Author: Nicola Brownsea

A Napier Podcast: Interview with Naren Hariparanthaman - Social Animal

In this podcast episode, we interview Naren Hariparanthaman, Co-Founder and CEO at Social Animal, a content intelligence platform.

Naren shares his journey to founding the platform and reveals how Social Animal reduces the need for 'manual' work; helping B2B marketers with the full content marketing journey, from finding content ideas, through to distributing and building relationships with influencers.

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Naren Hariparanthaman - Social Animal

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today. Welcome to the latest episode of marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I've gotten around Naren Hariparanthaman, who's the co founder and CEO of social animal. Welcome to the podcast and Naren.

Naren: Hey, thanks. Thanks, Mike, for having me here.

Mike: Great. I mean, I'm really excited to have you on because if I look at it, you've had an amazing career building companies around digital marketing, do you want to talk through your journey and some of the companies that you've helped start and grow?

Naren: Sure, so I have a degree, master's degree in computer science. So actually, I should have been into fully into coding. But I switched gears and got into stumbled SEO to be very specific in digital marketing. And that kind of like, got me into this marketing career. So I did my masters in the US when I landed a SEO opportunity, which is your internship opportunity. And then I kind of like cloud the way things work. And it was fascinating for me, and then I after like, then switched. Then after my internship was over, I decided, Okay, this is my career, I don't want to do coding anymore. And then I start, I went and work for a digital marketing agency in Austin, Texas. And that is where I learned most of advanced concepts of digital marketing, and particularly SEO, and we used to like, do SEO for large customers, like many fortune 500, some ecommerce stores, a lot of interesting projects. And then I, my hometown is India, Chennai in India, so I decided to come back to start my own digital marketing agency. And then I started my digital marketing agency here in India and started working with clients both in the US, as well as in India, and most of them b2b companies and like enterprises. And we were doing like a, like, full for main full suite of digital marketing, like SEO, paid paid social media, content, marketing, everything. And since I have a technical background, I've always been fascinated with, how things how software work. And so that actually helped me in like, kind of like looking at, like, if I could like build something. And social animal is something that we put to use every day in our work, digital marketing related or content marketing work that we do for the client. So that is when we thought that, okay, this is a software that even we could use ourselves. So why not be just like, build it and start, like having it as a separate product. And then kind of like, it all kicked off from there. And this was back in 2016, when we actually launched social animal in its first version, it was like, very different when it was first launched. Now waiting, we have come a long way. And we are basically a data company. So we process a lot of lot of data. It's a huge infrastructure. So we have close to like 480 million articles in our database, and then some 200 million influencers, some 500 million Facebook posts. And like we add close to a million articles, fresh articles to database every single day. So yeah, that's my journey.

Mike: And I love the idea that you built the software to solve a problem in the agency, and then realised it was something you could actually sell more broadly, rather than just trying to start a company on its own. I think that that's, that's great. It was already solving a problem. Correct? Yeah.

Naren: So we were like doing like a lot of content research. And, like, we were doing a lot of spare time was spent on tasks that were taking a lot of time, which could easily be automated. And also, Google is good for search. But let's say if you want to find influencer for a particular brand, it's very hard to use Google for that. So we were like, trying to do a lot of things manually. And then we internally built a very, like I maybe MVP version of social animal and we were using it and then it was proving to be like really useful. And then we thought, Okay, why not? We just like maybe Get into like a proper product and then launch it. And that's how Yeah, so first like main, we built it to scratch our own itch and then a lot of people also found it really useful.

Mike: Awesome I'm gonna have to ask you this because obviously you've got you know, really good success both in the US and also in India. I mean, is there a difference in terms of what clients want between clients based in India and clients based in the US?

Naren: Um, you know, from a marketing and social media standpoint, it is more or less same. The only thing is in India, it's, it's more tricky, like, I mean, I would say most of our customers are from the US. In India, we don't have a lot of customers, the one in India, the requirement might be in local languages, there are like, lots of languages here. So certain things may I mean, they may need it in a in a local language. Let's say there is a Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, like a lot of languages. So but in English, it's even more straightforward. So in the so we went up to the US market, because we could do a lot of advanced stuff like say, NLP, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and all that it is, like, sentiment, NLP libraries are available, easily to process English. But for local languages, it's, it's even more harder. So that's what that's the primary difference. But otherwise, the from marketing needs standpoint, it's more or less the same. And of course, English is also a big here. And enterprises, like create content, mostly in English. So we, our enterprise, clients here in India, use it mostly for their English.

Mike: That's, that's fascinating. So let's go back to social animals. So you had this tool within the agency, and you decided to spit it out as a separate company? I mean, what drove that decision? Were you just finding the cost of maintaining these hundreds of millions of articles too high? Or was it more an opportunity that you saw,

Naren: I think it was more of an opportunity, because I stumbled into digital marketing. And since I think my technology background helped. And we kind of like when I did the first version of the software, we kind of like shared it with a few agency friends and all that who kind of gave were really positive feedback, they thought that it was useful. And then I clearly got kind of a Go ahead, like, Okay, this seems to be something, it's not just useful for me. Other people also find finding it useful. So then, I thought, okay, let's just like, launch it as a proper product. So we had to do a lot more like UI UX, we need to do a complete overhaul. And then we had to, like add more sources, like data sources, because initially, we were interested in only not crawling the web, when it full scale, like how we do now, earlier, we were just like, looking at specific sources that could be of use to our clients. And then we thought, Okay, why not? We just like, crawl the entire web and process popular content, and all that. And then social animal happened. And so even now that it's a, the sources keep increasing, like, even now we continue to add more and more sources and right on so that people can get as much value out of it as much as possible.

