Andy Crestodina started building websites in the early 2000’s with a roommate and to this day has not pivoted. Through what he likes to call “zero-waste marketing” (and doing phenomenal work) he has turned this into Orbit Media Studios; a 48 person, ~$7million project-based yearly revenue business. His LinkedIn newsletter “Digital Marketing Tips” has accumulated 120,000 subscribers in its first year and he has facilitated $600,000 worth of digital marketing services donated through Chicago Cause, a nonprofit he helped create.

Andy Joins George Leith this week to discuss account-based content marketing and webinar building through LinkedIn, zero-waste marketing and how to align sales and marketing teams, and meeting what you know will work vs. what the client thinks they need.

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Introduction

George: This is the Conquer Local Podcast, a show about billion dollar sales leaders, marketers leading local economic growth and entrepreneurs that have created their dream organizations. We wanna share their secrets, giving you the distilled version of their extraordinary feats. Our hope is with the tangible takeaways from each episode, you can rewire, rework and reimagine your business. I’m George Leith. On this episode, we’re very proud to feature Andy Crestodina. Many years ago, Andy joined a roommate from high school and began building websites. To this day he’s never pivoted. He co-founded Orbit Media Studios, and now has a team of 48, with 7 million in annual revenue. His biweekly LinkedIn newsletter has grown at a substantial rate. Starting in February this year, with now 120,000 subscribers. He cemented himself as a thought leader in the digital marketing and website space. Get ready conquerors. Andy Crestodina is coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast. Andy Crestodina joining us from the beautiful metropolis of Chicago. I don’t say this every time Andy, I miss the odd city that I used to travel to. Chicago is one of those. I fell in love with Chicago the first time that I went there and you’re taking good care of that city, I’m sure.

Andy: Doing my best. Chicago’s doing pretty well overall. And it’s a great place to call home.

George: That’s fantastic city. Well, thanks for joining us. In the intro we talked about you and your organization, but I’m excited today because we are talking to one of the marketing greats that is out there and your company, Orbit Media Studios, congratulations on all the success. I wanna ask this question. You have 48 people and you guys are building websites and that’s what you’re doing, but we’re gonna talk about account based marketing in a few minutes, but let’s talk about web. That’s a tough frigging business and you guys have been doing it for a long time. You’re doing a hell of a job. How is that possible, Andy?

Creating A 48 person, ~$7million Project-based Yearly Revenue Business; How?

Andy: Oh, you gotta have passion for the work and for people. It’s 100% people based business. I grew up working in a restaurant. So it feels like that a lot of days, it’s like very much service focused. You gotta pay attention. You gotta really sweat the details. There’s a ton of little things that have to go well for a webpage to even load and just be empathetic. Be empathetic to the client who is in many cases, making an almost emotional decision when approving a deliverable and ultimately bottom line, the blood sport of digital comes down to empathy for the audience, I mean, we gotta know who we’re talking to, what their information needs are, what their fears are, what objections we have to address, how to add evidence and social proof to these pages and guide the eye, web design is mind control. Our job is to create a visual hierarchy that guides the eye through a series of messages where the person just gets more trusting, more clarity, more excitement, click to become a lead and that’s the game.

George: The one thing that I noticed in the way that you explained that was well done, by the way, the way that you explained it, ’cause you have my trust now I wanna learn more. How have you been able to navigate that world where the client doesn’t really know what they want, even if they say I know exactly what I want, like, how are you able to inject the things that you know are going to work? Because a lot of times what the thinks they want and what’s gonna get the job done are a long ways apart I’ve found.

Andy: Well, it takes a lot of conversation, and again, it takes trust. So one of the things to remind people of during these processes is that digital ink is never dry. None of the decisions we’re making are permanent, set in stone. We can always go back. Websites are very easy to change. Many of the things that feel like they’re high stakes in the moment are actually can be changed in two seconds at no cost forever. Another is to just remind people that there is no one right answer. There’s lots of ways to do this. And if you just think again, empathy about the visitor, what their moment of truth was that brought them here. What’s the true story in the life? How would they perceive each of these navigation labels successfully guiding them deeper? And really every one of the best practices that we apply is just a good hypothesis. Best practices are just hypotheses. So we’re gonna find out postlaunch exactly how people interact with the site. We’re gonna use analytics to see the visitor behavior data, and that can guide improvements over over time. So it’s really just explaining the logic behind all the decisions. It’s all for a purpose. There’s not one way to do it, but let’s just keep in mind that we’re being deliberate about all these dozens or hundreds of choices that are made during every web design process.

