Mar 26, 2018
If you could use only one inbound marketing tactic to generate increased visitor traffic, leads and customers, this inbound marketing pro says it should be original research.
In this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Orbit Media Co-Founder and CMO Andy Crestodina shares his takeaways from 3+ years of creating and publishing original research, along with actionable tips that other marketers - like you - can use to create research of your own.
Learn how his annual blogging survey has dramatically increased the number of backlinks to the Orbit Media site, generated incredible buzz on social media, and raised the company's visibility with its audience.
Listen to the podcast to learn more, or read the transcript below.
Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth and I am your host. This week, my guest is Andy Crestodina who is the Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media Studios. Welcome to the podcast, Andy.
Andy: I'm glad to be here. Thanks for
having me, Kathleen.
Kathleen: Oh, I'm so excited to have you.
This interview is really a funny story about how this podcast
evolves. I first started thinking about having you on as a
guest when I
interviewed Oli Gardner, who was on a few episodes ago. If
anybody is a regular listener, they know that I always ask the same
questions at the end. One of those is, "Company or individual, who
do you think is doing really well right now?" I like to have
examples of people doing it best practice style and I know my
listeners do, too. Oli, who is somebody that I greatly admire and
consider to be incredibly wise in this space, came up with only one
name. It was yours, so that is about the highest form of praise I
can think of. As soon as he said that, I thought, "Alright, I have
to get this guy on." So, I'm so excited to have you here.
Andy: I'm glad to be here and honored by
that, I'm a huge Oli fan myself and I had the pleasure of getting
to know him over the last few years and just follow everything he
does. Oli is the greatest.
Kathleen: Yeah, he always imparts a lot of
value when you hear him speak. Now, interestingly, speaking of
imparting value, it was fascinating when you and I started talking
and diving deeper into all the things you're involved with, from
the Content Jam Conference to some of the original
research that you've done through your agency. I realized that,
years ago, when I had my own agency, which I had for 11
years, it
was Quintain Marketing, that we were actually using your
research and citing it when we were creating content or blogging. I
didn't even know, at the time, that that was you. I just knew that
it was this great research, and very helpful, and very interesting
and we wanted to share it with our audience. So, it was just a
funny way of realizing exactly the point you were trying to make
when we spoke, which is that original research is such a fantastic
way to get your brand out there and to get noticed.
Andy: Yeah, what a cool case study. I'm glad
to hear that. We've been doing it for a while now, so I think we
all mention other stuff or cite other valuable things without
knowing, sometimes, just how close we might already be to the
person who conducted the research, so that's funny. I didn't know
that. We should look back and find those pieces and see what's
changed since then.
Kathleen: Yeah. I had a full-time Content
Manager and she was very interested in doing research around best
practices -- how long should it take to produce a blog, and how
much time are people spending on these things, and how long are
these, all of these questions that she was doing a lot of research
on? There wasn't a lot of information on it at the time and so, I
think she was really delighted to find the work that you had been
doing and to find that source. It was very helpful to her.
Taking a step back for a second, though, I'm getting ahead of
myself, so tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, about
your company, and what you do.
Andy: Sure, so I am the Co-Founder here. So,
in the very beginning, 18 years ago, my partner and friend from
high school and roommate from college, Barrett Lombardo was the programmer. I was
the designer and I also wore a lot of other hats. I was the project
manager, I was the sales guy or the marketer. As time went on and
as Orbit grew -- it's just a web design company -- we gradually
narrowed our focus and hired experts and found people who are
better at those jobs than we were.
Today, I have six designers, and 12 programmers, and a CEO and
so, my job has really just narrowed in its focus. I'm basically
just the marketer now, the CMO, but our style of marketing is the
same as yours. I'm a content
marketer, so this is 18 years of SEO and
analytics work and 10 years of blogging, content strategy,
marketing, and social.
Kathleen: Great.
Andy: So, I speak at events. I
have a podcast and have written a book and I'm just
one of those active people out there who does his best to teach
anybody anything that I can.
Kathleen: So, the company has been around for
quite some time and you've been doing content marketing, it sounds
like, for about 10 years, did you say? You mentioned a number of
the different channels that you've leveraged in the course of your
content marketing. I assume it took a little bit of time for you to
get traction through content, and I would love it if you could talk
to us a little bit about when you feel like it really started to
get results and what it was that was getting results.
Andy: Well, we were already somewhat
successful in search before there was really much of anything in
the way of blogging. This is years 2003, and '04, and '05. We
started to rank for the most important phrases -- the geo-specific,
local relevant phrases for our business category.
