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Every day marketers sift through dozens of headlines, posts, and slacks telling us about the latest and greatest trend we should be following.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and like you have to figure it out by yourself. But you don’t have to do it alone. Content Matters with Nicole MacLean (Compose.ly’s CRO) is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most — creating connection that drive results.
For more, head to our site: https://compose.ly/content-matters
Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://shareyourgenius.com/
Adam Robles [00:00:00]:
I think community is. It's not something you can really fake. It's super important just because nowadays consumers are very smart. They really control what is being marketed towards them. And a lot of people just want to be part of a community. They want to feel like they're part of something. Right.
Nicole MacLean [00:00:18]:
I'm Nicole MacLean and this is Content Matters. Created in partnership with Share Your Genius. Our show consists of three parts. One where we pull in other Compose.ly team members to talk about content that matters to you, like a viral LinkedIn post or the latest trend. The second always includes an in depth interview with a leading marketer, sharing actionable insights and a little inspiration. And finally, you won't want to miss the last segment, aptly called Friends Matter, where we're shouting out some of your friends and mine for their content wins in B2B marketing. Let's cut through the marketing chaos together. All right, we have Kaylee Peterson joining us back on the show, our mermaid in residence, slash Director of SEO. Welcome back.
Kaylee Peterson [00:01:06]:
Thank you for recognizing my official title. I really appreciate that.
Nicole MacLean [00:01:09]:
You're welcome. We're going to make new business cards and update LinkedIn and it's going to be a great time. So you are here to give us some insight. I've been hearing it a lot lately. You, when you and I were talking about this, you kind of mentioned it as well. But this idea of people working with SEO agencies and I feel like it goes really well for like a few months, maybe even a year or two and then things kind of die off. But this is kind of Kaylee's soapbox moment. So the stage is yours. Fill us in here.
Kaylee Peterson [00:01:44]:
You, I bring. Well, I've been on both sides of the coin. I've been the in house person working with an SEO agency, been in the SEO agency doing the work, talking to customers and I think we're hearing it. I've heard it the whole time. I've done SEO, but I hear it a lot now. Of I've been working with this person. I've been working with this agency for a year, six months. I don't know what's going on. I haven't seen any changes to my site. The numbers aren't moving. They don't tell me what they're doing. I just have no clue what I'm spending my money on. And I think SEO starts to feel like a gamble for a lot of people of, well, maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, but I'll have no idea either way. And I think there are a couple things that you should expect out of your SEO provider that not everyone knows to expect or knows to look for. And so we've started having this conversation a lot more often. But I would say my recommendations, if you're going to work with an SEO partner or an SEO agency, number one, they should be educational. So a lot of times SEO can feel like a lot of jargon, or it can feel really complex and technical because they're throwing out terms like canonicals or semantic entities or SEO loves a good, complicated way to explain a very simple concept. And sometimes people get intimidated by the language, and so they just assume it's really hard, really complex work, and they don't ask the question. And then they remain confused about what's being done on their site and why it matters. So you should always have a partner that you feel like you could ask them when you say that, what does it mean? Or what does search volume mean? And they're able to answer your question in a meaningful way, in a way that you feel educated and in a way that you feel like you hired an expert. So you're getting their expertise and you're moving on the path with them. They're not going along a path, and you're just trying to catch up. So finding someone who's really educational, I think is beneficial for your business and for you to understand what's going on. With SEO reporting, you wouldn't believe how many people we talk to that are like, oh, I've never seen a report from my SEO partner before. You should be getting a report monthly. You should probably be having a conversation with someone monthly about, here's what we did on your site the month before. Here's what your data looks like. That doesn't mean that the numbers are going to move every month. We know SEO is a long game, but you should at least see something happening. If it's a very technical work, you get a rundown of, here's what we fixed, here's where you can see it, here's why it matters, that all that was done. You shouldn't have that question mark of, I'm spending this money and where is it going and what's happening on my website, and that's the other piece you should be looking for, is the impact of your partnership. SEO is a long game. We know that. It's always been a long game. I do think sometimes SEO is an unregulated industry. People can kind of say whatever they want in SEO land. And I think that long time frame buys a lot of people a lot of time to kind of push things down the road. So it's very easy when someone says, well, we've been working together for six months and I haven't seen anything. And there are SEOs that will go, well, just give it time. Google, it's, it's a long term thing. We'll, we'll check back in at the year point. And I actually think you should be checking in at like three month milestones. Think of SEO in quarters. So at month three, you should start seeing movement. Impressions are going up, rankings are changing a little bit, the site performance is getting better. Maybe it's not lead, maybe traffic hasn't risen, but you're starting to See Movement. Month 6 is where you should start seeing some of those impactful data points move. So you're looking at traffic is changing, maybe lead generation is happening. You're getting some of those first page rankings you were looking for. Your site's really starting to create kind of a baseline relationship with Google and the year, that kind of nine months to a year is where you're going.
