Ran Mullins on Marketing Automation & Inbound Marketing

Thanks for having me.

Okay. My journey began back when I chose to be an illustrator. And I went to art school, and I took an equal amount of credits in fine art and communication design. But I was working at the Cincinnati Art Museum Library, actually, in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was following all of the design magazines and the illustration annuals and all of that work. I initially, immediately following college, did some illustration work for the New York Times Book Review. But I decided that would not be my path because there wasn’t enough money. I built a website for my paintings and my illustration work. And in doing that and sharing that website, this was 1995 and 1997 in that area. In 1997, I started my first agency. It’s called Metaphors Studio. I started getting requests from businesses to help them with their website based on the website I had created for my paintings. Between those businesses and several arts organizations that I worked with at the time, I began a website design company. At that time, it was like coming in the back door because many agencies could not do the web yet.
I had taught myself HTML and some PHP, and I’m not a programmer by any means, but I could get in and make things work and put together e-commerce websites between ’97 and 2,000 quite a bit. But when I started Metaphor, one of the things that I recognized was that many of our clients were coming to us from the website and then asking us to do a lot of work. I taught myself more about digital design, which was still in its infancy at the time, Cork Express, and programs like that. But I started hiring as well. The first person I hired was an account manager and then a designer. I was doing sales primarily and working on the business. I built that out within this year, able to have six employees in the first year, and made it through the dot com bust by being able to pivot. Going from just web or technology, which is how we had been seen, into branding, interactive, and advertising. I was having that full breadth of time

It’s a good decision. Yeah, we kept hearing from them. You’ve made our brand look so much better. Can you take over our printer? Can you redesign our logo or whatever the case may be? So, during that, I developed several processes, one being a brand mantra workshop. I’ve been facilitating brand mantra workshops ever since. We had a client, the Tom Peters Company. Tom Peters is the best-selling business out there of all time. And his company came to us. They were based in Cincinnati then, and we became their agency of record. We helped to launch a website for them that was really in disarray. They had already sent out much direct mail to thousands and thousands of businesses that they were launching the new site on a specific date. Their previous web design company had failed, and we had to take over and clean it up. That built much trust, and then we built a relationship. Okay. In attending some of those company workshops, they were doing workshops with Pfizer, Microsoft, and Herman Miller, and they were doing them primarily around what they called wild projects and culture shifts within companies.
Learning from that, I developed a brand mantra workshop and the alignment you can get among the leaders within a company to make creative decisions. We focus on the essence, the character, the identity of the brand, and getting down to one word for each so that there’s a three-word mantra. It’s been effective every time. I’ve done over 100 of these now. I’ve done them in the middle of the Maasai Mara in Kenya. I’ve done them in Switzerland and all over the US. But it’s been an enjoyable process and getting behind the curtain with leaders and getting them to be vulnerable with you, and then also, trying to think, showing their teams what they’re thinking. There’s always some epiphany that happens during that process. So with Metaphor, I ran that for 12 years and built it up to eight million in capitalized billings. And really, that company was from advertising to interactive to brand identity and PR. We were doing everything, and I had directors in each area. I’ve worked with several Fortune 500 clients, and it was a good agency. I sold that agency in 2009 to Leapfrog Interactive, now Leap out of Louisville, Kentucky.
They were a more prominent agency, and they were looking to come into the Cincinnati market. Then I worked on my own. After working with them for a year, I worked independently for three years as an allegory. I was working primarily as a consultant, not doing the execution. I had an assistant, so I did many workshops around personas and scenarios, the brand mantra workshop, and then following through with the execution and consulting with clients. And that led to quite a bit of travel. And let’s see, during that time, one of my clients had approached me about running one of their companies. I had no interest in becoming an employee, but I did come on as CEO and a company partner. I was able to, with a great team there, grow that 500 % in 18 months. It went from losing money when I came on to being very much from a positive standpoint. I call that company… What’s that?

Oh, sure. The name is Cleriti, C-L-E-R-I-T-I. And with Cleriti, that was my introduction to HubSpot. I had heard of HubSpot, but actually, they were just a content engine at the time. This was in 2012 and 2013. Yeah. As software tools, I needed to become more familiar, and then I started looking into what people were doing. At the time, HubSpot in 2012 2013, they were selling to mom and pops was their focus. And they still needed to shift to recognizing their partners. What I recognized immediately about it was that mom and pops were going to need help figuring out what to do with the software because what Darmeshaw had created was for advanced marketers, the way advanced marketers think. And mom and pops don’t have that training. They’ve just yet to do that. They need to gain that experience. As we became a HubSpot partner and went to the partner days in Boston, I recognized the opportunity for us to lead as a HubSpot partner and show others what to do with this. Thankfully, HubSpot agreed at the same time, and they started giving us more and more tools that were specific to the way that an agency might run. And the trainings as well were excellent. They shifted quickly and did an excellent job of building a partner program. So, we have become loyal to the HubSpot way.
I left Cleriti in 2015. There’s a falling out with my business partner, but at any rate, I started Reliquint that year, and I vetted Marketo and Pardot. I was looking at several other software in 2015, and I decided that HubSpot had the most integrated marketing automation tool. I didn’t have to go out and find a separate blogging tool or use WordPress for the blog, or I didn’t have to go out and connect up the analytics from a separate piece. The CRM was built right in.
There were so many things when I vetted them against Marketo and Pardot that it seemed obvious that HubSpot was a tool that we were going to use. In the last six, almost seven years now with Reliquint, we’ve built up in the verticals of technology, healthcare, and manufacturing and built growing clients. They have 20-30 times ROI by using… I start with our core Growth Catalyst. And I don’t know if you have any questions about that. But ultimately, that has evolved from my work in the past, looking at, Okay, there are all these activities we can do. Which ones make an impact? And there are some that you maintain because of the visibility, the thought leadership, and the brand presence, even if you need to get the conversions.
There is little B2B conversion out of social media in general. We can do more ABM work within LinkedIn, but that’s ABM. It’s not social that’s happening there. That’s really where the Growth Catalyst Framework came from. It’s identifying that there is a hub and spoke. We focus a quarterly campaign around a particular pain point for a person and develop advanced content, which means that there’s got to be a call to action, the landing page, the thank you page, all of that tied into that package. It is setting up the workflows for the lead nurturing emails and then making sure that you’re continuing to touch that prospect over time. And then the blogging for that quarter is focused around that particular pain point so that you maintain a focus.
This is not only for the prospect’s purpose, but it’s also for Google. Google sees that your company is focused on a particular issue and providing real information to solve that problem.

Yes. So all of that SEO work that you’re doing with that content is serving really two masters, one being the digital footprint and the brand visibility, but then the other being the tech you’re having all of that content registered, and your ranking is going up. We’ve overcome several client competitors by loading heavily on the front end and doing two weekly blogs. So, I’m doing eight blogs a month for that client and seeing quick results. Typically, we only promise clients that within three to four months, the content is going to get indexed, and you’re going to start to see that hockey stick start to happen. So, with new traffic. And that traffic is going to be much more focused than the traffic that they had previously. I’ll even tell them that sometimes we may lose some of that traffic that had nothing to offer you that could have been a better target. And if our general traffic goes down, but our number of contacts goes up, I’m fine with that.

Yeah. And a lot of that is writing content that’s very relevant to the prospect so that you start to weed out the other people who aren’t really at that level and can understand that content.

