Casey has lead marketing at some hugely successful B2C websites like Paelohacks and Watchmater.com; he's also done it for B2B companies including BigCommerce and ShipBob.
We talk to Casey about:
- How he managed to scale Paelohacks to millions of unique visitors and why he felt a lot of their success was down to great timing.
- The virtual summit playbook that Casey used successfully in both B2C and B2B companies.
- Why leading marketing is the same regardless if it's a B2C or B2B company.
- What are the key attributes to look for when scaling a world-class marketing team?
Highlights from the Show
[3:00] We talk about the Paleo diet, which was the topic of a very successful website Casey worked on - Paelohacks.com, and discuss other diets that are meant to help with productivity.
[8:05] The main growth channel for Paelohacks was user-generated content from search. Paelohacks built their website on StackOverflow software, but they had to migrate to another platform when that software got privatized.
[11:20] User-generated content can pose a challenge because you need people to create content on topics with existing search traffic. One way to encourage that is to seed questions to your audience. At Paelohacks, the community moderators would seed questions on topics that had existing search traffic.
[12:40] Casey and the team at Paelohacks went all in on using schema to mark up their search results for Google. They had some concern Google would start pulling all their results into the search results via information boxes, but they decided it was still worth the investment.
[15:00] Casey thinks part of Paelohacks success was timing. It was a perfect example of owning a site in a growing market.
[16:50] During his time working in both B2C and B2B Casey has leveraged influencer programs. His criteria for choosing what influencers to work with are:
a. Will, the person, provide a tonne of value to their listeners?
b. Will they help to attract other speakers?
c. Will they help with the distribution of the event?
[21:00] B2C and B2B marketing are a lot more alike than people might think. In both cases, your selling to human. In B2B it might be a little more complicated in that your selling to an internal advocate and a decision maker, but ultimately it's a person deciding to buy your product.
[23:40] One of the big differences in going from B2C to B2B is you have to get very good at focusing on your exact customer in B2B. You want to be honest about who is both right for your product and who is a potentially bad fit. Aligning the entire company around that ideal customer is one of the most critical parts of being successful.
[27:00] Casey thinks marketers can excel in both B2B and B2C businesses, and their skills are transferrable. In both types of companies, marketers should have accountability for the revenue number.
[30:20] The thing Casey finds most rewarding as a marketing leader is watching his team grow. There are a couple of things Casey looks for when hiring:
a. Are they hungry to succeed?
b. Have they done anything unusual in their past? Have they shown some creativity?
c. Have they had to market a bad product in the past? If they had, it would have been a hard uphill battle, but they would have learned a bunch.
[34:30] Other things you can look for are:
a. Curiosity - what questions do they ask during the interview
b. Problem-solving - what are interesting ways they've gone about solving tough problems
c. They like the autonomy to make decisions
[35:45] A good question Casey asks is - "tell me something in the past 6 to 12 months you were excited to work on".
Links:
- Casey on Twitter / LinkedIn
- Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
- Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium
