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The Digital Marketing Podcast
The-Raven-Tools-Story-Jon-Henshaw-interview
00:41:38
An interview with Jon Henshaw
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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 we're very lucky today because we have John Henshaw with us. John, introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about who you are and what you do.
- [00:28]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the co founder of Raven Tools which was created about 10 years ago back in the day and recently it was purchased by a company called Tap Clicks which is enterprise marketing operations platform. So they do more kind of high end reporting compared to what Raven does and they really like the reporting and what we were doing at Raven and, and saw it as a perfect match. So so now I am the director of digital marketing at Tapclicks which, which kind of manages the marketing for, for Raven and Tapclicks.
- [01:05]
A
And that. That's quite a recent development, isn't it? Was that, that was earlier this year?
- [01:08]
B
Yeah, it was earlier this year. It was technically around March and, and then we kind of put the word out around April.
- [01:16]
A
There's a couple of things I really want to talk with you about. Definitely want to talk to you about Raven Tools because it's one of, one of my beloved SEO tools.
- [01:24]
B
Well that's good to hear.
- [01:26]
A
And I also want to know a little bit more about Tap clicks as well. But first of all, Raven Tools, I really want to know the story, what was the story behind it? How did it all come up, come about? Because for listeners, if you haven't come across Raven Tools, it's a toolkit of multiple tools really that help you understand the kind of search engine optimization ness of your site and give you a whole suite of insights into how many backlinks you have. So that's other sites linking to you and they all set this brilliant kind of auditor on there that kind of screens your whole site, finds broken links and missing titles and you know all those things. If you ever looked at search engine optimization, particularly on page optimization, very, very good for. And then it's got other things in it. Like you can sort of monitor building out your links as well, can't you?
- [02:12]
B
Yeah, you can. It is a kind of all in one kind of tool set and reporting. Yeah, reporting is kind of the key. Yeah, the key component.
- [02:21]
A
So how did it all come about?
- [02:23]
B
So we were an agency and we were creating what is now called linkbait before I think the term was ever even used. And as an agency I was doing sales and bringing a new business and I needed a tool to kind of help me. Something that could be automated and I could do a lot of.
- [02:46]
A
Were you going blind? Using various spreadsheets and tabs and multiple apps in your browser, pulling it all together?
- [02:53]
B
I was, but in this case it had to do with wanting to tell somebody their site sucked. Their site was awful.
- [03:04]
A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
And I wanted to automate that process. I mean, I wanted to be able, I know technically, you know, the things that would need to be fixed and that type of thing, but I wanted to make it so I could just kind of run a script. It would parse the page and then, and then basically say these are the things that are wrong with it. And it was essentially kind of what HubSpot's website grader was when they made it. But it was before that. It came before that. It was very, very similar. I wonder, you know, in the back of my head, I wonder, did they copy that, you know, type of thing?
- [03:33]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [03:34]
B
And so it was called the SEO Analyzer. And it was just one of those things where you just pop in a homepage and it would spit out a report. Well, it was so useful to me. I was like, you know, I bet we get some attention and some links if we gave it away. So it gave it away and it was crazy. So back this, back in the day, if you're older like us and have been in the industry for a while, people used to have all these badges on the footer of their pages and it would be like, oh my site validates or it'd be a little score. It was very, very popular internationally. And in the footer they'd have all these little badges. So, so we, we came up with a score, you know, 0 to 100 score. And, and, and they would have these badges that they could put on their site. Like I got a, whatever score on the site name, which is the name of the company, SEO Analyzer. And I mean we had tens of thousands of people using it and putting the badges on their site. And of course back, back then when the algorithm was simpler, we were ranking like crazy like that. So that was great. Then we created what I believe is the first web based rank tracker. It was called SERP Tracker. And then we made two other tools. And so we had these four tools and we had them all on Amazon web services. We were actually in their private beta before they were even publicly available. But then we started to see the bill from them and we were just a boutique, you know, agency. And we started, and it was working really well, but it was also really expensive and so we started to see our AWS bill and we're kind of like, we can't afford this. We can't keep this up. We can't keep giving it away.
