Balancing Paid vs Organic Marketing While Growing from $0 to $30kMRR with Sam Chlebowski, Co-Founder at Motion.io
In this episode of Exploring Growth, host Lee Murray sits down with Sam Chlebowski, founder and CEO of Motion.io, to discuss the company’s growth journey and the balance between organic and paid marketing strategies. Sam shares valuable lessons learned from early marketing efforts, providing insights into the strategic evolution of Motion.io's marketing initiatives. The conversation highlights the critical significance of customer engagement in driving success.
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Sam Chlebowski
00:00:00
We've started to see some really nice traction with YouTube, and it's really surprising because if you look at our YouTube channel, you might be saying like, what is this guy talking about? Like these videos have 700, 800, a thousand views. The thing is, for a software product, you don't have to have a lot of use to have it be a worthwhile channel. You can you can post a single video. Hey, if it generates 200 leads and the only cost was your labor, let's say you're paying, you know, $200 a lead on a paid platform. You can do the math yourself. It's like that's valuable.
Lee Murray
00:00:38
So there's an imbalance that is happening in many marketing teams, in many companies. And this imbalance is between the value of paid and organic. And a lot of the teams, I think, in my kind of, you know, perspective of what I've seen out there are underqualified to for the organic side, they're just not quite sure which levers to pull. Or on the paid side, they usually have hired someone out to help them with the paid side, and they're not really sure how to direct those agencies.
Lee Murray
00:01:08
So I'm excited to sit down with Sam Boesky, founder and CEO of motion IO, who can give us his personal experience on this balance or imbalance while he was growing motion IO from $0 to 30,000 MRE over about a 12 month period. so, welcome to the show, Sam.
Sam Chlebowski
00:01:31
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on today, Lee. And really excited to kind of dig into our chat here today. I think it's going to be a fun conversation. I'll be able to hopefully at least give 1 or 2 things that folks can take away from with what we've done and how we've been able to build our marketing channels and strategy here at motion.
Lee Murray
00:01:49
Yeah, that's great. And I think to give you a chance to look at your business from, you know, one perspective. I know you're running the business and you're you're looking at it from, you know, multiple different hats. And I know you work with a lot of agencies too. So, you know, getting to kind of put on that marketing hat for, you know, 45 minutes or so and just like talk marketing is probably going to be fun.
Sam Chlebowski
00:02:08
Yeah. Awesome.
Lee Murray
00:02:10
So, you know, what I want to do first is jump into, I want to get into how you've been building motion. And we kind of prep for this, you know, thinking, okay, let's talk about the last couple of years, and then we'll look at, you know, year three moving forward. and how you've approached organic versus paid marketing. but first, tell us about what motion IO is and what kind of problems it solves for people.
Sam Chlebowski
00:02:34
Yeah. So motion IO is a client onboarding and collaboration tool that allows agencies to collect information, signatures, forms, any of the information that they need from clients, from onboarding forward in white labeled portals that are fully customized to their brand. The biggest problem that we are looking to solve, and that I think that we've proven we do a pretty good job at solving for the businesses we work with currently. Is there when so many, so much of the time when businesses are building out their onboarding processes, it really gets put together in like this ad hoc way where you have one tool for this, another tool for this, and automations, whether it's using Zapier or Make or direct API's or webhooks, something like that is the glue that holds all of that stuff together.
Sam Chlebowski
00:03:31
What we found in a previous business where I was actually an employee of my now co-founder, Perry, we were onboarding clients at incredible scale, like 400 clients a month. And we were doing that same exact thing, that ad hoc, disjointed tech stack for onboarding. We ended up building our own tool internally to kind of bring those tools together. And what we saw, what we found is it solved a big pain point for us. That said, that solution was in-house developed. It cost a few hundred thousand dollars more than we thought it would. and what we've done with motional is basically bring that to a SaaS product that is a really affordable way to have folks get this value of a central hub for all of their client communication, engagement, and document and information collection.
Lee Murray
00:04:21
Got you. And I'm looking at your website right now. look at the solutions onboarding, project management, customer success integrations, WordPress plug ins, client portals. I think that's a that's a big one. and I and I see that it's white labeled as kind of like the primary way that it's presented.
Lee Murray
00:04:42
what made you think to go down the white label route versus it being emotionally labeled, you know, product that everyone can just use off the shelf?
Sam Chlebowski
00:04:51
Yeah, that's a great question. So and a clarification there, is that like anybody can go and sign up for an account. But when your clients are seeing stuff that's coming from Motionlayout, whether that's the domain of your, the domain, of the actual portal itself, whether that's the email sending address, whether that's the business name being your business name is the sender, all of that's fit to your brand. And that's something we knew was really important, especially after speaking with folks who run other agencies before we even decided to build the build the product, we did heavy, heavy user research and validation before we decided to jump in. Now, some of that validation we ended up throwing out down the road because it ended up being wrong. But that was one of the big things that folks highlighted for us was ultra important to them. Is enabling Motionlayout to be a seamless extension of their brand?
