 Thank you for having me Moscon. I'm so excited to speak here Who here has started their career with the beginners guide to SEO? Yeah, yeah, hell yeah. I am so grateful to Moscon. I owe them not Moscon but Moz I owe them so much. I owe them my whole career like for all the content they produced So thank you to Moz and the team and all the hard work that you do. Thank you for this amazing conference So I want to tell a story and I'm trying to fit 15 years of building teams and marketing teams and consulting marketing teams into 15 minutes So let's get started with the story. This story is about you or likely about you Now I've met a lot of you at this conference And I have to say chances are if you're sitting here spending three days talking about Marketing analytics and SEO and technical stuff. You're probably a marketing badass Now you probably didn't start out that way if you're like most of us How you describe how you enter it into digital marketing you say I kind of fell into it In fact, if you search fell into digital marketing, it appears 51,000 times across the internet That's how often we fall into this right chances are we probably study something else in school But here we find ourselves bad asses of digital marketing. We've tried stuff. We've made mistakes We've learned we've tested and we've grown so much so Chances are that at some point your boss will come and say, you know what you're a fantastic marketer Now go build a team and just like you fell into marketing You've now fallen into marketing leadership, which requires a totally different set of skills so we start building our team and our team can be our Direct reports it can be our agency it can be the Consultants right and too many times when we move into leadership roles We start to apply the same skill sets that made us fantastic practitioners But if we do that long enough pretty soon, we're gonna look and realize Oh crap. We've left our team in the dust, right and that's not fun for them. It's also not fun for us Why does this happen? so like like she said I work in in Education a lot and I learned that only one-third of accredited universities offer two or more Classes in digital marketing and who knows if they're any good, right, but only a third even offer it. That's right now and Complicating things is marketing is a mix between art and science as much as we like to pretend This is is a science that we can test and experiment and always get reliable results That's wrong This is also an art form and that makes things really confusing and sometimes really scary So much so that only 9% of marketers strongly agree that their marketing is even working like don't tell the CEO that And only half of marketers feel highly proficient in our jobs like that's sad Oh, like we don't we don't know we're doing half of us, right? That creates a lot of burnout so I kind of feel for that. That's this a hard place to be sometimes So I've concluded in my time building and coaching teams that the thing Teams need more in digital marketing than any other space to build world-class teams is how well we as leaders can develop trust This is crucial trust means Well, let's let's get in that a little bit But the reason that so crucial is like think about what's happening outside of this economically politically that's scary on top of all the stuff we already talked about and Building trust is not saying I trust you If you say I trust you to your team you just said Good luck. You got this. You're on your own. Do not say I trust you So how do we develop team trust on a team? We're gonna have about three things today So one is focusing only on results number two is closing feedback loops and number three is removing barriers to risk-taking So first focusing only on results. I love this graphic. I've used this a billion times. I talk about this all the time This was originally made by ran fishkin talking about a conversation between Darmish and Elon Musk about how people on a team are vectors and they all point in different directions and they have different strengths or units of Productivity so the goal is a leader is to align all those vectors between where we are and where we want to go and Deciding what the units of productivity are. How is the team measured like? in in terms of productivity so there Sometimes as a leader when we are new we rely on old units of productivity old ways of measuring results things like how many hours Are you spending where are you working? How hard are you working? What deliverables are you producing? All those are kind of surface level not meaningful results When really what we should be focusing on is what are the outcomes? What happened because of your work regardless of how long it took or what deliverables you produced? That's what a real leader should be focused on especially in marketing So not ours. It doesn't matter when you work where you work. How hard you work or how like what kind of deliverables You produce it's what results happen So let's tell a story about that e-file cabinet their client of ours We love these guys we working for them for years what they do is their document management system They take all your paperwork digitize it and deal with the like automation of it And they came to us initially their SOW was like hey, we want you guys to work these number of hours We want this traffic. We want this content. We want some better rankings So we said okay, let's do that. We built a bunch of landing pages a bunch of content We built some content that was gated behind landing pages to produce mqls We built a complex email marketing funnel to drip and nurture those leads and it like worked But it was like okay. It was best practice Right and these days best practice is synonymous with mediocre or average So you have to do beyond best practice right you have to go beyond that and so we thought well What do they really want? What are the results they really want and we had a dram a jam session with their CEO their VP of marketing their VP of Sales and we said like tell us what's going on in the organization. We learned a couple things one They want to increase market share they had huge competitors coming and trying to eat their lunch They wanted more revenue and they had a giant sales team and not enough leads coming in to feed their whole sales team So their sales team was like really