How can early stage SaaS startups dramatically expand brand awareness and increase lead generation without spending a ton of money?
Justin Keller
On this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Sigstr VP of Marketing Justin Keller talks about co-marketing partnerships and how they’ve helped Sigstr gain traction without requiring a massive budget.
Listen to the podcast to hear how Justin built and nurtured co-marketing relationships and get actionable tips on building your own co-marketing program.
Transcript
Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen booth and I’m your host and today my guest is Justin Keller, who’s the Vice President of Marketing at Sigstr. Welcome, Justin.
Justin: Hello, I’m so glad to be here.
Here’s Justin and I doing our interview
Kathleen: I’m looking forward to interviewing you and learning more about the journey with Sigstr and how you guys have grown. Before we dive in, tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and also Sigstr and what it does.
Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ve been doing digital marketing for software companies for about 15 years now. I got my start as the first non-founding employee of a company called ChaCha way back in the day, and that’s what really gave me my bug.
They were located in Indianapolis and I really wanted to do the high tech thing, like full boar. So I went, I got myself an MBA and the day after I graduated, I packed up my car and I just drove west to try and make it happen in San Francisco.
So I was out there for about seven years, running a SaaS marketing team, having a great time learning a lot. And my wife and I decided, you know what, I think it’s about time to head back to the Midwest. And so through my network found Sigstr and came on as the Vice President of Marketing about two months ago now. I’ve been absolutely loving it.
What Sigstr does is, we take over — not take over — get into the employee email system and we standardize the business card info in an email signature. But what’s really cool about what we do, is we insert dynamic, targeted ads in every single email. And employee email is just a ridiculously high balling channel. It’s going to extremely engage people and we can get really targeted promotions in every email, and really magical stuff can happen for marketers.
Kathleen: That’s awesome.
And, full disclosure, here at IMPACT, we just started using Sigstr a couple of months ago and it was largely because one of our newest team members in the team that I run, which is our marketing team, came from another company that had Sigstr and she, from day one, was singing your praises about how effective it was and what a game changer it was for their marketing.
So, we just implemented it recently and it’s been really fun to watch the results. I mean, you’re right. There are so many different ways you can use it.
I think for us, initially, we’ve been using it to try to drive registrations for our webinars. We do two webinars a month and email does have such incredible reach, especially when you think about people, like on your sales team, who are really out there emailing people that might not be in your day to day contacts.
It’s such a good way to get your content and other things in front of people that otherwise might not necessarily see it right away.
Justin: Yeah, and it’s passive, it’s kind of like where it’s very frequent and it’s not like a hard call to action, right? It’s not like a mass email where you get it and you’re like, “Okay, I can delete this out of my inbox right now.” You’re gonna pay attention to that first email and you’re definitely gonna see what’s in the bottom.
We actually ran out of some eye tracking studies with an artificial intelligence company that showed that people’s eyes start right down to the bottom of the email if there’s a well branded signature there.
Kathleen: That’s so cool.
What I like about it, selfishly as the person responsible for marketing, is it gives my team a lot of control over how the brand is deployed, and the consistency with which it’s deployed. Instead of having everybody going rogue and creating their own signatures that may or may not be great, we can establish a format and we can maintain control over that, while still giving the individual some input into what they want to have in there, which is what is so nice about it.
Justin: Definitely. But no more Comic Sans in the signature, no personal quotes.
Kathleen: Exactly, exactly. Oh boy, I could spend a lot of time talking about that.
So, Sigstr’s great and everybody should definitely check it out and certainly, if you’ve ever gotten an email from me, you’ll see it at the bottom.
What’s been interesting to me is, Sigstr as a company, at least from the outside looking in, has really had this meteoric rise in terms of visibility. I’ve been in the agency world for a long time, and I feel like you guys came onto the scene and it was like, hot and fast.
As a marketer, when I see something like that, I’m always curious to dive in a little bit more deeply and learn what was happening behind the scenes that leads to that because, obviously, that’s what this podcast is all about. It’s like, “Hey, share your secrets with us so we can do it, too.”
