Marketing Experimentation Strategy: Define and differentiate between experimentation and execution in marketing activities (podcast episode #93)

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Coders are rewarded for writing new features, not for making their code as efficient as possible, Chirstopher Mims recently reported in The Wall Street Journal. According to the article, bloated software raises many risks, and costs the US alone $2.41 trillion due to cybersecurity issues, operational failures, and other problems.

It would be easy for me to sit here and point the finger at software developers, but are marketers any better? As we focus on getting campaigns out the door, new websites up, and hitting our numbers, what do we sacrifice?

Which is why I love this lesson from a recent podcast guest application – ‘Streamline processes to enable efficiency, smooth operations and get rapid results.’ Not shiny and exciting like new marketing tactics perhaps, but essential for a well-run organization.

So I invited that applicant – Tom Amitay, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer, Entail – on How I Made It In Marketing to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories.

Listen to our conversation using this embedded player or click through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

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Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

Here are some lessons from Amitay that emerged in our discussion.

Define and differentiate between experimentation and execution in marketing activities

When trying new marketing activities, define them as ‘experiments’ focused on learning rather than success. Amitay uses the analogy of a bakery developing a new cake recipe – you don't make 100 new cakes right away, you iteratively try small batches until you perfect the recipe before executing at scale. His team allocates around 20% of marketing resources to experiments since marketing changes rapidly. He learnt this very quickly from starting Entail AI during the midst of the pandemic in 2020.

Everything was so uncertain, and there were so many technological developments to keep in mind. He realized that his startup was only going to succeed if he was prepared to experiment. And experiment they did, they have had so many different teams, roles, action plans and strategies.

Experiments should be inexpensive, quick ways to test hypotheses and learn, not succeed. Once they find the thing that works, they stick to it, but that doesn't mean that the experimenting stops.

Prioritize talent over experience when recruiting

It's difficult to assess talent, but raw talent has more potential than specific experience that can be learned. They've hired talented people lacking direct experience, throwing them in the deep end while mentoring them daily. People like Kayla, who is one of their product managers, progressed incredibly fast, starting out as a topic researcher, and they fast-tracked her because of that progression.

So many recruiters want to hire based on experience, and Amitay thinks there is something to say about drive and talent, which is overlooked a lot of the time. Talented people have higher potential and can learn on the job, even if they lack directly relevant experience. Check for talent rather than specific experience.

Provide talented yet inexperienced people with frequent, short training sessions and support as they tackle new challenges

This ‘baptism by fire’ separates high-potential candidates and allows them to ramp up quickly into valuable team members.

With talented people, short daily training sessions can spark steep learning curves, as Amitay has seen with his team. Throwing them challenges while ensuring they don't fully drown works well – they learn rapidly, while separating out who can handle the deep end. Mentoring this way grows his team’s professionals exponentially. As they experiment, they constantly try new roles and teams to see what fits best. That way, people are also exposed to a lot more skills and learning opportunities.

Lessons (with stories) from people he collaborated with

Amitay also shared lessons he learned from the people he collaborated with.

Capitalize on opportunities when they present themselves, even if you don't fully understand their potential value at first

via Shay Yitzhak, founder of gambling site 888.com

Unexpected chances for success appear through experimentation so be ready to seize those breakthroughs. Amitay learnt this lesson from his dear friend Yitzhak, who founded 888 Holdings. He is so grateful for Yitzhak and his friendship and all the things he taught Amitay in life and in marketing before his tragic death in 2020.

When they were Casino On Net (or something like that) an employee suggested buying the 888 domain since numbers resonated with a large majority of their users. Despite already being established, they bought it for around $100,000 – a decision that massively paid off in the end. This really inspired Amitay. Once you make a decision it isn't set in stone, once again the need for constant experimentation comes into play.

Streamline processes to enable efficiency, smooth operations and get rapid results

via Lior Wiznitzer, Director of Organic Growth at Natural Intelligence

Companies that waste time get left behind in fast-changing fields like marketing. Stay nimble. This is something Amitay learnt from Wiznitzer.

As one of the largest Google advertisers globally, they streamline processes to maximize margins. Coming from inefficient companies before, their speed and efficiency stem from their company DNA. In marketing you can't afford slow, complex processes – streamlining boosts results. Amitay really saw this in action with their team and tried to implement that same mindset with his team.

Combine platform expertise with consultative service that builds client trust

via Gil Shoham, founder of Supersonic Ads

Provide tailored guidance across all marketing functions needed, don’t just promote your product. Deep expertise across online marketing and empathy builds confidence and encourages success. These are things Amitay learnt from Shoham, a good friend, entrepreneur and actually one of their investors.

In marketing, expertise is crucial for trust and results beyond just platforms. Shoham had integrated pods of experts across needs – SEO, content, conversion – to solve client challenges. Rather than just sell their software, they build multi-disciplinary teams of marketing experts to foster trust. They are lucky to have Shoham as one of their angel investors.

We concluded the episode by talking about the key qualities of an effective marketer. Amitay said there are many ways to be successful. Some are like Neil Patel and can build a personal brand, which requires qualities like charisma and dedication. Amitay considers himself more an experimenter, and one of the most important qualities is not being afraid to fail.

Discussed in this episode

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Transcript

Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.

Tom Amitay: Gill's business was very similar in a way where it wasn't just about building the solution for their clients. There are in the space, it's very consultative and they realize that's not really a word. When you speak with with clients, they need to rely on their expertise, they need to add and are different fields of expertise. So you need to bring that to the table as well.

Meaning that that's when you I mean, just like if you. I know if you if you build a house and you have an architect or an engineer, you know, it's not like that building a house isn't necessarily very easy. You need to have these professionals that you can trust that are doing the job correct.

Intro: Welcome to how I made it. In marketing. From Marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz, real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, The senior director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa Daniel Burstein, to tell you about today's guest.

Daniel Burstein: We've been coders are rewarded for writing new features, not for making their code as efficient as possible. Christopher Mims recently wrote this in The Wall Street Journal. And according to that article, bloated software raises many risks and costs the US alone $2.41 trillion in cybersecurity, operational failures, all sorts of other things. Okay. But it would be very easy for me to pick on coders for not being efficient to pick on software developers.

