Michael King - Open Source Marketing at SIC2013

OPEN SOURCE MARKETING: HOW WE DO MARKETING AT IACQUIRE The reason why you know who we are is due to the efforts of the people in this presentation

@iPullRank

DOWNLOAD THIS DECK http://iacq.co/how-we-market

@iPullRank

YEAR ONE: BRAND AWARENESS How marketing was born at iacquire

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iacquire.com

WHEN I ARRIVED AT IACQUIRE APRIL 2012… Nobody knew what it was, when I showed people the website they thought it was a software company. They purposely obscured their messaging.

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@iACQUIRE Iacquire.com

Brand reputation was meh

Those that did know iAcquire know it for the bad reputation largely inherited from the acquisition of Conductor’s Paid

Link practice and one of the co-founders having been involved with Text Link Ads.

This isn’t an excuse, it’s just me

explaining that I didn’t understand the

magnitude of the paid link building until I

did the quantifying outreach study which

was literally days before my official start

date.

In hindsight… I realize that iAcquire hired me to act as a figurehead showing their “commitment” to thought leadership and being a white hat SEO company.

iacquire.com @iPullRank

iacquire.com

OF COURSE MY FRIENDS SHOWED SUPPORT…

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Site traffic 3/30/11 – 3/29/12

Sorry for the Clicky screenshots. iAcquire was still very tinfoil hat about Google Analytics at this point,

but this was their site traffic for the entire year before I joined.


Site traffic 3/30/12 – 5/10/12

In the 6 weeks since I’d started I’d gotten iAcquire double the traffic they had the entire previous year.


How did I do that?

I posted the Noob Guide to Link Building as a compainion piece to Oli Gardner from @Unbounce’s Noob Guide to

Online Marketing and linked back to downloadable PDFs on iAcquire.com.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE! WE DO INBOUND MARKETING. To be clear I don’t develop marketing plans, I develop a quarterly content strategy and we execute against that with regard to iacquire’s business goals..

@iPullRank iacquire.com


The numbers behind the strategy

To date that post on Moz drove 1,211 newsletter signups and 451 tweets which helped increase brand awareness

and build a brand asset in the mailing list.

Paywithatweet.com This is one of my favorite tools for spreading a message. Make users tweet about your content to get it. Make sure the content is worth tweeting for though.



Diversify content types

PRESS

BLOGS VIDEO

UGC

COMICS

PRODUCTS

PHYSICAL SPACE

ADS

PHOTOS

INFOGRAPHICS

SERVICES

EVENTS

UI ELEMENTS

PDFS TOOLS

APIS

ANIMATIONS

COMMENTS

DATA

PLATFORMS

PRINT MATERIAL SLIDE DECKS

PLUGINS

TWEETS


GARY & cOGSWELL

I dreamed up a two robot characters based loosely on iAcquire’s co-founders called Gary & Cogswell and built a

comic strip series with illustration done by Kyle Bastian.

IN KANSAS

Reinclusion Afterlife Presentation:

http://bit.ly/reinclusion-afterlife




@iPullRank

This was great for me. I actually got the chance to do to affect change right away. The reality of it is iAcquire had an offering that I didn’t actually believe in. They

sold me on joining by offering me the power to build an SEO capability the way I

believed it should be. I don’t believe that’s what they actually expected to let me to

do that, but the brand crisis left me in a position to do so which effectively made it

possible to build offerings that I did actually believe in and make the marketing

that much more effective.


Hired megan & Norris

I hired Megan Brown (@thatgirlmegan) as our Social Media Strategist to help manage our growing community and

Norris Rowley as our Manager of Market Research & Analytics to help make our offering unique.


I spoke a lot

Between this year and last I have spoken at dozens of conferences on behalf of iAcquire to let people know that we

exist and are on the cutting edge of Search.