Mike: Amazing. Sounds like there's been an awful lot of work since when it was an internal tool to make it a tool for other agencies, rather other customers.

Naren: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So because internally, it could be like, we know how it works. So from for others, we had to like, get a proper UI UX designer, and then just reimagine certain things. So basically, like turning it into a proper SAS product, market ready product. So that's what we went after. Yeah.

Mike: Awesome. And I have to say, when I first saw social animal, I had no idea that it was originally an internal tool. So you've certainly done a great job of making it into a proper, you know, SAS product with all the UI that you'd expect if you come to it cold rather than it being an internal tool. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Thanks, Mike. So I'm interested around when you you started developing the product. I mean, what problem were you trying to solve? What was the kind of question people were asking that you needed a tool to answer?

Naren: Sure. So when we started, I mean, what problem does it solve actually, if you look at the benefit, it saves a lot of time like when you do content, research, and then content districts You're on content, like reaching out to influencers for amplification, like there is a lot of manual work involved. So like somebody needs to like just scour the web or the social media channels, and find, like, interesting pieces of content, what's trending and all that. So, so, we wanted to make a tool that will help any content marketer to content marketer or social media marketer to save a lot of time in their in their day to day day jobs. So if you ask like what social animal does, then it helps. It's a content intelligence product that helps content marketing content marketers, and social media marketers to like, in their entire content, marketing journey, the sense content creation, content distribution, and as well as content amplification. So social animal helps, like throughout whatever they want to do, from from ideation, were finding content ideas, and then once the content is created, even during that time, like what should be the length of the content, what type of content is resonating well with the audience, and deciding what to write. And then once it's created, like where to distribute it to get maximum reach, and then also like, like reaching out to influencers and building relations with them, and amplify the reach of the content? So it can it can help in all this. And in addition to this, like, people also use social animal to, like, monitor competitors, like say, what, what's going on with competitors, what content is working for them? Or like about like, also news and all these things?

Mike: The first thing in terms of what platforms you're you're using? I mean, where are you looking for content? You mentioned, you keep adding sources all the time, but I'm interested, you know, what are the key platforms at the moment?

Naren: Sure. So we crawl the web, and we get articles from across the web. So it could be like any new sites, to blogs, like all types of once we get the articles, we have a like a data pipeline. So we do NLP on them natural language processing. And then we kind of like, understand what the article is about. And then we extract entities. So without even looking deep into the article, you will know like, okay, these are all the things this article is talking about. These are all the topics. So we do that. And then we look up engagement for each of these articles on primarily for social networks, which is Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. And then we we calculate, like total engagement. And on top of that, we also have YouTube, like, we also get data from YouTube, like what's trending on YouTube. And, like, also other associated metadata with YouTube like views, upvotes, likes, comments, number of comments, stuff like that. So So basically, the article comes from various sources, by sources, I mean, websites, as well as we look at social media and if anything is trending or like a lot of people are kind of like sharing it. If anything is going viral, then we will always definitely have it in our database in our content will be added to a database almost pretty immediately.

Mike: That's, that's fascinating. So you're, you're characterising or categorising it by topic. And then you're measuring, if you like, how successful that article is, or how much impact it generates by the engagement on social is that is that the right way to explain it?

Naren: Yeah, that's correct. So on Google, it's based on the articles are ranked based on relevance where the primary like the signal for relevance is backlinks. So, that has been always the case. But here we look social signals is our primary driver or primary signal for finding popularity. So for any given topic, so now once we have all these articles, for example, if you search for Coronavirus in the last like say 24 hours, we may have like several 1000 articles. And so from that each of them gets shared in different ways. So probably we rank it based on the number of social shares. So you know, like what's, what was the most popular content on social media for Coronavirus, published in the last say 24 hours.

Mike: That's amazing. That's that's, that's really helpful. I can see how people can take that and use that to work out what they should be writing to get more engagement. So that's great. I mean, I guess one of the problems that you face in Iran would be LinkedIn because LinkedIn is famously difficult to get data from. I mean, do you think that's something that's always going to be a problem to understand what's happening on LinkedIn or do you see that changing

Naren: Ah, Yeah, you're spot on that. So in fact, we had LinkedIn share counts data up until February 2018. That's when all of a sudden without any pre announcement, they just like that cut off the API access to everybody, not just us, everybody. So we after that point, in in February 2018, we stopped having LinkedIn share counts, and we started. In fact, that's the point when we added Reddit before then we didn't have Reddit. And then we thought, okay, we'll add Reddit. So, yeah, LinkedIn has always been being unpredictable. So I don't think there is no reason for them to bring it back on. Like, they already had it. And they killed it. And it's been like, more than three years now. So I think that's not the case. Same way, we also had engagement data from Google Plus. And so of course, Google Plus has been shut down. And so we also had to remove that from our, from from social animal. So we always but look into other other sources as well, like, whenever there is anything we try to like, cover more platforms. So I hope like we'll be adding more platforms.

Mike: So amazing. I think most b2b marketers are incredibly frustrated that they're spending all this money, you know, marketing and promoting content on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn, just isn't giving them the access to the data. I mean, you obviously get some access to your information. But you, it's so hard to see what competitors are doing on LinkedIn. I mean, I certainly find that lack of API a real frustration, I think a lot of other people do.

