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Inbound Success Podcast


What do the most successful inbound marketers do to get great results?

You’ve heard the stories about companies using inbound marketing to dramatically increase sales, grow their business, and transform their customer relationships, but not everyone who practices inbound marketing knocks it out of the park.

If you want to know what goes into building a world class inbound marketing campaign that gets real, measurable results, check out the Inbound Success podcast. Every week, host Kathleen Booth interviews marketing folks who are rolling up their sleeves, doing the work, and getting the kinds of results we all hope to achieve.

The goal is to “peel back the onion” and learn what works, what doesn’t and what you need to do to really move the needle with your inbound marketing efforts. This isn’t just about big picture strategy – it’s about getting actionable tips and insights that you can use immediately in your own marketing.

Jun 18, 2018

What are some quick, low cost ways to generate fresh content and leads if you are a startup marketer with a lean team?

 

On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Parker Dewey VP of Marketing Michele Aymold shares what she's focused on as she takes the reigns of marketing for this fast growing Chicago area startup. In her case, she's applying lessons learned from her days running marketing for G2 Crowd and is using surveys to gather data on her audience and turn it into fresh content for the company while using lead nurturing funnels to keep Parker Dewey top of mind with survey respondents. 

Listen to the podcast to hear Michele's tips for using surveys to generate leads and hear more about the results she's gotten with this technique.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success Podcast. This is Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. Today I'm excited to have with me Michelle Aymold, who is the VP of Marketing for Parker Dewey. Welcome, Michelle.

Michele: Hi. Thank you.

Kathleen: I'm interested to talk to you. Prior joining Parker Dewey, which I have heard described as a small start up in Chicago that is getting a lot of buzz, you were with G2 Crowd, which I think of as a large company just because G2 Crowd has been very visible to me in my career as a marketer.

Michele: That's good. It means that I did a good job.

Kathleen: Well that's what I was going to say. Obviously you did something right, because you know, maybe it wasn't a very large company, but it was an established company that had an established marketing department. Certainly you grew it over time.

I want to start by having you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, but then I also want to hear a little bit about making that transition from a more established firm into a start up environment. Let's just start there and see where it takes us.

Michele: I started my full-time marketing career back in 2007 just as I was finishing up a graduate degree. I think I thought I wanted to be a professor and that was a terrible idea. But I definitely worked hard through undergrad and grad school.

I've always just been really interested in how people make decisions. I think that knowledge that I was learning in school, it really led me to marketing because I think it helped me kind of get into a buyer's shoes and think through the process so that I could build better campaigns to help them make those decisions.

I started working for the University of Illinois at Chicago and marketing some programs for them for non-traditional students. Found my way through tech and eventually found my way to G2 Crowd. That was a really awesome experience. I got to help grow the team. I love peer learning. I loved working there. The great part was, it was easy to get the customers to market for us.

Kathleen: Can you just state one word about what G2 Crowd is? In case somebody listening doesn't know.

Michele: Yeah, totally. G2 Crowd is the largest business software review site, so anything, whether it's an accounting tool, or a marketing automation tool. You can find reviews from real users on that site.

Kathleen: Yeah, it's great. I know that when I am in conversations with prospective clients thinking of hiring impact, and I did the same in my prior agency, when they are trying to decide.

You know, we do a lot of work with HubSpot, and if they're trying to decide, is HubSpot really worth it for me? We would always send them to G2 Crowd as like a nice, independent, third-party platform, where they could read reviews.

Michele: Exactly.

Kathleen: It's super helpful for that kind of thing.

Michele: I think it makes you look smarter too, right? Like you can give your own opinion, but "hey, don't listen to what I have to say, go ahead and read what others are saying as well."

Kathleen: Yeah, exactly. So you were doing marketing at G2 Crowd, you did a great job, as we said, because you had me thinking it was a huge company. And then what made you make the move into the startup world? That's just a very different environment.

