I speak with Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled. Will and his team have grown Distilled into a hugely reputable SEO firm. In this episode we discuss how they have done that through building their network over time, having a low entry point to their brand through DistilledU (their training site) and their global conference Search Love. There is also a lot of discussion around content marketing as well. This is a fascinating episode that touches on most parts of marketing.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Remember that marketing isn’t just advertising, isn’t just promotion. There are five Ps, or a number of Ps, depending which exact school of thought you subscribe to, but it’s everything. It’s the price, it’s the product, it’s the positioning, and it’s not just the promotion, and I think too often we see people thinking that marketing is something you can bolt on afterwards, whereas actually the word “marketing” comes from understanding the market, and that’s a fundamental place to start.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
I’m gonna start with the book I wish I had read five or 10 years earlier in my career. This is a very actionable tip-based thing. It’s called Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It’s written by an author called Patrick Lencioni. He’s excellent. You should read his other stuff as well, but Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a short read. You’ll read it in a couple of hours. It’s a parable, basically. It’s a very easy read. It’s the parable of the management team, but I think it applies to every team member, whether you’re a leader of a team, leader of a company, or just a team member, an individual contributor.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
There’s lots of things that I guess are in pretty much everybody’s toolset, but the one that is becoming increasingly invaluable is HubSpot. We don’t use the CMS, it doesn’t power our website, but we use the CRM, the email marketing, the analytics, that kind of closed loop marketing automation system. There are other things that do a similar thing, but I think if you’re in B2B, if you generate leads and then you sell on things, you need something that connects up your sales system, your CRM system, with your marketing system, and we’ve had it for a couple of years now, and it’s quite revolutionary in how we approach that.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
There are two campaigns that spring to mind. One is for the whisky Laphroaig, so love my whisky. Laphroaig is one of my favorites, and I remember trying it for the first time because of a magazine ad, which was …These days they run it with the hashtag #opinionswelcome. I don’t remember the exact details of the ad, but the gist of it was Laphroaig tastes like the smell of a burning hospital. Sorry.
There’s another one. You see the Patek Philippe ads for super expensive watches, you know, the watches that cost, what, I don’t know, 25 grand, 50 grand. The campaign that is you don’t own a Patek Philippe, you just look after it for the next generation, and I’m not in the market for a watch that costs tens of thousands of pounds, and yet I remember that ad, and I imagine it was super effective for them.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
I am a ridiculous West Wing geek. There’s a podcast called West Wing Weekly, which is a podcaster called Hrishikesh Hirway, and one of the actors of the show, Joshua Malina, who played Will Bailey on the show, and basically they’re watching an episode a week, working all the way through all seven series of The West Wing, and they just talk about it in excruciating detail, and if you haven’t seen The West Wing, watch The West Wing. If you have seen The West Wing and you think it’s fine, don’t listen to this podcast, but if you watched The West Wing and it changed your life, start at the beginning of The West Wing Weekly.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled, an online marketing agency. Will founded Distilled in 2005 with Duncan Morris. They’ve grown over the last 11 years, and now have offices in London, New York, and Seattle. As well as providing their expert marketing services to brands, they run a conference called SearchLove, and an online university called Distilled U. I’m looking forward to finding out how Will and his team have grown their agency, and the strategies they’ve used, so let’s dive right in.
How you doing today, Will?
Will Critchlow:
I’m doing very well, thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me on the show.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, you’re very welcome. It’s lovely to have you here.
Will Critchlow:
Thank you.
Matt Byrom:
To kick this off for our listeners, tell us a bit more about Distilled and what you do.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, so as you said, we’ve been doing it a little while now. We actually got started in 2005, so it feels like a lifetime ago that we got started, before … You know, I wasn’t married back then, didn’t have kids, whatever else, and we started out building websites, and quickly discovered that the biggest challenge our clients had was about getting visibility of those sites, getting people to visit them, and search was really the only game in town back in 2005, 2006, and so we started helping them with that, and the rest became history. I’m sure we’ll dive into some of the details, but we built a partnership with SEOmoz, I think they were back there, Moz, and ended up opening an office up in Seattle.
Matt Byrom:
Oh, so that’s the reason for the office over there, because you partnered with Moz.
Will Critchlow:
It is, yeah, absolutely. If you can remember the internet before Twitter, a lot of what now happens on social media used to happen in forums and blog comments and [crosstalk 00:02:40].
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Will Critchlow:
I wasted, spent, invested an awful lot of time in the comments on the SEOmoz blog, and got to know a whole bunch of, honestly, lifelong friends, people that I’ve subsequently met in person. Some of them I’ve still never met, but still chat to on Twitter and the like, and I felt we all learned together. You know, we were bouncing ideas off each other and building stuff out together, and yeah, out of that, got to know the team over at what is now Moz, that ultimately led to us opening an office there. Following year, opened up in New York, and then, as you mentioned, started running conferences, running Distilled U, all that stuff, and it’s been quite a journey.
The most recent thing that we’re working on is SEO split testing, so we built an SEO split platform called the Optimization Delivery Network, ODM, and that’s enterprise SaaS, so it’s a software product, and fits very neatly alongside our consulting, so we offer the software or we offer the software as a managed service where we can help our clients run it as well. Yeah, so it’s always new things, always keeping us busy.
Matt Byrom:
That’s very cool, so effectively, to distill that, you, no pun intended, actually, you started in web design, specialized into SEO, and then now you’re sort of developing software products, I guess. You’re going to move into the SaaS industry. Would that be right?
Will Critchlow:
I mean, yeah. That’s currently, what, I don’t know, 10% of our revenue, something like that, but obviously a growing part, and we do a lot of … The majority of our work is still just client work, and it’s everything that SEO has become, really. I think we still … We can probably dive into this a little deeper, as well, but we were chatting in the office the other day about how, for us, search has been a pragmatic choice rather than a dogmatic one, so yes, we’re search geeks, but really the reason that we do so much search stuff is because it’s effective and because it remains the way that the majority of people find most of our clients’ websites, you know, and buy from them and whatever else they need to do, and so we broadened the service set.
These days, we do obviously still do technical SEO consulting and the like, but we spend a lot of time on analytics, we have a creative content team, we do digital PR and outreach. A lot of it tends to funnel back to search, but it’s also great and fun when we get to push the boundaries out and do more innovative things as well.
Matt Byrom:
How will you work with clients? Will you speak with them and see what they need to really make an effective strategy to help them, or will you specifically try and, I guess, fit your services around those companies? What would be a normal engagement for you?
Will Critchlow:
It tends to be pretty consultative. I came from a management consulting background, and it’s funny how you end up shaping companies in your … maybe not in your own image, but around your own experience, and there’s a lot of things that come from that consulting world that have carried over, so you know, our team’s job titles are all consultant. For example, you know, we have consultants, video consultants, principle consultants, and we do think of it that way, so yeah, I mean, obs on occasion clients will come to us and say, “Look, we’re doing a https migration, and can you just literally give us the defined set of services that we need around that?” That’s fine, but our bread and butter is client comes to us with objectives, or client comes to us with, “What do you think we can achieve, and what can we do here?” We’re looking at that in a pretty consultative way.
Matt Byrom:
Will your consultants be the people that actually just give advice, and then you’ve got over people that will actually do the implementation, or will the client do the implementation? How does that work for you?
Will Critchlow:
It does vary. I mean, our consultants do get hands on. It’s not just a pure advice-giving role, but yeah, so it totally varies on the size and scale of the client, their own resources. This stuff is built up for whatever the client needs, so we have some cases, especially where our software is in the mix, where for a smaller operation, we might literally be making changes to their website. Other cases, our output is a presentation or a set of recommendations, or even tickets in their bug tracking system, right, where in some cases we’re story owners in a agile process, and we’re interacting with their engineering team.
It can be quite a wide range of actual delivery. The specialists we have tend to be on the creative side, so we don’t ask our consultants to be graphic designers, for example. We have a creative team. When we’re producing content, especially kind of bigger set piece hero-type content, that is a dedicated specialist team at our end, delivering that work.
Matt Byrom:
Okay, so there’ll be multiple different teams working with each client, I guess, from your point of view.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
That’s very cool. Great to learn a bit more about your business. Tell me a bit more about how your marketing strategy works. How has that evolved over team, and where do you find yourself now?
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, so actually going back to the beginning is perhaps the best place to start on it. When Duncan and I founded the business, neither of us had ever sold anything worth more than a thousand pounds to anyone.
Matt Byrom:
Well, that’s where you start, really, isn’t it?
Will Critchlow:
Right, right, and I remember … We’d built some small websites, somewhere between a hobby, a part-time job and a freelance consulting-type thing in the late ’90s when we were in school, so we’d sold stuff for a few hundred quid here and there, but never sold anything to a decent-sized business, never sold anything on a retainer, never sold anything, like I say, in the four figures, nevermind the five figures or six.
We bought a book just before we started the business. We’d been friends forever. We met at school, aged 11 or 12, so just before we started the business, we actually went on holiday together with our other halves, because we think it might be the last time that we could both go away at the same time for a little while, and we bought a book in Gatwick Airport called Selling to Win, and it stood out because it was bright, lime green, and it stood out on the book shelf, and we were like, “Well, we’ve got no way to choose. Let’s pick that way.”
We both read it while we were away, and that was the underpinning of how we sold through the first … Well, I mean, still today, but definitely back then, in the first few years, and it was written by a guy called Richard Denny, who was a massive kind of mentor to us over the years, because unfortunately he passed away last year, but we got to know him because we figured the only way we could tell if his book was legit was to try and sell him something using his own sale.
Matt Byrom:
I like that.
Will Critchlow:
Well, we thought every… must do this. You know, you write a book about sales, and of course, you know.
Matt Byrom:
You’re gonna get sold to for the rest of your life.
Will Critchlow:
Exactly, so [inaudible 00:09:13] people are gonna come out of the woodwork trying to sell you stuff. He said not the case, actually. We were the only people who ever tried it, so we literally ran his sales process on him. It was written in a slightly different era, it was a little bit old-school, so it was write a physcial letter, handwrite the envelope, and send it to them. The day after he gets it, follow up with a phone call.
The point of the letter is just to get them to take your phone call. The point of the phone call is just to get a meeting, and so then we jumped on the train, we got a 5:30AM train out of London. He was based in… Gloucestershire, somewhere like that, so we got this early train to get there for a 10AM meeting, and yeah, sold him a website we designed, and he kind of liked this couple of 25-year-old kids trying out his technique, and so he was a mentor to us over the years. Anyway, the point being, the one bit of his stuff that we rejected was he believed that you had to be all outbound all the time.
Matt Byrom:
Yes.
Will Critchlow:
His model was basically zero marketing, all sales, and it was very one-to-one, and he said … There’s a quote in his book that the day you stop making cold calls is the day your business starts declining, and that is the bit that we challenged him on. We’re like, “No, we hate that bit.”
Matt Byrom:
Even 15 years ago, really, when, you know, cold-calling was big, really, I guess, wasn’t it? It was much bigger than the vast array of tools that we have these days.
Will Critchlow:
Well, yeah, but you know what’s fascinating is, I mean, he was wrong in the hyperbole of literally our business never went better than when we stopped making cold calls, but there is something in there that we need to do more of that again, but the hustle, the kind of going and getting what you want, and I think it shouldn’t be cold. There’s a book called Predictable Revenue.
Matt Byrom:
Is it Mark Roberge?
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, I don’t remember, but talks about kind of once you’ve built a brand, or you’ve built something inbound, or you’ve built some traction, you’ve got people interested, they’re on your site, perhaps they’re signed up to your email list or whatever, there’s a temptation to kind of sit back and wait for the inquiries to come in, but actually there’s that warm outbound, I guess, which is a thing that we’ve never been that great at, and we probably should late on.
