DMV Podcast Episode 7


Katherine Watier Ong: [00:00:00] All right. All right. So today we're here with, Janet Driscoll Miller president of search Mojo. Janet, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got started with digital marketing?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:00:12] Sure. Absolutely. So I've been running my agency, Marketing Mojo for 15 years now. It is the 15th anniversary is next month. And, I got my start in digital because I was really fortunate to come out of school, out of college at a time when the internet was really starting to take off with the worldwide web.
And I'm a creative person and I'm a real analytical person. And so it just brought the two things I love together, and it was the perfect fit for me as a marketer. So, I got started real early, like in 96. I'm an old girl been around for a while.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:00:48] Well, and I want to thank you because you sent us a copy of your book, Data First Marketing, how to compete and win in the age of analytics. and I really enjoyed it. Can you tell everybody what your book is about and, how you decided to write it?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:01:00] Absolutely. So, you know, and running an agency for 15 years and working with a wide variety of clients, I see some of the same problems over and over. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. Doesn't matter if you're a B to B or B to C, it just is the same typical issues in digital marketing. And so what we decided to do was I wanted to write a book about the process we've used essentially in our agency over the years that have helped make us successful for our clients, help make our clients successful.
And it's a framework. It's a process that we use and it's also a mindset. It's about putting that data first before you think about anything else because I think people are ready to jump in and they think, Hey, I can just put a credit card down with Google ads today and I can get started. And that's a great eager mindset to have.
However, the reality is you really need to do a lot of planning before you throw up that first campaign. You need to think through it. And I think a lot of people don't always do that. And in the end, they ended up regretting it because of the backend. They don't have all the data that they wanted, which will end up telling them what they really need to know.
So that's really why we wanted to write the book.
Jim Keeney: [00:02:11] So at a high level, can you describe that process when you engage with a company that's, you know, really focused on traditional marketing and you're trying to move them towards the digital marketing landscape. can you just give us a high-level overview of the steps that you would take them through?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:02:26] Sure. I'll tell you that one of the hardest things is not just moving people from necessarily traditional to digital, but moving them, moving the needle in digital itself. So many people that we work with have started focused on measuring engagement. And engagement's wonderful, but that's not what your CEO cares about, frankly.
They don't care about the engagement. They don't care how many people read these great blog posts you wrote. what they care about is revenue. And especially in times, like we're in now where things are really tight for a lot of companies. It matters more than ever. And so how do we get started with that?
Well, we have to crawl before we can walk, right. We have to help move them down a path. So I have a continuum that I use that starts with things like something basic, like impressions. And we start with measuring that. And then we get all the way down to ROI and we just keep moving down that path. Usually, the clients are pretty receptive.
They just don't always know how to do it. And that's why they hire us because they don't know how to get there. And they know there are demands from their CFO or their CEO that they just don't have the answer to. They don't know how to get there and that's where we help them get there.
Jim Keeney: [00:03:38] excellent. So, setting in place a data-first marketing approach inside an organization, it seems like it would require changing organizational attitudes. So, you're walking them down this path, but right up front. can you describe when you run into, kind of resistance and things of that nature, how you, how you deal with that on a, on a kind of functional level
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:04:03] you have this quote inside the book that I just thought was so perfect for our audience and the focus of the podcast. Where, the quote is from David wallers, it's Harvard business view review, and the quote was the biggest obstacle to creating database businesses aren't technical, they're cultural. And I thought that was really, it really struck me because I think I've seen that as well. so can you share any stories or tips around how you've been able to successfully nudge organizations into integrating data into their larger marketing efforts?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:04:36] absolutely. And I think it's a two-part approach. It's there's not only just the cultural impact with the marketing team themselves and making sure the marketing team has that cultural understanding and embraces data. But it's also the rest of the organization that you have to work with, your partners in the organization, the groups like the sales department, right?
How do you get them on your, side to give you the data that you sometimes need from them? with groups, aside from the marketing team, I would say that the real focus is telling them what the benefit is to them. There's a lot of benefit to the sales department. If marketing can create better campaigns, more effective campaigns that drive better leads that they're going to get more sales, which means more money.
So it's really, you know, that's an easy sell, right? I mean, there are some organizations that are very reticent to give that data out. But when you can move that needle with other parts of the organization to get the data you need, then, you know, you're going to be more successful to meet their needs as well.
Now on the marketing team side, there are some folks I think that have trouble embracing. This new love, new marketing, basically. I mean, some people are probably about my age, who were old school, marketers who really didn't get to come up through digital. And that can be really tough, but there's also the challenge that you have people coming out of college today, who I think probably feel really eager and ready.
But the reality is that the college does not typically educate them on the newest things. In fact, when I went, I went to James Madison University, that's my Alma mater. And I went back to do some consulting with them. they asked me to come back and talk to them about marketing and the curriculum.
And as we talked about it, they admitted to me that it takes 18 months or more to get something into the curriculum. Which are eons in our industry. I mean, everything could change in 18 months. So that's a real challenge for colleges and universities, but that also means that people coming out of school, even if they have some level of digital experience, actually have very little digital experience.
Hands-on and so there's this real divide. You have some people who've been in it for years who know it really well. And then there are some people who. there's a lot of people actually who come out of college and they got just a cursory review. So you have to be willing to train and coach in your organization.
And that means creating, not only that mindset of saying we want to always have a change culture here, we always want to be doing better. Want to improve upon what we last did, but also making a safe environment for that and coaching them through it because, You know, once I think a lot of people get out of college or they think I'm done, I don't have to learn anymore.
That is not true with digital marketing at all. You have to
Jim Keeney: [00:07:33] It's just the beginning, right?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:07:36] So to really helping them through that is key.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:07:39] so I know you've also coached a lot of young people in your agency over the years. It's kind of, your model is grabbing some really smart, young people and coaching them up, which I've done too in my past. but do you have any, Things that you've been able to use to vet out whether somebody has got the innate DNA to work well in digital marketing, particularly this data first bit.
