Putting WordPress to Work
Carrie: Howdy everybody! Welcome back to another episode of officehours.fm. Today, I have not one but two guests joining me, the CEO and CCO co-founders of Lumen Foundry. I have Scott Buscemi (I know I am saying that incorrectly) and Peter Malick. Guys? Welcome to the show.
Scott: Thank you! You almost got it.
Peter: Yeah.
Scott: You got the beginning part which usually when it goes wrong for the most part.
Carrie: What’s the origin of your last name?
Scott: Italian!
Carrie: Italian ok. If I’d had my hands up Buscemi!
Scott: Yeah. It’s got the hand gestures on it.
Carrie: Ok. Excellent. Guys? It’s a pleasure to have you on today. I’m going to let you introduce yourselves one at a time. Scott? We’ll start with you.
Scott: Hi! My name is Scott Buscemi. I am the CCO and Cofounder of Lumen Foundry. We are a web and marketing agency in Los Angeles. I actually lived in Phoenix for most of my life and then recently moved to LA and I’m kind of adventuring out over here.
Peter: I am Peter Malik. I am also a co-founder of Lumen Foundry. I’ve been a musician most of my life. I’m from Boston Massachusetts originally. I started working for a pro audio retailer named Westlake Pro a while ago and had a major career shift. I found out that I had actually been a marketer for the last 20 years with marketing myself. So here I am! I’m the marketing end of this.
Carrie: Fantastic! Scott? You had owned a development agency for a number of years. What I would really like to get out of you guys is why you decided to go the partnership route. Secondly, what were some of the experiences and hurdles of joining with another person to start your adventure? So I guess…Scott? Maybe you could take us back a little bit and walk through why you decided to go the partnership route?
Scott: Sure. I actually started Luminary back in 2010. At the time I actually was just graduating high school and was going to college. It was just me but I had developers that were working with me. I focused solely on website development and some eCommerce development. From there, I started to go to WordCamps. It was kind of interesting over the past few years. I feel that people did start to recognize the name Luminary (the old company name that I had). When Peter and I started talking about this idea of having a partnership we were checking to make sure that we had all our copyrights and trademarks in place. Luminary was one of those ones that was a little shaky in the end. It was a bummer for me because I felt like there were a good amount people in the WordPress community that were starting to recognize the name but in the grand scheme of what we’re planning on doing and the scope of what’s possible there’s so much more opportunity out there that even just having a few hundred people that recognize the name and now can shift a little bit from Luminary to Lumen Foundry is perfectly fine. It’s ok with me. At least in terms of a partnership, one of the biggest things that I’ve always struggled with is accountability and the possibilities when you have two brains instead of just one, right? Instead of me just making decisions and expecting or hoping that they’re right, instead, I can kind of work with somebody else and then bounce those ideas off of them. That’s where I’m excited about the partnership. I see that there’s more than interest in one company succeeding. That will drive to more success.
Carrie: Did you feel like that you had gone as far as you could as a single owner/ operator or was it that there was this direction you wanted to take but didn’t quite have the missing piece to realize that vision?
Scott: So I actually graduated 3 1/2 years ago from college. Since then my company had been growing but not at like an exponential pace or at a pace that I would actually want. For context, I actually graduated high school in three years and then I graduated college in three years. I am always on kind of like a speed train (if you want to call it that). I always like going fast, fast, fast. So with my company, things weren’t stagnating but they just weren’t going at the pace that I wanted. With a lot of people, when a business owner thinks of website development they don’t really see a line item on their budget. They don’t always work to translate how that would turn into money, right? If you think about it website development on its own (for the most part) does not lead to an ROI. It has to have some sort of a greater business plan behind it or some sort of a greater marketing plan behind it. That’s where I wanted to start saying let me actually be a part of the full conversation related to ROI. Let me be a full partner in the clients that I’m working with and make sure we’re not just kind of implementing a strategy that they’ve already thought of in their head that might be kind of shaky. Actually, we want to start that conversation with them even sooner and start digging into where their marketing strategy and branding and messaging is coming from. The cool part is that is where Peter comes in with his history as a CMO and with his connections to people that are good with branding and messaging. Right now we are working with Michelle Schulp on some solid graphic design for our clients too. Those are the kinds of partnerships where I see it’s going to grow. I would not be able to do all that on my own. Having people that are really successful in their particular fields makes it so we can have a deeper conversation with clients.
