#98: The Role of Digital Marketing, B2B Website Mistakes, and How to Grow Your Salary as an Employee (with Tas Bober)

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1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit.

Exit, exit.

My new friend Tass is here, and unlike you listening to this podcast, she's on over 400 websites, redesigns, which we're going to talk about. But, Tas, good to have you here. You said you're a longtime list. Are you a longtime listener of this podcast?

Longtime listener. I think, like, one of the first people. I've been trolling. You. Not trolling you. Following you for a while.

No, that's not trolling. I can show you trolls if you want them.

Okay.

And so you sent me a note specifically you. A couple years ago, you listened to an interview that we did with Heidi at Telium and found out that they were hiring.

Yeah. So it was. I remember October of 2020, it was midst of COVID I was working out, and I was listening to your podcast. You interviewed Heidi. You were doing, like, your CMO series where you were interviewing and talking about team structure and that kind of stuff. And then a few months later, they were hiring for head of digital. And I remembered the interview. So I saw that she and I had a connection, and within two weeks, I was hired, and I was there for two and a half years. So you can take credit for it, though, because I wouldn't have known that Telium.

I would never do that. No, that's awesome. I think that makes a big difference for me if I can hear somebody talk before I go and work for them. Like, that was one of the things that initially drew me to the job that I took when I joined Drift in the early days was I had had David, who's a CEO, on my podcast, even before I had thought of working there. And after listening to somebody talk for an hour, you can kind of. Like, it's not everything, but you can get a different feel before going in. I feel like sometimes I've gone into a company and I'm interviewed, and I'm like, man, I had. I had no read on that lady. Like, I don't know how that went. And I think it makes a big difference.

Yeah. And it's a way to interview them and see how their mind kind of works, too. It was actually a lot of fun working for her. I learned a lot, too. We're very similar in the way we view, you know, just content and things like that. So it was fun. It was a fun Two and a half years.

I want to talk about digital marketing with you. Yeah, I also want to talk about you. Like, 99% of people listening out there went through layoffs, and. And then, like, we're like, what am I going to do next? And started your own thing.

Yeah.

So I want to talk about that. That's also relevant for a lot of people. But first, let's just, like, talk mostly about your background when it comes to B2B marketing, because it's a role that comes up inside of companies. Like this role of digital marketing. You've kind of made that your thing for your career in B2B marketing without trying to lead the witness here. Like, what is digital marketing in your definition?

Yeah, I came from a traditional background, and the reason I fell in love with digital marketing is a little bit different from you, Dave, because I know you're just like your creative genius guy, and you're like, I'm not as much of a numbers guy. I'm the numbers guy.

The best part is if you tell people that you're a creative genius, they will believe it.

Yeah.

So I just say that. That's, like, what I want to be in my head.

Yeah, there you go. I'm not as creative as you. So for me, the numbers was just really the time. This was pre Google Analytics, and I was writing content for this NBC TV station's website, and they had put up this big monitor behind me, and I'm like, what's going on here? And they plugged it in and they had chart beat. This was like, preg. The chartbeat. And they turned it on and I wrote an article, I published it, and I saw 13 people on the site reading it live, and it was like, I fell in love. I mean, the only other time was when I met my husband. So it was. It was at that time when I was like, yes, this is what I need. Because the way we were measuring TV was, oh, we're going to sample 400 households and then project it to 400,000 and say, this is what everybody's watching. Which is obviously not completely accurate. So this was a cool way.

When that happened, though. You and I talked about our ages before this podcast. Like, you were young at that point.

Yeah.

It's not like you were. Some, like, seasoned TV exec did that. Maybe that's why it worked. Right. Like, you're like, this is crazy. We can't know who's engaging with our stuff. And now here's a new tool that, like, hey, we wrote an article and I can tell you that 14 people are reading it right now.

Yeah, it was incredible to have that real time data was so new at the time. You know, now it's just like we over measure everything. But having that data point, I just started becoming very obsessed and I said, how can I do more of this and have more of that real time data? So accidentally or not fell into the digital and website stuff. And I had a mentor when I was in school and I was going to school for journalism and he's like, hey, listen, don't take this the wrong way, you're going to hate it, but I need you to develop some hard skills. And I'm like, okay. So I said, oh, what do I like to do? I like computers. I studied HTML and CSS and actually my first job out of college was working for a website company building restaurant inventory websites and then moving on to writing. And then I married the marketing side and that technical side and that's just the path I chose and drove home.

Yeah, anybody that I've worked with that's been really great in the digital space has some thread like that where like.

You have a little bit of hacker.

Creator, website builder in you. And I think you need to know that because when you get into the world of digital, there's so much tracking pixel, this tag, this thing you gotta do. Like you have to be a little bit more technical, I think than the average. I just like to write stuff, you know, type of Marketer.

Yeah. And it was funny up until recently one of my sayings, and I like to have little edgy sayings, but one of my sayings was I always look at things back to front. It's the only time that it's good is when you do back to front. You start with the reporting and then reverse engineer your way back into the messaging. And so I always look at let's foundationally set everything up correctly. So if you're using utm, set them up correctly. Is the CRM working marketing automation platform and then moving into the site. So back to front to help measure your programs as best as you can.