But anyway, that was a very, very long answer to that question, but the punchline somewhere in there is that along with way, we built the sales thing in the very, very early days, when we were literally selling a few of these websites a quarter, and then we decided that we wanted to have inbound interest, we wanted to write, so we started blogging. Out of that came relationships and all kinds of good things, and I think gradually finally crystallized into a strategy around when we started building the conferences, so 2010 through 2012 was probably when we crystallized all of that into the master plan, as it were, which is we have a ton of free content ready for the blog, to videos, to social, to wherever, that then we hope that people either early in their career or switching into digital marketing will get a Distilled U account, will start …
Again, some of that is free. They can start learning in there. At some point, they get a bit of budget. Maybe they drop their credit card in and they pay us $40 a month to get a Distilled U Premium account, and then at some point, they get to spend a grand on coming to a conference, and so they come to SearchLove, and hopefully they’re just getting more and more invested in the Distilled brand and the Distilled way, and we want to be part of their success, so we hope that when we look back on their career, and we’ve seen this actually come to light now, where we’ve had a couple of cases where people are now, you know, whatever, digital marketing manager, or director of search, or those kind of things, at big brands, some international, household names who’ve written to us saying, “I got my start because I started learning from Distilled U in 2012, and six years later, I’ve got this killer job.”
So we’ve been part of their success, they come to our conference, and then one day they either hit an edge case they can’t solve, or they need extra support or outside support, or they just get given a budget, whatever it might be, and that’s when they turn to Distilled, the agency and the consultancy, and come to us as a client.
Matt Byrom:
That’s quite incredible, really. It’s the ultimate long-term funnel, really, I guess, isn’t it? But that’s really-
Will Critchlow:
It’s like a decade long funnel, but …
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, so you’ve engineered yourself a 10-year sale cycle.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah. Good job, team. We joke, but adding urgency into the process is probably one of the biggest challenges with that, but the benefit of it is that it is a big flywheel, and you do end up with a big depth and breadth of people you know, people who know you, people who respect you, people who like your work.
Matt Byrom:
Would you say that that’s the most common route for people to find you, or to actually end up as a Distilled client, then, to come through Distilled U, go to SearchLove, and then end up being a client after those things have happened? Is that most common?
Will Critchlow:
I would say … Well, so the other big common one of course is referrals. I think referral business is big for any services business, so existing clients, past clients, points of contact recommending us, that’s probably the number one, when you kind of add together all the different sources of recommendations, whether it’s existing clients, whether it’s people who’ve spoken at our conferences recommending us to others, all those kind of things. Our networks. That’s probably number one, but the number one kind of inbound, if you like, is some combination of those things. Probably, as you know, with any funnel, not people taking all the steps in the order that you map out on a whiteboard, but doing some combination of Distilled U, SearchLove, blog subscriber, whatever it might be.
Matt Byrom:
I guess would you actually recommend that to people, then, as a way to build a funnel for your, I guess, marketing and sales team combined, is to actually build steps for people to go through, so they’re actually committing in a light way at the start, and then committing a bit more, then committing a bit more. Do you find that as something that you would recommend to people?
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, for sure, I mean, as long as you’re super patient. If you’ve got years, then yes. I don’t think that’s an entire strategy on its own, right? Like I said, you need to add the urgency somehow, and you also need to look of the things that pay off sooner than a decade out, whether that is more commercial calls to action, whether it’s paid media, whatever it might be. There are things that you need to layer on top to go with it, but yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is the way that I think you can keep your cost of customer acquisition manageable.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Absolutely. In that case, do you promote and market Distilled as the agency, apart from through the context you create, obviously which we’ll talk about shortly, or do you really have SearchLove and Distilled U as your main promotion tools, where you’re bringing new leads, new people into your business?
Will Critchlow:
Most of the activity probably goes on the promoting either the free or the paid content, so either the blog-type content, or a conference, or whatever, but we see that as promoting the agency, very often. I think we also do need to probably get a bit more commercial about some of these areas. We actually ran an experiment of our most recent conference, so we were at San Diego for our California conference six weeks ago, and for the first time, we ran a brief session in the middle of the first morning that was just an introduction to Distilled.
Our conferences are single track, so everybody is in the one room, so there’s no choosing between different sessions, you just kind of show up to our schedule, and so we were very, very conscious that we were forcing everybody to sit through, and not quite [inaudible 00:16:34], but something a bit promotional, and we were very nervous about it, and I think the feedback was great. We did manage to make it fun, and interesting, and funny, and engaging, even if you’re not about to become a Distilled client, so we kind of pulled off that side of things, but we also discovered that it’s definitely true that an embarrassing proportion of the audience doesn’t know everything we do, and there is definitely value in us just being that little bit more promotional, and at least telling people what it is we do, and where we’re good, and where our kind of proof points are, you know, our case studies or whatever else it might be.
Matt Byrom:
Did you find that was successful, in terms of graduating some people into Distilled Agency, then?
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, I mean, like I said, over six weeks ago, so it’s kind of more like it moves them into the funnel a little bit. They make inquiries, or they just say, “Oh, you know, next time I need that, I’ll be in touch,” but whatever, but yeah, early signs of positive [inaudible 00:17:28].
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I guess if were to just look the conference, SearchLove, that we’re talking about, what strategies do you use to promote the conference?
Will Critchlow:
We have quite a wide range of stuff. It feels a little bit like Russian dolls at certain times. It’s like, well, to promote the consulting, we promote the conferences. To promote the conferences, we promote the content. To promote the content, you know. So a lot of it comes back to people subscribe to our email lists in various forms, for various reasons, whether it’s like I want to receive your blog posts by email, or more like a monthly newsletter. We have various different ways of people giving us permission to talk to them, and then those channels become at least awareness building, right?
We’ll write, for example, a blog post about the schedule, the speakers who are gonna appear, what topics we’re gonna cover, and we try and always make that stuff valuable standalone, so it’s not just advertising, it might have a free video of a session from a previous conference, for example, and so we kind of use … We try and build this leverage from the free stuff, giving away free stuff, giving away value, giving away insight, in order to build commercial interest in the next thing.
Yeah, so I mean, an example would be we started doing a free monthly video series where we just take one of the videos from a previous conference, which is normally behind a paywall, and give it away for free to our email list subscribers, so it’s just a genuine, value-based reason to be on the list, and of course then you also get the notification in that email that says, “Oh, and by the way, early bird tickets are on sale for London now. Here’s the dates. Here’s who’s gonna be speaking,” whatever it needs to be.
We kind of see it that it’s balancing those two things of awareness, like literally people just need to know that we run conferences, what date they’re on, how much they cost, who’s gonna be there, the raw details, and the, I guess, trust side of it, that it’s gonna be good, and that comes from all of the stuff that we give away for free, typically.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, seeing a bit of content that’s happened previously and things like that as well.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
I guess with a high reliance on email, how do you feel about the new GDPR regulations that are coming in? How do feel that will affect you, how do you think it’s gonna affect your clients and the industry in general?
Will Critchlow:
We want everything we do to be stuff that people want to receive, so I don’t feel like we’re fundamentally at odds with the objectives here. To the extent that we do outbound, it’s outbound to people who’ve already showed us that they’re interested in our stuff and asked for more of it. I mean, the optimistic version is maybe there’ll be a lot less competition. If it’s good at dropping spam levels, then that’s good for anybody with an actual permission-based strategy. I tend to think that it will probably have less impact than everybody imagines, much like the cookie wall did.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah.
Will Critchlow:
It’ll be a thing that people comply with, but it doesn’t really change users’ experience that much. I think more interesting is probably the things like e-privacy and those kind of things, where … Actually, I mean, GDPR, the fundamental bit of it is more about being in control of your own data, so you know, you can make the request to see the information people hold on your or request for it to be deleted. I mean, that’s fine. You know, we’ve been in compliance with that forever, but what’s more challenging, I think, is going to be if and as they get stricter on you lose some of the tracking capabilities, you lose some of the tools. You know, what Facebook advertising tools are gonna be available as the rules get stricter on the platforms. Those are probably the more interesting questions, but to be honest, given it happens to everybody, it’s a level playing field. Doesn’t stress me unduly.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. If you’re playing by the rules, as you say, it shouldn’t have a big effect, and actually it should have a positive effect, and as you say as well, it’s going to be surprising if the effect is huge in the long run anyway, really. It’s also, I can imagine, going to be really hard to enforce unless there’s some big breeches or bigger companies that are not playing by the rules.
Will Critchlow:
I’m sure there’ll be a big test case. That’s why they’ve written it this way, right, with the 4% turnover or whatever.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Somebody’s gonna get stung.
Will Critchlow:
They’re gonna go for somebody big, undoubtedly, and it will make a big splash and a big noise, but ultimately my guess is this makes a bigger difference for the lawyers and the compliance people than it does for consumers.
Matt Byrom:
That’s very interesting. Anyway, so I’d like to talk about your content strategy, I guess. I know content is a huge thing for you. You create an awful lot of content, do an awful lot of thought leadership. Your blog is a fascinating place to be. I’d be really interested to learn a bit more about your content strategy, really, how you go about creating the content, and how you decide what content to create.
Will Critchlow:
We have a slightly probably different angle on this than … If we’re sitting down to make a content strategy from scratch, it might look a little different, because one of the things that is interesting to realize about our content strategy is that it doesn’t just serve marketing purpose, there’s also a huge team development element to it as well. We took the decision very early on that we wanted everybody and anybody in the company who wanted to be to be visible, and that we would … I mean, part of this was pragmatism in the early days. It was a small team. We all needed to blog if we were gonna do it, so everybody had to blog.
Then later we realized that actually we’d built a platform here. You know, if you write something on our site, or you use the Distilled name to get the opportunity to write for Moz or for Search Engine Land or for whoever it might be, then actually you can make a name for yourself very quickly, and we encourage people to do that. A big chunk of it is write what interests you, write what … Wherever our team feels that there are gaps in the market or there’s content that they wish existed, they should go create it, and that helps them build their careers as well. A lot of what we do is building the authority of the team, not just the authority of the site or the content.
It does bounce around a little bit. You know, you’ll get a very, very tactical tools and tips-based post from somebody’s who’s in the trenches doing client work every day next to a more strategic, future-looking post from me, for example, and that can bounce around a little bit, but actually I think in the social media world, that’s less of a problem because very few people consume the content by coming to the blog page and scrolling through it and clicking on every article. More often they discover it because it was shared to them, or whatever angle it might be.
I’m kind of okay with that, but it does mean that we have this quite wide-ranging set of things. We’re starting to get a big more focused about it, and have a balance and themes or sets of posts that go together into series, that kind of thing, but a lot of it is just actually tapping into the passions of the people, and we want that to be a relatively fun part of the job, so write what you get excited about.
Matt Byrom:
How do you balance the time, then, of the people who are … Well, if everybody’s writing, for example, how do you balance the team between doing client work and doing your own agency marketing work?
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, so I mean, I think everywhere you work has non-billable time, right? Inevitably, not everybody is billable 100% of the time. We took the decision to have utilization targets that did allow for more of that kind of time than other places. I mentioned I came from a kind of consulting background. We sought lower utilization targets than places I’ve worked previously in order to say but … Like the flip side, or the exchange of that, is that’s essentially marketing budget, that that bit of everybody’s time gets fed back into feeding the beast, and helping to grow the authority and the content space
Yeah, that’s the ideal answer. I know that the actual reality on the team is it ebbs and flows. Sometimes people get excited and really into something, and it’s what they want to do, and it’s something they’re passionate about, and people hammer out posts at all hours of the day, and whenever the passion strikes, and sometimes it’s just working incredibly hard to get that done alongside client work. Other times, it’s, “Oh, well, I’ve got a week here between a project ending and my next project starting. I’m gonna ship something in that time.” It’s kind of opportunistic in both directions, I suppose.
Matt Byrom:
I guess just trying to add value to the brand as people are working, in terms of what they know and what their experience is, just adding that expertise into the wider world as well, or giving it to the wider world.
Will Critchlow:
It’s super rewarding. I mean, I think when I … There’s lots of things that I’ve been proud of over the years, and I’ve enjoyed doing, but I think that when I’m looking back over decades, the thing that will stand out will be the careers that were built, or got started, or developed here, or that I got to have some small part in helping people grow.