Michele: I took a step back from building a big team to join in a little one, but I'm glad to hear there's lots of buzz, and that means I'm working hard again and making it work.

Parker Dewey is super interesting to me and a passion of mine. What we're doing is helping college students and recent graduates get that career experience they need for entry-level roles. We're a freelance platform, and anything and everything that you can think about in intern or freelance or Dewey, we get the college students and recent grads to do it. They can add those skills to their resume, you get help, and then one thing that differentiates us is we're not a recruitment firm, so if you've got a really great experience with someone, we encourage you to hire them. There's no additional fee or anything, we just think of ourselves like the facilitators.

So, like I said, I mentioned that I started marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago and just always been passionate about helping students sort of learn outside of the classroom.

Kathleen: You really did kind of come full circle and wind up back in that world of education. Even though it's not technically an education company, there's that link there. I think that's kind of cool.

Michele: Absolutely. Yeah.

Kathleen: So, Parker Dewey. In my head I'm thinking of it like the Tinder of businesses and recent college grads.

Michele: Yeah, yeah.

Kathleen: What geographic area do you cover? Like, if I'm a company in Connecticut, can I use Parker Dewey?

Michele: Yes, please do. We've got students actually everywhere. It's just US-based students for now. Who knows what the future will bring?

But again our goal really is to help anyone anywhere to get those students experience. A lot of the projects really lend themselves well to remote work. Like I've got a recent grad working on some social media for me this week. But then, because we've got networks or partnerships with the universities and colleges around the country. There could be someone that could come into your office and help you if needed too.

Kathleen: That's great. I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who are now going to go out and look at your website and find solutions for all of the many things that they haven't gotten done that they could've if they only had an eager young college grad to help.

Michele: Exactly.

Kathleen: I even have some things I might need.

Michele: Immediately when I heard about it, I was like "oh I have 20 things."

Kathleen: Totally! Especially if you're heading up a marketing team. I feel like I'm always drinking from a firehose.

So I'm curious, having gone through the experience, it sounded like you built the G2 Crowd marketing team from a very small team to what is becoming a much larger team.

As you come into Parker Dewey, it's a smaller company with a smaller number of marketing resources. You obviously are going to have limited time and budget. Based on the experience you've had, what are you focusing on to produce results for Parker Dewey from and inbound marketing standpoint?

Michele: Yeah, so like I mentioned at G2 Crowd, I was lucky that I got the customers working for us, right? So once you got your first review at G2 Crowd, you are more likely to tell your other customers and your other prospects, "check this out, check this out." So that was really helpful.

I'm actually starting to do something very similar here at Parker Dewey. Like I said, we've got this relationship with colleges and universities, and so as they start to have students and recent grads getting employed, getting this crucial experience, then they're telling more of their students, "oh my gosh, you have to do this." They're also telling some of their business connections, whether that's through the alumni network or what have you, "This is a great way that you can contact our students and get them working for you."

So I'm big on getting everybody else to help me.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Michele: When you're a small team, and you've got a limited budget, you rely on everyone else. So, that's one thing that I've been working on.

Kathleen: How do you do that? Let's actually dig into that a little bit deeper.

So you know that you want this virality, you want the colleges spreading the word, you want the students spreading the word, you want the businesses that hire them spreading the word.

Other than sitting back and hoping that that's going to happen, how are you going about encouraging that behavior?

Michele: We all know from experience that there's these pain points, but I think sometimes we feel, "It's just me, I'm just overwhelmed, I'm just overworked, I'm just having trouble hiring my next hire."

So what I've done at several companies I've worked through over the years, is work on the survey method. So, using the survey, getting people to answer some quick short questions about how they work and what their challenges are, and then turning that data into something that I can then present back to others.

My favorite example is actually just talking to someone like you and saying "Well we've helped other small businesses with this type of project, is that something that you need help with?"

And with that data, I mean I think it really helps to validate again, those paying points, and that there is a solution for you.

Kathleen: So, you put together a survey. Are you sending these surveys just to clients who have used your service already? Or are you sending it out to a broader audience?

Michele: No, to everyone. And actually so your audience probably was at INBOUND last year. For G2 Crowd we did something similar, just last year, at the INBOUND conference.

We were there asking questions about how people use reviews to make business decisions, how they trust them, if they trust them, what makes it trustworthy? And getting all that really valuable data that I can then turn around and turn into multiple pieces of content.

I'm a big fan of repurposing and I really just think, again, it all kind of goes back to that. We all sort of know we've got a problem, but when there's a stat behind it, when there's some data points behind it, it's like oh yeah, it's not just me, and I think that's really reassuring.

Kathleen: Now, as a young firm that is still building its audience, how do you build a list for that survey? Like, if somebody's listening and thinking "gosh I wanna try this," I guess my first question is how do you determine who it should go to? And how do you build that list? But then the second really is also do you put in place any kind of incentives for people to actually respond?

Michele: Yeah, yeah, so couple different thoughts on that. First of all, I feel really lucky that Parker Dewey has a network already. Whether it's through the Chicago entrepreneur scene, as well as through these colleges and universities that are just eager to partner with different innovative solutions to help their students transition from classroom to career.

So, I haven't had to do much list-building yet, which is amazing. But back at other companies and back at other places, I think the thing is to cast sort of a broad net at first and have your survey respondents sort of filter themselves, so instead of just saying "I just want marketers to ask this," but if you've got sort of connections in the network and a list, ask anybody to respond and have them identify their titles so that you could sort out and filter the data.

Michele: I definitely rely on my social networks and my in-person networks, and spreading the word that way.

And I think, again, what has seemed to have helped, you talked about rewards and incentives, a lot of times again, people just want that data to sort of understand how I measured up.

And so that's always number one, before we even plunk down money for a prize or gift card, like let's just see how many people will take it with the promise of the report in the end and we've been wildly successful to be perfectly honest.

Again, people just want this knowledge and want to learn from it.

Kathleen: Now do you have in your head when you send these surveys out, do you have like a certain minimum number of responses that you need so that you feel like the data you're getting will be statistically significant?

Michele: Yeah, for sure. So when we just did our one last year -- last fall with G2 Crowd -- we got over 500. And our goal really at the time was 300 just for that particular project.

So getting more than 500 -- we all felt really great about that and I have to thank the INBOUND attendees as well, because I think I hit up everybody.

But yeah, so it depends on your industry, obviously, and your niche. I don't think anything under 100 is worth much. That said, I mean it's easy for a marketer to say "hey I did a poll."

I mean, I think it's easy for a marketer to say, "Hey, I did a poll and here's some responses I get."

Kathleen: Smoke and mirrors, right?

Michele: Exactly. Yeah.

Kathleen: I guess my next question is really, do you have a personal feeling for how long you can make a survey and still expect people to respond, and do you set that expectation when you send it to them? Like, "this is five questions or this is two minutes."

Michele: I think more about the time because every question's sort of different. Sometimes you've got open ended ones in there that you really feel passionate about including and then maybe some ranking and things.

I also look back at the G2 crowd one we did last fall and think, "Oh, we really should have edited that more because I was really long winded." We really could have rephrased it, but, again, when you're running quickly to launch you kind of just get it out there and see what happens.

Michele: Like I said, I kind of try and pay attention to time. Time is money. Time is valuable and so I try and keep it under five minutes for the respondent.

Another good tip I learned, and I think it was from a graduate school class, so maybe it's the only thing I took away, but all that demographic info at the end, people always want to put it up front to sort of try and self select it.

Like I said, sometimes you just need data and that's the easiest thing. It's okay if you skip it if you don't get someone's job title. You still got their responses. Or you don't get their company sizes but you still get their responses. Just that little tip.

Kathleen: Thanks for the good feedback.

Michele: Its the least important when it comes down to what you're actually going to use those results for.

Kathleen: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What tool are you using for your surveys?

