Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, welcome. In this podcast, we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This is the campaign by 97th floor.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I am Paxton Gray. This is The Campaign, a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. The campaign is a weekly conversation with B2B marketing leaders designed to fit as much value as possible within 30 minutes. You can catch the campaign live on Fridays at 2 Eastern and you can find past episodes on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and at 97th Floor.com.
today, we've got a really great topic that should concern every marketer out there and touch every brand out there.
And that is the idea of CRO and improving conversion rates across the board. Uh, and I think right at the top, it's important to note AB testing is different than CRO. It's within CRO, but CRO is much broader than that. Um, there's a study released by HubSpot in 2024 in their state of Marketing Report and has a really interesting stat in there. It says for every $92 that brands spend spend on attracting an audience, they only spend $1 on improving conversion rates. So they're gathering these massive crowds, but they're not spending nearly enough attention on now I've got these eyeballs, how do I convert them into customers? And so that is. It represents a huge opportunity for most companies across the US and then according to Build wealth, less than 2% of all websites are using any kind of CRO technologies. So it's just an underinvested channel. And I think there are some reasons for that. But it is something that brands should be investing more into and exploring more, especially as marketers are being asked to do more with less. Across the board, there's a huge gap between what's being spent to get more traffic and what is spent to convert that traffic. But the opportunity cost here is huge.
So today's guest I'm very excited to have on has experience running CRO programs at Adobe and Vivint, to name a few. He's got a lot to say about CRO and how to do it correctly. So our guest today is Chad Solis. Chad is a Chief marketing officer at AudioEye. He has spent the last 24 years growing businesses from 30 million to 30 billion in revenue annually. He has cultivated deep experience as an executive in all aspects of marketing, digital products and technology for brands like Adobe, pluralsight, Vivint and Traeger. Chad is revenue focused, data driven and quality disciplined and results oriented. And Chad has been working with us for a long time at Nice M floor here. So I just watched from afar as he's gone from org to org and just taken them to new levels. Chad, thank you for joining the show today.
[00:03:03] Speaker C: X thank you for having me.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: So let's dive right in.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: Chad.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: I think it's a really good intro to this topic would be maybe a tangential topic which is, you know, you've gone and you've lifted up different organizations and I feel like you've got a really great battle plan as you enter these orgs. So when you start work on lifting up a new org, like what is your plan of attack generally in the first 90 days or six months? Like how do you think about that?
[00:03:35] Speaker C: Yeah, good question. You know, it obviously depends on every org and their current state. So you know, as I, you know, the first thing I do is listen to the org and see where the team is, where our partners in sales and customer success, how the situation is. But usually what ends up happening is the first place I start is data and making sure data. I'm able to capture data at every level of the journey that I'm accountable for, starting with the website, campaign tracking, behavioral tracking, those sort of things so that any program I go and deploy that I can measure it and understand how it's performing. So I'll usually start there. The second place I'll start or the next place I'll start or in parallel is any long tail strategies that take a long time to capture momentum and success. So things like SEO, I will put our strategy together and start executing on it just so we can start work on that long tail. That's usually where we engage 97th Floor to help us with that.
I think every place I've been since Chris Bennett was actually doing some of the tactical work when I worked with him 20 years ago is actually SEO.
And with 97 floor. So after those two data and long tail, then the next person I either hire or I engage with directly is conversion optimization. Because it's usually without a doubt the lowest hanging fruit and opportunity to double leads, double revenue really quickly.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah. So on that CRO side that's, I mean it's, it's so important that you know that's right in your list of priorities of what you're tackling first. And yet so many organizations are under investing or not investing at all in any kind of CRO practice. Why do you feel like that gets ignored at most organizations you know, I.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: Don'T know, other than it's a muscle that you have to develop.
