Successful Social Media Promotion: Mike Allton from AgoraPulse

Welcome to the Agency Journey podcast where.

We connect with agency leaders to uncover.

The hidden systems and processes that drive their success. Now let's dive into today's show. All right, welcome back to another episode of Agency Journey. This is Gray Mackenzie. This week I've got the pleasure of bringing on Mike Alton, who's the head of strategic partnerships at AgoraPulse. And Mike, I'm excited. I first came across the Gore Pulse. I think I looked it up when you and I first chatted, but it's 2013 or 2014. It's super early on and cool to see how far it's come. So I'd love to, A, welcome to the show and B, I'd love to hear a little bit about your role, how you got hooked up with Agora Pulse. You can give us the quick 30 second summary on what Agora Pulse is and then let's jump into what you're doing with agencies.

Yeah. Yeah. So thanks a lot, first of all, for having me. It's always fun to do podcasts and I love talking to fellow marketing geeks and entrepreneurs and so on. I've been using AgoraPulse for five or six years, I think. I met Emmerich at Social media Marketing World 2016 and he showed me the app on his phone and I fell in love and I used it for a couple years, wrote about it as just a blogger, spoke about it, and became a ambassador for the brand. And within a couple years he reached out to me because he'd been running personally the ambassador program. So the CEO of the company was running their influencer marketing. That was never a good idea because he's obviously doing other things. So they brought me in in 2018 specifically to run their influencer marketing and that role has expanded over the past couple years to include our brand partnerships, our event sponsorships, and our entire affiliate program.

That's awesome. This is one point that we've talked to a couple folks in similar roles. We haven't gone super deep into the story. What was that transition like to going from the influencer on the outside to going in house? Was that a good time of life to make that transition? What prompted that switch?

Well, it worked out really, really well for me because when I first met Emmerich, I had a full time job and then I had my side hustle, which was my blog, the social media hat, and my full time job was CMO of a global website building company. So like Think wix, Squarespace. It wasn't any of those two brands, but it's a competitor of theirs. And because I had great personal conversations with Emmerich over the next couple years, as I got to know him and use the brand and wrote about agorapulse, he felt the pain that I was going through in that other role. It was just. It wasn't a great culture, it wasn't a great fit at that particular company. And I wasn't doing things that I enjoyed just to highlight one of the issues with that particular company. I was the cmo. I had a staff of, I don't know, five or six people. We were a distributed company. I never met face to face, anybody that I worked with, not once, particularly the people that reported to me. And there were several people who would use avatars on our communication platform. So I never knew what they looked like. They would not activate their camera on video calls. This was five or six years ago, so Zoom wasn't a big thing. But still, I never met them, I never saw them. And that was just one example of the kind of strange, impersonal, informal culture that was there. So Emmerich and I talked for, gosh, three months, starting in late 2017, going into spring of 2018, to kind of formalize and figure out, okay, what is this role? Is this going to be a good fit for me? Is it going to be a good fit for AgoraPulse? Are we going to make wonderful things happen? Was excited to show up at Social media Marketing World 2018. That was like my first day on the job. Rolling, rustling up the different influencers that we had signed up that particular year to do video testimonials. So that's a great trial by fire for me. And it was definitely a good fit. It's been a grand jury journey ever since.

That's really cool, that transition. Finding the cultural fit with a role. It's funny you mentioned that this podcast, for the first three years at least, was all Skype. Zoom wasn't podcasting over. Zoom wasn't a thing. Different world in a very short period of time. So Agora pulls itself known for social media scheduling. You had mentioned a large percentage of the audience or customer based is agencies. Can you give us kind of a quick overview of AgoraPulse for agencies in the competitive landscape? A little bit throughout social and the different platforms that are out there. But what do you guys see yourself kind of benchmarked against in the space? And what's the agorapulse value prop?