Michele: I've used everything. I'll say right now with Parker Dewey we're playing around with Typeform. I love just the interface. It's just very nice and clear and I feel like it gently guides you from question to question. I can also think back to early days setting up a very custom form that really was a survey back in my email tool.

Kathleen: There's a lot of tools out there, that's for sure. When somebody responds on the survey that you're doing, are you looking at that person as a lead and are you funneling them into some kind of nurturing sequence or is it really just for the data at this point?

Michele: I definitely am funneling them somewhere. Looking at those responses and keeping your survey relatively short will help you do a better job at that.

There's the people who answer exactly what your gut feeling was and, yes, they have the pain. I'm definitely going to remind them, "Hey, we believe we've got a solution for this."

There's the other people on the other end that say, "No, I'm not having problems with that. That's not an issue for me." You can learn from them, get advice. Maybe they're not an advocate because they don't need your solution, but you can really learn a lot from them.

Turn their tips into content, help others get help.

Then there's all those people in between that you can nurture and do great things with.

Kathleen: So you get these results, they come in, you funnel the respondents into the various pathways that you've established for nurturing. Talk me through what you do with those raw results and how that then gets turned into different pieces of content.

Michele: I usually start with just a big master report. Here's everything we learned. We did that at G2 Crowd again last year and took the report and gave that to everyone who took the survey. We also made it available on the website and promoted it a lot at events and through the team's emails and things. We gave it away for free.

There was no form fill to view this data. It was because we really felt the data justified what our goal was -- to show people that yes, business buyers are using reviews to make these decisions.

We gave that away, which was great. We got the report to more than ten thousand people, which was awesome.

Michele: Then the easiest thing to do from there is quickly turn your report into a presentation. We had a webinar shortly thereafter and got people to register for that. We're able to take some of the webinar content, turn it into small and bite sized videos.

Then again, the idea is to offer people more and more information about the different results. We had ended up with a lot of cool infographics and social images just from the couple of data points that we got.

Kathleen: Is all of that content and that repurposed content being published on your website or are you looking to seed it out in other places, like other websites or other blogs, et cetera?

Michele: Well, at G2 we just self publish. I think we had a pretty good blog following.

Here at Parker Dewey, as I'm getting ready to launch my next survey, my goal is really going to be to get some of the college and universities to pick it up because I think they're going to help me build my audience the most because they're already well known. They've already got great web traffic and domains.

Kathleen: They have those fabulous .edu backlinks.

Michele: Exactly. Anything I can share with them to get them sharing is definitely going to help me spread the message far and wide.

Kathleen: Great. When you think about doing that, are you creating beyond ... Are you essentially doing their work for them and giving them promotional assets? How much do you give them?

Michele: Yes. Doing the work for them, and that's because I've been in their shoes and I know that even when you're at a large organization like that it's almost the same as being at a small organization. There's just always so many different things that you can do and so many different directions you're pulled in.

I'm going to seed them up with some templates and some suggestions and let their team sort of take from there to brand it to their own University and culture and all that.

Kathleen: I do find that any time you want somebody else to promote your stuff for you, the easier you make it for them, the higher the likelihood that anything will happen.

Michele: Absolutely. Yes.

Kathleen: Have you already tested out the survey strategy at Parker Dewey or is this going to be your first time?

Michele: We did a quick poll. We only put three questions in and just sent it to a few prospects just to get their feedback and hopefully have some more intelligent conversations.

We haven't launched a bigger survey yet. That's the next step.

To your earlier question about who you send it to, Parker Dewey is a dual marketplace. We also have his connection with the colleges and Universities.

I'm playing around this time with, do I want to send something to everybody? I think I do. I think I'm going to get some interesting layers and interesting answers by designing one that a recent grad, an employee, or a University could answer.

Kathleen: Hmm. That will be interesting. You're definitely going to have to take a lot of care in how you structure questions so that they can be relevant to those very different audiences, but ...

Michele: For sure.

Kathleen: It's going to be cool if you're able to pull it off. 

So you haven't really seen concrete results from this yet at Parker Dewey, and I don't know how much you can share about the results you had at G2 Crowd, but can you give us a sense about what sort of an impact this had, either on visits, traffic, leads, conversions, what have you?

Michele: At G2 Crowd, I know I asked someone to share with me the data so I know we got something like 289 people to attend that webinar and then those all went directly to sales to followup and continue the conversation.

Like I said, the report was free. There was no form fill, but at the end there was a call to action so we got a good percent, I want to say, two percent to continue on to the next action, which was really exciting.

I've also done this at other companies before. I was at Big Machines before Oracle acquired them. What we did with that was we took the data that we had pulled and actually turned it into an assessment, so we flipped it around and would invite companies to come understand where they were and how they lived in those different stages.

That actually ended up being our number one meeting booker. It just was a really great way, again, just people who feel pain and sort of just want to understand "Is everyone else like me?"

Kathleen: Yeah. That's awesome. I'd love to hear about some of the other things that you're planning with Parker Dewey and are these things based on stuff you've done elsewhere or are you coming up with some new ideas for the new company? Anything you can share on that front?

Michele: I just started an email series and it's me, it's really me.

I'm talking about the ways that I am relying on these college students to help me get work done and get it started. I wrote about my experience posting my social media job and it really only took five minutes to post. Here's what I get as a result from this student.

I'm really just looking forward to being me this time around. I think because we're young and small I can let myself shine and still think about the corporate image.

I also have experience building a team and working for small companies that grew fast. I'm excited about that.

Kathleen: When you think about doing an email series where the intent is really for you as an individual to shine through, what does that look like?

Email can manifest in so many different ways. From a design standpoint it can be very plain, html, and look like it just came from your Microsoft Outlook account or it can be super designed. You could have formal call to action buttons. I'm just wondering what your emails are going to be like and how do you translate your personality through?

Michele: I did a test. I tested one with a pretty banner and a button versus the plain text one and the results were close, but the plain text one got me more clicks. That's what I'll keep doing for now. I think I definitely want to add in some video down the line and some images and things, add them back in, but not so much in the html format.

Kathleen: It got you more click throughs on links in the email or opens?

Michele: Yes. Click throughs in the email.

Kathleen: Got it. Its really interesting. This is something that we're talking about a lot here at IMPACT because there are a couple of other companies that have really doubled down on that plain html format.

Drift, as an example. Nikki Nixon over at Flip My Funnel does really fantastic plain html community updates.

It's interesting. We have a lot of internal debate here on my team with some people saying that that can backfire sometimes because it makes it look like you're trying to hoodwink your target into thinking it's directly from you and it's not a mass email, and other people saying, "No, it's not about that. It's just more about stripping away unnecessary stuff." It's such an interesting topic right now.

Michele: I think it really depends on the audience and your two examples, Drift, and Nicki at Flip My Funnel, and myself for this particular series that I've started, we're all focused on marketers.

I'll admit it too, when I see sort of a very beautiful email, it's beautiful, but I might not start reading and taking the time to really click through it.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Michele: Maybe I'm a little more opposed to it. I think it's always important to continue testing, whether it's one audience or different audiences. Since I've worked really closely with HR industry in the past, and I would say the pretty button works better for them, and let's probably think about it in reverse. They're getting inundated with all these internal messages of "I need you to do this, I need you to do that", and handling boring stuff, so to speak, through their inbox, so, a fun email makes a difference.

Kathleen: Yeah, and I always also wonder -- the reason I was asking about whether you were referring to click through rates or open rates -- I also wonder if sending a plain HTML email increases the likelihood that your email will go into the main inbox of the recipient as opposed to the promotions tab or something along those lines because you don't have all that other stuff in it and Gmail maybe won't see it so much as a big email blast. They're no way to figure out if that's true or not, but it's something that I'm really curious about also.

Kathleen: I'll be interested to see how it turns out.

Michele: In my test that I just ran, the graphic one got more opens, but the subject line was exactly the same, so, I don't put too much stock in it, and I was specifically focused on the click through rate because that was what I wanted measure.

Kathleen: What platform are you using to measure your email performance?

Michele: I'm using HubSpot.

Kathleen: You are? Okay. Did you do a true A/B test in HubSpot where it picks a winner or did you just split your list and send-

Michele: I split my list 50/50 because it was a smaller list.

Kathleen: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I think that's what we were thinking about doing as well.

Kathleen: So, what else do you have in your bag of tricks?

Michele: A lot. I'm real excited about some of the play books that we ran at G2 Crowd and adopting them to this audience. Just some simple things like setting up some tweets that show off the success. We ran a really great, effective campaign.  We called it the "Twitter Thought" but it was always someone behind the scenes loading it in and had an excellent social media specialist who wrote it all.

Michele: Then I'm hoping to do the same thing here and just again show off the success of the projects that are getting done on the platform and try and keep us front and center in people's minds as they're thinking about what they can get done.

Kathleen: Now, Twitter. That's so interesting that that's your example. I feel like that is the most polarizing social network of all.

Michele: It is.

Kathleen: I happen to be a huge fan.

Michele: Well maybe Facebook now, I don't know.

Kathleen: Well, yes. That's true. I happen to be a big fan of Twitter. I like it a lot, but I think that there are specific ways we need to use Twitter to get value out of it.

Kathleen: You have, and what's interesting to me is that you have very different audiences. You have the universities, you have the businesses, and then you have the recent college grads. Which of those audiences are you going to target through Twitter, or is it all of them?

Michele: It's all of them and it's something that we actually discussed at G2 Crowd and did a little bit of testing on whether the value of having multiple Twitter handles and multiple channels versus just one brand of channel. We came to the conclusion at G2 Crowd -- and I'm using sort of that experience here at Parker Dewey -- that one is better.

Michele: I think a lot of that's based on the fact that it's moving really fast. People are going to follow hashtags and follow conversations that they're interested in and tune out the rest that they're not interested in.

I think, again, ultimately if you are that multifaceted platform, you should show that you've got multiple audiences that you're engaging with on an ongoing basis.

Michele: We're planning to do the same thing with Parker Dewey. We just had this discussion the other day, "Should we split it up into different channels"? I said, "No. Let's learn from the past and save a step".

Kathleen: Are you going to do the same thing for your other platforms too, like Facebook for example? Are you going to have one presence?

Michele: Yep. That's easier for me right now.

Kathleen: Yeah, that's for sure.

Michele: But, you know, again, it all depends on the targeting and the message. I trust that my audiences knows what's for them and what's not, and by the same token, if it's not for them it's also not harmful to learn about what those audiences are doing and learning.

Kathleen: I feel like I talk to a lot of companies that have that exact challenge.

In fact, we have a client right now that has that exact challenge that is serving extremely different audiences. They have a product/service that they sell where they're basically connecting photographers with companies. They've been struggling with, "do we create a different presence for the photographers versus the companies"? It is a discussion that is had in many places.

Michele: Personally, I think if your company's that facilitator then you need to be the expert in both those audiences. Again, having one unifying channel shows that expertise. I think you should definitely select targeted content for each, but-

Kathleen: Yeah. Well, there's probably also something to be said for, like if I'm a college student and I'm looking for great opportunities, there's something to be said for me going on to your social media presence and seeing that the amazing businesses that I might want to work for are already in your orbit, you know? The businesses seeing that there some great colleges and universities that are a part of your community. I think that there's a legitimizer there you can capitalize on.

Michele: Absolutely. Yeah. For sure.

Kathleen: Cool. I always like having conversations like this where marketers have entered a new role and a couple of my guests have been like this because, it's almost like you get a do over. Not that you need one. But you do -- you get all the lessons of the past and you get to say, "Okay, I'm starting fresh. What am I goning to pull in with me?"