agitated and then they had a board that was putting a lot of pressure on the CEO to see growth And then finally their biggest audience or their best audience was advertising or accountants But they weren't really well-known among accountants. So we said, okay, how can we help these guys? And we got on the phone with a bunch of accountants with a bunch of their customers And we started to learn about them what makes them tick and what they deal what they deal with day to day And we learned that they love their job, but they hate dealing with all the paperwork specifically the stuff that Works with paper like printers copiers fax machines We also learned that there's a lot of huge conferences for accountants that happen all across the United States where they gather together So we said let's build the world's first mobile rage cage and Put it in these conferences and let's fill it with printers and fax machines and copiers and then give them a bat and let them go nuts This is this is SEO. This is content marketing. This is ads, but it's doing it in a weird way So they came in they signed their waiver. They got into our hub spot where we could then nurture them later We suited them up. By the way, this is Matt. This is our content marketer the guy on the The guy in the blue shirt He's producing content. He's just not doing it with a keyboard And then we also stuck a camera inside the room where we recorded them We said hey, we're gonna email you your video later Whoever's video gets the most votes wins a thousand dollars So it turned them all into evangelists for our campaign getting all their accountant friends to come and vote for their video And they went crazy. It was awesome They loved it and it taught them that e-file cabinet our marketing gets you this much Just imagine how much our product gets you It got so much attention that we earned a bunch of press because of this We earned a bunch of links organically the news came out and covered it and in case you're interested We recycled everything so it was environmentally friendly So did we get the surface results? Yes, we did but we did it do it in the normal way We did it in a different way that helps get the true desired outcome, which is increasing their market share We improved their revenue 85% and their investors were super stoked and in my opinion the best thing that this did was it taught Accountants that e-file cabinet is like we get you Okay, so once we've get our team to focus on the true results of true desired outcomes the next step is to close feedback loops Let's imagine that we're on a hike. I love hiking We're on a hike up in the mountains and we come across this pristine lake as glass not a single ripple the whole thing And oh by the way, my son is there This is my son Pierce my oldest he turned seven in two days. So happy birthday to him Now he's also pretty rambunctious. So if you know seven year olds What is that seven-year-old gonna do when they come upon a lake that is clear as glass and not a single wave? What are you gonna do? Jumping at throat. Yeah. Well, my son will find the nearest rock. He's gonna throw that in Okay, now if you know my son, what is the next thing? He's gonna do after smalling it throwing a small rock in Yes, he's gonna think about it. Hmm This is not posed by the way. He's just like this mischievous He found a big rock and he throws the big rock in small rock small splash big rock big splash He's acting and he's analyzing changing how he acts and analyzing the outcome. This is a feedback loop It's crucial to how we grow as people. It's built into us No one was paying him to throw rocks in the lake He wanted to do it so feedback loops show us traction and that provides motivation to keep going when we don't feel like we have traction That causes burnout burnout has less to do with the amount of work that we're doing and more to do with the amount of Traction we feel we have in our lives. So think about that So think about on your team are there situations where someone doesn't have traction because they have a broken feedback loop Why does this happen on marketing teams? It's so complex. We have lots of people from different backgrounds We've got your ads people. We got social. We got content CRO And then we have the designers sitting over here and they're all asking for different things from different people I need these ads. I need this copy. I need this article I need these changes made right and they start to develop blinders and those blinders eventually over time produce silos to the point Where everyone is acting independently on the same account same campaign, but they're acting as individuals and Worse they're even analyzing as individuals Sometimes the content marketers are just looking at traffic and time on page and conversions PPC is looking at ROAS SEO sometimes just looking at rankings and conversions and then designers poor designers They're like, man, I hope somebody liked that ad, right? I hope I hope it works You know, they just kind of designed something they went off into the ether and they never heard about it again And where do you don't have that feedback and then analysis that creates stagnation low performance and burnout Where you have that analysis and you have more of it That's more growth more motivation more autonomy, which is what we need if we're gonna create a stellar marketing team So how do we close feedback loops? Number one, you have to identify all the contributors That's not just your direct reports, but that's your management. That's your consultants That's your agency and then ask yourself. Do any of these people are they struggling to improve? Are they stagnant? Are they not growing? Then number two, do all of these contributors know the full impact of their work? Do they know how their actions impact other people or impact the desired outcome? And if not, is it because they don't have access to the data? So they don't know why or if they do have access to the data Perhaps they don't know how to interpret it in my opinion everyone in digital marketing whether your designer content marketer SEO or ads You have to know Google analytics at the very least. You should be able to interpret that information And the last is as much as as possible. You need to automate this feedback We like often we know good leaders provide feedback Hey, you did a good job