Naren: Kind of Yeah, but I mean, Twitter is also big, like a lot of the b2b companies also use Twitter, to share content and all that. So of course, it's nothing, it's not a replacement for LinkedIn. But still, you can get a good sense of like, what they are up to, on other channels. And also, overall, the content that they're producing what's working for them, so So it's, it's okay. And also, when you go to LinkedIn, I mean, there are also like, some b2b publications, right? Say, for example, Business Insider, or websites like that. So you could also like have a bunch of websites and see how, let's say a brand mentioned in Business Insider, how is the reach of that particular article, or let's say, a PR campaign was done. And so what are all the brand mentions, across, say b2b publications, stuff like that those things could be measured using social animal? But yeah, not having LinkedIn, direct numbers from LinkedIn is definitely a disappointment.

Mike: Yeah, that's great advice, actually, that we shouldn't say here complaining, we should go and look at other ways to get that kind of insight. So I think that's great advice. And you talked about distribution, I think, you know, that's something that's really clear, you say that you can help people understand which channels are going to give them the most engagement. Can you just explain a little bit about how that works?

Naren: Sure, yeah. So we are looking at all these like articles published on a given topic or on the website, and all that, right. So you could search and then find, like popular content. So from that you can also get a lot of insights on we aggregate the data, and we kind of like give information on. Okay, so this particular website, b2b company has published articles, and then how has it performed that across social channels? So, for example, a fashion brand, or let's say, a recipe, somebody who's like producing content on recipes, that though, those type of content tend to do much better on Pinterest, compared to say, maybe Facebook will be second, Reddit, maybe not. And Twitter may not be that great engagement on Twitter. So we kind of like now what I'm saying is just a high level, like hypothesis, but you can validate this hypothesis by looking at actual data. So you can see okay, this is a if you search for a recipe, then you can see what are all the content that has been published and where all that has been shared. So if let's say you are a food brand, and you are going to create content on recipe, probably you can spend more time and engagement on your ad budget on Pinterest, rather than say, spending it on Twitter. So we kind of help in understanding that. And also we also try to give more insights on what type of content works so we look at say for a given keyword you can find we also categorise what are the different types of content being produced. So for example, if the keyword is say again, some recipe and then we can we will know whether it's an article or video or image, or is it a guide, how to guide or if it's a quiz. So we have like different types of categories content on like, different classified content into like different types. So and then we aggregate now Members, and we can tell you, okay, videos are really getting more engagement than long form articles or like, say, short articles. So we can give insights like that which you can use, we can let you can apply in spending your efforts in the right channel that will give you like maximum bang for the buck.

Mike: Oh, that's amazing. That sounds like you're not only saving time, you're also helping people understand where they should spend their time, or where they should focus to be more efficient. So that's great. Yeah. And then, of course, the last or the third, the third element is understanding influences. And here, I think a lot of people listening to the podcast will think, well, I'm working in b2b in a very niche area of engineering or something like that, you know? How can I find that there's probably not that many influences, how can social animal actually help me find influencers in a very specific niche?

Naren: Sure, so we have to influence a mod. In fact, actually three influencer mods. So you can even if it's a it's basically a keyword, right? So you can search for a keyword and you can fall in the niche or like a bunch of keywords and find three types of influencers. So how we classify influencers is one we do a tweeter Twitter search, so you can do a Twitter bio search. So you can find if let's say they are in the for example, in the welding industry, which is which may not produce a lot of like, Shadow the content, the case if you search for welding, then you see who are all the people who have mentioned welding in their in their Twitter BIOS, and you can be sorted based on the number of followers. So you can see like who are really influential in welding with by the sheer numbers, so that is first step. And then we gave a lot of filters where you can also narrow down by location by number of followers, and then whether they have a particular URL on their bio and all that so, so we give advanced filters with which you can narrow down influence. So that's one. And then the second even more powerful way to find influencers is we have a shared content board. So in that we kind of like do influencers, who, who have shared content that that has gotten a lot of reshares or engagement that contains a particular keyword. So that's the niche that you are in. So for example, let's say if you are looking for chef, if you search for Twitter, BIOS for chef, some Hollywood actor would have just mentioned chef, but in their Twitter bio, and they will show up on the top because of the sheer number of followers. But they are not really influencer in cooking or, or anything related to that. So. So when you do a shared content mode, search in SharePoint mode, we look for content shared by a particular user that gets that has the word, Chef. So for example, if Mike shares the content on the waist, I mean, the best chefs in the world, something like that. And let's say it got a lot of shares, then we'll list Mike as an influencer for chef. So this is really powerful in finding people who are driving real engagement for in your niche. So that is one. And then the third mode is the author mode. So we also gather data from within the articles, we have the author, author boxes, right? So we have information like who is the actual author who has created this particular piece of content. And so we also rank them based on how much shares this author has gotten in that particular industry. So that is super useful. And on top of this, we also have some filters, cool filters like a journalist, right? So if you search for a keyword, and if you're looking, if you want just journalists, so we have a filter, and you can find journalists in that particular post covering journalists who are covering news in your particular niche.

Mike: Wow, that's, that's really cool. And I think, particularly for PR agencies like us, you know, the, the ability to find out very quickly, what journalists have written about recently is is super helpful. So that that's really cool. Yeah, yeah. I'm so I'm interested. I mean, you obviously started this as a project within an agency. Who would be your typical customer? Or do you not have a typical customer? Are there lots of different types of customer?

