SaaS Marketing Show

How Drift Approach SEO For New Product Launches

Let’s face it, as SaaS marketers we all look up to Drift. They’ve built a brand and product that so many people love and admire – but how have they done it?

Today we chat with Bill King who works in the Drift acquisition team, looking after both SEO and Paid.

The core focus for this interview is ‘How Drift approach SEO for new product launches’ but we also cover the following:

  • How Drift have structured their marketing team
  • Drift’s approach to using PPC for testing new markets/products
  • Some of the most successful SEO plays they’ve made recently

Enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe wherever you’re watching/listening to this!

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Our guest for this show:

Bill King, Acquisition Marketing Manager at Drift

Bill is a former online poker player, turned growth marketer who looks after acquisition marketing efforts for SEO & paid channels at Drift. He’s also worked at some other great tech companies such as Hubspot and Avid Exchange.

Key Takeaways:

  1. SaaS companies should really focus on building an authentic brand with their marketing as it makes the conversion process much easier.
  2. Try using PPC as a quick way to validate your hypothesis and test new marketing ideas.
  3. Consider building out a mini-app or small tool that can help your target customer whilst driving top of funnel traffic to your offering. For example, Drift created a video test and a mic testing tool to help promote their Drift Video product.

How Drift Approach SEO For New Product Launches Transcript

Please note: We edit the transcript below for a better reading experience.

Dylan: [00:00:07] Welcome to today’s episode of The SaaS Marketing Show. I am super excited to be joined today by Bill King, who looks after SEO and Paid Acquisition at Drift.

If, for any weird reason, any of you out there listening, watching, or reading this, don’t know too much about Drift, they are the world’s only conversational marketing platform.

In my opinion, one of the best SaaS companies on earth right now when it comes to actually marketing themselves. I’m really excited to have you here bill. Welcome to the show.

Bill: [00:00:33] Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Dylan: [00:00:35] Today we’re going to be talking about how you guys at Drift actually approach SEO for new product launches that you do.

This comes off the back of a LinkedIn post I saw from you last week, where you took a screenshot of some SEO traffic increasing pretty rapidly. There are two plays that you’ve made over the last six months that are performing very well for you guys. I’m excited to dive deep into that. Before we do that, let’s just talk a little bit about you, the team at Drift, and how things are structured.

On your LinkedIn profile, it mentions that you look after PPC and SEO and acquisition. Could you just break down for us what acquisition looks like at Drift and what the teams like, what you do on a day to day basis etc.?

Bill: [00:01:16] I joined almost a year ago. It will be a year on May 6th. Right before I joined, they kind of launched the traditional demand generation team. They had toyed around with it, a couple of different models. They did a growth team who owned first click all the way to active users, and then they also own lifecycle as well.

About three months before I joined, they decided to have a more kind of like traditional function for acquiring users. Our retention growth team works on lifecycle retention, features, usage, all that type of stuff. It’s allowed everybody to really specialize in certain areas of the things they do really, really well. And so, I joined the team was actually quite lean when I joined in terms of demand generation.

We were doing traditional kind of webinars, trade show type of traditional type of stuff. I was the first digital acquisition person. We had a girl named Sarah, who owned Drift for Drift. So she was the person building the actual bots, and she also owned conversion optimization.

The two of us together worked on the real big pillars of how you acquire users, the traffic, and then the conversion rate as well. In that time, the team has scaled up quite significantly.

So now I would say it’s more of a split between brand and demand, whereas when I first joined, it was a lot of creative content, like brand type of folks. So we’re kind of balancing the boat a little bit and yeah. Things have been crazy. We’re growing like a weed, and we’re actually hiring to. If you guys are listening, come on over and work for Drift, that will be great.

Dylan: [00:02:52] Thanks for sharing that. The reason I ask is I’m really interested to see how, as a company grows like you guys are. Because you guys have grown a lot recently. I was looking before we did this interview just at some top-level numbers around like fund raises that you guys have done.

