Fresh Brewed Tech Live: April 30th Marketing Night

Sam.

All right. Please come join us. Have a seat. We're about to get started. Everyone got quiet too. I love it. It's well. Welcome, welcome. Hello. Welcome to Marketing Night by Fresh Brewed Tech. Fresh Brewed Tech is a tech blog and media company all about the San Diego tech ecosystem. I'm your host for the night with Fresh Brew Tech, Neil Bloom, entrepreneur, community builder and tech investor. And I am thrilled to be showcasing this fantastic panel of marketers. So thank you for being here and thank you to UCSD for hosting us at this beautiful new space. I think we can still call it new. I still smell that new car smell. Right, you guys too. UCSD park and Market is their first downtown experience and it's been great to house here. So thank you guys for having us. Thank you to the KOVE team for filling our cups and our spirits with happy juice. And to Erica, thank you for manning the front booth and getting everyone connected here. So tonight we're gonna talk about a few things around marketing. We're gonna talk about where's the industry headed. We're gonna talk about what makes a marketer, what makes a leader, and how we all got there. And so we hope that you enjoy. We're gonna not do Q and A. And so at the end, everyone's going to go to a table afterwards and we can go and talk to a panelist individually. And if you're looking to meet new people, look down at the color on your name tag and find someone with the opposite color. Playing a little matchmaking in that regard. But without further ado, let's meet the panelists. Each of you want to kind of introduce yourself a little bit of background? Sure.

Hi there.

I'm Sheena Schleicher, founder of Schleicher Marketing. My husband is my co founder and we've been in the SEO and paid search marketing space for the last 15 years. I started out in publishing and copywriting and quickly learned right out of high school that print publishing was evolving. So that's how I landed at SEO. And now we focus on E commerce SEO supporting brands through migrations primarily. And then I was connected with Neil through Startup San Diego as their EIR last year.

Travis Lamprecht, VP of Marketing and Communications of San Diego. Loyal. It's San Diego's men's professional soccer team. I'm from Queens, New York. I moved here in October. The club if a little history, if you don't know. They launched. The club launched in 2020 right before the pandemic, so had their first game inaugural season Sellout, all that good stuff and then no fans. Last year, an abbreviated season and this year is kind of like our first full length season from March could, could go all the way through November. Prior to this, prior to soccer, working in soccer, I've been working in American soccer. Last five years I've worked at ad agencies, experiential marketing agencies and politics. So different, different careers, but kind of all with the same similar threads.

I'm Molly Peters. I'm the senior content manager at Trust and Will, a VC backed startup here in San Diego. We're an online estate planning platform that gives Americans access to more comprehensive, affordable estate planning. So yeah, I've been with the company a little over two years now and I head up the content arm of our marketing department. So we have a brilliant team who's really great at producing engaging content that ranks really well on Google and we're all just passionate about educating people, providing true value for our members and driving organic traffic.

Thank you. And I'll round it out. Michael elliott. I own RocketDog Communications. We're a full service marketing and branding agency based out of Seattle with a second office down here in San Diego. Opened it just in time for the pandemic and I figured if I'm going to get stuck, I might as well get stuck in San Diego versus Seattle. So we had fun talking about that story earlier. But our job as an agency is to help brands tell the best story that they can and to be the choice at the end of the day.

Well, thank you. We got some diverse backgrounds both from AT brands and helping build brands. Let's talk a little about kind of the marketer. When did you first, any of you jump in here? When did you first call yourself a marketer? Like when did you know that not just like career path, but you really said, yeah, I'm a marketer. When you introduce yourself to people, family or friends or industry wise.

I'll take that one. So for me, marketing was a word I didn't use until like seven years into my career. To me, marketing, I had this idea of marketers from like Hollywood being these New York agencies. And it was very exclusive and highly educated and super creative people. And I just didn't see myself as that at all. I was a copywriter, I was a writer. I expressed myself mostly through writing. And then I got into SEO just because the opportunity showed itself working at a publisher. And Bonnier Corp came and bought out the magazine I worked at. And very quickly they, they let a bunch of people go because they were resistant to Going digital. And so many of the like long term editors, they were just like, nope, print is where it will always be. We're not letting go of this. And they let go of their jobs is what happened. So I was like 17 years old right out of high school and I was like, okay, writing career, like maybe I need to shift a little bit. And I stumbled across a writing position at an SEO agency and I just my personality of sort of being type A and like loving lists. And I really loved SEO. But again, I never thought of SEO as marketing even six, seven years into that path. And it wasn't until I really started building, just going deeper with the projects and, and seeing how SEO could inform a lot more than just SEO strategy. So it started to, I was able to use like my research and audience analysis to inform decisions for the creative team, web design, maybe photography that the brand should aim to capture. So many different things. Started to blend marketing and branding with SEO and that's when I started to see myself as a marketer. And beautiful things came from that. So now our agency, we like to call it People First Brand Focused marketing or SEO marketing, because oftentimes people and creative are left out of SEO and that's where we differentiate ourselves.

