Digital marketing hacks for 2023

Joe Ducarreaux: Hello and welcome to this Essential B2B coffee time chat brought to you by Lead Forensics. I am your host, Joe Ducarreaux. Do you want to maximize your digital marketing efforts? Are you looking for a fresh approach that will help your business reach new heights? Joining me to discuss digital marketing hacks and more is Travis Tyler, senior digital content producer at PandaDoc. Hi Travis. How are you doing?

Travis Tyler: What's up, Joe? Good to be here. My man. Gotta bring the high energy!

Joe Ducarreaux: Big energy straight out the gate, and I'm sure that's definitely a caffeinated beverage. You are sipping on there, I bet. So Travis, you are you are very active on social media and we're big fans here. Of the stuff that you produce, what are your top tips for producing content that really cuts through the noise?

Travis Tyler: I think one of the biggest tips I have is to look outside of business. If you are a business and you want to engage and entertain people, I think you need to step outside of the business world and get some inspiration from other sources. So, for me, I try to blend together a few different areas and I watch a lot of sports shows.
Sports broadcasters notoriously, big personalities, silly. They've been doing it for decades and they know what they're doing when it comes to creating engaging content. Over here in the States, I enjoy NPR I really like Fresh Air, which is an interview series by Terry Gross, and she is an inspiration for me on how I ask my questions, how I prepare for my show, and then a few other sources that I get inspiration from in how to engage audiences and create content is an educational podcast that I absolutely love and recommend for everyone is called Freakonomics with Stephen Dubner. And a comedy podcast.
And I will give a warning here. It is very dirty. It is very raunchy, and it is very inappropriate. And I know my European friends will love it. Americans who are a little more prude will probably be like, oh my God! Its a comedy podcast called Your Mom's House with Tom Sagura and Christina P and I try to blend these sources together.
So that's my tip for folks, is try to find inspiration. In an adjacent area to business that is not necessarily right in your wheelhouse, and you might find a little more spark in your creativity.

Joe Ducarreaux: If people are seeing the same sorts of things over and over again. Graphs and bits and pieces - here's how we did this with X number of things, getting inspiration from elsewhere, and then just bringing that to the forefront of your audience. So that's the key. Is it? It's taking it from. As you say, almost an outside of business perspective and go we'll just bring this over and reframe it.

Travis Tyler: Correct.

Joe Ducarreaux: Fantastic. So are there any are there any hacks for influencer marketing within that at all then?

Travis Tyler: I think there are definitely places you can draw inspiration from. I will give a shout out to my friends who have created an amazing community to be a part of called Social Social. It's run by will Aitkin, Jen Allen and Nick Capozzi.
And they recently were doing a live stream, I think last week or the week before, and they were showing Mr. Beast over on YouTube. Guy knows what he's doing, love him, hate him. He's a millionaire and he knows how to create content. And looking at influencers and how they create marketing.
But one thing that we're doing that I'm really excited to share with you, Joe, is I have turned inward. We have 800 and I dunno, 50 employees at PandaDoc. And I have a lot of talented people at my company. and we're trying to create internal volunteer influencers so that it's not just always my face on every single video coming out of PandaDoc.
So this year specifically, I've come up with a strategy. It's on a document, so it's official Joe where I have monthly requests. I put in from four or five different employees here at my company and I outline recommendation I show. A script I have links to the vertical video, whether it's a an Instagram reel or a TikTok, and then say, Hey, we wanna recreate this.
Can you record yourself? And here's how you're gonna record yourself. Just send it to me, record it on your phone, upload it to Google Drive, and then I'll take care of the rest. And so that's how I'm tapping into influencer marketing in an internal way. And my tip here is don't just pick anybody at your company.
I found people who were already creating vertical videos on their own for fun. And I was like, Ooh, can you work with me? Do you wanna work with me? And they were like, yes, of course. So there's not that much coaching involved and I don't have to teach people a whole lot of how to record themselves. They get it, they watch TikTok, they're on the platforms, they understand it, and that is my tip.

