With so many marketing software tools available, it can be difficult to identify which ones can really shake the needle. marketing without breaking the bank.
This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, the founder of Voy Media , Kevin Urrutia,talks about three lesser-known marketing tools that have made a big difference to his business. A self-taught marketer who studied computer science, Kevin loves discovering new tools that can save him time and give him access to information he can use to imp rove its marketing results.
In this episode, he explains how he uses Visual Ping, Phantom Buster, and Zapier to get big results on a low budget.
Check out the full episode or read the tranion below for more details.
Resources for this episode:
Kevin and Kathleen recording this episode Tranion
Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And today, my guestis Kevin Urrutia, who is the founder of Voy Media. Welcome Kevin.
Kevin (00:37): Hey, thanks for inviting me. be here.
Kathleen (00:39): I am really delighted to speak with you. I think we have a fun topic. But before we start our topic of the day, can you tell my listeners a little more about yourself and your journey, what you are doing now and what Voy Media is?
Kevin (00:55): Yeah. So my name is Kevin Urrutia and my experience in the part that makes more sense throughout the conversation is that I went to college for IT. So, I've always been in programming, doing software, softwa re design, and really my, when I was doing computer science, it's a lot like C more more Java, but really what I'm into. turned was no longer the front-end. So like JavaScript, HTML, and a lot of thatwas also to do with graphic design. So I also studied graphic design at university. So, it 's kind of like the visual slash programming aspect that has always appealed to me.
Kathleen (01:29): It 's an interesting combination.
Kevin (01:32): So I love the computer stuff, but I knew I didn't want to do like the backend stuff because I was like, no, we'll see that. I wanna build stuff and see stuff that people will see and can be like, Oh, that sounds cool. So this is really where I did this. And then after college, I went to San Francisco. So I lived there for four or five years. I would tell people like me from New York, San Francisco was like Mecca, like seven years ago. And when I found a job there, I was like, yeah, like I needed to go. I had never traveled there once, as in ghiking. But as I knew, just reading stuff like tech articles, reading these tech founders, I was thinking that there must be something in Silicon Valley that I need to figure out how I can do it.
Kathleen (02:18): You have felt the gravitational pull.
New speaker (02:20): I had to. Yeah. And I was just like, even to myself, like me, so I'm in NYC and got a job offer from ESPN and I tell people all the time, like a great place to go at that point in my life, it was like dating this girl. And she also found a job. She also felt like she always went to UConn and she was like, it 's perfect for us. But in my mind, I was just like, Oh man, like this was gonna be a tough decision. Like I'm like I told her, like, I don't wannas go to the yukon like this. I don't want to go to Connecticut. Essentially. I do not. I think it 's like my dream is to go to Silicon Valley and I will see, I will continue to apply for jobs.
Kevin (02:57): They will take me there. And obviously we didn't stick together because the big guys changed like your goals. But at least for me, when I went to Silicon Valley, it was everything I imagined, it was what I wanted and what I wanted to do.
And it really made me want to do more entrepreneurship, more startup stuff, because not everyone there liked me and that made sense. This led me to do startups and they do competitions, they just build stuff. And then I kind of came back to New York because after five years I was like, Hey, I want to go back and build my own thing. And thenthere i built a section in my first business, which was a first like a real business in between. I liked to build stuff.
But there I was building a cleaning business called Maid Seller s. And we did a lot of house cleaning. And then I did eCommerce and now what I do as a concept before I did Voy media, whether we help other brands, eCommerce companies, or information products to advertise online. So, it 's kind of like the journey of going from programming similar to where I am marketing now.
Kathleen (03:56): I love it. Me, this is, this is really interesting because I have talked to a lot of marketers over the past three years by hosting this podcast. I mean, I think I'm almost on episode 180 and you know you startto see patterns emerge when you talk to so many people. And one of the patterns I've seen is that a lot of times some of the top marketers that I interview aren't trained as marketers.
They studied other things. And I think I have this theory about it and that is, and, and my theory is that it has to do with the best marketers, whatever their background they could be trained as marketers, or they might not be, but the best are people who are simply eager students of the human spirit.
How do people think, how do people make decisions? What motivates them, right? Because it makes you so good at marketing. If you are fascinated by people and, and, and what makes them tick, you can be a good marketer. So I just think it 's interesting that you comez of this kind of environment.
Kevin (04:57): Yeah. And I think also, for me too, like I have the same thought with some sort of, at least for me with like any sort of thing that requires like programming. Right. For example, I programmed a lot in Silicon Valley and I worked with some really smart programmers and I asked them like, Hey, what's your background?
Like, Oh, I went to college for design or writing, but they're so good at programming. And I was just like, wow, that 's like crazy. Like, you're really good at it. Because you understand. And it's like, I would look at their code. My roommate is an example. Like he would we would talk about a problem and how he would break it down and be like, well, there's something in your mind that looks like, I, just, like, I can't think of co programseven that.
Kevin (05:39): Because you get that kind of thinking. And for me, marketing was that when I was in marketing I was like, Oh I understand how people think, that's why I turn to more marketing. Because even though it 's Silicon Valley, I was like programming in my mind.
I was just like, wow I'll never be the best programmer I had to love, figure I know what I'm doing well, because I know that like I talk to other people , I'm just like, oh my god you're so much better than me. Like I just needed to find something different. Right. So
Kathleen (06:07): Well, and the other thing I think is great about you. And one of the reasons I'm so excited to chat with you is that you have this IT background because marketing has evolved so much around your neck.rs from the last couple of decades and now, I don't think it's an overstatement to say that, you know, every marketer has to have some degree of ability to work with code.
As I always joke, I know enough CSS to be dangerous, no. Since I can get in there, manipulate the code, and spot problems in the code, I am by no means a programmer. But like, you need to know these things these days. And that's probably why you're so good at some of the things we're going to talk about today. These are cool tools that you might not be using.
And for those who are listening, I love this topic because nothing turns me on more than when I discover an obscure software tool that does something that previously has been like a manual slog for me , or I didn't think it was possible.
Kathleen (07:16): And like, there's just something thatexcites you so much to know, Oh my God, that 's the easy button here. And then that can also open up all kinds of possibilities for different things that you can do with your marketing that you maybe couldn't do before.
And there are, I have a ton of tools that I discovered that got me excited, but I found it really fun to listen to you talk about some of the tools you use. So today we are going to dig into this and we are going to hear about some of the most awesome like hacks and shortcuts that you have discovered with tools.
Kathleen (07: 49): What's the first tool you want to highlight?
Kevin (07:52): Yes. So the first tool that I really love to use and that we still use to this day is called Visual Ping. There is also another alternative to this which you can use.vez do is called Phantom Buster. But Visual Ping is a really awesome tool that is easy to use and what it is, it is basically a screenshot tool.
And basically the tool goes out there on any website, let's say google.com and every day at 9:00 am. I'm going to take a screenshot of the, the homepage and what it does, it looks basic but what's cool about the tool is what let's say today Yeah, you know, Friday, Saturday, Google updates, maybe a button, the tool, then an email saying to you, Hey, there's been a change on this website.
And that will highlight the changes. Because they will make like a comparison or a difference between yesterday and today and the next day.
Kevin (08:41): And it sounds so basic, but really it's kind of like the support, it's like once you figure it out somehow, oh that's interestingthat it can keep up with the basic changes. And now the way we used it here and made salespeople was what we are competing with to clean up local businesses. So what we did was we had the tool just kind of a competitor price page tracker. And when we saw that their prices for the pages would change, we would then be informed.
And that's a good thing about what you said before. It's like, you can check it everyday, but like after checking maybe five days, you'll probably be like, eh, they're not going to change and you kind of forget, no. It's like, ah, it's like, nothing is going to happen. Right. It's like, it's the same, but you don't see any change. You kinda like, Oh, I'll check it out like next month.