So, you've got a really eager college student. but that doesn't in my experience that doesn't always mean that they work. And I'm just wondering whether or not you've seen that as well, whether you've got some things that you use in the interview process or that kind of stuff to vet out whether or not a college student while they might be eager, also have the right gumption and the DNA to sort of work in the digital marketing space.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:08:23] One of my Favorite interview questions is I ask people if they're more analytical or creative, And there's no right or wrong answer. It’s just telling me more about yourself. And when someone says I am a very creative person and I like being creative and I like creating websites. And when I see things like that on their resume, where I see like they're very artsy and they like doing the artistic side of websites.
I have a lot of caution there because I don't think they'd be happy in the job I would have available for them because I spend most of my time, and I'm sure both of you do too. I spent a lot of my time in spreadsheets just before we decided to do our interview today, I was in a spreadsheet. So, you know, I don't think creative people feel very happy in that type of role, but analytical mind thinking is very important.
I look for maybe specific classes or majors, in particular, I like economics majors. Because they like numbers. And, it doesn't mean that someone who's a marketing major doesn't like numbers, but someone who's in economics really likes numbers. and someone who's in marketing can also do really well with that.
But I like to hear about their projects that they worked on. I'll ask some questions like, what was your big takeaway from this project? And, how did you measure that? Like, how did you measure your success? In this project and sometimes they're limited, right? They're only limited by what the school gives them.
For instance, I worked with a lot of folks who did the Google online marketing challenge, which is no more, but, for many years, about 10 years, Google ran an ad challenge for college students. And it was fantastic, but Google did not measure people on conversions. They measured them on things like clicks, which to me is sort of irrelevant.
I really care about conversions. So I had to really, you have to still give them some leeway there, on measurement because they, again, they don't know what they don't know, but hearing them say, well, I thought about measuring this way, or I thought about measuring that way or giving them a, a question and asking them here's a scenario.
Tell me how you, what you would measure, used to measure success in this type of scenario. Hearing those types of thoughts really helps you get into their mindset and the way they think about measuring their success.
Jim Keeney: [00:10:47] In defense of the creative types. well, the other way I come at it, ‘cause you're absolutely right. It is that odd or different combination of, you know, being able to think expensively about opportunities and persona and kind of the creative things that will resonate with people.
But at the end of the day, it needs to fit into a process that is measurable and results-oriented. So what I'll often do is when I talk to somebody who is a hundred percent, kind of design-focused for websites and things like that, I'll ask them about a design, specifically. How did you come up?
How did you decide that was the best design for that particular purpose, and then listened to the way they talk about it, and the people who, you know, fit are the ones that have, you know, are either constantly forming or have a structured process for deciding. Which design is going to be appropriate in a certain circumstance.
And you can see them going through a mental kind of checklist there. And that makes a big difference that shows that inclination to, not only be creative but also to make it measurable at the end of the day.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:12:00] I would also argue that persona should be based on some data
Jim Keeney: [00:12:04] Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:12:06] during my agency days I saw a few that were very suspicious. That's all I'm saying.
Jim Keeney: [00:12:13] my point being though that it's all about experimentation and you're constantly going to be fielding, you know, pressure from the sales force pressure from the product management group, et cetera, to try new things and to try new campaigns. You know where the rubber meets the road is.
Okay. If we set this up, how do we measure it for success? And what is the definition of success?
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:12:37] So, I'm also really curious since I, I actually had a sales role back in my, back in the day about aligning the sales and marketing part of your book that you talk about because, it certainly, obviously I had a different approach personally, because I was doing the sales and I'm a marketing person, but when you're walking into a sales team, And I realized they are driven by leads and they have commissions and that sort of thing.
But how have you seen over the years that you've been able to persuade them, to give you the data they need and to integrate with the marketing and sales, that is?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:13:09] It is very tough because in some cases it's very proprietary information. Right. in some cases I've told them if it's proprietary, you can give me blinded information. I just need an aggregate, or I just need to see down to a record number. I don't need to know the person's information, the person's name.
I just need to have a basic understanding of where we're tracking through. but, it can be very difficult. I've got a client right now who said to me, sales will never release this information. And I said, again, We're here to make sales successful. That's our job. That's our job as marketers, it is to see sales success.
And so, if sales do not perceive us as an organization, as a marketing organization as helping them, and being able to really be their champion, then what's the point? I mean, honestly, that's a big part of what we do and we have to ask ourselves and ask sales, well, what are we not doing that we should be doing? Now I'm sure sales will have many answers to this. I have gotten so many great answers from sales over the years. Like you only sent me Gmail email addresses or something like that, and that's not quality. And we have to have this conversation with. Yes, it is quality, but not everybody wants to hear from you immediately with a bunch of sales pitches in their inbox for their office email.
Right. We have to have those conversations. It doesn't mean those leads are illegitimate in some way. So it's really starting that conversation and really, you know, really working away at trying to, you know, chipping away at the unfortunate sometimes I think, I think a bit combative history.
at times between marketing and sales to really get the information we need. And like I said, you got to crawl before you walk and we'll get there, but just get what you can, as much as you can, as long as you can, and try and integrate as much as you can. That's the other, I think the big challenge here is making sure your data for marketing flows through to sales, even if they don't, have a flow backward to marketing that's automatic into your marketing automation or, other types of systems, at least be able to get that data from them at some point, like maybe once a month or what have you, so you can review it.
but it is a real conversation that needs to take place.
Jim Keeney: [00:15:28] when you first meet, a new customer, is there a diagnostic process that you go through that allows you to raise red flags and kind of know in advance that you're dealing with things, for instance, you have that marketing maturity survey in chapter four of your book, which I thought was really good.