Our three big buckets are marketing automation. So, working within HubSpot is setting that up. We do have clients on Pardot and Marketo, but we prefer HubSpot because there is less manual work involved, and we have to charge more if you use the other platforms. But that marketing automation, setting up those automated workflows, setting up all the lead nurturing, and many times taking what they’ve got, even if they’ve been on HubSpot and correcting things, is a lot of the work we do when we come in. And then we put in a structure, and that’s what most of the CMOs that we work with are most interested in, is the fact that we have chosen specific channels that work and we have a structure to it. Based upon that, we are giving them a way to put a structure in that they start to see working quickly, and then they can start to tweak. We help them to tweak by identifying what works, making that repeatable and scalable, and then beginning to drop off things that need to resonate with that prospect. Yeah, so that’s the marketing automation. Thought leadership is really around visibility.
It’s about making sure that the right story is being told in the right place, so getting their narrative inserted, but also positioning them as the experts so that they become the go-to. That involves even reaching out to journalists. It involves several PR tactics. I don’t consider ourselves a PR agency. However, from a content creation perspective and an inbound perspective, in the thought leadership piece, we understand how to increase the digital footprint for the client with a funnel structure behind it. So then setting up as much automation as possible for sales enablement and connecting up each level of the funnel. I used to lead with this, but now, with a lot of the clients that we have, they have separate agencies to do their branding, but we still do brand messaging for our B2B clients and help them to develop a brand platform if they don’t have one yet. A lot of them need to have their messages distilled down into digestible language. The exercises that we take them through are, of course, my brand mantra workshop. In addition, we build a brand manual that speaks on who we are, how we think, what we do, how we do it, who we do it for, and what we sell.
I do that again with a team of leaders and get them aligned around the language so that we’re all speaking the same language and listening for the voice of the customer; what language are they using when they’re searching? Because if we get down to that, the SEO is often correct. We’re using industry terms, but we’re not using people terms. And so when they search in Google, they’re going to use their real language as opposed to what the formal corporate speak may be around because they’re in the trenches. They’re the ones doing the work, and they need help. So when they go to look for information about it, they want the information to be at the level that they’re working at, whatever that means.
Yeah, yeah. So, formalized language is usually different from how they’re typing into Google for the most part. Yeah. That brand messaging is so important, and developing a platform around that. Sometimes, we have to help with guidelines because we will be producing all of the writing. We will be producing the design and production of the white papers and guides and ebooks and whatever the case may be. We have to be aligned with them regarding not only their design standards but all of the language as well.

In terms of an overall customer journey, I help my clients think about not just jumping into inbound but taking a step back and thinking about from the point that the person is a stranger; what do they have access to? What is there related to your brand that they can learn or understand without you knowing that they have any access to it? Whether they met someone at or less now during COVID, for sure, or maybe they were over at lunch club, and somebody talked about it, whatever the case may be, you can’t necessarily know. So they’re still strangers. But the thing that you can control is, are we talking to the right person? Do you have the right brand persona in mind? And are you speaking to what their needs are? Ultimately, are you positioned correctly in the industry? Are your differentiation points being spoken compared to your competition? Visually, is your brand, your website, your materials, or even your webinars or your podcasts reflecting the brand focused on the persona that you’re supposed to be focused on? In many cases, disjointed messages and fragments are being sent out there.
Then, ultimately, how is that all being expressed in everything that you are putting out there, from the website to any PDFs that are floating out there, whether there might be a trade show or maybe you’re putting on a virtual event or all of that coming to life? How do we bring it to life? So all of those things provide an opportunity for an impression to a stranger that we don’t know, but we have to have the message as clear and concise as possible to make sure that we’re hitting them. When they become a suspect, I put a suspect in before a prospect, which is when they’re more in the marketing qualified leads. They are in MQL because they heard a message, and they responded to it in a way that we can track. We saw that the PR message attracted certain people and their marketing-qualified leads. We have yet to determine whether they’re sales-qualified leads, but we know they’re marketing-qualified leads because something about the message reached them. Again, events are paid media; this is a lot of the way that we use Google ads and some of the LinkedIn advertising.
That is that marketing message reaching the right audience, and are we drawing in the right community of people that we want?

