Speaker 1: (00:07)
If you are a B2B entrepreneur, a lot has probably changed over the past 18 months. Last year business was booming. The rising tide lifted all ships times were good today. It's a different landscape. The global economy is volatile and many B2B SA companies are focused on running a tight ship rather than driving growth to provide some perspective on what it's like to be in the eye of the hurricane. I'm happy to be talking with Kate Bradley terrace, CEO of lately.ai. I talk to Kate in March, 2021 seems like a long, long time ago at a time when lately was emerging as a red hot company that had just raised a round of venture capital. Welcome back to marketing spark.
Speaker 2: (00:53)
I love red hot
Speaker 1: (00:57)
Well, it's better than the alternative,
Speaker 2: (01:00)
Right? It's true. Um, thanks so much, mark. It's really nice to be. I, I feel like, you know, I make, I make so many friends and so the best part is to reconnect with you and, you know, just to have that famili familiarity. So thanks for having me back.
Speaker 1: (01:15)
No welcome. Glad to do it. Before we start let's level set by giving people a quick positioning overview of lately, what does it do? Who does it serve? What are the benefits and how is it unique? And that is a lot of as many questions in a short period of time do best you can. I'm sure you've done this a lot. You've probably got it down, pat.
Speaker 2: (01:39)
You know, you're gonna have to compare from last year because it always, it always, you know, morphs right as time goes on, but so lately uses artificial intelligence to write high performing sales and marketing copy on social media. That's the, the short, quick one liner, but it doesn't really do us justice as you know, um, because it's a bit more complicated than that, which we can get into. Um, one of the things we are excited about is working with companies of all sizes, so small, medium, and large, and you know, that's a big no-no in SAS world is you can address everyone all the time, but we do, despite what they've said and we can, and we can do it, um, the same way, which has been, we, we, we went, we, we wanted to prove this point this year. And we did was that I can talk to enterprise the same way I can talk to small, medium business and reach them and convert them, uh, the same way.
Speaker 2: (02:35)
So that's been really, uh, kind of a fun thing to rub in and say, you know, ha I told you the other thing, that's sort of crucial to what we do is repurposing content, right? So artificial intelligence, as you know, mark is, is dumb. It's just a robot made a metal somewhere in the sky, in our case, you know, and humans have to train artificial intelligence, just like a garden. You have to tend the garden. And for us, that means feeding long form content to the brain. So it has multiple reference points that it uses to know what, to, what to grab and to turn into social. Right? So that repurposing factor turns out is a huge problem for everyone, right? What do I do once I have this amazing podcast? Like you have, how do you market it, right? How many, how many social posts should you post about it? Is it social only? Is there a newsletter happening? Are you posting it online? I know you have a long list of things, but that, that problem is difficult for so many because we're, even if we work for a large company, we feel as though we're an army of one, or we actually are an army of one, except that the army part isn't working. So well,
Speaker 1: (03:50)
Talk a little bit about how Lately's positioning and messaging have changed over the past 18 months. You said off the top that you are looking to reach different types of companies. And what is the trick from a positioning standpoint so that you are, so what you say, the story that you tell resonates with all of them, because they all have different needs and different challenges and different ways of, of using the technology. So what's been the biggest challenge from a positioning standpoint and what has been some of the, some of the keys to success
Speaker 2: (04:27)
On the change side, repurposing is a big one. So just that word alone, you know, it for us, it's very easy to, we, we do two things. One, we build a custom writing model for you, and we learn the words, phrases, and ideas that that will resonate most with your audience. That's the number one thing. The number two thing is the repurposing. So our, our greatest challenge is how do you make that one, right? Cause I don't have a long time to give you both. Um, but one without the other really kind of cuts the legs off there. You know? So we've constantly experimented with that. Sometimes when I'm talking to especially enterprise, I've learned there's egos involved. So the positioning that we use there is, is a slightly more delicate. Um, so is so that no one feels threatened by artificial intelligence, number one, right?
Speaker 2: (05:23)
Um, and the user is always the same small or large. It's always the digital manager, whoever that is. Now, if you're a small company that might also be you the owner, for example, right. Um, or it, the, the hat you might have, you know, multiple hats there for them, the idea of saving money and eliminating an agency or another team member is very appealing. And so I don't have to tiptoe around that, but I've also learned that artificial intelligence is a, is a scary word for so many people. And I think you'll remember from our, our previous conversations is that we talk a lot about the humans and the AI collaborating together. So we've learned in the last year to really double down on that. Um, like I said, AI must be trained. It's not here to our AI is not here to replace anybody for good reason, not just because I'm saying it as a nice thing, but marketing and sales, um, only works when you have that spark, right. You buy from people you like or trust, or, you know, you don't, you're not likely to double down and pull your wallet out for something that's just as falling flat for you. You know? And so the spark always comes from the human interaction. So learning how to convey that, why that's important. I mean, the, the opposite of that by the way, is that then people are like, well, what do you mean I have to do work?
Speaker 3: (06:57)
Right.
Speaker 1: (07:00)
They want their cake, they wanna eat their cake and have it too. Basically.
Speaker 2: (07:02)
That's that's right. Yeah. They want both, you know, you're like, okay. So like, I, one of the analogies I always say is, you know, the electric toothbrush, mark, I, you still have to hold it to your mouth.
Speaker 1: (07:14)
Right. Well, for, at least for the next little while before some robot appears in your house probably owned by Amazon.
Speaker 2: (07:22)
right. Yeah. Alexa brush my teeth. How weird would that be? You know of just thinking about the Jetsons, right.
Speaker 1: (07:28)
it's coming and Jeff Bezos will be the mastermind behind
Speaker 2: (07:30)
It. Oh boy. Yeah. Jet,
Speaker 1: (07:33)
One of the, one of the words I, I did wanna ask you about is a repurposing mm-hmm in the marketing world, there are catch phrases that marketers GLM onto. And it seems like from reading a lot and looking at LinkedIn is that repurposing and distribution are like the one, two punch for content marketers. It's their obsession. You know, a couple years ago it was long form content or videos or, you know, high value content. But now it's about repurposing and distribution. So how do you capture, um, what people are talking about, the words that they're using and integrated into your marketing without torquing your position in your messaging?
Speaker 2: (08:16)
You know, we do go with the flow. We're no dummies, right? I mean, with AI, even we, when we first built lately, we never talked about AI. We had no idea that was what we were building. And in fact, even when we were first aware of it, we were cautious before we even used that phrase. And, but it became a hot button and I knew that it would drive investors to us and, um, help we leverage the SEO off it. It's not that we're trendy, but we're paying attention. I mean, your question about how does it, how do we not let it kind of interfere or poke a hole in the core of what we do? I mean, the core of what we do is we make fans, we don't make sales. That's what we do. Mm-hmm right. And that comes from my background in radio.
Speaker 2: (09:07)
And just to remind anybody who, um, di hasn't met me before I used to be a rock and roll DJ. My last gig was broadcasting two 20 million listeners a day for XM satellite radio. So this is in fact my Uber power. Right. And we've what I've learned to do is to emanate that from within, right? So first I make my employees, my fans, I love them so much. Lauren, Chris, Katie, Kristen, Jason, Greg, Brian, et cetera. But they're Al they also want us to win. And we've learned to take the mindset we have internally and treat our customers the same way and our targets the same way. And it's how our AI operates also. Right? So everything emanates from, from radio, for me, we've learned by the way, to fold that into how we talk about the AI, if you want, I can can, cause I don't think I had this language when we met before.
Speaker 1: (10:02)
I don't think you were talking about AI last year. There's a lot, a lot about the power of social media and, and efficiencies. That was, seemed to be the scene that
Speaker 2: (10:12)
We should make a spreadsheet of this.
Speaker 1: (10:14)
So funny of all, all the things you talked about. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2: (10:17)
Yeah. Well, okay. So will you indulge me? I'll I'll um, kind of zero in on this. So when, when your brain listens to a new song, mark, it must instantly access every other song you've ever heard before in the single moment. And what it's trying to do is to find familiar touchpoint. So it knows where to index that new song in the library of the memory of your brain. And again, in this moment in an instant, because your brain is doing all that accessing, you've got nostalgia and emotion and memory and all these things that are just coming forth to play makes music so powerful. But also the, those things all make makeup for the, uh, underbelly of trust. Okay. Now trust is why we buy, right? Similarly, when you write me an email or a text message or a slack message or a social media message, I read it.
Speaker 2: (11:10)
And I hear your voice in my head because your voice as everyone's voice has a frequency, there's a, it's a song. There's a note to your voice. All sound has a, has a frequency to it. And so there's a similar thing that must happen. You as the author, if you wanna really engage me, have to figure out ways to give me familiar touch points, give me familiar access points and trigger nostalgia, memory, emotion trust, right? So this is what fuels the bedrock of our AI because Lately's AI, while it studies you and all your analytics, it then defaults to a series of other best practices. First one is me and how I write, I have a 98% sales conversion. Don't you want that? Of course you do. So let's take the best practices of what I do and, and pre-train the AI so that you can benefit from the same idea. Fans, not sales and sales. It's like an end. So,
Speaker 1: (12:15)
So AI is, is integrated into the platform last year. It wasn't there. What has been what's in the past year, been like from a business and entrepre perspective, uh, the highs, the lows, the lessons learned, because obviously as you said, you were a, a radio personality who sort of stumbled into becoming an entrepreneur. And I imagine that you're like many entrepreneurs you're still in the learning stage. What's the last you've been like. I mean, it's been certainly an interesting time to be an entrepreneur and certainly an interesting time to be running a B2B SaaS company,
Speaker 2: (12:53)
For sure. Um, and that's the nice way to say it. I think, you know, like there was AI last year, by the way, but we were learning how to describe it and talk it, talk about it and to connect all the dots and the story is everything. That's something I learned a long time ago. The story is everything. People. I mean, my husband reminds me about this all the time. Our, our wedding is a good example. Like people, there are events in your life that people will always ask about and you wanna be able to describe them in a way that, where they're walking away with the story, you know? So, so what, what is that, you know, at, at our wedding, by the way, he played me down the aisle to don't stop believing right. One of many stories,
Speaker 1: (13:38)
Seventies classic, for sure. Yeah. You're dating yourself, but dating him. Probably
Speaker 2: (13:44)
I am. And, and, um, what was the HBO show? But the mob that it was on, it had just ended Sopranos, Sopranos, sorry. Yeah, the Sopranos was like hot and heavy then too. So we were riff, we were riffing off what was popular and then surprising and delighting my family who didn't expect any of this with lately. You know, part of the thing about being an entrepreneur is knowing what stories to tell and when to tell them when to evolve them to your point, right? Mm-hmm this, this year versus last year, knowing when to equip others, to be able to tell the same story, cuz that's so important as well. And that includes, again, my employees, as well as my customers and other evangelists, you know, I'm, I'm creating, uh, exponential megaphone here. Right? The other thing in the last year, I mean, for us, so recently, by the way, like when the market turned down over the spring and summer, a number of my investors were reaching out like, Hey, are you okay?
Speaker 2: (14:49)
Everything okay. And I was like, same different day. I mean, are you kidding me? Like I'm I in startup life, it's always awful. Everything is awful once in a while, there's something great. It's a blip. And it's just this terrible, it's a blip. It's this twinkle, you know? And, and I'm the worst at celebrating that as my team likes to remind me, cuz I'm half glass empty, always, you know, but that was my reaction was like more terrible things are happening. I mean, you know, in case people don't know as a female entrepreneur, there's only 2% of all women owned businesses hit the million dollar mark we have not yet. We're almost there drives me crazy. We've been almost there for like two years. But then in fundraising land only 2.7% of all venture capital goes to female entrepreneurs. So I've raised 3.7 million. None of it comes from VCs.
Speaker 2: (15:46)
It's all been angel money. I still, I still can't get that badge. Can't do it. I don't know why. It's very frustrating to me. It's like a, I mean, anyone else would stop trying, but just it's like this one thing that alludes me and it really makes me angry. Um, so you know, the last year has been exciting, but also as we touched on before we started talking the layers of you, can't, you can't take out the stress of life and COVID and politics and global warming and whatever else is going on. And the humans, you know, my team, we're very open. We all talk about each other's lives and share because we have to, right. We have to know that in order for you to have a good day of work, you can't be worrying about the person in your family who just had a heart attack literally. Or my mom has COVID or so, and so's kid is going to college for the first time. Like all this, you know, all the mess, all the mess is part of it.