Kathleen: It's neat to hear that those are the things you're pulling in with you.

Michele: I'm excited. I love it. It was a hard choice to leave G2 Crowd. They're doing amazing things, but as I said in the beginning, I'm passionate about this. I'm passionate about those topics, so I was really excited to join and everyday is a new adventure.

The other flip side of that is everything I do is going to have some results and that's a fun place to be as well.

Kathleen: Yeah, and it's interesting that you say that because I have this conversation a lot with different folks on my team, because we're growing really quickly.

There are some people who are only happy in a very start up-y environment where they get to get their hands messy in a lot of different pots, and then there are some people who really like the larger company and having a very defined scope of work and set of responsibilities, and that's okay.

You just have to know what's going to get you jazzed everyday to get out of bed.

Michele: I've learned I'm gonna be stressed no matter what I'm doing. It's my personality. I'm a problem solver so if there's not problems, I find one and I solve it.  

Kathleen: It would be boring if there no problems.

Well, I want to make sure we don't end without me asking you the two questions that I love to ask my guests.

The first one -- and I'm really curious to hear what you're gonna say in this one because especially having come from a place like G2 Crowd and having seen so many different companies and how they go to market -- company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?

Michele: So, you already mentioned her, but a big big shout out to Nikki Nixon from FlipmyFunnel. G2 Crowd was an early sponsor of that. As far as I know, it all started as a road trip for Terminus and how many of us have done a road trip before? But she and her team really built it into a community. I just think they did such a great job and were able to really help marketers learn to segment better and become more efficient.

Michele: Locally, there's a company called Active Campaign, and they're trying to do something very similar and they're just using Meetup to organize all Chicago marketers. I'm missing it. I think it's tonight or next week so I can't go to the most recent one, but they've really hit the nail on the head of doing topics that are top of mind to marketers here in Chicago and I'm excited to see them branch that out to other cities as well.

Kathleen: Ooh, I'll have to check out what they're doing. Meetup is such a great resource that I think as marketers we overlook a lot.

Michele: Absolutely.

Kathleen: But I know I used to have a lot of clients in the software space, like Dell resellers for example, and they got tons of results out of sponsoring different Meetups and things like that. So, there's some little nuggets in there that are gold.

Michele: Yeah.

Kathleen: The other question is, with things changing so quickly in the world of digital marketing particularly, how do you stay up to date? How do you educate yourself?

Michele: The past three years that I was at G2 Crowd, for better or worse, I think I attended every single marketing conference at least once. I'll say some of my favorites would be Content Marketing World I think is a really good one, B2B Marketing Forum for martech but only if you're a nerd and I am a nerd because they really focus on numbers and oh yeah, there were even a couple of sessions that I was like, "Whoa, you're getting real granular there".

Kathleen: You mean like a data nerd? Somebody who wants to dig into the-

Michele: Yeah. I prefer face to face learning personally. At the same time, I'm always reading. I'm reading constantly, but there's something about that face to face and you learn from someone but then you also have those great side conversations. You start getting your ideas flowing, you write it down, you email your coworker who's still at their desk. I love it. I get a lot out of it.

Kathleen: You're always reading. Do you have a favorite book or blog?

Michele: My inbox is so full all the time, I don't actually know how I pick, just whatever subject line gets my attention.

Kathleen: That's the importance of the email subject line.

Michele: Yep.

Kathleen: Great. Well, this has been fun and I can't wait to test out a survey. Now you've got me inspired to do that.

Michele: Not too long, but do it. Go for it.

Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you for joining me. If somebody has a question or wants to learn more about Parker Dewey, how can they find you online?

Michele: ParkerDewey.com. I'm testing out all kinds of stuff so they can actually probably chat with me depending what page they go to.

Kathleen: Perfect. That's great. Well, thanks again, and if you are listening and you found value in this interview, I would appreciate it if you would consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever platform you listen on. If you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, please tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them.

Thanks, Michele.

Michele: Thank you. Bye.