Naren: Ah, yes, we do have lots of different types of customers, but I would my pocket them mostly into content marketing, and social media marketing teams in small or medium businesses and enterprises. So those are our primary. I mean, they constitute a large percentage of our customer base, who are mostly like, who take content marketing seriously, because somebody who's just doing it as a hobby may not be really interested in like growing they're getting leads are like growing their audience through content, so they may not be the great fit, but usually like businesses, small and medium businesses and enterprises do these days. Take content on social media seriously, and those are the people who can actually save a lot of time. And also get a lot of insights and monitor competitors. There are like seven several use cases. Yeah.

Mike: So I'm interested, you said to anyone from small business to enterprise, I mean, is social animal an expensive product, then it's got so much functionality, it sounds like it should be, you know, quite an expensive product.

Naren: Ah, not at all actually, it's like, so we have like a SaaS product, that's like three tiers. So the lowest plan is like, it's just $49 a month. And then we have agency plan, with Facebook features, and multi user access and all that. So that is a 190 $9 a month. And we have enterprise plan, which is 499. So compared to products in the market with like similar features, you will see that it's a social animal is definitely more affordable. And particularly for agencies, since they will be handling multiple clients at the agency plan is like, just they just need one subscription. And they can invite up to five team members, and they can use it. So we have like a lot of customers in that segment, who are like making social and multi use.

Mike: Wow, that's, I mean, that's great. And particularly if you've got multiple seats for that price as well, that that's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the other thing is, I mean, you've got all these functionalities, it quite difficult to learn how to use social animal or, you know, how do people pick up the, you know, the different features and how to make use of them.

Naren: I mean, it's pretty intuitive. Like, we always try to make the UI and UX like as simple as possible. So it is pretty intuitive. But like I mentioned earlier, like, it's also there are like multiple use cases. So social animal can be used for, say, content research, and then finding influencers, find monitoring competitors. And then like finding places where to distribute the content, and then keeping up to date on industry news, trends, events, which is like content intelligence, and then finding insights on like, what content is working, what are the top domains for a particular keyword. And then who are the top authors for a particular topic in the niche, or, and then like, say, for example, content curation, like what are all the content, I mean, to establish somebody as a thought leader, they may not just create their own content, but also share other people's content. So these are all multiple use cases. So we have customers who may not be using all the features, they may be using something more heavily, for example, if it's a PR agency, then they are more into influencers, they want to find journalists, stuff like that. But if it's more like a blogger, then blogger is interested in finding content ideas. So I think it's more like, that's why we, I mean, kind of call it like a, it's a, it's a Swiss Army knife for content marketers. So you there are like a bunch of tools you may need, you may use it however you like, there is no limitation on any one of these tools, or any of the subscriptions. So it comes as a suite. So like I mentioned, all these use cases are possible with social animal and based on the use case, like people use it in different stages of their content marketing and social media activities.

Mike: That's awesome. So, I mean, if people have a tool like this, I'm really interested, you've obviously, you know, through the tools seen an awful lot of activity on social neuron. Do you have any tips or advice on what really works? Well, on social that maybe some of the, you know, the people listening to podcast could use to improve their presence on social?

Naren: Yeah. So I mean, from social media standpoint, there are a few things like first one is choosing the right channels, right, that itself is super important. So it depends on where your businesses are, where your customers are, like I gave a example earlier, if it is, say, a food business, or if it's a fashion business, then I, they might get better returns by focusing on Pinterest, rather than, say, Twitter, for example. So this, I'm now giving a very high level, like how to choose the right channel. So that's where a tool like social animal can help. So when somebody is before doing a complete campaign strategy, they should pick the right channel and focus their energy there, and then move on to other channels rather than just spraying and praying, just to see like, what works, what sticks. So that's not the way to go. So based on data, there is data available out there. And you can look at like, see what competitors are doing. And another advice would be to like monitor competitors and brands that do really well on social media and try to do understand like, what is working for them and try to maybe take a lesson or two from their book and just implement it. So that is one and then Also like keeping a track of everything like so benchmarking, and then like publish a content like how is it performing? And let's say somebody else is publishing the content on the same topic, if they are getting more engagement, what have they done differently? Is it like the content itself? Or is it the distribution so that today with tools like social and well, it's easy to kind of do this at scale, like, look at, understand the metrics for a particular any campaign. And also, one basic advice that most people don't follow is not being consistent, like being consistent, and like trying out a strategy. Because social media, it takes time, right to build an audience to build a following. And then it's about building relationships. So just like publishing a piece of content today on like, or sharing it on social media, and then just like coming back after like three months and chatting on more piece, nothing is going to, I mean, it's not going to help. So the cadence, everything should be maintained, and engagement should be monitored. And like I mean, different. I mean, trying different schedules on like, when to share content. So all these things should be tried, and also be consistent. That will help in growing your social media audience. Yeah.

Mike: That's brilliant advice. Thank you for that. So I've just interesting, we've covered an awful lot. And actually, I could have kept asking you questions for hours. I think it's really interesting what you're doing. But is there anything else you think we should have covered in this interview that I've maybe missed?

