Guerrilla marketing suite

Should tweet, right? Okay. I don't know if we're ready. It says 1.30, so I guess we're ready. I hear a lot of plates in the kitchen and everything, but I don't know if we should start. Do you think so? I can't hear you. Should we start? Yay, good, awesome. I'm going to do a little talk on a guerrilla marketing suite. Peter from Umbraco, he called me up and said, Adam, can you do something called guerrilla marketing suite? And I was like, of course I can do that. So let's try that. The whole idea of a guerrilla marketing suite is to use some readily available tools that are inexpensive and easy to implement and spending hours and hours on end and heaps of cash on big tooling. But I will go through some big tooling because we've tried some of it and some is good, some is bad. And then I'll get into the guerrilla thing. But first, they said it was okay to put in one slide about the company. So I'll do that after I turn on my clicker. Okay. So, we do websites like most of you guys. We're about 140 people, most of them geeks, and we do 70% Umbraco. So that's basically it. Other than that, we just started dating some guys in Spain and we like Spanish, so that's good. They're called Le Cuati or the makers of... Le Grid, as they call it. Or Antoine, one of them does, anyway. But yeah, so that's us as well. And that's great. I think we actually met at Code Garden, so it's a story of company love at Code Garden that I'm telling. Anyway, guerrilla. I actually had to Google this thing because what is the correct definition of guerrilla? And as you can see, it's a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically amongst larger regular foes. And that's what I'm going to try to do today. Not fight, but... Talking marketing suites, my definition of a marketing suite is a thing that can connect and understand customer needs and intentions, if I needed to put it very simply. Okay. So that is the definition. And some base principles of a marketing suite, in my mind, is to be able to identify a person, a user, a client, a customer, when they interact with us. And interaction, that can be behavior, that means tracking and intelligence on what they do. These suites should also be able to send some kind of message. Be able to post stuff on social media or websites or change stuff, send emails and manage that. With everything we do, we want to measure because what gets measured gets managed. So, of course, we also need some kind of analytics. We need some kind of numbers that will give us basic return on investment. Does it make sense? Does it make sense to spend X amount of cash doing Facebook posts, for instance? So this is what we'll be building. But first, I'm going to look at some other tools. A couple of cases I'm going to run through very quickly just to give you an idea of some of the other tools that are out there that are more expensive. One of them is Clerk.io that we use on web. I will take it that's a pharmacy. And they would like to do search that is based off of your needs. So if you have a headache like I have right now because of all the Belgian beer I had yesterday, I would go to the site and search for, I have a headache, please fix it. And they will amend it. And they will do suggestions off of that. So the key takeaway for Clerk, anyways, and our experience with that is for search, it's really good. And it's good for product recognition. So, yes, it does all kinds of other things as well. We haven't looked into email and that much recommendations in Clerk, even though it does work very well. And it is implemented in that project. Another tool we've been playing around with is Rich Relevance. That also does recommendations based off of user behavior. Based off of what you've done. What you've searched for, what you click on, different campaigns. And we used it on Power and other sites within a client of ours called Expert. They have different brands. And what's really nice about Rich Relevance is it will actually track user behavior on different sites and accumulate it. So if you go to one of their brands and search for refrigerators and then you turn up at the other site as a new visitor, it will show you refrigerators. Kind of annoying if you were going for headphones, but good if you're in the market for a new refrigerator. So that's the thing with Rich Relevance. It will share cookies across domains. But what we use it mainly for is to do these different rows of products and do whatever fits the visitor or add whatever fits their behavior and their search history. And all of that is supplied by Rich Relevance. So we didn't really have to code a lot. And that was awesome. They have a ton of tooling for doing personalized search and discovery and content personalization, product personalization. And it works really well. I would recommend keeping an eye on performance for some of the queries that you make if you dive into Rich Relevance. If you add a lot of parameters you want to track, then make sure you queue it. Otherwise you make something that's a little bit slow. Another tool we looked at is Raptor. That's actually a Danish thing. We use it for some bookstores, the ones listed up there. And it does the same thing. And that's good as well. But what it does is it will look at behavior. And what we've done in this case is married it with something called Hey Loyalty, which is a customer club that's basically like