Nicole MacLean [00:05:44]:
Have a party, we're celebrating.
Kaylee Peterson [00:05:45]:
That's it, that's the roi. That's the sweet spot. That's where you're going, oh, this works. This is it. I can clearly see it in a lot of different places. And so you should be feeling that impact. And if you're not feeling it, that's, I think actually the biggest piece of an SEO partner you should be looking for is someone who's willing to admit that it's not working and have that sort of strategic flexibility to go, all right, we're six months in, it's not doing what we thought it would do. It's not working the way we want. Let's go back to the drawing board and fix this out. Instead of kind of a set it and forget it like, well, we set our 12 month roadmap in January, so we'll figure it out next January. You want a partner that's going to stop and go? Yeah, we did our best. It did not go the way we thought it would. Google changed in the last six months.
Nicole MacLean [00:06:34]:
We've had eight algorithm updates in six.
Kaylee Peterson [00:06:36]:
Months and we need to figure it out. So I think looking for like an educational partner who's keeping you in the loop, who's focused on the impact of the work they're doing, making sure you understand the impact of the work you're doing and is willing to stop and go. Okay, let's, let's go back to the drawing board. Let's refocus on your business priorities. Those things are going to get you the right SEO partner without having to know anything about the technical, the getting into the nitty gritty of it.
Nicole MacLean [00:07:02]:
Well, there's so much we can unpack there and it's a great tee up because Adam, who you're all about to hear from, who owns and operates an agency, you know, we talk a lot about the importance of trust and the communication and we should be partners and we're humans in business. And so I think that's really the most important thing is someone who is proactive, who feels like they're in the trenches with you and not that they're just collecting some retainer and running a checklist that you could get from HubSpot and saying it's going to magically fix everything. But I also think it's one of the hard things too when you're trying to evaluate or you are trying to have a good conversation with an agency. Because I'm always actually, when, you know, we're talking to new clients, hesitant to say here's a six months set in stone roadmap of what we're going to do because we know things are going to change or as soon as we get in there and really take a look under the hood, things are going to shift. And so to me, it's almost like what's a really good first 90 day priority list? And I feel like that can be very clearly understood by the agency by the point of contact, like you who are working with the agency and your boss, like that. And I feel like if you have a really solid 90 day plan, some people I do think come to us and say, I need to know exactly what you're doing with these X hours. I need to know exactly what you're doing every month. And the reality is there does have to be that bit of trust. Like, I'll give that to you for 90 days, but honestly, anything after that is a guess and it's kind of a waste of time that we could be doing other things on. But that quarterly view with like some vision, you know, we don't want to be like we're taking a U turn six months in. Just kidding. We're redoing everything. Like you need to have that North Star. But when you get, when you ask for something with that level of detail six, nine months out, the odds of that actually being the plan is so rare.
Kaylee Peterson [00:08:53]:
Yeah. And I think we find to your point, if you go under the hood, you know, what we thought would be the three month plan. @ the initial site review, we do a technical audit and go, oh, I need three months to fix everything happen. Never mind, we'll get there when we can. So I do think it's that like.
