Innovative Marketing Trends with Taran and Nick

And do you mind sharing some more in depth about what were some of the, like you said, automation and use of technology in the process? What were some of the things that you did?

Sure, nothing would I, yeah, firstly, nothing that I did was revolutionary, but it's in the context of trucking, it may be revolutionary. In general, in B2B, it's not necessarily revolutionary. So first of all, actually had people use a CRM to collect information and use that information. So we used HubSpot, but I'm sure Zoho or Salesforce or anything else could work, but just collecting all the leads you have, making sure you follow up with them. Very basic sales 101 level stuff. Number two. giving them a way to access those leads, right? We were using Zoom Info and Sales Navigator, but again, there's Apollo, there's many other tools out there that allow you to figure out who your leads are and do targeted research. Number three, building a small social media presence and a good website so that people could figure out we existed. That's really, really basic. Even in industries where websites are less important, turns out they're really important because the very first thing anybody does is... figure out who you are, they Google you, right? They look at your website and it's very important to have a professional website that communicates, hey, we're Fusion, we do trucking for this industry. It was very easy that you could go to us and if you wanted to talk to, if we weren't right for you, if you were looking for something else, go to somebody else's website. But if we are right for you, we make it very easy for you to talk to a salesperson within minutes, right? Which is very, very, which sounds again, very obvious, it's not necessarily how the trucking industry functions. The trucking industry is much more still today, even today, run through phones, right? Even though people don't want it be run by phones, that's just the way people think.

You're absolutely right. What you just described, having a good storefront, which is a website, having a good story to tell, having good social media presence, having a system where you can actually maintain and manage the records and the leads and then make sure that the right message is being delivered to them at the right time, and just keeping them engaged and warmed up. obviously be ready to engage and sell to them when they're ready to buy basically. And that's something that we kind of live and breathe at GrowthNatives. that's what I would say is like probably 90 % of what we do is help customers do that. And we see that, you mentioned that trucking, it may not be something that is very obvious even in industries. that it is very, very obvious. We work with a lot of B2B software companies. The processes and technology is still as broken as it ever was. it's an 80. And here we are talking about AI and the impact of AI and how it is going to transform the marketing and the sales function and really how companies are able to provide great customer service. and also like really kind of manage the whole life cycle of a customer in a much, much more automated way. But know, orchestrating that automation is... the art basically and the science. So it's not that easy. I mean it's easier said than done. It's like yeah let's use AI. What is it that we can use AI for? How do we implement it and then how do we manage it beyond that point? Yes we can automate a lot of things but you know there has to be some thoughtfulness that goes into it. But anyhow that was wonderful. Like you said you know the trucking industry not very obvious to adopt to technology. and processes. I have an interesting story as well. Way back in 2000, we used to sell supply chain software. Trucking industry was one of our target industries. It was so damn hard to really get the message across because most of the... These are large operators with anywhere between 2000 to 10,000 vehicles. The founder, CEO, is somebody who actually drove the first truck that that company, know, when it started. And he still has the same mentality and the same, he likes to grind versus like adoptive technology. That used to be the hardest part, like trying to show them what is possible and how it can. But let's fast forward a little bit and talk about idea scale. So what are you doing in idea scale these days and what's keeping you busy and anything new, exciting that you have done that has transformed the growth? Because I know you guys have had amazing growth since you joined as CEO, so.

Yeah, so when I joined Ideascale, we actually had no very minimal marketing presence. We had a website, obviously, but we had no marketing team. We had no social media presence. Our website, I noticed this on the first week on the job, it did not have a talk to sales button, which sounds very basic, right? It didn't have a get a demo button, which every software company does nowadays. So we've gone from zero to maybe not 100, but zero to 90 over the last two years. And we've done that in a few areas. Number one is, We got extraordinarily good and in fact best in class at SEO and organic and content marketing. So today just to give you a sense of how good we are, I have 10 times more web traffic than my next nine competitors combined. and that's organic, I'm not being sent for paid digital advertising at all, right? Whereas they're all spending lots of money on that. And the way we achieve that is we looked at our content market, we started a blog, and on that blog, we just put really, really high quality content that has nothing to do with selling our software. So a lot of people, their blogs are just thinly veiled advertisements for their own software or product. If you go read Ideascale's blog, it doesn't mention Ideascale anywhere. The only place you'll see the The is like, you know, at the top of the page in the footer and in the website address. The actual content of the article, the part that people are reading is just really good content on innovation. What are best practices? What are new standards? What are new tools you can use? And it's truly unbiased. It's objective. And the way reason we did that is because we realized Google's algorithm is actually quite smart and looks past thin, like advertising. It wants really good content and it looks at how people. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick, can I interrupt you for a second? I'm so sorry, but I think there is still that connectivity issue on your end because like for the last minute and a half or two, really the your image was grainy to me.

