The Zip episode 12
In this episode Megan Hannay speaks with Garrett Mehrguth, who is the CEO of Directive Consulting. They are a Google, Bing, Moz, & Unbounce partner serving mid-enterprise level firms with search marketing. Garrett and I talked about a topic that’s both a favorite and a really problem area for most businesses – breaking local marketing down into measurable goals, and then… actually measuring them.
We’ll talk about getting granular with Google ads, and why one keyword per ad is the way, Garrett says, to go. Plus we’ll discuss how Garrett advises his clients to slice their local marketing budget, based on high level goals and KPI’s (key performance indicators).
And we’ll also talk about Garrett’s not-for-profit goals for his business, and how he meshes them with heading up a for-profit agency.
Megan Hannay: So, hello and welcome to the Zip local podcast. Today I’m speaking with Garrett Mehrguth. And Garrett, I actually should have asked you, is that how you pronounce your last name?
Garrett Mehrguth: It’s pretty close. It’s pretty close. It’s Mehrguth, but I think it was good. I think it was pretty good.
M: Okay, cool. Mehrguth is so much cooler sounding than Mehrguth, so I’m sorry. Garrett Mehrguth is the CEO of Directive Consulting; they are a Google, Bing, Moz, and Unbounce partner serving mid enterprise-level firms with search marketing. Garrett has been published in Moz, Kissmetrics, Crazy Egg, Inbound, Ahrefs, Convince and Convert, Wordstream, Raven, Marin, Acquisio, Local Search Ranking Factors, and more. He has spoken at MozCon, Ignite, Big Digital, General Assembly, PeopleSpace Innovation Labs, SoCal Code Camp, and others. Basically, you’ve been everywhere.
G: Oh, I don’t know about that. I think there’s a lot more fun stuff to come, hopefully.
M: So, in this session, we’re going to discuss local search marketing from a holistic perspective. Obviously organic is huge, but with so many ads in even the local pack, as search engine marketers call it, that box of local business listings that appear for local research results, those are all getting in every SERP for local business searches. So, obviously enterprise and small and medium-size businesses want to get attention from search results, but they’re starting to have to think bigger than organic ranking, which is why we have Garrett on the show today. So, hello, Garret.
G: Hey, how are you doing, Megan? Thanks for having me.
M: Yes. Thanks for joining. So, Garrett, I just want to start off with how does the brain of a search engine marketer work – I guess a good search engine marketer in your opinion – and what do you see in content and in the brands you serve that maybe others don’t?
G: Yeah. Well, I think there’s all sorts of different types of search engine marketers, and just how they’re built up as people is going to lend them, I think, to all sorts of different aspects. So, it’s a really broad market where you can be someone who’s incredibly creative and maybe you’re very, very good at developing landing pages with a singular focus that convert incredibly well, or maybe you’re a very outgoing personality type who is great at writing copy and you just do a terrific job with outreach, or maybe you are someone who has a very technical background and you are great at technical SEO, so I think there’s this whole wide universe. I think the one thing though that I think creates a really good search engine marketer across all these different specialties is when they’re able to directly correlate the inputs of their work, meaning how many pitches they sent that day, how many crawlers they fixed, how many of whatever they did, and then they can correlate that to some type of business objective of the impact the inputs of their work had. And so I think the best search engine marketers really understand the bigger picture of what they’re doing and the KPIs that those impact, and most importantly how to insert a business or a brand within the buying cycle of a user on a search engine results page.
M: Yeah, wow. So, what you’re really talking about a lot is measurement. It’s being able to measure exactly what you’re doing and exactly how it’s affecting the customer and the client.
G: Yeah, no I think it is. I think it’s a lot of measurement, and I don’t know how exact we can always be, because SEO is such a sum of all the parts, and same with PPC, but I think there is a correlation you can start to discover between what inputs you’re performing and then the kind of forecast of what those outputs can yield when done correctly.
M: What are some of your favorite measurement tools or ways to measure that you’ve found that really help you figure out if you’re doing the best job for your clients?