Naren: Um, not much. I think we kind of like touched upon a lot of things. So yeah, so one of the things that we have also been doing recently is, so we realise that people use our data more than outside of even marketing. So we have API's, so we launched API's, and our API's are being used by a lot of products to get our data into their product. So that is something interesting. So if let's say a b2b agency wants to build a custom dashboard for their customers are for the clients to show, like, let's say, top industry news, let's say that, let's say a b2b Agency, or let's say a PR agency, or a b2b agency is has a healthcare client, and they want to show all healthcare related interesting content in a dashboard, then they could build a product build this, I mean, we give our data through API's, and they could build this dashboard in like, under a week, and just sell that to their, to their clients. So that is something now we have we have launched, I mean, we have a pay customers who are using it for this particular use case. And we found it really fascinating because we did not have an API and people came and asked us Do you do have an API? And we were like, interested. And we I mean, I set up meetings with them. And I asked like, okay, so we forgive API, what will you build, and that was like, really, that open opened up a lot of interesting ideas. So So that's something I would say, like, API's can be used to build products or like, custom apps for clients. And we also have one like, you know, blood buffer and Hootsuite right like that there is a there is a social media management product called post planet post planner is one of our eBay customers, so so they pull data from us and they give to their audience for curation, like interesting content to curate, with one click their users can curate. So things like that. So now we are seeing our data being used, even outside of marketing, which is like, super fascinating.

Mike: That's, that's really interesting. And, yeah, clearly, we need to get working in Napier, to make use of some of those business ideas. I mean, I assume people who have heard this a very interested to find out about social animals. So if somebody wanted to learn more about the product, you know, is there an opportunity for people to go and try the product online?

Naren: Yeah, sure. So they can go to social animal.com. And then we have a 14 day free trial. So they can just try the product and see, like, all whatever features I just mentioned, like they can use everything, and they can see how it works for 14 days. And then they can then take a call. And then if you have any questions like they can directly email me at Naren at social animal.com n a r e n, at social animal.com.

Mike: Wow, that's that's very kind to give out your own email address. So yeah, but I'm sure a lot of people will want to go try it out. But no rent. I mean, thank you so much for your time on the podcast. It's been fascinating. I really appreciate you being a guest.

Naren: Yeah. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. Have a great day. And, thank you.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

---

by Nicola Brownsea

A Napier Podcast: Interview with Tim Bohn - GatedContent

In this podcast episode, we interview Tim Bohn, Founder of GatedContent, an enterprise web form and content gating platform.

Tim shares how GatedContent is helping enterprise companies scale up their marketing automation and lead generation activities, to enable companies to build consistent campaigns easily and effectively across any website or content management system.

He also shares what strategies he thinks are best for driving lead generation through content marketing, and what B2B marketers could be doing wrong with forms and content to miss out on generating leads.

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Tim Bohn - GatedContent

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing b2b tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in b2b marketing today. Welcome to marketing b2b technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Tim bone. Tim is the founder of gated content and a marketing technologist. Welcome to the podcast, Tim.

Tim: Thanks for having me.

Mike: Well, it's great to have you on Tim, particularly as you seem so busy, you're still working in an agency as well as driving gated content. How did you manage to deal with that?

Tim: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's really getting content is a spinoff, from my experiences from working in a marketing agency. So over the years, the agency, we built quite a few tools and applications for enterprise businesses doing b2b marketing. And, you know, a couple of them turned out to be quite interesting. And we took them to market and gated content is really the main one we're focusing on right now. So yeah, I do have I wear two hats on a day on a weekly basis.

Mike: That's impressive. So gated content was that designed to solve a problem for a specific client or a group of clients.

Tim: It was probably a sort of pattern emerging that we saw when we worked with large businesses running marketing automation. So we've been working with companies like that for probably nine or 10 years, working with the likes of Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot apart up. And we noticed the challenge that large businesses has in trying to roll out their lead generation forms across the websites scale. And certainly, when you look at multi language or multi country campaigns, it really was a challenge, really getting it right and getting a standardisation in there. So that's kind of where the product came from.

Mike: Interesting, and presumably that that problems got worse over the the nine years, you've been running the business as people have moved more and more to inbound marketing or content marketing?

Tim: That's right. Yeah, it's and what we're finding is it's really a sort of a maturity point with our clients is that they may start with marketing automation, doing more sort of data, activities, where you might be just doing batch and blast loading lists in and things like that. And then as they mature, and start to expand out and trying to enable campaign creation for their teams, they realise this is a challenge, they realise that actually keeping control of all the data that you get from inbound marketing and doing lead capture and content gating, it can be a real problem. And that's where we come in, and we sit between the website layer and the marketing automation system, just to make it a far easier to, to roll out campaigns quickly and efficiently.

Mike: Interesting. So I'm guessing you're not another form builder, you're trying to solve a different problem. Do you want to talk a little bit bit about exactly what you're trying to solve? What the challenges that your enterprise customers have?

Tim: Yeah, that's right. We're not, I mean, there are lots of formulas out there. And they're and they're designed to sort of drag and drop and quickly put a form together at style it in a sort of one off, or a handful. What we're about is solving how you scale up your marketing, automation activities and your lead capture from inbound marketing. So it's the idea is that we you have a your marketing operations team, or your maybe your demand Centre for want of a better word, sit in the middle, and they define your standards for data capture for lead generation. You know, what, what are we going to be asking? What's our privacy policy? What are what are disclaimers? What industries do we ask, do we support what product areas we are going to ask all those kind of standards in the middle, and then they are defined in the centre. And then our system enables marketing teams to come in and use those standards and build campaigns and forms very quickly and efficiently. Stick them into any web page, any content management system they might be using, independently of the content management system. And therefore, you end up with consistent data, you know, across the entire entire enterprise. And certainly as we're seeing, there's a drive in multinational companies towards centralization of infrastructure, that, you know, we absolutely helped with that, that kind of process to bring everything into one system.

Mike: It sounds a bit like you're taking the the boring stuff away from those marketing teams. They don't have to worry about, you know, consistency of data or notices and things like that. They have to worry more about the campaign they're running. And I'm sure not only does that make them more efficient, but it probably also makes the job more fun as well.

