Bridget Willard | SaaS Marketing Agency

Author: Bridget Willard

  • In Marketing There is No Magic — Just work

    Magic. Magic awes us. Magic deceives us. Marketing tools are awesome. But they don’t do the work for you. If you want effective marketing for your business, pay less attention to magic tricks and more on the work.

    Do the Work

    I used to say there is no dream without the work. It’s true.

    So often our work has long term results. It’s no different with strategy. To craft a strategy and then wait for results takes faith — faith in the process, faith in the forecasting, faith in the tactics. 

    What does the work look like? Well, that depends upon your goals and budget, of course, but here’s a list off the top of my head.

    • Follow accounts that align with brand goals.
    • Share content from brand’s strategic partners.
    • Share content that aligns with brand goals.
    • Curate guest bloggers.
    • Write posts that engage the audience.
    • Interact with said audience (this means on blog comments, social media shares, etc.)
    • Be on the lookout for trends that will affect brand.
    • Advise clients based upon trends, industry news.
    • Interact with brand in their preferred form of communication (email, Slack, etc.)
    • Create and manage content calendar.
    • Check for replies and engagement during waking hours (6am – 10pm).
    • Be available for consultation on integrating social with whole marketing and product plan.

    Mimicking Social with Automation

    We love to hate Big Brother, data mining, and lack of privacy but in marketing we like to buy tools that simulate social interaction.

    Building a business outside of your first circle (your friends) requires blogging then a push to social (content marketing) plus engagement on those profiles (relationship marketing). There is no way you can do this with only tools.

    You wouldn’t buy a hammer and think you could build your own house.

    Why wouldn’t you also hire a professional to build your brand?

    Good marketing is more than tools you can buy.

    When you work with a professional social media manager, you get boots-on-the-ground insight that helps shape and modify your marketing plan to meet your business goals.

    You’re not getting automation.

    Sure tools can do things like help get impressions.

    Having impressions isn’t the goal of social media. A brand can have a lot of impressions for the wrong reasons (broken code, offensive tweet, etc.).

    The goal of social media is to engage an audience and gain or maintain affinity.

    In-House Teams

    So you have in-house people to implement a strategy. Great. Do they know which tactics will be most effective? Aside from posting, how will they do with replies?

    A person can implement a tactic but without understanding the why of the overall strategy, it is easy for the implementer to go astray. Blindly following trends, being distracted by the Kardashians of the Internet, and inside jokes are just some of the ways social can go wrong — quickly.

    The Brand’s voice must be protected in every social post. This means that the implementer must think out the effects (both good and bad) of any action before it is done. On social media, this thought process lasts seconds, if not minutes. Thoughtful engagement and relationship building is key to building a successful brand — that builds a business — in the long term.

    This is why it is important that a brand contracts with a professional social media manager or trains thier in-house staff.

    Both my very good friend Robert Nissenbaum of tso.media and I are available to train in-house teams.

    Marketing is a Business Expense

    Regardless of how you choose to market your business, it is a use of resources and, therefore, an expense. To grow your business beyond the near future, you will need to decide how best to use those resources — outsourcing a marketing professional or training in-house staff.

    A necessary evil? Maybe. It depends upon if you want to grow your business.

    I’ve been managing social media for businesses for over ten years and watched them grow. Is yours next?

  • On Leading the Make WordPress Marketing Team

    With the recent announcement that my friend Joost de Valk has been appointed the Marketing & Communications Lead whose role includes leading the Marketing Team, this is an ideal time for me to retire from my role on the Make WordPress Marketing Team.

    “Secondly, Joost de Valk ( @joostdevalk ) will take on the role of Marketing & Communications Lead. You might know him as a long time core contributor and plugin author. His role will be to lead the marketing team and oversee improving WordPress.org, related websites, and all its outlets.” Matt Mullenweg

    Leadership in the WordPress Project is meant to ebb and flow. My good friend and mentor Andrea Middleton gave a great talk at WordCamp Cincinnati describing it as a bazaar where people come in and out. You should watch it.

    As a single woman who is self-employed, this is a good opportunity for me to spend my billable time on something, well, billable, and doing much-needed client work.

    Leadership is Behavior Not a Title

    I am ridiculously proud of the work that I’ve done over the last two years building a marketing team that was previously lacking momentum and motivation. I built a team of eight Team Reps. We have published over 50 pieces of content including the About Page for 4.8, a Case Study for Rolling Stone, and the Trac Quickstart Guide. We now have 202 people on our Trello Board. That’s up from maybe a dozen people at Contributor Day WCUS 2016. By the time I was leading at WordCamp Europe in 2017, we had 30 people.