Right. But are we marketers any better? Right. As we focus on getting campaigns out the door, new websites up, hitting our numbers, what do we sacrifice? That's why I love this lesson from a recent podcast guest application, and I hope it makes you stop and think to the lesson is streamline processes to enable efficiency, smooth operations and get rapid results, something we all may be overlooking.

So I invited that applicant on to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories. Joining me now is Tom Amitai, co-founder and chief executive officer at Intel AEI. Thanks for joining me, Tom.

Tom Amitay: A very happy to be here.

Daniel Burstein: So let's take a quick look at your background, where you are now. I know you were CEO. It beat me previously for the past four years. Tom's been an Intel. It is a bootstrapped startup, and Tom manages a team of 50 on staff, along with 500 freelancers. So Tom, give us a sense, what is your day like as CEO and co-founder?

Tom Amitay: Wow, that's a very good question. I mean, usually it starts with a little bit of time with with the kid in the morning before I start working. But basically, I'm quite busy. I think I'm in from about 9 a.m.. I'm on calls. Usually the morning is basically booked until noon and more or less calls with the team as part of our process.

It's either training calls with the team or, you know, like status and so on. Then usually we have calls with clients as well. Afterwards could be calls with board members, investors prospects and so on. So it's most of most of the time is very busy around that. It's I mean, when the company was much smaller, I had more time to get things done.

Now it's a lot of like about managing more and more managing people rather than being able to work myself, which I like as well. But yeah, I guess I'm just in my most of my days as I want to call it. Yeah, so that's hard.

Daniel Burstein: So how do you make sure you do those things that are not urgent but important, like that long term strategic thing, that creative thing? I know you mentioned to me you're like walking distance from the beach in a big surfer. Like, is that your brainstorming time or is there some other time where you get to like, okay, what is the vision and strategy and long term thinking?

Tom Amitay: So so it's actually a good point. I mean, I used to have dogs there. They were all then they died. But usually like when I walk the dogs, it was it would used to be the time, you know, away from the screen. I mean, often you are still on like on the phone when you walk, but that like away from the screen or I like to say now like taking the break and go surfing also that's that gives you that like couple hours to clean out your mind's acne or thoughts.

So that's that. And besides that, yeah, if you're busy then it's about having a great team that that can do a lot of the work with your and and also another technique that I found that main that works for me now really well is that like really like how how we use the you know we're working with mundane our job management tools you know, work management tools to just write down all those tasks that need to happen and make sure they happen.

So that's less strategic, you know, but really making sure that everything that needs to happens and needs to happen happens in the end.

Daniel Burstein: Now, very cool. While I do like I mean, when you're walking the dog, you can still be on a call. I think of be harder and surfing. You can have a pretty darn waterproof phone and maybe like a GoPro phone in the earbuds, but be a little harder.

Tom Amitay: Yeah, I know that some people will go swimming with headphones, but I think that's really, you know, that's that's counterproductive. The idea that you're disconnected there. I have a friend who goes goes surfing. He has like he has a watch and I like him like an Apple Watch where he can answer messages and so on when he's in the water.

But for me, no, I want to be disconnected, at least for a couple of hours. That's really my my chance like to to clear my mind.

Daniel Burstein: You got to disconnect unless you've got headphones on and are listening to the How I made it margin podcast. While you're swimming or surfing, just unplug for a few minutes. Gosh darn it. Yeah. Okay. We're surfing the web enough, right? So let's take a look at some of the lessons from your career. You said define and differentiate between experimentation and execution in your marketing activities.

So can you tell us the story behind this? How do you how do you do that?

Tom Amitay: So, I mean, it took me a while to realize that. But, you know, often in marketing you have to experiment all the time. I've seen recently I've seen a post on LinkedIn from I think it was the CMO of Gong Gong I you know, a big, big brand. And among other things, they mentioned how they keep on experimenting all the time with their marketing and with marketing.

You have to evolve all the time, so you must experiment. And for many people and also for myself, it took me a while to realize that for many people it's difficult for them to do experiments really because they want to succeed. And then when you define something as an experiment, by definition, success is what you've learned from the experiment and not necessarily the results of the experiment itself.

Meaning if you're if you experiment in like creating new videos for social media, the experiment could be the experiments goal, could be to learn how to create a video in a certain format or to attract a certain kind of audience or whatever. But it's not necessarily the number of users or engagement that you're going to get from the video.

It's a completely different thing. And so instead of saying fail fast, which is also part of it, when you define something as an experiment, you know that the goal is to learn and then you define what you want to learn and you feel much, much more liberated or free to do what you need in order to learn that thing.

And in not trying to make something that's perfect. Because if you're trying to make something that's perfect, it's going to take time, It's going to be expensive and the learning curve is going to be much flatter, flatter than if you decide that you want to learn and you don't really care about the quality. It doesn't need to be pretty.

It's an experiment. You want to learn something. Sometimes you can learn it in 5 minutes, Sometimes it takes 5 hours, sometimes five days. But you can be very, very quick and very efficient when you experiment. And and when you do find that with your team, with your marketing team, it makes their work much more efficient because it also takes a while for them to understand that because we're wired to try to do things in a way that we're successful, that we look good and so on.

But when you want to learn something, no, you don't. You don't need to look good. Okay, let's say you have a bakery often, given the example, you know, you have a bakery, you bake cakes, you know, and you have great cakes and everybody loves their cakes. Okay. And now you want to try a new recipe for a new cake.

When you're trying a new recipe, you're not going to do it. You're not going to experiment and sell that new recipe. You know, while you're experimenting, you're going to try it, let's say on the side, you know, do a few cakes, see if they work or not. You can try a different like 100 Alt.Latino reach a recipe that you like that works, and only then are you going to put it in the bakery and start selling that cake.

And that's when you might not want to experiment. So it's a completely different mindframe that allows it to move much faster. In marketing.

Daniel Burstein: Can you think of a specific example from your career where you learned something surprising or counterintuitive from an experiment? Because I mean, I love what you're saying with experimentation. One of the things I love about experimentation, as you're saying too, is it just changes a mindset. It forces you instead of being a marketer and being executional and hitting numbers and saying, how can I get these numbers?