We're web design, but what I learned was that people don't do web design that often and so, I wanted to keep in touch with people over this very long buying interval. So, for me, the original idea behind content was to just stay top of mind with people during this long sales cycle and very long buying interval. So, I thought I needed to send people a newsletter or an email. I have to have an article that's useful, that people would care about, so I started publishing articles on my website and emailing this small list of people who I knew would be interested.
So, it was 200 subscribers in the very beginning and an article
every month or two and then, gradually, we got better at the
strategy piece and the planning piece around that and learned that
these articles could, themselves, rank for informational queries
and grew the list, got better at the optimization of the email sign
up form, which is an entire art in itself, which I love and love to
teach, but it wasn't until probably 2010 that we hired the CEO. He
built the Sales Team, so I no longer had to do all that sales work.
I used to spend all my days on the phone and all my nights writing
proposals. So, after Todd joined, I suddenly had an extra 20 hours
a week and that's the time, that's the moment when I doubled my
publishing frequency. I started the annual conference, I wrote a
book, I created a monthly event, all of the things. I just
basically got much, much more active and started to get much better
results after I took off that sales hat and began to focus more
just on the marketing piece.
Kathleen: Yeah, there is a lot of research
out there on the direct correlation between the volume and
frequency of publishing and the results you get. You can say it a
lot, but, until you experience the boost that you get, it's hard to
really appreciate the value of putting your time into it. I say
that having worked with so many clients over the years and I can
tell them, "If you blog three times a week, you're definitely going
to get better results than if you blog one time a week." But, I
find that, until they really see the product of that, it's hard for
them to attribute any value to it because their time is so, so
valuable, just like you experienced. You had so much on your plate
and it can feel like taking two hours out of the day to write a
blog is not the best use of that time, but it is amazing, the
results it can produce.
Andy: It's very hard to explain to people.
You almost have to feel what it's like. The people who are good at
this, it's like they're standing in a river of leads. It's crazy
how much demand you can generate, how many people are looking for
stuff on the internet, the amount of demand there is for each topic
and for each service. I sometimes just open an Analytics account
and just pull up one of my clients' accounts and just show them the
conversion report. "Look, leads everyday. See?" You know what
surprises me is that people say, "I get my leads from
referrals."
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: Which doesn't mean that you wouldn't
get more leads if you were successful at marketing. Referrals
are great. Nothing hurts that or this doesn't affect that at
all. Yeah, I know what you mean. Just over the weekend, I made a
chart trying to represent this, explaining how the amount of time
that you spend on something increases linearly. It's a line going
up and to the right, but results are not a line. They're a curve.
Results are exponential. Time invested is linear. So, anything, as
long as you're working smart, any work that you put in that moves
you even a little bit farther over to the right on that hockey
stick exponential curve, it makes an incredible difference, right?
So, in my experience, it mostly is a great idea to put more time
and effort into that thing, whether it's a social media post, or an
article, or a newsletter, or a podcast, an interview, an outreach
thing, a collaboration, and event because the difference between
good and great is so big that it's very much worth the time and
effort to make yourself even a little bit better and get over to
the right side of that exponential curve.
Kathleen: Yeah, and it's the content. It's
like the gift that keeps on giving. I look at people who say things
like, "Referrals or word of mouth give me a lot of leads." I think,
"But, take you out of the equation. What's your 'hit by a bus'
strategy? If you're out for a few weeks, does that source start to
dry up or slow down?" Whereas, you put something out on the
internet and it doesn't matter if you get hit by a bus -- although
let's all hope that never happens to any of us -- that piece of
content is still out there. One of my colleagues here at
IMPACT, Marcus
Sheridan, who is known as "the sales lion" out in the world,
has a fantastic slide I've seen him share, which is about this one
blog he wrote on the cost of an in-ground fiberglass pool years
ago.
Andy: Yup, yup.
Kathleen: Because he uses HubSpot, he was able to associate closed customers
with that blog. They would first read the blog and then, they'd go
through the sales process and then, they'd buy -- and because he's
able to associate that, he can quantify the revenue that's come
from it. So, he has this amazing slide he puts up, which is
something along the lines of, "This one blog post has yielded
millions of dollars in revenue." When he speaks to companies about
why they should spend time blogging, the question he always asks
is, "Is there anything else you could do with one hour of your time
that is likely to yield you millions of dollars of revenue?"
Andy: Yeah.
Kathleen: Probably not. Maybe there's a sales
meeting or something, but, usually, it takes more than one meeting
to close a deal like that. So, I always like referring back to that
because it really is one of the best illustrations I've seen.