George: I’m almost reading that you set the stage that this is going to be iterative. We’re gonna try some things based upon experience and the hypothesis that we have, but we don’t know yet. And we’re gonna show you what’s working and what’s not. Is that like you talked about proof.

Andy: That’s it, that’s it. So we know very well how a visitor will perceive a homepage header or a navigation label or a call to action. We do tests all the time. So we have a lot of data about what works well. I can tell you what is our top performing call to action based on the last 25 tests we ran, but that doesn’t mean that it’s gonna work every time or for this clients. So explain, teach, kind of build confidence that these things are just a moment in time and that no website’s ever technically finished, it’s just a project management company and it’s a project management job. So you need dedicated project managers who can explain these things very well.

George: And that you hit it off the top there where you said communication. I think that where I see people really fail on, this is a complex thing it’s not an easy thing. And you may know exactly what’s gonna work, but correct me if I’m wrong. What you’re saying is it’s in that early discussion and ongoing discussion where you set the stage for that we might need to make changes. We’re gonna try, you pretty much know though, don’t you?

Andy: Well, I had a conversation yesterday with the client that wanted to have their navigation all be tucked away in the hamburger icon. Even for desktop visitors to show the three little lines in the corner. You’ve seen this before. I would never know normally do that. I would not recommend that. You wanna help the visitor know instantly that they’re in the right place. And the visitor’s eyes will quickly go to the main navigation and look at those labels. Does that mean it’s a bad decision? It does not mean it’s a bad decision to use the hamburger icon for the desktop experience. So I told them, here’s what we recommend. We can do whatever we want to, it’s your website. I’m not gonna push you in to an option. Here’s why I recommend that. But if you feel strongly about this, we can definitely try that. I mean, there’s a decent case in that example, that it could be a good idea but what’s the downside? What’s the risk? What are the pros? What are the cons? That’s just a conversation.

What Is Account-based Content Marketing And How Can You Leverage It?

George: I had to ask about the website because we, in our audience, there’s a lot of people that sell websites and we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs that probably need a better website experience. So I wanted to ask that because obviously you are an expert in that space and thank you for those learnings, but now I wanna tackle ABM. And if we could put like an echo on that and maybe like some noise I’m out, myself and Elon Musk never met ’em by the way, but we’re trying to kill acronyms. And I’ve kind of taken that on. I was training some new sales reps in our company yesterday in an hour. And I was like, okay, list off all the acronyms that you’ve heard in the last three weeks since you started. And then they’re like, oh, there’s so many any of them. So ABM stands for Account Based Marketing. But what I’d like to understand in that acronym, and it’s been around for a while. What do you think it is? Because you are one of the experts in this space, 120,000 people go to your newsletter on LinkedIn, on your regular cadence. So you’re an expert, Andy, what is it?

Andy: Unlike traditional content marketing, which is ranking for key phrases, posting on social media, sending newsletters and getting traffic from those traditional sources of search, social and email, and then hopefully some percentage of those people become a lead. And then you qualify that lead after they’ve converted, taken an action on the website, hit the thank you page, that’s fishing with a net. So you just got a lot of agency who swims in today. It’s a passive thing in some ways. All of those, you’re sort of hoping for the visitor to take the first step. You need create a lot of awareness so that the people who really need you and who you can really help do swim into that net that day. And that’s how we’ve generated. We generate like 900 leads a year that way. And we, 7 million in revenue through mostly that approach. But ABM is the opposite. It’s fishing with a spear. You begin by identifying the people that you really wanna meet, that you really can.. if you reach them, if you persuade them, they’re highly likely to need your help because they have the job title, they’re in the industry, they meet your.. I’ll avoid the acronym, your ideal client profile. You’ve heard this one, right?

George: Absolutely.

