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How to Improve Content Success by Up to 500% with SnapApp

Posted Under: Marketing Marvels
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Marketing Marvels is the place to discover amazing new marketing technology that will improve your social media, content marketing, digital marketing and beyond. Hosted by Jay Baer, President of Convince & Convert, Marketing Marvels features short demos of remarkable software platforms, view all prior shows.

Interactivity can improve your content’s results by up to 5x. SnapApp makes building interactive content easy with a marketer-friendly interface you can dive right into.

SnapAppWelcome back to Marketing Marvels, where I’m joined by SnapApp’s SVP of Marketing, Aaron Dun.
Adding an element of interactivity to your content can improve your results by up to 5x. SnapApp makes building interactive content as simple as possible—no running to IT or other departments, no steep learning curve, just a marketer-friendly interface you can dive right into.
With SnapApp, you can build interactive whitepapers, quizzes, videos, and a whole lot more to capture your audience’s interest and keep them engaged. SnapApp provides easy-access analytics and integrates with all the major marketing automation platforms.
Watch the video to watch a guided demo with Aaron and learn more about its most powerful features!

Jay: Hey, everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert and welcome to another episode of Marketing Marvels, where I bring together some of the most interesting, fascinating and useful marketing technology in the world, we do a quick demo and I tell you who should buy this software.
Look, so many of us are making content. We’re making more content than ever. All the research shows that marketers are creating more content than ever, both B2B and B2C, but how do you actually get that content to perform. There’s a sea of content out there. It’s harder than ever to get results.
One of the very best ways to get results is to make your content interactive. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on the Marketing Marvels show, how to add a layer of interactivity into your content to improve your results by up to five times. Think about that. What if the content that you’re making today did five times the results that it’s doing today just by adding a layer of interactivity? You can absolutely do that. It’s not nearly as complicated or as difficult as you might think.
To talk to us about a fantastic company that makes that happen, SnapApp, it is Mr. Aaron Dun, who is the Senior VP at SnapApp. Mr. Dun, thank you for being on Marketing Marvels.
Aaron: Thank you so much for having me, Jay. I’m looking forward to it and I think it will be a lot of fun.
Jay: So tell us a little bit about the platform, what it does. Obviously we’ll do a demo in just a second. But maybe frame it up for Marketing Marvels viewers, how the platform came to be and the most important use case for it.
Aaron: Yeah. So when we think about marketing in 2016, it’s really pretty incredible, all the various options, all the different things that we can do, particularly as it relates to content, as you alluded to a moment ago. We’re really faced with this explosion of content. Everybody that I know of, all my peers, everyone that you know of really jumped on this notion of content marketing to tell a better story and get out there and really engage with your customers at a much deeper level.
But unfortunately, not all content is great content. Marketers are doing their very best to communicate and tell a story, but in fact we’re having a lot of unintended consequences, which is making it increasingly hard and difficult to break through.
Enter interactive content, right? So the idea of trying to figure out how you might resonate better with your audience, how you might tell a better story that really connects with the pain, the needs, the emotion, the fear of your prospects, it starts with creating a better experience and how do you tell a differentiated story.
So what we built is a platform to help you do just that. We have an interactive platform that helps marketers, allows marketers to create interactive content super simple. Think of sort of PowerPoint for interactive content. We wanted to be as easy as possible because we believe that you need to really rapid fire iterate new ideas and you don’t have a lot of time.
So our platform supports today nine different types of interactive content, from interactive whitepapers, assessments, quizzes, ROI calculators, games, brackets, interactive video and those kinds of things, all with the goal of telling a different story, a better story to get your prospects and your customers to engage with you and then ultimately moving those folks down the funnel, your lead funnel into sales.
Jay: I think one of the interesting things that you just said, Aaron, is that marketers can put this into practice themselves. This isn’t necessarily a tool, SnapApp, that you have to recruit friends in IT to be like, “Hey, can you guys please in your spare time find some dev time to implement this?” You can actually do this yourself.
Aaron: That’s right. That’s the entire goal of everything that we do here at SnapApp, to empower the marketer to do the work. If you need to engage an agency or you need to engage a creative services team to go execute, then we haven’t done our job well enough because I know I’ve been doing this long enough and the people who are listening today know that it’s very rare that you find that one silver bullet, that one thing that makes the whole business and when you do, great, good for you, that’s awesome. We will be seeing you at the next presentation at whatever conference.
