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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Show What You Do Online- The Swydo Story
00:29:15
Over 5 years ago, a team of marketers at a boutique agency outside of Amsterdam came up with the idea for a digital marketing reporting tool that would save them a massive amount of time, and create customisable reports. Before long they were offering...
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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 I'm joined today with a very special guest. This has taken a few months to organize, but a few of you may remember we've talked in the past on some of our Tips and Tools episodes about. About a tool called Swido. If I pronounced that right.
- [00:35]
B
You pronounced right, Swido.
- [00:38]
A
And we're very lucky to have the founder and CEO of Swido on the line today. So please introduce yourself, tell us who you are and where you come from.
- [00:48]
B
Thanks for having me, Karen. My name is Jeroen Mollyers. I'm the CEO of Swido and we are located near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And we are a, well, if you narrow it down, a reporting tool, but we broaden it a little bit. We say that we help online marketers communicate with the stakeholders. So basically we're in the communication business, but in the fact we are a reporting tool for online marketers.
- [01:15]
A
Fantastic. And what does the average day look like for CEO of Swido?
- [01:20]
B
I think for most CEOs or directors, it's decision making. Decision making is what today is because for instance, in online marketing, you will recognize that your listeners also recognize it. It's a market that changes constantly. So with a market that constantly changes, you have constantly decisions to make. Will I focus on this? Will I focus on that? And of course, with our tool and with our users that are very enthusiastic in using our tool, we get constantly feedback if we can add more features. Sometimes we have small bugs, sometimes we have our own vision. So it's constantly making decisions what to do, which path to walk.
- [02:03]
A
What was your background before you started Shuaidu? What prompted you to launch into the reporting tool space?
- [02:10]
B
It wasn't really that one day I came out of bed and said, hey, let's make reporting tools. These things grow organically most of the times. And that happened in our case also because my background is more in strategy and marketing, my personal background. So after I studied business administration, I advised larger companies on the strategy and marketing. And slowly that evolved more to marketing and later on to online marketing. And all of a sudden I realized that I shifted towards the online marketing space and we started then an agency in the Netherlands, online marketing agency. And that was back in 2006. And we very enthusiastically started managing campaigns for clients. But we realized that communicating with the clients about the results is just as important as actually doing changes in the AdWords campaigns. For instance, maybe you Also recognize it that you do something brilliant in your own being.
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, sure. And it's the biggest, it's one of the more challenging things I've been at both ends really. So I. In my day to day work, I've worked both agency side and within digital marketing teams. And for any of our listeners, if you have kind of pored over spreadsheets, inputting individual fields of data and pulling them together from all the different sources that you have from your analytics program and from your various different AdWords platforms or from your search engine optimization platforms, it's painful and it's dull. And you spend so much time putting the information into these spreadsheets and tweaking graphs and charts and stuff, you actually don't get the time to actually take, you know, spend time thinking about what's actually happening. How's this all, how's this all working? And that was actually how I discovered the tool because I was looking for. We were talking about this just before we started, weren't we? And I was looking for a tool to pull together, you know, results from analytics and AdWords and also Bing.
- [04:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, we recognize that. But also communicating with your stakeholders and that can be in an agency or it can also be like an in house marketer is just as important as really doing the job because you have to convince your stakeholders that you need to follow a certain direction. And you do it most of the times data driven. You collect data to make, to make decisions. And our experience was at that time that it was very, very hard. First to come back to the question, how did we start with the tool? We made a tool for internal use only and we used it for a couple of years and used it really just to report to our clients. But tool was much broader. There was even some billing in there, etc. And back in 2012, we thought, hey, maybe if we have the problem, maybe also have the problem. So we launched. It was a soft launch and from there on we slowly started to gain clients. And that was basically the start of our reporting suite.
- [05:25]
A
Why is it called Swido? Where does the name come from?
- [05:28]
B
Yeah, that's a funny, funny story because what we just discussed, that communicating is very important and that you have to show to your stakeholders what you do. We thought of the acronym show what you do online.
- [05:43]
A
Yeah, see, I always imagined it was something foreign. Yes.
- [05:47]
B
Yeah, so that's where it came from. Show what you do online.
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A
That's brilliant.
- [05:52]
B
Yeah, it sounds short and snappy and sounded okay. So.
- [05:58]
A
And it's certainly easy to find on online. So that's unique. Very often that's the thing with a style. You want something unique that's short, easy to find.
- [06:07]
B
Of course, that's very difficult in these times to find a unique name and also to find a URL that's still available. Yes, but yeah, I could advise also to the listeners if you start something new that find a short, snappy name, it's recognizable, it can have some sort of meaning, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.
- [06:25]
A
So who is your target audience and you know, how do you go about reaching them? How do you digitally market something like this?
- [06:32]
B
Yeah, well, we mainly focused on the, on the agencies because we were an agency, of course, so we know how they work, what their needs were. So that was our initial focus. And basically we see different kind of agencies in the agency landscape. We see that you have like small agencies, maybe three or four people working together and maybe they have 20 or 40 clients doing a very good job with that. And maybe they are operating locally. Also we see, we call them large agencies or broke agencies that you have agencies that have really a lot of clients. These companies have really high volume in clients. You also have, for instance, smart agencies. Not to say that the others are not smart. What we call them internally smart agencies because they go very deep into the analysis for their clients. They want all the metrics, they want all the filters we can offer them because they really want the data driven analysis of the performance. These are really different segments that we are targeting on. Of course that's also sometimes difficult because you want to be a perfect tool for all of them. And the fourth client segment that we recently see is more like platform partners. We also see and it's also trend in software that software is like a platform you integrate with other tools. And by integrating with other tools you can also be more successful. So we try to do that also with fido. Of course we integrate already with data partners we collect data with. But we intend to integrate even more with other tools in the future. Maybe even via for instance, platforms like Zapier. I don't know if you are familiar with that or if this then that are platforms that you can connect use to connect different platforms together. So in the growth, you ask also how did we grow? Well, we more or less focused on the search marketing part first. And I told you that in 2012 we started and we first we're not so successful to be honest, because we launched and our proposition, if you look back now, was much too broad. So we were a little bit like A Swiss army knife, you could do anything with it but nothing really good. And we observed that and then we said, okay, we need to narrow it down. What is the biggest problem that we solve? And that was the reporting part. When we more or less stripped all the other parts then we started to have success. We really focused on search marketing. So good running AdWords campaigns, that was the main focus the first two years. I think I always use a sort of model for that. If you focus on the people that have a problem and are actively searching for a solution, those are the most easiest targets to have because they have problem and they searching for a solution and then search marketing is the best means to get them to your website.
- [09:31]
A
And in terms of the development of the tool, at what point did you really find things took off?
- [09:38]
B
Yeah, what we always try to do is put complex things simple. So of course online marketing is complex sometimes because you have a lot of different choices and it's the, it's really an art to make it simple. Also in the user interface of the tool that you really keep it very simple, people really can easily find what they want and what they need. And that's sort of vision that we first did not adopt quite well what I just told you in 2012 and later on in 2013, more set internally. Okay, this is what we want. We want to have the vision make things simple, complex things simple. And then we really stripped out, get rid of all the distractions and also in the development cycle and then we got a lot more success out of it. Our users understood what we could offer them for value when they came to the website. And also they came in the tool they saw. Okay, for instance, onboarding is an interesting fact. Should you onboard your user with help articles or with tool tips, etc. You could argue that you should, but you could also argue that the tool should be self explanatory. If your tool does not explain itself, it's weak somewhere. So that's always a discussion in our.
- [11:02]
A
Company also, which is interesting because I don't think I've ever read a Swido manual. About half an hour of picking it up, just getting the hang of it. There's a lot of consistency within there. And yeah, a lot of other tools that I use are very complex and well, not only are they complex, but they also don't necessarily have manuals.
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B
Yeah, we have a documentation site but of course we keep track of who's reading it and it will do a lot of views and hits there. But I also try of course to incorporate Some help articles, but it's interesting to say in the, in the software landscape, in the tools landscape, to see some tools when they become mature, they cannot get away from the distraction to add more features to it. And it's not always a good thing to add more features to something.
- [11:50]
A
But have you been able to see any trends or shifts in what people are taking a keen interest in? Are things getting simpler or more sophisticated?
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B
Well, what we see is that marketers are getting more professional and that's a good thing. If you maybe saw a couple of years ago that you saw that maybe a technical company or company building websites did it on the site, did some online marketing on the side, but it's really, it's becoming a profession, a profession of people that know what they're doing and want to focus on what they're doing. And we see that in those three segments that we just mentioned, like the smarter agencies, broker agencies and the small agencies that they of course request their own features, but in their segment they're becoming more professional. I would say maybe even every month we're getting daily we get like 10 or 15 feature requests. Can you add this? Can you add that? It's Incredible, all these IDs for our tool.
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A
Yeah, I can well believe it having added a few of my ideas over the last week actually. So yeah, because you do, as you're using it, you sort of see, see potential with it. And as you obviously started out as an agency, so I would imagine you were sort of promoting, you know, doing all your research and your marketing in house. Is that something that you've continued?
- [13:23]
B
Yeah, we, we started now with some outsourcing, but to be honest, and I was the one that was holding it internally, it's sort of an addiction because I really still like to manage the AdWords campaigns, for instance, and I personally managed them the last three years still. It's not doable anymore, not in my time and also not in the vision of our marketing manager that says, hey, it's something we should incorporate with partners, with outside partners. So that's a process we're starting with at the moment. Also because we are having customers globally, we really need to think global but act local. So in some countries like France and Germany, we really need local expertise to have that market in. What do you say, the tactics adapted to those markets.
- [14:18]
A
It sounds like you're sort of tapping into global outsourcing. What kind of benefits are you getting with that? As the company grows and reaches into to new markets, are you finding any risks as you expand at that level.
- [14:32]
B
Yeah, it's potentially riskful because you're leaving a path that was successful and it's always dangerous or risky for your feeling at least that you're leaving something that you did yourself before and now you keep it in the hands of others.
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A
And how did you, how did you reach that decision? And that's a tough one, especially if you started as a, you know, a smaller company and it's, you know, maybe the marketing's, you know, your baby. And very often that's that, that's the case in people that start, start companies, you know, because you have to, you have to start, you know, greasing the.
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B
Wheels of commerce analogy.
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A
How did you approach making that decision and what have been the, the outcomes of, of, you know, releasing yourself from, from the owner's responsibility of constantly, you know, finding, finding new fresh blood for the, for the company.
- [15:30]
B
What you said is true because you're growing up and the company's getting, getting mature and then you have to, the kid has to stand on his own feet. And that's, that goes also for the, for the campaigns. So. But it's also based on a broader vision that we have in the company and that is stick to the, to the cor. We try to do it in the software also. And you have to, of course, if you have a global vision in your company, you have to have it consistent in every part. So you do it in, not only in the software, but also in the marketing and also in the sales and the division is that we do only internally what we do best. And if someone else can do it better, you have to outsource it. And we do it in the software. I can give you an example. For instance, of course, we are a reporting tool and we make a lot of PDF documents and also the PDF documents are mailed to the end customers. So the creation of the PDFs, we use a special tool for that. And the mailing of the reports, we use another special tool for that. We don't do it internally. We insource specialist technology knowledge there. And it's a vision. And that's why we can, with a relatively small team, we can make big steps. So it would be rare strange if we did not have that vision also in the marketing department. So my marketing manager said, hey, let's have this vision also incorporated in the marketing department and see who is the real specialist in those local markets or in this or in maybe a specific part of marketing. And let's meet those people, talk to them and see if we can partner with them.
- [17:18]
A
I think it's really interesting because a lot of people, if they're not at that stage, would always have ambitions to take whatever they're doing into the global marketplace. How do you go about finding a suitable search engine marketing partner to do that for you? What criteria did you set down to find the right people?
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B
Yeah, that's an interesting question because I told you that we were in the past we were an agency. And at the moment we are in the process of outsourcing some parts of our marketing to agencies. So you come to sit at the other side of the table. And that's interesting for me also because now you're really looking like, what do I want in a partner that I outsource my campaigns to? And you write down the criteria and you see criteria that you think, okay, that's how a client thinks to an agency. I wish I had known that before when I was an agency to think like that. Yeah. So what we're looking for, of course, is they have to understand the software as a service business because it's a really niche specialist business. Of course, B2B is very important because as an agency we were already also a specialist in B2B campaigns. And it's very different from B2C campaigns. And that for us also very important that the people we work with, the parts we work with, understand that B2B is very different from B2C. So that means, for instance, for Google AdWords, that you have a lot of negatives. You have your adapt your ad copy to the B2B space. You use all the possibilities that are in such an interface for attracting business people and not consumers. So that's very important. So the process is here. Like we network with them, we talk to them. It's also of course, personal based. You only have to like somebody you work with. It's also very, very important even in the Internet business, if you sometimes don't see each other personally, but you still have to like each other to work together. Sure.
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A
And how is the process going? I mean, has it worked out well? Are you seeing much more rapid growth? Has it freed up more time to focus on servicing your customers rather than just finding them?
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B
What see is that for instance, in the United States we have very good partner also for the peer team PR part. It works out very well. In South America we have now a local marketer working for us. That of course is the language part is very important. And we see that in Europe it's still that strange because we are based in the Netherlands But Europe still difficult to get to know the right people. And maybe that's because our focus was really on the United States for a couple of years because we thought that was the biggest market. But maybe we have to also, of course, go more in the local space and visit more like Germany and France and talk to people there. Because in those countries it's also very important just to talk to people.
- [21:06]
A
So do you get out much and sort of meet people face to face? You know, have you ever done the whole round of, of marketing shows or what? Have you, or have you sort of shied away from that tactic?