I brought on Josh Giardino

I hired Joshua Giardino (@techarity) so he could do Research and Development so we could stay on the cutting edge

with ideas for marketing and build tools. We built Authora & Broken Link Index from the Common Crawl

@iPullRank

Closed a $240k deal with a guest post I realized there was a knowledge gap around how to keep your social shares after a 301. I wrote a post on SEW, someone saw it and it ultimately generated $240K of new business for us.

iacquire.com


Hired tom

Selling on-page SEO projects made for products I could really believe in and enough revenue to hire someone to run

it. So Tom (@tomharari) joined the team as our SEO Manager.


Tom guest posted too

Almost right away Tom found his stride and started contributing not only to our own blog, but on Moz as a thought

leader.

Video content We also started doing video content to showcase the iAcquire culture, spread brand awareness, educate and entertain. Our video content doesn’t perform that well.



12 days of linkmas

I had thought leaders put together link building tips in the form of Christmas cards in the 12 Days of Linkmas

campaign. 51 Links from 16 LRDs for free. 5199 Pageviews. 107% traffic growth from Twitter. Coverage on SEW.


12 days of linkmas Social activity

Almost right away Tom found his stride and started contributing not only to our own blog, but on Moz as a thought

leader.

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There was no end to end measurement plan at this point Sure we measured traffic and conversions per channel, but never rankings. We

didn’t really have any way to tie site traffic to how much business we were driving.

At this point it was far more about how do we get more eyeballs on iAcquire. And

yes, we did that.

YEAR TWO: DIRECT RESPONSE Primetime lead generation

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@iPullRank

Goals (finally), Generate 15 leads per quarter

Build brand awareness

Launch new website

Develop Editorial Calendar

Promote Content via Social Media

Reach more Directors, VPs, and C-Suite Execs

Launch Co-marketing efforts

Develop email marketing / lead nurturing

campaigns

Create 3 case studies per quarter

Limitations, No defined budget

Lack of communication on resource requests

Not enough staff

Non self-sufficient team

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We started the year strong with 5 http://www.iacquire.com/blog/how-the-mad-men-of-iacquire-

performed-in-2012-and-what-to-expect-in-2013/


http://www.iacquire.com/blog/how-the-mad-men-of-iacquire-performed-in-2012-and-what-to-expect-in-2013/






























Redeveloped our target personas

Norris rebuilt our personas using data from Simmons Connect and we’ve since used those to develop Content

Strategies that have been incredibly effective in lead generation.

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Our core strategy is to produce entertaining and/or educational content with the goal of positioning iAcquire as the global leader in inbound marketing.

OUR CORE STRATEGY

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The iAcquire brand voice is that of a savvy yet trustworthy friend., It is authentic, authoritative and

friendly. The voice exudes confidence but does

not foster alienation. iAcquire speaks the same

language as its audience and while we are

experts we are not wizards. No buzzwords…

Tone • Authentic but not Brash

• Fun but not Silly

• Direct but not Uninitiated

• Authoritative but not Persnickety

• Questioning but not Rebellious

• Informal but not Unprofessional

• Cool but not Unapproachable

• Effective but not Complicated


Developed a slogan and philosophy

Unfortunately the CRAFT philosophy never caught on internally. Even in video interviews on the site with the

executive team some of them couldn’t tell you what it stood for.


Developed a search-driven information architecture

Despite the fact that we are doing marketing across multiple channels we developed a site architecture based on the

things that people are searching for to make sure it performs well Organically.


Updated the branding

Our Creative Director Robb Dorr and I worked to refresh the brand and make it look at cooler.


Developed the wireframes

Robb and I developed wireframes to help us all stay on the same page with the content that we’d need to create for

this new site.


Hired devin

I hired Devin Asaro (@copydev) as our lead Content Strategist to own the Content Strategy for the website in addition

to developing the copy.


Homepage before and after

…


Hired jenn

I hired Jenn Sager (@jennsager) to give us Creative firepower in NYC. She helped speed up the site launch working

on icons, case studies and other site content. She stayed until 10pm on her first day. She builds marketing materials.


