Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar, Content Marketing Manager at ZenPilot, joins the show to discuss his experience running a survey campaign to create original research hand-in-hand with strategic partners.
ZenPilot, Kuba explains how he incorporated partners at each step of the campaign. He tells how he identified good partners, strategized content, collected responses, and shared insights with partners. Kuba also divulged the promotion strategy for the survey, which included PPC promotion and partnering with a PR firm.
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Highlights
- Trust is the new oil for marketing. 3:47
- How did you pick the partners? 8:09
- How do you get a bigger partner? 12:37
- How to set expectations with partners. 17:21
- The push to drive responses and share the report. 23:23
- Distribution strategy. 27:17
- Data is nothing without a good story. 30:41
- How to leverage video ask into survey co-marketing. 35:16
Transcript
Logan Lyles 0:05
Welcome back to marketing together. I'm your host Logan Lyles with teamwork.com. I'm joined by my friend today Kuba crites, our content marketing manager at Zen pilot Kuba, welcome to the show, man.
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 0:18
Thanks for Oregon. Thank you so much for the invite. Super excited to be here. And I looked through some of the previous episodes of this show. I mean, great companies are really, really stoked for the invitation. Thanks.
Logan Lyles 0:28
Yeah, we actually brought you up by name a few weeks ago, when we had Kenny Lang on, as he was talking about, he was a guest on the Zen pilot podcast agency journey. So a client from that and really started to lean into a relationship with you guys seeing where could we do some more series together? Where could we do some more content together? So one building on obviously, you're thinking about a near bound approach to marketing just based on that conversation with Kenny but what we're going to be talking about today, something that came up between our partnership conversation@teamwork.com and Zen pilot, you guys are a phenomenal solution partner there is this concept of survey, co marketing really being a powerful way to execute near bound marketing with your partners. In fact, I shared a little bit about a campaign that both teamwork dot Commons and pilot have been involved with here and use recent weeks. And the one and only Pete kupuna commented and he just said this survey co marketing is the ultimate co marketing. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Because not only in your current role, but in previous ones, you've really been in the trenches using survey co marketing as a way to execute nearby and marketing. So tell us a little bit before we get into the nitty gritty of the tactics of finding the right partners, executing on original research, promoting to get responses, and sharing the insights and promoting that together. What's kind of your background in survey co marketing, what have been some of the things that you've done that have led you to think, Hey, this is a really key play that you can run in your band marketing.
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 2:06
I mean, there's a lot of upside to it. You know, you reminded me of the origin story of this conversation in general, I remember just reaching out to you. I mean, teamwork and Zen pilot, we're working on this survey together us helping drive responses for your service. And I just message you out of the blue saying, you know, I sympathize with the challenge, because that used to be my bread and butter at my previous company. So that's the experience primarily, in 2020, we launched a few things, we started doing live streams, and I fell in love with those as well. But one major project that my previous company launched was this survey among CTOs, we actually called it the global CTO survey. And partners were essential for the success of that, you know, in 2020, the first year, we managed to get 250 responses from CTOs, which was, you know, not super easy to get. And the year after that, we managed to get quite close to 500 CTO responses for the next edition of the survey. And there's just a lot of nitty gritty that goes into it. But I realized that I mean, we knew it would be a strong play, we probably didn't realize how strong, especially the repurposing opportunities, they're quite huge. So yeah, I'm happy to get into like any of that. All of that kind of chronologically, however you want to? You want me to tackle that?
Logan Lyles 3:27
Yeah, absolutely. So I think from here to give people an idea of what we're going to cover in the rest of the conversation, I think, one how do you identify the partners to do survey co marketing with? And then how do you develop the strategy of what the content and the survey or the report is going to be? How do you drive responses together? And then how do you share the insights together? But before we get into each of those four, I think one thing I just wanted to touch on there is that we've been touching on the importance of trust on the show, really, the reason that inbound needs to evolve to a near bound approach in marketing is that, you know, data was the new oil, it was what fueled the season of inbound and marketing automation. Today, what we're saying, you know, from partner hacker and reveal, and folks that are talking about near bound marketing, like the folks on the show, is that really trust is the new Data Trust is what is driving things. And I think what's interesting about bringing in survey co marketing into your near bound marketing motion, is that it leans on trust in two ways. You are partnering with the folks who are closer to your buyer to surround them, which is what nearby is all about. But you're also sharing insights that aren't just pulled out of thin air. They're not just hey, we have this point of view, because we have it we think this because it ties to our product. It's actually derived from the audience that you're trying to reach. And so you're able to share data, you're able to share insights that people trust. So when you combine the trust First of that content because of where it's pulled from, and the trust of the partners that you're surrounding the audience with, I think we're doubling down on trust in this motion. So I just wanted to call that out. Is there anything else that you know comes to mind there Kuba, as I shared just kind of high level of this motion and the importance of trust in executing this in a near bound marketing?