Our alumni network is pretty incredible. You know, we’ve got people who came into us as new grads or second job, early in their 20s, who built names for themselves, and were speaking on the biggest stages in the industry in 18 months, and some of them have gone on to build huge careers here. You know, we’ve got people who started as analysts and have worked all the way up to VP, running a business unit, general manager-type situations, or principle consultant, you know, deep expertise, helping the biggest clients and the hardest problems that we have.
We have others who’ve done their tour of duty, if you like, here, who’ve kicked assessment and done great things, and then have gone on elsewhere for the different challenge. You know, they’ve gone in house, or they’ve gone to run a marketing team, and some of them have gone onto incredible stuff, so they did that, but what happens by having multiple people do that here, it means that we’ve built a platform that gives that opportunity to the next generation coming through, right? They can build the platform based off what that alumni network did two years ago, five years ago, and it kind of gets pay it forward. You know, you build benefit from that platform. You very quickly can build the name if you’ve got the talent and the drive, and then the fact that you then did that here means you’re leaving a bit of yourself behind in that platform that helps the next generation coming through.
Matt Byrom:
Then everyone’s leveling up and leveling up all the time, really, as things get built on top, I guess.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Byrom:
If everybody’s sort of effectively writing what they feel like, in a way, how does that work with SEO? Are you doing some prep and some SEO research into the pieces that people are writing, or are you just writing, and if it adds value, then it should work for some people in some way for the brand? How do you feel about that?
Will Critchlow:
We don’t overthink it, so if there’s something that somebody really wants to write and it’s not something that anybody is ever gonna be searching for, then that’s okay. It can go out on social, it can be shared in other ways. Sometimes I think some of the best content we have was almost written with a single person in mind. It’s like, I’m writing this for you, like the perfect persona, if you like. We encourage people to say, if you did that, send it to them. If you wrote this for one person, two people, five people, send it to those people, and some of the stuff that we do is almost that, it’s like micro-audiences. It’s just that you put it on the internet in case anybody else would find it useful. That’s one side of things.
The other side of things is obviously a lot of the people who are writing are consultants, SEO consultants. They know this stuff, so when they are thinking about what they’re excited to write about, they’re basing it off… research, or they’re basing it off understanding search trends, and we definitely do layer on some of the processes to make sure that whatever you’ve written, try and give it a good headline, give it a good structure, and obviously we pay attention to the site platform itself.
It’s a bit of both, but it definitely isn’t … I think probably, ironically, it’s always the cobbler’s children with no shoes. There is some content that we should have that is less passion-driven and more keyword-driven. I think that’s undoubtedly true, but then you [inaudible 00:29:40] some of that with things like Distilled U, right? When we structured Distilled U, we said, “Well, you know what? There should be a keyword research module,” and of course that’s called keyword research guide, or whatever it might be, and so there are some areas of the site where it is more structured around knowing where the search volume is, but when we’re literally just talking about blogging, then, yeah, it’s a little bit more passion-driven, and then you layer the search over the top to say, “Okay, given that we’re writing about this, how do we make it as visible as possible?”
Matt Byrom:
Then once you’ve created content, what’s your promotion strategy? How do you guys get it out there? Do you have a standard checklist that you’ll run through to make sure you’re hitting all areas, or is it a big more freeform than that?
Will Critchlow:
We try to have as much of that checklist or process captured in systems as possible, so obviously there are some bits that need to be human, but for example, it goes out to everybody who’s subscribed to the blog, email list, that kind of thing. We have a marketing team of one, so shout-out to Tim Allen who …
Matt Byrom:
Is that your internal marketing team of one, is it?
Will Critchlow:
Yeah. He was a senior consultant in our London office, and moved into the marketing team. Moved to run our own marketing beginning of this year, and he and I have been kind of collaborating on a bunch of different ways that we can enhance and improve this, but yeah, I mean, so he runs social, for example, but then we also encourage the actual authors to push it out as well. Obviously the whole team can collaborate on Slack or wherever about pushing it out on their own social, but then people think about their own promotional plans, so is this gonna be particularly popular in a particular community that you’re an active member of, where you can go and put it there? Like we said, is it written with particular people in mind? Well, send it to them. Will this be helpful to any of your clients? Send it to them. All those kind of angles.
Matt Byrom:
How are people finding out about that in the team? Are they just looking at the blog on a regular basis, or is there some other way that you’re passing that information around the team?
Will Critchlow:
In-person discussions, team training, Slack we use for internal comms, so, yeah.
Matt Byrom:
Do you do any paid media at all? Any paid social, PPC?
Will Critchlow:
A little. We mainly do it … This is where I was talking about like the Russian doll strategy a little bit before. When we’re promoting our conferences, for example, often what we’ll be doing is putting paid budget behind content that we’ve written previously. It might be a bit of paywalled content, or whatever else, and we’re trying to build that, like, gradually getting closer and closer strategy. So yes, we’ll put some budget into background promotion of, for example, social ads, promoting content in a kind of evergreen kind of way, and then building up to having closer and closer relationships with those people until we’re hitting them with more commercial ads.
I’m sure people might have seen ads for SearchLove on Facebook or wherever, so yeah, we do a bit of paid search, and probably a little bit more of paid social. We tend to put the biggest budgets into that, where we’ve got the online, monetary conversion, so for example, selling conference tickets, just because that is where you can get the best kind of closed loop view on the ROI, and so we do put a little bit of budget into just general content promotion, but more of it goes into stuff a little bit further down the funnel. But we’re trying to push that further up, because I would love to spend more budget on the more brand promotion end of things, and yeah, getting our best content out more widely. It’s an area we’ve done a bit of, but again, I think there’s an opportunity for us to be better.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely, and the targeting is, for different social networks, particularly Facebook, is just improving at such a rapid rate, it’s like you can really nail down your audience to such a finite detail. It’s quite incredible.
Will Critchlow:
It’s mind-blowing how good their business is. We all know how good Google’s is, especially anybody in the industry, but Facebook was just … It was incredible that … They almost missed the boat with the move to mobile. If you remember how bad the Facebook app was.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, the first time they actually brought the Facebook mobile app out, they did it in HTML5, I think, at first.