Andy: Yeah. Okay, so now you’re gonna create contents. And what I’m doing here really is account based content marketing. I’m a content marketer, so I’m not using fancy technology. I’m not buying a big piece of software. There’s no advertising involved. I’m simply producing a custom piece of content specifically for this tiny audience. People with senior level job titles and companies of a certain size, companies in a certain industry. And that content is so compelling. It’s like research on common mistakes people are making, people just like you, people in your field, people who work with your type of clients and then it’s catnap, right? They’re gonna see I’m gonna reach out to them individually, one on one. I’m in LinkedIn, I’m contacting people through direct messages. People who are already in my network. So this is an example of, this is the 11 millionth example of where it helps to have a good social media network and then inviting them. Just inviting these people who are already highly qualified. So I did one last week. It was about a 10 hour project to get together the webinar and the research and the slides and put it all together. I had a total of seven attendees. George, am I sad? Is that a failure? In normal content marketing that would be a huge miss. Nope, two of them asked for follow up meetings and wanna talk to me about their projects. So it’s a quantity doesn’t matter. It’s about quality. 100% sales marketing alignment, zero waste marketing, because you are beginning with an audience that is extremely qualified.

George: Well, I was anticipating and hoping that this is where you would go and thank you for using an example like that, because you’re right. When we start on that, we’re gonna let our customers pick us. We’re gonna put out the very best version of us. And hopefully they find us and that type of thing. This is you actually picking the customers and you got seven qualified people that you already know have a need for your product or solution. Like that’s amazing.

Andy: I was hoping for 25, we had 30 registrants. Seven attendees live, anyone who registers you can potentially follow up with.

George: Yeah.

Andy: You take the event.. so this is the webinar. So you take the event landing page, the registration page and flip it into the post recording and post the slides. And by the way, George, like a lot of content marketing it has durability, no matter who I meet for the next three years who meets that profile, I can send them the same piece of content, the same landing page, the same video, the same slides, the same piece of research. It’s a new research that we did for these. So yeah, you said it well, I’m not waiting for them to pick me. I’m contacting them with something that is so eminently relevant to who they are, and it does so well at demonstrating expertise that you only need a very small number of attendees to turn into qualified meetings.

George: My hypothesis on this is that, you’re putting a lot, like you said 10 hours. You might be underestimating in my opinion, because those are the people you really wanna talk to. Like they’re the ones that you would kill to get that lead through an inbound motion. So, but it’s a lot of work. Like this is not for the faint of heart. You gotta put the work in. And I think you mentioned that, let’s unpack what you said. It lives for a long time if the content is built well.

Andy: It does, it was for sure 10 hours of my time to put together. And at least there are other people involved. There’s our marketing director and she has to program the event and set up the registration page and all of the webinar, technical mechanics. And then there’s, I got a new business lead. It’s like a client success guy. And he did a lot of outreach on his own. He built list these. And so I think altogether, these are like 20 hour projects at least. We’ve done, I think, five of them so far, and the revenue that I can definitely attribute to this is about $170,000.

George: Incredible

Andy: It’s without question effective. And one thing I like about it is that you don’t have to be a big brand. You don’t have to have a big body of work. You don’t have to wait for the content marketing flywheel to kick in which takes more than a year sometimes. So it’s an equalizer. I love it for that reason.

Zero-waste Marketing; Involve Your Prospects In Further Developing Content, Directly Or Indirectly

George: Well, you said zero waste marketing and I’m like that sounds environmentally friendly, zero waste. What do you mean by zero waste marketing?

Andy: Well, that’s a term that we used years ago when we realized that we could, during the process of creating content, involve our prospects or involve influencers or clients, or so let’s say I’m writing an article about some marketing technology article. There’s a journalist that I’ve always wanted to meet. I can contact that person during the content creation process, ask them for a contributor quote. And I just use the act of creating this article as a networking opportunity. I got value even before it went live. I know that it’s getting value. You can also reach out to cold prospects and include them in your content by asking for contributor quotes. You can reach out to new perspective clients. You can reach out to the people you’d hope to collaborate with in other contexts. So anything that you do via the act of creating it or the targeting of it when during promotion is so direct that, you know even if there’s only one page view in analytics for this, it was with that person where you used it for networking.