Carrie: CMO? Is that Chief Music Officer or a Chief Marketing Officer?
Peter: (laughing) It’s actually Chief Marketing Officer, although that was a good guess.
Carrie: Peter? From your perspective, I guess from coming in from outside of the WordPress universe, what made you want to hitch your wagon to Lumen Foundry?
Peter: Well, I’m not exactly totally outside of the WordPress universe. In 2008 my wife and I had a recording studio. And in 2008, we went from planning to expand our recording studio to having crickets. The only noises being made were of the world falling apart. So we started an Indie music blog at that point. We were on blogger for about five minutes. We were on square space for about 15 minutes and quickly outgrew growth. It was a WordPress music blog that we started 2008. We’ve been circling around the community for a while. I personally (actually the whole family) have been personally invested in WordPress. The conversation with one of the two owners of the company, Westlake Pro, where I was the CMO (which was about 3 1/2 years ago) led me to take a job there. I took the job strictly to build an eBay store for them mainly because I bought and sold a lot of guitars in my life. That sort of morphed into becoming the director of marketing and CMO. I realized that I’d really been doing this for a long time. I’ve been marketing myself as an independent musician, producer and so forth. At any rate, at the time I came onto Westlake they had what they would probably like to call an informational website. I would like to call it a disinformational website because they’re a store selling recording gear. They would constantly get calls from the website saying Hey! We would like book studio time. There was no eCommerce component to it. I sort of floated the idea not knowing at all what I was getting into, of the building an eCommerce store for them. My wife was the designer and we built a 10,000+ product WooCommerce store. Let’s see…anyway…that’s a really long answer about actually being a little bit involved in the WordPress community. I forgot the original question.
Carrie: I enjoyed the conversation. What I really enjoy there Peter is the idea of taking what is a passion in your life and then finding out how to actually wrap a business component around that. I had asked originally about in terms of coming on board with Scott what was the particular appeal of partnering in that way versus doing your own thing?
Peter: Well I met Scott by attending WooConf last year. I attended a couple of WordCamps this past year. Westlake Pro was actually looking to redesign the website. Basically, the beginning my relationship with Scott was that he was hired to design the website. At the same time, I’d been very much wanting to start some sort of marketing based agency. Those two plans remained separate for some time but as the project developed the idea came up that the two of us together would be way better than one plus one. That’s basically how it happened.
Carrie: All right! Here you are. Congratulations on your new partnership. It’s exciting and I saw that you’ve got some great teammates in Michelle and Vlad. Is it just the four of you at this point?
Peter. It is. We have some help as needed outside but it is the four of us.
Carrie: Gotcha. Part of what you do is marketing. Scott? I like what you said about being part of the complete conversation and not just executing the web development part but really being in the conversation from the beginning about how you can help impact someone’s business through the services you provide. Can you talk a little bit about like the marketing aspect? Are you talking about ads, content marketing, inbound marketing, email marketing or all of the above?
Scott: Our focus primarily is on inbound marketing. The cool part about inbound marketing is that it encapsulates all of the above (all of what you just mentioned). So it definitely touches upon SEO, it touches upon content marketing, upon social, upon email marketing and all of those other aspects. It kind of brings those all into one and makes it so we’re just not in a little tiny pocket. We’re taking care of a full solution.
Carrie: Can you describe for maybe someone who is not familiar with that term inbound marketing with that actually means?
Scott: I’ll defer to Peter to run through inbound marketing.
Peter: Well I think essentially with traditional marketing as with outbound, it is a sales situation where salespeople are cold calling, people are putting ads in newspapers, doing direct mailers, or taking out television ads. You know? I think that we all would probably agree that sort of dynamic is toast or close to being toast, right? People are just inundated. Inbound marketing is really a technique where you attract the people who are potentially interested in what you’re selling. You do that by creating content, by making sure that content has good SEO, by getting people to your site and then engaging with them once they get there. That’s the short answer.
Carrie: So engaging with them once they get there. What does that mean?
