This man's father was a radiologist and now he can diagnose the martech solutions to solve your pain

I gotta say, goedemiddag, Frans Rijmersma. Have I said that correctly, Frans?

Almost. It's— who cares?

Well, you and Gary Vee share very complicated names, I have to say. But you and Gary Vee also know how to leverage technology to great effect. And you're on the show today with me from Holland because you are a marketing technologist, a futurist, a speaker, And a top 10 martech influencer in Europe. So thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor. Thank you.

And I'm gonna stick to your Christian name because I don't want to insult anybody again with my bad Dutch. Now, SMEs, small business owners, can really be helped by technology. That's my big belief. And you're one of the people that helps to identify which ones they could use and what they can use them for. Do you want to start giving us some insight into what should people be thinking about in their business when it comes to marketing tech?

Yes, I would love to give some technology advice, which we'll start with. Please don't look into a technology first. Try to understand what you're trying to solve. And that's a very common mistake where people say, okay, I like this tool. It's almost feature gadget driven. And I would like to give a very simple tip, a hint, how you start looking for the right tools. If you know what you want, formulate in one sentence, let's say a goal or a definition of success. I want to set up a calendar. I want to set up a LinkedIn campaign. I want to get a better view on who's visiting my website. If you have that, then with that focus, go online and only take 30 minutes, no more. 30 minutes, 3-0. Go into some tools that you find just by Googling. And try the free trial. Even if you have the money to pay for a big solution, I even recommend this to corporate organizations. Please do your homework, educate yourself, understand what comes with the territory. So you go in 30 minutes and then you stop it. Even if you're halfway, you're in a flow, stop it. And then look at your goal and see if you achieved it. If you can't do it in 30 minutes, it's probably or not intuitive or not doing the job for you.

Great. So Frans, sort of 30-minute rule. That's really good because I also get excited by all the features and the functions, and then you're not doing what you set out to do. What are some of the sort of big trends that you see that if entrepreneurs are not getting with it, they might be missing out?

It's basically again, non-technology advice, but that's how you always can look at technology. They have to do something for you. So here we go. We have clients, we need them in a database. CRM. You need to have your clients in one place. And that's where your money comes from. And that's how you can cross and upsell. Full stop. And this is, by the way, I'm just by explaining this, I'm also explaining how the history of martech evolved. So the next step is, hey, we have our clients in place with a CRM. And in this case, you can go for a free tool like Agile CRM or Close.io. Very simple tools, do the job and you can use them. Free trials, sometimes free forever with the basics. And that's what you need. Even HubSpot offers a CRM that is pretty for free. And you can do a lot of stuff as a small business entrepreneur. The next step is going to automation. LinkedIn automation is a possibility, but just the normal email type of automation. So you have your clients in place in CRM. Now you need to have your leads in place. The ones that are not yet client, but want to be client or potential clients. And you need to learn how they talk, smell, read, browse the web. And that's where you need your lead management tool or marketing automation as they call it. I don't like the word marketing automation so much. I think it's confusing. It's like we're automating marketing. Oh, but social publishing is not marketing automation. It's the same confusion I have around the Oktoberfest in Germany. It starts in September. So why do you call it Oktoberfest? But that's my confusion. So lead management is the next one. And again, you can go for HubSpot, also Agile CRM support, that kind of stuff. And there are many great tools out there that offer free trials or freemium models. The third one is better understand what your client is doing across the channel. So let's say this is the third step in your maturity. And this is where for the big corporates, CDPs come in place, customer journey tools. To understand across the entire spectrum of your channels, it's 3, 4, 5 for your small business, you need to understand how do they flow from one to another. So you can capture them and give them the right message. The short ones on mobile, the bigger ones on the web. And this you do with customer journey tools. There is Heap.io, for instance, or Woopra. And they help you for free already get an idea of how this flows. Mixpanel is another one. They have just another offered and launched a new module called Flow. The name says it. And you can go for the big expensive tools, but these offer you the opportunity to understand what's going on. And these are the 3 big trends that I see for corporates, but also on a small scale for everyone. The 4th trend is something that has not been surfacing a lot yet, but imagine now we know who our clients are, we know who our leads are, Now we know how they flow through our communication channels, the 2 of them. Now we need to talk back. So content, how can we create content on a large scale, personalized? And that's where, yeah, for instance, tools like MonkeyLearn come in. It's an AI tool. You can just, for instance, use all the reviews or comments that people leave or the emails that they send to you, put them in a Google Sheet, just use the free version of MonkeyLearn.io. And it just tells you if those comments are positive, negative, or neutral, or what are the 5, 6, 10 topics that they talk about most. And there you go. So this is what I would say is really the core stack of what you would need.

Wow.

Yes.

So this is really starting to sound already though quite complicated, isn't it? What about— excuse me— what about this idea of staying in touch with the customer? Because there's so much technology The danger of automation is it somehow becomes autonomous. How do people stay in touch with the feelings and the pulse and the emotions of their customers along that journey then, Frans?