Offering clarity

One of the main goals of the new site was to showcase our expanded offerings with a lot of clarity to completely offset

the obscured messaging of the previous iteration of the site,

The industry took notice.



More importantly the metrics took notice

Organic search traffic increased We saw an immediate uplift in traffic from the Organic Search

channel.


Mom organic search traffic Our Organic Search Traffic has continued to substantially increase

MoM since the launch of the new website.


Our best referral lead source Having a mention on Moz’s recommended list has been our single

most consistent lead source. It cost us $0.



Moz referrals by the numbers

To date being on the Moz Recommended list has sent us 72 leads, most of which have been qualified.

Established a content calendar We’d had a content calendar in the past, but until now we hadn’t been able to sufficiently stick to it. With more staff we’ve gotten better at it.



Hired Konner

Konner (@konnersmith) is our resident Video Producer. He came in and helped us streamline our video work and

improve its quality. Up until then I was shooting and editing all the video.

WE blew out our video content We haven’t put enough efforts in promotions of the video content, so the views are low, but they look great! However people often comment to us in person on the content they’ve seen.



Hired j-li

Jiafeng Li (@jli_jiafengli) came on to our Strategy team and made us a much stronger team from a quantitative

analysis standpoint. We leverage her Excel skills to make sure all of our data is strong.


Iacquire got a lot easier to market

Now that I had a strong team of badass digital marketers and new cutting edge offerings it became much easier to

market something we could believe in.

DIGITAL STRATEGY

DATA & TECHNOLOGY

Data Partnerships

CAPABILITIES

COMPETITIVE Analysis MARKET RESEARCH IN-HOUSE EXPERTISE

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT SEO CONTENT MARKETING Social Media

IRANK

Content Strategy

measurement & optimization


Experian webinar

We did a co-branded webinar with SurveyMonkey


Surveymonkey co-marketing

We did content with SurveyMonkey

Meetups for brand awareness We launched our first meetup in partnership with Zemanta and Distilled

and it was a smashing success with 50 in attendance. We’ve continued

to grow them and have over 100 people attend each time.



The single best traffic driving piece of content on the site

My post on 18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2013 has driven over 70k visits and 61k unique pageiews

in 8 months making it our best traffic driver. That traffic is 100% organic.

MAKE DEFINITIVE TACTICAL GUIDES AND GET REWARDED WITH TRAFFIC. But not conversions if your content is too high funnel.



Hired amanda

Amanda (@agalluch) was one of our all-star interns the previous year who had continued to contribute to our blog so I

brought her on as an Associate Content Strategist. She owns our blog, email marketing and landing page creation.


Unbounce shredded our landing page

The guys at Unbounce tore apart our landing page and at the 0.20% conversion rate they are absolutely right.

iacquire.com

SO WE STEP OUR GAME UP IMMEDIATELY

@iPullRank


Hired sasha

We hired Sasha (@galkinator) who primarily works on the Strategy side as a Copywriter, but also frees up Devin to

do more Marketing work.

How we affected the business

@iPullRank Date

AN EXAMPLE OF HOW THE TEAM WORKS

I lead the thought with this I challenged the SEO industry to leverage the new data that Google has given us rather than complain about the data they have taken away.


iacquire.com

THE CONVO AROUND IT GAVE US AN IDEA

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Then devin made this Devin talked about how (not provided) moves us away from

keyword stuffing back into marketing and telling good stories.


WHICH MADE US REALIZE THIS…


iacquire.com

AND THE AUDIENCE REJOICED

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AMANDA AND DEVIN MADE THIS With help from our creative director @usethedorr. Signup: http://landing.iacquire.com/solving-not-provided/


http://landing.iacquire.com/solving-not-provided/







We ran twitter ads targeting seos

Our Twitter ads have resulted in 524 clicks to the landing page at a spend of $283.


We a/b test to get the most out

iacquire.com

SO FAR WE HAVE 90 SIGNUPS Not bad for a few hours work.

