Latest / Content, Briefly / Loop & Tie: Bridget Poetker's evolution from content → growth

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Loop & Tie: Bridget Poetker's evolution from content → growth · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Being true to yourself is the best way to grow a company because you have a vision of, you know, where you are now. [instrumental music] Hey, and thanks for checking out another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:14
  Today, we're talking to Bridget Putker. She's the director of growth at a company called Loopin'tie.
• 0:18
  Loopin'tie is a gifting platform, so imagine you run a small business and you wanna send a welcome gift to a new employee, that kind of thing, all the way up to a corporate gifting platform that giant company might use to send gifts to customers and employees and et cetera.
• 0:33
  There's actually really interesting marketplace dynamics going on here as well as enterprise SaaS, so there's really a lot to unpack there. Really good stuff.
• 0:41
  We talked quite a bit about values-based marketing, which I thought was a very interesting discussion. I really liked what she had to say about that.
• 0:47
  We talked also about campaign-driven marketing rather than channel-driven marketing.
• 0:52
  She has a background in content but now runs all growth, so it has forced her to think quite differently about how to grow the business overall, as opposed to just focusing on one channel being content.
• 1:02
  So anyways, lots of good stuff there. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Teal.
• 1:11
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• 2:04
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly. We've got Bridget Putker today, director of growth at a company called Loopin'tie.
• 2:13
  I have a lot of questions about Loopin'tie, but first, Bridget, would you mind introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are and some of the work you've been up to over the past few years. Yeah.
• 2:21
  I'm Bridget Putker. I am the content girl. I have found myself in growth now, which is awesome that growth is being opened up to content roles. I feel like it's definitely more usually a demand gen kind of focused role.
• 2:34
  Been in tech and content for five to six years. Before that, I worked as a content and copywriter at an ad agency, so I really try to pull that background forward in how we're thinking about B2B tech. Cool. Yeah.
• 2:47
  Most notably was at G2 when we scaled up that program in 2019, which feels like a lifetime ago. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, pre-COVID, that's like decades ago, basically. [laughs] How about Loopin'tie?
• 2:59
  Tell us a little about the company, the product, who are the customers. Just kinda like give us a sense of that business. Yeah. So Loopin'tie is a gifting platform.
• 3:09
  We play in the same spaces as the, you know, bigger Sendoso companies. Postal, I was previously at Postal before coming over to Loopin'tie.
• 3:16
  So I've been in the gifting space and content brand growth for about two years now. It's super interesting market. I feel like it is one of those, like, nice to have products, but it does have value, right?
• 3:28
  Like, it's definitely not a need to have in the tech stack, but I think that makes the marketing more fun because the customers know that they're, like, super excited to use the product, and it's not, like, a necessity.
• 3:40
  Our customers are typically smaller businesses. The thing that makes Loopin'tie different than the other marketplaces is all of our vendors are small businesses, mostly women-owned, underrepresented founders.
• 3:54
  We don't really wanna give our money to Amazon and some of these larger- Sure... kind of corporations. We, we really believe in sustainability, not from just a environmental standpoint, but economical as well.
• 4:06
  Like, how do we help support other small businesses? Loop team has been around for about 10 years and have been around 40 employees for that length of time.
• 4:15
  So not a huge scale-up process, but just found a way to build a product that works for our customers and found a way to grow programs from there. That's awesome.
• 4:26
  And so it is a marketplace, meaning I wanna send something to our customers at the end of the year.
• 4:34
  I would go in and browse listings that have been created by vendors that you've brought in so that there's a diversity of selection and things like that, which means that Loopin'tie is always trying to satisfy both sides of that marketplace.
• 4:45
  It's not just bringing customers. There's, you know, probably, I would imagine, a program to, like, bring new vendors in, test things out- Yeah... that kind of thing. Yeah.
• 4:53
  So the other thing that's interesting about Loop is that it's all choice-based gifting, so you send collections instead of specific gifts, whether that's based on, like, price point or theme, like new hire.
• 5:05
  We have new hire collections, but there's a, a list of, you know, 50 to 100 products in there so that the person that's receiving the gift can pick something that's useful to them that they really want.
• 5:16
  Basically, they give them a shopping experience instead of sending them just, like, here's a T-shirt or those kinds of things.
• 5:22
  We think and we hope that that helps cut down all the corporate gifts that end up in landfills, like, you know, and- Coffee mugs with the logo on it kind of thing. Totally. Yeah. Yeah.
• 5:32
  Like, it's great, but if I could pick a really nice coffee mug instead that I-- would actually, you know, looks good in my apartment and I'm excited to use, like, that's a different kind of connection to the product and to the company that sent it to you.
• 5:46
  Yeah. I love that. But yeah. We really have a huge, huge relationship with all of our vendors. I think that us being women-owned and founded as well, like, that's where we seek out a lot of other women-founded companies.
• 6:00
  We have a lot of support from-Our vendors and our marketing and our growth but we have a whole team for that.
• 6:06
  Buying and merchandising team, typically how like a subscription box company would have a buying and merchandising team. That's kind of how our teams function, too. They go out, they find the trending products.
• 6:17
  It's not just like, "Yes, we'll take in what our customers want to see on the marketplace," of course, but our team always tries to be ahead as well of, like, you know, on the TikTok trends, of what's trending on TikTok, probably we wanna get in our marketplace.
• 6:31
  So...
• 6:31
  And the other good thing about that is, like, we feel like we're amplifying brands that maybe people haven't heard about before, so it's a really great ecosystem, and it's so rewarding because of the way that it's set up.
• 6:43
  That's so interesting. You know, one of the things I hope to bring to each episode of this podcast is something we haven't heard before. Mm-hmm. So already, already this fits the bill. Amazing. So interesting. Love that.
• 6:54
  How does the sustainability ethos, you know, both on the environmental side but also on the merchandising side, affect your growth strategy? Like, how much is that messaging make it into your marketing stuff?
• 7:05
  Yeah, a lot. So when I started at Loop, my background is very heavy in, like, traditional content and SEO. You know, what are we ranking for? Can people find us organically in the way that we want them to?
• 7:18
  I think that the last thing people think about with corporate gifting is sustainability, so that was a huge, like, green space for us to be, like, educating the market on 40% of corporate gifts ends up in landfills.
• 7:30
  Like, even just that as a headline, and then- Yeah, that's stunning... the step ahead of, like, how we are, you know, solving...
• 7:36
  Especially when corporate budgets, I think it's over 3 billion is the TAM on corporate gifting now. Wow. Like, that much money is going... You're literally lighting it on fire.
• 7:47
  You're throwing it in the trash can- [laughs]... which is crazy. As far as it affecting our growth strategy, like I said, when I started, we went through a rebrand almost right away. That's what we did at Postal as well.
• 7:58
  It's what I did at Big T- It seems to follow me. It seems to be a project that I like to take on. Yeah, yeah. I mean- But that's amazing... are you even marketing if you're not rebranding? Yeah [laughs] Right. Yeah.
• 8:07
  But that we had that discussion for a while of, like, positioning and messaging, like, do we wanna come off as the sustainable corporate gifting company, or are there other lanes that we want to run in?
• 8:18
  And we just kept coming back to sustainability really being, like, a values-based growth approach.
• 8:25
  Like, we are focused on companies that think the same way that we do, and we are bullish on the idea that growth doesn't have to be traditional demand gen.
• 8:36
  And so that's where we really focused on organic and word of mouth and community, kind of jumping off of that sustainability messaging of just, like, if this is the way that we want the value props to go, then these are the tactics and growth programs within that that make the most sense, you know?
• 8:53
  Right. Right. Really cool. I wanna ask you more about content strategy, but as we dive into that, I am curious how the business model also affects the way that you go about growth.
• 9:06
  And what I mean by that is, you know, most of the folks we talk to on this podcast, they're B2B SaaS. It's all, it's all MRR. That's what they're thinking about.
• 9:14
  Assuming the revenue here is not recurring, does that affect the way that you run growth? I mean, like, the most obvious thing is, like, bringing in... You acquire a new customer. You know? Yep.
• 9:24
  Now you want to, every time they hire a new employee, have them, you know, gifting or- Yeah... you know, end of year or promotions or other milestones, things like that. Yeah.
• 9:35
  The good and the bad part of it is that we have multiple revenue streams, right? So we're buying the products from the vendors directly. We have a freemium model of PLG kind of motion of get these free users in here.
• 9:52
  Once they hit 100 gifts, in the free shipping, you know, on the next tier, so we actually do have ARR.
• 9:58
  We do have larger clients that we partner with strategically, Salesforce is one of them, to do a lot more of their logistics side of their swag programs or their gifting programs, so- Oh, interesting.
• 10:11
  We have a native Salesforce integration. Actually, let me back up. Loopin'tie has been around, like I said, for 10 years, but it was really just a gifting service for that long.
• 10:20
  I'm gonna get the dates wrong, but at some point, CEO Sarah Rodell won Dreamforce's Pitch Fest, and so that was how they started really building a platform and a software solution to plug into Salesforce, essentially.
• 10:35
  That's cool. So it's a legitimate tech company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's cool.
• 10:40
  But it's crazy that the growth avenues for the company have shifted so much just based on, okay, now it's a, it's not a service-based business now.