George: One thing that I’ve noticed, in our organization, we have a very large demand gen organization to drive our inbound leads. We’ve made the mistake, probably me made the mistake of mashing those two things together. So you take, hey, this is the inbound demand team. We’re gonna get them to do some ABM over here, but it’s so bloody different, am I right in that? Or is that just the experience that we’ve had?

Aligning Sales And Marketing

Andy: No, I think it is. They may not be naturals at this. It’s really much closer to the sales team. So let’s say I mean, people doing sales, they know very well what the most common questions are, what the biggest objections are, what the best answers are, what the best data points are. So your job is to really create content in collaboration with the sales team. They’re gonna be on the webinar. They’re gonna be listening. They’re gonna be writing down the questions. They’re gonna see who engaged. They’re gonna see who dropped out. They’re gonna follow up in different ways with different people. Normal inbound marketer, it’s like post and pray, right? You just put it up there and think something happens there or it doesn’t then you do it again.

George: Andy, you said something there. I gotta interrupt you because you said something that was really interesting to me because look up sales dictionary, picture of me. But what I’m finding is if the marketing team runs the webinar, it misses part of ABM. Because I think what ABM is, is you’re actually doing the demo. Like you’re down the funnel.

Andy: Yeah.

George: You brought the, it’s not like we’re getting these prospects to top a whole bunch they’re gonna fall outta the funnel like an inbound motion. This person should be buying what we have and they’re gonna buy it from somebody. So you need to have somebody in sales in there. It’s interesting you said that because I think that that’s where we maybe made some mistakes in our experience. And I’ve saw others make that mistake where they’re like, we’re gonna take the inbound team and they’re gonna do some ABM. No, you need to get sales closer to this because you’re dealing with a lead that is, you’re actually answering some of the objections during the webinars that would’ve normally been done on a demo, is that fair?

Andy: Yeah, I mean, imagine if you had a conference and you had a bunch of people attend, and your sales team stayed home, that’d be terrible, right? You’d want them in the room.

George: Oh God, I made that mistake. I’ve made that mistake.

Andy: You want ’em in there because their job is to build this relationships. And the audience is captive for that short time. So you can listen, you can find out what they care about. I mean, webinars are harder. You can’t really read their faces. But if there’s someone on the webinar that asks a question and it’s answered or it’s not, now you know something about that specific person’s information needs. An ideal client profile member has an information need that you know of. Your next action, a salesperson knows exactly what to do with that. You know who to talk to, you know what to talk about, it’s gold. So yeah, you have to be there to, or else you’ll miss the chance to build that relationship, which is after all the whole point of the content anyway.

George: Are the ABM deals that you’re bringing forward through this motion. Do you find them to be larger deals than what’s happening on the inbound side of the business?

Andy: Well, the size of the leads are larger because a great percentage of leads in web design are for extremely low budget clients. There are DIY tools that push down expectations for price to near zero. So when you get a lead as a web design company, there’s a decent chance that that lead is for such a small amount. We’re doing 70, 80, $100,000 websites. These are complex projects with six experts working for 400 hours or something like that. Like there’s like tons and tons of work today as we started from the jump. But in ABM, you have pre-qualified these people based on the basis of the size of their business. 0% of the attendees will expect that a website costs $5,000 or whatever the service might be. So they are somewhat vetted in the fact that they were on your list to begin with.

George: Our teams are embarking on one to many webinar motions, because we have some customers that you can’t put a human being on every call because they’re smaller clients. And I remember when we over the years, and I’ve been at this in the software business for about 10 years, and we were doing some webinars and five people would show up. And I came from the broadcast business. I want like 500 people. Like, I don’t show up for five people, but I justified it by saying to the CEO, who’s like, you only got five people who showed up. I said, that’s five one hour calls I didn’t have to have. I got four hours back. Is that something you’re feeling as well? That it’s efficient in a way that, and do you find that the people on the webinar kind of sell themselves as well? They build a little bit of tribe while you have them there.

