Georgiana Laudi is the Director of Marketing at Unbounce, which helps you build, publish & A/B test landing pages without I.T. so that you can Increase the ROI of your marketing campaigns.

Topic Georgiana Laudi Covers

→ Her background as a Director of Marketing for Unbalanced

→ Learning about unbalanced and what does it do

→ How companies she use unbalanced to market themselves

→ How she utilized the unbalanced platform

→ How she built, published & A/B tested landing pages without I.T.

→ Her strategy is to increase the ROI for marketing campaigns

→ Her thoughts on Hootsuite

→ Her thoughts on KISSmetrics

→ Her lion’s share of her time spent doing ramp up the marketing efforts with on balance

→ Her background in SEO

→ And a whole lot more

Links and Resources

→ Unbounce

→ Georgiana’s domain

Watch the Interview

READ THE TRANSCRIPTION

Bronson: Welcome to another episode of Growth Hacker TV. I’m Bronson Taylor and today I have Georgiana Lardy. Has that right? Georgianna? Yeah. And you are currently the director of marketing for Unbalanced. Is that right?

Georgiana: Yeah.

Bronson: All right. Perfect. So let’s begin by learning a little bit about unbalance. What is unbalanced? What does it do?

Georgiana: And runs is a self-serve landing page platform essentially for, you know, to allow people to build, publish and test landing pages. So anybody who’s marketing a business or product looking to endorse any sort of, you know, promotional marketing like that, they’ll want to use these stand alone type landing pages for higher conversion rates.

Bronson: Gotcha. Perfect. Let me ask you this kind of a side note. Is there added pressure when you’re the director of marketing for a company that helps so many thousands of other companies market themselves? Do you feel like you have to be like the uber marketer or does it not get to you?

Georgiana: Yeah, I guess there definitely is. I didn’t really think of it that much from the beginning, but yeah, marketing to marketers is definitely keeps things interesting. Definitely forces us to eat our own dog food and you know, only, you know, recommend products or tools or ways of doing things that we’re willing to do ourselves, that we do ourselves. So it’s yeah, it’s a lot of eating your own dog food and it also helps. We have like a great team as well. So all the gardener who’s now a creative director, you know, doing a lot of our content and stuff like that. And he’s a fantastic writer and super popular, so it makes it a little bit easier that I get to work with like really great talent. But yeah, also I guess really staying sort of ahead of the curve a little bit is really important. And there’s a lot of people now that sort of rely on us for really like solid recommendations. So we always like to keep just a little bit ahead of a ahead of the curve. So yeah, it’s fun. It’s a fun problem.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Yeah. You know what I think about this interview? I was thinking I want to divide it into two sections because there’s two different angles that I think you can help us with. And the first is I want to know about how companies use unbalanced to market themselves, because some of the people listening to this are going to want to know, okay, how do I actually use the platform? And what are some things I should know from the Director of Marketing about how to best utilize this platform? But then I’m also interested in a second set of questions, which is how you’re actually marketing unbalance as a platform because you’re a start up trying to get users. So I want to talk about the platform on balance and then how you’re marketing it a little bit. Let’s start with the platform. What kinds of companies do you see primarily using on balance right now?

Georgiana: And really it’s a huge range. I hate to give such a general answer, but it’s really is a big range entrepreneurs, startups, consultants, agencies, big brands with multiple, you know, marketing teams. So it really is a wide range. And, you know, in fast companies, education, finance, travel, real estate, it’s really, really, really a range. Yeah, it really is. Anybody who is marketing a business or a product or service. So yeah. Anybody doing promotional type marketing?

Bronson: Yeah. Is there any one category of company that really stands out? Like you have a tremendous amount of travel or, you know, is there any one that kind of spikes when you think about it or is it really just all over the place? Everybody.

Georgiana: I you know, I know you asked me that and I really can’t think of one in particular that stands out. Yes. No, unfortunately not. That’s fine. And there’s a lot of SAS actually.

Bronson: Really. Okay.

Georgiana: So yeah, there’s quite a bit, but I mean there’s a nice big range, right. So yeah. So what do you.

Bronson: Think makes people drawn to it? Are they drawn to it because they don’t have an in-house development team and they need quick landing pages? Are they drawn to it because they do have an in-house development team and they don’t want to, you know, have this being their time of the landing pages? Is there any, you know, kind of thread through all the users? Why do they use it, the ones that do? Is there any commonalities there?