Like how can I get stuff from potential customers? It forces you to be curious and say, What can I learn from potential customers? And my favorite experiment that I've ever reported on, I love this one. I interviewed the team behind the Obama presidential campaign. It was a reelection campaign. Nothing political here, not taking any sides. But as the Obama reelection campaign and they said at the time they did more ab testing than any other marketing campaign of any type, it was like five or $600 million worth of revenue they brought in from ab testing.

And their most surprising experiment, I remember they told us that I was interviewing the team behind it and they said when they would guess beforehand, they were never better than random chance. Like you think you know as a marketer, like what's going to work in random chance? And the most surprising one was the subject line. Hey, they had the subject line just, Hey, that's it.

Hey. And it was so effective for them, even turned into memes with that like Ryan Gosling and stuff with just a bit anyway. And they never would have guessed that. So for you, Tom, can you think of a specific experiment you ran that kind of really surprised you? Is counterintuitive, really help? How are the business? Can you talk us through that?

Tom Amitay: Yeah, I mean, I mean, we had we had plenty of occasions where I mean, when we experimented and then we came up with things we didn't know. It was also my previous company, definitely. And in this one, for example, you know, in SEO and Contents, most CEOs believe, you know, they live under the assumption that content that Google ranks content, long content, long form content that that an average boasts on Google needs to be about 2000 words in order to rank well.

And we've had a lot of experiments with with short content that outranks long content because we experimented with different types of content, like different length of content. So we found out that in many instances short content works really, really well. It's and, and we learned how to define which in which instances each works better and in which case as it works, it doesn't work so well.

So that's just an experiment. And, and you see many people will think, you know, all of your, all of your articles that say you're doing like blog articles and so on, only the articles need to be over a thousand words and it's really not the case. So that's just something that came out of an experiment. By the way, this entire company was created out of an experiment that we did basically.

And you know, before that, you know, we tried we were doing a lot of automation around Facebook groups and so on. And we said there's a lot of activity in Facebook groups. And we had an assumption that the activity in Facebook groups happens. You know, there's a lot of groups mostly run around, you know, sharing information, looking for information and so on.

So we had an assumption that people go to Facebook and not Google because they can find answers to their questions because maybe there's niches where there isn't enough information on Google or in the Internet on the Internet. And and some questions may be too long and complicated that you can find the answers online. So we started like looking at the information on Facebook groups and copying basically the topics and creating the the content on on websites just to see what works and what doesn't work.

And from that, we started seeing, you know, like started doing SEO before we even knew that we were doing SEO with a different, completely different approach to like, you know, the, the, the old school traditional keyword research approach. Okay? And we started generating a lot of traffic like that. So that was just an experiment that we tried and it got a lot of traffic.

We didn't know what we were doing, we were just experimenting. And, you know, there's like a bunch of other experiments that we did where when I know from like from conversion rate optimization to the way we, we for example, you know, we create content for we create thousands of articles every month of content. And when it came out, I mean, I was obsessed with, you know, how it's going to change the market.

And I wasn't obsessed in the same way that I think most of the market is where like how to use distributed to generate content. I was more obsessed with how it's going to affect Google because a lot of the traffic that we generate for our clients is organic traffic from Google. And so if the way I perceive that in the beginning is the charge is going to is that Google is going to replace the snippets in the results with a chatty bit like, you know, but that answers questions and that would kill the organic traffic to websites.

That was my initial thought. Okay. And we start like experimenting and trying to research and understand how it's going to really affect Google. I mean, we went through since November 22 when LGBT launched, we went through a series of experiments with trying to understand what content's going to still perform like outperform LGBT and how it was going to change.

And we ended up creating a completely different process of content creation. We stopped working with writers. We started working only with the experts. You know, we mentioned you mentioned like 500 freelancers that we work with. We have we have experts in every field that we that we create content in from doctors to h.r. Managers, payroll managers, psychologists, therapists, whatever you name it.

And we created a complete in a way, we invented a completely new way of creating content. That's that's human first content that's about very similar to what you're doing in this podcast in a way, content that's that's about sharing unique stories, unique perspectives, personal experience, personal expertise, exactly what we're doing now. We found a way to do it, that skill.

And then we were using a AI to create the strategy, to know what content to create, what topics to create, what's the value of every topic. Okay, So if you create content on certain topic, what's the value of that content for your business? How do you calculate the value? So we using AI for that, we're using AI to edit the content, but not to generate the content.

So all of that process evolved from an experimentation process that we used that we did daily. Okay, That was like really our R&D process. How do you develop a process to create content? How do you build the tools for that? So all of that was experimentation, trial and error, or how do you get to a point where you create content at a very high quality, low cost at scale?

Okay. And how do you do that? For many different businesses in many different industries at the same time? So it was just a series of experimentations all the time. And so once you once you reach a point and it's something I like, I remember I learned from my previous business partner. I mean, once you once you reach a point where your experiments work and you see that, that it produces the results that you want also, and then you bring it to a to a point where it's where it's stable or is reliable, then you move it so-called into production and then you're no longer in the experiment mode, and then now you're in production mode,

now in the scaling mode. And you and you focus on process, on making it's repeatable and scalable as opposed to just a quick process of learning all the time.

Daniel Burstein: Right? This warehouse had become a business. And I think to scale, part of the thing you need is the right people on your team, right? And when it comes to that, I here's one of your lessons. You say prioritize talent over experience when recruiting. So how did you learn this lesson? Tell us the story behind it.

Tom Amitay: So it probably has to do with my with the way I the way I roll, let's say. I mean, I often feel more comfortable working with Junior because because at the end of the day, when I'm marketing company and as a marketing company, we do need to experiment a lot. So you need people who are humble, don't think they know, okay, And it's usually easier with younger people.

And so for that we, we developed also through experimental session, we developed a process of recruiting people, testing people and recruiting them. Right now we have a process of we're able to test a thousand people a day with like automatically without doing anything. And out of those thousand people we'll recruit only one person who's a good fit. And I mean, the the percentage of the success rate is very high.

And by testing them, we can test their talents rather than their CVS and so on. We're not looking at severe that all we're just testing their capabilities in the specific things that the specific challenges that we would like them to solve. And then when you have talented people like that, it's much easier to experiment than to move quickly, which is part of the DNA of our company, that we need to move quickly.