Kevin (09:21): And then next month you forget, you wereis busy. But like this tool, you will only receive an email saying: Hey, this company has changed our prices or something has changed. Right. They will change the prices. Exactly. And then you can go and see and maybe update your internal spreadsheets, because we also have a spreadsheet of every price, every competitor that we have, that won't be anywhere we are in the market.
But yes, it's kind of like one aspect of using Visual Ping, another way of using it. And the way I like using it the most is that I like to track Google search results with this tool. So you type your keyword into google, you put like, you know, for example, for cleaning housekeeping services in New York, I like to see who is the top three and where we are changing in those rankings because that Google's rankings change every day.
Kevin (10:03): So you go probably get email everyday, but at least for me i'm like, i 'd like to know, how are you moving up and down especially when google has these massive updates where you went up and down and just follow the small changes made by the competitor.
I think people know that when you go to google you see like the blue title, like the header, and then you see like the deion, these are very useful for classification. So it's interesting to see what the first two companies are doing. So maybe you can change it on your website.
So Visual Ping, great tool. i like this one. It's free, not really free for a certain amount of use, like any tool, but if you could pay more for the credits and really, if you think about tracking differences, it is really good.
Kevin (10:42): And the reason that this tool came to my mind was because coding there is a website called GitHub and every time you make a change they will show you like, Hey, that 's is the code that was before, it was a code that is now. And it 's so helpful to see like when something breaks.
So you think of this as your website too. If something changes, maybe someone, someone, your team has changed something if you work in a large marketing team, like let's see how landing pages change for yourself or, or something conversion thing falls. So that's one way to think about this tool when you want to track the differences.
Kathleen (11:11): I, so it was really interesting for me because I feel like in all the bands in which I am, there is a lot of talk about the genre, Ooh, what analyzer softwaree competitive should we use? And there are a lot of big players in this market and this software isn 't cheap. And one of the things people use it for is exactly this use case. They use it to track how their competition is updating their websites.
And I love the fact that this is one way to do it for almost no money, because not everyone can afford to spend. I don't even know how much some of these rigs cost, but I think it's over a thousand dollars per month, let's say it's a major investment. And unless you do something with that information to really, you know, drive a huge ROI, it's not worth it.
And so, here is a situation where you may be disjointed. You can still do the same type of competitive analysis, but you can just do it with Visual Ping. And I vtell them, I feel like my brain is pulling, because there is probably a t and other ways to use it.
But I especially like tracking pricing pages or really liking all pages on competitor websites for the messaging changes you know about, looking at the product pages to see how they perform update the language on their product. If you have a competing product, those are all,
Kevin (12:30 pm): Yeah, exactly. There are so many ways to do it, but yeah, that's exactly why I found the tool useful because I want the competitor analysis software, but often times it's great, super expensive and want you as one feature among the 30 features they have. And you're just like, I'm not going to pay 5k for it. For example, let me pay $ 30 per month.
Then it 's a bit of manual work, but it ' s coeven the rambling way of doing it. And once you can do it now, it's like you are, you are, you are kind of limitless with the ideas you sometimes have. And then it makes you think, why do these software charge you so much? Like, it 's easy, it ' s like, this is what I think. I'm like, it's a simple tool. As if it 's so vast. Yeah.
Kathleen (13:06): Yeah. Now, earlier when you were talking about Visual Ping, you mentioned that there is another tool called Phantom Buster that can do the same. I knew about Phantom Buster. And this is one of those where I found it and was like, it 's the coolest thing. Because that's a lot. It does a lot of things beyond what Visual Ping does. So, let's start talking about Phantom Buster. I 'm curious how you use it.
Kevin (13:31): Yeah. Donc here. So Phantom Buster is considered visual, Visual Ping like screenshots do. This is just a feature of Phantom Buster. Phantom Buster is like the way to describe it, it's like anything you can do, like on a computer, they can, with a web browser, automate everything for you.
And some ideas that you can thin k about like, yes, fan ambassador.com. It's a great website, but let's say at least one of the ways we use it here at home is that we do a lot of Facebook ads with Phantom Buster. The tool will actually like it to call itself like a headless browser.