But more often than not for most of us, we have to test lots of different things and then we actually tend to hit more singles than doubles to find the triple. The more we can enable you to get more content out there, to tell a better story and really create what we call, the term we use is content-enabled campaigns.
So using content in your campaign and your demand gen strategies to engage with your prospects, get more prospects into your funnel, but also help sort out which ones are the best ones for sales. We try to find . . . the term we also use here is called the super MQL, the best of the best leads, but more importantly getting your prospects to engage with you and get that information such that you can send them onto sales in a much more efficient and effective way.
Jay: Fantastic. Are you ready to show us under the hood?
Aaron: I’ll do my best.
Jay: All right. Let’s do it. I’m going to give you the power to present to everybody. Now you are. Let’s see your screen and we’ll make it happen.
Aaron: All right. Let’s see if I do this right. If I don’t . . .
Jay: We’ll fake it.
Aaron: We’ll fake it until you make it.
Jay: Look at that.
Aaron: Boom. You should be looking at our website.
Jay: Yes.
Aaron: I think the easiest way to talk about what it is that we do is to really think about the different kinds of examples of how our customers are using SnapApp today. So, if you go on our website here, we have conveniently right here at the top all of our examples. We have this lovely customer example gallery where we show many of our very best examples and things like assessments calculators, infographics, videos, etc. And really we’re adding more and more to these every day as we get them.
What I wanted to show at the highest level is the way that you can think about using SnapApp and plugging it into your demand gen activities and bringing in more content to create more value for your prospects.
So here’s an example of a company called ServiceNow where they created a blueprint. It’s a little bit long, not necessarily what everybody would want to do, but you’re able to start to assess your prospects and understand are they going to be good for you? So most companies I talked to, their sales organization has some level of criteria that they’re always asking in those initial conversations to do further qualification to understand, “Are you a good prospect or not?”
Every company I’ve ever worked for, sales is always asking, “Can you tweak your scoring algorithm? Can try and find . . .? Can you get this data up front so that I don’t have to ask that question or these nine questions, four questions, whatever they are in the sales process?”
Typically as marketers we do that through progressive profiling. The first time you come I’m going to ask you for your name, company and email address and the next time you come I’m going to ask you the next thing and then the third and fourth on down the line. The problem with that is it requires your prospect to keep coming back and taking another action.
Well, that doesn’t always happen. It’s also very passive. So we work with our customers on these assessments. It’s something that a lot of our customers do. We jump right in to ServiceNow’s assessment. They’re asking a series of questions here. In their case, “Do you have a growing list of open and overdue IT issues?” This is a big thing for them. So in their case, yes it’s a challenge. It’s a good prospect. “Are you having difficulty getting issues resolved promptly the first time?” “Yes, we’re really busy.” So, these are all questions that they designed that get at the heart of the value prop of their product.
But it’s a very engaging experience. Maybe they already have a service desk solution. As you can see here from these dots at the bottom, there are quite a few of these questions. So I’m not going to go through all of them, but you can see that we’re getting more and more information from the prospect and we are getting a deeper level of engagement as people go through it.
Jay: That assessment is built inside your tool and then I think it was on their website or it’s on your website?
Aaron: Well, this is an example because we’ve cloned it to show on our website. But in their case, yes, they have deployed this on their website. So, we’re creating an app and that app had to live on our landing page or it can live on a customer’s website.
Jay: You just embed it into your own website then.
Aaron: That’s exactly right. So, how do I build this thing or anything else like an ROI calculator or an interactive whitepaper or interactive video? Let’s pop into the product here. When I login, the first thing I’m going to see, we’re in the middle of a pretty broad design rebrand, UX overhaul right now. So, it’s going to look a little bit different in about two months, but this is what it looks like today.
One of the first things you can see is a dashboard of how are your applications, your apps running? You’re actually looking at the live marketing team data. So, don’t look too carefully. But at a high level, we’re looking at a snapshot of overall performance, how many people are viewing the apps, what’s the click rate of those apps, how many leads are we getting.
The goal here is to drive more leads, find that 5x improvement over static content. We can see things, clicks by channel at a very summary level, where are things in my build workflow? What have I deployed? Again, this is the SnapApp marketing team. So there are a lot of apps here. Not everybody has this many apps running.
