Lucy Heskins: Your Product as a Marketing Engine

You’ve got a great product customers love and you want to grow your user base. In this session, Lucy explains why the smartest way to growth is to align your marketing with the strengths of your product so your product becomes a marketing engine.

She will you how to understand the types of problems your customers experience and how that should shape your marketing to capture demand. Lucy shares case studies of companies that have developed powerful product-led marketing approaches successfully including Grammarly, Hubspot. She will help you understand the problems your customers face so that you can align your marketing and product marketing strategy with insights that will drive effective growth and product development.

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Transcript

Good morning, Lucy, what are you going to tell us today?

Lucy Heskins 

Thank you so much. I’m going to be talking to you all about how to use product as a marketing engine. And in essence, this is pretty much a session about how to make your product more discoverable to problem unaware and problem aware audiences through content and also product hooks.

So what I will do is do the generic ‘Can you see my screen?’ First of all, thank you so much for tuning in. So my name is Lucy, and I’m the director of Oh Blimey, so I just before I kick into the session, I just want to say thank you for tuning into what’s going to be my first ever Bos talk. I’ve been part of the Bos community now for about six, seven months, and generally one of the most inclusive and friendly environments. So yeah, thank you very Thank you very much for that.

So today I’m going to be talking to you all about how to use your product as a marketing engine. And what I’m going to be doing is I’m going to be splitting the session into three areas to help you think of ways that you can get your product in front of more of the right customers. Because, in essence, that’s what this is all about making your product discoverable by connecting content and product hooks. So the session is going to be split into three points.

The first one is going to be around the types of customer problems. So here we’ll dig into a bit of theory. We’re going to look at the problem awareness matrix, but we’re also going to look at ways to categorize the types of problems that your customers are likely to have.

Next we’re going to look at using content to create demand. So this is where I’m going to put my marketing hat on, and I’m going to be talking about how to use marketing content to attract those people right at the beginning of the purchase process. So what we’re trying to do here is attract people that don’t necessarily know that they’ve even got a problem yet. And what I’ll do is I’ll use an example of Grammarly, in my opinion, they’ve they provide like an excellent case study on how to use blog content to connect with those problem unaware audiences.

And then I’m going to finish up the session by looking at how to use product to capture demand. So this particular part will look at the concept of engineering as marketing, and that is something that really focuses on how to create useful tools for your ideal audience when they’re looking to serve or solve, sorry, those early stage problems. So this is going to be around identifying complementary product hooks, building trust, and then ultimately building your audience. I’m going to use the example of HubSpot website grader. I’m sure many of you are aware of that as an example, but it’s still going strong after I think it’s like it’s launched 15/16 years ago.

Now, before I do jump into the actual session, if I can just tell you a little bit about my background so you can see the context and where in why I’m sharing what I am today. So I run, Oh Blimey, and I’m a startup consultant for B to B tech companies. A lot of my work is around product validation and go to market. But a lot of the examples that I’m going to be sharing are also based on my personal experience of working in house for a startup that was operating within the Online Learning industry, and it was acquired late last year. And previous to getting the startup bug, I was head of marketing for a global recruitment and ATS company, and this role involved was pretty much me supporting a team of 20 sales people, and my focus was generating leads, generating leads and generating leads.

So a lot of the principles that I would bring into my role are very much based on inbound marketing, but you don’t want to hear just about me, so we’ll be looking at the likes of Grammarly, HubSpot, Canva, and a few brands that you might not necessarily associate of doing some of the things I’m going to be recommending today.

So if you’re ready, I’m going to jump into the first section, which is all around Unlocking Customer Problems.

Unlocking Customer Problems

So what I’m going to be doing is talking to you about two main frameworks to start creating this marketing engine of yours. The first one is the problem awareness matrix, and the second one is a way to look at the types of problems your customers have. And this is something that’s referenced in the cold start problem.

Now just a bit of background and how I decided that these would be the most two appropriate frameworks. So I mentioned a couple of minutes ago that I worked for this startup that was operating within the online learning space, and my role was part product and part marketing. So understandably, part of my arena is to get in front of new customers, in front of new markets and help the company find product market fit, whatever that might mean.

And, you know, this was pretty hard because we were really, really small team, and we’re working in this really saturated market. And the, I mean, the timing was brilliant, because all of a sudden we find ourselves up against LinkedIn learning, and for the particular segment that we’re going for at this part, LinkedIn learning are offering their product for free, so the competition is really, really against us, and the tools that I’m using at this point to help us grow visibility of our product had major flaws, so we were using things like buy personas, which were great at telling me about the who, but not necessarily the why. They didn’t unlock the motivation why a customer might switch from one product to another. We’d use demographics, things like thermographics, which were great for targeting, but again, they provided this very one dimensional approach at looking at solving problems. And because we’re a startup, we’re operating lean, which is code for we don’t really have that much money, and our resources are really kind of kind of tight, so we can’t necessarily experiment on things. We can’t try new things. We can’t try new stuff, sorry. So we’ve got to be really, really focused.

And as a result, we went into what I call safe bets mode. We were so worried about taking risks, we ended up just creating content and offering parts of our product for free that every like everybody else was offering. So we’re literally just following what the market was doing. And the problem with this was that none of that turned into traffic. Didn’t turn into conversions. We were trying to take elements of our product and link it to real like top of the funnel, topics that were being talked about, spoken about rather in the news. We’re trying to make it relevant. But we were lacking in that ability to link the two. We couldn’t understand how to monetize it, and of the tools that we were creating, they just weren’t good enough. They weren’t solving early stage problems. So people weren’t weren’t sharing them.

So all of a sudden, we realized that we’re going to have to look at this through a completely different lens. So this is the first of the frameworks that I want to share with you on how we kind of answered some of those questions. And it’s the Problem Awareness Matrix, by Eugene Schwartz. Now I’m sure that this is going to be new to some of you. Some of it. Some of you might use this on a regular basis, but what I want to do is just lay a few foundations to make sure that we’re we’re all kind of starting on the same foot. Now, here’s why I love those things.

Okay, so this is something that a few of you might be familiar with some of it might be new, but what I’ll do is just give you a general overview. So along at the top of this matrix, we’ve got the stages of awareness. It goes from being problem unaware all the way through to most aware. And underneath, you’ve got an articulation of what people are saying when they’re when they’re in these buckets. So if somebody is problem aware, they are likely to say something like, I’ve got a problem with my accounting software. Whereas if someone is product aware, they might say something like, I’m I’ve got to choose between zero and QuickBooks. So the intent is changing.

But what I want to draw your attention to here is the type of marketing section directly underneath. Because as people learn about a solution, marketing needs to the marketing focus, sorry, needs to go from being indirect to direct. It goes from the need to tell high level stories all the way through to personalized direct marketing, which is all around trying to get that conversion or trying to get that sign up, so the intent changes. Now, why this was useful for us when we were looking to try and grow the visibility of our startups product was, previous to this we would group our activity under the main bucket so awareness, consideration and evaluation, but all of a sudden, when you start looking at a matrix like this and understanding what people are saying, what messages we should be putting forward, you realize that you’re opening up these new stages. And you’re all of a sudden, you realize that you might not be creating content or aligning parts of your product where you should be.