That’s where a lot of A/B testing comes in handy in that area. Then, moving from that suspect to a prospect. They’ve come in as a marketing-qualified lead. Now, they’re in our inbound funnel. They’ve come to the website, they’re starting to interact with the materials, they’re clicking on calls to action, they’re reading our many blogs that they read, and we can see those behaviors. We can track those behaviors so we can begin to understand them. Clients often tell us they don’t want to store Gmail addresses, et cetera, in their database, and if they didn’t come from a company email, it needs to be the correct person. It’s not necessarily true. Yes, we don’t want someone in college researching a paper and they’re just coming to gather information. But at the same time, several MBA students may be in the office of a much larger company, and they might be working on a project. Also, some of the junior staff might be doing research for the senior staff, and they want to avoid using their work email and start to get spam using a Gmail address.
We have to watch the behaviors and see what they’re doing and see if it connects to a sale or a sales opportunity. Because for us, we then move from being a prospect to being an opportunity. Is there an opportunity there? We know we’ve got the right person, and we base that on whether this is the right size company. Is this person a decision-maker that we’re talking to? What size opportunity is coming through? Can we qualify these things so that we know that it’s a fit for our client? That’s a big piece of it. In that opportunity stage, we get to come in with sales enablement and make sure that as they show interest, we are providing materials at each stage of interest and that we have automated emails that can go out. We move them from one stage of the sales process to the next, and we get down to that defined opportunity. Something I should say for those who aren’t necessarily HubSpot educated is that we always look at the sales funnel regarding awareness, consideration, and decision. So, at the awareness stage, they teach themselves about their problem.
They still need to get a name for it. So they’re all about information that can educate them. That’s where white papers and guides come in handy at the top of the funnel. At the consideration stage, now they’ve taught themselves, or they already knew when they came in, you don’t know exactly where someone will enter, but they are considering how to solve their problem. Now that they have a name for their problem, they’re considering the ways that they could solve their problem. They’re researching to figure out the ways that they could solve their problem. Maybe they already have somebody doing something, and they’re having much pain around it. The industry may have moved on from how they’ve been solving their problem. They have to go, and they have to educate themselves as to the ways that they could solve their problem. We want to provide good information at that stage. Webinars work well at that middle stage where they’re trying to educate themselves. They want to go to where an expert is talking about things. But case studies work well there.
They’re trying to compare things. When they get to the bottom of the funnel, they’re ready to make a decision. They’ve decided how they want to solve their problem. They’re looking to compare you against your competitors in terms of Who do I want to work with to solve this problem now? Which approach do I like? Which people do I like? Which tools do I like that they created to solve this problem? At that point, they’re typically ready to talk to someone. Anything that you can give them, whether it’s a 30-minute consultation, a product demo, a tour, whatever the case may be, that you can interact with them, they’re ready for that, and they show that they’re ready for that. And a lot of what we find is that you always need to find out where the prospect is in their journey when they first arrive—so having the ability for them to fill out a form means that they have less pressure from a salesperson contacting them. They can talk via email. Having an 800 number, okay, I want to talk to somebody right now. I got a bunch of questions or a live chat. So, through live chat, they could get a quick answer to a question that will help them decide whether they want to meet with you or not.
So having all of those available options is going to reach the broader audience because you don’t know what their psychological state is, you don’t know where they are in the journey, you don’t know what question they need to ask, that thing. So give them every option, whichever one feels comfortable where they are.

Okay, every company has different issues. There is no one-size-fits-all. No matter what anybody tells you, they’re lying; it’s just that everybody is in a different place, and they have different tools. They have different requirements based upon the company that they’ve arrived in. We work with many executives who are coming new, and they’re looking to establish a structure that was never there before. They’re focused on their ROI because they have to get a return on their actions. But part of their job is also to put that structure in place. We look at where the company is, and the majority of the companies that we work with are in the 50 to 500-million revenue range. We have several smaller ones that have come from my network from past work, but startups and staff and that thing. But those with CEOs that have a proven track record that they’re going to get growth.
But they understand all aspects of how big their sales team is; how much experience do they have? Are they more hunters and gatherers? Does the relationship hold? Are they going to sit back a little more? I’m thinking that through, but I understand what experience they have with content marketing. Are they experienced at all about this? Do they understand the difference between a blog we will write and an industry-level paper that might be submitted to a scientific journal? Very different things, right? The content we’re trying to create is to get the attention of the purchaser on the other side, not the scientist on the other side. So very different. And so if we can gauge who that purchaser is and understand what their needs are enough to get the two connected, then we can bring the scientists from our side to talk to the scientists on their side. But it’s for that company to understand that the level of content that needs to be created doesn’t all have to be journal-worthy. Published content is very important as well. It all has to be correct. One of the best compliments that we get is when someone says, I’m learning things about our industry from our blog.
And that’s great because that means that our writers are doing their research, they’re staying ahead of the curve, they’re teaching something to the industry, which is wonderful. That’s true.

In most cases, it’s not an either, or it’s a both and. It’s not that you can do inbound and not outbound like you’re just going to sit back, and they’re going to be context rolling in. You do have to do all the things. It’s hard for many people to understand. I think of CMOS today as being in a tunnel, and there’s all this traffic rushing past them, and they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but they can’t get there. That’s why establishing a structure and making choices around each discipline makes the most sense. Now, the marketing automation, the content marketing, the outbound campaigns, but then getting into conversion rate optimization. So once you have conversions happening, how can we learn from those? And getting the visitors to convert at the rate you want them to. Sales enablement is something else that many people are still catching up on from a digital perspective: how to put that in place. And account-based marketing has become one of the most effective B2B transactions.
When you’ve got transactions that are 100,000 to three million on average for companies, the account-based approach is working best. A lot of the personalization that comes with account-based marketing is the client list that you want, or you’re working with one division within that client, and you want to work with all of the divisions. Personalizing that outreach rather than just setting up Robo, direct mails, or that thing makes a lot more sense because you’re not just casting a wide net and hoping for what’s coming and who you want to add to your roster. Using account-based marketing makes a ton of sense in that case. But still having a structure to your inbound and having the sales funnel structured on your website so that as they come in, they have a place to go, and you can track where they went from that initial outreach. SEO plays a massive role in everything we do, and we’re writing for it in many cases, but we never write content that is just keyword-laden. We’re writing real responses to real problems.

Yes, real information. We want this to be newsworthy facts. That’s really what we want. We want it to be more than just filled with phrases and keywords. With me, we want them to follow, and we want them to continue to learn, and we want to follow up with lead nurturing emails with more valuable information. Then, pay-per-click still has a role. We want to drive more people to the top of the funnel most of the time. You don’t necessarily get them to go directly to a landing page and download what you want them to download. You’re developing a relationship with them. As you can get in front of them, make sure that you’re seen as an option, then the more you can tell that serve. You have to have all the other work built up behind that so that when they arrive at your website, they feel like you are an expert. Yeah.

Most of that is based on data. We’re learning from the data what is working and what is not working. We’re paying very close attention to what the competition is doing. The SEO is changing; I feel like every hour of every day. I used to say every day, but it’s every hour of every day. From a technical standpoint of maximizing this investment in this content, I still ensure that everyone understands the value of creating real content and that it’s an asset. It’s an asset that continues to deliver over time. And with advertising, I always call it a pop and drop. That ad went out, you paid for that long, then it dropped. The content you created, you may get leads coming from a two or a three-year-old blog because what they were searching for, you popped up in Google, and then they came in on that blog, but then they started to look at everything else. Yeah. It is an asset. Creating more content is still better right now.

Also, or still to date, our very best case study is a manufacturing company that we brought in $7 million in the first eight months of working with them. It was two whale accounts for them. One was $5 million and one was a $2 million account. But we could track both of those back to a Google ad that showed up for a search that they were doing. They clicked on that. They landed at a pillar page that we had created around, in this case, industrial packaging specifically. It was filled with lots of good information and several calls to action based on where they were in the funnel. We also pushed that through the LinkedIn profiles of the executives, making sure that those posts the blogs related to were sponsored posts on LinkedIn. And that initial work with the ads brought them to the page. But then, after all of the work that they did, we watched how many blogs they read before they contacted us. Then, they did all three things. They filled out a form, got impatient, and continued looking at the website. We had Hotjar on there.
We could see what the cursor was doing the entire session. Then they went to live chat, and they started asking a couple of questions on live chat, and that then moved them over to call the 800 number because they just wanted to have a conversation. Enough of the initial questions that they had were getting answered. They kept checking boxes, and then it brought them on. And that was five million. And this is another one of those cases. So this specifically was an MBA class that was doing a project for a client that ended up they were working on a project for the end client, and that brought the two together. Because that content was there, it brought them to the… I am curious to know how they were in the right place. But it was a perfect example of how all the vehicles were at play. If you pull any one of those out of there, then it could have either slowed down the momentum to them, or it could have allowed them to go to somebody else’s website and click on that following link down and search.

And I give this client credit. They had recognized that in the first five months of working with them before these big accounts came, we had brought them more contacts than in the previous five years of their web work. So, just producing that content, advertising it, and promoting it worked for them. And they organized around that. They use Kaizen, so they’re a 360 company, and Kaizen 360. And they had organized around that by naming our inbound leads as A, B, or C clients. The A clients would organize engineers around that lead because it met all their criteria. It was a fully qualified sales lead. They would bring a team of six engineers together to help that salesperson put together the most airtight proposal that they could. It was not general at all. It was very specific. At the B level, they might have two engineers helping that salesperson, and they were less qualified, but they met a certain number of criteria. They still wanted it to be a tight estimate instead of a loose estimate. Then, the C-level client, the way that they saw that, was more order-taking.
They were coming in. They already had their needs established, and it was just order-taking.

Yeah, there are always factors that you can’t control. But some things are happening for the client that we had a huge client that stopped receiving their funding. They did not get their next level of investment, and they had to cut services. Or we had one client who could have been a better fit, but they were doing more wholesale furniture, warehouses, and things, and they were using inbound. And it just needed to work faster for them in terms of sales. We had another one that was an e-commerce client, and while we were growing at a very high rate in terms of percentage, we still needed to meet their needs in terms of their e-commerce turnover. That was B2B, the hospitality industry, and we still needed to meet. They had not met those numbers before, but they thought switching to us would be the magic bullet, and it wasn’t the magic bullet. There are cases like that where I’ll refer them to a partner that we may have that is going to do something that’s going to be more immediate, and it’s less long view. Right up front, though, we are focused on the long view.
After that, in 3-4 months, when the traffic starts to uptick, in months 4-6, we want to see very qualified leads coming in. In months 6-9, we want to know that you have brand new proposals and estimates that you still need this content. By month 9, I will ask for a renewal of our next year’s contract because we want to work on the next quarter, the first quarter of the following year. We want to be working on that.

Marketize them? No, that is a great question. One of the things that I need to do now is we don’t take on project work for the branding or a new website alone. If they’re not going to promote it and they’re not going to use a marketing automation approach, they’re not a fit for us. Because there are so many clients that we would take on before, we would do a rebranding, or we would develop a beautiful new website, and then they would say it didn’t work. What are you doing to advertise it? What are you doing to market it? We thought we would just read… Why did you think that was going to work on its own? It’s not a build-it-they-will-come situation. It’s not. We do focus on those clients that are committed to a longer form. Even if they are focused more on the brand side of things, we work with them to identify the KPIs that matter the most to them so that we can still show that we move the needle regarding that. We need benchmarks, and then we need goals. To achieve this objective, we can get closer and closer to the goals, if not blowing them out of the water in some cases.

Yes.