We need to be able to experiment and we need to be able to execute very quickly. And it's easier with people that are very talented, that can learn quickly rather than people who will just have a, you know, a very long and impressive CV Sometimes I'm not saying that people can't have an impressive CV and still be very professional, but in this line of business, when you need to be very, very quick, when you find people that are very talented and if the company is structured, that's why they can become productive very quick and they can even be managers in about a year or two.

And we have we have a few a few of those very, very talented, very nice people I enjoy working with. And I think they've learned a lot since they started working with us. You should ask them, you know, they can do that. But I mean, I appreciate them a lot. And I think I think the point we've we've reached with them, with many of them is would have been much more difficult to reach with a person that has a lot of experience and not necessarily the same talent as they do.

Daniel Burstein: Can you give us a specific example of how you test for talent? Because when you say this idea, I feel like it sounds good to people. Okay, sounds more important to experience it. When you look at most job openings out there, there experience, focus, right? You need five years of Google Analytics or whatever, right? It's kind of silly because, well, that's something anyone can learn.

But I think we do that job. You know, managers do that because that's something they can easily measure. I can see if you've had five years experience in this. I mean, one test that worked for me for talent is I would hire a copy editor for marketing Sherpa. I would intentionally put a typo in the job posting, and I did this for a few reasons.

One, if you're interviewing someone, everyone says they have attention to detail. No one in an interview or in a cover letter saying, I have poor attention to detail, right? You actually have to see if they do or not. And when people are being tested, they're usually a little more focused on when they don't know they're being tested. But the other reason I did it was because the job of a copy editor, it's two things.

It's not just to find a mistake or to fix it or make the grammar good or all those things. It's also hand how they communicate with a writer, right? And so sometimes people would come in and they weren't humbled. All they'd be like, Then drop it. Like on the on the on the table in the conference room. Look at this mistake you made.

You need to hire me. Like, look at that. You had a mistake even in your job posting. My gosh. And they were not a fit at all. Right. Because they're not going to work well with our writers. But the people that came in, you know, they do the interview and at the end they kind of humbly say, I remember this one of the last copywriters I hired, you know, sort of, hey, I just wanted to mention I found this in your in your job posting.

It was a mistake. Maybe it was intentional. I need to know. But you make me like that person that was humble and kind of thought, well, the other side like, okay, that's not just someone who one has a talent to find it, but will fit in well with the team and the culture and be someone you want to work with and spend time with, right?

Yeah. So for you, like, do you have a specific example? How do you test and find talent? That's not easy.

Tom Amitay: Yeah, so it's actually very specific and it also probably has to do with my background, you know, like, I mean, I'm from Israel, so I had to go to the army and that's basically how it's built in the army. I mean, the army is is a huge operation that every year takes young kids 18 years old and turns them into soldiers and I actually had I mean, where we call ourselves a up of crap and even though we did raise money from some investors, but we basically that's a buffer in the bank and we we live off of our mean our revenues.

I was talking to one of my investors was an Air Force you know fighter jet pilots and often Israelis, you know, they they brag that they have the best pilots in the world. You know, when they do drills in against the U.S., they usually beat them like 100 to 1 or so. That's the ratio. But so, yeah, so I was talking I had this conversation with them about recruiting managers and I asked him, you know, how many, how many pilots in your in your squadron were recruited from different air forces and not from the Israeli Air force.

It said, What do you mean? I said exactly that, like zero, right. Everybody was trained there and they and they became very successful. So how do you how do you sort out the people and how do you train them very quickly? And so the entire company I mean, Intel is structured like that. First of all, we define exactly what are the the capabilities and the skills that every role needs to have.

And then we define test to test that. So, for example, we deal a lot with content. So we so most of our people, they need to have they need to really understand intent in content and they need to know how to edit content, need to be good with words, basically. Okay, so we test those two things. So for example, for intent, the way we test, there's very simple principles that we use.

First of all, what we want to test is your ability to understand intent, not the ability to understand the test itself. Because sometimes for myself, I'm not very good with following instructions. That may be one of the reasons why I started a company. Okay, So, so I don't want to test the capability of following instructions. Exactly, but actually getting the answer right to understand intent.

So we start we, we we create the test is divided into a few, a few steps, a few parts. And for every part we have basically the same question or the same type of question repeating. So if it was a math test, for example, then it was like, you know, just, you know, two plus two or three plus three, you know, like the same type of of of math problem that repeats itself.

So if it's like testing, understanding, intent, then you need to you need to be able to define the intent and the sentence. Okay. And you start with a very, very simple question that everyone is going to get. Right. And it's a multiple choice. That said, you don't need to test to check the results to get it automatically from, you know, just see if they got it right or not.

So they start with they get the instructions, they get an example, then they get five super simple questions that they're going to get right. And then it gets more and more and more and more and more difficult, like about 20 iterations like that. And then you have another part and another part and another part like that. And if they if they as the first part, they move to the second part, the third part, the fourth part, etc..

And then you're able to test different aspects of understanding intent in texts. Okay? Because that's part of what they need to understand. Then then you can do the same thing for anything. That's you can do the same thing for designers test. You know, it can be a multiple choice test where you like testing if they can see alignment, if they really have attention to detail.

So you show them a few, a few options and they need to decide which option is best. So so we're able to to publish this test and reach, you know, like thousands of people. Usually it's about a thousand people per day or start the test and maybe like five or pass and get like, like the more passes, you know, you can increase the bar.

You know, you can like the threshold. So you just eventually, if they pass the test, if they're from the same time zone as ours, the country that we can work with and if their salary expectations meet ours, then we call them for an interview. And if they're nice people and, and, you know, people that we can communicate with and people that we would like to work with, then we hire them.

And and usually these people are like, our success rate is above 90%. Okay, So we don't have to fire a lot. So that's part of it. And another part of it, which is the part that most companies don't have. This is why this thing will not work for them. But we developed at Intel is we built our company in a way that and that's another principle.

So one principle is testing very quickly without that taking time. The other principle is that they need to be productive in the first hour on the job. Okay, because I don't want them to waste time now, you know, like we have like long training and so on. So they pass the test. It means that they have the basic skills and and, you know, they can just basically go into the factory line, so to speak.