Georgiana: Well, there’s definitely commonalities in uses, but yeah, I guess the the i.t you know, those typical i.t bottlenecks that everybody talks about. That’s definitely a big reason for it. Yeah. People don’t want to mess around with that stuff. And also a lot of people that are a lot of marketers that are thinking more about ROI, especially when it comes to like performance marketing, like PPC or social ads, things like that, you know, they really want the biggest bang for their buck. And you testing landing pages is really the best way to do that. And they don’t have to for anybody else to do it. I mean, we use it ourselves, right? I mean, it’s like we always sort of say that like, you know, read our own dogfood, but you really honestly do. And thank God I don’t need to, you know, our team doesn’t need to rely on it to build these things for us or even conduct test stuff like that. So there’s a lot we can do without needing outside help inside of the department. So that’s a big reason for it. Also, integrations play a huge part into it too, so that makes it really easy to adopt for a lot of marketers because we work with so many of our marketing tools.

Bronson: Absolutely.

Georgiana: Can I answer your question? I feel like I.

Bronson: Mean, I think if you’re not. But it was great content either way. Is there any kind of companies that you feel like if they only knew about unbalance, it would make their lives so much better? Is there any, like, verticals of companies that just they just don’t know you exist and you just want to tell them right now, hey, we’re here. We can save you time, effort, all that stuff.

Georgiana: Yeah, particular verticals. That’s a good question. Sure, exactly. Because I think it’s probably pretty wide ranging across all verticals, any sort of, you know, marketing team or agency that or consultant that is a little bit more on the traditional side of things. So maybe has just started doing, you know, web marketing. Anybody who’s not really obsessed with their conversion rate just yet. Right.

Bronson: So so talk to us about that. Why is that person, someone that needs to know about this, what what’s the benefit for them if they’re just now getting into the Internet side of things? But they’re used to working with marketing budgets and campaigns and things like that. What’s the value add for them?

Georgiana: Well, really, because they’re you know, the majority of them are probably sending traffic to their home page, which is the biggest, you know, and they think it’s good enough to send traffic to their home.

Bronson: But why is it not good enough to teach us?

Georgiana: Yeah, well, there’s well, there’s a couple of reasons, but really there’s the biggest reason is that there’s a million links on your homepage. Right? So for a particular marketing campaign, I mean, obviously you have to have a great home page and it’s still incredibly important. But when it comes to campaigns and stuff like that, you really want one goal to be achieved, like you’re selecting an email address or trying to sell a product or you know, you’re doing lead gen or whatever. I really want one Google, so a standalone landing page will let you do that and it will. You know, all your content is about achieving that one particular goal as opposed to your home page where there’s a navigation and there’s a footer navigation and there’s a million calls to action all over the page. But for campaign, you know, for campaigns, you really do want to concentrate on one call to action and have the page, you know, for one particular purpose. And also another reason. Action, which is very important, is message match. So if you’re doing paid any sort of paid advertising, I see you really want a strong message match between the ad the user came from and the landing page that they end up on. It’s you know, you can just imagine what that will do for conversion rates to reinforce why they’re there and that they’re in the right place. So that helps a lot, too. And a homepage just can’t achieve that.

Bronson: Yeah. So let’s kind of go into those too a little bit because I feel like that’s so important and it’s a huge thing that unbalanced does. Yeah. And for a lot of people, if you’ve been around, this is obvious stuff. But for some people watching this, this is new and they’re going to learn some things here. So you call it a leaky bucket when they have too many called actions, there’s too many links, there’s too much navigation, because if they just end up on the homepage, there’s too many other places they can go without really giving you the one thing you wanted, which is the email or the sale or whatever it may be. Is that right?

Georgiana: Yeah, yeah.

Bronson: Absolutely. And that may also explain some of the things that people see online. If you’re on Google and you do a search and you click on one of the paid ads, you may end up on a Spotify page that doesn’t look like Spotify dot com. And people kind of wonder like, well, am I what is this like? It’s like another world or something, but they’re actually trying to squeeze you to do the one thing they want you to do. So that was the first thing you mentioned, which I think is really important. And then second, you talked about the message match. What is the wording you use there? The you had some phrase for it for. Yeah, but but that’s why is that important though? Why is it important that the ad they click on Google, let’s say, also has the same kind of language and messaging as the site they end up on? Because you can have an ad on Google and on to the home page, but the home page is talking about something different than the ad did. So why do you want that to match?

Georgiana: I think it’s really a lot about like trust and confidence and reassurance that they’ve arrived in the same place. They don’t you know, when people click on an ad, they they’re automatically a little bit skeptical. Right. And they’re like, I’m going to be salt, too. So it’s really is you know, if they see if they were compelled enough to click on the ad, then, you know, you don’t want to lose them at that point. I mean, they’re still semi cold at that point. But if they arrive on the landing page and the messaging is the same and they see things like trust factors like, you know, social, social proof, things like that, benefit driven sort of stuff. Then it and it all sort of matches where they came from. Then their confidence level in your company will be a lot higher.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s great. And I know that on balance doesn’t do this part of the equation, but kind of even going one step further back is when you buy the right keywords. So they’re searching for a keyword that matches the keywords you bought that has an ad with that keyword in it that takes you to a landing page about that keyword. And now that trust is just through the roof, they know the right spot because the whole thing began with their own search, and yet the entire process was just perfect for them. So they feel like this whole entire. The universe has just. Conspire to give them exactly what they want when they know it’s marketing people being very smart.