I would say for me, I would say I'm way better about telling stories than I am a marketer, which at the end of the day is technically what we do, right? So that's the little kid in the living room entertaining people, right? Worlds have changed, right? So, you know, you being a writer and all of a sudden like, oh no, the Internet, right. For me, I've been there that whole time. And so to watch those things change and evolve and you know, I went to school to be an architect and then decided, oh no, I didn't get in that school. I'll be an engineer. Oh no, that's not for me. And then went back for the School of Arts and Sciences and the University of Florida was like, oh my goodness, the school of Engineering is so happy to have you. I'm like, no, no, no, no, that's not what my paperwork says. And so I missed the deadline to get into that school by one day. And I was like, thank you, University of Florida. I'm out. So I kind of became a happenstance designer. And, and at the end of the day, I truly believe that good design makes a difference in the world that we live in today. Everything from apps that we all use to store environments to cars to all that stuff. And so I love being able to tell those stories and to get people to be like, ooh, tell me more.

I think I kind of have a similar story to that in terms of storytelling. I went to sdsu. I was an English major. And the only reason for that was because I was looking for what could I major in where I could take the least amount of math classes. So that was English. At the time, everyone was like, oh, what does someone do with an English degree? Can I become a teacher? I was like, oh, no, I don't really think I'm going to do that. I think I first called myself a marketer because my first internship in college, I was the marketing intern. So I was going around telling my friends and family, yeah, I'm a marketer, I'm a marketer. But I think it actually made a lot of sense going from English to marketing. It's kind of. You know, people don't often assume that, but writing is all we did in college. All of our finals. Everything was. Was writing, writing, writing. So I think I became a pretty good storyteller through that. Wasn't until my last company that I worked for, where we had an SEO team and we hired an SEO agency. And that kind of sparked my interest a little bit, because I kind of refer to creating content through SEO as like a puzzle. You're finding keywords, you're having to figure out where exactly to place them so that your content ranks. And I think at first I was like, well, how do you write for people and for Google? And I think a lot of times Google's even like, don't write for Google. Write for the people. But if you're writing for SEO, you are writing for the people because you're looking at what people are searching for the most, and you're writing content on that. So, yeah, I think storytelling kind of evolved into the more technical SEO side.

Of things for me, kind of piggybacking off both of you. I also majored in English. Didn't know what I wanted to do. That's kind of the major that you choose.

Right?

But the versatility, right. Of communication, writing. Right. Applies to anything that you do. And then that's where the storytelling piece fits in. Obviously. Also grew up loving film. Loving movies. So I. And then my first job in marketing was I worked. I was a brand ambassador for. For products, events, things like that. Before social media influencers, you were just at actual events sampling or doing something like that. But when I had my first job in sports five years ago and seeing my passions of film content, all these things, and now, wait, I can Use content, make video content that's going to actually move the needle, whether it's ticket sales, sponsorship, community, all those things. Seeing all those things come together. Right. And starting somewhere from an English major shows that you don't necessarily need to be a marketing major in college to do it.

Right.

Love that.

Yeah.

My path, owning a marketing agency now as well, or a media company. I have an aerospace engineering background, so you never know where the dots can connect in that regard. So not only at some point in your career, you have a decision path of, you know, specialist, generalist, manager, leader. When did you know that leader was the path? And what is a leader to you in the marketing world within each of your organizations? Now.

I can start. Oh, good. Okay. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't exactly sure that I was a leader. I think at a startup, obviously, you wear a lot of hats. You have to balance being a independent contributor and a manager. But I think, you know, at Trust and Will, they're very good about talking about your growth plan, kind of what you're interested in. And I realized that I was interested in kind of helping people find what they were interested in and seeing what they were good at and then helping them grow in that arena. My first hire was our SEO specialist. So I had that SEO background, and I was able to kind of use my experience and identify where I was lacking and where this person had a lot of great achievements and kind of push her through the path to where she is now. So I think it's just kind of fun. I was a mentor for SDSU girls who were basically. They got extra credit if they found a mentor. And so I was all excited to mentor them. They're like, I'm just here for the extra credit. But eventually I think they started getting excited to come talk to me, and I was getting excited to come talk to them. So I think you can just kind of feel if you are good at identifying people's strengths and helping them pursue those strengths.