@iPullRank

How we affected the business

@iPullRank Date

METRICS AND MEASUREMENT


We don’t build links, they just come

We have over 11k links from 1.3K domains without ever sending a single outreach email. Marketing > Link Building.


traffic

Traffic in general is up 172.74% YoY and Organic Search traffic specifically is up 1323.50%. Our content strategy and

site relaunch paid off.


conversions

Conversions are up 65.16% across the board and while the conversions we tracked last year are down substantially

the new ones that we truly care about (Site Contact Form Submit) are up.


Helloooooo conversions

Safe to say we crushed that.

That’s 283 leads in 3 quarters vs. the 45 we’re supposed to get



Cost Per Acquisition

Based on the numbers at my disposal which may not be a complete picture of the cost of the sales and marketing

teams our CPA is $3,756.


CPA:LTV Ratio

Our SalesForce setup is not entirely accurate, but based on the numbers that have been recorded our average

lifetime value per customer is $53,502 which makes our CPA:LTV ratio 1:14. (1:3-5 is considered good).

1:14

FAILURES Things we never quite executed on

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Outbrain doesn’t help us meet business goals

Only the most off-topic articles generate traffic for us through Outbrain and that traffic is largely unqualified.

We never launched this project. The

interactive developer who was working on it

completely disappeared and the project died.

USER GENERATED COMICS

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REPUTATION TRACKER We never launched Reputation

Tracker. The co-founders of iAcquire

announced they didn’t want me

making tools when I was in the middle

of it.

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AUTHORA Josh and I were ahead of our time

with trying to open source the Author

Graph. iAcquire didn’t believe in it at

the time and stopped putting

resources into it. Now they are

revisiting the idea as the basis of

ClearVoice’s author ranking system

VoiceGraph and VoiceRank

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BROKEN LINK INDEX The Outreach team wasn’t able to

properly implement the broken link

building as a viable method of building

links so iAcquire decided to stop

funding this project as well.

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NEVER LAUNCHED IACQUIRETESTS.COM We announced that we would we start making our seo tests public. The project never happened.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS What you should implement right now

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Understand your audience

This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot

from my friends in the industry.


Identify knowledge gaps that set you apart

We tend to b blog about things it no one else seems to be thinking about. It’s very effective in establishing us as

thought leaders.


Focus on content strategy




Have channel owners

Our efforts became substantially more effective once we had someone to own each channel.

Social Media Owner Blog, Email Owner


Over communicate

Meetings, emails, phone calls, Google+ Hangouts. I don’t care how you do it, just communicate what you’re doing.


Track everything



TOOLS WE USE What you should implement right now

@iPullRank


hootsuite




mailchimp




Experian simmons




moz




sysomos




15five




trello




Google analytics

Google Analytics is of course how we measure all the things. http://www.google.com/analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics


feedburner




Sharedby.co

We add our branding to the URLs and the top of every page that we share to easily drive people back to us.

http://www.sharedby.co

http://www.sharedby.co/


Bit.ly

We have our own URL shortener via Bit.ly for iacq.co. http://www.bitly.com

http://www.bitly.com/


Ga url builder

For measurement purposes we need to tag our URLs with the right parameters. This tool makes it easy http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-url-builder/

http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-url-builder/









unbounce

Unbounce is a WYSIWYG tool for building landing pages and running A/B tests. We don’t run enough A/B tests.

http://www.unbounce.com

http://www.unbounce.com/


eventbrite

We use Eventbrite for tickets to our meetups. It provides metrics and Google Analytics integration

http://www.eventbrite.com

http://www.eventbrite.com/


wistia

We use Wistia as our video hosting platform so we can get visits directly to our site from Organic Search.

http://www.wistia.com

http://www.wistia.com/


speechpad

We use Speechpad to transcribe our videos so we can place the copy on the page and better improve its visibility in

Organic Search. http://www.speechpad.com

http://www.speechpad.com/

@iPullRank

wwww.iacquire.com

Thank you Michael King Director of Inbound Marketing @iPullRank