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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Madhav Bhandari [00:00:00]:
1234. Exit. Exit. Exit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:14]:
Madhav, good to see you. Thanks for coming on this podcast. You've been doing some exciting stuff and I think you're a smart marketer and I'm excited to get to chat with you on the podcast here. How are you doing?
Madhav Bhandari [00:00:26]:
Yeah, I'm doing great and happy to be here. You've been listening to your podcast for a while now, so just excited to be on the other side now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:34]:
Thank you. Well, you've earned it. You've done some cool stuff and you've been an active member in our community, which is something that I love to see. And it's funny, I just talked with Matt the other day about, I got a message from somebody and they were like, hey, I want to post about my company in exit five. I'm like, well, don't do that. The way to get attention to your company is by adding value and writing posts and comments. And that's how I've gotten to see your stuff. And I wrote this post about how Pranav, who's the founder of this company called Paramark, I just happen to use him as an example.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:06]:
And I'm like, I looked at his profile and he's posted 153 comments in the community. He's never written, like a post that's like, here's why you should learn about my company. But he's always in the comments, like helping people out. And I'm like, that's how you do community marketing. Like, if you want to get in there, it's like, talk about your, like, people have questions that are related to your subject, write a comment, then people are going to find you. And I think you've, you've done a similar job. So we're going to try something different today, which is we're going to talk about more specific marketing tactics. You sent me over an awesome list of five things that you've done and tried at Story Lane, and we're going to talk about those, maybe riff on some new ideas.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:41]:
But before we get into that, want to, will you just briefly introduce yourself, who you are? What's your role at Storylane? And what is Storylane?
Madhav Bhandari [00:01:51]:
Yeah, so I'm Madhav. I've been like a B2B SaaS marketer for almost twelve years now. I've led marketing teams at a bunch of companies like Hubstaff, Ponsi Close, and now I lead all marketing at this company called Storylane, which is an interactive demo software. And it's sort of like all the rage these days. Everybody's talking about how you can sort of make your buying processes a little bit more buyer friendly. Right. So an interactive demo software is basically just, it helps create like this, almost like a product replica that you can get your buyers to just interact with and self educate about the product. And then it basically leads to better conversions, better sales conversations and all of that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:33]:
Give people a rough sense of like how big is the company and what does the marketing team look like?
Madhav Bhandari [00:02:39]:
Yeah, absolutely. So we're a team of, we're still small, so we're about 40 people overall and the marketing team is about ten people. Right now. As a company we have about 2500 customers. It's sort of like a one third split, like one third SMBs, one third mid market, one third enterprise. But yeah, like some of the biggest sort of companies used to delay. And you can think about Gong, clarity, Outreach, Nutanix, Silicon Valley Bank, Nasdaq, Dow Jones Index. All of these are customers.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:10]:
You've been there for about a year?
Madhav Bhandari [00:03:12]:
That is correct. Yeah. I'm about to celebrate my new anniversary. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:16]:
With the late night podcast recording with me. Thank you. What's the makeup of the marketing team today?
Madhav Bhandari [00:03:21]:
So I've got a brand team. So I've got a head of brand, I've got a head of partnerships. I've got a head of product marketing. And basically under these three are sort of the other team members and that sort of what basically reflects our investments as well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:34]:
Why invest in brand so early?
Madhav Bhandari [00:03:37]:
That's interesting because I think one is that we operate in a category which does not have a lot of awareness yet. Roughly, it's about 5% of the market knows about demo software or most of the people, if you ask them, they're like, oh, I know about demo software. I'm just like, I'm not sure if I should use it or not. They're at that sort of education level. Theres not a lot of existing demand to be captured. So you need to sort of create a lot of new demand. But when youre sort of creating new demand, you also want to make sure that youre sort of coming across as like this software which is in a league of its own. Thats sort of like how we sort of play it.
Madhav Bhandari [00:04:17]:
Like we try to stay away a little bit from like, hey, heres how you are better than our competitors and all of that. Try to sort of build a league of your own. And thats what we do. Right. And what weve seen when somebody sort of comes from any sort of a brand search, right. Theyre usually coming into the buyer conversations as either youre the first tool in the buying cycle, which is a huge advantage because then you have a very likely chance that youll close that deal or its going to be somebody just coming in. Theyve already done the research and then the sales team has it easy closing it. Lastly, its just with brand, its also youve become channel agnostic.
Madhav Bhandari [00:04:54]:
Youre not reliant on a LinkedIn algorithm or an ad spend or SEO changes things, always constantly changing. And I wasn't even, yeah, I did.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:04]:
An interview with this guy yesterday and he was asking me about drift and he was like, how did you, like, you all built such a brand? And he was like, I bought drift and I'm not even sure that the product was better than the, I didn't even evaluate the others. It was because you had this brand. And I love this topic of brand because I think when people initially here brand, they think of like your design, your logo, your colors. And he wasn't talking about that at all. He was talking about like our content, our point of view, the relationship that he felt like he had with us as a company. Like, I'm following this company as a resource, or for me, maybe you were the same coming up in my career in marketing, like, I would religiously follow HubSpot content. Like, I always tell this example of like the very first time I had to create a marketing plan as a young marketer, I had no idea what to do. And so what did I do? I used the HubSpot blog and they had this amazing resource on like, here's how to build a marketing plan.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:02]:
And I used that. I wasn't even a HubSpot customer, but I used that content. I built a plan. My boss was like, wow, this is amazing. And I was like, yeah, my secret was hub, I'm not going to tell her that, but I used, I used this great template from HubSpot and that made me a fan. Right? You build affinity for that brand that way. And I think that people get caught up in the brand being the visual design. I think that identity is really important too.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:24]:
But I, I think to me, the brand is like the reputation that you can build for your customers. And so the point of that story is David, who is the founder and CEO of Drift, was like, when they started the company, he was like, look, there's already 15,000, literally 15,000 other sales and marketing tools. Everybody's seen like the Scott Brinker Martech landscape slide. So his bet in starting the company was fundamentally like, we have to build a brand because there's just so much noise that everyone's going to want to know, how are we different? And we don't want to compete on the feature battle. Like, you have competitors in this, like, product in the demo, in the demo software space. I never like when the sales team is like, hey, do we have this one feature? You know, we have this one feature and they don't. And so how are we different? I'm like, no, I don't want to compete on that. I want to compete on brand.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:10]:
And I want you to be like, oh, I love the brand. The product features are kind of the same. And so who am I going to buy? I'm going to buy the company that I have a feel like I have a relationship with.
