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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Get To Know Your Visitors Better
00:29:17
Ciaran talks to Joe Cotellese an experienced digital marketer and founder of the social media tool Sharey. Ciaran explores Joe’s experience in learning more about customers and uncovers how Joe came to better understand quantitative and qualitative...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and today we're joined with a very experienced marketer, Joe. Joe, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background because you've been, you've been at this digital game for quite a while.
- [00:33]
B
Hi, Kieran. It's great to be here. Yeah, so my background, so I'm currently the founder of Sherry, a social media marketing tool. But my background has already always been in high tech products and product marketing. I actually got my start play testing video games for a company that was making sound cards for the PC back in the, in the 90s, but, you know, and moved from there to software engineering. But I realized pretty early on that, you know, I wasn't a great programmer. You know, there's a lot of people that were better at writing software than I was. But I also realized at the same time, like, that wasn't really where my passion fit. You know, for me, like writing software was a means to an end, but the, you know, the end was the product that you were developing. And, you know, that, that took my career away from engineering into, you know, product management, product development and marketing. And I've had held a number of positions. I was, you know, most recently in the email marketing space. Prior to that, I had done some like, social media consulting and things like that. And then, you know, like I said, most recently launched Shari basically to solve my own problem. But, you know, know, it's, you know, it's a tool that's, you know, that's in the marketing space.
- [01:52]
A
So I want to come on to Sherry, but we got chatting offline before we arrange this interview and you had some brilliant stories that I want to explore a little bit. So one of the things we're going to explore is what you learned about analytics from measuring people in their underwear. But before, before we get into that, I just kind of wanted to explore with you. Where do you think people's understanding of analytics often goes wrong? Because you've got a lot of experience in this space. You've worked some really big email automation vendors in the past.
- [02:26]
B
Yeah, well, I think one of the things about analytics is you tend to maybe get caught up in your ivory tower. You lose sight of what your customers are really doing because you're looking, you try to, you try to reduce everybody down to numbers. And you know, it's great when you are looking at things in aggregate, but there's A danger that you could begin drawing the wrong conclusions based on maybe not a complete picture of what your audience is doing. And analytics tools like Google Analytics and kissmetrics and those kind of things, those kind of tools all have their place. But you know what, it boils right down. We're talking about people and not numbers. And you don't want to lose the human side of analytics. Nothing beats talking to your customers.
- [03:20]
A
So you can't get much more human than measuring people in their underwear.
- [03:24]
B
Joe.
- [03:25]
A
But can you? I feel you need to explain yourself. Why were you doing this? And what was it that you learned about qualitative and quantitative analytics through measuring people in their underwear?
- [03:35]
B
Yeah, so, you know, I'm a pretty shy person, you know, maybe a little introverted. And a number of years ago, I worked at a company that was making a body scanner for the apparel industry. In fact, my first trip to the uk, I spent about a week in London on Regent street in the, in the Levi's flagship store, because they were one of our, one of our clients. So we had this, this body scanner. And people would go into the scanner and they'd stand there and 30 seconds, we take their body measurements, and from there we would recommend, you know, what type of clothes would fit you best. And, you know, when we were, you know, when we put the system together, we wanted to make sure that, you know, the system was well calibrated. So we had this, like, this just cylindrical tube that had a, you know, perfectly, you know, perfect circumference from top to bottom. And, you know, we would measure this and we would get hard data that said, okay, this thing was measured. I think it was 36 inches. And, you know, that, that always worked great. But, you know, when we were developing, you know, we were trying to develop a new measurement off of, of our, off of our system. And, you know, we were having problems getting, you know, the measurement right. So, like, the system would say one thing and the calibration tube said it was perfectly measured. But then, you know, we tried it on people and it would, it would be wrong. So we, we basically were like, all right, we gotta, we gotta bring people in. And so I put an ad in Craigslist and I, you know, I said, I'm, you know, I'm looking for, come in for a fit measurement for, for the apparel industry. You need to be willing to strip down your underwear. You know, we'll, we'll pay you $25 and, and we'll offer you pizza and, and, and like, you know, I had to, you Know, basically overcome this resistance to basically putting my arms around a, you know, a middle aged man and you know, who's standing there in his underwear and, and take a, take a measurement from them.
- [05:26]
A
This is, this is, this is quite an image. Was he eating the pizza at the time or did that come, that come later?
- [05:31]
B
Now, the pizza was after the, the pizza was after the, after the measurement.
- [05:35]
A
That was a wise move.