Andy: Yeah. They say advertising is
temporary, but content is forever.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: If you stop advertising, that thing
just disappears from the world, but, when you publish something,
especially if it's optimized and searched, I think that's one of
the big differences. Yeah. No matter what the tactic, the benefits
are durable, right? Subscribers don't all subscribe immediately, so
email list growth is durable. Followers tend to stay following for
some time, so social media growth is durable and links -- people
don't just delete links and pages from the internet that often --
so, the SEO outcomes are durable. Search, social, and email, if you
build up those channels, you can benefit from the results for
months or years to come.
Kathleen: Yeah, it really is amazing and
you and I are obviously big content marketing evangelists so we
might be preaching to the choir with the listeners that we have
here. The thing that I thought was interesting about you is that
you really have embraced this approach in a number of ways, from
creating the conference that you're doing to have a podcast, to
blogging, to doing original research. It was actually very hard
when we first got in touch to immediately identify the thing that
we should focus in on for this interview because we could easily
talk about all of it, but then, this interview would be about five
hours long. I remember I asked you the question, "If somebody
listening could only do one thing or implement one thing based on
your lessons learned, what would be the one thing you would suggest
they do that would most move the needle?" Your answer was?
Andy: Original research. When you asked that
question, you just instantly sharpened my focus because this
could've been about so many things, but, absolutely, I think, at
the center of the most successful content
strategies in the marketing space, for sure, there's a lot
of original research. So, all of the CMI stuff was built on this and they attracted
thousands of links and even this relationship that, although we
didn't know it at the time, started with research.
All the HubSpot stuff, right? Look how much they've
published in the way of original research, so it is, according to
research, according to Steve Rayson's research at
BuzzSumo, one of the two most powerful formats for content. I'm
excited to talk more about it.
Kathleen: Well, I think the thing that is so
compelling about what you've done is -- you just said it -- in the
marketing space, we're both marketers marketing marketing, if you
will. We are marketing our marketing services and there is
virtually no more competitive space -- maybe other than insurance
-- where trying to get found is so difficult because other
marketers are good at marketing. So, to stand out in the pool of
marketers, you really have to be doing something right. You've had
this experience producing original research and it has enabled you
to stand out amongst an incredibly crowded pool of very
competitive, very ambitious marketers. So, tell us a little bit
about the research you've been doing, when did you start doing it,
and how'd you come up with the idea for it?
Andy: Well, the hypothesis is that, in every
industry, there are missing statistics. I call it "find the missing
stat," so the one that you mentioned and you started right at the
top, there was a gap. There was a lack of information about how
long it takes to create content. How long does it take you to write a blog
post? No one had really answered the question and we could
do this as an exercise. You and I can pick a random industry,
that'd be fun, and just think through it and just look around and
find that there's missing statistics everywhere, so that's the
first hypothesis is that there's a missing statistic in your market
and that the internet will knock down your door if you can just
find out what it is and create the soundbite, create the stat,
create the number that sells for X. So, in our case, it was how
long does it take to write a blog post.
Now, to create a statistically significant answer to that, you have to ask a lot of people how long they've been writing blog posts. So, we needed to get a thousand bloggers to answer a question. In fact, we made a short survey. It was 12 questions and that was the first question is, "How much time do you spend per article?" We averaged their answers and concluded it was ... I have to look it up. The first year was 2014. It was two hours and 14 minutes or something, was the average amount of time it took to write a blog post and that obviously helped people make their case as they talked about their services, or they talked to their boss. The first slide in their presentation at a conference, the first page in their book, it's an important piece of information in our industry is like, "Yes. This takes time, but how much time?" That's the average time.
It gets exponentially more valuable as you continue to research and you track the longitudinal data, the trend. Now, I think it's three hours and 20 minutes. It's gone up 40%, so we keep asking and answering the question. By doing so, you have become the primary source and people will link to you all day long. You've advanced the industry, you've become relevant, you've contributed to the bigger conversation in a way that you wouldn't with just another medium quality blog post.
Click here to view Orbit Media's 2017 Blogging Statistics and Trends Survey Results
Kathleen: Now, I have to ask, to what do you attribute the increasing amount of time it's taking people to write blogs? I have a theory on this and I'm really curious to see if you're going to validate it or not.
Andy: Well, with this, I don't have data. I have theories as well and my theory is almost what you said a minute ago, which is just that it's so competitive. I see the trend and let's correlate. Bloggers who spend more time are more likely to say they get strong results, bloggers who write longer blog posts are more likely to say they get strong results. Bloggers who use editors, a formalized editing process, are more likely to report strong results. So, all of these things suggest that there's a professionalization of blogging that started probably a very long time ago where it's just posting little thing, like in a weblog.