Lee Murray
00:05:44
I like that, yeah.
Lee Murray
00:05:45
Looks like you have a lot of different applications, and it's not just for agencies. It looks like it's for all kinds of other, similar type of businesses.
Sam Chlebowski
00:05:53
Yeah. Our solution is really grounded in that marketing agency design agency use case. But since we have expanded a lot of the functionality within our product, so too has the markets that were targeting and were able to serve really well. Some people seeing success with us lately, accounting firms, legal firms, and it all comes back to that core job that Motion Audio is doing, which is collecting stuff from clients and folks like accountants, like lawyers. There's a lot of information they need from clients.
Lee Murray
00:06:28
Yeah. And you have the internal side of it, too, behind the scenes where you have to kind of organize and distribute that information. so yeah, I can see that being a very big benefit. So so did you start with kind of like agencies first in mind? Okay. We have a sort of like your minimum viable product was focused on this one target audience.
Lee Murray
00:06:48
And so that you can, you know, make it clear like this is going to work. And then you, you started to kind of expand to other types of verticals.
Sam Chlebowski
00:06:57
You're spot on. And the reason why we did that is that's where so I, I'm one of three co-founders of, Perry, who's our CEO. And then I have a CTO. and what where like, so much of our idea for motion audio came from was running agencies of our own, and that's what we knew. And we knew that there was a problem there. We knew after we did some early product validation that, hey, this is a problem that people really want solved. It's one of those hair on fire issues, especially for businesses. At a certain level of scale, if you are working with like a single client every month, there's other tools out there, quite frankly, like notion, maybe even click up or something like that that can do the job well enough. Right. but once you start to really like, be at that stage where you're working with ten, 20, 30, 50 or 100 clients simultaneously becomes really challenging.
Sam Chlebowski
00:07:55
that's where we started, because that's what we knew. I would say that, you know, even looking back, like one of our early mistakes is starting with the devil that we knew a little bit too much. Because what we've learned throughout the part, throughout the process of building and growing and marketing motions is, hey, there's a lot of other people that it turns out that have this problem and motions can solve that job really well.
Lee Murray
00:08:21
Yeah, well it's good. I mean, I think you guys were wise to start with one sort of target audience and define what your product does. it was close to home. So you knew you knew them. Well, and I think now that you've grown, it's great that you can you can offer it to other people who have similar problems. so you know why I wanted to talk to you about this idea of balancing organic and paid is because I've been wanting to have this conversation for some time, but I needed to find the right person that really had, you know, kind of a front row seat to organic and paid in.
Lee Murray
00:08:54
I think that from a little bit we've talked about when we got introduced, you have been growing your company over the last two, two years, essentially. and you're going into year three and you, you started from scratch zero. Right. And, and you have a pretty defined track record on what you've done with paid, what you've done with organic. And it seems like you're very thoughtful about, what you were doing. Now, of course, you had the marketing background, which helped a lot. so I think there's no, no better person to, to to take us through, you know, how you grew your company so far and how you thought about balancing these two. So let's start with year one. Take us through, you know, in detail from day one to, to, to, you know, day 365. And kind of looking back on that year, how did you think about deploying organic versus paid?
Sam Chlebowski
00:09:47
Yeah. And I might even take it back just a little bit farther for you because I think there's some helpful context there, which is day, I would call it -180.
Sam Chlebowski
00:09:56
So about six months, roughly before even a single line of code was written for motion. We were doing early product validation at that time. I became borderline obsessive with understanding the latest trends and the way that the process of marketing, not just for a SaaS company, but across the board, and how the content that people were using to get their brands, their products, their services in front of people was changing. One of the biggest things I saw early on was like, Holy cow, video is like, now what a blog post was five years ago. at the time, I was working as, head of growth at actually another startup. Well, kind of chipping away at motional on the side, and just became really, really invested in learning new strategies that I could deploy the day that we put our fingers down on the keyboards and started building motions. Because that's one thing that I think that in hindsight, we did really well is I had a plan going in and I knew that I wanted basically a couple of things.
Sam Chlebowski
00:11:11
I knew, number one, that the day we wrote our first line of code, I wouldn't have anything about the product I could necessarily share. Aside from the backstory of how and why we decided to build it, and where we see the vision of this product going. So that was day one of like the first information I wanted to get out there. I wanted to hit LinkedIn hard. I wanted to do a blog post, get it up on our website, which I developed in those six months leading up to, starting development on motion IO. and then after that, my plan was, hey, there's not a lot of other organic content that we can produce. What are the things that I could produce right now that might serve two purposes. And where we immediately landed was doing a podcast. We had a podcast at Brighter Vision, which was that, company that we that I helped grow to, 5000, concurrent customers we sold. We exited that business in 2020. and we did a podcast there, and it was a really great way.
