Latest / Content, Briefly / Mutiny: Stewart Hillhouse's "owned audience" framework

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Mutiny: Stewart Hillhouse's "owned audience" framework · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] So because these are senior people, they're probably not going to Google how to do website optimization, conversion rate optimization on my website.
• 0:10
  Like, they're not Googling those things, and the audience who is Googling that is not valuable to us at all because they're so far from the buying journey that it's not even worth getting that conversation started at this point in our company.
• 0:20
  And so this hand-to-hand content is by definition already quite personalized. We do that through owned channels so that we have direct impact on how we can get that message to them.
• 0:31
  [gentle music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. I've got a good one for you today. I chatted with Stuart Hillhouse. He runs content marketing at a company called Mutiny.
• 0:43
  Mutiny does website personalization, which is a really oversimplified way of saying that you can create totally custom experiences for every person that visits your website.
• 0:51
  Sounds overwhelming, but when he explained it, it's actually very cool and not nearly as complicated as I thought. We talk all about how the personalization thing affects the content that he creates.
• 1:02
  Interestingly, Stuart has not really paid that much attention to SEO and is instead leaning on an owned audience approach.
• 1:09
  We talk about exactly what that means, but I will tease that there's some good stuff in there about a newsletter which he writes exclusive content for, a community that they run, and then some playbooks, which are real-life examples of ways that other companies are improving their conversion rate optimization.
• 1:23
  I'll let Stuart explain all of that in much more detail. It was really interesting.
• 1:27
  I really appreciated his take on content marketing, especially nowadays when there's so much in flux with SEO, and he's just not really thinking about it, which is frankly kind of refreshing.
• 1:36
  So I think you'll enjoy it too. There's lots to learn and be inspired by from this episode. I'll get out of the way. Hope you enjoy it. Also, just a quick reminder to check out the new and improved Superpath Slack group.
• 1:47
  It's now twenty bucks a month. You can also get an annual discount. Your employer should probably cover it for you since it definitely counts as professional development.
• 1:54
  And I think what you'll find there is gonna be really exciting. There's some really interesting high-level strategy discussions, in-depth conversations on things like people management and career development.
• 2:03
  Honestly, it's awesome. I'm enjoying being in there more than ever. I think you will too. If you wanna check it out, just go to superpath.co/community and sign up there. [gentle music] Okay, we're live. Hey, everybody.
• 2:17
  Jimmy with Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly for you. Very excited to have my friend Stuart Hillhouse today. He runs content at Mutiny. And actually, you know what?
• 2:25
  I was gonna do an intro, but maybe, Stuart, could you just introduce yourself? You'll do a better job than I will. [laughs] Yeah, sure, no problem.
• 2:32
  Yeah, I lead content at Mutiny, and my path in content has sort of taken a direction around, like, marketing to marketers.
• 2:39
  Got my start working with Caitlin Burgoyne over at Customer Camp, helped get her set up with her newsletter, Why We Buy, which years later has now become, like, a huge- I don't think I knew that...
• 2:48
  a huge thing that tons of readers subscribe to- Yeah... and just turned a whole business around through it.
• 2:53
  So that was really a great intro to audience growth and what the owned media landscape looks like, especially in the newsletter world, and that's a pretty significant part of how B2B and now a lot of B2C creators are, like, making their livelihoods.
• 3:07
  So I got to see it sort of firsthand, which then brought me to Demand Curve, which is another sort of newsletter and content business where they are putting through cohort-based courses and growing a huge new email list.
• 3:19
  Got to work alongside them as one of the lead writers there and put together the newsletter and the website and all the kind of content that makes them so well known in the marketing space, which then almost two years ago brought me to Mutiny to lead content there, and that's evolved over the, over the years.
• 3:34
  I'll be happy to share about what our baby program looked like and where we're at now and where we're hoping to go.
• 3:39
  Sort of carved my weird niche in marketing to marketers about marketing through marketing, and that brings me here. [laughs] I love it. That's cool.
• 3:47
  Very meta, but also, like, when you are your own customer, it kinda opens the door to a lot of different type of stuff you can do.
• 3:53
  Totally, and, like, even before, the way I got into marketing in the first place was I was like, "I think I should just, like, start a podcast." I had a career in forestry.
• 4:01
  That was my first career, and I was like, "Okay, I wanna be where people are. I don't necessarily wanna live where the trees are."
• 4:08
  I love being in the woods, but I don't like being paid to be in the woods, so maybe I need to change my career around a little bit.
• 4:13
  And so I saw marketing as sort of, like, this interesting thing that I didn't really know much about. So the way I started it was just interviewing people over video.
• 4:22
  This is right before COVID started, and just asking about marketing. So I'd reach out to people on LinkedIn, and they had no idea who I was. I w-- I didn't even have a marketing job yet, I don't think.
• 4:30
  Like, I was still just, like, trying to do this as a side project.