Do you use tools like that to kind of elicit from people from an organization upfront enough of an understanding of where they stand so that you can make, you know, you can go in with your eyes wide open instead of, instead of discovering these things kind of halfway through the process
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:16:03] Yes. It's always fun when you're peeling back the layers of that onion and you have 15 more layers. It's so great. It's always good to know that stuff upfront. It's always good to know.
Jim Keeney: [00:16:15] And you peel it back and it always comes down to one developer in a back room somewhere.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:16:19] exactly there he is. yeah, one of the things we do right from the get-go is I ask clients how they measure their success.
And you'd be surprised at how many marketers really don't have an answer to that question. Or aren't measuring things right from the get-go right. They should be, which is another reason we wrote this book, trying to encourage people to be focusing on business problems and business results, rather than just marketing results and what we may value in marketing.
Isn't always what the CEO values. So we start with that conversation and that tends to throw up a bunch of red flags right away. To say, okay, here's what I can already see where the holes are. but to your point, yes, we have, an intake survey that we are doing with clients to understand similar to the marketing maturity model, to really understand where are they in this, in this, journey and what holes do we need to help them fill?
Because ultimately. As a marketing organization ourselves, a digital marketing organization as an agency, we measure ourselves by the success of what we do for our clients and they measure us that way. And so if we want to stay on board with our clients and we want to stay in business, we have to be able to prove to them our success, that we're meeting their goals, whatever those goals may be.
We have to show that we're meeting those goals. And so measurement is so key to us. We want to make sure we're getting it right from the get-go.
Jim Keeney: [00:17:53] Do you find them moving the goalposts on you during the process of the engagement and how do you handle that?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:18:01] Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes I actually started off doing web design years ago. That's probably how I met Katherine originally when we were in DC web women and I was doing some web design. And one of the things that as a creative designer, you have to be able to do well is you have to be able to get very specific information from people like I had a client one time who said, She really liked the Donna Karan website. She's a designer. she's a fashion designer. She, actually is just a phenomenal person and I really love her, but she didn't always give me specifics that I needed to design her website.
She'd say, well, I like this website. And I like all the open space. I'm like, so you like it without a lot of words on it is what you're trying to say. Well, no. And then like, you'd have to like try and dig with her. I think, you know, getting to the bottom of what someone's really thinking. Sometimes people are not clear in their communication about what they really truly mean.
They can be a little bit vague. And so it takes actually digging with them and that questioning to really understand, well, what do you mean by, I want to measure engagement. What does that really mean to you and really digging down to understand what that means for them?
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:19:16] So just to pivot a little bit, you talk quite a bit in the book about the, actually I think you have a whole chapter for marketers that want to be more data integrated and data-savvy. And so you talk about how marketers need to use data, to persuade and to measure their campaigns. so I'm just kind of wondering if you could talk through any tips that you might have for marketers that might be new to that, or stories you have of how you've been able to use data to really persuade or support a marketing strategy that you had in place.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:19:50] absolutely. one I have even from before I even started my agency, I worked for a company called web surveyor, and love that job. it was a highly analytical type of job and online survey company used to compete with survey monkey and, I decided to minimize our homepage to make, I did an AB test.
I mentioned this in the book I wanted to minimize the selections, because there's a really good book, by a guy named Barry Schwartz. It's not Barry Shwartz from search engine land, but a different Barry Shwartz called the paradox of choice. And if you give people too many choices, they become overwhelmed and homepages are kind of like a table of contents.
They just have a lot of stuff on them. And I look at it as a place that you go to find where you really want to go. but if you have too many choices, it can be really overwhelming. So we decided to minimize it and just really have the main selections, almost like the main navigation. And that was it.
And that was our homepage. And, it was nicely designed and so forth but it was very minimalistic. And we did an AB test and we found that we got 50%. More, free trial signups from the minimized homepage. Now the CTO and founder of the company came to me and he said, I want you to take this homepage down.
I don't like it. I don't like the way it looks. I want it down today. Go back to the old one. And I said, fair enough. But what if I told you that this new home page gets 50% more free trial signups? Would you still want me to take it down? And his answer was well, okay. Then leave it up. And it's amazing what can happen when you have that kind of data at your fingertips, in a conversation with somebody.
And again, I'm just a lowly employee working with the founder of the company. It's very important to have that information right there, because what's he going to say to me? No, I'd I'm, my aesthetics are more important. Then the success of our company
Jim Keeney: [00:21:52] actual conversion. Right? Sometimes it sounds, it seems like that doesn't it. you touch on something that's this is, a bit of a digression, but you touch on something that I have been, working with for a while with my clients, which is the homepage is no longer the homepage in the new world.
And I was wondering if, you know, because of Google and Bing, and all that, a lot of, you know, a lot of companies are now basically a constellation of home pages rather than one single homepage, you know, way back when you and I started designing websites, it was like, okay, we're going to have a 10-month argument about how to set up a menu structure that covers everything in the website.
And now I, you know, now I tell customers, no, we're no longer library technicians. People don't come to websites that way they come to landing pages. So, so I'm curious in your own work recently, have you been working with companies to kind of get them off the Oh, the homepage has to do everything into more of a, well, we need to have content clusters and have multiple different, landing experiences, depending on which target audience and which keywords and things
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:23:01] Yeah, I think that's incredibly important for SEO. I mean, Google has helped drive a lot of that, frankly, and thankful for that. I'm not always thankful for all the things Google does. But I'll be thankful for that because it has gotten people away from this feeling. I remember working for a company called software ag and when I was working there, the fights we would have with every department wanting something on the homepage, right.
The real estate was so valuable on the homepage. And is it really though? Because now you don't need that. You know, people, as you said, Jim can go right to a page. It's a landing page essentially on your website. and. That's what you really want. You want to get them to the place. They need to go as quickly as possible.