Sam Chlebowski
00:12:13
not necessarily for capturing like leads and demands, but for building relationships with key players, movers, shakers in the industry we were working in, which was, mental health, for that business. so that's something that I knew I wanted to do. And what I quickly learned is that, hey, when you have a podcast and you know, you don't really have any other content you can put out about your product itself, that podcast, if you're doing a video version of that becomes inherently reusable across all of your other social channels. So I use that as sort of a launchpad to start trying some things out on our LinkedIn. We even created a TikTok, YouTube shorts and kind of learning what I was doing and learning. The approach was really instrumental early on. that said, we also knew that a part of our strategy would be paid acquisition. Paid acquisition is something I have done now for years. Facebook, Instagram ads, Google ads, LinkedIn, you name it. I've pretty much either use them right now or have used all of those channels at some point.
Sam Chlebowski
00:13:26
And we knew that it was a really great way to get initial validation for products is by, hey, throw up a landing page, take 500, a thousand bucks, at a campaign, run it, see where it goes. If you're bringing in leads with that messaging, it's a really good way to sort of test that. so I was doing both of those things really were in some ways like the focus of that first entire year. One of the roadblocks that we ran into, towards the end of that first year of building motioning is that and we were still in beta at this time. we weren't charging anybody for access, but we did manage to, from our paid ads, bring on a lot of free users at a pretty reasonable cost per lead. It was around 15 to $20, per lead per trial. Sign up for those free accounts. what we learned, though, is that what we were building wasn't something that people necessarily wanted to use in its current form with motion IO. Our initial concept in some ways is very similar to what we have now, but at that time, what we were trying to do was message our product as, hey, this is a project management platform where it's for clients, but then also businesses.
Sam Chlebowski
00:14:49
And that whole dual sided piece of our messaging really threw people off. The one feature that we knew people were using from that were our client tasks. And we also knew from all of this testing we had done with paid ads that people were really interested in portals where folks could complete tasks. So we basically burned the entire codebase to the ground and rebuilt it with just those two features. Gotcha.
Lee Murray
00:15:18
Okay. So let's let's take a pause there for a second and go back to that first blog post. What was that blog post about? Was it sort of like the mission statement philosophy, the why, or what was it about.
Sam Chlebowski
00:15:30
That first blog post? you were you covered essentially what it was. in that statement. It was. Yeah. Mission statement. Why we built it, how we're building it, how we're seeing it go.
Lee Murray
00:15:43
Now, what was that? Was the purpose of posting that for SEO, for, you know, traffic for leads or just to kind of put it out there and say, okay, you know, here's our thesis and that and nothing more than that.
Sam Chlebowski
00:15:58
So it was, I think, in some ways, all of those things. The you know, we also knew that we wanted a blog on our site. What we eventually learned is how effective blogging can still be. that happens in year two. I'll cover that in a little bit. Okay. but we knew we wanted a blog. We knew we wanted content on our website. So that was kind of that first initial, like, let's dip our toes into this. Let's get started. We don't have a really good idea of like, what other content we're going to put out besides this podcast. But let's get started there because that's something we know we can do from day one.
Lee Murray
00:16:33
Okay. And then you started the podcast. What was the name of the podcast?
Sam Chlebowski
00:16:35
The name of the podcast was Designing Growth. It might come back in the future. but we did 58 episodes of it.
Lee Murray
00:16:42
Yeah. Great name. and, so you started this with what intention was the intention to to sort of visually and verbally, talk through, you know, what it is that you're building and sort of build in front of people or what was your intention?
Sam Chlebowski
00:17:00
So it wasn't necessarily a build in public sort of podcast, more than it was a podcast that would allow us to speak to the industry that we were targeting.
Sam Chlebowski
00:17:15
other people who had had these problems and different voices that we could bring on to share their own problems and talk about, hey, what it's like growing an agency from scratch to, you know, tens, you know, 20 of employees, and do kind of both of those things. It was also an SEO play to like get some of that initial traction, at least going every podcast episode we put out, had a corresponding, blog where you could find the transcript there. But one of the things that I discovered while doing that is, hey, video for podcasts is huge. And that was actually the reason why we ended up starting the YouTube channel in the first place, because I wanted a place for our podcast to live on YouTube.
Lee Murray
00:18:04
Yeah, there's a lot of reasons to start to start a podcast, and that's why I ask, because and I think a lot of the ones you listed are, are the ones that I suggest why people should start one. It starts to create authority in your domain, in your space.
Lee Murray
00:18:17
Credibility builds trust with those people who are close to you and or can find, you know, find you. it it's a it's a lead sort of lead generation as well. If you're bringing on people you, you think could buy your product. SEO is obviously a big piece if you're doing it right. so I, I personally think that was a great way to start because it allows you to sort of get some inertia in in your organic marketing in a way that has so many layers. But you're doing one thing.
Sam Chlebowski
00:18:47
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think that it also provided me a really valuable learning opportunity. I learned how to edit videos. I learned how to create YouTube thumbnails, both things I'm still improving at. But you're doing that podcast, and especially doing it on YouTube really laid the foundation for that. And now if we want to do it again in the future, I know exactly the type of person that I need to hire to be able to produce the kind of quality that I want, and I know how to give them instruction to make that happen, where if I would, I actually tried to hire a person for a first like 1 or 2 episodes, and it was just a disaster.