Georgiana: Yeah. Yeah.

Bronson: So am I going to go full circle there? No, that’s great. Those are two great reasons to use unbalance and you know, to even talk about that. Think about how many campaigns people might have in Google ads, how many different ads they have. That’s a lot of work to create a landing page for each and every one of those mini campaigns. But with unbalance, you can quickly go in and just, you know, make as many landing pages as you want. And so it kind of makes sense for someone doing a lot of pay per click, wouldn’t you think?

Georgiana: Tons of sense. I, I shudder to think that anybody is doing pay per click without it.

Bronson: Yeah. There you go. You’re also tagline. Yeah, I’m back. I shudder to think. Yeah, absolutely. Let me give you a chance to brag for a little bit about the platform. Tell us, what are some of the the biggest wins that companies have had using unbalance? And maybe you can use your name. Maybe you can’t. I don’t know. You know what you’re allowed to disclose. But tell us, like, you know, a company that has got a crazy number of email addresses or a crazy number of sales or help their bottom line in some way, that was really important to them. So brag a little bit.

Georgiana: Oh, God, I really wish I had some more, you know, compelling stories. We have customers, you know, send us emails, call us, tell us the most awesome stories all the time. One of the things where we’ve sort of lacked a little bit is on doing real case studies, and it’s something we’ve been asked a lot for and we are finally, finally getting around to doing them, thank God. But yeah, I, I don’t have I don’t have this like one awesome story. Yeah. There’s a lot of like smaller stories that we’re going to be pulling out of and, you know, making a full case study out of. But we do have KISSmetrics is a really avid user and really they’re their acquisition team. Yeah, they actually do one of our our testimonials as of late, our recent ones actually great relationship with them now because, you know, they reached out saying like, hey, your platform’s awesome and you’d love to like, you know, do something for you guys for one year or whatever. Yeah. I mean, KISSmetrics has hundreds of pages on unbalance and they use it a lot. They’re definitely considered one of our power users. And yeah, they’ve seen conversion lists of like 2 to 3 times. Hootsuite is another and they’re Vancouver based. They’re in.

Bronson: Right now. You’re named Robin. This is what I was looking for. This is this litany of you doing KISSmetrics. Tell us about Hootsuite.

Georgiana: Sure. Yeah. Well, yeah, Hootsuite being their customers, and they’re local. So they did they paid a visit not too long ago and told us what they liked, what they didn’t like about the platform, which is great, awesome learning experience for us. And yeah, yeah, they’ve seen lists of like 20% on one of their, one of their landing pages are actually probably more than one of their languages. But when you’re talking with a pricing page, a 20% lift is massive. Right. I mean, that’s huge. And yeah, I can’t disclose any numbers or anything, but yeah, they’ve had a lot of success with it too. But like I said, we’ve got a lineup of customers now that are like, Yeah, we really want to tell you our success story. So finally we will be putting these together. They’ll be on the site very soon. Yeah, and it’s also out there or too will be definitely pulling more out.

Bronson: Well, the two companies we mentioned, I think, are great testimonials because they’re not just any companies or Web companies with huge development teams and they themselves are in you know, they help people grow. Hootsuite helps people grow through using social networks. KISSmetrics helps people grow, obviously through using metrics and integrating with websites. So they have really advanced, sophisticated teams of developers and they’re still choosing to use unbalance. So I think just those two names mean more than just their users. They’re the kinds of people that could do it on their own and choose not to. So something that’s kind of cool to hear that. All right. Let’s talk about you a little bit as the director of marketing. So how long have you been with Unbalance?

Georgiana: It has been just over a year, actually. Just right. Yeah. Yeah. So it was last February, I guess, and I was working remotely from Montreal. So I went I mean, I went from I moved from Montreal to Vancouver to work with one man.

Bronson: Okay, great. And in that time period. So it’s been almost a year now. Where have you focused most of your efforts? Where have you said, you know, just on a daily basis, you come into the office or working remotely, you know, before what was the lion’s share of your time spent doing to ramp up the marketing efforts with on balance?

Georgiana: Well, one of the things that I loved about and bounced from the beginning was that they were big believers in inbound and content marketing. So we’ve definitely, you know, since I joined the team, we’ve definitely continued to do that and we’ve ramped it up. Yeah, there’s just been I mean, there was only one person in marketing before, right? So now we’re a team of five. So we have. So we get to, you know, pump out a lot more content. So we’re doing things like ebooks we’re doing on webinars.

