Marketing Automation Strategy and Opportunities for 2021 [with Dan McGaw]

Join Andrei and Dan McGaw on this episode of The Marketing Innovation Show, as they will be discussing marketing automation, personalization, hacks and trends for the upcoming year, as well as how to best optimize your funnels for conversion.

 

Dan McGaw is an award-winning entrepreneur and speaker. He is the Founder and CEO of McGaw.io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy. Coined as one of the original growth hackers, he has led the teams at Kissmetrics.com, CodeSchool.com, UTM.io and more. In 2015, Dan was selected to be a United States Ambassador of Entrepreneurship by the United States Department of State, where he had the privilege to advise the government, universities, and private corporations on how to build entrepreneur ecosystems.

 

Connect with Dan:

Website: https://mcgaw.io/

McGaw on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mcgaw-io/

Resources: https://mcgaw.io/tools/#gs.l5yqs8

Downloads: https://mcgaw.io/resources/#gs.l5yrjz

Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmcgaw/

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode Transcript:

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay. Hello, everybody. This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Dan McGaw, who is the founder and CEO of mcgaw.io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy. He's also known as one of the original growth hackers, and he has led the teams of KISSmetrics and utm.io, to name a few. Today we'll discuss marketing automation, personalization hacks and trends, as well as how to best optimise your funnels for conversion. Hi, Dan, how are you? How's the morning going?

 

Dan McGaw  

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Same here exciting times. Really, really cool to kick off the episode on the sort of marketing technology front right away. I think there's going to be quite some popularity about the subject mainly now, as we are in the holiday seasons, online shopping and online, in general, has been reaching enormous levels. Tell us a bit about yourself. What are you into and what you do at the moment in your company, as well as where you started? How you've been growing in this space?

 

Dan McGaw

Yeah. So I mean, I've been in the marketing and technology space for over 20 years. So I got my start back in 1998, sending mass emails since before there was even mass email. So the easiest way to kind of summarise my careers, I've just seen some shit, right. Definitely have been through martech for a long time. Like you had mentioned, I was the head of marketing at kissmetrics. So it was one of the pioneers in analytics space that worked with them. And I also had a couple more tech companies now. So definitely really busy. Today, though, running mcgaw.io, we're martech and analytics agency. So we help companies pick tools, integrate them, ultimately operate them and then use those tools to accelerate their growth. I mean, I have to say most of my time nowadays is really focused on sitting in meetings, finding out what are the new possible trends are going to come out and then writing about those pilot kind of trends. So I have a lot of content that's out there, I do a lot of interviews and stuff like that. So it's a lot of fun, I can't really complain. COVID, while it has sucked, everybody is going digital, everybody's trying to figure out how to transform. So for our business, it has actually been something that's kind of caused us to be really busy. We doubled our company this year. So we continue to grow. And we're gonna quadruple the company next year. While COVID is still miserable, I'm very lucky that I live in Florida, where it's hot. We don't have as much restriction here. So far, it hasn't been the end of the world for me.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Let's go strictly into this sort of analytics, tracking space, because I think you probably saw everything from the beginning, right? So you saw the technologies coming up, and then them not integrating without one another and then having to solve the issue of tracking source, etc, etc. And mainly, from a marketing leader's perspective, I think you also had felt that pain and the resolution. Tell us a bit about you, let's get to know you a bit as a person and as a professional.

 

Dan McGaw  

To start out with a little bit about me as a person, right. So I live in Orlando, Florida, which is a great place to live definitely is not a tech hub in the United States. It's a cool place, Disney World is here and stuff like that. But I love living here, it's a great place to raise a family, I have three kids, ranging from 15, all the way back to six years old. My nine-year-old, right smack in the middle. So we do a lot of stuff around that with my kids. And we're super big into baseball, which is all statistics-driven, right? If you really look into all sports, like baseball is the one that's most focused on the data all the time. That's a nice blend of my day job and being an analysis and statistics. And then also in baseball, because it's constantly looking at the numbers. So that's definitely a lot of fun. But I would definitely say that my entire career, I've been focused on technology. I mean, I was very lucky as a kid to be given a computer at the age of four years old. So even when I type now I don't use your standard home row kind of typing style. My style is a little bit all over the place, but I can out type most people just because I started so early on a computer. And when I was four, MS-DOS was the only way that you could get into a computer. Windows wasn't around yet. So that was how you had to use a computer was code. So I got good at code at a very young age. And that's kind of what got me into technology so much is that I was always on a computer and that was kind of my passion, was always being on a computer. I mean, I started my first company when I was 13 built that company until I was 19. And then, of course exited that business. It kind of failed but also turned into a success all at the same time. But I got my start in technology, in the music industry. So it was in the marketing of the music business. So I've always been in tech. I've always been heavily involved with what it was. And it's been awesome to see the industry change over the past 20 years, definitely going from "hey, there are no tools to developers like building out in Silicon Valley" to now seeing it where people have software everywhere, and things are growing across the country. It's been a lot of fun to watch. There's still a lot of cool tools to come. And I think that's what gets me most excited is that there's still problems. Now that we have all these tools, there's problems with the tool. So new tools are created on top of other tools. And that process is going to continue to keep happening. And that's what led to the blossoming of utm.io. One of our own products is: there was a problem and on top of Google Analytics and other analytics platforms, and we solve that problem. So there's a lot of things that happened.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Tell us a bit about your work with your own agency at the moment. How do you work with companies, just to get a bit more context for our discussion when we go into the nitty, gritty?

