Marketing Mavericks Show

A lot of businesses have the belief that pretty websites sell more of their product or service.

But does a website need to be optimized for the best visual appearance?

No, says James Canter, Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist who's been in this field for more than 10 years. Working with e-commerce and B2B business on improving lead generation and sales from their websites, he always asked a critical question first:

"Does it convert?"

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) aims to improve the performance of websites, in terms of generated leads or sales. 

There are no set-in-stone rules on what makes a website convert better, which is why data and testing are so important. James shares his principle of optimizing websites in the e-commerce space as well as for service businesses. 

We chat about the use of quantitative testing, using methods like A/B testing. Also, James talks about the massive importance of qualitative data like surveys, polls and interview to hear more opinions on the website and buying experience.

CRO evolved since James started in this industry more than 10 years ago. He takes an outlook into the future of CRO and the use of automation and artificial intelligence shaping testing and analysis.

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

Turning Google Ads into Profit in B2B Lead Generation – David Koves

Let’s hear from someone who knows Google from the inside and from running an own marketing agency. David Koves is a digital advertising agency owner with a focus on generating profitable Google ad campaigns for e-commerce and B2B lead generation clients.

Google ads make it possible to instantly generate clicks to your product or service. It sounds like the ideal business model to turn advertising into profit, but how does it really work? How money does it take? What’s a good ROAS (Return on advertising spent)?

These and more in-depth questions we have asked David to learn from his expertise in managing more than 100+ digital advertising spend over the last 10 years.

In this conversation we chat about David’s time at Google, working as an agency program manager as well as the growth and learnings from building Red2Green Digital, his advertising agency based in New York City, US.


Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

Why negative reviews are hurting the reputation your B2B business and how to fix it:

In this episode, we are speaking with Curtis from Objection.co, a fake review sniffer tool. Learn how the tool is able to automatically flag and remove illegitimate reviews from the major sites like Yelp, Google and Trustpilot. 

Learn how Curtis draws the line between illegitimate and legitimate negative reviews, differences between platforms, and how businesses can build more positive reviews from their customers.

What we chat about with Curtis:
- How Objection.co understands fake reviews
- Differences between review platforms on policies to handle fake reviews
- Why reputation management has a direct impact on revenue generation
- How to turn a genuine negative reviews into a 5-star
- To time the ask for a review based on your North-Star-Metric

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

One of the places where super passionate software enthusiasts meet is the online community of ProductHunt. 

It’s a place to discover new software and engage with founders. We asked ourselves what it takes to pull off a big launch on ProductHunt, to get tons of upvotes and got a product which generates curiosity.

Is Facebook the right medium to grow B2B sales? 

Absolutely, says Arman Ananian, agency owner and Facebook ads specialist. We talk with Arman about all things Facebook Advertising, from targeting strategies, creatives to the importance of the sales team and follow-up.

Arman started running ads for his own drop-shipping business. Being specialized in Facebook ads, in 2019 he got recruited to join the newly formed advertising agency CardoneKern.com, run by paid media expert Frank Kern and sales expert and business owner Grant Cardone.

We talk about his time in the US, working with Frank and his team, managing big client accounts. As CardoneKern transformed in Cardone Advertising, he made the jump to fully focus on his own agency, Arev Media.

We get into the nitty gritty of Facebook ads, going deep into the numbers of two different B2B case studies. Arman highlights the importance of asking for phone numbers in lead ads, nuances in ads set-up and the use of creatives to maximize clicks.

What You Will Learn In this Show

· The top factors to make Facebook ads profitable

· How Facebook ads can work in B2B

· Minimum and optimal budget for running PPC ads

· Behind the scenes of working with Grant Cardone and Frank Kern at Cardone Advertising

· Running ad funnels with educational content

· Discussing 2 case studies with number of ad spend, cost per leads, and return (ROI)

Quotes

“The most important factor for making Facebook ads profitable is that the business has a functioning sales process and team to handle incoming leads quickly”.

“Retargeting users visiting your website with Facebook is very powerful”.

“The phone number is the most valuable piece of information to ask for in Facebook lead ads”.

“You got to leave dynamic creatives running on it own for some time to let it keep optimizing”.

Resources

Wish to learn more about starting and scaling a successful agency business?

If you starting out in business, which route should you go:

Developing and selling a product or providing services?

The two approaches are fundamentally different.

Developing a product sounds great: High growth, high margins, less stress, chances for taking on venture capital, etc.

But what is it really like, especially when you are starting out?

We invited someone on the show that has been doing both, growing a service business model and now branching out by developing a new software-as-service (SaaS) business.

We are speaking with Max Louis, a web agency owner from the South East UK. He and his team are designing websites and 3D art for companies and creatives in the gaming industry.

His agency Max Louis Creative is operating internationally, using a remote team with designers in countries including the UK, USA, South Africa, Argentina, and Columbia.

In 2018, he added a new service of social media marketing into his portfolio, under a newly formed brand “Oleso”. Just last year, he then started working towards turning Oleso from an agency service model into a software product – a very audacious move.

He shares learnings on why the initial Oleso model was tricky: Customer expectation management, pricing and positioning problems, etc.

Max had the plan of creating a scalable business model for some time, now realizes theses ambitions in turning Oleso into a SaaS tool. He gives insight into his model of hiring talent, the benefits of managing a remote team, the journey from idea to product and more.

Oleso promises to be “The Social Media Tool to Replace Them All, Built By Social Media Managers For Social Media Managers”, an interesting value proposition.

The tool is an evolution from managing social media content marketing for brands, addressing key problems that Max’ team faced themselves.

What you'll learn:

- How Max manages to run build his new digital business

- How to get beta testers and advertise in the early stages of the business

- Building and managing a global remote team

- Office vs. remote work

- Plans to raise venture capital

- Learnings from building a social media agency

How to Research Your Market and Launch a Winning and Scalable Product

Struggling to assess the requirements of your market? And to launch a product that will build you your own tribe of raving fans?

Revenue Operations, also called RevOps helps companies find new sales and growth opportunities by optimizing several functions across the business. It’s quiet a new discipline that has found great resonance in Silicon Valley, seeing growth as an interplay of marketing, sales, customer success and operations. In simple terms, RevOps, helps companies grow revenue with new customers as well as strengthening existing customer relationships. 

In this podcast episode we speak with Jason Reichl, RevOps expert and founder of GoNimbly, a company that advises businesses on Revenue Operations with the promise to increase each customer’s lifetime value by 26%.

Jason shared some inspirational learnings from his work. For example, why Revenue Operations is finding such great adoption and why RevOps is a fundamental shift in the marketplace, making us rethink how we market and sell. 

Traditionally, companies have marketing, sales, operations, and customer success departments. Sales people think differently than a customer success person. There’s good reason for running things that way, but at the of the day it is inefficient, leaving revenue opportunities on the table. 

Why?

Because when working “silos” as Jason calls it, you will hit walls. You will never have fully transparency, insight, and intelligence about what is best for the customer and where you can create sales opportunity and service the customer even more. Jason’s focused on closing those gaps in the customer journey, breaking down silos, bringing teams together and facilitating better results.

Jason’s background is in marketing. Over time he realized what matters most is analysing the buyer’s engagement pattern rather than just focusing on growing customer acquisition numbers. 

He says” Customers come to the website to buy”. Making a website convert customers is all about removing gap points to ease the visitor’s concerns, making the site demonstrate trust, authority, solution-orientation, and other important factors. He uses various frameworks and methods to improve the website and buying experience, particularly through personalization.

Most importantly however is prioritization, understanding where in the funnel or customer experience journey are the real gaps. If your website is good at generating conversions, bringing leads into the door that are relevant, qualified for what you can offer them, then it’s probably time to look more into other areas first. 

Understand whether the bigger challenge is sales-conversions (turning those customers into paying users), retaining customers or making customers spend more money and thereby increase lifetime value.

This was a very educational and inspiring conversion and opportunity to get insight into Revenue Operations tactics that the top companies in Silicon Valley are using.

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

Corporate brands admire start-ups for their agility, to be able to make fast decisions and innovate on a rapid pace. 

But what can start-ups learn from the corporations that run like a machinery with hundreds and thousands of staff.

We are speaking with Aatif Basheer who knows that B2B marketing space inside out. He has a more than 10 Years of track records of working for brands and agencies serving corporates. 

