Rand Fishkin is the Wizard of Moz.
They're a funded, huge company.
Started in the SEO space actually
as a personal blog of Rand Fishkin
and it's now this huge company,
earning 10s of millions of dollars in revenue
and luckily Rand was nice enough
to sit down with me on the Digital Agency Marketing podcast
and we covered a few good topics around marketing.
In this video I want to break down
the top three things that we talked about
on the podcast.
Here is a picture of Rand.
He's known for his mustache.
Also known for MozCon.
He's got a really great YouTube channel as well
that's worth subbing to.
He does these whiteboard Friday videos
where he breaks down SEO tips and tactics
in a very straightforward manner.
The first thing we talked about
was strategy versus tactics.
- Yeah I mean I think that one
of the challenges a lot of marketers have
is we're in the weeds doing the work.
This is especially true for SEO's
but almost every kind of web marketer
has to do a lot of very tactical work.
How do I optimize this campaign?
How do I analyze this?
How do I set up this reporting?
And so it can be very tempting
when you are in situations that demand strategic
answers and responses to give very tactical ones.
And I found myself doing this many many times
when I talk to other companies
or people at Moz.
And sometimes you have to take the temperature
of the room that you're in.
If you are talking to C level executives
it may not be all about hey you know
we need a keyword to content map
so that we can figure out where the demand
is and start serving that.
Instead say, "well let's talk about reaching
the right audience and that audience's influencers".
So now you've gone a level up from the tactics
and you've said, you're speaking the language
that they understand and getting
to the goals that they want to get to
which is I need to reach this audience,
I want them to understand our brand in this way
and I hope to convert some of them into leads or sales.
- Another huge thing is to know
what marketing channels to focus on.
And Rand does that by having an experimental budget.
- Basically identifying areas of opportunity,
identifying areas of existing impact
and then identifying sort of experimental regions.
And we sort of try all three.
We generally reserve about around 20%
of our time for experimental sorts of marketing
both in channels and in investments,
the types of content that we create, that kind of thing.
Then there's what I would call areas of opportunity.
So this is essentially we're more sure
that they work, we've tested them in the past,
they seem to do well for us and we continue
to invest in them.
We think there's more growth to be had there.
- Lastly we talked about the KPIs
for each part of the marketing funnel.
- In terms of other web marketers at Moz
and how they're tied to KPIs,
some folks work basically on top of funnel
and the KPIs that they report on
and the quality of the work that they're measured on
is essentially, top of funnel metrics.
So those are things like the growth
of our traffic, the growth of traffic
to various sections and areas of the site,
and then external influence in other communities
like the growth of our social accounts
and the influence of those.
And then we have marketers who work
more in the middle and bottom of funnel
and those are essentially conversion
and optimization professionals
and they are really tied to how do we get people
moving through our funnel, to take a free trial.
How do we get more people to complete that checkout process?
And then we have marketers who work
on the retention side.
So essentially their job is to work on
areas that can influence whether people stick around
and don't cancel their subscription,
those kinds of things.
- It's worth checking out the full interview
on the Digital Agency Marketing podcast.
Rand also talked a lot about how
in their company they've got two roles.
Basically they've got managing people
and they've got artisans that actually work
on the product.
And the producers which is different
that most companies, they make actually
the same amount of money as the managers.
And one of the things Rand was saying
was just because somebody can manage somebody
doesn't mean they're worth more.
Those producers are worth as much
if not more for creating that high quality work.
And there's a bunch of other insights like that
on the podcast.
So make sure to check that out.
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Thanks.