Your Marketing Strategy is Doomed Without This | Ep. 2601

So we are going to talk about how there's this one thing that will crush your marketing if you don't take it seriously. So Neil and I might have different interpretations here, and I'm going to go ahead and start first and we'll go back and forth. So I think one thing that will crush your marketing for sure, this is probably the one thing, is if you don't build a culture of experimentation. And what that means is you're constantly One, you're very open-minded. Two, that means you're also open to failure. And it also means that you're not holding anything to be too sacred. It means you have strong views that are loosely held. And so when you build a culture of experimentation where wins are nice, but failures are also very good too because you're ultimately learning, that's how you're going to iterate and that's how you're going to compound. Because when you think about conversion rate optimization, for example, all you're trying to do sometimes is you're trying to hit some singles.

Yeah.

Occasionally you'll get a home run every now and then, but that's what you're doing. You're constantly iterating. And if you can continue to hone that mindset, then you're going to be good. The problem with a lot of people is they might develop this culture of testing for a period of time, but then they let it go and then their marketing starts to fall apart.

Dude, so I'm actually very similar to you. I believe that if you don't keep experimenting and testing, it's going to really break your marketing in the long run. But I'm going to add a caveat to it because this is where I think people mess up. And I'll give you a prime example of one of my older businesses. So we had a startup years ago called Kissmetrics, and Kissmetrics was a SaaS company. We got people to sign up, they fill out their information, name, phone number, website, email address, you get the gist. So then one day we decided to make the registration process as simple as sign up with Google. Then we changed the verbiage to log in with Google. And when we ended up doing that and removing the signup option by inputting the fields, but just only making it where they can just log in with Google, it was something ridiculous like a 90-plus percent lift in conversions, no joke. And it continued throughout the rest of the funnel. But as time went on, we actually saw a decrease in signups and conversions. And no one ran the experiment again in the short run, at least when we started seeing the decline. Actually, over time we saw the decline, but as we were seeing the decline, no one ran the experiment again of how having signup form fields or sign in with Google or both. They just assumed, well, this experiment worked in the past, it works, we already tested it. Well, over time, people got more conscious about their privacy and their data, and not everyone wanted to authenticate through Google. Some people wanted to put in their information like name, email, phone number, website URL, et cetera. And what we found is by removing form options in the earlier days, it increased our conversions, but in the long run, it actually decreased our conversions because consumer behavior and perception over data and privacy change and actually tank conversions. So what we found was when we ended up running a model where letting them sign up by manually putting in their information or logging in through Google, that caused the most conversions in the long run, but you had to retest and run more experiments. So the point I'm trying to get is, Yes, it's one thing you need to continually experiment and have that culture of it, but internally your culture can't just be, we ran a test, it won, that's the end-all be-all. Well, in the future that test may not still work, so you may need to either revert it or retest or come up with different variations or better variations because people change over time. And that's, I think, a big thing that people forget in marketing when they're running experiments.

If you want to win at marketing, the founder ultimately drives a lot of the change. They drive a lot of the vision, right? And so I think if you're listening to this and you are a founder of the company, if you want to drive the most impact, it is in your best interest to understand marketing. That way you can drive that culture of experimentation because as it goes lower and lower and lower down the hierarchy, it's harder to push this, right? You need to be able to be that change driver.

Yeah.

And so, here's the thing. Neil and I talked about this maybe a year, 2 years ago or so where as the company grows, sometimes the stuff that we used to be able to influence the most because Neil has his site, I have my website as well, sometimes you have to just let it be and what you were able to maybe change tomorrow has been delayed, right? Like Neil, can you speak to the story? Remember we talked about this how you just can't implement as quickly as you'd like?

Yeah.

But because we're both the founders of our companies, we can still kind of drive it, but not as quickly as we'd like. Sometimes that happens.

Yeah, especially as your organization gets older or bigger or both, you have to deal with legacy issues, whether it's policies, code, whatever it may be, systems and procedures, tech stack. So it just slows things down. But as a founder, sometimes you can just push and get things through, but a lot of times it takes longer. I'll give you a great example of this that we're facing right now. We're in, I don't know, maybe 19-ish countries. I'm saying 19, I'm rounding. I think we're in 20, but I'll round down to 19. And we have so many new leaders that we've hired in all these countries. I don't know all of them, nor does my co-founder. And they're running sales a different way that we would've ran when we started here in the United States and that we implemented in Canada early on and UK and Australia and Brazil and India. So we know I know it's worked in many different languages and different regions. And some of these international players, whether it's France or Germany or Netherlands or whatever it may be, sometimes they do things a different way. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but when you get large and there's so many layers, it's harder to get in. But my co-founder, him and I had a talk, boom, he started getting on the call with every single leader going over what they're doing. Not necessarily saying you're wrong because he doesn't feel that way, nor do I. But maybe we can take their strategies, integrate it with ours, and come up with a better way. And we started experimenting and adjusting how people are doing their marketing and sales in the different countries that we've been expanding into. But sometimes it just takes a little bit longer as you get bigger because you're just dealing with a lot more layers, politics, legacy issues, especially if you have a lot of customers. It's really hard to just adapt everything really fast.

All right. So, there you have it. Build that culture of experimentation and you will find that a lot of other values will trickle in. And just, it's on you to keep it going because you're listening to this and we believe that you're smart and you will make things happen. So, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It really helps this pod grow. Trying to take it to the next level here and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.