Now, it's more like a business. It's a
job title, it's a profession. So, as blogging becomes more like
journalism and blog posts become more like articles, I'm not sure
we should even call them blog posts anymore, they're mostly just
articles, then you can see how that would justify a greater expense
in an investment of time. When you see the correlation with
results, you can see why people continue to do it is because
they're finding firsthand that quality correlates with outcome.
Kathleen: Yeah, that's very similar to what I
was surmising because I know that when we first got into the
content marketing game at my old agency back in 2008, you really
didn't honestly have to put that much effort in to get results
because so few people were doing it and blogs were short. You saw
blogs that were 400 words and under. Now, that just really doesn't
cut it any more if you're not delivering value. It isn't as simple
as "blog and see results," it has to be "write good blogs that are
really helpful and see results." So, I've observed the same thing.
The posts are getting longer and more detailed. People are putting
more work into them, at least, the people that are really good at
this.
Andy: Well, Oli's an example, right?
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: Just pick your favorite marketer and
there's exceptions, right? People often cite Seth
Godin as an exception.
Kathleen: Yes.
Andy: He writes frequent little shorties and
that works for him. Yeah, and what better example than original
research as an example of quality. You're literally making
something original. Just look at a blog of any website and just
count through the tips, or the ideas, or the opinions in the blog
and ask how many of those are truly original. This is where
research can give you just a huge and immediate edge.
Kathleen: So, you came up with this idea
and the first study or the results were
published in 2014. When you first realized you wanted to do
this, you mentioned you wanted at least 1,000 respondents. So, how
did you go about building that list and making sure you got that
number of responses?
Andy: This is not a very practical answer
because it's not a repeatable, scalable approach. What I did, it's
almost like, as a joke, there's a software methodology they call
the death march, which is when you just pull all-nighters until
your product is done. It's crazy. Coffee.
Basically, I was and am fortunate enough to have friends who are generous and have audiences before we even called it influence or marketing, I guess. So, I just did tons and tons of personal outreach emails. I didn't use a tool. One at a time, I sent hundreds of LinkedIn messages and emails to people who I knew. The close friends who were open to it were kind enough to share with their audiences, so Ian Cleary was one. There's just a lot of people.
I also had to plan it from the beginning to include some bigger names in the piece itself, so there's 12 questions. For every question, there's a quote from Joe Pulizzi, or Ann Handley, or one of the big time names in the business. So, knowing that they'd be included, some of them promoted it. I'm like, "Yeah. As soon as I get done with this information gathering, I'm gonna include this quote from you, but I'm not quite done yet. If you feel like helping, you can just send this to your ... "
So, anyway, I sent 350 personal
emails. My hands hurt. It was many, it was weeks and time's just a
variable. So, you don't want to spend ... you can't spend half a
year gathering data.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: I think I spent about five weeks at
night and on weekends, but, since then, I've gotten a little better
at it. I have a list now of past respondents and I add to that list
when I meet people who are content creators. There are tools now
that didn't exist before that I knew of to do outreach,
like OutreachPlus, or Mailshake, or these different tools that make
sending semi-personalized emails to large groups of people much
easier. Yeah. It was brute force, you could call it,
slow.
Kathleen: Now, did you find that you needed
to offer any kind of incentive to people for responding? I don't
just mean simple monetary incentives. Some people do that, but I've
seen other cases where people will say you'll get the results
before the general public or you'll get the full version. Everybody
else will only get a summary. Was there anything like that or was
it just purely people responding out of the goodness of their
hearts?
Andy: Well, I made it very simple and I
reminded people in the outreach just how simple it was. It's less
than two minutes to take, to answer 12 multiple choice questions
and people often responded saying, "Wow, that was super easy." I
honestly think that, for many of these, I spent more time on the
email asking them to take the survey than they spent answering it.
No, I never incentivized. It might skew the results, right? Because
then, you're attracting people who are interested in getting
incentives. Nope, I never offered anything. I still don't. It's
just people. I know a lot of people have heard of it, so they want
to contribute to an industry piece. No, Kathleen. I didn't, but I
probably should've. It would've been easier.
Kathleen: Well, I don't know. It sounds like
what I'm hearing is that as long as you are able to streamline and
simplify the questionnaire and keep it short and, therefore, keep
the barrier to responding pretty low, that you really don't need to
go that route. So, there's a lesson in there for people thinking
about doing their first piece of original research to not overthink
it and over-complicate it.