Will Critchlow:
But somehow it became the best thing for that company ever, because they went through quarter after quarter, year after year, of selling more ads at higher prices to more people, and having better results for those marketers. It’s just that perfect flywheel of hockey stick growth, and not convinced it’s good for the world at large, but all of our digital media budget goes to some combination of Facebook and Google, but from a pragmatic performance perspective, it’s not really any wonder, is it?
Matt Byrom:
It’s quite incredible. I mean, slightly changing tack a little, as an SEO company, how do you feel the SEO landscape’s changing, and how is that affecting how you’re working with your customers these days?
Will Critchlow:
We really enjoy the futurology stuff. I personally do. We do a lot of talks about what’s changing, how the technology is evolving, what the capabilities of the search engines are these days, all this kind of stuff, and that’s really cool, and that’s really fascinating, and it’s a big reason why I’m still engaged and interested in being in this industry more than a decade on, but does it change the fundamental client interaction? Not hugely.
Does it change what we actually do for the clients? Well, that’s more evolutionary than revolutionary. Yes, there are tactics that you stop doing, or tactics that you start doing, but the fundamental discoverability of websites based on good, technical infrastructure, good information architecture, content that is the kind of content people are gonna be looking for, structured in a way that they can find it, backed up by good authority on the domain and high visibility in the industry, that’s been true for, well, the whole time I’ve been in the industry, but yeah. There are tweaks around the edges, and they’re the fun bits, but the fundamentals of the client relationship don’t change that fast.
Matt Byrom:
When you break down the fundamentals, it just sounds easy. It sounds like no-brainer, you know. Get the technical right, create content that people want, and build your authority over time. Sounds straightforward, but as we know, it is super, super hard.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah. I think the vast majority of it is simple, but hard. Hard to execute, hard to do right, hard to build operationally, hard to build into processes, hard to do perfectly, hard to continue to outstrip your competition. Remember, of course, it’s competitive web mastering, right? Whenever something’s easy, all your competitors are gonna have done it as well, so some of it is just [inaudible 00:36:26], right? You have to do it just to keep up. Simple but hard covers a lot of it.
Matt Byrom:
Simple but hard.
Will Critchlow:
Then of course occasionally you get the fun bits, where it’s like, a complete mystery, or it’s much more actually complex and difficult intellectually, and those are fun, but that’s where playtime happens. That’s not 90% of the work. 90% of the work is we know what needs to get done. Let’s turn it into a plan and let’s execute it.
Matt Byrom:
I guess if you were to look back over your business over the last 15 years, and sort of say, “You know, these things that we’ve done here have been literally killer for our growth and for our moving forward as a business,” what would you say those are? What are those marketing strategies that you’ve implemented that have just been the ones that have just taken off, that have just worked for you, that have just driven new user growth, that have just driven new clients to your business? What would you say they are?
Will Critchlow:
Infuriatingly, it’s never overnight success, is it? Or rather, the things that look like overnight success had the seeds sown years before, and I think it’s not super helpful and kind of tactically useful, but the things that have paid off have been those investments in future serendipity. You know, it’s the creating content before anybody’s reading it. It’s the being helpful and answering questions on whatever forum even before you’re a known name there. It’s building a presence.
Those are the things that have then led to things that look like overnight success, you know, like the first conference we ran in London selling out. Looks like overnight success. Wasn’t. What we talk about less often is the meetups we used to run when our office was in the crypt of a church at Waterloo, and we were lucky to get 20 people showing up, paying a fiver a head.
Matt Byrom:
So it’s years of relationship building, then.
Will Critchlow:
Relationship building, content building, authority building, email list building. Yeah, everything. I think there’s a couple of things that stand out in terms of process, so I think we have a couple of bits that worked well in that sense. When we launched Distilled U, and we were pretty transparent about this. You can actually go back and find some of the blog posts that I wrote in 2011, 2012, about this, about deciding to give it a try, and building the beta, and all that kind of stuff. We did that in a reasonably lean and agile way, and kind of a lean startup-esque way.
The one thing that came to mind when you said that was the launch of Distilled U felt like an overnight … not like revolutionary success, but an overnight difference in perception in awareness for the business, because I remember, we … Do you remember Launchrock, you know, the landing page [inaudible 00:39:06].
Matt Byrom:
Yes, yeah.
Will Critchlow:
I put out a Launchrock page that literally had taken me half an hour to build …
Matt Byrom:
It was so quick.
Will Critchlow:
… with a picture of me on stage and a bit of text that said, “We thought we might build a training platform because we have to do a lot of training internally, and we thought you might all like to use the same material that we are gonna use for our training. Sign up here if you’re interested.” 1,500 people signed up on that Launchrock on day one, with no paid media budget behind it.
Matt Byrom:
Is that just through sending out an email to the people that you knew?
Will Critchlow:
An email. A lot of them were brand new. A lot of them were not on our email list. A lot of it was from social, and referrals, and word of mouth, and just, yeah, turned out people did want that. It was very… but there was demand.
Matt Byrom:
That’s incredible.
Will Critchlow:
The Launchrock page had a 40-something percent conversion rate, so almost half the people who hit the page gave us their email.
Matt Byrom:
Then it had a big referral sort of mechanism built into it, as well, didn’t it? Social referral mechanism.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, yeah. That just worked really well, and then we were like, “Oh. Well, crap, I guess we better build it, then.”
Matt Byrom:
Oh, so it wasn’t built at this stage, then?
Will Critchlow:
No, no, this was [inaudible 00:40:10]. This was landing page first. This was like, “We’re thinking about doing this thing. Do you want it?” It’s all documented in old blog posts somewhere, but yeah, so we kind of did that, and we were like, “Okay, well.” I think I built some of the project. It was a little kind of hobby project. I occasionally like to keep my hand in with … I’m not really a developer or an engineer, but I like to occasionally learn new platforms or technologies or tools or whatever, so I built the prototype, essentially, just to prove that we could do it.