Tim: Absolutely, yeah. So we kind of replace, if you imagine a lot of way a lot of digital campaigns are put together, you would probably have to involve your web team, maybe your marketing automation team to put together a gating experience or a few web pages, make sure they're collecting up their analytics, make sure your measurements correct, make sure we're following the data standard guidelines, do the translation work, all that kind of thing is sort of already built into our system. And all the marketer has to do is decide what content pieces that they want to gate. What what's the messaging, they're going to give to the user, maybe provide some analytics information, like, you know, what, what's, what's my asset name, or what's my event label, I'm going to push into my analytics system, you just define a few things from a marketing point of view. and away you go, you don't really have to get any of the tech team involved to actually build campaigns out.

Mike: And that must, you know, massively increase the speed of getting campaigns out without needing, you know, developers and, you know, potentially market automation experts involved.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. And that was really, one of the things we saw over the years was the the time it took to put a campaign together, particularly multi language, just the build time, and then the QA time to make sure everything was connected up and your leads were flowing through. And maybe you're triggering the right nurtures in the background, or whatever it might be, you know, that can take weeks to put together. And it really comes down to, you know, a matter of minutes, really your hours just to do the form part of your campaign now.

Mike: That's brilliant. And in terms of how it works, I mean, presumably, what you're doing is you're taking data and feeding it into a marketing automation system. Is that typically what you're trying to do?

Tim: Yeah, exactly. So we don't replace marketing automation, we just sort of make it easier to to enable and get people using it. So we sit between the web layer and market automation. Typically, what we allow customers to do is where they may be creating hundreds of forms in their market automation platform. So let's say you're using Eloqua, Marketo, you might be creating a form for every asset that you're gating. Because we essentially orchestrate the front end layer in in the in the browser from the user sees, they can funnel all of those, those front end forms into just one or two back end forms in in in Eloqua Marketo. So, you know, the overhead in the back end is vastly reduced. And also, you end up with a much more standard workflow, sort of lead management workflow in the background.

Mike: is interesting. So, I mean, again, you're taking away the the building of forms in marketing automation, I mean, that that often is quite difficult or time consuming for marketing automation teams, because of the expertise that sometimes needed. That's right. Yeah.

Tim: Yeah. I mean, not what we've seen a lot of customers do is to when they reach that maturity point and have that problem, they'll probably just invest in technical, more technical resource to get more market automation developers in bore, they might offshore it to a company somewhere that has a lot of tech people, we can sort of help really avoid having to do that.

Mike: That sounds great. That sounds like you know, something most people struggling with the marketing automation would would like to do, because I know it's really tough to recruit people who are experts in those platforms at the moment. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So just in terms of what gated content does, is that all gated content, does it just sits in front of the the marking automation system, or do you have other integrations to provide other functionality?

Tim: Yeah, so when we talk about content gating, we're not just talking about, you know, gating a PDF, which is, you know, the classic thing to do is to get a guide or a white paper or something like that, but it could also be gating a webinar on an on demand webinar, which might be through a video platform. So we have integrations with video platforms. So we, you know, YouTube or Vimeo or video, those kind of things. We also have integrations with data enrichment platforms as well. So there are quite a few sort of firmographic smartphone technologies out there and the one we often integrate with is demand base and that allows to enrich the lead as it's being converted from unknown to known by completing the form, we can do a lookup with demand base and pull in additional thermographic data such as, you know, revenue or SIC code, number of employees, that kind of thing.

Mike: And that sounds great, because, you know, often that's very difficult data to get via a form, but can be very important in terms of lead scoring and lead qualification. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no interesting.

Tim: The other things we integrate with as well actually, just remind me is web analytics as well. So you know, the lead conversion point is is a critical point within that the lifecycle of that lead, and you want to be doing, you know, quite a few things, and one of them would be firing off into your web analytics platform, firing off conversion events, or goal events, or firing off things like pixels as well, for media campaign reporting, we can help orchestrate that, that part.

Mike: So what you're doing is as well as data enrichment, you're also helping with with attribution and tracking as well, by making that easier?

Tim: Yeah. Yeah, that's a big part of it. attribution is a good it's a good one to bring up. So yeah, lot of companies are using the Google standard, which would be UTM parameters to track inbound channels. And, you know, our, our tool is, has that built in. And we can capture last touch, first touch or start or collate multitaction UTM. And push them through onto the lead. A lot of a lot of our clients are utilising that that feature.

Mike: Interesting. I mean, you talk about the clients, and you mentioned, you know, people with multi lingual campaigns and large numbers of assets. I mean, is there a company that is the typical gated content customer?

Tim: ahead? Yeah, good question. We do, we put our sweet spot is enterprise and multi multinational companies. But we do scale down to smaller companies as well. The probably the, the main thing is that you're doing a lot of inbound marketing, and you're utilising content in some way. So you have a fair amount of content that you're using to convert new leads. So that would probably mean a sales cycle. That's, that's, that's relatively long, it's not a instant transaction on the website type relationship. And there's a reason a lot of content that you're trying to get across. So, you know, white papers, guides, that kind of thing.

Mike: Okay. And is that, I mean, quite often, you see that around quite technical b2b Industries. Is that typical within your customers? Or do you see a broader range of customers doing content marketing?

Tim: Yeah, the kind of kind of industries we work with probably engineering, manufacturing technology, FinTech companies, business services, companies, those kind of things. And they they align quite well, probably with the kind of companies that do need marketing automation, because that leads itself to the idea of nurturing leads through a through a buyer journey.