 

Dan McGaw  

There are two times that a company typically comes to us. So the first one is, hey, they lacked visibility into their customer journey, or two: now that they have visibility into their customer journey, or even when they don't have it, they want to be able to engage with people during that customer journey. And those are the primary root causes of somebody really working with us. That being said, most companies come to us when they need us to help them pick their tools. They want to figure out what marketing automation tool should they use, what type of CRM should they be using? How should it be integrating all of these tools together? How do they get all this stuff cohesively working together? We do a lot of implementation. So connecting, whether that be marketing automation with your website, we do a lot of customer data platform work. Connecting segment in with your website and your web application and your product to make use of that data will flow in analytics. And amongst all the other tools, do a lot of amplitude implementation as well, a lot of business intelligence work. So now that you have all this data, we dump it into a warehouse, we provide you with the analysis. On top of that, there's a lot of integrations work, we're known as a systems integrator. And then we also run the tools for companies. So some companies, they don't have the team that can help them manage all of these tools. So we become their outside BizOps, DevOps, marketing, operations, RebOps, any of those operational capacities, we do that for a lot of companies. And then we also have a lot of companies which work with us to do conversion rate optimization. So now that I can see my customer journey, how do they AB test their way to make sure that that is successful? And how do I maximise my conversions in there? All of it is focused on the middle and bottom of funnel of really optimising revenue, but we look at it through the lens of data and the tools to really get that going. Because as a marketer, nowadays, if you're not really technical, you're really dependent upon a company like us, or you're dependent upon engineers. And at the end of the day, if you're a marketer, dependent upon engineers, those engineers don't know what you're trying to do. There's typically an argument or a war there, we very much get inserted in between those arguments to make both sides happy. We become the technical side of your marketing team and manage all of that infrastructure. That's it from a high level in regards to that stuff. But when people want to work with us, we always start out with a diagnostics. So come in, diagnose all the things that are doing it, what's happening, what's wrong, we write a strategy, and then we jump into a multi-month retainer where we roll that stuff out. We always try to make sure that everybody agrees to what the problem and the solution is, first, before we jump into a project, for anybody who's going to be watching this, that runs an agency or anything like that, if you're not doing a diagnostics, and then going into the project, I would recommend really doing that audit stage first. Because if you don't, you're gonna wind up at a programme which you're gonna, you're gonna fail in, and nobody's gonna be happy at the end of the day. That upfront work is really important.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Considering most of our audience here is marketing people, or marketing leaders, or entrepreneurs, as well as a bit of sales. Typically, in the role of a marketing leader, you'd be the one responsible for building up your tech stack and running the marketing department, whether that's a one-man-band or a multi-person type of department. A set of questions that everybody has been having on their minds lately, in the last couple of years, at least, was what should tech stacks contain and how to best make it work together? Most people are probably using some technologies, some will be linked better than the others. But if you were to build up a tech stack from scratch today, for a company, let's say a medium-sized company, what elements would you be looking at? And how would you be looking at integrating them in such a way that it's not too many that is unmanageable? And also as we discussed a bit earlier, you keep track of the conversion path and the tracking that needs to happen through the funnel?

 