And that's the 4th wave I was talking about. So how can you make sure that your content is reflecting what the needs of your customers, the tone of voice, even the gender-specificness, because there are tools out there that can can create copy that is gender-specific or neutral. Textmetrics is a tool here in Holland and they do just that.

Yes, there's a company, there's a company in Holland called Unless that generates a specific web page for the specific user. In fact, it's getting that granular, right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

What about the kind of the measurement of the management of it, Frans? Because many of us have put in CRM systems. I've put one in as well. And I'm struggling with all the data now that I need to try and manage and analyze to look at the performance, because that must be the next part of it, the evaluation cycle. How do you help people with that then, Frans?

That is basically what I would call the third wave in terms of CDPs, customer journey, the Woopra and the Heap.io. But it's a very good question. I get it often where people say, I have a lot of data. Now what? I have no clue where to start. And you should start with the client. And the client is normally— so who is your client? What do you know firmographically, demographically about them? B2B, B2C? The next step is then what is their clicking behavior across those channels? And the third one is what words are they using? Because those words, like I just said with MonkeyLearn, you can pull out the keywords And use them in your Google AdWords campaign because that's basically a briefing but generated by the public, by your audience, by your client.

Wow, that's really clever then, isn't it? Do you need a PhD to figure all this stuff out though, Frans? Because most of us are trying to do a day job. Is it possible for the solopreneur to manage this on their own or do you think people really have to have help?

There's a lot you can do yourself and in preparation of this call and podcast, we were talking about democratization of martech. And that's the beauty of it. And I'm sure Scott Brinker also mentioned it, that more and more we are commoditizing technology. So in the old days, we needed a developer and then to brief this developer. By the way, this is where I come from. I was a marketer, started developing myself because I was sick and tired of briefing them. I might as well do it myself.

Right.

But now less and less I code because everything is online in no-code and low-code tools. There are some clever tools like If This Then That. Or Zapier or Blender.io from Belgium. Great tool. And what they do is basically allow you to create workflows to make your workflow literally and your data flow of your customers. So what does it do? For instance, I get a new website visitor from a specific country or background. You can enrich this data. There are tools like LeadInfo and they help you enrich that data. So you understand which company it is based on IP address or the And then you make sure that with Zapier or Blender.io, you say, okay, if it enters my website, submits a form, please send it to my Agile CRM and populate it there and make sure it goes into a specific bucket. So it receives, that person receives an email or the next time they show up. And this is an important one. You can address them on the chat function. So I would recommend on your website to do automated chat function.

Yeah, and I was going to say that's one thing that I noticed a lot of companies not embracing yet in Europe, but in Asia where I was living for the last sort of 13 years, online chat is prevalent, especially in China for online shopping.

Yeah.

You know, can you— what do you think in terms of having a strategy online which is real simple website plus a chat tool only? How light do you think a website Can be for a company, or do you think it needs to be really content-heavy to answer all the questions that someone might have? Because that seems to be a trend as well, Frans, isn't it? That most of us have a website and only the help page or the job page is looked at and the front page, and a lot of it is not needed. Where do you see that going in terms of website apps and so on?

Well, if you put it this way, and it looks like, so if you do it, it looks like we're doing these websites for search engine optimization and marketing. So we can be better found. So this is basically like social media, we're screaming and yelling, hey, we're out there and we have something to offer. It's just to draw attention. So probably the content heaviness has nothing to do, I repeat, nothing to do with informing the audience. It's just attracting it, which is a completely different task. If you look at the AIDA model, like attention, interest, desire, and action, it's a separate thing. So it's probably just to make sure people come to your website. What you really want is in the chat, engage with people. That's when they have a question. And Drift is a brilliant chat program. It's a tool you can use. I think they have also a freemium model. I believe even they use some AI in there. And what they depicted on their website was beautiful. They said you can create a chat flow just like you create an email flow, meaning You send an email or you open up a chat and say, hey, how are you doing? And then you can respond accordingly. So if they don't respond, you can remind them, or you can— if they respond to a certain answer, you can put them in a separate box, give a different answer. I do this on my own website, for instance. I'm not a very big company, so what I do is, how many people do you have in your marketing team? If it's below 10, I have to make sure they follow a training. If it's above 10, I have to make sure I offer them a martech audit. It's as simple as that. And that's how you can on the fly do it. You can always break in into your own chat and say and overrule it, but it doesn't have to mean that you have to be awake 24/7. The tool will do it for you and they can leave a comment as, hey, what's your name? Can I send you a message later on? And this brings this whole interaction back from, let's say a couple of days or sometimes weeks in an email flow. to just a couple of seconds or minutes in a chat flow. So you win a lot of time. And even more importantly, with the chat, you are catching your people right there and then when they're engaged. They have the question now, not in 2 days from now.

And is that what you'd call a chatbot, or is that slightly different to a chatbot?

I would call it a chatbot, and I've seen many different variations. So Intercom, for instance, offers also a chat functionality, and it really helps. What it does, it allows you to set up automated conversations. You could call that a chatbot, but I can also break in. So I can also take over, override the bot when I'm, you know, at my desk and see it happening.

But that's also good, especially for companies, you know, like my own that have got offices in Asia and Europe. And I have clients all over the world and many companies and many individuals like yourself are operating globally with their skill sets. So that kind of 24/7 is really important without trying to stay awake 24/7, right?

Exactly. And the beauty is you catch the people really right there and then, and that I cannot stress that enough. That's very important that I have the same. I don't have, I don't want to answer in 2 days. I want it now, not because I'm impatient, because that's the easy way to, easy thing to say, oh, people are impatient. No, I'm in the flow now. I'm engaged now. I'm looking for the answers. I would like to have my answers now. Because then I can make up my mind and I can decide maybe today. And not because I'm in a hurry or we're in a consumerism society. No, it's just because I'm busy with it. And otherwise I have to chop myself up in pieces with attention. It's a natural thing that we don't like. It's not so much hate. Yeah.

And I think we're also focused on getting a solution for that problem there and then against the timeline, probably. Now, what about the impact of video, Frans? Everyone's now on Zoom. What's your view on the use of video on people's websites, on tools like Bonduro, for example, the embed that you can now do with Vimeo? Do you think it's all worth the effort? Do we all need to get into TV production mode?

It converts really well, and that also has been recognized by Google. So it's again an SEO type of thing as well. So you get rewarded for putting videos online, but I do I think also our, yeah, we're getting more used to the concept now due to COVID and immersive, the rise of Zoom and GoToMeeting to, yeah, to be in a kind of a TV set, talk to each other. I look at the kids with TikTok, they're all over the place. It's common for them. Everybody is a star. So I think that, and it converts better. So it gives an idea of you're a genuine person, you're a real person. Yeah, it's also corresponding with the global village idea, I think. So yes, I can have somebody across the globe who thinks alike, but doesn't have to be a big corporate with the money to cover a worldwide TV commercial.

Yeah, it's got a lot more accessible, hasn't it? What about worldwide? Many companies are operating across languages. Do you see companies that need to operate with, say, Mandarin and Spanish and English and maybe Russian and so on, a mix? Do you see them at a disadvantage? With technology, or is technology kind of creating a level playing field for exporters?

What I see happening, and that's it, so I'm also publisher of the European Supergraphic, so we supply new tools to Scott Brinker and his global version, and very much inspired by him. And yeah, we have a large group of people here in Europe that provide us with technology, and what is really clear to me is that The type of technology from the US is really different from what we have here in Europe. So in Europe, and I'm going into the topic of multilingual, for instance, we in Europe, we are very much involved with content creation, localization, regionalization, because we have multi-strategies. One brand can be top of the bill somewhere and really low-end somewhere else in a different country. So these are things that in America you don't really have. We have different languages, and if you don't speak the language, forget it, you won't sell. So currencies in many cases, well, we do have the euro, but still we have currencies. So metrics, different metrics systems. We're very much in scaling content and creating that in bulk. And that's not an easy task because if you talk about video, for instance, the rendering of videos is taking a lot of processing power. So that's, I think European tools can do a great job. And I'm crafting now the new version for 2021. So it will be launched in the beginning of March, first week of March, probably. And what we see is really a lot of new video platforms coming up. And it has to do with COVID but it also has to do with the fact that, yeah, I think we are here involved with the multi-currency strategy lingual situation.

Inspiring about that as well is that if you're an international-oriented company from Europe, that there are going to be some solutions that are not just one language only. So it really helps you to go global with that. You've mentioned your amazing martech chart. How can people reach out to you to get hold of a copy of that and to learn more from you?

I would just recommend them to reach out to me through LinkedIn, Frans with an unpronounceable surname.

I'll put that in the show notes for your Please do.

And then they can just request the latest version. And we now have the version 2020. We do have also, and this is how we source the different new tools, we will publish also the local version. So the Dutch, the Belgian, the French, etc. And then we source a lot of new tools on top. On the website martechtribe.com, you can also find a submission form.

Frans R., thank you so much for joining me all the way from Holland.

Thank you so much for the conversation. Very inspiring as always. I like the questions because now after this podcast, I will do some more research.

Well, we're all learning together. Thank you so much for sharing. You've been listening to Frans Remersma, who is a marketing technologist, author, and speaker, and a top 10 martech influencer here in Europe. So thank you and have a good day wherever you are. Stay safe and do tune in and subscribe to this podcast. and write to us, jim@e2spr.com, if you've got any questions or any people you'd like us to feature on the show. Thank you so much once again for listening.