So if I wanted to go in and say, “All right, so this is what’s performing.” Back here at the home, I can see all the various apps. I had run a quick filter, which I’ll get rid of. So, these are all the various apps that we’ve got running. It’s searchable, which we’ll see in a second. But you very quickly see what’s in draft, what’s been published and you can jump in and see the metrics of all the different types of apps you might be running.
If I wanted to create a new app, it’s very simple. Again, our goal here is to make it as simple as possible and we’re constantly making new changes. As I mentioned, we’re in the middle of a UX overhaul as well to continue to make this easier and easier and easier for folks to use.
So if I wanted to create a new app, we just launched this new approach here, so we have, like I said, a bunch of different types of apps that I might want to launch. If I wanted to do one of those assessments that I just saw, I’d just use an assessment.
So this is going to give me . . . it was already in an assessment, so here we go . . . if I wanted to choose a theme, I come down here and say right now, I have no theme, maybe I want like the energy theme, so I can see how this might setup. And then I’m going to choose my layout. Do I want it to be multi-page portrait or single-page scrolling, multi-page landscape? You can make these changes. Then you go ahead and create. It’s that simple.
Now, all these templates, we continue to add to our templates, these are all suggestions. So, if you want to create your own using your own themes, it’s very simple to do that. It’s very simple to import your own CSS structures and your own design styles so you can make it look . . .
Jay: Almost like making an HTML email, right? Just with some other elements.
Aaron: That’s right. So, again, you just go through here and you have this panel that’s very much like PowerPoint, as you can imagine, where you can add pages, etc. So, rather than building one on the fly, we’re just going to come back up here to all of my existing ones.
Jay: This is like a cooking show, like, “Imagine when it comes out of the oven it looks like this.”
Aaron: That’s right. So one of the things we talk to our customers about is really developing apps at every stage of the funnel and really thinking about what it is that you’re trying to do because that’s going to gauge how you should measure it.
You think about top of the funnel. I want to create lots of engagement. I want to have something fun. I want to get people involved in what we’re doing. That might be one type of app and I might be measuring clicks and views and completions, right? But something like an assessment or an ROI calculator might be very bottom of the funnel. I want people to move to the next stage of my lead flow. So, there I might be measuring lead form submits and opportunity creation.
Jay: Yeah.
Aaron: Too often I think in all marketing, not just people working with SnapApp, we maybe misalign what we’re measuring against the goal of whatever campaign we’re running. So we wind up . . .
Jay: We’re measuring engagement deep in the funnel. We’re measuring leads top of the funnel. We’re just kind of all mixed up.
Aaron: Exactly. It winds up being a big old mess, right? So, I’m going to show you something that we did that was super fun that was very top of the funnel. Let me show you something that we did which was a “Game of Thrones” assessment. Everybody loves “Game of Thrones.” I’m going to admit here and I may be shunned from all future cool marketing things, but I actually haven’t watched it.
Jay: Don’t start. It’s going to cost you like 50 hours of your life. I’ve got to tell you, it’s a worthwhile 50 hours, but you’re going to have to carve out some time if you get started.
Aaron: Exactly. It’s a very simple thing. Hey, have some fun. This was before the latest season launched. Discover your “Game of Thrones” house. So this is the backend. This is what you would see on the landing page. Then we’re going to ask you a series of questions. As you can see here down the side our first question is, “What is your go-to button color?” Do you like blue or red or sepia or green? You make a choice there. These all have logic behind there. Question two, “What’s your marketing motto?” We’re sort of gaining more insight from you as you go through.
Anyway, you’re going to go down this little thing and I’ll share it out in a second at the end, but more importantly is this lead gen form here. So how do you feel about your marketing? Do you want to give us your email address? In this logic is where the magic really happens. So it’s kind of a cool experience. We’re learning things about you in a very fun and dynamic way, very top of the funnel.
But if we get your information . . . I’m asking you for your information because you want to take the next step, now we can start moving you down our lead funnel. We’ve learned through this process a whole bunch of very interesting things about you. I’ll show you how that comes to play here in a second. So, we’re connecting this directly into your marketing automation platform. In our case we use Marketo. So, we have this . . .
Jay: But I assume you also integrate into other platforms as well?
Aaron: That’s correct. We do all the big ones, but certainly the most popular ones these days–Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, Act-On, Salesforce, you name it.