I think some organization trivialize it because they think, like you mentioned in the intro, they think of it as a B testing and how much growth can you really get from simple AB testing? But if you actually treat it as a discipline, as a program, and you focus on segments, which force you as a marketing team and as a marketing leader to understand your segments, understand your audience more intimately, and then use CRO as the gateway into your other marketing initiatives, it becomes extremely powerful.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So that point about understanding audiences, that's something that there's a lot of marketers, or perhaps better said, a lot of executives bristle against that idea of investing in an audience. And I think for sometimes good reason, the. The marketing landscape has built these fluffy Personas with alliteration and saving. Sally, nice pictures. And, and you had mentioned in a podcast a while ago, it's like, what time do they like to have their coffee and what newspapers are they reading? You know, things that are largely just like fluffy. And there's not a lot of action that we can take.
And so that has caused some damage to this idea of, like, the importance of understanding an audience.
But that doesn't mean that it's not crucial to understand an audience. Sometimes people then say, well, I'm not going to do that. But it's like, no, no, we need to figure out how can we understand them to a level where I can give them a message that I know they're going to resonate with and they're going to act. I mean, that's marketing 101. And if we neglect that the channel investments often get so much more expensive.
So I'm wondering, like, the big question then is how do we have insights on these people that are actionable and don't cross that line into fluffy feel good, but it doesn't actually do anything. Do you have litmus tester or tactics that you like to think about as you start to understand an audience when you enter a new org?
[00:08:05] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, the first, the first thing with understanding your audience is specific to CRO. And CRO, you have this a little bit of a luxury when it comes to segmentation because your scope is narrowed pretty quickly because it's people coming to your website.
So it's a little different than, say, doing ICP research, which happens before your website.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Right.
[00:08:31] Speaker C: And so when it comes down to it, understanding your segments, it becomes a web analytics exercise and a clickstream analysis exercise. And so that's data you have, it's not some complex TAM you're doing. You know, if you're doing some go to market modeling or some product market fit kind of analysis, these are, you can do it on clickstream and webinar web analytics. And so now if you have data providers that are augmenting your click stream, say like a 6 sense or RB2B or you know, something like that, where you, where you're doing some reverse IP lookup and you're able to add some firmographic information to that, great. But what happens to be the most beneficial in creating segments is actually behavioral, which is just basic clickstream data. So what sources of traffic, how did they come to the website? That's your first step.
When what landing pages or homepage are they, are they coming to?
Are they, where do they go on their first next action?
Those kinds of things actually really start informing you about, about that buyer or about that prospect and you can start catering creative and content to that person immediately. So you know, generally mo, you know, shy of things like organic SEO coming into your website, you don't unfortunately know keywords that they're coming to you, but you do know they came from organic. And so and you know which engine, search engine they came from. And then you can actually kind of deduce something. Did they come from Google? Did they come from Bing, did they come from ChatGPT?
You can make assumptions and you know, a lot of marketers will overthink that a little bit and it's just like start with the gut instinct. What is someone searching from Bing Ming? You know, there you can, you can infer quite a bit from that. So how do I tailor something to that person and just test it?
Pretty quickly you see winners start to surface for those kinds of segments.
But more than anything, what I found the most successful in creating segments and understanding your audience is watching the first next action. What is the first click they do? And if they're abandoning, then you know, you have a problem with the page that they're actually landing on. And that's a different problem. But if they create a next action that creates a segment for you, you can say, okay, these people are interested in product X when I thought they were interested in product Y. Or this is their problem versus that is their problem. And you can start to see that by the blog posts they visit, the content they download, the product pages they visit, their search terms on your website. Things like that all give you information to create a segment.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: So are you getting into as you measure these are you getting into a lead scoring model or are you primarily thinking about this as depending on their action? It's more about the content that I'm delivering, and that's totally separate from like a lead scoring model. If they view our careers page, I'm not subtracting something like, how do you think about that?
[00:12:04] Speaker C: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So it is pretty similar to a lead scoring model. It's all happening client side or on their browser with JavaScript cookies and local storage. So, um, and yeah, like, I will build into, you know, product pages. Pricing pages have higher impact.
And if they end up on the careers page, that does have a. That changes the segment. So everything for me is about segments versus, like, good or bad. If someone's visiting the careers page, I'm gonna, I, I want to serve them something that's useful for that segment.