Okay, it should, because it's riverside, it won't matter, right? Because it's local uploading.

Is it? Okay, I didn't know that.

Yeah, Riverside records, Riverside records locally and then updates after the call. So any graininess that you get, yeah.

Okay. I'm not aware of that. that's why I just wanted to... We're having such a

Yeah, sorry, I've used, yeah, I'm, I.

good conversation. didn't want to go to waste. Otherwise, I was going to say if that persists, then we can reschedule and kind of have this conversation.

No, no, no. Any graininess you see will disappear when the actual upload on the hard copies of the files.

Perfect, so let's rewind. We'll go back to the, I'll probably, like, my editing team will fix all this basically, so we will just, I'll just ask the question again. In fact, like I had asked the question, maybe you just start with the answer, like which is like, know, like when you started at.

Sure. So when I started at Idea Scale... We actually had very limited or zero marketing presence. had zero people in marketing. We had no social media presence. We had no outbound marketing campaigns. Truly nothing. We were a couple of salespeople supported by no marketing presence whatsoever. So over the past two years, we've gone from having zero marketing teams, zero marketing presence to actually being quite good at marketing. And I'll give a couple examples of the things that we did, particularly the ones that have been very successful. Number one is on organic and SEO content marketing. So two years ago, we didn't have a blog. We started a blog and today that blog generates ten times more organic traffic than my next nine competitors combined. And they are paying for paid digital advertising and I'm paying zero dollars and I'm still getting more web traffic. And the way we accomplished this was we took a very different tactic to our blog than I think a lot of organizations do. A lot of organizations write a blog as a way to sell their product. Their blogs are basically articles on here's a hundred great ways to use my site. software. We did none of that. Every single blog article on Ideascales blog is actually high quality content for best practices for innovation practitioners. So if you are, that's the industry I play in, innovation practitioners. So if you want to learn what the best way to run a fishbone diagram is or what the ISO 56001, which is the standard for innovation best practices, or what are cultural changes you need to make, whatever questions you have on the actual content of innovation, we are the best resource in it. That's why if you look at where we rank, It's usually some common, if you Google anything related to innovation, it's some combination of us, Wikipedia and Harvard Business Review. We're top three in any language, any content area related to innovation. And obviously that's resulted in when Google's algorithm realizes we're putting out really high quality content and therefore people come to our website. And obviously one impact of that is some small proportion of people who come to our website realize these guys are really good at the innovation side. Maybe we should give their software a chance, even though we're not advertising our software.

Yeah.

And one practical impact of that is today, or when we started, we had one inbound lead coming every three months. Today we have about 30 every month. So that's a 90X improvement in high quality inbound leads, which is pretty good for a B2B business of our size. That's on

Absolutely.

our SEO marketing piece. Should I go on for the other areas of our?

Yeah, absolutely. What else was like, you know, something?

Sure, a second area is on social media. historically had very, we had a LinkedIn page, but we didn't do anything for it. Nobody was posting to it. So over the past year or so, we've made it a team effort. rather than having one social media marketing manager, we gave a lot of people around the company access to our social media accounts and said, look, anything that is relevant to Ideascale, feel free to post it. And we gave people a lot of trust. And then we also used some AI generated posts as well. again, within our content area.

That was going be my next question. You guys are all about innovation, so are you guys leveraging AI as an innovation and accelerator in your sales and marketing mix, and how are you doing it?