And so I don't really see too many arguments anymore about folks wanting to focus as much on the home page. However, I do still see occasionally the focus being on traffic to the homepage, and I tell them that's almost irrelevant traffic because if they drop off on that page, they're no good. They're no good to you.
So you know what we look at a lot of times, it's something like CRO testing for the home page to see how we can get more people to stay or more people getting to the destination they really had in mind, like I'm working with a large bookseller right now and they have all this other garbage on their page.
But really when people come to their homepage, they are looking to put in an ISBN, a book number, right. To find the book that they want, the specific book, they don't care about all these other deals going on the page or books in my state or whatever, who cares. No one cares about that. And we can see that through the data as well.
And so I, I literally said to them, one day I was like, you know, you should just go radical. You should just make the homepage a search box. And that's it. Because everything else is irrelevant.
Jim Keeney: [00:24:56] It worked for Google.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:24:57] It worked for Google pretty well.
Jim Keeney: [00:24:59] Yeah. So, so underneath the covers, technology plays a really critical role in moving towards data-driven, but, in a lot of organizations, there's still, you know, there's a lot of dynamic tension there. How do you work with the marketing department and the technology department to get them to work as partners in this process of changing?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:25:20] That is a great question because that is oftentimes I find even in SEO, especially I find it to be. The technology department will often be the cog in the machine or the one that we have the stopgap situation with because of the backlog. So a good technology group. And I don't mean to be too super judgemental here, but a good technology group that is led by a great CTO or CIO is going to prioritize their work based on revenue and impact.
And. I will tell you the bookseller. We had a situation this summer where our Google shopping ads went down for a time, Google shopping, being their number one revenue source. And, it went down for a time because. they had added something to the home, to the checkout process. It didn't need to be there and it was pretty extraneous.
It was optional, but it was there and Google didn't like it. And Google likes to every once in a while, just throw a lovely rejection at you and say, you have to fix this thing. Cause it's not like we like it. It's not our best practice. So we asked them to fix it. And we told them, this is how much we gave them dollar figures.
We said, here are the numbers. Here's what you're losing every single day by not fixing this problem. And yet still, it could not be prioritized over other work for two and a half months. And so they just lost a bunch of money. And luckily the people we work with and the marketing team understand that had nothing to do with us.
but it is very frustrating when a technology group does not listen to a business case, they really need to be prioritizing by a business case. If you are in a situation where they don't, it's, it's really difficult, but if you're in a situation where most technology departments, CTO, CIO, is they will prioritize by a business case and say, who is, how is this going to have the most impact on the organization?
What's going to have the most impact and then they will go ahead and prioritize your work. If you can show the impact on revenue, this is why this is so critical. So you may have to go to them and say, I can't prove the impact on revenue until you do this thing. And then I can, but at least, you know, showing that business case with them, sharing that's so helpful because most of them prioritize their work in that way.
Jim Keeney: [00:27:48] Well, and I think you're moving towards, you're trying to move towards an infrastructure where you can stand up an experiment in very little time, get it out there, measure the results and, you know, get rid of the ones that don't succeed. we had a very interesting conversation with, the head of marketing at, At Fleet.io.
And she, you know, she was lucky because it's a digital organization and when she came in, they had nothing. And that was something that she talked about a lot is over the last five years, she's developed a marketing team where they're constantly experimenting. They're, you know, developing new persona.
developing marketing campaigns around those personas, but knowing upfront what their measurement, indicators are, you know, their KPIs. If it doesn't meet that, they just get rid of it. Move on.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:28:35] Yeah, that's excellent. That's great. Yeah. And I will also say along the persona path, that's one of the things too. You can always be evolving and tools like HubSpot have ways that you can track by persona. you can go in thinking you know what the persona is, but you're not the customer you're trying to sell to the customer.
And so one of the great benefits of using tools like that is it can help you confirm whether or not your persona predictions were correct, or how you might need to alter them based on the data you ultimately receive. and so everything in the process always needs to be evolving and that's just another place where you can evolve.
Jim Keeney: [00:29:19] Well, and that's kind of a flag in the sand for technology. So a lot of times when you get resistance from the technology department, it's because they put off re-engineering things to get to that point. and you know, and you talk actually in the beginning of your book, you talk about that evolution of oh, we introduced this bit of marketing technology, and then we introduced this bit of marketing technology. And then we, you know, when you get to the point where you have, you know, six, seven pieces in your stack, and none of them actually work together, So, so yeah, you know, CTOs and CIOs need to really stay focused on making that very smooth and systematic so that you can put up an AB test and in no time at all.
and do those experiments.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:30:06] and I also try and avoid the IT department as much as I can. I know that sounds really terrible, but I do because I don't want to deal with the backlog. and so tools like Google Tag Manager, Google optimize, these are tools you can implement. Without much help from the IT department. They give you a lot more control as a marketer.
And I'm so again, I don't always say I'm thankful for Google, but I'm thankful for Google's tools in this manner because they have made it so that marketers can actually stand alone on so much work that they need to do on a website that they don't always need to require the IT department to fix things.
And that's really helpful.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:30:49] So, do you have any tips though, when you've got, you might've talked about it a little bit, but when you've got some really critical issues that are causing problems for website visibility and you have a backlog and those issues say you've got, you know, pages that aren't indexed, orphaned, whatever. and you can't necessarily prove they drive to revenue because they're not indexed yet or ranked. I'm just kinda curious how you walk through that and whether or not you have a different approach for an in-house development team or an outsourced development team.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:31:20] So, I prefer probably in-house, but I worked with a lot of external, development teams that do a great job. I actually worked with one recently first time ever. They actually contacted me about page load speed. And I was like, what? I'm blown away. Like I've never had developers internal or external ever say boo about page load speed. So I congratulated them on that. We had added some code to the site for HubSpot and they said, Hey, you know, our page load speed went up. And I was like, well, yeah, it's naturally going to go up a little bit because you've got a third-party script on there, but it was within the normal range, within normal limits.