Speaker 1: (16:58)
Talk a little bit about Lately's marketing approach to marketing. I think obviously one of the company's biggest assets is you the power of personality and, and having someone who's comfortable telling stories and talking to people and ha having a very public persona, how have you managed your role as the company's biggest sales and marketing asset with how the company's marketing has evolved? Because obviously it's easy to depend on you to drive brand awareness and bring prospects in, but at the same time you need traditional marketing or, or regular marketing or non Cape marketing to do its job. so how has the mix evolved over the past 18 months?
Speaker 2: (17:51)
Yeah. So I'll, I'll explain what we do, cuz it's replicable. It's hard, I'm mourning you all, but this is what we do. So we have a 98% sales conversion on our enterprise side and on our SMB self-service product side, it's anywhere between 20 and 45% because we just launched five months ago. So we're experimenting, but um, 98% pretty good. Why? So what we do mark is, you know, I had, I came at it thinking, okay, I know obviously that marketing is valuable and you, if you build it, they don't come. You have to set it up long before, right. Because there's nothing worse than needing an audience when there's no one there to listen to you. And so I had, you know, started building social media and all that kind of stuff. But I traditionally, my, my understanding was we needed to create content ourselves, but we never had time. And I'm the best content creator in the company. And I, I, I don't have time for that at all. I mean, I have a thousand other jobs, you know, and I couldn't afford ever to really take the time to hire someone who could write exactly like I would want them to, because of course I'm micromanaging about that particular thing. So I had a, an epiphany of sorts when in the beginning of 2020, a lot of people wanted to interview everybody because everybody had a podcast suddenly. Right. right. It was a huge trend. Yeah.
Speaker 1: (19:19)
Very, very trendy of
Speaker 2: (19:20)
Course, very trendy. And I was getting a lot of requests because I'm a female entrepreneur rock and roll DJ AI. I'm interesting. The epiphany I had was wait a second. What if I took this earned media and ran it through lately? So now I don't have to create owned media anymore, but earned media is easy for me that I don't have to think about this interview. I, you send me questions. I actually really don't read them because I can answer anything you give me and it's better. It'll be a better show. If we do it kind of spontaneously, I don't have to prepare for this and I don't have to do anything afterwards. I just give it to my team. So we upload it to lately. It breaks apart, everything you and I say, it's looking for the words and ideas that it already knows.
Speaker 2: (20:05)
My target audience are most likely to like comment and share. And we, and it breaks it up into like 40 social posts. My intern, I call her my intern, Alex. She's been working for me for five years. She's a, a real human being with a full-time advertising job. And she's great at it. Somehow keeps working for me, love her to death. And she takes what's come out of the AI. She tends that garden a little bit, make sure it's not off the rails. We publish it on both our brand channels and all of our employee channels cuz together we're stronger. Right? So make making the employees, the advocates as well. And then we look to see online, who's liking and commenting and sharing. We start conversations with them and it's very easy cuz everything is visible if they qualify or they don't qualify. So by the time we move them into a demo, they're hot, right?
Speaker 2: (20:53)
There's no cold, you know, happening here. Right. So that's one thing we do. The other thing in, in parallel with that is we're we believe that we're all in it together. And we put our money where our, our mouths are. Um, so we look online for our targets, our customers, and each other internally, when people talk about us, when there's occasions like say my customer, Jen McFarland, let's say she wrote a book. Then we would grab her social post about writing a book. We put it in our sharing is caring channel that we have in slack and the whole team, even my engineers is tasked with liking and commenting on this content. Okay. So we do it for our customers. We do it for our targets. Um, not a day has passed in three years where someone hasn't spontaneously written about us on social media.
Speaker 2: (21:43)
So every time we see that we pop that in sharing is caring and then anything I write generally as well. Um, so there's a lot of, um, and this is manual by the way, this is the part nobody wants to hear but you gotta do it. You know like, and it's also the fun part. I mean today, Chris bro, who wife is Kate snow from NBC, he's my, uh, teammate. And he posted a Twitter post about her writing a blog about bringing their son to college. And so of course we all piled on, you know, cuz we wanted to help Kate. We wanna celebrate this joy in their lives. I, I know something about Chris that I might not know, which is important to know. This is a big deal for his family today. Mm-hmm and that empathy, that sympathy, it goes a long way. I mean people poo poo social media and think, well, why does someone wanna know what serial I had? But that's not the point. The point is when you build that relationship, ship strain, total strangers will do things for you they wanna help you. People's nature is inherently good, right? They wanna be part of a winning team. Everyone wants to be part of the winning team.