Yeah, so we're using AI at ton in kind of three areas. Well, actually. Number one, as a company, we're using AI everywhere for just to improve our productivity. Our marketers are using it to generate content. Our salespeople are using it to write emails. Our engineers are using it, co-pilots to write code faster and better. I'm using it for better decision-making to double check decisions that I'm making or to review my analysis. So we're using it everywhere. Specifically to marketing, I think that there's three sub areas where we're using it. Number one, auto-generated content, right? So whether that be for our blog or our social social media, we're using AI to auto-generate content. Number two, we're using it to optimize human-generated content. Let's SEO optimize this or let's optimize this for virality. And number three, we're using it to supplement content. So let's imagine that you published, you've written a great human-written blog, but you need an image that perfectly fits that. Let's use an AI to generate an image for it or to write an addendum or to write metadata for it that can be used in other contexts.

What are the tools that you're using for achieving this, if you don't mind sharing? What are the tools,

What is what sorry?

the different tools that you're using? Is it chat GPD?

Sure. We've left it to everyone, well, on the engineering side, we're using GitHub Copilot, which is probably best in class for the software engineers. For everyone else, we've left it up to the individual in terms of what tool they want to use. The three tools that are, again, pretty standard nowadays that people are using are Anthropic, ChatGPT, or Gemini for text-based recognition, and then something like Dolly or Mid Journey for graphical generation, although now Gemini and a couple of these other tools are multimodal and can put out graphics as well. But we've left it to the individual. you know, sometimes I personally use a lot of Gemini and ChatGPT for text, but then when I need code or graphics, I go to Anthropic because I think it's a little bit smarter there. But that's, we've left that up to the individual employee on what tool they like the most.

Got it, well that's wonderful. So yeah, so we talked about AI and how you guys are using that, helping you kind of accelerate and accentuate the content that you guys are creating and then in return that's actually kind of bringing you quality traffic and some of that is actually becoming business. So anything else that you would like to share about like what you're doing at Idea Scale?

think the third area, and this is less on the marketing side and more on the sales side, is historically we were very much a US-focused organization, we call it US and Canada, North America-focused organization. Over the past year, we've expanded globally because one realization we had, and perhaps we should have had it before, was the problems that American corporations are facing are ultimately not that different from what a Chinese corporation or an Indian corporation or a French corporation or government, right? Like we serve a lot of US government agencies, the French government, the Japanese government, governments are facing the same problems around how do they become more innovative and evolve to address evolving demands from their constituents or customers. So starting this year we expanded globally. went into, we made a couple hires in Latin America, in South Africa, in India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. And when you put all that together, the cool thing is we discovered that our number one, we validated our hypothesis that there are all these opportunities. But secondly, we also, the good thing we did was we also didn't just hire a salesperson, leave them by themselves. We actually put in some marketing efforts behind each of those countries or language groups. So that made it a lot easier for our salespeople to be successful and generate opportunities, whether opportunities coming through our marketing efforts or through their own relationship building, was buttressed by some of the marketing that we'd put in place before them.

Great. Well, that's amazing. In fact, I think you brought up like three very different and unique things that I think any business can adapt. One is really going to be more digital and more modern in their approach, how they attract and convert customers. Two, I think is really more of like the forward looking leverage AI in the mix so that you can use that as an accelerator. the funnel. then lastly like you know I really like what you just shared about you know it's a very traditional thing to do. You know find who else can be your customer and start knocking on their doors basically. So you know it doesn't have to be limited by geography, it doesn't have to be limited by you know find your ICP and it could be global. And the world we live in today is very agile from that perspective. So you know it's very easy to do business across the borders, it's very easy to... parent-to-date markets that you may not have thought of being possible a couple of decades ago. Especially in technology, know, and product-led growth, it is so much easier to go and sell anywhere in the world while you're sitting anywhere in the world. But anyhow, this has been a very interesting conversation, and I really want to thank you for being a wonderful guest. We... For the listeners, I hope you guys have been able to learn something here and would be able to actually implement it in your businesses. wishing everybody a very, very successful remainder of the 2024 and obviously the future. Thank you.

Thank you, Terran.

Okay, I didn't.