Saving Time While Maintaining Impact Through Networking and Webinars

Andy: Yeah, that’s how I thought about.. George, it’s an important point because in my early career, I went to networking events. Over plus travel time, over a couple of hours, I talked to three or four people. Later I learned that I could attend conferences and maybe give a presentation. In an hour I talked to 100 people. Then I learned that eventually with some risk and some investment and growth, I could run my own conference. And now I’ve got 500 people in the room. So the efficiency is definitely part of content marketing. It normally takes the flywheel effect before you know that when you write an article, you’ll likely get 1,000 visitors on it. When you give a webinar, you likely get dozens of visitors, dozens of attendees. Produce a video, put it on YouTube, promote it well you’ll have thousands of views on that over time. Content marketing is super, super efficient. That was my goal when I first started content marketing, I knew I needed to keep in touch with thousands of people over long periods of time, because you only need a website every four years. I’m in the lumpiest industry of all time, right? It’s you don’t need us in between, yeah. So how do I keep in touch with lots of people, demonstrate expertise from a distance, basically put all these people on autopilot just as if I was calling them up. But account based content marketing has some of that same benefit. I mean, all content marketing has that benefit of extreme efficiency when it works well. But in this case, it’s efficiency for so much more of a targeted audience that you get greater sales efficiency, because the qualification process is already done.

George: One of the things that I was thinking when I was reading the show notes that producer Bret put together was zero waste marketing. I believe that everything you’re doing in these webinars and the lead up to the webinar will just help your inbound demand motion. Is that part of it as well?

Andy: Yeah, you know what? Even it’s a good point. Even if they don’t attend, even if they ignored my message in LinkedIn, it was still a touch point. It’s like people who say, oh, I sent an email and my clickthrough rate was only 10%. Actually just getting the email was a touch point. It’s like saying, oh, I ranked high for a phrase, but I got low click through rate. Even just seeing you in search results can help reinforce that person was already somewhat brand aware. So you’ll never know, attribution is hard for these reasons. You don’t know how many people have you in the back of their mind right now. But no, I think that measuring the attendees only, I think it’s a problem, especially these days. If you are measuring the number of attendees, you may be tracking the wrong metric and kind of hurting your ability to be strategic about the true outcome and benefits of these actions.

George: Well, and just imagine somebody will even land on the website and seeing that you do webinars, it adds a level of trust to the organization. And then I go to a so-called competitor, right? ‘Cause you don’t have any competitors, you guys are great, but they don’t have that component. You’re like, oh, I’m starting to be skeptical right now because Andy has this. It’s a really good point. And we know, we all have CEO and CFOs that are saying, okay, that money I gave you, what did I get out of it? And you’re like, well, I ran these webinars and these channels and we’re looking for volume, but in this motion, what I hear you saying is it’s more about who you can get on the other side of the microphone for the webinar and the value that they might bring, because you’re not selling $1,000 website here. You’re selling $100,000 websites.

Andy: Yeah, it’s not how many, it’s how good, it’s how qualified, it’s who. So that’s exactly what it comes down to. When I saw how few people were attending, I took a breath and this happens to us all the time, right? And by the way, if you’re a serious player in any category, you’re gonna fail a lot period. No matter what, we all fail. Anyone who does sales, of course, we’re all gonna fail. Most of the time, that’s normal. It’s fine. But in the end, a week later I’m seeing these meetings on my calendar I know it wasn’t a failure. But it really hard for me, especially like considering my background in 14 years in content strategy to like, to not care about the numbers. And it’s just more about the love, right? It’s about the quality of their experience. And you don’t know, maybe one of those attendees was in a conference room where there were six people watching.

George: No, that’s right. It might be a much larger audience than you thought. Your LinkedIn newsletter, which comes up biweekly, 120,000 subscribers. I’ve just adopted the LinkedIn newsletter format myself. And by the way, one of the best things I ever did, 3000 subscribers in like a week, but I’m sitting here going, I’m losing to Andy and I don’t wake up to lose very often. How did you do it? How did you build that audience? That’s amazing.

Andy: Well, yours will be that big. We started in February, and watched it grow probably at about the same rate yours is growing,

George: Like about 100 every three days is what I’m seeing.

Andy: Yeah, it’s something like, yeah, it’s strong.