Speaker 1: (23:03)
Aside from you being the content engine that you run through lately to generate all this, this great social content what's else was in the marketing mix. What else are you doing? Are you advertising? Are you creating content? Are you leveraging, uh, SEO or are you basically, you know, focused on a few small channels that you're doubling down on?
Speaker 2: (23:28)
So until recently there was nothing else. Like we don't have a budget for paid. We don't have the time, the, the only content we were creating was we were doing, um, like a live office hours every week where Lauren, my COO and former head of customer service would do like a 30 minute kind of rundown of how lately works or maybe interview some other expert, that kind of thing. And even that we tanked at the last few months because it wasn't, I mean, in the end it's content for us because we would take that too and run it through lately, you know? Um, we're about to relaunch that and, and revamp it, which is another story we just sent our first newsletter out in three years. and I didn't, I didn't write it.
Speaker 1: (24:19)
That, that kills me to hear that I'm a content guy, you know, newsletters, customers are supposed to be a good thing. You know, everyone says they're amazing, but okay, so that's happening,
Speaker 2: (24:31)
It's happening. And it's only happening because I, I found a few extra dollars to ha and I found someone who G my friend, Jen, um, who could write exactly how I wanted to, to write and knows enough about us. So there wasn't any training required there. We did start doing LinkedIn paid ads about a month ago, just with a very small amount of money to do an experiment. Because like you said, I mean, so, so consistently what I do is I do three of these interviews a week. Sometimes I'll do a guest blog somewhere and we always are driving a thousand people to the website, a thousand it's sometimes it's 900, sometimes it's 1200, but it's a thousand. And to your question is like, well, how do you double that? How do you scale that? And we're doing the same thing always. So we know that we've created this, um, replicable model so I can make other people me, right. Lauren, Chris, Katie, I can put other people on the cover of the magazine that's one way, right?
Speaker 1: (25:28)
Which
Speaker 2: (25:28)
Isn't necessarily scalable. So you have to either make more content, which we're trying to do with the, I mean, I haven't raised in three years. So like with the budget, we have be borrow steel, um, or paid ads. So our idea is even with the small amount of effort or money, probably we should be able to get that get 2000 in, you know, very small amount. And that's what we're experimenting with. Now.
Speaker 1: (25:58)
It would be fair to say that the social media landscape has changed a lot. The players have changed a lot or at least, you know, some of them are doing well. And some of 'em aren't. So rather than ask you to give me a nice succinct answer to what you think of the social media landscape, I'd like to do a rapid fire around. And the way it works is that I'm going to give you a word or a couple words, and I want you to riff on them and you can riff as long or as short as you like. But almost top of the mind reactions, you, you, you're probably very good at this because as a radio personality, you're probably used to doing things on the cuffing on the fly, but let's try this and see how it goes. You are you game for this?
Speaker 2: (26:43)
Yeah, that sounds so fun. I love you're doing this
Speaker 1: (26:46)
Speaker 2: (26:48)
Now. Personal stuff is traveling so well on LinkedIn. I've been experimenting quite a lot with it, from pictures to videos, to sense of humor. I can go way out there. I can use words that I normally would only preserve like ballsy, for example, um, for, for other channels. And I can talk about, you know, being on vacation, like I always bring it back to work, but I've been seeing, um, my post triple in, in views when I'm just talking about life. The other thing on LinkedIn, just so interesting. If you talk about God, boom algorithm bumps that up, fascinating and negativity is nothing new. LinkedIn always drives negativity. So negative stories I'm I'm failed or whatever. So I I've been drip feeding those in to see what's the algorithm kinda, really thinking about, which is, you know, curious to me. So
Speaker 1: (27:41)
Talk
Speaker 2: (27:42)
Stevie next,
Speaker 1: (27:44)
Stevie N
Speaker 2: (27:46)
Yeah. That, so that viral video of the guy on the skateboard he was skating to, um, was it dreams? I think it was dreams and just that one 32nd lick. And so then who was her teammate in? Um, my brain is like, so not a, who are the guys in the band with her? Help me help me,
Speaker 1: (28:10)
Mark Lindsay.