Jay: Great.
Aaron: If we need to add one, we will. So what’s interesting is we have these different fields where we’re collecting data and we’ve mapped them. We’ll show you what this looks like in Marketo. We’ve just mapped them to different fields in Marketo and we’re sending across the data how you answered the question.
So if I did this the right way . . . And this is where this is really . . . you see where we’re sending it to Marketo. So, this is everybody who filled out in Marketo, now we’re in our live instance of Marketo. This is everybody who filled out this SnapApp. We’re going to pick up Patrick Moynihan here. Again, this is a live lead.
You can see if we scroll down here because we have a lot of noise in here because we use Salesforce for a lot of this stuff, his questions. So question one he’s . . . sales and marketing alignment is key. We don’t need those things, but account-based marketing and sales enablement are key issues for him. They’re looking to update their interactive tool.
So this is all information that can then get passed on to sales that sales can use to have a much more strategic conversation with that prospect, “Hey, I know that sales and marketing alignment is a key issue for you. Let me tell you how we can help you with that.”
Jay: Nice.
Aaron: Yeah. Even more interesting in addition to that because sales loves that, is we can also run differentiated nurturing against how you . . .
Jay: I was just going to ask you that. So, send a follow up email to everybody who said, “Wolf and sales enablement and send them a special sales enablement was raised by wolves email.”
Aaron: Exactly right. That’s really where the magic happens. Now you’re running a differentiated nurture stream against very microsegments. You can really test that out and figure out who are really top of the funnel and who are moving through the lead funnel and who can you accelerate, try and find those super MQLs, if you will. So now on the Salesforce side again live data. Don’t look too carefully. We can see here that here SnapApp result, this guy wound up in the House of Stark and again, that information is available for folks. So, if I go . . . it’s all through this question and answer process.
Jay: So, I love the assessment. You said other things you can make infographics.
Aaron: Yeah.
Jay: And videos.
Aaron: Yeah.
Jay: What else is on that list of nine things?
Aaron: Let’s go back and let’s look at that list of nine things. I do want to leave the site because the rest of the marketing team would be mad at me if I overwrote their “Game of Thrones.” So polls and surveys, contests, you have blank canvas, sort of create what you want. Contests, there are a lot of different people who do different contests. You can imagine lots of different things.
Bracket challenges are a relatively new things for us. We ourselves did a campaign around what’s your most binge-worthy TV show in a classic bracket style. It got a lot of people to engage. Now, those people are not leads by any stretch of the imagination but they’re now engaging with our content in a fun and interesting way and now we can sort of pull them. We can do other marketing to them to move them down the funnel.
Jay: Did you capture email address or you didn’t identify them?
Aaron: Yeah. We did capture email addresses. But one of the things that’s interesting — it’s sort of hard to see in the code unless you know what you’re looking for — we have a two-way integration. So, if you already know who you are you can actually set that lead form to skip.
Jay: Okay. Nice.
Aaron: If Jay Baer is already in your database. We already know who you are. We already know where you work. When you’re coming in and filling out and participating in one of these top of the funnel campaigns, we can just skip. We don’t even show you the lead form because we already know who you are.
Jay: That’s nice.
Aaron: Yeah. We had one of our customers, HCSS, which is a construction software company that sells to construction companies. They created a bracket, your most interesting project that you’ve built. They wound up with 130 or so submissions from their customers. Several hundred thousand people participated and voted all the way through the bracket. At one point it broke their website they had so much traffic. And really created some really dynamic engagement with their customers at a level they’d never been able to experience before.
Jay: Especially for these interactive apps that are top of the funnel. So you’re largely interacting with people who perhaps you don’t have a relationship with historically. What is the promotional layer for that? Are you driving people to the bracket, for example, through social, through paid? How do people know that this bracket exists?
Aaron: You still do need to promote. You have to get it out there using however you want. Most people do social, email, website, sort of your standard ways of thinking about it. Some of our forward thinking customers are also starting to bring these into the events. They either have it at an event on an iPad or something like that or they’re creating apps before the event. Hey, I know you’re going to the show.
Some of our forward thinking customers are also starting to bring these into events, where they either have it at an event or something like that or they’re creating apps before they event, “Hey, I know you’re going to this show. Love to get some thoughts about what you might want to see there and how you can engage.” Actually Oracle just did something with us around MME this year. I’m assuming you’re able to see this.