Dan McGaw  

I think with any company, the first question you have to ask of course is how much budget do I have, right? How much money am I actually able to spend on this? I think that's a really important thing. That will narrow down ultimately what we need to do. But I think the most commonly overlooked part of your martech stack is your website. Most people don't even think about their marketing site as part of their technology stack or part of their marketing stack. And that's something that I think is really, really important. The first stage you have to work on is with that. If you have a custom-built website, which is built by your development team, for me, that's kind of a bad way to approach it. And the reason why I say that is because there's a marketing team, you need to be able to make changes quickly on that website. They're always dependent upon a development team to do that, I think it's a really bad step forward. And then on top of that, another thing you have to take in consideration is whenever you want to get tracking set up on that website, it's gonna be even harder to do because once again, you're dependent upon the engineers, and depending upon what those engineers are big fans of. Let's say that they're using Gatsby, which is a brand new CMS language out there, Gatsbyjs. It's gonna be really hard to track. And it's gonna be really, really difficult to make sure that you can get all of your tracking setup on those websites. So I think the CMS is going to be one of the most important parts you have to think about. We highly recommend to companies to leverage WordPress, especially marketing teams. It's really cheap, flexible, easy for teams to use and marketers are very familiar with it. It's also built on the general internet, right? It still uses HTML and CSS for the most part. So it's easy to track. Now, I'm not telling you, if you're an e-commerce company, naturally, Shopify is a great solution. So definitely leverage Shopify in those cases. But if you're trying to go like the direction of web-flow, I think it's a cool solution. But at the same time, it's just like WordPress, right? There's really not that much of a difference. And for everybody's  "Oh, it's a drag and drop thing". If you want to create a custom page, you still need a developer, if you want to be able to do custom stuff, you still need a dev. The problem is, with web flow is that it has all kinds of complications into tracking. Nobody is familiar with it as they are with WordPress. And for me, I try to use technologies where I have a large access to people who can work on that for me, at any given time. WordPress, huge access to a bunch of people. I think the CMS is a really, really big component of that. And you can, of course, look at other CMS is like contentful, and a lot of these new headless ones that are out there. And there's a lot of opportunity there. But I always tell people, "Hey, keep it simple, keep it super, super sweet, and go with something like WordPress to keep your life easy". But when we think about building out the rest of that stack, the CMS is something that we're heavily dependent upon, so that CMS is built well makes it really easy for us to be able to lay Google Tag Manager on top of it. And if you're not using Google Tag Manager, you definitely have to, tag manager is really good. A marketer can learn it with three hours of online courses, it will make your life much much easier and much more flexible. So making sure that you use an easy CMS tie with a good Tag Manager is going to be super, super helpful. But I would say the next component is, of course, you need to start figuring out what is the marketing automation tool I'm going to use? Do I need to have a CRM separate from my marketing automation tool? You have to start to understand what analytics tools you're going to use, you can use Google Analytics, which I think is great for everybody, you should probably also use a product like amplitude, which is a free analytics product. But it gives you much more behaviour tracking a little bit easier for people to use, you have to start getting curious around all of these different questions of what your problem is. I can't make that decision for you. But the tools that I would quickly recommend: marketing automation tool naturally, everybody always knows of HubSpot and Marketo. I recommend Autopilot. Hands down my favourite marketing automation tool out in the space, it is purely an automation tool, works as a platform. So I would get that definitely set up. I would highly recommend if you need a CRM, I recommend Salesforce for anybody who's looking to grow their business. As a smaller business, if you're not looking to really grow, I would recommend a product called Pipedrive. Really, really both of those integrate well with autopilot. So I think that would be the next stage. And like I had mentioned with analytics, you always need Google Analytics no matter what. But I would highly recommend layering on amplitude on top of it. Both of them are free analytics products, they provide a different view of the world. And those things get you set up. Now the thing you have to think about what the stack is you have data that needs to flow into all of these tools. And the typical way to do that is to integrate leveraging Google Tag Manager and then sending that data into each one of these tools. But the problem is, when you have to integrate four or five tools, that means you have to integrate four or five different tools and their own native syntax. And when you add in Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Pinterest ads, all these other technologies you're going to have and most companies have over 25 different technologies, a lot of integration time. And then if you need to switch, it's a lot of switching time as well. So there's products out there known as like customer data platforms. CDPs is what they go by as an acronym, I highly recommend getting one of those. Really successful becomes the hub of your stack and everything integrates with that. So your website integrates directly with the CDP you would send all of your event tracking to that CDP, the CDP would distribute that information to other products. The CDP will save your developers a ton of time in regard to implementation. So literally, you're gonna spend one-fifth of the time in implementation. That saves you a ton of money, but it's also going to give you cleaner, more accurate data. Most common companies that you'll hear about segment they just got acquired for 3.2 billion by Twilio, which is a great company. There's other companies out there known as MetaRouter, which is another popular CDP. And then there's also RouterStack, which is a new open-source version of those CDPs. But there's tons. If you're a mid-sized company or a big company. There's a tonne of customer data platforms out there from Blueshift to Blueconic to Axiom. Salesforce has their own CDP now, which it sucks. So just don't buy that one. Segment, of course, I had mentioned already. I think there's 85 different CDPs. We had done a research study on customer data platforms about a year ago for a big company. We had to review all of them. If you were to go to our website, mcgaw.io, go to our blog, it's in the footer. Look for the customer data platform on and we'll explain what is the value, why would you choose them, what are the three different types of CDPs? Because that's becoming the hub of the stack moving forward. So even though we already talked about a lot of tools, that CDP is going to be a big thing that you need to focus on as well.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's very insightful. Do you have a favourite CDP that use?

