The Niche Media Approach
Learn from Shane Murphy-Reuter, CMO at Webflow, about aligning your media buying strategy with how people consume content.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of CastMean Studios.
Today, we are joined by a special guest, Shane.
How are you?
>> I am doing very well.
Thanks again.
Great to be here.
>> Yeah, excited to chat with you today.
We're Webflow customers here at CastMean Studios.
That is exciting to chat about all the cool marketing of Webflow.
And of course, your background and everything in between.
As always, our show is brought to you by Qualified.
You can go to Qualified.com to learn more about the number one conversational
sales
marketing platform for companies revenue teams that use Salesforce.
Head over to Qualified.com to learn more.
First question, Shane, what's your first job marketing?
>> Wasn't the first job marketing.
I joined, well, take a step back.
When I was at college, I studied law and business.
And I was like, I don't want to do that.
I want to do something creative.
I was like, "Markly, that'll make sense."
And I had this idea of myself moving to London and being a creative marketer.
So I joined a company called Orange, which is a telecom company on their
graduate program.
Loved it and spent by seven years in London, yeah, before coming to the US.
>> I'll spend a little bit later.
>> Yeah, and so tell us what it means to be CMO Webflow.
>> Yeah, so I've now been head of marketing for
companies pretty similar to Webflow for about 10 years.
Started at Adroll, running marketing there.
Then intercom, Ziminfo and that Webflow.
And these companies aren't in these incredibly interesting stages where
I joined after they've had this technology innovation in a certain target
market that explodes.
And they get to a certain scale.
And that's like their first rocket ship, you know?
For Adroll who is retargeting for Webflow's visual development,
try small agencies and freelancers, be able to build websites at pace.
And so my job actually, this has been made of stage, is pretty broad.
Like, I equally need to think about how do you build a brand?
How do you market the product at the product level?
How do you think about cell-serve growth?
>> I don't think about sales growth, semi-derived pipeline for
sales, which I sure will talk a lot about.
And so it's a very diverse discipline all the way from thinking about
creative to analytics to marketing technology.
Which is both really exciting and fun, but very, very challenging.
And so, yeah, you know, Webflow specifically,
I'd love being here at a company that really feels like has an opportunity to
become
generational and changing lives that we see every day.
And so being a Webflow specifically,
I think that there's also an emotional connection there.
CMO, it's really fun to have a product in the market that cares about.
>> Yeah, and it's just so, so dang important.
You know, every single guest on the show,
we ask them how do they view your website?
They view their own website.
And every single person says the most important thing for
demand, just the most important thing for our brand, for our thaw leadership,
for everything else.
You know, it's so obvious, but it's like it is the most important thing.
And it's kind of funny that for like a decade,
everybody just had these really clunky experiences with their website.
And the only person who could update them with someone who had to be a
freaking world expert at building on that platform.
And you know, with like no code tools and all that sort of stuff.
I was telling you the story before this that our guy Colin,
our head of content strategy, he learned web flow in a weekend.
And now he makes all the updates to our site.
He's done really cool stuff on cast me in studios.com.
And like, to me, this is like the beauty of marketing technology and
the beauty of like this modern landscape of giving people the tools at
their fingertips to be able to have an outsized impact and like, you know,
web flow is right at the right at the top of that.
>> I love that.
Thank you for your customer.
>> Yeah, I think marketing is up until now,
it's up between a choice of either join me fast.
You move fast like you get these templates and
more templateized tools like the weeks of the world or
maybe build one of the term anywhere like your engineering team gives you some
kind of compelibency or power.
And where, you know,
hadn't written code unlocks endless possibilities, but
it's extremely expensive and extremely slow.
The technology innovation that like web flow done on other companies have done
all is happier within process management, not so the same.
And I use you to move at extreme pace, but not give up on the power.
So I can run flow and it says, you know, this will like a web flow.
You're manipulating, you're creating real code, right?
You're in a visual interface that you're designing.
But it's created real clean code in the background.
So you're not giving up on that power.
And it's a pretty trust for measurable customers.
And, you know, as I said, it gives like companies all sides the ability to
move fast, iterate, but not give up on that power.
And also just be for design.
So it's been pretty game changing.
Yes, so we started, I started casting four years ago.
We built this site on on web flow from day one.
And like every change we've had to do everything super easy,
add new pages, adding content, you know, adding these sort of things.
And it's just like makes it all easier, you know, it makes everything easier.
And it's so important.
And there's so many things that hook into your website, obviously, and all
these
other pieces.
It's like, I feel like it's still criminally under invested as people's
websites.
And then you see, you talk to like CMOS, it'd come into a company that'd been
around 20 years, something like that.
And the first every single CMO I talked to is like the legacy infrastructure,
the technical debt that we have is off the charts.
Like I talked to this one CMO, a good power mine, a public company.
And they're like for a year I spent on the website, like the full year just
trying to un un F the entire thing.
And like now with the ability to be able to do that stuff so much faster.
And like you said, to have the complexity there, it's hugely important.
This is where all of our tools hang off of this is where our sales
forces and everything else, like, you know, tools like qualified and all this
stuff and all hangs on your website.
You got to have a freaking fast website that works and is great and beautiful.
Yeah.
Yeah, you said under invested is funny.
Like I agree that it's so painful for so many marketing teams to iterate on
their
website that they tend to just look at a lot of the experiments they want to
run
or they just want to make because it's just like so in some ways, yeah,
under invested.
But in a lot of ways, it's over invested.
Like my last job, I think I had a 15 person web dev team.
Just to like build things to the website.
And it was like just massive investment, slow moving.
So yeah, it's real.
And as I said, it's not just, I think, well, web floor applying this to the
website,
but I think it's happening across different industries in this concept of
code dependence is something that you think a lot about a web flow.
We don't think the code should go away.
Like code is obviously the backbone of it, but do you need to actually learn to
write code?
And I think a lot of companies are recognizing that there are ways to give you
all of that power that actually need to write it.
What is so important for marketers, like the thing for me personally,
as a marketer is like, I have to be able to, I want control, right?
I want the green light.
I want the creative control.
And I want to see how this thing looks like in real time.
So like as the CEO, if I want to be able to dig in there and scoot around a
little bit,
but the idea is like, I want that stuff like iterated super quickly.
I want to be able to change messaging.
I want to be able to change, you know, we're going through, you know,
a little bit of a repositioning exercise, a CASB.
And like that stuff is like you want to be able to be fast at that.
And to the point of the under and under invested over invested, I totally agree
over invested on maintaining a site, which you don't need to have all that
stuff anymore.
But under invested in terms of it is your customer experience, how someone
comes to your site and buys from you is your customer experience, your buying
cycle,
the types of content you have on your site, how they can consume it, how easy
it is to consume it.
You know, it's like all those things are extremely important.
And that's the part that's being under invested is like the customer experience
of when someone gets you do all the work, spend all the money to get them to
the site.
And then what happens?
And it's like, it absolutely sucks and they can't find anything and, you know,
everything else.
100% like the other trend we think a lot about is the fact that the first
technological
innovation for marketers was how do you get people to your site?
When you think about search, exploded, social exploded, paid,
socialist, voted SEO, all of that.
And you know, when it first part of my career technology, and that's where
the investment was going because it made sense.
So I thought there was tons of opportunity to put people behind a generated
traffic.
And it's been a bit of a scene, actually, of my career to shift that.
And the second I'm like, we're even working for companies like,
at all, their whole value proposition was like,
retarget people that were on your site and increased that 2% conversion rate to
a bit higher.
Yeah.
But you get people to your site.
Can you support them?
Can you answer the questions?
I think given some of the challenges that are making the paid channels,
less and less effective from a targeting perspective,
it's now even more important than ever for companies to best the time and
energy
the conversion part of it.
I think people talked about it before.
Career rate optimization is important.
But I promise if you look at a market is budget and you look at today and which
money they're
spending on traffic generation versus conversion rate optimization, it is 51.
And that needs change.
I think that, you know, shows that Webflow are kind of leading into that.
That the fact that I think a lot of people are recognizing that.
And so yeah, it's exciting time.
Dude, I cannot tell you how many times I sit down with a company,
huge company, 4500 company, what a global 2000, whatever public company.
And we're like, hey, for this, we're going to build this show.
And we just needed to have a landing page for the show.
You got to throw it in the nav bar somewhere.
You because we're, you know, we want to position around this and they're like,
it's going to be a big ass with our dev team.
And you get the sign and you're like, it's a page.
