obviously, with your support to, you know, make sure that the bookings happen and everything is going smoothly. And you guys are doing a great job at it.    Tom Donohue   Thank you.    Andrei Tiu   No worries, nothing to thank you for. Thank you. So how do you see the market evolve over the last maybe two years since you started to prepare this for the market?   Tom Donohue   I would say probably the most the biggest thing that has changed about the podcast market is the shift away from Apple Podcast to more spread out platforms, you know, we got like Spotify, Podchaser, Buzzsprout. Like there's an endless amount of podcasting platforms now, and the listenership is so spread out that one thing that has been hard for us is actually tracking engaging listenership for in terms of impressions, how many downloads is the show gets? Because originally with podcasting, like Apple Podcasts was the one and only like, if you go and see how many reviews or ratings a show has on Apple Podcasts, you can get a really good idea about the type of listenership, how much reach a specific client is going to get by going on a certain show. But these days, and especially within the past, you know, six months, we've seen such a huge expansion out to these different platforms, more indie platforms that are popping up for certain types of podcasts or certain types of demographics. Listenership is just spreading out so much between them that it's actually become harder to gauge the exact metrics that any certain show might have. So that's a challenge that we're facing right now. And we're kind of figuring out new ways to figure those things out. It's best that the host just tells you the numbers that they see. But it's kind of hard to ask that of a host. And we respect any show, smaller or large, and we think that there's benefit in going on any sort of show. Because as long as there's a great conversation being had, we see the best marketing tool that you get from podcasting as the opportunity for you to repurpose that content and use it in different places. So yeah, I would say the biggest change is just that spread out that jump away from Apple Podcasts onto these newer, more indie platforms.   Andrei Tiu   And regarding your strategy in terms of going to market, and launching the PGL, which you are managing at the moment. How are things in that area? And the reason why or the purpose of the question would be, I know for a fact, there are a couple of people that are tuned in to our podcasts, most likely today as well. And they are preparing the launch of, well, everybody in their space, but the launch of platforms or marketplaces. So I think there will be a really nice benefit to them to hear about your story from way back when maybe the platform wasn't yet live, and why you chose it to be invite-only, how you got on to building the initial community around it? And also, maybe what's your plan for the future? Like, do you want to keep it like this forever? Do you have certain metrics or things that you are looking to achieve before going into the next phase? Does Kitcaster got to be the sort of product, And yeah, business launch? And growth strategy, from your perspective?   Tom Donohue   Definitely, okay. So it's a couple of things. Definitely the PGL, I would say, for anybody going to start like a new platform or something like this, one of the best things that we had done is just simply, to the extent that you can, just give it away, like, let people use it for free. The free trial loss aversion model is, is huge in these types of subscription services. In a sense that: Hey, take this for free, try it for a while, and then also that just encourages users. And we get people on the platform actually using it so that when somebody hops on, it's like: Oh, there are people on here. I would say always, to the extent that you can, just to start off, give it away, get people using it in that way you start to figure out what is working with your platform, what's not working, where you can impro

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Sean Campbell, as they will be discussing Sean's background & story, inbound marketing and important aspects for growing a pipeline, Sean's secrets and frameworks used when consulting clients, actionable points for service businesses looking to scale in 2021, and also Seans's platforms and promo. Sean Campbell is the CEO of Cascade Insights, an author of several books on technical as well as business topics and a well-regarded conference speak. He is the best person we could have in matters of knowledge when it comes to surviving and thriving as a service firm owner or the leader of a practice area inside a larger services firm.   Connect with Sean: Website: www.cascadeinsights.com LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancampbell/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/seanallencampbell/ Twitter Handle: https://twitter.com/sean_campbell   Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox   Episode transcript: Andrei Tiu  0:13   Hello there. This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation podcast show. Our special guest today is Sean Campbell, who is the CEO for Cascade Insights, which focuses on B2B market research. He's mentoring companies on how to build a marketing pipeline that won't break the bank and grow sustainable companies with consistent revenue streams. And today, in this episode, we'll discuss growing a modern service business. So without further ado, hi, Shawn. How are you? How's the morning going?    Sean Campbell  0:39   Awesome. Thanks for having me on.    Andrei Tiu  0:42   That was short. It's a pleasure to have you here. How are you? How's the how's life? How's the morning going? I know you had a busy one. So how's the energy?    Sean Campbell  1:26   Yeah, things are great. It's gonna be like 109 on Saturday here in Portland. So which is really, really hot for Portland, like super hot, most of the West Coast of the US is just going to get kind of baked. So I'm hoping our conditioner doesn't die and all the rest of that kind of stuff over the weekend. But things are great. You know, I mean, honestly, it's been a good year for us so far, you know, overalls, business, and, you know, life's Good.   