So it was fine. But, I said, I've worked with some good ones. I've worked with some really terrible ones. People who call themselves developers. Who were definitely not developers? and that's one thing I think it's hard today too, is terminology because you've got people who are front end developers and back end developers and people who are front end developers sometimes you get people who are really designers who call themselves front end developers and, That could be a little challenging. So understanding who you're talking to is really key to getting that success. But one of the things, you know, you mentioned orphaned pages and things like that. I like to go extreme, Katherine.
I like to just throw it out there. We're gonna get de-ranked from Google. Our whole website's going to come down if we don't fix this and how much does that mean in business? What I do know is our website makes this much money today. Right. It brings in this much money. It brings in this many leads for the sales team.
And if our whole website goes down and we don't have that organic search, then the sales team is not going to have any leads and they're going to be upset and they're going to come knocking on your door. So I like to just kind of go a little extreme if I have to tell this story, paint this picture of doom and gloom.
as I need to, even though I think, you know, realistically. Would Google take down my pages if they saw an orphaned page here or there immediately, probably not, but it's still a best practice that we want to take care of it. So if I find that I need to go doom and gloom, I do. And I always try and involve the people who I need to involve, but if I need to go higher, I go higher and I don't hesitate to do that.
I have never hesitated even as an agency owner to pick up the phone and call the CEO and be like your IT team is not doing what we need them to do. So you know, you need to call them and talk to them. So you just gotta do what you gotta do.
Jim Keeney: [00:33:50] Well, and I think at the end of the day, they appreciate that honesty and forthrightness, right.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:33:55] Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we've had a client who, the CEO their particular, niche was disk defragmentation. Which you don't really think about anymore, but years and years ago, when we first started out, that was a big deal. And now your computer just does it really automatically.
And you don't even think about it, but they had disk defragmentation software. And it's amazing what you can share with a business based on what you see in their data. Like looking at disk defragmentation, as an example, we could see it wasn't just their brand. It was every brand declining in search usage, if we look at Google trends, we could see searches for disk defragmentation were going down. And so I let them know that because another agency was trying to say, well, see, Janet's agency is not performing for you because your searches are going down. And I was like, it's not us. It's the industry.
The industry is not in a good spot and we could demonstrate that. And when I, and I told the CEO that eventually they had to part with us because they had to rethink their strategy for their company. But one day I got a call from that CEO kind of randomly. And he said I want to thank you. He said, because of the data you gave us, we retooled our entire company and.
What a benefit that is to be able to help a CEO understand, Hey, this particular market is on the downward slide. You need to really retool and think about regrouping and rethink what you can be doing to survive because this is not going to work. that is such a wonderful thing to be able to share with somebody.
I mean, even though it's negative news, but to be able to help them guide their business in that way.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:35:42] Yeah. I always find it very interesting how many people and this interesting, only because I'm an SEO on deep in that stuff all the time. But the audience data that you can get for, or the audience insights you can get from search data and how many marketers just don't even know you've got that kind of freely available data, but you can use it always surprises me.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:36:00] And to Jim's point, they appreciate the honesty. they're not, resistant to it. They appreciate the honesty and the data because it helps them prepare. And I find that time after time is that's really true.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:36:12] so I'm, singularly obsessed with the part of your book that talks about the soft skills and in particular soft skills for, the people you're going to bring on board. I know you talked a little bit about how you could interview people and especially kids out of college and see if they've got the right DNA to be good as a digital marketer.
but say you've selected a group of young people that are on your team. So they've got through the first vetting process. is everyone universally able to develop the soft skills to be effective in digital marketing? Do you have any tips or tricks about how to, increase the number of soft skills they have?
so they can be even more successful. I know you and I have both coached quite a bit. I coach sort of instinctively, but I found some stuff inside your book that I thought was a bit more, of a process. And I'd love for you to talk about it a little bit.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:37:06] Absolutely. yeah, so having folks right out of college, what I've also found, but even people who are experienced, depending on how they were taught really affects, you know, when they came up through education, the educational system really affects how they approach problem-solving as an example. And, in many cases, I find most people.
The educational system in our country generally has us regurgitate answers, right? We study something, we learn it, we regurgitate it on a test. We move on. There's not a whole lot of problem-solving required or real critical thinking required in a lot of, the educational system in our country.
Depends on who you, who taught you though, right? Really? it's teacher-based. so one of the things I really do like to use is the Socratic method of questioning. This is where you don't give them the answer, but you ask them why you just keep it's like a, it's like a two-year-old, but why? Katherine, I'm sure you get that a lot. 
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:38:09] Yeah, exactly.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:38:11] but really it's those great kids, kids at two are already thinking ahead and they're thinking in the Socratic method. But, yeah, really having them think through the problem. Why is it this way? Why do we feel this way? And you can kind of ping them and help them, get to the answer, but really consistently using that method is really key.
The other thing that we do in our agency is we have a strategy meeting for each client every month. we call it a brainstorming meeting and we get together. And for half an hour, we have a conversation about that client. And we talk about everyone who comes to the meeting must bring two good things that happened, and everyone must bring two negative things that happened.
And I don't like to call them failures. I call them challenges. What are we up against? But everyone must bring four things. These four things in the meeting, they must come prepared. So they had to think about it before they come to the meeting. And then when we're in there, it's a really great opportunity for me to coach them.
So for instance, I had a great guy working for me. He, he had a degree in analytics, which was awesome. I don't see that very often. But even though he had a degree in analytics, he came into the, meeting one day and he says, well, this was a paid search meeting. He says, well, impressions were up this month.
And I said, great, well, but why were they up? and one of the favorite answers by the way I get from my young folks is seasonality. If I hear seasonality again, I might scream into the void. But, no impressions might be up because why, what are the reasons impressions could be up while they could be up because you're spending more.