Sam Chlebowski
00:19:25
Like the quality was terrible, didn't sound like something we would put out. It didn't flow like something either. So sure, I found it really valuable.
Lee Murray
00:19:35
Okay, so then you went on to paid and it makes sense why you would you'd get into paid pretty early on, because you want to get in front of a lot of people quickly. you want to test a lot of ideas. I mean, you have a good, you know, pretty good marketing background and knowledge of what to do. For what purpose? Did you have a plan that you sort of said, okay, you know, aside from the blog blogging, we're going to start this podcast for these reasons, and then we're going to shift to paid. Or was it more of like, okay, we're learning as we're building and let's deploy things as we're learning.
Sam Chlebowski
00:20:08
It was very much so. The latter of cool. We've built this product. We have a very basic MVP. Let's sit down and let's talk about what our messaging is going to be like for this product.
Sam Chlebowski
00:20:24
Let's how we're going to communicate what it does to people. Yeah. And one of the ways that we knew that we were going to going to be able to test is like what is effective? And should we even continue building this business was through paid ads. So as we as the product evolved over that first year, we tried out a whole bunch of different messages in our ad creative. one of the earliest ones was something along the lines of project management tools being broken for client work. Motion is going to fix it. That actually flopped fat flat on its face. And so we try to get the next message that we put out there was that client portal messaging, hey, bring all of your stuff into one central hub. And the leads just went crazy. that campaign, it was converting super well. We were waking up in the morning. It was like 20 new trial signups, you know, almost every single day. And that said, okay, we're on to something. I think we should go and continue to go in this direction.
Lee Murray
00:21:33
Gotcha. Okay. So, I think that's pretty clear roadmap for what happened in the first year, as you're then looking to go into year two. How did you shift your thinking as what is what it seems like is you've got your your MVP together now you have a focus, you have a target where there was a lot of discovery in year one from for just from a business model standpoint, as you entered year two, what was your thinking behind organic and paid?
Sam Chlebowski
00:22:03
Yeah. So and this was something hard to figure out. And it almost happened exactly at the end of that first year. There was a point where I had realized because as we had a product to market, there were additional things that I started adding on doing monthly release notes, doing, product update live streams, doing knowledge base articles. And we started talking about it and I was kind of just breaking down like, hey, here's how much time I'm spending on these podcast episodes every week. we could hire somebody. We could outsource parts of the the editing.
Sam Chlebowski
00:22:44
but even then, if we do that, I'm still investing a lot of time into it. And that's a person that I don't know if is worth us spending the budget on right now, because we're we're not seeing the tangible benefits. We needed to transition basically from brand marketing to results marketing, where that process of saying, like, hey, we're not looking for the brand exposure. We want tangible things that we can prove out different types of channels. So let's take a pause on the podcast. Yep. And at that point we really, really focused in because this was motion V2 al call it, where we felt really good about the messaging, about the product vision, about this platform for client onboarding and collaboration. We had those pillars in place and we said, let's focus a lot of our time on finding one additional channel at least, or at least, you know, one channel, one additional paid channel and then one organic channel that can work really well for us long term.
Lee Murray
00:23:54
And you were already running which paid channels.
Sam Chlebowski
00:23:56
So we were running in that first year. And one that we've never really stopped is Facebook and Instagram ads. It's so funny because everybody I feel like on my LinkedIn feed is always talking about how Facebook Instagram ads don't work for us. They work great. Yeah. maybe we just unlocked some really great targeting options, but they've always been our best performing channel.
Lee Murray
00:24:20
Nice.
Sam Chlebowski
00:24:21
We'd also try to experiment with Google ads. we've tried to that experiment like 2 or 3 different times. We always end up pausing it because the cost of conversion is just skyrocketed. Yeah, for us. And it just became not worth it. but the other channels that we launched in year two that we experimented with, Reddit ads, we tried that didn't really work for us. LinkedIn ads. We're actually doing LinkedIn ads again now, and we're seeing some, some decent results from it. Not nearly as good as Facebook, Instagram, as well as Cap Terra, advertising on Cap Terra has been something that's worked really well for us.
Sam Chlebowski
00:25:01
It was something we knew we wanted to try. That was another priority that was high on my list. As soon as I said, okay, we can go ahead and pause on the podcast so I can free up time. And what I focused on to make cap tier effective was like, I want to get every single one of our customers I know really likes us. I need to get them to leave a review. So I was doing, outreach, both some automated and then just, straight up like manual emails to people to get them to leave a review of us. And it worked incredibly well. After we had about 15, we started, advertising. And we've been, keeping a budget there ever since.
Lee Murray
00:25:41
Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. And it makes sense to with what you're building. did you on the Instagram and Facebook side, did you have an organic presence before you started running ads there, or did you start to build that while you were running ads?
Sam Chlebowski
00:25:56
Yeah, that's a great question.