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 5:23
I think you hit the nail on the head here, like, for so much marketing content out there, I'm just asking myself, is this real? Is this somebody's opinion that is being presented as fact? Is this a hot take? That has been called the state of things? Or is there actually some semblance of reality in there? And, of course, you know, even in surveys, the, you know, the data can be somehow manipulated, we've seen it right. But it's so much harder. And the likelihood I think, is so much higher, when you've got, you know, 250 responses, 500 responses? And, you know, like, a hard percentage of those people are saying, for example, you know, an important question in our survey was, how many of them are willing to outsource development, you know, in what kind of time horizons are willing to outsource development? Obviously, that was important for us as a business. That was kind of the, you know, the gold question that we had in there are like, how many of them are worried about cybersecurity? I mean, it was it covered a lot of layers, honestly. And it led to some really interesting insights. Interestingly, you know, each section of the survey, like one was about cybersecurity. And we had a cybersecurity partner who was primarily interested in that they wanted the data, they wanted to comment on that they wanted to contribute the expert commentary. Then another one was about leadership and training. And we had a partner whose whole business was training tech leaders, and they were very interested in that part. So it kind of the broader you make the your survey, the more air surface area you've got for partnerships, I feel so anyway, to your point about trust. Yeah, I was, I was thinking the exact same thing, that it's it's two layers, you know, with more partners involved, you have more trust that the service legit in the first place, which increases the likelihood that you'll fill it out. And also, again, is this dose of reality, something that people can lean on? When so much, it's just hot takes out there right now,
Logan Lyles 7:08
a dose of reality in a sea of hot takes. That is, I think, how how we could execute this and how it'll actually be perceived by our audience. You know what you were saying there? Kuba. Again, drawing from your experience working for a company that was focused on CTOs and CIOs and those IT leaders? Maybe that's a good segue for I think, what step number one in survey co marketing really is, is identifying the right partner. So it sounds like to me, you're looking at, hey, we're trying to reach this audience of IT leaders. And maybe if I kind of visualize a pie chart, or kind of a circle, there's these different areas that are important to them. Training, outsourcing cybersecurity, it did you maybe kind of look at it that way, and then say, Okay, I want to partner in this area, and then it cares about cybersecurity. I want a partner who cares about training, and then tried to fill it in there. Was that part of it? And or, you know, What other things did you use to start to think about? What partners do I want to bring in to this survey, co marketing motion
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 8:19
was actually the other way around, to some extent, in that the partners that signed up to join us with a survey, at least the ones that had quite a close partnership, they actually influenced the shape of the survey, and the questions in the survey. Now, before we started recording, though, you touched upon something that I also wanted to expand upon was also kind of picking the topic of the survey, I feel like, you know, we went kind of easy mode with this, because in hindsight, it was such a strong move to just pick the persona as the topic of the survey that made everything simpler, because a partner only needed to ask themselves or, you know, when I was sending messages looking for partners, I only had to ask, you know, are CTOs a relevant audience? For you? VPs of engineering engineering managers, are they a relevant audience for you? If so, we're running a survey all around that, that kind of the clarity, the simplicity that it lended to the project, I think, drove it success. And now as for picking the partners, a lot of it was just looking around, well, maybe not a lot of it, but part of it was just looking around and looking at, you know, our existing clients for the company that was running the survey. For example, we had a client that we were helping build software for, but also the industry that they were they were in was cybersecurity. So it was a very natural conversation, we're going to be running the survey, can you help us promote it? But can you also help us ask relevant smart questions and the survey? So what we did was we pulled the partners in very early in the process as we were shaping the survey, because we also thought, you know, selfish benefit for them. If there's like for us the golden question was, are you outsourcing? Are you planning to outsource because we were a software development agency, right. But for this partner of ours, They were about, I mean, this is a little bit technical, but they were about the security of like containers in programming. So we said, Okay, I mean, among the questions, we'll add one that's like specially for you, how are you currently approaching the security of your containers, and that made them extremely motivated to distribute the service, because