Based in London, he spends his focus on Marketing Technology, Inbound marketing (SEM, Display and Social Advertising) and CRM integration.

He currently is the Head of Marketing at Preqin, a financial technology consultancy firm. 

Speaking about corporates, everything happens on a different level. Decisions take longer, budgets are bigger, but also the tool stack is way different. 

Not everything works smooth at Corporates. For example, Aatif shares that the tools which corporates use are often outdated because adoption of new technology naturally takes time. 

With this conversation we aim to shed light into the benefits of both types of company structure. There are plenty of elements each side can learn from each other and implement best practices to become a more efficient and effective organization.

We chat with Aatif about:

- The future of the marketing agency model

- In-house vs. Outsourced marketing

- How to break down the marketing function into different departments

- Marketing leadership and management

- The KPI to keep track of on a weekly and monthly basis

- Influencer marketing as a launchpad to get your message out

- Why inbound marketing pays off

- The corporate buying process

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

Greg is a digital transformation expert with a very interesting resume.

He is in the online industry since the early days of the New Economy and Dotcom boom.

He spent 3,5 years working at SaaS-based tech start-up in Virginia (US), before he made the jump to start his own digital agency, Carousel30 back in 2002.

Greg has come a long way, building up the brand into leading digital experience agency, working with brands like NASA, Toyota, Volkswagen, Porsche and the United Nations.

We are speaking with Greg to hear about his journey building up an agency from the ground up, from humble beginnings to working with the most renowned enterprises in the world.

In our conversation, Greg shares fascinating insight into the stages of growth: Hiring staff, buy-out of business partners and ultimately selling his company in 2017.

After the acquisition, he continued working for a couple more years at the company before leaving in 2019.

While growing Carousel30, Greg also wrote several though-leadership books and got different speaking and contributor roles, incl. Forbes, Advertising Age and the Washington Post.

His latest venture is no less exciting. In Spring of 2020, he started CareerGig, a digital marketplace for hiring freelancers. Other than contemporary freelance platforms out there, his mission is providing freelancers with the security and stability of a full-time job.

Greg has big plans and a clear mission: “Find better ways to connect people to the things they value most”.

We speak about his early-stage growth, what type of marketing he does at CareerGig and how builds his team, hiring new staff month by month.

Topics/Questions covered:

- Growing a digital agency business to the enterprise level

- What is the right staff to hire at what time?

- Buy-out of partners in the business

- How to handle enterprise sales processes

- The future of digital agencies

- How to innovate the busy, global market of freelance hiring

- Hiring and growth at his SaaS

- Agile methodologies and processes in SaaS marketing

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

Rayan and Paul are Growth marketers, helping corporate brands using the dynamics and innovative growth strategies of startups. Rayan founded Growth Studio in 2016, creating a revolutionary concept at the time, when growth hacking wasn't a mainstream term amongst brands and marketers yet.

We first talk about the origin story, how Waseem met Rayan at a job fair in East London including how Growth Studio came about.

Paul and Rayan share their stories of how they realised the big agency model was broken, not built for startups and not commercially attractive for a whole bunch of companies.

Coming from a corporate background, Paul and Rayan quickly used their knowledge and experience to scale early-stage startups. At the same time, working with start-ups meant sharing ideas and techniques from the corporate world which we talked about as well.

Working with 200+ startups worldwide in micro-niche industry verticals Paul and Rayan share some amazing insight into the world of both the corporate and startup world.

We are super excited to bring you this episode, talking about:

- What is growth hacking?

- What does it mean to have a growth mindset?

- Understanding of why data is key for Growth-Hacking

- How earlier stage startups used Growth-Hacking to propel their growth

- Why portion of the marketing budget should be defined for Growth/Testing/Experimenting/R&D

- How product-market fit is an important step for start-ups.

- How Growth Studio can be both strategic and tactical.

- How Growth agencies could set up their own pricing.

- Working with corporate is important if you want to sell to B2B enterprises.

- Business & Marketing needs to align.

- Finally how somebody could get into Growth-Hacking.

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

Nelson Jordan is a Conversion Copywriter, helping companies find the right messaging and landing page copy to convert more customers.

Being active in digital marketing for many years, Jordan has worked on many campaigns, incl. Search-engine-optimization, Pay-per-click marketing and content marketing. 