Andrei Tiu  1:54   Good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah, I mean, beach weather all around the globe, I think, you know, we depends on which area of the world you are right now. I mean, you probably have a better time really COVID. And maybe you are a bit more free to travel or there are some areas that things are not that good. But for example, you know, UK is kind of uh, at the moment. Right, right. But some of Europe is doing pretty well. How are things for you, Sean? In Portland.    Sean Campbell  2:23   Just with COVID? And that kind of thing in general?    Andrei Tiu  2:25   Oh, yeah. You know, like, travelling restrictions. And, you know, life, in general, isn't back to normal?   Sean Campbell  2:30   Yeah, I mean, Portland's interesting. Oregon, kind of locked down really early. Like, because we were surrounded by California to the south and Washington to the north. Washington had a pretty aggressive policy as a state. And then California just got hit with a lot of cases pretty early. So Oregon kind of followed suit. But that was even before we had a lot of cases. So it kind of kept the overall numbers really, really down here. I mean, and that's not to take away from any tragedies that have happened to families and whatever I mean, any tragedy is, huge, but like, but in terms of like statistics, COVID didn't really hit Oregon that hard compared to the surrounding states. And, and we took a little bit longer to open up same thing, the government here was kind of conservative with kind of its approach overall, I think that worked. All right. And, yeah, I mean, things are, I wouldn't say they're back to normal here. I mean, there's still a fair amount of kind of mask wearing, I think we're only at like 70% vacced. Here, maybe, maybe 60, I can't remember the latest stat. And the other thing that's interesting about Oregon, in particular, where I live is that there's a very kind of Stark divide between the urban area, the state and the rural area, which is extremely rural. So like, you know, you have a very urban core that's kind of well known for being fairly trendy, fairly hip, all that kind of stuff. And then at the same time, you've got another part of the state that is literally cattle ranchers, right, completely different opposite end of the spectrum. You know, probably the closest analogue in the states would be kind of like Austin, Texas versus the rest of Texas. And I'm not trying to say one's right or wrong. I'm just saying we have a pretty big political cultural divide in the state, more so than some and I think that was also one of the things we're still dealing with the COVID. You know, I don't know if you want to call it.  It's funny, I think of a quote from Churchill all the time, when I think of COVID. He said something at the end of the battle of El Alamein, which was in 1942, he said "this isn't the end, it isn't the beginning of the end, but it's perhaps the end of the beginning." And I don't know if it's the end, the beginning of the end of COVID right now, or it's the end of the beginning. I don't really know. And I don't think anybody knows, you know, what the Fall is gonna look like and everything else but right now not seeing a lot of cases, business is getting more and more back to normal people are going back to offices. Lots more people in the streets and in stores and those kinds of things. But that was a little bit like that last summer, too. So, you know, I've been telling my staff, when it comes to like how I think about this, from a business standpoint, I've been randomly saying October 22, which just kind of a made up date. But I basically just say, once we get about six weeks into the fall, and kids are all back in school in the States, because in the States, at least, there's been a little variety there, state by state, whether kids have been able to go back to school, but it's pretty clear in the fall, pretty much every state will have their kids back in school, most people will be back in office buildings. It'll be interesting to see, you know, six weeks into the fall, if we're sitting at 70% backs rates, and, you know, so I, you know, I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic of what will happen in the business community in the fall is what I'm saying. But I'm, I'm, you know, we've been talking about it a lot as it relates to business travel, and when we should get on a plane again, you know, a lot of our corporate clients to larger corporate clients. Most of them aren't really back in the office until the fall, like a lot of move kind of picked Labour Day in the States was falls on the first Monday of September. And so, you know, that seems to be kind of the unofficial day that a lot of these large companies are going to get folks back in the office. But even so, we're going to do in our probably our first business trip as a team, roughly in about three to four weeks just to kind of test the waters. You know, so we'll see, I get a little bit that a sector-specific though, like, from a tech sector standpoint, tech basically was able to work remote faster than everyone else, you know, if you're selling services in the manufacturing sector, y'all might have been in the office a couple months ago, and you're probably on planes a couple months ago. So some of that is unique to kind of who we serve.   Sean Campbell  3:20   And now that you mention about business and tech, let's present people a bit with your background and your story, as a professional entrepreneur, and now CEO of  Cascade. So tell us a bit about you like how you started, you know, in the technical space and how he founded the company. A way back.   Sean Campbell  7:15   Yeah well, I wanted to be a college professor, I didn't necessarily want to be technical. And I didn't necessarily want to own a business. I meet guys all the time, who, since they were two or whatever, maybe they were watching Shark Tank episodes, which is a show in the States, you know, maybe they were doing that. And they've always thought like, they want to be an entrepreneur or whatever. I didn't. I didn't even really want to have any sales responsibilities. My dad was in sales, and he did really hardcore cold calling based selling insurance in the 80s. When it was 100% commission sales. That was my image of it. And I didn't, I didn't really want that. And what happened was, I met a beautiful woman who ended up being my wife and still is, and I didn't want to be a starving college professor, I kind of wanted to provide for us. And she was happy to do it. We always joke she says, I would have followed you to Waterloo, which is Waterloo, Iowa, which is where the PhD programme was going to be that I was going to go to, and so she would have willingly went. But anyway, I left my master's degree where I was teaching. This will date me a little bit, I'm 51, but Windows for Workgroups, and office on like when it used to come on 34 diskettes used to be a stack about this high of l

