Innovative Marketing Tech And Growth Strategies with Benjamin Shapiro

For business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your.

Profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo.

Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

And we're back another episode of Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad Costanzo and today I'm going to have a fun conversation with a guest that we've been shooting the shit over the past 10 minutes prior to this and in the past 10 minutes I can tell you that this is already going to be a killer conversation because we were talking about ways to grow podcasts and we were talking about different marketing technologies and strategies and, and it's rare that I jump on a pre interview call with a guest and I've already taken like a page of notes. So that being said, you guys are in for a treat. So I met today's guest as a referral from a good friend of mine, Jeremy Ryan. Slate of command, you'd brand media and Jeremy said you gotta meet Benjamin Shapiro. We talked about the name here just a second ago. We'll dive into the fun controversy behind the name. So Ben is up in the San Francisco area. He's a brand development and marketing strategy consultant and he left a career in biz dev at ebay, little bitty e commerce company to become an entrepreneur that has run a bootstrap startup, multiple marketing teams at early stage VC backed companies and independent consulting and content business. He's also the host of Martech podcast which I just subscribed to and you're going to want to subscribe to as well. There'll be a link here in the show notes and we are going to dive into some of the strategies that are really working as Ben helps growth stage companies understand how to identify the overlap between corporate identity and customer needs to really build an effective marketing strategy. Ben and I share a very similar business model background from consulting to podcasting. So we are going to allow you to eavesdrop on our conversation as we share what's working, what's not and what you should be paying attention to. Ben, welcome to Bacon Wrap business.

Bacon wrap. Brad, what's up man?

So as I mentioned, you are not the controversial Ben Shapiro that is all over YouTube and Google and probably hijacking your name. In the SEO.

I'm the boring Ben Shapiro. I'm the burnt wheat toast of Ben Shapiro's. Just the guy that runs the marketing consulting business, not the one that's in your political news feed.

Yeah, stirring up Controversies and smack talking.

He was trending on Twitter yesterday and I got a bunch of like hate emails and it's like it's the wrong guy.

Yeah, I've always thought that's gotta be terrible. Luckily, as I mentioned, there's not too many Brad Costanzo's out there. I think there's only one in Omaha, Nebraska, so I don't have to deal with that. But if the conversation we had prior to hitting the record button is any indication, I'm really looking forward to hearing more about what you've done, what's working and why you do what you do. And so let's kind of go back through. One of the very first things that got my attention, as I'm sure you've led with this quite a bit, is that you used to be pretty big in the biz dev side at ebay, Correct?

Yeah, that's really where I cut my teeth. Right. I started my career, I bounced around a little bit before working at ebay. Out of college I got some sales experience, I worked at a sports marketing agency. But my career really started when I got into the technology sector and I learned the basic blocking and tackling of Internet marketing. And I was fortunate enough to be on the business development team within the Internet marketing organization. So I was put in charge of some relationships that were pretty meaningful. Ebay's relationship with Yahoo and HP and some other strategic companies, Facebook and Google at the time managing a lot of their fixed placements. So basically where ebay's logo would be, where it wasn't media, where it wasn't a variable, was a stuck placement like your instant messenger, as your desktop icons back in the day. And those were $10 million relationships. So I really learned kind of the lay of the land in terms of the different types of Internet marketing and got a good sense for strategic business development negotiations, what business models should look like and was a springboard for the rest of my career. Also a great network at ebay. That's basically like getting an mba. The caliber of talent while I was there was incredible.

Imagine what years were you there?

I was there for seven years. So I think I started in 2005 and I left in 2012. Maybe I'm off by a year, but.

Somewhere around there had to be pretty exciting to watch the growth and everything happen during the pandemic.

Yeah, I was there as ebay peak. My first day was eBay's 10 year anniversary and it was the Internet darling. Was kind of the end of the 1.0 Internet era and also saw Some big strategic acquisitions like the Skype acquisition, which ended up being a little bit of a failure and started to see ebay as it came off being the biggest, baddest bully on the block and kind of had its lunch eaten by Google and Facebook and a couple other companies. Amazon as well.

Yeah, it is funny, like, I mean I still use ebay occasionally. It doesn't hit the media that much. It's not really as talked about as much. It doesn't seem as though they're doing as many innovative things out there anymore, but I mean they're still a behemoth.

Yeah. The ebay playbook was less about strategic media and brand building. Initially the brand, the first 10 years it was really important to develop the brand. That's why everybody knows ebay. You already know ebay, they don't need to do television ads unless they're trying to remind you or reposition. And so now you see ebay, television ads that are about. Ebay is great for all this new stuff and you'll find better deals. They're trying to reposition what you think of the brand, which is used stuff, auctions. But the brand was established and so when I was there, the playbook was how do we get the individual right product in front of you when you're searching? Which was more about SEO and SEM and affiliates.

Right.

It was less of a brand development and more of a product marketing exercise.

Yeah, that makes sense. Now, after ebay, did you go work for another company? Did you branch out on your own?