So what I’m hoping is that you’re kind of looking at this, some of it will be familiar, some of it might be new. And what I want you to do is just just think about it from your products perspective. Like, do you actually have the customer language for each slot? Do you know what your customers are saying, and honestly, do you think that what you’re putting out from a content perspective or a product perspective actually aligns with what you should be saying at the right time? So that’s the first kind of framework that I want to share with you.

I’m now going to jump into the second one, which is all around types of problems..

Types of Problems

Okay, so we’ve just looked at the stages of awareness customers likely to move through when they’re buying a piece of software or they’re buying a product. So this is the second framework that I want to share with you, and hopefully you’re stuck when I introduce this, you’ll start to see it coming up more and more as we start looking at the actual case studies.

So this principle is based on the cold start problem, which is less referred to as the art of leveraging network effects to launch and scale businesses. So this is something that I learned when I was on the product led growth accelerator run by Wes Bush. And what Wes says is this is a really effective way to categorize the types of problems that someone may come across when using a product. So if you think about the slide I just showed, you, think of that as a timeline that’s chronological. This particular principle doubles down on just one of those stages and looks at things almost like like a cross section.

So the way that you were to use, or kind of understand this theory is know that every customer, when they come to your product, they’ve got a goal that they need to solve, and to achieve that particular goal, they’re going to be faced with problems and as product people, as marketers, this framework allows us to group problems into buckets – so beginner, intermediate and advanced problems.

Now the key to making the kind of uptake of your your product work is to one, understand the type of problem that your customers facing at that point, and two, to align the right part of your product to help them move on to the next stage. Now that’s a little bit of theory.

Canva

So what I’m going to do is very, very quickly show you an example with Canva. I’m going to go in and change that one go, can you see the Canva slide? Yeah, cool. Okay, I’ve got my pattern in. I know what I’m doing with that now. Okay, so we’re all familiar with Canva. Let’s say I’m going to use Canva from a perspective of Oh Blimey. So my goal going into Canva is to keep my clients happy by launching a number of marketing campaigns.

So in order to achieve this kind of big, big goal, I’m going to face a number of problems that I need to overcome to get me to the next stage.

So a beginner’s problem in this context might be, I’ve signed a client, and I say, Can I have a copy of your logo? And I realized that they don’t have it in the right format, so I’ve got to go somewhere to be able to recreate their logo and turn it into a JPEG or a PNG or whatnot.

Now an intermediate problem might be the client saying, we’re going to promote a new campaign. Can you help us put together a series of social media posts? They want to post it on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, for example. Now I know that each of those channels require different dimensions. They they require me to create a different type of asset, and it be a massive pain to be able to to have to create all of those individually and go in and out. So that feature of Canva is what I’m what I need to use. I need to be able to optimize the images. But I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t, if I hadn’t solved the problem that I previously had. I need a copy of the logo in the right format to be able to then create the assets so it’s all connected.

And then lastly, an example of an advanced problem then, is the client says, Okay, we’re we’re getting ready to launch this campaign. We’re going to be launching under a new brand or in different countries. So we’re going to need you to change the colors or the fonts or something. So for me to help them launch on time, and effectively, I need one place where I can manage all of their projects, upload multiple fonts and whatnot. I need to be able to send them real time work that I’m doing and ask feedback. The only way that I’m able to do that is if I’ve been able to successfully navigate through the first two problems that came before. So it’s all it’s all connected.

Now where this could go wrong is if you were to create a tool that’s pitched at the wrong problem level. Okay, so let’s say Canva offers me a free social media optimizing tool. I can only use that if I’m able to create a logo in the correct format in the first place, so they’re all connected. Okay, so what I want you to kind of take away from this particular slide, and this is, this is the last of the theory is you’re probably sat here thinking, Oh, I know what my customer problems are, but is there a way to really hone into your individual customer problems and then categorize them into beginner, intermediate and advanced? So I just want to kind of sow, sow the seed of that theory, because that’s now what’s going to influence the next two sections that we’re going to cover.

Okay, so we’ve done the theory. Now we’re going to look at ways to help make your product discoverable to those to that problem, unaware audience using content.

Okay, so to recap, a problem unaware audience is just as it sounds, it’s someone who doesn’t know that they’ve got a problem yet, and it’s our job to try and find these people who are kind of on the on the brink of realizing that they need to make a change. Now we do that in this section by creating marketing that’s indirect. You can see where this kind of sits within the matrix. And we do this by creating stories or answering questions to help provide value at that point of pain.

So what our aim here is you need to identify the early stage problems that our customers are likely to have, and then we need to find a way to create content, to create demand organically.

Now for marketers in the audience, you’ll know that I’m referring to Content Marketing here, but if you’re kind of new to this concept, what you’re looking for is a way to create brand awareness and a way to start attracting traffic to your website.

Leads. We’re not even touching leads at this point. I mean, if you did get a lead through this process, Brucey, bonus, but that’s not what this is all about, okay?

So we know that we’re targeting the problem unaware audience. We know that we need to focus on creating stories and answering questions through Q and A.

What about formats? So I’m going to approach this from a B2B perspective, and it’s recommended that the kind of the best formats that we should be using to tell these stories at this part of the process are maybe focus around videos, blogs and images. So think about it and how you might use these channels in your day to day life. So I know that I’ll go to YouTube and I’ll search for a tutorial on how to measure website traffic and after the cat videos and things, I’ll probably find myself watching a video that’s all around how to implement GA for, or there might be some kind of scare story about how I’ve only got X amount of months to implement GA for now.

Whilst I’m now navigating these searches on YouTube, at no point have I mentioned a brand name at all. Because I’m not, I’m not that far down the problem awareness matrix. I’m still, I still don’t really know that I’ve got a problem. And it’s this kind of organic intent which is possibly the reason why YouTube is actually the number one most visited website in the US by organic traffic. And according to RFS, hrefs don’t know which way that you sit, but YouTube is number one for organic traffic. And then if you think about blogs and Google, so how many times have you asked a question and someone has just gone just Google it? So it’s no wonder why 69% of marketers invest in SEO because they know that Google is likely to be kind of one of those first the first stage or the channel that people go to when they start this process. Now I wouldn’t be a marketer if I didn’t say this comes with its caveats. It does depend on your audience, depends on the channels that they use to kind of research and buy a product like yours, but some of these should kind of give you a few shortcuts to consider.

Grammarly

So yeah, right. Okay, so now hopefully I’m going to take all that theory and a few of the kind of pros about this approach, and I’m going to jump into how Grammarly connects all of this together. So as I mentioned, like for me, Grammarly presents this like amazing masterclass in how to build visibility of its product to a problem unaware audience. So if you are unsure or you’ve never heard of Grammarly, just a very quick recap. It’s a $13 billion grammar app, and it’s used by students and writers and the like who want to feel more confident when putting pieces of work together. So there’s a grammar checker, there’s a plagiarism checker, there’s a number of tools here.

Now, last year alone, Grammarly had 17.4 million Google visits to its website a month. And what’s really interesting about this figure is a third of those had navigational intent, so that is people typing in something like Grammarly login. The rest of it, that’s 6 to 8% all came from organic visits. So that’s people looking to solve a problem but they’re not mentioning Grammarly brand itself. So how does Grammarly then leverage content to get in front of this kind of problem unaware audience?