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Tyler Kemp, as they will be discussing effective strategies in meeting marketing and sales to grow your B2B business and sales, innovation in the sales technology space, and also about his FIRE formula that helped others scale their marketing.  Tyler Kemp is the CEO of LeadRoll.co, a cutting-edge outbound sales agency that replaces SDRs and guarantees high-ticket sales appointments at scale. He's a sales and marketing powerhouse that's built multiple 7-figure businesses and has helped hundreds of high-ticket sales organizations light up their sales calendar like a Christmas tree. Currently, he works with small businesses, Influencers, and sales/service professionals. He's been helping start-ups, small business and personal brands strategize scaling and growth during quarantine, and he's teaching clients to dominate their brands right now.   Connect with Tyler: LeadRoll.co: https://www.leadroll.co/  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjkemp    Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox   Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu  0:04     Hello, everybody! This is Andrei, and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Today, our special guest is Tyler Kem, the CEO of LeadRoll.co, a cutting-edge outbound sales agency that replaces SDRs and guarantees high ticket sales appointments at scale. They will discuss effective strategies in meeting marketing and sales to grow your b2b business and sales and innovation in the sales technology space. Tyler is a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? Let's roll!   Tyler Kemp  3:37      Andrei, thank you so much for having me. I think we're gonna have an action-packed podcast today, a lot of really good stuff to share. I'm pumped to dig into the current state of marketing to sales. If you're listening today, guys, you're probably affected by things like iOS 14, by changes in LinkedIn, their connect request, by Google's third party pixel changes or Facebook's retargeting limitations, all kinds of stuff going on right now, which makes this podcast episode important. Andrei, how would you prefer that we take this?    Andrei Tiu  4:22      I think that we can start by giving people a bit more context around you, around the agency: how it came about and what you guys are doing at the moment. And then we can dive into the strategies and things that we were briefly discussing before the show that I think many of our listeners will hear about some of this stuff for the first time, which makes it exciting. And then also the actionable things that our audience as well as you know, their peers could do in scaling up their sales, marketing activity, the alignment, and overall boost business. Tyler Kemp  4:57      Yeah, get it to grow. I'll give you a quick background on me. If you haven't heard of me or you don't know, kind of the stuff that I've got my hands in. I cut my teeth in sales two decades ago, probably in demand for about 10 years. Started my first business in my early 20s, after some youthful entrepreneurial stuff, and didn't make any money. I had run this little business for like three years and no real money. We made money, we scaled, we did stuff, but we didn't make real money. Having said that, I learned a lot. Took these learnings and went into the mortgage sector residential mortgages. I worked with a single loan officer, and he was originating the loans I was bringing in the business, and I applied a lot of what I learned about scaling, systems, about the true sales process. Together, we were doing 120 million in loan volume annually, growing 20% year over year. I went on from there to teach, and train several (about 20) Top Producing teams that were doing somewhere between 50 and 100 million to get to the next Echelon. From there, I went to become on the Marketing Advisory Board of a $16 billion company before the age of 30. I was in my mid-20s, and I was on a $16 billion companies advisory board. After that, I left that to go into startup space worked with a company, get from 60 grand a month to 200 grand a month, in eight months for x growth radical, really fast. And then launched what is Leadroll. At Leadroll, we specialize in high ticket businesses, were a multi-million dollar organization, and I've built several seven and eight-figure businesses at this point. What we do is: we book high ticket appointments guaranteed for sales teams, we take the place of an SDR and we light up sales teams’ calendars, like a Christmas tree. Now we do specifically work with companies that are either in the US or selling to the US trying to break into the US. If you're listening, you're like: "Holy crap, I gotta work with these guys.". We can best help you if you're trying to enter the US market. Otherwise, a lot of what I'm going to share with you is relevant no matter where you are. Now we've got hundreds of clients, and we are launching ever forward. The future is a little bit tumultuous for a lot of people. There's a lot of questionable things happening in terms of data privacy, in terms of platform changes, in terms of what can you do today to be successful. I think that the changes are targeting small businesses. They want small businesses to shrivel, how are you going to do demand if you don't get some of these things solved. If some of these changes are rendering Facebook ads, for many completely useless or rendering paid ads completely useless or outbound automation that they might have been tinkering with completely useless. Today, I think our time would be well spent to share how you, as a small-medium enterprise business, can solve these problems for yourself, and potentially thrive when your competitors are shrivelling up and dying.   