Madhav Bhandari [00:07:18]:
100% very true. If you look at any software category, everyone has these table sticks features, and ultimately you're just selling that point of view and trying to find that drive. So 100%. Yeah, I agree on that because it's a losing battle after a while. It's like you come up with this feature, the competitor will come up with it, and it's just a competition who's going that way. So the brand 100% tilts that favor on your end for sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:43]:
All right, I want to get into the tactics a little bit. You've done some pretty crazy stuff already at Storylane. One of the things that stood out to me is you wrote about this in exit five, is using demo led SEO to grow traffic from twenty five k a month. Is that visitors a month? Views a month?
Madhav Bhandari [00:08:02]:
Yeah, 25. Give us those a month.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:04]:
Okay, so you had 25,000 visitors a month, which is pretty dang good on its own. I'd be happy with that. We don't have that. We have like ten k visitors a month to 220,000 visitors a month in six months. That's nuts. Your traffic is now a quarter million visitors a month. Coming to the storyline site.
Madhav Bhandari [00:08:24]:
Yeah, it's sort of like those wild stories where it's like, try 50 things. One of the things sort of work out. And, you know, the funny thing is that the original goal when we actually started with this experiment was that, how about we get to month in traffic by the end of this year? That was my conversation with the CEO. And we were like, let's figure out a way to get to month. And I think when we implemented this demo led SEO, I think we smashed that goal in like a month and a half. And it was like, okay, something.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:52]:
Okay, let's dive into a bunch of things there. So first of all, why traffic as the goal is it. I go to the story lane site, and you have a free plan, a starter plan. You know, it's free. $40, $500, $1,200. It seems like you have a freemium, like a business where high volume of traffic is going to grow more signups. Was that the hypothesis, like, if we get more traffic, more people are going to sign up for our product?
Madhav Bhandari [00:09:17]:
Yeah. So we basically have two sales motions, right? One is a product led, the other is a sales led motion. And then theres like this mixed motion where its like some product led folks come in, and then our sales sort of takes those folks and then builds them into, like, these big accounts. But this was primarily for PLG, primarily because it was like we had sort of refined the PLG product over like a year, year and a half. Like, the conversion points were great. Everything was sort of like, at the standard. I think where we were lacking with PLG was just, you just need more visitors on the website. You just need more qualified visitors on that.
Madhav Bhandari [00:09:50]:
That's the PLG play. You need to drive that. And that was when that conversation happened. The only way that we'll be able to convert is we first need to get a lot of traffic on our website and obviously a lot of relevant traffic. But that was the starting point of discussion, and traditional SEO was going to take too long. Everybody says you invest like a year onto it, two years, three years. And we didn't have that sort of time. We wanted to just figure out a way on how we could do this faster.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:16]:
I mean, that's always been my biggest challenge with SEO. It's like, I get it. I believe that it works. But so many marketers that we talk to, it's like, it's about now. It's about doing things. You know, how do we decide to spend that money on budget and time and resources when, like, we need to hit. We need to get closer to the goal this quarter? I hate to say it, but I don't really care so much what's going to happen next year or two years because I don't even know. I don't even know.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:40]:
You need to be doing short term and long term things. The fact that you were able to crack this SEO thing in a short period of time is amazing. Tell me about the approach. Because we're in 2024, the game has changed for SEO because there's so much competition, right. There's so much content out there. It's very hard. If you started a SaaS company in, like, 2010, you could basically be the only company doing product demos and just like create blog posts and magically rank you clearly had to take a different approach. So how did you get after this? From a challenge perspective, how do you do this in a way? Is that a false belief that I have that SEO is too hard to work in a competitive industry?
Madhav Bhandari [00:11:22]:
I mean, it's funny because it's like there's all of these conversations that are happening around SEO that's changing. SEO is dying this and that, and some are true, some maybe not so, right. But I heard this on some other podcast, I think this guy called Amir and he mentioned, it's like, I don't care if SEO is not going to work in two, three years, it's working right now. And I just care about this year. And that's what we were, hey, yes, things are going to change in a couple of years, but it is working right now for many, many companies. We wanted to take that approach. And then the other thing I also want to highlight is that what I mentioned, that the demo software category is there's no existing demand to capture. There's very little there.
Madhav Bhandari [00:12:08]:
So in order for us to create demand, one of the ways I look at it is I look at adjacent categories and try to see if I can find people that are in the same state of mind as what we want in our existing category and try to convert them in that. So that was the other sort of approach. Like, what are those adjacent categories that we could truly sort of get a shit ton of traffic from?