• 10:49
  Even with the PLG motion, with that rebrand, we also did a pricing and packaging refresh, and we, we are way lower than every other gifting platform in the market, even just having a freemium model.
• 11:01
  Like, it's okay if you come in and gift one time. Like, the other growth loop that we have that we see significant success in is when people get a gift, they're very likely to sign up for Loopin'tie. Oh, interesting.
• 11:18
  So closing that growth loop was really important for us, too. And even in our, like, attribution on the front end, just self-reported, there's so many that say, like, "I got a Loopin'tie gift." "Who sent it to you?"
• 11:30
  Like, just trying to understand, you know, word of mouth community and also just basically referrals is, is a lot of our growth m- motion, too. So it's a lot of nurturing. Like, it's not traditional demand creation.
• 11:44
  It's, like, capturing and nurturing and kind of amplifying, like, what we're doing that's already working. Right.
• 11:51
  Okay, this is great because content marketers often are thinking about content, not network effects or product marketing or things like that. So I feel like there...
• 12:00
  I would imagine that probably shapes the way that you think about content. Possibly-Meaning that it's just, like, not all about customer acquisition all the time.
• 12:08
  Maybe it's about activating previous customers or moving free customers up into, I don't know if you'd call it an enterprise plan, but kinda like that equivalent to- Yep... to expand into an organization. Yeah.
• 12:20
  I think it's interesting because that's not a challenge I've ever taken on before.
• 12:24
  I did come from traditional content where all we're focused on, especially at G2, was as much traffic as we can get, as many backlinks as we can get. Like, the typical issues that content marketers face.
• 12:37
  I was able to set up that program at the bottom of the funnel and say, you know, all we're ranking for on Google is Loopin'tie. Like, all branded, right? Like, that's typically...
• 12:48
  That's the last three companies I've been at, is their, where they were starting from.
• 12:52
  So for better or for worse, I kinda got to build the content program from nothing, but in this specific situation, it was like start it at the bottom of the funnel and make sure that we're ranking for things like corporate gifts, sustainable corporate gifts, corporate gifts for new hires.
• 13:07
  Like, things that are really tactical, and then we can also use that in those product marketing emails, and things like just be able to reuse the content so it's not siloed.
• 13:19
  I'm a huge fan, and it comes from my advertising background, of just, like, campaign thinking.
• 13:24
  I think it makes it easier instead of channel thinking, of like, "Okay, I gotta go set up a social media presence for this company, and here are the posts for the next 30 days," and whatever.
• 13:35
  I'm so much more about, let's set up a three-month campaign that includes a message across paid, social, organic, just viral. Like, and even inside the product.
• 13:47
  Like, yes, to your point, we want people to use the product as many times as possible, and that also comes down to content. You know, how many days in March are there for people to give gifts?
• 13:58
  Like, okay, for example, our employee appreciation day is March 1st, but we're doing a campaign around employee appreciation month. Like, shouldn't just be one day. Like, trying to take creative angles on things.
• 14:12
  I also think it's interesting and different for me from a content perspective of working at a company that's really seasonal. I've never done that before.
• 14:21
  Obviously, we want people to gift all year round, but the crazy time is November, December, January, and how do I plan for that in a content way to make sure that we're showing up when we need to be?
• 14:37
  That was a really interesting challenge this year, and it worked out for us. The rebrand was rightly timed, the... And then we just started publishing something once a week. Just something.
• 14:47
  We were like, "Here are all the gift guides that we need to write. Let's get after it. Let's work with buying and merchandising. You know, let's work with the product team on helping our product lead SEO."
• 14:58
  So just different programs like that, but working at it from a seasonal angle was super interesting. Yeah. That is very interesting. There's a lot of nuances to this business it sounds like. Yes, there is.
• 15:08
  [laughs] I really appreciate what you said about campaign marketing versus channel marketing. I think we might borrow that for the title of this episode. Yeah.
• 15:16
  But it kinda speaks to something you said as you were introducing yourself about going from content to growth, and it sounds like,
• 15:23
  just hearing you talk about this, I can sort of see where content fits in, but I also see how you have, like, a much broader perspective on that. Yeah.
• 15:30
  Was there a learning curve there, or is like, did you walk in the door, and you're like, "There's... It's just so obvious. There- there's so many other things we could be doing besides publishing articles"? Yeah.
• 15:38
  I think it's a mix of both. I think that as much as I have a lot of experience in content marketing, that's always been my foundation, but I really feel like content marketing is all of marketing.
• 15:51
  If you can do content marketing well, like, it's the whole game. Demand gen runs on content marketing. Community runs on content marketing. Yeah.
• 15:59
  All of these things, and like, again, taking it back to my advertising background, like, campaigns and content go together. You can't have a campaign hollowed out without any content in it.