• 4:33
  And people would say yes 'cause it was like, you know, all the conferences were canceled, so everyone was just looking to, like, get their name out there.
• 4:40
  And then after a little bit, one of the guests was like, "Hey, can I, like, pay you or, like, hire you?" I was like, "For what?" "Like, to do this." I'm like, "What's this?" He's like, "This is content marketing."
• 4:49
  I'm like, "Oh, okay. There's a new, a new part of marketing I didn't know about." So, uh, you know, kinda meta. Even more meta now that we're having a podcast, and that's how I got my start. Yeah, yeah.
• 4:59
  That's really cool. I love it. I wanna know all about all the content stuff that you and your team are doing at Mutiny, but maybe first, could you just tell us about the company? Who is Mutiny slash what is Mutiny?
• 5:09
  Like, what is the product, and who is it for? Yeah, absolutely.
• 5:12
  Mutiny is a demand gen tool that a marketing team would use, and it allows you to turn more of your website visitors into customers, and that's through conversion rate optimization and allowing you to personalize your whole website based on who is on your website.
• 5:29
  We primarily are used by B2B companies.
• 5:32
  Well, we're, we're exclusive for B2B companies, and so that's sort of our differentiator versus other personalization platforms that try to go more the B2C route and get a lot of kinda e-commerce and stuff like that.
• 5:42
  We just focus on B2B companies, and so that makes the targeting and that makes the messaging that much more precise because you're able to, like, look at the company level, see what they sell to, how they make their money, and then down to the contact level and be able to tailor your message.
• 5:59
  And so it becomes pretty interesting to see some of the personalizations that these companies are able to do because we all know that the more-Relevant and timely a marketing message is, the more likely someone is to want to continue the conversation.
• 6:12
  And so we dogfood our own product in pretty much everything we do and really try and keep a pulse on, like, what marketers are looking for, and that continues to evolve as new AI advancements are coming through.
• 6:23
  The landscape around social media is always changing, and distribution, and how people are getting their messages out there is always changing.
• 6:30
  And so that's why Mutiny's been really successful up to this point, and I see us evolving with the landscape as we go too. We're at that unique stage where we're not too big, but we're not too small.
• 6:39
  We're, we're just the right size that we can pivot while also serving our existing customers even better. And so that's really exciting as we move forward in this weird AI space that we're now finding ourselves in.
• 6:50
  Yeah, yeah. It is weird, isn't it? [laughs] It's just so, like- [laughs]... confusing sometimes. One quick question about Mutiny. I'm noticing that the primary call to action in the top right corner is book a demo.
• 7:00
  Is that a signal about the type of customer you're hoping to reach?
• 7:04
  Our marketing team is measured on meetings booked as our primary metric, and the reason you're probably seeing book a demo as your CTA, you, Jimmy- Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah. [laughs]...
• 7:16
  is because you've probably been to our website a few times. Yeah.
• 7:19
  And so the CTA has evolved to be something a little bit more direct, whereas the first time you went on our site, it was probably something a little lighter.
• 7:27
  It was maybe like, "Go through our interactive demo," or maybe we were suggesting a piece of content that's specific to a first-time visitor who works at a B2B m- media company, you know?
• 7:36
  So that's the kind of level of personalization you can deliver, where you're changing not only the copy, but the CTAs, where in the buyer process you are, and we can do a lot of cool stuff that way.
• 7:46
  Okay, that's really cool. I didn't actually realize that that's what was happening. [laughs] So that's really interesting.
• 7:51
  The benefits of personalization is that you could, at the very least, be running some tests because if some people maybe are better suited for a trial or some other kind of marketing related CTA versus others who are like, yeah, a large company, like, let's get them on a demo, that's, that's really interesting.
• 8:05
  Who do you sell to? I mean, is it... Do you sell to companies kind of across the spectrum of small startups all the way up to enterprise?
• 8:10
  Yep, and we've, we have the data to show that based on our usage of our product and our customers' usage of the product, that there are certain acquisition strategies that work better for small or mid-size startups versus more of an enterprise large company.
• 8:25
  And so even the CTAs, like, the direction of the sales process, maybe you run more of a product-led growth motion for those smaller customers because there's a high likelihood that they're not qualified because they don't have enough traffic or aren't big enough or wouldn't be able to, you know, make the budget request for something like this.
• 8:43
  And so you can send them down more of, like, an automated PLG motion. Maybe they take an interactive demo. Maybe they talk with a BDR eventually to then s- qualify them.
• 8:52
  Versus, you know, an enterprise person, we know when they land on the site based on how much traffic they have and how big their company is that they're absolutely qualified and probably aren't likely to convert on, like, a little, you know, self-serve demo.
• 9:06
  They want more of a handheld sales process where you can connect them directly with an AE that is already assigned to that contact into that account. And so that's one...
• 9:15
  A really cool personalization that I love is, especially if you, if you're dealing with large enterprise companies, there's a high likelihood that someone else in that org already has checked out your product and may already be in the sales process.