 

Dan McGaw  

We use Segment the most. And then I would have to say MetaRouter would be second in line from that one, but we use them in very, very different search situations.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I think a natural flow from here would be, let's say we have a company that doesn't use a CDP. So they were using, the top of funnels, strategies or tactics, which would be driving email traffic from Facebook, or Google or Instagram, depending on the industry, and the type of company, and then Google ads. And then they were tracking everything, in Google Analytics, let's say they were using a Tag Manager for this. But I would like to talk with you about this space of marketing, personalization and automation, because I think this would help us solve deep stuff. This is what a CDP does, right? It helps you automate and personalise much better than marketing communications. If you were to jump into or look from outside at this type of company that runs all these strategies. Let's say they're a medium-sized company, how could they could use a CDP, in order to get to an ideal scenario for running their marketing operations in a traceable manner.

Dan McGaw  

I think the greatest benefit with a customer data platform CDP is naturally the fact that it enables you to track all the data, and then store that in a very, very structured way. So it can be leveraged in the future. There's a lot of different ways that these CPSs can be used. But I think the most common one is that once we know certain attributes about a user, we can take a certain action and make something happen. You don't always need to use the CDP to do that we can do a lot of that personalization and managing of the customer data by using products like Autopilot, which is one of the reasons why I really like Autopilot, is it's super flexible, it allows you to do all kinds of automation. But the customer data platform, when I think about most CDPs, the biggest value they provide is, I only have one place to send my data. And they distribute that information out to all the other tools. And this is really, really helpful because I don't have to make five different integrations, I just have to make one. And then they distribute that data to the other tools. And that's where I think the value of the personalization really lies to the fact that it's no longer hard to get all of this data somewhere else. And really, when you think about a stack, the reason why it's really valuable is that it's all connected together. If you want to be successful in modern marketing, and you don't want me or my clients to basically kick your ass in marketing, you have to understand, the reason why we're successful at marketing is because all the tools are integrated. All the data from everywhere is being pulled back into one place, if not being mirrored across all these different tools. So we actually know all of the information about the customer. So when you think about a normal customer record, most companies have little bits of customer data spread throughout all of these different tools. And they don't try to get it all back into one place. When you get it back into one place, you're then able to make a lot more actions on it, you're able to actually know what's going on about the customer. And you'd be amazed the number of companies that don't know the amount of revenue a customer has spent with them in their marketing automation tool. Most companies don't have that known at all inside it, they only have it inside their analytics product. But from when we think about using a customer data platform, we now have every single action, every single, value every single thing they've ever done, being sent into all of our tools. So now I not only know that they've purchased six times and their total revenue amount as my analytics tool, but I also know that same exact answer in my marketing automation tool. I also know that inside of my CRM, I'm able to use that data to be able to send over to Facebook that I want to change this person's audience pool. So the CDP for me is not necessarily just the CDP has the knowledge to do the personalization, it's the fact that you can get this knowledge to every single tool in your stack, where that data is needed. And I'll try to provide a little bit more context. When you think about Salesforce's CRM, the sales reps are working on that tool every single day. Never before have people been able to really successfully get their web behaviour data sent into the CRM, there are some fields that get updated. But if you set up your stack correctly, you're able to take all that information you have from that user's behaviour history online, be able to mirror that even with customer data enrichment, so pulling in third-party data, and then set that inside of the CRM. Now, when a sales rep finally goes to look at a lead, they have all sorts of information. So instead of them just saying "Oh, I have a lead", they now have a lead where they have every single bit of information they could ever need on why they're going to reach out to them, how they're going to reach out to them, how many times they've viewed the pricing page, how much revenue does this company have? So, it really takes your data to a whole new level, and allows those other tools to do the personalization, or the humans using those tools to do the personalization.

 

Andrei Tiu  

So let's take, for example, segment or autopilot, to show how somebody should look at building a tech stack on top of a CDP. If, until today, you are running your marketing on specific channels, you had bits of data from each of them, and then you are maybe running some remarketing campaigns or abandoned cards in e-commerce, or these specific campaigns after your tracking was identifying specific actions from your customers. If you're running a CDP, then you'll be able to use the CDP to distribute the automated actions based on the data that somebody would be attributed from his interactions with your brands. By the way, the type of CDP that we address at the moment, does it integrate with a proprietary email marketing automation tool, or do typically pull that from another place?