Yeah, I jumped off the cliff and started my own company. All the cool kids were leaving the big companies to go work in San Francisco at startups and I wanted to do that, but I didn't really have a lot of previous experience. You know, like I mentioned, I worked at a in sales and I worked at a sports marketing agency. I didn't have a lot of other tech experience. And so going from BD to being a marketer at an early stage startup was challenging for me. My resume was kind of looked at as a big company guy because I spent so much time at ebay. And so the way for me to make the transition to being more operational and getting that sort of hands on experience was to do everything by myself. So I started a startup that was a video guitar lesson service called Strum School. I was a terrible guitar player and I decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking about how to learn to the guitar instead of actually learning the guitar. And so I started this video guitar lesson website and like to say it was a little bit before its time. It was Google Hangouts for guitar lessons, but before Google Hangouts. And really what that means is I wasn't a great product person. I was a better marketer. And so we got a lot of people to the website and not a lot of people to buy anything.

That's funny. Yeah. My very first digital product that when I started off in this and I use it kind of as a marketing laboratory, just kind of figured out, didn't know what I was doing, but it was in the magic tricks. So it was basically like bar tricks and impromptu magic tricks that and then I went for. Instead of trying to sell it to magicians, I typically tried to sell it to the men's dating advice crowd. So men who are trying to get a little bit more attention from girls, et cetera, and the whole dating pickup seduction market was pretty hot. So I just kind of like I'm going to teach magic tricks to that crowd. It was fun. It was actually fun to write copy for, et cetera. There wasn't that big of a market. There wasn't a ton of people out there searching for it. So I really had to hone my skills in building joint ventures and alliances with other people in that market to promote it. I dominated SEO, but the volume was absolutely minuscule. But I still got that business up to about half a million a year.

So I was happy you did better than I did. That's kind of the classic first time entrepreneurs mistake is you create a business based on something that you're personally passionate about, not an opportunity that you see. Right. Good businesses are driven out of opportunity and passion obviously plays a role and keeps you interested. But I don't know if there was a need for a guitar lesson website when I launched Strum School. And that was probably at the detriment, right. I did not actually do enough market analysis, enough customer research. And that's one of the hard ways that I learned the lesson about what marketing really is and how to develop a brand and think about building a business is figuring out where there's actually a need for a product you could build.

And that was. The thing is, I know mine was opportunistic in that I had just read, I'd read two books back to back, Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And that introduced me really to the concept of selling information online, et cetera. And then at the same time I had read Strauss's book the Game Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. I was had my girlfriend at the time I was, you know, who's now my wife. And I was never part, you know, I never considered myself a pickup artist. But I remember him talking about in there that he used magic tricks at bars to kind of break the ice with women and kind of build curiosity. And I remember reading that like, oh, that's genius. I know a couple dozen magic tricks and I went looking for like pickup artist magic tricks and I wanted to see if this guy would teach them and he didn't. But he had a New York Times best selling book. And the opportunity I thought was that people out there are just like me, probably googling this and not finding a solution. So I was opportunistic, more so than passionate. But the problem was the opportunity wasn't big enough. The juice. I squeezed the hell out of that fruit to get as much juice as I could. But in retrospect I was like, hey, this is great. There's no competition for this. Well, there was a reason there was no competition.

Yeah, you know what my magic pickup trick was?

What's that?

What's your favorite drink?

Cool. Let me go make that magically appear.

That's awesome. I love it. So you got into the consulting side of things and you started to work with companies. Early growth stage, middle market. Who has been your sweet spot of companies that have engaged you to help with their growth plans?

Yeah, after strum school I went and worked at VC backed companies. So I was still in house and I spent about five years working for other people's startups, running the marketing department and it was gratifying and it was really interesting and I loved the challenge and the work and the figuring out what the brand was and how to operationalize it. The problem that I had was working at an early stage startup, you're spending long hours, you're probably underpaid with the hope that your equity is going to be worth something five years down the road. And that five years never came for me. And so I was sitting there looking at having a wife and a kid on the way and saying I'm busting my butt for an under market salary in the hope that this brand is going to grow. The relationships weren't good, I was tired of it, I wasn't really motivated. And so I said, look, I'm going to go do my own thing, I'm going to go figure out what I want to do next. But this isn't working for me. My intent was to go back and find a real job and I was taking on short term projects to pay the bills while I was figuring out what I was going to do with my life and one short term project got referred another short term project, which another and another and the next thing you knew, I was running a consulting business and I've been doing these short term projects for a year and I was happier than I'd ever been. I was working on things that I was interested in, I was doing the things that I did well and I had independence, more authority and autonomy. So I sat there in year two of my consulting business saying maybe I'm not going to go back and get another job. Maybe having somebody else be my boss is overrated and I'm sure I'll get a job at some point feels inevitable, but I'm enjoying riding this wave.

Yeah, that's fantastic. You mentioned some of the short term projects you were working on and doing the things that you were really good at. Marketing and biz dev, just in general as a field is so fragmented, there's so many different aspects of that. There's people who specialize in traffic and conversion and profit optimization and SEO and paid media, et cetera. Right. It gets so granular. What were some of the areas that you were particularly good at and maybe on the other side, the areas that you didn't really like to focus on?