Andy: That's for sure, that's key. I get
surveys and I am on page 11 of a SurveyMonkey thing and I'm wondering like, "How
are they even going to use this answer?" It's greedy basically,
right? They're making the respondents pay more in their time and
attention, but it isn't the only kind. The survey is not the only
type of research. The survey was necessary to answer a question
like, "How much time does it take to write a blog post?" Because
there's no other source of that information, but I have since found
other ways to create original research that don't require that kind
of outreach, that can be created much faster.
Kathleen: What would be some examples of
that?
Andy: Well, I tried to answer the question,
"What features are standard on websites?" Because, I wanted to make
an article about web design standards and I simply went
to Alexa and downloaded a giant list of
websites. Alexa.com has lists of the top sites and in
every category and I had a virtual assistant go look and fill out
the spreadsheet that I'd started that said logo in the top left,
contact in the top right, value proposition above the fold, blah,
blah, blah ... it's just observation. You just choose a data set
and a hypothesis or a set of criteria and then, observe it.
So there's lots of research in marketing around the world that is not based on outreach and respondents. It's just simply based on observing data and creating an analysis from it. So that survey was actually extremely useful to me because it answers questions for my clients, like, "Is it standard to have a search tool on your website?" It's not. Today, you can still find it. It ranks toward the phrase "web design standards" and probably a hundred people read it every day.
Click here to view Orbit Media's article on Web Design Standards.
Kathleen: Well, I'll make sure to include a link to that in the show notes because I think that would be interesting for people to see what that looks like as a finished product. Speaking of taking research and turning it into a finished product, walk us through what that process looked like for you with the blogging research. I imagine the first time you did the blogging research, it was really just an individual project that you were working on by yourself. Was it just you that turned that into a publishable piece? How long did that take and what did the process look like?
Andy: Well, I had the help of Amanda, who is our Marketing Director, and Amanda Gant does a lot of the editing, and polishing, and some outreach, and coordination internally. So, I never do anything that's more than a draft, so there is workflow here, some workflow. I'm also lucky enough to have a team of designers, so I might do really rough graphics and diagrams in Excel or Google Sheets and give them to the designers.
They create those, so there's a lot of pieces that are coming together at the same time. From the very beginning, I do outreach with the influencers, so there's one per question. So, for the question like, "Do you work with a professional editor?" Or, "What's your process for editing?" With folks like Sonia Simone from Copyblogger, champion, brilliant, genius editor, it was just like, "Could you please give your insights into editing in general?"
Now, I wait until I have some analysis and I send them the data and I say, "Sonia, would you like to contribute by giving your two cents on the trend?" Then, I'd get input from the influencer on the actual data itself. As the reports come in and the research comes in, I will take an early look at the data to see if I can spot any trends or major shifts. Like, this last year, there's a huge spike in people doing paid content promotion. So then, I get the wheels turning on that as a topic and start to think about that. But, basically, I'm soliciting input, and there's content coming in from different sources.
There's my outreach partner who's getting the data. The data comes into SurveyMonkey or whichever we're using. Content from influencers comes in from this side. The data gets created as draft images, which are given to the designers, which come back to me. Amanda is contributing to the overall shape of the piece, but the fun part -- the light bulb moment -- is when you first get the initial quantifiable numbers in. You start to see the early results and you're like, "Wow, yeah. Are people spending more time or did that max out? Are articles really getting longer? Is it still true that publishing more frequently gets better results?"
There's a moment when you realize,
"I'm looking at a spreadsheet here and I have insights into this
industry that no one else knows about. It's 1:15 AM and I'm the
only person who know that, in 2018, it takes this many minutes to
write a blog post." It's fun.
Kathleen: That's neat. So, start to finish,
you're doing this yearly. How long is this process over elapsed
time?
Andy: If the average blog post takes three
hours and 20 minutes, take a wild guess at how much time we spend
on each one of these blogger surveys.
Kathleen: Three months?
Andy: Well, total hours. I track hours. But,
that's true. It takes about three months end-to-end, for sure.
Kathleen: Oh, gosh. I wouldn't know where to
start, I would guess, at least, 40?
Andy: Yeah, it's 150 hours.
Kathleen: Wow. How does that divide out
percentage-wise?