Speaker 2: (28:11)
Thank you. I think it was Lindsay Buckingham. Yeah. So Lindsay Buckingham did a, did a skateboard thing during, during the, during the same song. And then she sang over, you know, the piece so that I loved that. I thought it was amazing because so much, so much of the music on TikTok are these like annoying songs. I don't know where they come from. Um, and so it was a great break in the, you know, the thing, I mean, for me, what I, what I like there is, I love watching guys skate to Michael Jackson, you know, I'm into the roller, the roller skating. I don't know why. Um, but I've, I can see now everybody, janking the system it's just about dancing and pointing, right? Like that's, that's the thing. So I wonder when that will change. Um, you know, T we integrated with them recently
Speaker 1: (28:55)
TikTok for B2B SA companies.
Speaker 2: (28:58)
Yeah. I mean, we're not doing a good job of it because we don't have the resources frankly, to do it. Um, and so I, I just dabble over there. I, I just poke around so that someone doesn't call me old lady,
Speaker 1: (29:10)
Uh, Twitter,
Speaker 2: (29:11)
It's the beast. I love the Twitter. I don't understand what the hell, um, Ian Elon Musk is doing.
Speaker 1: (29:21)
No, I don't think anybody does for that matters. So you're not alone.
Speaker 2: (29:26)
That guy guy's crazy, but it's our bread and butter. I mean, I don't, it's funny. I don't, I, LinkedIn is where I personally live, but, and, but Twitter is I more live there because the SEO seems to be so strong for us and the, it can, it can withstand a huge amount of quantity, which is where it lately thrives. Um, I hate Twitter chats, sorry, friends who've recently invited me to do one, um, which I've said yes to, um, because they're always, so they're seated. Everybody's prepared beforehand, including me, everything you write is already pre-written, you know? And so when I do them, I try to write things that people don't expect me to write. You know, my, I, I joked, but somebody once called me in SU as an insult. And I, I looked, I looked it up and I thought best compliment ever
Speaker 1: (30:20)
Facebook, the evil empire.
Speaker 2: (30:23)
Exactly. You said it. I mean, it's, I, I almost never post their, I look because there's people I know that do, and I otherwise would never keep in touch with them, but it does feel like, um, you know, when you walk into a, an old camp and it smells like mold, like that's what Facebook feels like to me, you know, sounds terrible. Um, and meta, what the hell is meta? They're ruining a perfectly good, good word there. Thanks.
Speaker 1: (30:51)
uh, what about, uh, Facebook's uh, evil twin sister, Instagram.
Speaker 2: (30:56)
That's the other place I personally live. I don't post a lot, but I find out a lot about my community there. And I really like that. Um, I'm, I'm kind of gossipy person, you know, I hate to say that about myself, but I am. I'm interested in what's happening around me locally. And that's where I find out there's a new taco stand. They finally opened down the street. Thank God. You know, there was a, there was a, there was a forest fire up at Mohonk mountain in the well Minka state park, which is like blows my mind for around here. So that's where I get my news. Um, I also, one thing on Instagram is like, what is up with all the posing? There's so many people I know who work, who I know professionally. And then on Instagram, there are these sex pots.
Speaker 1: (31:44)
,
Speaker 2: (31:45)
It's a little embarrassing,
Speaker 1: (31:47)
Social commerce,
Speaker 2: (31:50)
Social commerce, like, do you mean like NFTs like that?
Speaker 1: (31:54)
No, but selling stuff via social, you know, when you, when you're Instagram feed is just teaming with offers to buy, you know, crappy stuff that you probably wouldn't wanna buy. Otherwise
Speaker 2: (32:03)
I totally have gotten sucked in it. I've totally bought weird things. I have frownies are right over there. You know what they are, they're, it's tape that you past you paint, or you, you put over your wrinkles and go to bed and hope they disappear.
Speaker 1: (32:16)
Does it work?
Speaker 2: (32:18)
I, I still haven't done it yet. I've had for like four,
Speaker 1: (32:24)
One of these impulse buyers, eh, uh, what about, what about social audio? It's interesting, you know, clubhouse, apparently it split itself apart. And remember, I think when we talked last year, clubhouse was still popular. Do you have any, any thoughts about social audio
Speaker 2: (32:39)
For me turn off because I've been there. Right. And I did that already and it didn't, you know, I had a personal bad experience that skyrocketed me out of, of radio. Um, but I love the theater of the mind. Mark. I love that clubhouse exists. I feel like I'm not interested in playing telephone and just hearing a bunch of people have a conversation and over overhearing that, that sounds innately boring to me. And what a time waste, to be honest with you. Like, if you haven't been enchanted by that before I get, I mean, I get it. I haven't been in for a while and people keep trying. I mean, for me, there's no value there. Like if I can't, I guess you can you record now? I don't know, but previously you couldn't record. And so then if I can't record it, doesn't become content for me to use, to promote. And like, this is how I think, I mean, I don't, there's almost nothing I do that isn't specifically for something lately much to my husband's great, you know, chagrin.