one of those they can directly allude to in all of their marketing and messaging forward, you know, like 40% of studios are saying they don't have security for their containers, or, you know, or whichever this that ended up being that I think provides like a good natural motivation and incentive. So some of it was just looking about, you know, good fit clients that we could partner in, bring them, partner with, bring them closer, another was just looking for companies that are kind of in this golden zone of partnership, same audience, complementary services, I'm sure this must have been mentioned, on the pod, you know, thus far, in particular, there was just one company and then have to shout them out by name, they're called leader from Spain, Alvaro Moya is the is the leader there. The first year, we were doing the CTO survey, they were quite small. But we quickly found that, first of all, they had a lot of hustle, and they did some of the, you know, the best and most could have vigorous promotion of it. And also, the fit in terms of complimentary services, it would like it was like two jigsaw puzzles, you know, they were so far from offering development teams, they wanted nothing to do with that, they were happy to refer business to us, ourselves, we're like, we're going to do it for you, we were not so much. And we're going to train your team, part of things so that, I mean, look, for those where there's zero friction, where you know, you were a potential client of yours could easily become a client of your partners, and there would be just no competition in there. So you know, and I think it's also good, you know, as you're reaching out to partners to have some moonshots, and they're, so in the software development world, we managed to get, I forget if that was for the first edition or the second, but we managed to get scrum.org as a partner. And you know, if anybody's heard of the scrum methodology, they're kind of the main voice in the space. You know, we sent like a dozen of these kinds of moonshot invites. And, you know, sometimes it turns out that you know, somebody who's connected to a larger company, and you know, you just, you have that little bit of luck to grab that large partner, call them, you know, a strategic partner, or give them a more prominent placing and on the marketing materials. And I can, you know, drive a lot of authority and a lot of responses to,
Logan Lyles 12:37
I love what you said there and reaching out to, you know, maybe punching above your weight a little bit, shooting those those shots out there to see, can we get a bigger partner where maybe they're larger, they have more reach, maybe we don't have an existing relationship. So one, just try to look to see what connections that you have. One thing I've heard, Jared fuller reveal talk about lately is, you know, how much time he spends writing intro emails for other people to send on his behalf. I think that's actually a skill that a lot of marketers could start developing. I think some salespeople who really lean into referrals and intros, they have that motion, they've, you know, exercise that muscle, I think that's something that could also lead to some success for marketing teams as well. So just to recap where we've been, I think you've, you've covered one and two, because I was kind of thinking about, you know, picking partners, as you can already have this strategy developed and then working on it with them. It's really kind of a one two punch, it's picking the right partners, making sure they're shared ICP, there's complimentary services or products, there's not friction, reach out to them and make it simple, just make it about the shared ICP. And I actually relate to that. So where we opened up for you listening some context, what Kuba and I are working on, between Zen pilot and teamwork.com. We're doing a benchmarking study for agency operations. So marketing and other sorts of agencies out there to really help them benchmark certain things like their utilization rate, their billable hours, those sorts of things within the agency. And as I started crafting my email to reach out to partners like Kuba and other of our solution partners@teamwork.com, I started saying, Okay, here's what's going to be in it. Here are some of the questions that are not. And I was like, hold on a second, I need to make this way simpler. Like, hey, kubot, we're doing a report on agency operations. And I think you guys could help us drive more responses and we can co promote the insights together. And it was something like that very simple. That was just what is the topic and who is the persona so I actually followed some of your advice even before hearing it. So that's good affirmation that I'm, you know, thinking, thinking intelligently, like you would advise there Kuba. So then from what you were saying, if you allow your partners to contribute questions, They're going to be more incentivized to share those those insights. Is there anything else you want to speak to Kuba in kind of this, if we're combining step one of picking the partners with step two of developing the strategy, anything that you learned in developing that strategy before you start to go to market together to collect responses, and share the the survey or the report that was helpful as you're still in the trenches, kind of in that closed room with the partners, developing the strategy before you go to market with the survey that you want to touch on?