He found a passion in conversion optimization and copywriting, enjoying the research of drafting the perfect messaging for businesses. 

What exactly is conversion copywriting and what does Jordan helps companies with?

It's creating content for web-pages to make the potential buyers take an action, such as filling out a lead capture form or buy a product. 

Copywriting is hard. Nelson shares that the fundamental problem in the digital marketing world is that marketers spend too little time on researching their audience. However, research is more than half the game in conversion copywriting. 

There are no magic words and just few principles that create excellent copy. It's putting in the work to find a connection with customers to make them feel understood when reading your website copy. 

Nelson is a CXL certified optimizer and passionate advocate of the CXL institute which is considered one of the leading resources in conversion optimization. Going through the course helped him get to become a top-level copywriter and conversion analyst.

Speaking about principles, there is one big lesson that Nelson observed: Marketers should write up the content first before starting on the landing page design. 

Unfortunately, most marketers do it the other way around for practical reasons, thinking "Let's just fit the content into the page where ever it fits".

According to Nelson, that's most definitely a conversion killer.

These are the topics we speak about:

- How Nelson got into copywriting

- Differences in dealing with US/UK as clients

- Nelson's experience with ConversionXL (CXL)

- Copywriting principles/ myths

- Mistakes in copywriting/conversion optimization

- Use of different headlines

- Nelson's morning routine (It's quite a unique one)

- Book recommendations on copywriting

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

We're back with a new episode and an amazing guest, the founder of FindThatLead, Gerard Compte. 

Gerard is a serial entrepreneur in online marketing, founder of a number of tools such as scab.in for LinkedIn, Find That Fake, and his most recent creation Meerkat.link, which is a tool to help marketers acquire backlinks through outreach.

Gerard is very experienced in lead generation and outbound marketing. In today’s show we'll be finding his story in entrepreneurship, his success with AppSumo lifetime deals to skyrocket sales and how he keeps innovating with the creation of new tools.

Gerard started his own journey by scratching his own itch. All his tools and services have been the outcome of solving his own business problems.

In today’s show we will be finding out his story in entrepreneurship, discussing and learning from his expertise.

Here are the main topics/questions are discussed with Gerard;

• How did the book “4-hour workweek” inspire him to start his career?
• What are the main projects he is still delegating?
• How did the creation of Find That Lead come about?
• His advise for attracting new users on AppSumo.
• What did he find so attractive about outbound marketing?
• How does he find a balance in what ideas/workload he takes on and what is the deciding factor for a potential product?
• What channels help him receive the most attention and traffic?
• How does he find the startup environment differs in Barcelona vs other areas?
• What is the source of his energy and unique enthusiasm?
• What exciting things will we see coming from Gerard in the future?

It was great speaking with Gerard, we hope you will enjoy the episode as much as we did.

Here are the links to Gerard's tools and platforms:

by Christopher Lier


Looking back 5 years, I was just starting out in digital marketing. I searched Google and YouTube for content and tutorials about different digital marketing business models.

Initially, the huge information out there was overwhelming. I liked the idea of learning of Search Engine Optimization. It seemed to be one of the easiest channels that didn't require any money.

It was fun, but overwhelming at the same time. Luckily I am persistent by nature, so I kept learning and experimenting for a couple of months. Focus over months and years is key to mastering digital marketing. 

The first achievement was getting a keyword to the first page, then the first keyword on position 1 and the first affiliate marketing commission.

It was a step-by-step learning process. It took quite a bit of time and we are still learning a lot up to this day.

Today we have a marketing team, including inhouse staff and outsourced staff. We learned a lot of lessons over the past years when and who to hire. 

This episode is for everyone who is either new to marketing or looking for better ways to grow by delegation and involving more people. 

Contents of the episode:

- Principles of team managements, hiring in LeadGen

- Importance of focus for success in marketing

- How to start with marketing channels with no skills at all 

- Social media: Who should do it and what results does it really bring?

- Best marketing channels for early stage companies & startups

- Waseem's hiring process involving virtual assistants (VAs)

- SEO: Who should do what?

- How to outsource blog content creation

- Delegating & systemizing email marketing

We are looking into the different digital marketing channels like SEO, PPC, social media, content marketing and want to find out what parts you should outsource, what parts you should handle with your own staff and what channels are not worth your attention.