Speaker 1: (33:43)
Well, that was the inherent flaw of the clubhouse. As you couldn't record anything, it kind of went into the ether. Right. So there was no, there's nothing you could extract. Uh, yeah. What about something close to you? Well, your heart, or Lately's hard as social listening,
Speaker 2: (33:58)
You know, you and I both know buzzword because the, the hard way is the way, I mean, you, if you go to Instagram and you go to Twitter and go to LinkedIn, you are social listening, you are paying attention, right. You don't need a platform to do it for you. That sounds like the lazy way to me. Right. I mean, we're always very quick to know who's talking about us and what they're saying. Cause we're just paying attention. I think it sounds like that's becoming more obvious than, but every once in a while I meet a customer who like doesn't, you know, wants to know if lately is doing social listening specifically. And I just think, well, when's the last time you logged into Twitter? And they're like, I don't know, months ago. And I'm like, well, I mean, you're an idiot.
Speaker 1: (34:41)
There you go. There you go. Final one. Then this is one that, that I love, cuz I, I, I don't really understand. It is, uh, is influencer marketing.
Speaker 2: (34:51)
I get, I get what you're saying. Um, cuz of course everything I do is influencer marketing, right? I mean, at some level that you do naturally, I mean, word of the, there's nothing more powerful than word of word of mouth except for rewards, which the airlines all figured out, you know,
Speaker 1: (35:13)
I dunno when it, but it comes influencer marketing. It's like people try so hard. Right. And it really, I don't know. I think they try hard to be influencers and it should come. It should be organic rather than forced.
Speaker 2: (35:25)
It should be. I mean, you know, because we're, we all wanna monetize everything. Of course we're all the problem is that you're pointing out is everyone sciences, everything to death. So they want to break down the perfect algorithm for influencer marketing, you know, whereas just sometimes just, you just gotta let it happen. There's unpredictable UN unknown. I mean, marketing is unknown. There are unknowns that happen that you have to include that in your, in your plan or in your process and, and leave room for it to happen. The influencer stuff. By the way, the reason I have frownies is totally that reason. Like I saw a friend of mine was using them. I, I think that everyone cottons on eventually and that's why trends are trends. And that's why tried in trues are tried in trues just because you put a name on it, like influencer marketing doesn't really change what it really is.
Speaker 1: (36:25)
Right. Which
Speaker 2: (36:27)
Is trust. We've talked about trust, right?
Speaker 1: (36:28)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's true. This was, uh, not the most rapid of rapid fire rounds, but that's okay. Cause sorry, but people seem to like it, they seem to like the fact that this is the way that we sort of, we, we talk off the cuff these days. And so it's a great way to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time, you know, again, great insight into lots and lots of different things. And it's great to hear that that you're doing well. And that that lately is continue to thrive. Good luck on getting over that 1 million revenue figure and uh, see if we can, uh, see, you can get the people over in Silicon valley or other valleys to give you some money. That would be nice to see in, in 20 22, 20 23,
Speaker 2: (37:08)
Thanks from your lips to God's ears, mark.
Speaker 1: (37:11)
okay. So one last question. If people can't find you on social media or LinkedIn on any other platform, uh, where can they learn more about you and lately?
Speaker 2: (37:22)
Well try hard people. It's not that hard.
Speaker 1: (37:25)
Try harder. I can say. Yeah,
Speaker 2: (37:26)
Try harder. Yeah. Uh, dub, dub.lately.ai is us and uh, I'm kate@lately.ai. You can always just email me and say, I heard you with mark. You sound like totally crazy and you'll be right. then I'll respond.
Speaker 1: (37:42)
Well, thanks for listening to another episode of marketing spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via apple podcast or your favorite podcast app and of course share via social media to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategically Pfizer and coach Gmail, mark and mark evans.ca or connect with me on.