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 15:31
There's another big part of the strategy that I wanted to mention. And that's incentives. So it turns out, when you bring in a variety of partners, they have a variety of incentives to offer. And I felt like that really increased conversion rates for us where each partner we asked not just are you willing to promote, but are you willing to contribute another incentive to the survey, and it turned out to be, you know, at the end of the day, a nice grab bag of okay, this partner is offering a free course this partner is offering 50% off this is, you know, sometimes it was, it would be kind of this play out, okay? This ebook is like, usually on our site, but we're still gonna throw it in there, you know, it's still gonna be part of the email, just so you know, for convenience, you also get this from another partner of ours, somebody even offered a free consultation, you know, for anyone who requested it, if they, you know, had the extra capacity. So at the end, it was like, I remember the landing page was like a cards of different incentives. And I mean, there's various schools of thought here, of course, I mean, we did explore the idea of gift cards as well, ultimately, we ended up redistributing the budget that we would have contributed to gift cards and put more of that into PPC promotion, which I'm not gonna lie, it was part of how we distributed the survey as well, how we got the how we got the responses as well, actually. But still, I mean, I felt that it was a big value proposition when you just had this kind of grab bag of goodies for anybody who filled out the survey. And it only takes just one of those that somebody wants to grab that might push them over the edge to actually fill out the survey. So again, I think it boils down to you've got these partners involved in so many more layers than just the distribution of the survey and the insights, but also the design, but also the incentives. You know, however many layers, I think it results in a better survey, better insights at the end of the day, and just more reach.
Logan Lyles 17:21
Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of reach, let's segue into CO promoting to drive responses. So before you have the final survey the report with the insights and you're sharing those together, you've got a step to promote together, which is really where we've been the last couple of weeks between teamwork dot Commons and pilot in this story of driving responses together. Talk to me a little bit about how you set expectations with partners, do you give them kind of the same call to action? Hey, send us in your newsletter, LinkedIn, maybe we're going to do a PPC campaign, we're going to own that you're going to do this. What have been some of the tactics that you've found helpful as you start to build your campaign to drive responses with partners, and divvy up the roles and responsibilities? Really?
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 18:09
Yeah, you know, when it comes to crafting the message of like, what will make this worth your time? Yeah, look, I mean, there's a lot of podcast episodes, I found that kind of gloss or an important detail that really drove success. I don't want to gloss over the PPC part here. Okay.
Logan Lyles 18:26
Yeah, let's double down man.
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 18:28
If you're willing to, to devote some PPC budget here, then yeah, by all means mentioned, now, we're going to run a campaign of X many figures. So you can be you know, so we're serious about this, or investing in this, you know, gives them an idea of the budget. And it just really helps them realize that you're serious. That's one important thing to show them the message and you're talking about the investment in the in the campaign that gets people to listen, another one is I would underline the importance of the strategic partner, you know, one bigger brand, just mentioning it, that they're already partner, and you know, that they're already locked in as a strategic partner that can really help with this message. But sometimes, I mean, an important part of the conversation. And this is something that you need to prepare for, and also kind of set expectations correctly as the partners are going to ask you, what kind of data are we going to get from the survey? Are we gonna get the raw data? In which case, you know, if you're distributing in the EU, you really need to make sure that kind of all the legal stuff you've got covered in terms of you know, they should consent to their data being shared, not just with your company, but all the other partner companies. What we did in most cases was we mentioned that there's going to be a report, as a result of the survey, the report, the report is going to show, you know, certain data correlated with certain other data. So for example, investment in cybersecurity versus size of company among the CTOs. And even though we're not going to share the raw data with our part notice because of the complications I mentioned earlier, if you need us to pull anything else correlate question number three with question number 17. And see what kind of chart results of that we can do that for you, you know, or upon request, we can do that for you. I, I felt that was kind of a happy medium, where, you know, in some cases, we did get that question, and we provided the answer, sometimes even being asked that question by a partner means thing, that would be interesting to include in the final report as well, if you know, if there's interest, so it helps you craft the final report as well, because that's a big piece of it, you know, actually looking at the data and picking how what kind of story you're going to tell about data. That was that was a big piece of it. But