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:31]:
Well, so you said something interesting there. From a strategy standpoint, it's like, before deciding if we're going to go. Okay, so we want to test SEO. Okay, great. One layer down from that. Like, what is our approach going to be? Is it going to be, is there lots of existing traffic that we're going to try to capture that demand or do we need to go and create a different strategy? And it seems like that's what you did with creating these different demo pages, right? You're going to try to talk about a related topic that the people who might buy your product are interested in, but it's not specific, related to storyline. I think in the example that I saw from you, you talked about canva. Give me one or two specific examples so we can paint this picture for people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:12]:
So where did you start? Give me a couple examples of creating this playbook.
Madhav Bhandari [00:13:16]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think we started with, I actually took inspiration from a couple of these PlG companies that did really well. Zapier Scribe, how bunch of these others. And so Zapier, there's this popular experiment they talked about maybe ten years ago, which is what the integration keywords, how they grew from that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:37]:
Yeah. And just for context for people. So Zapier, basically they have this tool that I think of it as the glue for all of your systems. It connects everything. And so they can integrate with HubSpot, with Google sheets, with mailchimp, with slack, with all these things. And so their whole content strategy was basically to create use case pages for all those things, like how to automate this task with these two tools. And so if somebody's searching for something related to how to do some automation with Google sheets, the article that's going to show up is a page from Zapier that's going to show you how to do that, right?
Madhav Bhandari [00:14:09]:
Yeah, 100%. Exactly. What was interesting about that strategy was that it was just so massively scalable. You had tens of thousands of keywords with absolutely no competition. And that's what you see with most PLG companies, which have sort of cracked SEO. Our thinking around that was if we could find a cluster wherever I people that we sell to. So we sell to sales folks, we sell to marketing folks, demand gen product marketing, and then we sell to a bunch of Personas. And if we could expose them to the interactive demo tech in a scalable way, we could see our PLG conversion metrics making sense.
Madhav Bhandari [00:14:48]:
And so the canva, I can take another example of, let's say, Google Analytics. We created a tutorial about Google Analytics. So what I did was we started looking at tools which let's say product marketers use. So you think about webflow, HubSpot, activecampaign, all of these different, different tools. And we started looking at clusters where we had the opportunity to create like 10,000 pages with driving something like 100,000 volume. And we started looking at these how to tutorials. And the base of the idea was that what if we tried to just, we just removed all the text from the pages and just added an interactive demo to explain this, because our product would work really well to explain these sort of topics. So that was the initial seed which we went with, and that's how we found the initial set.
Madhav Bhandari [00:15:34]:
Like Canva, basically, the canva cluster basically came from the fact that there are these adjacent marketing roles that sort of the product marketer interacts with, whether that's.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:45]:
The social media got it. So product marketing was your core customer, and we're going to just focus on creating helpful content for them. You mentioned 10,000 pages. How did you come up with these traffic estimates? Were you doing keyword research? Were you plugging in Google Analytics tutorial and seeing what the volume is for that? Where did you come up with how many pages you would need and how much search volume you could get?
Madhav Bhandari [00:16:10]:
Yeah, we use the standard SEO tool. Href Semrush looked at the volume and just did a rough estimate on that. For example, if a keyword has, let's say 250 volume or something, and knowing that a particular keyword can have multiple variations, we just sort of assume that, okay, let's say we drive maybe 200 traffic out of it, and if you multiply that with, let's say, 100 keywords, that's 20,000 in traffic monthly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:39]:
Right, right. Would that be 100 keyword variations of Google Analytics tutorial? You generate 100 variations of that search phrase, basically.
Madhav Bhandari [00:16:50]:
I wouldn't generate it. We would just sort of assume it. Like if a particular keyword volume has like 200, 250, you would at least have 1020 variations of that. And you can assume that there'd be about that much traffic. You'd get. Honestly, it's not granular and very mathematical in a way that it's like exactly how you can get it. It's more like an estimate that, okay, we'll get somewhere between 200 to 400 if we rank number one. And sometimes we can be widely off.
Madhav Bhandari [00:17:15]:
I'll be honest there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:16]:
I'm more just thinking like, if it was me doing this, I mean, man, that's a lot of work to just get 200 visitors a month.
Madhav Bhandari [00:17:24]:
Why do you say that it's going to be too much work for 200?
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:27]:
Because I don't know what I'm talking about. Because I don't know. I don't know how to do it. So I want to know, how do you go from, okay, we have one keyword that's going to bring us 200 visitors a month. How do you get that to 200,000 visitors a month?
Madhav Bhandari [00:17:42]:
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So the first thing is when you come across an opportunity with like 10,000 keywords, you sort of get over and, oh my God, that's a lot of keywords. Where do I even start? That was the exact question you had and you just looked at the 80 20 there. Basically that there's 20% keywords that drive 80% of the volume and we're just going to focus on that 20% keywords. That was basically what we focused on. So we had a particular filter that anything less than this volume and anything more than this difficulty score we are not going to target. For example, the canva cluster has 4000 keywords, but we actually just created 200 pages in that.
Madhav Bhandari [00:18:20]:
And just like that, we took every cluster. And that allows you to just capture majority of the traffic with the least amount of effort.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:27]:
Is it like one page? So when you say you created 200 pages for the canva cluster, is each one of those 200 a page for a different variation of that keyword?