Like when I asked Colin to do that in Webflow, it takes him 35 seconds of like,
he can spin up a page and put it in the nav bar, literally that fast.
But it's just like, how is that possible?
And it's not like getting approvals.
It's just like getting a page on the site.
I always look at that as sort of like the innovation test.
And it was the guy who really started up his innovation score for a company
is how quickly could a good idea get from the lowest person at the company
all the way to the CEO and then and then implement it.
And I think about that with the website of like it is the canary in the coal
mine that if you can't even get a page on your website up in a day,
it's like, how can you possibly do anything else?
Right? You know what I mean?
It's like crazy.
But it's, you know, and not to go too deep on this, but it
takes things like localization.
We just want your localization product.
When I started my career, when I was at ad, I was running European marketing.
It really localised our site in a different languages.
I cannot tell you if it paid for that.
Yeah.
You either need to get a set up.
The translation costs like everything.
And now with the technology advancement,
tools that were flowing, they're other ones.
Yeah.
And you can translate and localised your site.
In 20 minutes, if I didn't bother, like, you just language five minutes.
If you want to do all the images, you know, I'm going to take the large.
You want to style it differently.
That's a little bit longer.
But ultimately you have complete control in a way that we just haven't had in
the past.
And it is your point, like the key thing in moving that pace.
I think this is true across marketing, across sales is like, how do you how do
you
organise your team and give them the tools, then empower them back to your
kind of need startup thing to go from concept to your
execution as fast as possible.
And typically the way you do that is you cut out the interdepartmental
dependencies.
And so if you could empower the marketing team, let's say the design
themselves to not only just design in FigMap, import it into Webflow
through our FigMiddo Webflow sync.
Building it within the day in legit.
That's moving fast.
That's like, yeah, it's like changing.
All right, let's get to your marketing and a little bit more
deeper into Webflow in our first segment, the Trust Tree, where you go and feel
honest and trusted to share those deepest, darkest pipeline secrets.
We know what Webflow does.
What types of customers do you have?
Who's in that buying committee?
Yeah.
So we think about customers through two lenses.
About half of our business comes from agencies.
So these are agencies who are building sites for clients.
But we have the relationship with the agency.
And then about half of it is where the company comes directly to us, like an
R2 fit as sort of a casting comes from someone's ability themselves.
And oftentimes they would use an agency as well.
So it's a bit of a flywheel.
So we really think about our business in that way as a flywheel.
And from the buying committee, it kind of depends.
Like if it's, as I said, a lot of those two things.
If it's coming through the agency, the buying committee tends to be first, the
agency needs to be the one who is like, yeah, we should use Webflow to go and
build
the site because it matches the requirements.
And so internally within the agency, there's to the champion that within the
company,
there is champion tends to be either somebody on the design team or somebody
with a group, ark, an ET, who's trying to move fast.
Then they typically bring in the business decision maker who
tends to be the head of marketing.
CMO, VP of marketing, whoever it is, is like, yeah, this makes sense,
but I read our company up.
And then most really important, they typically bring in an engineering
decision maker.
And we're just like, hey, yes, this technology is secure.
We're comfortable with marketing, like being empowered this way.
And so our, our, in a lot of deals, like the 3D key roles, like that
champion is to be more like the user, the website, the head of marketing, the
head
of engineering, and maybe with an agency involved too.
So it's been difficult to navigate sometimes and particularly when our
messaging is so much about empowering the marketer, we need to find a way to
make sure that we don't alienate the engineering person.
And that's how it's set up can be complex, but not them both.
And what's your marketing strategy?
How do you think about marketing holistically?
Yeah, so marketing is pretty straightforward.
If you summarize it, I'm going to like summarize it, right?
The job is to define a story.
That's compelling.
And then your job is to communicate that through channels that engage people in
order to take some sort of action.
At the top level, you've got your brand level.
Like this is how, like why should people buy it?
What's like our mission is to give everyone developers super parents, right?
So we've got like this emotional position at the top to get people
like she cared or why we exist.
Then you've got your solution level.
What's the problem you're solving?
We've talked a lot about that for workflow and then you go to your product
level, right?
Where it's like, hey, you can use localization to do xyz.
And so we apply that kind of story, channel approach all the way from the
highest level brand all the way down to the product level.
We're trying to get some of you to exist across with your product.
So that's the way we think about marketing.
