#183: Strategy | How Storylane Grew Organic Traffic 10x Through SEO in 6 Months (with Madhav Bhandari, Head of Marketing at Storylane)

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Exit. Exit.

Exit. Madav, 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 you doing?

Yeah, I'm doing great and happy to be here. Been listening to your podcast for a while now, so just excited to be on the other side now.

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 and Exit 5. 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 happened to use him as an example and I'm like, I looked at his profile and he's posted 153 comments in the community. He's never wrote, 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 Storylane and we're going to talk about those, maybe riff on some new ideas. 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?

Yeah, so I'm Madhav. I've been like a B2B SaaS marketer for almost 12 years now. I've led marketing teams at a bunch of companies like Hubstaff, Bonsai, 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.

Give people a rough sense of like how big is the company and what does the marketing team look like?

Yeah, absolutely. So we are a team of, we are still small, so we are about 40 people overall and the marketing team is about 10 people right now as a company we have about 2,500 customers. It's sort of like a 1/3 split, like 1/3 SMBs, 1/3 mid market, 1/3 enterprise. But yeah, like some of the biggest sort of companies use Storylane. You can think about Gong Clari, Outreach, Nutanix, Silicon Valley bank, nasdaq, Dow Jones Index, all of these are customers.

You've been there for about a year.

That is correct, yeah. I'm about to celebrate my one year anniversary. Yeah.

With a late night podcast recording with me. Thank you. What's the makeup of the marketing team today?

So I've got a brand team, you know, 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.

Why invest in brand so early?

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, you know, 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. You know, like they're at that sort of education level, right. So there's not a lot of existing demand to be captured. So you need to sort of create a lot of new demand. But when you're sort of creating new demand, you also want to make sure that you sort of coming across as like this software which is in a league of its own. That's sort of like how we sort of play it. Like we try to stay away a little bit from like, hey, you know, here's how we are better than our competitors and all of that. Try to sort of build a league of your own. And, and that's what we do, right? And what we've seen when somebody sort of comes from any sort of a brand search, right, they're usually sort of coming into the buyer conversations as like, either we are the first tool in the buying cycle, which is a huge advantage because then you have a very likely chance that you'll close that deal or it's going to be like somebody just coming in, they've already done the research and then the sales team has it easy sort of closing it.

Right.

And I think lastly it's just like, I think with brand, it's also like you become channel agnostic. You're not sort of reliant a LinkedIn algorithm or an ad spend or SEO changes things always constantly changing. And I wasn't even, yeah, I did.

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 hear 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, right? 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. 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. But 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. 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. I feel like I have a relationship with 100%.

Very true. If you look at any software category, everyone has these table sticks features, and ultimately you're just sort of selling that point of view and trying to find that tribe. So 100%. Yeah, I agree on that. Because it's sort of a losing battle after a while. It's sort of like you come up with this feature, the competitor will come up with it, and it's just a competition of who's sort of going that way. So the brand 100% tilts that favor on your end, for sure.

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 5 is using demo led SEO to grow traffic from 25k a month. Is that visitors a month views a month?

Yeah, 25k visitors a month.

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 10k 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.

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 100k a 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 200k a 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 I was like, okay, something.

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, 1200. 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 gonna sign up for our product?

Yeah. So we basically have two sales motions. Right. One is a product led, the other is a sales LED motion. And then there's like this mixed motion where it's like some product LED folks come in and then, you know, 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. 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 and how we could do this faster.

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, two years, because I don't even know. I don't even know. You need to be doing short term and long term things. So 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, like, 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?

I mean, it's funny because it's like there's all of these conversations that are happening around SEO, that AI is 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 sort of like what we were like, hey, yes, things are going to change in a couple of years, but it is working right now for many, many companies. So 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. So in order for us to create demand, one of the ways I look at it is like 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.

Right.

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?

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're, 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 like one or two specific examples so we can paint this picture for people. So where did you start? Give me like a couple examples of creating this playbook.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think we started with. So I, I actually took inspiration from a couple of these PLG companies that did really well. Zapier, Scribehow, bunch of these others. Right. And so Zapier, there's like this popular experiment they Talked about maybe 10 years ago, which is about the integration keywords.