Jay: Yes.
Aaron: You can say why are you . . . this is for 2016, which just happened. I didn’t go in 2015. Here’s why I might want to attend this year. Are you B2B or B2C? Based on all these different picks, you’re starting to build an agenda that’s really customized and relevant to you.
Jay: Nice. That’s really cool. I was actually at that event and spoke. I didn’t get a chance to see this assessment though. It’s great.
Aaron: Did you show up here? If I had known ahead of time, I would have tailored this.
Jay: That’s okay. That’s quite all right. Don’t worry about it.
Aaron: In their case, they have a next call to action — download the mobile app, learn more about how it might work for you, share it on Facebook. There are a lot of things you can do to promote next actions as well.
Jay: So in the dashboard that we looked at earlier, as the marketer, I’m going to get data on visits. So how many people actually used that assessment. I’m going to get some sort of conversion rate metrics of things that are going to go into whatever marketing automation system I direct them to.
Aaron: That’s right. Then you have a choice, by the way, what information you send across. We’re not today attempting to replace Marketo or Salesforce as your system of record. What we’re trying to do is really inform and help you make more strategic decisions about what’s working and what’s not. So, you can say, “Hey, this app is a homerun or even a solid double. Maybe I should double down and do more of it,” or, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea but it doesn’t seem like it’s performing. Maybe I need to do more promotion to get more people’s eyes on it.”
I think a lot of times, unfortunately, we may have a little bit of hubris about how great our website is, some people really have a great website. Some people don’t. But hey, I promoted it. I put up my website. I sent out a tweet.
Jay: Yeah.
Aaron: That can work. You might want to do a little bit more with it. You can really start to see that come out in the data. You can drill down app by app and see how each app is working.
Jay: Are there any technology requirements to embed this in a site? Do you have to have a certain site platform or anything along those lines?
Aaron: You do not.
Jay: Nice.
Aaron: It’s straight up embed codes so you can put it wherever you want and we have people putting it on anything you can imagine. And for some people maybe IT is a pain and they can’t create new pages, so we do give you the option of hosting on one of our landing pages.
Jay: Hosted landing page, sure.
Aaron: There are a lot of good reasons to do that. I think most people would prefer to host it within their own infrastructure, which makes total sense.
Jay: How does the interactive video work? With so much content moving toward video, I’m interested to understand the interactive element of that.
Aaron: Yeah. The question is do I have an example on the website right now? I think I do. If I don’t, I apologize. We should. Okay. We’ll leave off the folks who actually do video for a living. Let’s look at CEB. So this is going to play the right way. Can you see the video?
Jay: Yeah.
Aaron: You can hear it? Wow. So, you can see how in this case they’ve overlaid a question.
Jay: Nice. Is that question coming from your app?
Aaron: That’s right. The nice thing about video is this video doesn’t live in our system at all. So if you had a YouTube video or a Wistia video or Brightcove or Vidyard, any of those top video platforms, we just go grab your video and then we add these interactive elements to it. You don’t have to like throw out your Vidyard or Brightcove install. We ride alongside that.
This is really the key thing here to think about when you think about interactive content and you think about SnapApp specifically. We can help you create new things as well, but we also want to help you extend the existing assets you have. This video may have already existed but you want to breathe new life into it by adding some additional interactive elements to it.
One area where some really forward-thinking folks are doing some interesting things are webinar replays. We had a webinar. We had lots of great people attend. They had a live experience. Then we take that, most people take that flat video. Store it up as a move file somewhere and then gate it with a lead form. Great. Now you can watch it. You have none of that experience from watching it live. You can recreate, you can add questions. You can engage on different levels on different levels of information within that webinar replay to make it a better experience.
Jay: But that video is not choose your own adventure. So if I click yes or no here, it’s not going to change the subsequent video content.
Aaron: That’s right. There are ways you can sort of fake it out a little bit.
Jay: Yeah, branch it and all that.
Aaron: But that’s going to require a lot of video.
Jay: Right.
Aaron: Ambulance going by. The joys of Downtown Boston. If you want to go and shoot all the video to create a choose your own adventure, there are ways to do it. Most people honestly don’t have that kind of time or energy.
Jay: Sure. But then all these clicks inside the questions that are laid on top of the video will go into your data base of record.
