This Week in Startups - Marketing SEO & Conversion Funnels | Scaling Your Startup S2 E6: Gravitr’s Doriane Mouret & Outlaw’s Danielle Vincent | E1218

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

This episode is full of tactical advice for improving your marketing operations. Gravitr's Doriane Mouret explains how to improve your conversion funnels (3:28), Outlaw's Danielle Vincent shares how to improve your SEO (33:45), then Jason joins for a Q&A covering the right cadence, location, and quality of content to publish (47:21).

Season two of scaling your startup is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-CROWD.com slash twist. NetSuite. Don't let old software and spreadsheets slow you down anymore. Upgrade to NetSuite, the world's number one cloud business. system. Head to net suite.com slash twist for their special financing program. And Silicon Valley Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has been providing banking and financial solutions for

every stage of the startup journey. Learn more at SVB.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to scaling your startup season two, episode six. So far, it's been an amazing season. We covered growth. Social media, copywriting, sales, fundraising, and product. What an amazing season we're having. You can see all the episodes at this week in startups.com slash scale. We do this as a service to you, founders, who are trying to build your companies and dealing with some of these issues. You may not be dealing with all of them, but you could always use a little help on sales

and fundraising. Well, that's typically never easy. And today we're going to cover two things that are absolutely crucial to growth, which sometimes people, maybe they wait too long to address. One of them is SEO. You have to get your search engine optimization right so people can find you because even today in 2021, people start at Google and they go look for you. Yeah, sure, sometimes they might find you on social.

Sometimes they might look for you in an app store. But Google is still dominant. And it is an amazing opportunity for you to catch people when they have intent. When they type something into that search box, they are looking for an answer, and hopefully your startup and your product or service will be that answer with us today, Danielle Vincent, who is from Outlaw Soaps, which is a great direct consumer brand that we were lucky enough to invest in. And she breaks down all the secrets to content and SEO. Additionally, one of the things that people forget about is to think holistically about their funnel, their marketing funnel, from just people knowing you exist to engaging people, building trust, and then eventually closing the sale. So we have Dorian Moray. Got it right.

Okay. And she is the CEO of Graviter, which is a company that helps people with their marketing. And she's super smart. And she's going to talk to you about how to optimize your conversion funnel and not break them.

Because conversion funnels are critically important. These are two amazing, amazing founders and two amazing presentations. You're going to want to get your team together. I highly recommend. You watch the whole series with your team during staff lunch or have a staff dinner, send everybody food or Uber eats, whatever it is. Get them in front of these videos because you may know 60%, 80%, you may even know 90% of what's

in this scaling series. But that 10% or 20% could be what puts you over the top and you can beat your competitors, grow your revenue, pay your people more and just have a more successful company. All right, first up is Dorian, Dorian, take it away. Thank you, Jason. Hi, everybody. My name is Dorian and I'm the CEO of Graviter. And today I want to talk about marketing and more specifically conversion funnels.

And before we get started, maybe I should say why someone like me is relevant to talk about this. So Graviter is a, it's a platform that enables boutique agencies and creatives to deliver like big marketing groups. And really our secret is that we automated processes, we have upfront pricing and transparent pricing, and a global talent collaboration to really deliver world-class marketing campaigns with actual ROI. And so what we notice with of our customers is that most people don't actually understand what conversion funnels are. And so that's why I want to go a little bit into this today and why the conversion funnels matter for your marketing campaign. And so first I go over the conversion funnel, the basic definition. What most people think a conversion funnel is, is like, it's what happens between the first time customer heroes about your brand. Things happen in the middle, and then the other end is when they convert into customers.

So that's what usually people think of when they think of a conversion funnel. And usually what they also know is that you get a lot of people at the beginning, and you're going to to lose the majority of those people throughout the funnel and only a small amount of them is going to convert in the end. And so what most people think is that, okay, the bigger your reach at the beginning, the more people you'll convert in the end, right? Because if your conversion rate is always going to be, I don't know, 2%. If you reach 200,000 people or 2 million people, obviously you'll get more customers if you

reach 2 million people. But it's a little bit more complex than this actually. conversion funnel first don't necessarily start at the first contact and they don't necessarily stop at the conversion. In order for people to find you, you need to build some kind of brand that they're able to find. And so the brand building part of a funnel is actually very important. Before they even get in touch with you, customers need to know who you are and need to know how you present yourself to the world. And once they convert, it's also not the end of the funnel because many things can happen after that, usually people don't necessarily take care of,

which can create churn and other things that we'll talk about a little bit later. And throughout this process, you have a lot of different things that can happen. And at every step, there is actions that you can take to maximize your conversion rates. So it's not like one number that you can't beat.

It's something that you can actually do something about. And so there's lots of things you can do to optimize your conversion funnel. So for example, in terms of the brand building parts, if you know your competitors better, if you do some market research, if you create a persona,

if you prepare a strategy, if you have a good branding, good messaging, this is going to help people finding you and increase the number of people get to first contact. Then when you're in first contact, you know, you can do advertising, PR events, SEO, things like that to maximize that first contact.

And so on. So there's a lot of, I mean, I'll go over quickly the rest of it, think once people have heard of you about you, one, you can create a lot of content and a lot of value for them to consume before they actually convert into customers. So that's video, that's audio, that's copy, that's brochures. And then once they're ready for conversion, you want to optimize your website, you want maybe to have some email marketing. And once they're actually converted, you want to do some product marketing and even, and if your B2B is probably going to be a sales cycle.

So those are all the things that you can act on in order to optimize your funnel. But what's happening in reality is that most people are going to focus on specific moments of the funnel. So for example, I don't know, they get, you know, $50,000 from some kind of grant to do marketing and they're going to put all of that in a Facebook ad. The problem if you do this is you actually waste a lot of money. Because what's going to happen is you get a lot of reach and then people are not, not walk through the conversion funnel process, and so they drop before they even convert, or did they churn once they've converted?

Many VCs and, you know, marketing leaders tell you, oh, you need to focus when you do marketing. You need to actually focus on specific channels that work for you. This is true. You do need to focus, but you don't need to focus on a specific marketing activity. You need to focus on a specific funnel. So you need to find the right funnel and then focus on that funnel, the one that works the best for you. And this issue is actually you can feel it in the conversion rates that you see for any kind of industry when it comes to marketing.

So the darker blue here is the median conversion rate per industry. And as you can see, that means that 50% of the companies in those industry are way lower, way under the average conversion rate of that industry. That means that more than half of companies in every industry actually don't know how to do conversion rates. conversion funnels, right? They don't understand how it works and they don't know how to optimize those conversions. And we're going to go over the different misconceptions that people usually have about conversion funnels and how to debunk them and then what you can actually do to improve your conversions and improve yourself. It's time for our crowds deal of the week. Right now, you can join our crowd's investment in Saito Reason. Saito Reason has partnered

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And some of Our Crowd's companies have been acquired by buyers like Intel, Nike, Microsoft Oracle, and my favorite Uber. With Our Crowd, accredited investors can invest directly and easily in startups early before the IPO or get bought. Accredited investors can participate in single company deals for as little as $10,000. Or one of Our Crowd's funds for as little as $50,000. That's a fraction of what a lot of money is a fraction of what is a company deals for as little. would be if you tried to go direct. The investment professionals at our crowd have already invested

hundreds of millions of dollars in over 200 companies with dozens of exits. Again, the R-Crowd is free. Just go to O-U-R-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. So the misconception number one is, okay, it doesn't matter if my website or my logo is not pretty. As long as my product is good, the customers will convert. So this, you know, people who think everything is in the product. Elon Musk actually had some comment like this at some point. It was a couple of years ago where he said that Tesla doesn't do marketing. But I think what he meant is that Tesla doesn't do advertising, which is a very specific part of marketing.

Because actually, Tesla is a marketing machine. It has very well-defined customers, funnels that are very polished, that walk people through, you know, the first contact all the way to the onboarding. And so the reality is that just Tesla doesn't do TV ads, which is one aspect, that one activity that you can do inside of a funnel. So the reality is that 73% of people who get in touch with your brand for the first time

actually not ready to buy your product yet. So they're maybe looking for a solution. They're like, okay, I don't know. for example they want to travel they're like thinking okay i haven't traveled in a year it's i've been you know quarantine and so on and so i'm thinking about going on vacation so they go to your travel travel app or to your hotel website and they're kind of browsing but not necessarily ready to buy it and if you don't do anything to actually convert to to actually convince those people that you're the right solution for them what's going to happen is that at conversion time the same amount of people will

still not be ready to buy It's your job to actually do something in between those points to convince people to actually convert, become customers, and then even upsell and cross-sale. This old thing, the whole conversion funnel thing, actually happens before customers even experienced your product. So when people say, oh, my product will sell itself, the problem is people don't know how good your product is at that point. And so assuming that the product will sell itself is not necessarily relevant at this point.

What you need to do is actually build trust. That's the only tool you have at this point. You can't showcase your product. I mean, you can't show how powerful your product is because they can't use it yet. So they have to trust you that you are actually the right provider and that once they convert, they'll be happy with your product. And the question is, how do you actually build trust? Well, first, you want to make sure that you provide them with value throughout the conversion funnel process before they even spend a dime with you. because then you'll show, okay, this person is ready to actually give me a little bit,

to show me that they trust to me. They trust that I'm going to do good use of what they're giving me for free. So that's one thing you can do. The other thing you can actually do is create many opportunities for them to interact with you. That's why, you know, if you're going to see a brand on TV and then you're going to interact with them on social media, and then you're going to go on their website. This creates different opportunities for interaction between the brand and the customer. It's similar to a friendship, right?

You meet someone, you exchange conversations. Do you find this person to be valuable in the sense that they bring you, you know, what they're saying is interesting? And then you see them several times and then you realize, oh, you know what? I want this person to be my friend and you build a friendship. It's kind of similar in that way. So that's the first thing. Build trust.

Don't just rely on the quality of your product. It won't work. The second misconception is, oh, what I can do is, you know, if I get some, some money from an angel investor or something. I can get a flashy article in the press. I can put all my money into an online ad and then do a tons of, you know, buy some social media followers. And it's going to create FOMO and then people will actually want to come because of this.

And I actually started calling this the clubhouse effect, which is something that we've been seeing, you know, the last three months. What happened with Clubhouse is everybody was talking about it. Everybody was all about Clubhouse. had a huge momentum. And what we're seeing right now is a large drop in signups and retention. And I'm actually one of the people who signed up pretty early on Clubhouse and never really used the app.

And part of the reason is because there was no funnel for me to go through. Once I was in the app, like I got invited by a friend and I was there. And I was kind of, I don't know what to do. I ended up on the app. There was nothing I wanted to listen to. I came back a couple of times because Jason had. a couple of rooms that were going on that were interesting. But then he stopped doing it and then I have no reason to come back to the platform.