Yeah, so then it was like, okay, give that to some real developers to make it into the real thing, start writing content, and we had a couple of people who were super passionate about it back then. You’ll still see their names and faces all over it. Some of our alumni, John Doherty, Jeff [Kenyon 00:40:55], Paddy [inaudible 00:40:56] were all just super passionate about it. Between them and myself, we just … I don’t really know how we did it, but we were shipping a module a week at one point, and yeah, just writing all, getting all of that knowledge out of our heads. Yeah, so then we launched a paid beta, and then paid … It was like a paid alpha, just make sure the signup works, and then paid beta. We grandfathered them all in, so we still have people today paying us the $20 a month rate, which was the beta rate, and we just said, “Yeah, you can stay that price for life if you like,” even as we put [inaudible 00:41:35].
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, that’s probably that example. The other one was, again, not super actionable, but opening new offices. It’s a massive pain in the arse, the more offices you have. You know, more timezones, more coordination, more fragmentation, less focus, et cetera, et cetera. There are challenges, but when we opened up in Seattle, we got new business. When we opened up in New York, we got new business. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, because then you have to … You know, an office is for life, not just for Christmas. Nonetheless, it was one of those things where we definitely got influx of new leads and new business when we did it.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. Particularly is something that is on our radar at the minute. We only have one office. Or it’s a potential thing for us, and in what way did that just generate you new business? Was it that some of your team actually went out and networked in the local community, or was it just that you had a local point of contact that you could refer people to, so it naturally resulted in more people signing on? How did that work?
Will Critchlow:
Those are the slow burn things, the non-overnight success. Yeah, absolutely, those things. The overnight bit, I think it’s just something interesting to talk about, right? Looks like digital PR, people see it, they get excited. Somebody’s like, “Oh, great, now I can work with you. I’ve been reading your stuff for ages.” It gets people off the fence, that kind of thing. With New York in particular, there was a really interesting effect that I remember we got a half dozen inquiries from companies who were like, “Finally, we can work with you, because now you’re in Manhattan,” and it’s a bit like London in that way, that there are some companies who want their suppliers to be in the city.
Matt Byrom:
We find that a lot as well, actually.
Will Critchlow:
Obviously we have clients up and down the East Coast, because we had a West Coast office and we had a London office. We had American clients before we even had an American office, but there were some who we were never gonna win until we were there.
Matt Byrom:
That’s awesome. Really interesting to hear. I guess my last question before we jump into our last five is what strategies are you gonna be focusing on in 2018? What’s big on your radar at the moment?
Will Critchlow:
As I said before, a lot of stuff that doesn’t change. We’ll just take that as a given, right? We’re carrying on doing a lot of technical consulting and all of the bits and pieces that we’ve done for years. I think, as I mentioned earlier, one of the big things is SEO split testing, that we think this is the future of technical and on page search for large websites, but as Google more complex, more machine learning-driven, it’s harder and harder to say from first principles or best practices what somebody should do or what’s gonna work, and you just have to try it on their site.
Matt Byrom:
Explain to me how that works a little bit more, the split testing. So you’ll launch two versions of a page with different characteristics, or …
Will Critchlow:
No, so unfortunately you can’t do that for SEO. That’s how you do it for [inaudible 00:44:16]. That’s how you would test to see which one users like. You could have two versions of your homepage, and send some users to one and some users to another, and see who converts more. No, for SEO, because there’s only one Google bot, you can’t do that, because you’d either have to put Google bot into group A or group B, and/or you have duplicate content. This is why it only works on large sites, but the way it works is that you take a group of pages, so imagine an ecommerce site with a thousand products, for example.
You would say, “Okay, we’ve got this change that we will think will make a difference, this change to product pages that we think will make a difference for product pages,” and what you do is you test it by saying, “Okay, let’s make that change to some percentage of those product pages.” The control and variant is the control group is the pages you didn’t change, the variant group is the pages you did change, and so you get your A/B test that way. Now, the statistics and maths that you need to figure out then if that was a beneficial change is unfortunately a little bit more complex than in the CRO case, but yeah, this is recently the platform we’ve been building.
Again, the reason we’ve been building this platform is that we believe this is how you do [inaudible 00:45:21] SEO and on page SEO in the future, and our platform basically both enables you to do that kind of thing, make an arbitrary HTML change to x percent of your pages on your website, which is generally quite a hard thing to do, and it integrates with analytics to pull in data and perform statistical analysis to figure out if there was an uplift. For the first time really ever, we’re making technical recommendations, and then a couple of weeks later, you get back a nice little graph with a confidence interval that shows whether you were right and how many [inaudible 00:45:52].
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic.
Will Critchlow:
That’s super management-friendly. You can imagine it really helps them getting buy-in from management, from engineering, from product across the business. That’s one big thing, and then I think the other side is just continuing to build out our creative and content capabilities, so we’re pushing a lot more, I guess, mid-size content these days, so we’ve over the years got tons of big content, big campaign-based stuff, where you might get millions of views, and hundreds of links or whatever if the campaign goes well, but we’re also seeing a lot of benefit now of building really good content across a slightly bigger keyword set, and more content that’s designed to rank rather than necessarily get links. You know, just stuff that’s designed to be the best on the internet for whatever that area is. I feel like that strategy is getting stronger as Google is better at figuring out what is the best stuff on the internet, not just what’s the best linked to stuff on the internet.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, it’s really interesting, because I speak to people that are running fast-growing companies, or they’re head of growth or what have you for fast-growing companies, and the number one thing that people are saying in content is you have to be number one, you have to be the best piece of content for whichever topic or whatever your target is for that particular area, you have to be the best, or you have to at least think you’re the best, or your content is more in-depth or comprehensive or whatever that might be. It’s just so, so important these days, and that really is a flavor that everything is mentioning across these podcasts.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah. I think there’s a few different ways of achieving that, whether it’s looking at underserved markets, or areas where nobody else has built anything particular good, or just building something incredible. What I think is clearer and clearer is that there isn’t a ton of mileage in building yet another average thing on a competitive keyword.