Andy: Well, when I was doing it, it was 60
hours of outreach. Jason Quay has helped me more recently and he
spends about 40 hours doing outreach that is simplified and faster
partly because there's tools now. You could use OutreachPlus and it just helps. Tools like this
make it much, much easier to send emails to lots of people and
they're still genuine.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: It's a human connection still. It's not
mass mail, actually. The analysis is probably another 25 hours, the
outreach, the editing, the image prep, it would be another 40
hours. You put in the promotion of the piece once it's done, of
course, is gonna be even much higher. There, again, is that idea
that time is incremental and on a straight line. It takes me 15
times as long as the average article because most of my articles
take six hours to write or something, but the results are probably
100 times. So, would you spend 15 X on something? No. Most people
would not do that, but what if you had some certainty that the
outcome would be 100 X? That's huge. You should do it. We should
all be spending 10 times what we used to spend on a specific
content piece twice a year because you know that the results are
... you'll have contributed to the industry. You'll have helped all
of your colleagues and made something completely original and new,
so I think it's worth it. It's insane amounts of effort, but I
think it's worth it.
Kathleen: You've produced this report each
year. How have you promoted it? What format is it published in and
what channels do you use to get the word out?
Andy: Well, I'm the guy who never uses a lead
magnet, so I'm weird that way. You can get the whole thing just by
reading the whole thing and anyone can get it, but there's a lot of
great promotion tricks involved. One of them is each one of the
data points in the piece actually can contribute to the value
proposition of somebody out there somewhere. So, people who use a
formal editing process are more likely to report strong results.
Who would use that? Any company that offers editing services. So
there's a lot of targeted outreach you can do to people who will
instantly be thrilled to have found this bit of data. Year over
year, you can go back and use a tool like Open Site Explorer to see who's linked to
something. Anyone who linked to it before, covered it before might
be interested in the update.
You can use tools like BuzzSumo to see who shared something.
Whoever shared it before, would likely be interested in it again.
In fact, you stack the deck by including all the influencers in the
piece, means it's automatically gonna get visibility because
they're gonna talk about it all over the place probably. Every
year, Pulizzi and Rose would cover it. You don't have to make sure
that the big names know about it. They were included in it.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: It's like, "I don't have to let Ann
Handley know that the new survey is out. Her face is at the top."
So, the collaborative content means that the influencer marketing
is built-in. Of course, it's big hit in the newsletter. As soon as
it's live, you can reach out to publications and say, "Do you want
to cover it from this angle or that angle?" You can offer certain
media outlets exclusive versions of it by correlating, by finding
different correlations and making something original for them. A
lot of people said they wanted to cover it, and I would just give
them the full raw data if they wanted to find something new in it.
I've just done a full-court press on email and social.
Original research gets much more easy to promote after you've done it several years in a row because anyone who is involved with, shared, commented on, or linked to previous versions of it are people who you should let them know that the new one's live.
Plus, the 13th question in every
survey is, "Would you like to be notified when it goes live?" Those
are not people I put on my email list. I'm very careful not to send
email to people that don't want it, but those people ask to get
just the survey results. So, there's 1,300 people right there who
asked to be notified when it's live.
Kathleen: That's great. Now, I imagine there
are an infinite number of ways that this content could be
repurposed. You can have your one summary report, but are there
other ways that you take this and turn it into ... I imagine you
can make things like infographics, or slide shares, or
what-have-you. How are you using it throughout the year?
Andy: Well, the infographic is an immediate
home run because my friend, Barry Feldman, who's my podcast co-host and good
friend, he makes an infographic out of it. He pitches that
different places. Everyone immediately picks it up. So, every year,
I think it's been HubSpot who runs one of the early
versions of the infographic on their site. There, again, you can
use Open Site Explorer to see who linked to that version of it over
there or you can use BuzzSumo to see who shared that version over
there. Anyone who you like and has a certain level of fame, you
could reach out to them and offer to collaborate with them on
something. Yeah, repurposing it. It gets mentioned on the podcast,
it gets written about in lots of places, in lots of ways. I used to
do a bunch of ... I had to save energy while doing this research
piece because, as soon as it went live, I tried to go on a little
mini guest blogging tour.
I've got a little kid at home now and
I'm too busy, but I help people who want to cover it and so, lots
of other websites will pick it up and start to write about it. When
they do, I'm fast to get them other insights they
need. Emarketer.com is very rigorous and they
want to know all about how I gathered the list, so you have to just
be able to provide that to them. It's really PR basically.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: You made news. As soon as you make
news, you have to be ready to continue to get the echo chamber
going and respond to requests, to people who want to talk about
that news.
Kathleen: Yeah, and this has obviously worked
really well for you because you're continuing to do it. Can you
talk a little bit about the opportunities that doing original
research has opened up for you?