Okay, so their strategy is every single blog that they put out is tied to a tied to a customer problem, and the aim is to get people to their website. Now they’ve done a lot of work in investing in the right customer acquisition platforms. So they’ve they’ve got freemium work in they’ve got a number of product extensions. But in a nutshell, here’s how they make their product discoverable.

So first of all, they know their ideal customer, and they know their problems.

The second part is their content strategy is optimized around beginner problems, those ones right at the beginning. So examples of this would be, they’ve got content called how to sign off an email. They’ve got a bank of content that is all around common confusions. So is it accept, or is it accept? Is it practice, or is it practice? Brackets or parentheses? So these are the kind of queries that you’d do a quick Google search for. And what’s interesting is that all of these are top of the funnel searches. At this point, people are asking for kind of dictionary definitions, how to spell things they don’t know who Grammarly, Grammarly is. So by Grammarly creating blog content around this particular intent, it’s building its authority and it’s building its trust. It’s getting its brand there at the right moment for when somebody has that moment goes, Damn my spelling’s poor, or I need to hand in my dissertation get someone to check it.

Now, third part of how they get this working is that all of their call to actions are clear and they are optimized. So when you get onto the blog and you get the answer that you want, every single post either promotes the Chrome extension that it got, or some of their free tools. So free tools include things like the grammar checker or the plagiarism checker. Yes, there’s a nod to the pay products that they’ve got, but everything is all around getting them to the next hook as well.

So I think if you, if I was you right now, listening to me talk about this, I’d be thinking, Okay, well, whereabouts to get this information from in the first place? Like, how do you know what early stage problems are? And it genuinely is from their customers. So they’re already sat on a lot of data, okay? And they’re able to see what the search queries are coming through the app. That’s something within their control. But they’re also talking to their customers. They’re running interviews, they’re running surveys. They’re getting this voice, we call it voice a customer, which pinpoints where somebody was, when they were at that struggling moment. More of that later, but kind of as a high level with results for Grammarly then. So if we dig down even further, we’ve seen that they get 17.4 million visits a month. The grammar checker alone here gets 2 million visits a month. The website in total, has over 1700 index pages. So that the website is big, they’re very, very visible. And because of what they create and how closely it is tied to this beginner’s problem, they get a tremendous number of high value backlinks. So people value their content. People are sharing it, so people trust it. And you’ll see education establishments, the media, they’re all sharing links to Grammarly, which then helps push up the website in the search engines, and then, as a result, improve their visibility.

Okay, so we’re now going to get to the kind of the third part here. So we’ve covered ways to make your brand more discoverable by creating content for that kind of that first thought.

Now we’re going to look at how to focus on elements of your product to capture demand. So in a nutshell, this section is all around the concept that’s known as engineering as marketing. And if you’ve ever read the book traction, you’ll know that it’s one of the 19 traction channels that Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mayes suggests.

So in a nutshell, engineering, as as marketing, is all around creating useful tools for your audience to solve an early stage problem.

Now, what makes this different, to say a blog post, for example, is it’s all around capture and demand earlier on in the process, but it it comes, it comes at the stage before a free trial or before signing up for free freemium. Now this is a concept isn’t necessarily new, but I do think it is highly relevant, and that’s because of the rising costs of advertising, of customer acquisition. I was listening to an interview a while ago, and there was this guy from HubSpot that suggested that the majority of investment bypasses the company now and it goes straight to Google and Facebook. So I think marketing as engineering or using parts of your product as a hook is an effective way to kind of open up that funnel and also create assets of value.

So this is where it sits, within our within our matrix and examples of marketing, as engineering as we know it, formats include things like widgets, free apps, downloads, but let’s consider what it looks like in the real world. Okay, so here are a few examples, many of which I know that you’ll be familiar with. So we’ve got HubSpot, we’ve got Wix, Canva.

I came across Canvas tool recently. Their tool is the color wheel, and I came across it because I needed to find a complementary color to pair with a client’s brand, all I need to do is go in, pop a hex code in, and it gives me a series of colors that I should use in my my designs.

And there’s things like Sprout Social and they offer a free social media resizer, which lets you change the posts around or with the aim of trying to get you to sign up to their scheduling software.

Wix, for example, love them or hate them, they’ve actually got a business name generator. What’s interesting about Wix is that they’ve clearly identified who their customer is. It’s the it’s the small business owner. They know that if somebody is going to be setting up a website, they’re going to need to have a customer name, business name. Sorry, that’s really, really interesting.

Now, if you are, if you’re thinking about pursuing this as a way to kind of attract, attract because customers and build visibility, there are few rules or best practices to get get the most from this. So the tool that you create has to be complementary to your product, because you have to work out a way to monetize it. It’s got to be low friction. It’s going to be simple to use, and it’s going to be free. Free is the absolute most important bar. It’s more likely to be gated. So you might need to pop an email address in, and it needs to focus on one persona. You’ve got to make it super, super specific, because if you create something that’s just general, it’s not going to be valuable. Valuable people aren’t going to want to share. It’s just going to be a bit meh.

Now, the visibility benefits of considering creating a tool are tenfold. I mean, I’ve already showed you evidence that it can boost your SEO. We looked at the Grammarly case study there. Then there’s the social media aspect. So people talking about it on LinkedIn, Twitter. An example here is a couple of years ago I was on Twitter, and I wanted help to audit someone’s Twitter following, and someone mentioned the fake followers tool that Spark Toro offer, and I would, I would never have come across that if people weren’t talking about it in my kind of social networks.

And then possibly the kind of biggest value, certainly as kind of a performance marketer, is the audience building aspect. So if you get your tool, ask somebody to pop in an email address, for example, obviously, make sure you’ve got your GDPR set up, but that lays the foundation for nurturing campaigns. And all of this can come around from creating something that’s kind of generally, generally useful.

Now there is a massive misconception that only fun companies can do this, only fun brands can do this. But in my opinion, I don’t think there’s actually some such thing as a boring industry. I’d like genuinely think it’s a mind like, it’s a mindset thing. And I say that as someone who has worked in recruitment, data, hosted, telecoms, VOIP and something else like the pretty tough subject matter. But I think if you’re trying to make this work for your product, it comes down to three things, brand, solving a genuine problem and knowing that if you are promoting a B2B product, you’ve got to make it feel like a B2C product.

So on the on the screen, here are a few examples of brands that are also using engineering as marketing and offering parts of their product as hook hooks to get people to find it.

So I’ve mentioned Sprout Social, but we’ve got Zoopla there.

So Zoopla offer a house Valuation Tool. You pop in your postcode, pop in a couple of details, and it tells you roughly how much you could expect to get for for your house. And what else have we got? We’ve got the a recipe card generator. We’ve got a speed test. And I want to turn your attention to the gray screen that’s genuinely someone’s website. So I did this, did this, did a bit of research, and there’s a company called Diplo, and they offer so their their hook is an AI speech writing tool for diplomats and practitioners to ensure that when they are doing speeches they talk about cybersecurity correctly. Now that, to me, is quite dry content, because it’s not relevant, but all of a sudden you can see that that would actually be really useful for that particular audience.