Nicole MacLean [00:09:14]:
Flexibility and the, it's just like an interview. I mean you want to like you're looking for those critical thinking. You should be asking questions to understand how an agency or a thought or an agency partner would think. If you see these things, how are you going to adjust? How are you going to communicate that with me? How are you going to educate with me? Because the nature of SEO, especially in today world, there is no best practice, there is no set it and forget it strategy. Too many things are changing and even a best practice today might just look a little nuanced, you know, later. So I think that's a really helpful vision as folks are getting into Q2 and trying to figure out like how is our 2025 strategy going and what's needed. So thanks so much for joining Kaylee.
Kaylee Peterson [00:09:58]:
Of course. Thanks for having me.
Nicole MacLean [00:10:00]:
Of course. All right, go enjoy. Adam, everyone.
Adam Robles [00:10:05]:
I'm Adam Robles, a co founder at Reach Agency. We are based in Toronto, but we essentially work with clients across the world. Reach Agency is a digital marketing agency where strategies and numbers meet creativity and design. And that's really just a fancy way of saying that we're an agency that is practical with how we go to market for our clients. We're very metrics driven, we're very revenue driven and essentially every asset that we help create for our clients is meant to contribute to the, to their overall customer journey.
Nicole MacLean [00:10:35]:
We're just going to dive in here right off the bat because you said the triggering statement, which is the, the structure and the practicality of how you go to market with the creativity and the storytelling. I mean we all talk about that. Marketing 100 requires both of those to come together. But how does that, do you see that play out in a day to day for you guys and with your clients?
Adam Robles [00:10:58]:
Yeah, it's interesting. So I have a sales background and then my wife who is my partner in the agency, she has a design background. So if you, you mentioned our logo before and that's where the left and right brain come in. We essentially offer the best of both worlds and we just help clients take a holistic approach to that. Right. So just taking, just being practical and being very, very intentional with marketing, I find, I'm sure you can, you can, you can relate to this. But I find like with some marketing there's a lot of fluff out there. Right. And, and just customers and just audience nowadays, they're just too smart for that. So yeah, you need to be, you need to be respectful, you need to be practical and you of course need to be intentional with how you're marketing towards your audience.
Nicole MacLean [00:11:38]:
How do you find that? It often with clients is there's some element of both that you have to support them in, or do you find that this client is really good with reporting and structure and execution, but they maybe don't have that big idea or they're, you're maybe pushing them more on creative or vice versa, where they're really strong in creative but they're maybe less structured and less practical with how they go to market.
Adam Robles [00:12:03]:
Yeah, that's a good question. So the way that we work with a lot of our clients, like I, I would say it's a partnership. We're typically the highest serving marketer for a lot of our clients. Like, we work with clients that are personalities all the way up to, I want to say fairly small. But, but where they need us, we work in two facets. We, we essentially help build the go to market strategy for a lot of our clients and that's across the four pillars that we identify and we value, such as branding, content, social media, and then community development. And then of course for a lot of our clients we also implement. So that's across those four pillars as well.
Nicole MacLean [00:12:42]:
You mentioned community development. What does that look like nowadays?
Adam Robles [00:12:47]:
Yeah, so community development for us, that is developing our online community. So not just necessarily just growing it, but of course ensuring that your community is engaged, that they're advocating for you. And then of course that community oftentimes expands into when you do in person activations or events. Right. So for us it's, it's both, that's both worlds and they're two different communities because oftentimes an in person community is really just specific to your location. Whereas, you know, your, your digital community can be pretty much the entire world.
Nicole MacLean [00:13:20]:
Yeah, I feel like community has been one of those kind of like trending channels for the last few years and kind of everyone wants to do it, but I feel like very few people do it well.
Adam Robles [00:13:32]:
Yeah, I agree. I think, I think community is, it's not something you can really fake. It's super important just because nowadays consumers are very smart. They really control what is being marketed towards them. And a lot of people just want to be part of a community. They want to feel like they're part of something. Right. So when you combine with that, with the fact that for most industries, the barrier is fairly low. It's very important to have a community that supports your product, your services, and just your overall brand well.
Nicole MacLean [00:14:00]:
And it seems too that I've seen the best communities I've been a part of is there's of course some assigned moderators, but it's normally not someone from the company or the community itself. It's three to five power users that really keep it engaged, make sure it's not just a pseudo sales pitch, and is really more of that authentic communication. So it's kind of, I think, important to have those power users first who are kind of committed to what you're trying to build and then let that almost be more of a grassroots effort within the structure of whatever that company puts in place.