MailChimp but different, where they will put suggestions in emails and have your points you collect when you buy stuff, like on any other e-commerce site. But instead of coding it, we use this. So kind of an awesome tool. So why so many different tools? That's actually because of client demand. Because many of these vendors, they have approached our clients and said, Hey, our tool is the best in the world. It will take over everything. It might be and it might do. But it was actually client demand that said, Okay, we want to try Raptor or we want to go with Clerk.io. So that's good and challenging. And we like testing out different things and implementing different things and see what works. Talking tooling, then there's also this. Ooh, Sitecore. Which many of you may meet in your daily work is a client that has heard of the Sitecore experience manager and all that jazz they have. And they are trying to own the experience instead of building a CMS. I think they do brilliant work. The trouble is that no one knows how to operate it. Okay. Or very few do. So, yeah. I could talk about that the whole day. So I'm not going to do that. This is from Bracco country. So I'm just going to mention two things to other services. Now we're in the throw bus services and words after this presentation. HubSpot. I think it's annoying that web agency are able to create that much hype and buzz. They make a lot of noise around basic CMS product and CRM product that is tied together, but it works brilliantly. Just don't buy their blog thing. Tell your clients that. And then another one I would pay attention to is Falcon Social. They changed their name to Falcon IO because that's the thing you do these days I guess. We of course also bought Novocell.io, not using it for anything. Don't worry. We're not I-O-ing. But yeah, Falcon, they did a lot of social media management for Carlsberg and things like that. And they're moving more into the tracking and behavior stuff on websites as well. And that's kind of awesome, I think. Yeah. At our own company, we use something very simple. We use something called LeadScore app. What it does is it looks at different users that might turn up at our website, and then it tries to identify them. So whenever they sign up for a seminar or the newsletter or type in a contact form, we will then get some info off of them that we can use. So it will score leads. It might not show very good up here, but what you see down here, is different people that have a different lead score. So it will then accumulate different clicks and different interactions they have, and that score is then put on the person. So Emil Rasmussen right here, he has a pretty high score. He's a colleague of mine. That might be why he has a very high score, because he's clicked on everything. But the whole idea of this lead scoring is on different pages throughout your website, you on path, actually. You set a score, and whenever a person has visited X number of pages within a specific category, they'll get a score, and then they'll pop up and say, hey, you might want to call Bob, because he scored high in Umbraco. Okay, we'll call Bob. So, yeah. Another thing we use is Footprint. It's a package we did last year, demoed last year. We use that for behavioral targeting as well, and we use it for doing variants. So, for instance, of our website, here is a demo where we have, it works like Vorto, where it creates these tabs within Umbraco. So if you have things that you want to vary on your site, you can then have these tabs and go in and do a variant for a different segment. So in this case, we have a segment called Marketing Automation Seminar that has a different title in here. So it's very basic, but kind of what you want to do is, is interchange a couple of elements for different purposes. So if we know people originate from our newsletter, then we might not want to show them the newsletter sign-up box. We could ask them to like us on some kind of social media platform instead. It sounds basic, but it is, and that's what that tool does. This is an example where the left one is the default or the regular site, and then we're in a segment here. This is just a simple demo I did where you change some text. Anyone can do that. But the whole point is, many of these things are dead simple to do. We just don't do them. And we've been able to do these things, create variants of content, create variants of the site for, yeah, well, ever since the Internet was born, ever since Tim Berners-Lee, he started doing that, HTML stuff. And if we're talking Gorilla, you can't do it in a different way. This is beneath our daughter company. They're like the design part of our company. They don't like CMSs and Umbraco and stuff like that when they do their own little website. So they just hard-code it in HTML. Yay. One big landing page. But what they do is they set a simple cookie. That counts up. And whenever that cookie reaches a different value, they will put in another text. So when you visit it three times, they'll say, hey, do you want coffee soon? And if you've been there ten times, they'll say, hey, come on, call us. This is getting embarrassing. You should call us now. And what they did is they used telemetrics. So that phone number is a special one that's only on that thing. So they're actually tracking. If it works, it works. If the phone number thing works. So we have right now, I think, eight