I think the last one was in April of 2018 $60 million raise. That was the third time that you guys have raised money. I’m seeing Drift everywhere on LinkedIn and social specifically, too. That might be because I’m a big advocate of the brand. At Hey Digital, we’re a partner agency with Drift as well.

Whenever I’m looking at, okay which brands should we look at in terms of who are doing marketing well and creatively? Drift is always one of the top three that people look at, right? So, what’s it been like going through that growth because even with PPC or with SEO. They work together very well, but that’s the job of so many different people.

How do you structure that time? I know you said you have a split between brand and demand. I like that terminology too. I like that way of putting it.

Are you the sole person that’s managing all of the paid activities? Do you have multiple people within those kind of areas too, or what does that look like?

Bill: [00:04:02] Until three or four months ago, I was the only person doing all that stuff. They’ve had some other folks that they’ve worked with. We’ve worked with agencies in the past, and some other folks who have dabbled in certain areas and that stuff, but nobody kind of owned it. So, when I first started, I was the only person kind of doing acquisition.

We just hired Molly Clark, who’s fantastic. She came over from ZoomInfo. So the teams growing. We’re known as a really great brand company. There’s a lot more to that, I think than most. Most people they see the brand, and they see how we’re all kind of involved, and everybody’s out there all the time.

I can’t overstate how important it is from a performance marketing standpoint. If you are going to work on a brand that has no recognition in the market, your job is way harder. Right? That’s pretty clear. And it’s obvious, but the question is like, how do you go about that? Which one do you invest in first?

How do you approach that if you’re a founder? Those are the questions everybody is asking. So at the time when they were building Drift, actually I knew most of the folks that started the company because we worked together at a previous job. I went to do a startup in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then came back up here to join the team later on.

But at that time, they were kind of in the apex when everybody’s doing performance marketing, everybody’s doing PPC, everybody’s doing Facebook ads. Everybody’s doing all that stuff. And so if you think about it, if you step away from what you’re comfortable with and you think to yourself. Where’s the value in the marketplace?

Is it going to compete with someone for a quarter percent of that conversion rate, our click through rate from this PPC ad? Or is it, let’s go separate ourselves and create something different that has long term, tangible value that we can continue to build on. Everybody knows the brand, all that came together as obviously very strategically and they invested in marketing early.

I think a lot of teams, they wait until they have PM fit and people are kind of excited about it and then they’re, all right, let’s put marketing on top of that. But I think that they were strategic in the sense that they were, okay. How are we going to separate ourselves from the pack?

We can build an awesome product. We can do a bunch of performance marketing, but everybody does that. What’s something that can separate us and create a moat around this thing we’re building? Because if you think about brand, brand is like, it’s all the pieces. The thing that’s most exciting about Drift’s brand is it’s not just marketing.

We have a really great customer success and support team. The experience is awesome. The product is fantastic. The marketing and just the general tone. We try really hard to be relatable to people. And, all that together creates something really special. When you’re sitting there and you have this type of opportunity, you’re like, wow.

The brand is already well known. So now as a performance marketer, you sit back and you’re like, wow, this job’s gotta be kind of easy if you think about it. The really tough parts of those traction pieces are kind of already covered. And it’s just about you monetizing the easy to win stuff and then building these other modes around the tougher competitive spaces that you need to really grow fast.

I would say if you’re a founder out there and you’re thinking, “How do I think about building my team?” I would say, it’s probably pretty smart to get someone who’s thinking about the brand and stuff like that early on.

Especially nowadays where commodities are software. We’ve all got the same tools. We’re all reading the same content. It’s tough to find value out there. I think those things are very important to think about early on.

Dylan: [00:07:40] Yeah. I agree. That’s really valuable advice. Thank you for sharing that. Maybe this is more of me being a little bit like greedy, I guess, and asking some personal questions. But whenever we’re working with our customers, running their PPC campaigns for their SaaS companies.