Right.

How they sort of grew from there.

Right.

And so we were.

Yeah, and just, just for context for people. So Zapier, basically they have this tool that I think of it as like the glue for all of your systems. Right. 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?

Yeah, 100%, exactly. What was interesting about that strategy was that it was just so massively scalable. Like you had tens of thousands of keywords with absolutely no competition.

Right.

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 where the people that we sell to, so we sell to sales folks, we sell to marketing folks, demand gen product marketing. And then you know, like we sell to a bunch of Personas.

Right.

And if we could expose them to the interactive demo tech in a scalable way.

Right.

Like we could see like our PLG conversion metrics sort of making sense. And so the Canva, or I can, 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.

Right.

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 a 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 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 the social media.

Got it. So product marketing was your like 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 like 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?

Yeah, so I mean we use the standard SEO tool, href SEMrush.

Right.

Looked at the volume and just like, did a rough estimate on that.

Right.

Like, so, for example, if a keyword has, let's say, 250 volume or something, right. 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.

Right?

And if you multiply that with, let's say, 100 keywords, that's 20,000 in traffic monthly.

Right?

Right. Would that be a hundred keyword variations of Google Analytics tutorial? You generate a hundred variations of that search phrase, basically.

I wouldn't generate it. You would just sort of assume it. Like, if a particular keyword volume has like 200, 250, you would at least have 10, 20 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. I'll be honest there.

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.

Yeah. Why do you say that it's going to be too much work for 200?

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. 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?

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 overwhelmed. Oh, my God, that's a lot of keywords. Where do I even start? That was the exact question you had. And we just looked at the 80, 20 there basically that there's 20% keywords that drive 80% of the volume. And we are 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. And like, for example, the canva cluster has 4,000 keywords, but we actually just created 200 pages in that. 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.

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?

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? Right? 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, 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.

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?

Yeah, absolutely. So in total, I think we're at 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. That's the page, right? And the template for this page. Like we spend a lot of time on the template, right? Like 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 like, 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 sort of educated them about what are the best practices of a demo, how do you sort of create a tutorial as a demo? And you know, how do you create this page? And depending on the complexity of A particular tool like Salesforce is a much more complex tool than Canva.

Right.

So 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 and it was pretty fast to create those pages. You know, like we were seeing these contractors create anywhere from 10 to 25 pages a week, depending on the complexity of the tool.

Do you have any tips for helping people find contractors to do this work? I've heard people who have 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, what's your secret?

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. Out 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.

We actually looked on upwork for people who actually had experience using Salesforce. And there's an easy way to do that. You can do like a test assignment with them before they start.

Right.

Basically ask them to create a demo about this particular feature in Salesforce. And if they can't do that simple thing about Salesforce, that means that they just don't know what that is.

Right.

So 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.

So you're paying somebody for this test and just deciding to like only do one or two and then paid for the test. 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?

Yeah, of course. A hundred percent. We have a bunch of those.

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.

Yeah, a hundred percent. This is part and parcel of contractors. Like, you will burn through some of these, but that's okay. Like, it's a very small sum of cost.

Okay. And then on each Page. I think what's cool about this approach is like 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?

That is correct. Yeah. So we, 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.

Nice. And so then you're able to track how many people go and sign up from that link.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Cool. All right, so what have the down funnel results been from? Basically 10xing your organic traffic in in 6 months. Did it work? Has it driven more signups, more trials? What are the results?

Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I can also show you a slide. I'd shared that SaaS open because that might. I don't know. Can we share things in here?

I think so.

I don't think so. Okay, cool. Yeah, maybe I'll just.

It turns off my video.

Yeah, I'll probably share it later, but like, I'll just walk you through. So we basically doubled our signups every month on average since we've sort of 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 doubling our PLG ARR in just one quarter. And we were sort of doing pretty well on that. But I think what was even more interesting were the second order effects out of it. So this was an experiment to sort of drive PLG signups, but we actually ended up closing multiple enterprise deals because of it. So we closed multiple 10k plus deals using demo led SEO. And it continues to sort of scale as the traffic grows. We saw a jump in our brand search traffic. So pre demo led SEO vs post demo led. We've had a 50% jump in storyline keyword brand searches. I track the keyword storyline in our Google search console and I can see from like February to like today it's sort of doubled with demo LED SEO. That's the interesting bit. And I think the other, I guess data point that you know, for you to think about is that so our Sign up 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. That's sort of at a flat pace. It's sort of like the signups are maybe going up and down a little bit, but it's not really sort of growing really fast. And the signup conversion rate is about 0.8% there. So the difference is just 0.8 to 1.2%. It doesn't 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 led SE, we got 220,000. If you multiply that into 1.2%, that's where the magic lies.