Sam Chlebowski
00:25:58
That's a great question. So in the first year, I was really just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Yeah, we had an organic presence on Facebook and Instagram because I was, putting out like clips from the podcast on there pretty regularly, basically every new episode, 2 or 3 clips. Okay. but once we decided to stop doing that, I really had to think, like, long and hard of, like, what is going to go on these channels now? And what I started doing is, publishing things like our release notes early on. Okay. with just, like, a simple picture, a link to it. And then I was looking for other things that I could post, and I said, let me do a full tutorial video of motion. So let me just walk through every everything that is available. I'll put it up on YouTube. We have this YouTube channel already. What I ended up doing is I broke that out into like 5 or 6 different snippets that could highlight, like the most important features of people.
Sam Chlebowski
00:27:02
And what I saw reading through that is like how some of these features people are really interested in hearing more about other ones. They kind of missed the mark. Maybe I can try and republish something later. but there were a couple of those videos that started to see some traction and I said, okay, great. I'm going to double down on this, and I'm going to use that clip from that full tutorial video as inspiration from for another video on a similar topic. Yeah. And that really laid the foundation for much of our YouTube strategy today.
Lee Murray
00:27:35
Gotcha. Yeah. So you would take off of these conversations and sort of follow that thread and create content that was like that content.
Sam Chlebowski
00:27:45
Exactly, exactly. So basically long form version of that short form snippet. Yeah, I would put out.
Lee Murray
00:27:52
Yeah. Building that idea out because you know now more what your customer is going through, what they're looking to accomplish. And you can pick out these short term short form clips. You can also look at their, their performance to and say, okay, which ones do we want to pick out and dive into now would you create video or would you do blog posts or what kind of content would it just be? Short form reels.
Sam Chlebowski
00:28:18
So the foundation for everything was really long form content. Was doing that initial version of a long form tutorial video. Something that surprised me with YouTube and it's it's actually kind of funny. I talk about my brother is a pretty big YouTuber, but like in the cooking space, he looks just like me. Same last name. His name's Ethan. He's great. and I would talk to him about, like, YouTube and, like, you know. Hey, what are some ideas here? One of the things that he shared with me was like some of the best products, and this surprised me. He's like some of the best products that I follow that I look at. He's like, I think the number one video I go to on their channel is that like full length 20 minute tutorial video. Yeah. And I said, I would have always thought that that kind of thing was like too long for people to watch, but I, I tried it and it ended up working. So with that, I was able to pull out clips of that and start repurposing them the exact same way I had done with the podcast.
Sam Chlebowski
00:29:19
Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:29:20
That's awesome. That's a that's a great idea. So you would create longer form 20 minutes or so tutorials and then you pull out clips of those and post those on social.
Sam Chlebowski
00:29:31
Yep, exactly.
Lee Murray
00:29:32
Would you point back to those sort of episodes?
Sam Chlebowski
00:29:36
So with the when I was doing the podcast, yes, I would point back to the episodes, with the short form stuff. I honestly these days, like just let it stand on its own. Okay. al, like in our Instagram story, I'll post that. I'll republish that short or reel or whatever it is. and include a link to the full YouTube video. But besides that, I'm not, like too heavy handed on making sure it gets a link back. just because I know that our YouTube channel is linked in our bio so people will find it when they want it.
Lee Murray
00:30:07
So you guys probably still still have a relatively small team, right? So is all of this, all this, the two long, long form tutorial videos, the short form, everything that you're doing is that just you and your voice or using voice changers or are you, you know, how are you creating this content?
Sam Chlebowski
00:30:25
It's all me.
Sam Chlebowski
00:30:26
Yeah, it's all me. I use AI tools to help me out. things like, there's a great tool out there called Content at Scale that I use where I can kind of feed it some information and say, turn this into a YouTube script for me. I can use that as a foundation. and I do that for a couple of other things. But in terms of, like the editing, the recording, that's all me. it's something that it's so funny, like, as you do these things, you realize the areas where it can be better. Yeah. And there's definitely places where I can improve. But looking back, like what I've been happy with is just the output. and I think that that's a real benefit, like just even zooming out of having three co-founders instead of one, because we've been able to focus within our areas of expertise and not have to get pooled into overlapping circles. Right. when the time to ship something to focus on, something arises.
Lee Murray
00:31:24
Yeah. Okay. So then.
Lee Murray
00:31:26
So then what I'm hearing you say is your your focus was on the marketing while the other two founders were focused on something else.
Sam Chlebowski
00:31:33
Yep. Yeah. So, my co-founder Zach, his focus, he's our CTO. He's a absolute wizard of a developer. He is the man behind motional. The actual code that makes it run. Yeah. my co-founder Perry, he leads our sales and most of our customer success initiatives. Okay.
Lee Murray
00:31:55
Okay. Yeah. That's great. I mean, what a what a, you know, great team to have working together. Everyone's kind of, you know, doing what they're, they're good at. during the second year. Did you focus any of your effort on SEO?