Andrei Tiu  8:58      Let's take it from the umbrella view and talk about how you guys are working with your clients at the moment as an agency from the sales perspective. Here we can kind of debate how that might be or might not be different for the record, for people tuning in. We are a marketing agency as well. So, from the alignment of marketing and sales, mainly from this point, as a sort of external party that comes into the business and helps. Tyler, how are you guys doing it? How do you work with your clients, and what's the relationship there? And then I'd like to dive a bit more and in more detail into the innovation, in the tech space, sales technology, and touchpoints because I think those are insightful and can open eyes for other people.    Tyler Kemp  9:51     Completely. So, our relationship with the client is built on a very simple premise, which is that unless you are deep in the weeds, and unless you have a robust and thorough understanding of a successful sales process, it's going to be very hard to continue to iterate and drive actual results. I think that we've kind of taken our stand against some of the brand awareness mantra in favour of really focusing on sales activity that moves the needle, outbound sales, driving leads, making sure that leads are actually worked and nurtured effectively, things like that. When a client comes to us,  they've probably tried dozens of other agencies in the past that didn't yield the results. They caught into some hype, they thought: "Oh, I need to do this new thing, maybe I need to do a lot of social posting, maybe I need to do whatever.". They are a little disenchanted because they did it, they paid a bunch of money, and then no sales were generated. What they were told as well people know your brand more. So, when they work with us? They work with us because they want to drive revenue. We calculate the math with them. They might tell us: "Well, I want to add 5 million in revenue, in the next six to 12 months.", and we work backwards to figure out what exactly do we need to do to hit that number, in terms of outbound, selling, bringing their solution to market, identifying the prospects, doing all the magic stuff that we do, which we'll get to probably in a second. In the end, delivering massive net profit results to these businesses and allowing them to scale superduper fast. They can scale up, they can scale down way faster than they can scale their internal sales team, way faster than they can scale a team of SDRs. We get probably 10 times the result of that, if not dramatically more, with a fraction of the cost.    Andrei Tiu  12:22     So, before we go into the actual tactics and sales process, and the point that we were discussing just before, let's discuss a bit more about the decision-makers. As I mentioned before, we have several C-level people on the show, many of them maybe we're not yet thinking about going and breaking into the US. Maybe some are already there, but they don't know what's out there and how the US might be different from other markets. Can you tell us a bit about what's different? Why you guys are working primarily with the US so that people can understand what might be different in, what they should do locally if they're not from the US.    Tyler Kemp  13:06     Right. Why should you focus on that market? The first reason is that if you're a UK listener, if you are a listene

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Joseph Wilkins, as they will be discussing tricks and hacks to increase the view rate of a marketing or sales video, what makes excellent marketing & sales videos and what septs to take in order to increase the chances of your video content to go viral. Joseph Wilkins founded ProCreative Studios almost 20 years ago where his team produced infomercials, TV commercials and corporate videos. Joseph has directed thousands of campaigns for clients including Google, Linkedin, McDonalds, GoldmanSachs, Chevrolet, Home Depot and other mega brands. As habits shifted from television to online, Joseph launched FunnySalesVideos.com in 2017, where he creates attention-grabbing viral style sales videos that entertain viewers into making an immediate purchase. With two decades experience, hundreds of millions of TV & online views and hundreds of millions of dollars in tracked sales, Joseph has developed 8 simple steps any business can follow to boost online sales.   Connect with Joseph: FunnySalesVideos: https://funnysalesvideos.com/ How To Make a Video Go Viral Podcast: https://www.audible.com/pd/Podcast/B08JJPY549 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilkinsjoseph/   Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox   Episode transcript:   Andrei Tiu  0:08   Hello there. This is Andrei, and you are on a new episode of The Market Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest today is Joseph Wilkins who is the founder of ProCreative Studios, which he's been running for nearly 20 years and FunnySalesVideos.com. Joseph is also a host of the How to Make a Video go Viral Podcast, and today we discuss what makes great marketing and sell videos and hacks for making your content go viral. Joseph, thank you for being on the show. Good morning. How are you? How's the day going?    Joseph Wilkins  0:33   It was bright and early. Good, though. Thank you for having me on the show. I'm excited to chat with you today.   Andrei Tiu  0:40   Excited as well! A very hot topic today, videos, marketing video, sales videos, and how to get as many people as possible to see them. So I think we have a busy agenda. Insightful things I know, you have prepared an overview from your period that infomercial produced overview from your own e-book, which is for free to download if our listeners here would like to get a more in-depth understanding of what we're going to be discussing today. Can you tell us where they can find it, and the link is going to also be in the description of this episode?   Joseph Wilkins 1:15 Sure. So it's a fairly small book packed ebook. It's called ''How to create a funny sales video without hiring us. Eight simple steps anyone can follow" and you can download it at the bottom of our homepage, which is FunnySalesVideos.com.   