Andy: Well, one thing that I didn't do as
well, but I think I would do if I was in a different industry would
be to create statistics that support our value proposition, which
is an obvious one, right? That's why most people do research and
marketing is not to get direction in content marketing, but to
support their value prop. So, companies that do X are more likely
to get this result, so it becomes part of your homepage and all of
your materials. Another way to do research to get results that I
don't do but could, would be to do it like a smaller data set but
higher touch. So, you guys would be great at this. On behalf of one
of your clients, you interview 50 CMOs. Tell them what their top
pain points are or something. So, when you call someone and say,
"I'd like to interview you. It takes five minutes. I just need some
data." They say yes not because it's a cold call because it's not,
but it's still a pretext to build a relationship.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: You're on the phone with someone that
you'd like to, one day, connect with more, or sell to, or
collaborate with. So, I think that high touch, smaller dataset
outreach, like phone interviews, would give you a much better
networking benefit that I've gotten. So, there's definitely ways,
different angles on this that would give you better benefits than
what I've experienced myself, but the upside to us has been very
high in terms of just list growth, and followers, and mentions, and
search, all those good things that happen when you ... through
normal content
marketing, just an extreme version of it.
Kathleen: You've had opportunities to speak
as well at conferences, I'm sure.
Andy: I was doing a ton of speaking even
before this and I don't talk about it that much. Occasionally, I
put in a slide where, just like any other slide, it supports
something else I'm saying, but what I would say is it helps other
people. I get mentioned in a lot of other presentations because of
it.
Kathleen: That's great. Now, you're a guy
that I know that appreciates some solid data. Do you have any data
you can share with us about what impact this has had on the
company, whether that's website visits, or backlinks to your site,
or customer acquisition, any of that?
Andy: Sure, so I'm gonna go right now
to Google Search Console and we'll
see which of my pages have been linked to the most, according to
Google itself. We will see just how these were the articles that've
attracted the most authority and links from other sites if I pull
it up. You can see how the spike in traffic from email -- it's
always one of the top emails -- I could put my own domain into
BuzzSumo and you could see how these are always some of the top
shared articles. So, I said at the beginning, many, many years of
search, there's a gazillion links to our website, but I'm looking
now at the Search Console> Search Traffic>Links to Your Site
report. I'm gonna sort by source domains and number one is our
homepage, that's normal. Numbers two, three, and four are all
blogger surveys.
Kathleen: Wow.
Andy: So, there's been four and then, five,
six, seven, eight, nine. Number nine is another blogger survey, so
there's four URLs on my site that are these surveys.
Kathleen: Four in the top 10.
Andy: Yeah, it's four. All four are in the
top 10 and three of them are the top three if you just include the
homepage. So, it would be unethical to not link to research, right?
It's called a citation, it's like the bibliography. So, it becomes
very obvious after you think about it, even for a few minutes, why
original research attracts links and gives you a durable SEO
authority benefit. It's because people have to link to it to
support the way that they used it, so a high domain authority
website links to this survey probably once a week, just
organically. I don't have to do outreach. It's like you're just
link attraction.
Kathleen: For anyone listening to this
thinking, "I need to get on the ball and do some research" what
advice would you give them, for a person starting now, based on
your experience?
Andy: Well, look at the industry that you're
in and try to find gaps. I would define that idea of the missing
stat -- the missing statistic -- and something in your industry
that is frequently asserted but rarely supported. So, whatever it
is in your industry that's frequently asserted but rarely
supported, you can go out and your goal is to then fill in that
gap.
There's a blank spot. You're gonna
fill in that blank spot with an important supported piece. But
then, again, you shouldn't go in with an outcome in mind. It's
research, so you should be prepared to find unexpected things. If
you don't have the network to do a huge, giant survey thing, either
partner with the media, partner with someone else, right? If you
ever want to partner on a research piece, we're gonna do something
amazing, Kathleen.
Kathleen: I'm calling you right after
this.
Andy: Yeah. When we hang up, we're gonna
create a small piece.
Kathleen: We're gonna figure out what the
missing statistic is.
Andy: Yeah. It's gonna be good, or just use
that observation trick, or, better yet, here's an even easier one,
you can aggregate data from other surveys. So, every year, I do
this how much money do marketers make survey or not a survey but a
research piece. Now, I have no data about how much money marketers
make, but I just go to Glassdoor and payscale.com and find the median of all of
their marketing job titles compensations. I immediately have 60,000
data points and almost a more authoritative answer than either of
them because I have the combined.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Andy: I can say like, "The average marketing
coordinator makes $43,000" or, whatever the numbers are. So, you
can also just aggregate data from other sources. Popularizing
existing research, there's nothing unethical about it. It's called
being like Malcolm Gladwell, that's all. There's lots of people who
mostly do marketing of other people's research. That's not weird.
But I would start by looking at your industry. Try to find a
missing statistic, that thing that's frequently asserted but rarely
supported.