Joe Ducarreaux: And I suppose it's incredible how quickly then the, those regular faces for sure. If they keep coming up and coming up in the, within your company very quickly people will recognize that person from that company and associate it with your brand. Then I guess it's we had James Gayle on a little while ago who runs Shogun Social and he, introduced to the idea of creating a parasocial bond, which is effectively, it is exactly that is recognition of a brand through someone's face.
It's almost user generated content, but from your company. That's a real smart idea, Travis. I like that one.

Travis Tyler: Again, it's a smart idea. I think so. And I'm glad you do too. We'll see how it goes. It's a new role for me, taking a step back from being just a pure creator which I've been doing for the last two years here at PandaDoc.
And stepping into more of a influencer management role where I'm directing people and nobody's reporting into me. So let me not get my ego too big. These are just people who are kind enough to volunteer and say, Travis, I'll record this for you. No problem. And we'll see how it goes. We're gonna try to run it.
But you're tapping into exactly what we're trying to do over here, which is the creating a parasocial relationship through our social networks and a recognizable face to brand connection. Fantastic.

Joe Ducarreaux: So you did mention there that you've got this sort of the strategy of okay, so here's the script.
This is what I want from you. Are there any other sort of hacks with content planning that you can share with us? Is it a case of, do you literal. Plan out. Okay. We're every single post is planned out, or do you leave a bit of flexibility? Should anything come up? How does that look in your company?

Travis Tyler: You'd think at a company of our size, we'd have it super ironed out. And like programmatic, our podcast has become that way due to necessity because it is such a large lift for us. And we're spending a lot of money on it. And we're putting a lot of, weight into that. I have come up with a very.
Rigid system where I'm mapping out episodes, quarters in advance, lining up guest pre-interviews, and then interviews working in monday.com as our kind of program or project management tool and Coordinating those efforts with the different agencies that help us with editing, that help us with recording.
When it comes to our vertical video content, we're not quite there yet. And I will say that we do try to leave some room for improvisation and spur of the moment ad hoc creativity. One of my favorite creators on TikTok, who I've copied some of his videos and brought them over, over to Panda and make sense in the business world.
He talked about like when he tries to schedule out creative time, he doesn't create anything. And that happens to me too, Joe. And that's it's the nature of the beast. If you want to create, really nuanced content, sometimes blocking out the time to do it, it just doesn't come to you.
And so I recommend folks do what you alluded to in the beginning, which is, Try to hammer out your processes, but leave some room for flexibility and some creativity. There is no, you must create x number of vertical videos this month, Travis. It's What do you recommend we try to do this month, Travis and I say let me try to get at least one vertical video from five different people at my company and I'll see what I can create in addition to that.
And that helps. Have some magical moments where I'm inspired and the next thing I know, I'm in a flow state and I'm just four hours of costumes and different angles and getting silly and creating will hopefully be an engaging video for folks.

Joe Ducarreaux: You mentioned, costumes and I am surprised you aren't dressed as a panda because you seem to be in quite a lot of your videos!
My next question for you is quite a big one, Travis. I'm intrigued with your answer for this one. How do you get a return on investment from your digital content?

Travis Tyler: I will tell you that is. It is tough and it's not going to be easy for anybody. But the way that I do it is a combination of qualitative and quantitative recognition.
I'll start with the qualitative piece. I screenshot every DM I get on social that compliments my work or our work, and I save that in a folder. And then I whip that bad boy out quarterly and share that with my boss to share with the team at large, because sometimes the numbers don't cover at all the impact we're having.
Our CRO loves to see numbers ticking upwards in terms of engagement metrics and ensuring that, we're seeing more website visitors or conversions coming in from like social last attribution touch. But in addition, what can be more compelling and create that warm fuzzy feeling is seeing the screenshot that I share in a Slack channel that shows somebody that's love the, work you're doing.
That post was hilarious. Big fan of Panda. We actually just signed up for a free trial. That's huge for us.
And right now, I will be honest with you, Joe, we have not a great not as good of a view into our attribution as we would like. And I think this is something that, whether we're a unicorn company and this is still an area that we struggle we don't have a great tool that shows us one to one, or one to two or two to one, or whatever your, ROI or your ROAS is on like a sort a, so an organic social post. I posted on LinkedIn Mockingly recently where I said, what is a new social follower worse to the company? And I did it in like the Reddit style. Lowercase, uppercase, lowercase, uppercase.
And I basically said if you have to ask, then you don't understand how people shop anymore. And they trust people they buy from people and it happens on the dark social. And that stuff's just, unless you have a form field on your, Your website where you're collecting demos or free trials or whatever, if you're a service or a product based company that says, where did you hear about us?
Or What made you sign up today? And people are, people are filling that in and then you're using that data unless you have that set up. Your ROI is just gonna be like a guess. We're going, oh engagement metrics social follower count share a voice, through a PR tool or a sprout social kind of tool.
Those types of things. So a long-winded answer to basically say it's tough, man. It's hard out here for us creators to show our return on investment.

