Patrick Ward | Rootstrap
Patrick Ward has served as head of marketing at three different companies ranging from one million to three hundred million in annual revenue, and repeatedly found success by focusing on five things which he says comprise the “marketing transformation mindset”.
In this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Patrick breaks down those five things which include:
The company story
Using the language of the customer
Growing employee advocates
Leading with the humans first
Experimenting with new technologies, but only leaning into them if they produce results.
Check out the full episode to hear why Patrick says these five things are key, and what you should know about them.
Resources from this episode:
Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn
Check out the Rootstrap website
Learn more about Nano Globals
Patrick and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Patrick Ward, who is the Vice President of Marketing for Rootstrap. Welcome to the podcast Patrick.
Patrick (00:32):
Thank you for having me, Kathleen. It's a pleasure to be here.
Kathleen (00:35):
I should say congratulations, because you were just recently promoted into your, of VP of marketing. So that's exciting and a great way to ring out 2021. <Laugh>
Patrick (00:48):
Absolutely, it's been a little overdue, but very excited for both myself and the team.
Kathleen (00:54):
That's great. Well we're gonna talk about some interesting stuff today, specifically, something that you refer to as the marketing transformation mindset, but before we get into that, I'd love it if you would give my listeners a little bit of background on yourself and your career and, and also what Rootstrap is.
Patrick (01:13):
Absolutely. So my name is Patrick Ward and as my accent belies, I am not originally from this country. My home country was Australia where I was born and raised and worked my way up. As many of us do, found university, started to think of what I wanted to do with my life. So I went through a finance major. Didn't like it. Went through an economics major. Didn't like it. Went through a marketing major. And finally I found my place. So like many, I started on the advertising agency side mainly in the world of content, working with what I call the boring industries. Primarily insurance and finance was my niche at the very start. And then for a while, you know, that was, that was good, but it was limiting in many ways. So obviously the best place to do any marketing in the world is America.
Patrick (02:08):
So I took a chance right after graduation came to America with about maybe $5,000 in savings just determined to make it work. And since then I've been through many different companies and finally had landed at Rootstrap. Rootstrap is a custom software development agency. But when I tell people that they're always like, okay, like you and a thousand others. So the thing that I always like to tell people is we are the tech team behind Masterclass. So if you've watched a Gordon Ramsey episode during the pandemic and learned how to cook, that's built with our technology.
Kathleen (02:48):
Ah, that's so cool. Okay. I have been a Masterclass member for two years. So I feel like I was very ahead of the curve with that. So I love that and that definitely is a good way of explaining it. And also I just, I think it's so interesting to me cuz you talked about just picking up and leaving Australia and coming to the us. And I feel like that is such a, a very Australian thing to do, you know, from the country that coined the term walk about. Like, I, I, I remember when I graduated from college, I actually spent some time around Europe with a Eurail pass and most of the other people that I met were from Australia and they were all just like, they were all like, yeah, we just picked up and left and here we are. And so, so many, so many great things from what you just said, they brought back a lot of memories. <Laugh> of traveling by train through Europe with, with various Australians. <Laugh>
Patrick (03:39):
It's very wild to think about that. 1% of Australians are overseas at any one point in time. And that might seem like not a lot, but if you think of it compared to America, can you imagine if there were 3 million Americans overseas at any one time and that just shows you the sheer scale of like you Australians, we, we love to have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder and therefore have to go and explore the world.
Kathleen (04:05):
I think it's awesome. I love the, the spirit of adventure. So you, we, you and I connected and, and we, we talked just a little bit about this notion of the marketing transformation mindset. What is that?
Patrick (04:21):
So, one thing that I'd found when I started my marketing career was that a lot of people focused too much on tactics. And specifically there was this sort of pivotal point I wanna say in the late two thousands, early 2010s where suddenly tech know was coming into marketing in a big way. So before that it was very much, you know, creative spirits very much of the mad men era where, you know, you spend a lot of money on marketing. You weren't sure whether it worked, but you just sort of felt like it was the right thing to do. Then what you had was what I would turn the growth hacking years, where suddenly you had so much measurement come into marketing and honestly to its detriment, because I think what we lost in that period was the true creative spirit of how do we tell stories?