• 9:28
  And so what you can do using Mutiny is create a little banner at the top that says, "Hey, Jimmy, someone else at Superpath is already in the sales process with Mutiny.
• 9:36
  Do you wanna talk to [laughs] do you wanna talk to Liam right now? Oh, by the way, Liam's your assigned sales rep who's gonna take you through this."
• 9:44
  Like, you can kinda create this experience where it's, yes, it's, it's automated and it's still product-led growth, but when you're ready, you're, like, directly connected to the sales process to then get you towards, like, the next steps.
• 9:56
  That's cool.
• 9:57
  Having that access to the data and seeing the conversion rate of a requested demo versus a trial when presented to the same audience in the same industries at the same stage in the buyer journey, you can have very granular view at, like, where in the buying process people are getting hung up, and you can then run so many tests to figure out how to improve that conversion rate and then therefore make your pipeline healthier and have marketing be accredited to more pipeline generated.
• 10:22
  So interesting. You know what I find really fascinating about this as a content marketer is that it's very overwhelming to me.
• 10:27
  It's a type of marketing that I really know very little about, and I'm curious who the end user is. Is it someone from the demand gen team?
• 10:33
  Usually, that's sort of the first user would be someone on the demand gen team or, like, you know, the VP of marketing who thinks that their demand gen team would benefit from increasing their conversion rates.
• 10:43
  But they can use it for a whole variety of use cases, though, because some companies run paid, and so therefore they're putting a lot of effort towards the, like, creative and the copy within the ad that they don't ever take the time to optimize their webpage.
• 10:57
  They'll get intent, and someone will click the ad, but then they come to a generic landing page, and it's like, okay, you already spent the money to Google or Facebook to get them on your site, and then you don't do anything to, like, get them further.
• 11:08
  And so Mutiny can help you do that so that the website looks and feels and says the exact same messaging as every single ad. So that works well for companies that have, like, large paid programs.
• 11:18
  But then it can also go into the account-based marketing side of demand gen, where you're creating personalized one-to-one pages that your sales or BDR team can go and reach out to your target contacts and say, "Hey, I can't explain everything in a email, but check out this webpage I made for you."
• 11:36
  And then when they open it, it's got their title. It's got all the pain points that are relevant to that title based on the company size and the industry and everything we know about them.
• 11:47
  It's got customized images and graphics and CTAs and everything.
• 11:50
  So, like, it kinda goes both ways of it can be one to many, where it's like this page is always gonna be relevant because of how you're getting there, or it can be the opposite, where it's like I made a very hyper-precise page to give to someone, but I did it at scale, so I didn't actually need to build 1,000 web pages, but I can deliver those super effectively.
• 12:09
  How does the personalization affect the way you think about content marketing?
• 12:13
  Because the first thing that's coming to my mind, as you were mentioning, spending a lot of money on a paid ad and then sending people to a generic landing page, is that a lot of companies invest heavily in SEO content, which is incredibly generic.
• 12:24
  Mm-hmm. So often even written by someone who doesn't know the target customer- Yeah... all that well or the subject matter all that well. So I just sort of, like...
• 12:31
  As you're thinking about a content strategy, which I guess you've been doing for a couple years now, like you sort of alluded earlier where it started and where it is now, can you talk a little bit aboutWhat that journey has been like, some of the things you're doing, and maybe like some things that have worked or not worked.
• 12:43
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:44
  Our primary buyer is usually a senior level marketer, and so they might not be the day-to-day end user, but they're the ones who are like, "Oh, I think this will help improve my program, and I wanna get it started with one team, and if it works well, then we'll continue to like expand it throughout the rest of the marketing org."
• 13:01
  But marketing is like under the gun in the last eighteen months. We're talking in fall twenty twenty-three. There's been a bit of a tech recession. Purse strings are much tighter than they used to be.
• 13:11
  It's harder to get buy-in for like a new tech stack or like a new tool to bring in.
• 13:15
  And so therefore, the marketing team needs to like understand how their work is directly impacting not leads and not traffic, but like direct pipeline, which is sort of like a new muscle for content people, I feel like.
• 13:29
  I know demand gen people would be-- It's like, of course, that's what marketing's for.
• 13:32
  Whereas content was like, you know, okay, let's get some more page views, and therefore we have more top of funnel, and even if our website's not converting that well, we have...
• 13:39
  You know, if we add an extra zero to the end of that number, that means we'll have, in theory, an extra zero to our bottom line.
• 13:45
  And like, you know, that math still works out, but now that it's either more expensive or not possible to drive more traffic because maybe your audience isn't interested anymore, or the channel you used to be acquiring people through, whether it's social media or paid ads or SEO, is totally in disarray right now.
• 14:03
  I've been talking to some people, and like all of a sudden, LinkedIn, you can't drive traffic from organic LinkedIn anymore because if you share a link in any of your posts, even in the comments now, they like hide that.