Yeah, for me, it's a little different, but a little bit of the same as well, in that one of the core tenets of who I am as a person is I love seeing the people around me succeed with me, helping them get to that point, whatever that is. Right. That brings me personal joy. And people are like, why does that make you so happy? I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, look, somebody is doing something they love doing, and if I was able to help them with that, that's awesome. As a designer, your normal path is junior designer, designer, art director, and then creative director, and then maybe like account creative director. And so like a lot of professions, you kind of work yourself out of doing the thing you love to do, and you just start managing people. That's not really for everybody. I'm actually really good with people and I'm really good with clients. And so it was a natural thing for me when I became a happenstance entrepreneur, right? I went from being a creative director at a large web company, the biggest web company in Seattle at the time, to being unemployed slash, business owner. Elevator ride down, right? And so it was a little bit of a shakeup, but it was fun at the end of the day and me being able to sit in a room and hear a customer tell me, this is what I want, and then rattle off for like nine hours. And me go, okay, okay, so here's the one sentence. And they go, how did you do that? And I'm like, it's all about good listening and distilling down to understanding what it takes for other people to say yes. And sometimes you gotta build consensus around that, and sometimes you just figure it out with a client. And so whether you realize it or not, you are a leader in that regard. And so sometimes you're great at it, sometimes you're not, but you can always work at being better at something like that. So. Thanks, Neil.

I might take this question a little a different direction, but you know, for me, starting out, I wasn't the most confident person. I came from a family that, I mean, I grew up in poverty and just didn't have a lot of support from family and very tumultuous situation, barely made it through financial aid to go to a community college. And so just going into the work field, I didn't have a ton of confidence, but I just kept working and studying and contributing and building relationships with the people around me and especially clients while I was agency side. And then several years into it, I mean, even feeling like I should have felt very accomplished at this point in my career, but I still didn't. That imposter syndrome just really took over. And I think part of it was I was one of the few female women SEOs at the time that was attending these conferences and contributing across places like the Moz Blog. There just wasn't very many women contributing back then. And not only was I a woman, but I was like 18, so super young and didn't really know what I was talking about. But then over the years, those contributions, even small individually, they added up and it started to get attention from people who had influence in the space. And so one thing that gave me incredible confidence and really, I think in some ways was the catalyst for me to launch my own business was getting this Google alert that my name showed up on a list of the top 20 SEOs in the world. And it was a list created by Rand Fishkin, who's the founder of moz. And I literally screamed when I saw that my husband was asleep on the couch and I was up just reading about SEO, as I did on all the time. And I saw that and I was just like, my mind was blown. And it gave me so much confidence. So I think at that point, like, I just needed that push to see myself as a leader. And I hope for the leaders in this room that they hear that story as encouragement to encourage other people. Because, like, you might be that Rand to someone else who needs that, that spotlight on them, that encouragement that can really launch them into, like, what they are meant to do.

As someone who knows Rand, he's a great guy. Congrats on making that list. Right. He's not going to put anybody in a list that he doesn't believe.

Yeah. I could just close with. For me, it's been a little different. Like, I haven't been in so many different careers and sectors where I didn't, like, work my way up necessarily. But I've always, since I was a little kid, been kind of like, addicted to challenges. And then initiative. Right. I've always had that. So I always say, like, initiative and some talent, but initiative is going to take you to the next step no matter what. So, like, just a quick example. Politics. I worked in the New York City Council. I had no zero politics experience, didn't know the ecosystem, anything, literally. It was. It was when House of Cards had just come out, I was watching House of Guards, and I was like, I feel like I could do that. I feel like I could be in that world. So literally went on Craigslist. That's back then Craigslist. So you can get jobs in Craigslist. There was a director communications job for a city council member in Brooklyn. I applied immediately. I'm leading a team. Took a hit on salary, but that was fine. But believed in myself, right. And knew that I would have the initiative at the job to quickly excel, Became chief of staff, use that to parlay into soccer and so forth. But initiative, I tell my staff now, if you want to move up, you got to show me initiative. And that'll take you to the next level.

I love that.

Love that series.