Matt Byrom:
No. It’s true. Okay, fantastic. Well, I’m gonna bring this to our last five. That’s five quickfire questions, so number on is what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Will Critchlow:
I’m gonna go back to basics a little bit here, and apologies, teach some more experienced people to suck eggs slightly. Remember that marketing isn’t just advertising, isn’t just promotion. There are five Ps, or a number of Ps, depending which exact school of thought you subscribe to, but it’s everything. It’s the price, it’s the product, it’s the positioning, and it’s not just the promotion, and I think too often we see people thinking that marketing is something you can bolt on afterwards, whereas actually the word “marketing” comes from understanding the market, and that’s a fundamental place to start.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. The basics. I love it. Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Will Critchlow:
Yes. I’m gonna start with the book I wish I had read five or 10 years earlier in my career. This is a very actionable tip-based thing. It’s called Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It’s written by an author called Patrick Lencioni. He’s excellent. You should read his other stuff as well, but Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a short read. You’ll read it in a couple of hours. It’s a parable, basically. It’s a very easy read. It’s… the parable of the management team, but I think it applies to every team member, whether you’re a leader of a team, leader of a company, or just a team member, an individual contributor.
If you have ever experienced cases where you feel like the team isn’t quite aligned, you feel like maybe you’re all pulling slightly different directions, that everything’s just a bit harder than it has to be, the interpersonal relationships are strained, that there’s any of that kind of issue, and I imagine that is almost everybody, you need to read this book. It talks about the ways that teams fail and how to avoid them. Can’t recommend it highly enough, and just two that I think are more, if I can stretch it out to three recommendations, two others that I’ve just read that are two sides of the same coin.
Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which is the story of the challenges of growing a high-growth business, and it just tells honestly those challenges, and then many of you will already know Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, a good friend of mine and at Distilled. He’s just published his book, Lost and Founder, which covers many of the same topics, but from a slightly more small business angle, and more personal challenges, and I think both of those are just really important, because I don’t think we talk often enough about how everybody’s struggling with stuff. It’s all hard, and we need to look after ourselves and our emotions as well.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that’s very true. I actually have heard the Rand Fishkin book is it. I need to check that out as well, but what I’ll do is I’ll put those three books, and also the books that we mentioned previously, which is Selling to Win and Predictable Revenue. All those will be on the show notes page, so if anyone wants to take a look at those, head over to mattbyrom.com, click onto this episode, and you can grab a link to all those as well.
Will Critchlow:
Perfect.
Matt Byrom:
Number three is what software tool couldn’t you live without?
Will Critchlow:
There’s lots of things that I guess are in pretty much everybody’s toolset, but the one that is becoming increasingly invaluable [inaudible 00:50:54] is HubSpot. We don’t use the CMS, it doesn’t power our website, but we use the CRM, the email marketing, the analytics, that kind of closed loop marketing automation system. There are other things that do a similar thing, but I think if you’re in B to B, if you generate leads and then you sell on things, you need something that connects up your sales system, your CRM system, with your marketing system, and we’ve had it for a couple of years now, and it’s quite revolutionary in how we approach that.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic, and what’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Will Critchlow:
Having said in my first tip that marketing isn’t all about advertising, I’m gonna talk about an advertising campaign. I’m fascinated by magazine ads, and it’s a bit weird because I’ve never made a magazine ad and I don’t even read any magazines these days. I read pretty much everything online, but there’s a few that caught me in the moment that I remember years and years later, and I think there’s something about how … It has nothing to do with magazines. It probably has to do with the fact that there’s something about catching people at the right stage in their life, and it’s why it’s worth Nike investing so much to make sure that the running shoes you wear as a teenager are Nikes, because then you might well be a fan for life.
There are two campaigns that spring to mind. One is for the whisky Laphroaig, so love my whisky. Laphroaig is one of my favorites, and I remember trying it for the first time because of a magazine ad, which was …These days they run it with the hashtag #opinionswelcome. I don’t remember the exact details of the ad, but the gist of it was Laphroaig tastes like the smell of a burning hospital. Sorry.
Matt Byrom:
That’s okay.
Will Critchlow:
It’s like basically TCP and wood smoke, and you probably won’t like it, essentially, was the gist of the ad. They basically positioned it as being just challenging, and you should try it if you’re into whisky, but don’t necessarily expect you’re gonna like it. There’s something memorable about that, and it’s interesting to me how memorable some of those campaigns can be. Similar to … There’s another one. You see the Patek Philippe ads for super expensive watches, you know, the watches that cost, what, I don’t know, 25 grand, 50 grand. The campaign that is you don’t own a Patek Philippe, you just look after it for the next generation, and …
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, it’s very clever.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, but I’m not in the market for a watch that costs tens of thousands of pounds, and yet I remember that ad, and I imagine it was super effective for them.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. Love those two examples, and I’m gonna try and get the links to some of the ads, and put them into the show notes as well so that people can click on those.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, great.
Matt Byrom:
Finally, which other podcasts do you listen to?
Will Critchlow:
I am a ridiculous West Wing geek. There’s a podcast called West Wing Weekly, which is a podcaster called Hrishikesh Hirway, and one of the actors of the show, Joshua Malina, who played Will Bailey on the show, and basically they’re watching an episode a week, working all the way through all seven series of The West Wing, and they just talk about it in excruciating detail, and if you haven’t seen The West Wing, watch The West Wing. If you have seen The West Wing and you think it’s fine, don’t listen to this podcast, but if you watched The West Wing and it changed your life, start at the beginning of The West Wing Weekly.
Matt Byrom:
That sounds cool. I actually am guilty. I don’t watch The West Wing, but I might check it out, you know, and then I’ll let you know how I get on.
Will Critchlow:
Don’t start with the podcast, start with the TV show.
Matt Byrom:
Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ll definitely start with the TV show, or I’ll be so confused.
Will Critchlow:
Yeah, don’t.
Matt Byrom:
Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on today. It’s been fascinating listening to how you’ve grown your agency, and really interesting learning about Distilled U and SearchLove as well, so it’s a pleasure. I really encourage everyone to check out Distilled and SearchLove, and Distilled U as well.
Will Critchlow:
Appreciate it. It’s been a ton of fun. Thank you for inviting me on the show, and yeah, thank you.