Adam Robles [00:14:38]:
Of course. Of course. Yeah. I think the biggest thing that we stress to a lot of our clients is by all means, you definitely want to grow revenue, you want to increase the customer lifetime value. That stuff is important. That stuff keeps lights on. But in order to get there, you first need to show that you care. I think that's a huge component. You need to put in effort because at the end of the day, you're just building relationships with your community. Right. And social just allows you to do it at scale content as well when you post it, wherever you. Wherever you do post or wherever it lives. So as practical as that sounds like not a lot of companies care about their clients. Right. Or care about the community, which is unfortunate.
Nicole MacLean [00:15:12]:
You mentioned in community being authentic, making sure you care. And I hear a lot of, I mean, spoiler alert. I'll tell you my opinion. I think they're coming at it from a misguided perspective. But I hear a lot of maybe CS leaders or even some CEOs who whenever you talk about community or maybe doing even, it doesn't have to be a full committee, but like a customer event where you're actually gonna have customers seeing each other, communicating, being able to discuss things, who can get a little may scarcity mindset is the right way to say it, where they're like, oh, well, I don't know if we want our clients talking to each other. What if, you know someone has a bad. Is having a bad experience and they kind of poison the well type of thing. Have you had people who've given you that objection or kind of how do you work through that? Like, what would you say to people who maybe have that approach to communities?
Adam Robles [00:16:04]:
We don't advise our clients to go that route because if, if you are preventing your clients from speaking to each other, you probably have bigger problems in reality. Right. Because you're, you're really just trying to keep your clients in silos. Like if you're doing the right things, your clients should become advocates and you would actually want your clients to speak with other clients or even you or new customers or just your community as a whole. Right. Word of mouth is the strongest form of marketing. And digital just allows you to do that on steroids. Right. Or allows you to do that scale. Sorry. So I would, yeah, we, we don't recommend that to our clients and in the event that we do like we would actually probably recommend that they solve bigger problems, whatever that may be, because they most likely have those.
Nicole MacLean [00:16:47]:
Yeah, I think that's a fair point. Is like if you're, if you are concerned about it, you have, there's something deeper in the organization that isn't going to be solved by any sort of kind of marketing, demand gen campaign, whatever you want to call it. There's clearly something more foundational that needs to get addressed with the client experience first.
Adam Robles [00:17:06]:
Yeah. And we live in the Internet age where you can find anything anywhere. Right. So.
Nicole MacLean [00:17:11]:
Right. Yeah. I mean they can go to G2 Crowd, Trustpilot, Clutch. I mean they can make their opinions known if they have them. You know, you're not going to prevent that just because you put your clients together.
Adam Robles [00:17:21]:
Yeah, we live in the information age where anyone can find out anything about anybody or any, any, any company. Right. So it's really just your job to control whatever reputation is out there, do your best and if there's a crisis, just manage it.
Nicole MacLean [00:17:36]:
Yeah, absolutely. How did you get into agency life? Like were you a executor, first turned consulting or what? What was that journey for you?
Adam Robles [00:17:46]:
So my journey, I was a sales capacity, so essentially account executive for a lot of marketing tech companies in the Toronto space. Toronto has a fairly big startup space and just spent time just building out, I guess like my toolkit. So work for companies that focused on like classified ads, influencer marketing, community development, content development as well. And then that was maybe for about six years. And then afterwards after those six years I just decided to start my own agency. I felt as an account executive you kind of get burned out just just selling a tech and not really implementing or executing with a client afterwards. And you know what, I just got tired of it. I just wanted to be on the other side where you know, you feel like you are implementing and you're making real impact. And that's, wow, that's almost Been seven years ago. So, yeah, I've been doing the agency side for quite some time.
Nicole MacLean [00:18:40]:
What we. The sales marketing relationship comes up a lot on the show. What do you think are some of the perspectives or experiences that you had as a, as an account executive that you're able to bring to your clients and kind of help them maybe bridge that departmental divide?