- [05:36]
B
Yeah, well, we didn't want to, you know, adversely affect anybody's body measurements. But, you know, Steven Pressfield is this, this, this writer who talks about resistance as he, he personifies resistance. And you know, he, you know, resistance is like your, your frenemy. You know, you want, you, it's, it's always there and, and you got to work through it. So I had to overcome basically the resistance to my internal resistance of being an introvert and put a tape measure around a bunch of people and take their body measurements. I learned something by doing that, and I learned something how it relates to qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. So the first key takeaway for me was for 25 bucks in pizza, you can get people to take their clothes off for you. But the bigger takeaway here is that, you know, it's not really that hard to get customer feedback, and you just got to overcome the resistance to ask, you know, so like, don't be afraid to actually talk to your customers. You don't have to even pay them $25. You know, you can use tools like Qualaroo to run intercept surveys, or you can take an NPS survey to get customer feedback, but you can also set up a good feedback loop in your organization between sales and support to help get that data back into your marketing department so you can make better decisions. The other takeaway was that people are squishy, but your data isn't. And we were working with somebody who was wearing a size 32 pants, but the system measured him as 36. And we told him, hey, you're really supposed to be a size 36. And he got really insulted, you know, because, you know, he's, he's a human and you know, this is what he, he believed. And even though the hard data said one thing, you know, when you talk to the customer, he had a completely different perception. So like, you know, you use tools like Google Analytics and you know, it does a really good job of giving you data in aggregate. But, you know, as I was saying earlier, you could be making the wrong assumptions about something. You know, you could, you could see that your, your funnel stops at a certain point and your conversion rate is not what you expect it to be. But Google Analytics may not necessarily tell you why. So there's other tools that you can incorporate into that to get more qualitative analysis. So first off, like I said earlier, you could actually talk to your customers. You could put an intercept survey or something like that in there and talk to them and find out why. But there's also a new market for qualitative analysis. Qualitative. Qualitative analytics tools. I'm a big fan of a tool called FullStory, and FullStory, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it'll actually record your audience's sessions on their website. So I'll use it today when I'm trying out new landing pages. You can actually watch somebody traverse your landing page and sort of hover over all the content, and it gives you a better picture of where they might be getting stuck. So if your landing page has some text and you can see them sort of hovering around one spot, it might be that's the area where you need to dial in and maybe clean up your messaging so that they can break through and actually do the conversion event that you're hoping for on your site.
- [09:06]
A
Yeah, we've been using similar tool at Target Internet using hotjar, but it does a very similar thing to fullstory, and it is amazing the insights that it provides and the amount of work it's sort of generated and. Right, we need to change this and this and this. But, you know, it's good, right? It keeps things moving forward. And actually we would have been blissfully unaware if we'd just sort of gone with the default analytics reports in Google Analytics. So, yeah, really helpful.
- [09:33]
B
So did you see instances where you got an insight out of hotjar that you would not have necessarily gotten from.
- [09:40]
A
Google Analytics all the time? It's a very different tool. It's measuring very different things. But what I love is that you can, you know, with these tools, what you can do is you can literally get down to the individual and sort of really walk in your customer's shoes. It's something I very often bang on about during podcasts. But, you know, it is really important to do. And actually some of these tools really help you to. To do that. And I think, I suppose, I think the important thing, I think with it is actually we're using it to try and improve the user experience. So like any superpower, you need to use it for good rather than bad. And used in the wrong way. I think things like this can be quite intrusive, but actually, in most cases, the data is anonymized, isn't it? You don't actually know the individual that's doing it, but you are able to get a gist that actually something's not working here or something's broken, we need to fix it, because why else would they have done this? So, yeah, no, really good. It's been very, very insightful. Very useful tool in our arsenal.
- [10:39]
B
Yeah. And I think touching on the usability aspect is really important. One thing that your traditional quantitative analytics won't tell you is if you have a dead spot on your site where there's somewhere that your audience is trying to click because they think it goes somewhere and it doesn't, that creates a cognitive load on the people using your site. And it's all of those little micro transactions that you can't necessarily say this thing or this thing prevented them from converting. But over time, all of those little annoyances that add up that you would never see, they just get completely washed over. In quantitative analytics, you're really missing out on a big part of your picture.
- [11:24]
A
I think they get washed over in people's lives as well. Because actually, think about it. We've all had bad website experiences, but how often do we actually reach for the keyboard and reach out to the organization to actually say, this is broken? It's just too much hassle. You just don't. You just sort of moan about it when it crops up next time in conversation or you had a bad experience. Did you tell people? No, but actually, organizations should be checking this kind of stuff. And I think anybody listening out there, if you're not doing some of this, I'd really encourage you to give something like this a go. It's very, very insightful.
- [11:56]
B
Yeah.