Yeah, and it's funny because before I met Emmerich, I was Actually known as the hootsuite guy. I had developed. I mean, you talked about Skype. I'm going to throw it back even further. I developed a huge audience on Google. I had a quarter million followers on Google back in the day. And one of the reasons I developed such a huge audience back then on that particular platform was I talked about hootsuite all the time. I would tell people how to do it. I would decipher these bizarre streams and tabs and all these different things. I helped people figure out how to use their ridiculous 50 point system to generate reports. And I turned that into a book. I actually wrote the book on hootsuite. And it was around the time that I met Emmerich. It was that same year that I'd published the book. And for whatever reason, hootsuite didn't actually like that I wrote a book about their product. Yeah. And your face is like, what? Why wouldn't any company like it if somebody outside the company who wasn't paid, I mean, I didn't ask for money, went out and wrote the manual on how to use my product? That would be free advertising. It was free advertising. I still sell copies today on Amazon, even though it hasn't been updated in years. So all that's to say, when I met Emmerich, I was already heavily invested in a different platform. And he showed me what agorapulse could do. And it was like an amazing light bulb went off in my head. Angels singing from on high. It was really dramatically different and better than what I'd been using and teaching people how to use. So that was an easy transition for me right away to go from using hootsuite to Agora Pulse. And to get to your question, one of the things that made it so easy was just the intuitive way that agorapulse approaches management of different social profiles. You have an inbox where all the different communication that's coming at a brand or clients of an agency direct mentions, replies, comments, all that stuff is filtered into a single inbox. That makes it really, really easy and fast to take care of all those things. And that's been kind of our bread and butter since the beginnings of the app, is how can we make the agency life a lot easier. So we make it super easy to add client profiles. We make it really easy to create schedules of content and then send that particular client a link to a calendar that they can open up and just quickly see at a glance. Oh, I've got this content scheduled out at these different Days. Approve, Approve, approve. I don't approve this one and here's why. And all that gets back sent back to the agency without them having to log into a GoPulse or some other platform or a Google Sheet and sort all that out. So that's been our focus and recently we've decided that just as a marketing company trying to enhance our own marketing. Oh, we need to identify what our ideal customer profiles are ICPs. And do a better job of talking to those ICPs. We've always talked to agency owners, but we've never been so focused on providing them documentation, resources, blog posts, webinars, all that sort of thing to really help them with their entire life, not just here's how to use agorapulse. So that's been a shift of ours this year and we've recently added a bunch of new features. We've now supported monitoring of Google My business. We've added an asset library where people can upload drafts of posts and video assets and so on, all to help agencies manage multiple clients so much better and more affordably. And that last point I'll stress, and then I'll throw it back to you, is that when we're looking at agencies who have multiple clients with multiple profiles and we're comparing what we do and what we offer and at what price to like a Sprout Social, this is a big differentiator of ours. We don't like to hammer on price, but the fact is if you're a growing agency, you're adding a lot more clients, a lot more social profiles, you're going to be able to use AgoraPulse at a much affordable rate than someone like Sprout Social, where your rate's going to probably double every single time you.

Add a new client, you brought out kind of a nuanced point there, which is it's one of the things when I'm talking to somebody who's using AgoraPulse, that's one of the things that they mention they love. But from a marketing perspective, you don't want to go to market saying, hey, we're the cheapest, we're the cheapest. But it's an important point to bring out. It's not going to lead in the marketing expensive, but in terms of agency overhead, it is a lot more compelling from a price point perspective than a bunch of the alternatives out there. You mentioned kind of the focus on the ICP kind of stuff that you guys did. You just ran here. Well, not just ran, but a couple Months ago you ran Agency Summit and you've been involved in virtual events for a while. Can you give us kind of a quick overview on Agency Summit and then let's talk about, I guess, from an agency perspective, if I'm looking at running a live event, what are kind of the key pieces that you figured out? Hey, here's what actually makes these worth it to put on.