- [05:15]
A
I guess you're paying for all that.
- [05:16]
B
Paying for all of it. And I'm giving it and we're giving it away.
- [05:18]
A
Tens of thousands of people. Whoa.
- [05:20]
B
So it had sort of surpassed our budget.
- [05:24]
A
Suddenly you realize the Internet isn't so free. Right. So, yeah, somewhere it's interesting.
- [05:29]
B
Well, and unfortunately, back then, particularly for SEOs, part of the reason why you get into SEO is because you don't like paying for ads. I mean, I mean, you want free, you want to, you want your tools to be free and you want your traffic to be free. So the idea of getting an SEO to pay you for something was actually quite difficult back then.
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A
So I think it's still quite hard now.
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B
It's probably. Yeah, it's still very, it's still quite hard now. But now most people like rely, you know, they'll pay for some tools.
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A
I went around the booths at Brighton SEO when, when I last attended and literally I was just going, how much? How much? Oh, I know it's thousand pounds a.
- [06:06]
B
Month depending on who you talk to. Some of the tools, they have some serious. Yeah, they have some serious tools or at least they're proud of them. I don't know if they're worth that, but they're definitely proud of them. That's what my dad always would say is something that was like maybe overpriced. He's like, wow, they're very proud of what they have. I'm not as proud about it, but so, you know, we kind of racked our brains and we were just like, what would we pay for? We, we just looked in the mirror and we're like, what would I pay for?
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A
Yeah.
- [06:32]
B
And the conclusion we came to, the answer we came to was that our biggest pain point was managing the data from our link builders because everybody was doing something different. So back to your point of a bunch of spreadsheets and this and that. And then it was also getting all the data, like your analytics for your site and stuff. Everything at that time was manual for everybody, including us. And it was very, very frustrating. And it took a lot of man hours to try to put those things together. And it's cost.
- [07:04]
A
The APIs weren't there, or if they were not necessarily documented and only being used by the companies that were building.
- [07:10]
B
They were kind of in their infancy. You know, we had access to some of them but it still, it wasn't easy for anybody to act, to just use an API. Now it's very easy. You even have services that make it easy to pull in data from APIs. So back then it was very difficult, it was very time consuming and costly, especially to any agency our size or any other agency. And so that is where Raven was born. And it was basically, you know, what we would pay for a magic button and a tool that would just, that everybody, all the link builders could use to just centralize all their data to.
- [07:47]
A
Make the pain go away.
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B
To make the pain go away.
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A
Space to think about what I'm doing rather than pulling it all together.
- [07:54]
B
Yes, that's really what it's all about. And to save money. I mean it's just the amount of time and effort that went into collecting and aggregating and producing a report that actually made sense and was true to your client. And if you're an agency, you have many clients and that quadruples your time. So we built it and we launched it and everybody hated it.
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A
No. Yes.
- [08:17]
B
So they hated our first version of it and, and so that was, you know, that was obviously frustrating.
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A
What was there? What was there? What was there not to like, what did they hate? Was it the cost?
- [08:27]
B
So no, it was not the cost. It was priced like super cheap when we launched it. The, the reason why was because we were missing a few key components. But we got lucky in that the right agencies, both actually in the UK and the US saw what we were trying to do and they actually reached out to us, these kind of bigger agencies, and they said it's close but.
- [08:51]
A
You need to do this.
- [08:51]
B
That's exactly what they said. And they were like, we don't want to build it ourselves. We don't have the resources. You've already like, you're almost there. And so they worked with us for about six to nine months to get what was missing. And what was missing was we were kind of missing some reports. We didn't at the time, we didn't really have true multi user capability. And they were just like, it's really important for us to everybody have their login, their own login, a few white label things. And so after about nine months and working with them, we relaunched it. And it was way, the acceptance was much better than what we had before. And then really it was three years of just hoofing it, I mean just hustling and myself personally just going to every show and trying to get to know everybody I could and you know, just the tried and true method of just being out there and getting to know the right people and trying to get on the speaking circuit, you know, so people can get to know who you are and know your brand. And also a series of just, you know, as you make more money and you get more customers, you, you take that money, you put it back into either internally with your company to add more resources or you sponsor. And I would say the turning point for Raven was maybe like 09 or 10, 2010 or something like that. And this is a story a lot of people don't know. Okay, this is, this is sort of like, oh, really? That happened. We were at this place where we were growing. It was good. I mean it was healthy, but it wasn't amazing. And we just had so much money in the bank and we felt like the time was right to just take a really big risk. And that risk was to be the major sponsor of pubcon Las Vegas, which is the big, the biggest show. Particularly back then at the time. Yeah, pubcon is, is a.
- [11:01]
A
It's nothing to do with drinking beer.
- [11:03]
B
It has everything to do with drinking beer.
- [11:06]
A
British pub.
- [11:06]
B
It's how it was started. Yes, it's okay. It started, it's really publication conference.
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A
That's why I was saying.
- [11:12]
B
Yeah, but it started in, in bars when SEOs were just meeting, talking about things and it just became pubcon. But it's a, it's a very so long standing big event in the States and they do a couple now, but the biggest one is always in Las Vegas and several thousand people. And so we decided to just basically spend all our money, like literally spend all our money. And it was, it was a do or die thing. It was sort of like, if this doesn't work, yeah, I think we're in trouble.
- [11:47]
A
So what year was that?
- [11:48]
B
I think, I think it was like 09 or 10 or something. Yeah, I mean it was, it was a while ago and, and, but it was a huge risk. I mean I was scared to death, but. But it was like a psychological ops type thing. It was like a psyops marketing approach. And, and what we wanted to do was we were just, we wanted to, we wanted everybody to believe that we had made it, that, that they're gonna see our logo everywhere. We're gonna have our entire team. We literally brought everybody, I mean, just everybody. I mean they were everywhere. You could not, not see a Raven person.
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A
Every man and his dog. Yes.
- [12:26]
B
I mean it really was. And, and it was overwhelming in a good way for us. And, and that, and so the Message we wanted to convey was sent. And, and we wanted people to think that we had arrived. And, and if you weren't using us, there's probably something wrong with you. I mean, that's really what we're, I mean, that's what we're going for. And, and it worked. And, and after that point in time, I mean, we experienced 10% month over month growth for like a good three years. I mean, it was like, it was crazy, crazy growth. And of course, as that happened, everybody took notice. I mean, because I saw we were going like crazy. And then you just started to have. I swear it got to the point where there was a new competitor entering the space. It felt like weekly. And I mean, it's almost comical. It's like, and now's this and now that one, and now here's another one. And because people were like, oh, there's money being made in this thing. So I would say, you know, that was kind of our heyday. I think things started to get difficult for us around the time, like near the end of 2012. And that was where a lot of things kind of is like a perfect storm of things. Because we used to be an agency, we were doing the work and that affected how we built our tools and what we were building in a really positive way.
- [14:02]
A
So this time the agency's still going alongside.
- [14:05]
B
No, no. So, so, so we had stopped that and went 100% software. Part of the reason for that was because we literally started to see ourselves competing against bids with our own customers.
- [14:19]
A
Okay.
- [14:20]
B
And I, I, well, I, not only awkward, but I, I didn't think it was ethical for us.
- [14:27]
A
No.
- [14:28]
B
To have our customers data, very sensitive link building data, and be competing against them for link building. So for ethical reasons. Not that I ever would, but I can't control a desperate link builder on my team who might find a way to get access to the information. So I wanted to.
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A
Yeah. I mean, no one can control that desperate link builder. It's true.
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B
It's true.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So I wanted to eliminate that.
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A
Yeah.