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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?

Yeah, different sort of sub, I mean different folders.

Sure. Do you still see a role for the blog or are you going to just do all this moving forward?

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 Demolit is sort of like where we are very heavily focused on.

Yeah, because I think 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, oh, 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.

100% 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 as good of a content. There 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.

All right, let's talk about webinars. So 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 B2B 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.

Yeah, so we used to do the same webinars where it would be like the standard thing where you'd invite a guest, you'd pre prep for it, and then you tackle a topic and the same topics covered by a hundred other SaaS companies on the webinars. So we did that. Didn't get a lot of engagement.

Yeah, you get like 62 people registered, 14 of them show up and then you're like, why the heck are we doing this?

And it's so much effort, like, it's so much effort to like, prepare.

Absolutely.

So it was more of a reframing of how we thought about. So you'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.

Right.

These are opportunities for us to really get an 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, like, you know, at exit 5, you guys just sort of launched the roast.

Right.

Which is very new. It's not something that's ever been done.

Right.

And just like that, you know, we've also done, you know, we've done like different things, like an award show in the style of the Dundees. And, you know, 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 lift and brand searches and there 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.

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 sponsor, just because you do something with us, like 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 ad, 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, four hours of like master level content to help you with your B2B 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 one hour out of their day and what are they going to get out of it?

Oh, 100%. Yeah. We keep talking about like B2B 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 B2C, but like, there needs to be some sort of change in the or 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.

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?

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 it's not just sort of posting from the company profile and individual profiles. That works. Like employee advocacy works 100%, it drives a lot of traffic. But we also work with some other people to sort of get a lot more attendees. So for example, I'll give you an example of our product launch, which was for Demo Hub, right? And we needed to build onto that wait list. So one of the things we did was we hired a bunch of these micro influencers or micro LinkedIn creators with like these 10, 15,000 followers, and they create like these funny one minute sort of videos, right? 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 like this conversion, there's like maybe a 1 2% conversion that can sort of drive attendees. And that worked amazing for us. We did this ad with this guy Ryan from Laudable. He basically did like 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.05 dollars per click or something. It's pretty amazing.

And how do you measure the success of these webinars?

There's a bunch of things that help us sort of understand their success, Right. So 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 sort of stuck in the pipeline. They just closed and they're paying us like 20K and they're like, oh, wow, okay. Like, 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.

Right.

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 like which tool to choose.

Right.

You sort of use the brand, 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 a hundred percent means that things are working right.

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%.

So I used to think I have a slightly. I mean, I have a different take to revenue attribution. But then when I heard Pranav 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 conversations, like, the thing is that like in 2010 or 2012, it was like you create this piece of content and 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 Dundees, and then they would go on to Exit 5 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?

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, a good example, right. So we did drive. We have noticed in the last. So drive was two weeks ago. Every week since Drive, the. 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, like, 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. 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 like, 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 5 and more like, website traffic is up, branded search is up. There's probably something related to that in that. And think about how you and I like, browse LinkedIn. Right? Just because I see something on LinkedIn doesn't mean I'm instantly going to click on it. But I may have seen it. It may have planted a seed in my head. Two weeks from now, I need to go find, you know, something comes up about product demos and I'm like, oh, yeah, what was that company storyline? 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.

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 know what that is, so just explain that quickly.

Yeah, So I was at Drive Exit 5.

Right.

Event, we couldn't get a sponsor slot, let's just put it that way.

Right.

And we wanted to sort of get.

We.