Andrei Tiu 1:32 Sweet, we'll include a link to that in the description of this episode as well. And very excited, to get into the nitty-gritty. So let's see - let's build a bit of context first for our audience. Tell us who are you, how you start on your journey and what you're up to?   Joseph Wilkins 1:51 Sure. So I started, as you mentioned, in my intro, 20 years ago, I started an agency that was primarily focused on producing television infomercials, short-form TV commercials and corporate sales videos. And our very first project when I started the company, in fact, the client that helped me to start the company, was Little Giant ladders. And within a short period of time that infomercial produced over $200 million in sales, just absolutely mind-blowing. I always like to qualify, we were one of three production companies on that project. But it gave me a taste of the power of video when you create a very well crafted sales message, and then target a larger audience. So we did that for about 15 years. We were an agency that would do creative for television, and also online. We've worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet. I mean, LinkedIn, Google, Chevrolet, Goldman Sachs, McDonald's, but we also worked with a lot of smaller startups. So we were kind of, you know, always a fairly small shop, but we have clients that didn't make us look that small. Anyway, fast forward to about five years ago, we were struggling because we were kind of basing all of our marketing on old technology - television - people don't watch television the same way that they did 20 years ago, when I started the agency, you know, Divo, TV. And then obviously now online streaming has just not completely but almost completely replaced our viewing habits. I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I watched live, real broadcast television. And so about five years ago, our clients were saying, how do we get back to how the results that we used to get on television, because production costs weren't getting any lower. airtime costs weren't getting any lower, but the viewership was much, much lower. And so that's when we started to look at agencies like the Harmon brothers and other agencies like them that were doing these entertaining, viral-style sales videos, using humour primarily to entertain viewers into a purchase, or at least entertaining viewers into being aware of new companies and liking new companies and getting online social traction. And it's funny the past 15 years before that when a client will call us up and say 'Hey, we saw this really funny video, we want to do something like that. We would say 'Sorry, we don't do funny. Go contact one of these other companies because we just didn't have the tools the team and the worst thing you can do is try to be funny when you're not. And that's when the Harmon brothers were launching their Harmon Brothers University which is basically where they would take on Students and mentor them and teach them how they did what they did. And after going through their course, we started to see just hugely successful results online compared to what we had been doing previously with your traditional, you know, boring style, benefit-driven, call to action, shove-it-down-the-throat-and-try-to-get-them-to-buy-without-really-giving-them-anything-to-enjoy. And as soon as we went through their training - and I recommend Harmon Brothers University to anyone watching- our first campaign hit 7 million views. To give you some context, in the past 15 years, anytime we tried to launch a campaign online, our biggest grossing views for a video was 100,000 views maybe. And so this just catapulted the results that we're getting. Fast forward to today, our last campaign between two videos has 60 million views. I mean, just absolutely outstanding numbers, and more importantly, millions of dollars in sales. And so basically, what we do now, is we try to position ourselves - we're still a very small shop, and so we have fairly small overhead, but you know, trying to produce these bigger budget productions, or at least the look of the bigger budget production, on a much smaller budget than some of our competitors. But even so, some of our clients still can't afford that. And so that's why we came up with the free ebook. And I love to teach people my eight steps, how any business owner, small or large can try to create these kinds of more entertainment style marketing so that they can see much bigger returns on their ads.    Andrei Tiu  6:52   Super. So is there - before we go into it - is there a certain pattern or a certain type of brands that you thought was more appropriate to this kind of funny video type of advertising than others? The reason why I'm saying this is because for example, from our work with brands in B2B and B2C, and b2b stack and professional services and everything else, you always know it's not a person that purchases that product or that software if we talk B2B. But did you find any brand can apply these principles to a certain extent? Or is there any other context or advice you'd give to people before we go into the actual practice?   Joseph Wilkins  7:35   My standard answer to that anytime the phone rings and a potential client says 'is this really right for our brand?' I always say 'well, is your end customer a human being? You know, do they have a sense of humour? Do they like to smile? Do they like to laugh?' And so the short answer is no, we, it doesn't matter whether you're producing a campaign for a very, very serious B2B audience, or a b2c or even we've done fundraising campaigns. So regardless of what your objective is, the key is you've got to make a relevant story. You can't think of this as let's just go out and be funny. That's one of the last steps, the first step - and we can talk about this later - you've got to identify who is your audience, and what kinds of problems do they have. Then the rest you can create a story around, but as long as you're relevant, you start out with pains that you know, your customers are experiencing them build a story around that it doesn't matter what the current company is, or, frankly, what they've done before. We're all looking to get to disruption, something that's different from what your competitors are doing. And so, you know, I tell everyone, B2B, B2C, seriou