Aaron: That’s right. So again, when we’re in the builder over here — if I was creating an interactive video and . . . okay. Sorry. So, there’s lead for, you can have lead forms and all those that when you configure it is going to show up in our case Marketo.
Jay: I love it. It’s great. Fantastic. Good demo. Anything else you want us to look at?
Aaron: No. I think we could spend all day here, right? I think we gave you a good example, a number of good examples of how you can get started. So that’s really the key is that you have the ability to do lots of different things. You have the ability to . . . you have the freedom to really choose and create your own experience how you see fit. We really encourage our customers to experiment, test. You might fail once or twice, hopefully you don’t, but the goal is to really define those things that are going to create a better experience, a richer experience.
When we talked about use cases earlier, how do we get more leads in the top of the funnel? Get more people to engage with you at a high level. How do we signal for sales? Who are the best? Who are the super MQLs that you should be talking to more efficiently, effectively and also how can we use these to really enrich and augment our data? Many of us have hundreds of thousands of names in our database and we only know a fraction of the information that we want to know. How can we tailor a SnapApp to go and ask those questions in an engaging way to fill out that profile in more depth?
Jay: SaaS platform, are you charging on a monthly basis or per app?
Aaron: Yeah. It’s an annual SaaS platform. It ranges anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000. Today, that’s based on the number of apps that you want to deploy. We try and make it as easy as possible for you. We want you to deploy tens, dozens, unlimited apps if that’s what you want, but the goal is to make it as super simple as possible.
Jay: And do you have some sort of a customer success team that’s helping those folks figure out the nuances or best practices for app creation?
Aaron: Yeah. We’d love to say, “Hey, here it is, go do and go build it,” and a lot of customers can do that, but we realize this is a new thing for a lot of people. So, our customer success team is great. We just actually hired a new expanded team, brought on a new leader, a woman by the name of Renee Bachmann coming out of Acquia.
So, it was a great hire for us. She’s been doing great things the last several months to make sure that when you deploy SnapApp that we’re helping you get it setup the right way. The actual turn on is easy, “Here’s a password. Off you go,” but the ideation of which apps, what content do you have that exists today.
Jay: Mapping those apps to the funnel like you talked about.
Aaron: That’s right.
Jay: So top of the funnel we need three, middle of the funnel we need three, bottom of the funnel we need three and kind of thinking that through.
Aaron: Right. Marketers today are very adept. We’re already thinking about content types at the funnel stage, but they tend to be very traditional. “I’ve got a blog post for the top. I’ve got a whitepaper or an eBook for the middle, I’ve got a case study, ROI Excel sheet for the bottom or some sales enablement piece.” How do we extend those assets out and think about the interactive pieces that can ride along with that or how do we create new ones for each of those stages as well?
Jay: I suspect most customers are on the B2B side just because of the nature of B2B demand gen and lead gen. Do you have some B2C customers playing with it as well?
Aaron: We do. You’re right. Our focus of late has been B2B because that’s where there’s a lot of interesting marketing going on at this level. We have some more traditional consumer-oriented companies in our history.
We also had a big publishing business early on, kind of a pivot from the prior company. So, like Oprah Winfrey Network is a customer, which is great. But really our focus today is more on the B2B side of the world because that’s where a lot of the interesting marketing challenges lie for this kind of thing.
Jay: Especially with the multiple funnel stages. No question about it.
Folks watching Marketing Marvels, thanks as always for tuning in. I love what Aaron and the team at SnapApp are doing. To get a more comprehensive demo where you can really go through there and Aaron and his team will kind of hold your hand and show you all the nuts and bolts we don’t have time for in this episode, go to Info.SnapApp.com/Marketing-Marvels. We’ll have the URL for you not only in the show notes, but on the screen as well. You can follow along.
Go check that out. Sign up for a demo. You are going to love it. I think if you are doing any sort of robust lead generation in a B2B context in particular, this is kind of a no-brainer. There are only so many whitepapers and blog posts you can create. At some point, everybody has seen as many whitepapers as they can possibly stand. So the ability to create some really interesting, innovative, interactive pieces of content without a lot of hassle is really, really interesting and really exciting. The ease of use is a spectacular feature set.
Aaron: Thank you.
Jay: Aaron, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions before we close out this episode. You talked about the pivot at SnapApp. You’ve been in content marketing and software for a while. How did you get to SnapApp? What’s your origin story with this company?