• 16:09
  So I kind of see content as the cornerstone of all of the marketing, and then the other kind of marketing titles that you would see are just more like channels. You know? It's like- Yeah...
• 16:20
  how are we going to use this content? How are we gonna distribute it? There definitely was a learning curve. So at G2, I was very specifically content and SEO on a team of, like, 30 other content marketers. Oh, wow.
• 16:33
  It was so fun. Our team was bigger than HubSpot's content team at the time, which was crazy. Like, I don't know... We didn't need that many people, but also we did just based on the goals that we had. It was so fun.
• 16:45
  Learning together, failing together, you know, pulling out that five million, the first five million in traffic was crazy. Then I moved over to Bigtyme, where it's a Chicago startup.
• 16:56
  It's like a payments kind of processing thing for billable hours. So a little bit, like, more specific, but I was their digital marketing manager. I wasn't doing content at all. They had a content team.
• 17:07
  I was doing their, like, Capterra bids, running their pay-per-click, and things like that, which that was the biggest learning curve ever, and I also realized my brain just doesn't work that way.
• 17:18
  Like, every day signing into Capterra and being like, "I gotta bid more than this guy." Like, uh- Right, right... it's just not, just not for me. Um, I understand why it's valuable.
• 17:27
  It's another place that people can find you. I think it was Mitch Kozai, he runs DemandWell now, he used to be at Lessonly, that said, like,
• 17:35
  every place or every, you know, keyword or et cetera, like, piece of content is, like, a door to your website. Like, try to open as many doors as possible. It's not about opening one door wider.
• 17:45
  It's like, isn't it better if you open another door to another path or another person on that path? I just, I, that's always stuck with me. I like that. But Capterra is the same way. It's a door, right?
• 17:55
  It's like more doors to the website, more doors to your marketing is better. So I think having, like-That strictly organic and then strictly paid back to back, I like immediately saw where they married together.
• 18:08
  So when I got the opportunity to go to Postal and be their head of content and brand, and brand is really where I wanted to be and where I really feel like that community side comes in, just very authentic to the way that I operate.
• 18:21
  Again, brand and design and content, like that all just goes together, and so I feel like I kinda got a crash course in growth before actually having the growth title.
• 18:30
  But like you said, Loop and Tie is very nuanced, so I think that that's also a lesson in and of itself is like I can take all these playbooks, all these things that have worked for all these different companies,
• 18:41
  but it's very specific to whatever company or whatever specific problems that that company is having.
• 18:46
  Like, you know, if, if Loop was ranking for all of these things before I had joined, then I wouldn't have written the same things, obviously. Sure.
• 18:54
  I would've started building on top of that, but we didn't have the foundation to build. So I think that what I've learned most is that focus on yourself and, like, not the playbooks or not your competitors even.
• 19:09
  I struggle with that as well, is just some people get so focused on what their competitors are doing, and they lose the plot. Like, what are you doing? What is your story? Why are you trying to tell the whatever...
• 19:19
  How do you know that that's working for them? Like- Right... you know?
• 19:23
  So while there was a learning curve, I think the biggest th- lesson that I learned was focus on the issues that are in front of you and use your entire experience to solve the specific problems at this company, and you'll have way bigger impact faster than trying to sell this long-term content strategy with nine months of keywords and just, like, you know.
• 19:45
  It's so much better to focus on specifically what's right in front of you and then how do I use content campaigns, channels to drive impact to that specific thing as fast as possible.
• 19:57
  The answer's not always gonna be the same. Yeah. I'm so glad you said that. I think it's so tempting for content marketers to look at the way other companies do content and just say, "Let's do that."
• 20:09
  And they've, I think, have a sense that, oh, if it worked for them and we can reverse engineer it, it will probably work for us, too.
• 20:15
  And actually, at the agency, Animals, where I used to work, we studied this a lot because on our- Uh-huh...
• 20:21
  sales calls, we would hear frequently, at the time it was Intercom, and companies would say, "We wanna be the Intercom for human resources," or- Mm-hmm... "We wanna be the Intercom for whatever." And
• 20:34
  at first we were like, "Okay, we'll, we'll try to do that." It doesn't work. It really- Yeah... doesn't work. [laughs] Yeah. You know? For so many reasons.
• 20:39
  It's almost like the fact that it does work for them is sort of proof that it won't work for you. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I think that [sighs]
• 20:48
  those are, like, the red flags now that when, you know, somebody in leadership says those things to me, it's like that flag that goes off like they don't really understand marketing or they don't really understand concept marketing specifically.
• 21:00
  I think that there's a lot of people that focus too much on output and not enough on outcome. Yeah. Where are we trying to go? Why does it have to be a blog post? Why does it have to be a podcast episode?