Adam Robles [00:18:59]:
Yeah, I mean, just being on both sides and now just seeing it holistically as like an agency owner, there's often like a battle or a fight for budget between both departments and companies. And in reality, they should actually be working together. Things should just be viewed holistically because one's really not important than the other. Like, they both work together. And you know what, if they can work together and complement each other, you know, great things happen. Right. So, yeah, I think that companies that do figure this out, that, that do identify that both sales and marketing are important and they're not placing one over the other. Like, those are. Those are the companies that are really getting it right.
Nicole MacLean [00:19:38]:
What are some of the, like, maybe one or two things that you think are the most common faux pas in community development? And then flip side, you know, what are two to three of the best things you see companies do?
Adam Robles [00:19:50]:
I guess the one faux pas a lot of brands, and this is even for our clients, they just get caught up with getting to a specific number and follower count, whatever that may be, whether it's like a thousand or ten thousand, there's always a number that's in their head and they might often feel that it validates them for whatever reason. I'm not sure when we hear that, we advise our clients that not to focus on a number, but instead to focus on an engaged community and engaged advocates. Right. Because you can have a million followers, but if none of them really care about you, you know what, having 10 followers that do is actually much more impactful. So that's a faux pas, a best practice for developing a community. It's more so just to focus on the fact that it's not just a number. They are actual people on the other side. So as I mentioned before, just really just caring about each individual is if somebody comes to you with a complaint, whether it's on like Google My business, like, don't view that in a negative way. Like, that's an opportunity for you to learn and get better. Right. As a company. So we have a lot of our clients, like anytime they do receive negative, negative feedback, like they take that proactively and they take that positively, and they often turn that negative customer experience into a positive one, and then they gain an advocate, which is incredible.
Nicole MacLean [00:21:02]:
Reddit comes up a lot on the show as well, and it feels like kind of the next big community. Social play for B2B. How are you seeing that start to play in for your clients and is it coming up and as they're thinking about their kind of future strategy?
Adam Robles [00:21:18]:
Yeah, that's interesting. So we haven't really dabbled into Reddit for our clients. I use Reddit quite a bit on the personal side, so I understand, I understand its power. Especially if you can find a community that you can trust, you can gain a lot of insight and as moderators, I'm sure you can. You can influence a lot of people within that community. So, yeah, I love Reddit. We're still trying to figure out how to implement it for our clients. As you're aware, like with social, you can oftentimes be on so many platforms for one of our clients, like we have, we're on about 30 platforms for them. So to integrate just another platform, whether it's Reddit, it's not just simply just adding them to the stack. There's a whole, a whole strategy that we haven't yet figured out on what to do for our clients at scale. Right. But personally, I love Reddit and yeah, I think it's definitely a great opportunity for companies that do invest in it.
Nicole MacLean [00:22:13]:
Well, and to what you said earlier, really thinking about it as the human and not just a number, Reddit, you can so easily screw it up. There is such a culture, there is such a specific way that you're supposed to use that platform. You, I feel like for so long people said, okay, well, you can put a post in HubSpot or in these social tools and just say, cool. Also post it on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook and X slash Twitter and blah, blah, blah. And you never were really having to customize it for the platform. I feel like most people are moving away from that and recognizing that that's not actually how you grow an audience if you're on all these platforms. But, but Reddit in particular is just so niche and it's going to be so obvious if you get it wrong. And I think that's where that's most of what I've been hearing the last few months is like everyone recognizes the opportunity, but it's going to take really like a lot of intentionality to make sure you don't do it wrong and actually end up kind of like harming your brand in the process.
Adam Robles [00:23:17]:
Yeah, it's unfortunate because I feel like we live in a culture society nowadays where if you get something wrong, people will will jump on you right away just for honestly just making a mistake. Right? So I wouldn't just, I wouldn't just solely focus on that being a Reddit thing. Like I think that's really just social media in general.
