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Mastering Community Engagement: Strategies for Effective Content Marketing

Harshit Paul , Director of Product Marketing at LambdaTest

Join Harshit Gupta as he delves into a fascinating conversation with Harshit Paul, Director of Product Marketing at LambdaTest, exploring the disruptive journey of LambdaTest in the testing market. Learn about Harshit Paul’s transition from Salesforce developer to marketing strategist, LambdaTest’s mission in the testing and digital experience space, and the strategies that propelled LambdaTest to stand out in a competitive landscape. They explore various aspects of marketing strategy and team leadership. Harshit Paul shares valuable insights into keyword research, content optimization, conversion rate optimization (CRO), automation processes, video SEO, branding efforts, and fostering growth within the marketing team. Gain insights into successful go-to-market campaigns, content optimization strategies, competitor analysis tactics, and the importance of community engagement in driving growth.

LambdaTest is a leading AI-augmented unified test orchestration and execution cloud that enables developers and testers.

Harshit Paul
Director of Product Marketing at LambdaTest

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Wytpod. My name is Harshit and I’m the director of business alliance at Wytlabs. We are a digital agency specializing in SaaS and e-commerce SEO and I’ve got Harshit Paul with me today, the director of product marketing at LambdaTest. Now, LambdaTest is an AI-powered, unified enterprise text execution cloud platform that helps businesses drastically release time to market, frees you faster test execution, ensures quality releases, and accelerates district transformation. So big. Welcome to your hash. I’m so happy to have you with me today.

Thanks, Harshit. Harshit calling Harshit. But thanks for having me here. A pleasure to be and looking forward, excited to being a part of this podcast. Let’s get this started.

Let’s start with your background and your professional journey so far. You’ve been part of the LambdaTest for so long, over five years now. Would love to hear about that, please.

Sure. So currently, as you pointed out, I’m the director of product marketing at LambdaTest and I have been a part of the marketing team ever since the marketing team was founded here.

So it’s been more than five years since the product was kicked off and the marketing team was founded. I was fortunately one of the founding folks here and got my hands on multiple things. But before joining LambdaTest, I was also a Salesforce developer, a Salesforce certified developer for Wipro Technologies. I worked there for two years and yeah, so I transitioned my career from developer to marketing. The reason why that happened was that I realized that I had a strong inclination to market tech products. I realized while I was a Salesforce developer that Salesforce was creating such a storm in the community back then and still is, right, it’s still the market leader in its segment. And there was this really hard push towards getting the certification in every quarter from the MNC push as well, right? If you want to be acknowledged, make sure you are getting a certification, a fresh certification issued from Salesforce. I was intrigued by the entire business model and how they have come up from a mere CRM company to something that has penetrated so deeply into the enterprise mechanism and leveraged the power of community.

I wanted to do something similar and that’s when I decided this could be fun. Fortunately in my pursuit was able to find the LambdaTest and I started my career here as a content marketer back then, went on to groom myself to content manager, had my hands dirty on performance marketing throughout the entire span, and also worked on, realized that since I was the part of the founding team. Of course, it was pivotal for me to understand the product mode more than others. Eventually, I had an act for the product as well. So product marketing management came my way and currently, I’m one of the directors here and leading the product marketing manager. So that’s about it. Apart from the professional journey, I am a big-time anime fan. I talk about anime day in, and day out. I do that in my free time and I’m also a football lover. My favorite club is Manchester United, which is not at all in a good state these days. But yes, we are bearing yeah, so that’s about me. But yes, if anybody who’s listening to this episode would want to sync with me and chat about marketing, football, anime, or anything in general, feel free to sync with me on LinkedIn.

All right, let’s talk LambdaTest now and its mission testing and digital experience space.

Yeah, so if I were to put it in simple words, because of course you use some heavy jargon when you introduce the LambdaTest. I’m not sure how much folks will be able to understand that right from the get-go, but if I were to simply put my vocabulary here to define Lambda’s mission is to make life easy for the modern QA and businesses.

We realize that testing is one area that is bombarded with requests. You have something to test with everything you have right now, and every week you’re getting more things shipped onto your product, right? So the bandwidth of the tester gets squeezed out week in, week out. And we wanted to solve that problem by giving them a unified testing platform where they’re able to pretty much do all sorts of testing, all different stages of testing as well. Right, from one central tool.

So we have test execution, where you are executing tests all the way to test orchestration, where you are running them smartly. You’re also getting insights from the platform and you can do all sorts of testing, meaning you can do live interactive testing, which is manual exploratory testing. You can also run your automation testing, right? So to get your automated tests running, you can also run visual regression testing. So there’s all sorts of testing. But all in all, we want to make the life of the modern QA easy and help businesses ship things faster to accelerate their feedback loop. Because every time the feedback loop is delayed, the entire speed to market gets affected.

So we want to solve that particular pain point for enterprises and SMBs alike.

Let’s talk about some of the USPs as well. Like you’re in a competitive space you have to understand what makes Lambda stand out of the crowd.

That’s an interesting question because back when we started as well, of course, this space had some clear competitors and they were ruling the marketing market as well. They were dominating. And since this is the advantage you get when you are a late bloomer, right, you come out, you see the leaders that are there in the market and you understand the pain points that customers are still facing.

So when you have the same offering to offer, you make sure that those pain points are very well covered, right? We always wanted to be customer-centric and we have always been customer-centric. So customer centricity has been the value and the core of LambdaTest customer centricity and community feedback, right? So that’s how we have, and we have exceeded, made a mark in terms of the competitive landscape as well, because folks were able to realize that we are working towards something that is meant for the community, that is meant for the end user and not purely something that is just functional is there as a traditional execution platform and it’s doing its job, but it’s not improving. So competition thrives. Evolution.