• 21:12
  Why does it have to be this specific thing?
• 21:15
  How about we start with we wanna reach these people, and then we go research how to find those people instead of this is the only way I'm serving you that content because that's what works for me.
• 21:27
  It's about the customer and how the customers are finding us. It's not about me. Sure. So I think it's really, like, the output versus outcome conversation, and that comes down to trust.
• 21:38
  Trust comes down to what's your track record and experience of growing companies, which can be tough because that's not always, certainly not always within marketing's control.
• 21:48
  You hope that, you know, you can influence the way that it should, but if all the pieces of the go-to-market engine are not working together, it's gonna be an uphill battle. Yeah, for sure.
• 21:59
  You know, it sounds like Loop and Tie has a strong sense of itself. Mm-hmm. You know, that it kinda understands the product and the brand and the vision and all of that. Am I overstating that?
• 22:11
  I guess kinda what I'm getting at is, like, does that make your life easier to, like, go out and execute with a strong- Yeah...
• 22:16
  sense of who you're executing for versus maybe other places you worked where it's more like, "We do this, run this playbook"? Totally. Yeah, I think it's really... it's a solid foundation.
• 22:25
  I think that being true to yourself is the best way to grow a company because you have a vision of, you know, where you are now realistically, where you wanna be five years from now.
• 22:37
  When everybody's bought into that versus saying, "Okay, we want our ARR to be this."
• 22:43
  Like, this is the first company I've been at where we have, we have growth goals, and we have, like, the monetary goals surrounding it, but there are so many other values-based goals that I think was really refreshing to hear from an executive and their whole team say, you know, "In five years from now, we want these companies to be partnered with us on their social impacts programs.
• 23:07
  Like, that's who we wanna be." And so that is a way to get every single person on the team in the boat. Otherwise, you're looking at MRR, ARR.
• 23:16
  That probably only really pulls your marketing and sales teams in one direction, and product is going toward we need this many things to ship and for these customers, and it's all going different directions even though if you're all trying to get to the revenue goal, but does the product and engineering team really have a vested interest in the revenue goal outside of their bonus?
• 23:36
  No. Right. You know what I mean? So, like, it is those values-based things that, quote unquote, "are fluffy," but that's how I feel you should be building a business instead of...
• 23:47
  At least it gives you a direction as a whole team to be working toward, and then every little thing that you're working on, you have a place to say, "Does this get us there?" You know, "Is this valuable right now?
• 23:58
  Is it valuable for us five years from now?" Like, it just creates a depth that I think is really missing inside of these tech companies today.Yeah, that's really cool. I love that. I do wanna ask you about your team too.
• 24:12
  Like, what does the growth team look like? And as part of that, I'm just curious how you balance in-house resources versus any external resources- Yeah... agencies or freelancers that you rely on. Yeah.
• 24:24
  So I joined Loop as, I think, employee 40 and marketing team member five, including the CMO. So we have MK as our CMO. MK is, like, ex-Alyce, ex-HubSpot. They've been around. They know what they're doing.
• 24:41
  They were actually really championing me when I came over, of like, "This isn't a traditional growth demand gen role. Like, we want you to do your thing in organic and community." And I'm like, "Sold."
• 24:50
  Yeah, how great is that? Like, just, just hearing it, a leader, and they've known me for a while. They've seen me operate.
• 24:57
  S- Sarah Pyan and I used to do Self-Control and Cheese with the podcast, used to work for them at Alyce, so that's how we got connected. They've been a mentor to me for a long time.
• 25:05
  I was so psyched to hear, like, somebody actually, somebody else actually thinks about it this way, and I'm not, like, crazy, you know? That's awesome. Like, there are other ways to go about growth than just paid ads.
• 25:16
  Like, wow, amazing. So I came on. We had a product marketer, Molly.
• 25:21
  We hired a designer within the first couple months of me starting there just because if I was gonna be cranking out all this stuff, I'm like, "I can do it, but it's gonna take me three times as long as somebody else that is better at it than me."
• 25:33
  Right. So having that design resource is really important too. And then we have marketing ops, so there's not many of us. The growth team, I did sign on, and I think we had Simon at that point, who's our paid specialist.
• 25:46
  So I help him build the growth strategy, and then he's actually doing the tactical, like Google Ads and LinkedIn ad stuff. And then around the holiday season, so with... He's a contractor. He's amazing.
• 25:59
  Our ROAS are insane. Like, I think average they're around 600%, and in holiday season it was up to, like, over 2,000%. It was crazy. Oh, wow. That's insane. I'm like, we just kept pouring money into it.
• 26:11
  We were like, "More." [laughs] Like, "More." It was awesome. He's great.