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Simon Severino, as they will be discussing strategies for increasing business profitability and productivity, brand consistency, as well as specific marketing strategies that can turn around business performance.  Simon has worked with leading brands like Google, BMW, Crayon, Roche, Deutsche Bahn, but more importantly, he’s fired himself from operations and enjoys now his life and business more than ever. He now helps business owners like you do the same, via One-To-One CEO Coaching. His 274 templates and swipe copies help dozens of teams every week scale faster than ever.   Connect with Simon: Strategy Sprints: https://www.strategysprints.com/  YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnSFgJd0CrsEdQdO21txR2A  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strategysprints/  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonseverino/    Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox   Episode transcript: Andrei Tiu  0:08   Hello everyone. This is Andrei and you're on the new episode of the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Simon Severino, who is an internationally renowned SEO coach and business transformation pro and founder of strategysprings.com. Today, we will discuss strategies for increasing business profitability and productivity, brand consistency, as well as specific marketing strategies that can turn around business performance. Without further ado, Simon, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you?    Simon Severino  0:54   Hey, Andrei, excited to be here. Hello, Marketing Innovation Podcast Show.   Andrei Tiu  1:00   Hello, hello, hello. I like the energy we started well. It's a lot of interesting things that we can dive into today. And I'm looking forward to it. I know you have a wealth of experience working with CEOs across the world. So, it was really exciting finding out more about your work. What we're going to do is try to take as much as we can in this episode of your insights and knowledge, and apply it to our audience, which is in large proportion CEOs and founders of their businesses, but as well as Marketing Leaders. I feel there's a good synergy between the two subjects. And I think it's a lot of transferable skills and insights that can be brought to the surface. So, if it sounds good to you, let's have some fun.   Simon Severino  1:48   It's tough times, Andrei, right now running a business is hard. It always has been hard, but COVID has accelerated stuff. If you don't work sprinting, now you have a problem. If you don't run your company in a very lean and adaptive way, now you have a double problem. And if you're not built like Lego instead of Duplo, in many small parts that you can recombine quickly, you have a problem. So, it was always tough to run a business. Now it's double tough. Let's share with your audience a couple of things that they can do right now, to get back on track. Because sales are much harder right now, and many of us need to change their offer, according to the new needs of their people, because their life has changed. So, of course, their needs have changed. We cannot do whatever we were doing before. Three habits that I use within my personal life, running a business as a CEO of a global company that works in 114 countries. I have certified Strategy Sprint coaches doing their magic every day with companies that are unicorns and are evaluated at a billion but also with solopreneurs running a one-person marketing agency and one-person SAS startup and one-person consultancy - IT consultancy, a management consultancy. What we help them install now is a system to get the right numbers of what's going on. Because most people don't have their data. They don't have market data. Some people have market research, the big ones have market research. But that's not your data. Because the data of if you say: "Okay, there is this market that can be exploited." Well, that's a theory that's not data because maybe Elon Musk can exploit it, but you don't if you don't have these people right now warm on your email list. So, you just won't get to this market. That's why market research is not helpful. What is helpful is having your data right now. By that I mean how many people were today on your website, how many of them are interested, how many of them are engaged, they're clicking a lot of stuff. So what's the one thing in your system that helps you with one click to connect to them, and to move them forward in the next stage and the next stage. This is the system that we need right now, we need to know who wants something from us, and what's the one button that I click that sends out the right template, the right message so that I can do it at times 100 times today. So that in total we will have around 900 conversations this week, and so next week, we can close five of them. That's the system that we need right now. We call it "the value ladder". I have just posted a video on LinkedIn and YouTube about how we do it. It will be a bit long, but let me tell you the core, the core is a daily habit, the weekly habit, and the monthly habit. Daily habit: How are you spending your time? You're a marketing manager, or you are an entrepreneur who has marketing duties? How are you spending your time? Write it down. So, 6:30 - running eight, breakfasts, 9:00 - LinkedIn, write it down, and you will find that not every hour that you put in, is on the highest leverage point. Maybe wasting 30 minutes on Clubhouse is a high leverage marketing activity for you, or maybe not, I guess not. It is only a high leverage activity. If it builds on everything else marketing, and it creates a conversation that in the next 30 days will become a high ticket client. Does it relate, or does it just create 15 Instagram followers? Then you're wasting your time. These are the examples. We go through the time how are we allocating it then in the evening, I asked myself two questions. So five-minute reflection of the day. Which one task should I give somebody else because they can do it better? The second question: If I would live more intentionally and more freely, what would I do tomorrow? That's my daily habit. If you install this daily habit, you have one foot back in control of this crazy ride that is this year, because, at least, you are in control of your time and you have more intentionality on how you spend your time.   