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Marketing Strategy Talk w/ Ryan O’Hara, VP of Growth & Marketing @LeadIQ

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Marketing Strategy Talk w/ Ryan O’Hara, VP of Growth & Marketing @LeadIQ

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Founder
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Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy
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Lessons on Creative Marketing & Prospecting Strategies to Breakthrough the B2B Noise.

In this installment of Marketing Strategy Talks, I’m joined by Ryan O’Hara, VP of Growth and Marketing at LeadIQ. Ryan has a wealth of knowledge to share with you ranging from sales prospecting all the way to guerrilla marketing tactics. Over the years, he’s made a name for himself dropping “knowledge bombs” on LinkedIn on the regular making salespeople all over the world prospect better.

The reason I loved talking to Ryan for about an hour recently is that he’s one of the most creative marketers I’ve come across. He stands out in a sea of B2B marketers and in this interview, he reveals his secrets so you can too.

Now, without further ado, let’s dive into our conversation below. Enjoy!

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Transcript

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    All right. Ryan O’Hara, thanks for taking the time today.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    It’s an honor. I don’t even want to make it a big deal. You can’t hear it right now, but it’s emotional. I’m actually crying.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    It should be emotional. This is a big deal! Anyways, thanks again for joining the Marketing Strategy deep interview series. Marketing Strategy is a site where we feature the most effective strategies for rapid growth. For Marketers, by Marketers. And your name came up…dare I call you a Linkedin influencer?

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Ooh, that’s really nice.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Yeah, keep that title, it’s yours! Let’s dive right in— I think the thing that really jumps out for me is your ability to build a strong personal brand. On LinkedIn, you’re posting videos AND you have a personality. You’re not just taking the stuffy corporate type of approach to marketing. So why do you think that’s so important these days and what are some tips for people starting out?

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. I didn’t originally plan to do this, and I hope people don’t think I’m like super vain for this. We’re trying to actually scale this now at LeadIQ too with employees that we have here. I want a ton of employees here to be the faces of our brand. The way I look at it, people like people, they don’t like brands. So if you’re a marketer and you’re spending all this time trying to get people to like your brand, it’s okay, but no one’s going in liking TBS on Facebook, they’re liking Conan O’Brian’s page, right? It’s the same exact thing. Same thing on YouTube—Conan has more subscribers than TBS. But it’s not just because Conan has more fans from his days at NBC. It’s because people like that brand of Conan and all the things that come out of that and that universe because there’s a human story to it.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    It makes total sense. People buy from people!

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Exactly, I’ve kind of taken that, and I try to run our marketing department like that here at LeadIQ. So we try to put content on every day. That’s one rule that we have. Or at least four days a week if we can. I’ve got a couple of people on my team, but the content we put out, it’s not just about LeadIQ. In fact, a lot of it’s mainly about best practices, opinions, things we’re learning from the day. The awesome part is most of the people that are listening to this probably work or have a sales team. If you’re someone that has a sales team, you’ve got a team of professional talkers that you should be putting on camera and throwing on microphones and stuff. With the way the technology has gotten better, it’s so much easier to do this.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    So true, you barely need any tech to produce a high-quality video these days…

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    I did a post today on LinkedIn, plugging a content site that I’ve started for sales reps called OutboundTV. I have nice cameras here and know how to cut and edit videos. But for the sake of the video, while I’m plugging this, I’m also telling people to make content and put it on LinkedIn every week cause your customers see it, they’ll recognize your name, and they’ll want to follow you and maybe even engage with you! We make most with our webcams. It’s not fine quality. But if you watch the video, it looks great. It’s enjoyable. It’s entertaining. I know it’s working because I posted it a couple of hours ago, and it’s already got four-digit views on LinkedIn and at least double digits for engagement. I care more about engagement than views when I’m putting something on LinkedIn.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Wow, that’s great! And I agree, I’d take engagement over views any day of the week on Linkedin.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    The point I’m getting at is, you need to be putting content out there online, and you need to be agile and fast about it. So the core way to get started is to do a talent audit. Get a list of people that you have in your office that you can use for this type of marketing. Not everyone’s going to want to do this part. For example, if you’re an introvert and you have an employee, don’t go and be like “You need to get online, or we’re going to fire you.” Don’t do that. Instead, use what the developer’s really good at and build a brand around that. Maybe they are better at writing posts and writing stuff. If they’re better at writing, instead of being out on video, have them do that. They can act like a journalist a little bit and tell stories about what’s going on in the news and stuff.

    I talked to a person that has been running marketing teams for a long time. He was telling me that they newsjack a ton of stuff with one of their on-staff developers. They make mobile apps and stuff. He’ll actually go and grab a new story, like the stuff that happened in the primary during the Iowa caucus a couple of weeks ago. Instead of writing and putting a video up where he’s on camera, he just went and did a big writeup and analysis on what happened to why the mobile app failed for tracking the Iowa caucus.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Nice. Yeah, that’s smart.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    The post had more views than any of their other blog post combined for the year.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Wow, that’s a crazy story! And kind of brilliant to be honest…

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    We all have personal opinions. Business and personal is now sort of meshing into one thing, and I think it’s a side effect of having a smartphone that we didn’t originally plan, but that’s what’s happening. So if you’re listening to this, you’re a one-person studio. That’s the way you look at it, and you need to run your marketing department like a media company.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    I love that, ‘run your marketing department like a media company.’

    So two things I really want to unpack there first is internal marketing. Great for you to bring this up because I think it’s one of the most underrated things that marketers do. Everybody can get something out to the public. But honestly, the hardest thing to do is get your internal team to buy into the marketing message, not only what you’re sending out, but kind of exactly what you said, get them to actually make it their own, repackage it and give their opinion. And it’s hard. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve struggled with internal marketing at my companies, big and small.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    So you’re 100% right. Determine who is maybe not necessarily a video person, maybe give them an article to write instead.

    So how do you do that at scale? So if you have, let’s say 50 to a 100 person company, how do you align people across multiple departments around your marketing? Do you have any tips there?

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. So our company right now is about 60 people. But if I tomorrow had 300 people working here, I would have two full-time content marketers that just help put stuff together with someone on staff. A perfect example of this, there’s an advisor in Manchester, New Hampshire, a company called York IE.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Yes! I know them well.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Adam Coughlin who works there actually did this a lot at Dyn. So he’d go find engineers on the team. They’d come up with a story together. Adam was an editor, so he’d go edit the stories that they put together and work on it with someone and make it a lot easier. So the ask that he was doing with the actual employee that was working there is really only 30 or 40 minutes a week. You do this for an ongoing project. I think what we need in HR is companies that are bigger need to have a branding department internally. It’s a new idea. It doesn’t exist yet. I’m telling you this, in 10 years, you’re going to see this. This is what’s going to happen in 10 years. You can be ahead of this if you’re listening right now.