We're basically like behind the scenes, we're going to log in, into their system, right? Wherever they use you enter your Facebook credentials, it will connect to your Facebook account and then you can give it a list of Facebook pages.
Kevin (14: 19): Remember that Facebook Pages can be, your competitors can be yours, your own ads. Let's say you are hired to work with the agency. You can say, hey, like I wanna see what ads they're creating. And then it will go to the ad library, at least for us. Because it 's an important part of the page. And then it will take a screenshot of all the ads you serve. And then you can actually save them to an Excel sheet.
So visually sorry, Phantom Buster is like this automation chain. So like I'm going to take a log, you go in, take a screenshot and then it'll say like, Hey, let me say all these urls in an excel sheet. And then in your Excel sheet again with Excel has macros. Now you can do a bunch of other things as well. And like, say like what's the text on it.
Kevin (15:01): But basically it's kind of like the core of Phantom Buster, where, and again, it's just one thing in Phantom Buster, you can do a lot more. Another thing that we saw, we saw right, brick wall before too, is I was telling you, it's like, let's say you have a mailing list of people you want to contact.
You can actually put these first names and emails into an Excel sheet. Phantom Buster will then read this data. And potentially, let's say you want to find them on LinkedIn Elk. We try to find their LinkedIn profile and then put that profile in your URL. So now if you're doing some cold outreach, then you can message them on LinkedIn. So basically you see this whole process like, like SDR work can be automated. So Phantom Buster helps.
Kevin (15:39): So as Ithink, it's like doing a task over and over again, try to see if Phantom Buster can do it for you. And there are a lot of these built-in automations, but you can code it as well. And it 's a powerful expandable. It 's like you can code all things. And the reason I think this is so important is that people probably know when you're doing all this kind of scratching basically right. Scratch the data.
Sometimes you can be gender paralyzed, say LinkedIn by Phantom. Buster has similar proxies that allow you to kind of limit and strangle yourself so that you can do a hundred at a time, but it won't do like in the next minute, it's okay Say like, okay, let's wait five minutes. It's okay, you don 't like to be banned.
So Phantom Buster is smart enough to know that and really wants to work with you pto do your tests. So that's a way of thinking about it, at least for us Facebook tracking is so important. As again, this is competitive research. We want to know what ads other companies are doing, how they are doing it. If someone looks different, we'll come in and say, okay, maybe let's copy this ad and see why they're doing it, why they're making this change.
Kathleen (16:43): There is definitely an aspect of Phantom Buster that is about using your powers for good and not for evil. Because I have heard a lot of people talk about its use with reference to LinkedIn, for example, like, and one of the use cases that I have heard is, you know, if, for example , if you 'S there is a certain LinkedIn group and you like it, everyone in that group is an awesome qualified prospect or everyone with an X job title is a great perspective for me you can scratch profiles, get all email addresses.
And, but then it's like what you do with it. That 's kind of the question, right? And I mean, for me, you could do ads to match the audience. For me it's, you know, on other platforms potentially. You know, what I wouldn't want to do is like a cold extension email all or you could come up with a list for your SDR to do. And it 's just a faster way to build that target list, but it ' s so interesting and there are so many different ways to use it. So did you use it any other way than these?
Kevin (17:45): So other ways we use it obviously are screenshots, other ways we use that too, a big one we used to do, it was probably kinda like whatwas once four, it's like Instagram automation is a big one, on Phantom Buster
Kathleen (17:57): In what way ?
Kevin (18:00): So basically what you can do with it, same with like, before you can log into your Instagram account, and then maybe you could kinda like, if you like hashtags you can, it will come in and look like posts. And then that would at least help you appear more in the algorithm. And then people would say like, oh who's kevin loving all my posts.
Let me go to its content. Interesting. Let me go, let me go follow him back. So there is a way to automate this kind of process similar to that of people knowing who you are because you will like their content. Stuff like that weren't really used before. It doesn't work really well anymore. Instagram has kind of like said, no, as we can detect this type of stuff.