Are we spending more this month? Oh, yeah, we are. Well, then that may be why our impressions are up because we're spending more, we have more availability. So really digging into him and saying impressions aren't what we really care about. What we really care about is conversions and rates, not even just conversions, but the rates themselves, because you could spend more money and get more conversions.
What we care about are things like did we improve upon ourselves month after month from a rate perspective? And so being able to be in those types of meetings and coach them at the moment is just so invaluable. I highly recommend that type of approach because it's worked really well for us over the years.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:40:32] And have you ever gotten to a moment where you vetted somebody, thought they were going to work, you've been coaching, and you decide you have to let them go because they're not working out.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:40:43] Yeah. Luckily I don't have to do that very often. And I will say that I invest a lot of time in people, I would say the earliest, I typically would see that somebody is really not ready to move forward in a year. and so, I've seen some people a little bit sooner than I think this might not work out, but I keep on working at it.
But generally what I find is especially younger people stay in a job for about a year or two anyway. So if you find that the person is not working out, they may leave on their own, but people who are really invested and are really excited about what you're teaching them and love it might stay longer.
And that's been my experience. and you can tell between, I'd say six months and a year, if they're really going to work out because the beginning of someone's new employment is always like learning the ropes, like where's the bathroom and how do we check our email? And, but really six months in you get a good start, getting a good feel for them.
I have had to let people go because I could see in the end they were not going to progress past a certain point. And that's very hard. But I will say there's another book and y'all are gonna laugh when I tell you about this book, but I think I might mention it in my book. Actually, the book is called fire someone today, and that sounds really terrible.
And I felt really bad walking through airports with that book because I think if you. People thought I was the cruelest person, but it was written by a gentleman who, he's a Christian and he ran this Christian software company. It had, it was Bible Software. And so he was a really good person. He really wanted to do the right thing.
But what he realized was, and I thought this was a great takeaway, that when you, sometimes people stay in a job longer than they should. And they, it holds them back from going into things that they should be doing. Maybe trying something they would really like. And what I found is people I have let go that I'm actually doing them a favor in many ways.
It doesn't feel like a favor when I do it, but many people have come back to me later and said, you were right. This was not the right field for me. I found something I love even better. And that's, you don't want to hold them back from their potential. Sometimes they're holding themselves back from what they really should be doing.
So if you know, the sooner, you know, that someone's not a good fit, it's time to let them go so they can start figuring, forcing them to figure out what's good for them.
Jim Keeney: [00:43:16] so along those lines, data-driven marketing, it's kind of a new field if you could design your ideal marketing department, what would be the roles and what would be the positions that you'd look for?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:43:28] that's an interesting question. Well, I definitely want some good data analysts. And I mean, real data analysts, people who say that they're an analyst, people who really know how to read data. we have a degree here at the University of Virginia. I live in Charlottesville and, a degree in data science.
Data Science Institute. so you're seeing more of that popping up these days. I think that's awesome. I'm really excited. I'd like to get people from a group like that, although they might be bored with what I have to give them, I think that it would be ideal. you'd want a CMO who doesn't have to know everything but knows enough that can really understand that digital is, that all things in digital are not always measurable as we think they are. and we have a CEO who can understand that too. That's also really key. I think there's a miscommunication or misunderstanding between the CEO and the C-suite, and marketing about what is measurable, what is not. And, there's this concept that everything in digital is measurable.
Not really, like during COVID as an example, we used to measure store visits for one of our clients, but because they're doing delivery instead of store visits, because of COVID we lost our store visit visibility. In Google ads. So sometimes that kind of stuff goes away and you don't have that visibility.
So you have to understand there are limitations, but I think a data analyst or a CMO who understands at least top-level, high level, the capabilities of, digital and is open to try new things. I think people who are good designers, who like to test, that's always a challenge. You know, sometimes designers can feel really connected to their design and not want to try new things.
So you want designers on your team who are willing to try new things and are eager and love data to be able to try new things. And I definitely have someone who is a strategist and someone to implement. maybe that's a junior person as well, who really, again, understand data and analytics and care about that.
And look at those types of pieces before making a decision. So they're informed and they work with the analyst to do that too.
Jim Keeney: [00:45:44] In that kind of collection, where does the psychology come in? Cause you know, the, a lot of times things like conversion will come down to, and you said this before, like, you know, they've measured it pretty well. The biggest thing about a button is how vibrant the color is, you know, but there's a certain element of it.
both psychology and also being able to sense the, you know, who the customers are and how they talk about things and how they think about things so that you're aligning your conversion process with the way they think about your product.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:46:20] Yeah, I think, you know, definitely the persona, someone to build personas and work on content. Is really key as well. I'll let that part out. You know, once you develop the personas and you know who you're writing for, you want to create content, that's going to be compelling for them. And that's really an important part of this is it's a really key part of it.
and. Really making sure we write the content and then you have the data analyst helping you measure the effectiveness of that content, but that we can use in our different campaigns. and that's a big part of that, but also, you know, the people involved all need to really have the mindset of testing and continuous improvement.
If they're not on that path, you're gonna have a difficult time. You know, you don't want to have people who were so married to their work, that they can't take constructive criticism.
Jim Keeney: [00:47:12] Sorta like running a science department rather than a biology department than it is
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:47:17] It is.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:47:19] And do you vet for that in the interview too? The ability to take constructive criticism, is sort of one of your vetting questions?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:47:26] You know, I think probably in different ways it is. I don't ask, you know, I think if I asked somebody if they're, they could take constructive criticism, their answer is going to be obviously yes, of course, I can.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:47:36] Right.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:47:37] but, You know, different people look at criticism differently. Some people look at criticism and think it's constructive.
Some people might look at the same criticism and say, it's not constructive. So it's more of a scenario. Like if I told you this, what would you say? and see how they react to that. I've, interestingly enough, had people try and give me constructive criticism on my website or something like that in an interview.