anyway, to the subject of, you know, incentivizing partners, there's that as for promote, promoting, I wonder if we did anything here, that would be exactly groundbreaking, there was a lot of LinkedIn, there was email newsletters, and you know, a lot of following up if I'm on, so you gotta be a great project manager for this, you gotta have your system for have reminders or, you know, set up a clickup board for it, perhaps, of, you know, keep the partners involved, it's like, it forms a mini community, you know, for a time when you've got these partners involved. So you know, I had this email thread with like, BCC everyone. And every week or two, just an update on where we are in the process, a reminder of when we are closing the survey, and you know, what more you can do, you know, and individually, I saw that you posted on LinkedIn. Great. Did you also send the email, please send it you mentioned, you're going to reach out to this community? Did you reach out? I'm sorry, there's a lot of follow ups. And also, even if they're not a partner, do look at, for example, paid newsletter placements, that gave us some responses where we looked at, you know, within the software development industry, what are some newsletters that are highly regarded, and it's actually take a little chunk of that PPC budget, reinvested into that newsletter placement, that helps because it's because you know, you're reaching the right audience there, you know, it's really important, whatever budget you're spending, you know, that you're as certain as you can be, in our case that we're reaching CTOs, maybe VPs of engineering, you know, one step down, but because otherwise, the budget is just wasted, right. So I think those were the main plays there. Of course, there's stuff that could be explored here that we in practice didn't like doing no more events around the you know, even as the survey is happening, we, of course, included as a CTA, you know, for as long as the survey was running, every time I was live streaming on, by the way, if you're a CTO, watching this, the CTO serving is is where you're gonna go. And oh, actually, you know, within the PPC campaign, one important piece was also do a video. Again, we got into the office, I did a video and I think it's really like, we can see the conversions from it were much better than text ads. And you will be surprised, also by how much better performance when and keep it kind of lights, when you add a little bit of humor to the video, you might think, you know, pretty serious ICP. But you know, the more lightness we introduced into the video content, you know, the more dynamic we made it, the better the results. So, definitely, I would encourage, you know, adding that into the mix, also a little bit of a lift, sure. But it really helps with, also, you know, having more content formats, it helps you advertise multiple times, and not overwhelm the audience with the same type of message.
Logan Lyles 23:23
And I imagine, right, there's kind of two pushes, there's the push to drive responses between your company and your partners, the other evangelists that you're activating in this near bound motion, and then there's the push to share the report or the survey, whatever format you're going to use as either a lead magnet or a content offer in the future. Think about, hey, if I'm doing video, if I'm putting more lift into this different sort of content to drive responses, how can I repurpose that or leverage part of what I've done in the promotion of the insights? Or could I record a video that maybe I could, you know, sit down once and record two versions that we're going to use one now to drive responses and the other later in the process some of that you'll have to wait until you can analyze the insights but kind of batch some of that and I think that that makes it more approachable. The other thing that came to mind for me Kuba is you're talking about organic social with LinkedIn, you're talking about paid media with a PPC campaign. And you're talking about newsletters, like these are all standard marketing channels that we're all using, but we're near bound is different is that you've involved your partners much earlier on, you're not coming to them and just saying, Hey, here's a link, can you share this? And can you share this in all these channels? So there's been the relationship through the process and don't neglect the follow ups? That might even be the title of this episode. Don't neglect the follow ups. Obviously, you guys at Zen pilot consult on operations and project management. teamwork.com is a project management platform for agencies. So we're going to touch on the project management piece here, but however you do it however, you're trying liking things if it's in a pm tool or a spreadsheet or whatever, just know that you can't just say, hey, Kuba, you agreed to this suite. Okay, I'll see you in three weeks, right? You need to be sharing updates, you need to be following up, you need to make sure that you're asking for follow through on the commitments that you ask for, and that you're sharing what you followed through on right. Sometimes that's a great way with partners instead of just saying, hey, Kuba, did you send that email? Right? It's, oh, he could we sent our email yesterday, on Tuesday, we're already seeing this, like, give you something to be excited about, you know, and then that incense, that reciprocity of oh, gosh, I was gonna get that out by Friday. You know what, I'm gonna get that out by Wednesday, or whatever the case is, I'm getting super specific. But I think that that's really weird. This is different than just even though it incorporates all of our standard marketing channels. And you're bound approach means you've got to think about the relationship throughout the entire motion, right?