So it was working great. I remember four years ago Instagram had no limit on how many people you could follow. So people were finding like thousands of people in a minute and it's just like, Oh my God. Oh, the followers.
Kathleen (18:50): And it 's, these are examples of marketing like spoiling everything, no. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Kevin (18:57): Like, thats what I said, Phantom Buster is, there is all this stuff you can use, but it 's, it ' s kind of like anything. This is how you use it. If you want to do it the natural way, you can do it. But then again, if you go crazy you're just going to be abandoned. So what's the point of using these tools if you can'twill only be a month, no. It 's like anything. Right,
Kathleen (19:13): Right. Alright, so we have Visual Ping. We have Phantom Buster. What else do you have in your back pocket?
Kevin (19:20): Another, another one that we really like to use is this one. sort of a mixture of two things. Zapier. People know Zapier. Zapier is a bit, thinking of Zapier is a bit like the non-visual way of Phantom Buster. With Zapier, companies actually need to like to develop an API or application programming interface to work with each other.
And so Zapier allows it. And the Zapier thing, it's kind of like, it's safer because you kind of don't like scratching Zapier and saying: Hey, no, these companies that have been on our plate -form because they are allowed to be here. So Zapier is a bit like a safe card of thisyou way. But how we, how we did it, how we use Zapier here, in many ways, like my zap is like crazy. Like I think I wouldn't charge 500 per month because I have so many zaps.
Kevin (20:10): Here are a few ways I have used it for my cleaning business. So basically we here in New York only clean certain zip codes. So in Zapier, when we get a new reservation or a new cleaning in Zapier, the reservation will go through Zapier, Zapier will then scratch what kind of API does the zip code.
And then we will continue doing as a corresponding pattern in Zapier. And we'll say, hey, if that's the case, if that zip code isn't in our target service area, message our customer service saying, hey, this customer just booked a cleaning, but he's not our service area called them. They can therefore cancel the reservationin this way. It's like a better one, instead of like the customer service rep, reading, every booking that comes in and fair, or specific, and it helps us with the same productivity of customer service, because now we know that too.
And the reason it was useful to us is that we wouldn't recognize this type of booking until it does, let's say the day is breaking and the customer is. It's like, Hey, why don't you tell us? So it's like, you see how, like, some of this stuff is because you just need a solution. So that's one way we use it.
Kathleen (21:11): It reminds me, it reminds me so much of an interview I did. My God. I can't remember when it was a long time ago with a guy named Connor Malloy from Chi City Legal. It's a Chicago law firm and it's him and just his partnaire. They are two lawyers. They don't have any staff or anything.
And him, it was such a good interview because he basically automated his entire business using Zapier. And it 's super impressive what he was able to do with it. And I just, always loved this episode. And I talk about it a lot because it's a great example of you don't need a big team, a big budget, or fancy software to do really cool things. . And it 's the same.
Like, you know, you don 't need to have a very sophisticated marketing automation platform or a lot of money to spend on your tech stack. Like, I think you are, you talk about a lot of similar things to what Connor did. And, and I, it turns me on because I like solutions that are accessible to everyone.
Kevin (22:11): This is why Zapier, I thinkuthis is so powerful because once you are so fun ny, because after we did a few, some automations in the company and like other team members started to watch, they're like, they're trying to automate everything. I'm like, alright. Say, relax, relax. Because then you realize like, basically you realize, Oh, I don't, I don't have to do any work.
Kathleen (22:30): Robots run my business. And then you have these nightmares about Zapier breaking up and your whole business coming to a head.
Kevin (22:37): For us it 's like, this is, this is what our nightmare, because even like, a bit what you said before. So we have our booking platform for the cleaning company. And we just said like, hey we don 't need emails anymore because of the copuzzled emails, as all reservations go through Zapier.
We have another Slack that says, whenever there is a reservation, it will go through Zapier. And so basically another, another zap we did with Zapier was that similar to what I said before, by protecting the zip code, we can also detect the address. And then we will put the address as if we are on New York street. And then we will just have a link automatically, we will link to the StreetEasy address. And then the customer service rep can go and see, Hey, does that booking size match the actual house? And if it works well, we don't do anything.