Yeah. So I've been doing virtual events for years. Started in 2018, and I've explored different platforms every time I've come from this live video, live production, remote live production, background. So I know how to run a live video and I've been kind of approaching my virtual events the same way. 2018, I did a whole series of live broadcasts using Livestorm Co, which was okay. And every time I've done this right, I've learned and improved on it. So like, one of the things I learned with Livestorm was that it was basically a series of 16 individual webinars instead of one cohesive summit, which the feedback I got right away from users was, hey, Mike, I just had to register 16 different times to watch all these different sessions. Okay, we fixed that. So from that point on, I used a platform called hey Summit where they could register once and view all the content. We ran a hey Summit for a few quarters and then I switched to what I used for a while. I used Run the World once or twice and then I've used airmeet most recently. And every time, obviously I'm trying very much, trying very hard to learn and also provide a much better experience, much more robust experience for users. It's bigger, better content every single time, but it's also more engaging and more immersive. And that's probably why we've settled on airmeet most recently, because it's the most, most engaging, most immersive platform. When I ran agency summit in Q2, when agency owners first got in, we had 2,500 agency owners from around the world. And when they first entered this venue, they saw this huge, massive full screen graphic that explained where they were. It was a picture of Paris in the background and it had an autoplaying video of our customer support manager, Cristal, with her beautiful French accent saying, bienvenue, Agency Summit. Welcome agency owners to the Agency Summit. By Godopulse. And I'm doing a lousy French accent. Hers is much pretty than mine, but it's a two minute welcome video with music and everything making people feel like, oh, I'm not sitting at home in the middle of a pandemic anymore. I feel like I've gone to the Seine and I'm enjoying a cafe in Paris while I'm learning from some of the best and brightest speakers in the industry. So that's how that has evolved over the past few years. And this agency summit was kind of the culmination of our learning. We had nine live workshops, speakers with Jay Baer, Lee Goff and other agency coaches, Stephanie Liu and so on, with dozens of pre recorded sessions for people to go deep dives into how do I do client contracts or how do I set up messenger marketing and started getting into that with my agency. So that was fantastic from a content perspective. So the next part of your question, what should agencies be thinking about if they want to get into this? Give yourself time. First of all, you're not going to want to put an event like this together in 30 days. You're going to want to give yourself plenty of time to collect speakers, settle on a platform, determine your strategy for the entire event, and then also give yourself time to create all the promotional assets and then promote it. You know, one of the things that I realized early on was that I was doing these every single quarter and often I wasn't giving myself enough time to promote. You know, we, we'd find, have everything finalized, like maybe three weeks out from the event. And that's not enough time. We need at least a month just to promote, which means the landing page has got to be done. Your speakers have to be lined up, all of your assets had to be created. And there's a lot that goes into it. I now have this whole list of asset, for instance, requirements that I give my graphics team. Hey, every speaker needs to have a landscape, a square and a portrait image, a graphic. That's just them and their talk and of course the date and the link and the hashtag and you know, and the branding, which means you have to have their picture, their name, their Twitter handle, their talk title has to be finalized. That's all got to be like six to eight weeks out if we're working backwards. The other thing that I often didn't do well and I've since learned is I would decide the format of the summit, right? I would decide, for instance, that I'm going to do eight or nine live workshops with Q&As. And then I also want to have dozens of pre recorded sessions and I want to have sponsor booths. And then I'd go out and find a virtual event platform. And I'm here to tell you there is no One virtual platform that is perfect. There is no one virtual platform that does everything well. They're all great in one respect or another, but they all have strengths and weaknesses. And one of the things that I found is, as an example, most platforms are either really, really good at live content or they're really good at prerecorded content. But I haven't found one that handles them both well, like airmeet. Super customizable in terms of the venue and the live stages and the sponsor area, the expo hall and the lounge. So it felt like a really immersive event. But when I wanted to do a full day of live sessions and have dozens of pre recorded content available just on demand, I had to kind of funky, you know, do it in a funky way. I had to have all the pre recorded content scheduled for the day before at half hour intervals, which meant it was confusing to people who were coming into the platform and seeing today's date, but also yesterday's date. It kind of made them feel like they missed stuff. So the advice that I've learned is decide that you want to do an event. Decide what your overall strategy is. What did you want? What do you want to accomplish? Like in our case, it's, it's frankly lead generation. We just want agency owners to come sign up so that we can develop a relationship with them, then pick the platform and then design the rest of the event around the strengths of the platform. So if I'm using airmeet again, like I'm probably going to use them again next quarter, it's going to be a single day of probably almost exclusively live content at first because I know the platform handles that really, really well. I know it's not going to be confusing to my audience. And I know that if I try to just have a bunch of prerecorded content, it's going to be confusing. It's not going to result in the best overall experience for my attendees.

Right, that makes sense. Seen a lot of love for airmeet. Obviously Hop in is raising absurd amounts of money, buckets of cash over there. From a promotion perspective, I think for Agency Summit, you've got these speakers, obviously they're featured, they're getting exposure to the AgoraPulse audience. And internally, for AgoraPulse, you're promoting it obviously via social media or email list. How much of that strategy is consistent where you're then taking speakers and saying, hey, you're going to promote to your list as well. How have you structured that? How have you encouraged folks to do that. Is that a requirement? You make that kind of a requirement to say, hey, if we're going to speak, I want you to distribute to your list. But how do you think about event promotion ahead of time? Because any agency running an event like this, obviously you're trying to. That's the key thing to. The key for a lot of folks is once we have the content strategy and we know what we want to deliver at this event and who it's for, getting in front of those people.