• 26:15
  And we did end up also seeking out a social media and community manager, just freelance in the busy season because I was busy growing other things, trying to make impact every day.
• 26:28
  I think that was another seasonal thing that I learned, was like, I can't be focused six months in the future like normal. Like, what can I do today that's gonna make an impact?
• 26:36
  So Amber Rhodes from UserGems has been helping us on the social side, and she's amazing. Like, she picked up our voice so quickly.
• 26:44
  Another really, like, refreshing thing about Loop is just, like, the creativity that we're allowed. I think that that's something special.
• 26:52
  I think it's also something missing in most marketing teams, is, like, the f- the leeway to be creative, and that also means to have things not necessarily land the way that we want them to, but we learn.
• 27:03
  So just having the creativity from, from her side has been amazing. It's like a breath of fresh air into our product. Yeah, I think that that's, like, the whole setup really. I'm doing all of the content myself.
• 27:15
  Okay, that was what I was gonna ask you next- Mm-hmm... because I noticed you did not mention a dedicated content [laughs] writer. [laughs] It's me. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, it's me.
• 27:22
  I think that early on I was like, okay, I can not do this in my sleep, but I was also like, at least the things that we've outlined are pretty programmatic, I guess.
• 27:34
  Like, we were writing a lot of gift guide listicle things just to get the specific, you know, employee gift ideas and, like, those kind of blog posts up and out.
• 27:44
  So I relied really heavily on the buying and merchandising team for a lot of that product data. You know, what are the top five gifts sent this month? What are... Like, trying to, you know, interview our customers.
• 27:54
  Molly, Molly really helped, the product marketer, really helped with case studies and things like that. So I was really just in charge of doing the content for the blog, and then I also manage the website.
• 28:05
  So I have my hands in a lot of things. [laughs] Yeah, that's a lot.
• 28:08
  Have you found yourself having to kind of hone new skills in this role, whether they're, like, technical skills, like learning different software or, like, analytical skills or just even, like, time management? Yeah.
• 28:20
  I think that, like, the biggest thing that I've learned is in this role specifically, I've always been analytically, like, minded, but never, like, in HubSpot building my own reports.
• 28:31
  Like, as growth, like, you have to do that. I learned a lot about, like, list segmentation and... 'cause we have, you know, business users, we have personal users.
• 28:41
  There's just a lot of people that use our product for a lot of different things, so messaging that way and specifically targeting and segmenting versus just, like, spray and pray to everyone I think was definitely what probably the biggest thing that, you know, the list doesn't have to be the biggest for it to be the most impactful email.
• 29:01
  Sure. Like, it's actually the opposite. The smaller your list is, probably the more impact your email has. Right. Right.
• 29:07
  And also, like, I've always been, even in content, like, beating the, like, marketing should be snuggled up to sales drum, but I've never, like, been as close to the sales team as I am now, and I recommend it, highly recommend it to everyone.
• 29:23
  Like, at the end of the day, sales is the one on the calls with the customers. The AMs are the calls with your customers. Like, that's where the best content is. It's not in your Ahrefs.
• 29:34
  It's not in what your ex- competitors are doing. It's what are your customers asking for, and how can you continue to bring them back to your product with content? Yeah. Amen to that, [laughs] for sure.
• 29:46
  I feel like Gong is the best thing that's happened to content marketers- Yes... in the last, like, 10 years. Thank you, Devin Reed. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] Actually, Devin's gonna be on the podcast.
• 29:55
  We just yesterday scheduled, so we're gonna- That's sick. He's awesome... be talking a lot about that. I wanted to ask you too about team communication, right? Like, the, the roles on the team are pretty varied. Yeah.
• 30:04
  Do you have, like, a weekly growth meeting or a monthly growth meeting where everyone syncs up? Do you split that time between kind of like status updates and-You know, kinda like making space for more creative thinking.
• 30:15
  I would just be curious- Mm-hmm... like how you and the team go about staying in touch- Yeah... with each other. Yeah. So the both contractors, I have a standing bi-weekly, I think.
• 30:25
  So I do paid ads on the opposite weeks that I do content in social and community. So I touch base with both contractors twice a month, and we communicate almost exclusively in Asana, and Slack obviously.
• 30:39
  As far as like the internal team, we have a marketing meeting every week where everybody has kind of bought into all of the growth programs and understands what's happening because we have it set up in campaigns.
• 30:50
  So that touches product marketing, that touches the design side, et cetera.
• 30:55
  So we kind of run our marketing meetings as those status updates, and then we actually have an, basically an all-hands every week with the whole team.
• 31:04
  It's definitely more lax than like, "This is what marketing's working on." We have that once a month of like t- departmental updates of priorities, but we typically will do like every single person, so it's not many.