Yeah, that was a big weakness of mine. And I think like if I were to go do something again, I would. In the past I've been like, go, go, go, go fast, go fast, go fast. And that's great and we can grow that way. But I think eventually six months, a year, two years in, you're like, shoot, this is broken, this thing is broken. So I like, I do think there's a lot more housekeeping that I would do to get. To get everything right. And I see you not nodding along, obviously, but it seems like that's worth the effort to make sure everything is trackable and measurable, even though we believe that not everything can be trackable and measured. Got to have that house in order.

Yeah, that's a frame of mind that has been changed a little bit for me as I've gotten more active on LinkedIn and I'm like, oh, you know what, Tas? You can't measure everything. Just look at your own buying journey where you've hired the last five people based on text messages with your peers. So, yeah, that's been a hard realization for me, but I'm accepting it slowly.

Okay, but what is it about LinkedIn that. What are you seeing from that that's giving you that feeling? It doesn't show up in some dashboard that you have.

Oh, where does that start? This conversation is so hot right now. I started posting back in April just as a fun creative genius exercise following the Dave Gerhart model, like 200 years after you started so very late, but just started validating thoughts and ideas. And then I realized, oh, this is actually a data driven marketer's dream, because I can validate ideas without spending money on it. But also realizing that engagement isn't everything. So sometimes you can get like 12 likes on something, but then your DMs are alive with the Sound of Music. And so you start having these conversations. You get things like, I just commented on Dave's post, now I'm on Dave's podcast. I mean, those things are not measurable. And sometimes you gotta go with that gut feeling, which I feel like I abandoned. I'm like, who needs your gut when you have data? But no, I'm bringing the gut back.

So you mentioned a couple things in there. And this is. I asked this. Cause I wanna get into it with you. Cause I think it's an important discussion. Cause I have somebody who has a background in digital marketing and we need to come back at some point and talk about like, what's in that bucket. And you owned all of it at Telium, so we'll talk about that. But just while we're here, like so much of the marketing and digital marketing, the things you think that you need to do. The CFO loves paid marketing, paid media, because it's very tangible. It's like, I'm going to give you $50,000. You're going to show me what Google AdWords is going to show me, which keyword. It's very easy Right. But doing something like you just mentioned, like spending time on LinkedIn, which is, you got a podcast appearance, you found your last job, you've been getting new customers from your business. There's not like marketers in the, especially in the digital space, they love to be able to say, well, on Tuesday, August 15th, we posted X and we got this many people to our website. But so much of that breaks. And what you mentioned is such a good example. And this happens all the time with like Exit 5. Anytime I do an Exit 5 promotion or like about once a week I do a sponsored post, I have a lot of demand for like, sponsorships. We roll it into Exit 5. And once a week I do a promoted posts from a company in the space. And sometimes There'll be like 3 comments, but I'll hear from the company that they got two big customers from that. Or I'll promote like my Exit 5 newsletter. And I'm like, oh, shoot, I haven't done a promotion for the newsletter a while. I'll write a post about it and it's very like, hey, join 13,000 marketers who get B2B marketing tips, blah, blah, and I'll check on it. And it has like 1 comment and 17 likes. Then I go over to HubSpot and I see that I added 3, 300 new contacts that day. And I'm like, shoot, this is a perfect example. It's not always this perfect chain that happens. And I think that's one example of things that just kind of like make their way into marketing. You have to balance this line of doing things that are direct response and are measurable and doing things that just. You feel like, yeah, look, you're building your own company right now as you task, like, as an individual posting on LinkedIn and sharing your expertise is going to help you drive new business. And it's not always going to be easy to measure, but you're going to know when it happens.

Yeah. And right now, and I've only been doing it for a short while, which is April. And right now, the ability to have started my own thing wouldn't have been possible if I wasn't posting. All my business right now is referral or inbound, just from sharing value upfront, you know, no gated content. You don't even see me really mentioning my company name, except for the one time I said, hey, I'm going out on my own. Here's the company name. But I just don't talk about it as much because people buy from people and I'm just Trying to make it more about other people than myself. And then the rest will come, right? Build it and they'll come kind of thing. So kind of testing out this different way of marketing that just goes against the grain of what even I've done for the last 15 years.

And as a publisher, you mentioned this before, like, whether you're a news. A news business like you were in your past life or you're starting your own business, just as a way to. When people think about the ROI of social media, like, as a way to measure, As a way to, to figure out which content might work, it's an absolute cheat code. So many times I've posted something, I've written something on LinkedIn and there's been a response to that. And I'm like, wow, there's a lot of interest in this topic. Let's say for B2B marketing on, like, how to report to the CEO and I'll write a post about it. It'll be hundreds of comments or like, more engagement than typical. That is a light bulb to me. Than like, oh, there's a topic here. And so, like, we could do a full podcast episode on that and that would be interesting. Or we could do a webinar about that, or I could find a sponsor to do something. And there's lots of little signals like that that I think don't get accounted for. And I see a lot of like, brand B2B brand LinkedIn content that's just promoting our stuff. Hey, we won this award. Hey, we're hiring. Hey, we're doing this thing. And I'm like, man, so many people are just using this channel.

So wrong, so wrong. And then you look at the likes and comments and it's all the employees who were forced to go and engage with the posts. And I'm like, that's embarrassing. And I look at that too. And very few companies are doing it right and they're winning at the game. But yeah, most of them are like, it's all about us. And here you go. And if you want this extremely valuable piece of content we've created, it's a transaction. You gotta give me something before I'm gonna give it to you. But, hey, I wanna build trust and credibility with you. And then, yeah, we used to do.