And so they don't so they touch they're in production from from the first minute on the job, but they're not allowed to submit anything to clients and so on. So there's like there's a services aspect to our business. So we built it like this so we can scale quickly and so they can do a lot of the work.

But everything they do gets reviewed by a more senior person and this is how it's built, like a pyramid like that. Again, very similar to how the army is structured. Okay? And it makes them very effective very quickly. So we can move very quickly. We can recruit people very quickly. We can invent things very quickly. Okay. And create new processes very quickly.

So it gives us a lot of advantage. And then when we basically dev, you know, like the R&D and then you know, has to keep up with that pace. So like developing the tools that we need in order to to, to like streamline the processes that we're working on.

Daniel Burstein: But then imagine you do have to train those people also, and you mention your next sites and provide talented, yet inexperienced people with frequent short training sessions and support as they tackle new challenges. Yes. So how do you do that? I mean, that kind of sounds similar to what would happen in the military as well. Ready to go basic training and then go on from there.

Tom Amitay: Yeah, So it's what I mentioned now. I mean, it's very true. You can't just expect them to be professionals from from the first minutes on the job. Right. So, so they need what we've figured out is that if they get so if people that you recruit get instead of having like a long training period or long training sessions, you let them give them tasks that are tasks that you need for production for what you're doing.

So it means that they're important and you just check in with them quite often. So it really depends on what you're teaching them, but you can check in with them like three times a day or five times a day, depends on what they're doing. And then then gradually you can reduce the amount of time that you need to check in with them.

Okay, So you can you can check in with them and know in the first week they could check in with them like three or four times a day. Every time is about 15 minutes. So what have you done? Let's go over this. What? What you can improve or what you should improve, what you should do differently and so on.

And then they learn. They're open to learn because they're juniors, so they're still open. And when you when you do it like that, you don't you don't burden them or you don't overload them with too much information. You're just giving them, you know, like small bites as much as they can chew, you know, at each given moment. And by doing that, they learn on their own.

You know, they try something on their own, they get feedback and then they basically learning by doing is much faster than trying to learn by like just like theory or intellectual learning. So they do that on their own and then they get feedback and then they improve and they get feedback and they improve. And then the learning curve is very, very steep.

They can move very, very quickly. And it works really well with this like very short feedback sessions. So don't waste too much time trying to explain things that are for people who are like maybe premature and understanding like more complex things that it will take them, you know, another week or another month or another year to be able to understand.

So again, to give them as much as they can absorb, as much as they can learn at the moment, and then let them keep on, keep on working.

Daniel Burstein: I said this sounds like a really well-oiled machine, but for things that you are well in and know well, I think one challenge that a lot of startups have, especially bootstrap startups as they grow, is there are going to be areas they need to grow in that they are not expert in. So I wonder if you have a specific example of how you handled one of those areas or scaled up.

Like, for example, I interviewed Dan Garcia, the CMO of the Providence Blockchain Foundation, on how I made up marketing, and one of his lessons was make up for areas where you're not as strong. And he talked about when he first became a director at a Fortune 300 company was only 26. And, you know, he did what we all did at first.

Are you just trying to go for, you know, your strength, you know, like attracts like and, you know, senior leaders taught him, No, you've got to counterbalance your skills to balance out what your actual team needs, what the company needs. So be Tom. As I mentioned, a lot of startups, especially bootstrapped startups, they need to grow in certain areas.

Well, they don't have a subject matter expertise in that yet. You've got that well-oiled machine to train people for that. When you do have that expertise, how do you grow to have a specific example, how you've been able to add skills that you didn't already have in the company?

Tom Amitay: So first of all, you can you can recruit juniors that have that have the skills or have the talent that you lack and mean. We have many of those. Many of them are much better than I am in many things, from content creation, editing, developing, redesigning, or, you know, you name it. But for us, again, for us, our DNA is about moving quickly, being able to experiment and develop things very quickly.

So I'll give you an example. Okay. So we create a lot of content and then in order to create that content, we need to decide. I mean, if it's SEO, for example, we need to make people do keyword research, right? So we had about 20 people, analysts like researching, you know, what topics to create content on and what and I have them I have had no no prior experience in SEO.

So we did get them outside, you know, consultants, you know, just this helped us. We know they filling the gaps, but it wasn't as significant as the process that we've done in-house. What we've done is we've worked with that team. So I would do every day to meetings with this team of like 20 analysts every day reviewing one of their, like taken one of them or like in each meeting taking one of them and going over the strategy that they created for one of our clients.

Okay. Content writing, going over that and the entire team had to use the same form, I think, exactly to what they were working on. And every meeting we would iterate, we would change it and everybody would have to align. So it would be 20 people in the meeting going over one of the the that the guys work. Actually it's mostly women, not men.

I don't know why that way, but that's how it is. They're very talented, not all of them, but many of them are. So every day they would have to go over what like that person did. Learn from that, think together how we can improve it, what we can change. And then everybody would have to go and change their format to what this person has done.

Okay. And it would change twice a day. And we went like this for a few months every day. Changing, changing, evolving, evolving. If you're talking about, you know, R&D, research and development, that's what the research. And then we reached a very, very, very solid model that we then turned into our own model. We call it the topic authority graph.

It's basically an upside down model of how Google works, how you can map all the topics of a website and how we do it automatically. Okay, we do it with a battalion map, all the topics that are relevant to a website and understand exactly what is the value of each topic. So it took us a while. We worked on this with 20 people iterated every day and in an area that we didn't know much about and what we just decided to do, we did our research and we reached a point where the model works, worked really well as much as you could do manually.

And then we said, okay, now we're going to turn this into software. And we did. And now this is this is a model that that maps. You give it a website, it maps all the revenue topics. It could be hundreds of thousands of different topics and the value of each topic. And, you know, the priority of when you want to create content for that, either for SEO or for social media.

It's basically it does all the strategy automatically. And it was only through experimentation and research.

Daniel Burstein: Well, in the first half of the podcast, we talk about lessons you learn from things like building your ACL model. So thanks for sharing that. In the second half of the podcast, we're going to talk about lessons you learned from people you collaborated with because that's a great thing we get to do as marketers. We get to build things and we get to build them with people.