And that's always interesting too, to have them come through. First of all, I'm always glad when someone comes to our website and has investigated us before they bother having an interview with us. You know, they know what they're getting into that gives them brownie points right off the bat. But, when they give me constructive criticism, I'm impressed that they're willing to be bold enough to say to me, Hey, I saw this on your website.
Have you considered doing X, Y, Z? Because I think that would be really successful for these reasons. that is a really bold, awesome move. And that's the kind of person I want to hire. Because it's somebody who is not willing, not afraid to come to me and say, I think we should make a change.
Jim Keeney: [00:48:42] Yeah.
Katherine Watier Ong: [00:48:43] Do you have an internal team process that you use to get people comfortable with this constructive criticism if they're not coming from that background.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:48:52] Yes. I will say I've had some people in the past who were very sensitive. And so in the review process, in particular, we have really tried to talk about what are your strengths. There's a lot of different ways to look at this. Some people say you should do positive and negative.
Some people say you should only focus on positive. some people try and do the positive, negative, positive sandwich. The reality is I found that just being honest with people, but you want to be very focused on the positive, but also on the things that they need to work on. And I don't call them weaknesses.
I call them they're, you know, here's your next area for development, or here's what we need to work on to get you to the next level. And we try and be as transparent about that as possible. And we measure as much as we can. Regardless of the type of skill that they might need. So, and then also in the feedback that we get, this is really interesting because, HBR, Harvard business review has some really great little short books.
They're like 15 minute reads on different things. And one of them is how to give effective feedback. And a lot of people give terrible feedback. and they don't know how to do it properly. So we do 360 reviews in our company. And one of the things I train everyone on is if you don't know how to rate someone on this, don't answer it.
Because you should not give feedback if you do not know. But secondly, if you give feedback, with a number and rate this person, you must give a specific example of where they did this well or where they didn't do it well, so that they can relate to, Oh yeah. I remember that scene. I remember this situation and it can help them to evolve.
I also think you got to deal with it. As much as you can in the moment, but on reviews. Like we do quarterly reviews, which as you guys know, does not happen in most companies. In fact, annual reviews are lucky to be happening, but we do, with our new folks, we do quarterly reviews for the first year.
Jim Keeney: [00:50:52] excellent. Yeah. And then it's very much about moving. It's exactly equivalent to data-driven marketing. It's moving away from the subjective to the concrete. So, you know, I know in my own experience that, that when I sit down and discuss what's happening, I'm always talking about the things that actually happened, the outcomes that we're seeking, rather than, you know, perceptions or, you know, impressions or what have you.
And that, what because we want to simultaneously encourage a culture where failure or mistakes are openly discussed, in a nonjudgmental way, because we all make mistakes and things are going to happen. The worst thing in the world is if you try to cover it up,
Janet Driscoll Miller: [00:51:38] Absolutely. And you know, the other thing I try and do is to make a review of a conversation. It's not just about what I expect as your employer, of you as an employee, but it's also about what you expect to be as your employer. Have I not provided something you needed, have is the failing of not achieving this particular goal, because I didn't give you something that you needed to train.
and so we try to have this two-way street and, it's worked pretty well for us. Like, we have this open-ended question. So we have a self-evaluation people have to fill out before these reviews and, in a self-evaluation, there are some open-ended questions.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:00:00] I was wondering if you can share the tips that you found over the years related to hiring training or improving those kinds of soft skills amongst digital marketers in the analytics skills.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:00:10] Sure, one of the things that I like to ask people right up front in the interview is if they see themselves as more creative or analytical. And just because you're, you're creative doesn't mean you can't be analytical. Some people will tell me they're both, but when people are necessarily highly creative, sometimes they may not appreciate or really enjoy a job that is so analytical because really data first marketing is.
Wrapped up in so many spreadsheets and analysis that you want to make sure you find people who are happy with that type of work. If they come in expecting it all to be, you know, really highly creative, that is only a very small part of the job in many cases. And so we, we always try and decipher that right at the front of the interview, but also we look for people who have backgrounds.
And I found like for instance, people who have degrees in economics are really good hires because they actually really enjoy numbers. And so we look for marketing and economics majors from college business majors. Economics is definitely one that, that is a really helpful major that we find is really a good fit oftentimes in this type of position.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:01:25] And do you think that anyone can get trained in the soft skills that are required to be a data-driven marketer or are there some people that are better set for that? And do you have any tips around increasing their skill set to get there?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:01:39] Yeah. You know, soft skills are tough because there are things that you build over time. They're not something you normally just take a test on, you know, in school, it's not like taking a hard skill test, like the Google ads exam to determine if you have a certain skill. So for soft skills, there are ways to train people, but some people have more difficulty getting trained.
So one of the things that we do in our agency is we have a meeting once a month, a brainstorming meeting for each client. And for those meetings, we ask our staff to come prepared. With two things that were positive over the last month, so they can celebrate their wins, but also two things that were challenges.
And as we discuss these challenges and wins it's a good opportunity for me to see how those staff members are pulling data. And if they're recognizing certain information that needs to be pulled, and that's one way that we work on some of those skills and I coach them in that particular instance, for instance, somebody might say to me, I think impressions were up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I say, well our impressions, what we're going for here, or is the goal of this campaign, something more like conversions. And so it gives me that opportunity to really coach them through thinking through these problems and problem-solving. So it's a really great opportunity to really one-on-one, especially when you get to a position like mine, where you're CEO and you might be re removed a bit from the day to day of working with that staff member.
It's a good opportunity for me to reconnect with them.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:03:17] Great. That makes tons of sense. Now you, in particular mentioned in the book, I think it was, a grid and a way to evaluate and move people. Now I'm forgetting what you called it in the book.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:03:30] There's a soft skill. Yeah. I remember when you're talking about this is soft skills like a roadmap.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:03:34] that's it. That's it
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:03:35] how to really test. We took that from another company that was really generous in helping us with some of this information and really a way to build those soft skills and looking at a roadmap of how you can move past and move forward with that.