We often have, as the companies continue to grow. There’s always this discussion around, “How do you measure the impact of a brand on PPC?” You’ll see the branded campaigns that are up and running. They’re always going to have really great performance metrics, right?

The cost per conversion are always low, etc. Some customers that we work with at the early points of launching branded campaigns have concerns around those. We answer those questions in various different ways. But for you guys, it must be a really interesting use case because the brand is so strong at Drift.

You said earlier that you kind of separate brand and demand, but how is that a difficult conversation for you when it comes to, let’s say, reporting or measuring success of either SEO or PPC? How does that affect things? Do you treat brand totally separately? How does the team look at those things at Drift?

Bill: [00:08:47] We all win together, that’s for sure. And I think, everybody has an understanding that if for us to win, everybody has to be really good at what they do, right? So the design has to be on point. The site structure has to be well done and we can’t be having the stuff go wrong, like go down and all the, like everything creates that halo effect over the brand.

Then it’s up to me and the other people who work in the demand gen team just to monetize that. Right. So if you’re thinking about dollars in dollars out the clear, and I think as like marketers in general, we’ve always been like, okay, well I can rely on this model. I know that if I do the CPC campaign within a certain percent of areas, this is the type of customer I’ll get.

Everybody can do that though. And so when you’re thinking about how do I create an advantage that’s super important. But I think the team is well aware that each person has a big critical role in how we all grow. The moves that they’ve made on building the team out are very intentional.

We have kind of traditional content. We have a ton of folks who work on video and brand and design and that isn’t because we just want to throw cash up the window. All these investments create this overarching feeling of when you interact with Drift and those have secondary benefits that you can measure.

You can see a look at just the general awareness and demand of your brand in general and how do people act on that. Then you start thinking a level below that, which is how many people are not just aware of Drift because it’s cool and they can learn about stuff, but what are our products’ names?

Are they increasing demand over time? Does that trickle down or is it just people know about us? So all those things are super important. There are great brands out there . One of the brands I admire a lot is Ahrefs. They not only build a brand, but then they teach you how to do your job with their tool and their content.

It’s not just empty investments. You’re creating this flywheel over time as you get these great experiences and eventually it builds up.

Dylan: [00:11:01] Yeah. I think that’s a super valuable point that a lot of people miss. We shouldn’t be doing content or any marketing activities just for the sake of doing content or marketing activities, right?

We should be creating valuable assets or things that are actually going to help an audience. I think sometimes people don’t know how to do that, so they’ll end up just creating a lead magnet or a piece of content for the sake of it. There are ways that you can structure your content to be useful, entertaining for people and still promote your product without it being an overly promotional piece of content. Ahrefs do a great job of doing that, and yeah, I think that’s really important.

Cool. So thanks for sharing. That’s really. Interesting to hear a bit more about the kind of inner workings of you guys and the team. Now I want to go straight into our topic for the show.

So as I said, I saw a post on LinkedIn from you a few days ago or last week now about how you guys are approaching SEO for new product launches. So the person that you shared was a little bit about the Drift video product and what you’re doing around that. Right. So maybe you could just give us a quick kind of rundown as to what that post is all about, how you’re approaching Drift video at the moment, and then we’ll go into some tactical things around SEO for product launches.

Bill: [00:12:18] Sure. Yeah. At the highest level, Drift itself is a brand, and has four critical pillars. We have the platform, which contains multiple products. We have our chat product and everybody knows that product. We have our email products, our automation product, which is technically a layer across all those products because it touches each aspect of it.

We also have a video product and that’s where the play that you saw me talking about came in. The core users of Drift are very specific people. It’s marketers and demand gen folks, performance marketing folks at SMB plus, but really like mid-market plus.

Those are the real core platform users. And then we’re building all these different kind of pillars around the brand. So the video product is kind of a new thing for us. And so we’re starting to build presence in the BDR, sales folks who are doing a lot of outreach. Now, I would consider video kind of like a startup within Drift, kind of like it has cross alignment with the chat product and some of those folks do use both, but right now it’s kind of launch in, figure out who is this right for, who’s willing to pay for it. We’re learning every time we acquire a net-new user for video. That value is actually super, super important because as we grow that flywheel of like net new users.