 

Dan McGaw  

I typically try to make it so that my CDP is where all my integration is. And then everything else gets integrated with the CDP. So I typically try to make use of the CDP is my only customer data pipeline. And that's where I'm sending all my data. But naturally, these things get set up in a myriad of different ways. But usually, what the CDP sends the data to the automation tool, if you're lucky, that automation tool has a two-way integration with your CDP and they're constantly recycling data, which is a really common thing as we want to recycle data throughout the entire system to get those things connected. But there's a lot of ways that you can integrate these tools. And if you're just starting out, don't blow up your entire stack to roll out the CDP. Use the CDP where you can obviously connect things the quickest. And then, over time, you're going to want to transition those things. But I don't feel like you need to blow up your entire stack on day one when trying to roll out a CDP. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. But for example, for being able to use some of these types of personalization, such as: somebody's viewed my page three times, I want to show them this push notification on web or mobile or something like this. What would be some tools that people could look at in order to get a glimpse of what it would mean to integrate something like that, either in their current stack or with a CDP? 

 

Dan McGaw  

Yeah, well, I mean one thing to help people kind of really understand this: one, I wrote a book on how to build the modern stack. So if you just went to our website, McGaw.io, you'll be able to get a free copy of my book. And the book is called Build Cool Shit. It's your blueprint for building the modern tech stack. So that book will make it really, really easy. It's a short book to read, really, really helpful, but will kind of explain how you should integrate all these tools together to get this set up. So I think that'd be really good. But I think the easiest way to think about it right is: if you're trying to get all these things connected, you're going to need to be able to set up what's known as a data taxonomy to understand what are the actions people are happening, and then what is what are the properties that are associated with those things? And if you're really interested in learning how to design a data taxonomy, once again, just go to our websites in the footer, there's a downloads and resources section. In our resources, you'll be able to find a webinar, which is talking all about how do you build out a data taxonomy. Anything that I tell you today, you can find on our website for free, on learning how to do it, and the data taxonomy will teach you. You need to have the data taxonomy to set up basically all this tracking and understand how it's all supposed to work, that tracking would be rolled out through Google Tag Manager to get it live on to your website, just like if you have conversion pixels for AdWords on LinkedIn, roll them out on Google Tag Manager, get those things set up. And then naturally, that data is going to flow into whatever tools that you then send it to from Google Tag Manager, then build that out. But if you're really trying to create more actions: somebody does this on my website, and I want to be able to add them to this retargeting pool, or I want to send them an email, you don't need a customer data platform, right? That's where autopilot would come in and do all of that work for you. If you set up autopilot, you can build a journey inside of autopilot really, really easy once you drop their JavaScript on your website saying if somebody visits this page, do this action. And they have form trackers and stuff. So if somebody fills out this form, you can see that without having to write any code. And that's where autopilot is super, super valuable. Based upon some of the examples that you're providing, I would say you don't even need a CDP, right? Just use autopilot and autopilot will get you most of the way there. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. I see, okay. Very cool stuff. Now, let's see. Let's go a bit back to the customer that we were talking from the marketers point of view. I mean, it's still from the marketers point of view, but looking at the funnels and the way that a company's customers will interact with its marketing messages, communications, etc. I know a lot of your expertise is in optimising these conversion paths and getting your funnels to convert better. So let's get a bit of into this subject and look also at the different marketing tactics or optimizations that can be done along the way to either growth hack your optimization level, or just to make them convert better, really, at the end of the day.

 