We got to talk to Dan. We gotta, we gotta fix that next year. Okay, Keep going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we needed to figure out, like, 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. It had an ad and then we basically put it right in front of the venue. And luckily for us, Drive was a very outdoorsy event. So a lot of 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, right? And I think if you look at it more broadly, it's more like this, right? If you know what you're talking about. With Exit 5 we've got like more trials coming in, right? So as long as, you know, every week over week your sort of trials are growing. As long as when you know, when you sort of talk to trials and ask them like how do you hear about us? And the answer sort of reflects the investments you're doing in marketing. You know, it's, it's working, right. And that's sort of like 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 the what, how we strategically decide where to invest and what. And what to sort of shut down.

When you think about what you're doing in the marketing now and where marketing is going, what is your personal opinion on where, on what role AI will play for B2B marketers? Is it something you're excited about using, not using bullish on? Maybe it's overhyped, overrated. What's your perspective?

I think AI is a fantastic more with less sort of a lever. I'm doing a lot more work than I did like maybe five years ago because of AI. I'm able to just refine things super quickly and I feel like that's the future with AI and marketing. There's going to be more innovation, there's going to be I guess a different playbook. Today's playbook in marketing is very different from what was like maybe 10 years ago. And I think that's what's changing. So like, and I feel like with AI it'll help you sort of adapt to that playbook. For example, right now with AI, we use it for, you know, 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 right 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 is like changes the playbook. That's how at least I see AI sort of evolving marketing.

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 I. It's almost like everybody on your team can be like a full stack marketer with what's possible with AI.

You know, 100%. Yeah. Even like for example, for you guys, I'm assuming, you know, 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?

Yeah, 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, 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 gold mine of content that we should be, we could be repurposing. 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 like what you did with SEO.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that makes sense. But I also feel that I think right now we sort of face the problem of like there is too much that we can write about and too much content we can produce.

Right.

And I think the way forward would be like, how do you sort of Prioritize that.

Right.

Like, so out of the 175, which of those 20 that you use AI to sort of really craft it and not do the 175? Because there's already so much content I'm consuming. I just. I'm already overloaded. So I just want to see the best of the best.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's wrap up with. Tell me one thing in marketing that it's been a year. Is there something that you cut, like, it's not working anymore, so we're 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's not working for us. We're just not going to invest. Right there.

It'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. Like, we don't have, like, forms for people to subscribe and all of that.

Right.

We don't take our webinar attendees and send them like 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, you know, email is actually one of the things that worked really well for you because 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 purposely not invested in. And we are not. We used to do that a little bit, but then we sort of canceled our email automation software and everything. We're just like, we're not going to do that.

So you don't have any email?

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.

Interesting.

And I know you're big on that.

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 like an 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 like having an actual strategy. There is going to be the thing. I'm a big believer in that everything can work. I've seen everything work, right? You can make the case. ABM works, TikTok works, email works, LinkedIn works. One team cannot do so many things. And I think that usually the 8020 rule is better and it's like, do less. Yeah, let's do less things and let's be better at them. And then like once those things are successful, then we can add more channels as opposed to like, man, I see a lot of marketing teams that do. We're on YouTube and like 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.

Yeah, it's true. 100%, right? Like, you got to focus. But if, 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.

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. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. 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 25k. I think it should be much bigger than that. 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, you know, like Morning Brew. Their product was an email newsletter and so I think it works. And again, I think that this idea could work. Like I think you could start a newsletter at Storylane that could work really well. 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 you know, it just becomes another promotional channel. It just becomes like an email that's like, hey, we have a webinar this week. We, you know, sign up for a trial, whatever. But if you hired a dedicated writer and you paid them, say, hey, I'm gonna pay you $100,000 a year, you're just gonna write our email newsletter and make it awesome and make it like, Monday.com does a good, good job of this. They have this Monday. 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 Storylane, we're not going to promote storyline. But now you have this engaged audience, and so then when you do have something to promote for storylane, 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 5 for Danielle, you know, she's spending 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.

Yeah, that makes sense 100%.

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 the notes here so you'll get a bunch of friendly notes after this. Everybody met you at Drive. 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 5 podcast.

I appreciate that. Thank you, Dave. And yeah, Drive was amazing. I was like walking around on my LinkedIn feed. I keep saying that.

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 to. 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. All right, Madov, good to see you. I'll talk to you later.

Exit foreign.

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