- [11:57]
A
And it doesn't necessarily involve getting people to strip down to their underwear and eat pizza. But nonetheless, the lessons still the same.
- [12:04]
B
Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, bringing an NPS survey into, you know, your marketing toolbox is really helpful there. You know, it's. I don't know if you've. You've spoken about that before, but that's. That's a really useful tool and very easy to set up.
- [12:20]
A
So I want to move things on. There's another question you sort of hinted at that you've taken a NINJA aptitude test and that it's helped you to create better buyer Personas. And I just feel this needs to be explored slightly. Joe, how did you come about taking a ninja aptitude test.
- [12:39]
B
Right. So back in 1999, Star wars, the Phantom Menace came out. And you know, it kind of ruined my childhood a little bit because I grew up on the original Star wars movie. I'm dating myself there, but you and me both, right? So, you know, I didn't love the movie, but I thought the lightsaber fights were really cool. And I, I was, I, I was watching like a making of video and, and the choreographer was a martial artist who was an expert in the, in the martial art of kendo, which is a Japanese sword fighting martial art.
- [13:15]
A
Okay.
- [13:15]
B
And I was like, oh my God, this is really cool. I want to learn, I want to learn kendo. So, and I was looking, you know, I was actually back, this is, you know, back when, you know, people still use yellow pages. I was trying to find a local martial art place that taught kendo. So I come across this, this one studio and I call up and I, you know, obviously I'm not going to tell him I want to learn kendo because I want to be a Jedi Knight, you know. So, you know, I call up and you know, I, this man answers the phone. He sounds like an older, older Korean gentleman. I said, you know, I'd like to learn kendo. And I, it was like, I said some kind of code word because he got real quiet and he's like, well, how do you know kendo? And I said, well, you know, I, it's a Japanese martial art. It's beautiful, beautiful art, you know, art form. And you know, I'm really interested in learning more about it. And he said, well, you know, kendo, I don't teach a kendo class. All I teach is ninja fu and we teach kendo as part of that. And would you be interested in that? And I was like, be a ninja? Yeah, sure. I'm all, I'm all for that. But of course, you know, I was trying to be serious. I'm like, oh, that, that sounds really, that sounds really interesting. I would love to, you know, I'd love to learn more. So he invites me down to the, to the, to the dojo. And you know, I walk into this place and like, there were ninjas like everywhere. You know, there's like, you know, these guys throwing stars and they have all the weapons, they're climbing up the ropes and they're doing all kinds of crazy ninja stuff. And I meet the, you know, the owner and you know, my, like, I said it was this, this older Korean guy. And you know, there's like, there's like this moment when you meet somebody where you're both kind of sussing each other out, you know, it's like, you know, so this guy looks at me, you know, and I'm like, you know, I'm like a soft beer drinking, chicken wing eating, software engineer, slightly overweight, you know, and I think he had this impression in his mind that I was going to be somebody else. And like in that moment, he's like, well, you know, ninja. You know, the ninja training, you know, you need to be a serious student. And anybody who goes through our program has to pass a ninja aptitude test. Now I swear he made this up on the spot because he just didn't want me in the studio. So I'm like, all right, you know, I'll go through the test. So he has me doing all these different feats of strength and agility and I go through this whole process and I think I was doing okay, but he was still trying to weed me out. So the last step of the test, he tells me to lay down on the floor, face down. I'm like, okay, put my arms and my hands behind me. And then in this final act of indignity, this 60 year old man reaches down, he grabs my arms and my legs, lifts me up, and then starts shaking me. You know, I don't know why, but he starts shaking me. And I did the only thing that anybody could do in that situation. I farted in his face. So, you know, he puts me down, we both, you know, I stand up, we both kind of look at each other. I knew, like, all right, this is never going to happen.
- [16:21]
A
That's not good. And he said that doesn't happen in the Star wars films. When, when Yoda's training Luke Skywalker.
- [16:28]
B
That's, yeah, you never, you never see that happen. So he, you know, he looks at me, I look at him, we're like, all right, you know, this isn't gonna happen. And you know, like, it's a funny story, you know, it's funny that it happened to me. It'd be funny if it happened to anybody. But I took a lot away from that. You know, I was like, you know, here's. And I didn't really learn this lesson until a lot later. But, you know, I said, here's, here's somebody who was really focused on the type of person he wanted to attract into his gym. And, you know, the competition in the area for karate schools is really, really fierce. You know, there's, there's like three or four that have, you know, obviously big marketing budgets and he can't compete with them, you know, so he had to really focus in on who it was that he wanted to, you know, really wanted to attract. And, you know, it's not just enough to know who your customer is, but it's also important to know who you don't want, because I think there's a risk of making compromises in your marketing and in your messaging to dilute it in order to attract a wider and wider group of people. And unless you are really clear about who you're focused on, you tend to sort of go down this. This slippery slope of mediocrity. You know what I'm saying?