Patrick (05:15):
How do we articulate a message that a brand is trying to convey to the world? All very quality measures when we're suddenly being forced into this quantitative world. And so I took a step back when I was going through multiple different companies in, in various different stages, you know, some as big as 300 million others as small as just a million a year in revenue. And I applied what I then as the marketing transformation mindset. And so having done this for three completely different companies, I kind of realized that I'd stumbled onto something, something core to what I believed marketing was, you know, we're not just the party and events people, but equally we're not data scientists. And I broke it down into five steps. And these five steps I think can be applied for pretty much any company, but definitely their sweet spot is what I will term small to midsize agencies and then small to mid-size companies.
Patrick (06:19):
And when I say mid-size all the way up, even into the hundreds of millions, because this all comes from one single idea, which is that brand does not exist. Now I know a lot of marketers hate me for this and they're always talk about, oh no, we've got branding initiatives. You know, our brand is strong. No, it's not. Nike's brand is strong. Apple's brand is strong because you can ask any person on the street and they will have images, words, associations conjured up in their mind. If you ask most people about most companies, they don't have brands. And so that's where I wanted to create a compelling way to do marketing through the marketing transformation mindset that actually spoke to what a company can physically do rather than going too high end as it, in the case of leaning into the enterprises that have true brands or just leaning too far to, towards the other side, the growth hacking tactics that I mentioned.
Kathleen (07:22):
I love this. And I'm just gonna say that I, I, I'm very tempted to turn this into a podcast, which is a debate on whether brand is a thing or not <laugh>, but I'm not gonna do it cuz that's not what we're here to talk about. So that's an interesting perspective. And I, and I'll add to that. I just I'm in the middle of actually reading this really interesting book called The Culting of Brands and it is about how you develop a, a strong brand. And it actually, it makes a really interesting argument, cuz I've always said like the cliche line brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. Right. <affirmative> which I think is somewhat true. But the book actually makes an argument that the brand is less about what people say about the company and more about how they, I, how they define their identity for themselves as relates to their use of your product, her service.
Kathleen (08:20):
So it's more about the person who uses your thing than it is about the thing that you're selling, which I thought was really interesting. This is a complete aside, by the way. <Laugh> so, so maybe the reason that we think brand doesn't exist is because like the way you're talking about it is, is kind of mass brand awareness. Like it, that that's almost impossible for most of us to achieve, but if you flip it around and look at it, like this book talks about it, where a brand is, how is how somebody defines their own identity as it relates to their usage of your product or service, then all of a sudden you can really build a strong brand, but, but you're defining it success in a different way. So total aside, I just had to add that cuz it was top of mind <laugh> so I, but so you have this focus in between brand and in between call, call it growth or performance marketing. And you've boiled this down to five things, which I love be because I love making things actionable <laugh> so let's get into those five things.
Patrick (09:19):
Yep. So the five steps as we boil them down into the simplest form, the first step, the company story must be clearly articulated. The second step, all external communication must be in the language of the customer. The third step internal communication must drive the creation of what I'm terming employee advocates. The fourth is that consumers trust people quicker than they trust companies. So lead with the humans first, this is kind of like we were talking about just previously about brand where they try and lean too much into their, before it's even been created. So instead better to lead with people. And then the fifth is experiment with new technologies, but only lean into them. If your organization seeks to master them, this final one is very important because it's an acknowledgement that growth hacking and performance marketing exists, and it's still are necessary evil in many ways. It's not a bad thing that marketing is now more measurable. It's more aligned with revenue, but going too far in is going to be a misnomer and you're gonna lose some of that core element of like what makes marketing really exciting and honestly what makes as who they are.
Kathleen (10:39):
I love this. And I agree with so much of what you just said. I wanna, I wanna take 'em one by one. Let's start with the first one. Would you reread what that one was?
Patrick (10:49):
So let's start with the first one company story. This is pretty simple. Some people call it a brand story ironically. But really you are trying to get to who we are and what we do. And the reason this came about was very personal to me through Rootstrap where, when I came on board, there was no marketing, it was an entirely outbound driven. There were hustling for deal, very feast and famine. And really, you never knew where your next client was coming from. So really we didn't have that core identity out there into the market. What I applied was obviously some principles of inbound marketing that was, you know, my primary focus as a, I started my career. I was originally a copywriter way back when, but more importantly, by articulating this company's story, we started working with companies that we never could have imagined.
