Christian Nahas Talks About Inbound, Content Creation & Digital PR

Hello, thank you Harshit.

Well to all children out there, I’m doubt they’re listening, I was a bad student, well not a bad student, I was very average until I went to college and I went to college for art Direction and I ended up of course my first job was in art Direction creating ads for automotive for electronics for household appliances and that job was in Dubai but I was always fascinated by technology, so, I was starting to design in within the agency I was working at, I started helping designing websites and that was in the mid-2000s.

Sorry.

Well I wasn’t really familiar with the back end so, I was designing the front end and the experience and this ties into my story today where you know we look at also the user experience to see how we can convert more leads, but back then I was already fascinated with technology even though I was more on the artistic side and in 2008 2009 a lot of people lost their jobs with the financial crash so, I decided to move to Paris and continue my education, I thought the best thing I can do now instead of looking for a job and not finding one is to reinvent myself, so, I decided to go into technology and I studied, I got a master’s in project management that got me into Tech. So, I started working at Microsoft, then I moved to the south of France and worked for a travel IT company as a product manager and project manager and that was really a great experience because now I had these two sets of skills that I could combine and I decided to move to the US to California in 2012 and I started my own agency.

So you asked about my childhood, everyone is my family as an entrepreneur that’s all I know so, it just comes naturally to me. Okay I really had the urge to start my own thing and so I did and of course my Creative Mark was really small then it was just me and I was working with smaller companies local businesses and I wasn’t able to help them fully or complete that Circle of growth without adding some digital marketing services to my Design Services and so, I quickly shifted to becoming a digital marketing agency instead of just a design agency. We started with the Small Things Community Management social media some, PPC and it’s only when we became a HubSpot partner in 2017 that we really grew. We exploded and now we work with much bigger companies. We deal with much larger budgets than we used to and yeah this is pretty much the journey for me and my Creative Mark.

So, of course from 2012 to right now up until now I learned a lot and of course the learning doesn’t stop. So, we’re a 360 degree agency, we offer all kinds of services, so, between myself and my team members we’re able to offer anything we have. We have experts in pretty much every aspect of the digital marketing sales and customer service fields.

So, of course you know we can’t hire, we cannot hire every writer out there, so, in this case, in the case of writers, we outsource, we have an editor on our team but then we outsource the actual writer we want writers to have a very specific expertise or a very specific knowledge of course every good writer can conduct a great analysis or research for a specific topic, but it’s always best to have someone that has had experience writing for a specific topic and that’s why we do not hire writers directly on our team and we think it’s actually a good thing you know. Clients tend to look for companies that have their entire team in-house and for writers. We really do not believe writers should be first of all held in a golden cage because they’re creative and also you need to be able to source that talent for your specific topic, your specific project and clients.

Yeah! Yeah! and as you said you had an editor on your team and you cannot do without an editor because that’s how you can keep content marketing strategy on track. And make sure that it’s successfully completed.

Oh, it’s busy busy. Those first 30 days are you know immensely, what you call it important to complete a year-long let’s say a year-long retainer you need those first 30 days. I would say 90 days to be highly successful throughout the years. We’ve developed our own process and it’s called The Dream Process. So, it goes from discovery, road map, execution, analysis and momentum and we guide our client through that process and then go back to discovery every month. We go back to discover things, change especially in the target market that we work in. We work with software companies the most and everything changes every day you know agile. We’re agile too. Marketing sales and service can be agiled as well but in this process, I would say those first, well 60 to 90 days depending on the scope, are the most important and this is where we conduct our client workshops during that time, we conduct our client workshops. We work with them and their teams to identify and develop personas because we think that’s the basis of all our messaging and then we look at their marketing processes and look at opportunities where we can optimize. We do the same for the sales processes and the customer service processes. Once we outline all of that, then, we can start implementing those strategies.

So, we have three favourite CMS’s, low budget B2B would be WebFlow. We think it’s just the best CMS out there, especially for design.

For clients with higher budgets, we go with the HubSpot CMS for B2B because it’s extremely powerful and ties into the CRM and all of the martech tools and sales tools and service tools that HubSpot has to offer and then for e-commerce, neither WebFlow nor HubSpot are optimal, so, we go with Shopify.

So, for Shopify if you’re using a template that they already have, out of the box template, then you’re gonna face some challenges, especially with JavaScript, minifying JavaScript, like that’s a big issue. But then, you have plugins for instance to resize images automatically, but the way we do it is, we’re designing from scratch. So, we have our UX UI team design the website and then we have our developers develop a template from scratch, a theme from scratch for Shopify. WebFlow and HubSpot are amazing for SEO. We have basically no hurdles whatsoever with these two CMS’s, they’re just amazing for SEO. Shopify would be the only one.

Conversion. Conversion either conversion as it is or conversion optimization it’s very easy for anyone to start a campaign on Facebook, Instagram, Google search. It’s really easy, you throw some money and you get traffic.

But then optimizing your landing pages, optimizing your website, optimizing your messaging to increase conversion rate, that is where you really need an expert and that’s where we usually come in. So, if we talk about PPC, we start with brand awareness campaigns to attract more traffic and that’s relatively easy.

Of course we keep optimizing to increase that traffic, but then, we want to work on the optimization and that happens on site. Those landing pages, but also, sometimes rarely, but sometimes, it’s the messaging on the ad itself where if there’s a disconnect between your messaging and your landing page, you know that person is just gonna bounce. But that would be the primary, what do you call it challenge, that our customers face, is that conversion.

So, we use a mix of two things. So, we of course integrate Google analytics with HubSpot and then we look at Google analytics to pull some reports, but then, a lot of our reports are on HubSpot. So, this is where we can really track conversion rates and we look at the behaviour under a microscope. You can really, at a granular level, look at the behaviour of each of the users.

No, no they do not. But they will show you, so in a contact record or company record, you will be able to see all of the activities. Yeah, all of the activity that a user has taken on your website, on your landing pages, on your blog, the calls-to-actions they have clicked on, the meetings they have booked. So, you can use all of that data to one, create workflows but also to segment lists to score the leads. So, you can use that data for many different things, in that way, you can optimize that conversion from visitor to lead, from lead to customer. But, of course, yes, Hotjar is a big tool for us as well. So, thanks for reminding me of the Heatmaps.

So, what we do. So, first of all we start on a low budget.

We believe that you have to fire bullets before firing cannonballs and so, we start these campaigns on a low budget until we optimize them to a satisfactory level and that takes about two to three months. We ask our clients to be patient with us but once it’s optimized, then you can scale up and then it’s easy to get those results for the client, of course in every industry with every target audience, you’ll hit the cap at some point and then you have to optimize further. And sometimes you just cap. You cap out in a market and that’s just how it is. But we help our clients, then find the next revenue channel and develop that revenue channel. I’m not sure if I deviated too much from your question.

Yeah. So, inbound marketing is an amazing methodology and it has all of these different tactics in it and we use them all thanks and of course being a 360 degree agency, we can do that in our strategy. We’re going to include organic and paid but also we’ve been working a lot recently on PR. And PR we were amazed with the results, that we were able to generate with PR and when you see results like the awareness campaign, for that particular thing PR is good or you know for lead generation as well. You’re finding it good, so, it depends like we have. It can be tactical or general. So, if it’s general, it’s like brand awareness, so, we’re releasing, you know, we’re publishing a press release about a company that just started or is launching in the US or is launching in Canada. So, it’s very generic, it’s very corporate but then, we can also zero in on some of the services, specific services and audiences that the customer is looking to attract. For instance, we have a customer in Asia that is launching in the US and we are using, of course we used PR for them to launch their brand in the North American Market, but now, we are working with them to launch their API services in the US. So, see we went from abroad to specific with the same channel and the same media.

So, other than the personas or as part of the personas, we also look at the pain points per persona and we look at the way they can use that tool or that service. So, the different use cases, we combine all of that to create multiple landing pages. So, let’s say, in wellness we have a big pilates studio in the UK that we work with. So, they have the office worker that’s the persona but that office worker has several pain points. So, they have lower back pain, they have bad posture, they have maybe not being active is also affecting their psyche and their mental health. So, here are already three points for one persona, for one service those are three different landing pages and we’re going to create, we’re going to support each of these landing pages with content. So, 8 to 12 pieces that are very specific to that pain point to that persona and if we want to take it even further, if that client has a budget, we urge them to create those pieces and those landing pages for each stage of the buyer’s Journey.

So, that same persona that one pain point in the awareness stage, landing page, supporting content, same thing for the consideration stage, let’s say same thing and with a healthy budget you end up with wealth of knowledge on your website, on your blog, in your knowledge base and you start attracting a lot more organic traffic that way. When you become specific, the more specific you are with your content, the better, the higher, the chances, you’re gonna increase your organic traffic.

Yeah. A lot of preliminary work is done. So, I try to simplify it earlier but we also conduct the keyword research, the competitive analysis to be able to gather those keywords that are going to be better performing than other keywords. So, that also helps us build that content strategy and that content.

So, we look at the time that the reader has spent on those pieces, the bounce rate, we also look at how many times this content has been shared and also the interactions are very important, those visitors click on the calls-to-actions, did they subscribe? Because the goal of that content is mainly to generate leads, that’s probably the KPI we look at the most.

So, KPIs, like the time span, the bounce rate and the times shared, that gives us a lot of insight into whether or not a piece is working for the client and if it’s not, then we have to either rewrite it or write more content and the content’s relevant. So, of course we conducted our analysis, we have our keywords, so, it’s still relevant, it’s just not relevant enough. So, sometimes we either have to add or rewrite.

Yeah! Yeah, Yeah! Sometimes you know just changing the call-to-action to something else.

And of course, we AB test our calls-to-actions. So, changing them up or changing the placement in the piece or AB tests two different ways of showing that call-to-action can make a big difference and that’s where design and marketing join hands. So, for instance you can have something we’ve tested lately, can you have just a simple text in the middle of the piece and it’s centred, instead of left aligned and that just makes it different enough, yet it kind of blends in so that the person stops and reads it.

Works better than just a plain button that is highlighted because now people have become very accustomed to seeing CTAs. So, they’re kind of blind to those CTAs and they just scroll through, they scroll past those CTAs. So, we test things like that or we test something bolder than the button, what if it pops up from the side. So, these things can make a very big difference. Wording also, wording your CTAs in a different way.

I’ll tell you something that will always puzzle me and I’m a big fan of technology and I always test products, so, even if let’s say we’re happy with SEMRush, we’re going to test other products.

I purchased the product to test it and I’m still followed around the internet with ads and it puzzles me, because there are ways around that, there are ways to remove me as someone who has converted fully. I’ve completed the whole buyer’s Journey.

The way to remove me from that audience and yet it’s not happening. So, I think this is a mistake because it is a budget, an unnecessary budget for paid ads and those companies, especially at an early stage, need every cent you can save and you can spend it somewhere else.

Well for customer retention and growth through loyalty programs, you can use that differently. Plus of course, it’s a great idea to keep advertising to that same person, but then, you can change that message.

And you can create a referral program like, I don’t know, refer a friend.

And get a or for a chance to win a thousand dollars or…

And get 50 Amazon gift cards. So, you change the message, what I see a lot is that the message is not changed, they’re still asking me to purchase it and I’m like you know maybe, I’m more critical of that because of the profession. I’m in, but it’s just weird to me when tech companies don’t use tech to help them Market.

So, there’s not one hack, like many hacks, but if I’m to focus on the one hack, it would be list segmentation.

You cannot complete or you cannot build a successful and effective marketing automation strategy without clean data and a list that is properly segmented. And I think that would be my first go-to, like, if you have a CRM, start segmenting before you start automating your marketing, start segmenting. Ask the right questions to your customers, hire someone to add detail to your CRM to add more to enrich that data or even plug in a tool to enrich that data for you. So, segment and then move forward, before you move forward with automation.

So, we do help marketing teams and sales teams come to an agreement. We create an SLA, where we define all of the qualifying points. So that you can hand over that hot lead to the sales team and I mean that’s a very important part of revops, where you help that sales team close more business, shorten that sales process, and make more revenue. Generate more revenue for that company, but how we go about it is, during that workshop, those first important three months, two to three months, this is, when we define all of that of course it’s not carved in stone. We can always revisit every few months, we revisit those documents and we create a new or we update that SLA. But during that workshop, we really ask all of the questions to that sales team. We look at their sales process. What makes a good lead for you? Why have you lost leads before? Can we make a list of that information and that information is then shared with marketing, like you know, you really need to look at this data before you hand over that lead to the sales team.

Yeah! I’m so happy you asked that. So, we’re very proud of our training. Every call we have with a client is an opportunity for us to show the back end of the tools. We work on the way. We’ve built a specific strategy. How we manage a certain tool also at the end of that workshop, actually, we close that workshop with the training session. But that training session is for current employees. What we do is we keep answering those customer questions with loom videos and we create that channel for the client, with all of their videos, all of their questions asked. It’s like a private knowledge base for that specific client and there’s nothing like showing a client or answering a question to a client, using their own portal and their own tools that have been customized for them and that’s how we manage the training. So, let’s say they’re on-boarding someone new, we will have an hour or two training, depending on the scope, depending on what we’ve done for them, but then, we guide them to that library and we ask them to look at it and find answers there and of course we’re always on Slack with our customers, answering questions and we’re available anytime, if they need anything, more answers.

It’s all part of the big retainer. There’s no extra charge, it’s just, yeah, it’s the managed service. We have to be there for our clients. So, there’s no extra charge for that.

So, remember, I told you about PR. That is by far our most successful case study. We love sharing that story, it’s pretty recent. We started with them in December. It’s an Asian company that’s expanding into the North American market. So, Mexico, U.S, Canada and they were expecting a thousand U.S users in the first quarter and with some PR work and content marketing, we were able to get them 17 000.

So, like, we by far exceeded expectations and we’re very proud of those results. Another good case study, unfortunately with the pandemic many businesses had to pivot. We heard that word a lot. Some people got really tired of it, but I can’t find another word and one of our clients got really affected by the pandemic. So, they sell books to public schools in the US and of course, you know, it’s not just the classroom that needs books but it’s also the library and that’s where they get most of their money. So, of course they have an e-commerce site, but that’s not the biggest part of their business. So, yeah with the schools closing that affected most of the revenue, you know, they lost most of their revenue overnight and so, we had to pivot and help them gain more customers online. So, we had to quickly develop their e-commerce business and it was a big success. So, we saved that business.

So, you have these two sides to PR. You have the SEO side and then you have the editorial side and we do both. So, of course you know everyone knows the PR web. You can go on PR web with the right keywords and all that and you can get traffic and you can get all the backlinks that you need with high authority websites. But, what we did for that client, we focused more on editorium. So, we went to top tier publications, Forbes Bloomberg TechCrunch and with that we were able to attract all of that traffic and new users and that demands a whole different set of skills. So, we’re no longer focusing on keywords and we’re no longer focusing on the SEO structure of a piece. But it’s more about the story, the audience, and of course the medium you’re using. So, where are you focusing your efforts?

Yeah?

Yeah of course, I mean these are websites with 70 plus or 60 plus authority scores. So, of course.

I don’t know it’s going to be interesting to you, but, as an agency owner as you grow you know you’ve heard of growing pains and we grew a lot during the pandemic.

A good rule yeah and business was doing great, but then, for admin and that has nothing to do with marketing or sales or service or our services. But running our administration was hell, was kind of hell and of course trying to find the right people accountants, assistance to help us was a challenge and actually we ended up hiring the wrong accountant. I mean a bad accountant, and we paid a heavy price for that in 2021. So, my advice to agency owners, company owners out there, as you grow, make sure you surround yourself with solid people, make sure you vet them real well before hiring them.

Sure.

Yeah?

Oh God. I don’t know, I can look it up, let me check. Oh, I looked at your pricing page.

Success. The idea of success.

Early bird. I’m the annoying roommate who will sing good morning and you know sing in the shower. Yeah.

What career?

Oh! As I grew older, I recognized my skill as a designer and I became more aware of that.

I don’t know, I mean, I don’t like talking about myself. Friendly.

So, one of my friends really likes having unusual birthdays for himself. So, once we had to paint a portrait of him while he was dancing. But during the pandemic of course we couldn’t meet, so, what he set up was a lab therapy session on Zoom and I almost cracked my ribs laughing. It was the funniest Zoom call I’ve ever been on.

Thank you. Thank you so much. It was great meeting you.