to ten different phone numbers that we use on different places in different campaigns and different things just for kicks to see if it works. But it does. Yeah. I'm going to dive a little bit into what the clients are seeing around the web. And I found this brilliant thing. I'm going to. Oh, it's there. Oh, it's there. This is Experian showing their marketing suite. It's a minute and a half, but, yeah, enjoy the show. All right. I really want to go. Oh, I really want to go. I want to do, do, do, do. Yeah, we got the picture. This is the stuff that our clients see. So when they turn up at our office, they'll go, yeah, I saw this video. I can become a superhero of marketing. I just have to buy this tool. And then everything will be awesome, like the Lego movie. But that's not quite what happens. They do not turn into a superhero overnight that are able to post everything everywhere easily. They're like, can we just have this installed? And then we've heard of this term called marketing automation. And then we push a button and then we lean back and just homer it. So that's what we're met with. They want this tool. They want this tooling. But in many, many cases, they just really have no clue how much effort it takes on their part to do three variants of all texts, to do different newsletters with different texts in it, to handle a ton of different campaigns for different audiences. So the... Lean back homer thing is not what you get with marketing automation. So I recommend that you tell your clients this or show them this photo and say, this is not what's going to happen. You're going to be crazy busy if you do this. And then they go, okay, but I've heard that was the best tool out there. Yeah, there are many. This is Chief Matek or what it's called. He does this annually. A guy that apparently installed... He sells all of this and looks at it. I don't know. But it just goes to say that there is no holy grail. There is no one tool that will revolutionize everything, that will make everything work. So what we try to do is do some hard work and be simple about it. And I'll show you in a minute. One thing I think we tend to forget as developers, as geeks, is that there are humans behind all this data that we look at. We saw some names before in LeadScore app. And in many cases, we just see pie charts and graphs in Google Analytics and other tools. But remember that every click is a human. And remember that they have a goal. They have something they want to achieve with their presence on your site or your client's site. And we try to educate our clients. Some of them have last year figured out that there is this new thing called a marketing architect. Because you need to be an architect in order to tie all this together. So we have some marketing architects that visit our office and they go, Yeah, we saw the video and we would really like a Bentley Continental GT. Can we have that? And we go, do you really need a Bentley Continental GT? In order to drive down to the store to get groceries? That's kind of expensive. So we figure out this is what most people ask for. What they really need is more like a Passat, like a Volkswagen. But the thing is what they're actually ready for is more like a Hyundai i10. Something small that can do the job. So we'll try to bridge the gap. And... What we try to do is kill all that buzz that we see. Kill all these videos with some reasoning. And say, try to get to the core of this and figure out what you want to do with your website. So in this example I'm going to show you in a minute, they have seen all these crazy tools that could do all kinds of things. But what they really needed was to handle some leads to follow up on them. Maybe do a little bit of retargeting. Maybe export some of those email addresses and do Facebook campaigns off of them. Manage some status on a customer. Where is the customer from they maybe got an offer to when are they ready to buy. And then they want to segment their emails into two to three segments. So they want to send stuff to people that have already visited them and know who they are. And new potential clients. And then they want to see if it works. And they would like to see it every day on a dashboard. So that's what we concocted it down to. After they showed us all kinds of crazy tools. Or great tools. But they're just not ready for them. They're more like in the business for a hammer. So that's what we're trying to do. And the client that I'm going to show you stuff from is... They're called Sea Rangers. They have these two crazy fast rip boats. They sail around. They're called Aarhus. And they do team building exercises and stuff like that. So they're in the business of selling to businesses. That's B2B. So they need to manage leads and manage relationships. Their customer journey or their funnel looks much like this. They have a website. They get some traffic from that via Facebook. And then they have some people that call them up. The guys that call them typically will ask them to go look at the website after that. What they do then is they hope that they turn into a lead. They're registered as a lead. And then they're put into their CRM. Then if they buy something they go on a tour on the boats. And after that we would like to go on a new trip. So we try to repeat the process. That's their business. It's very simple. And that's what they want to turn up to optimize. So the