Patrick (11:50):
When I first started like many software development agencies, we tend to work with other startups, other solo founders, other early stage entrepreneurs. Maybe they've got a little bit of money, but when you start articulating your company story, when you start really putting what, who are out into the world, suddenly you start attracting those companies that resonate with you. And it was interesting because having applied this company story, it was only at that point that we started attracting Masterclass, Sony, Open Door. These really massive companies who, even if you asked our client representatives on their side, like why did you come to us? It's because what we were saying to them was compelling or it was different or it was unique. And that is a hard thing to nut down, particularly because when you first ask any executive, what this company story is, they're gonna tell you the usual, we were founded this many years ago you know, in this city and we had this dream, you really have to, as a marketer, really push your leadership team and you always have to call on almost anything that they say to try and get to some core truth.
Patrick (13:06):
Because as much as this sounds a simple step, I would argue that the company story to be clearly articulated is almost the hardest step of these five, because you are always constantly saying to your executives who should be the ones driving it. How is that different from any of our competitors? Why is that unique? And honestly, if you go by the principles of asking why seven times, as well as pushing back on anytime an executive says something that kind of sounds like generic buzzword filled propaganda, you will get to the truth, but it will take several long meetings. I remember when I first I did this as my first point of business coming into Rootstrap and it took two weeks to finally get to a story that we could all be comfortable with and actually spoke to who we were.
Kathleen (14:01):
So who do, do you have any examples of companies out there that have really good company stories? Cause I think this is one where we as marketers, I think all of us believe that we should have this, but there's a lot of really horrible. So the easiest way to really understand it is to see good examples.
Patrick (14:21):
I, it's funny that you brought up the idea of cult because this is where I think HubSpot does a really good job and it is creating a persona around itself that is implicitly where the company is the thing it does and vice versa. I think this is the ultimate goal where the service or product you are offering is synonymous with your brand. That I think is the key signpost of what a company who wants to do this successfully looks like. Because if you think about some of the core fundamentals of inbound marketing, it all gets associated in any marketer's mind with HubSpot. And that while it seems a obvious and implicit is anything, but it has been carefully curated over a number of years by their internal organization of really making sure that everyone understands that this is who they represent. And more importantly, who they represent in opposition to, because let's be honest, think about where HubSpot came into.
Patrick (15:34):
And I think this is what makes them a particularly inspiring example. They came into a space of CRM that was already dominated. Now we can talk, you know, again on an aside about category creation, but the fact is most marketers will never deal with category creation. They'll be dealing with some startup that has some hypothesis that is usually going after an incumbent. And that I think is the key thing here where HubSpot was able to go into a space that was already very mature, already had an established competitor in the form of Salesforce, you know, a true titan of the industry and the true innovator. And yet by creating a company story, they were able to detach their success away from the physical service. They didn't just come into the market and say, Hey, where a great CRM or where a slightly cheaper CRM they really looked at. This is the engine of what we provide. This is who we believe we are. And if you are on board with this mission for the future, then you should join, sign up for our service, participate in our you know, events, make sure you read our content, all of these other aspects that, that make up the HubSpot brand.
Kathleen (16:53):
I do think also HubSpot, if you're specifically talking about the CRM, I think the other thing they did that was brilliant. And, and I was a HubSpot partner for many years, was they did. They looked at the behemoth Salesforce and they said, what is it that this isn't solving for? And they came at the market from the opposite direction where they started with SMB as a Salesforce, wasn't really, Salesforce was built for your enterprise. And they took all the, the user unfriendly parts of Salesforce and they made it friendly. And so, whereas Salesforce was built for the sales manager, HubSpot was built for the sales rep and you know, when you build for the sales rep adoption improves. And so it's just, it's an interesting case study for sure. And, and very hard challenge to try into the CRM market. Alright, what was number two on your list?