Madhav Bhandari [00:18:38]:
These are like tutorial keywords. So think of it like how do I remove my background in canva in an image? Or how do I add a music track in a video in canva? These are all different sort of questions within how to use canva properly. Even in Google Analytics knowledge, it's things like how to create a view, how do I create a filter in Salesforce? It's like how do I merge a custom field, how do I integrate with mailchimp, those sort of things.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:08]:
Got it. Okay. And then how did you actually go about creating this content? Let's talk about like how you actually made demo. Like, what was the content on each one of these pages? Who did it? Was it, did you hire a contractor? Did AI write it? How did you do it? How did you execute on this?
Madhav Bhandari [00:19:23]:
Yeah, absolutely. So in total, I think we add something like 2100 pages for demoled. There's no way that we could do this on our own. So we hired some contractors and initially we did it on our own. So the first 50 pages were created internally by us just to sort of get a sense of like what should be the page structure. And honestly, like, the page is very simple. If you go to it, it's like you have a title and then you have a demo which is front and center, taking about 80% of the page and then about 50 words of description of what's in the demo in there, just so that we could rank on Google. And that's about it.
Madhav Bhandari [00:19:59]:
That's the page and the template for this page. We spend a lot of time on the template where the conversion opportunity should be, how should the page look like so that whoever was going to create these pages, they don't have to think about where do I add the CTA, what should the CTA be, what should be the meta title structure? All of that was pre decided beforehand. And now we had these contractors. So we found these contractors, someone came from a referral, someone came through upwork, all of these different places, and we basically made them demo creators. So we educated them about what are the best practices of a demo. How do you create a tutorial as a demo. And how do you create this page depending on the complexity of a particular tool? Salesforce is a much more complex tool than canva. We had different expectations and different requirements for those tools and they just sort of, once they got trained, they just started creating those pages.
Madhav Bhandari [00:20:57]:
And it was pretty fast to create those pages. We were seeing these contractors create anywhere from ten to 25 pages a week depending on the complexity of the tool.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:08]:
Do you have any tips for helping people find contractors to do this work? I've heard people who have a bunch of success finding contractors like you in this example, but then I could hang up this call and go talk to a marketer and they're like, I can't hire. Like the work that we're getting out of. Contractors that we hire is not good. So what would, what's your secret?
Madhav Bhandari [00:21:27]:
Yeah, I think it's more like, obviously with the contractors we hired, it wasn't like the, every contractor we hired was great. Right. It's sort of the ten we tried, maybe three actually worked out. Right. That is like you just have to go through that motion. But it's like, I think if you have a strong understanding of what you need. Like for example, in our case, if it was a very deeply technical article, right. I, we actually looked on upwork for people who actually had experience using Salesforce.
Madhav Bhandari [00:21:54]:
And there's an easy way to do that. You can do a test assignment with them before they start. Basically ask them to create a demo about this particular feature in Salesforce. And if they can't do that, a simple thing about Salesforce, that means that they just don't know what that is. A simple test assignment is a great way and the test assignment is basically the real life thing they'll be doing if they can grasp it. And if their first two or three pieces are good, we continue with them. If not, we just sort of pause it and move to the next person.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:23]:
So you're paying somebody for this test and just deciding to like only do one or two and then paid for the tests. And then did you have a scenario where you, you paid somebody for articles and just, you never ended up using them because they weren't good?
Madhav Bhandari [00:22:35]:
Yeah, of course. 100% we have those.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:37]:
Yeah, but it's just like a tax, it's just like a small test. You have to pay a small tax to figure out the good ones.
Madhav Bhandari [00:22:43]:
Yeah, 100%. This is part and parcel of contractors. You will burn through some of these, but that's okay. It's a very small sound cost.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:50]:
Okay. And then on each page, I think what's cool about this approach is you're writing content that's not about how to use your product, but it's about a topic that somebody who would use your product cares about. But then when they actually go to the page, you're going through a product demo. Like you're using your tool to show them how to do things instead of just text on the page, right?
Madhav Bhandari [00:23:11]:
That is correct, yeah. So we basically have a storyline demo that's running and they're sort of interacting in that storyline demo to understand it. And then we basically, one thing we've added at the top is that this demo was created in this many minutes using storyline. That's a good call out to explain that this tech, you can also create.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:31]:
Nice. And so then you're able to track how many people go and sign up from that link.
Madhav Bhandari [00:23:36]:
Yes, yes. Absolutely.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:38]:
Cool. All right, so what have the downfunnel results been from basically ten x ing your organic traffic in six months? Did it work? Has it driven more signups, more trials? What are the results?
Madhav Bhandari [00:23:50]:
100%? Yeah. I mean, I can also show you a slide I shared at Sasopen because that might, I don't know, can we share things in here?
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:59]:
I think so.
Madhav Bhandari [00:24:01]:
I don't think so. Okay, cool.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:03]:
Yeah, maybe I'll just, it turns off my video.
Madhav Bhandari [00:24:06]:
Yeah, ill probably share it later, but ill just walk you through. So weve basically doubled our signups every month on average since weve done this experiment. So the way our traffic has grown sort of looks like a hockey stick sort of growth curve in terms of PLG signups, which contributed to doubling our PLG ARR in just one quarter and were sort of doing pretty well on that. But I think what was even more interesting were the second order effects out of it. This was an experiment to drive PLG signups, but we actually ended up closing multiple enterprise deals because of it. So we closed multiple ten k plus deals using demoled SEO. And it continues to sort of scale as the traffic grows. We saw a jump in our brand search traffic.