Yeah. The ironic thing is when I sat down two days after leaving my last startup job and it was a bad breakup, I was really butthurt, for lack of a better term. And I wanted to build a website that repositioned my career and told everybody, hey, I'm taking on these short term projects and kind of explain what my experience was and make it feel like it was a logical decision to move from the startup that I was in. I truthfully hadn't really thought it out that well. It was just time to go do something different. And the copy that I wrote going through that initial process was give your brand a voice. And I went back while I was sitting there thinking of what didn't work in my career and what I did well and what I wanted to do. And it was help people in brands, companies figure out who their authentic selves were, how to articulate that to the people that are interested in it, and then where to go say the words they need to say to make a business impact. And so there's a couple other pithy lines that are on my website. It's not personal, it's not business, it's business with personality. Those are the types of things that I think sum up what I did as a marketing consultant, which Is first off helping brands get the foundation of their marketing department together. A lot of the times what happens are brands, even successful ones, start marketing, but really what they're doing is they're starting growth, but they don't actually think about marketing and positioning and matching who their company is against who the target market is. They don't do a lot of customer research. They just go out and they place some ads on Facebook and say, ooh, we're marketing.

Just to interject there with a conversation I had yesterday. So I have a client, they are a venture backed startup. It's a really cool app. I have equity in the business as well. And this is recent. So as of yesterday we were having maybe our second or third call and we're just really in the early stages of laying out the marketing plan, et cetera. And the CEO just said, so should we go jump on like start driving AdWords right now? And I was like, whoa doggy, like there's a whole lot more before you just start throwing money at AdWords because a lot of what you just said, the foundation has not been laid. They're like, we just need to get growth. It's like, let's hold on, let's make sure we have the brand messaging and avatar, et cetera just right.

It's the common thing for VC backed businesses. I just took a bunch of money. I need to show that I'm on the path to this trajectory of growth. So we need to get going and show business results today. And in reality, the brands that I've seen that have the best marketing departments that are the most efficient are the ones that have an understanding of who their customers are. They've done their research, they have a very clear view of what the purpose of their company and what their products are, how they solve their customers problems and then knowing all of that information, they're more efficient with their targeting. Right. They have a better channel selection because their customers are saying where they want to hear about this type of product. So by doing all of this research, it's not, oh, I'm just doing the foundation and I'm building a framework. No, you are doing the things that are going to make you efficient, that are going to spend efficiently. You're having a positive business impact. But you need to do your homework first before you just start throwing money. Otherwise you're just going to throw it away.

Yeah, like they say, measure twice, cut once and it saves you a whole lot of time and energy on the backside. And once more, a commonality is that some of the stuff that you're talking about there is the foundation as well as the brand, voice messaging, et cetera, a little bit more on the conversion side of things and the creative. And that's really as well as where I've shined when I'm working with clients or portfolio companies or even partners. And those are the aspects I like, because when you do, when you are able to dial in the creative and that it makes all the various traffic channels so much easier than trying to shovel traffic into something that hasn't been well thought out.

I feel like most executives that are non marketers think of marketing as customer acquisition and they don't think of it as the combination of positioning, customer acquisition, conversion, rate optimization, customer retention. Right. And all of that is sort of underlaid with what's your brand and what's the experience. And, you know, I think that's changing a little bit now. We went through this phase where everyone was looking for growth. Hackers, right? People that are going to come in and do technical stuff to the website or to a marketing channel that are just going to make users just appear, drive virality and all of this stuff. And you saw all these brands get really big really quickly and then plateau because there wasn't a real sense of brand and direction. Look what's happening with Uber now, right? They built this huge growth hacking engine and I'm sure they would just call it growth. And then, okay, that stalled out and so they needed to invest a ton of money into performance marketing and now they're doubling back and thinking about the brand. Obviously, Uber's a gigantic company and has been very successful, but to me, they ignored building marketing foundation and didn't cultivate all of these channels at once. And that's the best way to drive sustainable growth, is understand who you are and who your customers are, cultivate marketing channels that are exceedingly efficient over a long period of time and when you need to show growth, be operationally efficient enough at the performance marketing stuff that gets dollars in the doors right away. Everybody just goes and says, I'm just going to buy my way in. As opposed to developing content and marketing strategies and partnerships that are in the long term, what are the most efficient ways to build a brand? Build a company.

Right. Seen it. I want to say this is from HubSpot, but I ran across not too long ago, maybe about a year ago, and I really like this. And they're talking about how the funnel is dead. Long live the marketing flywheel. I don't know if you've kind of Seen that, I kind of liked it. I've always been a big fan of this flywheel concept. And for any of my listeners who's not too familiar with what a flywheel is, it's a mechanical thing. It goes in cars, et cetera, or engines, whereby when you get the wheel turning or the components turning, the more you get it going, the more momentum, the more momentum it creates. So it's like where force creates force, et cetera, and it almost becomes a self perpetuating thing. And it's a really interesting concept that they were talking about, which is so many people are so focused on a funnel, which is really customer acquisition. How do I acquire and activate them, period. But when you add in the flywheel concept, it's the sales, it's the marketing, it's the retention, and it's all the other things that drive more people back. Because when you think about it as more of this holistic mechanism that has to be built to run for a while, I think you approach the marketing strategy a lot differently than if it's just like you mentioned, growth, just acquire users.

Yeah, I think that more sophisticated marketers find value at multiple points of what was the funnel or getting people into the flywheel. You can come to my website, you can listen to my podcast. Maybe you don't become a subscriber. That's fine. I hope you enjoyed the content. Maybe you just didn't feel like subscribing, maybe you were on the treadmill and couldn't click the button.