• 14:14
  That's so frustrating. Yeah. [laughs] They've completely nerfed links on LinkedIn. And like, same with Twitter. Twitter's a nightmare anyways.
• 14:21
  And then SEO is like up in the air, and you can see times where there's just like a twenty percent drop in your new baseline from SEO just because something changed, and there's nothing you can do about it. Right.
• 14:31
  So as content marketers, we're all like, okay, well, the game used to be like, let's get more. And the way I've been directing our content strategy is around more like hand-to-hand content.
• 14:42
  So because these are senior people, they're probably not going to Google how to do website optimization, conversion rate optimization on my website. Like, they're not googling those things.
• 14:52
  And the audience who is googling that is not valuable to us at all because they're so far from the buying journey that it's not even worth getting that conversation started at this point in our company stage.
• 15:01
  And so this hand-to-hand content is, by definition, already quite personalized. We do that through owned channels so that we have direct impact on how we can get that message to them.
• 15:13
  And so that's through our newsletter and other email marketing, through our community, which is called M two, where we bring in marketing leaders and have small events that they can come to and roundtables where it's not recorded.
• 15:25
  It's just like straight-up conversation between CMOs and VPs of marketing. And then we have the curated Slack channels. We've got in-person meetups and in-person events and then virtual events.
• 15:35
  And so that's why I've kind of gone this direction of hand-to-hand content because I wanna like get the thing right into your hands and show it to you because I know that this is how you're thinking about your job.
• 15:47
  I'm not here to try to sell you that CRO is the right thing for you. I'm here to like make you better at marketing and operating in this new environment so that you're interested in what we're doing.
• 15:58
  And our product will eventually come down the line as something that you would consider just because we've earned that trust of being a reporter in the field versus just trying to direct response market the hell out of you to, like, book a demo just to fill that quarterly pipeline.
• 16:11
  Yeah. Yeah. I've never heard the term hand-to-hand content. If you came up with that, you should trademark that. That's good. [laughs] Okay, deal. [laughs] What does that content look like? Does it take the form of...
• 16:20
  Thought leadership is sort of a loosey-goosey term, but you know what I mean, sort of like the first person narrative style content?
• 16:26
  Or is it more like data backed, or like maybe if you could help, like give us some color on like what is the actual like piece of content look like that you would try to hand off to someone. Yeah.
• 16:35
  We're trying new stuff all the time and, you know, investing a little bit, and then if it doesn't work, we kinda move on.
• 16:40
  But one of the more consistent and one of our most popular formats of content are called playbooks.
• 16:46
  And so these are conversations that we have with our customers, but also non-customers as well to share a way that they increased their conversion rate, and it follows the same format every time.
• 16:58
  It's like, here was a challenge we were having, and then here was our hypothesis of how we could grow that conversion rate and, and fix the problem, and then here were the steps we took to do it. Here are the results.
• 17:10
  And so these playbooks are like fairly skimmable but also very tactical, where it shows screenshots. It tells you exactly what they did.
• 17:18
  It shows like how it went from before pictures and after pictures so that you can kind of like apply this to your own website and your own marketing.
• 17:27
  And then at the end, it shows like real numbers that just by making a few changes, they were able to like double the conversion rate of that thing.
• 17:33
  And conversion rate's an interesting metric to like highlight because it kinda does two things. It increases the amount of leads or, or meetings or whatever your, like, next stage in the conversion process looks like.
• 17:44
  It increases that, but it also decreases your cost of acquisition because you're now getting more people for the same spend.
• 17:52
  And I say spend as in it could be invested in content, or it could be invested in paid, or it could be invested in that event. And so it's sort of like this bonus metric where it makes everything more effective.
• 18:02
  So if you can increase the conversion rate on one key page on your website, it's not just like a one-time bump. It's like a forever bump that kinda just keeps moving everything up and to the right.
• 18:12
  And so it's really awesome to have our friends share these stories and be so open-booked about it.
• 18:17
  And these are from like amazing companies like Notion and Sixth Sense and Snowflake, like big companies that are doing serious volume.
• 18:23
  But also these tactics are able to be done by smaller companies who are just trying to get their foot in the door and build their pipeline that way as well.
• 18:31
  So that would be a format, and that's a written piece of content. But the source material to turn it into the written piece is usually a live virtual event. And so we'll bring them on.
• 18:41
  We'll have helped them prepare, so they just present that to us, and then we'll share it with our community and with people on social and partners and whoever else we can get our message out there to come to this live thing.
• 18:50
  And then the recording gets turned into written content.
• 18:53
  And then following that, I use pretty much all the ideas from that and all the sound bites and all the good ideas that was created to then populate our newsletter, which we send fairly regularly. Used to be weekly.
• 19:05
  Gone biweekly just so that there's a little bit more breathing room because I'm the only in-house content marketer.
• 19:10
  I outsource some writing to some friends of the show and get some freelance writers on there, and that helps supplement my time so that I'm not always typing, and we're able to actually spend a lot of the time on, like, distributing it and getting it out there.