• 31:18
  There's 40 of us. Like, it's pretty quick. But does a happy face, meh face, or sad face for the week and tells us why. And then we all answer the same like silly question to just like, we're all remote.
• 31:30
  The company's always been remote. Yeah. I think that's a huge benefit too, is like, it's always been remote. This is always how they functioned, so they really have found like a groove and a culture in that.
• 31:41
  And like they make those meetings fun. It's not like, "Oh, I have another all-hands meeting." It's like, "What's the question of the week gonna be, and how am I gonna answer it?"
• 31:50
  And it's nice to also hear like how people are feeling, and then why.
• 31:55
  Like specifically what are you working on that's making your, you know, a sad face or a happy face so that people get bought in and understand what everybody's working on at every step of the way. Yeah.
• 32:06
  Sounds like Loopantai really understands culture as well. Yeah. Like, there's a difference between the company that developed a remote culture 10 years ago- Mm-hmm...
• 32:16
  versus the ones that freaked out during COVID and started doing- Yeah... like Zoom call icebreakers that everybody hated. Yep. Yeah. Well, it feels authentic to who they are because it is. Yeah.
• 32:27
  I also feel like that comes directly from the top. Loop is also the first tech company that I've been at where the three sales team members, the...
• 32:37
  I think the person that's been there the least amount of time is like on year four. Like- Oh, wow... it's like, it's a solid group, and it's been a solid group, which I think is really helpful, too.
• 32:48
  Like, they've been through so many phases together that that also helps the culture, is just like it is a tech company. Things change. Like,
• 32:57
  that's just how we roll here, and that's how we operate, and it's part of what makes us a successful business, is that we've all ridden these waves together, you know? Yeah. Totally. On my list is reporting.
• 33:11
  Gotta ask you about reporting. Mm. Mm-hmm. Are there a handful of metrics that you really care about? And related to that, are there any kind of tools or processes that you rely on to make reporting easy? Yeah.
• 33:25
  We love HubSpot. I mentioned earlier that MK came from HubSpot, but every company I've been at, I'm like, "Do we have HubSpot? Can we use HubSpot? How can we use HubSpot more?" This is an ad for HubSpot now.
• 33:36
  You know- Um [laughs]... I've never, I've never used HubSpot. Really? I've been in marketing for like 15 years. I've never used it. That's amazing. I feel like I'm missing out.
• 33:43
  [laughs] So we use HubSpot for just like the centralization of everything. On the growth side, I'm tracking both demos and signups.
• 33:52
  At the beginning of the year last year, my directive was increase as many free signups as you can. Like, the demos are coming in from strategic partnerships, are coming in from sales going to these events.
• 34:06
  Obviously make it a place that we can get demos, but, but signups was the directive. So I was really heavily tracking that and like changing programs based on that.
• 34:14
  You can see even on our website, like demo is the secondary button. Signup is the first.
• 34:20
  And what you had said earlier about we don't necessarily do the like MQL to SQL to like all these things 'cause our sales team is small. That's not how they've ever operated.
• 34:29
  They could get on a call and sell it on that call, or they could get on a call and it takes six months to sell it. Like,
• 34:34
  it's so specific to who we're talking to and like who's on the other end of the phone, that creating process for that would be a waste of time, honestly.
• 34:43
  Like, so I think that it's really helpful that our sales team is also just like very much up for whatever. So we, we track signups. For me, we did the huge like GA4 stuff, which was horrible.
• 34:57
  We had a great agency help us with moving data over into Looker Studio and Microsoft Clarity and pulling it over into just a place that wasn't GA4 because it's not great to look at.
• 35:09
  It's really hard to use, which sucks because I used to be in Google Analytics every day. Yeah. For sure. And now I feel like crazy for never looking at it.
• 35:18
  I'm also a huge, like I almo- I check Google Search Console almost every day. Like, are the impressions and the clicks going up?
• 35:25
  Like, at the end of the day, that is the core of my job, is how many people are we driving to this website? Yeah. And in that vein, like so impressions and clicks are one thing, but
• 35:36
  my favorite metric forever and always will be like time on page. Are people finding what they need? How many pages are they looking at? Pages per session. Like, what's the quality metric out of the quantity? You know?
• 35:47
  Like, that's the one is time on page. Are they finding what they need? Are they staying with us? Are they actually reading the content? And then are they clicking through the product? How many...
• 35:58
  'Cause I think that's, our product is open to like you could sign up at the end of the process if you wanted to, the gifting process. So are they clicking into the product? Are they making that jump?
• 36:08
  How long are they on there for? Are they finding what they need? And that helps me inform the product team of like-Hotjar says people are dropping off here. Like, can we look at that?