So tell me a little bit about that.
Justin: Absolutely. And you’re right, we had a really big year last year. We got Series A funding from a bunch of phenomenal investors and that’s really when we were able to step on the gas. We were kind of bootstrapped before that.
What happened is, it’s one of those things where unfortunately it’s kind of everything. Everything kind of came together at once. But I think the things that really allow those things to come together is a really strong content program and a really big focus on developing co-marketing relationships and kind of agency relationships as well.
Kathleen: Really? Okay, let’s start with the content program. That’s obviously the heart of inbound marketing, which is what we like to talk about here. Tell me a little bit about your approach to creating content for Sigstr.
Justin: So, when you’re working with a product like Sigstr, it’s one of those things where, email signatures are very familiar but the way we’re approaching them is completely novel, right? It’s kind of like a brand new channel in many ways.
So there’s a lot of market building we have to do and we felt like content was the best way to do it. We’re lucky to have on our team Brad Butler, whose just a phenomenal content marketer. It kind of heads up the program and he’s really, really good at getting in with our customers and learning about the ways that they’re using it and celebrating their success in finding different ways to tell a similar story, in repeatable ways, things that we can use for both lead generation but for sales enablement too, and that’s been huge. He’s also really good at kind of taking what we do, so again, it’s a new channel, we need examples, right?
So customers are great but we definitely “drink our own champagne,” that’s the term we use here. We drink our own champagne.
Kathleen: Can I just stop you and say how much I appreciate that you say champagne because, maybe it’s just that I’m like old, but every time someone says they’re drinking the kool-aid, all I can think of is-
Justin: Is Jonestown?
Kathleen: Mass murder in Guyana and I’m like, “I don’t know that it’s a positive thing to be a Kool-aid drinker.” And the fact that Kool-aid is, objectively, kind of a disgusting drink in my opinion.
Justin: Yeah.
Kathleen: And this could be controversial, because I have an eleven year old who loves it, but I look at it, and I’m like, “That is just gross. Don’t put that in your body.”
Justin: Yeah, no, absolutely not. And then the other one people, the other thing people say is, eating our own dog food.
Kathleen: Oh, which is also just horrible.
Justin: Yeah, how much are actually making dog food, in which case that’s actually really gross.
Kathleen: If we accomplish nothing else on this podcast today, other than getting people to switch to “drinking their own champagne,” I will feel as though we’ve made an important contribution to society.
Justin: Yes, yes. Absolutely.
Kathleen: This is major.
Justin: Cool. Thanks for joining us everybody!
Oh, champagne. So, we tell really cool stories. I mean, we’re using our product in really, really innovative ways.
Just to give an example, and I’m not trying to make this into a commercial, we align the signature message with opportunity stages.
For example, when one of our AE’s completes a demo, they click the little button in sales, the demo’s done, and for the next two weeks, anytime anyone at Sigstr emails someone at that company that we just finished the demo with, they will get a message that says, “Hey, thanks for taking a demo. Click here for more resources, so they can kind of learn a little more, kind of thing.
There’s kind of an IT process when you’re installing Sigstr, and when we go into that phase, the signature’s like, “Hey, here’s everything your IT team needs to know about onboarding signatures.” Telling stories like that, and getting people to think really creatively about how to use the tool is great.
And then lastly, developing relationships on the co-marketing thing is one of the biggest legs that a co-marketing relationship stands on is kind of content swaps and developing content together. So we’ve been really fortunate to make a lot of really good friends in the marketing community and being kind of a unique product, we don’t really have any competition, and so we’re able to play really well with a variety of different vendors and tell really cool stories together.
Kathleen: So I want to get to the co marketing and content swaps in a minute, but first, on the subject of the content you’re creating for yourselves, the thing that I always find interesting, especially with companies like Sigstr, that — you said it, you make a product that helps people create email signatures — you could very easily have an entire content strategy that revolves around talking about email signatures, but, that can be a really boring subject, right? So I’m curious to know how you guys think about content, how much of your content is specifically about the product, how much of it is about the broader subject of email signatures, and then how much of it really departs from that and is about the broader challenges that your audience is facing?