Whatever it is, let's be honest, it's not fine if they don't subscribe. It's the worst thing somebody could do. It's like you're slapping my mother when you don't subscribe to my podcast.

People. 88% of people that listen to my podcast are subscribers.

That's good.

The other 12% of the people are busy. Not that my listeners are not busy, but that's fine. Maybe it's not their cup of tea or maybe it just they could not actually subscribe and that's fine. Marketers are sophisticated enough, the good ones, and we get enough data now to be able to figure out who are the non subscribers and then to remarket to them. And so even if you didn't convert in the first time, you've now self selected as somebody who is likely going to be interested in more of my content, which means I'm going to continue to market to you. And so it's not the one that got away, it's you're halfway there. Right.

Well, especially because it's harder. Luckily with marketing technology out there, or as I like to call it, Martech, it's harder to get away. There's more opportunities to stay in contact with your customers, with your prospects than ever before. And if you approach it correctly, it's much more powerful than just trying to be the get them on the first go round.

Yeah, I mean I do performance marketing for the Martech podcast. So there are people that come on to my website and don't become a subscriber and I'm going to continue to market to them and I'm going to continue to present content to them, retarget them on Facebook with a short audiogram or you know, another list of the people that we've had on the show and other reasons to give them the ability to re engage and give them a second opportunity. Think about like when you're buying a car, you go onto their website, you research the car, maybe you go to the lot, you walk through, you don't talk to a salesperson. The next time you go for a test drive and then you start negotiation, it's a five touch experience, minimum. That's okay. Hey, you want to test drive the car and walk off, that's perfectly fine. I know how to get ahold of you. If you're interested, I can get you back.

Exactly. Speaking of podcasts, so Martech, obviously marketing technology, tell myself and my listeners a little bit more about the theme and the kind of guests and the topics that you really like to cover on your show.

Yeah, we talk to marketers about how they use technology to drive business growth and career success. It's the tide for first greatest podcast in the world. I guess that this is the other first place vendor.

We're neck and neck number one.

Yeah, well, you know, that's generous of you to share the spotlight with us, but I've been producing content for the show for 17 months, so it's a relatively new podcast. It originally was going to be a lead generation tool for my consulting practice and it grew way faster than I ever could have expected and so just decided to keep it as a content asset. The episodes are 15 to 25 minutes a day, discreet, actionable pieces of content and we cover all sorts of topics, how people use technology for B2B, B2C, everything from influencer marketing to multi touch attribution strategies. We really cover the gamut of things that modern marketers need to know and be aware of. Then we also talk to a lot of marketers that have really interesting career Paths so you can think about what the right path is for you. So we've had people like Gary Briggs, who is the former CMO of Facebook on the show talking about how he went from being a college student standing around a keg to becoming the CMO of Facebook. And so that was a fun story.

Oh, I'll bet.

Yeah. Actionable stuff and interesting stories from great marketers.

Let me ask you, when you started off the podcast and you said it grew a lot faster than you expected, what were some of the catalysts for that? What did you do correctly? I mean, probably just float it out there and just say, if I record it, they will come.

I mean, originally that was kind of the plan, but there's really like four or five things that you need to think about when you're launching a podcast. Organic, viral, paid, and partnerships. I'm sure I'm missing one of them somewhere. But organic is what's your content? How's the app store going to look at you? What's your title? What are some of the other pieces of content that are out there? So my show is the Martech Podcast. There wasn't a lot of Martech titled podcasts, so I started getting a lot of downloads because people were just searching for Martech in the itunes and Google Play app stores. We produce a lot of content, so we're able to do some keyword optimization in our titles. So that's really the organic side, virality, because we produce a lot of content, we have a lot of guests. A lot of guests means a lot of people sharing the content because they want to promote their interview. People are on the show to try to get fame and fortune or at least promote their brands. Maybe the biggest thing that we did that most podcasters don't do is we actually bought media. I use a platform called Knit. I'll preface this with I have a referral relationship with them. So if anybody goes to Knit, tell them I sent you. But Knit is a dynamic ad insertion platform. So I have a little less than a 60 second ad that says something the extent of Are you ready for your next great podcast? If you're interested in learning how great businesses grow, check out the Martech podcast. Here's a sample of the content. Just search for Martech Podcast. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, where.

Do those show up?

So it's dynamic insertion, which means that unlike a host red ad, it is not somebody saying, okay, I'm going to read this ad and it's going to show up in this episode. I can actually give NIT a budget. I want to spend $1,000 on these three days, and I want them to show up on these 10 podcasts. And Nit has inventory mostly with Turner Media. So CNN, NBA, Bleacher Report. There's some business shows, some politics, some technology, humor. There's a whole bunch of stuff. But it's a lot of impressions because it's a marketplace. You can get the inventory for super, super cheap. Don't tell anybody, but, you know, I place most of my bids for like a dollar cpm, which is thousand downloads. Since the inventory is really cheap, you get a lot of impressions. And even though it's not super targeted, you know, I'm not just targeting the business shows. I run most of my stuff on the CNN network. There's a lot of marketers that are. Out of, you know, the 15 million people that are listening to CNN daily, a lot of those people are marketers. So maybe there's a million or 2 million marketers. Well, that's a lot of people I can reach for really cheap amount. So I've been just absolutely pumping as much money as I possibly can into NIT. We spend about $6,000 a month now just through that channel to try to grow the Martech podcast. And then the other thing is partnerships. And, you know, I'd call this a partnership networking with people that are in your industry, working with other blogs, other content partnerships. Just getting your content out there, doing syndication, getting other people to share and promote it, you know, that's the other way to try to drive growth. And so combination of those four things is really what helped us hit the ground running.

