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.
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?
It wasn't a first job marketing. I joined, well, take a step back.
When I was at college, I studied law and business.
And I was like, "Oh, I don't want to do that. I want to be some 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, yet before coming to the US.
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 Web
flow for about ten years.
Started at Adroll, running marketing there.
Then Intercom, ZMinfo, 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.
For Adroll, it was re-targeting for Webflow's visual development,
tried small agencies and freelancers, being 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 sell-serve growth?
How do you think about sales growth, selling a private pipeline for sales,
which I'm sure we'll talk 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 Covial
Radio Shield that's like, has an opportunity to become generational and changing lives that
we see every day.
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,
"It's an important thing for demand. It's 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 was 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 Webflow in a
weekend.
And now he makes all the updates to our site. He's done really cool stuff on
castpingsudios.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, Webflow is right at the top of that.
I love that. Thank you for your across work.
Yeah, you know, I think marketing is up until now, it's between a choice of
either join me fast.
You move fast, like you get these templates, more templatized tools, like the
witches of the world,
or maybe build one of your own, like your engineering team gives you some kind
of compaliveness.
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 Webflow done, I don't know the companies
have done a like Zapier within process management, not so the same.
And allows you to move at extreme pace, but not give up on the power so it can
went flow.
And it says, you know, this bill, like a Webflow, you're manipulating, you know
, you're creating real code, right?
You're in a visual interface that you're designing it.
But it's created real key and code in the background.
So you're not giving up on that power.
And it's been 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.
Yeah, so we started, I started casting four years ago.
We built this site on Webflow 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 is people's
websites.
And then you talk to like, CMOs that come into a company that's 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, 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.
And 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 it's somewhere else
to get 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 web floor applying this to the website,
but I think it's happening across different industries in this concept of code
dependence system.
We 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 market
er 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 cast be in 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.
You're 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.
When 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, how do you get people to your site?
When you think about search, how do you get social, explode, paid, social,
exploded, SEO, all of that.
And when it first part of my career technology, that's where the investment was
going.
Because it made sense, where there was tons of opportunity to put people behind
and generating traffic.
Overall, their whole value proposition was like, re-target people that were on
your site increased that 2% conversion rate to a bit higher.
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.
I think people talked about it before, conversion rate optimization is
important.
But I promise if you look at a marketee's budget and you look at today and
which money they're spending in a traffic generation versus conversion rate
optimization, it is 50 to 1.
And that needs change.
I think that, you know, it feels like webflow kind of leading into that.
The fact that I think a lot of people are recognizing that.
So, yeah, it's an exciting time.
Dude, I cannot tell you how many times I sit down with a company, a huge
company, 4500 company, global 2000, whatever public company.
And we're like, hey, for this, we're going to build this show.
And we just need to have a landing page for the show.
You got to throw it in the nav bar somewhere because we want to position on
this.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
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 city. 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 Adlo, I was running European marketing.
And really localized our site in a different languages.
I cannot tell you what painful that was.
Yeah.
You either need to get a set up the translation costs, like everything.
And now with the technology advancement tools that were flowing, there are
other ones.
Yeah.
And you can translate and localize your site in 20 minutes.
The fed and bottom like, if 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 page, I think this is
true across marketing, across sales is like, how do you organize your team and
give them the tools?
Then empower them back to your kind of mean 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 imported into Webflow through our FigMilla
Webflow sync, building it within the day in a long time.
But in the day in a little bit, that's moving fast.
That's like, yeah, it's like changing.
Alright, 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,
a sort of casting, comes up with 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 good marketing team who's trying to move fast.
Then they typically bring in the business decision maker who tested me to head
of marketing.
CMO, VP of marketing, whoever it is, is like, yeah, this makes sense to build
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, in
a lot of deals, like the 3D key roles, like that champion used to be more like
the user or the website.
They had a marketer than 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.
And what's your marketing strategy? How do you think about marketing hol
istically?
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, why should
people buy into you?
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 to actually
care about 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've got your product level, right, where it's like, hey, use
localization to do x, y, z.
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.
And we're trying to get some of these to customer to adopt the product.
So that's the way we think about marketing. 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, professional sites, where they're updating
them. They've got a lot of revenue coming through them.
Our first job is to get those companies aware of workflow and understand the
visual development is the future.
So our brand and product marketing team are heavily focused on this kind of
concept of category creation,
building the brand with that market, which then obviously leads to the
background material.
Our second part of the marketing strategy is that thriving agency child, so
building the thriving agency child to support them.
So we actually organized a team this way. I've gone like one marketing team
focus on the agency side, one marketing team focus more on that kind of like
new market building.
And if we could build those two things, we'd build the two sides of that fly
wheel I'd talk about and it just self-rehabforces.
And then supporting that obviously we still got a growth team right.
Making sure that commercial after my agent is great all those supporting both
of those creative team.
So to think, but those are two pillars of our 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 just on their sides?
How does that look?
Yeah, it's a marketing or search for some of this copy.
I think about the three ways you can think about it.
What is like hard line this person's reporting into that leader?
Another way is dotted line. They sit in a central team, but they dotted line up
into one at marketing focus.
And then the third way is they're just in a central team.
And deciding whether or not to centralize or decentralize comes down to really
wanting to strategy for that specific marketing pillar.
For example, we actually have great strength in the agency market agencies are
aware of us.
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 and know how to pitch web flow that they
learn how to use web flow.
So the types of people that we put dedicated on our agency team are much more
focused on agency enablement.
And like we brought a team that does live streams and do live stream today and
all that is web flow.
And they're building the partner program.
The centers are rated partner management all about to the thing.
And whereas on the other strategic pillar and going and building our brand
awareness and you market up larger and high teams.
And that is much more about brand marketing.
Right. So we have things like our strategic events team there that go to far
ster.
Farster will be to be some of the regard and symposium.
Our comms team sits there.
Our content team sits there.
Because 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 we have like two things growth.
You are no matter who's coming to our funnel.
They need to think about that and connect to a rate and consumer website, how
to well board them, etc.
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 a bunch of sort of disconnected
and broadly dedicated.
Any other thoughts on strategy or structure or anything like that?
No, I think my main advice for anybody who's you know, CMO or coming up to this
stage is really making sure that you find that right balance between 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've got to market the key feature.
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?
Because you never break out of that like early adopter market, right?
This kind of course is a causal stuff.
And like the analogy that I'd be using in terms of elsewhere is like, if I'm
the head of marketing test that I'm not like spending all my time talking about
how the maps got there.
No, I'm telling the world that electric cars are the future.
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 kind of have 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.
So I want to, of course, think about brand level messaging, like solution level
messaging so that we go on like actually build momentum in a new space.
And there are companies that have done this well that have not flown to that
track the guns of the world really built the category conversation intelligence
It drifts operation mentioned, but you know, drifted an amazing job.
I was at five, six years ago, creating a concept of conversational marketing.
And so there are examples of it out there.
And what I will say that typically what I've seen is I've joined with these
companies to stop the gravitational forces down to the product level.
And you really have a market of need to like push beyond that and make sure
that you continue to grow the dealable 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 or 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 confidence, you get it.
If he comes to your website, what do you do?
It's like, oh, it gets treated like everybody else, right?
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, qualified marketing strategy is genius. I'm a college learner in the back
of the camera world is called.
It's where effectively like a smaller company will set up their operations
beside a larger company.
So wherever the larger company is kind of like, yeah, maybe they're, they're
stores or whatever, the smaller company that is sending something related will
sort of follow them, which makes sense.
And it kind of like the work conflict did was the digital equivalent, which is
like, hey, people already is a massive demand for products that are,
that sales force customers need.
Let's just latch into that existing demand there for that adjacent category and
then suck it into our category. Right.
And you've never seen that in other places like clavio building on top of shop.
Save you a million dollar or something else.
Yeah.
And it's really, really, really, really smart and a different approach. I think
that a webflow does not the same, kind of like a JSC that we could do that with
So we are a bit more and let go create category mode.
And, but if you have the opportunity to do that as a company, like go for an
old age, you certainly be a record card reader strategy.
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 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, web
flow or, you know, this one other competitor.
And, and I literally was like, what is webflow? And I looked it up and I talked
to Craig and Craig, so as you're built, qualified himself on webflow.
Yeah. And again, it speaks to sort of like the nature of that seven. 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.
But to get beyond that, it's 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 the person is not a developer is
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 thrown in with the wicks and the squarespaces of the
world.
Yeah. And the no code thing kind of played into that a little bit that were,
you know, not enterprise grade and those sort of things.
No, no, you're Cody. We're going to give you this, you're Cody and you're just
not writing a letter by letter.
The other thing, you know, that I think about a bag or a category is sometimes
it does make sense to enter an existing category and help people reimagine what
that is.
So take an iPhone, for example, I don't know if this is the 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, my understanding is that the
regional team is 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 for a strike.
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 how more people use it for money. People use it for is this like a
computer in the pocket.
But the genius of it was to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, nobody knows they
need to have a phone.
Let's start there. Let's tap into that and then reimagine what a phone could be
The op-lover of a scale that they have the power to be like, I'm money to be
able to do that.
But I would like that's kind of a risky strategic decision that was genius.
Whereas for Webflow, you know, the equivalent would be that we say no, we're a
website builder.
So yeah, you know, we're in the category that Wicks and Squarespace are in, but
reimagine what they can do.
Anyway, like I do think there are some times that make sense to take an
existing category reimagine it, but oftentimes certain for Webflow, that always
a failed strategy for us.
So 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?
So 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 with their friends and they do all this
stuff.
And like, that is the currency 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.
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 pixel ended up, then their ads started being like the best
camera.