    You have someone that basically comes in and says, I’m your publicist at this company. I’m going to figure out how to build your brand internally here, whether you’re an SDR that just got out of college and you’re figuring some stuff out, a senior AE who’s been there for a long time, or a developer that’s been writing code for the company for 10 years. Whatever your background is, I’m going to take your life experience, and we’re going to figure out how to make it public and help you. This is what’s really cool about it. Companies are afraid to do this, these big companies, they think their employees are going to leave like, “Oh, if I get that person out there and they’re putting content out there and they become a personality, everyone’s going to poach them and take them.” But if you invest in your employees’ brand, it’s addicting, and there’s fear there. I know it sounds terrible, but there’s fear.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    I’ll give you a good example. At our company, I’m not saying this person’s here for fear, we have a guy that came in as an SDR. His name’s Jeremy Lavier. He puts out a lot of content on LinkedIn. Most of his videos will crush. He gets five digits and a lot of views, hundreds of engagements on things. Jeremy had a brand before he joined us. One of the things that our marketing department was able to do is put some dollars behind it. So when Jimmy puts a post up, we’ll rip and cut up what he just did and literally retarget people on social with his content so they see his name over and over again. He builds a following with the familiarities.

    He’s doing great stuff because of that, he’s getting higher response rates and higher engagement rates on his cold calls and cold emails and he’s now an AE for us. But when you look at what’s happening with Jeremy, his brand is huge. He’s a household name in the sales space right now. Most of the people that we talk to have watched one of his videos or one of my videos or one of our staff’s for things that they’re putting out there, and it’s because of that, he’s not going to leave. He’s addicted to it. It’s fun. It’s cool. He could go to another company that might not put that infrastructure.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    This was a guy that was working at a company called NaviSite that Charter bought. They’re an ISP. When big conglomerates coming in and buy a company, the first thing they lay off is sales. They laid off their entire sales office, and Jeremy was underappreciated for this. I saw his content. I knew him for a little while. I had him on my podcast before we hired him. I just knew I want to have this guy work for us. It’s been great because he’s in a perfect position where he can be an expert and teach people about prospecting but still do sales and still do his normal day-to-day stuff. So I think a big thing is to put people where they fit.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Yeah. That’s a really good point. I’ve watched Jeremy’s videos, and I feel like everything you guys put out is short for the most part and to the point with a ton of value, and it has a purpose, right? Your videos are really focused. You guys have that down to a science. That’s really why I reached out. Because you are doing that better than most people in the space. I think with video, and especially LinkedIn video which is a relatively new thing, you guys are up there with the Gary V’s of the world in my opinion. You’re doing some great things!

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Thanks, man. That means a lot. Hopefully, I don’t use that many cuss words.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Just don’t start selling wine out of your office and I’m sure you’ll be fine!

    But the second piece I wanted to unpack from your original point, how do you calculate the ROI for LinkedIn videos? So I know you’re reporting up to a manager of some kind, whether it be a CEO, a CMO, whatever it is. I’m sure you have to justify the time and ROI of your marketing activities. You guys are posting like crazy. You talked about engagement metrics. You talked about shares. How do you actually justify the ROI of these activities to your manager?

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    All right. I’m going to say there are three things and hope that there are three things. Let’s see if it works.

    The first way is, so I’m the VP of marketing. I directly report to our CEO. One of the things that we eyeball is direct traffic. So if I see direct traffic, I’ll give you an example. For the first couple of years that I was here, we didn’t really know how to position this product or how to sell it. So we were trying experiments all the time. A lot of what I did early here was lead gen. Our growth kind of was… It was okay. About two years ago we started shifting our focus to be more awareness driven, where instead of putting the things I know about prospecting behind a gate in a wall, I just opened it up and started doing it on social. Every time I do something on social, I have a call to action that’s pushing someone to go do something or check out something we’re working on, go to the site or whatever.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Sure, makes sense.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Since we’ve done awareness, we’ve actually grown 6X the past two years doing this. What’s crazy is the awareness shift has better ramifications for us. So yes, it’s is harder to measure. But we keep an eye on our direct traffic every month, and I see our direct traffic is slowly climbing up, slowly climbing up. Last year, for almost half the year, our number one source of traffic was direct. I know that from Google Analytics. I’m looking at it. I can’t measure everything, but the awareness is there, and that’s where I know it’s capitalized on that. That’s the first way.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    The second way to track ROI for this is if you have an outbound prospecting team, what you need to do is have your outbound prospecting team go through, and prospect the engagements that come in. So if I go put a post up on LinkedIn and it gets 111 likes, we go through the 111 likes and prospect everybody. Every person that engages, even if they’re not in your ideal customer profile, they could potentially refer you to the right company or contact. There’s still value that you can get out of that person, or maybe you can get them to make content with you instead. So if John Maza steers his sales development rep, reaches out to someone that liked my video on cold calling tips, and it says, “Hey, what’d you think of Ryan’s cold calling tips?” He’s going to have a way higher response rate.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    John can actually then go make content with them. Kind of like what you’re doing right now. He could hop on a Zoom with them, ask them one question, record it, throw it up on LinkedIn, tag that prospect, send them the file, let them post natively, and you rinse and repeat. The same people that come in and comment or engage on it, you prospect those people and do the same thing, and you create a cycle where people feel like they keep seeing you somewhere because you’re infiltrating the same network over and over again. Does that make sense?

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Yes absolutely! So that’s #2…one more (laughter)

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah, so that’s two. The third thing we do when we measure stuff is when people come in, we ask how they found out about us.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    There you go, simple but effective.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah, it’s an easy question you can ask. We ran a survey last year and I think we ended up seeing around mid-20% had originally discovered us through a LinkedIn video. But I’ll take that. That’s 20% more customers that we wouldn’t have had had we not been doing the LinkedIn video. There are still other things too because think about this. When I take a LinkedIn video and make it, I’m not just going to throw it on LinkedIn. I’m also going to throw it up in the marketing machine and retarget people on social, on YouTube, and on Facebook and Twitter and stuff. I can do the same thing, exactly the same.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    So that’s sort of the third way of getting our ROI. It’s not just content you can do. I’ll give you a fourth because I just thought of it and it’s bonus. You also can take any content that you make, go find a transcription service like rev.com or one of those, I don’t want to plug them specifically, but I know that’s one of them that people use, and they’ll automatically type up what you said, throw that Q&A up on a blog post, and now, you’re getting SEO out of the thing that they’re talking about in the video. Have the video embedded at the top and the transcript underneath.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Hey that’s my move! (laughter)

    Exactly though. I think you said something pretty profound is that basically when you shifted to focus on awareness-based content, you 6X’d, essentially, right? I mean, at the end of the day, as marketers, that’s all we really should care about is if our marketing activities are driving revenue at the end of the day. I think it’s one of the major ones.