Dan McGaw

Yeah, I mean, I think whenever we think about the buyers’ journey, we have to remember that there's four distinct parts of the buyer’s journey that you have to kind of take into consideration. And you can look on the internet and look up what are the parts of the buyer journey that I'll be explaining. But we try to always follow the four-part process, right? Somebody has awareness, once they become aware of you, they then need to research you, they then need to consider you and then they can purchase. So they have to walk through those four stages. So whenever you think about your buyer’s journey, you want to lay into that framework to make it a little bit easier to understand what are the types of messaging that I need to provide them as they go through that. So when we think about the awareness stage, awareness would be, of course, anything that you're driving off of your website, to get somebody to your website. So any of your advertising channels and things like that, we need to think about where a customer is in that journey. So we're now making them aware. And every business is a little bit different. When you think about Google, people are trying to solve a problem. But when you think about the people on Facebook, they're just viewing Facebook. So even though you're making them aware, in either one of those channels, you have to understand what are they trying to accomplish. So you really want to make sure that your messaging focuses on what are they trying to accomplish on that medium. So when you think about Google to try to solve a problem, many cases. They're looking for an outcome, and you very luckily you can create the outcome that they're searching around. So you really have to think about that. And on the flip side, with Facebook as an example, they're not looking for an outcome. They're looking for their friends posts. So you have to create something that's going to be enticing and as well as something that's going to get them to become aware of your product without trying to necessarily solve a problem you don't know the answer for. So sometimes you have to focus on the outcome a little bit more in that case. And that's going to change on all these advertising platforms, from LinkedIn to Pinterest, to even cold outbound email, you really have to understand the medium that you're reaching out to them is going to change the messaging that you should use for that awareness stage. And then on the flip side of that, when somebody clicks on one of those ads and comes to your website, probably want to have a custom landing page, which is going to be tailored to whatever that outcome that they recently clicked on. If you have people that are coming to your homepage, they're gonna be made aware that your brand exists through that. So you have to match the messaging to whatever your value proposition is, for whatever awareness channel they're going to get there. You really have to take a step back and understand what are your customers trying to do at this moment in time, especially when they're in that awareness stage. They're just becoming aware that your brand exists. So we need to keep it very, very high level and focus on one course, whatever that value is going to be for them. I think the greatest thing that I always try to tell marketers is nobody cares about you, we don't care you exist, we don't like you, we never want to know that you're there. Marketers have to understand this has nothing to do with them. This has everything to do with the customer. And marketers typically only think about themselves. And I hate to say that, but it's true. Marketers always think well, what would I do? And nobody cares about you, you're not the customer, you're not buying this solution. What does your customer want? What does your customer want to do? And that awareness stage is really, really important. Now you have to understand this: once somebody becomes aware of you, they then need to research you,. They have to be followed through this buyer journey. And that's what's really important. I think a lot of companies miss this: they don't try to control the customer journey enough so that way people can properly give research. And you'll see this on every single site you go to, you visit the home site, or the homepage, and the first call to action is by now. They just got there. You sell flip flops: okay, why are you better? You've got to provide that opportunity for them to actually do research to know why you're better. And I think it's really important, we see this happen a lot, where people are just driving for the sale the entire time. Well, they still have to research, they still have to consider you. So provide them that opportunity. And they'll buy. So you have to give them the opportunity to understand and research what you have. So provide that information, deliver it to them and carry them down a customer journey on your website where you're allowing them to give research, explain the value props, give them the pieces of information they need to make a valuable decision. And that's really going to help you. And to optimise that funnel and we see this as an example all the time in online education. The online education playbook is super, super simple. I'm aware that you have a product or course which ultimately is going to teach me something where I have a problem. Okay, great. I hit your homepage. Let me click on a button that says show me courses. Show me all the courses you have. I want to see what you have. I can research and see how you're different. I then get to the next stage. I see all the courses you have. Well naturally I'm researching to see if you have all the courses we have. Part of that research journey is I then click on a course that I care about. I want to learn how to do to stay at home and be a  chef. I then click on that course but I didn't go to that course. Well, the next thing I want to do is: is this content going to be any good? Is this going to be fast enough? Are they going to have the topics we like? Are they as good as Gordon Ramsay? We want to make sure that we have that? Well, the best way to allow them to research that is to give them a video on the page so they can see how the course is structured and then, of course, to give them access to that course for free for either the first lesson or short period of time so they can then research that and figure out if this is a valuable purchase for them. But naturally, they're going to consider that purchase against things they have, whether there are competitors in the marketplace, whether they're going to learn it on their own, whether they're going to learn it from YouTube, right? They're going to do their own research, and then they're going to consider their decision. Your job is to make sure that when they do that research part, that you come out on top. So you want to make sure that you give them good language there, you give them good help, you give them good service. And you stop thinking about: oh, well, I already know this product, so I don't need to explain it. Make sure you explain it. That's pretty straightforward. And last, like I had mentioned, you have the consideration phase. This is really where marketing automation, analytics really comes into play. You should be retargeting them, you should be sending them emails, you need to keep yourself top of Mind during that entire consideration phase. So you have to make sure that you follow the general process. And then, of course, the last stage is purchasing. We need to be able to get into that purchase process. And we want to make that as easy as we possibly can for those people. So going back to the top, awareness needs to be matched to wherever they are in the buyer journey. Are they getting information? Are they being made aware of you, when they're doing their research on your website, you need to make sure that you give them good information, good copy, good images, good explanations, pushing them down that funnel? Don't talk about yourself, talk about how you solve their problems, they need to be able to consider you against what other options they have And during that time, you just need to focus on staying top of mind. And then, lastly, is purchase. So if you try to break it down to those simple four steps, makes it a lot easier to look at each one of those pieces of the buyer journey and understand what type of communications you should be offering. I think that's a basic fundamental that most people just miss. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Okay. And what are some very often encountered mistakes that you saw from clients when you first started to work with them on this? 