George: So it’s gotta do with the algorithm, I think.

Boring Names For Newsletters And How LinkedIn Is Wanting You To Win

Andy: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things that we did that I think have made it more effective. One is that we gave it a really boring, but specific name. It’s called Digital Marketing Tips. So I’ve seen people who do LinkedIn newsletters and is like, what’s inside Brian’s brain? Like if I see that call to action, I don’t know who Brian is. Like, people are just naming things in sort of Brandy, no vague, non-descript names. So I knew that that would help because someone sees that they know what it is. It’s specific enough that it sounds like it has some utility. And then I have just been consistent with the quality. And it’s mostly, I’m gonna confess now, I’m basically just repurposing old articles. Some of which were published years ago, each of which, I mean, I spent 10 hours on average on an article. So these are long form, super detailed, highly visual, step by step insanely practical content, the best that I could do every two weeks. But I have a virtual assistant that just copies and paste in previous things that we know got traction and had a good headline and visitors engaged with and then clicking send, and it becomes a LinkedIn post and it starts conversations. And I get a lot of feedback. Thank you, thank you, amazing. So helpful, very grateful. I’m leveling up my skills, thanks to you. So it’s really a repurposing slash syndication strategy, but yeah, if you see that button Create Newsletter, click it and I recommend giving it a really boring, but specific name.

George: I’m gonna change my name of the Triumphant to something more boring. And thank you for that advice. I do want to ask this question though. When I saw what was going on there, I think LinkedIn is kind of prioritizing this because it’s the new feature that they brought out, which doesn’t surprise us, does it?

Andy: Oh, their traffic must be through the roof. They’re sending millions of emails a day, inviting people onto the platform. So they are empowering creators. That they basically made it so that we are all suddenly doing this devil’s bargain and building on rented land. That’s what happens, right? You don’t get their.. I suppose if you hired one of these companies to like scrape the data, you could go through each subscriber and find their email addresses and pull ’em out, which I’ve never done anything like that. But we’re really just leveraging LinkedIn’s willingness to give us this visibility at such a low cost. But again, this is one of those moments where digital marketers are doing a trade off and deciding to give power to digital giants and big tech and monopolies. So I recommend it, but I’m realistic about it. I’m not kidding myself. These aren’t.. I don’t have these people. These people did not actually subscribe to my own email newsletter.

George: No, and that was the first thing when I saw the numbers go up, I’m like, what am I getting here? What type of a reader am I getting? And then I went through the..’cause you can see the list. There’s a bunch of people I’d like to run some account based marketing on I know their ideal profiles. So I do like that, that I can see that the subscriber and who they are.

Andy: Good for you. I think that’s, again, one of the benefits of having, of being early in a process. I remember when I was just getting started with email marketing, I would watch that list carefully. If I get a new subscriber, I might go look, ’em up.

George: Hmm.

Andy: There’s a guy named Chris Killbourn, who famously, every time he got a new subscriber for his first 10,000 subscribers, he emailed each person and asked them what they would like to learn from him. Can you imagine?

George: I love that. No, I love that. It’s good.

Andy: Let’s get a robot and do that.

George: That’s amazing.

Andy: Yeah, what would you like me to write about for you? What would be the most helpful thing I can do for you? And very different experience.

Andy’s Advice: As Mentioned Right From The Start, Care For And Keep In Touch With Clients

George: Andy, you said something earlier in the episode that I didn’t forget because I got a horrible memory now, but you said something about I’m in the lumpiest business of all time and that’s web sales. Like when you sell a website, you eat and then you don’t eat for a while. If you were to give our listeners that are maybe thinking of, I wanna sell more websites and I wanna do what Andy does. Is there a bit of advice as to how you’ve removed some of that lumpiness and built, like this is a hell of a business that you’ve built with your team of 48, and $7 million in annual recurring revenue, and you stuck with a tough industry. So what advice would you have for our listeners?