Andrei Tiu  7:00   Good insight. How about the weekly one?   Simon Severino  7:02   Weekly habit: get your numbers, collect your data, your data, not the theoretical data, the benchmarks because as soon as their benchmark, this is all the data. Even if it's currently that doesn't mean that you have access to these people. So, forget market research. Collect your data, what's your data? Collect the main three numbers for marketing of this week, operations of this week, sales of this week. Pick your three but usually marketing numbers. "How many conversations did we start? How many engaged people did we have? This week on our website? How many Subscribe to our newsletter or download the periods?" For example, three numbers and you track these three numbers every seven days. We do it every Friday, in the Friday meeting three weekly numbers. What do we learn? Why do we have 14 more subscribers this week? What happened? Was it a video? Was it a person? Was it the process? What is working? Because we will double down on what's working? What's not working? Because we'll stop doing it. Same with the operations numbers - How many clients did we fulfil this week? How many needs did we completely fulfil? What else do they need? How many of that did we build this week? Sales numbers - How many conversations on the calendar? How many sales called were scheduled on the calendar of our people or sales team or my calendar? How many of them did we convert into a client? How many follow-ups did we do with the ones we didn't convert? Can be three very relevant numbers, very simple to track, you can track them in a spreadsheet, we do it in a spreadsheet in a Google Sheet. Simple as that three numbers. But, every seven days, you collect these numbers, you discuss these numbers, what works - you double down on it, what doesn't work - you stop doing it. Andrei Tiu  9:03   You mentioned also, I'm just driving a bit to go into the monthly habit now. I just get a feel of something that has been very much in conversation amongst us the marketers, which is trying to automate a lot of the communications that we have, and getting people like through that funnel, and trying to deliver the right message at the right time. I feel there's an element of this in what you are saying as well, and I was wondering if you can give us a bit more insight into how you coach your clients to do it. Well, if they already have a bit of that in place. I know you're doing that already because I received your email sequence after reboot. You are on top of it, but I would like to let people know a bit about the insights into what you're proposing.    Simon Severino  10:04   Email is a core of the sale system. Because you know that for a hi

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Devin Miller, as they will be discussing trademarks, copyrights, patents, and how to protect your intellectual property as a business. Devin is an entrepreneur, patent and trademark attorney, and an Intellectual Property expert. He specializes in protecting startup and entrepreneurial companies with IP Legal Advice, setting them up for success in their business! In addition to founding and running Miller IP Law, he is the co-founder of several startups including a multi-million dollar startup for wearable glucose monitoring. Devin has worked with the likes of Amazon, Intel, Redhat and Ford.   He is passionate about helping businesses and has the drive to educate and entertain listeners with years of experience as a calm speaker, and veteran podcaster.   Connect with Devin: His podcast; https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-inventive-journey/id1499417283  Info: https://podcastconnection.org/devinmiller/  IP Law: https://milleripl.com/  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milleripl/    Connect with Andrei: Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro   Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/  Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu  Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency  Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/  Email at hello@marketiu.ro   Listen to the episode on your favourite platform: ▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube ▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show ▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean ▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify ▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer ▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher ▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox   Episode transcript: Andrei Tiu     Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. This is Andrei. And our special guest for today is Devin Miller, entrepreneur, patent and trademark attorney and intellectual property expert. He specialises in protecting companies without legal advice. And in today's episode, we discuss trademarks, copyrights, patents, and how to protect your intellectual property as a business. Devin, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you? How's the energy? How do they go in? Devin Miller      It's going well, so busy as always, that's the way I like it. So life is good. And I'm happy. So no complaints.   Andrei Tiu     Awesome. Awesome. So where are you tuning in from today?   Devin Miller     So yeah, I'm in the US in Utah, just north of Salt Lake City.   Andrei Tiu      Nice. So in the middle of the day for you, as we, as we record now, really excited. So a lot of interesting stuff that we want to discuss today's, it's the first time that we dig into this subject on the show, and I know it will be very relevant for a lot of people. And everybody I'm sure is going to, you know, leave with some important nuggets of knowledge. And before going straight into the trademarks, and intellectual property subject, let's help people get to know you a bit better because you've done some pretty impressive things in your life. You've also been a serial entrepreneur funding and being involved with a lot of businesses, including the one that you're running at the moment. So tell us a bit about your journey, how you got to where you are today, what got you into this niche?   