And we've used that also in reviews to really understand where people are at. And we, we created a bad system in our, in our company. This batch system was based on something Zappos had done. With different types of skills. And so we also using that roadmap and using our badge system of, have you earned certain types of skills?
Like, are you able to speak on the phone with someone professionally and coherently? Those are obviously qualitative skills. And so we judge those and decide if the person has earned the badge and that roadmap was really helpful in getting us there.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:04:27] Yeah, I thought that was super useful. I've, I've done some coaching, but to see the roadmap, I just thought it was very eliminating. 
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:04:34] Really nicely laid out, just really clearly laid out for you. Yeah.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:04:38] yeah, super helpful. So as marketers we're always interested in being as close as we can to our end customers and what makes them tick. Have you ever had any recent aha moment about your client's customers that you thought was striking?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:04:55] About my client's customers, I thought was striking.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:04:57] or yours as an agency
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:04:59] Oh my, my customers I thought was striking. Yeah. I think you know, COVID, in general, has been really striking. Yeah. The past nine months have been pretty amazing to watch people and companies adapt. And you know, recently, you know, when we look at data, one of the really interesting things, it was a real pivot point recently was one of our clients is in DC, there their an alcoholic beverage company.
And They used to have people coming to their store. And so store visits were our number one measurement out of Google ads, but they started offering delivery when COVID hit. And so that meant we had to really pivot our measurement because we weren't getting store visits anymore. Well, they were delivering.
So now we had to really rethink our, our measurement. And so in particular, COVID has really adjusted a lot of what we've had to think about from a measurement perspective and how we can really judge our success. The good news is things are really great. It just means that you still have to think about it.
For instance, our store visits really plummeted because of the fact that Google has a certain threshold you have to have for store visits to even report them. And because of the delivery, people were opting for the delivery option. There weren't enough store visits to report on. So it really meant a lot of pivoting both for our clients and for us.
And so you always have to be keeping an eye on that kind of thing, because you just, especially with right now, what's going on in the world. You really don't know how things are gonna change and how you're gonna have to alter your measurement
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:06:32] no, that totally makes sense.
Jim Keeney: [01:06:34] So the top of your funnel just essentially disappeared.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:06:38] right. Or changed, it changed which measurement had to become the top of the funnel?
Jim Keeney: [01:06:43] Did you find a trick for handling phone calls?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:06:46] Yeah. You know, phone calls weren't as hard because we do have the Google ads phone tracking. So that's been very, very helpful and it even gives you duration. So we've clients with the look, phone trees, and stuff. You have to really think about that because a phone call that's one minute. You may need to take a minute or two to get through the phone tree, to get to the right place versus a phone call it's 30 seconds.
So you have to really understand that pretty well to understand what you're really probably true conversions versus which are maybe quick calls to get directions or something like that.
Jim Keeney: [01:07:21] yeah, pretty significantly different from a store visit.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:07:25] Yeah, exactly. And depending on the client, some don't really want store calls. I mean, as much as they'd want a store visit or vice versa, some want more calls than store visits, depending on the type of thing that they're selling. For instance, we have a client that is a farm implement store that also sells propane delivery. For propane delivery, they prefer phone calls, but for gardening supplies, they prefer store visits. So even within one client, you may have different data points that you're looking at, depending on what you're selling at that moment, what their real goal is.
Jim Keeney: [01:08:00] Yeah, it's similar to when they're all digital marketing separating affiliation leads from organic leads from ad leads is the equivalent, you know, that's the digital equivalent to phone calls versus store visits versus some other channels.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:08:17] Exactly. Exactly.
Jim Keeney: [00:08:19] And they all have different behaviors. They all have different steps before they get to the, you know, the bottom of the funnel where you're measuring conversion.  And do you have any kind of back of the envelope tricks for dealing with gaps in those conversion processes? So I'm going from the phone now, now I've referred them onto something else.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:08:39] Well, you know, really depends on the client's backend, like for a phone call as an example, they may have tracking software, phone call tracking software, where we can see through a phone tree what the requests were, was its directions? Do they press one for directions, they press two for this. So we can get some more information typically from the client and the situations you know, for store visits, it's a little bit different because you sort of have to make the assumption in many cases unless the point of sale system has more information or you have a coupon that you're using like a coupon code.
So it really varies by a client what their tracking systems allow us to see and what they're able to share with us as well.
Jim Keeney: [01:09:21] Excellent.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:09:22] So Janet, this has been a really great conversation today. I just wanted to wrap up with a couple of last questions we ask everybody. So what is the win or resource that you'd want to share with our audience today?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:09:36] Well, I really would love to share data studio, Google data studio. We use that tool so much with our reporting. It's a free tool. I think it's a really excellent way to visualize your data. So I highly recommend that. I think it's a great win and honestly, you know, we've talked about in the book, how important data visualization is.
To get people to absorb the data and information you're sharing. So I think that Google data studio is an excellent way to do that.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:10:04] great. And then how can people learn more about you?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:10:08] Well, you can come to our book website, it's data dash first marketing.com. You can also download a free chapter of the book about culture, which we've been talking about today. You can read that chapter for free. If you go, to bit.ly/dmf-culture
And you can download that free chapter and read all about all the techniques and see the roadmap we were talking about as well as in that chapter.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:10:41] great. That's awesome. And what's your Twitter handle and your corporate address?
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:10:46] My Twitter handle is Janet D. Miller and my corporate address is Marketing-mojo.com.
Katherine Watier Ong: [01:10:56] Great. Thank you, Janet. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise with our listeners. It's been great.
Janet Driscoll Miller: [01:11:03] Thank you so much, both of you. I really appreciate it. And I've had a great time.