Like I think about marketing.
Our strategy is really true fault.
One, we need to go and take larger companies.
We call them people with pro sites or professional sites where they're
updating them.
They've got a lot of revenue coming through them.
We, you know, our first job is to get those companies aware of
workflow and understand the visual of alvegetes the future.
And so our brand and product marketing team are head of
the focused on this kind of concept of category creation building the brand
with that market, which then obviously leads to demand to improve the fall.
Our second part of the marketing strategy is that thriving agency
child, so building the thriving agency child to support them.
So we, and we actually organized the team in this way.
I've gone like one marketing focus on the agency side, one marketing team
focus more on that kind of like new market building.
And but if you, if we could build those two things, we'd build the two
sides of that flywheel I'd talk to pay and it just self-rehabforces.
And then supporting that obviously we still got a growth team right.
It's like making sure that commercial after my agent is great.
All those supporting both of those that creative team sort of thing.
But those are two, um, our two pillars are a marketing strategy.
And so far it's been working really well.
Love that.
That's really cool.
Since you said it, bifurcate the team on that, like you said, they have
shared resources that are sort of pooled and then separate resources that are
not.
What are the type of things that they have that like just, you know, just on
their
sides like, well, how does that look?
Yeah, it's a marketing or search for some of this copy.
I think about like the, there's sort of three ways you can think about it.
What is like hard line this person's reporting into that leader.
Another way is dotted line.
Like they sit in the central team, but they dotted line up into one
marketing focus.
And then the third way is like they're just in a central team.
Um, and deciding whether or not to, uh, centralize or decentralized, uh, it
comes down to really what is the strategy for that specific marketing pillar.
For example, we actually have great strength in the agency, uh, market agencies
or wherever it was, they love us.
We have tons of the community through our fault any day.
Our bigger challenge with them is actually making them successful as they
come into the fall, making sure that they get clients in order to pitch web
flow that they learn and use web flow.
So the types of people that we put dedicated on our agency team are much
more focused on agency and enablement.
And like we brought a team that does live streams and do live stream today.
All the eddy's web flow and that sort of thing.
And they're building the partner program.
These centers are rated partner management, all of that sort of thing.
And whereas on the other strategic pillar around going and building our
brand awareness and demand is new market out larger in his teams.
And that is much more about brand marketing, right?
So we have things like our, our strategic events in there that go to
farster, uh, suppose, or farce would be to be some of the regard,
or suppose, you know, Mark Holmes team sits there or content team, uh, sits
there.
Cause that, they, what they're trying to do is build a category within the
market.
And so the people put there much more about sort of broad building.
And then the central resources really be out like two chains growth who are no
matter who's coming to our funnel, they need to think about that and connect
to a rate of consumer website, how to build board them, et cetera.
And then our creative team who are creating like the assets required for
all of those campaigns, we keep separately so that we don't have like, um, a
bunch
of sort of disconnected and I brought it back to you.
Any other thoughts on strategy or infrastructure or anything like that?
No, you know, I think my main advice for anybody who's, you know, a CMO,
or are coming up to this stage is really making sure that you find that right
balance between, um, how you think about the brand level solution level and
product
level. I typically joined companies, as I said, at this stage where they've had
great success selling to early adopters.
Early adopters tend to be much more interested in the product features.
And the founders are typically technologists who are really close to that
market.
And so all they want to talk about is the product.
They want to talk about this cool feature that we're launching.
You got a market that can you feature?
You know, and so all of the gravitational pull internally, not all of it, but a
lot
of it is around how you need to do a better job of marketing the product.
And what ends up happening with these companies is the growth stalls.
Why?
Yeah, because you never break out of that like early adopter market, right?
That's kind of close to the cause of stuff.
And like the analogy that I'd be using in terms of where it's like, yeah, if I
'm
the head of marketing of Tesla, I'm not like spending all my time talking about
how the maps got better.
No, I'm telling the world that electric cars are the future.
Um, and internally with a technology company, that typically tends to be the
biggest challenge that they face, which is growth slows because they've never
really tapped into those new markets by explaining the overall problem they're
trying to solve in the world.
And so this is why, as I said, like in my marketing team, I've kind of had
these two very distinct focuses.
One focuses like, yeah, market the heck out of the new features to our agencies
that are coming in so they can use them so they can sell them like, yep, that
makes home sense for that market, which is our original market for this new
market.