Nice. As far as partnerships go and whatnot. Has there been anything besides just getting on other shows, et cetera, that has worked particularly well?

Yeah, I mean, we have a relationship with the Martech conference. They're a sponsor of the Martech podcast. And so I think that being involved there and helping them promote their podcast probably gives us a little credibility. I don't really like, say, hey, we're affiliated with them publicly, but I think.

That when people want to assume that that's quite okay.

Yeah, are very specific saying that they are a sponsor of the show, that we are not affiliated. We are not the same company. I think that, you know, I've talked to them about an opportunity for us to take the Martech podcast content and match it and put it on their web properties. And so I think that that's a good example of a partnership. Not something that we've done, but something we've discussed. A little bit. But that to me would be an exciting opportunity. But, you know, there are other brands that are interested in promoting the content, and also that kind of gets into our sponsorship program. Those are partnerships in my mind. We get other people to help us pay for our advertising and they do some promotion as well.

Right. And you said on Knit, you typically bid about a dollar cpm, did you say? Approximately. And that you're spending about six grand a month. What were some of the numbers you think you're getting for, like, are you able to track or what metrics are you able to track from that? Because none of us know how many subscribers per se that we have. We don't have download.

That's the gift. And the curse of podcasting and being in a developing medium is that the analytics aren't great, so you don't get a lot of attribution. I've done it enough, long enough to know that when I advertise, it works, and when I don't advertise, I don't grow. So we spent $1,000 here, $1,000 there. In the first year of the podcast, I think I spent a total of 10 grand. And the weeks that I was advertising, we'd see great weeks. And the weeks that I didn't have the capital, we didn't grow as fast. Sponsorship. And when I had money to invest back into the podcast and I wasn't coming out of pocket, we advertised more consistently and we saw more consistent growth. And then once a quarter, the first week of the quarter, I turn off all of our advertising and you know what happens? We don't grow. Right. Everything stays flat. You don't get new users, or you get very few new users, listeners, subscribers. When you're not putting yourself out there and finding a new audience, there's inherently some churn. Some people are going to unsubscribe or stop listening. And so that's why we have to keep our foot on the gas. But for me, it's more of an off on. I don't know if I'd call that an AB test, but, you know, I have a test in a control group. And what I figured out is that the cost per download, not cost per listener or subscriber, but cost per download, incremental download, is somewhere for me between. My best week was 75 cents and probably my worst week was around $2. So I think that we've seen very strong returns. If I'm putting in a thousand dollars, my expectation is I'm going to get a thousand new downloads. Compared to the previous time period. And I've done this for other brands that are a little bit more specific. I do an SEO podcast called the Voices of Search for a company called Search Metrics. They're only marketing towards the SEO community. There's less SEOs than there are marketers, so their cost per acquisition is 2 to $3 instead of 1 to 2. Nice.

And then you mentioned the call to action that you typically make on that. Do you just tell them to go search for martech in their favorite podcast app or do you.

Yeah, that's been my call to action so far. And truthfully, it's because I haven't got around to republishing the Martech podcast website right now. If you go to martechpod.com it redirects you to my consulting website, where the Martech podcast is hosted, where the webpages are hosted. If I had a separate domain that was a better landing page experience, I would say visit them aretechpod.com or search for Martech Podcast wherever you find your shows. But just giving the audio prompt, here's how you find the show. Go to your app store and type in martech Podcast. That's the only call to action we've had on knit. Totally imperfect. And the tracking and attribution is terrible. It works nice.

Well, that's good. And then I know we talked about a lot of the other little strategies offline on that, but more so on the types of clients you bring on there. You bring on a lot of SaaS owners, is that right? Like marketing technology, CEOs and companies who are doing innovative stuff, or are you bringing on a little bit of.

Yeah, most everybody is a marketer or an executive at a marketing company. And so, you know, on some level, those are marketers as well. B2B and B2C, we don't really specify. We're probably about 50, 50 in terms of the content we produce. You know, if you listen and you're a B2B or a B2C brand, you'll get value out of listening to some of the other channels. I think B2B is moving more towards performance marketing and an influencer channel. And that's kind of what. And ABM is obviously a thing. And then the B2C brands are getting better at CRM and sort of integrating their data, like the B2B brand. So a lot of that stuff is getting blended together. At the end of the day, what matters to me is that they're good marketers and we try to be very channel specific. And mix it up so we don't just only talk about marketing attribution or tech stack building all the time. We've had somebody come in and talk about how to market to millennials. How do you use Snapchat? And then we've had people do the, you know, how do you use CRM and optimize your brand for use in Salesforce?

Nice. Are there any kind of favorite technological solutions, strategies, things that you know, at least recently? Favorite might not be the word, but anything that really got your attention lately is innovative, cool, share worthy.

Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a couple different things. There's a podcast, hacks. I love POD Sites, which is an analytics platform for podcasters that gives you more data about who's listening to your show and allows you to retarget them. So I'm a huge fan of that product and brand and they're a sponsor of the show and they were guests on the show. So I think that stuff's really interesting and it's relevant to me. I think that the trend of brands moving towards micro influencers is really interesting. Media is getting more expensive going on. Facebook is getting spendy and so people are looking for other channels. AdWords is getting more expensive. It's like, I can't just throw my performance marketing dollars. I need to find ways to spend more efficiently. And that gets into content marketing, targeting CRM and influencers, and just being a little bit more nuanced and creative with how you put together your marketing platform. It goes back to us talking about understanding who your customers are and doing that homework. When you know the people that you're trying to reach, it's a lot easier to figure out the channels and the people that are influential in those channels. And I think that's an interesting trend.

Fantastic. Are there any technological solutions around the micro influencers that you come across that.

There's a whole list of micro influencer platforms. The one that comes to mind first is, I think it's Heartbeat. I had a good conversation with their CEO, not even on the podcast, just an interesting guy. And when we started talking about the platform, intellifluence is another one that Joe Sinkowicz, who has been on my podcast, the Martech podcast and the Voices of Search podcast is really an interesting platform. Ways to get reviews and people talking positively about your brand.

I love it. Now how much of your time right now, business, et cetera, is devoted to growing the podcast. I think you mentioned that this has been your main initiative here recently. Just because you see all of the success and scale that's already happening. Has this been one of your primary focuses at the moment?

Yeah, it's the primary focus. I basically have put the consulting business on the back burner. I'm still doing some advisory work. So instead of me being an operator as a consultant, I can kind of do some strategic stuff. But the people that I'm working with have to have the operations under control.

Yep, that's the thing for me as well.

Yeah. It's more being a sounding board as a consultant and being an advisor. And in terms of like my operational time, it's all going towards content development, ad sales, developing new podcasts, and then I have one consulting relationship again with Search Metrics, where I'm building that podcast for them, the Voices of Search show.

Are you doing any of the content yourself, like recording or are you just help producing?

I am the host and the producer. So every episode is me yapping away about organic growth and content marketing. And most of the guests are Search Metrics employees, talking about ways to develop growth strategies and a lot of technical SEO stuff. We do a lot of content marketing work as well, and we have some really interesting SEO guests there as well. But I'm dangerous enough at content marketing and SEO to be able to ask the questions, but not good enough to be able to answer them. So that's why I'm the host right now.

I love that. How soon after you started Martech did you start to go after sponsors and people too?

Yeah, when we hit 10,000 downloads a month, I felt like we had a large enough audience that it was monetizable. And so it took us nine months to get down to the five figure download mark. And in the first month we sold our advertising, it was November, we sold out all of our Q1 inventory. So it took us a month to sell three months worth of ads.

And this is one of the things I'll learn as I start to subscribe and listening to your show. But how often, like how many ads are you throwing in a show typically?

So we do dynamic insertion. So there's two ad spots, the pre roll and a post roll. And in each one of them there's an A and a B spot. So you're going to hear there are 30 to 60 seconds, so a minute to two minutes of advertising about two minutes into the show and about 30 to 45 seconds of advertising at the end. It's not a ton. They're short pieces of content. Right. They're, they're 15 to 25 minutes long. So we don't want to have The Joe Rogan 7 minutes of advertising upfront because you're not going to spend three hours with us. And we also want to keep all the advertisers very specific and interesting to the audience. People that listen to the Martech podcast are there because they're interested in learning about B2B SaaS technologies. And so most of the sponsors are B2B SaaS technology. So there's a value in understanding what some of these companies are and do, but we try to keep it relatively short. The thing that we do that's a little different than sort of the standard podcast is we will sell all of our inventory to a sponsor for a given period of time. If a sponsor comes to me, I don't say, okay, I'm going to put you in Tuesday's episode. I say, I'm going to put you in every episode that has an ad unit for a week or for a month. And so we can swap out the ad units dynamically for a given period of time. And so we have a couple sponsors running all of the time. We're now getting to the point where we're sold out and people are coming and saying, hey, we really want to sponsor the podcast and we want to do it in October. So we're testing what happens if we do three ads. But that means that we have to shorten all the ads. So instead of it being four or five minutes of ads, we're trying to keep it to like a minute and a half, two minutes.

Right. And by the way, that's awesome that you were able to sell sponsors so quickly. I know a lot of podcasters, they can go years without going out and getting those sponsors. And I know that the way that you've actually monetized this and created innovative sponsorship opportunities is what we were talking about offline. And I think that's, like, absolutely fantastic. And it's a really cool way to think out of the box. I don't know. I mean, if you are free to re. Explain that to the guests, I mean, to the listeners. I don't know if.