Devin Miller     Yeah, and that's a long question or a short question to a long answer. But I'll try and keep it reasonably concise. So a bit about myself. I graduated, I got four degrees, which my wife always jokes is three degrees too many. So I got an undergraduate, I got an electrical engineering degree as well as a Mandarin Chinese degree. And then when I was kind of getting towards the end of engineering school, I kind of had two passions when I thought law and intellectual property was fairly interesting. I also loved entrepreneurship and startups in my own business. And so rather than do one, I went off to graduate school and got both a law degree and an MBA degree or Masters of Business Business Administration at the same time. So I grabbed both of those. And then since then, or even while I was in school, and we can happy to dive into a bit of the business I've run but started my first real startup while I was doing the dual degree. And that's still going and still, an active company that which I actively participate in but knowing have done several startups is kind of side hustles and just second-time jobs, as well as pursuing my legal career. So I did work for some of the biggest law firms in the US, Top 100 law firms for some time. And then about three years ago, I kind of had an itch to want to focus on startups and small businesses with my law firm. So started Miller IP law about three years ago, really with a focus: hey, I'd like to provide the same level of quality, the same level of service I did with the big clients when I was at the big firm, but for startups and small businesses, so about three years ago, I leapt started my firm. And then I also take a lot of what was I guess, you know, side hustles. And I always look at side hustles, it's just a second full-time job because I was working as many hours on my side hustles as I was my full-time jobs. I kind of combine all of those and started to integrate into a lot of the different businesses, my pursuits, my time to kind of have those all meshed together. And it's worked out well. And it's been a fun journey. A couple of other fun notes. So I've been married for 13 years, to college sweetheart, I have four kids that are between the ages of five and 10, that sign and then three daughters. And so I've done several, I have my family, I have my religion and my church. And then I have my business. And I've done three or four startups that have a couple of those have been seven and eight figures as well as now Miller IP law. So lots of fun things a lot. It's the things that keep me busy.   Andrei Tiu     Exciting! So at the moment you still run some of the startups, I mean, you know, businesses that started as startups, and then a lot of your focus goes into the IP law. So how is your like, what's your standard, let's say, I mean, I know, two of them will never be the same.    Devin Miller    I'm gonna say every day is if I mean one week, I'll focus a lot more on the IP law, that'll be my predominant focus. Other weeks are on the startups. And so it's every bit is a bit different. I mean, I usually work on any given week, anywhere from on a low week, 50 or 60 hours on highway 80 or 90 hours. So you know, I tend to work plenty of hours and I also try and put a lot of time aside so if I'm not working and with my family and spending time with them, that's kind of my two competing interests. Or you know, two places I spend my time but really, any given week, probably half of my time is on the IP side of the law firm side so about 30-40 hours a week and then half of my time is going to be on the all my startups and kind of running and managing those. And really to be able to juggle all those manage the multiple businesses and that have some great team members, a lot of great people that support me, that allow me to kind of explore and go after all my various endeavours all at the same time.   Andrei Tiu     So, tell us a bit about your work with startups and with businesses with the Miller IP law. How do you help them? What are the most encountered things that come with you when they are looking for this type of advice?    Devin Miller    Yeah, so maybe I'll answer I think one of the questions was just kind of how do we focus or what do we do with startups? One thing is backing up a little bit, and I mentioned a bit as in, you know, I work for a big law firm and they had clients, including I worked with amazon.com, and Intel, and Ford and Red Hat, and other companies. And so those were always wanted. But I always found that I loved working for startups and small businesses because they're the fun ones. They're the ones that have one idea, they don't have the multi-billion or million-dollar, trillion-dollar budgets, or whatever it is, they have a small budget there, they got one thing and they're making go off, and you can have a lot more impact, you can talk with them, strategize with them, work with them. And so that was really what I found is a passion. So then when I started Miller IP law, I said: Okay, when I start a law firm, I want to work with the clients, I find fun and exciting, which are the startups and small businesses, and I want to figure out how to focus my firm so that we can work with those and then help them and so everything that I kind of set up from that point forward is really how to help startups and small businesses to compete at the same level as big businesses. One of the things that we kind of looked at and did one them was, we set it all up on flat fees. It makes it easy to understand the costs. Because one of the biggest gripes with most you know, almost every attorneys, including intellectual property, when people go into them, it feels like it's always a never-ending check. I go in, and from the time I walk in the door, they start the clock going, and every time I asked a question, shoot an email, it can be a five-minute question, and they billed me for half an hour and I always don't know what is going to cost me. And it's always more expensive than what they estimated. So I said: Let's, let's help them figure out, let's do a flat fee. So you know how much our fees including governmental fees, how much all in is going to cost me to do an application or trademark. And that's where we started. And then one of the other things that we looked at was the legal industry. It has is up there with some of the worst custom