 

Dan McGaw  

I think the first one is always trying to go for the home run on the homepage. Everybody's trying to get them to buy as soon as they hit your website. And I think that's a really, really bad example that we typically see. People start with imagery first, they don't start with the copy first. First, you've got to get the copy written down, you've got to get the value props written very, very well. The next one I would definitely say Is everybody talks about themselves. And as I will always say, nobody gives a fuck about you. Like nobody cares. You've got to start talking about it from the outcome that you're going to create for your customer. We are the best CRM ever, Ha! Nobody cares!  You will close more deals by using our CRM. Okay, now everybody cares. But you have to back that up with research, you have to allow them to be able to see how do you make this statement. That's the number one problem I would probably say that we see everywhere: everybody just talking about themselves, and they need to talk about their customer, they need to talk about the outcome that they'll create for their customer. Don't get me wrong, there's times that you need to say: we do this, and that's super, super helpful. But you need to make sure that you're trying to put it back on the value benefit that you will create for that customer. I would say that, probably the next one that we see the most is over designing a page. A really, really simple one that everybody does is you probably see that staggered content where it's like image on left, then image on right image on left and image on, right. I'm not sure if anybody else knows this. But whenever you read a book, you don't read left page, then right page, then left page, then right page and left page. No, you read the left, and then you move to the right. You should do that for the content on your website, as well. Put all the texts on one side, but all the images on the other side. Don't stagger it, it really makes it hard to read. Yes, it looks pretty, but I'm not in the business of looking pretty. I'm in the business of making money. So I think staggered content is always going to hurt you. Focus on capturing emails, capture emails, capture emails, capture emails, capture emails, your strongest channel will probably always be email. If you focus on capturing enough leads. One of the reasons why our business is so successful and why we consistently stay successful: we've created an amazing amount of valuable content and then we tell people to give us their email. And then we leverage that email to keep them up to date with our content. And we're always putting out content. But we focus on getting that email. If you went to my website, it's not always telling you: Hey, by now. It's saying: Hey, go check out our free tools, go check out our blog post, build that relationship, but capture more emails. That's always the big thing that we focus on: is getting more emails. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

One point that I think we didn't specifically go into but I really wanted to touch on it before the end of the episode was leveraging advanced automation without having to pay loads for it. So two questions here. First of all, I know we were talking about leveraging Amazon automation, but without the budget. And the second was in terms of getting to the next step, what would be like an average or a meme budget that somebody should allocate when they are looking at revamping their marketing stack and just to get a bit of a feel for what it would mean in terms of financial resources as well. 

 

Dan McGaw  

I think the first part: how are you going to be able to create personalization like Amazon, I would definitely lean on a product like Autopilot. Going back to that tool I had talked about. Autopilot does some really, really cool stuff. And it's super, super flexible. From a marketing automation standpoint, it can also create pop-ups on your website. So I would definitely say that would be the tool that I would lean on the most there. But there's another tool that's out there, that's a little bit newer, it's called convert flow. That product is amazing. It integrates with products like Active Campaign, autopilot HubSpot. Enables you to recognise who that user is on your website, and then personalise your website based upon that user. And that's very Amazon-esque. Being able to make it so that the consumer will see what you want them to see, based upon their previous purchasing history. So I would definitely say convert flow is a really, really good product for that, is really, really helpful. They'll do all your pop-ups, will do all those things as well. So autopilot tied with convert flow. If you have a customer data platform, and a tracking everything, definitely some crazy superpowers there. And other tools that I've said so far are all that expensive. With autopilot, you can get started, I think as low as $20 a month with the product, and then it ramps up from there. With convert flow, I think it starts at $40 a month so and then ramps up from there. I know segment you can get started for $100 a month, I know they have a free tier, which is pretty limited. But $400 a month you can get started there. And we work with multiple clients now that their marketing budget is really, really small. So as an example, one of our clients is using amplitude, they're using the free version of Segment, they're using, the lowest version of Pipedrive in the lowest version of autopilot, and there may be spending $100-125 a month. So you can really get a lot done with these products. If you don't have crazy volume. If you have crazy volume, you're starting to get much more expensive. And I'll just use our company as an example. I can't talk about our clients because it's kind of confidential information. But as an example, on our website, we have utm.io, which is one of our products. UTM, which is really helpful for marketers, it will allow you to have data governance on your UTM tracking code. So if you're using a UTM spreadsheet, or you're going online using one of those forums, just go to UTM do the free plan will crush it for you. It has a UTM spreadsheet, we'll give you a Chrome extension. And it's super, super awesome. But with UTM, it gets about 10,000 visits a month to its website, we have about 15,000 customers that are using the product on a pretty active basis. Amplitude for that product is entirely free. So we don't pay any money for that. Autopilot runs in about $500 a month for that product. So definitely add some cost to it. But it's very, very valuable. We have segment installed on that product, as well. About $150 a month for that product. So really isn't all that crazy expensive. And those are the main ones that we would really have to pay for. Google Analytics is still free, Google Tag Manager still free, Google optimise is still free. And we're really only paying for autopilot and segment. Everything else is pretty much-taken care of. Unless you consider Helpscout, which is our customer successful. So to build a marketing stack, you don't need a bunch of money. You really just need to know how to integrate it and how to set it up and which tools are better. And that's where I would say, go check out a free copy of my book, like I talked about, just go to our website McGaw.io, you'll be able to get a free copy through the site. And my book will tell you how do you set up the stack as cheap as you can, and how do you integrate it to create all kinds of cool outcomes that we’ve talked about. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