    It’s the job of the leader to see who is participating and what their passions and skill sets are. I’m proud of the Team Reps I’ve recruited and the company culture we have created in Slack — someone is always being warmly welcomed as soon as they join the team.

    I picked up Dwayne in Atlanta, who along with Yvette who I got in Paris, have set up and managed our Trello board and tasking system. Dwayne has been my right-hand man, scrum master, and collector of tears. Yes, there were tears. It was a tough job leading a Marketing Team with no front-facing publishing ability besides the Marketing Blog and WordPress.TV. Together, we formulated a vision that would be successful and be a good use of the highly-qualified marketers that were donating their (very expensive) billable time to this beautiful project.

    Jen has been my SEO editor and champion for the team, always welcoming everyone and helping at Contributor Days. Maedah has been a great rep, always helping with notes and eventually being the one who publishes them. She and Yvette do that now.

    Mike has taken on the initiative of high-level projects like Five for the Future and interfacing with the Growth Council and their projects. Harry has been a great project manager, setting the week’s agenda, and has taken over leading the case studies that David Skarjune began before he retired. Siobhan joined us after Nijmegen and has been trained by Dwayne to lead the weekly meetings in addition to taking on an editorial role.

    All of them have helped us build a handbook and partner with the design team to create a brand and style guide to help guide how the team functions.

    I am confident that we have a working and well-oiled machine. There is good infrastructure and leadership for this transition with Joost. Since Joost has been a major part of the Meta Team, the Marketing Team is now in a position to help contribute to front-facing projects on dot org.

    Would I do it again? Yes.

    Whether or not Team Rep or Team Lead is the appropriate title, I’m proud of my behavior and if asked to do it again, knowing what I know now, I would absolutely do it again. I am proud of the high-level strategies, work recruiting, and relationships that I’ve built in order to make this project be as successful as it is, given the handicaps it had, in a short period of time.

    Retiring from the Team Rep role does not mean I’m leaving the community or the project. I believe in the WordPress Project. I believe in the WordPress community. I believe in the people that I have met in this project. At my core I believe in the mission of WordPress to “democratize publishing“ and “give a voice to the voiceless.“

  • A Case Study: Marketing Consulting with Jocelyn Mozak

    From time to time, a case study becomes a good way to reflect on results for both you and your current and potential clients. This is my first for one of my very good friends and I’m proud that she’s also a client.

    https://twitter.com/JocelynMozak/status/1084120768240181248

    The Client

    I met Jocelyn Mozak of Mozak Design at WordCamp Seattle last year. Her Portland, Oregon based business is going well and she often presents and coaches on systems and processes that help other businesses. However, she wanted to build up her brand awareness about her coaching program and training for speakers and wasn’t sure how that could happen with Twitter.

    The Challenge

    Jocelyn was all-in on Facebook. That’s where her tribe was. That’s where her clients were. That’s all she focused upon. But after sitting down at an impromptu lesson I gave to Robby of Beaver Builder at WordCamp Seattle 2018, she was in.

    I could sense her excitement and that was contagious.

    She DMd me. I invoiced her. Caldendly appointments were made. Once the Zoom call began, I had a chance to change her mind about Twitter. People who know me know how much I believe in it as a tool.

    https://twitter.com/JocelynMozak/status/1062393906279649280

    The Consultation

    The first call was the test. Test of the coach on the consultant. Could her audience really be elsewhere except her beloved Facebook? How could she connect with people who might like her coaching services? Once I began to teach her about lists, however; I think she saw the way she could grow her influence.

    One of the things I enjoy (I know, it’s supposed to be about the client) is that during a consultation I can give specific rather than generic examples. So, for this call, I suggested that she create a list of WordCamp speakers starting with those slated to speak at WCUS. This allows her to spend time engaging with her peers in the speaking world and continue to build those lists. Since she is an avid speaker at a variety of conferences, the light bulb went on and she went to work.

    Look at those lists!

    After that, we briefly discussed hashtags and their purpose as well. I’ve personally seen her engage more on Twitter in our circle of friends and watch people tag her to get their attention.

    The Second Call

    Okay, Bridget. If you can do that for Twitter, what about LinkedIn. (Quote for dramatization).