This episode will give you a clear understand on how to build your ideal marketing team, going deep into different areas, uncovering common mistakes. We have made those mistakes a long on our ways and continually keep learning. 

I firmly believe that whoever can master hiring and delegation will have the most successful companies in the industry. 

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. If you enjoy the content, make sure you like the video and subscribe and let us know any questions in the comments below!

Finding the right content platforms to promote your business is hard.

Blogs, website content, video, social media, podcast - It's confusing to pick the right channel that delivers a positive return.

Over the last few years, content marketing has grown enormously. If done right, you can get huge amounts of targeted followers and web traffic, resulting in more leads and sales.

Although praised by a lot of marketers, making content marketing work takes a lot of effort.

It’s no surprise that businesses are tempted to take the short-term pill - Buying ads to get leads and sales quickly.

With this podcast episode, we want to share an honest assessment of content marketing channels: Sharing what it takes to make blogs and content platforms profitable for you as a marketer/ B2B company.

We’ve ditched a lot of channels over the past years, but crucially we persisted with others. 

Search-Engine-Optimization (SEO) and blog content marketing are some of our biggest lead-generating channels for both our SaaS business and Waseem’s web agency. 

Making content marketing work is very rewarding and can be a lot of fun if you are passionate about what you do.

We will also shed light on content marketing myths and cover the following topics:

- Is content marketing free traffic? 

- What type of work shall I outsource?

- How to keep content updated and consistently ranking in Google

- How to protect yourself against algorithm penalties in SEO

- How to write blogs that are not boring

- Can anyone start video/ audio marketing?

- How much time does it take to get results?

- Tools we use for Onpage/Offpage SEO

Psychology is at the heart of everything we do. We are both passionate to learn and share what we know about Psychology. 

In this podcast episode, we discuss some of the essential human traits when it comes to marketing and selling.

As a deliberate practice, we have over the years studied psychology either by reading, listening to podcasts and following great mentors like Jim Rohn, Brian Tracey, Grant Cardone and more.

We are both excited about this topic, and we go deep into the basics of what is marketing psychology, why people buy what they buy. 

As a landing page expert, Waseem shares his simple tactic to influence buying behaviour and how typical human behaviour can be replicated online to get more signups or leads.

We also discuss various examples of how simple tactics improve conversion rates. Chris presents a case study of GoCardless and how they improved the conversion rate by 139%.

You will get to hear our personal stories on how our own decisions change when the focus was on emotions rather than just the product or service.

Want to read some books? we have got you covered. 

Chris shares his learnings from the book 'Thinking Fast and Slow'

and Waseem shares how his copywriting improved by reading the book 'Making websites Win'

We are super excited to share the new episode with you.

Listen in to this episode of the Marketing Mavericks Show. 

Running marketing agency companies and a SaaS marketing startup has given us tremendously valuable lessons. 

Now we want to share them with you.  

We are passionate marketers, driven by data & growth. We love connecting with fascinating people who got experience and valuable lessons to share. 

Over the past years, we have met hundreds of incredible marketers we learned from. 

It's those people that constantly push you to learn, do and experiment more.     

This new format, the Marketing Mavericks Shows is run by Chris and Waseem, the two Co-Founders of LeadGen.   

Waseem is also a marketing agency owner, having served more than 500 clients worldwide, running the leading landing page design agency in the UK.  

Chris has gone through a lot of areas in digital marketing and sales, incl. Affiliate marketing, Search-Engine-Optimization, B2B lead generation and sales funnels and more.   

Waseem is the Tech-Brain behind LeadGen, who came up with the idea of creating a better online form-builder solution for marketers. Chris is the mind behind our marketing and customer relationship management.

Our goal is to make top-class digital marketing content accessible to elevate your knowledge, skills and results.  

We want to share not only the hands-on content of digital marketing, but also show you behind the scenes content of our work at LeadGen - Content you won't find anywhere else.  

The Marketing Mavericks Show will also feature interviews with the best people in the industry, going deep into one marketing challenge and topic at a time.    

We hope you enjoy the content and we will have lively discussions!  

To get to know more marketers and participate, join our Facebook Community LeadGenerators: