How B2B Marketers Can Create Hype Cycles

The Power of Being Interesting 💡

According to Emir, the key to success on LinkedIn is to be interesting.

"Nobody cares about you or your company," he notes, "unless you build enough connection and interest in your audience."

HockeyStack's approach is to post about their product once and then post two unrelated posts before hyping up a new feature for at least two weeks before launching it.

This approach has helped them generate a lot of interest and curiosity from their audience.

Emir believes that it's essential to turn every single thing that they do into a content piece.

For example, with every single hire, he records a podcast episode, turns it into a YouTube video, and a blog post and then launches everything together.

He notes that this approach builds a connection with the audience and makes HockeyStack more interesting.

‍The Power of Attribution 🎯

Emir's insights on the importance of attribution are particularly valuable for businesses looking to optimize their marketing efforts.

According to Emir, it's crucial to track every touchpoint in the customer journey, from the first marketing touchpoint all the way to contract, signature, and product engagement.

By doing so, businesses can gain a better understanding of what's working and what's not, and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Emir also stresses the importance of last touch and linear tables for content and ads.

By analyzing these touch points, businesses can create retargeting strategies based on the most frequent last touch points. This approach can be particularly effective in generating direct response.

Documenting and Creating Content Pieces 📚

Emir's insights and strategies offer valuable lessons for businesses looking to leverage LinkedIn for marketing.

By focusing on being interesting and generating hype around their product, HockeyStack has been able to drive growth and generate interest from their audience.

The use of teaser videos and turning small additions into big announcements are great ways to keep the momentum going and generate interest in your product.

Building a connection with the audience and being someone that people want to engage with is more important than being a company that is interesting.

By focusing on building this connection, HockeyStack has been able to generate interest and curiosity in their product.

Wrap up 🔄

HockeyStack's success on LinkedIn has been driven by their focus on being interesting and generating hype around their product.

By leveraging teaser videos and turning small additions into big announcements, they have been able to keep the momentum going and generate interest in their product.

Emir's insights and strategies offer valuable lessons for businesses looking to leverage LinkedIn for marketing and optimize their marketing efforts.

Episode Links:

Follow Tara Robertson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taraarobertson/

Follow Emir Atli on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emircatli/

Check out HockeyStack: https://hockeystack.com/

Check out The Flow: https://hockeystack.com/the-flow

HockeyStack’s Y Combinator documentary: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7059533487497768962-YRqI?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Follow Justin Rowe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-rowe-4043339b/

Follow Dee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paidthacosttobedaboss/

Follow Canberk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/canberkbeker/

Follow Mark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkosoglow/

Check out Lavendar.ai: https://www.lavender.ai/

Check out Navattic: https://www.navattic.com/

Check out Clearbit: ​​https://clearbit.com/

‍

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Episode Transcript

0:00:00

Tara Robertson

Welcome to a new episode of Demand gen Chat. I'm your host, Tara Robertson, head of Demand Gen at Chili Piper. In this episode, I'm joined by Emir Atlı, Lee Cofounder and CRO at Hockey stack hockeystack has seen amazing growth in the last few months, and almost all of that is thanks to their LinkedIn presence. Emir shares how they've pulled off this growth and how they help their customers approach the often sticky problem of marketing. Attribution hope you enjoy my conversation with the Emir.

0:00:26

Tara Robertson

Emir, thanks so much for joining me on Demand Gen Chat. How's your day going?

0:00:29

Emir Atlı

It's going really good. We are onboarding a couple of people onto the team, so it's always busy, but I'm doing really good. Thanks for having me.

0:00:37

Tara Robertson

Yeah, of course. I'd love to just start right off the bat with something fun and spicy. Is there a marketing hot take you have or maybe something that you have seen on LinkedIn that you disagree with, that you want to share with the audience?

0:00:49

Emir Atlı

Yeah, there are lots of stuff. I think one of the first ones is nobody cares about you or your company. I think if you build enough connection and if you build enough interest in the audience, everyone cares about you. For example, for us, six, seven months ago, we were nobody. But now most of the demos start with, how did you do this? How did you do this playbook? It comes down to, I think, being a person, that's interesting.

0:01:21

Emir Atlı

So, for myself, if I post about our product once and I try to post something really unrelated twice, and then for the company, we are launching something new almost every single week. And if we build something today, we are getting together, like couple teaser videos and creatives, and then we hype this feature up for at least two weeks and then launch it, even though our current customers use it now, non customers do not know about it, and then they know about it through those teaser videos.

0:01:52

Emir Atlı

So an example is we integrated Chat chip and then we created two teaser videos, and then we created Hype. And even we had a waitlist, somewhat like health fake waitlist. So just people comment on the post and can I get access? Stuff like that. And then we booked around like 40 demos just from that post, not just for the feature, but most of them were also interested in the product. And then people like a hype, and then lots of people followed the page, all that stuff. So it's just about being interesting as a company and person.

0:02:27

Tara Robertson

Yeah, and you're in a really interesting position because obviously you're a co founder and you're running marketing, so a lot of marketers don't get as much, I guess, control porch, but a lot of us don't get as much control over these fun flashy announcements. Every two weeks is amazing. I mean, I I think most marketers would love to have big announcements every two weeks. But do you get other pushback from other co founders on hey, this is too much, we have a lot going on on the technical side or are you guys all on the same page about we just have to keep this momentum going?

0:02:58

Emir Atlı

Yeah, so generally we are on the same page. Sometimes they say it's too much and then what we do is if there are some additions to the product that we not announce, but still they were effective. Sometimes we add a really small feature or in an addition to the product, we don't really care about it because we don't think it's going to be having much effect on the customer experience. But then from the feedback that we get through the Slack channels we have with our customers, they say it's amazing, it's like affect our workflow day to day.

0:03:35

Emir Atlı

Then we create a teaser video and then launch it on LinkedIn. Sometimes we do that, sometimes we turn those additions into free products. So we worked on a UTM URL cleaner, which is basically what we are doing through Slack channels we are sending these are like CSV files to our customers. These are the errors in your utms. And then we just built a fruit tool and then we are going to launch it soon.

0:03:58

Emir Atlı

So if I get a pushback from my cofounders, then I try to turn other things into teasers.

0:04:05

Tara Robertson

That's really cool. So kind of creating those marketing announcements when at surface level it maybe isn't announcement worthy, but then you hear that feedback from customers and that's really cool. I'd love to shift gears a little bit. And you mentioned that you always have something coming up. You're a busy guy, but what are you really focusing your time on right now in this quarter and do you think that'll change?

0:04:27

Tara Robertson

As you mentioned, you've hired a couple of new key people. I've seen some of those announcements. They look like great hires. But how will that change the focus of your day to day?

0:04:36

Emir Atlı

Yeah, and also connected to the first point, what we do is we try to turn not just product launches, but we try to turn every single thing that we do into a content piece. So with every single hire, I record a podcast episode, turn that into a YouTube video, turn it into a blog post and then launch everything together. Once we hire someone, everything we do is going to be a content and then that also builds a connection with audience and it's like make us more interesting for my focus.

0:05:07

Emir Atlı

My core focus right now is the flow, our new media company and our hires right now when we hired head of content Obed and now we are hiring a content creator. So they are going to be building the flow. So what the flow is it's basically all the media that we produce going to live on one landing page, one YouTube channel and a couple of podcasts. My focus right now is so far I have like a podcast. I did, I think 20 episodes there.

0:05:40

Emir Atlı

I had amazing guests, but the core focus was on the guests rather than us. And it makes sense to get some authority from the guests into your side. From now on, we are going to put our team into the focus. So as we are building the flow, our customer success managers will have a dedicated show in which they're going to talk about customer experience of our customers with clips. Me and Obed going to have another show that's going to put the focus on us.

0:06:12

Emir Atlı

I'm thinking of other shows as well. So just like putting making hockey. Stack an expert and every single team member an expert in their own areas is my core focus. And we're also coming up with new categories of video series, rap songs, all the creative stuff. And then our whole focus is educating the audience and also entertaining them. So it's going to be my focus. I don't think it's going to change.

0:06:39

Emir Atlı

My other focus is rebrand. So we are in a rebrand right now. So we are changing the website, the blog site, all the pages that we have. And I'm working on aligning sales, marketing, customer success all around a single message. And that message is basically Attribution so far was something that didn't work. Visible takes months to set up other Attribution tools. You need a developer team, data team with Aki Stack set up is five to ten minutes.

0:07:10

Emir Atlı

You have everything in place from day one. We are backed by Y Combinator and it's just the next big thing in this space. And if you don't jump onto this bandwagon right now, you're going to miss out as our core message in our sales demos. The first part and then I want our website to reflect this with a really good design and really good copy.

0:07:35

Tara Robertson

It's a lot of different things to focus on. It's a big list to do, but exciting stuff for sure. Since you brought up Attribution, obviously I have to bring it up. Talking to you, I'm curious at a super high level. I know there's so many different takes on this, but how do you recommend your customers approach Attribution? Like you said, some people overcomplicate it. They have data teams working in a silo from marketing.

0:07:57

Tara Robertson

Other teams just rely on self reported. What's your recommendation for someone trying to figure this out?

0:08:04

Emir Atlı

Yeah, I think the core focus should be getting as much data as you can. For us, it is LinkedIn impressions, LinkedIn Engagement, like ad impressions, ad clicks, everything that happens on the website, everything that happens on the CRM, getting all that data in one place. And my core focus is to understand the customer journey from the first marketing touch point all the way to contract, signature and product engagement. I think if you don't have anything in place. Just start with that.

0:08:33

Emir Atlı

How can we bring all the touch points in one place and see the entire journey? Whether it's ABM, whether it is like smaller deals, you would need to understand how the deals are progressing so your sales team can follow up with the deals that are not going well, or your marketing team can have access to that data so that they can work on those deals. In terms of retargeting, in terms of webinars, all that stuff that you can do for our customers, I recommend they have access to this, but having at least one person, like a marking ops person or I don't know, paid person, so that they can check out this customer journeys often and then make changes to their strategy.

0:09:14

Emir Atlı

Right now, our customer success managers also check out the dashboards of our customers every two weeks to give feedback. Things like this blog post is working well, this has workedmail. I create a report to show this stuff like that. So we give support on that part too for specific advice. What I'm doing myself is, as you said, I'm a co founder and I'm also running marketing and overseeing sales too.

0:09:42

Emir Atlı

We have a head of revenue, but I'm like the bridge between marketing and sales. What I'm doing is I have last touch tables and linear tables for the content and ads. So if if I see like an ad campaign or a blog post is the most frequent last touch point, then we are creating retargeting strategies based on that blog post, based on that webinar's case studies that you have a direct response. And with linear I can see all the touch points. Our customers have that's one specific advice that no one does.

0:10:14

Emir Atlı

When I tell our customers that, they're almost always surprised. But this is really simple advice that would make a lot of sense to implement right now. Other than that, I think the biggest debate is software Attribution versus software based Attribution. And this debate is just nonsense because you can do both. Nobody can stop you from doing both. We are doing both. We have a separate Attribution form in which we almost always get colleague, peer search, browsing, stuff like that.

0:10:47

Tara Robertson

But sometimes I love when people just write internet. That's my favorite one.

0:10:51

Emir Atlı

Yeah, we get lots of googling too. Yeah, we got sometimes interesting insights, but most of that is like those answers.

0:11:02

Tara Robertson

On the last touch piece. I'm curious because a lot of people have different approaches there too. Are you looking at last touch before an office created or are you looking further down to what actually got them to close the deal?

0:11:14

Emir Atlı

Yeah, I look at last touch before booking a demo sometimes. We also do like we get sales touch points as well. What we are doing is we are comparing the deals that have been closed versus not closed and the email touch points. Is there anything specific that made the other ones closed and the other ones not closed. Maybe timing, maybe subject lines, maybe the follow up material, et cetera. I'm also taking a look at that. This is after demo, after the second call.

0:11:46

Tara Robertson

Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. So on top of that, it sounds like you have an outbound team as well. That's working. Are they working totally different accounts than marketing or are you guys all working from the same list of target accounts?

0:12:01

Emir Atlı

So far it's all 100% inbound. Now what we are doing is maybe this is also interesting. So we have a live demo, this is Gated. So people need to enter the email addresses to access our live demo. And on the live demo we have our entire product with dummy data and you can play with the product as long as you want. You can create filters, you can check out the product in details. And what we do is from what I've seen on Architects dashboard, like around 80% of the people who contact sales check out live demo before that.

0:12:37

Emir Atlı

But we get I think I don't have the number off top of my head, but what we have lots of people check out live demo and not contact sales for some reason we have a fun template. It's like my spiderman senses start working. This is a screenshot of your session. Do you want to see the same thing for your visitors kind of thing. And with that template we are using that for high intent companies that have either checked out our live demo, checked out our pricing or both.

0:13:04

Emir Atlı

And we are using Clearbit as well on top of it. And then we do this as an outbound. We don't do any cold outbound so far yet, but I think we will start doing that in a couple of months too. And we will use the same list. So the same list that goes to LinkedIn will go to our sales team too and they will have engagement metrics to focus on.

0:13:29

Tara Robertson

Cool, yeah. And what tool are you using for the live demo?

0:13:32

Emir Atlı

We build ourselves.

0:13:34

Tara Robertson

Oh, cool. Interesting. Yeah, we're looking at a couple of different ones right now.

0:13:37

Emir Atlı

So I was curious no, actually we built a live demo before it was cool, like two years ago, maybe. It was one part of our website when we were just starting out and we didn't think about it much, was like the I think it was natural to us. Then it became cold and it became expensive. Now we cannot go with a tool anymore because we put so much effort into it. And what's cool about building it yourself is you can customize some parts on the live demo. So if you want to highlight something, we are doing that on live demo because it's different than our own product.

0:14:16

Emir Atlı

It's the same, but we can change some parts of it because it's our own code with a tool. I think they are replicating the product exactly as it is. So you cannot change some parts. Sometimes what we do is we change text and then change it into fun jokes, stuff like that, that would make people laugh that probably you would not be able to do with it.

0:14:41

Tara Robertson

And has it always been gated or did you experiment with leaving it ungated ever?

0:14:46

Emir Atlı

Yeah, it was gated until three months ago. So why we did that is of course we are losing lots of people who don't want to enter the email addresses. But with this like follow up email, we turn lots of entrances into demo booking. So until we probably early September or October we will turn it into an ungated version. But until then we are in a grower die mode. So this makes more sense.

0:15:17

Tara Robertson

I'm curious, I know you brought up LinkedIn a handful of times. It sounds like that's a huge channel for you guys. Can you talk a little bit about on the organic side, specifically how you grew so quickly on LinkedIn? You kind of came out of nowhere and growed a pretty big following.

0:15:33

Emir Atlı

Yeah, exactly like we are right now. In the last seven months, our average growth in terms of revenue, actual revenue, not sign ups, is 40, 45% month over month and 90% of the pipeline at least comes from LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn Social or a combination of that. So what we see is if people come from LinkedIn ads, if it's the last touch point, at some point they see us on Social as well. So our strategy is we have a list on LinkedIn ads, and when a company reached a certain engagement level or impression level, which is usually 200 250 impressions in a high or very high engagement level, we get that. List and then connect with related people like VP of Marketing, head of Marketing, head of dementia, et cetera, so that they see our posts as well.

0:16:25

Emir Atlı

Me, my co founder and CEO, Obed, Courtney RCSM and other team members post. We are posting twice a day. Some of them post like once a day. We have a marketing calendar for the whole company so that we can see what each other is posting. And what we are trying to do is we have a content calendar and some parts of it come from me and Obed because we know what we want to talk about. So if we launch a feature, we let people know. On Slack, this is feature launch, can everyone talk about it this once this week?

0:17:04

Emir Atlı

And then we are also like collaborating with other people as well, with agencies and other SaaS businesses. And in general, what worked for us is just posting twice a day, being interesting and then connecting parts that we talk about into the product. So sometimes I'll talk about growth, but then connect it to the product. That's how we can report this stuff like that, that really works well, other than that, what we initially did is just like meeting with people, sending hundreds of DMs to meet and then those connections, those meetings turn into actual connections and now they're engaging with my content was not my purpose initially. It was just to meet with people.

0:17:54

Emir Atlı

Now they're engaging, now they know our brand and some of them turn into customers along the way.

0:17:59

Tara Robertson

And it sounds like it was super intentional on your part to focus on LinkedIn. Did you ever try other channels organically or did you just say let's just stick with this one and grow and make it work?

0:18:09

Emir Atlı

First, in terms of ads, we tried lots of things. Facebook didn't work, YouTube didn't work. When I say it didn't work, like we invested a couple of thousands of dollars and then didn't get much out of it. So in terms of social, LinkedIn was the best channel because we are selling to B, two B. In terms of ads, LinkedIn worked really well because we can connect that with social. So if people see an ad and then see that same person on the feed as well, that really gives people trust with other channels.

0:18:43

Emir Atlı

We are using them for retargeting purposes only.

0:18:48

Tara Robertson

So you are still retargeting on Facebook, on YouTube, anywhere else? That's interesting.

0:18:54

Emir Atlı

Yeah, Facebook what we are doing is actually for retargeting. I am using like most companies are just using G, two testimonial, stuff like that. We are using basically anything that might build trust in terms of things that we prioritizing with is like clips of my podcast, podcast episodes that I've been a guest on. We had a couple of influencers that we work with. We get videos from them talking about architect and basically anything like I have a playbook, some parts of the playbook.

0:19:31

Emir Atlı

I also take screenshots of my post, advertise them because it's basically the same feed. When people write an ad copy, they're like overcomplicating it. When they write the same post on their personal page, they write it as they would write, I don't know, to a friend or texting. I know they are on the same feed. So I'm trying to keep things simple. And what I would post on my personal page, I advertise them as well on the company page.

0:19:57

Emir Atlı

And also something that I'm doing is if I have an ad creative in mind, I first tested on my personal page, see if it gets engagement, if it gets decent engagement and I advertise that.

0:20:10

Tara Robertson

And was there anything you tested that you thought would be great and it just really flopped? Does anything come to mind?

0:20:17

Emir Atlı

Yeah, I created fake Twitter screenshots, like a fake profile.

0:20:24

Tara Robertson

I've seen some of these.

0:20:25

Emir Atlı

Yeah, fake profile asking what are you guys using for Attribution? And other fake profile answering hockey stack and a short description. It didn't work at all. CTS were like 1%. It might be the images were really small. It might be the reason, but I thought it would make sense. It doesn't make sense sometimes.

0:20:49

Tara Robertson

That's just how it is. Yeah, it's just trial and error. Do you have a way of I mean, it's a little bit easier when it's a small team, but do you have a way of documenting the different things you've tested and tried and what kind of has won out so that you can share that with the rest of the team as you grow?

0:21:05

Emir Atlı

Yeah. So keeping the team lean is what we like, so that everything is easier. But we will probably add 50 people by end of this year and it will be enough, I think, for the year. And for documentation, I am documenting everything. We are using Notion and I have folders for every single thing that we are doing. For Ads, I have a folder and I'm putting in what I tested. What's the result for every single test? That's like part of my process, and I'm sharing that with the team. So for Paid, I don't know anyone to share, but for content, I'm sharing it with our head of content now, our full time designer.

0:21:55

Emir Atlı

So our designer designs something and then she can see the results, so that she can change the creative space on that. So that's a mission critical part of our process. And for others, what we are doing is we are recording internal meetings that might be something unusual. We are recording everything. And then if something comes up now, we are working on a series that's between me and Obed. We are like working on messaging, narrative, content, strategy. And from six months from now, probably, we will launch five series. Two of them will be really good, three of them will be not really good, like compared to other ones. And then those two ones, we will go back and then find the clips and then launch them to show people this is how we thought of the series and it's how it came out to be.

0:22:48

Emir Atlı

That's something that we work on. And for the other ones, like LinkedIn, Ads, SEO, stuff like that, my strategy is like testing stuff, becoming successful with a couple of months and then creating a playbook or something like that. So for LinkedIn as playbook. We tested LinkedIn as for two months. We spent, I think, 1020k on LinkedIn, and then ROI was like 89 X in terms of pipeline value and a close one.

0:23:17

Emir Atlı

So I created everything, I built everything in a Notion doc and then turn it into a Playbook and then launch it on LinkedIn. And then even now, people go into the website and check it out and they need to enter the images. When they enter the images, we can identify the previous visits and visits after that. So when that person comes to the website again, checks out pricing, I can see that. And then our team can reach out.

0:23:40

Emir Atlı

So everything connects to each other.

0:23:43

Tara Robertson

Yeah. It's all so meta that you're documenting what you're learning on LinkedIn and then you're getting more audience from LinkedIn. So that's really cool. And we'll share the link to that playbook because it's really detailed. I think people will really want to check that out. And that's one thing that a lot of teams I talked to and myself included, as you get bigger, you get more siloed and you forget, oh, this would be useful for design to see this stuff. This would be useful for the content team to see how this ad performed. Right?

0:24:09

Emir Atlı

Yeah, I think recording internal meetings is something that I just thought yesterday, by the way, is going to be huge. And if we decided that earlier, now we would have lots of content to work on because we decided on lots of things. For example, if I had recordings of the first how we came up with the first LinkedIn ads strategy, categories of ads, that would be massive right now. And now what we are doing is we are also documenting, like we got into YC and we documented before the interview is what we think. And then after the interview and we create a documentary with people reacting to it, our advisors, our team members, and after that, yeah, we are talking about what we are going to do now.

0:25:02

Emir Atlı

So, yeah, documenting and creating content pieces is going to be a huge part of our strategy.

0:25:07

Tara Robertson

That's very cool. And it's been cool. I mean, I think I've been on LinkedIn maybe a little longer than you, but it used to be such a dry, boring place. It's so cool to see that people are sharing, like you said, internal recordings. That would not have been a thing on LinkedIn five years ago. It was very polished and it was just like PowerPoint presentations that people made for every conference, right?

0:25:30

Emir Atlı

Yeah, exactly. And now as we hire more people, what I'm focusing on is getting a vision in place that everyone is aligned on, setting the goals and leaving them alone. Because it's like if you get the smartest people, then you need to leave them alone to work on that vision. That's my core focus. If they come up with something or question or something like, can we get this? Can we get this person? Can you talk with this person? Stuff like that. I then get in and then do that, but other than that, I'm just like, this is a vision, this is what I want to do, this is why do you have any feedback? Sometimes they have feedback and then we change the strategies, change the vision a bit and then they're just working. I'm there to support and I'm doing my own thing to support them and.

0:26:26

Tara Robertson

That takes a lot of trust. So do you find, are there certain qualities you're looking for when you're hiring so that you know that you have the right team, that you can kind of let go a little bit and let them do their own thing.

0:26:38

Emir Atlı

Yeah. And for all the revenue facing teams, we have a requirement to be active on LinkedIn. By the way, that's probably the first question that we ask in the interviews. That's for only the revenue facing teams, not like, for engineers. Yeah. What I'm looking for is something that shows in their background or stuff they talk about, something that shows that they started something from scratch. Most people that we work with, for example, Obed, has created his own agency, scaled it and then left it because he got bored. I think for other people, they were like an advisor as a startup and just like starting something from scratch or wanting to start something from scratch as well.

0:27:35

Emir Atlı

And it shows in the process. For example, as with D, was at Metadata, and then he joined us as head of revenue and first sales hire. In our first goal, he said, okay, let me create a sales plan for you. And we didn't talk about anything. I didn't talk about my plans, but he said, okay, now I know who you're looking for. I don't know your goals. Let me create a sales plan and then meet in three days, and I'm going to show you a deck of what I can do with you. And then in that meeting, most of the things that he talked about were exactly what I'm looking for. He said, I'm going to be a sales rep, but I'm also going to be on podcast. I'm going to be networking. This is what I'm looking for personally.

0:28:21

Emir Atlı

And he also created a sales plan that's like raising prices, going to these companies, figuring out ICP, a little bit more, stuff like that. That shows in the interviews. Yeah, I think that part of that is also he knew he's interviewing at a startup. He was interviewing at bigger companies, too, but I don't think he would do that at a bigger company. So that's a high thing. Cost of joining an earlier stage company.

0:28:54

Tara Robertson

Yeah. I think a lot of that comes down to taking initiative and showing like, hey, I can do this, and then I'll run it by you, but I don't need you to tell me, go make a sales plan if I'm a sales leader. Right?

0:29:04

Emir Atlı

That's part of exactly how does it work at Chill, apart from now, that's a good question.

0:29:10

Tara Robertson

We don't necessarily say you have to be active on social, but that's part of the process. Obviously, we want to grow on LinkedIn too, so that's part of the criteria ish kind of vague. But again, we want initiative, but it's more about we just want to trust that people can go and do things because we're fully remote. We have no plans to ever be in an office. So it does take a little bit more trust than the typical, we're going to see you on Monday and you'll. Be here at this time.

0:29:40

Tara Robertson

Everyone's off doing their own thing, traveling and still getting their work done. So we just have to hire people that are motivated and self motivated without being kind of chased for things.

0:29:49

Emir Atlı

Awesome.

0:29:50

Tara Robertson

Kind of switching gears a little bit. I'd love to hear about you mentioned that certain channels didn't really work for you and you had to pause things, move budget around. Is there anything in the last few months that you've really had to pause and just kind of reevaluate, especially like budget wise?

0:30:08

Emir Atlı

In the last months? No, but a year from now. We were focusing heavily on SEO. It worked well in terms of traffic and initial customers. But I think as we focus more on it, we saw that our product is so complex and it's a new category, so SEO might not be the best thing to focus on right now. So we went on with LinkedIn. I think for simpler products in a more well known industries, categories like a pop up tool, SEO might be the best option because it's cheaper, gets you conversions long term, and everyone knows what a pop up does.

0:30:55

Emir Atlı

So with us, Attribution is not a category that everyone knows in or not. And we are also trying to build something new. So for Se and also it's really hard to get people to write about this. That's also another challenge.

0:31:12

Tara Robertson

Yeah, it's tough too, because I feel like if you ask ten marketers what Attribution is, you'll get ten different answers. So doing SEO for something like that is very hard.

0:31:22

Emir Atlı

Exactly. Yeah. But we were successful. I think we focused on it for six, seven months. We were at 10,000 clicks after that. We still have, I think, six, seven k, even though we have not posted in the last three, four months, it set the foundation. Now we have a good domain authority. So if you want to focus on it next year, we will still have that domain authority to start. So we're not going to start from scratch. That's good.

0:31:51

Emir Atlı

But if you were to focus on it another year, for another year, then you would not be at this position right now.

0:31:58

Tara Robertson

Yeah, sometimes you just have to like you said, you don't want to lose that momentum. But it's not the focus right now and that's okay.

0:32:04

Emir Atlı

Exactly.

0:32:06

Tara Robertson

Cool. Looking ahead to the future, what are you looking forward to? It sounds like you guys have some fun announcements coming up pretty regularly, but anything in the next maybe six months or so that you could talk about?

0:32:16

Emir Atlı

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this documentary that we will launch about Y Combinator. It's confidential right now, so we cannot do that. And we are actually working on a video. I'm looking forward to building out the media company and we have some creative stuff like songs, videos, sketch, et cetera. I'm looking forward to those, how they're going to turn out. And last thing is, I'm looking forward to partnerships. So we have not focused on partnerships yet.

0:32:48

Emir Atlı

Main funny thing, I think talked with your CEO yesterday and she wanted to be a partner too. The companies like Chili, Piper, Lavender, Novadic, we're talking with a couple of companies to partner on content and other things we can do in terms of product marketing too. So I'm looking forward to those as well, how they will turn out.

0:33:13

Tara Robertson

Very cool. Yeah, especially for a tool like yours. You just need to have a certain level of Sophistication in their tech stack already as a marketer bringing on attribution So, it makes total sense to partner with other Martech tools that are already embedded in those customers.

0:33:29

Emir Atlı

Yeah, and an advantage that we have is if you partner with a product, get the usage data, and then development is on our end. We will just build an integration and from that point on, the other company's customers can see the ROI, the value, that investment that goes into that product easily with hockey sack. So it's like you don't have any partner. Yeah, exactly.

0:33:59

Tara Robertson

Cool. So let's move on to our quick fireAround. Just a couple more questions for you while I have you. First. Is there another marketer that you follow and really enjoy their content that our audience should go check out?

0:34:11

Emir Atlı

Yeah, I think Justin Rowe is doing an awesome job of impactable. He's really good. John Berk at Cognizant, he's really doing good. And then not marketing, but probably marketing plus sales. Mark Kosoglo is awesome and he's joining us as an advisor too. Yeah, these four would be awesome.

0:34:36

Tara Robertson

Yeah, those are great racks. What's an under the radar channel? Or maybe a tactic, maybe a new LinkedIn ad format that you guys are testing out that's really working for you right now.

0:34:48

Emir Atlı

Yeah. Before, we were looking at specific tactics like, would SEO work, would this work? What we found out is everything works. It's just like the combination of different stuff and how we can build that connection. Now what we are focusing on is four or five core channels that we can focus on and how we can tie them all together to be everywhere that our audience hangs out in. This is one thing that we are still working on as a strategy, probably cool.

0:35:16

Tara Robertson

Yeah, I'd love to see the playbook on that. Once you put that together, I'm sure you're going to work on one.

0:35:21

Emir Atlı

Yeah, that's going to be awesome.

0:35:23

Tara Robertson

Great. And lastly, where can our audience go to find out more about you and follow you? I'm assuming LinkedIn, but anywhere else you want to plug.

0:35:31

Emir Atlı

Yeah, LinkedIn. And then we have a newsletter on the flow you can also subscribe to that.

0:35:39

Tara Robertson

Cool. Great. I'll put those links in the show notes for our audience. Thanks so much, Emir. This was a great chat.

0:35:44

Emir Atlı

Thank you, Tara, for having me.

0:35:46

Tara Robertson

And thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode.

0:35:50

C

Thanks for listening to Demand Gen Chat. Demand. Gen Chat is a Chili Piper podcast hosted by Tara Robertson and produced by Me Nola McCoy. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast. It only takes 5 seconds and helps other marketers like you discover Demand Gen Chat. Also, if you'd like to have a question answered in a future episode, you can connect with Tara Robertson on LinkedIn, send her a DM with your question, and it could be answered on a future episode.

0:36:20

C

Finally, if you've gotten this far and are wondering what Chili Piper even is, Chili Piper helps B two B marketers book more qualified meetings for their sales teams. You can't afford to leave opportunities on the table, so let your lead self qualify and schedule a time with the right rep instantly. And that's just one of the many revenue impacting things that Chili Piper does. Visit Chilipiper.com to learn more, and thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of Demand Chat.

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