The Exchanges

Q Okay. And then, so we talked about voice a customer. We talked about paid to amplify. Talk to me a little bit about your own team. So, so what do you mean by your team in LinkedIn?

A Yeah. So we created a channel called Operation LinkedIn, and essentially we have everyone share the posts that they're doing. We try to have it be tend to be topical focus. So talking about marketing automation, talking about owned assets, talking about AI, anything that kind of ties back or relates to our product. And we tried to gamify it a little bit. We had what we call the 10 K club, which means you got at least 10,000 views that week. And we tried to show what the top performing content was each week to give people specific examples of how they could up level. And so we continued to grow that. Our first goal was as a team to have 150,000 views a week, and then 200,250 thousand. And I think we're a little bit north of 300,000 a week. Impressions is what I'm talking about right now, right now. So we're continuing to try to iterate and improve and just have many different known faces on channels like LinkedIn that can help spread and distribute topical leadership. I think, again, the key here is we're not just sitting here talking about active campaign. We're talking about the category. So we're talking about email best practices. We're talking about the tactical layer. Um, not just company or product focused content.

AI assessment note: “we created a channel called Operation LinkedIn, and essentially we have everyone share the posts”

Q you know, person on their email, a send it thing and get a 60% open rate and a, and a 10% open to click through rate. You know, that's world class, but to get them excited about screenshotting that active campaign report, putting it up on LinkedIn and giving sort of, you know, your brand additional love is a whole nother activation channel, right? How do you make that happen?

A Yeah, for sure. So we've gone through a lot of iterations, and in the early days, we grabbed our highest NPS folks, we sent out an email to them, and I essentially just evoked, like, I'd love to know what do you love about ActiveCampaign, if you would share it, you know, yada, yada, yada. That obviously worked only for the best advocates. I'll kind of fast forward to the final version where we had, I think it was like our last one got 60 different customers to post, and the keys there were a couple fold. Number one is to give them an exact day, Number two, to give them an exact scope. So we'd love to know why you came from MailChimp or why you came from Brevo or ConvertKit to active campaign. So specific day, specific scope, and then some amount of reciprocity. So how can we help them? We're a big team. We have big social, so we can help repost their content. We can help have 50 members of our team jump in and engage on that content. If they have an asset like a podcast, we can get our team to follow and engage in that asset as well. So I think having reciprocity And also having a defined scope of exactly when and what that is what got the most buy-in to get customers to all post and weigh in on a channel like LinkedIn.

AI assessment note: “specific day, specific scope, and then some amount of reciprocity.”

Q on podcast. I see one called Email Einstein by Vera Sadlik and Andre. The 194 episodes since July of 2020. Uh, regardless if you've been on this one or not, if you did want to get on this one, it said, ListenNotes is saying it's a top 1.5% show for this topical category. What's the next step? What are you emailing the, the, the, the host? What are you saying?

A Yeah, great, great question. So I, I divide it into three parts. So the first part is the hook. So you want to watch at least one episode of the show and have something topical and relevant to the actual show because I've done a lot of podcasts. My process is I almost always would recognize at least one of the guests and I would use that personal relationship as a hook. If you don't have that breadth of kind of experience or knowledge, I would just watch an episode and that looks topically interesting and try to pull out something in that hook. So that's stage one. I also recommend that everyone leaves a five-star review for the podcast. It's a great way to lead with an actual value add. Every podcast host wants more quality reviews. So attach a screenshot of, of a five-star review you left them. That never hurts. The second middle section is the authority of like, why you, why are you relevant to their audience? And so I think thinking very intentionally about why you're helpful to their audience, not just like your credentials is important. So the middle part is you build authority. The third part, this is very important. Suggest very specific topics. Don't come in and just give something general. Like I'd love to talk about email marketing, right? That that's going to be boring. No, one's going to pick that up. But if I say something like, you know, newsletters are broken. 9…

AI assessment note: “I divide it into three parts. So the first part is the hook.”

Q Alright, let's wrap up here. Influencers. What should we know about influencers? How you were doing it?

A Yeah, for sure. So it's a much, it's a large conversation. I know we don't have a ton of time. So what I'll say is at a very high level, there's kind of like three buckets. There's performance oriented deals. That's what we started with. With performance oriented deals, you have a certain amount of target accounts. So I would sit down with a brand and I would say, Hey, we, in the next quarter, our target accounts is 20 paid accounts. I would then take the average amount that a customer would pay through one year. And that would be the cash That I would split 50 50. So let's just say the average customer pays 2000 dollars a year, right? And they have a target account of 10. So that's 20,000 dollars. So I would pay that influencer 10,000 dollars up front. They would get the remaining 10,000 dollars if they hit that specific target. And they'd have a whole set of deliverables, social posts, videos they'd made mentioning us at conferences, all these different kind of activatables would be in that contract. And what I liked about that model specifically is you're very much in the trenches and you have You know, you both have the same incentives, because they want to get the renewal, they want to get their second 50%, and they also want to get it renewed for next quarter, and it's very tangible, the outcome. The challenge with influencer marketing is often someone does a post, it get…

AI assessment note: “There's performance oriented deals. That's what we started with.”

Q the YouTube channel podcast and an email list, and they go, let me go do all those things. And what they, what they don't realize is you have to study the history of how that company built those assets. There's a sequencing that's important to that. When you came into active campaign, what was the first priority on earned media? And then what did you stack on second and third?

A Yeah, for sure. So the first thing is I found that guesting on podcasts has been a really powerful way to get yourself in front of large audiences and to do it relatively quickly. Starting a podcast is great, but it's slow and it takes a long bill to get to meaningful results. But if you hop on 20 podcasts that are say top five percent, you can very quickly accumulate hundreds of thousands of impressions from those viewers. So my process very specifically is this in the early days. I would go to a platform called Listen Notes. Listen Notes is a large database. And on listen notes, you can search any podcast and you can see it's ranking. You can also get email contact information. You can also use filters. So you can look very specifically at different topical clusters, or even look at other people who are similar, like thought leaders in the space who you want to see what podcasts have they been on to give you a list of which ones might make sense. And then I was, what did you search for that?

AI assessment note: “the first thing is I found that guesting on podcasts has been a really powerful”

Q Let's jump into LinkedIn first. So, uh, you say team voice customer and paid to amplify. Let me just quantify paid to amplify. I mean, can you give us a general sense there? Are you guys spending, you know, 10 grand a month on thought leader ads paying to amplify or like a hundred grand, a million a month? Can you give it, quantify that a bit?

A Yeah. So I don't have a exact budgetary numbers to give you, but what I can tell you is that the CPM is pretty efficient on our thought leader ads around 50 dollar CPM. So we're essentially driving pretty good brand awareness and exposure through those campaigns. What we do is we run, we do run some single image ads and single video ads, but typically we actually promote the best performing organic content either from our team or from our customers. Cause on LinkedIn, you can promote anyone's content Whether they are an employee or outside. So that's been our strategy is to have content that actually educates on the paid front. And that's been really effective for us.

AI assessment note: “I don't have a exact budgetary numbers to give you, but what I can tell you”