• 19:23
  And so we found that the weekly newsletter was a little too much, so it's gone down to biweekly.
• 19:27
  But the angle I take with that is essentially like this newsletter is not a content digest of like everything we publish that week. The way I think about it is as like a letter from the editor. Oh, interesting. Yeah.
• 19:38
  I don't know if you still read magazines, but like the first page is always the editor talking about what was cool that month. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I get Outside magazine.
• 19:46
  They always have that right next to the table of contents. Totally.
• 19:49
  It's the perfect way to organically talk about the edition, be like, "We have stuff that is gonna be interesting to you," but the actual purpose behind that letter from the editor is to likeProve that you have a pulse on the culture, and you can say, "Whoa, crazy that this happened this week, right?"
• 20:06
  Or you can talk about, you know, a specific marketing campaign that was very timely, like the Barbie-Oppenheimer cultural thing that happened earlier this year that was unlike anything a lot of people had seen in the pop culture and movie space.
• 20:18
  It's like, why wouldn't I talk about that? Let me bring that in there and drop a little Easter egg just to keep people excited.
• 20:23
  And so I've always approached the newsletter as a way for me to, like, digest all of the conversations I had that week with my team, with people not at my team, things I'm seeing on LinkedIn, people I'm talking to, other newsletters I'm reading, to, like, share our take on it.
• 20:39
  And I kinda take the voice of Mutiny's content editor and just say, "Here's how we're seeing the world.
• 20:44
  Here's how we're gonna help you position yourself better in this world, and here are some resources that we've curated or created that will help you get there."
• 20:52
  But we also, like, f-follow the eighty/twenty rule, where it's like I'm giving away eighty percent of the content natively in the newsletter, and you can still click the link, but I'm not really optimizing for clicks at this point.
• 21:04
  I'm just optimizing for, like, [laughs] getting my ideas into your head. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess that... I mean, that idea fits pretty nicely into the owned media framework, right?
• 21:15
  Like, the most important thing is that you have a good relationship with that person, not that you achieve whatever the conversion metric is necessarily.
• 21:22
  Maybe that's oversimplifying it a little bit, but I feel like people really appreciate when you give them something, and you just make it easy for them, especially marketing to marketers.
• 21:30
  I feel like you have to be pretty careful about if it's just like, "Click this button," everybody knows what you're trying to do, you know? Oh, yeah.
• 21:35
  One way I like to appeal to the marketing audience is by, like, breaking the fourth wall and saying, like, you know, if they put a little CTA there, it'd be like, "Click this if you just wanna see, like, how it's done, but you don't care about, like, the fluffer."
• 21:47
  You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I break the third, fourth wall and, like, share when I'm doing a tactic. Or, "Hey, this is a marketing thing we're doing at Mutiny.
• 21:55
  Here's behind the scenes of how we thought about it and why we did it and how it performed." I also follow the rule of, like, I wanna create content that I would wanna see, and I would love it when brands do that.
• 22:05
  So I'm just like, "I'm just gonna create the thing that I wish was more in the world." Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Can I ask you a quick follow-up question about the playbooks?
• 22:12
  I really appreciate how skimmable they are, and I really like how visual they are as well.
• 22:16
  And I can imagine a reader on the other side being like, "Oh, this is a, a small but meaningful improvement that we could also make." Mm-hmm.
• 22:22
  And I guess my question is, do you find that website personalization is a muscle that people have to build, where, like, giving them lots of small things actually, like, helps them become the type of marketer who runs tons and tons of tests?
• 22:34
  Or is Mutiny primarily selling to people who just like this is what they do already? You know, like, they're already running tons and tons of tests. I feel like it appeals to both audiences.
• 22:42
  So if you don't yet have any type of personalization or conversion rate optimization program, seeing is sort of like believing, where it's like, like you said at the beginning of the episode, as a non-CRO person, you're kinda like overwhelmed already.
• 22:57
  Yeah. So that's why I wanna show them that it's not groundbreaking stuff.
• 23:02
  It's just applying all the marketing and psychology stuff that we all know about and have studied and we think about as we do our jobs, but doing it at a more precise level where we can have very specific things be right because we know that this person should be seeing this kind of thing.
• 23:19
  But on the other end of the spectrum too, someone who already has a pretty strict CRO program, I also wanna say that there is a technical difference between conversion rate optimization, CRO, and personalization.
• 23:30
  A strict CRO program would be very much more just A/B testing and changing one thing on the page in search of the optimum layout and color and format.
• 23:40
  You can change everything on your page, but it's one thing at a time so that it's A/B. It's, like, going one against the other.
• 23:45
  Whereas personalization is more of a directional optimization, where we're saying, "Let's change these things because this CTA would appeal more to this person.
• 23:52
  But we can also change the picture, and we're gonna change a couple things on the page."