Sam Chlebowski
00:32:10
Yes. And this is actually what I was going to talk about next, because it was something that really came out of nowhere as being immensely successful for us. The first year we knew that, we knew we wanted to build an organic search presence. We knew it's something that worked for us previously.
Sam Chlebowski
00:32:30
The hardest part of that first year, if I'm being frank, is like it was just hard to be able to come up with content that would rank well. We were using tools like Ahrefs, but I was so tied up in, you know, getting our podcast episodes come out that my output was a little bit slower with like, organic blog content than I would like it to have been. in hindsight, that's something I would would have probably focused a little bit more closely on. I think it was a little bit of a mistake on my end. Instead of trying to do a podcast every week, I probably should have been doing 1 or 2 a month and then allocating the rest of that time to doing a blog post and building out just general content on our site. And that was another reason why we ended up deciding to take a pause on the podcast, until we had the resources to make it a little bit less demanding. Sure. because we have just seen incredible traction of with our organic search presence.
Sam Chlebowski
00:33:33
I think we have month over month this year. we've increased search traffic nearly 20% every single month.
Lee Murray
00:33:41
Wow. That's awesome. What would you attribute the success to? Anything specific?
Sam Chlebowski
00:33:47
The success is having a strong strategy. I think at the end of the day, having a hypothesis and then a strategy that flows down from that. Pivoting away from it when it doesn't work, sticking with it when it does, and where we really found a lot of success is finding a industry plus a use case of motion IO. And if we can kind of pair those things together it's going to it's been really Successful. For us, it's our most successful blog post. By and large. So for example, we put out a bunch of content recently about our WordPress plugin that's kind of that perfect harmony of industry, plus some other tool plus motion IO. that's been one of our best YouTube videos so far. It's one of the most visited pages on our website where you can download and get setup information for our WordPress plugin.
Sam Chlebowski
00:34:49
and that was something that I'll actually be very candid, is something we've only figured out like 6 or 7 months ago. Yeah. Until then, the organic search growth really just like slogged along at a at a snail's pace. So my advice there is also stick with it, keep trying things like until you come across something that works because SEO is going to seem like it's going nowhere until it does work. In my experience.
Lee Murray
00:35:14
That's such a valuable tip. I think you're giving people is that framework of industry plus use case because inside of that is very specific, valuable messaging. And I think that you can create blog posts, you can create video and create all kinds of content around use cases inside a specific industry. And so I guess for everyone listening, that is to two general, it would maybe serve you well to take a few months and focus in on one niche. because those use cases are going to be invaluable to the person searching for it and finding it and engaging with it.
Sam Chlebowski
00:35:54
I think that's a perfect distillation of that, Lee, because, I mean, it's exactly what we've seen.
Sam Chlebowski
00:36:01
And I think that that is why people say that SEO doesn't work anymore. It's because they're still using these hyper general keywords where what people really want, and I think what or how organic video content has shifted the way written content works as well as people want this like very personalized sort of 1 to 1 experience. They want to feel like you know what you're talking about. You either know my industry or what I do, or you are like me in some way that I relate to you. And if you can find a way to marry that with your blog content, I think it's a phenomenal foundation for an SEO strategy.
Lee Murray
00:36:44
Yeah, 100%. And what comes to mind is the, the last book, I think, or maybe second to last book that Seth Godin put out talking about. I want to like, basically, I want to do business with people like me. You know, it's all about that fit. And when they find a something that's useful, that is speaking to them, and then the rest of it goes along and there's a fit for the brand and, you know, all of that.
Lee Murray
00:37:11
And then of course pricing and etc. then that's where you have your best, you know, quickest sales, I think, Acquisitions and then then retention for the long term.
Sam Chlebowski
00:37:23
Yeah. Yeah. And even just like for another example of how we've deployed this strategy, one of the things that we knew people were using in our industry were, I note takers, I use one. Nearly every person I speak to uses one, especially in the agency space. And they wanted to have those transcripts basically flow into motion automatically. Okay. We built a way to do it for them. And as soon as we had that live and ready to go, I was just like, I got my grubby little marketing hands all over that because I'm like, this is perfect. Boom. YouTube video blog. Let's get this thing out. Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:38:02
It's huge. I mean, now that you say it, it makes so much sense because, you know, there's all these little steps to the things that you have to do.
Lee Murray
00:38:10
And I, I know using it, it's like, okay, well that that happened. Now where does that go? It's just sort of there. You have to go do work and labor to get back to it.
Sam Chlebowski
00:38:20
Yep. Yeah. And I think that that's also a even just a tertiary point on that of like the power of just knowing your customers and speaking to your customers. Had we not been talking to them, I would have never known they wanted to do that. I would have never known it was important to them. Right. and then we were able to come up with a solution that really was able to marry what we were doing in product, with what we knew would work well in marketing, because also we would look in Ahrefs and we would see, hey, AI meeting notes is a really nice keyword. How can we take that keyword and narrow it down to be something that we know our customers are interested in?
Lee Murray
00:38:57
Okay, so back to this idea of balancing paid and organic.