Bronson: I got an email today about the UN webinar, you know, talked about five, four, three, two, one, you know, you lost them, they’re off your site or are you going to do about it? Join our webinar. I was like, Oh, what? Great timing. I’m interviewing you today and I get sold through this morning by Unbalance.

Georgiana: Yeah. So depending on if you’re a customer or not, that email would have come from probably a different person. So it might have come from me or it might have come from our director of Customer Success. But yeah, the one.

Bronson: I got this morning was director of Customer Success, but I am a customer on a different email, so I have to go check that one and see if I got one from you.

Georgiana: Yeah, we do those on webinars in partnership with our customer success team. So, you know, as much as we want to educate our own customers, you know, marketing gets, gets to, you know, takes part of the part of the work and we produce them together and yeah, they’re awesome. They’re awesome for our customers and they’re awesome for acquisition, honestly. And they’re ridiculously popular with people and it’s crazy. I mean, we put on a couple first ones which were really, really fun and not stuffy and not the traditional type of webinar. I mean, webinars are already kind of feeling like they’re on their way out, but I think it’s just because our people are just finally starting to do them the right way. Yeah. So yeah, they’re really, really, really popular actually. So yeah, it’s a really good one.

Bronson: So you put a lot of effort into inbound marketing, so really just try to create content. You mentioned ebooks, you mentioned webinars. The blog is a great resource, which I’m going to ask a little bit more about and a little bit, I think with all that that content, how do you create it? So like an e-book, let’s say, what do you do to create an e-book? Do you find an author that’s already successful and has this e-book ready to go? Are you creating it in-house from scratch? What do you actually do to create this content? Because I think people are going to want to imitate what you’re doing. They’re going to say, Oh, I’m balance obviously knows a lot about marketing. They’re using inbound and content creation. So let’s talk about the mechanics of it. How do you actually get the content?

Georgiana: Okay. Well, like I said, really, really lucky. We’re working you know, I’m working with a lot of great in-house content for talent. So Ali Gardner, who started the blog and did the majority of the content, all of the content on the blog a long, long time until I came on board, I guess. Thank God. Yeah. And he’s an incredible writer. Just it just happened to be an awesome writer. And yeah, he writes our content or he writes are our e-books. Sorry, I think I’ve coauthored one or two, but for the most part, it’s all he and he’s really is sort of a UX conversion kind of minded person, which is great. And I mean, you know, he’s sort of he’s now branded as like Mr. Landing Pages and yeah, he writes awesome, awesome content. But the topic or I mean, it sort of starts with like, hey, what are we going to write about? And, you know, I have I have to sort of plan that in 2013. We have a certain amount of e-books that we’d like to produce and we try to tie the content to, you know, maybe it’s a topic that our customers are screaming about and knowing. Maybe it’s a topic we saw really, really successful on the blog. Or maybe it’s something we can tie to a feature release. And that’s actually our upcoming one is going to be tied to a feature release. So rather than, you know, screaming from the mountaintops that we’ve got a feature release, we never really do that. Right? We’ll be like, okay, so what kind of content? When can we create around, you know, the benefits of this? So I guess that’s what our next one is going to be. So yeah, all he writes them, I edit them, they go through a copy editing process. Obviously they copy edited twice or three times actually, and then go through to our designer who, you know, gets them into a nice PDF and then we go to the landing page. Of course we’ve got a blank page to, to give them away and ultimately.

Bronson: So you give them away. Are you getting anything in return? Email address, sign up.

Georgiana: Yeah, we yeah. Well, I was going to say actually over almost about a year now, we’ve been doing a little bit more lead gen, but not in the sort of traditional sense of lead. Yeah, we don’t have a sales team, we never send really like hard sell emails, anything like that. It’s always just about content. So it’s like giving so much content, it hurts kind of thing. Yeah. So yeah. So we put up a landing page for an e-book. Will we give people the choice to either? In most cases, we’ll give people the choice to either provide us with an email address or to get it for a tweet. Okay. And we’ve run a few tests on that, obviously. And it has proven just as sort of, you know, although, well, you know, we can’t do the lead gen with the people that will do it for a tweet. It still really helps with virality and, you know, gets word out about it and sort of keeps them. She’s running a little bit. So like, you know, even after the initial campaign, there are e-books are continued to be downloaded for forever more. Yeah, which is awesome. And there’s about a 2080, you know, 8020 rule there with we’ll get about 80% emails and 20% tweets. And at the end of the day, I mean, we’re not we don’t do hard sale. We’re not into that kind of thing. So not there’s anything wrong with it.

Bronson: Do you grow if you’re that kind of company?

Georgiana: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that’s works really, really well for us. And you know, in the e-book there is, you know, regular CTAs to sign up like.

Bronson: You know, using an e-book, but it’s a PDF so they can actually click a link, right?

Georgiana: Yeah. And so we’ll have another landing page. So, you know, if after you’ve read the e-book, you’re interested in using a product that will let you do these kinds of things, you know, rather than using it. And there will be another landing page to sign up.

Bronson: Yeah. What you just said is so interesting because I am literally having the discussion right now with my partners about how to spread growth hacker TV and we’ve decided they’re going to get an email address for like a part of a free video or something, you know, or we’re going to ask for a tweet. We’ve been going back and forth, which one we actually called, some other guys got some advice and we’re hearing different things. So it’s great to actually hear the 8020 and kind of what you found out in your reasoning. It may not be helpful to anybody else listening, but it’s really helpful to me.

Georgiana: So thank you for that. Yeah.

Bronson: This has been enlightening to me. This is exactly what I wanted to know. You mentioned Ali a couple of times. So, you know, Unbalance has an incredible blog. I mean, I get forwarded, you know, blog posts and everything all the time and I devour them. It’s so good. It’s one person behind that is like because other companies, like I have the guy from Treehouse on and everyone that teaches at Treehouse has to give blog posts to create this content machine. Is it really just one guy for you guys basically creating his content?

Georgiana: Not any more. Once upon a time, yes, it was. So before I joined the team. Yeah, it was all you creating, all the content, you know, daily or weekly blogging. And then he, he started getting more guest posts. And then since I’ve come on board, it’s been sort of more of that. So we really love the conversion community and there are such brilliant people and we’re always discovering new, amazing people. And yeah, we get them to contribute and we get awesome, awesome guest posts and really awesome authors and posts and they’re so, so no. Now it’s, I mean, we’re a marketing team of five, but we have one person who’s full time on the blog. It’s not holy, but there is one person full time on the blog and social all. He spends quite a bit of his time on content and approving posts like that. And as Y so we sort of have, you know, our two in-house subject matter experts and then we and all is still writes a lot of the posts, but we also have a lot of other contributing authors which they’ve just been absolutely incredible.

Bronson: Yeah. Do you think.

Georgiana: There are safer people? Yeah.

Bronson: Do you think that’s a good system where given them exposure, I’m assuming you’re not paying them. You’re giving them exposure in a platform and then in return they’re giving you inbound leads and really SEO worthy kind of things for Google. Do you feel like that’s a good trade off if you get the right people to write for you?

Georgiana: Yeah, definitely. There is a mix. Some are guest posts and some we do. We do pay for their contributions to the blog. But you know, we don’t have any really hard, fast rule there. Yeah, yeah. It’s we went through a period of time actually where we were we were blogging five days a week, which was insane and an insane amount of work, especially. We were two people at the time. It was only all nine doing it and yeah, it was an insane amount of work and there wasn’t much time to do much else. So we’ve paired it down a bit. We’re now doing about three, but they’re really, you know, we try our damnedest to make them really, really meaty, awesome posts. We refuse a lot of posts, to be honest. We get a lot of requests. Do we have like a right friend bounce page? We get tons of requests to contribute to the blog and we refuse the vast majority of them. But just to sort of maintain that, you know, that level of quality.

Bronson: So yeah, so you and all we have to manage all of these guest blog authors. Do you have people that are writing on an ongoing basis for you all or is it just one offs.

Georgiana: We do now? You know, we were seeing, you know, really awesome contributors, the blog, and you’re like, I want this person all the time. This is like amazing. They’re super easy to deal with. They know what they’re talking about. You know, they don’t take it off. You know, they bring awesome ideas to the table. And yeah, so we are we have some really great relationships with regular contributors, but we definitely do. We do take our guest post from like we because we do a lot of co-marketing and partnerships. So a lot of times will bring on, you know, a new author out of out of nowhere for, you know, add an explosion kind of thing. And. And if it works out, then we ask them to write again. And for the most part we have a really great relationship and get to continue doing that.

Bronson: Yeah, and I ask these questions because other people are going to be trying to build this kind of machinery and you know, so it helps us really know the details of like how you’re building the machinery to have this blog that generates inbound leads. How many people do you have writing on an ongoing basis where you have that deep relationship? Are we talking five people, 30 people? You know, I mean, just roughly.

Georgiana: Right? Oh, God, not 30. I don’t think I could ask that.

Bronson: So that’s all I’m asking. I want to know how much you can handle before the wheels come off, you know?

Georgiana: We’re still quite a small team, right? So I’d say regularly. Besides, aside from Ali, who who writes at least two posts a week. I’d say maybe five or six that regularly contribute. But we’ve got probably anywhere, you know, 15 to 20 who we, you know, are in regular contact with. They may not, you know, contribute once a month, but we have a pretty good roster of our favorite people.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s great. All right. Let me ask you this. You mentioned all the different things you do, you know, webinar, you know, the eBooks, the the blog, things like that. What’s been in the year that you’ve been there? What’s been the single most successful thing you’ve done? Was it an e-book that you put out or a blog post you wrote or a fill in the blank? What was the one thing where, you know, and maybe you don’t have the stats on this either because you’re still getting the case studies together, but what’s something you’ve done? Because, you know, I’m interested in the outliers. The one thing I was like, wow, that worked.