- [17:49]
A
Yeah. You try and be all things to all people, and you just. Then you do end up. I know it's cliche, but you do end up disappointing everybody, really. And I think. You know what? That's a brilliant story. It is. It is very true, isn't it? There's the right kind of customer and the wrong kind of customer, and actually the organizations that take on too many of the wrong type of customers, it never ends well. It never ends well. And it absorbs vast amounts of resources, time and energy and sometimes money as well.
- [18:16]
B
You know what? You nailed the point exactly. You know, imagine if he took me on as a. As a client. I'm gonna now come into a school, you know, and he's bringing other people in that are more in line with who he wants. And they're taking a look at me and they're like, why did you let this guy in?
- [18:31]
A
There's a. You know, there's a part of me that really wishes that had happened, because I think. I think there'd be some more good stories.
- [18:38]
B
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, there's. There's a lot of examples of this, you know, even outside of the ninja school. There's a department store chain, Sears, in the States, and they're really struggling. And they're struggling because they're kind of stuck in the middle. They don't know where they want to go. They're not a specialty retailer. They're not like Gap or Levi's or Best Buy, where they're focused on a core audience and a core product set. And on the other end, they're not, you know, Target or Walmart or some of these big box discount retailers. So, you know, they're. They're not able to compete on price, and they're not able to compete on differentiation. So they're kind of stuck in the middle. And, you know, because of it, you know, they're struggling and they're. They're closing stores.
- [19:27]
A
Some great insights there, and thank you so much for, for sharing those. Those with us. I hope everybody's enjoyed them as much as I have. I really want to move on to what you're doing now because actually, you've, you know, you've worked for some really big organizations and large corporations, and you're now working for yourself. And you. You're living the dream as far as I'm concerned. You've set up a tool now. The tool's called Cherry. And I really want you to kind of talk us. Talk us through that. But. But before we do that, what's been the biggest challenge going from. Because I know a lot of our audience maybe one day aspire to doing the sort of thing that you're doing. What's been the biggest challenge in going from a large corporation to working for yourself?
- [20:08]
B
Well, I have to say, I mean, if you get the opportunity, you definitely should take it. You know, the idea of escaping the cubicle and the traditional 9 to 5, I think, you know, had a pretty strong appeal to me, you know, mainly because I, you know, I want to spend more time with my family, but, you know, a whole new set of challenges. You know, it's like, oh, I'm getting rid of the meetings and all the, you know, the trappings of a large corporation. But I would have to say, like, the biggest challenge is where you focus your attention and being able to cut out the cruft. And with regard to focus, I think you have a tendency, or I have a tendency to gravitate towards the things that I'm most comfortable doing. Product design, software design. But once I recognize, once I hit a certain point where the product was good enough to Reed Hastings, the founder of LinkedIn, I think he said this, he said, if you're not embarrassed by the first iteration of your product, you launch too late. So there's this tendency for me to want to spend time in that space when really none of that matters. What matters for me is the top of the funnel and all the marketing and sales activities around developing the top of the funnel. So I have to resist the urge to do the thing that I'm comfortable doing and move towards the, you know, the thing that I'm not comfortable doing.
- [21:32]
A
So let's talk about Shari. What is this tool that you've given everything up and invested everything of your life into? Because I think. I think it's a little bit special. And that's why I reached out to you when you got in touch and said, yeah, we really need to talk. Just share with the audience what it is and what it does.
- [21:50]
B
Sure, Kieran. Thanks. So Sherry is a social media marketing tool that adds a call to action to curated content. It's a really simple concept, but what I like about it and the reason I developed it was because it solved a problem that I had. So I was building a product management website and I was trying to drive more traffic to my website. And you can do paid media and earned media. I was writing content and, you know, you can only write content, you know, so fast. And at the same time, you know, I was curating a lot of great content, you know, or people were telling me they appreciated the content that I was curating on my social media channels. So I was like, you know, it'd be great if I could get more value out of the content that I was curating. And that that sort of led me down the path of. Of Shari. So basically what Sheri does is allows you to. When you find interesting content that you want to curate, you do it through Sherry. Sherry builds a distraction free version of the content and allows you to place a call to action to drive traffic back to your site while you're sharing the content. So as a curator, you're providing value to the people who have created the content, who they're now getting exposed to a wider audience because you're curating their content and at the same time you're getting value out of it. Because if your audience is interested in the things you are curating, they might take advantage of your call to action to come back to your website.