We’re trying to build a kind of a Loom style acquisition engine where after we acquire people, they invite others and because video you send it out, there’s that loop.

I think actually video is probably the most interesting because we’re still figuring out, is this its own thing. Or is it integrated deeply and people who start off using video, do they also use the platform? So as we’re learning a lot of these things, we’re starting to think about how we then invest to grow the product.

So if you look at video on its own, the average revenue per user is quite low. Now if you start thinking, okay, how many of those users can we then convert over to platform users and how does that affect the economics? That is a totally different discussion, but I don’t think we’re there yet for that to be concrete.

So what we did to kind of try to learn quickly, grow users without investing a ton of capital. Really what we’re trying to do is we’re not trying to sink a ton of cash in, acquire anybody possible, and then figure out the monetization later on. We’re trying to be thoughtful about how we grow the user base, about how we grow, the investments we put into it.

So what that does is that kind of limits to what you can actually do to actually go acquire users for that platform. And so when you have low, first year revenue products. You have to start thinking about ways that you can get users as cheaply as possible, but also as targeted as possible.

So, for new product launches that, I guess we’re going down the path of cause that’s the most relevant in the most recent kind of new launch that we’ve done. So for that one. It was more about, okay, let’s test paid. Let’s try to see if we can acquire some new users. We tried to get as low as we possibly could, and we’re like, eh, this is okay.

It’s not quite where we need it to be. So we started looking at what are some SEO plays we could make and who are the people we’re competing against and how are they getting traffic? I think that’s super important. If you’re launching a brand new product. Take a look at what they’re doing.

There’s tools out there you can see, you can take a look at what channels people get traffic from relatively. And then if you see that there’s a dominant channel, a good example is some of the competitors for us in video, they get a lot of their users from one or two channels, and then the network effects afterwards kick in after they get to a certain threshold.

So for video, what we’re trying to do is get as many high qualified users as cheap as possible, plus those kick in. So for SEO. For that specific channel it’s very low cost. It takes time to build, but once you build it up, then you have a pretty good idea of what areas you should be in. You can continue to build that over time, and that pays off quite a bit.

The other thing too is someday maybe our target for CAC might be a little bit higher and then we can go put paid on top. But we don’t want to build the user base just on paid because that’s a tricky situation to get into because once you turn it off, it’s off. Right. What we were starting to think about is, okay, if we can’t pay directly to get someone to sign up to use this, what are the things that we can build? What are the hypotheses we can say that that person would be looking for before they sign up?

So before someone knows about video, because actually Drift is well known, but the video product isn’t yet. We’re kind of building its own funnel to start with. The thinking there was, all right, we have to acquire people who are users of video. That’s number one. Number two, we want to get paying users.

We don’t want to just grow anybody on the platform, so we really want to get salespeople. More people who are in like BDR roles, who are doing outreach and who are sending cold emails and who are doing prospecting. That’s the person who’s going to hand over the money. And then there’s other scalable things just to grow the user base.

Because what happened was we started doing a lot of these plays just to get sales. Usually people would pay for it. That’s growing. That’s nice. But then after using it internally, a lot of us just send updates with this product, or our customer success team are sending videos to our customers explaining a product change or a feature that they could do or something like that.

We’re like, wait a second, there’s something here. Overall, our baseline play was, find the users who were willing to pay, build some funnels around that. And now we’re starting to think, okay, after realizing that there’s actually a lot of use cases here. There’s other use cases we can start to build.

There’s customer success. There is support. There’s a leadership type of presentations you can give and the chatbots, right next to the video. So there’s a lot of plays there. I guess this is a really long answer to what you’re asking, but basically what I’m saying is it started with the business model.