Patrick (17:38):
<Laugh> so external communication must be in the language of the customer. And so the key here is how do you get the language of the customer? Because every company is going to face this, right? They're all going to have lots of brainstorming inside, but you are naturally only creating further blind spots. So the very simple thing that I always like to do is going to reviews. I'm sure that many is B2B, SaaS companies are all familiar with all the review systems out there. There's, Capterra, there's G2 Crowd, there's Clutch. There's good firms. All of these they're basically the same, but the great thing that they provide to you, as long as you are getting a relatively consistent flow of reviews, you is you are getting words specifically from the customer because all of these reviews are not conducted by you. They are written by your customers, or perhaps they're being conducted through an interview format with one of the reps of one of these platforms.
Patrick (18:44):
And this is where you can aggregate that content. A nice little hack that I like here is aggregating the content into a word doc, usually usually using a, a virtual assistant. And then you can use word cloud technology to start picking out what are the key words or key phrases that most of your clients are using, because that really should be the common language that you use to describe yourself. A lot of agencies and a lot of small startups fall into this trap of going too much towards the founder story, right? They go too much towards, oh, well, it's my baby. I created it in this way. So I'm gonna dictate everything of it's described. And to your point, this is not the case, right? This is not why people buy it's because they buy because your service or product meets a certain need.
Patrick (19:42):
Maybe they identify with your product in a certain way. And they're looking across the sea of similar competitors, but your spoke to them and risk on a deeper level. That's what you're focusing on because the customers are driving what you create out of this language, because they're the ones who are gonna respond to it, right? A prospect is going to respond better to similar messaging from someone like them, rather than you, you know, shouting into the, so it will. So you harvest these customer reviews, you thread those common language themes, and then based on particular ICPs that you have, that should be what is driving your external messaging.
Kathleen (20:24):
And I would add one of my favorite tools for message testing is it's pretty new still it's called Wynter, W Y N T E R. And it was started by Peep Laja, who was the founder of, of CXL or, or Conversion XL. It used to be called. And it's so cool. You literally, you, you get these small audiences, call it 10 to 15 people that are directly within your ICP, and you're able to load into the platform like messages. It can be copy from your homepage. It could be images of your homepage. And then they have these structured question sets that you can use to test the messaging and to get not just quantitative feedback, but really truly qualitative feedback. And it's very, and, and it's very quick. So that's a little plug for Wynter. I have loved using that in the last year. Okay. So, so get your brand story straight, put your language or your copy and the language of your customer. And then what was number three?
Patrick (21:24):
Internal communication must drive the creation of employee advocates.
Kathleen (21:30):
Now this is, I love this one. I just have to interrupt you and say, I love this one because this is, I think, I really believe where most marketers fail. They do great marketing externally, and they forget about the internal and they also don't recognize the missed opportunity that exists within their, our own staff. So tell me all about it. <Laugh>
Patrick (21:51):
Okay. So the reason why this is so important is because when you wear marketers, who are we spending most of our time with, we often spend it particularly in small organizations with the C-suite, right? Because ultimately we're accountable to them. We're either to sales for the amount of revenue we drive, or in many cases. And I'll try and say this delicately, but there are a lot of egos in the C-suite. And if you play to those egos as a marketer, maybe you are getting them into the right press that they want to appear on. Maybe you're getting them into the right podcast or the right keynote speech, or what that is that plays to their ego. You will do well and you will keep your job. And that is a good thing for any marketer. But if you are looking to truly amplify your marketing impact, this is where you need to harvest your employees.
Patrick (22:43):
And really like you say, drive those internal advocates. So how do we do this? Well, that is the key. It starts from the employee to create not just social, but true influence. So the way that we do this is through a couple of different things. We look at product meetups. So within certain coding languages, we sponsor our employees to go out and create product meetups around different coding languages around diff around different frameworks in the community. We put resources behind them and more specifically financial resources because it's one thing to say, oh yes, we encourage our employees to participate in the C. It's another thing to say, you wanna start a Python meet, you wanna start a Ruby on Rails meetup, here's $5,000. So you can throw an event so you can hire a space. Those sort of efforts really pay off. Then we look at social elements.