That's why I want to, of course, think by brand level messaging, my solution
to have a messaging so that we go on, like actually build momentum in a new
space.
And you know, there are companies that have done this well that have not
flown to not track the guns of the world, really built the category
conversation intelligence, drift operation mentioned drift because they're
qualified.
Now, but you know, drift an amazing job.
Well, I was at five, six years ago, creating a concept of conversational
marketing.
And so there are examples of it out there.
And but I will say that typically what I've seen is I've joined
near with these companies to stop the gravitational force is down to the
product level.
And you really have a marketer need to like push beyond that and make sure that
you continue to grow the overall market.
Yeah.
And you know, it's funny that you mentioned that the, you know, the
drill stuff where it's like, you know, compare that to qualified, where
qualified is, you know, one of the interesting things that we've talked
about with them is part of the reason why we rebranded the show to be called
pipeline visionaries is every time they posted about pipeline, it got more
clicks, it got more views, it got more, whatever, because that's what people
are actually focused on.
They don't care about, you know, like the conversational nature of it, right?
It's like, if they care about, is this thing going to help drive pipeline?
How do I turn my website into a selling machine?
How do I do these things?
It's not just about the feature.
It's about this like broader, you know, broader thing.
You know, no surprises like Craig was the CMO sales force and he's the CEO, you
know, qualified.
It's like, of course that he's going to be able to see that stuff.
But I think that that's like speaking to the broader category is like, there is
no pipeline cloud.
There is no, you know, solution that's being able to look at this stuff.
You know, he, he, when we sat down originally when he was like, I'm starting
this company.
And he was like, if the CEO of your biggest prospect walked in the door of
your headquarters, what would you do?
It's like, oh, you roll out the red carpet.
You get it.
Conference, you get it if you come to your website, what do you do?
It's like, oh, it gets treated like everybody else, right?
Um, and like that, that, that thing of like, how do you make that entire
experience completely different in order to shape the pipeline?
I always fall like that's, that's a, you know, that's a category shifting
proposition.
Yeah.
Qualifies marketing strategy is genius.
I remember college learning about this.
I come at what it's called, but it's where effectively like, um, a smaller
company will set up their operations besides a larger company.
So wherever the larger company is kind of like, yeah, maybe there, there are
stores or whatever, the smaller company that is sending something related will,
uh, uh, sort of follow up, um, which makes sense.
And it kind of like the, what hopefully did was the digital equivalent
that which is like, Hey, people are already, there's a massive demand for
products that are the sales force customers need.
Um, let's just latch into that existing demand there for that adjacent category
and then suck it into our category, right?
Um, and you now seem that in other places like Clavio building on top of shop.
So if you, I don't know, $1,000 or something else.
Um, and it's really, really, really, really smart.
Um, and a different approach, I think that a webflow does not the same
kind of like a Jsoncy that we could do that with.
So we are a bit more and let go create category mode.
And, and, uh, but if you have the opportunity to do that as a company,
like go for an old age, it should certainly be a record card.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, too, and I'm curious to your thoughts on this is like,
you know, you're not in the category of website builders or you're not trying
to be in that category.
Like you're something beyond that much beyond that.
And I think that that's like part of the thing, like when I, I remember, uh,
when I saw the post as why influencers are so important, Emily Kramer was like,
if you are a startup building a company, you need to be building it on, you
know,
uh, webflow or, you know, this one, other competitor.
And, uh, and I literally was like, what is webflow?
Uh, and I looked it up and I talked to Craig and Craig so as
a user built qualified himself on webflow.
Um, yeah.
And again, it speaks to sort of like the nature of that stuff.
And I just remember thinking like, Oh, I didn't, I don't know what this thing
is,
but I had all of the lifetime of marketing experience building websites on
every
other type of platform being like, this is horrible.
Like this is such a terrible experience.
Um, but to get beyond that is like, you know, the idea of like what this
website is and who can do things and this idea of, you know, that, that
you all are talking about now about having code, but not having to write code.
Right.
It's not just about being low code or no code.
It's about the code is still in there, but, uh, the person is not a developer.
It's freaking super powerful and obviously that's why you're positioned around
that.
Yeah.
Like I will be, when I joined webflow, they'd actually
spent a long time using the term no code.
And one of our main challenges was to reposition ourselves.