Yeah, and this is a bit of a dance. There's a lot of nuance here. So our agency is working on behalf of a client. You're going to have two different kinds of speakers and maybe you have both the same event like I've had in the past. You've got speakers who are volunteers, you are not paying them to speak, you've invited them to speak and they're getting exposure. Maybe they're getting access to the registrant list, but they're not being paid. And on the other side of the spectrum you've got speakers who are being paid. There's a contract there and I mentioned that at the outset because the speakers who are under contract, you can work into that contract requirement to promote. Like I've had, I've had speakers in the past, it was part of their responsibility, they were delivering a keynote, but there was also an expectation that they were going to promote the event with a speaker who's volunteering that time at least. Personally, I have a hard time telling what they have to do other than delivering their content. You know, that's kind of the extent of what I'm going to tell them they have to do. Now the other angle that I want agencies to think about is, is sponsors and partners. I want to stress that word, partners. This has been a huge factor for us over the past probably three or four events. I started to bring on other brands who could partner with us who offer non competing services to AgoraPulse. Great example is eCamm. I'm using eCamm right now to kind of stream into this zoom call. ECAMM is a live remote, live streaming tool. Right. Fantastic company. And, and we've come alongside them many times to partner because we talk to a lot of the same audiences. So we give them access to our event, set them up with the booth, maybe even let them do have, you know, some presenting speaker kind of a platform, give them access to the registrants. Big deal. So now it's a co marketing collaborative event and of course the Requirement is they're going to promote to their audience.

Right?

So that's the requirement side, right? You've got speakers who are, if they're paid, you can absolutely work into that contract and it should be in a written contract that they're going to help promote and what that looks like. And then of course, you can bring on partners and you can require them to do that. This is like in lieu of a paid sponsor. If you, again, if, if you're doing paid sponsorship options, you know you're going to charge me a couple thousand dollars to be a sponsor of your event. Well, then you can't require me to, to promote it. I'm putting up cash to be a part of it. So that's. The first part, is how we structure it. The second part of making sure that we get the kind of promotion that we want with an event is to prepare all the assets ourselves as the event organizer or the agency who's doing the event organization in advance and provide them to our partners and our speakers in a way that makes it as easy as possible for them to actually utilize those assets. So don't just throw everything into an email. Don't just dump everything into a Google Drive folder. One of the things that I did was with this last event is I started using HubSpot. We've adopted HubSpot as our CRM. I created a custom list of all of our speakers and all of our sponsors. And I created some custom fields for each one of those types of contacts where they would have their own event tracking link. They would have their own Google Drive folder with their own personalized assets. Like if it's a speaker, they could go to that folder and they would find their square image, their landscape image, their portrait image, you know, anything else that we might have for them. And then in the emails that I would send out, I would use HubSpot's mail merge feature so that I could put like tweets in the email itself. And the tweet would have their unique link inserted. I would have email copy sent to them. I would give them time frames. Again, maybe it's suggested, maybe it's required. That's just how you frame it. But I would give them maybe three emails that they could send out over time. Here's an email that you can send out right now. Here's one for when we're a week or two out, and here's one for the week of the event. And the last thing that we would do is every single event that I put together, I create a Spreadsheet. And that spreadsheet has a couple tabs. The raw data tab has columns for each session title, each topic that's being presented, right? Like how to add remote live streaming to your agency's services, you know, or how to handle client contracts for your agency. Then I would have the speaker's name and I would have their Twitter handle. And our Twitter handle, I would have the event hashtag and a link to their individual session. And I would concatenate all that information on a new tab into the content of a tweet and the link for a tweet. And so now we've got a sheet that I can export as a CSV that has the tweets built in. And I would tell them, hey, if you're interested, I've already gifted you Agorapulse. That's usually part of the deal with anyone that works with me on our events. Did you know that with Agorapulse you can bulk import a CSV of posts? And I would tell them, or maybe even do a quick loom video that says, hey, here's how you can set up a queue. And you know, there's 30 days between now you can have this, you know, just repeat once a day and do a bulk import. And not everybody does it, but some do. And so, and that's really the key is to make, make all these options super easy and available. Not everyone's going to do everything, but some people are going to do some things. And so as you go through your event, at least in my experience, all of a sudden, now I've got speakers who are tweeting out each and every single session and they're tagging every single other speaker at the event. I've got brands like, like ecamm and CallRail and Growth Channel and so on vis me who are tweeting out links to the event, tweeting out links to their CEO's presentation, and making a big deal about how, you know, payment ties. Speaking at Agency Summit. It's really cool and it's a really effective way to get outside of our own box or your client's box in terms of, you know, I'm a gora pulse. I've got a hundred thousand followers. Okay, well, they're going to tune me out, you know, after a while, right? But now I'm talking to callrails followers and Canva's followers and Asana's followers, and Asana's talking to their followers and saying, hey, our agency audience, we've got this great event. We're being, you know, we're part of this. Here's the link. Show up. So that's how we run our event promotion.