And I have, I'm not invited to any club. There is no trigger from the app itself to tell me to do something else. The problem is that a good PR stunt like this is going to create a lot of reach. But that reach is going to be wasted because people are not actually going to stay and even are going to start talking negatively about your app. So yeah, that's what I was seeing. What I just said is, like, you create a lot of reach, lots of reach by doing this.

But then because you don't follow up with any funnel, what happens is you have almost no conversion. And the people who actually convert don't actually stay on the app, don't actually stay using the app. Another example that I think it's called ByCloud, which was, I thought the concept was really interesting. It's social media, basically, a stock market kind of, where you can buy stocks of famous people and kind of resell them. And everybody was talking about this for a while.

But I'm not sure if you guys remember or tried to use ByCloud at that point. But there was actually no lending page for ByCloud. So you would go on their website and it would give you an error page saying that the site is not accessible. So they got tons of reach, tons of people going to their website, which couldn't do anything. You couldn't leave an email. you couldn't do anything. And so I feel like this is, again, and a waste of a good conversion funnel

that was starting really well. Like people were starting to talk about this. And then now you go to Buy Cloud to their website. They have a lending page where you can actually sign up. But it's a little bit too late because all the reach that was going on is kind of gone. The misconception number three is, okay, once my customer is converted, I won, that's it.

All I need to do is go to the next one and try to convert the next lead. So most people focus on acquisition. And the reason, mostly, I mean, especially for us, startups, is that we want to look good for the next board meeting. Or, for example, for the next launch accelerator presentation,

we want to make sure that we hit that 30% growth MOM. And so we focus a lot on acquisition. The other thing, too, that people can do is, oh, let's just focus on acquisition right now because it's all we, you know, we have a limited budget. Let's not focus on retention. And once we raise more money, we'll go to retention later on. And what's going to happen is, again,

you're going to waste a lot of the marketing potential that you could have had for free at that point. And you'll pay for it later with a lot of churn. And what you actually need to do is think long term from the get-go. Because once the customer is converted, if you continue engaging with them through product marketing, through free knowledge, through interactions with your team, you will be able to upsell, cross-sell them,

and they might even refer your product to other people. And all of that is almost free in the sense that you don't have to work too hard to make it happen as long as they're happy with your product. One company that's really good at this is superhuman. They're extremely good at onboarding. Once you convert, for people who don't know, once you convert, you actually have an onboarding session with a superhuman employee who walks you through all the the features of the product and then they stay in touch with you.

Like you can reach out to them whenever you want and you can give them feedback and they get back to you within a couple of hours. And the CEO also sends probably an email. It's like once or twice a month and talking about, you know, how he optimizes his day or how he markets superhuman things that can be relevant to you. He's not asking anything in exchange. He's just like, hey, here are my thoughts for the months, and here is something I'm doing, and I thought you would find it interesting.

So they're really good at keeping the customers happy, onboarding them first, and then keeping them happy. So they're more likely to refer, to upsell, to cross-sale. Obviously, right now it's a flat rate, but we can imagine that as more features are being developed, that I would, as a customer, I would upsell across-sale on superhuman. So those are the three misconceptions that I wanted to go over. And to help people really visualize the impact of marketing on the conversion funnel, I actually created a little tool.

And I wanted to show you guys. So this is something I built really quickly just to help people visualize the impact of marketing on conversion funnels. And so the numbers you can see here, the conversion numbers you can see here, are actually actual numbers. So, for example, for email marketing, the average open rate right now is around 25%. The click-through rate from those 25% is around 4%. So those are the standard rates that we see.

They vary a little bit per industry, but for simplicity, that's how I'm showing it. Same for advertising. For example, a Twitter ad is more going to be in a 1.5% conversion rate. Facebook is more going to be 0.7 conversion. So, but overall it's around in 1%. Same for Google keywords and all kinds of SCM. We're around 2%. A good optimized lending page can convert around 8%.

If it's not optimized, it's more in the 2.5%. Those are actual numbers, as I was saying, but then the numbers that I put up there, the 5%, are just me giving like small numbers to show an impact. For example, if I do a competitive analysis, if I improve the understanding of how I differentiate from my competitor, this is going to impact the quality of my funnel. So let's say it impacts it by 5%.

So that's how I get to my actual conversion rate, which you can see at the bottom here at 11.92. So let's say I don't do any of this. I don't need competitive analysis. I don't need to do a persona. I don't need a strategy. I don't need a logo and colors and messaging content of any kind. I don't need to build a community.

I don't need to do any outreach, influencers or events or PR. And I don't need to optimize my pages. So here, we actually get to a conversion rate to 1.28% of 1.28%. So I hope this helps everybody realize marketing can actually have an indirect impact on your conversion rate. Not just about that funnel that people think,

you know, about when they think about conversion, just the first contact things happen. conversion, there's much more going on up here. And this could actually negatively impact your conversion rate, which is around 2.5 on average for all industries. It could go actually under if you are of a really bad website design. If you have a really bad logo, if you're not explaining who you are properly, it could

actually negatively impact your conversion rate. So now, if I put everything back, if I do competitive analysis, I understand my market really well. I understand who my target is. I build a strong strategy with very strong funnels. I create a good brand with a good logo, good colors, a good personality for my brand. Create messaging. I create video, audio content.

I create photos, if it makes sense or illustrations, I have a blog or some kind of white papers. I have a group of influencers I can reach out to to talk about my brand or I do PR or event. have a community that I engage with or I'm very active on social media. And then I do on top of that my classic funnel and I optimize my pages for conversion, then I can actually get my conversion rate way, way higher than it would be otherwise. So I've been showing this during, you know, my introduction calls and it's been pretty successful. Not necessarily again. It's not hard science.