issue here is they have limited budgets. It's a very small company. They have limited manpower. They don't even have, until half a year ago, they didn't even have a person in charge of marketing. They just had these guys that were good at sailing boats and telling stories about the sea and sea monsters and stuff like that. And the city of Aarhus. So... And there is no IT person. There is no one that knows anything about coding or setting up platforms or even setting up email addresses. They need help with everything. So they're good at their boats. They're good at team building. They're good at the bay area. So their current setup is mostly going out to the bay, catching crabs with people and putting them in pots and doing Viking stew. They also have MailChimp. They have Podio and WordPress, by the way. So we took that into account. I said, okay, we don't want to throw out MailChimp because you just learned how to use that. We don't want to throw out Podio, which they use for managing their CRM. And, yeah, we do want to throw out WordPress because it gets hacked all the time. So, yeah. And it is actually hacked right now. So if you go to searangers.dk, you might know. It's not. So let's go into the guerrilla marketing suite. First, we need to re-identify people. We need to be able to put them in segments. And prerequisite of that is to be able to identify a person when they revisit. So what we did, we took our footprint plugin and married it to MailChimp. The footprint plugin is very simple in that regard. It just makes a cookie with a visitor ID. There are many ways to do that. Many platforms do this. The before-mentioned platforms, all of them do this. There are tons of evil ways of setting cookies like EverCookie, if you've heard of that. We don't do that. We just do plain old cookies. So we set a visitor ID. And then within MailChimp, we go in and add a merge property on all our subscribers with a visitor ID. We don't want it visible. That's a thing you need to tick off that thing. Otherwise, it will show a visitor ID that they can enter if they use a basic MailChimp sign-up form. We also add a bunch of other things. But this is the most important thing. What we do is then in the sign-up form, we make sure the visitor ID is there as well. We could do it behind the scenes. But it's already readily available in the cookies. So it was pretty easy to add. And then what we do is we send some email. Not with pigeons, but with MailChimp. I should have put a messenger bag monkey up there instead. I see that now. Yeah. So what we get is we get these inbound links. As you see up there, there's a regular Google Analytics tracking with the source, newsletter, campaign, yada, yada. And then there is a visitor ID. So all we need to do really to re-identify this user at this point in time is to set it within footprint. So that is footprint current visitor set ID. And that means we can also track across devices. So if we know who the person is when they signed up on desktop, then we will be able to retrack them on other devices afterwards. There is a catch. If someone were to forward this newsletter to another person and they were to click on the links, they would be identified as this other person. So it's not exact science. You need to remember that. But if we just disable forwarding in email, please, that would be nice. No. So what we do, we can then create a segment within footprint. In this case, it's just very, very simple. It's a demo of how to add a segment that will catch people from the newsletter. But I could use a lot of other queries to do that. But this could be the way to go. The next thing that they want to do is to segment their newsletters into three different groups. So they have potential clients, existing clients, and business partners. This is not implemented yet. But I recommend that you use groups for something like this. Mailchimp also has a feature called segments. But that's more for their tracking purposes. And it's more built into their platform. So if you mess around in there, you might end up with some broken segments. Because they try to figure out what city people are in and how often they open and stuff like that. So they're more like their segmenting engines. So if you want to do this guerrilla-ness, I recommend the group. I recommend the groups. Yep. For storing all this data, there are a bunch of different services. One could use segment astronomer or customer I.O. In this case, we have customer I.O. behind the scenes. I'm going to show you a screenshot of astronomer and how to use that. This is their basic identify endpoint in there. That's funny. I wrote astronomer up there and then it's the segment API. But don't worry because they share the same API. They call it analytics.js. So you can switch between those two services rather easily. But the whole idea is that you want to identify users. You give them some traits. There's an email address, a name, an industry, whatever you have. Then you can add a bunch of other traits to them. All in order to try to re-identify and identify a user. So if you want to do stuff like that and you're into data science, I really recommend looking at these guys. Yes? This is customer I.O. that we've been playing around with on our own website to try and see how that works. What it gives you is a base profile of all visitors. And you can see recent activity. For instance, I know this person that