That at Drift, but it was different. We used to ask everybody to comment on the post. But this was like in 2017, and LinkedIn was very. It was an old platform, but it was being. It was new as a content platform. And so people were not used to it being used like Twitter or Facebook or whatever. And so we were doing that as a company, as employees inside of the company. And you could basically jack up the engagement so much by having employees comment on it that then the reach of that post would just explode. They've since fixed that now. And so yes, now six years later, if I see 15 people on the side of the company, awesome, Great. Go us. It's like it doesn't work that way, but it was one of those little hacks from the early days. Okay, I want to talk to you about digital. I'll read what you were responsible for at Tealium because I think this is true of the digital marketing role. You were director of digital and website and I think oftentimes it makes sense to put these two things together. I'm curious to hear your opinion on that. But you owned all digital marketing efforts, including paid search, paid social and SEO. The website, including content, strategy, team support and infrastructure. There's a bunch of other stuff, but I think that's. Those are the two big buckets tactic wise. Like all of the digital channels and the website. Why did you own both? Do you have a philosophy on digital and website? Did those two things work well together? How. What would you do again if you took a new role or you were building out a digital marketing team, where would all these channels be? I would love to hear your reflections on some of that.

I have always owned both and I know that there are some companies who are larger and they'll do. There's a person who's in charge of paid acquisition and they only focus on the digital channels and paid media. And then you have just organic growth that sits with maybe the content team or corp comms. But for the companies that I've worked at and anywhere between, you know, 50 people companies to 20,000 person companies, we've always owned both, which is the digital and the website portion, I think because they're typically linked with like a landing page and the digital, you know, you're sending people from those channels to the website so you can kind of control the whole experience and then the reporting on it as well. So it's a way to own it start to finish. So my preference is to own both so that it's. It's not like a handoff that someone else is going to get the other piece and I have to work harder to get something off the ground. So that's my preference. And if I had to build it from scratch, that's how I do it too. I just keep them both under the same roof.

What role should the website play inside of a company? This is a big, we could spend hours on this topic alone. And I, I haven't really talked about website with anybody specifically, but do you have a philosophy on like what it should do, how big it should be, the footprint, all the things? Because I could make the case that you could have a one to two page website in a lot of cases. And then I see companies that it just, it goes nuts. And there's like a reason that the website should have 200 pages because you're in all these different geos. And then there's also the third bucket which is just like the website is just this absolute Frankenstein thing that 15 different marketing teams have changed over 15 different years and it's a mess. What's Tass's philosophy on this?

My philosophy is that large or small, you shouldn't regurgitate every part of your business on the website. It's kind of a storefront you gotta give people directions to. Imagine walking to a grocery store and you're like, I need a can of beans. There's no signs anywhere you're running through. The beans aren't logically where they're supposed to be. So I think it's more of a directional. Here's how we support you. Here's just enough information for you to do a checkbox and eventually have a longer, larger conversation about something that's more customizable or suited to you when you have that one on one conversation. But if you give them everything that they need right there, cool, that can help them make a decision. But then you end up with this 3,000 page website because it's just so stuffed and you're fighting for people's attention these days. So can you be more concise? I think that's a superpower today is can I be more concise? Brevity is going to be your friend. How do you maximize the real estate? Because honestly most people don't. 70% of traffic doesn't make it below your hero area. So do you have enough information on there to get them curious to move to the next section? And if they were to explore, give them the right information. Right. And it's similar to LinkedIn where we sit and talk about all the awards and who we hired in as the CFO and whatever. People don't care about that. And at the end of the day, if that's what you're going to fill your stuff with, they're going to bounce because inevitably they're, they're selfish they want you to solve their problems. That's what they're there for. You have three seconds. What are you going to do with it?

Is the 70% like a stat you've seen or just in your experience across companies that you've worked at, seen?

And I just ran an audit for a B2B company last week and it was like 32% and then it was drop off after that.

Okay, so this is a stat that I wish I could articulate because I've been in so many discussions where it's like. And it's always internal. The VP of product thinks that you need to be doing a better job talking about this part of the product or there's some functional area. You know, you have a director of something, something. In apac, it's like one random thing and then like, the team gets. And I think of this from like a marketing leader standpoint where, like, then the team gets, like, sent off in 15 different directions to go build six new website pages just to make some internal person happy when, like, hold on, hold on. My friend Tas just told me right here that literally 70% of the people are never going to ever see this. Why don't we just focus more on here? And to tie this back to what you said earlier in B2B, no one is buying something off of your website. This is. They're. They're not buying a hat and they're going to click and check out on their website. And so the goal. I love how you framed this before. If I could build on that, like, the goal of the website is to get most cases, it's to request a demo, start a trial, sign up for the free version, or talk to us. And so you don't need to put every single use case and feature and function. It's like the goal of the website should be a way to like, guide you down that path and say, like, yes, I might be interested in doing this. I want to talk to you now.