- [23:26]
A
We've reviewed some similar tools. I know a couple of years ago we looked at, I think it was called Sniply, which was an interesting one. I got very animated and excited about this until Daniel pointed out to me, actually, Kieran, you're putting messages on someone else's website, sort of opening up a bit of an iframe for the calls to action, the stuff that you were linking to. And that opened up a whole can of worms and kind of the ethical side of this. And I think that's what's interesting about sharing. You've sort of dodged that really, by putting it into this safe space. What was your thinking on kind of how ethical it is sharing other people's content like that?
- [24:04]
B
So I think that's a really great point. And, you know, when I set out to make Sherry, you know, one of the things that was important to me was to make sure that the, you know, the original content Creator had, you know, proper attribution. So you know, there's a couple, you know, there's a couple approaches you can take. So yeah, I'm familiar with Sniply and you know, they put the call to action, you know, basically, you know, they co opt, you know, the destination website and you know, the risk you run into. I mean that's certainly a viable path to go, but it's a little off putting to have somebody else's content on your own website. And what I wanted to focus on is, you know, make the content front and center and make sure that, you know, the authors are properly attributed. So we don't claim that the content that you curate is your own. You know, we put, you know, we attribute the author and link back to the source content. You know, we don't index the page. So it's not, you know, we're not stealing SEO. It's very similar to if you're familiar with tools like Flipboard or Pocket or Instapaper. We just are basically building a nice readable version of the curated content with the call to action on top of it.
- [25:16]
A
Yeah, it's no different really to what Google's doing at the moment. Pulling in snippets into the search engine results pages. You get a link to the original piece. I do sometimes question how obvious they make it. You sometimes just sort of grab it without seeing who it's attributed to. But I think, I think, yeah, that kind of sharing's a lot more common.
- [25:38]
B
Yeah, I think so. I mean that was, you know, that was sort of the impetus. So you know, it was like I was looking at, you know, most of my consumption was through, you know, tools like Feedly and Pocket. And I was like, you know, this is, this is very similar in that regard.
- [25:51]
A
What kind of benefits and uplift have you seen for customers using this? You know, can you, can you really drive significant conversion rates through your, you sort of third party content that you're sharing?
- [26:04]
B
So what I've been looking at. So you know, I, I'm a big proponent of, I don't know if you've heard the phrase eating your own dog food. So you know, we, you know, I actually use Sherry as a promotional vehicle for, for Sherry and you know, I'm seeing, I actually had somebody send me a tweet or send me an email who just signed up for the service and he said, I can't believe I found you via Twitter. He's like, you know, he was shocked because you know, he responded to, basically he followed through the, you Know the various steps of the funnel starting with Twitter and people talk about, you know, all the noise in social media and that it's hard to break through and you know, to get an email like that, it really made my day. So, you know, it's, from my perspective it's, you know, it's been a win. In fact I actually, you know, it exists because, you know, I built an additional prototype for myself and I was like, wow, this is working way better than I expected.
- [27:02]
A
And so what's next on the roadmap for Sherry?
- [27:06]
B
So, you know, right now I'm mainly focused on, you know, dialing into a good product market fit, you know, you know, my background's in product development so I'm really, you know, customer centric in terms of listening to feedback from customers and you know, giving them the features that they're looking for, you know, near term plans. It's mostly focused around adding additional analytics and optimizing the workflow from the share to publish to Buffer, HootSuite, SocialPilot and tools like that.
- [27:38]
A
That's fantastic. So if we want to find out more about Sherry, how do we do that? Where do we go?
- [27:43]
B
So you can Visit us at www.getsheri.com.
- [27:48]
A
Fantastic. And I recommend even if you're not interested in at all, pop along because actually Joe's got some really good of some very funky looking tools. I was having a look at them this afternoon and yeah, it's a good read your blog. Thank you.
- [28:02]
B
Oh, thanks a lot. Yeah, I just, you know, I'm a sort of a marketing tool geek and I'm always interested in finding, you know, things that make my job easier. You know, right now I'm a solopreneur so any, any opportunities to streamline my, my workday and automate things is, is really, you know, something that jumps out at me.
- [28:22]
A
There's some definitely brilliant time saving tips and tools. I'm going to be putting a few of them into action myself. But thank you so much for the time, Joe.
- [28:32]
B
Thank you, Kieran. It was great.
- [28:33]
A
Wish you the very best of luck with this tool. Yeah, go check it out guys.
- [28:37]
B
Thanks a lot, Kieran.
- [28:46]
A
Thanks for listening to the digital marketing podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free benchmark skills test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date. Just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.