It's not actual. Obviously, we don't know if it's exactly 5% the impact. but even if it's only 5% this is how much it would impact the final conversion rate. Okay, so I hope by now you understand the value of having strong conversion funnels and that, you know,

I was able to convince you of all the misconceptions that are currently around conversion funnels and conversion rates. Are you still running your business on outdated software? You know the ones I'm talking about. Sometimes legacy software can be like quicksand for your business. The bigger your company grows, the faster you sink with all that software that just can't keep up.

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N-T-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash twist. So now the question might be, okay, so what do you do as a company if you want to improve your conversion rates, improve your funnels, and actually overall increase your So the first thing you want to do is actually assess what you already have. So there's a bunch of different activities you can do. There's a bunch of funnels that you can build. But first let's go, let's do a little bit of an inventory of your marketing asset. Put everything in one place. So I don't know if it's for you, for example, you have a bunch of content.

Put everything into one big folder that's like, here is everything I have so far. You can also include in here the things that you are able to get but don't necessarily have yet. So an example could be, okay, you know, one of the co-founders is a filmmaker. The other one is really good at, you know, it's an engineer. He built a website. So you know that you can have a really good website with really good video content in-house. So you count that at something you can do in house. So then go over the things that you don't have in house that you will need, that you'll need to work on.

So that's the first thing you want to do. Once you have your inventory of marketing assets and marketing activities, you want to actually build. your funnels and conversion goals. And what that means, as I said, start from the very beginning, the first contact that, the first thing that the customer or the potential customer would see from your brand all the way to the point where they actually become an active customer and even an advocate of your brand. So here I'm giving a couple of examples.

If it's, I don't know, it would be a mobile app. You could start with having, you know, an ad campaign on Instagram. which redirects to a video podcast that you have on a weekly basis or biweekly basis. And then from that video podcast, you can redirect people to lending pages that are relevant to the episode or to the industry. And then from those lending pages, people could get a free trial of the mobile app. And once they're inside the app, they have suggestions on how to use the app and how to make the most of it. So that's one example. If you're more on the B2B side and your SaaS, for example, you can start by, you know,

having a group of analysts or influencers in your industry that you can talk to, that you can invite to specific events, for example, virtual events, so they can talk at your events. And so if you do this, they're more likely to actually talk about your brand on their channels and their platforms. So you get those influencers to talk about your products. You get everybody to join virtual events during the events. You can gather emails and then have an email marketing campaign. In that campaign, you redirect people to a website,

where they can sign up and they can sign it for, you know, to enter a sales cycle and then the sales team takes over. They do a demo call and, you know, and then we go into the more of the B2B sales process. So that's the second step. Build your funnels. And for each of those funnels, make sure you have conversion goals. So instead of saying, oh, we need to reach two million people or 200,000 people, you want to talk about, okay, how many people do we want to convert? How do, how many people will make this funnel worth it. And you want to go back from this. So let's say, you know, you know that you want to convert, I don't know, 10 customers doing your demo call. How many people doesn't mean you need to sign up on the website? You know, let's say, I don't know,

100 people need to sign up so that 10 people get to the demo call. And then you go back. So that means how many people do you need to reach from the email marketing perspective for them to get up, to go to the website and sign up and so on. So you want to go backwards to figure out what's the reach you should get to in order to meet your conversion goals. The third thing you want to do, so again, you have your inventory, you have your funnels, you have a conversion goals. Now you want to actually create a timeline and budget. You know how many people, at that point, you know how much money you can make, or revenue you can make from those funnels because we've established, okay,

we're going to be able to convert 10 people at $5,000 if we're talking B2B, obviously. so you know that you're going to make $50,000 from this campaign. So you kind of have your LTV already from the campaign. But now what you need to do is how much this campaign is going to cost you and you want to determine your CAQ. This is something that non-marketers are tend to be really bad at. They tend to underestimate how many, how much time every marketing activity is going to take and how much money it's going to take.

Obviously, they want to be, they want everybody wants to be optimistic. They want to make sure that they actually get the most out of their marketing budget, so they want to minimize how much it's going to cost and how long it's going to take. On Graveter, we actually built a tool that automatically tells you how long something is going to take and how much is going to cost up front based on the different activities that you choose. Again, the goal here is to determine a timeline and a budget that is realistic, that actually gets your result. instead of saying, oh, I'm going to do it for, I don't know, $2,000, and it ends up costing you 10.

Let's say, you know, you build that timeline for yourself, and you can also work, obviously, gravite as an example. You can work with marketing professionals who've done it before, and know those things, know those budgets, know those timelines pretty well. What usually ends up happening is, okay, you calculate, you know, a full campaign with a very clear funnels with like a lot of marketing activities ends up being too much money

or too long and so what people tend to do in that case focus on specific marketing activity so instead of they're like okay well we can't do advertising and website and a video so let's just put everything in video and we'll see for the rest of it

this is the wrong strategy what you want to do is keep the funnel that you've already built but reduce your reach So instead of spending money to reach 200,000 people on an ad campaign, try to reach 20,000 people and convert as many of those as possible. So the goal, again, is to increase the conversion rates, not to increase the reach, because the reach won't matter if people not actually stay on your platform and or stay with your product and use it. And so, of course, you want to make sure through the third step that the revenue you're going to make from this campaign is actually, always much higher than how much it's going to cost.