Joe Ducarreaux: Yeah, absolutely. I do. I do understand where you're coming from on that one, Travis, to be completely honest with you. Just on the sort of the social selling side of things then how important would you say community is to, to selling socially?

Travis Tyler: I think it's important as hell, and I think where I want to talk about this is
community to me. From a business standpoint can mean so many different things. Are we talking about a community of existing customers? Are we talking about a community of prospects? Both. For PandaDoc, we do, I think, a really freaking good job in terms of supporting, enabling, educating our existing customers and that I would say we.
there's always room for improvement. But I would say we do a pretty damn good job of feeding that community where we don't do an awesome job and we're trying to get better at and trying to figure out and look at other folks is in terms of our prospects, people who aren't PandaDoc, customers who don't know about us.
And I'm of the mindset, dude, I don't want to be a part of any more communities. Like I, I don't, I have two Slack channels or Slack communities that I'm a part of. The Panda one for my work and social, the one I called out earlier. I don't wanna be a part of any other communities. I don't. I have so many subscriptions I pay for.
I realized I was part of Dave Gerhard's, exit five Community, and I got charged for it, and I was like, s***, I forgot about that one. I was like, I don't, I'm good. and breathe that and I say that in jest, but I try to get that point across to my team who wants to build a PandaDoc community, and we constantly have internal debates about should we join an existing community, should we sponsor an existing community that already has a great following, that has, legions of, fanatics that are, fueling it.
Do we really need to reinvent the wheel? Do people really want another community to be a part of? So I would say my recommendation and tip here is if you have a group of existing customers, that's your community and that is where you should, you know, invest in community, create content for them, make them laugh, entertain them, educate them, communicate with them make them feel special and welcomed.
I think that's a much easier and. Going back to your question of return on investment, I think that is a better use of your time, energy, and resources.

Joe Ducarreaux: We touched on webinars and podcasts. Here we are on a webinar. What are some emerging trends in digital marketing that, that businesses should be aware of?
So the reason I bring up sort of webinars and podcasts is that they've been around for a long time, but in recent years they've seen a growth in people use using them. So what are emerging trends that businesses need to be aware of? And do you have any tips about podcasts and webinar creation?

Travis Tyler: I'll start with the first question of trends evangelism. So what does that even mean? I started to see a couple of people I've been following on social. With their new titles of like lead evangelist or chief evangelist. I'm like, the hell is that? And it's going back to what we talked about earlier, Joe, which is you recognize a face and you connect it to a brand.
And I think that is gonna be continuing to be a much larger trend where you're reaching out to that evangelist and as an almost a, and you're becoming like an inbound engine for your organization. And I got hit up today. Literally an hour before this we started to sit down to do this webinar together.
Joe and I shared it, on Slack saying, look, here's another one that's come in. And it's not to be braggadocious, but it is to show that, the effort I'm putting into posting and connecting and creating these parasocial relationships is having an impact on the business that doesn't always get seen by our attribution tools.
And I would say, my, my prediction is this is going to impact the B2B space so much more this year. You're gonna see plenty more people becoming evangelists for their companies, and you're gonna start to know a person. Like in front of the brand. And it's not always gonna be your CEO or your founder, it's gonna be somebody like me, a goofball that dresses up in a panda costume and, twerks on camera.
So that would be my prediction is trend emerging trend is this evangelist role tips for recording, webinars and doing podcasts. I got this tip when I was first. Deciding that we wanted to create a podcast, an ongoing audio, video, multimedia series here at PandaDoc, which is the world does not need another sales podcast or insert, marketing podcast.
I think that when you sit down to create a new form of content or an ongoing series, or a limited series, whatever it is that you're gonna put all your time and energy into is. Can we not just do what everybody else is doing? Let's bring something different, even if it's a slight differentiation. And so for us that's why when we created the Customer Engagement Lab podcast, we were like, we're gonna blend comedy and education.
And yeah, there were a few people already doing this but they weren't doing it in quite the way that we were. That would be my tip is try to find some sort of differentiation where you can confidently say to yourself and your team, there is nowhere else anyone can go for this specific type of content.
We are the ones that can do that in a way that nobody else is quite doing that.