Like a lot of the time we were, we were throwing in with the wicks and
squarespaces of the world.
And the no code thing kind of played into that a little bit that we're, you
know, not enterprise grade and those sort of things like, no, no, no, you're
Cody.
We're going to give you this, you're a Cody and you're just not writing a
letter, a letter by letter.
The other thing, you know, that, uh, I think about a bag or a category is, um,
sometimes it does make sense to enter an existing category and help people
reimagine what that is.
So take a iPhone, for example, I don't know this to be case.
I was never at Apple, but I would imagine there was a huge amount of debate
internally, but this isn't a phone.
It's not a phone.
It's a small tablet.
In fact, what I understand is that the original team was working on the iPad
and
they couldn't get it quite to work and then see jobs like, Hey, that's, that's
make a phone first, right?
Um, and so I'm sure that they didn't want to call it iPhone.
In a lot of ways, you'd be like, that's wild.
Don't do that.
That's not more what people use it for.
One of you people use it for is this like computer in the pocket, but the
genius
otherwise to say, not, not, not, not, nobody knows they need to have a phone.
Let's start there.
Let's top into that and then reimagine what a phone could be.
The op-lover of a scale that they have the power to reimagine, like, I'm
money to be able to do that, but I would, like, that's kind of a risky
strategic decision that was genies.
Whereas for webflow, you know, Pete, you know, the equivalent would be that we
say, no, we're a website builder.
So yeah, well, you know, we're in the category that Wicks and Squarespace are
in,
but reimagine what they can do.
Those things.
Anyway, like I do think there are some times that it makes sense to take
any just in category, reimagine it, but oftentimes certain for a webflow, that
always a fellow strategy for us and we didn't do it.
Yeah.
And, you know, just to finish the thought on the Apple piece there is, what
did they put in all their ads?
You know, for the decade of the iPhone shot on iPhone, right?
So what are they marketing?
A camera, right?
It's like, that's the thing.
It's like, because they realize, oh, you know what everybody does with these
things?
They take a million photos and videos at their friends and they do all
this stuff.
And like, that is the currency of our of our modern world is, you know, all
of these social channels, all this stuff, none of it exists without photos,
where else better to take them than on your phone, right?
So it's like, that's the sort of thing is like understanding what is the actual
reason or what is the actual utility of the thing that people are buying?
Yeah, they want a phone.
Yeah, they want to be able to access all the ads, but you can do that wherever.
Like this is what being shot on iPhone looks like.
Looks like, you know, all their ads shot on iPhone.
I just like always go back to that.
And then I think the picture ended up then their ads started being like the
best
camera.
And it's like, you know, Apple doesn't say that the best camera.
They say this beautiful image is shot on iPhone.
They show you what it means.
They don't tell you they have the best camera.
Yeah, enough to nerd out too much of marketing strategy.
Like Apple or I'll be a second cramp like this.
But you're Apple.
There are two of those that are doing their one is a big long, big
city is a creative company, you know, and so tapping into that is through the
thread of their brand is really important for them.
And I also think that as I talked before about the kind of brand
hierarchy from brand to solutions product as a double click on that and I've
got a framework or to share.
But in there is the aspirational customer that you need to define and in
a in great brands, hero, that aspirational customer.
And Apple have always done that.
Like you think about the original, like behind the Mac campaign, the we are
what was different, you know, we are for the craze.
It was always about the the person behind it and what, what, you know,
emotion and either trying to power a human.
Those stories in the way that where flow is changed because lives and even
ambition to give everyone developers to power is very centered in its human
inside and in the power of a human that we really tried to.
Continue leaning.
That includes our first ever billboard campaign, Times Square, we put some of
our
most successful customers up and showed a redo hero at them.
Centering around the shoe behind the product is like, radiate port.
All right, let's get to our next segment.
The playbook where you open up the playbook and talk about the tactics that
help you win.
What are your three channels or tactics that your most uncutable budget items?
Yeah, these are going to be that that shocking.
The first is for sure, search, right?
Both paid and organic search.
When I joined, we actually invested in many, many, many channels.
We pretty much could have all the way back to the search.
Paid social, really low ROI paid video, like hard to
without attribution to ROI, but we did uplift testing, terrible ROI.
And so we brought away down to search and it's been very effective.