Aaron: Yeah. So I’ve been doing B2B marketing for more years than I care to count at this point and I have the hair to show it or don’t. I’ve worked in the content world. A couple companies ago I was in the content management space. I really enjoyed working closely with marketers and helping marketers figure out how to market better. I think that for me personally, I really enjoy that experience because marketers are a tough crowd. We’re jaded. We’ve seen it all, but when you can break through with marketers, I think you’ve really done something interesting.
Most recently I was at a cloud storage company and we had a successful exit to a large IT company out of California. As I was thinking about what I might want to do next, looking for a company that had some great technology in the marketing space with some great momentum behind it where I could come in and help shape the marketing and the go-to market and really help marketers achieve more. Our leadership team that I joined has done a lot of great things and there’s a lot of momentum behind the business.
So I’m super excited to be back in the marketing community. I’ve been back here since February and I’ve been loving every minute of it.
Jay: Fantastic. We’re delighted to have you back. On behalf of the marketing community, although I’m not really enabled to speak on behalf of the entire marketing community, but I will do so anyway. I will be their proxy. Thank you for returning. Last question from me, other than SnapApp, which is certainly a marketing marvel, I love it, what’s marvelous technology to you? What’s a marketing technology platform out there that you’re like, “That’s awesome”?
Aaron: There are lots of things, of course. We talked about some of them here. I think two things. one, I really like what Influitive is doing on the advocacy side.
Jay: Me too.
Aaron: Creating a community around your users. Marketers want to buy from other marketers, so the power of recommendation matters. Creating a community of fans who love what you’re doing and want to tell others about it and are enabled is cool.
Jay: That’s the whole point of this show, right? Let me use what measure of influence I may or may not have to tell people, “Here’s software I think is really interesting you should look at.” I completely agree with that thesis and I love the guys at Influitive. I spoke at their conference recently and it was really, really well done.
Aaron: Yeah. They’re good guys. But don’t sleep on simple technology. I’m a big fan of Optimizely. It’s so simple. I think one of the things that I try to do and try to instill in my teams that all marketers should do is test the crap out of everything. If you’re not running countless tests down to . . . sort of the growth hacking mentality, but really test everything. Be willing to test some crazy ass ideas. They’re not all going to work. Optimizely makes it drop dead simple to think about running those micro tests. It’s a pretty tactical piece of technology but you can really use it strategic benefit.
Jay: Great point. Good question about SnapApp. Can you do A/B testing and things like that within an individual app?
Aaron: Yeah. We have some A/B testing capabilities within the app and we continue to add to it every day. So, there are lots of ways you can do within the app A/B testing and then also of course using it on your website using whatever you’re using for A/B testing.
Jay: To test the wrapper around the app.
Aaron: Exactly.
Jay: One thing I forgot to ask you, all the apps are responsive, I presume?
Aaron: Yeah. There are a number of different ways to do responsive. There’s a certain amount of responsiveness out of the box. Sometimes I think marketers who are really thinking about the mobile channel, that’s really important to them, they actually prefer to go build another mobile app specifically. There are a lot of different ways to do that, but we give you limitless possibilities. So, yes, the answer is yes.
Jay: Great. Fantastic. Aaron, thank you so much. And thanks to the entire SnapApp team for building some truly spectacular technology. I love it. I know lots of folks in the Marketing Marvels community will love it as well. Thanks for taking the time. Great demo as well. Thanks to all of you for watching.
Remember, go to Info.SnapApp.com/Marketing-Marvels to sign up for a full demo from Aaron and his team. You’re going to love that. New episodes of Marketing Marvels launch every two to three weeks. You can subscribe on our YouTube channel. Go to bit.ly/MarketingMarvels for the direct link to subscribe to this very show.
Marketing Marvels is a production of Convince & Convert Media. In addition to this show, we’ve got a ton of podcasts as well to help marketers get better at their craft. We have Social Pros. We have Content Pros. We have Influence Pros, which is all about influencer marketing, and we have the Business of Story, which is a podcast about building Hollywood storytelling principles into your marketing. All four of those shows can be found on our website, ConvinceAndConvert.com and of course on iTunes or whatever you happen to use to listen to podcasts or go to ConvinceAndConvert.com/Podcasts for all of that stuff.
Until the next episode, I am Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Thank you so much for being a Marketing Marvel.
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