Madhav Bhandari [00:24:51]:
So pre demoed SEO versus post demoled weve had a 50% jump in story lane keyword brand searches, ad track the keyword storyline in our Google search console, and I can see from February to today, it's doubled with demoled SEO. That's the interesting bit. And I think another, I guess, data point for you to think about is that. So our signup conversion rate with our traffic right now is about 1.2% with these demo led pages so if you've got 200,000 people coming in, it's about 1.2% of that. And if you compare that with a traditional blog. So we also had our blog and our SEO that was running for two, three years. Thats sort of at a flat pace. Its sort of like the signups maybe going up and down a little bit, but its not really sort of growing really fast.
Madhav Bhandari [00:25:37]:
And the sign up conversion rate is about 0.8% there. So the difference is just 0.8 to 1.2%. It doesnt seem a lot, but when you actually look at the volume is when things start becoming really clear. Because in the last 30 days, for example, in our blog, we got something like 15,000 visitors. And in the last 30 days from demo, we got 220,000. If you multiply that into 1.2%, that's where the magic lies.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:02]:
You mentioned your blog. Is your blog separate than where you have these demo led SEO pages? Are these more like website pages as opposed to blog articles?
Madhav Bhandari [00:26:10]:
Yeah. Different sort of subdivisions. I mean, different folders.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:13]:
Sure. Do you still see a role for the blog or are you going to just do all this moving forward?
Madhav Bhandari [00:26:18]:
I mean, we do keep doing the blog a little bit. The blog has a different motion, a different approach. It's also not PLg, it's also driving like enterprise deals. It's just not my top three in terms of priorities. It's sort of like running as like more on a maintenance mode than like an active focus. And demolition is sort of like where we are very heavily focused on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:39]:
Yeah. Cause I think in, in conversation with like a bunch of early stage companies trying to figure out what to do from a content standpoint. It's always this discussion about like, should we be creating website articles or should we be focusing on the blog? And it seems like more of the juice these days comes from doing this type of approach where you're creating website articles as opposed to having a blog. I don't know if it's because of the strategy or for whatever reason, but it seems to be. I'm hearing more people are having success doing stuff on the website as opposed to necessarily like how we started ranking for all these blog keywords and our blog has become this major resource. That's what the Zapier approach was. Those weren't blog articles, those were website pages. Right?
Madhav Bhandari [00:27:21]:
Hundred percent, yeah. I mean, I think the blog is just, it's a bloodbath out there. Like, everybody's creating content, everybody's sort of creating at this good of a content that is like, you know, there's these AIO views and different, different things that are going. So it's not really going in your favor. But also, like, in our case, there's a unique situation also because, like, our category is sort of like, we've done everything we could to capture demand from that category. Now what? Right. So you need to find another place for growth.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:47]:
All right, let's talk about webinars. Webinars is another thing that you all have done that's been working. I love webinars. Webinars work fantastically for us. Talk to the average b two b marketer and they think that webinars stink and webinars are dead. Tell me about what you all have done with webinar strategy and what's worked and why it's worked.
Madhav Bhandari [00:28:06]:
Yeah, so we used to do the same webinars where it would be like the standard thing, where you'd invite a guest pre prep for it, and then you tackle a topic and the same topics covered by 100 other SaaS companies on the webinars. We did that. Didn't get a lot of engagement.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:22]:
Yeah, you get like 62 people registered, 14 of them show up. And then you're like, why the heck are we doing this?
Madhav Bhandari [00:28:28]:
And it's so much effort. Like, it's so much effort to, like.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:31]:
Absolutely.
Madhav Bhandari [00:28:33]:
So it was more of a reframing of how we thought about. So we're still doing webinars, but now we think of it as more live events than webinars. The way we start doing things, like we have this live event sort of calendar that goes across the year. And I consider those live events as more like brand launches. These are opportunities for us to really get uplift in our overall brand volume. And each of these live events are like these one of a kind sort of events. So, for example, know at exit five, you guys just sort of launched the roast, right, which is very new. It's not something that's ever been done.
Madhav Bhandari [00:29:14]:
Right. And just like that, we've also done, we've done different things, like an award show in the style of the Dundies. And we've done a different sort of a product launch. We've done a GTM demo day. And every single time we've done those, we've seen a lift in brand searches. Like, I mean, I literally have the data where I can show you that at that time of the live event, we saw Lyft and brand searches and they were like a bunch. Like, the amount of attendees we get from these live events are like eight times more than our standard webinar we used to do earlier.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:44]:
I think about this a lot because I was talking to, I was on a call with one of our sponsors yesterday and I was talking about how just because you do something with us, we don't have this magic ingredient that's going to magically generate leads for you. It's like if you spend money with Google, right? And you do, you make ads, you do ads, adwords ads, right? If the copy is not good, if the headline is not good, if the copy is not good, if where those ads go, which page they drive to, if that page is not good, you don't go, oh, Google's not working for us, right? You're like, oh, it's the offer. And this is what I think about all the time, is I don't think enough marketers sweat over the offer. It's like the, what's in it for me? Everyone's doing these webinars, so why should I go to this thing? And so for us, like we did this, we're doing this roast, we wanted to try to do like a big virtual event on the heels of our in person event drive, we wanted, we're like, what's a thing that people would spend a bunch of hours on? And how do we make it different than another webinar? We're like, oh, what if we, people love websites, what if we break down all the pieces of the website? What if we get some interesting sponsors involved? What if we take a different approach? The, what's in it for me is you're going to get three, 4 hours of like master level content to help you with your b two b website. Okay, that's a better offer than like join Dave for a conversation with so and so on a webinar. And so I think like you have this GTM demo day, you have Dundee awards. Like I think we need to spend more time as marketers thinking about the offer. It's not so much about whether it's a webinar or not, it's like why should someone sign up for this and give you 1 hour out of their day? And what are they going to get out of it?