The fourth thing you want to do is work with experts. I kind of touched on it a few times, but as I was saying, the goal is to have realistic expectations when it comes to budget, when it comes to timeline, because otherwise you won't meet your objectives. A pro will always know how to determine that. They've made the mistakes in the past that they can bring to the table and prevent you from making. So if you try to do it yourself as a non-marketer or someone with no experience, what's going to happen is you're actually going to make those mistakes, which in the end will cost you more than if you hadn't made them in the first place.

And so you'll have much lower conversion rates. And what happens is the campaign took you longer than you thought was more expensive. It was not as good because, you know, you made a bunch of mistakes that lowered your conversion rates. and in the end, you actually decrease your marketing ROI. And that means, obviously, that now you have slower growth, your board of directors not happy, you have self-stoubt, higher churn. Now it's an existential crisis and so on and so forth, so we don't want to go that route. So this is it for me.

I hope I convince you about the importance of conversion funnels and how to use all marketing activities to build those funnels and really guide your potential cost. through the process all the way to advocates and active customers. My name is Dorian Moray. You can go on Gravita.com if you also want to see there's so many things you can do in marketing. We have a list of products there that can help you determine like think of ideas of marketing things you haven't necessarily done. So I'll definitely recommend to check it out. You go to Gravita.com slash products and you'll see a list of products there.

And you can also email us at high at Gravita.com if you want to learn more about us. Okay, next up is Danielle Vincent from Outlaw Soaps. Hi, my name is Danielle Vincent, and I am very excited to talk to you about SEO, Fundamentals. That's right. We're going to be putting the fun in fundamentals. Who am I? Well, again, Danielle Vincent, and I have a little company called Outlaw. We make personal care and home fragrance for people who want to smell like campfire, leather, whiskey, stuff like that, really exciting stuff. And basically, if SEO didn't exist, we probably wouldn't either.

We are very dependent on it. Before that, I worked for the Oprah Winfrey Network. The Oprah Winfrey Network website was my project, as well as a bunch of other projects that were probably not of interest to you if you don't like Oprah. ABC and ABC family before that, all of this means that I've worked with a lot

of very expensive SEO consultants, and that's how I learned everything that I know about SEO today is from all those expensive consultants. and they've been very free with their knowledge so that they can help us improve, and I'm going to give you about $20,000 of their knowledge right this minute. So why pay attention to SEO? Because it provides incredible value for absolutely free. It made up 18% of our revenue last year,

and the total cost, free. The total time, almost none. So there's actually no reason that you shouldn't do this. When we talk about SEO, we're of course talking about Google. Why? Because Google is the greatest. Everybody loves Google. And why do they love Google?

Because Google is really good at what they do. They deliver what people are looking for. And they do that by looking for relevance cues. And that's what we're going to talk about, how to show that you are the most relevant thing for what people are searching for. It's really just as simple as that. Now, if you were to search for SEO or search engine optimization on Google, you'll see that there's a lot of paid ads here. This is not what we're talking about today.

We're not talking about paid search. And we're talking about the free organic search that shows up under all these ads. If you're looking for paid search classes, do that through Launch University. That's great. But this is not for that. this is about how to show up in organic search results, which is, again, free. So here's what we're going to talk about today.

What Google looks for when ranking sites and pages, that's your site, what people are looking for, and how to tell what they're looking for, and how to show up there, and how you can build lasting relevance over time. That's the long game that people are talking about, but for the most part, all of this other stuff is stuff that has pretty immediate effects,

which is great. Now, I'm going to reference the Matrix. I love that movie. So this is the woman in the red dress. You want to be the woman in the red dress to Google. That in a world full of people who look exactly alike, you want to be the one shining relevant site or whatever it is that people are looking for. Now, in order to do that, you must think in code. And that's how the whole internet is made. So right now, we get to decide. Are you going to learn a little bit about code and how the robots think, or do you want to go back to sleep? Well, I hope that you want to learn because that's why you're here, right?

So let's take the red pill and carry on. This week in startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if? Are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that can keep a founder up at night, and no one understands us quite like Silicon Valley Bank for over 30. 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped thousands of high-growth companies by providing scalable financial solutions,

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How do search engines work? Well, I don't know if you remember in the Matrix, but there were a lot of little robots that ran all over the pods of humans. those robots. These robots, crawl the web, Google's robots, and they create a massive virtual matrix of every single website. They create a map of the web, the web. And they check back whenever a page is updated. So if you, like in one of these pods, if you're jiggling or if you're waking up, they will come over and check on you. That means you want to be updating your site a lot so that Google thinks, oh, there's something going on over here. So you want to create relevant content, create meaningful links between pages,

and cultivate meaningful backlinks, which we'll talk about. And most importantly, update your site frequently, which I'll also talk about. Now, what Google looks for in ranking sites and pages. This is about how, you know, the code works. This is what everybody sees. Now, of course, for people who look at code, that is this. And the good news about this is that we have total control over it. It's really great. So this robot is your dear friend. You want him to come looking for you whenever he's thinking about indexing keywords.

So to do that, you want to update your site frequently. Now, we're going to talk about the page structure. We're going to think about the specific keywords and updating the site, linking, and all this stuff, really it's important to think about what keywords you want to rank for. So in this case, we wanted to rank for things like Campfire smell soap or soap that smells like campfire. We wanted to make sure that if somebody was looking for exactly what we sell, we were the only credible result. And that is the goal when you're first starting out is becoming the only credible result

for the most specific narrow group of folks. Now we're doing things like trying to rank for body wash and outlaw and soap. But back then, campfire soap was our jam. Okay, so page structure matters. Your brand name matters, your URL matters, and the page content also matters. Within the page content, you have the H1 tag, which is you should only have one H1 tag on every,

page. Otherwise, Google gets confused. What's the most important thing? H2, a little more flexible. You can have a couple, but still, this is how Google determines the hierarchy of your site. And then the content of your page is less important. I mean, it's still like important, though. So don't totally pay, you know, totally ignore it. Now, I want to talk about blogs because the blog is the easiest way to update your homepage on the regular, create a lot of cross-linking between pages and everything like that. It is a very good friend of yours. So the effing blog.

It is loaded with keywords and you can link those keywords. You have total control. It's educational. And you can use that content everywhere. So like, for example, this solid cologne versus spray cologne with the number one result for solid cologne versus spray cologne. And we used this in our newsletter and we used it in, you know, some emails. I mean, it's like everywhere.

Okay. So now we're going to talk about what people are looking for and how to know what they're looking for and how to show up there. I want you to get a tattoo of this on your arm, trends. com. Because this is how you know what people are looking for. I was working with somebody who was trying to figure out how to get their. job search website ranking.

It was very huge. You know, obviously there's like, you know, Indeed, Monster, there's a whole bunch of competition. How do you rank? Well, obviously job search has the hugest thing. But then, find a job. I was very surprised to see that find a job had a lot of searches for it. Now, this is a gap because there's no,

actual website, like there's no page title for find a job. There's finding a good job. You know, you're going to be competing with Indeed. But this is something you could chip away at. And if you rank highly for that open season keyword, you're getting a lot of traffic there. A lot of people tell me, oh, I don't know what to write for the blog. Well, don't worry because Google will tell you that information, which is super helpful. So do a keyword search for your search and then write down everything that comes after that. And then write down all the answers to these questions. Write down these questions in exactly this word order.

It's very, very easy. Scroll down to the bottom, look at the related searches, and write those down. And these have become your content calendar. Super easy. Okay, so back to the blog. That's right, the effing blog. Ah, it's a lot of content.

and a lot of content does take time to write, but it's a lot less time than you would think. You want to make sure that you don't duplicate content across your website because Google penalizes that. You want to make sure that it's real content, that it's actually delivering value and not just some flop. And you want to make sure that you have your keywords that you're trying to rank for, linked, and that you're not overdoing it on the keyword density.

and that you're naming your links and using all tags, which I'm terrible about the all tag thing. But anyway, what are links? This is a very stupid question for the people who are watching this because everybody knows what links are. But for our purposes, links are just a map of the web. They show what content is related, and they build overall site credibility.

So the more cross-linking you have in your site, the more foundation of relevance, and the more foundation of credibility your site has. So there's lots of different kinds of links within your own domain, from another domain to your domain, and from your domain to another domain. Now, within your domain, this is the thing that we're talking about with the blog.

You can do this from product pages. You can link to products from your About page, which has a high authority. You can do this yourself. So there's absolutely no excuse to do this. It is too easy. It is too. too light effort and you should totally do it.

Now this is a bit harder because this is earned media, right? So you're showing up on another website and that website has some sort of credibility in and of itself, right? So Men's Journal is saying that this hand-washed and lotion set is the coolest thing that they tested that week. This is because we have a PR person who goes and says, hey, will you please link to these people? And that's how we get on these.

it's harder, it takes money. But, you know, if you reach out to, you know, media, they will sometimes write about you. Now, from your domain to another domain, this further establishes the foundation. It is not as important as the other link structures, but, you know, still works. It still helps. Okay. So how to build lasting relevance over time. This is really where you become new.

So with this, you are going to be. going to be blogging. You're going to be making sure your content is unique. You're going to be targeting these keywords. And then you do that over and over for like six months to eight years. You know, who's counting? And then you will be the search engine master. And you will rank. You can just creep up. It's like a credit score or anything else. You just claw your way up. those ranking pages, it's actually a lot of fun. If you're competitive, you can internally yell at people who are doing poor, poorer things.

Of course, then there's always some guy who releases something that is exactly the keyword that you have just ranked number one for, Campfire Cologne, who then takes it over. And you got to start clawing your way back again, because I'm not going to be able to compete with him until he's not as big of a deal and we're a way bigger deal. So thank you so much for joining me. And if you have any questions, I'd love to take them. All right. Great job, Doreen and Danielle. So my first question on SEO. Do you need to have a dedicated SEO person inside your company, Danielle? And if so, should you hire somebody and train them up on how to do it? Or do you think you have to try to compete for an expert and somebody who's been doing it for five years. If you were,

let's just say a startup company of five to 15 people, what would you do? How much money does this hypothetical company have? Because that's the answer. If you have a lot of money, you probably will be hiring a content person anyway, right? So you'll be hiring a writer and that writer should be versed in SEO. Most online writers are SEO folks just because they've had to figure it out and they've had to learn their crap. People who are new to it, if you're hiring interns, they might not be as up on SEO. So you're hiring a writer who understands SEO.

Absolutely. Or the CEO can do it. SEO working from home. Maybe they've got two, three, four years experience. What do you think in the United States? that would cost ballpark in 2021? Oh, heck, I don't know. Or range?

Well, you know I write all of our stuff myself. So I don't know. But yeah, I guess I would say probably. Well, Dorian probably knows. So, Dorian, which is good to having both of you on. Dorian, what is the market rate and then sort of same question. If you were going to hire a content person, do you agree, a content plus SEO person or an SEO specialist who hires content?

What would you advise a five to 15 person startup? Obviously, somebody who's Zillow and has a thousand employees is going to have a 10-person team. But this is this week in startup. So let's talk about a startup with a million dollars in seed funding, five to 15 people. Maybe they're doing 50K a month in revenue. They got 18 months of runway. They're kind of grinding it out like both of you are. What would you advise them to do?