Lee Murray
00:39:01
You had this success with the industry plus use case kind of framework. Did you run with that on the paid side then?
Sam Chlebowski
00:39:10
So not necessarily okay. the way that we've really been able to explore messaging on our paid side is honestly through really just sitting down and coming up with like together of like our messaging, what we think could work and then rapidly testing and iterating. So anytime we launch a new campaign, what I will do in kind of my process for it is I say, let me take let me come up with four different concepts for a unique concepts. Let's discuss as a team based on what we're hearing in sales, what we're hearing in success. Let's decide how or what piece of creative best fits what we're hearing on the ground, and the reason why people are searching for motion. I o I've tried a couple of times to take like best performing blog posts, best performing, Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts and convert them into ad creative in one way or another. It's something I still I, I think that there's still opportunity there, but it's something that I haven't been able to see success in quite yet.
Sam Chlebowski
00:40:20
Yeah. but on the other hand, some of our ad campaigns through the process of like, rapid iteration of just like, hey, focusing specifically on the pain that we help solve is the one thing that ties them all together. and then the messages in between them are a little bit different each time, but, like, that's what we really focus on with our paid initiatives.
Lee Murray
00:40:42
Yeah, I like that. It's interesting because, you know, the intent you would think would be the same for someone. Well, I guess if you're doing social ads, that's different than I was. I was thinking paid search and then organic rankings, those that that intent is going to be the same on that page, for when they show up there. So then if you took your organic and put it into Google Ads, you might see some success there. you know, from the success you saw on organic. but then if you're talking about social, you're you're exactly right. I think that's a completely different intent, that's happening there because you're stopping them on a on a feed.
Sam Chlebowski
00:41:19
Yeah. And I think one thing that's interesting too, to share about, like this breakdown is so we, I keep track of all of our lead sources, where they come from, who signs up from for a trial meticulously. Every single day I go in our CRM, I'm looking, I'm sorting things. at the end of every month, I break down where people are finding us. We do. We use a combination of like self attributed lead source data, as well as like what we're able to pull in from UTM, GA, etc.. what we've found is that search and paid are really two different buyer personas. Our the people coming to us from search are going to be much more like middle to top of funnel, where the people coming to us from paid channels are much more towards the bottom end of the funnel, meaning they saw an ad, they had some pain. They're ready to go. Sure.
Lee Murray
00:42:23
Now the caveat to that though, my question is, is the content you're posting on social those social ads bottom of the funnel driven, or is it because what it would lead me to believe is if they're more mid top of the funnel on search, that is due to what they're searching.
Lee Murray
00:42:41
Right. so if you're that's the question is on social the social ads, is it bottom of the funnel type of content.
Sam Chlebowski
00:42:49
Yeah. It's a really great question. And honestly, yeah it is within paid. It's totally bottom of the funnel. I think that there's probably more we can be doing to expand our paid funnel. We've tested a couple of things that are more top of the funnel. One of the ones that we're going to be experimenting with soon is we have this new, AI standard operating procedure generator that, we built, basically, after hearing folks say, hey, you know, it'd be great if I could just use an AI tool to build out various tasks workflows for my teams in motion. Io we developed this tool that, you don't have to have a motion IO account to use, but, we'll generate you an SOP, and then if you'd like, you can take the SOP it creates and turn that into a motion IO project. Or you can just save it and store it away wherever you keep the rest of your team files.
Sam Chlebowski
00:43:49
But that was something we want to experiment with next. in terms of like expanding the paid funnel, because it's a really great point that you raise is we do it's not necessarily the channels, but more of the messages that we're delivering on those channels that account for that difference.
Lee Murray
00:44:06
Right? Yep. Super interesting. So if I'm recapping, it's it's not that you necessarily had a specific plan in place other than the strategy of staying close to the customer and, you know, asking them what they wanted, which is that's what a lot of marketers should be doing. So, you know, good job on that, because it's I think sometimes it's easier to sit inside of the room with, you know, the other two people and think about what it is that you want to do. but get it staying close to the customer, asking them for their feedback. and then you, you did sort of balance this, this, you know, experimenting, which again, I would just raise to say testing and experimenting is a key component of marketing.
Lee Murray
00:44:51
So doing that both on the on the organic side and the paid side, but leaning into paid to get quicker results. I think I think how you approached is, is, is is great. I mean, you're learning you're learning the key things that you need to know about your customer now so you can improve your product And it is very clear after, you know what, 24 months, very clear what you do and who it's for, which is is honestly a hard thing to do when you're building something brand new. so, so kudos for that. Now, as we move past year two and we look into the coming year, what's your plan now? You know, you've had time to, like, kind of look back over all of this and say, what are we going to do now with what we know?
Sam Chlebowski
00:45:39
Yeah. So the big things, highest priority on my roadmap for the next year is the we've started to see some really nice traction with YouTube. And it's really surprising because if you look at our YouTube channel, you might be saying like, what is this guy talking about? Like these videos have 700, 800, a thousand views.