We limited the amount of channels that we thought were the highest pay off, and we doubled down on those things and so as we’re acquiring users, one of the things we built was a microphone test and a test for your webcam, video quality. Because the hypothesis was, what’s one thing?

How do we get people who are high enough intent that they would try the product, but large enough scale of traffic, this will be worth it for us. And so we’re doing keyword research and we’re like, wow, there’s actually some competitors who are doing similar things like this where they’re building these little apps to help people get more out of their video experience.

And so, not every person who clicks on that page is the core salesperson who would use it. And so that took some selling internally for me to explain why the strategy makes sense. It’s not a one to one relationship between all that, but the topic was large enough that I was like, let’s try it out.

And so obviously the conditions that we have right now have changed the market and more people are saying, using video, and so therefore more people are looking for ways to get better video experiences. And that’s where that project took off.

Dylan: [00:19:53] Yeah. I actually think that’s a really interesting point because I was going to ask you. You look at the competitors, you look at what their traffic channels are, you do some keyword research, you see what they’re driving traffic from, what their articles are like. How you can improve on those, et cetera. Then peeling back the layers a bit more and trying to get to that point where it’s like, okay, you understand these are the target user groups and these are target customers.

And then instead of just creating content for them that step before that you’re almost going back one more step to kind of reverse engineer. Okay, what’s the first thing they’re going to be looking for to then do that test and then sign up, instead of going straight for the trying to on a page that’s, video, sales video tools or something, which everybody else is.

I guess the interesting point is there’s not really a tool that can help you do that, right? That’s kind of a combination of keyword research, looking at other people, but then just your own team brainstorming and intelligence.

There’s no other way that you can do that, is that you just have to sit down together.

Bill: [00:21:00] I don’t think it’s magic. It’s digging into the people who love this, who are pumped about it. Okay. What you said about optimizing your page for a specific term. So we still do that, but what we do is we take a portfolio approach where I’m like, where is the big scale?

Maybe not so targeted things we can do. And then how do I counterbalance that with product page optimization? When you’re looking for video, you know, video selling software, we should be theoretically be there, but that is only going to grow so much. So how do we balance scale and targeting as well.

Dylan: [00:21:39] Yeah, for sure. That’s really interesting. Okay, cool. And then you said, you said obviously that the early stages of this, you’re trying to find that balance between, running paid campaigns, which are going to drive that traffic and get people here straight away, whereas the SEO is stuff that takes a little bit longer to ramp up, which makes a ton of sense.

Is that how you’re approaching a lot of different, whether it’s new products that you launched, campaigns that you’re running, like you’re always combining PPC and organic. Or how do you look at that?

I had someone on the show, his name was Nick from a company called LearnWorlds. He was on the first episode that we did.
He was talking about how the team at LearnWorlds used PPC to inform their content strategy and their content strategy to inform their PPC strategy. How do you begin in the role where it’s all of these things combined, how do you approach that? How do you use both of these different areas to continue to propel the business forward?

Bill: [00:22:35] I think I’m at an advantage by being in that, in this kind of blended role because it’s all about the data. Early on, you build a product, you have a hypothesis that something’s going to be interesting to people. There are a certain amount of people who are willing to pay for it.

If you work your way up from there, you’re at an advantage. If you don’t have that data and you’re searching around to find who’s willing to pay for it, what are the topics they’re interested in? You’re in a tough spot because you have to make many more bets before you figure out what works.

What we try to do is when we launch something brand new early on, it’s super important to just really look at the core users who are willing to pay for it and dig into that data. So a good example is for PPC. You could validate a hypothesis on paid like that because you can quickly get scale.

You can quickly get learnings and then you can take those people that you acquired and you can say, all right, these ones didn’t work. These topics were total crap and it was just fluff traffic. But this is interesting, what do we learn about these types of topics? Because you have the data to validate those ideas.

if you don’t, you’re just running around and spinning your wheels, right? So early on, I’ve made so many mistakes with this but make sure you have the data right. You don’t want to wait too long, but make sure you have the right stuff in place so that when you learn, you can go quick off that stuff.

With low revenue products, you can get in a really bad situation where if you burn too much cash just to build the product. Number one’s dangerous. Number two. You’re not sure if people actually really are pumped about it, right? Cause paid is, there’s something you kind of forced the initiative, right?

So if you’ve got SEO and you’ve got by, you know, all these other things that are working together, if those are working, there’s probably something there. And so if you dig in the layers of what’s working on those channels, and then you’re, okay, I know with reasonable certainty that if I spend money with these types of people, I’m going to get that cash back.

To me, that’s super important because I think the old school, grow as fast as possible and then figure it out later. I think that’s kind of dying. I just think a lot of people are smartening up about that stuff.

Dylan: [00:24:43] Yeah. This is great if you can acquire a ton of users or customers really quickly, but if you can’t keep them around, if you can’t build a brand and encourage the reason so many people love Drift, like you said, is yes, you have a great product, but there’s so much more behind the great product and products that you have.

Even us working with the partner team, for example, the whole experience is just fantastic. When we’re using Drift itself, the customer support, there’s people always there all the time who always get back so fast. So there’s so many different elements.

I think that’s something that, especially any early stage SaaS marketers or founders that are listening to this all the time they’re looking for. Right, okay. Well, it says one or two channels I can quickly experiment with and that’s fine.

I know we’ve talked about a couple of plays that you guys are doing to approach like SEO or PPC for a new product launch, and that’s fine, but I think it’s also really important to cover, as you said at the beginning. These things work, but they work so much better when you have a blended strategy around everything else.

When you’re thinking about brand, when you’re building a community, when you’re making sure the product is good, all of those things lead to better conversions in any of the other marketing experiments and actions that you’re taking.

I think that’s something that a lot of people miss sometimes.

Bill: [00:26:02] The beautiful part about being when you market to marketers is they have a strong voice and they’re willing to let people know so that can work for you or against you. So make sure you have the things together.

If people are willing to, you know, if you want to live off the fruits of people compounding your story, we’ll make sure you have it right because if you don’t, then it can work the other way.

Dylan: [00:26:25] Yeah, totally. Okay, cool. So just to kind of recap some of what you said. If I was to do one takeaway from this in terms of, okay, what can someone do to approach SEO for either a new product launch or just their SaaS business that they’re marketing or building at the moment?

I actually think that one of the tactics that you shared that’s really valuable is not just looking at all of the traditional SEO or PPC activities that people take, but taking a step further back and thinking, okay, before my prospect or target customer would sign up to our platform. Don’t think about what they would do before that, but think about what they would do two steps before that.

So for you guys, it was identifying, okay, we have this video product and maybe if we create a piece of content around a microphone, audio quality tests, we know that something that’s going to drive a lot of traffic, kind of two stages before purchasing. Same with the webcam, video quality test. And I think that is actually something that a lot of people could think about.

Depending on what their software is, think about what kind of, it doesn’t have to be a microsite, but I’ve seen people have success with that too. Like building sister sites or micro sites to help, build virality and then drive traffic to that platform. But think about what, what else can you do that supplements your product?

I think that’s one really good strategy that you talked about amongst everything else but aside from that what is one other thing that you guys are doing right now that you’re really excited about and whether it’s SEO, PPC, marketing. Is there one quick tip that you could share with people that you’re seeing good results from currently?

Bill: [00:27:52] Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, I can tell you one thing I’m really excited about. So we launched this new AI product and I think a lot of people like hear that word and they have a different reactions to it. But this is a true, like we build a model from the ground up.

It’s not a shared model across all your different chat conversations. It’s literally we have an engineer who works with you and analyzes your conversations and builds a custom model and that’s not for everybody yet. It’s for a lot of the larger companies who have a lot of conversation volume and this and that.

But like, right now it’s in its infancy and someday there could be a day where you are able to automate your entire cell phone? That’s the vision we’re trying to do is go down this path where there’s no discernible difference between your best sales rep who’s on your website and the spot.

That’s what we’re trying to do. So, if we get there, I think the exciting thing about that is that frees up marketers and sales and businesses to kind of do more exciting stuff. And what I’m pumped about, a lot of the stuff that’s going on in the world is, I think, so I was, we did a webinar with SEMrush last week.

And so we were talking about SERP features and featured snippets and all this stuff. A lot of people ask me all the time. Hey, you guys, you guys have so many people in the content, design and video and audio. I think that used to be a nice to have. I think those days are coming to a close where this whole hire an army of like content people.

We’re just going to sit there and like publish away SEO articles. I think those days are dying. So I think if you look at a lot of the SERPs out there, it’s YouTube videos and podcasts are starting to get infused. And it’s really what that means is people want to be able to pick a medium that they want, that’s kind of right for them.

So I would say, don’t think about that as brand anymore. In order for you to get access to the people that you want to market to, the way that they consume content has been changing for a while. And I think now, as Google is helping marketers be able to surface those things better. It’s really important for you to start thinking about diversification in doubling down on the things that work.

Go do a bunch of different things, validate if it works, and then double down on those types of things. I think these rich media formats are the future. I really do. A lot of the data supports that as well. We’re trying to grow our YouTube channel, we’ve got several podcasts.

We’ve got our growth podcasts, we go CMO podcasts or product podcasts, all over the place and we’re growing those in there. They’re growing every day. It’s not overnight, but we know that these bets are not something we’re going to win right away, but we know it’s going to pay off in the long run.

I think it’s super important to have a mindset of experimentation and understanding coming up, oncoming trends because not that long ago it just didn’t exist. And people were still using forums and this wasn’t a thing. So just have context. This was only three, four years ago.

Right. So, as marketers, I think it’s so important to start thinking about the changes in consumer consumption in the preferences they have, and just really our job as grown people is reducing friction and increasing value. So if you can just reduce friction, increased value. So whether that’s your content product or if it’s your actual product.

Start thinking about the ways that people are changing. Because I think pretty soon, a lot of this text-based format is going to not be the preferred medium. That’s one thing that we’re going hard on this year.

Dylan: [00:31:31] That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s exactly how I’m thinking about things too.

And it’s really good to hear like getting that validation, I guess. Right? Cause you say, the market is changing as to what people want to consume. There are so many different options out there right now. And I think traditionally within SaaS, SaaS marketers, it’s very easy to just stick to the activities that have always worked, right?

And the SEO activities or content activities, these, the webinars in the same way that we’ve always done them and just drive and directed them in the same way that we’ve always done. I think, as you say, a way things can change so much in such a short period of time. And I think if you start to leverage these things now, there’s never going to be a negative to it.

Right. As you said, the cycles. If you start a podcast now or you start creating more video now, or you start whatever it might be, if you start doing that now, you’re never gonna regret that at any point. It’s always a good building block for something.

Bill: [00:32:24] Yeah. That’s underlying like curiosity.

You should be willing to make a ton of bets that have low investments, but potentially high payoff. Right? You could do this podcast for a year, and maybe 1,000 people listen to it through the course of the year. That’s tough. But if you really understand the people and the changing preferences, you’ll know that’s okay.

Keep doing it and keep executing because someday that’s going to happen. And you don’t want to wait until later on. So, because that’s what people with big budgets, that’s what they can do. They can just turn on the switch and switch things over. So, I think it’s really important to stay curious about stuff.

Dylan: [00:33:03] Yeah, for sure. Bill, thank you so much for sharing all of those insights about Drift, about what you guys are working on. It’s been really great chatting to you, so yeah, thanks. I really appreciate it.

Bill: [00:33:12] Yeah, my pleasure.

Celia Yarwood
Co-Founder @ Hey Digital. Design ninja, crystal lover and stationery nerd.

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