Yeah, and that's the thing, is that's why numbers can help with the story as well. I mean, it's hard because you go to any website, and I struggled with this too, internally is because you're everybody in the company is your stakeholder. Every single person I work with, every department, legal, infosec, cs, education, everybody. Because everyone touches the website. So you're trying to make everyone happy. It ends up being this quilt situation where you've just stitched up different parts of things together. So how do you organize the chaos and make it look cohesive and then try to please everybody because Demand Gen wants to put a CTA to an asset on every single page and sales is like, no, we gotta put a demo request on every single page. And then now you're sitting there with 15 different CTAs, you've confused everybody, your copy's too vague. So I think it's about setting some non negotiables and saying, okay, here you have some flexibility and below the fold where people don't even go, so let's the non negotiables above the fold in that 30%, you know, and capturing the attention there.

What's interesting right now in the world of, of websites, I've been out of the game, I'm out of the game for a little bit. Are you using AI to like personalize content? People using chatbots or I don't know, give me. So let's talk about the tech stack of the website here. Since I finally got somebody who's deep in this world and you're out there now you work for yourself, working with clients, you know, helping them with website strategy and growth and optimization. What's some of the tech side of things that you're excited about or use?

You know what's funny is there hasn't been a huge shift. I think people are using AI a lot for copy. They're still testing the waters a little bit. I did build one website just completely with AI, just from a design standpoint and had to completely edit the copy because it was horrendous obviously. But even design wise there's still some inflexibility. So I think that we're a little ways from that. And there's too many nuances because everybody's tech stack is different. So if AI helps you build something in WordPress that may not integrate with Marketo or whatever else you're using. And so that's when you still need a lot of developer intervention. You need consultant intervention. So at that rate you might as well just be in control of the process, start to finish. And maybe some other website folks are using AI a lot more. I'm dabbling in it right now, but it's still a long way when it comes to website design because it's such a nuanced, complex app.

What would be your dream tech stack then? Like if I'm a client of yours or if I'm a series A or B B2B SaaS company, what would you want us to be using?

I'm pretty tool agnostic, but my recommendation outside of aem, okay, they're going to hate me, but I can't use AEM. This is where I'm scarred from the 400 websites. We can talk about that too.

You can't use what? What is it?

A.m. adobe Experience Manager.

Oh, okay. Never heard of it.

Raleigh. Okay, good.

Yeah, I don't know anything good.

You've been spared. It's the only one I don't like working with. It's really hard. It's not meant for publishers, but typically I tell people, okay, if you're smaller scale, start small. Don't try to think and build for the future. It's same thing with a product, right? You're not going to sell for something that you don't have yet. Sell them on what you can solve right now. And so it's the same thing where, okay, use something like webflow for something that's more plug and play, where you have a little more control. If I'm not in the picture, you have control if you're a non technical marketer to go make some edits.

Please, please just listen to this advice and start small. Yes, I worked at Drift when we, we raised $15 million. From the beginning, the company had $15 million in the bank. But the founders were like, we don't have a budget though, so be scrappy. The very first website that we use, this is a $15 million B2B SaaS company. We use Squarespace. We spent, it was, it was like $20 a month because the CEO was like, I want this fast, I want this now. I want a website up in two weeks. Let's design it and upload the images and put it on Squarespace and it's gonna be 20amonth. Because I feel like what happens is a lot of people say we gotta do the website and then you go like, should it be Webflow, should it be HubSpot, should it be WordPress? Should it be this other awful thing that you mentioned? Okay, well there's 15 different tools and they all cost 30 grand and we gotta do this. In my example, we've already shipped the website, gotten feedback on the messaging, starting to get signups. We got this thing going. You can make changes over time, right?

Yeah. And the thing is, use this very popular thing called integrations, which almost every tool has now. And honestly I work with three clients right now and they all use Squarespace and they're small scale. And then the ones that are a little bit bigger use WordPress. So yeah, that's why I say I'm tool agnostic. Because when I come in My first thing isn't, hey, let's redesign your website. It's do you need to redesign your website? Probably not. Let's work on the content portion first and then see if we need to scale in the future. Once you're ready for that, what do.

You look at to figure out, like, if the website is is working? Obviously there is demand, like, are people coming in and requesting a demo? But how much are you thinking about conversion rate optimization? A B testing. And I'm asking those questions in the context of like, this is B2B considered purchase. I'm not buying something off the website.

Yeah, that's a huge component of it. Obviously we all talk about SEO all the time and I think SEO's also changing rapidly. And you, you guys have had demand, well and stuff on here and they can speak a lot better to those things than I can. But with the conversion rate optimization, we're looking at a few things, right? What are the desired actions you're hoping someone takes? Sometimes, it's not always, let's talk to sales. What is the page if there's a new feature? And I'll give you an example. Here's a great example. We had a pilot that we ran with Meta and running ads on meta historically.

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Visitors to exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a href r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

Matter doesn't do well for B2B. We all know this, right? But what we were able to tell was running some ads there just spiked the organic traffic for a meta blog on our site, no relation by 30%. So sometimes it's also putting two and two together. I always say it's like dementia and smoking, right? You have to make that connection. Dementia when you're 80 and smoking when you're 20 or whatever. So that's kind of how we look at it too, which is what activities are helping lift the website and doing some of those analytics. Throughout every month we would report on the website performance and talk about here are the strange things in the market that are making people look up, you know, privacy or third party cookies or whatever. And that's helping us grow. So sometimes it isn't the website itself, it's how the market's responding, you know, and what's hot right now, what's trending right now. So we do a lot there. And actually I just put a post out and I use Drift as an example with their demo page experience and that's one of the first pages I'll look at to optimize. But certain things that I found that work really well, setting expectations because people think they fill out a Demo request and SDR is going to contact them and give them a demo right away of the product. Not how it works. So it's just saying, hey, we'll have a discovery call, then we're going to have, we'll see if we're the right fit for you. We'll customize the demo and then we'll go on having them schedule a meeting right away versus filling out a form, waiting 24 hours or you may never be heard back again. So just things like that, small changes, you don't have to make anything large. You can just make little iterations. But the biggest mistake I see is people don't give it enough time, they make a change and then oh, it doesn't work and next week they want to change it. Give it time also.

