How To Scale Your Business To Reach A Larger Audience With Brandon Andersen From Ceralytics [AMP 062]
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- Some information about Ceralytics and what Brandon does there as the chief strategist, as well as what Brandon did before Ceralytics.
- Some of the marketing challenges that Brandon faced as he moved Ceralytics from a startup to a successful company, as well as how they got past those challenges.
- The concept of a blue ocean: what it is and why it’s important.
- Successful things that Brandon did right away to build an audience in the early days of the company.
- How focusing on influencer is a great marketing tactic.
- A step-by-step way to build relationships with influencers.
- Tips on getting into guesting.
- Brandon’s best tips on marketing strategy and how to build one as a new marketer.
- “Marketing strategy will impact every piece of your business and it should be tied to every piece of your business.”
- “Those early days are going be really rough. You’re all gonna be trying to finding your way. You need to communicate with each other and really listen to what each other has to say.”
How To Scale Your Business To Reach A Larger Audience With Brandon Andersen From @ceralytics
Click To TweetTranscript:
Nathan: How can you scale a business with marketing? I mean really do it. Brandon Andersen is the chief strategist at Ceralytics. His work has been featured in Forbes. He guests all the time on podcasts like Convince and Convert’s Content Pros. I know you’ll meet him next year at Content Marketing World 2. Today, on the Actionable Marketing Podcast, Brandon is sharing how he’s scaled Ceralytics with marketing, specifically you’re going to learn why failure helps you improve, how to overcome your marketing challenges, and how to build a blue ocean in your marketing to position your business completely differently than your competition. As Brandon started Ceralytics, he focused on a few key marketing tactics that have really paid off like connecting with influencers. You’re going to learn how to get started with that to reach a much larger audience. Im Nathan from CoSchedule, with that, let’s check in with Brandon. Hey Brandon, thanks a lot for being on the podcast today. Brandon: Thank you for having me. Nathan: I'm excited to have you on the show. Let’s talk a little bit about Ceralytics. Tell me about that, what do you do there? Brandon: Ceralytics, I'm a co-founder of the company. My title is Chief Strategist. Basically, I oversee all the fun stuff. Ceralytics, what we do is we’re a content intelligence platform. What that means is that at the basic level, we’re trying to identify what topics you should be writing about using data based off of what has worked on your site in the past to drive awareness, to drive engagement, and to drive conversions. We look at that at the topic level. We say hey, here are the topics that are driving all of these things on your website, here are topics that are underutilized on your website. We also look at your competitors. You can actually look at your competitor websites and say hey, competitor ABC has these topics that are performing really well on their site. That’s really good for you to know how are they positioning themselves, what’s actually having an impact on their audience. But then we also show you whether they have underutilized topics. What’s something that they had really good success with that they, for whatever reason, never went back to and wrote about. Now you know hey, here’s something they uncovered and they never picked it up. Now, you can pick it up and write a piece of really great content around that topic. Finally, we look at your entire industry set. We say hey, here are the topics that are resonating with your industry that you don’t write about. It really just identifies what you should be writing next. Nathan: Nice. It’s a really smart idea which kind of leads me into my next question for you. What were you up to before you started Ceralytics then? Brandon: I was working at a large PR software company and I oversaw US marketing for them. The pieces of our team that I oversaw were demand generation, marketing operations, and contact marketing. Those are three very different types of teams and we used different types of data for those. For demand generation, it was very data driven. We knew what programs we should put money into, we had a really good idea of what kind of ROI we’d get out of it, because we had data on everything. It was really cut and dry. That was nice because it gave us peace of mind that what we were doing was going to work before we even did it. But then, we’d have the contact marketing meetings. We tried really hard to get as much data as we could to identify what should we be writing next. What kept coming up was we kept saying ah, we think we have enough data for this. At the end of the day, we’re really still making assumptions and we’re really kinda guessing. We’re hoping that we’re going to be right. Strategy, planning for what were we going to cover became a lot of guessing. That really stuck out to me as that’s just not the right way to do this. Unfortunately, it’s the way that the vast majority of companies create content. They say hey, we guess that this is the stuff that’s going to be happening, here’s the stuff that we should probably be covering. Or here’s what’s happening right now in the news, we’re just going to cover that and be the next in line to create a piece of content for something. It’s not data driven, they don’t know before they write it what’s going to work. I thought gosh, if I'm having this problem and clients that we had at that company, we knew that they were having similar issues, there’s got to be a way to do this. Actually bring data driven metrics behind what content you should create. That’s what spurred the idea for Ceralytics. Nathan: Nice, that’s pretty smart branding. Obviously, there’s a need for Ceralytics. I am wondering then, you went from this really massive company to a startup. Running this thing, what were some of the challenges with marketing that you faced as you got Ceralytics up and running? Tell me about that. Brandon: It was night and day difference. The obvious things were the budget. I went from millions of dollars of budget with a great team of people to no money. It was like no budget. We bootstrapped the thing and had really no money for marketing. We said what we’re going to do is when we get clients, we’re just going to reinvest back into the company. Starting off, it was zero budget. That was a shock. The other thing was we were doing something completely new. There are no other companies that do this. We had no competitors to learn from, there’s nobody to look at and say hey, let’s get some competitive intel from these people. We tried to look at people who were kind of in the space and at the end of the day, we were on our own. It was a blue ocean, it was here we go, we’re going to do something that’s brand new. Trying to navigate that was really challenging. Nathan: Nice. You just mentioned the word blue ocean, I love that approach. Could you tell me about that with Ceralytics? How did you find your blue ocean? Brandon: For those