here or hey, this could have improved. Here's how that's a good thing You should do that, but that is not the feedback loop I'm talking about if your entire team's feedback loop relies on you Remembering to tell them whether something went well or didn't that's gonna break no matter what so they need automatic feedback loops This has to be as consistent and as devoid of feeling as an echo Right. You speak in a cave and you get the echo back Speak in response act in response act in response. There's no feeling is just I act and something happens And so how do you do that? You set up, you know customer alerts for the entire team? Everyone on the team Moz stat notifications here. I'm alerts Google data studio You should have a team dashboard that your team is analyzing together If you do that then you'll suddenly see a team that will start acting together and they start analyzing together Sharing bits of information from their different disciplines that are relevant to each other One cool story of this is eos They do those chapsticks and those little balls and our concept marketer was producing a bunch of personas for them and Putting them into the funnel and in different stages and she learned something that was really cool She said all these personas seem to be interested in this thing zodiac signs That's interesting then the SEO specialist came and said well Let me do some analysis on this and saw like tons tons of keyword volume around that and a lot of the organic content I'm seeing pairs products with zodiac signs. That's kind of interesting and the ad specialist said well I have the ability to target people based on their interest number one in zodiac signs and number two I know their birthday, so I know what their sign is So what we did is we paired all of the eos products With different zodiac signs and then targeted them to people who were interested in zodiac signs based off of their sign And as a result we increased purchases 42 percent and that set of ads had a hundred and eighteen percent higher return On ad spend all the other campaigns that eos was running at the time all thanks to the team sharing bits of information That they didn't think was interesting alone, but together produce this cool campaign Okay, the last is removing barriers to risk-taking. This is one of the most difficult but one of the most fun and rewarding parts When we take risks There's a lot of fear involved and there's a lot of fear on your team I can tell you right now. There's a lot of fear in your team, so it's our job is leader to reduce that How do we do that? We don't tell them it's gonna be okay The way you do it is you understand what the full risk is that they're bringing to you if they're coming to you with a solution We want to say like hey. Yeah, you got it. Go for it. I love the idea go for it But what we should do is understand the risk What is that play here and then understand in depth their solution poke around ask questions? And then once you've done that you've communicated I've taken the time to understand this and then if doesn't go well We both share the burden of the responsibility on this So go for it. I believe in this that is being a true leader think of it as a slack line or as Tight rope When you're the practitioner you're the person walking the tight rope when you're the leader you are now the tight rope The tight rope shows us where we were and we were you're going what the destination is what the goal is It also provides support and guidance And then if you'll notice she'll has that safety harness to know if I fall if this doesn't go Well, I'm not gonna die. It's gonna be okay You're not gonna fire me if this is go well right and that's the role of the tight rope And that should be your role as the leader of a high-performing team. I'm gonna end on the story of touch the needle If any of you are in mattresses or no mattresses, you know that in 2020 for some reason Pandemic hits we all get obsessed with toilet paper and For some reason mattresses mattress sales March you look at it March mattress sales boom through the roof is crazy and then March and then 2021 came and Matches sales started to tank because we don't need anymore. We're full of mattresses So so sales started to dwindle despite, you know, we were doing SEO We were doing ads and all that good stuff for them And we like sales were still going down which was like scary for the team internally because they don't want their jobs Cut or their budgets cut it was scary for us because we don't want to lose them as a client and The team alone came up with a solution. It was like kind of a Hail Mary They said hey, we think this will work. We know what your values are to create connect and nurture We know who you are and we know who your audience is They target a lot of new parents because that's the time typically when you're buying a new mattress and they need a lot of rest So what we pitched to them was doing an internship where the parents could apply to intern test out a new mattress And it was like a job so we created a job landing page They could apply we then reached out to partners to co-market with calm storybook or us news to share their product and tap into their audiences We built out an entire course with JD Velia Sleep course and then we produced a ton of content email marketing whole funnel campaign a bunch of ads and While all the competitors were decreasing in their total sales Tough to needle saw a set 57% increase in revenue and 35% increase in conversions because they took this swing this big expensive risk So when you think about before creating high performing team think about these three items in the end It's about developing trust it's giving people a safe space to take risks do things that are weird Go beyond best practice and try things and if you do that you're gonna convert your marketing team from this into this People that will adapt people that will autonomously make decisions that are gonna be for the betterment of you and for your client and for your company and your team They will have your back doing stuff that you've never seen before that the industry has never seen before and we need that We need more leaders Leaders have an impact that lasts forever campaigns come and go but the leaders make more leaders And that's what our industry needs and that's what I invited you. Thank you