Kevin (23:19): If we don't, we need to call a customer service customer and say: Hey look, we've booked a room, but your house is a nice room. What exactly are you looking for? Is it like a room or an Airbnb?And then it helps us with that. So like I said, it 's pretty cool. Yeah. So all of this stuff was like stuff we do automatically.
We are like manually. It's like, okay, like Zapier, if you just give us the link, then we click and open. So that's the great thing about Zapier. Other ways we have used it for us too is kind of like when people contact us, at least for media boys, Zapier has this thing called lead score. It is powered by another software called Mad Kudu. So Mad Kudu is super expensive. And it 's kind of like a lead scoring platform.
Kevin (24:01): A lot of big companies are using it, but they have a partnership with Zapier that they are fueling. Zapier's free tool called lead score behind the scenes. And you get a hundred free users per month. And fundamentallynt, lead scoring is really cool because let's say someone contacts you through Zapier, you get three Emil email addresses, then you pass them to the lead scoring tool, the scoring tool leads.
Then come back with the profile of that email, what company they work for, what their size is. This will give you quality lead. They will be like low, medium high. So basically it's kind of like super interesting for you. If you do like Lee in qualifying low, medium high, this is a great way for you to pass it internally to your sales rep. Hi, I usually have them like, Hey, this is a great track.
Kevin (24:41): I'll tell them about average, second best turnover, one third. Okay. The people who were training or testing new programs, because we don't care. As if we don't close them. Right. And it'sthe way, and then it automatically distributes to your internal Slack sales channel and then says, Hey, Kevin, you had a new lead to talk to them or, Hey, John, you got a new lead, go talk to them. And then we know who is going to talk to me as opposed to manually telling us like, okay, like that sounds like your track. Right. So. Stuff like that.
Kathleen (25:10): It 's great. Yeah. I didn't know Zapier had the best score.
Kevin (25:15): Yeah, it 's, it ' s really good. I think this is probably one of their most underused features and they have a lot of those like internal zapping tools. They have another one called as one-off emails where you may like to email yourself. So when something happens in their tool and it's free too. So of course, it 's like interesting. Because it istègre, if you want Zapier to fit in pretty much like almost anything you've ever used. Like, they're crazy how big they are they've grown up. It 's as if all tools want to be on Zapier.
Kathleen (25:45): Well they solve a huge problem not just for marketers.
Kevin (25:50): These are business owners. It 's really like the cuts before. It's like automating your business people, all the reasons Zapier is so great is because all these integrations before you have to get a developer to do it for you, and you have to find a way to love it, kinda like hack the api, but vape you say, hey look people want this stuff.
You should make your websites available, programmatically. This way people can use your software more efficiently. And it 'crazy. At least for me with my software background, I'm looking for new, built software. Like if you are looking at any software application, the number one thing on the card is once the Zapier info
Kathleen (26:23): Exit and c 's like crazy,
Kevin (26:25): Like how people want to be like Zapier for everything, because they know that once as you access their system, it can go up to 20 different locations. And I think for people listening, it's that concept is like, hey, like you wear it in Zapier. Now you can go anywhere and anywhere, how do you automate that? How do you make it easier for your internal team? How do you make it easy for everyone? Because there are a lot of things you are probably doing that really make sense. Like, hey, if that happens do it and Zapier phad to do it rather than as you do it yourself.
Kathleen (26:55): Yeah. So the question that comes to my mind when I listened to you talk about all of this is that you have a computer engineering degree. So if anyone is listening most of my listeners are marketers who don 't have that kind of degree myself, like, what do you, how good you need to be competent to do these things? For example, do you need programming skills?
Kevin (27:20): No. And that's, that's why I like something like Zapier, for example, they make it super easy and you don't have to do any programming. It 's literally like a user interface that says, Hey, we know you want to log into the service. This is what the output will look like. And I'll give you some sort of similar output test. And it says like, name, email, last name, codepostal, and said, Hey, here's what you'd get.