Those we've made like, could our cacken in by two or a third of what it was and
accelerate growth.
So that's number one.
And paid social market, I mentioned that we're doing the shift up market.
We have found LinkedIn to be very effective as a way to the tapping to the
market audiences, where you can be much more targeted at sites, company
jobs, hiding those things.
That's when they're effectively, so I could not turn that off.
And the third, like I mentioned, in our shift up market,
fields, field marketing, generally like advanced skin, ourselves out there on
our content machine.
So we've still only just shipped to put a market has been critical as well.
And I give a bonus.
Well, I know you asked what's for you, but the fourth, it's not what you'd
like immediate bestment, but our growth team is critical.
All those things, as we've talked about this at the start, they drop people
at our website, they drop people in our product.
All the things that we're doing around coverage, right?
Optimization and improved onboarding, creating a product quantified to the
emotion up to sales is big critical flows as well.
Yeah.
One of the things that I remember when we were building the site, as you know,
building a website is a very personal journey, especially for like, for me, as
a CEO and I have sort of like this vision of what I wanted the website to be in
the brand to look like and all those sort of things.
And I pity all of the, uh, all of the, the webflow architects that have to deal
with the visionary founder to do all this stuff.
But, um, there was some, there was some posts out.
It was basically just like, you know, the, the top webflow websites.
Gosh, I spent so much freaking time on that site on that page, just scrolling
through, just looking at what's possible, looking at parallax and all the
different
things and what are the things that we could do and all that.
And I want this and I want this.
And I want this.
Um, gosh, you got to be able to see that stuff.
And then you got to be able to hear from people and how they use it and, and,
uh,
you know, and get that no like and trust, right?
Like when you're going up market, you know, you're like, you got to be able to
have the conversation of what could be rather than just, you know, what, what
is
that?
What's one thing that that you're not investing or you, uh, you kind of
mentioned something already, but, um, that wasn't working or fading away or
something you don't invest in this year.
Yeah.
Again, this is probably obvious, but paid social for a long time, I think was
like really effective for, for, for folk.
Not only do I think that just tack as ever jumped on the bad right in there,
like
increased, then obviously you have targeting challenges that are prepped in
that mean that the target is worse.
So the cat just shops through the roof and the ROI just to decorate it.
And, and so we pretty much fully pulled out of that apart from our investment
in the day and a market.
And yeah, just really challenge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The, my only concern with LinkedIn is I feel like everybody's doing the same
thing
because they all realize the same thing.
So that, that tends to get a little bit expensive too.
That's the main problem with those two, Chant, because we do the same thing.
Our podcast or our strategy is, I call it podcast paid in partners where it's
like, you know, original content paid through search in LinkedIn and then,
and then going to market with partners that are selling to the same people.
We have a very outbound play as part of our like content strategies.
But the idea of that paid of like, I felt, I found the exact same thing is like
Google and LinkedIn end up working really well, especially together.
They work really well together and everything else I just felt like was so
expensive.
But then randomly you'll see those LinkedIn things just shoot up so, so high.
It's a challenge.
Yeah. And I should say, you know, kind of the way I'm stuck, my story is more
like
direct investments in growth.
Most of the companies that I've worked for, if you look at the non-varies,
well over 50% of the customers coming by and through just a strength of the
brand.
Like the companies who act on the true or thorough and branded search of sorts
of
things, that's true for rep flow as well.
And so this, this is why ignoring those very sort of growth tactics that I
mentioned.
We do put a heavy vest maintain ensuring that we're building the brand and
add also that part of the child, like the part and challenges that fit you to
celebrate business.
And that is an acquisition child in the cell.
So I got to, and I would say that maybe the higher level answer is that we have
three
bullet rates and bring people in.
It's like the stripe the brand.
There is like, you know, growth marketing, which I talked to.
And then there's our partner channel.
And so don't want to like kind of miss the fact that there are two-worded
massive drivers of our acquisition.
Yeah.
What do you do for Bransaupe?
How do you spend your money?
Yeah.
Well, right now it's mostly organic, right?
In up until now, I think against pretty much the forms of our stage,
brand is built through community led branch, right?
And in a con it was there's an on the two founders at every startup meetup.
They were on this.
We could start talking all the time.
They were in the community.
And that's because they get the product, they get the customer.
They're in there.
And so the brand is very much built bottom up.