Joe Ducarreaux: I think you're absolutely right. It's almost not to say that if you are creating a new podcast, it does need, maybe gimmick is the wrong word, but it needs to have a fresh format, doesn't it? It can't just be, oh, we take a sideways look at the week's news.
There are, as you say, it's ubiquitous. There's so many of this. You absolutely have to nail down a new format and a new way of doing things. I think you're absolutely right there. So then how often should you review or tweak your content even to find out what's.

Travis Tyler: I would say our format for how we review and tweak content is when you're first starting out.
My biggest recommendation is do a pilot, just like network television, runs a pilot episode of their show. Do this internally and it's a it's an great opportunity to get feedback in a proof of concept. So rather than some pie in the sky, script that someone's reviewing, some founder or sea level is like the hell, is this like you want to create a podcast and these are just the questions you're gonna ask?
We actually recorded a pilot episode and we wanna show it to you. I know you don't have a lot of time. Can you just watch 15 minutes of this 30 minute thing? No, it's never gonna see the light of day. But we went bold and we wanted to try something different. And this is your opportunity to say, I like this, do more of this.
I didn't like this. Here's why. And that's when you're first starting out when it comes to, and then that way you can make those tweaks and those adjustments. And then when you're trying to, when should you review your content? We do like an annual outward feed. Period. Pretty much every year with our video content, our podcast, and our social media content, we send out a survey both internally and it's voluntary.
So it's just Hey, have you liked what you've seen, as an employee of Pando, do you like the, the content we're covering? Would you like to see different topics? Here are some suggestions and recommendations. And I actually got that I think it was Spotify sent me a survey.
I wanna say this year we're like, Hey, as a Spotify premium user or podcaster, or whatever it was we'd love your feedback. Can you give us 10 minutes? And they were like, we have this idea of a concept of something we want to bring to market as a Spotify user. Give us some feedback.
And that kind of, I took the style of questions and copy and pasted them into a document, and then I put it into not SurveyMonkey, but one of those tools and then sent it out both internally first and then externally to our customers and any of our prospects that we're willing to on our kind of subscriber lists of email.
I think I got a couple hundred responses, which was good, and then used that feedback, shared it with the team, and then used it to make some tweaks. An example, Joe, if you're like, okay, cool, what kind of tweaks have you. It started out where our podcast was, me and my co-host, another PandaDoc employee.
And we would occasionally, our format was basically 10 or 15 minutes of him and I, joking around, covering a topic, doing a segment together, and then we'd bring in a guest for about 15, 20 minutes. And so it was broken up into those two halves. And then unfortunately my co-host, he quit PandaDoc.
He went to go work at another company. So I took ownership of the show and I asked for some feedback and wanted to make some tweaks to the show, and I wasn't sure who I was gonna replace him with. I ended up never replacing him and just have a, recurring, like, rolling door of guests coming in.
But one of the pieces of feedback that I loved was somebody was like, I would love it if Travis could do a round table with multiple guests and multiple voices. And that's now become a staple of our show where every three or four episodes I do a round table with me plus three guests. I play host. And then you get to hear a bunch of different voices and opinions and.
Have become some of our most popular episodes. So that tweak came directly from the audience feedback. And then the last question about like, how often should you review, I do a quarterly review for metrics and engagement, and we look at a couple of different Areas, mainly three areas. Audience growth, social followers, impressions, engagement, email subscribers, podcast streams.
Second one is brand growth, share of voice, share of search, new and unique website visitors. And then the third area that we review and do analysis on is on conversions, visit to inquiry, conversion rate, and then core trials. Again, this pertains specifically to PandaDoc cause we're a SaaS tool. We have a free trial option.
And we report on those quarterly and it's part of a slide deck of a all hands marketing and then that reports back up into the executive team, et cetera, et cetera.