Madhav Bhandari [00:31:21]:
Oh, 100%, yeah. We keep talking about like b two b is so boring sometimes, you know, it's just so boring. We need to, I mean, you know, like there's obviously we can take inspiration from b two C, but like there needs to be some sort of change in the art, we need to break that cycle basically like you know, get done with sort of like the standard case studies or get done with those, you know, like these standard webinars. Like I think there needs to be a stop somewhere. And I think when you do that, you start to see like, oh, okay, that's interesting. I didn't know this webinar could actually be interesting, you know?
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:54]:
Yeah. How do you drive attendance to those webinars? I'm assuming with so much traffic now, you must have a sizable email list that you're able to like promote these events to. How do you actually get people to register and show up?
Madhav Bhandari [00:32:06]:
Oh, absolutely. So there's a bunch of things. One is definitely the customer list, right. We get a lot of folks from there. The other is LinkedIn. We're pretty big on LinkedIn, so we sort of drive folks from there. But then its not just posting from the company profile and individual profiles. That works.
Madhav Bhandari [00:32:21]:
Employee advocacy works 100%. It drives a lot of traffic. But we also work with some other people to get a lot more attendees. So for example, ill give you an example of our product launch, which is for Demohub. And we needed to build onto that waitlist. One of the things we did was we hired a bunch of these micro influencers or micro LinkedIn creators with these 1015 thousand followers and they create these funny 1 minute videos. And what we realized was that using humor is a great way to reach to a very wide audience. And then through that there's this conversion, there's maybe a one 2% conversion that can sort of drive attendees.
Madhav Bhandari [00:33:05]:
And that worked amazing for us. We did this ad with this guy Ryan from laudable. He basically did a skit and we ran it not just organically, but also as paid ads and everything. It's one of the best performing pieces that we have. I think it basically drives clicks at something like $0.5 per click or something. It's pretty amazing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:27]:
And how do you measure the success of these webinars?
Madhav Bhandari [00:33:31]:
There's a bunch of things that help us understand their success. One is there's a direct impact that I hear from the sales team. For example, for GTM demo Day, once that happened, it was like I got messages from two account executives messaged me saying that, hey, I had this deal which is stuck in the pipeline. They just closed and they're paying us. They're like, oh wow, okay, one deal sort of worked pretty well, and then we had a bunch of others. So what happens is that we take these events and then we sort of use them to reactivate some old sales conversations, maybe a prospect that's gone cold, or a prospect that's not responding or a prospect that's just sort of undecided on, like which competitor to choose or which tool to choose. Right. You sort of use the brand.
Madhav Bhandari [00:34:18]:
These brands are live events as a way to sort of maybe tilt a little bit to your thing, right? So that is one way the sales sort of gives feedback that, okay, this worked. The other thing is we see, that's one thing that I definitely look at is does it impact our brand searches? Are people searching for storylane on Google? And every single time if we do an event and I see that there's a bump in searches, that 100% means that things are working. Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:45]:
Interesting. So even if it's not a direct response thing, you're saying there's a lot of correlation between you guys making a bunch of noise, doing some stuff and then more people end up hearing about storyline and thus going to Google and typing in storylane and going to your website at some point in time after 100%.
Madhav Bhandari [00:35:02]:
So I used to think I have a slightly, I mean, I have a different take to revenue attribution, but then when I heard Runav at drive, I was like, this is exactly how we sort of think about it. Like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You know, like, but I mean, so for us, like, the conversation is like, the thing is that like in 2010 or 2012, it was like you create this piece of content, somebody will click on it and sign up for a product. It was like a very linear sort of attribution path, which does not exist anymore, especially in our space. It's a very disjoint sort of a path. And here's an interesting one. For example, somebody would see a demo, Dundee, and then they would go on to exit five and then ask for like, hey, I'm evaluating Storylane and these other competitors, which one is the best? And somebody would recommend, let's say, storylane, and then they would go search for Storylane and then sign up. How do you sort of attribute that? There's just no way, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:56]:
There's no way. Yeah, that's why I thought Pranava's approach is great and even you just hearing him talking about it and Dan has been like, we've had a good example, right? So we did drive, we've noticed in the last, so drive was two weeks ago. Every week since. Dr. The two weeks since drive, we've had more trials than ever before for our community. Right? We haven't done a specific tactic to drive more people. It just seems like that event elevated our brand in some way. And because everybody's talking about it on LinkedIn, there's some correlation between people searching for us, and we've just seen everything is up across the board.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:35]:
That's not why we did drive. But now that's like, oh, shit, we should do it again next year because we know we feel that bump. And so it's interesting to hear that. Or we started spending on LinkedIn ads. If we look at the direct attribution of those LinkedIn ads, it hasn't really done much to drive trials. But when we look at search volume for exit five and more, like, website traffic is up, branded search is up. There's probably something related to that. And think about how you and I browse LinkedIn, right? Just because I see something on LinkedIn doesn't mean I'm instantly going to click on it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:04]:
But I may have seen it. It may have planted a seed in my head. Two weeks from now, I need to go find something comes up about product demos, and I'm like, oh, yeah, what was that company's story, Lane? And I search for you, and I land on your site that may have originated from a LinkedIn ad, but I just didn't give you the click there.