Georgiana: Right. The eBooks. Honestly, what we started doing, which wasn’t really happening much before I came on board, was we actually started emailing again. Email seems to be that, you know, that one channel that you know, I don’t know it’s either is still like heavily underestimated.

Bronson: I think it’s magical. I think email is magical.

Georgiana: It is.

Bronson: The Internet has so many interviews on here.

Georgiana: Yeah, yeah. It’s crazy. So, yeah, it’s really been building up that that list of of really engaged people with our content and that happens all through e-books. So yeah, having an amazing, you know, a content creator in-house is a big, you know, a really important piece of this puzzle, obviously. And they don’t have to be in-house. But yeah, creating that kind of contact really desirable. Like I would pay for this content. Yeah. And giving it away and yeah. Collecting an email address and we’ve done awesome stuff with like, you know, and I say lead gen I and I know it’s, it’s not like hard but yeah we do that. It’s been really successful for us. Yeah. While yeah. Also partnerships and integrations and co-marketing with other companies has been huge work.

Bronson: Tell me about a partnership kind of situation. How does that play out? They come to you, you go to them, what does it look like so people can replicate it if they want to?

Georgiana: Right. Well, in the beginning it was we were going to them even just a year ago, it’s changed drastically. I was you know, I was sending out emails. I mean, there was sort of a queue of people like our, you know, our hotlist if we’d love to work with and, you know, we’d reach out and and basically, you know, put it in such terms that, like, this is what we’re going to do for you. This is what’s in it for the partner. Right now we’re it things have changed so drastically in the past year that now we’re getting flooded with emails from people looking to partner with us, which is an awesome, awesome thing, right? Yeah. So yeah. What does the typical co-marketing thing look like? It really kind of depends because we have technical integrations with some partners. So if we’re doing the integration, then we’ll obviously reach out and say and produce content and things like that that surround the integration, you know, use cases and why a marketer would want to use these two platforms together and, you know, make, make a marketing story and a. And then there’s also just flat out, you know, co promo with complementary companies which, you know, they that might involve guest posting on their blog, on our blog or or vice versa. And, you know, being a guest on an on webinar or, you know, maybe an email introduction like a mutual email introduction to each other’s customer lists, which is a little bit different cause that’s, that involves our customer success team, that’s our marketing effort. But it is part of a co-marketing thing that we might potentially do with a really tight match. Yeah.

Bronson: And that have to be really tied to give up emails.

Georgiana: Yeah. Well no we don’t get.

Bronson: We’re not give up. I mean to even blast off not to your emails. Yeah. I can spam act with like you’ve given them up.

Georgiana: Yeah. No, no go ahead. No, but no. If we’re going to recommend a tool, it’s got to be a really great match and it’s got to be a tool that we really, really believe in and that we think would be really beneficial to our customers. Yeah.

Bronson: That’s great. Let me ask you this, being that you create so much content and that’s such a of a dominant focus. Do you guys think about it in terms of SEO? Do you know a lot about SEO and you’re thinking about how the content works with what you know about SEO? Or is it really let’s just create great content that we would want to consume and SEO Inbound takes care of itself through Twitter or Google. How however it’s going to work. Because I know some people come at it heavily SEO, some come at it more. I got an intuition on what the people want or I’m seeing it like you said, through, you know what people are telling you they’re interested in. How do you guys approach it?

Georgiana: Well, I have personally, I have a background in SEO, but but to be honest with you, it’s not something we break our heads over. I think probably early on. It’s hard to say, though, because I wasn’t I wasn’t there for the first year. Right. So I know that during the first year, all we did spend quite a bit of time, you know, optimizing the website, optimizing content, things like that. But it’s not something we break our heads over now because, you know, we have such a great community like that social community that we had is awesome. And you know, obviously we don’t ignore it. I it’s impossible. I can’t ignore, of course.

Bronson: Especially with a background in it, you’re never going to ignore it. You’re going to do it on accident.

Georgiana: But it’s not something that I would find at this point is worth dedicating that many hours to or resources. I think I would much prefer our team concentrate on creating amazing content rather than making sure we’re hitting, you know, the perfect keyword, you know?

Bronson: Yeah, no, that’s just that’s my take on it as well. You know, I feel like if you’re creating great content, you do good SEO and accident. Yeah. So it goes hand in hand almost. That’s great. Well, let me ask you this. What’s the next channel kind of look on the horizon? You’ve been there a year. You’ve probably, you know, been working on things that were just front of mind had to happen. What do you see as kind of maybe the next channel you want to go into? Do you see yourself as just I’m going to focus on content from now until forever? Or is there another thing? Are you going to get into ad buying? Are you going to get into, you know, fill in the blanks, some other kind of acquisition channel beyond this in a, in a year, in a few months or something.