So I think if you are sat here thinking, Okay, well, how do I get the ball rolling with this? And just bear in mind that go back to go back to your office and think about the data that you have that’s connected to your audience’s problem, and see if there is a way to automate it to give someone like that immediate pain relief. Those are the two things I would suggest you think about.

Okay, so what I’ll do now is jump into the example of the HubSpot website grader. So this is the last case study that I’m going to kind of dig into and show you how brands are using this. So I’m of I’ll just, I’ll admit it, I’m a massive HubSpot fan girl. I have been for absolutely years. But for me, they give you kind of the best example of how to use Martin as engineering to make your product discoverable. So the website grader, if you’re not aware of it, it was created back in 2008 and it’s a tool that helps you to kind of evaluate the performance of your website. So you pop your your URL, your email address, in, and then all of a sudden it tells you what audits your site, speed, your SEO, your design, what your website looks like on mobile, and you get an instant audit. So you get instant results on where your website is falling short and what you might want to improve on. And then following that, because they’ve got my email and they’re starting to build that connection with me, you are sent drip campaigns on here go, here’s how you might want to improve. So it’s really, really consultative in that respect.

Now, at the beginning of this talk, I mentioned that I had been head of marketing for that recruitment product, and I was supporting a sale, a sales team of 20 people. My focus was on leads, leads, leads. So a few years into the role, and the market becomes really, really saturated, and I noticed that our lead volumes just decline overnight. Having my monthly target, there’s 150 qualified leads, and it just half to 75. So at that point, I’m just thinking, Okay, what on earth has broken? What have I done? So I think about the beginner’s problems that I’m going through when I tell this story. So I Google, why am I leads down this naturally presents a series of websites and blogs that tell me that I should be looking into auditing all of my activity. I should be looking at conversion rates, my campaigns, the effectiveness of my email marketing. And it’s through this process I came across the website grader because it is beautifully optimized for this beginner’s problem.

And the more and more I dig into it, I look through the report that the website grader has served me, and I realized that actually, I shouldn’t be looking to get more leads. I should be looking to make more from what I’ve actually got.

And in this instance, the HubSpot value proposition works really, really well, because it offered a real solution for me at that point, it provided an answer when I did the initial Google search, all of a sudden I’m aware of their brand. They are not being those icky sales people. They’re being very open about their products. I don’t have to request a demo like I’m getting the answers straight away. They’ve perfectly positioned themselves in the middle of this chaos that I’m trying to, trying to navigate by and ultimately just making me feel really, really good about the brand itself.

And what’s really interesting is I remember going into my boss’s room, room that sounded weird, office with the results of this website grader, and I use that as a business case to say, Hey, do you know what? It’s time that we we make a change. We need to invest in improving our marketing and general, I think HubSpot is likely to help us to kind of solve some of these problems.

Okay, so what I want to do is just finish up by showing you what this has got to do with visibility. Okay? Because when you look at this through the lens of marketing as an engineering tool. They were able to automate some of the data that they are sat on. They are automating a consultancy element. They’re offering this product for free, and it’s something that connects to a genuine early stage problem, uh, problem at its peak, I think it was back in 2018 this website, the page for their website grader, was getting 34,000 organic visits a month. It had over 8000 domains, kind of linking to it. People like New York Times were using it and writing about it in their articles. Brands like Moz and Netlify, they’re all linking to it, which is really, really interesting, because all of a sudden complimentary brands are talking about it.

As a marketer, I might use HubSpot, but I might also use Moz I might also use Netlify. It’s it’s all of a sudden HubSpot has put itself in my in my ecosystem. Now, at the moment, we’re in 2023 and had a quick look, and this website page is actually ranking for over 3000 keywords. And the majority of keywords around are around terms like site grader, SEOgrader, grade my website. Why am I leads down, marketing audits. They’re still pushing this agenda. They’re still pushing this focus of how to serve early stage problems.

Okay, so think about how you might be able to relay this onto your own business. Think about the problems that your customers are likely to face, and think about what part of your product you can offer for free to help them at that point. And the emphasis does need to be around free.

Sometimes people will say to me, well, I need you to dig a little bit more into how I get this information from my from my customers, and there’s a series of kind of best practices that you can follow.

So I think if I was going to interview my customers to find out what their early stage problems are, I would speak to recent ones. Recent customers are the best because this struggle has happened to them recently, they’ll be able to recall it. You also want to interview your profitable customers. I know that sounds very, very obvious, but interview those people that you want more repeat business from.

You can use a combination of surveys and interviews. I’m not going to go into the specifics, because there’s clearly a number of talks coming later on in today’s symposium that are going to go into the real like topics here, and I think they’ll be able to do a much better job than me, but I think you have to speak to your customers. And I know sometimes people say, I don’t want to disrupt them, I don’t want to annoy them. I don’t want to talk to them, because they’ll remember that they subscribe to my products and I don’t want them to cancel. But the thing is, though, there is much more to gain by talking to customers.

So they get Aberdeen Group. They say that companies that speak to customers and conduct this type of activity speed up their sales cycle. They get 56% more revenue from cross sell and upsell opportunities, and they get 54% greater return on marketing investment. So I mean, I think I’m really building the case here. HubSpot website. Grader is 16 years old this year. And I’m not saying that the results from this kind of activity are going to come overnight, like you need to work on it, but if you look at this screenshot that I put together. This is from Hubspot’s footer, and it was from yesterday. And you can see that actually, this is something that works for them, because they’ve got a website grader, make my persona, blog ideas generator, they clearly know who their audiences are, and they clearly know how to kind of hook and capture that demand as well.

Summary

Okay, so. So to summarize, we’ve been talking about how to use your product as marketing engine. So I’ve looked at the problem awareness matrix kind of got that back onto back onto your radar. We’ve looked at different ways to categorize your problems. Hopefully, I’ve kind of shown you how brands like Grammarly connect with their problem unaware audiences, and perhaps you’re now thinking, okay, what are we doing as a company to get on people’s radar? I’ve also looked at engineering as marketing, and if done well, it can absolutely help you to start generate a series of qualified leads. And I mean, the whole point of the kind of today’s session and today in general, is to think about how you can go back to the office and actually replicate some of this activity as well. So hopefully I’ve given you a good few examples.

I will do the obligatory sales last slide. I’m Lucy. If you visit Oh Blimey, I’ve got a newsletter. I’ve got a few downloadable playbooks, and if you’re into really, really sarcastic comics, I’ve got a comic there called the adventures of startup marketing as well. So I’m going to stop sharing and thank you for listening.

Q&A

Lucy Heskins 

You’re on mute.

Mark Littlewood 

Thank you. We’re all on mute. No, you cannot ask questions. Cheng Vu, what do you think this is some sort of interactive session where you get to listen to someone and then ask questions. Cheng, please be our guest. You can ask the very first so talk related question.

Audience Member 

It’s very, very useful presentation. Thanks Lucy. My question is on the engineering is marketing, if the if the stuff that you can do that, like the example that you use with HubSpot, is just providing a URL, but let’s say, for example, if there’s a bit of friction, ie, for example, they need to provide an API key in order for us to deliver that value. Is that still something that you would encourage people to do? So, for example, you know, we have got a bunch of data that we have got access to, and we can show shows to the prospects, like the interesting thing we can tell them about, but the prerequisite to that is we need to have some sort of API key before we can give that value to them.