- [14:55]
B
As even a possibility. And that was one of the best decisions we ever made. So. Except for. Which is what I was gonna talk about, which was just that I think when we stopped doing that ourselves, we started to lose a little bit, you know, lose touch with what's the latest, greatest, and what should we be doing. I think coupled with that. And this is a. We eventually, you know, corrected ourselves with this. But there was a good period of time where I think, whether you call it contentment or maybe just Thinking too much of yourself, thinking you're awesome and everything you do is magical. Took over us for a little while, and we just thought, whatever we make people are gonna love. And I think so. I think we stopped listening to our customers for a little while. I mean, and by not stop listening, I mean as in didn't reach out to them to make sure that we were building the right thing or what they needed. Yeah, that's what I mean by that.
- [15:55]
A
But it is hard, isn't it, when you're riding that wave of success? It's so busy all of the time. And it is the natural tendency, no matter how, you know, ethically proficient you are, is to just believe now, everything's good. Everything's good. I don't need to put time into that. You know, why worry about that plate that's spinning perfectly, and you convince yourself that all the plates are spinning. But I don't need to. I don't need, need to worry about that.
- [16:21]
B
Is. That is exactly what it felt like. And I prefer your description of it than mine because mine is much darker. Mine is more like, I just got full of myself, you know, or whatever. I mean, like, I look at it almost in a more negative way, but the way you say it is more true in a sense that it certainly wasn't conscious. I mean, in other words, it was more of just we got busy and we just quit talking directly to our customers with stuff because we felt confident about what we were doing.
- [16:51]
A
I think it's a really fascinating story of, you know, it's a fantastic case study on the pitfalls of success in a way, you know, for other people, yet to tread that path. Keeping. We always say this as marketers. You have to walk in your customer's shoes all of the time. And actually, what's interesting for me is the very success you had was because you listened and you made changes.
- [17:17]
B
Correct.
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A
But that's something you constantly have. Have to do, no matter how good it seems.
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B
That is. That is the lesson I learned. And it's funny because, you know, I have friends in the industry or even people who aren't friends. I just kind of watch other, you know, companies do their thing. And it's interesting being in my shoes after going through some of those things because I'm watching some of these companies make the same mistakes that we made. And it's, It's. It's. It's the company or it's the founder or whatever, where you start to see their head get a little big.
- [17:54]
A
Yeah.
- [17:55]
B
And they think they're a little better than they are. And, and, and can't make mistakes. And because, and right now they're floating on that success. And I start to see them stop listening to other people because they think they are magical and they aren't.
- [18:09]
A
They believe that the thing is the thing. The thing is never the thing. It's the customers in their relationship with the thing. That's what. That's what.
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B
That's exactly what it is.
- [18:18]
A
I'm going to chat at this point, take a short break and I'm going to challenge everybody listening to this. I want you to seriously just stop for a second and ponder how much are you listening to your customers and what they need and how much are you just being carried along by the tired of stuff to do? Because I'm telling you, from my experience, there is gold every time, both in both financially and in what you gain as an organization in actually listening and taking time out to do that, no matter how successful or busy it seems. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now, but I just wanted to make that point. So Raven Tools then. One thing I really wanted to talk to you about was that there was a sticky. A sticky point.
- [19:02]
B
Yeah, we were almost there. Yeah, it is a very sticking or sticky point.
- [19:09]
A
So tell us what happened.
- [19:11]
B
So that's part of that perfect storm. So I just kind of led up.
- [19:14]
A
To it as far as the whole.
- [19:16]
B
Thing right at the cusp. And so one day, out of the Blue, Google, their AdWords department decided to just not even call us up, just send us the nastiest email and say that we were out of compliance with their AdWords API. Because at that time we had finally moved into reporting for social and paid, not just SEO. And they said that they were going to revoke access to their API if we didn't remove anything that had to do with scraped data. And so we had two sources of scrape data at the time. We were. We had switched over to Authority Labs for our ranking data and we were also using SEMrush's API for our research tool. And which, and by the way, I mean, when I say this, it's like, oh, I hated getting rid of these things, which is where this is leading. And so we had to. We struggled with this. I mean, we had so many internal debates. This was just, it was agonizing coming to what we were going to have to do with this.
- [20:30]
A
I was a customer back then and those were the features. I really.
- [20:33]
B
Oh, I know. That was the beginning of it. Even before Raven existed, it was all about the rank tracking. I mean like everybody knew us as a rank tracking provider.
- [20:42]
A
They weren't necessarily. You couldn't really get that easily within this whole suite of things as you, as you could with your tool. That was the best.
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B
I thought we made it awesome. Yeah, I would like to agree with you that it was awesome. And I loved it too.
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A
It was good. So what do you do when faced with a decision like that? You've got these killer features that you know all of your customers love and you have to pull the plug on them.
- [21:06]
B
Well, first I want to say the decision, the reason why we made the decision to pull the plug on it was because we didn't know if this was just an AdWords thing or if this was a Google thing. And our concern was that at any time they could then next, like if we defied them because they are Google after all, that they would then say, we're taking away Google Analytics API. And that to us was sort of like a death blow. The Google API becomes so important to our customers for reporting that if we were to lose that, it's like horrible. So that's why we made the decision. And so what do you do when you take away the core feature that everybody has come to know you for other than cry.
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A
Disruption? Doesn't get much more big than that.
- [22:06]
B
It was huge. It was humongous. And it was so big that we lost half of our customers within two to three months.
- [22:11]
A
Months. Wow.
- [22:12]
B
That's how big it was. And that was brutal.
- [22:14]
A
Yeah.
- [22:17]
B
I would say that for myself. Being a lifelong entrepreneur, you have to be an eternal optimist. And you can't be a quitter. You can't quit. And there was no way we're going to quit. I mean, it was sort of like we're going to fight our way back and find something. The thing that ended up saving us was I had been working sort of like a skunk works like project on what is now known as the site auditor. And I had been working on it for a year with one of our developers and our lead designer. And it was just a passion project of mine. I'd been prototyping this. We had had like a working prototype. I just was like, this needs to be in the market. Like we need a web based auditing tool because there really wasn't one that existed out there at the time. And, and it ended up I couldn't convince anybody in the company to do it. And when I think when we were finally at this sort of like desperate place and we were seeing People leave. I. They were like, okay, let's build it. And they built it and it became our most popular tool ever. And it ended up bringing more customers to us than we'd ever had ever in the history of the company.
- [23:33]
A
So, I mean, I went on a bit of a journey with that particular product. Do you know what? One of the best things I think you did was you wrote to everybody and explained what was happening.
- [23:44]
B
We did our best.
- [23:45]
A
You did, you did. You kept. And I remember reading that email that came in first thing in the morning. I came to my email box and it was there and I was like, oh, no, oh no, oh no. But the fact that you've been honest and shared with me exactly what was happening and laid out a plan of what you were going to be doing about it. Yeah, kept me. Kept me in the loop completely.
- [24:06]
B
That's good. I'm glad that's how you experienced it.
- [24:09]
A
You know, the other really weird thing was that it was like an actual email from you to me. It didn't come across as that, yeah, remain true to that customer. Customer focus. And actually, I wasn't angry at you. I was angry at what happened.
- [24:24]
B
Really.
- [24:24]
A
It was kind of, you know, that was a good thing. So, so the, the auditor tool, in terms of staying true to your original remit, which you shared with us earlier, which was to. The original tool, was very much about pointing out problems and.
- [24:41]
B
Yeah, the, the SEO analyzer by site name.
- [24:43]
A
Yeah, exactly. So the, the auditor tool and I, I then went on to work with an agency a few years later, and actually that auditor tool was one of the best tools in our bag in terms of when we had new clients come on, we could run the audits and we could go to the client and say, your baby is ugly. And this and his.
- [25:02]
B
Technically speaking, kind of what it did.
- [25:06]
A
Kind of what it did. And yeah, it was, you know, it used to win people's trust and actually gave you all the key metrics and gave you a very clear idea of what needed doing.
- [25:17]
B
So, yeah, it's a great tool. I mean, and I definitely consider that also my baby and I, I love it. And that's exactly how most of our customers use it to this day. They actually use it as a pre sales tool too. So they like to run prospective customers through it.
- [25:36]
A
Exactly how we use it.
- [25:36]
B
Yeah. Send them the thing. And then when they win the business, like you're saying, then they use it as a workflow tool to actually fix it and watch the score improve. So, yeah, I really like it. Again, it's just like theory. When we, after we launched Raven, it was successful. Same thing happened with Site Auditor. Since we launched it and people saw people wanting it and using it. Now we've got all these other competitors out there, big and small, and it just fascinates me, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. I mean, there's definitely a need for it.
- [26:12]
A
Yes, you. Yeah, well, otherwise it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to do. But, you know, again, it's going for that magic button, that button that makes people's jobs.
- [26:21]
B
It is. And that's what it was for, be a magic button.
- [26:23]
A
Absolutely fantastic. Well, thank you for that. I've enjoyed that immensely. I did one last question on Raven. Why is it called Raven? This has always, always bothered me.
- [26:34]
B
I love this story.
- [26:36]
A
I love all the branding around it.
- [26:38]
B
But why Raven? I love hearing that, that you do. Okay, so again, back in the day, SEO, a lot of people didn't understand it, but what they did think of when they thought of SEO was like this, like dark arts of Internet marketing. And so there's that. And I always really like the. There's, at least in the US there's a publisher called O'Reilly and they make like coding books and things on all the covers. They always have animals that are associated with like the programming language or whatever it might be. I love that. I was like, I can always know that this animal is related to this language. I can scan the books and be like, oh, that's JavaScript.
- [27:20]
A
Yeah, Python.
- [27:23]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, or they have like an emu for something or whatever. And so I really like that. And I wanted something simple. I wanted something that people could remember. And so Raven came to mind. And the reason why I picked Raven was because of, you know, Edgar Allan Poe and sort of this, the relation to the darkness. Ravens and crows are also considered the smartest birds on the planet. So I like the idea that this was like, really intelligent software associated with the dark arts of SEO. And so that's where the name came about. That's why it kind of picked Raven. It just seemed to fit really well back then. And then as far as the branding goes, the visual, you know, logo mark. My wife is an art director and graphic designer, and so she's taught me a lot about what makes a good logo and what makes a good brand that lasts for a really long time. Because I definitely think our, our brand has lasted a long time, at least visually. I Mean people, it still feels relevant to today. It's not like an old logo. And. And so I actually went through a couple designers to get to what is today's, you know, for past 10 years, is Raven's logo. And. And it was everything from. It needs to work really well in one color. It needs to be concise, it needs to be bold. It, you know, all those different things. And that was. That's how it came about. It was. It was that background. And I wanted the logo to be a certain way. And it's worked out really well. And I will say, one of the things I'm proud of, at least I know I had an influence of this on in our industry, is that before, before our original T shirt, all the T shirts were awful. If you would go to a trade show, everybody was convinced you had to have your URL on it. They were convinced you had to have all this crap on your shirt, which basically nobody wanted to wear. And I hated it. I hated it as like, just a consumer, as a. I mean, like somebody who would want to wear that. And so I always told myself, if I ever get the chance to make a T shirt for my own company, I'm gonna do the opposite of that. I'm gonna do what seems counterintuitive to every marketer that's out there, but I think is gonna win for us.
- [30:01]
A
It's almost a bizarre concept. Make a T shirt that people want to wear.
- [30:05]
B
How crazy. It's like your mind just exploded.
- [30:07]
A
Where did you get that from? Yeah, so.
- [30:09]
B
So we were the first people and I drove this to just. All we did was we put our logo on a. Oh. And it wasn't just how we did it. It was on what shirt we did. We did the American Apparel super soft T shirt. I mean, something you could sleep in. And then we just put our simple logo on the front. It was just a black shirt with a white logo on the front. Nobody had ever done it before. And they went like hotcakes. I mean, they. And everybody was wearing them at conferences. Like everybody wanted them. And then everybody was. And that's what you want. That's like the magic, which is, oh, my goodness. I just went back to this conference and everybody's wearing my T shirt because it's a cool looking T shirt and it doesn't have a bunch of crap all over it. It doesn't have some URL on it. Because I knew that if it's within context, particularly in our industry, just with search and everything, they're gonna find the site. I'm not worried about them finding the site. The right people are gonna find the site, and if it looks cool and they want to wear it, they're gonna wear it. And that's just free advertising for me. And it was great that going back to that pubcon conference, we extended that. We actually started making new designs each year just for that conference. And we would have hundreds of shirts and people would stand in the longest line to get our shirt because it was so popular. My wife actually designed all those and they looked really cool. Always really simple. Always, you know, just. And it was like pubcon in the year. And people wanted it because it was a collector's thing. And. And we were. It was kind of like that. Yeah, but we would be wiped out. Every single show wiped out. I mean, it would be the longest line. Everybody hated us. I mean, all the competitors and hated us. They just hated us. But we had tapped into something that nobody had tapped into yet, which was a desire for something that was uncomfortable, look cool, that was unique, that was special to the event, that didn't look crappy, you know, and that really worked well for us.
- [32:18]
A
It fitted around your customers needs. It did.
- [32:20]
B
It did.
- [32:21]
A
Just a bit of feedback.
- [32:22]
B
So.
- [32:23]
A
I'm a big fan of freebies at shows, but I have to say, guys, you need to try harder at this because a lot of stuff I get, I would. I'd be too embarrassed to use. And I think. I don't think people think about that. It's all about. Do you know what it is? It's all about them.
- [32:40]
B
It's a. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. It's all about them, not you.
- [32:44]
A
And if you're not thinking about. Okay, if I'm going to give something away, it's not about me. It's about the person I'm giving it to. It. It's like a gift, isn't it? You wouldn't. You wouldn't buy some. You know, it's like the trade show equivalent of buying something that you love for your. For your wife. I still regret buying my wife that set of tiles, but that's. Right, right, right.
- [33:02]
B
That is a horrible choice, by the way.
- [33:04]
A
That's another. That's another story.
- [33:06]
B
I'll give you another example of something where to me, this is thinking about them. But you're still getting your brand out there. And that is one of our other really popular T shirts to this day. And I mean, we don't even promote the social tools on our. On our tool anymore. Our app, one of the most popular tools was when we. I mean, T shirts was when we launched new social management tools. And we wanted to get the word out there, so we did a really simple T shirt. It was just another black American Apparel T shirt. And it just had the text, I'm a social tool. And then on the sleeve, we had our logo. We just had the simple Raven logo on the sleeve. I mean, it was just very simple. Yeah, again, no URLs. No, not ugly. People love it because they're like, everywhere I wear, people are laughing like they think it's the greatest shirt ever. And so, again, you tap into what is it they want to wear and what is it that's gonna make them feel good about having that on them and get away from this idea that you have to put your phone number on their forehead. You know, I mean, like, give them something they want, give them a good experience with your brand. And that's gonna go a lot further than you just thinking about yourself and making sure they know who you are.
- [34:20]
A
Yeah. So what's next for Raven Tools?
- [34:24]
B
Well, the nice thing about Tap Clicks, who's the new owner of them? Is they have a lot of resources, resources that we didn't have. And so they've been helping us hire new developers. We're starting to really focus on things we weren't able to focus on in the past as far as product goes. So we even have a awesome redesign that's happening that will be released in a few weeks. And it's amazing. I mean, it's what I've wanted for a long time. And so we did a lot of research, crunched a lot of data, and I really believe that the team made the right decision. So I'm pretty pumped about it, both as an end user and just being associated with Raven. We're going to continue to add some more data connections and really just start to look at areas that if we just improved it a little bit, would make it amazing, make it very competitive. So there's so many much to the entire app that we've built out over the years, and it's just like, you know what, there's just a few things here and there that if you could kind of complete this workflow, make it easier for them to do certain things or give them this insight. Since we already have the data, we're just not showing the insight. It's going to make it way more powerful and way more worth the cost of having an account. So that's. That's kind of where Raven is going. And then I'm also hoping thanks to again, more resources that we can get site auditor going down the road again because we have a standalone site auditor, but we just haven't done a whole lot with it lately. It runs great, it works really well. It's not like it's been neglected in any way in that sense. But there's a ton of features I want to add. I mean there's a ton of things that I think would really set it apart from what's out there today that nobody would have. So I'm pretty excited about, about that. And, and then it's really just getting everything on par with, with how it works with Tap Clicks and Raven is going to stay. I mean it's a good brand. It, it really fits a need in the market. It's, it's generally more of a small to medium sized agency kind of need or marketeer and it does what they need. But one of the things that really interested tapclicks was we have people who outgrow Raven. We have agencies that as they do really well and they grow, need way more advanced features. So an example of that would be we only connect to so many things in Raven, whereas Tap Clicks connects to like 170 or something. Right.
- [37:13]
A
We should probably, I mean just for those that don't know, just kind of give us the lowdown on, on Tap Clicks because I think it's a phenomenal tool and it's always been when you want to do something a bit complicated, always seems to have a solution for.
- [37:27]
B
It, which is, yeah, you know, their, their goal is to deliver the, the complicated things in a simple way. So the idea of course is going to be that it's going to be simple for you to do, but what you're actually doing or what it's doing in the background, it's quite complicated. And so an example of that would be with Raven, if you want to report on AdWords and you want to report on Bing, you have to do those separately. And however, as you kind of grow and you get bigger, you're using a lot of different paid services and whether it be AdWords and Bing or something well beyond that. And a lot of times people don't want to have those things reported separately. What they want is, they want to know what is our, is our ad spend, what is our paid spend and how are we doing and how are we converting. So one of the very, very cool things that Tap Clicks does is it gives you the ability to combine all the data into one. I think that's Killer. And so I can basically pull in Bing ads, AdWords, Facebook ads, and anything else. And I can, I can make them into one unified, you know, sort of data point for each of the data points, and I can deliver that to whoever I need to and be like, this is where we are with all of our efforts for those people don't need to know the granular details.
- [38:46]
A
And that's the other thing I thought was very good with it, which is you can dial stuff up for different teams, but have all the reports automated, which is great.
- [38:53]
B
That's exactly.
- [38:54]
A
For a larger organization. Amazing to be able to do, do that.
- [38:57]
B
So it's like Raven Reports, but on steroids. I mean, it's really what it is and it's pretty awesome. I mean, there's another feature they actually released shortly after they, they acquired us that I think is amazing, and that is you can, you can take a PowerPoint template that you customized, that's branded and everything, and you can upload it to Tapclicks and then you can output automatic. You can automatically create your reports and automatically output it using your PowerPoint template.
- [39:28]
A
No.
- [39:28]
B
And then have it, you know, be sent to your client or whoever. And it's just, I mean, to me that's like, it's like a miracle. Yeah. And if I've learned anything over the years, it's people want diversity in how they do their reporting, how they deliver it. Because we tried to go down, we thought that everybody was at a place where they could just have responsive HTML reports. And we were wrong and we had to correct that quickly and be like, okay, and here's your PDF reports again. And I think Tapclicks always knew that that was the case. And so they have tons of different ways that you can output your reports because they know that their customers, clients prefer all kinds of different formats. And so again, it's like if you're using Raven, you get PDF or you get HTML and if you're using Tapclicks, it's like you get all these things, like all these different formats that you can output to that are based on their clients needs.
- [40:39]
A
Great. Well, John, it's been fascinating talking to you and we wish you the very best of luck with the up and coming launch.
- [40:48]
B
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
- [40:57]
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 mentioned, please please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. 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.