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 25:58
Yeah, yeah. And also, like, I would pull this thread from earlier and all and pull it all the way here, like, remember that kind of in mind model, you have a question or questions that they contributed, that they care about very deeply, right, already in the survey. So once you've got the results, it's very easy conversation. You know, like, Alvaro, you asked about how many CTOs are training their people to what extent their training, or neglecting their training? Well, turns out 48% Don't have a training plan, you know, for the next three months, or they don't have anything in place. The LinkedIn post writes itself, you know, it can be such a strong part of your messaging for months, you know, going into the future. And so that's why I think one of the main ideas here is that when you involve them in the design stage, it's so much easier, because you're not just giving them an opportunity to increase their brand awareness, but strengthen their messaging with real data. Like that makes it so much more probable, so much more appealing for them to just keep hammering, you know, naughty, you know, this is the difference between them, distributing the report once or twice, versus referring to it for the next six months in all of their blocks. You know, like the problem we solve, CTOs indicated that actually, yeah, it's it's a pressing problem. For them. It's a pressing need. They're neglecting this, we've got the data to show for it. Another part that I wanted to contribute to the distribution piece, if I may. One of the best moves was, honestly, if you've got the ready report, consider taking a taking on a PR firm. Okay, consider partnering with a PR firm, even if it's short term, just show them the report. And they'll be chomping at the bit to distribute it like seriously. PR firms love to have something to kind of go off of and having some hard data, it makes headlines, like super easy for them. In our case, it was a lot of our respondents, I think it was like a 5050 split. And 50% of them said it was something related to cybersecurity like that they wouldn't allow bring your own device, because it's threatened cybersecurity, one of those headlines, I didn't want to misrepresent here, just the thing being like, I this was a repurposing channel that I didn't expect. But it worked out marvelously. We had, you know, some big coverage off of that. And it really helps to, I mean, of course, you can do the PR motion yourself, right. But partnering with the firm was a good move for us. And they could take that content, and they use it for months. And once they stopped using it, there was this law of okay, what other things have you got? Can we repurpose some blogs? That's cool. When is the next CTO survey coming? Just really want to work on that is what the firm just kept saying to us? Yeah,
Logan Lyles 28:47
that's a good shout, to think about engaging a PR firm both in you know, really in the final stages as you're sharing the insights, but I really love the the visual and the very specific example that you gave, how can you set it up? From the beginning of starting survey and the sort of report and analysis co marketing in a nearby and marketing motion? How can I set it up so that my partners aren't going to send two emails to their database, but they're going to refer to this report in their content for the next three quarters? Thinking about how you approach which partners, how you pitch them, how you involve them in the questions, how you involve them in crafting the insights, that is going to make the difference how you bring them in to the process and project manage that and follow up with them and share them, share with them what you're doing and hold them accountable to the things they committed to all of those little pieces are what lead to that outcome that you just summarized, which is what we normally get versus what we really want when we're doing this sort of CO marketing. Well, Kuba as we round out the last little bit here. Let's talk a little bit more you kind of already stepped into step four in sharing the incites engaging a PR firm can be another tactical thing here. I know that along the way in your marketing career, something you've mentioned to me is, you're very passionate about live streaming, you love several aspects of that. How do you think about and how would you advise other marketing leaders who are thinking about survey co marketing in a near bound motion? Where does live streaming come in as a distribution channel, once you're at the end, you've got the report, you've got the analysis. And you're thinking about how are we going to distribute this from our point of view, through our partners and with our partners, that what's what are some of the tactical things you've done with live streaming and other channels for distribution of the final piece of content?