Sam Chlebowski
00:46:01
The thing is, for a software product, you don't have to have a lot of use to have it be a worthwhile channel. You can you can post a single video. Hey, if it generates 200 leads. And the only cost was your labor. Let's say you're paying, you know, $200 a lead on a paid platform. You can do the math yourself. It's like, that's valuable. Yeah. so that's number one is expanding the paid channel. number two is keeping up, just consistently shipping new blog posts, new articles, new support docs that are customers are going to value, in terms of channels, we still want to find one additional paid channel where I think that that could happen is we want to run some more experiments with Google ads again to see that, okay, now that our organic search presence has picked up on Google, which was not the case when we last experimented with Google ads, now that that's picked up, will it help prop up Google ads in some way? Is it now a good time to try that again? Because that's something I see with.
Sam Chlebowski
00:47:10
And it's so hard to attribute these things, but I know that whenever I post a video that performs well by our standards on Instagram, I can count on our cost per lead the rest of that week being at least a couple of dollars lower. so continuing to do all of those things, expanding to, you know, experimenting with Google, we'd really like to get LinkedIn ads to work as well. our two high priority. But the great news is that we've found our channels, and now it's just a matter of, you know, continuing to, succeed in them.
Lee Murray
00:47:47
Yeah. Optimizing and optimizing them. and I love that you're saying this about your YouTube channel, because especially in the B2B context, because that's the world that you're in. You know, it's not about raising the number of views that helps, but it's really more about connecting the right people to that content. And I would say the same thing for podcasts. It's, you know, I don't even look at my stats for my podcast.
Lee Murray
00:48:12
I mean, I will if I need to for some reason. But, you know, I don't because it's not really that's like a third or fourth reason why I would do this or even probably fifth or sixth. You know, I'm doing it for all the other reasons we mentioned. and from a B2B context, it's very valuable to be way beyond the views or the subscribers or followers or any of that. So that's a huge point.
Sam Chlebowski
00:48:38
I could not agree more. And that's something I quite frankly, really used to beat myself up over of not seeing like a high number of views, whether it was on a video, whether it was traffic to, a page. I think in any kind of organic content, it's like if you're just listening to what people are interested, you're doing some, you know, keyword research to validate that. Yeah, over time that's going to be successful. Yeah, in some way or another for you, especially in the B2B projects.
Lee Murray
00:49:08
Yeah, there's so many strategic ways of of utilizing long form content like that.
Lee Murray
00:49:12
Aside from the views and what I'm interested in. You know, if you look at your you mentioned your brother has a YouTube channel, and, you know, pretty successful, in his world, the views matter because that's how he's making it work, right? I'm curious though, like, how did you get two brothers that are both in marketing? Because that's that's really the business he's in.
Sam Chlebowski
00:49:33
Yeah, it is. it's I think it all honestly comes back to our dad. He was, So my dad's a doctor by trade, but where he really shined was in the business aspects of running a practice. And he was, a key member of this organization that helped build out, basically go from a network of, like, one family practice office to I think now they have like 40 or 50 or 60 across the state of Pennsylvania. and he had always told us, like, hey, ownership in in whatever job you are working, whatever you're doing. Ownership is the real path to wealth. And I think like as soon as we were in college onwards, he was really like repeating that, really repeating that with us.
Sam Chlebowski
00:50:21
And I think talking about what he had done with his career, was really a way to inspire us, even if that wasn't his intention at that time. But he would tell us about all of these things. And I think that that's why we both ended up both as entrepreneurs.
Lee Murray
00:50:38
That's awesome. I mean, and you guys are on your way, I mean, to to, you know, very much successes in that world. So, you know, it's awesome having you on. Thanks so much for this story. I mean, thanks for sharing your your personal experience. it's been very helpful for me to, to kind of peel back and look at what you've been doing. so, you know, thanks for sharing that with our listeners.
Sam Chlebowski
00:51:00
Yeah. And thank you so much, Lee, for all of the thoughtful questions you've asked. It has me not only reflecting, but like looking forward at the year ahead and saying, how could I do things a little bit differently? So thank you so much for being a great person to talk to.
Lee Murray
00:51:14
Yeah. No problem. Okay. So if we want to send people to you, I know we got to send a motion bio. Where else can we send them? Yeah.
Sam Chlebowski
00:51:22
So emotional. You can sign up for a free trial if you want to try us out. No credit card required. if you want to connect with me, on LinkedIn, that's a great place. I respond to every single message that isn't, you know, a bot or somebody trying to sell me cold outreach services.
Lee Murray
00:51:39
Yeah, exactly.
Sam Chlebowski
00:51:40
and as well, like, I throw out my work email maybe a little bit too generously, but, it's Sam at motions. If you want to get in touch with me. There you.
Lee Murray
00:51:51
Go. Cool. This is great. And, we'd love to stay in touch. And maybe a year from now, take a look back at what you've done differently.
Sam Chlebowski
00:52:00
Absolutely, Lee. Thanks again for having me on and hope you have a great day.
Lee Murray
00:52:04
Awesome. Thanks.