    So thanks for tackling that question, I’ve always wondered how your videos are backing out. I see your views on LinkedIn—they’re in the 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 range. I’ve always kind of wondered how are they performing from a demand gen standpoint… I’m assuming it’s working because you guys are doing almost everyday…Right?

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    There is some strategy behind how the content is designed too. Let’s start with that if you have a little bit of time.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Nothing but time!

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    So you’ve probably seen this because I know you’ve been following me and stuff for a while on LinkedIn. But for people that don’t, I actually have done a couple of talks about this too. We actually did something at LeadIQ that I call brand archetyping. What it is in the ’60s, all these ad agencies started hiring psychologists on staff that would basically be like, “Let’s figure out the psychology behind this ad to get people to resonate with it.” All these top psychologist people were coming in that were disciples of Carl Jung. He said that people like to categorize other people. For example, when I talk about the Fonz from Happy Days, what word would you use to describe the Fonz?

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    “Cool”

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah, he was cool. He was badass. He was like a rebel, right?

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Exactly!

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    If I go through and talk about Michael Jordan, what do you think of?

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Superstar, talented, winner, etc.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. He was the best, right? He was the king of that. People did the same thing with Muhammad Ali, right? The idea behind branding yourself when you’re putting content out there is you need to have a consistent voice. If I go and put a video out and I’m super serious on Wednesday, and then I put a video out on Friday, and I’m silly in it, it’s going to make people feel weird because it’s like… It’s okay. I’m not saying it’s not. It’s okay for me to sometimes put something up that’s serious. But you have to be consistent with the same personality. The way to do that is to pick a brand archetype. If you’re building this out, brands do this for their actual companies. Harley-Davidson, for example, is a rebel brand. One of my favorite examples, Taylor Swift is a lover brand. So she’s all about intimacy, letting you in in our world, showing stuff, sharing secrets. Her songs are literally her reading stuff that’s happening in her love life. She’s all about that part. Right?

    With the brand of your company, you want to have an archetype for your brand, but then the people that are part of your brand can have different archetypes. It’s actually okay. I didn’t know this when I first joined LeadIQ. I thought everyone that’s at LeadIQ has to be a jester brand because that’s what we’re trying to be. We’re trying to be a brand that’s making you entertained, making make you laugh. That’s our whole thing. I’m still dropping wisdom bombs on prospecting. I’m still sharing stuff. I’m just framing myself as someone that’s going to make fun of myself a little bit. I’ll crap on my haircut. I’ll talk about something I did where I put my foot in my mouth. I’ll be vulnerable and share those mistakes for the sake of making you entertained. That’s really what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to be a showman, sort of.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Whatever archetype you pick, you can look them up. Just google LeadIQ brand archetypes. You’ll see if I wrote about it. It’s okay for people that are at your company to have a completely different archetype because it’s almost like watching a TV show. Do you ever watch Parks and Rec, for example?

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    of course!

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. If every character in Parks and Rec was the same personality, the show would be really boring. Right?

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    oh god yes.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    The idea is that the characters that you pick from your staff can have different personalities. Jeremy on our team, he can be lighthearted and silly sometimes, but Jeremy’s a sage. He has so many cool prospecting stories if you sit down with them. I could grab a documentary crew and probably form around for a year, and we’d probably have six years of content that we could put online because of all the stories and the things he talks about. He’s got that sage brand, where he brands himself as the smartest prospector in the room when he’s going through this stuff. Me, I’m trying to make you laugh. I know my shit about prospecting. Sorry. I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear. I know my stuff when I’m prospecting.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Woah betty! It’s all good. Quick unrelated announcement: for all those 6-year-olds reading or listening to this super in-depth marketing interview, earmuff it for me right now (and go to bed!).

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Oh now, I’m turning into Gary V. It’s happening. I know my stuff with prospecting. But at the end of the day, I also want to give you infotainment. I want to entertain you while delivering information to you.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    I think that’s also a major reason why you stick out too because not everybody’s playing that card right now, I did read the brand archetypes article and they’re spot-on.

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Thanks for that. The cool part is there is no wrong answer. Here’s the thing. We are actually all those archetypes. You and I, it might not seem like right now, we can both be badass. We can both be lovers. That sounds weird to people listening.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian

    Wow, I’m flattered (laughter)

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah, yeah. Edit that out (laughter).

    Anyways, we could both be king brands. We could both be explorers. Every archetype appeals to someone. What you want to do is look at what your competition is doing and try and do the opposite. Try and find some different… Our space, for example, we try not to frame LeadIQ as just a data provider.

    We do get in bake-offs with other data providers, and I go and investigate what they’re doing. One of them is like a sage brand, where they’re talking about insight and giving you information about the stuff they’re trying to be a sage brand. If I go to another one, one of them, they do like the Muhammad Ali thing where they talk about being the best, and they frame themselves as the king brand like Rolex and BMW were the best. You’re getting a finely tuned machine. We’re accelerating your path. They say this stuff. I see that, and I’m like, “Dude, every business does that. I want to be different.” So for me, I have a natural inclination to try and do something that’s more entertaining.”

  • Ian
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    Ian

    I’m a big believer in that last piece you said, which is basically when everybody’s zigging over here, you should zag over there, especially in B2B!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    You’re quoting me. I say that all time! I’ll go into a meeting with people and say, “We need to zig while they’re zagging.” People are like, “What are you talking about?”

  • Ian
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    Ian

    That’s true. I think that’s the only way to stand out, especially in B2B, it’s so corporate. It’s so stuffy. The jester brand, depending on your competition’s position, is a great way to stick out and win hearts and minds.