Mark Littlewood 

Can I just ask? By the way, if people are asking questions, it’s always so I always think there’s no kind of magic playbook, and questions are powerful, but everybody exists in their own context. So just say a little, I mean, just a short thing about your company, your organization, because it just, it just helps to understand those sorts of things. And that’s like, that’s not specific to this particular question, which was excellent. It’s a more general thing for other questions.

Audience Member 

Yeah, I mean, probably I can give a bit more context. So the company that I’ve worked for, we ingest lots of data from E-commerce platforms and email marketing platform, but in order for us to deliver value, you know, we can only look at the prospects on data which would require some sort of excess key. Hence my question.

Lucy Heskins 

Yeah, of course. Thank you. Thank you so much. So I was listing there, and I’m ever the marketer going to say it depends. Now, I think for marketing as engineering, or engineering as marketing rather to work, it needs to be low friction and it needs to be free.

So I think the fact that you are requesting the API, I would say it’s slightly further down the process, because somebody already knows that they’ve got a problem, so they are perhaps more problem aware. I think it is a combination. Because I think if you looked at something like Profitwell, so I signed up to Profitwell Few years ago, and they asked for, I think it was the payment detail, some payment detail so they, they were able to help me kind of plug in and create this dashboard. Now that was valuable at that point. I didn’t have to pay and whatnot, but there were a few steps that came before it.

And if I jump back to the example about HubSpot with the website grader, I only had to give them my URL. The next stage that followed this website grader was, I think it was like a freemium version of HubSpot. And for that to work, I needed to have put my put code on my website, and then the insights would start coming through. So I I’m tempted to say that if you require the use of an API, you’re slightly further down the process, and perhaps it’s maybe a stage after marketing engineering as marketing. Don’t know why I’m now forgetting which way that goes, so I would probably challenge you to think about what the problem is before and what somebody is searching because the API kind of point comes a little bit later that that would be, that would be my gut feeling. And you will get this information from running customer interviews. And I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but the jobs to be done technique that’s a that’s a really effective way of, kind of getting under the hood and understanding what people’s struggling moments are. So, yeah, sorry, I’m not. I don’t know if that answered it, but my gut feeling is that’s a little bit farther, farther than what we’re what, what we were talking about.

Audience Member 

Yep. Thank you,

Mark Stephens 

Lucy. I have a question as well. So in terms of your talking about creating a free tool which is a subset of your product. So our product essentially is a software application that’s used for bulk conversion of PDF files to html5 documents. So we identified that there were lots of people out there who didn’t even know if they could convert documents and wanted to try it. So we built a free online converter, which used our software, and that was our free tool.

The problems that we then had is one, we actually found that that then confused people as to what our product was.

The second and they weren’t sure whether and we weren’t selling the online converter. We were just doing the online converter as a free product to get them into it. The second problem we found was we had a lot of noise where, essentially, it attracted a lot of people who are just looking for that and aren’t our target market.

And the third problem we found is actually that free tool became easily our most popular ranked page when we get lots of hits from India on people who never have any intention of buying the product, which is to some extent, competing against the rest of our sales websites. So I wonder what your thoughts were on how we could avoid those problems, or whether that just goes with the territory.

Lucy Heskins 

Okay, I’ve jotted down a couple of things, because there are a few parts there, and I’ll ask, I’ll see what, how I can help.

So I think the first one was, what struck me was the example that I gave when we worked for a startup, and it was pushing out a tool that had nothing necessarily to do with the products. And I think when you are considering something like this, you need to work out how to monetize it, because it, in effect, is a way to kind of generate leads.

Now, when I was working for the online learning provider. At that point, the market was talking about employee well being, something like that. And so a lot of the kind of content that we would put out was around well being, how to, how to talk about, how to, how to develop good standards when you are managing a team. And that got us, got like a nice little reputation in that space, but we didn’t have the product to then serve. We had nothing. We didn’t have a bottom of the funnel product to actually give someone. So there was a mismatch, and that was a result of us going after something we thought we should be going after, rather than it being connected to an actual early stage problem.

So I think that that’s the first thing that’s kind of jumped out in terms of kind of the point that you made right towards the end, about almost like a cannibalization of this free tool, outranking the pages that you want it to, and the example of the website grader, they’re ranking for something very, very generic. So kind of like short tail, kind of fat, fat, fat keywords where grade my website, whereas HubSpot product pages are segment leads, or they’re more tied to actual physical parts of the product. So I think in regards to how you might stop that cannibalization, I would look at what long tail keywords and what short tail keywords you should be using, and match the intent, because you’re trying it sounds really generic, generic here, but what you’re trying to do is optimize for something really fluffy, open like this, the general big problem, and your product should be solving more of a specific need. So if anything, there are two sets of keywords and the two sets of intent. And in the matrix I showed the the fact that marketing goes from indirect to direct. It’s almost like the. The keywords for your tool should be more on the indirect side, and the keywords for your products should be more on the direct side. So that was a lot of jargon words there, but um, it’s, I mean, do you think that’s a fair answer, or do you reckon there’s a there’s still a bit of confusion.

Mark Stephens 

I still think there’s a problem if your tool is related, particularly if it’s a free tool. So you’re trying to get as much traffic as possible, but at the same time, you’re not trying to compete with yourself. And I’m not sure how you I’m still not sure how you avoid the confusion of this isn’t our product. This is just a free tool that is related to our product, or it showcases what you’re getting into with the product.

Lucy Heskins 

Yeah. I mean, what about if we looked at the example of Grammarly then? So their free tool is the plagiarism checker, for example. But Grammarly, paid product is a grammar app. So I wonder, if you optimize, you’ve got a set of product terms, and you cluster it that way, because I wouldn’t, don’t know if you were going to type in plagiarism checker, you’d come into their page, which is to do with, has someone nicked this, or have I nicked this? But when I’m doing that, my intent isn’t to sign up and buy a product. I don’t know whether, I’m not sure if that’s clear, and like, if anybody else has got any suggestions here, because I think I’m coming at it from kind of my context, but to me that they’re very the intent is different, and so the keywords needs to be different. But, um, it’s something that i

Audience Member 

Hey, Lucy, Hey, how’s it going? Great. Talk. I just want to jump in with an example, actually, that will probably give a little bit more context to Mark’s point, which was, I used a free generator for removal of image backgrounds, and their tool was exactly that it was removal of image backgrounds, but what they did was they capped it at one per IP address, so then that way I can test out the tool, the generator, see it actually receive that one piece of free collateral. But then they said, if you want to use it more, this is what we do. We do it in bulk, at these prices. So I think that’s a example of the free generator being exactly linked to what you’re selling. But you have to cap it. You can’t make it, you know, just a free fraud. Otherwise it’s not a business as a hobby at that point. I hope that’s a add some color to the question. Lucy,

Lucy Heskins 

yeah, no, no, thanks. So I think just to hear and playback what you’re saying then is, I guess there’s an element of, it’s freemium, isn’t it? Understanding which features you’re putting this side of the paywall and that side of the paywall, I think that’s what we’re kind of, we’re getting to. But that made, that made a little bit more sense for me. Mark does that.