Georgiana: Right? Y Yeah. I mean, a year is a very far away to me.

Bronson: Especially for a marketer that’s an eon away. So, so much can change in our landscape in a few minutes.

Georgiana: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Next couple of months, I would doubt with case studies at the top of my list right now. All right.

Bronson: Case study. That’s right. I’m just not high on your list in any case study.

Georgiana: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re going to be actually working on some customer success story videos as well. So not just written format like, you know, dry PDF. We’re going to go from the success story, you know, angle we were, you know, we’re B to B, but we don’t, you know, we’re various are in casual company and we concentrate a lot on being like both educational and entertaining. And so, you know, we, we don’t put out like dry content as much as possible. Yeah, but yeah. So case studies is definitely one. I’m trying to think, well, we just launched a conversion focused partner ecosystem on our website. So what does.

Bronson: That mean to me about that?

Georgiana: And our because our partnerships are so important to us, we really want a better way to sort of display either our fardeau partners or our integration partners, like our our technology partners, but also just, you know, services that work really well with an amount. So we have a section of there, it’s in the main nav now and it’s all dedicated ly broken down into basically, you know, conversion categories like email, PPC, design, copying content, you know, things like that. So a CRMs, marketing automation, you know that those kind of tools that work really great together. So that was just launched only a couple of weeks ago. So we’re still, you know, learning our way around that and there’s a ton of stuff is coming out of that. Now, all of a sudden you put up this like, you know, build it and they will come kind of thing is happening right now. And all of a sudden, you know, these great partners are sort of coming out of the woodwork. So you’ve got so now I have, you know, a ton of stuff that we can look forward to doing this year in partnership with other people. Also, we have some awesome integrations that are coming online, which will be really great to to co-promotion with partners and like I said, a couple of feature releases as well. So, you know, we, our product team is, you know, working their ass off. We’ve got great roadmap coming up and I’m really, really excited for the things that we get to talk about in the next couple of months. So future releases, partnerships and case studies are definitely my number one priority in 20 years.

Bronson: So it looks like you’re drowning in opportunity. You get to choose your path. How you know, what opportunities do you want to take hold of? Because it looks like you have quite a few of them. Has anything about the marketing of Unbalance surprised you in the last year? Because you’ve obviously done marketing before you did CEO before. When you come into unbalance, I’m sure you had, you know, your preconceived notions about how it would play out and what it would look like and what the community was going to be like and what kind of people were going to use it. Was there anything that was just really surprising that you’ve, you know, kind of uncovered in the last year?

Georgiana: Right. That’s a good question. I would say. I mean, you know, first thing that comes to mind is that the absolute willingness of companies to go into sort of partnership agreements with us and I don’t mean like official agreements, I mean like just a great rapport with a lot of other really great companies. I, I maybe I thought that that was going to be a bit tougher, but it’s been really amazing. Like the people that I’ve been in contact with over the past year have been incredible and, you know, super easy to work with and super willing. And, you know, they’ll do work and we’ll do work. And, you know, we both contribute to this really great thing. And yeah, I think that now is the sort of surprising thing is that they’re not coming to us as opposed to us seeking them out, which is a really nice surprise, right? Yeah. Another thing would probably be and this is, you know, probably horribly cheesy to say, but our cousin. Numbers are a huge thing.

Bronson: Well, you have to say that.

Georgiana: Yeah, but honestly, when I was, you know, I made a big I moved across the country to come work and I’m bouncing. So one of things that I was doing in my during my due diligence of, you know, looking up unannounced was, you know, one of their customers saying about them and how their customers feel and asleep. Awesome, awesome people. They love a product they love on bounce and that was I was like, oh okay if if they have this many fans I just it was overwhelming honestly. And yeah, they’re just really great. Yeah. We have the best customers and.

Bronson: Also since you’ve talked about all the good things so much. One last question about, you know, kind of how you’re marketing unbalance. Is there anything that’s been really frustrating as a marketer, something where you just ran to this wall over and over, you’re dying to get past it, buy it, threw it over it, and you’re just like, it’s not working, but, you know, it’s supposed to. Is there anything that’s been really frustrating for you?

Georgiana: Not that frustrating, yeah. Okay, that’s fine. Oh, yeah.

Bronson: Yeah, sometimes. I mean, it happens to start over. I mean, sometimes it can be truly frustrating. So I was just wondering if you’ve had any of those stories.