But before we do that, I should mention that to how I made it and Marketing podcast is underwritten by Mac Labs Institute, the parent organization of marketing Sherpa Mac Labs. A I now has expert assistance copywriter, project planner, marketing professor, social media pro and email assistant. It's totally free to use for now. Just go to McLeod's ICOM and start using it.

That's MSE Lab as a ICOM to get artificial intelligence working for your marketing. All right, so let's take a look at some lessons from the people you collaborated with. Here's a lesson you should capitalize on opportunities when they present themselves, even if you don't fully understand their potential value offers. Kind of ties in to what you were saying about experimentation.

You said you learned this from Shae Yitzhak, the founder of gaming site 888 AECOM. How did you learn this from Shay?

Tom Amitay: So she was a dear friend. I mean, I told you this is a picture of him right behind me, died four years ago. I think it was four years ago. Beginning of COVID. Yeah. So he was a brilliant person. And I've learned a lot from him. I mean, we had the company was my partner, my previous company partner and investor and and basically we would sit down like, you know, at least like twice a week.

And it was a personal IPO of the company for over $1,000,000,000. We manage over a thousand people and I've done many things for women and often what what would happen when we were having conversations he would come to me and say, you know what, I've been up all night. I've had this thought that we must go in, you know, in this direction, whatever.

And I would tell him, you know, I have, I think, completely the opposite. I think we should go in the opposite direction. And they would say, okay, you know, it was that easy, you know, to change his mind. And and he told me a lot of stories about how he how he really capitalized on opportunities, you know, of you know, you're working very hard to try new things.

You're building the things. And then all of a sudden an opportunity shows up. And often people will not really capitalize on it because it's not what they planned or because they're too busy doing another thing. But that's how it was for him. So he told me, you know, like, like one of his stories, we're building 888 online gambling, and so it's eight dotcom, right?

So in the beginning they used to be called so they started as a solution for they built games for the idea was what was it to build games for, for like online, you know, like, like they call it like supermarkets And this was back and at the end of the nineties. Okay so they, they built games. So if you're shopping online you want to be bored or something and of course it didn't work, but they saw that people are playing with their games and then they shifted to, they shifted to online gambling.

So that was one way they capitalized on an opportunity by their name. In the beginning, the name of the website, their domain was the casino. On net, it says even his parents, if they wanted to see what this website was looked like or whatever they couldn't spell it right. So like it was a difficult name for many people to spell right, and it sounds like they were already like quite a big company.

They were making quite a lot of money. I mean, probably like over like $1,000,000 a month at that time. And one of the employees in the company, which I don't remember his name because I never stepped foot in that company, but I heard all the stories. So one of the employees came to him and told him, you know, I just came back from a trip to China and, you know, the people in the forest, they're really obsessed with numbers.

They really love numbers. And and I saw that there's this domain available for purchase. It's 888. com. Maybe we should buy it. And he said I you know it's not important let's leave it you know and he said like you know in the evening he grabbed his head and said, what am I an idiot? And I just called the guy, said, Let's go buy that domain.

And so they went in through hoops, you know, just to make sure they go and buy the domain through. I like I like without telling the person they were buying it from that They're like already like a successful company. So he doesn't charge them too much. And they ended up buying it for not that expensive. It wasn't that expensive, I think when they bought it.

And, you know, it ends up being like, I mean, they're a company and a lot of it was also because of the domain that's that's super easy to remember by the way later they also purchased 777. com and they built another like affiliate site on that and it was sold for about $20 million down the line. But that's just one of the stories about, you know, capitalizing on opportunities.

Daniel Burstein: So you mentioned, I think Shai was an investor in one of your previous companies. You had you ever see of the start of a company. Now, while you do have some funding, you are taking a bootstrapped approach. Can you give us a sense what are the pros and cons or what are the different considerations, if there are any?

Maybe we should do everything the same between a funded company. When you're taking on funding, private equity funding, whatever capital, whatever it might be, versus bootstrapping and just kind of, you know, doing it yourself. Can you give us a sense?

Tom Amitay: Yeah. So it's very different. You know, there's often that a lot of tension or stress or anxiety or whatever that has to do with, you know, running a business. So I think bootstrapping is a different type of tension than, than if you raised money from investors. The basic difference is that if you go down the VC path, then you're basically planning for a runway of, let's say, a year and a half more or less, and you raise money and you're planning to grow very quickly and then basically burn all this money and then raise raise again and while I've seen, you know, working with many clients, most of them are funded companies, is is that

they because they want to grow very quickly, they recruit people in a completely different way than than we do. They look for people with experience. And so it's very difficult to to recruit a person like a manager, I would say, depending on the role between sales and marketing and dev and so on. If you're trying to recruit managers, the success rates aren't very high.

Okay. And so but when you have to grow very quickly, you need to you need to encourage people with a lot of experience. So that's one challenge that we don't necessarily have. We can grow more slowly and but more how to say more like to have a more sustainable process. And I mean, we started the company know back then it was during COVID, you know, like companies were like, like we're raising money like left, right and center right like, like huge drones.

And so money was very cheap. And I saw companies like throwing money away, you know, out the window all the time. And and then the market shifted and then all of a sudden, you know, now this like layoffs and all that. And when we are a very, very efficient company, we don't throw money away. We don't waste money.

So for us, the kind of like this downturn in the market didn't really affect us that much. I mean, it was for us it was I mean, we did lose a few clients that had no budget. Our company were shut down because of that. But for us, for our company, the entry changed my eyes because we we were working very efficiently like that and not, not, not burning money being basically either breakeven or be profitable all the time.

So because you invest more in growth. So we didn't have that that type of tension of having to like, grow very quickly, recruit people very quickly, burn all this money, raise another round. Tell your investor stories all the time or, you know, like having to pitch to investors all the time. So we don't have that. We have more freedom, we have more wiggle room in a way, because we don't need to raise money all the time.

Daniel Burstein: You mentioned your efficient company. Let's talk about efficiency. This is something I talked about in the open. You know, I mentioned software developers have technical debt that's well known. And I don't know, we don't really have a term for marketing. But I often think about sometimes, like in World War Two, after America got burned, bombed by Pearl Harbor, there's a very famous Doolittle's raid where America just wanted to say that, Hey, we can hit Japan.

And so General Doolittle at it. The problem was we didn't really have the right equipment, so we had these big bombers that needed long runways, but they couldn't fly far enough to Japan. And then we had these smaller planes that could take off of an aircraft carrier. So what they did is they decided we're going to use these big bombers, but we're going to make them light enough that they could take off on an aircraft carrier.

So they basically just took these planes and they threw everything off on machines, anything that had any weight, just so they could take off on that short runway. They bombed Japan and then they just crash landed in China because they didn't even have enough gas to get back. And to me, it was such an analogy of how sometimes I see market as approaching in some market or campaigns where they just they just throw everything out the window so everything we can at it.

Let's hit our numbers this quarter. And again, I think something that's overlooked in that fact is some of the things like efficiency. So I love this lesson. This really is what caught my eye in your podcast. Guest application Streamline processes to enable efficiency, smooth operations and get rapid results again, we just overlook this to try to hit our numbers.

You said you learned this from law, which Snitzer, the director of Organic Growth and Natural Intelligence. So how did you learn this lesson?

Tom Amitay: So, I mean, we've been working with natural intelligence for for a long time now, for years. And they're an amazing company. And they're one of the biggest advertisers on Google. On Google globally. You know, I think, if I'm not mistaken, Google built their offices. They spend about half a billion dollars a year on Google. Okay. And and when you advertise so much and in paid advertising, the margins aren't aren't huge.

Okay. So when you advertise so much and the margins are huge, you have to be very, very, very efficient in order to, you know, to make as much money as possible to to keep your margins as wide as possible. So so for a company like that, every, you know, fraction of a percentage is worth a lot of money.

So if you compare, by the way, to, let's say, an insurance company, we works with insurance companies, okay? Like online insurance there, they can be an online business. They can be in marketing and so on. But they're an insurance company at the end of the day. So there's bureaucracy. There's a lot of red tape. Everything takes forever. Nothing is moving.

And also in the marketing department, it's the same thing. But when you look at natural intelligence, everything just just ticks, everything moves very quickly. There's even there's almost no red tape over there even. I mean, they're a big company there, about 500 and something employees that are there, tech company, very serious people, very talented people, very nice people, also a very good culture.

And everything is just streamlined. When they need something, they get it. When the team needs something develop, they get it. When they build something, they build a team and they build it very quickly. When they need to execute, they execute. It doesn't take there's no ego involved. It doesn't take forever. And I can see in many, many other companies and the impact that they can have because at the end of the day, they're they are a marketing company.

Okay. And that's the main difference between being a marketing company or being a marketing department within a company, since the entire company in the US marketing, all the processes are super, super streamlined. It's a very well-oiled machine. Everything runs super smoothly and their impact is huge. What they can do is huge and if they operated like many other companies that we see the way they're like, you know, it takes them super long time to make decisions and so on and get approval.

I mean, I've worked with companies who told us they want to do to to work with us. You know, they wanted to use our platform and it took them four months since they made the decision till they signed the agreement. It took them four months. You know, they got the agreement or the agreement on the same day, you know, So with natural intelligence, that doesn't happen.

I mean, they did they did do a very thorough due diligence before they started working with us. You know, we had a few meetings with them, like ten people in every meeting. They they interviewed our the other clients that we have and so on. But once they started that, they were going for this, like everything was open, there were no roadblocks, there was no obstacles.

Integration was a team working on integration. You know, from day one, very talented people. Very quick integration was done at every different track move, like super, super, super smoothly, in sync, including procurement and legal and everything. Super, super smoothly.

Daniel Burstein: Can you give us a specific example of how you build from the ground up for efficiency? Because as I mentioned, like, I think a bad way to do efficiency is what many companies do. They do it on the back end, right. Which is essentially layoffs. They realize, no, we have too much overhead. We're going to like cut people back.

Let's see if we can keep this thing running costs. All right. And as I mentioned, a lot of times when we're you know, we're trying so hard to get something going quick, you know, it takes longer to make it efficient or to do it right from the outset, which is why we don't especially for technical oriented companies, you know, because there are certain ways to build things and get it up that aren't the best for long term to maintain it and keep on going.

Kind of like I mentioned, that Wall Street Journal article, the beginning. So you have a specific example of how you built something from the ground up to be efficient.

Tom Amitay: Yeah, it's I mean, I mean, Intel I our company, the entire company is built like that. And going back to my my partner, my previous company, she and he built eight, eight, eight that come and it was a gambling company. But gambling companies are marketing companies at. The end of the day, they need to be very, very good marketing.

And he used to tell me, you know, if we can do acquisition, if we can acquire customers at 10% or 20% cheaper, then our competitor, this is where our money is at, this is our margin, this is our profit, this is how we win. Okay? So it is about being more efficient. It is about spending less on acquisition than than your competitor.

And in order to do that in marketing, you have to be super efficient because, you know, there's a lot of money falling through the cracks, a lot of money wasted on processes that are very long. So this is the principle. And for example, at Intel, Intel is an organic marketing company, okay, marketing platform. So our platform supports teams that need to create content for for social media offering SEO text and video.

And so, for example, like the story I told you before about how we used to develop content strategy with 20 analysts, okay, we did this. So in the beginning it was one person. Then we had more clients, more and more clients, so we recruited more people. It became an entire organization of analysts just for their strategy. Part of things.

So we were iterating again and again and like every day in, day out, until we built a model manually that worked. And then we developed it into a product and now instead of 20 analysts that that need to do content strategy, we have only one person and we have more clients and then back them. Just one person working with with the platform and now it's reached the point where the clients can use the platform and the clients are using SAS.

So that's how we developed SAS based on the on the research that we need for our clients. And this is how we ensure that this is super, super, super efficient because we were using it for ourselves. So it's definitely like eating your own dog food. That's the principle. So we did that with creating content strategy. Then we have another process of how you create content there, spoke with it with a prospect.

One of the biggest companies for a for female tech. They have a few million visitors on the website every month. They have a team. They have at least ten people reviewing every content piece before they publish it. It takes them eight weeks to publish a content piece. Okay. And they have thousands of articles on the website. And so I show them RCMP and we I mean, we do thousands of articles for a not for one industry for but for dozens of industries.

Each one of them can be completely different. And and our clients of all of us do very, very high standards, in fact, higher than they would hold themselves to. Okay. So we needed to create a system that would allow us to create content at this level, at this quality, at scale, very, very quickly and inexpensively. So we built a with a built in into our product for that where where multiple people can can work on every content piece it can go.

It goes basically through a kind of a pipeline. That's our Intel CMS. That's how it works. So people can so their strategy strategy gets approved, then it's it creates a brief, the brief together gets approved, and then it goes to the experts, the expert creates the content. This content is edited into video and text, and it goes through editing steps.

And for each step, the stakeholder can go in, make edits, change and insert comments and so on. It goes on from one step to the other until it is approved by the client and published to their social media or to the website. And so by doing that you can have a very solid strategy that ensures results. You can have the stakeholders approve the content because we've seen this process is very, very fragmented.

Different stakeholders need to approve, need to, everybody needs to chip in. So we built a system where every stakeholder can approve the content before it gets published or before it goes onto the next step, and it can also be sent back. So we just built a product to support exactly that. So that was about efficiency. Then we built another product.

We saw that many companies, you know, every every company tries to kind of like reinvent the wheel when they build content on the website, they build pages, they do the on page SEO, they do the design, etc.. So we built we built our own page builder that can work with any website and just build content pages that can be easily customized into every website, any website you want, any platform you want.

We can integrate with anyone and you don't need to do all the skill work. So this also saves time. It saves a lot of time because when you start doing building pages for SEO, you build it, then it tasks, then it takes a couple of months and you make another change. It can take a year to reach like a stable version.

So for us it's like a plug and play. You just connect it to a website and it works. So that's what Intel provides instead. So also in terms of like solving on page SEO and all the technical SEO path, it's done. And then we have then we started seeing, you know, some websites have issues, know like FCO issues.

Sometimes the pages are down, you know, you have downtime, you have pages, that node too slow, you know, you have a bunch of problems. So we built our own our crawler that crawls our clients websites and tells them if there are issues and now they can get alerts in our system. So you don't need to go and manually do like site audit.

You get it live on your website all the time. So that's what we've done. The same thing with conversion rate optimization. You know, companies end up with thousands or hundreds or thousands of pages of content pages on the website and they can track the conversion because analytics, most of the analytics products are not built for that. They have analysts like looking at different blogs, looking at different pages, how much traffic they're getting, how many click through of they getting from these pages onto the to the, you know, further down the funnel.

And by the way, most of them don't really do it. They just create content. They don't really know if it converts or not. That sort of 99% of the companies. So we built a system that can map all the topics of the website. That's a strategy and then see every topic as a as a campaign. Like how much is it, how much is the value of the trip of that topic?

How much traffic is it getting, How many conversions is this topic getting and is it getting? And what's the difference between the value and the actual sales it generates? If the difference is big, we can optimize for more traffic or for for more conversions. And by doing that we optimize the entire conversion rate optimization process. So now you can you can optimize thousands of pages as opposed to being to just, you know, optimize your landing pages and the annual homepage.

So all of those things are parts of optimization that enable you to increase your reach, increase your acquisition and also lower your acquisition cost. So it gives you a huge advantage in marketing.

Daniel Burstein: So doing all those things, doing automated technical things are a way to be efficient, right? Removing the human element as a way to be efficient. But you also said one of your lessons combined platform expertise with consultative service that builds client trust. You said you learned this from Gil Shoham, founder of Supersonic Ads. So where do you add in that human element?

How did you learn this from?

Tom Amitay: Gil Yeah, so I mean, Gil is an investor and a partner in a company, and he sold supersonic ads to Ion Source. And even though while they dealt with what Ion source deals with, it's more like monetization for, for mobile gaming. So it's a different field. But still it was very similar in a way. Gil's business was very similar in a way where it wasn't just about building the solution for their clients.

There are in the space, it's very consultative maybe, and that's really a word when you speak with with clients, they need to rely on your expertise. They need to and and they're different fields of expertise. So you need to bring that to the table as well. Meaning that that when you're I mean, just like if you I know if you if you build a house and you have an architect or an engineer, you know, it's not that building a house isn't necessarily very easy.

You need to have these professionals that you can trust that are doing the job correct. And when you need to build a lot of content, it's like building equity for your brand, you need to know that you're doing it right. You need to know that you're not making mistakes, that this content is going to perform, that it's not going to like they're going to be cannibalized of, you know, creating the same content that competes with the same pieces, competing with each other.

They can be performance issues. They can be a lot of issues when building something on that, just like when you build a house. So you need to have the right engineers. And for that reason you need to be able to bring into the table, to bring to the table experts in each party, in each field that is involved, for example, SEO.

So it's going to be technical SEO. And the strategy part, you need to have people who are content experts in terms of the of how to create the right content. You need to have subject matter experts that can create content. You know, if it's if it's like medical content, you need to have doctors in India, fact checkers. So you need to bring all that expertise to the table to create trust with the client, because trust is a very important part of of of that business.

And by the way, it's also a very important part of how you market in the business. It requires trust from its clients. It's also a very important thing that you need to solve in your marketing as well. So from your marketing itself, prospects can trust you as well.

Daniel Burstein: Well, we talked about so many different things about what it means to be a marketer, Tom, what it means to build a company. All this if you had to break it down, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Tom Amitay: Wow, that's that's a difficult one. I mean, so I can only think so first of all, I can only tell you like my opinion, because there's many people that are very, very different than me and can be super successful. I'd say that it depends on the type of marketing that you're doing. You know, some people I like, I know like Neil Patel, for example, if you know, I'm in SEO, so he's built his own personal brand.

So that's one way of going. I think if you have that charisma and that dedication, other people are more dedicated to the numbers. They can be like amazing performance marketers. So it really depends on on kind of what scale of marketing you're in.

But I definitely think that, that the ability of of experimenting, ability to experiment and to fail without being afraid to fail is one of the most important qualities, because in marketing, you never know if it's going to work or not before you try it. So I think I think this is the most important quality.

Daniel Burstein: Well, thanks for sharing all these lessons from your career, Tom. I learned a lot and thank you to everyone for listening.

Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it in marketing with Daniel Bernstein. Now that you've gotten inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas, Extensive library of free case studies at marketing Sherpa dot com That's marketing SRH, ERP, Ecom.