Yeah, I'm happy to. So just the conversation that we had before was most people are saying, hey, I have ad space, and I'll record your ad on Tuesday's episode and you'll get how many ever downloads? I get 10,000 downloads for that one episode. What are you going to pay for that at $25 cpm, you're going to make 250 bucks a show. It's not a lot, right? And when you're doing one show a week now you're looking at 1,000 bucks a month. You can't run a business on that. Maybe you decided to do a couple episodes. Well, now you're looking at $3,000. It's just not enough money. What we do is a combination of four different things. First, advertorial content. We are going to have the people that are sponsors of the show come and produce content. We're going to make content for them. So CallRail and Spark Post were our first two sponsors. And instead of just saying, hey, I want you to come in and just buy all the ads, hey, we're going to create a week of content that is about what your topic is. So we did telemarketing week and we did email marketing week and we created a piece of content for them. It was a 90 minute interview that I broke up into five different pieces. So now I have five episodes. And it allows the brand to tell a deeper story. There are very few mediums. This is why I love podcasting, where you can get somebody to listen to you for 15 minutes a day for five days in a row. That is a television series, right? How much would you pay to have somebody develop a television series for you? It's really expensive for me, for somebody, me to create a week of content for a brand, it's like five grand a week. So it's dramatically less than you going out and saying, I'm going to produce my own radio show or I'm going to make a television series. You supplement that with, okay, you get this deep engagement where people are really getting into the message and they're really thinking of you as an influencer and as somebody who is influential in the space. And that's great. But you don't have a high number of impressions, right? To get somebody to actually remember the brand and to activate on it, you need to be in front of them over a long period of time. And that's what the host read advertising is for. So somebody will come in and do a week of advertorial content. And we'll follow that up with a month of advertising. So the people that are hearing your story are then remembering your brand for the next month when they listen to the rest of our content. Well, now you're getting somebody that knows what you do, who you are and respects you hearing about your brand 10 times in a month. Those are the people that are actually going to get off their butt and get to your website. The last thing that we do is I mentioned the POD Sites analytics platform is really interesting to me. And so what that does is it gives us the ability to understand who is listening to our podcast and to retarget them. And so when a brand comes to me and says, hey, create this advertorial content. We want to advertise on your platform. We want to reach your audience. I could say, you can reach my audience. That's great, but that's only the first half. I can then take the people that listened to your content on my show and create a lookalike audience on Facebook and find thousands of other people that are like them. And so now we're doing performance marketing to get other marketers that are not in our existing universe of podcast listeners, and we're driving them to be advertorial content for our brands.

So pause right there, because that's important.

Yeah.

Which is awesome. So you take those people who are listening, like if I was on your show, the folks who listen to the one with Brad Costanzo, you take those over to Facebook, and obviously, you could run an ad directly to the ones who listen. But you create the lookalike audience, and then you run ads back to the podcast and primarily, but not the podcast in general, back to that specific episodic advertorial pieces of content. Right? Yeah, exactly.

Think about it this way. I am taking people that look like Brad Costanzo fans, and I'm going to market to them to land on a piece of content with Brad Costanzo.

Yep.

Right. And so now it's like, you are have a high propensity to be interested in this speaker, because Facebook is great at telling me that. And other marketing channels as well. Twitter and Google and all the remarketing platforms. We're gonna run a big programmatic advertising test as well next quarter, but we're gonna run around the Internet and we're gonna get all the people that look like they would be Brad Costanzo fans, and we're gonna drop them off on the Brad Costanzo piece of content. So now we're getting more listeners, and they're getting that deep engagement with you. And then the last thing we do is we go back to the brand and say, do you want to buy the retargeting audience for everybody that's listened to your piece of content? Because you can then do performance marketing to try to sell them things. And so those are really the four products that we have.

Nice. And then, yeah, on the third one, where you're going to run ads to the lookalike audience on Facebook, back to the advertorial content. You're buying those ads, but you're probably part of the package is you're using their budget. Right. Cause that there's a. I would imagine there's a budget.

Yep, absolutely. Sorry, I totally cut you off.

No, that's perfect, though. So let's just say, for instance, that budget would be $5,000. In order to do that, Brad sponsor the podcast.

He gives me five grand and says, go on to Facebook.

Yep.

I am now taking that $5,000, and I am marketing it towards a piece of my podcast content. So I am Getting podcast listeners. 88% of people that listen to my podcast become subscribers. It helps me grow my brand. It also fuels the retargeting audience that the brands then buy. So they get warm leads out of doing this advertising. They care mostly about who is listening to me tell this story. And if it happens to help you grow your podcast, wonderful. If they want to do their own performance marketing, that's fine. I'll give them the retargeting audience. They can create a lookalike audience as well and do performance marketing, direct marketing to them. But I'm just a little more efficient at marketing my content than other brands are.

Right? Yeah. And then that. That fourth piece is, well, we'll give you the audience. We can download and give you the audience so that you can upload them into your own Facebook and you can advertise if you want. Assuming you're good at that. They can do it to their blue in the face, or they could hire you to do it if they wanted.

Maybe it's just more efficient for me to take my content and market it socially. The Martech podcast promotes a piece of Martech podcast content. And then once people have consumed that content, then the brands are like, okay, this person's listened to me Talk for 90 minutes over a week. They've listened to five episodes of weekly content. They're clearly interested. Now I'm going to spend the budget to try to get them to buy something. I love it farther down the funnel.