That's helpful to get a kind of inside look and some of the tactical stuff that you have. There is a catnip for with fellow nerds out there. But the promotion piece running Agency Summit is really cool. I think you mentioned you've got kind of tentative plans in terms of timeline to run it again, as well as some other events that you're building out. But in addition to the live stuff that you're doing, the influencer stuff that you're doing. Agorapulse, y' all have also come out with a new podcast, right?

Yeah. So we started a live show this quarter called Agency Accelerated. And it's quite honestly a lot of the same strategies and tactics just repackaged into what is initially a live video interview. So we have a host, Stephanie Liu, who spent a decade in the ad agency world, and she spent years doing live video and live hosting. So she's a really fantastic host. She understands agency language. And then for each episode, it up a partner guest. Like I mentioned payment tie earlier, Right. He was our first guest back in July. He's the CEO and founder of Visme. He came on the show and Stephanie's asking him all these questions about, you know, what does Visme do? Why is it good for agencies? You know, he, he also had an agency before he founded Visme. So again, he speaks that language. We had John Lee, who is with Microsoft Advertising, plenty of other amazing guests. And then we use this repurposing strategy of taking that live video interview that went out to all of our channels, all Stephanie Liu's channels, entrepreneurs channels. We repurposed into a blog post, and I repurposed it into a podcast, which just launched this month. So the Agency Accelerated podcast is on, you know, all the podcast channels, Apple, Google, Spotify and so on. And it's, it's just taking that same content and getting it out to a wider audience and again, taking a lot of that same strategy that we've, we've learned from our summit. Years after each episode has filmed and it's been repurposed and published, we send an email to payment and say, hey, here's your recap. Here's your video. Here's three video snippets. Here's some quote graphics because you said some things that are really awesome. And here's the podcast, if you want to subscribe or share your episode or maybe leave us a review. Have Your team take a look at it and listen, because we think it's really awesome.

That's awesome. I think the live show into podcasts, we're not currently doing it. We used to stream these interviews live into our Facebook group. And then I said go out on the podcast lead or on a podcast feed a month or two months or whatever down the road, we should get back to doing that again. And in some cases, it provided the opportunity for kind of a little bit of live Q and A, which. So we do the podcast itself, kind of transition out of the recording or, you know, well, hey, we'll cut the rest of this and then it's live Q and A. And there's some initial benefits there. A lot of creative stuff to be done with repurposing content and just doing the same work, but putting in a little bit of extra work to get a lot more value back out of it and deliver a lot more value to folks. So I think that's a great tip that you guys are taking that and repurposing it so many different ways. Mike, as we wrap up, for folks who want to check out, obviously we'll link up Agora Pulse and all that stuff that's in our tech stack, recommendations for agencies for zenpilot customers. Then that'll be familiar. But we'll link up the gorepulse.com domain and that kind of stuff. But for folks who want to connect with you or any other point place that you'd point them, where else should folks go?

Yeah, so if you've got questions for me, Twitter's usually the easiest place because anybody can DM me. You know, you don't have to necessarily be connected. I'm at MikeAlton a l l T O N on Twitter. You can hit me up on all the socials, but that's the easiest one. And definitely give the podcast a listen. Would love to know what folks think about the first six episodes. By the time this comes out, we'll be into season two. We've got Guy Kawasaki and Jerick Robbins and Alan Kay. I'm so excited. We've got Alan Kay coming up. For those who don't know, he's the advertising legend who did the Xerox commercial with the Monks. That was a Super bowl commercial years ago. He came up with the if you see something, say something slogan for New York City after 9 11. So really excited about that, and I just appreciate you giving me the time to come on here and have a conversation with you about the fun things we've got going on.

Absolutely awesome. Well, this has been fun, Mike. Appreciate your time. We'll make sure that your Twitter is in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being willing to come on and share. Thanks for listening to the Agency Journey Podcast. Visit agency Journey Insiders.com to join the.

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