Yeah, let's talk about the, the. The tension, but also love flow. That is sales and marketing. Right. At the end of the day, marketing's job is to help grow revenue. But also at the end of the day, it's usually sales job to close the revenue. What's the relationship like now and in your past and kind of going forward? Have things changed in any new environment around that?

As someone who wears both of those hats. Yeah. From time to time. And having to work directly with both of those groups inside of companies, it's interesting, right? It's a little bit of like dog eat dog space, like finger pointing. Oh, we don't. We're not closing deals because of that. Right. And well, you're not. We give you the stuff. The answer is it's really the most effective thing is a team environment. Right. As a marketer, my job is to help create a brand that people want to be associated with. As a salesperson, in theory, I've made your job easier to close that deal or I've given you tools to go tell somebody about our product. And so you can be an awesome salesperson. If you got crappy looking materials, chances are probably no. Right. But not always the case. But in my opinion, you'll always have that balance because sales is about, I need closing today. Right? And so as an art director at an agency working with the salespeople, they would show you their presentation. But like, here's a presentation or here's my one sheet I made up on my own. I'd be like, stop right there. Right? Like, you can't walk out the door with that. That's some crappy looking stuff. But for them, it's about speed. And a lot of designers and marketers are about time. And so they will polish and polish and polish that stone even though it's good enough, right? And marketers and salespeople like, I don't need a diamond. I need something that's shiny. That's what I need. Designers are like, I want to give you a diamond. And so part of my experience or one of the things I think is good about my part in that role is I understand what good enough means, but also what building a great brand does for sales. And so, you know, I've had designers that work for me that want to do that diamond like for 12 hours working on that one thing. And I'm like, you got two hours. And they're like, what? I'm like, that's the deal. And so as a business owner, I have to wear both of those hats and understand It. But I think, to be honest, I think it's good for both of those groups to really understand that they're both fighting for the same thing because. And they're not fighting against one another. And so back to the leadership comment earlier. I think that's where leadership plays a big role in those kind of environments, because there will always be tension of speed versus quality. That good, fast and cheap. Which one do you want? Choose two salespeople. Like, I want it good, I want it fast, and I want it cheap. Designers are like, no.

I think I've kind of seen both ends of the spectrum. It's interesting. I've never really thought about this question, but I worked at a company before where the sales team and the marketing team, like, were basically arch nemesis against each other. There's a lot of finger pointing, oh, wait, we have this, you know, asset and you didn't tell us, blah, blah, blah. And we were very, very disconnected, which was fine. We were kind of over here doing our own thing. They were doing their own thing over there. But it didn't lead to, you know, the success that it could have been. Whereas now I think it's really important for a marketing team to really be connected to the sales team because they're on the front lines, they're talking to people, and those your clients are telling them, why don't you have this? We want to see more of this. Our. Our sales team is more B2B focused, but they're out there telling us they're. They're basically giving us the answers, we need more of this or we need more of that. And then it's marketing who can help support that and create. Create that for the sales team. So I think building that relationship between the two teams can be, obviously, should be. It should be a good place to work and everybody should have be, you know, team players. But I think sales and marketing, specifically, because sales team is on the front lines getting all that information that then marketing can, you know, do their expertise to produce.

Yeah. So in sports, right, like, sales and marketing are kind of, you know, work. We're working very closely together. I feel like marketing, though, always gets, you know, we always get the bad rap of we like to just spend the money, we have the crazy ideas. Right. Nothing's track, you know, nothing's trackable and all that stuff. But I think in sports, it's unique, right. Where we literally, our organization really can't do anything without us giving them the tools to communicate the messages they're trying to communicate, whether it's Tickets, community sponsorship, the actual team, our owner, the coach. Right. So when, you know the work that we're doing, we actually, I think more than other fields, maybe in sports, you do kind of see that real time success. Product marketing for sure too. Right. But it's fulfilling to see it that way. And I think actually more than most, there's more of a healthy relationship with team ticketing and marketing, especially in sports.

That makes sense. Let's talk a little bit about kind of where marketing's headed because we've talked a lot about storytelling, talked a lot about not as much tactical ways that we're storytelling and getting in front of the customer. But obviously things are changing and the mode of storytelling is changing from video and audio having a permanent presence to short form versions of the same on TikTok and Reels and stuff like that. Where is SEO playing a part of that? So maybe kick it to you first and then, you know, how is the art of storytelling evolving with new marketing tools today?

Sure.