Nicole MacLean [00:23:37]:
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Adam Robles [00:24:48]:
I don't see challenges like, I just really just see opportunities like it's, there's, there's just a lot of great opportunity with, with marketing and also just other agencies or other client or other brands just not doing as well as you are. Right. So off the top of my head, opportunities that I see, of course AI is definitely an opportunity. We haven't really dabbled into ChatGPT, but we've scaled how we do things using AI or using tech. So the opportunity is definitely there for that. Really strengthening what the customer journey looks like from end to end, all the way from awareness to acquisition. I think that's, that's really important and just of course further identifying how to get your target audience through that journey. Social paid ads I definitely feel is a huge opportunity as well, just across the board, across platforms, just really helping accelerating what you're doing and of course complementing the organic side. But for us like I'm like we're really focused on personal branding for our clients, helping A lot of our clients, founders that do want to be in front of the camera are comfortable with it, really diving into like their personal story and humanizing the brand through them. Right. And then as we discussed earlier, like community is always going to be an opportunity just because your community is super important nowadays.
Nicole MacLean [00:26:11]:
Yeah, that was a very glass half full answer, which is great. We love to keep the positivity because it can be a bit of a slog sometimes here in marketing. So many that we could dive into with that for the listeners. When Jillian was on the show probably two episodes ago now, we did a lot of discussion on that, like founder led thought leadership, founder led content, and that not every founder is meant to be in camera. And that's okay. And I think it's maybe don't you mentioned so many different opportunities and it is so omnichannel. And if you have that founder that is great at being vulnerable and can share their story and no one's going to share the mission and get people excited about what you're doing quite like maybe a founder role can, but if they are just not the most compelling or you feel like you're pulling teeth, I think what I took away from that with the conversation is like, don't force it just because it's kind of a trend right now either.
Adam Robles [00:27:09]:
Exactly. That, that goes back to what you said earlier. Right. Like, not all content is good content. You can definitely put out things that can harm your brand. So if you're, if you're not a founder, that's great in front of the camera, but you do have a large team, I'm pretty sure that that could advocate for your brand and really stress what your mission and your vision is. Right. So yeah, of course vetting your founder and training them definitely will go a long way.
Nicole MacLean [00:27:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. And it is, you know, it's also a gift. If you have that person who's really magnanimous and can catch fire. Like that is something that you should double down on. You should figure out how to make it, like you said, structured, practical execution of that, how to create content at scale. You know, of course, maybe it's a podcast, maybe it's a webinar, maybe it's video based. And then you're repurposing that using AI, taking the transcript, making those blogs, making social posts. I mean, if you have that as a gift, use it to kind of fuel all those other channels too.
Adam Robles [00:28:11]:
For sure.
Kaylee Peterson [00:28:12]:
Yeah.
Adam Robles [00:28:12]:
And just to, just to go back to the, I guess like the founder side, like the founder doesn't necessarily need to be polished or be like a renowned public speaker. They just need to be vulnerable and be human in.
Kaylee Peterson [00:28:23]:
Right.
Adam Robles [00:28:23]:
And, and really be passionate. I, I find that some of our clients, like, they don't want to be in front of the camera because they don't necessarily. They feel like they might not be the great, the greatest at it, which is the furthest thing from the truth. Because at the end of the day, like they understand their mission, they understand what they represent and really how they want to help their clients or their patients or their customers. Right. So, yeah, I would say like for, for our agency, we're always trying to push our clients, founders to the forefront just because we understand that humans, like humans buy from humans. So yeah, you don't necessarily need to be the best speaker to be that person.
Nicole MacLean [00:29:00]:
Yeah, I think that's fair. And there's also so many different formats. Some people might be great on a podcast and some people might do great taking the car videos where you're dropping your kids off. And that's more authentically you. It's also, I think, important to kind of test what works and what feels the most authentic to your. Whoever that thought leader is going to be.
Adam Robles [00:29:20]:
Yeah, exactly. And people, I'm sure you're aware people consume content differently nowadays too. Right. So whatever works. Not even necessarily what works for you. I think what's important is like what works for your audience. Right. Whether it's something that's written, whether it's a visual, whether it's a static post, you're almost not as important. It's, it's, it's what makes sense for the people that you're trying to attract.