What's tough about that is there's only so much you can do on the website. To your example earlier, this is like our, the website is our store. There's only once they're in there, there's only so much that we can do. And I think we like to believe that like there's people that talk about like, yeah, you just got to drive more high intent traffic. It's like, oh well how do you do? Is there a button you just press and you get more high intent traffic? It's like, well maybe more people need to know who we are. More people need to know we can do this. Maybe our the perception is this or there's too many reasons to just focus on the website. And oftentimes in B2B you're not going to have hundreds of thousands of visitors every week coming to your site. And so like the amount of time it's going to take to get hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on your site to get the answers that you need is going to be tough.

Yeah, totally. And here's another thing is I think it's a lot of education that needs to happen internally too where sometimes, you know, if you're reporting to a group or reporting up, they get hung up on the traffic numbers and sometimes it's not about that, it's a level deeper. So I'll give you an example. Last year, you know, year over year the traffic was exactly the same. But our demo submissions and requests went up by 30%. That's a huge indicator of intent going up, quality going up based on whatever activities we were doing, especially brand related or things you can't measure, they're coming in looking like organic or direct traffic. Even though numbers weren't really, you know, spiking but then you look at the submissions, you're like, oh, holy cow. 30% is a huge jump year over year, especially in a bad economy. So that's something where you have to be a storyteller a little bit and bring that to surface to show that sometimes it's not just the surface level. Oh, we want 50,000 people coming to our website every month.

So you own the tech, the actual website. But did you work closely? Like who owned the copy, the positioning, the messaging, the design? Can you talk about that?

Yeah. So with our marketing team, I worked very closely with each department to build out the website copy. So our head of content and I would work together very closely on SEO related stuff. On copy related stuff, I'd work with product for really core messaging across the entire site. So if it was anything to do with our solutions, use cases product, they were typically involved and then worked very closely with MOPS to work on the form. So our forms were the marketo form. So I worked very lock and step with them actually. So much so that MOPS leader and I had one on ones every week. My head of content and I had one on ones every week because everybody touches the website and so we had to work together to own that and do that together. Tech stack was kind of half and half. I owned a lot of the tech that went with the site on the digital end. So things like drift, the CDN, hosting, cms, all of that stuff I owned. And then MOPS owned, you know, the marketing automation platform and sales ops, the CRM. So there was a lot of merging of heads that needed to happen to make one thing fly.

What's been the best execution of positioning and messaging and the website telling the right story. I don't necessarily need a specific example, but I'm looking to see as the person who owns the website, when you're on the receiving end of that, a company that like has their shit together when it comes to telling the company story and executing on the website, what does that look like?

It's not a perfect science. There's no one who has just like knocked it out of the park. But my company before last, it was a fun one to work on because it was manufacturing SaaS, right? Which everybody's like, oh my gosh, boring, please. Because I know that there are some marketers who are like, I will only sell Martech, I cannot do DevOps, I can't do anything else. But with manufacturing SaaS, you would imagine it's like the old boring blue, you know, just, okay, everybody's in Hard hats, whatever. But they took a completely different approach when we did the redesign where they focused on an outlaw brand. And so they went completely bold, against the grain. Even the tone of the copy across the entire site was this edgy, outlaw tone. And it was like you in a western and a sheriff is giving you direction on everything. So that was a really cool project to work on. And it took, you know, moving mountains, but everybody kind of dropped everything. And that was all we were focused on. We went into a deep, dark hole for three months and just worked on launching the website. And it was a pretty smooth launch, you know, between everybody, but the positioning was pretty cool and. And it's not something you would ever see in manufacturing.

What's too long to redesign a website? To relaunch a website. What's too short and what's too long.

Three to five months is typically the sweet spot for B2B Enterprise or any bigger B2B company. I've done it in as small of a time as like three to four weeks. Typically when I'm hired on, that's something they hire me on for. It's. It's always the first project, hey, we got to redesign the website.

I'm like, they're like, yeah, we hired you to, like, because we have this problem that we need to solve, not because we want you to spend three months talking to everybody inside the company.

Yeah, exactly. It's never like, hey, we need to really iron out our paid media strategy. It's always the first thing is, hey, we need to redo our website. So we really love that you've done 400. I'm like, well, let's just add it to the pile. Let's go. So that's always the biggest thing, but three to five months, sweet spot. Longest one I've done is over two years and more of like a phased approach. It was a new type of way that we did that because we worked very closely with each stakeholder and each stakeholder group got a lot of attention to make it just right. But the problem is the life cycle of a website is of pretty short two to three years. And either you're due for a redesign if you haven't kept it up to date and had someone to maintain it through that period. But yeah, don't make it last two or three years. That's my advice.

You sent me some awesome notes a while back, and I'm just going to pull them up and maybe we can spend a couple minutes riffing on, on each of these. Right?

Love it. Let's do it.

First question is what to do if you're starting in digital marketing today.