Yeah. So one of the things I always share with clients is that even if Google didn't exist, we would use the tools that we have available to us for keyword research and understanding our audience. We would use them, it would inform our branding, our content strategy, our marketing as a whole, regardless of search engines. And so, you know, many brands are trying to take, take back their dependency on Google as they should, especially on paid search. And so what we do is work with a lot of brands to help them build their brand, build their, figure out what their story is. So over the years I've become a little bit less of an SEO, more of a business strategists because we work with these brands for multiple years, usually like three to six years now, they just keep renewing, which is great for us, but you know, we just get deeper and deeper into their business and we start uncovering stories that they're not telling to the world. And so, and once we've already built out their website to, you know, answer all the questions that people have about this product or this service, and we, we've done all the storytelling that we possibly can about this brand, then we start saying, okay, well what else is there? What are the stories that we can showcase the people at your brand? And I think that we work with a lot of lifestyle brands and so our audience are consumers that tend to care about the mission and the values of the brands. And we can tell that by the interaction, different analytics that we can see on the website, how people are interacting with it, what, what content's resonating with them. So even though this is like I'm an SEO and I have these tools available to me to, you know, help inform their content strategy, I think you know SEO sort of table stakes these days. I think if you're launching a brand and you're not thinking about SEO, then you're sort of already behind. Most developers will say they know SEO, but you really should still have at least an SEO like technical audit if you're launching a website to get everything where it needs to be. But then as far as content strategy, I mean, from a content strategist over here, you were just sharing about how it's part of your process now. So your copywriters should all understand how to do keyword research and how to analyze the SERPs, the search engine results pages, how to scrape reviews from Amazon and other products, other competitor websites to get that information and to inform your content strategy. So at least in the SEO space, I think it's come from a place of just like being super reactive to what Google's doing and every little adjustment that they make. I frankly don't follow algorithm adjustments and I haven't changed what I've been doing for like 15 years. I'm doing the same tactics we've been doing for all those years. I've never done link building. We, but we also do work with brands who earn their press, they earn their media, they earn those links. And so we're able to come alongside and really focus more on strategy and positioning and site architecture. And so yeah, in the SEO space, I think especially startups, you know, who think that they need like this big SEO strategy right away, sometimes you don't, sometimes you really need to focus on your brand story and getting that out there first.

Agreed. As a brand story guy, I mean, to your point, I think that changes aren't changes, right? It's always something, right? Something new. The short form content of today, the TikToks of the world, right? Like the democratization of people and brands has been a big shift since the pandemic, right? This idea that I could just fire up my phone and just become TikTok famous and next thing you know, I don't have to work at my job because I'm making a million dollars, you know, doing a teddy bear, right, that has finger puppets on the inside of it. But to your point, it's. There was a point in time where you could be good at one thing and your brand would be successful. That's really not the case. Right. So you talked about your Lifestyle brands like SEO, rock solid, but they're also getting other press, right. They probably also got a great website. Right? So there's. And that's why we built RocketDog the way we built it. Because it really for a brand to get the fullest value, you need to be able to touch all those things and you might be successful if you are good at one of them, but you won't be successful for long. Right? Because things constantly change.

Just have to say, I really love that you said you don't follow algorithm updates. I think that I couldn't agree with you more. I'm glad my boss isn't here to hear me say that right now. But I think I always say like if you're producing high quality content, that that is what your audience wants. It doesn't matter what the Google. Google's just trying to scare us all the time, I think. And if you're producing the right stuff, then it's going to continue to succeed. We have shifted our strategy a little bit so we still produce a lot of SEO focused content to gain the traffic and hit on those super high volume keywords. But we have so many stories from our members that we're really trying to focus a lot on user generated content. So estate planning is like inherently you're making super tough decisions. It can be really emotional for people. Oftentimes it, you know, a big trigger for people to create their estate plans is because they lost a loved one. So they're in a very emotional place. And our customer support team just gets tons of stories of like, oh my God, you helped me so much. We had a member like sending a photo of their baby in the hospital after it was born, after they set up guardianship through us. So we're like internally sharing all these stories. We love to hear all these stories, but how can we get that out to our audience? Because those aren't going to rank on their own. They're not focused on keywords, they're focused on this story about our members. So what we're trying to do is take that content that's driving a lot of traffic for us and within that content, pointing people to those member stories because that's what really pulls on the heartstrings of people.