You know, it's these episodes that we actually talk about practical stuff, and tools and everything that I think are most appreciated, because there's so much information from everywhere, but nobody really does it until the end. So it's always good, even for our clients the same as they hear solutions from us, but it's the first time they hear them. So it's very good to get more opinions about something so you understand this is right, and is the right thing to do and then to be able to also check out information further. So definitely, thanks for the free book as well. I'm sure that everybody that is going to download you they're going to find it insightful, also had a look into your background and everything before the episode and before we got the chance to meet. I know the information is good. So you guys tuning in, make sure to check it out, you have the link in the description of this episode as well. And now since we are getting close to the wrap up of the episode, Dan, what I was thinking of, is discussing a bit about what you guys are doing with the agency at the moment and what's your plan for 2021? What's the type of clients that you work with any announcements that you can give out to the world and you'd like to talk about?

 

Dan McGaw  

Yeah, I mean, 2020 has been an amazingly crazy year for everybody. Right? So COVID has been really, really hard. We were very fortunate at the beginning of COVID, we acquired one of our competitors, a company called Bard analytics. So it's been a, pretty impressive year for us. So we're trying to build on top of that growth in 2021, we're going to be quadrupling the size of the company. So we're about 15 people right now, we're gonna be going up to about 60 people this upcoming year. So definitely a lot of growth is planned. But we're just doubling down on our content marketing. Content marketing, I think, is definitely huge for everybody. I would just tell other companies to double down on content marketing, figure out what is going to be your stick and how you need to do it. But we're focused on hiring. So if anybody here is ultimately looking for a new position, we, of course, are hiring, you can always go to our website, the careers page is in the bottom of the page. That's my number one focus for next year. And I think we're probably gonna roll out one or two more products this year. utm.io has done very successfully, we've had that product public in the market for about three years now, that product is growing at a really, really good clip. And then this year, we're going to launch an AV testing tracking tool. And then as well as an AV testing prioritisation tool. So those products will come out in the middle of 2021. I never meant to start a consulting company, it just kind of happened. And our strategy with the consulting company is to do really good work and solve hard problems for our clients, but to also find unique hard problems, which nobody else is solving, and then to build our own products around that. And we're going to continue to do that over the next few years and continue to focus on building cool products, and we'll always have the consulting business and then we'll always have the software products, that we're going to consistently just roll out. Some of those will possibly be sold, some of those will stay inside of the company, the world is its own oyster, so we'll figure it out as they go. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. But if you're looking forward to following along, definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn. And that's where I'm most active, I'm not a big Twitter fan, just too much garbage going on in there. So follow me on LinkedIn. And naturally, go to McGaw.io, go to our blog, check out our content, sign up for our newsletter, stuff like that. But like I said, get a free copy of my book. It is a real book, I, unfortunately, forgot to bring one into the office today. But, it's an awesome book. Sometime later in 2021, my next book will come out, which it's going to be deeper on how people can do all the things that we do. Because I want to help everybody be good at marketing technology. So that's kind of us in a nutshell.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's so exciting. I think running the consultancy in the software, business in parallel, it's a very healthy business model. And no surprise you've been growing so quickly. Best of luck for next year, really excited to see how things are gonna be evolving. And also for the new tools. Maybe we can organise something like this when you are getting closer to the launch, and actually, you can give a bit more insight into what's the plan with them, maybe if you have something exciting going on the marketing front as well because I'm sure you are probably planning this out over this couple of months. But until then, Dan, so great to have you here. Thanks so much for the time and the insight and for being on the show. Guys tuning in, make sure you check Dan's resources out and also if you have any questions, make sure to reach out to him directly or to me and I'll make sure to transfer them to Dan and see how we can best answer them. Also, if you need somebody to optimise your CDP or things to do with the marketing technology side of things after you have checked out his book, make sure that you reach out to Dan for some advice on LinkedIn. Okay, so until next time, Dan, thanks so much again, really big pleasure, guys. Thank you for sticking around and for tuning in. Hope you found this insightful, looking forward to any feedback that you might have. And yeah, see you soon. Have a nice one!