    Let’s explore that a little bit. So you’ve literally shot a video in a car wash. You’ve shot a video in a snow storm. I think you nail the jester brand archetype. Are there tricks, are there tips for creating engaging video content? Because I see a ton of honestly, just really terrible video content out there where somebody is surely holding cue cards in the background. Give us some advice on how to really make it authentic and really make videos stand out from the crowd.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    So when I was coming up in school and stuff, I used to be really into A.V. stuff. I made movies, I shot stuff. We’ve probably made some stuff that I would never want the world to see because of how terrible it is now. But I learned a ton. I was that kid in high school that went skateboarding with people, was bad at skateboarding, and then learned how to film skateboarding so I can still hang out with all my friends who were good at skateboarding. But that was kind of how it happened for me.

    One of the things that I learned is that over time, when you watch stuff, pay attention to the way that things are edited, meaning you don’t have to… Editing’s very easy now. You can literally buy Adobe Premiere and pay, I think it’s like 30 bucks a month and cut it yourself. Or if you have a Mac, you can use iMovie. It comes with it. You can use Windows movie. Don’t overcomplicate your editing. Here’s what I recommend. Change shots every couple of seconds. There are graphs of this when you’re doing video. In the old days, a shot basically means you change angles or you change whatever you’re showing every couple seconds.

    The old movie days, the average shot length, the problem is when movies first came out, they tried to make them like plays because that was the audience and they were trying to capture that when a movie came out in the theaters. They’re like, “You can see this play that you’re not able to see live with Grace Kelly. That’s pretty cool.” You wouldn’t normally get to see Grace Kelly in a play because you’re in Oklahoma, and she’s not going to be there, right?

  • Ian
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    Ian

    (laughter) right.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Or he’s not going to be there, whatever celebrity it is and stuff. What they did over the years is slowly make shots faster and faster. I remember I saw someone did a blog post about this on the A.V. Club. You go watch the Fast and Furious, and they literally changed shots every four seconds. It’s pretty much the most ADHD movie of all time, how quickly they’ll go change shots. But those movies get billions of dollars in the Box Office every time they come out. It’s because they’re engaging to watch. They change angles a lot. You don’t get bored and complacent. I do the same thing with my cuts.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    So I do something that’s a little weird. I only film with one camera a lot of the time. But anytime that I breathe, I cut. Anytime that I pause, I cut. I put a video today, where I’m trying to make it look a little bit more polished. I did a video today where I wanted to show, you could make a polished video with a webcam. So what I did is: I recorded and every time that I stopped, I just moved and made the video a little closer to my face for every other line. It looks like the angle is changing really quickly, and it makes it easier to watch. People don’t want to just sit there and listen to me read a blog post to you. They want to see stuff that’s fast and quick.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Wow, that makes total sense, but I’m sure most people don’t even think about that!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    The other thing that I do that is really surprising, I think that people that talk to me about my videos and say like, “Hey, I think your videos are funny and cool and stuff,” a lot of this stuff ends up happening in the cutting room. So I’ll film something with no bit and then come up with an idea in the editing room afterward. So if you’re working with a video editor, let’s say you’re a  marketer listening to this, and you have an editing team on staff or a freelancer, watch what they’re editing and come with some ideas. I’ll give you an example…

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    I did this video once at a conference with the CEO of Chorus, Roy Raanani. Chorus is a software, where you record your calls, and they’ll analyze them for you and tell you how to be better on your calls. Roy did this really cool talk at the conference about how reps should shut up when they give out pricing. So if I’m a rep to you and I say… If you asked me how much it is and I say, “Oh, it’s $1 million,” don’t talk after.  Just be quiet and see how they react to that price. He showed that best practices, the deal sizes will be higher if you don’t talk after you give out your price.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    I heard Roy do this at the conference. I went up to him and said, “Roy, can I have you repeat that on camera for me and share with my network. We both are going aftersales teams, so it’s perfect.” Roy said, “No problem. Sure.” I interviewed him. It was a very dry and boring interview. What I did in the cutting room, I went into the backroom afterward when I had a break, and there was no one at the booth. I went into a back room and just went into a closet and started cutting this video really quickly. I thought of a funny idea where I would zoom in in slow motion on my face and tell you what I was thinking as the customer.

    All I did is I grabbed my phone and used the voice memo and just went, “$1 million. That’s a lot of value.” I did an obvious over-the-top corny internal dialogue voice, and I slowly zoomed into my face while I did it and then just cut back and just went back to the conversation. The video killed online. Tons of people jumped in. A lot of the Chorus reps came in and jumped in on it and thought it was really awesome. Roy asked for the file and reposted it.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    (laughter) that’s great…

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    So that’s an example. Things can come up in the cutting room. Think of ways that you can do stuff where you don’t take it too seriously, and you think of things that happened in real life. Do you know who Allen Gannett is?

  • Ian
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    Ian

    No, I’m not familiar.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Allen Gannett, he started a company called TrackMaven, and he sold it. He also wrote a book on creativity. One of the things, he went around and basically interviewed creative people. I saw him speak at a Ramp last year or two years ago in Boston. He also has a Corgi and I have a Corgi. So we both are Corgi friends on that end.

    I haven’t really talked to him that much, a couple of seconds once. But Allen’s book, one of the things he talks about is the best, most creative genius people out there consume content. So if you’re a marketer and you want to come up with creative ideas, don’t look at other marketers. Go consume content outside of your space.

    You have no idea how many ideas I get from outside of marketing. I’ll be cooking dinner and throw up on my phone. I’ll just open Hulu and watch an episode of 30 Rock while I’m cooking dinner. I’ll get an idea of something that they did on that show, and I’m like, “Oh, why don’t I…” I won’t steal the idea. I’ll come up with my own version of the idea. But I’ll be like, “That’s kind of funny. I wonder if I can learn… Why was that funny?” Then I think about it and put it back in. You should block time to go and consume content!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Another thing that I do, I have a podcast that I do at LeadIQ called the Prospecting Podcast. If you listen to our early episodes, they’re really bad. They’re boring. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wanted to get a podcast in and start learning. But as I’ve gone on, I’ve gotten more entertaining, and the reason is because I started listening to other podcasts. I have a little shower radio that it bought for like $25 off Amazon. I suction-cup it to the wall, and I listen to a podcast every morning. It could be other people. I tried to not listen to business podcast. You should. You should listen to business podcast too. But I try and listen to something that’s more lighthearted or has engagement, and I listen to other formats and say, “That’s how they did that.” Then it gives me ideas for things that we can do.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Yeah, things like Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, right?

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. I love that podcast.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    One of my favs too.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    You know what I love about that podcast? I love the commercials. If you listen to how Conan does the commercials, they’re bits. They’re bits, and it’s genius. We’re all marketers. We should be stealing those bits and thinking of that idea for the way we talk about our product and our services.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    I forget the company that he was plugging for a commercial, but he was like, “I don’t know what these guys do. I’m going to call the service line.” He calls the service line, and then literally some random service rep picks up.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Was it Mailchimp? I think it was Mailchimp.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    I think it was something like that. It was marketing automation. It might’ve been Constant Contact or something like that, but something similar. Right?

    Their ad was so jargon-y that he basically half-way through the ad gave up and just called the service line for a clear answer on what the company did. Obviously, some Conan shenanigans ensued and it was funny. The genius part of it was, he just kept calling the same service line every episode and saying, “I need to talk to Dan in the service department.” And it just became the re-occurring bit, but it was a damn commercial!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    He figured out a way for me to not skip the ad. I’m their target buyer, by the way. I’m not going to get them right now because we need something a little bit more robust. But when I start my next company or work at another startup, five or 10 years from now, I’m probably going to look at them because I’m like, “Oh, they’re aligning their brand with Conan, and they’re doing this fun stuff.” That’s sort of a good way to approach it.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Another thing that you can learn from podcasts is you can hear stories from people about what happened to them, and it’ll help you get ideas. Maybe they call him the godfather of podcasting, but a lot of people listen to Mark Maron, WTF with Mark Maron, and his format for his show is he interviews someone. He’ll go grab someone, whether it’s a comedian or whatever. His show’s changed a lot. He’s been doing it for forever… I think one of the reasons he’s so popular is just because he was one of the first ones to do it with good gear. He came from the radio world. So he had good equipment.

    But Mark basically is turned his podcast into stories. If you listen to his podcast, all hear stories of people that’ll come on, and it gives me ideas. One of my favorite episodes he did was with Danny McBride, who he’s from Eastbound & Down, and he’s made a bunch of stuff.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Love Eastbound & Down. Kenny Fucking Powers!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah, yeah. He’s awesome, Kenny Powers. One of the things I really learned from him is he basically made his own jobs, and I heard that and was thinking… I heard his podcast, and I went to my team and I said, “Guys, I want you to listen to this podcast.” I found a YouTube link forward and sent it to them, made everyone listen to it. The lesson was basically to be proactive. Don’t wait for things. Go make your own job. The things that you’re doing at LeadIQ, we have functions that we want you to get done. But at the end of the day, I want you to be putting things out there that are your ideas that have you inside of all of them.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Danny McBride couldn’t find work in Hollywood. He moved back and became a substitute teacher, and he and his buddy basically came up with this karate movie called The Foot Fist Way. I can’t say the words, it’s a tongue twister, The Foot Fist Way. He’s a karate instructor. I haven’t watched it, but he made this, put it in a couple of film festivals. Will Ferrell and Adam McKay saw it, and they said, “Hey, we love that movie. Let’s get you a holding deal with HBO.” That’s how Eastbound & Down got made.

    The whole part of the athlete coming back to school and being a substitute teacher was inspired by Danny McBride’s own experience. But he just went and made his own project. If you’re a marketer here, don’t wait for your CEO to tell you to go do something. That’s the lesson. Don’t wait for me to come in and say like, “Hey guys, we need to do more of this stuff.” Go out there and create your own things. One of the things that we did, Ritchie Matthew was on our team. He’s our content producer. Ritchie does standup comedy on the side. I told Ritchie, I’m like, “Dude, if you’re funny, and you know a lot of really cool people, and you work in comedy, find a way to put that comedy into the business stuff that you’re doing.”

  • Ian
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    Ian

    That’s great advice.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. He’ll go get an influencer in sales like Cory Bray or Josh Brown. He’ll record a quick Zoom with them, and he gets great info out of them, and he’s funny, and it works. He puts his own personality into it.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Sounds like “Between two Ferns” but for business?

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. The only thing that stinks is a lot of the people that you want to work with, you’re going to have to do over a Zoom call.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Of course, yeah. Still not quite the same as an interview in person.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    My marketer inside wants to always try and use things differently. Zoom for example…

    What can I do that’s clever and different in a Zoom that other people can’t do? I remember we once did a call, Ritchie and I, where I was trying to basically get a lot of people that watch our stuff, and they’re like, “My boss won’t let me make content. Can you do something for that, or what can I say to my boss to get them to agree to let me go make content and spend a little time on content? These are reps and stuff. So Ritchie and I did a video where we’re on Zoom, and on the Zoom, I’m like, “Ritchie, you’re ready for this? We’re going to do a wild ride.” He’s like, “What?” I’m like, “Listen up, camera. Pick up this laptop. Just connect it. Bring this right over to your manager right now.”

    We did a video where the rep was supposed to go past the video to the manager and hit play so they could watch it. In the video, we gave them like 30 seconds and just played music and looked around it while we’re waiting for the rep to go find their manager. I got messages from people after the video. I think I got like four or five messages from people that said that their manager loved the video, and now they’re like trying to get their team to do it. So it worked. The idea worked.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    (laughter) that’s clever.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    I used the creative medium of Zoom to get something out there with a message to give people value and help them.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    So let’s unpack that creative and ideas piece a bit more and shift gears a little bit.

    So what would you consider your most successful campaign of all time?

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Ooh, well, so the hard part for me is a lot of the cool stuff that we do, I usually do in the realm of prospecting, so if I go do something that’s really unique and different. My favorite thing that I’ve been doing lately is we’ve been doing public call-outs of prospects that we want to work with. So I’ll give you an example. I’ll tell you a bare-bones version of it, and then I’m going to go through a more detailed version. If you’re listening to this, this is a really great way for you to break into really big accounts that you want to get.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    I was talking at a conference in Chicago last year, the AA-ISP leadership summit. I was doing a talk on social selling. To open up my talk, I said to everyone at the conference while I’m on stage, I’m like, “I want to do something really unique, guys. Can everyone say hi to James.” I turned the camera and said, “Hey James, I’m on stage right now. We really want to break into your account.” The company was InVisionApp. I think they’re just called InVisionApp. But I was like, “We really want to break into your company.” John Maza asked me to do this. I’m on stage. Let’s get everyone to shout and say, ‘Hey, what’s up InVision?'”