If you were to actually make the call, how would you like to deal with it now? And then it will go like hey now log into the second tool. And this is where it's going to happen. So Zapier made it super easy to do this for anyone because exactly they fix this exact problem. You said it's like, not everyone knows programming. But they want to make it a way that you can kind of transfer that data.
Kevin (28:03): So this is what I love about Zapier. As they have done for all businesses. As I think they've done a really good job of making things super friendly for marketers. And I think that's probably the reason they got so big because it's just like, your possibilities are endless once you, I thought we werelike, make one and try it.
And sometimes it 's sometimes like anything, you know, it ' s like, you just get overwhelmed thinking how hard that could be. But once you make one I'm like, you're going to, you're going to go crazy and you'll realize, oh my gosh I'm running. Like I have so many zaps. Like, it's like, it's kind of h ow it was in my business.
Kathleen (28:33): And now what about Phantom Buster and Visual Ping? Do you need to know anything?
Kevin (28:36): Yeah. So visual, so Visual Ping is very simple. It is probably the easiest. It 's like, Hey, enter, a URL track. That's it. You have nothing to do. Phantom Buster is a bit more complicated. I think Phantom Buster of all is the most complicated because it's kind of like the raw version of Zapier, how would you do?
And of course there are some built-in as well, but to really do a lot of work you have to like to know more about the genre, how do you integrate your google sheets like? And it's like importing your cookies a bit. It imports your, your hidden encrypted passwords, all of it. It is a little more complicated. But it's a lot more powerful because Zapier has the ability to zap, you can only use what's on their platform.
While Phantom Buster is like, if there 's no zap, you can go to Phantom Buster and scratch your own kind of data and pass it to say a leaf Google, then do something else with it. So a Phantom Buster is probably the most complicated, but not super complicated. It only gets complicated when you want to do some super personalized and personalized things.
Kathleen (29:42): Wow. So I feel like it was so. AmuBesides, I feel like this must be a regular topic in the podcast where we talk about cool tools. Because we haven't really done this before. Unless it's part of another part of an interview.
So I want to challenge everyone listening, that is, we've only covered three tools here. If you've got a really cool tool you're using that you think people don't know about, but they should be tweeting me at work, mom is working. And I will come up with a list and maybe I have another one, but I will share the tools for sure.
So tweet me at @workmommywork with the best tools, you know, that's underappreciated or unheard of, and we'll get the word out about them. Or if you have a cool tool that you think more people need to know about. All right, change gears, Kevin. I always ask my guests two questions and I want to know what you have tosay. The first is obviously the podcast which concerns inbound marketing. Can you talk a bit about whether there is a person or company today that you think really sets the bar high for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?
Kevin (30:54): For me the company should probably be Zapier. I think their inbound marketing is probably some of the best. When I talk about marketing, I am talking about some of their internal traffic through SEO. They develop their brand so much by doing tool reviews, such as the Phantom Buster reviews.
They rank well enough for that, but they're also very smart by any permutations they can do. So let's say you can do like Zapier with MailChimp. Zapier with Drip. All this only attracts a lot of inbound traffic to them. And they make great comparisonsons of what their tools can do with all software. And they're just super smart about it.
And if you look at their similar SEO growth, it 's like crazy. I'm just like, and what I love about them is because every year new marketing technologies come out. So they're like no limit with how much they can grow because there's so much of it, and I'm just like, wow, this company is so smart. I love Zapier.
Kathleen (31:51): This is awesome. I'll check that out. And then, you know, the other thing that I hear a lot from my listeners is that as a marketer it's really hard to stay up to date with all of this. Like even just what you talk about. How it changes so fast, like you say new tools are coming out all the time. How do you stay personally informed about the changing digital marketing landscape?how do you stay informed?