Andy: Well, that is actually the problem is that it’s not recurring revenue and it’s an 85% project based. So one thing is to do ongoing marketing to your current clients to keep in touch. So earlier today I wrote five birthday cards, happy birthday websites, one year old, happy birthday websites, two years old. And that’s gonna be part of like an account, like a automatic drip campaign that will send annual things, congratulating people, asking them to reach out. And then just look for the adjacent services that you can offer that even out the revenue with some kind of monthly something. So we finally added SEO and that helps, but you need a line of credit. You need a huge pipeline for leads. Your whole team is going to want to keep getting raises. And so you’re gonna have to keep nudging up your prices and moving upstream. The good news about web design is that there are some people who expect to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars because they’re significant business. But one final tip, build out your support team. Staff a team of support people who are dedicated to support, because the likelihood that this person’s gonna come back and ask for your help in three to four years is gonna be based on how well you took care of ’em in the interim. People love or hate their web companies not based on design or programming or copywriting or the brand. They love it based on how responsive that company was 18 months later when they called. So if you don’t have a dedicated team for that, they’re gonna bleed your past clients who will bleed time away from your project team, which kills margin. Build a dedicated team for support and get that team to break even, in the long run it’ll be profitable in terms of client retention.

George: Well, that mic drop. Right there, let’s just drop the mic and be done. Andy Crestodina, the CMO and co-founder of Orbit Media Studios joining us from the metropolis of Chicago. Isn’t Chicago metropolis in the Superman movies? Wasn’t it shot there?

Andy: I don’t know. I think maybe because Gotham was New York. There’s like Gotham metropolis.

George: I’m not a DC guy, I’m more of a Marvel guy. So I definitely know that the Avengers was filmed in Chicago.

Andy: Yeah, well, the Spider-Man movies have been shot here, different things. Chicago’s a very photogenic city with the ton of film shot here, but yeah, I’m glad you have some love for this place. It’s a wonderful town in a lot of ways that 20 miles of park, right on the lake, there are zero cities in the world that have public parks all on their most valuable land for the 20 mile strip of the entire coast.

George: The gold coast,

Andy: The gold coast, Lincoln park. It’s gorgeous, it’s a great place. And it’s doing fine during COVID, we’re hanging in there. And this was fun. Thanks, George, for having me on.

Conclusion

George: Andy, we really appreciate the learnings. The folks that listen to our show on a regular basis, they’re out there doing this. Like they’re working with business people. They’re not selling maybe 70 or $100,000 websites, but you definitely gave us a lot to think about and to apply. So we really appreciate your time. Go subscribe to Andy’s boring name on his newsletter with some great content there. And we’ll make sure that we put all the contact information in the show notes that people wanna reach out and follow your content online. We appreciate your time and have a great evening.

Andy: Thanks, George, bye bye.

George: We can’t thank Andy Crestodina enough for sharing his stories this week. Here are our team’s top three takeaways from this episode. How do you meet what you know will work with what the clients think they need? And the big thing to remember from Andy is that digital ink is never dry, I love that line. Explain the logic behind the decisions you make and provide data as you go along. Marketing and sales teams must collaborate. Don’t post and pray. Involving sales means you get the ground level desires and objections to include in your marketing. And keep in mind that those webinar attendees, if you’re using Andy’s formula for account-based marketing, they’re deeper in the funnel. They’re going to need a sales rep to be involved in the conversation because they’re not top of funnel leads. They’re not just doing qualification and education. They’re actually starting to experience the solution when they get into those deep webinars. If you liked Andy’s episode discussing account-based content marketing, let’s continue this conversation. Here are a few more relevant episodes from our corpus of Conquer Local Podcast to listen to the next time you’re enjoying a coffee or sitting in the car or walking the dog. Check out episode 434: Outsourced Marketing: Joining Your Client’s Team with Stephanie Krummenacker. Episode 225 websites: The Good, the bad, and the ugly with my good friend, Jillian ALS. Episode 311: Discipline Leads Results with my other good friend, Steve Whittington. Those are just three of the over 200 episodes we’ve produced in the last four years to help you conquer local. If you found value in today’s episode, please leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. The feedback that you post online helps our team grow and better adapt to what you wanna hear in season five. Be sure to subscribe the award-winning Conquer Local Podcast, as we continue to welcome extraordinary sales leaders, marketers, and entrepreneurs. My name is George Leith, I’ll see you when I see you.