    I turned the camera and everyone in the audience yelled, “Hey, InVision.” Then I turned back and like, “Oh, the way this works. I’ll tag you on this post. We can help you with X, Y, Z.” I don’t want to pitch my own product in this, but like, “We can help you with X, Y, Z. DM me, and let’s get a conversation started.” He DMs Maza that day. A couple of hours later, we got the meeting. I don’t know if they closed or not, and if they did, I don’t know the terms and conditions stuff. But the point I’m getting at here is we did a public social call-out on something, and all of these people joined in like, “Do it. Do it.” All these people did sort of joining it and telling them to do and egging them on. I thought it was super cool. Now, we thought of that idea and did that, and it was super easy to do, but not everyone has the capability of doing a conference. So you’re not always going to get asked to speak at a conference.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Exactly, but I think the concept of something interesting and unique holds.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    So another thing that we did I had Ritchie come in. Ritchie lives in New York, but he also comes… It’s actually funny, he kind of lives in my house sometimes too. So he’ll fly back in here and come back and forth and spend a couple of weeks at a time here, and we’ll work together, and then he goes back to New York to do stand-up on weekends and stuff. One time we wanted to find something unique we could do online that prospectors would be impressed with. I said, “We’ve got to get back to doing a clever prospecting idea.” So we storyboarded it out. We decided this idea where we’re going to do this campaign where we make infomercials. But the infomercials were about SaaS companies that we use every day.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    We’ve done two so far. We really should do more. They’re awesome. But we did one for Drift, and it’s our most viewed video of all time. I think it probably broke 100K for views.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Wow.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    What we did is we basically did… It’s really terrible. But Ritchie is basically like Billy Mays, and he’s selling Drift, and we changed cuts a lot. Because we had our employees come in and pretend to be customers giving testimonials. We made it really cheesy in 80s style.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    (laughter) of course!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    But the cool part is we tagged a couple of the decision-makers at Drift. What do you think the decision-makers at Drift did? They copied it.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Shared it. Yeah.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    They shared it with their entire sales team. Everyone at Drift sales team and marketing team and customer success came in and liked it, and their entire network flooded it and started commenting and liking, and liking, and liking, and liking. We infiltrated the Drift network. The cool part is we got the meeting too. so we got the result that we wanted, but we also got a huge boost in getting LeadIQ in front of this audience that does have some overlap with LeadIQ.

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    Ryan O'Hara

    The second was a company, the Muse. Have you ever heard of them? They’re a job for your site that does native articles on your company and why you should work there. I loved them. We use them a Dyn, and they’re very helpful for us for hiring. So I was like, “Oh, let’s figure out a way to do something for them.”

    We did the same exact format. It was way cheesier. These reps flooded in, commented and liked it. We got the meeting with the three people that we wanted to get a meeting with, and the rest is history. So the public call-out thing has been something that we’ve been doing that’s really fun and unique and also puts us in a position to get free awareness from companies that we were trying to work with.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Yeah. That’s really great. This should be a major goal for companies, especially startups. If you can tap into a bigger audience by simply being creative, that’s a huge win. The goal for all targeted outbound marketing should be to get it shared around the office. That is so valuable from a marketing standpoint. If your message gets shared around even to just a sales team, that is a big accomplishment and will pay dividends. Because it’s hard, really hard for companies to be interesting enough to a point that their content gets shared around other companies internally. Think about how many cold emails we get a day, then ad how many cold calls we get a day. It’s a lot of noise. The fact that somebody is not only looking at your message once but sharing it around, that’s impressive stuff, and I could totally see why those would be successful.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    So you mentioned Dyn, and I know we have a shared connection at Dyn. Shout out to Josh Delisle!

    But I want to talk about a type of marketing you were kind of known for at Dyn. I know you started as a BDR and got promoted up through the ranks and eventually made it to marketing. But it sounds like your M.O. at Dyn was guerrilla marketing. So walk me through a campaign you did for Dyn that was kind of in the guerrilla-style.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    All right. I love this. This is super fun. Kudos by the way for them. I want to give them shout-out. They’re not existing anymore because Oracle bought them out, but it takes a lot of courage for people to let a kid that lives in his mom’s basement do some of these things.

    I’ll tell you one that’s not prospecting related because I think most people hear the prospecting one. So I’ll tell you something else I did…

    We once did this campaign. Dyn every year does a huge South By Southwest party. A lot of tech companies back then used to do that. They still do, but obviously, it was canceled recently because of the coronavirus and stuff. But Dyn, it was a good spot for us because it was a chance for us to get face time with media companies. I remember one day, they were like, “Hey, we want to do something cool at South By. I was thinking, “I want to do something that’s interactive.” I remember reading about something called ambient advertising basically, where you do something with the environment that you’re around.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    For example, someone went to a skate park, and they were looking for a brand new half pipe, and a company in China made a half pipe that looked like a wok, like a pan. So when people would skate on it, the angle that it would look like for anyone watching looked like a pan, and they just put their logo on the half-pipe. I thought it was really cool.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    That’s a great idea.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    So we had this internet switch in the office. Dyn powers backend stuff for almost every website that you use, like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, you go down the list. We had this internet switch that we made in the office that would turn the internet on and off. I had this guy Tyler Gutierrez on our team take a couple pictures of the internet switch, really high-res super professional equipment, really nice cameras. We basically hunted down and found a guy in a van because every guerrilla marketing thing comes down to a guy in a van.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    (laughter) yeah of course!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    We found this guy that had a van and a projector. What we did is we bought one of those old MiFi cards that you can get internet from, plugged it into a laptop that projected this internet switch. I had the dev team build something where anytime that someone tweeted at Dyn internet on, the switch would turn on, and it would say this person turned off the internet. If they typed in internet off, the switch would flick off, and it would say, “This person turned off the internet. They’re a jerk.” So we made a bunch of these automated messages that would come up, and we just projected it across buildings at South By.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    One of the people that did it was a correspondent from the Daily Show. He tweeted it off and posted it, and they ended up putting it on their website. The cool part is his tweet blew up. It got like 20,000 retweets, and it crashed the server that was doing the switch on and off trigger for Twitter because we didn’t think it was going to be that successful. Unfortunately, about 25 minutes into the campaign, cops pulled over the van and told me I had to stop because he didn’t get the proper paperwork. But the damage was already done. We had already had a couple hundred people tweet and turn the internet on and off. We were doing it outside of concerts.

    So they’d be waiting in line to go see Modest Mouse or something. While they’re waiting outside, there would just be this switch for the van on a big building, and people would tweet it, sit there and watch it. People are filming it, and we saw videos go up online. Very cool. Very, very cool.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    It’s also not true guerrilla marketing unless the cops show up. Right?

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    That’s right. You’re not doing it right if they don’t show up! I’ll give you another one real quick because these are fun to talk about.