Nicole MacLean [00:29:41]:
Yeah, that's a really good point. You also mentioned social ads, which I'd love to hear more how that is fitting into strategy. I think there's a lot of concern over the traditional PPC or paid search ads right now, just with AI and the change in SERP usage and interface. But social can also be very expensive and maybe a little more top of funnel depending on your industry and your target market and kind of what you're looking for. B2C, it's probably very different than maybe a B2B use case, but how have you seen that really fit into kind of an omnichannel approach?
Adam Robles [00:30:20]:
Yeah. So for social, you can essentially use it at different points of the customer journey depending on what you're wanting to target. Right. So if it's for awareness, it's simply just boosting a post. If it's consideration, it's really Just driving website clicks. Or if it's actual conversion through meta ads, you can, you can develop a lead list, right. Or you can set up a metapixel and tie it back to your website. So social paid ads, they do work fairly well. They're fairly cost effective and not compared to, I guess, traditional methods like buying a billboard or buying a TV commercial. Like nothing's gonna be that expensive when you compare it to those things. Right. So I guess everything is relative. But yeah, that's, that's how we approach social paid ads. Depending on what our client is trying to achieve in relation to their customer journey.
Nicole MacLean [00:31:04]:
And you mentioned that earlier too. The really having a defined, cohesive customer journey from awareness to acquisition, who do you think owns that in a company? Is that marketing's responsibility to have the customer journey through? I mean I would even say it's not just acquisition but to advocacy as we were talking about earlier, is making your clients advocates of your brand. That obviously marketing touches some of that. A lot of that is the sales, A lot of that is CS or account management. Do you think it's one person who needs to champion that and kind of document it and manage that consistency or is it buy in from. Do different people own kind of their respective phases of that journey?
Adam Robles [00:31:49]:
Yeah, that's good. I mean depending on the size of the company. For smaller companies it's definitely all hands on deck. For larger companies and just companies in general, everybody needs to be bought in. But for the larger ones, biz dev would probably own everything up to consideration. Sales team would own acquisition. Once they're acquired, that'd probably be flipped to the CS team where they would upsell that client, collect reviews, advocacy, things like that. Right. So that would be for the larger company, but I guess in general like buy in would be across the board no matter what.
Nicole MacLean [00:32:24]:
Do you think marketing can't? I mean it probably depends on their seat at the table. But can marketing build that and get it out or do you think it has to have more of that senior like executive leadership kind of sponsorship in order to get all those departments on the same page?
Adam Robles [00:32:42]:
Yeah, so we with our clients, we typically don't deal with companies of that size where they have a leadership team of God knows how many people. Right. You need buy in from everybody. But yeah, buy in from the executive team definitely will help champion it and push it through and just make sure everybody is bought in. I think that's super important in like a Fortune 500 or a larger corporation. Otherwise everybody's just going to fight for what they think is right.
Nicole MacLean [00:33:08]:
Yeah, I mean, I've seen too. It's even like 50, 100 person companies that like everyone has their own opinion on what is a priority and how things should get done. And I think sometimes marketing is probably the one who talks about the customer journey the most because, you know, that's what we're supposed to do. But at the end of the day, like, how much can marketing like, you know, force sales into doing something that maybe isn't the priority to getting a deal across the finish line, you know?
Adam Robles [00:33:34]:
Yeah. At the end of the day, it's human nature just to have your best interests. Right. So like I'll give you a real life example. Like we have a, our client that has about 60 employees. And just to put it in perspective, it's a physio clinic. Right. So they have healthcare professionals who don't really care about social as much as they should. So what we typically do is we actually run lunch and learns just to educate them on how social ties into what they really care about, which is revenue. So helping them with the lead gen, with building out awareness, how to utilize content through social, those are things that we educate them on to show its importance on helping them make more money, get more patients, things like that.
Nicole MacLean [00:34:15]:
Yeah. So like you said, putting it in the perspective of your audience and making sure that it's relevant to them.
Adam Robles [00:34:22]:
Yeah, exactly.
Nicole MacLean [00:34:24]:
What advice would you give to marketers kind of going in to 2025 where they should really be thinking and how to kind of help balance the strategic storytelling with the structure and practicality of execution?