Justin: Yeah, I’d say it’s probably 30/70. I think 30% is probably talking about email signatures — maybe more like 40 — because you’re right, it can get old quick. And so our kind of guiding light, really, in our content program, is, will a marketer read this blog post and walk away a better marketer? So you can get that done with email signature stories, sure, but we really like to focus on the broader industry and figure out how we can tie in our story wherever it’s appropriate.
But we’re really, really focused on creating content that just like is valuable, right? We do a lot of talking at ABM (account-based marketing) events. We kind of have an ABM product ourselves, so we’ve been driving a lot on the power of aligning content at the right time, whether it be through an email signature or through an email or what have you.
We see ourselves as one of many channels that every email marketer, or I’m sorry, every marketer should use. And so we don’t just focus on ourselves.
Kathleen: And so for anybody listening, ABM — account based marketing — and I know you guys, in fact, I went to an event recently where somebody from Sigstr spoke about that; how to use Sigstr for account based marketing. That is such a hot topic right now, so that’s pretty cool.
Okay, so you’ve had this content strategy. Let’s shift now and talk about the content swaps, because you’re obviously creating content for your own site.
When you think about co-marketing, let’s take a step back and just, if you could explain a little bit more about how you think about it. Who are you looking to form partnerships with? Is it companies that have an audience you’re looking to reach? Or is it companies that have complementary products?
Justin: Mmm-Hmm (affirmative)
Kathleen: Or is it all of the above?
Justin: It is a little bit of all of the above. And like I said, we are pretty neutral in the marketplace. We’ve got a wide variety of friends that we can pick to work with, the more the better.
Organizationally, Sigstr is all about developing relationships and being just a good partner. And so, yeah, we absolutely are looking for people with sympathetic audiences.
We are a reseller to marketers, we provide full marketing to tech companies. And we work with brands that we really admire. There is no shortage of … I think the most recent marketing landscaping is over 5000 companies. So there’s a lot of people to play with, but we really like to find the brands that we look up to. And I mean that, we look up to the brands.
We definitely feel like we’re lucky to be hanging out with some of the brands we work with.
Kathleen: What would be some examples of brands like that?
Justin: So we work a lot with Terminus, whose kind of an ABM app platform.
We work with PathFactory and with Uberflip. We work with, kind of everyone you know? A lot of people that are in the ABM landscape or demand-based … those guys.
And, it works out really well for us because … let me back up. The way we approach it is, “Hey we really want to work with you. You definitely have a bigger reach, and a bigger microphone towards the audience we want to get in with, but let us do all the groundwork. Let us, kind of, help you create a great piece of content and if you’ll do us the honor of posting it on your website or putting your logo on a piece or whatever” it feels like a fair trade to us.
Kathleen: That’s great. And funny enough, so, Nikki Nixon who heads up the #FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus has been a guest for us on this podcast in the past and I too … I look up to them. I think she’s done a great job building out communities so, that’s an awesome example.
Justin: They really have. That whole #FlipMyFunnel thing is amazing and again it’s another example of just being super neutral. It spun out of the Terminus company but they are agnostic when you’re dealing with vendors. When Terminus goes to the #FlipMyFunnel conference, they are going as sponsor they’re not like the people that are hosting it.
Kathleen: Yeah, That’s awesome!
I’m interested in the content swaps because I think there is … There’s a lot of potential there. There’s not only the opportunity to get in front of a new audience by creating content on somebody else’s website, but there’s also backlinks which, as a geeky marketer I’m really into.
I guess the question that I have — because we look at this all the time — is about bandwidth. You have your own content you’re creating for your site and then it can be very time consuming. Do you have a certain target for how much of your marketing team’s time goes into creating content for your own platforms versus content for your partner platforms?
Justin: I think it’s really ad hoc and it’s opportunistic for us.