And then there's also recency and frequency. And if someone visited a product two weeks ago and now they're visiting a new product, recency, from my experience, at least in the companies I've worked with, is far more important than frequency. And so you start aligning. But again, you would test that because it might not be the same for every business. So you start aligning content based on the patterns you're seeing.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Is there any.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: So you'll build a little score that just sits there. You know, you'll create a bunch of hypotheses, you'll create a score. Each page view, each click can change that score. And then on the next page, the next load, your content can change based on that.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: I like that. And it's also, I'm assuming, changing based off of where they were, where they came from, and whatever scores that page produced previously. Is that accurate?
[00:13:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: So I love to get as tactical as possible. And I'm sure there's a lot of people wondering, so what do I use for this?
Is there a tool set or tech stack that you like, generally employ to build out a program like this?
[00:13:56] Speaker C: Yeah, so I've used quite a few.
I've kind of landed at least recently on Mutiny as our optimization platform.
Adobe Target can do this kind of stuff as well.
Optimizely can do this kind of segmentation and targeting and testing as well. So those three are probably the three I would go to. There's actually quite a few. There's even open source you can start with. It's inexpensive. I think it's called vwo.
And then they can graduate into paid offerings.
So there, you know, there's, there's Solutions for every level of business and what investment they have available to them.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, great.
So, and we get into doing tests and you know, that's a huge part of CRO.
How do you think about building these tests? Like what do you think marketers should be looking at first? You know, if we were to build a bit of a framework around building your first test or you know, deciding what to test first. What, what do you look at?
[00:15:16] Speaker C: Yeah, so I break it into three pieces.
Audience, which we've already talked about. And that's honestly 60 to 70% of the equation. Getting the right segments is the, the most important, which is why we spend a lot of time talking about it.
Then it's content and creative. Those are your next two. And in content, if you're like a consumer business, I would lump offer into content.
If that's a discount or a value prop, it doesn't have to be a discount.
But in consumer oriented businesses, offer usually will roll into that content component. And so content is the most, the second most important thing after audience and then creative, which is ironically where teams usually spend the majority of their time is actually the least important.
It's important, don't get me wrong, but it's just the least important of the three elements.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: You're talking like button, color, placement, format, like that kind of stuff. Yeah, right. Yep.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: So content is, you know, what they, what you want them to consume, whether that is, you know, a video, a link out to a blog, like a cross reference call to action like you like this, then you'll really love this, you know, that kind of thing. And then, but again, you need to align the content to the outcome that you're trying to drive. Ultimately if you're a B2B or you know, SaaS business, you want leads or a PLG motion, you want a trial. So you might have to understand that to get them to trial, you actually need them to go two or three steps into the website before they're willing to engage in a trial. So if they're in step one, your goal is get them to the next step. If you're in step three, your goal is to get them into trial and you actually start understanding the path that a customer's taking to ultimately achieve the highest conversion.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Okay, so, so we're going to segment our audience and, or I guess we're, we're constructing our tests around segments or audiences around content. And then lastly, and least important is around the creative.
How else would you think, like would you recommend? So they've got that dialed in this is what I'm testing for. Then what should they do next?
[00:17:53] Speaker C: Then next.
So they know what they're testing for, they know who they're testing to.
Then you test your content and creative application. And the creative application, I should note, and just a small plug here for my current employment with AudioEye.
People with disabilities actually account for about 25% of web traffic on the Internet. So one in four of every visitor has disabilities. That is an opportunity to personalize and to optimize to a segment. It's actually really easy to do that.
They represent a massive buying power. They span across B2B, D2C, so that it's relevant for all types of companies. And it's a huge opportunity. By simply optimizing your creative side of that equation.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:56] Speaker C: To people with disabilities, you will. You would instantly see a lift just optimizing that side of the creative.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, let's dive into that. I want to. Let's get into accessibility more. So a lot of people view accessibility incorrectly, in my opinion, as you know, this is just like a nice social good. And I think it is a social, you know, it's a great thing to do socially. But outside of that, there are other people who view this as okay. What I'm doing is I'm avoiding lawsuits. But even that is, I think, an incomplete picture. There's a big benefit for businesses who adopt accessibility. Tell us about how companies should be thinking about the upside of accessibility investment.