Madhav Bhandari [00:37:20]:
Yep, yep. By the way, here's an interesting statistic. Right? So for the storyline truck that we ran at drive, assume most people won't.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:27]:
Know what that is. So just explain that quickly.
Madhav Bhandari [00:37:29]:
Yeah. So as a drive exit five. Right. Event, we couldn't get a sponsor slot. Let's just put it that way. Right. And we wanted to sort of get.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:40]:
We got to talk to Dan. We gotta. We gotta fix that next year. Okay, keep going.
Madhav Bhandari [00:37:44]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we needed to figure out, like, because this was, like, the exact match of people we wanted to sort of, we sell to. So we wanted to get exposed to, like, you know, come across to them in a different way. So just being an attendee wouldn't make sense. So we initially thought about, you know, putting, like, a billboard on the. At the Burlington airport, but there weren't any good options there. And then we decided, we'll do a mobile billboard. And we basically called that the storyline truck.
Madhav Bhandari [00:38:08]:
It had an ad, and then we basically put it right in front of the venue. And luckily for us, drive was a very outdoor event. Folks were spending time outside and sort of became one of those things which was like, I think everybody I spoke to at drive knew about that truck, knew about storyline. What worked for us at that time was when I actually looked at our analytics that particular day we had something like 150 additional people sort of searching for storyline like. It was probably like one of the highest storyline traffic days, those two or three days, that's the correlation. And I think if you look at it more broadly, it's more like this. If what you're talking about with exit five, you've got more trials coming in. As long as every week or week, your trials are growing.
Madhav Bhandari [00:38:52]:
As long as when you talk to trials and ask them how do you hear about us? And the answer reflects the investments you're doing in marketing. It's working. And that's the high level view that even we look at. And then there's obviously data driven things that we also look at. But I think this is more like how we strategically decide where to invest and what, and what to sort of shut down.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:14]:
When you think about what you're doing in the marketing now and where marketing is going, what is your personal opinion on what role AI will play for b two B marketers? Is it something you're excited about using, not using bullish on? Maybe it's overhyped, overrated. What's your perspective?
Madhav Bhandari [00:39:34]:
I think AI is a fantastic more, with less sort of a lever. I'm doing a lot more work than I did maybe five years ago because of AI. I'm able to just refine things super quickly. I feel like that's the future with AI. And in marketing, there's going to be more innovation, there's going to be a different playbook. Today's playbook and marketing is very different from what was maybe ten years ago. I think that's what's changing. And I feel like with Aih, it'll help you sort of adapt to that playbook.
Madhav Bhandari [00:40:10]:
For example, right now with AI, we use it for whether that's our LinkedIn content, whether that's for coming up with ideas for these campaigns, like the storyline truck, all of these different things. Now the time to create those campaigns, what would have probably taken four weeks can now be done in five days. And now you have more and more of these initiatives happening, which just changes the playbook. That's how at least I see AI sort of evolving marketing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:34]:
Yeah, I think people get caught up in the not great blog posts you get from AI writing tools, and they think that that's what it's going to be. But I see it more as like, there's so much innovation happening with websites, landing pages, video, audio, images. It's not just about using AI to write articles, it's about this superpower to help you as a, it's almost like everybody on your team can be like a full stack marketer with what's possible with AI, you know, 100%.
Madhav Bhandari [00:41:03]:
Yeah. Even like, for example, for you guys, I'm assuming, you know, you're, you're right now a team of five, right. And what you're able to achieve with a team of five. If AI wasn't there, I'm assuming that would have been maybe seven or eight other, like, people, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:15]:
Yeah, I, yeah. I hope they're listening because I want to do this SEO play that you're talking about because I think we're sitting on, like, we have, we get 12,000 website visitors a month and we have essentially a three page website. And we just have done, no, all of our content is like, in the community or on the podcast. But I've done 175 episodes of this podcast. We've sent two newsletters a week for like two years. We have 50 webinars. We've done. I think we're sitting on this goldmine of content that we should be, we could be repurposing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:47]:
And I don't mean just like run it through AI and write it as a blog post, but, like, imagine what you could do taking the transcript from this interview. We could write an article about how you did this SEO play. There's three or four articles in here. There's three or four newsletters. It's stuff like that that I think is really powerful from a content standpoint or what you did with SEO.
Madhav Bhandari [00:42:07]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that makes sense. But I also feel that, I think right now we sort of face the problem of there is too much that we can write about and too much content we can produce. And I think the way forward would be how do you sort of prioritize that sort of the 175, which are those 20 that you use AI to sort of really craft it and not do the 175 because theres already so much content im consuming, I just, im already overloaded. So I just want to see the best of the best.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:39]:
Yeah. Yeah. All right, lets wrap up with, tell me one thing. In marketing that its been a year, is there something that you cut, like, its not working anymore, so were just going to cut it and not focus there? Maybe it could be something that's maybe popular among another team or somebody else is doing, but you've just decided, like, we got too much going on. That channel is not working for us. We're just not going to invest right there.
Madhav Bhandari [00:43:01]:
That's an interesting one. Let me think about that. I think one is, and this might contradict what you sort of advise, we purposefully don't invest too much on email marketing that much. We don't have forms for people to subscribe and all of that. We don't take our webinar attendees and send them the future promotions and everything. It's just more like, it's too much. I just feel like I'm already overloaded with so many emails, I hardly open email anymore. And I know that you guys have told that email is actually one of the things that worked really well for you.