Patrick (23:48):
So we have many team members who like to play a sport. We provided them with something as simple as uniforms, because it's a great little conversation starter, those sort of elements where someone is doing something that they would already do. Why can't we participate in that as a company to make sure that those employees say, oh, you know, I see you've got a Jersey there, what's that company? Oh, we're from, Rootstrap suddenly a conversation that started. We also look at other things like talent pipeline. So we give our employee time to be university lecturers. That's a crucial thing, particularly in, in today's tech talent war, where it's really hard to find new talent and certainly poach them from other companies. It's a great way of training the next generation. And they're already participating by getting candidates through who are already familiar with our organization, but really where all of this comes together is one thing that we've called the world cafe.
Patrick (24:53):
And the world cafe is an initiatives framework. It is purely democratic where the entire company, all 200 of us decide on 16 initiatives to pursue for the year. There is no dictating from the executives. It is purely based on what employees want to pursue. And each initiative gets a certain amount of funding and that funding then translates obviously to a certain outcome. So sometimes it's a diversity and inclusion initiative. Others is social connection amongst the company. Other times it's like I mentioned before, certain frameworks that people want to explore, maybe they wanna learn new programming language. The point of this world cafe is that it creates entire company. Alignment is truly employee driven. And by creating that space where everyone gets a true voice, you are able to really have a powerful message that, you know, when you have any employee who is outside the organization or outside the four walls, going to speak very highly and with a lot of pride about your organization.
Patrick (26:12):
Now it's a hard thing to do. A lot of companies pay general lip service here. They say, oh, we have an open door policy. Or, oh, we, you know, we care about our employees or, oh, we give them some time to volunteer. But what I really like about how we specifically at Rootstrap have created this world cafe is it's really putting our money where our mouth is when it comes to showing that every individual employee has a demonstrable say in how this organization is run. And by giving them that ownership, they are going to create that communication that is ultimately beneficial. And as marketers, I'm always gonna want 200 advocates rather than my team of 10.
Kathleen (26:57):
So question on this one, and I like, I like your approach to this and sort of, it's a very, almost organic grassroots approach to getting employee advocates. And I, it surprised me and not in a bad way, because when I hear most marketers talk about how they galvanize their internal teams, the focus tends to be on things like training them on how to post more on LinkedIn and how to share the company's content. Like, is that at all a part of this? Or is it, or, or, or is it really just what you've described?
Patrick (27:29):
It's interesting. You say that because we've certainly tried that approach in the past, and we'll certainly encourage it for the right folks that want to participate. But the funny thing is about encouraging them to share on social. Like you say, is it often feels too forced. And I think what the world cafe does that is different to that is whereas telling people or training people how to share on social, it feels like it's another thing they have to do. It's another marketing mandate. And so you get some people who are enthusiastic, a lot who are kind of mayor and then a couple who are also just a little resentful of it. And so it never feels truly employee driven. Yes, that is not executive driven, but it's really just marketing driven. And so by shifting it to the world cafe into this initiatives framework, we're basically acknowledging that you have passions, you have desires of skills.
Patrick (28:29):
You wanna learn, you have ways you wanna share your work with the outside world. Let's empower you to do that in whichever way you see best. So there are some people I know who will never share on social, but maybe they're running the local product need. And then there are other people who are speaking at a conference, but maybe they'll never write an article for me. And then vice versa. And I think what this does is it creates a true collective mindset towards furthering the company's goals rather than mandating some arbitrary number of oh great. 70% of the company shared our latest corporate piece of social media information or something along those lines. I think that's the key that a lot of marketers need to get away from where they're trying to get specifically to a quantitative ROI result rather than thinking of the mass. Right? You are trying to expand it from, I have my 10 marketers or however many marketers you have in your team sharing messages of, you know, very positive messages about your company. And you're trying to escalate that across your entire organization. Yeah.
Kathleen (29:42):
I really like your approach. It just feels like there, it would, it would engender so much more authenticity than the push to post on LinkedIn. So that's really interesting. I, I appreciate you sharing that. Okay. What's our next one.
Patrick (29:58):
So consumers trust people more than they trust companies, and where I'm going to lead this one is towards a real interesting phenomenon of B2B influencer marketing. So many of us are familiar with influencer marketing on the B2C side. Obviously organizations like Instagram have been very king of this more re TikTok, but B2B influencer marketing is quite a bit different. And the problem is there is a right way to go about it and the wrong way, and the wrong way I'm gonna start with is where you are trying to essentially mimic what the B2C influencers are doing. You're trying to get millions of views and <affirmative>, they honestly tend to be towards more mass content that appeals to everyone. It tends to be more inspirational. And I'm not saying that that content isn't valuable, but as a B2B marketer, it's very useless. And we saw this before, where we tried to run a couple of, and most of our views were coming from students and solo founders with limited cash.
Patrick (31:08):
Well, for an organization like us, where our minimum engagement is a hundred thousand dollars, it didn't make any sense. So where do we pivot? We pivot to coming more from an individual thought leadership perspective. Now again, thought leadership is one of those terms that has been bastardized to all hell, but more importantly, it's speaking very directly to an audience it's able to be more focused into. Can I write this piece of content that is speaking to the right hundred people? And sure enough, that approach really worked for us. A third of our new business, 2 million to be precise came from individual thought leadership. It came from articles on Medium, primarily and also came from content shared on social. That quite honestly, didn't get a lot of views. If you were looking at it from a vanity perspective, you would not have thought it was worth the time of day, but when you trace it all the way through, when you trace it to the messages that we get in our LinkedIn inboxes of the executives that we manage, when you trace it all the way through to an open deal, and then to revenue, that when it makes a real difference.
Patrick (32:25):
And I think this is the thing that a lot of companies get really scared about because they think that, oh, well, if I'm not getting the views, it mustn't be valuable. And that's the key with B2B influences is that it's not so much that they have large view counts. It's just that they have the right views.
Kathleen (32:45):
That's so true. Amen. I just wanna stop and underline what you just said, and it's not just about influencer marketing. It's about how you think about marketing in general. People need to stop thinking about the quantity, like the massive traffic and the people do this with SEO too. It's like, we're going after these high volume keywords, you know, like that's not necessarily gonna, and maybe sometimes that'll get you results, but what really gets results is high intent. And so if it could be finding the influencer with like the right 10 people who listen to them, or it could be finding the very niche podcast with the tiny audience, that's exactly in your area of interest, or it could be optimizing for the keyword that doesn't have high search volume, but that is exactly the person that you want to be reading your content. So that is my, my rant. I totally agree with what you just said. And I love that approach.
Patrick (33:38):
Yeah. I mean, what this looks like in practice, I will give one example that's kind of perfect for this is we had our CTO write a piece about fraud detection within eCommerce using machine learning, an ultra specific term. It basically only yielded about 150 views, but yet it has yielded two projects, both with $250,000. Holy cow. That's, that's what happened when you find the right people and that's the art, that's where I think that marketers really, and this kind of comes back to what we're talking about in its entirety. You want marketers to still have the creative freedom to go after ideas that, that speak to a person, right? That might be a little more qualitative, but you also wanna arm them with the right numbers, the right metrics so that you can prove, Hey, doing this was not a foolish endeavor. Yes. I didn't get 5 million views on my LinkedIn post that said, you know, entry level jobs should be entry level agree because that content sure. It appeals to a lot of people on LinkedIn, but it's not relevant to your business. It's not relevant to the problem you're trying to solve. It's not relevant to your overall vision and mission of your company. And that's really what you should be measured on as a marketer. Yeah,
Kathleen (35:04):
That's a great point. All right, what's our next one?
Patrick (35:08):
And finally, number five, experiment with new technologies, but only lean into them. If your organization seeks to master them, this is a problem. As older time, marketers love trying new things. They love experimenting. They're very often willing to say yes to almost anything. They end up burning themselves out by doing this. And they also end up getting really poor results. Anyone who has managed a social media accounts, for example, of any large organization knows this. They are putting out the same content across eight different platforms. Each of that is only getting two likes if they're lucky and it just doesn't. So the key here is find one where your niche lies. So the example here I have is from one of my former companies, dog town, media, there are 1 million in annual revenue at the time. Now I was told you are gonna be responsible for the social networks.
Patrick (36:17):
And if I'd run every other playbook, I would've said, okay, let's do Facebook. Let's do LinkedIn. Let's do Twitter. I didn't have that time. And I didn't have that team. So I said, we're going to just do LinkedIn and we're not gonna do anything else. We excluded every single other social network. Naturally my CEO was terrified of that prospect. <Laugh> he felt like, oh, well you need to be everywhere. No, you're done that in just one year alone, you yielded $650,000 in pipeline. And the overall agency's revenue grew to 2 million. That is the power of when you seek to find an area or a technology that speaks to your audience and master it. Now, it doesn't have to be a social media network. You might find a new tool such as, you know, one I've been, we've been talking about copy tools. One I've been using recently that I've really enjoyed is copy AI. It's taken the amount of time. I take to write an article from four hours down to about 20 minutes.
Kathleen (37:24):
What? I'm gonna have to check that out.
Patrick (37:26):
<Laugh> and that's the point when you find a tool that really supercharges your growth, that's when you can really get those outside results. But it really comes back to that eye idea of mastery because more often than not most companies just try and that spray and pray approach, and it just doesn't work.
Kathleen (37:48):
Yeah. There's like, there's an element of FOMO that marketers suffer from. And I saw this play out dramatically with clubhouse. It, it, it was so fascinating, you know, this rush, everybody was like just creating on clubhouse left, right. And center. And, and I'll be honest. I mean, there were times when I was like, am I missing the boat here? But I, I made this very deliberate decision to not spend time on it. You know, like I was a guest on somebody's clubhouse show and I listened once or twice, but I was like, I'm not, not putting any resources into this because I know I don't have the bandwidth to do it well. And I know that so far as for my company, that I'm a marketer at LinkedIn was the place for us. Similarly, like we don't do anything on Instagram, you know, it was just, these were very deliberate choices.
Kathleen (38:40):
And I think that, so there's a little FOMO where marketers, especially with new platforms are like, oh, we all have to be the first ones on it, you know? And that's happening now with things like NFTs and crypto. And and then there's also this like shiny object syndrome. 'em Where we do love playing and testing things. And I, I think you, you put it so nicely, which was, don't like, and I'm gonna paraphrase, but it's like, don't be afraid to test things and, and experiment, but don't kind of go down the rabbit hole, unless it's really something that's going to deliver bang for the buck. I, I liked how you it a lot.
Patrick (39:16):
Yeah. I think it just comes back to, you know, time box your experiment, make sure that it's going to, you are going to measure it over a sufficient quantity of time. You don't want to do it too short, because like you say, you won't get any significant data as a result, but equally don't suddenly find that after for a quarter that you spent all this time experimenting. When really it was you going down the rabbit hole, because I think you should be able to ascertain with almost any platform. Is this something that is going to serve me for the future or is it not? Because at the end of the day, focus is key. We know this, like there's so many adages about just being 1% better every day. And that really resonates deeply, particularly as a marketer where, like you say, we're being pulled in so many different directions. If we can just sit, still focus on the, the three to five things over the course of, you know, even long periods of time, like a year, like two years, like five years, that'll make the biggest impact. Suddenly all those boats that you didn't jump on are gonna be irrelevant.
Kathleen (40:28):
Yeah. I mean, this, what a great list of five things, Patrick, I love how you've distilled it. And I think for many people listening, some of these are things they know, but maybe just needed to hear again, you know, and I think there's so many things like that for us in life and, and certainly in a career in marketing where, you know these things, but you need to be reminded and you need to keep them top of mind. And especially when you're faced with those hard choices of things, like, should I spend a lot of time on Clubhouse? <Laugh> you know, it's so easy to do that. And so I, I love you boiling it down and making it so digestible. And you've had some great results with this in your career. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about some of that?
Patrick (41:11):
So I mean, the results certainly speak for themselves. The, every company that I've, I applied this to has been on the Inc 5,000, which is always a, a nice accomplishment. Specifically the most recent example of this is, is Rootstrap. I grew an inbound pipeline from zero to 32 million. And more importantly, I think it speaks to the types of clients that we've been able to attract. Every company that I've worked for has been what I would class a no name brand in that no one really knew about them. No one really knew anything about what, who they, or what they stood for, but we've been able to work with people like Masterclass, Sony, Google, Tony Robbins, Snoop Dog, like you name it, the, the list goes on. And it's just incredible to be a part of a company where, you know, you don't have the big brand name behind you that can kind of open doors and, you know, make you look to be a better marketer than you are. And I think that's what I certainly take a lot of pride in. And I think any marketer should be able to take pride in that if you apply these very simple five steps, you too can work with some of the biggest names in the a world, make an enormous impact and really just show your chops as a true, genuine, authentic, honest marketer.