[00:19:46] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, again, I think most people address accessibility either with the fear of being sued or actually having been sued for.
For lack of compliance.
The upside is, like I mentioned, one in four visitors have potentially some form of disability, whether that's auditory, visual, neurodivergent, anything that impacts them from experiencing the website how you want them to. So, you know, that could be something as light as dyslexia or colorblindness, or it could be something more severe.
Either way, you can accommodate that. And so that group of people represent. Just in the US with the people. People with disabilities represent $20 billion of buying power.
And that's just on first purchase. The fact is, companies that truly invest in accessibility and make a good experience for those individuals, those individuals become extremely loyal. The reason for that is only 3 to 4% of the Internet is accessible. So when someone with disability finds a company that solves their problem that they're looking for and they're doing it in an accessible way, they become extremely loyal. So their lifetime value actually starts to compound that $20 billion of buying power. And then the final step on that is those individuals, their families are actually loyal to those businesses as well because they have empathy for their family member. And then that buying power expands into the trillions. It's actually $8 trillion of buying power when you consider the loyalty of both the person with disabilities and their families. So becomes pretty powerful from a, from a investment perspective and return on that investment. And it's applicable across the board, especially for consumer businesses.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Yeah. How does a company approach this? Like, let's say they engage with a company like AudioEye. What, what should they be expecting in terms of like time and build out and what they should be expected to do on their end?
[00:22:09] Speaker C: Yeah, that, you know, that's contingent on what kind of investment they're willing to put forward. So, you know, and there, and the size of their business, you know, there's a lot of components. But you know, audio, for example, if you're a company that doesn't have time to deal with this audio, I can take it entirely off your plate and do it for you.
And we, we have an ex. So we, we do it with a three pronged approach. We have automated AI technology that solves about 40% of the problem. A lot of folks think they can buy software, it'll solve the problem entirely.
And that's not the case. A lot of our competition has actually kind of pitched a turnkey automated AI solution. It's not true. It's actually automation. Best in class can only solve 40 to 50% of the problem. And that's actually audio.
So the next leg of that approach is human assisted technology where we have experts who will, who audit the website and the experiences and can implement changes via the technology to get to a greater level of compliance. And then the third component is integrating into your software development lifecycle for websites or product. So those three approaches get you to the most compliant level and more importantly, in my opinion, to a level that will achieve the highest conversion for a massive component of your, of your audience.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Right. I love that. Yeah. And that's ultimately like, it has to make good business sense. And it does.
So it is something that, that companies who are reaching a wide market, they need to be thinking about and they're leaving conversions and they're leaving their customers just, you know, hanging out to dry if they, if they don't make it easy for them to convert, which. Absolutely, yeah, I mean accessibility is definitely part of CRO is how it should be thought of.
[00:24:23] Speaker C: So yeah, and there's, there's upside as well for your if you're doing good accessibility. Well, there's additional upside. If you're doing good accessibility, it actually will help your SEO efforts as well as your your generative generative engine optimization as well. All leverage those pieces and so it can help multiple strategies while helping your optimization efforts, right?
[00:24:51] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean you're going to have great engagement metrics and the better those get. Obviously like your ranking is going to improve across the board and yeah, helping the LLMs also access your content is going to be helpful in the future. So Chad, this has been so great. Thank you for joining today. I did want to ask if you people want to reach out and connect with you like where would you, where would you want to send them?
[00:25:18] Speaker C: Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I respond actively to in LinkedIn unless you're outbounding and cold calling then I'm a little less respondent. But yeah, reach out. Happy to hop on a call and chat with anyone interested in going deep on Croatia.
[00:25:38] Speaker B: Okay, so look up Chad solisdioeye and if you're only listening, that's a U D I O E Y e dot com so Chad, thank you again for joining.
Tune in next week we're going to be joined by Ryan Nelson, CMO of StackAdapt. We're going to be discussing developing and growing multi channel strategies. Thank you all for listening. Have a great weekend. And Chad, thanks again for joining today.
[00:26:06] Speaker C: Thank you Pax.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20 year old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight and Check Point know their customers, execute innovative campaigns and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit us at 97th Floor.com and if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. See you next time.