Georgiana: Um, no, I probably have the typical, you know, the typical marketing problem where especially when you’re, you’re marketing a product or service loss or, you know, when you’re marketing SaaS product, you know, it can be hard to tie marketing with product, right or product releases and things like that. So I mean, now that we have so many, you know, things on the go like books and webinars and the blog and, you know, all these, all these sort of campaigns that come running through all the time. We try, like I said, to tie feature releases with content. So we do like a themed week on the blog and we put together and then webinar we write an e-book which is a huge that’s like writing if you book is a massive job, it’s not it’s not like, you know, a week project, right? So trying feature releases with marketing campaigns, you know, is something that I don’t I don’t know if that ever gets perfected. Yeah. You know, having perfected that yet.

Bronson: It’s just difficult to coordinate it because there’s so many moving parts, so many people, so many different needs. Try to be mad.

Georgiana: Yes, yes. So many people and so many needs trying to be. Yeah, absolutely. It’s just that’s that’s, you know, our current sort of struggle right now or my current struggle right now is tying those two things together and not, you know, not being so, like, date specific and being a little bit more flexible and yeah, not, not having it be the end of the world if, you know, I, I deploy, you know, waits an extra week or two or more.

Bronson: Okay. So let me ask you this. That brings up another question. So a lot of times in companies that are not marketing companies themselves, because unbalance is for marketers, you know, marketing always takes a backseat to the product, right? The product release cycle is the number one thing and nobody interferes with it. Do you have the ability to go to them and be like, Look, this e-book is incredible. We need to push off the launch of this feature to this time, to coordinate with it with the product team. Even consider taking input from the marketing team about when to do something with the product itself. Is there more of a level grand with you guys or is this still priorities keeping marketing a second?

Georgiana: No, they would, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Especially in terms of integrations and things like that. I mean, that’s what we always say, right? Like we are our customer is our team.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s what I’m interested in knowing because you’re such a different kind of company. Yeah.

Georgiana: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s it’s actually awesome. Our dev, you know, our product team is amazing. And yeah, they’re always coming to us asking for, you know, opinions on different future releases. Like, how do you use this? What do you feel about this? And it’s actually really it’s an awesome experience, honestly. Yeah. But I mean, in terms of like driving, like what integration, what technical integration is going to come next, marketing is a big saying that and even the direction of the product, just because, you know, we are our customer, we use this product every day. And my biggest frustration with the product is definitely our customer’s biggest frustration with the product. So yeah, they’ve regular a lot of communication actually between us.

Bronson: You know, you just made a lot of marketers very jealous of product teams and developers. They’re actually looking for input from them on the front end and not just say, Hey, I’m done, go marketing now. So, so sorry, everybody, that you don’t work for on balance. All right. Well, let’s let’s close up the interview with one last question here. I’ll give you a chance to kind of give back to the community of people that want to be in your shoes someday. They want to be the director of marketing for a startup. What’s the best piece of advice that you can give to someone who really wants to understand startup growth and eventually maybe end up in a situation like you? One piece for many pieces you can go on as long as you want.

Georgiana: Okay. Okay. I say. I mean. You know, from it, from an unbiased perspective and also from a personal or professional perspective. It would definitely be to never, never, never underestimate the power of creating a loyal community or an engaged community. You know, it sounds so know like, yeah, okay, social, social, social. But honestly, I mean, like the connections that you’ll make on Twitter at the beginning. Mm hmm. Well, it can very likely be your most powerful in strategic partnerships, you know, not that long later. And that, you know, you underestimating the power of that. That’s what, you know, I shudder to think of, you know, technical co-founders or technical founders that just don’t put enough emphasis on that or enough importance on it. And it really, really is huge. I mean, from a business perspective and from a marketing perspective, it’s absolutely massive. And yeah, I’ve just been having that great rapport with and the community is super, super important and I’m trying to think of what else. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, putting out a lot of so much content that it hurts but not getting, you know, not getting so lost in it because the keynote content marketing is all over the place now and it’s starting to, you know, it’s becoming old hat almost. So we’re really standing out in terms of content and not being afraid to do things that are a little bit different. Um, you know, one example actually, which is perfect is, um, I only put out the new guide to online marketing, I think it was in 2011 and it was an infographic and an e-book like nobody had ever seen before. And it was, you know, completely out of left field, like nobody had produced something like this. The infographic, when you print it is like seven feet tall or something is ridiculous. It was just like over the top, huge. And it was a huge, huge success for us. And it was because he went off the beaten path, did something that was very different. Yeah. And also always very both educational and entertaining at the same time. So that too for for building that rapport with the community. And yeah, I’d say those are probably the two things to never sort of underestimate, I guess.

Bronson: Yeah. The community and the power of quality content.

Georgiana: Yeah.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s that’s incredible advice. Well, Georgianna, this has been an awesome interview. Hopefully people go and try and bounce and and watch you guys just market yourselves and learn from your marketing and actually use your product. So thank you so much for being on the program today.

Georgiana: Hey, thank you so much. It was fun.