The way we evaluate it really is, it’s kind of like getting to first base with a partner, right? The content swap is the easy thing to do, right? If you have content laying around that is somewhat relevant to the partner or whatever, it’s really easy to kind of repurpose that. Just take it, put a fresh coat of paint on it. Figure out how you can talk about the partner and yourselves in it in a way that tells both of your stories.
But then really, when we’re looking at it, it’s partners with whom we want to partner more deeply, right? We want to be hosting events with them, we want to be doing web events with them. Maybe there’s even a product integration down the road and it’s really a good way of dipping your toe into a bigger partnership because, it does kind of have lower overhead than, I think, many other marketing initiatives and if you can prove that success there it makes sense to keep the relationship going and getting a little more serious about it.
Kathleen: I’m sure there are people listening who are thinking, “this is an approach I might want to experiment with” and I would be willing to put money on the fact that a lot of them are probably in the same shoes you were in when you started, which is, “I’m gonna be approaching partners that have a bigger audience than I do.”
As a David going after a partnership with a Goliath, can you give listeners some advice on how you approach it so that both parties feel like it’s a win? And, how do you then manage and maintain that relationship in a way that’s mutually beneficial?
Justin: Yeah. One of the ways that we approach it is, usually, we will do the majority of the work. We get really scrappy about it and say “Hey, just by virtue of participating with us … that’s all you have to do. You have to show up and smile, right?” And, we’ll kind of do the rest. So offering to just “plus up” whatever their content initiatives were, kind of for free, is usually pretty healthy.
I think developing personal relationships is also a really good way to do that though so, a lot of the relationships that we’ve got are people that we’ve met out on the road at conferences or just kind of networked with and it started as a buddy-buddy relationship. Having conversations marketer to marketer, kind of like we’re doing just now. Not having an agenda really in place. Just kind of be like, “I really think what you guys are doing is amazing, I want to learn more about it. What are your big campaigns and projects this quarter?” And then, ending with “I’d love to have our brands play together one day.”
You know it’s great. I think the more partners you have, the better. It helps kind of edge out competition and it helps really shine a brighter light on both of your brands even if you don’t have as big of a reach. You’re still introducing new people to that brand.
Kathleen: Yeah, definitely.
I have a little anecdote about this. I think people are gonna hear you say things like, “Oh, we’re big into relationships and individual one-on-one stuff.” It’s easy to kind of hear that and be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
So the reason that we started talking to Sigstr is that we had a new employee who had used them previously — and that’s Stephanie Casstevens — and she came from another company that had Sigstr and she was … She’s just like, the most enthusiastic individual on the planet to start with.
Justin: It’s true.
Kathleen: Which is why we love her! But it’s easy to find somebody like that who evangelizes your product and say thank you and appreciate it, but I think a lot of companies don’t take that extra step and really show the love back.
I’ll never forget … I think we were on Slack or on a Zoom call and she’s like, “You’re not gonna believe Sigstr just sent me this amazing box full of swag and really cool stuff!” And, it was just that little touch. I know that there was a handwritten note in there just saying how much you guys appreciated her, and that kind of thing goes a long way. And so, I think from what I’ve seen, you all do a really nice job of that.
Justin: We spend a lot of time and a decent amount of money doing that. We do send a lot of swag … If, anyone really wants some Sigstr swag, hit me up!
Kathleen: Ooh, what’s the best way? Should they Tweet you?
Justin: They can Tweet me or they can shoot me an email. @JustinKeller is my Twitter handle and Justin@Sigstr is my email. Hopefully this doesn’t come back to bite me.
When we get new customers, we send a note. We spend a lot of time doing handwritten notes. And we’ll recruit many people. We’ll have our design team. We’ll get some of our sales people, and we’ll all huddle around a table and write personal notes just to …
Kathleen: That makes such a difference.