Kathleen: Well, it sounds like what I'm
hearing is something that actually makes me excited, which is that
you don't have to be a statistician. You don't have to be trained
in the art of asking questions a certain way. It really does sound
like you have to scratch your own itch. You have to think about
"what's that piece of data that I want?" and maybe put together
just a short list of questions around that. You could start with
that, or, I loved your example of the observable survey of the
websites. Are there things out there or trends that you could
observe? Like you did, get a virtual assistant to do some of the
work for you. All of this, I'm thinking, at least from what you
said, it doesn't have to be a massive undertaking. You can make it
a massive undertaking if you want to, but you don't have to.
There're a lot of ways to simplify it, which is really
reassuring.
Andy: Yeah, yeah. There's tools that have all
kinds of data where you can just grab the dataset from there and,
sometimes, combine different datasets. Seriously, in a mini
workshop, if you and I spent 20 minutes, had a glass of wine and
just brainstormed, we'd come up with some great topics. You could
just imagine what the outcome would be, what the insight would be,
who would care about it, how you'd promote it, where you'd publish
it, what formats might it work well in, who might be an ideal
contributor to it, what influencers would want to know. There's so
much missing information in the world, right? These are great days
to be a marketer and think bigger than the other marketers around
you.
Kathleen: Yeah, and so many great tools for
collecting and analyzing data, too, that weren't there just a few
years ago. Well, so much good stuff here. This is so interesting
and I am 100% gonna take you up on that. Let's have a glass of wine
and brainstorm topics.
In the meantime, I'm going to ask you
the same few questions I ask everyone. So, starting with the one
that bubbled your name to the top of my list, company or
individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well
right now?
Andy: Well, I've gushed about her already.
I'm gonna give the name Sonia Simone because I owe so much to her
writing and teaching in the very beginning. Copyblogger is an amazing resource to this
date. Rainmaker Digital is the other name for the
brand, but Sonia Simone, I got to see her two weeks ago. It was
awesome, it was beer not wine, but I saw her at Social Media Marketing World, which was fun.
Yeah. If you ever talk to her or have her on your show, she has
this just soft voice, but knows every answer. She knows everything,
she's a killer SEO, she's just an incredible, incredible marketer.
Her targeting is accurate, her quality is huge. She's so unassuming
about it all, but that woman could blow up any brand. She's
amazing.
Kathleen: Well, now I'm going to have to have
her on. So, Sonia Simone, if you're listening, I'm coming out for
you. I'm looking for you to be my next guest.
Building on that, marketing is
changing so quickly. The technology that underpins how we market is
changing so quickly. How do you stay up-to-date? What are your
favorite sources for educating yourself?
Andy: So, I like this format. I like that
we're on a show and I think that it's a great opportunity and our
listeners will appreciate a podcast recommendation, I hope, because
podcasts are just a fantastic way to learn while your eyes and
hands are busy. Experts On The Wire with Dan
Shure is an SEO podcast that a lot of people still don't
know about. I'm listening right now to his 90th episode, but he has
so many great guests that you've never heard of who know so much.
Some of it's partly news, a lot of it is very tactical, but, for
anyone interested in search, Experts On The Wire by Dan
Shure is an excellent podcast.
Kathleen: That sounds like a great
recommendation. I, too, love podcasts, which is probably why I
wound up starting one, so I'll have to check that out.
Lastly, you've shared so much great
information and so many wonderful insights into how to conduct
original research. If somebody out there is thinking about doing
this and wanted to get in touch with you and ask some questions,
what's the best way for them to reach out to you?
Andy: LinkedIn might be my best social network,
although I'm very active on Twitter. Yeah, orbitmedia.com, or social media, or andy@orbitmedia.com is my
email. My phone number is (773)353-8301, leave me a voicemail.
Kathleen: He wins the prize as the first guy
to give out his phone number in a podcast.
Andy: Everyone has everyone's phone number,
anyway. Who cares, right?
Kathleen: That's true.
Andy: People don't call each other unless
they're serious about really something urgent.
Kathleen: I love it. Well, that was one thing
that Oli did say about you when he mentioned your name was that
you're a great inbound marketer not because you're trying to
actively sell something but, rather, because you're trying actively
to be helpful. I think this is the perfect example of that, so
thank you so much for sharing all of this.
This has been really fun for me. If
you are listening and you enjoyed the podcast, I would love it if
you could give us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever
platform you choose to use when you listen. If you know
somebody who's doing really kick ass inbound marketing
work, tweet me
at @WorkMommyWork because I would love to
interview them. Thanks, Andy.
Andy: Thank you.