• 36:18
  So it's definitely a mix of a lot of stuff. Obviously, I have, you know, the Ahrefs to do some of the keyword research on the front end.
• 36:25
  But I would say the majority of stuff is in HubSpot, and it's, like, tracking the typical website traffic from different sources. Our biggest source is direct, and that's because of people sending gifts.
• 36:38
  And so when people receive a gift, they're going direct to the website. Yeah. And obviously growing organic traffic and growing paid traffic as well. Common misconception is organic programs are free.
• 36:51
  That's not the case. Like, you're still paying somebody to do it, right? Like, it's just a different kind of play. It's not so month to month. It's hopefully long term if you're doing it right. Yeah.
• 37:02
  There was one thing you mentioned I want to just quickly zoom in on, which is that a user could come on the site through- Mm-hmm... content, let's say,
• 37:09
  go through the process of gifting, and then not sign up till the very end, which means there's some blend of marketing pages and product pages on the site. Yep. Do you differentiate between those two in your reporting?
• 37:22
  Yes, because the product team reports on one, and the marketing team- Got it... is reporting on another. So I'm really focused on the marketing side. But there's no, like, stepping on toes kind of thing.
• 37:34
  It's like I want product to look at the marketing side from the product angle. They want me to look at what the product numbers are telling me from a marketing side.
• 37:43
  It's all user behavior, but it's just, like, at what stage in the customer journey and what in the user journey are they at, and, like, how can we start to predict and serve up the content that they need at that point?
• 37:55
  Yeah. Love that. There's two new questions we've been testing out on guests. One is about kind of the skills you rely on in your day-to-day job. Mm-hmm.
• 38:02
  I think you actually covered that pretty well when you were talking about making the transition from content to growth. So I'll skip to the second one, which is what surprised you in this role?
• 38:12
  Whether it's something that was easier than you thought, something that was harder than you thought.
• 38:16
  I mean, I'll leave it fairly open-ended, but just, yeah, just curious, like, if there's anything that was like, "Dang, I didn't expect that." Yeah.
• 38:23
  And maybe it's a little silly for not expecting it, but it is hard to manage as m- m- many balls in the air as po- Like, it is hard to not get caught up in the I have these 10 things going on.
• 38:36
  How do I keep inching all of them forward?
• 38:39
  It is so much more impactful, and I learned early, that, like, if I can really focus my time on setting up the foundation for all of the programs, but then focusing my efforts in sprints on specific things, it's way better for
• 38:55
  the impact that I'm having, the output that I'm having, but also just, like, brain space, creativity, mental load. Like, taking on all of that at once is too overwhelming to be able to actually make progress.
• 39:08
  So I know it's not always reasonable to be like, you know, "I can't do a social post this morning and then write three emails this afternoon and do this," but do it in sprints. Do it in bulk.
• 39:18
  Write all your social posts in three days for two months. Like, there's nothing keeping you from doing that. It's just time management. I think it's a good lesson. I think I personally could learn from that.
• 39:30
  I don't do a very good job working in batches, which is kind of what you're getting at. Probably make my own life a lot easier. To each their own. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Totally.
• 39:38
  I, I, I have some things to learn in the time management realm, that's for sure. Seriously appreciate you coming on and talking. Really interesting to learn about Loop and Tie.
• 39:46
  Like I mentioned, I'm always trying to bring, like, what's something new we can talk about- Mm-hmm... in this podcast that we haven't done before. Like, we've got that in spades here. Awesome.
• 39:52
  So really appreciate that, and appreciate your time. I know you got plenty else going on in your life, so thanks for taking time to chat with me.
• 39:59
  We will send people to the Loop and Tie website, and I would encourage folks, like I do in every episode, go look at it. Mm-hmm.
• 40:04
  Like, now that you've heard what the growth program looks like, go see it in action, because, like- Yep... I feel like that's where you actually start to learn, "Oh, okay, that's how that works."
• 40:12
  Like, maybe there's an idea or two I can borrow for my own marketing. Mm-hmm. But would love also to send people to connect with you to LinkedIn, personal websites, portfolio, or anywhere else. Yeah.
• 40:22
  Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. If you have questions about Loop and Tie or anything growth related, please feel free to DM me. I am chronically and tragically on LinkedIn.
• 40:32
  My website is just bridgetputker.com if you wanna reach out to chat more about just, like, content projects. Cool. And you do do some consulting too, right? Yeah.
• 40:40
  I'm doing that on the side, so it's been good for my brain to pick up different problems and also help me solve Loop's problems by looking at it from a different angle. For sure. I love that.
• 40:50
  Well, we'll make sure we link to your LinkedIn and your personal website in the show notes too. Awesome. Bridget, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Jimmy. Take care. [upbeat music]