• 23:56
  And the differences in lift is also sort of like the, the main reason why personalization plus CRO go really well together is because you can have the smaller, like, technical details being worked out, which might get you one or two percent increase in conversion, whereas a strong personalization experiment could lead to, like, fifteen or twenty percent increase in conversion.
• 24:17
  And so it's sort of like personalization will get you directionally better and is more about a process of improvement over time, whereas CRO is like, okay, let's just, like, do the small stuff to make this really, really right.
• 24:28
  That's really cool. I wanted to ask you about the community as well. I've definitely noticed that it seems like a lot of SaaS companies want to run communities. Seems like many of them struggle to do it.
• 24:38
  I don't have tons of data to report on here. I just... The, the feeling I get is that they try to over-optimize them.
• 24:44
  And I'm gonna take a leap here, but I think I'm right that Mutiny takes this kind of owned audience approach, where it's like it's really about creating this, like, nice holistic experience for a reader or a potential customer as opposed to just trying to, like, milk metrics out of them.
• 25:00
  Yeah. So could you talk a little bit about the community? Like, what is it? Is it Slack? Does it ha-happen somewhere else? Like, who's there? How do you run it? Like, what do you hope to get out of it?
• 25:08
  And just kinda, I guess, any other context you could provide there I think people would be very interested in. Yeah, absolutely. The community continues to evolve as well.
• 25:14
  We've, we've had it for over a year and a half now, and it started off as one thing, and we saw there was signal that we should probably continue cer-certain programs and then cut other programs.
• 25:24
  And where we're at now is, like you said, we're not the first SaaS company to throw up a Slack channel and say, "Join your peers," and then use it as a place to farm leads from. Like, that's not our approach at all.
• 25:35
  The approach is whether you're ready to buy Mutiny or not, there's benefit in you being in our network and in our community, and not from just, like, a lead gen thing, but us as a martech company, we need to know about what's going on and what people are thinking about and what questions they're asking and what challenges our ICP is having.
• 25:56
  And so we do thatThrough, I'd say, like three ways that we do it within this community umbrella. The community, by the way, is called M2. So that was a purposeful decision to brand it not as Mutiny.
• 26:08
  It's cool to have a name that's not your company for certain assets. It stands for Modern Marketer, and so we wanted to kinda like portray this, this idea that we're not done yet. Nothing's done in marketing.
• 26:19
  It's always evolving and moving forward. And so you can apply to join, and essentially we look at the, at the applicants and let them in as we go. They can refer people as well.
• 26:29
  We have a Slack channel where people can go in and converse one-to-one with curated channels so that people can have conversations about paid or demand gen or content or whatever is like on their mind, and that's okay.
• 26:40
  That happens organically.
• 26:42
  And you've been running a Slack channel for years now, and so you, I'm sure, have seen, you know, people come in there and they're excited to join, and then they might taper off after a little bit due to like notification overload.
• 26:53
  I know for me, I've got... I'm a member of a bunch of different Slack channels, and I see so many red buttons telling me I need to go check something that I just don't anymore.
• 27:00
  Yeah, it's challenging, and Slack gives you no control over that, which doesn't really help. So weird. So we don't pretend like Slack is the end all. It's the most important part of the community.
• 27:09
  It's just a way for people to get together and us for also, like spread message around, you know, what events are coming up.
• 27:15
  And so that's the other piece of it is like we want there to be virtual and in-person gatherings that we're helping to facilitate so that people can actually, like take the relationship to the next level, and it's not just LinkedIn connections, and it's not just Slack messages.
• 27:29
  It's like, "Oh, finally get to meet Jimmy in person," and that's a really meaningful part of our careers, right?
• 27:35
  So we're playing the long game as well, where it's like we just want you to be in our ecosystem so that someday you're in the position, you're like, "Oh, finally, personalization is like the most important thing on my list of to-dos, and now I'm a CMO.
• 27:48
  I know I'm gonna reach out to Mutiny because I've been in this community for a couple years, and I've been to an event, and I got to hang out with them at a booth at a conference, and there was an after party and all this stuff."
• 27:57
  So it ties everything together and acts as a source material for the content team to have these nuggets of wisdom that are being dropped there, where we feature them in the newsletter, and we compliment the creator and like give them a little bit of a platform within Mutiny's platform.
• 28:12
  And, you know, if we record webinars, which sometimes we do and sometimes we don't, we have like non-recorded stuff because then people can, like really be open up about what questions they have. That's cool.
• 28:21
  I like the non-recorded webinars. I'm not sure I've come across that before. It's a challenge because you want to be accessible and not gatekeep information.
• 28:30
  And so when someone's in a weird time zone, they're like, "Can I get the recording? I live in, uh, you know, I live in Asia." It's like, "Sorry, we didn't record it."
• 28:37
  So I think we need to do a better job with like presenting that as what's gonna happen. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you're not gonna get the recording and then not lead people on.