Adam Robles [00:34:42]:
I hate saying this because you said that I usually provide glass half full.
Nicole MacLean [00:34:48]:
No, that's good. We want that. Yeah.
Adam Robles [00:34:50]:
But it's interesting, right? Like we're like, I'm based in Canada and I think just around the world budgets are tightening up and we are sort of in, I want to say like a world recession right now. So that's really impacting just budget spends and marketing dollars. Right. So I think it's pretty important, you know, if you are carving out a budget for your clients, whether you're an agency, whether you're a marketing department, you really need to prove your value right away. Otherwise you're gonna lose your budget or you might even lose your job. So it's really just tying it to the specific metrics or KPIs that your company is measuring or your client is measuring. Right. A lot of it does tie into revenue. So it is super important just to tie what you're doing and your output.
Nicole MacLean [00:35:32]:
Towards that well, and really that is the balance of how we started is creativity and storytelling with the numbers. So you need to know those numbers. But I think sometimes what's hard is that not every single thing on your budget is going to have a 4 10x ROI, but sometimes it's important to getting to the ROI of other channels like community development. That's going to be a really hard thing to put a hard number on. And yet a good community development strategy is likely fueling other things. So I think that's a great example of you need to look at the numbers, you need to understand them, and then you need to put it into a story to help your leadership understand that value and what's happening in order to kind of defend or. Yeah, I mean, defend the budget spend, whether that's people or dollars.
Adam Robles [00:36:25]:
Yeah, it's always interesting talking to other marketers because marketers understand the importance of like awareness. They understand the importance of engagements, even like building out a, an actual community. Right. And sometimes you often can't put a dollar value to it, but you do understand its importance. And once you. It's really tough because once you pull budget from marketing, you can't just see it dwindle and then automatically put money back into it and then think it's just going to prop back up again. Right. A community and really just marketing in general, like, it's something that, you know, you need momentum, but once you do stop it, it's. You actually lose momentum right away and it's tough to build it back up.
Nicole MacLean [00:37:05]:
So time expectation, like we were just doing some Q2 planning and it was the classic CEO versus marketer conversation of, you know, I want X deals closed this quarter. And I was like, okay, but I probably, we probably needed to set that goal like in Q1 so I could go build pipeline for it so that it could close this quarter. And they're like, just figure it out. And I mean, in fairness, it was, you know, your CEO or your COO or CRO like should push you to. Because if you fall short of a higher number, that's better than falling short of a really low number. But also that just recognition of, okay, yeah, we can do that, but it does take time. Like we can't just pull things out. I feel like that's often, especially when people start getting a little nervous or a little uncertain about things, they look to marketing to create momentum immediately. And that's just a lot of these things take a bit of time to, to come to fruition. Yeah, yeah.
Adam Robles [00:38:04]:
That just goes back to being intentional. Right. And of course with, with a CEO, like if they have shareholders, like just having empathy for what they're dealing with.
Nicole MacLean [00:38:11]:
Point.
Adam Robles [00:38:12]:
You know, I think it's really just important just to understand the market as a whole. Like in Q1, like it's, it's probably hard to build a pipeline because it's Q1 and everybody is just starting the year right. So I think it's just understanding market conditions in general and just, and just understanding what's going on and how that impacts everything.
Nicole MacLean [00:38:37]:
Welcome to another edition of Friends Matter. This week I'm excited to share the official launch of UserEvidence's 2025 customer marketing technology Landscape Report. When Jillian was on the show just a few weeks ago, she teased that this was coming and gave us a ton of great insight on the importance of user research and using owned data in your marketing. And this report is just a live use case. I've already been watching their playbook and encourage you to follow along as well to see all of the ways she uses this in her content marketing. Huge congrats to Jillian and the entire UserEvidence team and be sure to check out the customer marketing report yourself. If you know of someone doing awesome things, we want to hear about it, just go to Compose.ly Friends Matter to nominate them. That's Compose ly Friends Matter. Thanks for listening to this episode of Content Matters, created in partnership with Share Your Genius. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a review and share with a friend. Otherwise, you can find all the resources you need to stay connected with us in the show. Notes Till next time.