Peter: I think typically the default has been you know to grab an email address. We all try to get sign ups to the mailing list by offering a white paper or offering some eBook that is something as perceived value to your visitor. Then part of inbound marketing (which is also called marketing automation) is the point you are able to track that email address. It’s not like you know your weirdly tracking some person but you are tracking what that email address does on your site or even what they’ve done on your site before they signed up. Based on that, it’s possible to now figure out what that person’s real interests are and serve them content and eventually serve them offers that’s targeted to their interests rather than sort of just spamming out your best guess of what somebody might be interested in.
Carrie: You know? I have the perfect example of this in my inbox. Last week I was looking Pottery Barn and sent an email that they had a bedding sale. Well, I need some new bedding so I clicked on the link and was looking around and then I abandoned ship because I got distracted. This morning I get an email from a company I’ve never heard of. It’s about bedding. When I go to the very bottom of the email I can see that it’s part of the Pottery Barn family but it’s a new thing they are rolling out. I’m like hmmm…something tells me that if I hadn’t clicked on that link in that other email and actually went and looked at that website, I would not be triggered to receive this particular email.
Peter: You know? That’s absolutely right. Actually, how did you feel about it? Did you feel it was invasive at all or did you feel ok about it?
Carrie: You know? That’s an interesting question. Being in this industry and understanding how one click can lead to other actions, I was not creeped out by it. As a matter of fact, I was like ok. I’m legitimately interested in what you have to say. But it is strange to think how behaviors are tracked.
Peter: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Peter: It is. I think part of it is actually that’s one company that does it really well.
Scott: Well, the thing that I thought was funny is I was with my friend yesterday. Actually, she bought something online from an eCommerce store and they had it where (I think there is probably a WooCommerce extension for this) where after she made the purchase she got an email saying hey thanks for buying. Here’s a coupon for 25% off if you buy within the next 14 days. To us, as marketers it sounds like a cool thing, you know? It entices them to come back. Instead, she sent me a screenshot and messaged me saying “those bastards”. Didn’t they think why didn’t I have this coupon before? Why is it that now I get a coupon? It’s funny to see that sometimes we might see marketing things as beneficial but to the user side, they might see it differently. So I think even Gary Vaynercheck says marketers ruin everything. It’s very true. That happens a lot. Even I am still not a fan of those general pop-ups asking for emails, opt-ins and things like that. Yet there are so many people that do it. You’ve got to believe that somebody is making something off of it if it keeps on showing up everywhere.
Carrie: Yeah it must be working even if we find it highly annoying. This is great conversation guys.
So we were just talking about pop-up ads, “in your face” marketing and how sometimes what we think works, doesn’t work. Can we talk about some of the actual tools that you’re using? A lot of folks that listen to this show are developers and I know that the nerds among us would love to know what you’re actually using to track these engagements and follow up with customers.
Scott: Sure. We actually have a very interesting tool that we’ve been using. A lot of people for inbound marketing will use HubSpot. It has the CRM aspect. It has so many other different aspects for tracking users, etc. etc. But it’s expensive! Even basic plans can be hundreds of dollars. Even if you have 10,000 contacts you’re looking at thousands of dollars every single month. Obviously, for some people that turns into value and it’s worth it but for people that are maybe just starting to get into marketing automation that’s the tough pill to swallow. That’s a lot to take on. If your campaigns aren’t set up properly or if you’re not doing it right you’re just wasting your money. We are actually investing a lot of our time and integration time into a new system called Mautic. It’s actually an open source alternative to HubSpot. So just like how WordPress is open source and that’s contributed to its success, its growth and the number people that are involved in its development checking for bugs and all of the other pieces that go with it; Mautic is the same way. So it’s still premature and in its “baby” phase. There’s a lot of other features that can be added and some bugs that still need to be fixed. But it’s at the point where it’s ready for production. That’s why I think it’s really cool for us to kind of start this fresh ground to make our stake in that open source community over there. I’m also kind of curious how the WordPress and Mautic communities will come together at some point or at least be able to recognize each other and see how things progress.
Carrie: Interesting! By the way guys, if go to officehours.fm and click on this episode, I will have the link to Mautic and anything else that we’re talking about here. You know? When you said it’s kind of in its baby phase, my first thought was no a pull request, welcome!