• 28:44
  But at the same time, it really does change the dynamic of having a virtual get-together with ten people, and everyone's got their cameras on, and everyone's talking and asking questions or giving feedback or sharing insights is such a different dynamic than cameras off, eighty or a hundred people sitting in a room just watching a PowerPoint through Zoom.
• 29:04
  Like that's, that's totally different situation. So we're, we're still figuring out what to do specifically, but the kinda conversations are just so useful to have and be part of. Yeah. That's really interesting.
• 29:13
  I've actually found a similar thing with Superpath where people have these really interesting conversations.
• 29:18
  It would actually be pretty easy for me to take all that stuff and post it and try to use it to get more traffic or, you know, basically try to use it as fuel for growth. But then why would anybody post anything?
• 29:28
  [laughs] You know, no one would feel like safe or comfortable posting, you know, like really interesting stuff or potentially a little vulnerable stuff if they knew it was just gonna be turned into some public thing, you know?
• 29:37
  So it's like when you create that safe space for people, it's a really, really different experience. Yeah.
• 29:42
  And you have to be-- What you're doing, like you have to be mindful about keeping it that way because it's a really important way to build trust with people. Totally.
• 29:48
  And one of the most interesting parts of those roundtables is when someone shares their screen and literally shows you an asset or a dashboard or a project plan or a timeline.
• 29:59
  Like people do that, where they show, "Here's what I'm doing. Can I get some feedback? I need help with this," or, "Here's how I did this super successful campaign. Here's how we figured out the narrative.
• 30:08
  Here's my messaging doc." People are sharing assets that we're all working on on a daily basis, but they're all like very secretive.
• 30:15
  But I don't feel like that is the n- way it needs to be, as long as it's dummy data and it, there's no proprietary like leakage. It's straight up just like templates, right?
• 30:24
  And so what we try to do is work with people to be like, "Can we white label a template with you?
• 30:29
  And we'll give you credit, but like we'll share it with our network and through our platforms so that this is like a useful thing that more marketers can have access to." And we're doing the same thing.
• 30:37
  We straight up duplicated our Google Doc dashboard, removed the data, put in dummy data, and are sharing it with our community this week. And that's sort of like, we'll see what the feedback's like.
• 30:46
  But those are the kinda things that happen behind the scenes when people are having one-on-one conversations, being like, "Hey, can you show me what's going on? I, I'm a little lost." Right.
• 30:54
  That's happening all over the place every day with everyone. So now we're kinda like bringing it to the masses a little bit more for people who may not have access to that kind of information or network yet. Nice.
• 31:02
  That's really cool. I really like that. Do you mind if I run through a couple of like housekeeping type questions?
• 31:06
  There's like a few things that we ask everybody that some you've actually already alluded to, but I think it might be helpful just to get some additional clarity. We ask everybody about metrics.
• 31:15
  And you mentioned booked meetings as your primary metric. Is there anything else that you feel is very important that you look at closely? And then in addition to that, is there a dashboard, a spreadsheet?
• 31:24
  Like how do you report on stuff, and then who also, who do you report it to? Yep. So outside of meetings booked, which is marketing as a whole is measured on that. And so we break that down.
• 31:34
  So inbound is one channel where meetings are booked, and so that's anywhere on the website or requesting a demo. That's my number. That's my metric because I sort of control the website, being the content person.
• 31:45
  Paid is another inbound channel, and events is the other inbound channel. So those three come together to create the inbound number.
• 31:52
  Then there's the outbound number, which is owned by the BDR team, so they're out, they're outreaching, booking meetings with people.
• 31:59
  That's how we're, the marketing team is sourcing pipeline, which is meetings booked.You know, within each of those, people have their secondary metrics that they'd be looking at.
• 32:07
  The BDR team's looking at open rates and, you know, response rates and things like that. Paid is looking at cost of acquisition and impressions and stuff like that.
• 32:15
  I focus on website visitors because that's a primary driver. You need people on your website if you're gonna convert them using our forms versus another platform, and then conversion rate too.
• 32:25
  So those are sort of like the two levers that you can kinda have with your website, is like, "Let's get more people to the website."
• 32:30
  And so that was sort of like the old way of doing it, where it's like, "Let's just dump more money into ads. Let's dump more money into SEO."
• 32:35
  But the second part, which Mutiny helps with, but also is actually under your control, is that second lever, which is conversion. If we can convert a higher number of the same people, we're getting more pipeline.
• 32:45
  And so we're always trying to run those tests and embed personalization within the content as well, so that we're both influencing the conversion rate and the traffic, so that we have programs built out to do both of those things.
• 32:56
  So there's kind of two ways of thinking about it. That's how we're broken down by metrics. You know, all those data sources are then piped into a Google Sheet.
• 33:05
  Most of the data is, is coming in pseudo real time, or, you know, it might be updated every three hours or every day or something like that. But we can actually be looking at, well, how are we pacing this week?