Oh, man, this market is brutal. And I get a lot of DMS from people just entering the job market. They're in college, they're like, I don't even have experience. How am I supposed to compete with 2000 applications? And I was trying to put myself in a time machine and I said, okay, if I went back right now, the first thing I do to get experience is try to build something on my own. And it's not even about, oh, I'm going to try to build a following. Yeah, I'm going to be so cool. I'm going to be the next TikTok star. Star. It's not about that. It's all the auxiliary skills that come around that. Right. You learn copywriting if you're doing it on LinkedIn, you learn how to talk to people and network, you build relationships. But say you, you start to get into TikTok, you learn some basic video editing skills, you learn how to sell yourself, you learn about analytics and what messaging resonates. So that's what I've told actually a couple of people to do is just start posting. And they're like, well, I don't know what to post about. And I'm like, well, it doesn't have to be marketing related. What do you like to do? Fitness. You like video games? Talk about video games.

Yeah. That's great. And I love that advice because it's really, it's tactical. It's like, anybody can go do that, right?

Yeah.

And especially earlier on in your career, like, if you're at a bigger company, you might not have the keys. Like, earlier on in my career, like, I couldn't just go mess around with the website, but I got to start my own podcast. And when I started my own podcast, I created a website for that. And I feel like I learned so much in the three months of, like, I had to buy a domain, I had to set up security, I had to add the copy, I had to find a freelance designer and like, that stuff that I didn't learn on the job, but I had to just figure it out. I love that advice and, like, you can do it and, you know, maybe you spend 100 bucks on your own on buying some tools and stuff to get this off the ground. It would be totally worth it.

I'd be so impressed if I saw a resume that said, oh, I built this versus oh, I grew my company page from 1,000 to 2,000. It's like, okay, Cool. You built something for yourself from 1000 to 2000 that's gonna pique my interest. So yeah, totally.

Okay, so summary is start something on don't wait to be hired. I always found that this type of candidate was the best person to interview, which is like, hey. And also people early in their career like, well, how do I get into this? Or later in your career, if you wanna make a switch, how do I get into this? X but I don't have experience about it. Well, start a blog about it. I talked to a guy the other day, he's like, hey, I wanna get into partnerships, but I don't have any experience in partnerships. And I was like, well, what if you just started a podcast or started a newsletter or blog where you once a week you dug into the partner strategy of some company and like, you're not an expert in it, but you learned about it. Now I'm interviewing you and you want that role. Like, I can tell that you're passionate about this topic and you're learning. Okay, next one is saving everybody. The CFOs out there will love this one. Saving the company before making them money. How do you do that?

Oh, this is my favorite question ever, which is why I threw it in there. They don't call me Bargain Bober for nothing.

Bargain Boba.

Bargain Bober. I'm serious. Okay, I'm going to show you something. So I have a mug that says Wrecking Ball on it. This was nominated by the marketing team I worked with. After your probation period of 90 days, they nominate a nickname for you. So it says Wrecking Ball. Because I come in and the first thing I actually do, you talk about quick wins all the time and you talk about low hanging fruit. So for me, the low hanging fruit is I come in and the first thing I do is who are the vendors and what technology are we using today? And I'm not coming agencies out there like, oh my gosh, she's the worst kind of person.

TASS is coming with that. She's going to cut that, cut that contract short.

And it's not even about that, but I think that that's something to be said, right? Like if I come in and I see Drift, I'm like, yes, I'm excited they're using Drift. Drift has been so successful for the last two companies I've worked at. But then I see no adoption or they're not utilizing it correctly. I already know that's something I need to dig in and either promote adoption and education or say, hey, if this is not something we're going to leverage right now. Use the money for something else. And so sometimes it's the smaller stuff too. There's like a lot of plugins and things like that that you can clean up and then you have a smaller list to manage as well. But I've saved companies anywhere between 30 to $65,000 just doing that.

Totally. Yeah. Like, come in, audit the tech stack and let's trim a bunch of stuff. I do that. I need to do a better job of that even in my own, like my personal business. But like once a month I'll just have a panic about expenses or something and then I'll go look at my American Express like business card. I'll be like $19 for this recurring like random SaaS tool. And it's like, well, I just saved myself 240 bucks this year. Okay, now, but think about that inside of the company, right? There was. There's just so many things, especially if there's been a team there before, that people are signed up that you don't know who the heck is using. Right?

Yeah. And you're scared to get rid of something because you're like, what if someone in some random dark hole of the company is using this and I kill it? And then someone's going to scream, just cut it. And if they scream, then we'll do a discovery process again.

The wrecking ball.

The wrecking ball.

I love that. I like that you just come in and make stuff happen. Not everybody agrees with that. And I can see I am more empathetic than I might seem on LinkedIn sometimes. But I, I can see both sides of that. I can see how you. There are certain roles and certain things that like, you don't want to come in. In certain stages of a company, you can't come in and change everything. But in my experience, I've been mostly in the startup arena and or hired to do a specific thing where before taking the job as cmo, I spent three months with the CEO talking about all the things you want to do. So like, heck yeah, once I start, we're going to make a ton of changes in the first month because why are we going to wait? But I do like that overall my bias would be towards, like, if we hired you for a reason, why do we have to wait for month three? When you've talked to everybody inside of the company and feel up to speed to make these decisions, like, let's go right now. Learn on the job. That's the best way to do it.