Mike: So I mean, it's been interesting talking about gated content. I, you know, I I'm intrigued, one of the benefits of working with you must be the fact that you see an awful lot of gated content on the web. I mean, you know, I know, you've you've had millions of leads run through the system. I'm interested, you know, what do you see as working the best in terms of strategies for, you know, driving lead gen through content marketing?

Tim: Yeah, that's a good question. And I mean, the first thing I'd say there is that gated content can have a bit of a bad rap. And because people gate too much, maybe you're they gate stuff that that's low value. But what we see as being the best approach is having a site wide approach to getting content, don't just look at it as a as part of a campaign, though it can be part of a cake campaign, look across all of your content across all of your websites. And look at the opportunities to where you have valuable content or interesting content that is worth that value exchange. And that's, that's absolutely what we're about is making it easier for companies to get stuff at scale, and to get it on their main website, not just on landing pages, that kind of thing. Other other kind of features that can help is things like progressive profiling, which means that we, you can ask only a couple of questions maybe on the first visit or the first asset, and then ask a few more on each asset after that. So you're building up a profile over time, and you're not creating this massive barrier to people converting. And that's a built in feature of our tool.

Mike: And presumably, with that progressive profiling, what you're doing is all too filling a lot of those details because you know them already. And then just asking the next question.

Tim: Exactly, yeah, what we do is we leverage the existing tracking technologies that come with the marketing automation platform. So if, if you're using aliqua, or Marketo, or pardot, they will automatically be tracking your users if then if they've already converted, and will leverage that cookie and those scripts and will pull that into the forms.

Mike: And so could that potentially pull in data from a marketing automation platform that hasn't gone through gated content then? So maybe something has been uploaded by sales?

Tim: Correct? That's right. Yeah. If they're cooking in some way. So another way of them being cooked is if they've if they've clicked through from an email that's come from market automation that will make them known to market automation. Or we can leverage that that tracking cookie and pre populate the forms of the user.

Mike: That's, that's interesting. You don't lose any of the benefits of the data in the marketing automation platform. That's That's all. Absolutely, yeah.

Tim: Yeah. We're trying to work with all the technology that the clients already have and not not fight against it.

Mike: Not trying to reinvent the wheel. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So you mentioned something, a couple of questions ago that I found very interesting. You talked about how you help people get content across the website, rather than just on landing pages. And I know, you know, a lot of marketing automation systems eventually, you know, you end up with this kind of ghetto of landing pages on a subdomain, which, which can be difficult. I mean, can you talk a little bit about what you do to, to address that problem?

Tim: Yeah, so this is, again, probably a bit of a maturity thing, I think, is that when you start off the marketing automation, you start building things on on the landing pages that come in those platforms, because that's the easy thing to do. And probably your web team are busy doing other things. But that is a bit counterproductive in the long term, because you, you don't really get a good organic reach. By doing that, you know, you're like you say your landing pages are a bit a bit siloed off, and they're not part of your main website. So you get to a point where you realise that you really need to be doing gating and pushing campaigns, and doing inbound marketing, to your main website, and you're going to get the benefit of paid media going there, but also organic traffic as well. So our, our, our tool is designed to work with any content management system, it's a client side technology, if you can create a hyperlink on a page, then you can get something on a page, you don't need to create separate, special landing pages for forms, you don't need to create thank you pages, it's all done there. And then the experience and the transaction is created in the page where you put it. So a good example, I like to give is, if you've got a blog page, you might be having a blog on a particular subject, and you know that you've got a white paper that that is a really good companion piece to that blog article. If you can create a hyperlink in the blog, using our tool, then you can put drop a gate, create an opportunity to create a lead conversion point there and then on the page without any extra work.

Mike: So it's as simple as just a hyperlink. I mean, how does that actually work in practice? What's the technology behind it?

Tim: So our script sits on the page. It's a tag on a script that goes on the page like most tech marketing technology that you might utilise. And it's just scanning every page as the user loads it looking for our embed links in our embed links are basically just, they look like hashtags, basically. And when we see one of those on a hyperlink, we just replace it with some script that generates the content gate on the fly.

Mike: Wow. So So literally, you put a link in and then when you when when a visitor views the page, it gets replaced by the form. That's almost magic. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Interesting. So, you know, looking forward, I mean, you've talked about gating. We've talked a little bit about gating across the whole website and just on landing pages, which is obviously one mistake people can make, I mean, what are the other things you see people doing wrong with their forms or with their content that's causing them to miss out on generating leads?

Tim: I would probably say having an approach which is I'm singular approach so I'm creating my campaign I'm creating generating leads to my campaign. And therefore, the my sales guys need these eight pieces of data in order to qualify them. So I'm going to create a form with those eight questions on it. Because, you know, on my on my most valuable ebook, nothing else, whereas you want to take a more holistic approach, you know, get gate a number of assets and get them across the website and reduce it down and take a longer term view. So right? Well, I may not get the eight questions I need straight away, because i'm gonna i'm nurturing these people over time may be my, my sales lifecycle is a three to six month period, therefore, I'm going to give them the time to come back, read more things, and I'll build the profile up over time.

Mike: So this is the kind of progressive profiling versus the one piece of content that Hakurei someone's gonna give, you know, all their data to, to receive.

Tim: Exactly. So progressive profiling is part of that. But the other thing might be utilising different types of forms for different types of assets. So, you know, 334 field form for something that's lightweight, maybe an infographic or something like that, and then more heavier forms for heavier content.