    Yep. We set up another call over Zoom (she likes to record them) and we went through specific use cases on why she should be there.

    Who is her audience? Women leveling up their careers and speaking engagements.
    Where do those people spend their time? LinkedIn.

    It made perfect sense.

    The Results

    I’m stoked with the results. I knew Jocelyn was sitting on a gold mine.

    Twitter:

    Jocelyn tweeted only 17 times in October with 1,880 impressions. In November that number went up to 220 with 40,200 impressions. December was 276 tweets and 48,300 impressions. I’d say those are impressive results.

    LinkedIn:

    After Jocelyn put our plan into action for LinkedIn, the more professional network, she’s had a 60% increase in profile visits.

    Look at that increase!

    Google Analytics

    Google Analytics is the ultimate in metrics. The whole point of social media is to build brand awareness so that people will visit your site. I love that her traffic has dramatically increased from Twitter (54%) and LinkedIn (2000%).

    Love the green numbers!

    The ultimate result, to me as a consultant and teacher, is her newfound excitement for platforms that can help her build her own coaching business to a new level.

    Bridget’s Twitter coaching has been transformational. I used to use Facebook exclusively and avoided Twitter at all cost. After a single session with Bridget I understood exactly how to wrangle Twitter and make it work for my business. Now Twitter is a key part of my social media marketing. I’m building relationships and growing my online visibility. I even, I dare say, prefer it to Facebook somedays!

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  • Psychological Pairing: Forget Motivation – Actually Get Stuff Done

    Motivation is constantly being chased by apathy and rarely wins the race. So? How do I get stuff done? Psychological Pairing.

    What is Psychological Pairing?

    “In relation to psychology, pair by association is the action of associating a stimulus with an arbitrary idea or object, eliciting a response, usually emotional. This is done by repeatedly pairing the stimulus with the arbitrary object.” Wikipedia

    Motivation isn’t tangible. It’s allusive. It hides from you. Motivation is too hard to nail down. So what do you do?

    Basically, I bribe myself.

    Eat the Frog

    One of the sayings in productivity is to “eat the frog.” This means that you do the one thing you don’t want to do first. Everything after that tastes good. Having spent 30 years doing secretarial work, this is how I’ve lived my life. I still do it.

    So, you eat the frog. Now what?

    Set Limits

    It’s so easy to get distracted working at or from home. As I write this post, I’m a bit down so I’m in bed. This is a rule I generally don’t break. I have a desk in my living room (no TV in there). That is where I work. When I get up from my desk, I am done working.

    Limits help set expectations for yourself and for your friends and family. This especially helps if you have people living with you like family or roommates.

    Work like an employee. Block out your time. Take scheduled breaks. Write down what you’ve done. Make a task list but put it in your calendar. Tasks take time. If you don’t understand how much time you’re spending, you will underbid projects and overtax yourself. But that’s another blog post.

    “Work From a Calendar: I have recently picked this one up: to work from a calendar instead of a to-do list. What I find useful is that a calendar forces me to rethink my work from tasks to time units. It is a small change, but it increases the chance of getting things done.” Ye Chen

    Reward Yourself

    Okay. This isn’t about time management. But it is. So, essentially, psychological pairing is about doing something you don’t like doing and then rewarding yourself with something you do like.

    [bctt tweet=”To motivate yourself, pair a task with a reward. Small task, small reward. Build. Do. Accomplish. It’s that simple.” username=”BridgetMWillard”]

    For example, after my husband passed away, I needed to donate his clothing. It was overwhelming emotionally and physically. So I decided I could fill two plastic bags and then take it to Goodwill. Each time I took those donations to Goodwill, I went to In-N-Out for lunch. I treated myself for doing something I didn’t want to do.

    It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. Write a blog post, watch a movie. Do two hours of client work, have a cup of tea. Send a proposal, go for a walk.

    The key to psychological pairing is that you are self-aware enough to know what motivates you and that you break down the tasks. Achievable. Do it. Write it down. Rinse and repeat.

    Happy working my friends.

  • Marketing Isn’t About Tools – It’s About Psychology

    Marketing tools are simply that — tools. When you overly rely upon automation to replace human connection you will always fail, regardless of how slick the tool is.

    Marketing is about relationships. Relationships take time. No CRM or auto dialer will change that for you.

    A brand needs to be relatable. As your customer base relates, they develop affinity to the brand. Affinity leads to loyalty. Loyalty leads to sales.