Scott: Exactly! I mean you can see that they’re ready for people to help them out. I think my biggest thing is how to introduce Mautic to the WordPress community. It’s a weird thing for me to be able to make a WordCamp talk about Mautic but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s not that crazy of an idea. I think the thing to consider is that Mautic is not a WordPress competitor. So I won’t be going to WordCamps like introducing Joomla where this is all the benefit of Joomla and why you should switch. Mautic and WordPress work together. That’s why I’m not too worried about feeling like I’m abandoning WordPress in any way because I’m not. It’s a matter of doing both.
Carrie: You know? Is A/B testing part of what Mautic can do? Like what you do with your own strategy?
Peter: Yeah it is. The really interesting thing about Mautic is that it has very sophisticated email tree functions where you can actually do if/then type decision trees with email sequences which can be really powerful.
Scott: Well, the other thing that you can do with Mautic is actually present dynamic content on a website. So depending on the visitor, you can even have a webpage that says that the visitor’s name. You can say “Hey Scott! Thanks for visiting again.” You cannot only A/B test but you can show specific content on your webpages depending on who’s visiting. So if you have somebody that’s in a certain segment you can show them one piece of content and if they’re in a different segment you can show them something else. So it really goes to show its not even just A/B testing. You’re going way beyond that. You’re actually changing up the entire layout or content of your site depending on who’s on that page.
Carrie: This may sound like a loaded question, but does this sort of thing work best in an eCommerce scenario or is it for any website?
Scott: Well I’m starting to realize that we’re always marketing ourselves as an e-commerce development company. At the end of the day, honestly, every website is an eCommerce website especially if it’s business-related. So with eCommerce technically, yes. If there’s a shopping cart or even if you’re selling your services and trying to get people to contact you that’s still commerce online…eCommerce. So I see it as any business can succeed with it. But we have a client with a blog that has over 1 million page views a week (sometimes over 2 million page views every week) and we’re starting to explore what we can do with marketing automation to email people blog posts that they would be interested in (depending on what category they’re interested or what tags they’re interested in). It doesn’t have to just be just for an eCommerce site. It can be just anyone that has a website that they want it to do certain things with visitors or to meet certain goals. This makes it so that they are able to do that with some automation tools.
Carrie: Is there any Google analytics integration in terms of seeing what people’s traffic flow is or patterns are on your site?
Scott: So Mautic has its own tracking tools. They’re definitely not as full-fledged as Google analytics. That’s why (again) I call it a baby. The cool part is when you install Mautic you don’t clear out all of your other tools. So you can actually still use Google analytics and get all of your data out of there. There are also specific tools you can use within Mautic to track how many visitors you are getting and what they’re doing on the site. I see it more that Mautic is more of a one-to-one basic understanding of tracking each visitor and making decisions based off of that specific visitor rather than trying to understand the mass decision-making tree. Then Google analytics is where you can see it more as a worldview, big picture vision of how traffic is flowing through your site and where they’re coming from. So that’s how I see it where Mautic is kind of a one to one and then putting automation on top of that. Google Analytics can be for bigger picture scenarios.
Carrie: Do you think there needs to be critical mass if you will? So for a website that’s low traffic or is just getting started that doesn’t have those millions of page views, is there still value in treating visitors with this catered experience?
Scott: So interestingly enough, Google analytics actually is not trustworthy when your data is low, especially if you’re doing A/B testing with the Optimizely or some other tool. To get scientific accuracy for your A/B tests requires thousands and thousands of visitors; sometimes millions if there is not just a small little tiny difference in conversions or in clicks. So the cool part of marketing automation is that even if you just have 10 people that are visiting your site, those you could see as 10 very valuable people. You want to make a catered experience for those people. So it depends on where you’re at with your site. So if you’re getting 10 people a day and they’re just stumbling upon you because you have a funky domain or something like that, right? Maybe it is that you actually have to figure out how you’re going to start writing content, work on your SEO, your social and work on all those other aspects. But once they get your site, you want to make sure that they are following some sort of funnel and going through a path of whatever you want that goal to be, whether it’s contacting you or whether it’s downloading or purchasing something from you. With any of those goals, you want to be able to right away have that in mind.