And I think it's easier for someone like me to come in as a head of digital and website rather than a CMO to come in and say, I'm going to make a whole bunch of changes. It's better for the CMO to wait a little bit, just kind of see how everything works together. But I have the advantage of coming in and saying okay. I mean, working through the tech stack doesn't really hurt anybody. It's going to save the company money right off the bat. It's not impacting anyone's jobs. Yeah, it's a win win for me.

You mentioned picking the right external resources. I've made a lot of mistakes with agencies. I'm sure many people listening have and I don't feel like I have a good playbook for hiring agencies. Other than now. I only hire with agencies of people that I've heard of or worked, worked with in the past. In the digital and website world, there's a lot of agencies. What's your framework for picking the right one?

I'm very process driven. So this is again Where Creative Genius vs Type A process driven.

This is why I suck at making, at doing things like that because there is no process. It's like, oh, I have an idea.

But you're so good at the. I'm just gonna kickstart a podcast. Meanwhile, I've had this mic for like six months and I'm like, I'm gonna start a podcast and I'm just like, I'm, where's the data? But then, you know, you gotta do stuff before the data comes.

Well, first of all, the data is gonna come in after this because when we post this, you're gonna get people messaging on LinkedIn. And for what it's worth, the ROI on the. You sound great right now and so it was worth it.

Thank you. Not as shaky as I thought I'd be, so that's good. So yeah, I actually have a framework. So they call me the template queen. I have a template for everything. Are you having a child? I have a template, so message me if you're having a baby. I have a template for everything that you need regarding a baby or a wedding or a honeymoon or a trip, everything. So I have a template for picking the right partner. And even though I love my partners, I have really good relationships with agencies I've worked with in the past. I am a person who believes in fairness and equality. And so what I do is I source agencies from a couple of places. So I'll go look up on Google, especially if it's an ads, you know, Google Ads agency. I'll be like, well, you ranking, you know, so I'll pull a few from there, I'll pull a few from referrals. I'll text a couple of people, ask for recommendations on LinkedIn, get a short list of like eight. And then I have a whole framework, Excel sheet, template and matrix built out. And I put in. I do things a little bit differently, right? A lot of people hire agencies based on gut, like, yeah, good enough. We'll try you and we'll see how it goes. I give them access to everything. I let them do an audit and then I assess what their recommendations are because I know the problems already. I want to see if they're picking them up and if they're strategic enough to give me the right recommendations that aren't just Google's recommendations or something that's really surface level. And I also do this a little bit differently where I have kind of a requirements document, I call it like a soft RFP document. And I tell them everything they need to know about the company, the state of affairs, what our goals are. This is the exact budget, do not come in above it. This is what I'm looking for. I want to meet the account team before, because you always get the A team that sells you and then the B team graduate who's managing your million dollar budget and you're like, no, this isn't gonna work. So there is a framework. I set expectations, we're all aligned, and then it ends up being beautiful partnership.

Most times there's still gonna be outliers. But this is a great example. And this is again, this is why I'm not good at this. It's like, you need to be good at anything in the marketing or business sense. You need to be able to articulate what good looks like. And I think in this example I've been like, hire agency, do this. And they're like, okay, well, and then I get the work back. And it, I don't like it. Right. But that's because I failed to define what I want and what good looks like and what success looks like. And when you do more of the work upfront, whether it's hiring somebody on your team or hiring an agency or hiring a vendor, right. They will have such a better set of expectations. And on the flip side of this too, you have a very clear rubric now to judge the success of this other than like, yeah, they look good, right?

Yeah. And I get to see how their brains work, which is important because the thing is, most digital teams run extremely lean. I mean, the biggest one I've been on was 13 total outlier there. Most of them are one to three people. And so your external agencies are your team, so you're only as good as your team is. And when I look at the recommendations, I don't care if they give me the fanciest deck or, you know, the person who beat out eight agencies. I always joke with them that he wrote his presentation on a piece of toilet paper and handed it to me, but it had better recommendations than agencies who are huge. And he won the business, came in within budget and actually listened to what I asked them to do. But that's the thing is, I don't think clients take very good responsibility either on the other side of it because they hide information or they don't feel like they need to tell the agencies what's relevant. But I'm very open about that. I'm like, okay, you give me the platform metrics. I'm going to show you what's behind the curtain. We're going to look at the lead quality every week. We're going to talk about whether your things are working or not working. And I need you to bring ideas to the table because I can't do all the thinking all the time. So. Yeah. And also I try to make it fun. You know, we get too serious, and so there's lots of jokes flying about and trolling and that kind of.

Well, yeah, because you don't want to get run over by the wrecking ball. So you got to make jokes. So you don't.

It sounds worse than it is. I promise.

You're working out, listening to Drake, then you're the wrecking ball. I like you already.

Exactly.

Let's talk about growing. I like this topic. We don't talk about this enough. Growing your career in marketing like an entrepreneur. I think you need to be a big advocate for yourself. Big advocate for your career path, your compensation. Yeah, you mentioned that you were able to you increase your income 600. You are really data driven and template driven. 600% increase in income over the last 13 years. Like, of course you measure that.

I absolutely measure that.

I like numbers a lot in, like one to two minutes on. On this podcast, which is obviously a big ask. Just talk about advocating for yourself, how you've gone about navigating that path, getting races and promotions and et cetera.