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 30:41
So the report or at the end of the survey, you've got a bunch of data, right? But data is really nothing if you don't have a good story to tell about it. This goes both into writing the report. For each, you know, charts for each slide, you have to ask yourself, Okay, this is the data and what does it say about the state of affairs? What does it say about the trends? definitely consult, you know, the experts within your company as well, you know, I'm in the software development space, I've been here for three years, you've been here for 15, this data, what does it say to you. And that was extremely important, actually, you know, these expert commentary slides, you know, from somebody within the company, from one of our clients from one of our partners, for our CEO, you know, that this report ended up speaking in many authoritative voices that really helped here, and connecting this to live streaming. You know, live streams are good for certain things, and not so good for some other things, you want to explain how to do our complicated workflow and click up or teamwork, for example, then a live stream is great for that. Because you've got this kind of screen sharing piece, you know, people maybe want to, they would rather see a YouTube video, scroll through it, etc. But what live streams are good for his storytelling, actually. So. And, you know, live streams also feel like a kind of, it feels more immediate, it feels more like news a little bit more like news. So definitely, you know, this is something that we were planning on executing never really got to, but I'm confident that this is the right play is the report is in, here are the insights from the report you, I think you could run even in multiple, depending on the length of your survey, you can run multiple shows off of this, okay, so here's a save state of cybersecurity, according to our survey, you know, for all of this, you've got so much more authority, or here's the state of software development frameworks, according to our survey, you know, bring one of the partners on as a guest speaker to comment on this a little bit more, I mean, the possibilities, there's a ton of them. And all of a sudden, because you've got this authoritative data, you're dictating what the industry is saying about these areas. Because, you know, you're giving them something to lean or something to refer on, you know, I probably don't have to mention this, because I mean, it's been said, but it's also a great SEO play, right, having the survey. Now, what we did was, we gated the report for like, six to nine months, to get the lead gen benefit of it. After a while we ungated it to get the SEO benefit of it, obviously, you know, everybody was referring back to it, you know, according to the CTO survey, blah, blah, blah. It was a nice links magnet, which helped promote itself. So yeah, like, very think very thoroughly about the story that the data tells how it relates to you know, what your brand is about the message you want to put out, the partners are gonna look at it from their perspective, you know, when the messages align, definitely go live or do a podcast and talk about that. And that'll catch on, I think,
Logan Lyles 33:34
Man, I love that strategy that you talked about their to gate it initially, and then ungated later, for the SEO juice, and the backlinks, all of those sorts of things. I think you make a really good point about where this fits in with live streaming, especially the point about like, it feels like news, like, hey, we just got out of analyzing all this data, and we're gonna share the the insights, right? And it makes sense for, you know, a live stream, people are going to ask questions, well, okay, well, what about this? And you get to you get to also see in that context, from the comments and the engagement that you're getting? What are the follow up questions that people are asking, how do they initially respond to some of the things are they surprising to them, right, and that can influence the content that you create further, as you build on the rapport, the different angles, you're going to take in those posts that point back to the report, because you see that, hey, people in the livestream were really surprised by this, or it kind of confirmed what they were saying that can influence the different folk and the different angle that you might have in future LinkedIn posts or things like that. The other thing, so we're referring to a couple of stories, right? The previous company, you were at where you guys did the global CTO report or CTO survey, and then the state of agency operations that we're doing@teamwork.com with partners, we're definitely planning on doing a Live Stream. Here in about a month, we're going to talk about some of the analysis and the insights. The other thing I thought about is we have like 12 Plus partners like Zen pilot who are helping us distribute it, we can't necessarily have all of them on the live stream, kind of weighing in and giving commentary and stuff like this. So one of the things I'm planning and, you know, take this, if, if you're listening, and you're thinking about how to do survey, co marketing, take this with a grain of salt, because I haven't necessarily executed this, but it's an idea I floated past some of our partners. You can use a tool like video ask, which is I think was acquired by Typeform. Or vouch one of these tools that allows you do send a survey or send a question to one of your partners, they can hold their phone up and record a quick video and answering that question. And where I think this