So the way we actually build our pricing is based on, we productize everything. as you know, and we don't do hourly rate. But we use hourly rates as a way to create this pricing. And I would say on average, a blog post 500 word blockpost, high quality SEO is going to be in the $400 range, like $3 to 500. You can go to Fiverr, get an article for 90 bucks. But as Daniel said, they might not necessarily be experts. They might not necessarily use all the keywords that you need. it might not be as valuable.

And I want to really add to that, building valuable content is actually going to naturally create SEO anyway, and it will actually really engage people and make them want to stay. So it's not just good for ranking high. It's also good to keep people going. Ah, so when you were talking about your funnel, it would build trust, which was something you brought about, and then sort of dovetailing with Danielle's.

you might pick some people up in a search engine here or there as well. So it kind of serves too. And a freelancer you're saying 300 to 500 an article, which if you were trying to do articles weekly or twice a week means you're spending $20,000 a year on freelancers. Is that about right? Yeah. Yeah, a couple thousand dollars a month if you really want to, you know,

push it every month and post regularly here. Danielle, what do you think the cadence should be for content marketing? what is your cadence in, you know, today, and what do you aspire for it to be? Because I know it's, you know, one of those things. We're almost daily. Almost daily. Yeah, and here's why, because there is, you should always push. You should always push more content, more contact with your customers, especially if you

know that they like your content. Just like Dorian said, it's a way to really engage people. And especially if you're answering questions or giving. customer interviews, they write themselves. So, yeah, I would say our ideal cadence is daily. We achieve about four times a week. And you do, as the founder and CEO, you do the majority of that. I do a lot of them, yes. And I guess that means you don't need any editing or you don't need anybody to come up with ideas because you have your finger on the pulse of the business. We always need an extra set of eyeballs. I mean, I think that every, yeah, yeah, for editing.

And yeah, I mean, I like to have another set of eyeballs on it. Yeah, this seems to be a trend. I mean, if you think about my firm, I do the content every day in my podcast or on social media, and I still do my day job and it takes me an hour a day to do some content. But boy, it's kind of hard to be competitive, Dorian, if you're not, right? if you're not doing, if you're a CEO who is quiet and nobody hears from you, that's kind of hard to compete against a CEO in your same vertical who is a chatterbox or constant producing. Am I correct?

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, Daniel, this cadence is, I mean, I'm not there yet. I really want to get there for times a week is really impressive. So yes, it makes it even, it makes it harder. Any part of the funnel that's being done better by a competitor, obviously. is going to be harder for you to compete against. I really liked, Danielle, your idea of when you get customer support questions or your customers are asking questions, they might be sending something to the customer service

line that you could make into content. So, in fact, this very serious scale, which you can visit the entire series in the last season this week in startups.com slash scale, is created based on what our founders struggle with, like SEO and like funnels. and here we are, and then this gets broken up, and we make a Notion page out of it, and we make a LinkedIn page, a Medium page. We'll maybe put it on Calicanus.com

and then ask our guests to tweet it or share it on LinkedIn and other social networks. What do you guys think of putting too much content out there or putting content in multiple places, which I guess is two different things? So you're doing four times a week. Would 40 make it better? Would that work against you?

And then the second question, should I be posting my show notes for this week in startups? We do these pod notes. Afterwards, we started writing, what lessons you learn. And I told them to super distribute it. Put it on LinkedIn,

put it on Calicanus, put it on this week in startups, and put it on the notion instance. Just put it everywhere. Did I make the right decision on an SEO basis? Let's do that first. If there's a lot of overlapping page content, and it's some percentage,

like 37% or something. If there's 37%, let's say, overlapping page content, it's going to hurt you. So if you're, say, posting the same article on Medium and on your blog, Google's going to be like,

wait, what are we doing here? This person is spamming. So make it slightly different. You know, take the show notes, have an intern reword some of the stuff. That's a great job for an intern because then they'll be learning from you. But yeah, that's,

the content, does sprout so many opportunities. And if you change it slightly, then it can be used to a lot of places. I want to add to that because I completely agree. And one thing you can do is actually start with a long form piece of content and turn it into smaller pieces of content. So do a summary of those show notes and put it on LinkedIn instead of putting the entire show notes.

That could be a good way to do it. I also want to add that, you know, on average, this changes all the time, but on average, like, five, something like five percent of people who follow you are going to see a post that you put on social media. So the more often you post, the more people you're going to be able to reach. So obviously, that's very important. But like Daniel said, it should be, content should be differentiated. I keep asking my team to repost the same clips with different content three times over two weeks. because if only 5% of people are seeing it, what are the chances,

I mean, you can actually do the math, if you're doing your statistics, you can actually do the chances of somebody seeing it. It's going to be very rare. So if I were to take this discussion, because it's a little meta here, just about posting to social media,

if I phrased it three different ways and posted it three times to LinkedIn, three times to Twitter, and three times on our other Twitter handle, chances are nobody sees it twice. So people generally overthink this, correct, Daniel? So you actually said something that, earlier about 40 times a week and is that too much.

And I have to say quality is so important. If you're posting low quality, it is worse than posting nothing. How do you know if it's low quality or it's high quality? Are you getting engagement? Are people writing about it? Are people liking it? Are people commenting on it? For me, when I look at my reach on Instagram, to me, the most important thing is not

reach on Instagram. it's likes because are people liking it? Are they engaging? That's going to make sure that my stuff shows up more frequently on people's. So if you're posting a question, for example, with the show notes, like what's your number one SEO tip? Then that'll start, I mean, you know, that'll start moving up. Doran, what about TikTok versus Instagram versus Twitter? How do you advise a client, which one to pick because at a certain point you could just be making content

all day and forget about your original business I see some people crushing it on YouTube obviously my podcast crushes it so I kind of stop blogging I feel like I'm better at this format people are telling me I should do TikTok and Instagram never took off for us but LinkedIn is doing really well for us

so how do you make that decision when you're advising a client of where to put your energy because my perception is there's probably 20 places you could 10 major places but I don't know, maybe you can do two or three well. Am I right? Yeah, exactly. And there's industry standards, obviously. So most marketers will know if you're B2B versus BDC. Those are the basic stuff.

But the reality is this changes all the time. So when agencies come to you and say, we have this recipe, it's a magic recipe. If you do it, it's going to work no matter what. This is not true. So you start with industry standards, okay, based on, okay, we're mostly in your case. you're talking, you're on the business side, so that's where LinkedIn is working so well for you. The Gen Zs who are on TikTok are not necessarily going to look for content, like your content,

when they're on the app. So it's not necessarily relevant, I think, at the moment. It's not just about what's interesting to the people who are on the channel or on the platform, but also what mindset they're on when they're on that platform. So when I'm on TikTok, I'm not necessarily wanting to, to learn anything about, you know,

startups. I just want to see cat videos and have a laugh, right? So it's not just, it's the context in which they are, and it's also the industry standards. And that makes total sense to me. When I'm on LinkedIn, I'm in a business mindset. When I'm on Instagram, I'm in a visual shopping art mindset. When I'm on TikTok, it's like dancing and goofy.

And Twitter, I'm in like full contact, intellectual debate. So where do people, With soap exist. For us, we love Facebook. We have a Facebook group and there's a lot of engagement on our Facebook group. And yeah, so Facebook is a really good channel for us and Instagram. Why do you suspect Facebook is? Well, we are very much a community-based marketing organization.

And so maybe on some, for some soap companies, Instagram would be better because it's pretty. For some, if you're taking pictures of people in the shower, I would say TikTok, your little heart out. But for us, since we're community-based marketing, it's really about Facebook. Well, what do you think about hiring like a millennial marketing manager and having them doing all kinds of horse videos and ranch videos? I actually think a bunch of cowboys and cowgirls dancing around and soap would work really good on TikTok.

Oh, my God. I love TikTok. And if I had unlimited time in the world, I would do nothing but, produce TikTok videos. Like, I would do nothing. But walk around with a bikini and a chicken mask on and just sing Bohemian Rhapsody all day. It does seem like less clothes on TikTok gets more views on the general trend. I don't know if in business, that's compatible.

Chicken mask, no clothes. Oh, my God. It would break the internet. Bikini is, yes. I'm going to start giving. I'm going to start wearing like my baiting suit and giving, uh, start. I mean, there's your TikTok. There's your TikTok channel.

It just writes itself, doesn't it? It's horrible. I mean, we're getting old, right? Like, it just doesn't relate to us. I do have one, like, TikTok that I watch, which is, and I'm going to reach out to the guy because I find him so compelling. He just does short videos on things you don't know, like shortcuts on iPhones or shortcuts on your Mac desktop, but whatever.

And it's like, I love a good quick key. And it's like so awesome to just get one little quick key. 30 seconds, one little feature on your iPhone. You didn't know where it's there and move on. And super cool. So you like to be informed? I do like to get a little knowledge. Yeah.

For me, it's not just about like, you know, but I guess people who are getting dance moves are being informed if they want to learn to dance. Oh, see, I'm with Dorian. I'm just looking for like Will Smith doing a duet with a cat that's playing the piano. Like, I, that's all I want. Yeah. What questions do you have for each other, I'm curious, if any?

I, before we move on, I just want to add to what Daniel said about community, what we're seeing actually more and more is on the social media side of things. That community is working not just for soaps, but it's actually starting to work for everybody. And by community, I mean, private groups, modern fertility, for example, is a really good, it's a brand they're doing really good in private communities, obviously because fertility is also a taboo topic, so it's a little bit, it's really relevant. but we see it everywhere. So having private communities where people feel like they have a premium access to the brand, to content, and so on, yeah, so it's not just in soap, I want to say.

This is something we see overall. My question for you, Daniel, is actually we did a piece some time ago where we talked about lending pages as a way to improve your SEO. And a question we had from some viewers were, what about it does accessibility impact your ranking and your SEO.

And it's something I said yes, but actually I'm not sure. Yeah, so there's a couple of things. For accessibility readers, they depend very heavily on the page hierarchy, so the page structure with the H1 tag and the H2 tag. They really depend on those, and they depend on the site link names

to tell people who have visual impairment what is on the screen. So good SEO is good accessibility, and good accessibility is great SEO. And I believe that Jason, or that Google penalizes websites that do not have accessibility. I don't have any data on that because they're very about their, you know, secretive about their algorithms. But I believe that they either they do now or they will start penalizing websites that don't do accessibility. any questions Danielle for Dorian oh yeah that spreadsheet that you shared that magic awesome Google sheet do you have that available anywhere can we see that can I use that can I have that can I make it

part of our daily regimen I can share it with you oh my god this happened to me during the accelerator I built spreadsheets and then people asked me to share it no problem put it on your put it on your blog get more traffic content marketing uh all right listen this has been amazing great job everybody And we will see you all next time on this weekend start. Bye-bye.