Mark Stephens 

It definitely gives me some ideas to work on. So thank you very much on that.

Mark Littlewood 

What is the thing you’re going to work on, Mark?

Mark Stephens 

Reviewing the keywords and the intent and trying to make sure they’re not both just trying to go after the top keywords.

Mark Littlewood 

Cool. Joe, pitch.

Audience Member 

Thanks, Mark.

Mark Littlewood 

Sorry. Joe pitch, not psych, that’s an auto correct, yeah. Sorry, I just put that in there.

Audience Member 

That’s very common too, by the way. Welcome to my welcome to my world. Hey, Lucy, thanks very much. Kind of the key takeaway I got from your talk, which was very good, was just to really focus on the beginner problems with the initial attracting, you know, them to your website, or initially, one of the things that you said, just kind of mentioned, is like, okay, it should be, should be gated. You should ask for an email. And I actually that’s kind of the way I used to think, but honestly, I’m questioning that more and more nowadays for a couple of reasons. We did have some free things on our website, so, like, I’ll give you an example so we have, it’s media planning software. We had a, basically an Excel template that is, you know, media plan template, and that was very popular. It was data. People would put in their address, and it would basically email the template to them. And so that was successful in the sense that it created a lot of leads, but it created a lot of bad leads in a kind of overwhelm. You end up with too many.

Audience Member 

And then the other thing too is I wondered, especially nowadays, people are reluctant to give their email address, kind of like earlier, when things check and boom, I’m sorry if I’m saying your name incorrectly. Yeah, I talked about the, you know, this API key, which is. It a step further, but even asking for an email address is friction, and I wonder if it might be better sometimes to have ungated content. And I’ve heard more and more stories about ungating content. It’s hard to measure, but it seems to outperform gated content, and I’ve been starting to run some experiments with that as well. And I, you know, because it’s so hard to measure, I can’t, I don’t know, but I was wondering if, like with your experience and the clients and companies that you’ve worked for, if you might have any advice to give around, you know, gated versus ungated?

Mark Littlewood 

Yeah, quick question, Joe, do you do cohort analysis of your lead?

Audience Member 

No, that’s it. Yeah, that’s even more sophisticated. But you mean cohorts and sense of when they came in? I’d say the this is a really silly thing, but the it’s not really cohorts in a sense of when they came in, but if it’s like, like at Gmail on the weekend, it’s almost like 100% of the time, a bad lead. But you know that that’s just kind of a very crude thing. But you know looking at domains is a way to do it. In fact, every once in a while, we’ll go back and just Bulk Delete, like free email addresses from our website. If it’s not like a company name or B to B, that’s another thing to know. So if it’s coming in from Gmail, it tends to be not as high quality. But we’ve never like, we’ve tried, it’s hard to do, but we’ve tried to do cohort in the sense of when they came in over time in the different treatments, but that’s something that takes a lot of work.

Mark Littlewood 

Sorry. Lucy,

Lucy Heskins 

No, no. Thanks for the question. And I think it’s one of those things that I think people keep on coming back to gated or ungated. And I’m a fan of both, because I think if you get everything, you’re never going to build that level of authority do what I mean. And I think if you look at the example of I mentioned Canva, the free color wheel, at no point does it ask me to put my email address in. So I’m popping in my hex codes. It’s saying, here, go here, the lovely complimentary colors. And I think the way that you would make ungated work is making sure that you’ve optimized for the right next step. So for example, with Canva, it was okay now visualize these colors in your own sales deck, and it takes the colors that I had put in, and it’s mocks up, like a little visual at the below, and it’s it’s trying to then get me to sign up for a free trial.

And whilst I might not convert, then it’s always going to be a tool that I’m going to go back and I’m going to play around with, and I’m likely to come across another one of their tools where I might have to put my email address in. I think also the fact that the anime this is going to be very generalistic here, but the change in nature of search mean blogs and tools like this are now having to compete against kind of feature snippets which have a 0% click through as well. And I think if you’re making it harder for people to find answers, you’re just not it’s not in the spirit of good marketing. It’s not in the spirit of good B2B marketing. That’s That’s my personal opinion.

In terms of, kind of like dummy leads. I think that there are a few factors. So it’s context that someone has come in. I think you’re always going to get Duff leads. I have them to my own website, and very similar. I know that if someone comes in at about two o’clock in the morning, I know that that’s not a real email address. I think it’s just the nature of the beast with B2B marketing and offering free lead magnets. But don’t know you. I mean, you can try and improve the quality of the domains coming through by asking more questions and sign this kind of sign up process, but by doing so, you’re only adding more more friction. So I think an effective way could be to look at the almost like the lead source of the leads that are coming in, and which ones are, which ones are scoring high from a lead scoring perspective, because it might just give you an indication that it’s just the nature that if someone comes through from a Google ads, they’re more likely to type in Gmail. If you play around with the context that someone comes through, you can understand the almost like the intent or why they came to you in the first place. And I have, I mean, I’ve got competitors, I say competitors, but I’ve got people that work in similar space. And they go, All right, what’s Lucy up to now? And I they’ll go onto my website, and they’ll put in test, test haha, and download, download by information. I think it’s just the just kind of the nature of it, but I’m. Just Just think about where someone is coming from before they hit your gated piece of content, and just work out where the kind of the better leads are coming from. But, yeah, I don’t know whether I answered that, but hopefully I’ve given you a few things to kind of consider. The overall message is there are definitely pros and cons to both gated and ungated, and I’m seeing more and more businesses using ungated as a way to build that, build that authority, build that trust earlier on in the process. Yeah,

Audience Member 

yeah. I think that that example with the color wheel, where you can come in, you know, ungated, and get some value out of it. And then there’s an option to take the next step, which is, you know, now you have to reveal yourself. Think that makes sense, and it’s got me thinking of like, there’s, you know, like, say, t shirt among design companies, where you can go and design for free. And this is now, do you want to save your design? You’ve invested a bunch of time into it. And in order to save the design, you have to put in your email address, and then they like, you know, email your link to it. I think that that’s an interesting thing to think about. So thank Thank you. Lucy, yeah,

Lucy Heskins 

no worries.

Mark Littlewood 

There’s a thing about funnels here as well. I mean, I’m going to pick on Anna Crilley in a minute, just for a little bit of a heads up, Anna, because you’ve got a really interesting situation, because you’re more at the bottom of the funnel. Lead magnets and awareness generating and awareness building is a very different thing to nurturing your prospects through and as Lucy was talking about earlier on, different people are at different places in the in the buying process. And if you’ve got really simple ways, easy ways of maintaining some sort of relationship, or collecting lots of stuff at an early stage, that’s great, but don’t waste any time on it, unless it’s don’t spend a lot of time nurturing those leads very actively, because they’ve probably got quite a long way to go through the the funnel to become meaningful. Sorry, so mark Stephen, no. Mark, Matt Stevens, Matt’s. Mark Stevens,

Audience Member 

Yeah, it’s not really a question. It’s just a feedback thing, as much as anything, this is give me lots of new things to think about, which I don’t normally have thought about previously. And what was quite nice is bit of background, some Cambridge University Press and assessment. So we’re primarily dealing with teaching English as a second language. And I was thinking, you know, how, how would people find us? I was thinking, Well, you know, they might search for a specific course, but now thinking, well, but then that implies that they already know an answer to a question. So thinking about what Lucy was saying, I tried to sort of be much more general and open. So I just literally opened up a Google window and typed, what link, what level of English, am I? Because before you do anything else you might need to know, well, do I even need to learn English? And actually, amazingly, one of our websites popped up as the top result, which was really great, which was a test your English thing. So it was, it was quite nice seeing that in action. It was being able to take what Lucy had said, turn that into some thoughts and a question, and then realized that actually we’re doing that, which was, like, say, quite a positive thing to see. So, yeah, like I said, not really a question, more just a comment, but, yeah, definitely, very, very interesting.