Mike: Definitely makes sense. So, I mean, if people listening to this are interested, and you know that they'd like to try gated content, they probably have a few questions. I mean, the first is, you know, with any migration of, you know, either form based technology or marketing automation, it always seems to be a nightmare, does it take a really long time to get gated content up and running?

Tim: It really depends. So some of our customers have been up and running in a couple of weeks, ready to go. And others we can take, you know, a few months to really nail out with them what they want, their standards are going to be maybe what their their lead flow is going to be in the background. Because what we try and do is align the questions, we're asking all the data we're sending within our gates to a back end lead process. So do we want to trigger an M qL? process that pushes them straight to Salesforce? Do we want to put them in a particular campaign or a particular list? Do we want to register them with a third party webinar system? All that kind of thing? So it depends how complicated it is. But somewhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of months, should get you there.

Mike: And presumably, that's for companies with quite a large number of forms. Correct?

Tim: Yeah. And there will be a bit of a migration process involved. But we have the capabilities of, of generating gates in bulk. So we normally go through a process where they'll audit what they're doing. Give us a spreadsheet of everything you want. And we'll generate all the gates and give you back the codes and they just get dropped into the content management system.

Mike: Wow. So the customer doesn't really even need to generate those. Those forms. They've just auto generated and they drop in a link then. Exactly right. Yeah. Just like creating a database record, basically. Brilliant. That's, that sounds great. So I mean, we've talked about an awful lot of functionality here. And yet you You said that although gated content is primarily targeted at enterprise, you know, range of company sizes. Use it is it an expensive product.

Tim: So we're we're a SaaS company, and we price it like that. So we price it on volume of use. And our starting point is around about 200 pounds a month. And we scale up from there.

Mike: Yeah, and that's definitely not expensive, particularly if someone's using marketing automation tools like marquetta. Wireless.

Tim: Exactly. Right. Yeah. I missed the on the price of automation developers as well their day, right?

Mike: Well, absolutely. Yeah. Compared to compared to hiring someone. It's, it's a massive saving. That's that's, that's really impressive. Yeah. I mean, thank you. So it's been, you know, really interesting. You know, it seems like every time I ask a question, there's something new I learn about gated content. Is there anything I should have asked about that? I haven't, or, you know, any features that you feel, you know, perhaps people might not realise are included in the product?

Tim: Yeah, sure. So there's one. One feature that we're particularly proud of is our sort of dynamic rule engine a way of we can automatically manipulate what the field forms doing, based on other data that's happening in the form. And a common use for this is actually with privacy and consent. And obviously, that's a that's a big challenge with companies again, when you're looking globally, is what consent should I be seeking, depending on which country or even maybe it's the US which state that users in? Or are they already opted in and consented to market? Are they already a customer? So all those data points come together and are we have With dynamic rule engine that we can manipulate what what's happening on the form. So our customers will take all that data, you know, what country is the user in? cetera, et cetera? And then decide what's going to be shown from a content point of view? Are you asking for an opt in? Are you asking for an opt out? Are you opting in by channel? Do you change the privacy link, and all that's got to be translated as well. And we have a translation engine built into. So that that kind of thing is we're particularly proud of, and our, our customers can manipulate and change that as their legal interpretation of privacy rules changes, they can do all that themselves, because it's a no code solution for for doing dynamic forms.

Mike: That sounds really interesting, because I know, you know, a lot of companies have problems where, you know, somebody signs up on a form they opt in, and then the next thing they sign up for, they get off of that opt in again, and they don't choose to opt in and the contacts lost then. So you can you can actually work out from the way the contacts stored, whether they're a customer or whether they've already opted in.

Tim: Exactly, right. Yeah. So as long as they've they've already been cookied, against the market automation platform, we can pull additional information that's coming from that that record, such as their customer status, or, or whether they're already opted in or not. Yeah.

Mike: Wow, that's cool. That could that could definitely help, you know, maintain a larger mailable database, which, which is a great feature.

Tim: Yeah, exactly. Some of our case studies are exactly about that is the idea of maximising your marketable reach. And we've had customers again, that have, because it was a complicated problem to fix their approach was, we're going to do the most stringent form of consent request, which is normally probably what double or double opt in, which is the German standard, we're going to roll that out globally. And then after a few months, they realised that their marketing databases just tanked to 5% of what it was. So we can come in and help create a more dynamic, flexible approach to seeking consent that adapts to where the user is, rather than the page they're on. It's, you know, it's based on their geography.

Mike: That's, I mean, I think that that could be huge. I've seen clients, you know, lose 90 plus percent of their database by making bad decisions from a GDPR or other privacy level legislation. So you know, that that could absolutely pay for the tool, just in terms of maintaining a larger database. that this has been fascinating. I've really enjoyed the conversation, Tim, and I'm sure people listening will have enjoyed it. And if they're interested in either finding out more from you or trying the platform, how should they go about that?

Tim: Right? Well, the easiest way is go to our website, which is very easy to remember, it's gated content.com. on there, there's some more information as case studies, there's a product tour in there. And obviously there's you can, you can use our contact form, which uses our own technology to get in touch. And we can do a demo. And we can even set sandboxes up for companies if they're looking like a really good fit.

Mike: That's fantastic. And I'm sure you know, there'll be people who want to do that. So thank you very much for being on the podcast. Tim. It's been a great episode. Thank you very much.

Tim: Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing b2b tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier b2b dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

---

by Nicola Brownsea