I actually want to respond to that because so much of the best performing content has zero search volume. Search volumes are the average monthly searches over the last 12 months. But the ones that get engagement are the ones that trigger emotions. But those are indirect signals that help your high volume search queries rank better because as you have all that engagement with this like emotional story or some, you know, things that go viral, those are all signals to Google that hey, this brand, this domain, really, they don't really, you know, they're starting to care more about brands, but really it's about they're looking at the domain, your website and they're seeing all this engagement, they're seeing people flood to that website, they're seeing people Google your brand name. And so those are all indicators to them that, okay, this should rank higher for queries, maybe new and upcoming ones surrounding that topic and then also the other ones that you're going after, right? And so having that balance of like going after your SEO pillar type, you know, KPIs and balancing it with just like feel good stuff or things that maybe the brand wants to share and we'll see how it performs, that's something we love to see. And as an SEO, you don't know what those things are going to be unless you really dig into the company and get to know the people. So that's what we try to do.

And as a brand guy, that's social proof, right? The idea that you read a testimonial or you see a video or whatever instantly gets me to trust you exponentially, right? To be like, alright, I'll give him my money, right? I don't know if it's going to be great, but Sarah says it is. And if Sarah seems like a good person, I think I'll give it a try.

Just kind of speaking to you overall, like, you know, not following algorithms or paying attention to that constantly. I would recommend that overall, like in all marketing, I don't always follow the rules. Like I'm not sending an email at this time because everybody tells me to send an email at this time. Not tweeting something at this time because everybody says that's when most people are engaging. It really is about your audience, right? But it's also what moves the needle I think for us. Video content, super important sports video content's becoming kind of homogenous, right? So we do have to create that emotive connection no matter how we're delivering it. But there we've seen things of how maybe even a video is formatted, right? If it's a close up or something like that, that and whatever feed it's on can get more engagement, right? So even getting that granular of like how it's actually being delivered. But overall, I would say of course there are rules that we should listen to, but overall you gotta see what.

Your audience wants piggyback off that. A bit of being a marketer is a bit being a scientist where you, you know, it's subjective, so it's your own audience, but it's a B test or at least know how to have a control and an experiment where you're turning a dial. How much is built? Like, you actually design those experiments versus, oh, we learned something last week. Let's try something different this week. Like how much of that is built into each of your kind of marketing hat and stack?

I would say it depends on the client. Right. Does the client have the budget and do they have the patience to do that? Right. And how are you pitching that engagement? Right. If you're just building a website, great. Build a website. But if their response is like, where's all the traffic? Well, if you didn't talk about a campaign to drive traffic and there's no budget to drive traffic, and you're just hoping that some magic search engine says these guys are the best, probably not going to work. But we try to. Anytime we're doing the digital ad campaigns and things like that, we try to come out of the gate with A and B. Right. A, B and C. And, you know, I love that, the technology, for instance, and Facebook can tell me how far in a video someone has watched before they leave. And if they do, then great, give them this ad. If they've watched 20 more seconds, send them this ad. Right. And at the end of the day, I use that to get you to yes, faster, because very few people are going to get to yes on the first question. Right.

I definitely agree that it depends on the client. You know, as a fellow agency owner, some have these robust budgets and vendor partnerships that do AB testing. And it's great. And, you know, we can learn some things with these very expensive tools. But I find that for most of our clients, there's a ton of data available that's free that they're not utilizing. And so I, I usually say, hey, before you go spend thousands on this cool, a B test tool, let's look at what we can do just by getting, you know, rolling our sleeves up and digging into the data. You know, hotjar is really great for seeing how people interact with your website. There's a lot of free tools. There's Google Analytics. Just looking at the numbers, not even the visuals can tell you so much about, you know, how people are, what, what people care about, how they're engaging with it and how your efforts are performing. But then also we, you know, while I'm on the organic search side, we also have paid search efforts and that's a great way to do some testing in a quick manner. So you know, new messaging that you want to push, that you're considering pushing and seeing if it affects click through rates on organic search. Let's test it out in paid search and you can find out within a couple of weeks if that's going to work well or not. But by and large like for me it's, it's not super scientific at least especially starting, you know, I talked about how I wasn't really like I didn't consider myself a marketer but I just kept focusing on like, well this is what I would do if it was my company, you know, and like caring enough about it, believing in the product, like caring about the people and the brand. But with that can became a big reason why I left the agency world was because I didn't want to market for brands and businesses that I didn't care about because I couldn't put my heart into it and really get to know the ins and outs of it. I mean frankly, when I worked agency side, the majority of my peers and even myself never once had hands on experience with the product or the experience that or anything from the brand that we were selling. And so that was a big shift for me when I had a winery client and I was like, I'm going to Napa and my agency, that was a hard decision. Super hard. Yeah, my. But my agency actually didn't support it. They were like, well, we're not gonna pay for it. This isn't, this isn't part of our process. No one else is going. But if, you know, we'll be gracious and we won't charge you a PTO day to go up and visit your client. And it became the most important thing of my career I think because I built a relationship that showed to what ended up being a pretty high profile like client, that I cared. And I think that went beyond everything. And when you care about your work and your, you know, the project that you're on, then good ideas come from it. Like you don't have to prove everything because they know you care and you know their audience, you know their brand and product and what you're. They trust you is really what it comes down to.

It's like sports team, right? We're putting out content on the daily constant video, video content. So ours is definitely less scientific and more reactive and like what's working and not but you know, sports on the field, right. Is Becoming more analytical. Right. And we're losing some of the intuitive feelings of just the game that we're playing. Right. I feel the same way about marketing. You got to trust your intuition a little bit. It's a lot more feel than just numbers and tracking and what's going on here.

All right, let's do a few rapid fires. Anyone have a favorite recent tech tool, marketing or otherwise, that they are falling in love with using?

A lot I don't know about fall in love with, but you'll probably answerthepublic.com is a great one. Right. It's a website that you just type in a topic that might be relevant to your brand and you can see the top results that people are asking in a bucket of categories. I think it's 10 categories or something like that. So if you want to get into the content writing game and kind of rose rise through the ranks, it's a quick, easy way to see what people are searching for and then you could answer that side of the space.

I love ahrefs. I'm sure you're familiar with that. That's my favorite SEO tool. I also think this is might be controversial, but I think not even a tool. But just I think we've kind of gone away from SEO content wise. Just like analyzing the actual SERP itself, it can tell you a lot than you know, more sometimes than what a tool will tell you. A tool is just pulling that stuff. It's obviously a little more manual to do it that way. But to your point, if you care enough to do it and you really believe in whatever you're working on, you can find a lot by just digging through what's. What's Google saying? Why is Google pulling these articles as the top search results? Or people also ask questions? What else are people asking? We can talk about that. So I think if you don't have any budget for any tool, just look at Google, it tells you a lot.

Blinkfire, it's a social media tool that essentially you could see what are your most engaged posts. It tells you kind of why. For us, sponsored content is big, right? So whether that's on our jersey or whatever it is, blinkfire will track, basically you enter categories. So Rocket League's our front of kids sponsor. We have Rady, children's, et cetera. You can plug all these in. Every photo across your social media will be tracked by the sponsored name. So you can deliver the reports literally in like five seconds of you know, how well this campaign has gone in, how many eyeballs were on the front of the jersey, et cetera.

So I'll list a few for you all. But first off, I just want to comment. Like, it's crazy that this is a marketing panel, but there's so much talk about SEO. And, like, I didn't even think SEO was marketing when I started out, but here we are, like 15 years later. But, like, going back to my earlier comment, we would use SEO in these tools, like, the mind, the logic of SEO, even if Google didn't exist, because. Right. These are giving you insights into our audience's brains. Like, what are they thinking? What questions do they have about our product that they're. That we don't know, maybe. So some of the tools that I love, Semrush or Semrush, whatever you want to call it, it's a paid tool. It's like 99 bucks a month. But they also have like a freemium version. You can do like 10 searches a month, and it's awesome. Especially their keyword magic tool. You can, like, sort by question, and it tells you all the questions people are asking about any topic. So I love that one. Also, I'm still amazed by how many websites I come across that don't have Google Search Console and Google Analytics installed. They're free. They tell you so much information. It's just Google's way of helping you make sure your website is crawlable and, you know, SEO friendly. Knowing what to do with it, like, takes some practice, but just get it up. So when you do bring in the right resources, at least they have that historical data. Your SEO should not be the person that comes in and says, hey, let's get GSC set up. Like, you should already have that in place. And then the last thing I guess I'll say is I feel like most of my success has just been from reverse engineering my clients, competitors, or who they aspire to be, whether it's a direct or indirect competitor, and just reverse engineering the heck out of not just their SEO strategy, but even their product and their naming conventions and how their websites, how their web page is laid out. You mentioned the SERP analysis and. Absolutely analyzing what is Google showing in the search results. Sometimes they bold it. Sometimes they're showing more or less information for each listing. You can start to understand, okay, what is it that Google likes? What will help, you know, if we do something similar with maybe schema markup that will help us achieve that or better search visibility and then drilling into those pages and seeing, okay, what content do they have on those pages? That's helping them perform so well. So reverse engineering is like my best.