Mark Littlewood 

I’m delighted. I’m delighted. Thank you. We’ve got so many exciting things coming up. I hope your brain doesn’t explode by end of the day. Anna, hello. Anna Crilly, hello, hello, hello.

Mark Littlewood 

Let me introduce Anna very briefly. She’s running a software company that does stuff for libraries and librarians. So Anna, are you very interested in raising awareness of that generally? Or is your challenge? And this is picking up on one of the other sessions that we’ve got. You’ve got some really you know who your potential customers are. Most of them are using your system. Can you just give a little bit of context about that? And then Lucy’s gonna magically give you some thoughts about

Audience Member 

Yeah, okay, yeah, we’ve got, actually got two products. One is used by libraries, and we do have 50% of the UK market. And. Um, and it’s our software controls library computers. And so everyone kind of knows who we are. If they get around to sort of shifting to us, they, you know, they’ll know where to come. And what we’ve been doing quite a bit of is becoming quite an expert in library computers and doing lots of thought leadership, and we do a survey, and if you wanna know about library computers, you come you come to us, and the government comes to us, and we’ve done quite a good job about kind of retaining our market by promoting the importance of this service and the other product. So leads to that are not so much of an issue, but the other product is used by universities for managing equipment, and that is something I’m keen to increase our needs for. So, yeah, does that give you enough information? Lucy and you’re on mute.

Lucy Heskins 

Sorry. My dogs started barking, so I thought group myself, no, no, thank you. I think I follow the library computer part of it. But in terms of the kind of managing equipment for the universities, what kind of equipment are you talking about?

Audience Member 

So typically, Schools of Art would use the equipment who are loaning expensive. You know, it might be kind of becoming a filmmaker or a cameraman, and you’ll be, or, you know, a photographer, and you’ll borrow a physical equipment that gets checked out to you. Or it might be borrowing dark rooms, or particularly studios, because it’s like a check in, check out service for for equipment.

Lucy Heskins 

 Got you. Okay. And is it,is it software, or is it the physical equipment that people

Audience Member 

It’s a software product.

Lucy Heskins 

Okay. And so I’m gonna ask some really, like obvious staffed questions here, the way my mind goes. And so who is the end user of software?

Audience Member 

Well, we’ve got two end users. So students book the equipment. A bit like putting things in your shopping basket, only you’re asking to borrow this equipment that you’ll then return. And then there’s sort of rooms and universities have got all this equipment that where people are checking it in and out to students. And then you got people who maybe manage those services and want statistics on usage. Have we got enough cameras? When are the peak points.

Lucy Heskins 

Okay, and then what is the, what’s the problem you’re solving? But by offering this software?

Audience Member 

Access to students, you know, in the olden days, it would have been on a spreadsheet they can’t really access. Or, yeah, quite often we’re replacing kind of paper or homegrown systems that don’t sort of survive very well. So students need to see they it’s, you know, it like borrowing a book from the University Library. There’s peak times that everybody wants it. So it allows students to kind of get in, understand what the university offers, and get their get their slot for completing their their module. And then the problem it’s solving for the people who run these sort of checkout stores is they’ve got queues of students sometimes, so they need to efficiently check this stuff out. And nowhere is, you know, you all know. We always know where these you know, could be 1000s of pounds. You’re giving somebody, but where is it? Who’s got it?

Lucy Heskins 

Yeah, okay, okay, I think if I look at the students example, so if I’m a student and I want to borrow some mic equipment, or or something like that. What is the problem that I’ve got before I realize that I need to check out some check out some audio equipment. For example,

Audience Member 

I’ve been given an assignment and I don’t and I’ve got to use the T I might be directed to use particular bits of equipment.

Lucy Heskins 

Okay? So I think my gut feeling, and again, this comes with the caveat that I I’d always say, speak to them. Speak to them first. But it would be, is there any value here in tutorials on how to set up the equipment and how to pick up and how to use it, or if they are accustomed to using the equipment or music, music or whatnot? Is there any value in teaching them how to get more out of their use of a particular type of microphone or something? I think, I think without, without the specifics, my gut feeling would be okay. What is the beginner problem of a student wanting to check out some some audio equipment? Yes, they’ve got an assignment, but do they actually know how to use the equipment in question effectively? Like, would they go onto YouTube? Would they go to Tiktok? I don’t know. To work out, how can they, how can they optimize their their use? Because I think if you are able to understand what, how, how you can improve their performance and what they’re what they might be looking for from like, I don’t know what they’re searching for on YouTube. Is there any way that you, as your service, can offer the videos and capture their interest a little bit earlier? I don’t know if that’s like a fair recommendation, just because I’m not 100% on on the environment. But I just wonder if there’s, if you were going to create content to teach them how to use this equipment, would that be something that might be of interest, and if not, what would they be looking for instead?

Audience Member 

Yeah, so I suppose our buyer is not the student. Our buyer is the university. So I mean, if we did have something that was useful that they directed students to, you know, we’d be heroes for them. And a lot of our kind of content has been around how to choose the best camera for your university, or benefits of barcodes. The sort of, you know, we kind of refer to as the onion, you know, like it’s not the product in the middle, it’s kind of the next layer. And then then sometimes we watch ourselves, we haven’t gone too far out, because this isn’t really our kind of area, but it kind of gets us away from this is, you know, this is an Equipment Checkout system. Why you should have one? You know, be really close to the product, or we can kind of step a little bit away about where do you get the best shelves from? We haven’t done that one, but the people who run these stores kind of get quite geeky about that sort of stuff, because it really matters.

Lucy Heskins 

Okay. And do you know who would be involved in buying the software in the first place? Because I wonder, is there something there that you can start unpicking the channels that they’re using to start this, this research process? I mean, is there kind of like a no. Are there groups where people talk about this. How nerdy do these people? People get?

Audience Member 

I suppose that’s thing. Quite often, the people who are buying it are the people above the people who’ve got the prop those problems, and their problem is, how do I stop my team moaning?