In any, they find a target market, they become part of that community.
And then it grows from there.
And the first stage of brand growth at Webflow is very, very similar.
We have a very heavy investment in our community.
The families were heavily involved in the design community freelancers and
small agencies with the heart of brands.
So and that is what maintain us a lot to today.
That does not get us into that new market.
And so we are heavily investing now across two made areas.
One is analyst relations and where we're now starting to like really
engage with the likes of Forester, Gardener, etc.
And to start to leverage existing categories and get covered in the CMS
choir, all those things.
The second one, which is maybe that more interesting is that our media
investments, I use this term, "bitch media" where I know you go, if you want to
go
build a brand, go to an agency, they'll say, great, how are you going to have
you?
There are five million.
That's a great because they have to operate at scale.
Oh, they do.
They'll go find media partners that are at scale so that they can do three or
four deals, put a million into each one.
And suddenly your billboards everywhere, you're like getting covered in
wired, which is not that very focused.
And it's like media's moved up.
Like, that's not how people consume media.
Why are barquers buying media like that?
And and so this concept of mid niche media is to allow to be buying
strategy with how people could see content was in much more than
each way.
So right now, we've just done, I think, five different podcast
bots, ship deals with podcasts that are consumed by CMOs, which is our new
chart of market.
So things like Jenny's podcast, which is a bit broader.
It's not just CMOs up.
Yeah.
And CMO moves, things like that.
And so we've got a marketing events, right?
Topic Firester, Garner, these are where are CMOs?
Where are they?
CMO content?
Where are they?
Like, you just knew the things go be there, either advertise or
spot to the event and go get a speaking slot.
And so it's a much more niche media approach.
And we're building up, we already started that approach like three
months ago.
And so we're we're the problem with that approach is that it's lower.
Right.
You got it.
The other approach, mass to one big media partnership and you're
kind of like everywhere, this approach requires you to do, you know,
20 deals with individual podcasts and 10 deals with different events.
And so it's a bit of a slower burn, but for sure, the right thing for us
in best in our I would, you know, anybody listening to this,
they're a marketer or they work with marketing team.
This concept of niche media buying is like really important.
That's our second big area of investment.
I 100% agree with that strategy.
And that's where like I look at those people as partners, like people that you
can you can cut a check to.
It matters to them, puts food on the table.
It allows them to create what they do what they do best.
I love that stuff.
I mean, it's partially to my heart, but it's also just like those are the
people have massive, massive spheres of influence.
And those are moonshots like they can be they can return all your, but they
can have you can have 100 XR or Y with stuff like that.
Whereas the other type of paid stuff where, you know, all the other stuff
that you mentioned earlier, you know, it'll get you two X and you know, you,
you go on your merry way, but this is where you can have an outside result is
with niche media.
I 100% agree.
All right, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits, which is quick questions and quick answers just like how quickly
qualified helps companies generate pipeline, tapping your greatest asset,
your website to identify your most valuable visitors and instantly start
sales conversations.
Quick and easy, just like these questions, go to call fi.com to learn more.
Shane, I don't have to convince you how important the website is for everybody
else out there.
Quick hits.
Shane, are you ready?
I am ready.
What's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
I can play guitar and piano, which is the forehand, but I can do that badly,
but I do it.
Favorite book podcast or TV show that you'd recommend?
This is embarrassing.
The bachelor, me and my wife watch it every week, gray weighted, melt your
brain
after our days work.
Love it.
You have a fair and non-marketing hobby that maybe indirectly makes you a
better
marketer.
Yeah, rising.
Everyone should write, write down your thoughts, write a wrote a book in the
past,
like writing.
What's your best advice for a first time CMO?
Become a CFO.
Basically, you need to be the person that is as financially illiterate as any
person in the company.
If you hear a financial term that you don't understand, go learn it, go read a
book on finance, that will get you and you will see to the table.
Um, and people will back your decisions as a result.
Fan.
Tastic.
This has been awesome for listeners.
Go check out Webflow.
If your website's not a Webflow, I don't know what you're doing at this point.
Uh, you listened to 45 minutes of us talk about it.
So, um, Shane, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
No, yeah, just so I think we had so much time talking about Webflow already.
It's game changing for any basis, big and small, go check it out.
Awesome.
Thanks so much and take care.
Cheers.
Bye.
Bye.
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