who are not familiar, you got a blue ocean, you got a red ocean. Blue ocean is wide open, it’s new territory, it’s untapped markets, it’s some new offering that goes to an existing audience, or an existing offering that goes to a brand new audience. That’s what blue ocean really means. For us, it was we wanted to go out and we saw that there is an issue with people needing something like this and nothing existing. That made the most sense to say hey, people need this, it doesn’t exist. If we create it, there’s automatically demand and we’re going to supply it. The alternative is to go into a red ocean. A red ocean is hey, we’re going to go into some place that it’s just some industry that already has a lot of competitors, we’re going to try to differentiate ourselves in some way. That’s where companies are. Most companies are in the red ocean trying to battle it out with the big people in their industry. Those are actually people who we help the most because we do the competitive aspect. If you're saying hey, if you're in CRM software and you're up against SalesForce and NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics, if you're up against them, it’s great to know what they’re doing so you can get an idea of what’s working for them and then you can learn from it. But in a blue ocean approach, it’s wow, alright, this is brand new. What we really did is we looked at publications in the space and we looked at what topics are resonating in these publications that then matched with what we do? Things like content strategy, content intelligence, those things start coming out from that. Nathan: Nice, I love that. We try to apply some of that same approach into our marketing too. It’s fun just to hear how other people do it too. Brandon: Yeah, it’s really cool. Your story is really fantastic too. I don't know if there’s a way like link to a podcast about you telling about your story because when you told me about how CoSchedule got everything started, it’s really amazing what you were able to do in a very short amount of time. Nathan: Yeah, we’ll definitely include that in the link. Thanks for the props. I don't know, it’s fun to talk shop. Obviously, we’ve done it a few times. Brandon, I have another question for you. Based on that blue ocean, obviously there’s some challenges that you have when you get anything started. Let’s just talk about you getting Ceralytics up and running, what are the things that you did to overcome the challenges that just kind of talked about? How did you get past those things? Brandon: The first big challenge is not having a budget. What it became was we knew that we had to get a client on as soon as possible. I use my existing network to start reaching out to people to identify people who might have this need. A week before we officially launched the product, we actually landed our first client. We didn’t even have the product out there yet and we got a client on. That client, the revenue from that, ended up paying for a sponsorship to Content Marketing World, we had a booth at Content Marketing World. We were able to launch the product officially there and then from that we were able to get more clients that we then invested into other events, and then we got to invest into paid advertising and Facebook advertising and more content. That’s been what we’ve been doing so far, the fact that we had no revenue. Now, we basically just build on our own success and keep reinvesting into the business. Nathan: I think that’s a really smart way to approach that because you need to reach that audience. I want to know more about building that early audience, what were some of the most successful things you did right away to build that early audience at Ceralytics? Brandon: There were a few things that we did that really worked well and there were some things that didn’t work very well. But, the things that really worked well, we built a small, but pretty tight group of Twitter followers, by simply… We got on different Twitter chats and we were just parts of the Twitter chats. We were never promotional. We just wanted to add our voice to the conversation and whatever kind of information we have that could help people. That’s what we did. It was a lot of us linking to other people’s websites, linking to Content Marketing Institute’s survey results for their B2B and B2C marketing which are absolutely amazing. If you haven’t downloaded the new ones, go do that right now. We also got some great testimonials. Jay Baer was one of the first… He and [00:13:54] were some of our first beta clients and we got a great testimonial from him, great testimonial from Chad Pollitt over at Relevance. When we launched our product in the content marketing world, there’s a lot of word-of-mouth and everything from there, we got to meet with more people, and network with more people. We just started building this. It’s a small, and it still is a pretty small tight-knit group of people who just know who we are, they know what we’re doing, and they’re our audience right now and we’re working on building that audience out. Nathan: I think that is really interesting. Talk to me a little bit more about that. Why do you focus on “influencers” marketing tactic? Why did you prioritize that? Brandon: My previous role that I had, I was very lucky. I was collaborating with big names all the time. It helped that I had a really big budget at the time. I had a team of people. It was something that I saw working at a larger company. I thought, “Well, the catch is if it works at a larger company, why not bring that tactic to Ceralytics?” What was nice was I already have the connection. I already knew Jay Baer. I already knew Rebecca Lieb. There were all these people who I already had in my network that I can go to and say, “Hey, I’m starting this thing. Here’s what I’m doing. What can we do to work together?” That was something that was huge for us because we had no audience. We had no audience, no budget. What do you do with no audience, no budget? Well, we could start creating a bunch of great content. But we have no network to get it out. What we did was sort of lean on these different influencers and they helped us get in front of a bigger audience. You think about it like those influencers were just introducing us to audiences that would’ve cost us a lot of money to get in front of otherwise, and they were doing it for free. Jay Baer has a quarter of a million Twitter followers. When he tweets something out about us, well, great! I mean, it’s not like a quarter of a million people actually see it but a small fraction of that do, and that’s an audience that we’ve never had before. By using “influencer marketing” we were able to capitalize on other people’s audiences. You’re also capitalizing on their trustworthiness too. Because if somebody sees that as Jay Baer is backing a company, even Jay backs CoSchedule as well. He loves you guys. That’s a testament to like, “Hey, if this thought-leader really believes in this company and he thinks they’re doing really cool things, I should really check them out.”![](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/AMP-62-Quote-1-770x371.png?w=3840&q=75)
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