G: Yeah, I think the most basic thing in the world is just to do a good job with you Google analytics event tracking and be able to track everything from your micro conversions like emails to your macro conversions like form submissions and phone calls. With phone calls, we like to use CallRail; I think they do a terrific job and they integrate well, and from there we can start to really get a bigger picture of the leads generated from all the different channels.
M: And that’s CallRail? I haven’t heard of them. So, CallRail.
G: So, CallRail’s pretty cool; they have a really nice platform, it integrates well with other players, and we’ve found it to be pretty user-friendly.
M: Cool. And yeah, the great thing about Google analytics also is that they’re free, because there’s so many analytics platforms that charge so much money. So it’s like as much as you can get out of them is great, because they don’t cost anything.
G: Agreed. Very much agreed. I think they have a really robust platform and they can do whatever you want as long as you can build it correctly.
M: Right. So, as a local marketer who specializes in search, how do you break down the SERP – the search engine results page – for each new client? What do you look at first and is there anything besides the rank that tells you if they’re on the right track already?
G: Yeah. So, I think what I look at first is I gotta understand the business objective of the customer. A lot of them might– like, for example, why this matters is let’s say you’re a plumber; maybe you only have three trucks and you lose money if you drive too far. So, maybe they really want to double down on just one city and do really well in that city. Okay, well if that’s the case, how quickly– but then there’s another catch: so they want to work in one city, but they also have an incredibly high cost per clicks; maybe it’s an 80-doller cost per click, but they only make $120 on the job, then their net profit’s 10%, they make five bucks then on a new deal. And if they don’t have a ton of cash, they’re not willing to acquire new customers to hopefully get referrals and future repeat customers, so maybe they can’t do PPC ads. So, what really is important for me and our company is to understand, okay, what is your exact market model, what is your business KPIs, and what are the realities of your cash model? Because if you don’t have enough cash to reinvest and if you don’t actually keep the right– like if you can acquire customers but you’re not making any money, eventually you’re just going to run out of money and it’s not going to help anyone. But let’s just say, a really general term where they have good margins and they can kind of be everywhere, if that’s the case, I think you want to balance your immediate returns with your long-term returns. Immediate return would obviously be search ads; within a couple minutes, you could write an ad and be number one. Obviously, I think the key to make these successful is that you’re going to create a custom-landing page to single keyword ad groups. So, you’ll take your time to actually build out your campaign around single keywords with unique ad copy for those keywords that go to a unique landing page, and when you do that, I think you can start to have conversion rates in double digits and really make your money there. And then from that point, there’s the reviews that show up right above it, so within the landscape of a page, you have the paid ads at the top, you then have the map results – and in that map results, I think it’s really important that you get your reviews. There’s been multiple studies – Casey Meraz just did a click study test and what he found was the site with the most reviews generated the most clicks, and that was more important than placement, so that’s another huge thing. So, even if you’re second but if you have the most reviews, they found that you get the most clicks, which is cool to see. And then below that are the organic results. Now, here’s the crazy part about organic: a lot of times there’s between seven to ten results showing up down there, but a lot of those aren’t actual businesses; they’re like Yelp. If you look at a local search engine results page, Yelp might have two or three spots. So, what then you want to do is take market shares, theoretically, from a business perspective, is you can’t control demand. Often time a singular plumber can’t make more people in the city need plumbing; they can’t make more toilets clog–
M: Unless they have some evil plan to clog up the city, but yeah.
G: Exactly. So, from there, they have to determine how much market share they can take for those queries, and the best way to take market share is to take as many positions. So, that’s why you need that paid ad, you need those map results, you need your website to rank, but you also need to look at the paid lists. So, maybe Angie’s List ranks organically; okay, how do I rank high on Angie’s List? Usually that’s reviews. Okay, how do I rank high on Yelp? Okay, that’s reviews or ads. Okay, do I launch ads on Yelp? And then you can look in your Google analytics, which was talked about earlier, Megan – on the left column, there’s an acquisition tab. If you click on that, it’ll show channels. From channels, you can now see all the different places that you’re getting traffic from and you can see what their conversion rates are. And if you set up values for your events, you can also see how much money you’re making from your different channels, and that’s what’s really cool.
M: Yeah. So, a couple of interesting things I just want to point out from what you just said. First of all, I think it’s so interesting that when you’re talking about what seems such like a niche part of marketing being your search engine results page marketing, really you kind of, in order to figure out what your strategy is, you have to go as high-level as, “What are the goals of my business? What is the huge, big picture of my business? Who can I serve, how many people can I serve, what are my margins?” It’s just a lot more big-picture than– a lot of times – probably you guys get these kind of queries – I know Citation Labs, which is ZipSprout’s parent company, gets these kind of queries where it’s just like, “We just want some SEO – just help us get some SEO,” and the idea that you can’t just slap it on, that it’s actually part of thinking about how your business is structured is a really good point and I think it’s really interesting to think about it as so much bigger than just actual what’s on the page. And then a more specific question I had is, you were talking about Google ads and you were saying – if I understood correctly – you were saying to do one keyword per ad, which is interesting, because in creating Google ads, they’re like, “Please make a list of ten to twenty keywords -” why would you recommend to do one keyword per ad as opposed to multiple?
G: Okay, so the reason being is the match types– well, first off, Google likes to make money, so if you add more keywords, they show your ads more often, they make more money. Okay, so they have their own motives, which is fine, and that’s their business, so that’s great. But, what we need to take into consideration, I think, is how much control can we have over our messaging? So, what we do when we have lots of keywords in an ad group is we essentially tell Google, “Match our best ad copy the way you see fit to the keywords as you see fit,” and so what we do is we give away some control. And when you do that, let’s say I’m an SEO firm, let’s say that, and I want to do some ads and I want to launch search ads. Well, they’re really expensive – let’s start off by saying that – but second off, I decide that I want to do well for SEO services and I want to get more SEO services leads. So, I might launch– in the ad group I’ll call SEO services and I’ll have search engine optimization services, SEO services, SEM, SEO firms, SEO agency, SEO companies, but then I only have three ads and I might create my ads for those to be like, “The top SEO firm in Orange County,” “Best SEO company.” But then I can’t control if– for when someone searches “SEO firm” if they pull my SEO company ad, and now I’m not bolding the text, I don’t have the right correlation, so my click through rates go down, my quality score goes down, and my cost per click goes up, and now I’m losing money.
M: Yeah.
G: And so you just give away control when you don’t really, really build a foundation. And so what we’ll do is we might start broad, we’ll mine a search term report, and then we’ll see which search terms are performing the best and driving the most revenue, and then we’ll build keyword ad groups around that data with custom landing pages.
M: That’s a lot of work. No wonder you–
G: Yeah, there’s more hours that go into it, for sure, but I think that’s the only way to do it really, really well.
M: You kind of already spoke to this when you talked about figuring out if you want PPC or if you want organic ranking or if you want a rank on Yelp, but how would you recommend, in general, that search marketers or in-house people that are focused on search think holistically about search engine marketing, even from just dividing budgets to people resources? How do you decide where the money goes?
G: I think it depends on, once again, the business objectives. So, if they’re saying, “Look, search team, we need to generate– our pipeline’s got $40 million in it, we need to get to $100 million in the next three months,” well, I don’t care who you are; in general, if that’s the case, and you’ve never really done SEO, you can’t get there that fast. So, maybe we invest 80% into pay channels and we start to look– this is what I would do then is I would look– let’s say you do ERP software: you’re a big B2B company, you do ERP software; I would then look within that, search “ERP software providers,” I would then see what results rank in the top five, then I would see if there’s any lists in there. Now, if there’s a list in there that I can use, I’ll pay to be on that list near the top, and then I can actually hack organic traffic to then send self-qualified leads right away to hit our new business KPIs. So, it’s about understanding all the different opportunities that exist in the time frame of the expectations that are results.
M: So, wait, can you go back for a second? You can find a list and then just get yourself added to the list?
G: Correct. You just gotta get reviews on there, and oftentimes those lists are actually paid models. It’s like Capterra, for example. So, if you search “ERP software,” I bet you Capterra ranks somewhere in the top five. So, then you would go on Capterra and then you’d see what their cost per click is; usually it’s about 25%, 50%, 75% cheaper than AdWords, and you have social proof, because there’s reviews. And then so someone doesn’t know, by the way, that it’s a paid list, so they go on the top ERP software provider, they see the number one result, 300 reviews, five stars, they give you a call. It’s that simple.
M: Yeah. You’re blowing my mind right now. So, obviously you know a lot about PPC in general; for someone who is kind of aware of all hats, maybe someone who’s in house or just kind of at a smaller company that can’t specialize as much, how should they decide where the money goes if they don’t have the resources to specialize in all of these different areas, or even hire people who specialize in all these different areas?
G: That’s a really great question. I think it comes down to the profitability of the product as well. So, you can sacrifice profit if you have enough margin. You can get immediate results with paid ads or paid lists like Capterra. But big picture: you want to grow; the problem with all these paid lists and services is that every day that a new competitor enters the marketplace, they’re all based on auction models or demand. So, even if it’s a fixed rate, it’s still based on the demand, so as more people enter the marketplace and more competitors enter or increase their prices, your margin deteriorates, because you’re still charging the same price for your service, yet the cost to acquire the customer went up. So, I think there’s always a healthy balance of building out your content marketing, doing your link building as well, doing your technical SEO, so you can own your traffic. Remember too, at all these places, you don’t own that lead, so theoretically, at any time, that company that you’re advertising on could go under, those reviews could get pulled, something could happen, they could get penalized for Google for whatever reason, and so it’s not always you owning that lead; you also can’t add them to your re-targeting list, you can’t also do a lot of other things, so you have to get them from their site to your site. So, I think– I don’t have a great answer for sending it– like, okay, you should do 75% here, 25% there. The best way to look at it is to understand what your business objectives are, the timeline of results, and if you’re like, “Look, we’re growing really well already, we want to keep our margins, we don’t want to pay for leads,” then yeah, let’s do 100% in SEO. But I don’t ever think that’s wise, because I think you’re leaving money on the table. If you find a keyword that’s profitable, like– so let’s say that “SEO agency” is a profitable keyword for us, let’s launch an add, let’s make sure we’re showing up in the local pack, let’s advertise on all the sites that allow us to advertise on, let’s take display out on exact placements on sites like Forbes that might already be ranking for that keyword. So, when you start to take a really comprehensive look at it, one person can wear a lot of different hats by just asking, how do I put myself in the buyer journey of someone looking on my most profitable keywords?
M: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then I think it also makes sense, like you were saying too, the fun part about PPC is that it’s immediate. Like you said, if you find that great keyword that just really wins for you and you can spend $100 and make $500 very easily on it, that’s great, but forgetting that, again, you don’t own that traffic; still working on those organic channels so that you’re building up your brand as well. It’s a fun balance, for sure. So, do you find that there should be differences between small and medium-size local businesses versus national brands when looking at the SERP? So, say you’re Lyft versus a local taxi company or you’re Home Depot versus a local hardware goods store, how would you treat these type of clients differently when you’re looking at focusing on their search engine ranking?
G: So, we work with one of the largest insurance firms and we do their local search at the national level, but we also support a lot of small businesses, and here’s what I’d actually say: I think that the small business has the competitive advantage. I would not agree that because you’re an enterprise-level firm, you have enough of an advantage. I think the problem with enterprise-level firms that people forget is they have to share their resources across five thousand cities.
M: Right.
G: You can dedicate 100% of your resources to 100% of one city, meaning that you can go out there and you can get reviews from all your customers, you can build links from all your partners and providers–
M: And it all goes to one place; you don’t have to divide it.
G: It all goes to one place. Exactly. These players– I mean, how do they scale out a link building strategy for five thousand cities and all these different insurance agents? Well, your one insurance agent with your own private company, yeah, you can focus all your resources on that. And so, I actually don’t believe that enterprise businesses have any type of advantage in local results, and I don’t see them even being favored at all in the map results as often, at least in my own queries. I don’t have the data to support that, but in my mind, I don’t at all see a competitive advantage for enterprise-level firms. The only think they have going for them is their domain authority, but they don’t really usually have the page authority, because they can’t build up their links to one particular page; it’s just spread across the whole entire company.
M: Yeah. And I guess just to clarify for any beginners that might be listening, domain authority and page authority are ways search engine marketers kind of help determine how high up a page is. Page authority is actually created by Google, so it’s a way to kind of see if a certain page is considered very relevant or not very relevant on a certain domain. But on top of that question, I guess my follow up would just be, with this big insurance company, or let’s say you were working for Home Depot versus Joe’s Hardware, which is an example I used in a previous podcast, I agree – I don’t think necessarily the enterprise-level players have a distinct advantage, but would you have a different strategy for each of them? Would you kind of come at their campaign differently?
G: Yeah, no, definitely. I think the key is enterprise customers have a hard time of doing all the little things right, because there’s so many little things to do, meaning that creating content for your location page at Joe’s Hardware, it’s pretty easy – you got one location page you write your content. You’re a huge insurance firm that’s got all these hundreds of thousands of agents, it’s hard to create the content for every hundred thousand agents uniquely. It’s also hard to get a link to those pages; it’s hard to make sure that the insurance agent builds their own link. I mean, what insurance agent’s out there doing link building for their page that they don’t even own that their company owns? So, all the little metrics that make the big difference at a page and city level, you have advantage on, meaning you can have friends at the Chamber of Commerce, you could have business partners locally that’ll link to you, you can go out there and you can do what you guys are doing, which is amazing – you can start to support local organizations. How does some huge Home Depot have time to support all these different locations and do all these different sponsorships? I think you have the community aspect, and the reality that you truly are local to that area, while the other people are just a business that happens to be in the area.
M: Right. Yeah, it’s definitely a lot harder in some ways to be enterprise. So, something – speaking of local donation – something we love to talk about at ZipSprout, and I know it’s something important for Directive Consulting too is incorporating brand mission into local marketing. So, at Directive, I know you’ve decided to give away 10% of your company’s profits to local charities; is this something you advise clients to do at all, or at least to consider? Or if a company or client was considering starting a giving program, how would you recommend they get started?
G: That is a hard question for me, Megan, because I’ve actually never advertised it yet. We’ve recently built the program, and it’s something that was so hard. I mean, as a CEO, someone who also gets paid off your company too, it’s like, “Okay, there goes 10%,” and that’s scary and it’s hard, so I don’t necessarily advise anyone just go out there and give 10%; it was a hard thing for us. It was something that we felt really called to do and something that we felt that we really wanted to be about as a company. Forget any type of marketing – literally, we don’t give a crud about getting a new customer because of it. Now, with that being said, we’re probably leaving money on the table and not building our brand and communicating what we’re all about as well by not incorporating it into our site, but that’s also because we’re waiting, I think, to where we have a really established program, because we’d like to do even more with it. Because as we’re growing every month, it just provides more opportunities to create a culture of giving in our organization, and I think a culture of giving is so rare in society today that if you can build it into your actual team members and build it into what the organization’s about, that to me is far more impactful to an organization’s growth, because it can prove things like retention metrics, hiring ability, and things that actually truly fuel your growth once you hit a certain size. I think growing is great, but then everybody talks about scaling. The hardest thing, I think, is actually scaling their quality, and I think the best way you scale your quality is by having the best people, and I think the best people need a culture and environment that supports them and that gives back, and I think that’s what giving can do. Now, what a company does to use that in their marketing is up to them, but I think every company should build a culture that embraces and encourages giving and selflessness, because I think that attracts the right people to really grow.
M: Yeah. No, that’s actually a really good point, and I love your phrase ‘scaling quality;’ I’ll try to use that in a couple tweets related to this podcast, because it’s a really good point, and I think it’s kind of back to the unmeasurables in a way, because it’s a long-term thing. When you talk about employee retention or when you talk about building brand, that’s not something that you can start today and then tomorrow be like, “Aha, the result is ten.” It definitely takes years a lot of times for those mission-based decisions to come into fruition, but I think that it’s a good point about how it’s, again, more of a big-picture thing. Because if you think about the kind of people you have working for you, obviously, the more integrity maybe you employees have, then it’s more likely that they’ll work harder and that will help your company in general. So, I think there’s definitely connections there even outside of marketing, which is pretty interesting.
G: Well yeah, and those are just lovely people. I mean, you think about it, I gotta wake up every morning just as much as they do and we gotta go work with each other. We have to enjoy– I mean, yeah, you’re going to spend ten, eight hours of your day with people you don’t like that are all self-centered and focused on money, I don’t know if that’s the best environment at least for myself; I want to be around people who want to give back that are really passionate, and I think that says something.
M: Yeah. No, yeah, it definitely does. So, one last question I guess on marketing in general, I think one of the biggest difficulties – as we were talking like Home Depot versus Joe the Hardware store guy – is getting messaging, especially if you’re an enterprise brand with dozens or hundreds or thousands of locations. So, do you have any tips for local content creation or campaign management that takes into account a local vibe, or even maybe local competitors?
G: Did you say content creation? I’m sorry.
M: Yes.
G: Yes. I’m sorry.
M: That was a very long question.
G: No, no, no, you’re totally fine – something came up. So, the key, I think, on that is heck yeah, you can kill it with content; it is so fun. My favorite part about content is you can actually be local. I’m from Orange County, I know about all the different surf spots, I know about all the different hiking trails, so what we’ll do for our customers, especially Orange County-based ones, even the ones that are anywhere nationally, is we’ll– like, for a divorce lawyer: nothing is harder to write about than a divorce lawyer. How do you come up with good content to promote on Facebook for a divorce lawyer? So what we did, we decided to say, what if we could be a divorce lawyer that actually was about its customers and wanted to keep them together? Which sounds crazy and against their business model, but just because they’re making money on a service doesn’t mean they have to be encouraging the service. And so what we started to do is help them with– we came up with ideas like eight-day-cation ideas your spouse will love for under $20. And so we created actually all this positive messaging, and they performed incredibly well; spouses were tagging each other on Facebook and they were commenting. We’ll talk about thirty-plus hiking trails you never heard about in Orange County, the best ten food trucks and where to find them – you see all the content? How the heck could Home Depot create that content they don’t know?
M: Right.
G: And so, we started to create those types of things and then you promote that – think about it: then what you do is you can do things like “Ten reasons why Mission Viejo residents are better than Laguna Niguel.” You can create controversial content and then literally target only people in Mission Viejo, then have them share that. So, you just have to be really smart, tactical, if you’re in a city you can only do city-based content targeting people only in that city talking about only things that they know with acronyms they use – like they don’t call the beach San Onofre, they call it SanO, so, “The best break in SanO and when to hit the shore.” And you can all of a sudden start to talk about things that only people in Orange County who like these surfing sites like SurfLine, follow and then promote it to them, and then allow that to show that you’re local and actually know the audience and know the business, and now you build your brand amongst your audience.
M: Yeah. And I think that’s actually becoming such– that the idea that having ultra local content like that is becoming so prevalent now that I think for companies that are enterprise-level that do have thousands of locations, that might even behoove them to find local, even local content creators who actually do know the difference between those two cities that you mentioned that I have no idea what they are and why they might think one is better than the other, but obviously people from those places probably think that’s kind of funny and kind of interesting.
G: Well, hello, Airbnb, right? Isn’t that exactly what Airbnb’s doing? They’re hiring a local photographer, they’re hiring local content marketers to create all this content–
M: It’s so smart.
G: They have terrible SEO though, but they have amazing content. So, if you look like rentals and things like that, they don’t rank, but guess what has more searches than rentals? Airbnb. So, it doesn’t really matter if you’re focusing on business KPIs; it has to be all about the business, all about growing, and then whatever’s going to really hit your goals, and I think that’s the key.
M: Yeah, and I think Airbnb specifically has done– I mean, I’m a huge fan of them and I think they’ve done a great job, like you said, just speaking to– and they actually ask their hosts, so as a host, you get asked all these questions that are really about them creating content. It’s like, “Hey, what are your favorite local restaurants? What are your favorite– for people that are visiting your town, what’s your favorite bars to go to?” And you just fill it in because you want to be a good host, but then for them, that’s like, “Oh my god, someone from this town is– we’ve got ten people saying this is the best local brewery.” It’s just, the way they’re going about creating content now is actually really smart, because they have all these hosts that are creating content for them and are happy to do it, because it helps their ranking and helps them make money.
G: Oh, it’s a game changer, right? And think about it – that’s an enterprise right there doing it at scale; they’re using their own user base that they’ve acquired and then scaling out the content for free based on what incentivize– the same thing Yelp did: so when you sign up for a Yelp account as a business owner, you’re going to go out there and fill out all your information and then Yelp indexes that, “Hey, check out our fresh content.” And so that’s a really cool way to scale it. For enterprises too, I mean, I think the best thing that they can do is a better job with reviews and then understanding how to house those reviews and where to put the real canonicals and where to index those reviews so that it ranks with the associations of what types of queries have the largest volume. I think there’s a lot of ways to do that really well at scale, and that’s a cool way to do it. Same with e-commerce: you can scale out– a lot of e-commerce stores, we do a lot of e-commerce as well – we do a little bit of everything; we’re kind of passionate about diving into these different fields. And with e-commerce, say you have forty thousand skews, it’s very difficult to do forty thousand product descriptions that are unique, but if you have reviewers who can create all this unique content for you, now your reviews are your unique content. And so, I think regardless of industry – local, non-local – the key is going to definitely be, I think moving forward – especially for enterprises – is how well they can scale out unique content.
M: Yeah, and how creative they can be in doing so.
G: Exactly.
M: So, final question: if you could have lunch with any marketer or any businessperson, who would you choose?
G: Yeah, I mean, I’d love to talk with a couple different people – it’s hard for me to say. I’d love to meet with some of the biggest search agencies in the world like iProspect and Razorfish and talk to their founders and learn about their organizational models, how they acquire their largest customers, their sales channels, things like that. And I’d love to talk to guys like Will Reynolds and stuff and more about how they run their businesses and how they help their people and how they create their culture, because I think that’s what’s got me most excited right now. I feel like the search engine stuff’s really fun, I love to talk about it, I write about it all the time, but I’m really, really passionate about how companies run, how they acquire customers, how they create culture, and I think that’s where I’d love to learn more from some of the leaders in this space.
M: Yeah, no, that’s true. Kind of like we were talking about with donations, I think culture is a big deal for the longevity of any company; you really have to figure that out, especially as you’re growing from a small shop to having a lot of people. That’s kind of the time to be concerned about that.
G: And how the culture gets owned; how it spreads beyond just the culture – maybe even the culture of the people who engage with you. If you can almost change the culture of the people who work with you and engage you and your venders, I think that’s something Moz did, and I think that’s why Moz has been so successful, is because they were able to create a culture for everyone who touches their product. They almost embrace that culture themselves, and I think that’s why they’ve been so successful is it creates a ton of recurring revenue, a ton of audience loyalty, and things like that that scale beyond its founder. So that even if Rand wasn’t a part of the company, if they could maintain that culture– and that’s the key, I think, is maintaining a culture that exists outside of your management.
M: Yeah, and it’s like your brand itself has a personality. Like Moz, their Twitter handle is a robot.
G: Yep, exactly. It’s very, very cheeky and smart.
M: Yeah, you can talk to the robot. So, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So, Garrett, thank you so much for talking to me today. I feel like I have to listen to this again just to– you have a lot of really good insights, and I think to you they’re just so ingrained that it’s like, “Oh, gosh, okay, let me piece this apart and kind of really digest this,” but I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today, so thank you.
G: Oh, it was my pleasure. I’m so happy that we had this opportunity, and I can’t wait to hear it myself, so that’s fun.