Lucy Heskins 

Okay, so in essence, then you’ve got three you’ve got three audiences here. You’ve got the check, the check, the check payer, the manager and the user. Yeah, and for the you to get justification, or for you to get more sales of this, are they looking for more young people checking the equipment out, or is actually a barometer of success, the managers not moaning as much and being able to be more efficient. Because I, I wonder if one of those is more of a priority, that might be the one that you focus on to start unpacking this a bit more. I don’t just just a suggestion, but yeah,

Audience Member 

it’s, it’s kind of an extension to the sort of Persona work that we’ve done about the buyers that is all quite old and worth revisiting. We’ve kind of done sort of free, editable infographics. So put your put your stats in this and tell everyone about your service. And then you, you know, if you can’t get the stats from your system, or maybe you should be talking to us, because we could give you those stats. We’ve done that before, not quite sort of built into our, you know, just as something on our website, rather than, I think, some of the ways you’ve talked about, yeah,

Lucy Heskins 

okay. I mean, if there’s, like, anybody else that has suggestions as well, because I’m very conscious that I think I’ve given quite a prescriptive list of suggestions on what you could do in terms of kind of focusing and prioritizing. But, but yeah, I Yeah. If anybody else has got any kind of suggestions, please do. Please do chip it. Because this is, this is definitely one that’s kind of stumped me.

Audience Member 

Hey, Anna, I’m Logan. So I’m really intrigued by this is it has a lot of overlap with what I do as what your system and your product is really asset management, it sounds like. And I go in the direction of, okay, they’re the people buying the product, and what kinds of problems may they have? Are they concerned about shrinkage? Are they concerned about what’s the lifespan that we’re getting out of these this camera gear or microphones, before we have to repair or replace them? So my mind goes to, could I create blog content around, how do I reduce shrinkage? Maybe, how do I first see that there’s a problem with shrinkage? Or, how do I maximize the utilization of my assets? And then, as a manager, I’d also think of, okay, well, do I have a pain point in my processes with is the person at the counter in the library? Okay, is it a 30 minute process for them to check out this piece of equipment? And can my product reduce that to, hey, it’s two minutes. Person can self enter their information, get this and get out. So I go to wording around that of, is there something with the checkout process? Maybe that can be, how do I improve the speed of my checkout process, and that, in turn, helps serve those end users who are the ones getting that equipment. So no clear answers, but I’m intrigued by your use case and the overlap.

Audience Member 

Yeah. Well, we’ll connect.

Mark Littlewood 

We’ll try to put you in a little breakout session later on, but it’s interesting. So Lucy, you’d need to think, because Anna’s coming to bosconference Europe, which is at the end of March, strongly recommend anyone that’s foolish enough doctor have signed up to to make sure that they do, but that’s just under a couple of months away. So Anna and Lucy, I think you should make sure that you kind of get together at a conference, and by that stage, Lucy, can you have solved all of Anna’s challenges? Please?

Lucy Heskins 

It depends

Audience Member 

growing so that’s a big

Mark Littlewood 

We want fewer problems. Yeah, there should be a sort of checkout line, 500 problems or fewer. One last question. I think Cheng Vu, you wanted to come back with something else, and then we’re going to take a little break for having break purposes.

Audience Member 

Thanks, Mark. And this is not really specific problem to myself, but I was just wondering, the example that you use on Zoopla being the property portal who makes money from the realtors or the estate agents, but actually the tool that They come up with is more targeted at the the people who buy house. So in the UK, the user who users who buy house, don’t actually get charged, but they get charged from they charge the real estate agents. So I was wondering if that actually is an applicable example to use engineering as marketing.

Lucy Heskins 

I think that is I think it is interesting because so this is a process that I went through recently looking to potentially move house. Used it as a way to find out how much the house might be valued at. And from one perspective, I’m going in, and the advertising on there is from local estate agents for me. So it’s building up that kind of brand brand recognition. So for example, Peter Allen down the road, wasn’t really sure if I’d heard of them before, but all of a sudden I start seeing their brand. So that’s one element. But I think from the estate agents perspective, it’s interesting, because I think it’s Zoopla is an advertising portal for the estate agents, right? And I think that whilst I don’t necessarily put my details in by using the tool, I’m now aware of that estate agent, and because the particular jobs to be done profile that I might fall into, I don’t want to advertise it myself. I don’t want to go to a listing site where I’ve got to do all the paperwork myself. So it’s, if anything, it’s kind of signposting me not to Zoopla, but to the real estate, real estate, estate agents that advertising. So I wonder whether that’s the play for that particular particular market as well. I might be able to give you a bit more detail in about six weeks time, if I sell my house. I’m not really sure, but I think if from that, it’s a brand recall, it’s making sure that that estate agent is building trust and is appearing in the context, the right context at the right time. So I’m in potentially buying buying a house mode. They’re putting their brand in front, and I think it’s creating that association. So I think that’s loosely the play there, if I’m honest.

Mark Littlewood 

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, there’s a few of those spaces that they’re essentially marketplaces. So they’re selling advertising to the estate agents. Is they want lots of buyers, and anything they can possibly do to increase eyeballs, how very 1999 of me, anything you know, look up your neighbor’s house prices. I don’t know if we were talking in the group, or whether this was in a in a subgroup, but we were talking about getting stuck in a wormhole. But Tim Wilkinson was talking about getting stuck in a wormhole yesterday on Twitter, of looking at houses that have been put on the market, that haven’t been tidied up, all of that stuff is really consciously generated and encouraged, because it generates awareness of the platforms it increases. It’s good for SEO, it’s good for searchability, all of those, all of those things. So there’s a at that sort of scale. These things take on a slightly different thing. For someone like Anna, who’s dealing with a you can, you can kind of find ways of making a mark more efficiently. But I mean, all of the big estate agents, or all the big online estate estate agent companies have got essentially unlimited budgets, and they’re in a massive arms race of just throwing money at all sorts of stuff to Yeah, in a way, but I’m keen to hear about your experiences. Lucy, don’t move.

Lucy Heskins 

I’ll still be in Wales. It’s fine.

Mark Littlewood 

Okay, I’ll still find you on Zoom.

Lucy Heskins 

It’ll be, it’ll just be another valley. You’ll be all right.

Mark Littlewood 

Okay. Thank you very much. You can contact Lucy. I’m just going to share her contact details in the chat, or you can do it. She’s going to be around for the rest of the of the possessions here. We’re going to take a little break now and come back at half past the hour. So look at that. I’ve given you two minutes of extra time. How unexpected and how generous you? Yeah, I’d suggest you take your camera off and come back. There will be someone around if you’ve got questions or whatever for most of the time here, but periscopes down, and let’s put our virtual hands together and say thank you, Lucy, that was cool. See you soon. Kirk, final words,

Kirk Baillie 

Yeah, it was a very good session. It was great to get so many great questions. And yes, I’m sure Lucy’s pleased to get a bit of a break for half an hour, and then you get to annoy all the other speakers that we have coming up later this afternoon. It’s always good to go first. So yeah, all good, and yeah, we’ll see you when you all come back.

Mark Littlewood 

Brilliant. I love our team synchronicity. Kirk, because not only are we wearing our superhero T shirts, we’ve now both put cardigans on.

Kirk Baillie 

Means is actually a blanket because I’m quite cold.

Mark Littlewood 

.. enough to Kirk’s office. Periscope, Stan, we’ll see you soon. Thanks, everybody.

Lucy Heskins

Founder, OhBlimey

Lucy is an early-stage startup marketer who works with founders to validate, create and build their businesses, primarily in the b2b tech industries. She was the marketing lead and employee number one at subscription learning platform, Careercake, a video learning platform that achieved 400x growth, supporting 10 million learners, from over forty countries that was acquired by the world’s leading e-learning platform, SocialTalent in 2022.

More from Lucy.

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