Madhav Bhandari [00:43:38]:
For us, LinkedIn works as a much better distribution channel, and we just focus on that because that's where the people are hanging out. So that's something that we've purposefully not invested in, and we are nothing. We used to do that a little bit, but then we sort of canceled our email automation software and everything. We just like, we're not going to do that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:53]:
So you don't have any email?
Madhav Bhandari [00:43:54]:
Yeah, I mean, we've got like the intercom, which is like our customers and everything, but we don't have like a marketing comm software.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:02]:
Interesting.
Madhav Bhandari [00:44:03]:
I know. And I know you're big on that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:06]:
Well, I. Hmm. I'm big on having the ability to, like, reach out to people when you need to. Right. But I do think that inside of a SaaS company, the concept of a newsletter is not always great and just ends up being a waste of time. It's kind of like blogging to me in some sense. It's like, let's send out a newsletter for the sake of it versus having an actual strategy. There is going to be the thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:29]:
I'm a big believer in that everything can work. I've seen everything work. You can make the case. ABM works, TikTok works, email works, LinkedIn works. But one team cannot do so many things. And I think that usually the 80 20 rule is better. And it's like, do less, let's do less things and let's be better at them. And then once those things are successful, and then we can add more channels as opposed to like, man, I see a lot of marketing teams that do.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:56]:
We're on YouTube and every video on YouTube has like 17 views. And I'm like, well, what's the point of that? That's taking somebody's time.
Madhav Bhandari [00:45:04]:
Yeah, it's true. 100%. Right? Like, you got to focus. I mean, let me maybe ask you a counter question on the email bit. Right? Like today you're sort of sending out these awesome newsletters and everything, right? Like you, let's say, I don't know, because of a talent thing or whatever, right? You take a six month break and then you send out another email again six months later. How many people do you feel like will stay subscribed? Do you not feel like it's such a transactional audience the moment they stop seeing you, they forget about you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:32]:
And then when we email them six months later, everyone's like, how did I get on this list? Who are you? And they unsubscribe.
Madhav Bhandari [00:45:37]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:39]:
Yeah.
Madhav Bhandari [00:45:39]:
I don't know.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:39]:
It's definitely possible. I think it's different in our case. I think we've built a brand that was based on me, like my personal reputation, and we've intentionally tried to move away from that. I would be surprised if a lot of people unsubscribed. I think what's different about our business in this case, it's like we're not selling a software product and so, like, we can truly be a content business. And so we're thinking of it as our email list is still not very big. It's like twenty five k. I think it should be much bigger than that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:07]:
But we decided to, like, hire Danielle and pull forward a bunch of hiring this year because we have bigger goals for next year. And I didn't want to wait till January to start doing those things. And so we think of the newsletter as a product. Like Morning Brew. Their product was an email newsletter. And so I think it works. And again, I think that this idea could work. I think you could start a newsletter at Storylane that could work really well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:33]:
The key is, though, it can't just be less like, let's take a bunch of articles from this week on the blog, and here's what. It just becomes another promotional channel. It just becomes like an email that's like, hey, we have a webinar this week. Sign up for a trial or whatever. But if you hired a dedicated writer and you paid them, say, hey, I'm going to pay you $100,000 a year. You're just going to write our email newsletter and make it awesome. And make it like Monday.com does a good job of this. They have this Monday.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:58]:
They call it Monday insights or something like that. And it's never really about their product. It's about, like, trends in the workplace. And that's become, like, a good resource for people. I think you'd have to take that approach to make it meaningful. And then the bet that I would make is that it's almost like LinkedIn, where we give, give, give, give. Like, we're not going to promote storyline. We're not going to promote storyline.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:17]:
But now you have this engaged audience and so then when you do have something to promote for storyline, you'd be able to drive an actual response from that list. But again, it takes time. It takes time. It's a dedicated resource, like for exit five, for Danielle. You know, she's spending a multiple hours every week reading, writing, researching this newsletter that is in place of other things. And so in your case, it's with a small team. Okay, well, if we're going to do that, what are we going to not do? Right? There's, it's always, it's always a game of trade offs.
Madhav Bhandari [00:47:45]:
Yeah, that makes sense. 100%.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:47]:
All right, well, this was a great conversation, my friend. Is great to see you. I'll let you go. I'll let you get off the hot seat. Everybody can go. Check out all, we'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile in this, in the, in the notes here. So you'll get a bunch of friendly notes after this. Everybody, everybody met you at drive.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:01]:
One of my favorite things about drive is you were sitting there in the crowd, you were engaged, you were asking questions. You were there to be there, which was awesome and excited to get to know you more and keep chatting with you, keep doing great stuff at Storylane. You're somebody that people should be following. And thanks for coming on the exit five podcast.
Madhav Bhandari [00:48:19]:
I appreciate that. Thank you, Dave. And, yeah, drive was amazing. I was like walking around on my LinkedIn feed. I keep saying that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:26]:
Yeah. And then I got, you know, I was worried about, Dan, was worried about me. Am I going to be too fired up after it and be like, let's do more drives? I've like, since then, I've had that. He's like, let's do, let's do drive three months from now in Denver and then let's do it again in, in the fall in Miami. I'm like, relax. No, we're not. We're doing it once a year. Please, no more.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:48]:
Good to see you. I'll talk to you later. All right. Exit, exit.