Kevin (32:12): So for me the biggest, I love using twitter.com. I think it 's like my favorite platform. I'm addicted to Twitter. So I'm just the marketers on Twitter. As obviously there are, I'm really big on SEO, for example. I love to follow Rand Fishkin. I think he 'sa pretty smart guy.
Kathleen (32:30): He was a guest.
Kevin (32: 31): Oh yeah, no, I love Rand. Yeah. He loves Moz, as this is where I learned most of everything from the start. I tell people it's crazy, like a long time ago, but yeah, like Rand, I'm just, like I try to follow people that I think I am like, I try to follow like Like marketing leaders, let 's say Zapier. I'm like, okay, who handles their SEO. Like this guy must be smart or fair. So JI have to, like, I'm looking for these as really smart marketing for these brands.
Kevin (32:55): Another great brand that I really like is a tampon. So I follow their salespeople from the buffer. I think their SEO is excellent. So I'm like, okay, who are the guys running around? The SEO stamp. But to me the way I think it looks like, say, stamp a big company now. But what I like to do is think about it, go to LinkedIn and find out who was working for the tampon during this growth phase because maybe they are not there, but these guys have probably, maybe written about it, something and think about it. It's kind of what I think it is that a lot of Buffer is huge now, but the guys who farmed it are probably not around anymore. I need to find these guys.
Kathleen (33:31): Yehis. Well, I have some great advice for you on who to follow on Twitter if you are into SEO. So an o for them, like you said, you like to see who works SEO in companies that are really, really good at it. So one of the top SEO specialists at HubSpot who doesn't have a high profile but is brilliant is a guy named Victor Pan.
So, follow him for sure. And he does little rants once a week on some SEO topics. And the marketing nerd in me is completely obsessed with him because he gets really specific. And then the other is Barry Schwartz whose handle is Rusty Brick. He's like, I think if you're not following him for SEO, you're not following anyone.
Kevin (34:18): Barry somehow he knows all about SEO, all the news, as he is up to date, he is so yes.
Kathleen (34:23): Well every time I find like bugs online I just caught them and tweeted them to him and he finds the answer in five minutes.
Kevin (34:30): He's very good. Yeah. He runs like Rusty Brick in upstate New York and yes.
Kathleen (34:34): And it is, I think, isn't it? Is this the search engine field or the search engine journal?
Kevin (34:38): I think he has both. Me neither. I'm like, okay. One of them is crazy how similar they are, but I think he's leading two. Yeah. It's like he's got two blogs or something that I'm like,
Kathleen (34:51): And he has this direct line in John Mueller at Google.
Kevin (34:55): Well, yes. I mean, at least for me like, like I do, like,it's pretty funny talking about SEO. Like with Voy we paid but like SEO it's like where I learned just like these guys SEO like if they think differently then yeah.
Kathleen (35:08): Oh, that 's fascinating. It 's so fascinating. Okay. Well, if anyone wants to know more about Voy Media or wants to connect with you and has a question, what is the best way for them to connect with you onl ine?
Kevin (35:18): So you can always stick with me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is therefore @Danest. I've had this since I was like, when Twitter first came out.
Kathleen (35:28): That's why I'm @workmommywork.
Kevin (35:32): I will never change that one. People are like, is your name Dan? And I'm like, no, that's not it.
Kathleen (35:36): I had my Twitter when my son was born, which was a long time ago.
Kevin (35:41): I never changed that name. It's like my favorite username. Because it 's also short if you are like, I want a short name. I was like, okay, you don 't get mine. So another way is just Kevin @ Voymedia and it 's the V O Y media.com. So, but yes it is, this is where you can find it.
Kathleen (35:56): Awesome. Okay. Well, I'll put those links in the show's notes. So if you want to ask Kevin about any of his cool tools or anything Voy Media related, you can find his information there. And as always, if you are listening, I would really love to. If you head over to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a review so that other people can find us and find out about us, that's all we have forthis week. Thank you very much for joining me, Kevin. It was very fun.
Kevin (36:22): Thanks for inviting me.
I want to stay informed when the podcast is released?
Send us your name and email address below and we will send you the show notes every Monday!