Carrie: Peter? I promise I’m going to let you talk here. Scott? I believe you had some user experience in your background? When you talk about a funnel, are we just sticking a call to action at the bottom of a blog post? What is your experience of an effective way to pull somebody into that funnel initially?
Scott: I actually have a client that we’re working on a proposal for now where they have a travel website. They publish a magazine and then have a travel site all related to cities in one state, right? So in that case you don’t want to just have it…on the current site they have on the sidebar a little widget that says sign up for the buzz newsletter and you’ll receive some cool tips and tricks. That’s what a lot of people do. They just throw something on the sidebar and say hey! Sign up for my newsletter. Then nobody really clicks on it and they say there’s really no value in newsletters. Now if you think about it, if you’re just a visitor on that site and you’re looking for cool things to do (let’s just say in OC. You’re going to Orange County and you want to know). You don’t really want to sign up for this like general travel newsletter. It makes no sense for you to go onto the sidebar and provide your email for this like random buzz newsletter and get things weekly because you are in the mode of wanting to know exactly what you can do in OC in the next couple days. You’re not going wait for months and months to figure out from this newsletter that hopefully is about the city that you like. In this case, what we’re actually going to be suggesting is to create may be a top 10 list in ebook form (just a PDF) and make it so at the end at the bottom of the page related to that city we say hey! Get the top 10 list for the city you just entered in your email. So they enter their email and then they get the list. So the cool part is that they’re getting the email address, they understand exactly what city they’re interested in so they can continue to market them related to that city. They are providing valuable information that the visitor actually wants which means that they’re going to come back when they want to visit another city. So that’s the big difference. It’s not just throwing a call to action at the bottom of every page that does the same across all pages but starting to think when somebody is on this page what additional value that I can provide that makes them want to actually engage with this page rather than just go back to Google and find another one. What can I do to really say I know who you are and what you want and I’m to provide that. I will continue to provide that to you and then turn you into an actual lead in some sense.
Carrie: That’s a great example. Peter? Did you want to chime in that?
Peter: Sure. You know? I think it’s a really interesting and delicate dance. Are you familiar with a service called unroll me?
Carrie: Yes.
Peter: I entered my main email address into unroll me a few weeks ago. I was subscribed to like 400 newsletters, right? I unsubscribed to about 250 of them. I realized (I don’t know if this was your experience or not) but they’re people whose email list I’m on. I am happy. I’m fine receiving 2 to 3 emails a week from them. Then there are others that even if they contact me twice a month, I’m pissed off. So, you know, it’s really kind of a delicate dance. I don’t think that there is one answer as to whether you solicit somebody to be on an email list whether you’re being too forward. The idea of this whole inbound marketing is that you are providing something that somebody wants. It should be easy, it’s transparent and that you never feeling overwhelmed. If your subscribers are feeling pressured or pissed off, you just are not doing it right.
Carrie: That indeed! If you have not used unroll me go check that out. I think it only works with maybe a Gmail account but it’s fantastic.
Peter: I was just wondering about that. I think it may work with a couple of others too.
Scott: But not Yahoo.
Carrie: What is Yahoo? We’re going to wrap up here guys. I’m going to ask you to think of your best piece of marketing advice that you would give. While you’re thinking on that, let me just say that I would love for you guys who are listening if you’re not already a part of the office hours community we would love to have you. It’s a free slack group were we just meet anytime of the day and chat about whatever is on our mind You can join that over at officehours.fm/community. Scott? Where can people find you online and follow up with you? After that, give your best piece of marketing advice.
Scott: Sure. So you can always find us at lumenfoundry.com. I am a happy tweeter on Twitter which is @scottbuscemi. My best piece of marketing advice would be to know your customer, understand what they want, why they’re with you and what is it that drives them to keep on coming back to you?
Carrie: Great stuff! Peter? How about you?
Peter: Yeah. @Lumenfoundry.com. Also on twitter @silvertone which was started as a music twitter account but that’s where I am. The best piece of marketing advice? I would say be of service, be informative, show up for people and they’ll find you.
Carrie: Those are the golden nuggets that you will find here on officehours.fm. Thank you guys so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom. To everybody that is tuning in, I’ll see you next week!