    Every year, I got tasked with doing something cool for the holidays for Dyn. So one year, I wanted to do something that would get other companies involved. This is the secret, by the way, if you’re a marketer, trying to figure out like, “I have no audience. I just started a company, or I just started my department.” We don’t have a lot of fans. Go find people that have fans and use them to do stuff. It sounds evil, but you can do it.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Vice President
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    Ryan O'Hara

    We did this campaign, where we found companies that we wanted to work with or companies that we were already working with that had decent audiences. I rented two school buses, and I filled up a bunch of Dyn employees with hats, and we just went around to these different companies. I’d get one insider of the company. I hired a film crew, and we just went to these places, these offices, and we gave everyone donuts, coffee, and cocoa and singing Christmas carols and recorded it. We just filmed the reaction because no one knew where it came from. Then we all just would run away a flash mob kind of with no explanation, and we just leave the cookie donuts and all that stuff. We left the treats there, and then we’d go onto the next office.

    The cool part is we filmed it, made one mega video for it, tagged all the companies in it, and they all posted and reposted on their social. HubSpot shared it, and HubSpot at the time I think probably had three and a half million followers on Twitter. We did one with Acquia. They have a huge following in the Drupal community, which they work with developers, and we target developers. So it was like a perfect win-win for us. We strategically picked places that we wanted to work with. Then we went after those audiences.

    One of them was the Boston or the Cambridge office for Twitter. We ended up getting a retweet out of Twitter, which was pretty cool.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Wow! That’s cool.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. Just getting something that’s about them, not us, and doing something that’s cool. Yeah. We spent the money on it. The whole campaign probably cost us 1,100 bucks. But I’m going to get way more engagement off of that than if I go dump $1,100 on a Twitter ad.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    That’s so true.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. It’s kind of cool. You know what stinks? These things that I did, a lot of them, that moment in that time, they were very cool. Today, you probably wouldn’t work your ass off to get a bunch of tweets because Twitter is not what it used to be. It’s not the glory days of Twitter where you could just do donuts in the parking lot and get engagement.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Yeah, exactly. Not too many marketers I feel like these days have that type of cred. So I think that’s really interesting to share, especially the guerrilla-style approach.

    I remember a story from the original American Apparel CMO, and American Apparel was kind of not really a thing. He’s the guy that wrote “Trust Me, I’m Lying”, the book about the way the media works and the blog systems and how news gets fed up from the bottom rung of blogs, crappy blogs, up to the medium tier, and then eventually on the national news if it’s picked it up because nobody wants to write new articles anymore. People are inherently kind of lazy. They just want to take the news that’s already out there and re-package it.

    So anyway, this guy basically bought a billboard for American Apparel in a big populated area in New York City. Then that night, he went to the billboard himself and spray-painted racist graffiti on it. Now I wouldn’t recommend this. (laughter)

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Oh my gosh.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    But it was so bad that it made national news, and everybody had a camera on that billboard overnight.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Oh, and they had the American Apparel logo on it. All these people are seeing this.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Exactly!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Holy Crap!

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Yeah, it’s so simple but so effective that I’m surprised not many more people pick up on strategies like that, minus the racism. It’s really, really cool stuff.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    You know what I think happened, you know what I think happens, actually? If you guys look at my LinkedIn before I joined LeadIQ, I jumped around a little bit in between Dyn and LeadIQ. I went to these places, and I felt like a lot of the places I was going to work with that I didn’t feel was going to be like this, they turned into almost like spreadsheet paralysis is what I’d call it, where you get so caught up in measuring the numbers and stuff that you don’t do. If you don’t do, it’s hard for you to get output and input from what you’re doing.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Vice President
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    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    They spend too much time looking at graphs and spreadsheets and like, “Where am I getting traffic from? Is it measurable and stuff?” It’s okay to do that. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be doing that. I’m saying just it’s more important to spend your time, especially if you’re a smaller shop like us getting stuff out there every day.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Yeah, that’s true. Going back to that awareness piece. I mean, it’s not necessarily a math equation, but it’s getting your name out there, getting recognition around the topic that you’re trying to sell your solution into. I think that makes total sense.

    So all right. So we talked about a couple of campaigns, right? So you’ve got the kind of the creative side. In my opinion, the other side, which is marketing fundamentals. So not to get all dry, but what are your three favorite books or the three books that really just knocked your socks off as far as marketing is concerned?

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Vice President
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    Ryan O'Hara

    I really, really like… I talk about this one a lot, but I really loved reading Contagious. Did you look at that? Have you read that book or seen it?

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Yes! It’s great.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Basically, a professor, I think he’s from the Wharton school or something wrote about what makes things go viral. One of the things that I love about what he talks about is he tells stories of things that went viral and what happened to them and breaks them down really simply. You think about the stories that we were just talking about today, a lot of those… I had done these things before that book had come out, and I was trying to figure out, why did that work versus this? I started looking at all the things that have been successful, and they always fit into one of those buckets. You should all go read that book. It’s great.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Another book, Allen Gannett’s book, I don’t remember the name of it, but I’ve read it. You should check out that book. It’s on creativity. Search Allen Gannett on Amazon. It’s a good book that talks a lot about consuming content to get ideas. I’ll have to look it up, or you’ll have to look it up in post-production and dub over my voice and sound like a weird deep voice guy or something when you’re doing an impression on me.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    **DEEP MOVIE TRAILER VOICE**

    In a world…

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Yeah. Yeah. Perfect.

    The last one, there’s a book called Think or Tots. It’s helping you with creative thinking. I opened that guy up. I have it on my desk. I open it up pretty often whenever  I get writer’s block.  I’ll give an example one of the things they talk about in that book. If you’re putting stuff together and you’re trying to think about like, “Oh, what do I come up with today?” One of the things that I stole from them for prospecting that I now do in marketing is go write something as a character of a fictional thing that you like, and you’ll get an idea.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    One of my common characters that I’ll go write something as is I’ll go put some together is Wayne Campbell from Wayne’s World. I’ll write a blog in his voice, or I’ll write up an idea and be like, “What would Wayne Campbell do?” Then I switch it back to what I would do. You know what I mean? You can do some fun brainstorming this way.