And it's like, you know, the iPhone doesn't say that. And then 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.
So I have to nerd out too much of marketing strategy like Apple or obvious, I
can cramp like this, but you know, Apple, there are two of those days they do
their one is, and they've logged in cities, a creative company, you know, and
so tapping into that is through 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 and 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
creative.
It was always about the person behind it and what emotion and I have the return
of a power at human.
Those stories in the way the workflow is changed because lives and even
ambition to give every developer's powers is very centered in its human insight
and in the environment of a human that we really tried to continually
needs that inclusion of first ever billboard campaign times greater input to
our most successful customers up and showed the redo hero them centering around
the shoe behind the product is like, really important.
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 search.
Paid social really low ROI paid video like hard to provide tuition to our life,
but we did uplift testing terrible our light.
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 third about it was and accelerate
growth.
So that's number one, paid social market I mentioned that we're doing the shift
up market. We have found and into the very effective as a way to the tapping to
the market audiences where you can be much more target and size company job
side and
that's been very effective. Those are not turned that off. And then third, like
I mentioned in our shift up market, field market in January like events getting
ourselves out there our content machine.
So we've still leadership to put a market has been critical as well. And I'll
give a bonus while I know you asked for three, but the fourth stop you like
immediate bestment but our growth team is critical.
All those things as you know, we've talked about this at the start, they drop
people at our website that drop them out product. All the things that we're
doing around coverage right optimization, improved onboarding, creating the
product quantified
lead motion up to sales is big critical force 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 website to be
in the brand to look like and all the sort of things.
And I pity all of the call of the web flow architects that have to deal with
the visionary founder to do all this stuff. But there was some, there was some
posts out is basically just like you know the top web flow 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.
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 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 is
what's one thing that that you're not investing or you, you kind of mentioned
something already but that wasn't working or fading away or something you don't
invest in this year.
Yeah, again, it's probably obvious but paid social for a long time I think was
a great effect for for for folk.
Not only do I think that just cack as ever jumped on the bad right in there
like increased that obviously you have targeting challenges that are prepped in
that mean the target is worse so
the cat just shot through the roof and the ROI just to decorate it and.
And so we pretty much fully pull out of that apart from our investment in the
end of market and yeah just reach out and channel.
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 channels because we do the same thing.
Our podcast or our strategy is I call it podcast paid and 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.
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 and I should say you know kind of the way I'm stuck by sure is
more like direct investments in growth.
Most of the companies that I worked for if you look at the non varies well over
50% of the customers coming down through just a strength of the brand.
Like the current act on the true referral and branded search of sorts of things
That's true for webflow as well.
And so this is why ignoring those very sort of growth tactics that I mentioned.
We do put a heavy investment in ensuring that we're building brand and add also
that part of the child like the party child is that 50% of our business.
And that is an acquisition child in the cell.
So I got to I would say that maybe the higher level answer is that we've 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 other massive drivers of our organization.
Yeah what do you do for brands so how do you spend your money.
Right now it's a mostly organic right in up until now I think against pretty
good forms of our stage.
Brand is built through community led branch right and in a car it was dares and
on the two founders at every startup meet up.
They were on this we could start talking all 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 and in a defined 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 a maintenance 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 quite a
goal.
The second one which is maybe that more interesting is that our media
investments I use this term, Bitch Media, where I go.
If you want to go build a brand with a agency they'll say great how much money
you have.
You have five million that's a great because they have to operate at scale.
Oh they do they 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 is moved up.
Like that's not how people consume media.
Why are marketers buying media like that?
And so this concept of mid-nitch media is to allow everybody buying strategy
with how people could see content within 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 market.
So things like Jenny's podcast which is a bit broader it's not just CMOs up.
And CMO moves things like that.
So we've got a marketing events right to prepare for a stir garden or these are
where are CMOs.
Where are they doing CMO content where are they like you just knew things go be
there either advertise or sponsor the event and go get a speaking slot.
And so it's a much more niche media approach and we're building up really
really started that approach like three months ago and so 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 to
invest in in our I would you know anybody listening to this their marketer or
they work with marketing team.
This concept of the API and it's like really important.
So that's our second.
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 money can
have you can have 100 X R.
R.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 the two X and you know you go in your merry way but this
is where you can have an outsized result is with niche media 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.
Tap into 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.
Hi I'm ready.
What's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume.
I can play guitar and piano which is a form 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 way to melt your brain after our days work.
Love it.
You have a favorite non marketing hobby that maybe indirectly makes you a
better marketer.
Rising everyone should write write down your thoughts right I 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 anyone
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 your and you will see to the table.
People will back your decisions as a result.
Fantastic.
This has been awesome for listeners go check out Webflow.
If your website is not a Webflow I don't know what you're doing at this point.
If you listen to 45 minutes of us talk about it.
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 about checking out.
Awesome thanks so much and take care.
Cheers Ian.
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