- [21:18]
B
Yeah, well, in the first time we, what I told you, we focused on PPC campaigns, but now we try to add more layers of marketing on top of that because with the search campaigns you only talk to those people that have this problem and search for you. But you have to also coming to the division of people that maybe don't realize that they have a reporting problem. So we see that it's very important to talk to people also. So we try to visit, we try to go to conferences. Now for instance, Brighton SEO, we're going there. Smx, we're going there. Hero Conference, we have been a sponsor in the past, but also we try to call our clients and that's rare, I think, in the software as a service business, but we really try to call every lead that signs up and sometimes we can't reach them or they're not available, but it's just a touch point. Hey, we are, we are the software, but we are also people. We are here. We try to help you. If you need this, you can reach us. And we try to have that personal touch.
- [22:27]
A
So the one question I love to ask people that have started businesses is, you know, if you could reach back into kind of early 2011, 2012, right at the beginning of the process, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give this young upstart CEO starting a new, on this new venture? What are the key things that you've learned that you wish you could share with your former self?
- [22:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's a good, good question. I wish we could all ask that question. But yeah, I really would advise to focus on the, on the real problem that you want to help your clients with. What is the problem they want to solve? Why would they want to use your tool, your company, your service, etc. And, and, and no distractions, just focus in your website, in your campaigns, on this one, one problem. Because probably when you're a startup, you have a limited budget you cannot overspend. You have to count every dollar. So focus on the real problem. Try to then make this machine get rolling. And I would advise on firsthand focus on search campaigns because people are searching, coming to your website, they can try your product and if all is in line with each other, they will sign up and they will upgrade to a paid or they will contact you to buy your services. So focus is the most important thing.
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A
And what things have you done that have really given you that key insight into, you know, what to focus on and what are the things that people actually want? How did you go about doing that? Because I think it's really good, really good advice, but I'm really interested in, you know, what were the key breakthroughs for you?
- [24:13]
B
Well, of course, what we really learned is from a period that we didn't do it well because we have had a website with a lot of clutter on it and distractions. But what really, really helped is that we also sat together with the team and said, okay, what is the thing we're really solving? Why are people signing up for R2? And also let's ask the people have low barriers to ask them, why did you sign up for R2? What is the problem that you want to solve? And then more at a certain point we saw the light. This is it. This is the, we need to focus on this part of the problem that we're solving.
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A
All right, brilliant. And what's next for Schwaido's plan for global domination?
- [25:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, we're going to buy Alphabet. No, we just want to be good tool for our customers and maybe we want to expand more the brand Swaido because we stand for professional, friendly online marketers and we have a good tool now. But maybe you are not really a brand. People mention us and they recommend us and that's good. Of course I'm enthusiastic about it. And then you see, okay, it's starting to be a brand and that would be good if you are more like a brand community and you've got some.
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A
Exciting things in the pipeline. Is there anything you can share with us that's up and coming?
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B
Thanks for asking. In 2016, we really focused on new technology. So in 2017 we really want to launch better connections, more connections with data partners. And we really want to focus on, on being a platform, platform for people to integrate with. Integrate with. Maybe we publish our reports not only via email, but also maybe via slack or via WhatsApp, etc. So in the data part, we all will add a lot of more Features, but also maybe in the publishing part. So Swido will really be a communication platform for online marketers.
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A
Well, I'm super excited what the feature might hold because the more information you can knit together and compare and contrast.
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B
Yeah. Still keep it simple in the visualization. Still be easy to draw conclusions there. So interesting things coming up in the pipeline. Yeah.
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A
And where does the little red character with the eyes come from? Is there a story behind that? Or is it Sweetie?
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
He's called Sweetie. Is he?
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B
Right. Yeah. Yeah. That was funny. Yeah, we thought it was. It was a vision. I don't know if we're gonna. I'm going to keep him more easy. We're going to kill him in the future. But it was the idea that my business partner said, we need some humor. He likes humor. And we said, yeah, but it's serious business because people want a reliable tool. So if it's serious business, you don't want humor in other things. So it's like Sweetie is the only one in the company that can have sort of humor towards clients, and the rest will be serious. Something like that.
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A
Oh, please keep him.
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B
Please, please keep him. Because it.
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A
Because it makes it a bit more playful and fun when he comes in.
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B
Jester. Is that the correct translation?
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A
Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I don't know. It's. It's a human side, isn't it? Yeah, I. I'm very fond of the little fella.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I'd be sad. I would be sad to see him go. So. Yeah, that's my vote. Anyway, we'll see what everybody.
- [28:02]
B
Yeah, I agree with you.
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A
So if we want to find out more about Spidoo and the tool and what it does, where do we go and how do we do it?
- [28:09]
B
You just go to swido.com and we have a free trial. Just trial it out, be in contact with us, ask us questions, and we are very happy to help you further.
- [28:20]
A
Fantastic. Well, Yuron, thank you so much for giving us the time and taking us on this. On this.
- [28:24]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [28:25]
A
Yeah, it's been fun.
- [28:27]
B
Thank you.
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A
Thanks for listening to another episode of the digital marketing podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mention, please visit our website at www.targetinternet. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to help.