  • Ian
    478
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    Ian

    That’s great advice for all you copywriters out there!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    When I worked at a ChartSpan, where I was doing medical marketing stuff, I used to write in the voice of Liz Lemon. I’d go channel a fictional character and find something to go work on. Think of something like that that you can do if you’re getting writer’s block, and you’ll come up with ideas. Just trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    That’s really smart. I haven’t heard that one before. Especially for people that write copy every day in high volumes. I think it’s tough because sometimes you can’t get out of your head and get stuck. You ask questions like, ‘what else could there be?’ That’s a great tip to get the creative juices flowing once again and I could definitely see how that could help people get past that block.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Vice President
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    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    Just don’t copy. Make sure whatever you do with anything in marketing with these ideas you’re talking about today, even though we talked about one that involves racism and having it work, don’t bring up race, religion, politics. I’d stay away from those three right now in anything, gender too, just avoid that stuff. If you’re trying to be funny or do something, just avoid some of that stuff. It’s good to be polarizing. I know that some people watch my videos on LinkedIn and hate it. I know nine out of 10 people are going to really like it. One out of 10 is going to hate it, and I’m never going to work with that person. The secret is I don’t want to work with that person anyway. They’re going to suck to work with, and they don’t like me, and I want to be myself.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    You got to be yourself and be confident in yourself, and you’ll be a lot better off. Whatever brand archetype you pick, use that as your compass and your guide of like, “All right, what copy am I writing today? Okay. I got to make sure it fits into this archetype that I’m deciding to go with.”

  • Ian
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    Ian

    It’s interesting you say that actually the three pieces, right, the race, religion, politics, and that American Apparel CMO basically said that’s the only thing you should do is attack those three. So his whole strategy was basically trying to piss people off and create controversy. I would side on your end with that issue.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    I will tell you this. The thing is American Apparel probably was the rebel archetype, which was all about attacking those things and appealing to you, wanting to challenge the status quo. I’m sure that that was intentional, and it’s probably why it worked. If we’re going to talk about that same archetype, literally political candidates do the same thing. They find one of these archetypes, and they go and do it. If they’re not, they should be.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Ok, we’re coming up on time, so I’ve got the lightning for you. Give me your top three marketers on LinkedIn that everybody should follow.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Okay. If you’re trying to do branding for yourself, go follow Phil Gerbyshak. He writes a lot about how to make all this stuff I’ve covered on Linkedin.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    If you want to see someone that’s putting content out in a DYI kind of fashion, go follow David Gearhart. He used to work at Drift. He just started or he just moved back to his old company that he had worked at before. He’s a must-follow for this stuff because he’s doing stuff that’s very similar to what we’re doing right now, not using high production. Just get something out and get it done. The third person I’d recommend to follow, let me think. Let me think. Let me think. Let’s see Gaetano from Nextiva. I can’t pronounce his last name. He puts out a lot of cool content on LinkedIn. If you want to get LinkedIn content that gets a lot of buzz and gets a lot of information and people jumping in stuff, he puts out a lot of really cool stuff about marketing, and I love it.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    I’ll give an example really quick. He put out a post around the holidays where he went around the mall kiosk and listen to people pitch him. He was doing a campaign targeting sales reps, and what better way to break down pitches from people from mall kiosk for stuff for B2B. It’s such a clever idea. He’s brilliant. He was one of the guys that helped get sales hackers off the ground. Everyone should go follow him. He’s a great person to go follow.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Nice! Really good list. All right. Quick plugs, where could people find you?

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Ooh, okay. First thing I want to plug, I’m going to plug three things. First is LeadIQ. Go to LeadIQ right now. If you have anyone that works in prospecting, we’re trying to make it so that you can make better first impressions where you reach out someone by enabling a flow where you can go read about someone online, push that stuff into your CRM and just act right away, and you’ll have better cold emails and cold calls if you do that.

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Vice President
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    Ryan O'Hara

    Second thing, we have a content site that we watch called Outbound TV. Literally, I just made a Netflix clone with nothing but sales content in it. But there’s going to be some marketing content coming on it too. I got Sangram from Terminus. He’s been putting some stuff up there, which is kind of cool. We’re going to slowly be ramping and adding some marketing content to the site too. Go check it out. It’s really fun. You can see all my videos that are on there too. Third thing..

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Woah woah woah too many! Kidding, what’s your third one?

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    … go add me on LinkedIn. That’s all. Ryan O’Hara. I’m the second guy that comes up. Damn, you guy, the CEO of realtor.com. I’m coming for you. That’s all right. Maybe he’ll change his name or something. If I put in enough embarrassing videos on LinkedIn, maybe he’ll stop. Linkedin. But yeah. Go find me on LinkedIn.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    I feel your pain,  I think there’s like 10 other Ian Lucks in the world. All of them are up there on the corporate ladder. So I’m fighting that battle too!

  • Ryan O'Hara
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    Ryan O'Hara

    You’ve got a great name. You got a great name to live up to.

  • Ian
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    Ian

    Yeah, let’s hope one day it pays off! Ryan O’Hara, it’s been insightful. I think you are doing marketing in a unique and different way that deserves attention— I’m super impressed by the stuff you put out, and I’ve been following LeadIQ for a while, and I think you guys are crushing it. Thanks for taking the time with me today and let’s catch up again soon.

    I’m Ian signing off from Marketing Strategy.com and don’t forget to join our newsletter to get the best strategies and tactics for rapid growth written for marketers by marketers directly in your inbox. Catch you all next time!

About the Participants

  • Ryan O'Hara
    0
    Title
    Vice President
    Specialties
    Marketing Strategy Sales Video Marketing

    Ryan O'Hara

    VP of Growth & Marketing

    Ryan helps companies everywhere change marketing, sales, and prospecting strategies. Some of the areas he loves helping people with is branding themselves, writing cold emails, prospecting, and building your brand as a media personality, and most of all, doing business messaging that isn’t boring. If you are looking for someone to share some wisdom bombs you’ve come to the right place. Ryan’s had marketing and prospecting campaigns featured in Mashable, TheNextWeb, CNN Money, and Fortune.

  • Ian
    478
    Title
    Founder
    Specialties
    Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

    Ian Luck

    Founder, Marketing Strategy

    Ian has marketed for some of the world’s best-known brands like Hewlett-Packard, Ryder, Force Factor, and CIT Bank. His content has been downloaded 50,000+ times and viewed by over 90% of the Fortune 500. His marketing has been featured in Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Adweek, Business Insider, Seeking Alpha, Tech Crunch, Y Combinator, and Lifehacker. With over 10 startups under his belt, Ian’s been described as a serial entrepreneur— a badge he wears with pride. Ian’s a published author and musician and when he’s not obsessively testing the next marketing idea, he can be found hanging out with family and friends north of Boston.

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