• 33:15
  We have weekly targets, and we can see, you know, how are we pacing this week? Do we need to tr- do something to kinda drive that number up? How are we pacing for the month?
• 33:21
  And then it all just rolls up to the quarter kinda thing. But when you click on each tab, it goes into, like, super detail of, like, what that actually looks like.
• 33:29
  The person running ABM isn't really that interested in how many website traffic visitors they're getting, so that's sort of, like, hidden a little bit.
• 33:35
  And then I report to the head of demand gen, and actually I have that meeting right after this. Oh, nice. So we have a weekly huddle where it's the demand gen team gets together.
• 33:46
  Then we have a weekly marketing meeting where we all come together, and the leads report on what's going on and, and where we're at. And then I have a one-on-one with my manager every week as well.
• 33:57
  And so yeah, head of demand gen reports to head of marketing, which I guess would essentially be CMO.
• 34:03
  We don't have a CMO, but that's sort of the structure, is head of marketing, and then there's head of demand gen, head of product marketing, BDR lead, and then all their direct reports would be pretty much all the channels.
• 34:14
  So content, paid events, BDRs. Got it. Oh, yeah, that was the next thing I wanted to ask you about, is, like, is there a sort of Stewart equivalent thinking full time about the event stuff and about the paid stuff?
• 34:24
  But it sounds like there is. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yep, essentially. But we all work together because we're trying to influence one number, which I think is a really important thing that marketing teams get lost.
• 34:34
  I mean, I even worked at a bigger... This is already the biggest company I've ever been at.
• 34:37
  But I feel, from what I've learned, is, like, when there's too many directions or metrics or things that we're looking at, you can kind of over-optimize for the wrong things, even though it was the right decision to be made, versus, like, the whole marketing team as one saying, "We need to drive X number of meetings this quarter."
• 34:55
  You can kind of as a group work backwards, being like, "Okay, what's the run rate of each of your programs? Is there a way that we can then increase that ten percent this quarter?"
• 35:03
  Because that's gonna take effort on top of the day-to-day stuff that just allows you to hit the current run rate.
• 35:08
  And then as a group, with the spare time we have, let's find one marketing moment that we can all work on together that is big and hits all of our channels.
• 35:19
  And so that's a big thing that we've been doing since as long as I've been at Mutiny, but that we are doubling down on, is having a marketable moment predictably, you know, every quarter or every, like, quarter and a half to make a splash because that pumps all the numbers.
• 35:32
  That gets a spike in traffic, that gets a spike in meetings booked, that gets a spike in interest in the brand.
• 35:38
  But instead of just making that an event and no one else cares about it or thinks about it or talks about it, it's a marketing project that everyone's involved in.
• 35:47
  And so there's an integrated campaign that happens behind it.
• 35:50
  I'm creating content and graphics that are then getting promoted through ads, that are also being pushed to our newsletter, that are also used as ammo to the BDRs to be like, "Hey, come to this thing," you know.
• 36:00
  "You're not ready for a meeting? That's okay. Come to this thing." The sales team knows about it.
• 36:04
  Product marketing is, like, getting in the messaging, and we're positioning ourselves for future product releases and all that stuff.
• 36:09
  So it all comes together with this, like, veneer of brand, but it's actually performance through every channel along the way. That's cool. I like that. Very holistic, very comprehensive. That's really cool.
• 36:20
  So I think you have a meeting with your manager in, like, two minutes. I wanna- [laughs] I wanna make sure we get you out of here. You've been really generous with your time, Stewart, and this is really interesting.
• 36:29
  Just feels like a totally different flavor than any of the episodes we've done so far, so- Oh, awesome... really interesting stuff. I would strongly encourage people listening to go to mutinyhq.com, right? Yep.
• 36:38
  Check it out. See what version of the site you see, but also go check out the content, particularly the playbooks. I think the playbooks are really cool.
• 36:44
  I really like how you've emphasized them on the site too, or at least in the, the version that I see.
• 36:47
  There's cool inspiration for folks working on other types of SaaS products there too to just learn a few things and, one, learn some things about how you might increase your own conversion rate optimization or some ways you could personalize a site, but two, like some ways that you could create different types of content too.
• 37:00
  So really encourage people to check that out. Where else can we send people, Stewart? Can we send them to your LinkedIn, Twitter, a personal website, or anywhere else? Yeah, absolutely.
• 37:08
  Mutinyhq.com/subscribe will get you to the newsletter page where, you know, I'll be able to share everything with you, and you'll start getting that.
• 37:16
  But yeah, me personally on LinkedIn would be the best spot, Stewart Hillhouse. I've got a yellow picture.
• 37:21
  And yeah, if you add me, definitely let me know that you, you heard through the podcast, and I'd love to meet more marketers out there, please. Cool. Awesome. Stewart, thanks a lot, seriously.
• 37:29
  Really appreciate it, and hope we can do it again sometime soon. Always, Jimmy. Thanks a lot, man. Take care. [outro music]