When I moved here, I moved here in 2010, and a lot of people said, hey, you know, as a woman and as a minority, it's going to be a little bit harder for you. And. And I couldn't understand why. I'm like, why would it be harder for me?

We moved here from where I'm half.

Indian, half Thai, so I lived in India and Thailand, and then I moved to the U.S. there's a lot going on back there.

Oh, God. So people are like, welcome to America. You're a brown woman.

Good luck to you.

Good luck trying to get equal pay, okay? And so I'm like, watch me hold my beer.

Love that. 600% show them.

Yes, 600%. Show them. And actually the New York Times has some census from, like, they need to update it, but, like five or six years ago, where you can plug in your race, your gender, your income, you know, what your degree is and stuff like that, and it will tell you how much of a percentage above other people in terms of just like, income ratio and like, where you are. And so I owe, for some reason, use that as a measure to say, okay, am I benchmark or am I being. Is there some kind of hidden bias that's at play? Because I never felt it actively, but maybe it was something that was happening behind the scenes. My children are interracial, so that's something I need to consider and am I setting the path for them? So one of the things that I learned very early on, and it's actually kind of simple, it's ask. I mean, the worst they could say is no. Just ask. There are tactful, nice ways to ask. The most they can say is no. That's one to create a lot of demand for yourself. So mostly I've been able to do that because I've had companies compete for me at the same time. And I think knowing that, right, Just marketing one on one, creating more of a demand.

So how does that play out? Like, inside of a company, you just might take a conversation with somebody who's interested and get a benchmark of, like, what you could make elsewhere.

Well, yeah, sometimes, you know, you. Obviously. I'm sure lots of people are recruited while they're at companies. If I'm actively job searching and somehow the stars line up where I have multiple conversations. This is obviously prior to this market, right? This market's a little bit crazy. But this was, you know, back like even a few years ago, just having multiple conversations and just knowing, okay, my ideas and thoughts are valid, I could really help and, like, focus on providing value and, you know, how much you can do. Also, I do a lot of free work. I show portfolios, I Do audits without them asking me. I run a few projects without them asking me and I think that kind of helps set the stage because they're like, oh, dang, I didn't ask her. She did this. The value's already there. It's almost like a lead magnet, but for your job hunt. And then you name your price. And honestly, just learning to say no and choosing. I think you and I have talked about this before. Choosing a moment of discomfort over long term resentment. Choose the moment of discomfort. Ask one time. The worst they could say is no. And honestly, most times they say yes.

Well, and just realize that that person is also an employee at the company or is oftentimes the CEO. Their boss is the board. They're probably going to ask her a raise at some point too.

Yeah, totally. Why not you?

Is that something you've been comfortable just asking from in the right out of the gate? Obviously I have a different perspective on this as a male, but like in the past I've had co workers or people on my team be like, you know, this is something that's harder for me as a woman or as a minority to like speak up and be the advocate for my salary. Like, is this just who you are and, and how you've done it or like, what got you to do that? That can be a painful.

It is painful. Yeah. Because I think the idea is, oh, okay, if Dave asks, he's assertive and he's a go getter. But then if I ask, I'm the angry brown woman, you know, so. So how do I not be the angry brown woman? But also how do I not do this? Like people pleasing, I'll do anything, you know, that kind of thing, or coming across kind of meek or submissive. But I think it's just a matter of just treating it as if it was matter of fact and business and just saying, hey, I noticed that the range for this position in the location that I'm in tends to be 150 to 175. I believe that I need to be closer to the top end of the range because of X, Y, Z projects that I can come in and do right away. Here's my 30, 60, 90 day plan. Here's the stuff that I've done. Here's an audit on your site, here's the things that I could do. And hey, if you decide you don't want to hire me, here you go. Take this audit and make sure that your next person can do that for you. And so it doesn't have to be this awkward. Like, hey, what do you think about maybe. You know what I mean? Just speak with confidence because you deserve it and you probably do. You've earned your time, you know, you've earned your stripes.

Well, it goes back to what you said earlier, which is just like you're a data driven, template driven person. And when you, if you come to a hard discussion with data that can make it a little bit easier, then it's not like you're not just being angry or upset or feeling underappreciated about your job. You're like, hey, here's what the data says of this market. Or I got, you know, a bunch of peers. Or here's this study that I found and can we have a discussion about this or. Yeah, how can I get on a path to be there and have a benchmark and have a check in, not at some arbitrary date in the future, but like, okay, maybe you can't give me a raise right now, but it's September. Is this something that if we do X, Y and Z, can we revisit this in December for January 1st?

Yeah, exactly. So there are soft ways to approach it that still gives you the confidence and assertiveness without the fear and resentment and the anxiety that comes with it.

All right, let's trade emails and we'll do a part two in a month or two because I'd love to have you back on, but we gotta wrap up. You gotta go get to website number 401.

We didn't get to talk about that at all either.

We didn't talk about that. Well, we talked a lot about your website knowledge. We didn't talk about how you've done 400, but maybe we'll definitely do a follow up that's on my. I already made a note. I'll reach out to you and we'll do it. Everybody, if you're listening and you either just like the vibe from Tas or learn something new, go to LinkedIn, look her up. We always link to the guest's profile here on the podcast. Send her a note, send her a connection request, tell her that you heard about her on the show, and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Exit 5 podcast. All right, see ya. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates plus we have a community, a community of over 4,000 thousand B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing an on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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