Kathleen (42:43):
Cheers to that. And that's clearly one of the reasons why you've just gotten promoted. So congrats again on that. Okay. Switching over to the questions I always ask at the end of my podcast you probably know what's coming the first being marketers have always been challenged by trying to keep up with all of the changing things in the world of marketing. How do you do it?
Patrick (43:07):
So I think there are a couple of good resources here, and I will put this caveat is I try not to listen to too many marketers because many of them are garbage <laugh>. But aside from your good self Kathleen, two of my biggest areas, one is a community called Pavilion which it has a number of different marketers in it. I, I run actually a marketing executive channel within that community. And the other is Chris Walker. Chris Walker is the CEO of Refine Labs. You can check his content out on LinkedIn and he's again, a real straight shooter who's just been calling BS on a lot of what I talked about when it comes to growth hacking where a lot of marketers are using technology as a crutch rather than trying to be the very best marketers they can be. And so he's just showing how all the attribution software fails, how the marketing mindset fails. And someone I really look up to who's really blazing a, an awesome trail in showing the world what marketing really is and can be.
Kathleen (44:17):
Boy, his name comes up a lot on this podcast when I ask this question. So that is the sure sign that he is doing a lot right. And he has been a guest in the past. So definitely check out the episode with Chris Walker to hear more of how he thinks about B2B marketing. Second question is, and, and maybe that you've already answered this, which is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. So who out there, either company or individual is, is setting the standard for what it means to do it well?
Patrick (44:47):
Yeah, so I certainly answered it somewhat. And I was thinking obviously like HubSpot is the king of this, and we understand that, but I wanted to call out a company that's a little under the radar and that's Segment.com and Segment.com specifically is a customer data platform that targets data scientists. And the reason I wanted to call the these guys out is they're a really fascinating example of how you can create an entire content ecosystem, a massive content ecosystem targeted at one single title that of data scientist. And it's really interesting to see how, when you get to the, that level of granularity, you are really able to succeed. I think they were recently acquired by Twilio as a result. And then the other one that I want to call out, and this is a bit of a shameless plug, so I hope you'll forgive me, Kathleen is Nano Globals. Nano Globals is my little side gig that I started at the start of the pandemic. And I would say it's a great example because I've grown that from zero to 37,000 monthly visitors in just under a year.
Kathleen (46:04):
Nice, good job.
Patrick (46:06):
Yeah. Applying my methodologies in a, in a good constructive way.
Kathleen (46:11):
And what does Nano Global do?
Patrick (46:13):
Nano Globals. We are a remote work and outsourcing tech consultancy.
Kathleen (46:20):
Oh, very cool. Oh, well, I love this Patrick. I mean, you are, you're, you're drinking your own champagne as they say. So that's great. And I'll definitely check out nano globals and there are a lot of us working remotely now. So what a, what a great time to be in that world. And thank you so much just for these really timely reminders of those five things. I, I, I feel like that the conversation really resonated deeply with me and hopefully it did for folks who are listening. And if somebody is listening and they want to reach out and ask a question or connect with you or learn more, what's the best way for them to do that?
Patrick (46:55):
Always LinkedIn. I am on there constantly. So it's linkedin.com/i/ James Ward.
Kathleen (47:03):
Great. All right. I'll put that link in the show notes, along with the links to Rootstrap and Nano Global, so that you can learn more about what Patrick's been working on. And as always, if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, please stop and take a minute and leave a review on apple podcast. It makes a huge difference and it gets us found by more listeners. And finally, if you know somebody else, who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, send me a tweet at @workmommywork. Yes, that is my Twitter handle. <Laugh> and I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, Patrick. I really enjoyed this.
Patrick (47:40):
Thanks, Kathleen.