So this is a question I ask every single one of my guests. Although I think I know because we had a conversation on this prior to. So I think I already know the answer to this. But the question is, what's a nut you're trying to crack? And by that I mean, what's a skill you're trying to learn, a person you're trying to meet, an initiative you're trying to get accomplished, or a problem you're trying to solve? Is it safe to say that the biggest nut you're trying to crack right now is how to scale up the listeners of Martech and find all the different ways from appearing on shows like mine to all of the various other growth strategies you're testing. So I know that continuously adding subscribers and listeners to Martech is one. Is there anything else that you're trying to figure out right now and that either myself or maybe some of my listeners who are listening might jog our minds and be able to help you out?

Yeah, I do a monthly recap of what we're doing to grow the Martech podcast and how the business is performing. And so we kind of answer this question once a month about what we're trying to accomplish and what our approach is. And so we talk about our yearly goals. Some of them are quantifiable, some of them aren't. The big milestones for me this year was to go from 10,000 downloads a month to 100,000 downloads a month. That is the primary thing that I'm focused on, which is just growing the Martech Podcast to be one order of magnitude bigger than it was last year in terms of monthly downloads. At the size of the podcast, building the audience, the goal was to hit $100,000 in revenue per year. We've already passed that, fortunately. So we've monetized the podcast really well. The other things that we're doing is now investigating, okay, I know how to grow a podcast relatively efficiently. We definitely feel good about how we're able to monetize a podcast. And so then the question becomes, is it better for us as an organization to create more podcasts and actually create the content ourselves, or does it make sense to take what we're doing and create a podcast network? So, Brad, guys like you might say, you know what, it's a pain in the ass selling these ads and finding the sponsors. I'm making 10, 20 grand a year. If Ben can make 100, I would give him 20 and take 80. And so we're investigating the idea of building out the ad network and finding the sponsors. And that way, podcasters like you only have to worry about producing the content, and you still get all of the other value out of building your network and can focus on growing your show and monetizing it in other ways, like lead generation.

I love it.

Finding consulting clients now.

I think the podcast network is a tremendous idea. I mean, I think it's something you're probably moving forward with, just probably dotting I's and T's. I mean, anytime you can create that Network effect in anything in any business. You're probably familiar. You've got a tremendous amount of exponential value. There's. And I can see how it would be very valuable to a lot of podcasters. Do you think you would be going more after developing new podcasts and then adding them to the network versus finding existing ones?

Yeah, we're testing it. The second podcast we've launched since the Martech podcast is a show called the Finding a Job podcast, and it's targeted at a different group. It's for early careerists. So the people that are just coming out of college looking for their first job, as opposed to the Martech podcast, is for career marketers, people that already have defined themselves in their careers as being focused on marketing. So, you know, there's a huge audience of people that are graduating from college, writing their resumes, looking for their first jobs. There's also tons of brands that are trying to hire them. And there's people are marketing towards college. Well, I want to call them college kids, but, you know, college students, people that are looking for their first job. That's an important demographic and that's really big. So we're a month into publishing content for the Finding a Job podcast. So one idea is to pick off different verticals. Maybe we'll do a technology podcast. Maybe we'll do finance and investing. I will definitely not be the host of either of those shows. So we'll have to figure out whether it's easier to find people that are great hosts and train them to produce.

I think that's easier. Yeah.

Or if it's easier to just say, hey, you've already got a podcast. Let me just go sell the ads. I've got an audience. We're going to test out both next year. This year we're kind of laying the groundwork and building the foundation, but really our bread is buttered with the audience growth of the Martech podcast. That's what pays the bills.

I love it. Well, man, this has been filled with awesome. I love it. So let's tell people some of the best places where they can go subscribe. And I think anybody would be crazy not to subscribe, especially since you explain kind of what you're doing. And I love it when kind of the wizard lets us kind of look behind the curtain and see what he's doing.

Yeah. We are curtainless and we're open kimono here at the Martech podcast.

Yeah. So what's the best place people can go to subscribe and to find you?

Easiest thing to do is Just the podcast player that you're listening right now. Just search for the keyword Martech Podcast. It's the one that's the white background with the M in the middle of it. I think the logo is a blue and green logo. You can go to martechpod.com if you want. The website. We're going to relaunch the website and it's going to be all beautiful and fancy, hopefully this upcoming quarter. If you're interested in learning more about my background and don't want to hear the Martech podcast, you're doing something wrong. It's probably the best thing I do. But the consulting website is benjshapp.com, b E N J S H A P and all the social stuff is Ben jschapp.

Perfect. Perfect. Well, I appreciate your time on here, Ben. It has been fantastic and I can't wait to get it out, published and hopefully some of my listeners will become some of your listeners. And you know, I can't wait to put some of this very tactical, actionable stuff into practice myself.

I had a blast. It was great spending a minute with you.

Absolutely. Well, thank you very much. And for everybody else who's been listening to the show, make sure you go and subscribe to the Martech podcast. Search for it in the podcast app of your choice and also look at some of the show notes. There'll be a link straight to it. And if you have any questions for me, you can always send me an email to ask Bradaken Wrapped Business. I appreciate all my subscribers and look forward to dropping the next episizzle on you. By the way, Ben, we don't have episodes here at Bacon Wrapped Business. That's what all you other podcasters have. We have episodes.

Episizzle. I get it. I love it.

Ours are a little bit different.

You're definitely a marketer.

Exactly right. Love it. Well, thanks again, Ben and everybody else. I'll see you on the next one.