I've blacked out attended a seminar at our company and they're on our newsletter. So I might want to use that for something clever. You can imagine the possibilities. But anyway, yeah. Back to SeaRangers. They have Podio. Podio is like Umbraco, dog types, just way immensely stupider. Because it caters to everyone. So you can build your own entities and entries within Podio by drag and dropping these different field types. So what SeaRangers has done themselves actually, with a little bit of help, is to build up their thing. Now this is in Danish. And the one on the top, that is the company relations. So there is a company contact within it. And what we're trying to do here is do a tour. So if you want to do a tour, you need to fill out these blanks. So what we do is build up their CRM data. And we want it formatted in this specific way. What we can then do is use their API hooks to talk to this. And here are the JSON values out there. So what we want to do really is whenever a person, or in most cases a company contacts SeaRangers, they want a trip on the bay, we want to do a customized page in Umbraco where they can go and see a summary of the trip and the agreement and start times and stuff like that. So all these things, we want to take some of that info and put into the website. So they can just send the link to the client and say, hey, this is what we agreed upon. Hey, let's go boating. So that's the whole idea. So whenever they add a trip, so we're going spearfishing with the company. So this is what we look like within their CRM. It's pretty basic. There are a bunch of different other things down there. But we know that on the 28th of August, we're going spearfishing. This is basically the stuff that we want to put into the website that we want to be able to see as a client. So over in Umbraco country, they have on their new site that's not ready yet, they have the contact info that's copied from Podio put into a base contact info field. They have some notes that are internal for them. They then have the schedule, what's agreed on. The guide is assigned and the captain is assigned. So when they send this link to us, we can see, hey, this is a captain that's going to, Morten is going to drive the boat and Sine is going to be telling us about the bay. So yeah. And then there are some more info, basic text page stuff that we put in there. So they can make a nice page that's custom for us or for their clients. Other things that, after that, what they would really like is people to see when these pages are visited because these are in many cases descriptions of what you may want to buy. So the thing they want to do is get notifications when people end up on these pages and when they interact with them. So we've not done this yet. We use Slack extensively internally. But it would be rather easy to set up a connection between Slack and all these other services because, again, it's just an identifier. We're tracking some behavior on a page and we know this page was sent out to a certain amount of people. So now we know, hey, John saw the page with his offer on it, so you might want to call him. So yeah. Another thing we haven't done yet is set up a dashboard for them. This is our own from the office. That does all kinds of numbers. And they're all green. Yay, that's good. I think they manipulate them a little bit because it's in our front office so when clients visit, everything is green. So I think our marketing people are just messing with them. I don't know. Can't be green always, can it? Anyway, this is real-time data and that's what they want as well. They want to know how many offers do we have out, what's our cash flow, do we have any places where we need to call some clients because the boats are not sailing next weekend. That's a bad thing. We need to make money. So yeah. So basically the Gorilla setup is MailChimp because they already had it, Podio because they already had it, and then Footprint to tie everything together. And what we haven't done yet is put some Gecko board and some Slack in there. But that's going to happen. So yeah. That's that. But when we talk customer experience and we talk all these things, we must not forget the experience outside of our scope, outside of what we can take care of. So in many cases, we see that we come to a point where we've optimized the digital experience a lot. But then when you get on the boat, it's the wrong guide or he doesn't know who the company is and so on. I'm not saying that it's like that at SeaRangers, but it could be. And I think as companies, it's our obligation to try to tackle that a bit as well to help the other ends of the customer journey meet with the stuff we do. So we try to ask a lot of questions like, okay, we set up a system that will notify John when new clients visit the website. What does John do? Oh, he just created a filter in his email client and it goes there and it dies. That's not good. Let's talk to John about this. He needs to call these people. Oh, good. Let's follow up on that and get some tracking on there. It's called Gorilla. And Google suggested this as the first image. I don't know if you've seen it. It's a selfie monkey. And so I had to include it in the presentation. But up there is the logo of RunScope. I don't know if you're familiar with RunScope. It's basically a thing that will look at all transactions that goes through or all traffic that goes through