plays into survey co marketing is you, I could send it to you Kuba and say, Hey, here's, here's an insight that we gleaned in the report, I want to get your hot take on this insider, you add your commentary, right. And now I collect that from all of these partners, I have additional expert commentary quotes to add to the report. And I've got that video, I can pull that into D script, add subtitles, add a common CTA that points back to the report, and then give that back to the partner and be like, Hey, here's the video for your next LinkedIn post to drive back to the report because, one, it features them. And two, it allows you to, to use that video in multiple ways in a, you know, a LinkedIn post or a social post, you can post from your side, one that they can post from theirs, and you're getting the quote to incorporate in the report. And I think that partners are going to be more inclined to share that as opposed to I'm like, Hey, Kuba. Here's a graphic from the report. You know, can you guys draft a LinkedIn post around this and, and share it? Yeah. But that's pointing back to just the report. And maybe our company is the one who drove it. If it's you speaking on it, and adding commentary? How much more likely are you going to be to share that? So that's something that I'm thinking about, in this, you know, fourth step of survey co marketing with a near bound approach. As you're sharing the insights with partners, how can you help them more easily and at scale, create content in and around that builds on the survey, or the report that features them that they're more likely to share. So that's one other thing I've got anything else you want to touch on in this final stage? Kubo. Before we wrap up today,
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 37:29
related to what you said, you might not be able to involve all the partners, but I would experiment with maybe like, roundtable in a smaller group. I mean, the only thing I like better than the livestream is one person is a live stream, it was two or three people. And now and then that makes it so much bigger of an event. And you know, for this initial launch, you've got an even bigger reach if you pull in some of the partners and also it's got you know, deeper insights from multiple perspectives like I could see I could really see that working for you know, the server that teamwork is running, right now, if
Logan Lyles 37:59
you want. We're we're thinking out loud or planning out loud. If you're listening to this, we're trying to draw from, you know, Cooper's experiences in the past and also just shared hate what we're doing and how we're iterating on it. So I'm hoping that if you're listening through to the end of this conversation, you're still getting some valuable insights and how you can leverage survey co marketing in your near bound motion. If you want to, like me stay connected with Kuba follow what he's doing, how he's learning out loud in the marketing that they're executing and Zen pilot, Kuba, what's the best way for people to stay connected with you and or the Zen pilot team if they want to reach out after listening to today's chat?
Jakub (Kuba) Grajcar 38:40
Well, I'm on LinkedIn a lot, probably too much. Sometimes I say that I'm like a high functioning LinkedIn addict. So follow me on LinkedIn. Jakub, Kuba, get outside. And definitely follow Zen pilot, especially if you're in the agency space or professional services. And you're dealing with problems like tasks are falling through the cracks, if you've ever had missed deliverables or deadlines for clients, or you just can't accurately answer the question of like, how booked? Are we right now? Are we under capacity over capacity, we don't have visibility into that information, or your team members aren't meeting their commitments or aren't as aware of their commitments as they should be. Those are all the problems that we help solve. We solve it through training, we solve it through implementation and two different pm tools, one of them being teamwork, so you can check out Zen pilot.com. We've got actually a freshly published teamwork.com guide for agencies that guide you through a lot of what we do is actually sent pilot clients if you're if you want to go the DIY route, and use a system that we've tested with over 2000 agencies for driving visibility, accountability and efficiency, then you can do that so follows in pilot, personally as an pilot, there's one thing that I'm most involved in and that's the first class operations newsletter. I like to say that I host This newsletter, so if you want my newest thoughts bi weekly or so, then first class operations, look it up, you'll find it. So I'm on LinkedIn, look up Zen pilot. We're also on LinkedIn. We're also on YouTube, we publish a lot there. So any of those is going to be a good sign.
Logan Lyles 40:14
Yeah, absolutely. And that's definitely a good call out. I think your newsletter and the way you approach it as a host is actually a great learning and something that I'm always looking for and not only the content but how you're approaching newsletter a little bit differently and iterating on it and trying new things. So definitely a marketer you want to connect with connect with Kuba on LinkedIn and follow us in the coming weeks you'll see how we're executing some of this survey co marketing together. As I mentioned, today, we're learning out loud documenting some of our learnings from the past with Kuba as well as some of the things that we're involved as partners in on right now. So, as always, thank you so much for listening and remember, we go further faster when we're marketing together.