Justin: I one hundred percent think it makes all the difference in the world, and it’s not scalable, and that’s probably why more people don’t do it and why it does have such and impact.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Justin: It’s just rare. I mean, it takes a lot of manpower to pull it off. But, it’s kind of one of our core beliefs that we need to be good partners and that’s kind of how it shows up for us.
Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like handwritten notes are a lost art and I think it’s only going to get worse because I was just talking with my son, who is 11, the other day and, you know, he’s not … they’re not teaching him cursive and …
Justin: Mmm-hmm (affirmative)
Kathleen: I just think all of these things, when combined, and the fact that they all live on devices … You’re only going to see fewer and fewer handwritten notes. But even my son, who doesn’t write anything, when he gets something in the mail, he’s like, “What? I got mail?” And he’s so excited! So, I just think it’s such a great opportunity to make a connection.
Justin: It’s true. And that old school thing is coming back again, right? Back in the day, everything was done via mail. And, back in the day, email was not thought of as a channel. But you know, now here’s Sigstr growing like a weed using email signatures. I mean, I don’t want to say direct mail but kind of like, really personalized handwritten stuff — I think that’s, it’s so old school, its new school again. It’s like the vinyl records of marketing.
Kathleen: Well, even direct mail — I think you have to do it right but, we used to do dimensional mail for clients, which is direct mail but in a box.
Justin: Yeah.
Kathleen: And, there’s almost nobody out there who will get a box and not open it.
Justin: Totally.
Kathleen: You get direct mail and if it’s flat mail, you just toss it right in the trashcan so, that’s the first hurdle you have to overcome. It’s just getting somebody to open your thing.
Justin: Yeah.
Kathleen: And, everybody thinks, “Ooh it’s a box, maybe it’s a present.”
Justin: Yeah.
Kathleen: So, I think with all of these things it’s just about how you use it, because I can’t even count on one hand how many times I’ve read articles about email being dead, which is just so false. It’s how you use it, you know?
Justin: It’s true, it’s true. We actually included in your swag box, we’ve got stickers that say “Email will never die.”
Kathleen: Yeah.
Justin: And …
Kathleen: Long live email!
Justin: Yeah, I agree.
Kathleen: I love that. So, you’ve done all of these … This co-marketing. You’ve got your content strategy. Can you share any numbers about the impact this has had on the business, whether that’s in terms of traffic growth, or new leads? You’re saying that this has been successful for you and it’s …
Justin: Yeah.
Kathleen: …really driving your growth. Do you have any data to back that up?
Justin: We do, yeah. So, in terms of the content swaps I don’t think I can point to any good numbers. Our traffic — website traffic — has definitely increased, I mean, substantially for us. Almost 10 times in the past year.
Kathleen: Wow, that’s amazing!
Justin: And I can’t point back to any co-marketing initiatives exactly. I think that’s just kind of a ground swell. But through these partnerships we’ve started hosting third party events at all the conferences. So we’ve kind of got this little branded event that we’ve called “All about margaritas,” which is a different interpretation of the ABM acronym, right? And …
Kathleen: That sounds like an event that I would come to.
Justin: Exactly, right? So we worked with BrightFunnel and with UberFlip on hosting these events. And it’s one of those things where like, I mean, you know conferences are not cheap. I mean that is …
Kathleen: Yeah.
Justin: I would posit pretty much everyone on this call, it’s probably their biggest — if they do conferences — their biggest line item in the marketing budget. If you kind of have a bad place — a bad booth place — or you know, it’s a really crummy conference, it’s really tough to maximize your investment there.
So what we’ve done is we do these little after parties where we’re all promoting it together. We’re all having a lot of fun with the promotion. And yeah, I mean for the one we just did — the Marketo Summit — we had well over 700 people registered.
Kathleen: Wow. That’s a lot of margaritas.
Justin: It is a lot of margaritas. We actually had to kind of get a waiting list going. It was a very good problem to have and it’s been tremendously successful. So we’re kind of doing that more and more. We’re taking that on the road.
Kathleen: So are you getting lists of conference attendees from the conference organizer and that’s how you’re reaching out or how are you doing that?
Justin: Totally organic social, a social promotion. We put it in our, you know, our newsletters or whatever.
I will tell you a little secret, and again, I’m so not trying to make this commercial for Sigstr. Ten percent of those — no twenty percent, twenty percent of those — registrations came from Sigstr signatures, right? So it’s one of those things where you’re just passively emailing, doing your thing, but you know, people see the call to action and they’re like, “Oh, that sounds like me.”
Kathleen: And you know that because, as I understand all of the links in the Sigstr signatures, you can build them out as tracking url.
Justin: Oh come on, yeah.
Kathleen: So concrete proof that that’s where it came from.
Justin: Yeah. Really, really deep analytics. Everything integrates with marketing automation or with your Salesforce or whatever. So you can get really good analytics and even kind of attribute pipeline to it.
Kathleen: That’s awesome.
Justin: Yeah it’s really, really great. So yeah, huge.
We did another one. We had almost 200 people register for that, which we were thrilled about because it was the day before the conference even started and it was, you know, it’s a smaller conference to begin with anyway. So that’s kind of been like the ultimate culmination of these partnerships and how things have really, really shown up in the pipeline for us.
Kathleen: That’s great. Well all really cool and really interesting stuff. I love what you guys are doing. You were also mentioning that, you know, you have some great strategies for building relationships and what a big part of how you approach things that is outside of, you know, sending people swag boxes. Any other tips you have for listeners on that?
Justin: Yeah, we spent a lot of time on social media, like engaging. Not like trying to be like, “Hey, take a demo,” you know.
I’m just kind of like following him around, like engaging with them, actually keeping up with their tweets, retweeting big moments for them and just kind of being a friendly face in the social crowd. And we think, you know, even the personal engagement, it’s tough to fly out and see customers, especially when you’re a small company, a growing company like us.
We do try and make a point to build in as many customer visits as we can. Just because that face time is so much … so important, right? When you really connect with someone on a human level, the relationship changes, but you know, people develop an attachment with you and I think that’s such … I think emotion is such a huge buying trigger that people ignore.
And I think that’s what it all comes down to is really, you know, developing relationships, developing an emotional connection is really what I think helps drive a business and a brand.
I may get this quote wrong, so please fact check me audience, but I think it’s like 95 percent of all buying decisions are based on emotion. Then the rest of the buyer’s journey, I mean, that’s like before the purchases or the buying committees even started. And from that point on, the buyer’s journey is all about substantiating those emotions, right? And that’s why content is so important in showing up data is to prove to someone that their emotions are correct.
Kathleen: Yeah, I definitely can see that. And I’m curious, you know? Well, I can see see where emotion is so important, especially because your audience is marketers.
Justin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kathleen: And I know from being a marketer myself for a long time that one of the biggest challenges we face is tool overload.
Justin: Yeah.
Kathleen: You know, every organization I’ve worked in, one of our biggest line items is recurring monthly SaaS subscriptions. Individually, they might be small amounts of money, but it adds up quickly and so what happens when you have this proliferation of software tools is inevitably, you know, there’s some percentage of them that you don’t use. Certainly you don’t use them to their fullest.
But I have found in my experience that when I have a good relationship with the vendor then, you know, those are the ones that tend to get the love. And what’s great about that for you — as somebody who is selling SaaS is — churn goes down with those situations. So I think what you’ve said rings really true to me as somebody who is a target for you guys, and I know it’s true for us at IMPACT. Like, we felt a lot of attention from Sigstr in terms of helping us get started and get going with the product and that makes a huge difference.
Justin: Yeah, totally. I think you had the podcast with Dan Moyle. Like, I think he’s telling the same story. It’s all about developing those relationships and, I think that especially in the age of automation and robots and everything, I think just like how email is kind of important for the same reason, right? Bringing the humanity back into marketing is more important than ever.
Kathleen: Yeah, so true. Well I want to make sure before we wrap up that I have two questions I always ask everybody who comes on this podcast and I definitely want to ask you and get your perspective. One of them is company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?
Justin: So we do this thing and we were trying to get the ball rolling on it, but we do this thing internally we’re calling “Brand Crush Monday” where we kind of just find a brand we really like and …
Kathleen: I love that.
Justin: And so the most recent one that we’re all kind of fawning over is a company called Tunnelbear. Really, really just like, it’s just one of those websites where it’s like, even if you’re not a buyer, you just kinda want to click through and see what all the pages have. They’ve done a really good job of that.
I think Uberflip does a really good job with inbound just because it creates such a good time to experience where you kind of are, okay, piecemealing your information away for an exchange for interesting content. They do a really good job of progressive profiling. So I like what they’re doing a lot too.
Kathleen: Oh, I can’t wait to check out Tunnelbear. I’ve seen it Uberflip and I agree they’re great.
Justin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kathleen: But I love when I hear new ones that I didn’t know about before. So that’s awesome.
Second question, you know, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly and especially with it being very technologically driven, the challenge that I hear most from marketers is just keeping up with all that new information and staying educated. How do you keep up and stay educated?
Justin: Yeah, I think I try to do about a book a month, either read or listen to. Now that it’s nice and I can walk to work, I get a lot more of that in and then podcasts for sure.
Kathleen: Any particular favorite podcasts?
Justin: Well since we’ve met, I’ve grown quite fond of yours. Also like, I liked the Andreeson Horwitz podcast a lot. I like Sangram Vajre’s #FlipMyFunnel podcast. I think that one’s also pretty great just because it’s so frequent and it’s pretty digestible. What else? What else, what else? I mean those are my main ones off the top of my head. I do have a lot of guilty pleasure podcasts I listen to as well, but those are the marketing ones that I really, really like.
Kathleen: And then a fall onto that, any particular books that you’ve read lately that you would recommend?
Justin: So when I joined Sigstr, I bought for my entire team a copy of Contagious by Jonah Berger. That was kind of like my bio. I was like, “Read this, this is the new Bible.” And then Good to Great I think is another. Who wrote that? Jim Collins.
Kathleen: Yeah.
Justin: Another fan. I think those are both like 101 — you have to read these if you’re a marketer — books.
Kathleen: Yeah, those are some good ones. I just finished Eating the Big Fish, which is about what it means to be a challenger brand. That’s also a great book if you want one for your recommendations.
Justin: I do. I’m going to the beach. I’m going to need some reading materials. So I appreciate that.
Kathleen: Yeah. It’s funny because I’ve been wanting to read more books and so I finally bit the bullet, and I really like actual books because I like to underline and write notes and margins and things, but I just couldn’t move fast enough doing it that way. And so I finally bit the bullet and decided to try Audible and now I’m completely hooked because I listen to books on 2X speed and I’m like tearing through these books. So that’s one of the reasons I love asking people this question at the end of the podcast. I get to get recommendations from my own list.
Justin: Awesome. I will think of some and I’ll shoot you an email. Absolutely
Kathleen: Great. Alright. Well for people who have questions for you or who want to check out and learn more about Sigstr what is the best way for them to find you individually online and of course then please, if you could share Sigstr’s url. That would be …
Justin: So Sigstr is Sigstr dot com. And then if you want to find me online, I think probably the best way is just a twitter, @JustinKeller, one word, is my handle. And then LinkedIn, I think is just Justin Keller, but I think your listeners are probably pretty savvy with the Google.
Kathleen: They’ll figure it out and if they can’t, I will put those links in the show notes.
Awesome. Great. Well thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really fun hearing about how you guys approach things.
Justin: Thank you so much. This was a treat. I really … this is my first podcast as well, so thank you for that.
Kathleen: Well great. I’m so honored. That’s great. Well, hopefully first of many.
Justin: Hopefully.
Kathleen: Well, thank you again for joining me and if you are listening and you liked what you heard, I would really appreciate if you would consider giving the podcast a review on Itunes, stitcher, or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody who’s doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thanks again.
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