I'll round out just with a design thing real quick. I see a lot of portfolios and I see a lot of people coming in and I talk to a lot of clients about I've got this product but I don't have it, I don't have it bottled yet, I don't have the thing. The reality is there are tons of Photoshop mock up templates out there, right? Yellow Book I think is one of the websites. IStock has a ton of them on there and there's a ton of them that are free. But the idea of wrapping your label around a bottle or putting a billboard up, like we use that all the time to showcase work. And so if a designer comes to me is like, here's my portfolio and I'm like in yours. Doesn't look like it lives in the real world, it's just too easy to do that today. And so I just, when I see that designer I'm like, either A, you don't know about those tools so your teachers and helpers should be more updated on that, or B, you just didn't take the time to do a quick search on the Internet for like Photoshop mock up billboard, right? And there you go. And then the other one is I'm not a big Chrome user, but Chrome as a browser has the ability to throw a bunch of plug ins in it that you can go across another Shopify website and it tells you every plugin that they're using on that site. Right? So like what email capture thing? Klaviyo like what follow up are they using here? Right. And so to reverse engineer the idea of like find somebody that's doing your thing and if they're on Shopify, great. Load in one of those plugins. It'll tell you exactly what tools they're.

Using to win and to piggyback that as a non creative person, you're right. There's so many free tools available to like become a quasi designer. So like these days I'm actually in the past I would say okay, you need to create these pages with this content strategy and this copy and these keywords and these internal links, et cetera. And it would get nowhere because like it's not enough direction. So then I'd move into like let's do some like lo fi low fidelity wireframes with like gray boxes and mock it up. And it got maybe a little more progress, but still not what I wanted. And so now as an SEO, I'm saying, give me access to your creative assets. I can piece it together. I may not. You know, very few people are true creators where they're creating a thin air, but all of us, I think can piece things together to look really pretty darn good. And like now there's Canva, which is an amazing resource for like easy design work. So that's something that I think has set us apart is being able to make the SEO informed recommendations with a mock up based off of their creative. And I'm not a designer, so if I can do it, you can too.

Welcome to the team.

I've got a very recent Chrome plugin that I just installed. Non marketing related because I'm a serial tab open person. Tab suspender will suspend all tabs that you're not using within the last 30 minutes and does not use your memory. So that saved me a ton because I've been. My computer's lagging and it's six months old. All right, anyway, last question. Because I run the tacos and tech podcast which by the way, this interview will be on publish within the next week or two. We got to know favorite taco spot. Who wants to go first?

O side resident here and Craft coast. You have to go for Baja style street tacos and craft beer.

This is probably going to be cliche. I've been here since October. Tacos El Gordo.

I gotta say Oscars, which I think there's actually one downtown. But the PB location has the best tacos. And really it's not even the taco. It's the green light green sauce that you just have to put on on.

The taco taco and their ceviche.

Yes.

So good.

I don't know that I have one right. Which is. I would. I will say this, the one, the one closest to me, I find taco. I find the taco story in San Diego very entertaining because I love tacos, I love burritos. And everybody's like, what's your. But like I've asked that question and everybody's like, here's my one of 10,000 answers. And I'm like, most of the answer is like walk down the street. There's like seven. Seven, right? So by my place over in Mission Hills, Barrio Star is a restaurant nearby, super tasty. The park's right there, right? It's always a good go.

There's the right taco spot for the right hour of the day, that's for sure. There's no wrong answers here. Well, let's give a hand to our panel, please.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, this was great. Speaking of tacos, there's still taco and fajitas available, so please, if you have some food. And then we're going to break out into tabletop discussions. So panelists, please go find your table, grab a drink as well, everyone. And thanks so much for coming again. Freshbroodtech.com is our blog and newsletter where we put out a weekly newsletter, not just showcasing our events, but everyone else's events that are happening, including evo nexuses. Anyone who's raised funds recently, tech jobs. So if you aren't subscribed, check out freshprotect.com and our podcast twice a week, Tacos in Tech Podcast, where we interview technology builders and then on Fridays we read the tech news and make sure you're informed. So thanks again for coming out. Our next event is Dev and Data Night, late September. And in October we're in a trial sales night, bringing together kind of the revenue community. So hope to see you or your employees or your team at a future event. So thanks again. Appreciate it.

Thanks guys.

Thank you.

Thank you guys.

Great job.