Joe Ducarreaux: So, it's a very actionable tip you've given there in terms of, sending up the surveys and bits and, eternally and externally.
That's fantastic. I'm gonna reference the the AIDA model, and for those of you aren't aware, that stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. Is this something you keep in mind when creating your content?

Travis Tyler: Absolutely. We use a similar framework. It's a little bit different. It doesn't have as cool of an acronym, but basically our four kind of funnel.
I don't forget what you would call that. I guess stages would be discover, learn, try, buy, and again, that is because of our product. It's a little bit different. Most of the work I do is gonna fall into discover and learn, because I'm not necessarily a PandaDoc product expert. I know it pretty well, but there are definitely people that know it way better than me, and I tend to tap those people to work with me occasionally to create more of the desire and action or try by stages of our funnel.
My creative process, like we talked about earlier, Joe would be a little bit too constrained. If I started with that framework every single time and then worked outward, like I said earlier, I do leave some room for flexibility of just like spur of the moment creativity, and I try to figure out which of the buckets it falls into and then we will categorize it that way.
I've only recently, after two and a half years of creating content, consistently become much. You will find if you are in marketing. Creators are not always the most organized people. Sometimes creativity and being bombastic. And big personality, it doesn't always go hand in hand with being super forward thinking, great planning, super structured type A kind of people.
And so I try to do my best and that's where we've had to hire some other people on our team to keep me in line and keep me on track and help me stay organized and a bit more mature about how we go about organizing and planning out our.

Joe Ducarreaux: That's fantastic stuff. You've given us so many little tips and tricks today,Travis. I have one final question for you. If you could give everybody watching this one final top tip, actionable hack to take away today, what was the one key thing you want everyone to go away and do following this conversation?

Travis Tyler: Can I give one piece of advice and then one actionable tip? Is that allowed?

Joe Ducarreaux: On this occasion I will allow that! That's fine!

Travis Tyler: Oh, alright. So my piece of. Is life is too short to either market or sell a crappy B2B SaaS product that you don't use or really believe in very much. And I learned that the hard way. I have worked for companies where I just, I didn't believe in the product and it was just, cuz it wasn't great, it wasn't a great product.
Okay. So life is too short so that if. Lacking in motivation cuz you're like, I don't even use this thing. Or I don't know how it benefits my company or it benefits me. One of the other questions that I prepared for, but you didn't ask, and I'm gonna answer it anyway, is what does success look like?
And for me success is. Having fun at my job. This is what I love doing. I love meeting with people like you and creating relationships and friendships Joe and like following your career journey. So that's the first part. Second part is if I can make an impact on my company's bottom line, that's awesome.
I really want to help. I know the goal of a business is to make money. I get it. I'm not disillusioned. And I want to try to help and then if I can help the people in my network. In this case, I now, in this stage and journey in my career, I work at a digital document, e-signature company.
They need a digital document tool. Awesome. I think PandaDoc’s a great one. There's other great ones too. I would love for them to check it out. So those are the three things that give me success. And I want people to recognize that as well. And Yeah, that's my life advice. Life is too short.
Go work for a company. You believe in tool. Maybe you've worked at a job and you're, you used a tool and you really liked it, and you're like, man, you know what? I could be an evangelist for this tool and go to that company and market the hell out of it cuz I've used it before. So that would be my actionable tip is when you're interviewing for a job, whether you're in marketing or you're in sales, you're in customer success, you're in demand generation don't necessarily.
Just go work at any old company scrutinize their product or their service, test it out, try the free trial, get a demo of it as like a, you a sleuth customer and see how it goes. And you will have a much better time working there, I promise you. So that's my actionable tip.

Joe Ducarreaux: Travis Tyler, thank you so much for joining me for this this coffee time talk.

Join us again for another coffee time talk with Lead Forensics. Thanks very much. All right.

Travis Tyler: Thank you.