So we came out and we don’t want to brag about it, but we of course helped and forced the companies to evolve their existing offerings as well.

Gotcha. And because you mentioned, Harshit, that there were already big players in the market, what were the core strategies? And also like the core channels, pillar channels that you leveraged to disrupt the market and have your own space, what exactly did you do to make that happen?

So back then, as I said, community feedback was very important, right? So we went into different sorts of communities, be it reading communities like medium, we wanted to see what kind of topics people are talking about, right? What are they writing? What are they thinking about the product or the compatibility of different frameworks around the product? We dug deep into question-and-answer communities, and they were not just limited to tech communities like Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. We also were picking out questions on generic communities like Quora for instance, where people are asking about their pain points and we are addressing them. We are letting them know that there is a solution like this that exists. So right from the get-go, these are some free, low-hanging fruits that you can immediately target if people are out there asking problems and you have something at hand which you know can solve their problem, The idea is to go out, find the closest, most resembling questions that folks are asking and answer them. One way to do that, of course, is through organic marketing.

But that can take a good amount of time for you to plan things as to what kind of topics should go out, and it might take some time for them to start ranking as well. So the first step was to make sure that the entire research as to which kind of keywords we need to target, is right. What kind of topics we needed to write about was the utmost priority. And we had that planned out and we also penetrated communities, be it reading communities, be it question-answer communities, and we were able to, of course, align ourselves. We were also getting in touch with some influencers back then, but of course, influencer marketing, if you’re starting a marketing team at Fresh, can put a hole in your pocket back then. So back then we were able to see different venues as to where we should be heading out and we were able to drop down that. Why did we start the platform? Because we want to make life easy for the community. So let’s start with the community first. So we got into the community, we dug deep. We were also able to, speaking of communities, we were also able to dig into slack communities and understand what is in general that testers are facing trouble.

And even Google chat groups.

So there’s a lot that you can penetrate when it comes to community. Community is not just something that has a label on top of it, right? You can find people talking about it in a small WhatsApp group as well.

And there are all sorts of different groups and other things that you can penetrate. So we did that. And of course, as an early adopter, we wanted feedback about the product as well. So we wanted to make sure that they are the early adopters. They get some incentives and we get the incentives from them as their valuable feedback.

So that exchange happened and of course, we were able to groom our product and make a mark out there.

Now, in the current scenario, what are the winning channels for you?
So I’m saying that not today because you started a community, you must be doing all those activities right now as well. Maybe some resources are allocated to that. I would love to understand the current scenario, like what is your main winning channel?

Yeah, so is the main winning channel. There are many now because we have seen. So one thing that you do as you grow, is to make sure that whatever is your winning formula, you keep it right side by side, you are exploring other venues as well. So we started with the community. We went out with the right content.

Then we devised ad campaigns, performance, and marketing. We improvised one step at a time and we made sure that that was there being stable. You keep the other things stable, right? Be it content, or performance. So it’s not just one area that contributes to LambdaTest growth per se, right? It’s multiple areas. We have matured over time along with some new areas that we are venturing into year after year, right? Depending upon the scale of the company. So be it in terms of big partnership marketing motions, or be it in terms of ABM dedicated ABM campaigns, which we weren’t doing early on, but we are doing now and we are doing that well. So all those different things, plus added on top of what we were already winning. So 60% to 70% organic traffic month on month, ever since we started has been our goal. We’ve been able to achieve that. And that alone is a massive branding to the product.

So that’s how we were able to come out in front of everyone because folks are reading our material and we aren’t just selling them, we are giving them solutions that may or may not even be around LambdaTests, but they are remembering where they learned it from and then they go ahead and explore that. So it’s a ripple effect that happens from there on. So multiple platforms working together in the right synergy is the success that we are facing is the formula behind our success at this point.

And since organic is one of the biggest channels that you leverage, I would love to understand your content process, like how you approach new content. Also when it comes to content refresh as well, do you have any process predefined that you follow internally?

Yeah. And I’m pretty sure that now everybody who has been a part of the content gameplay would be very highly focused on refreshing the content ever since this recent update from Google which has come in, is helpful. Content update.

A lot of businesses are hard because many times folks are trying to churn out more and more topics, right, but what about the topics which you have written four years back, five years back, which are not so relevant now?

So refreshing is very important. Ideally, for us, content frequency is at a very good scale. We roll out around 70 to 100 pieces of content every month.

We do decide once a quarter about the kind of topics we want to reach out to. We utilize our keyword list. Once a quarter, our entire aim for that quarter becomes that list. Of course, there are ad hoc entries. If there is something new that comes in, we accumulate that on an ad hoc basis. We have a massive content pool for that.

Pool of writers. So anything that ad hoc comes is a separate thing. But refresh, of course, once a month you should look into your search console and see which are your failing articles. By failing, I mean something that either has been declining or has declined to a point where it is not contributing to your traffic at all. Right, what do you do with those URLs? Should you keep them? Are they relevant to your product? Because many times what happens is you release some content which is four years, five years back, and then you realize, oh, the content strategy has changed. Now we don’t target these topics. We have realized the kind of topics we need to write about. So maybe this is something that is too far off of what we offer and this is not something we have the right topical authority of, right? So we shouldn’t be talking about these areas now. And maybe I can park that URL, maybe I can take it off from my website. Or if that is very close to what you do, decide that every month. If that is failing, because if you take too long and something goes behind your hindsight, then in that case you’re going to end up losing a significant amount of traffic as well as position.

Once your position is off, it’s going to take some time to recover and you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort to optimize because there are not just one or two areas for you to go ahead and optimize and aha, that’s not what happens.

So Google has made it very convenient for folks as well to find data and you have to think SEO has changed, right? So earlier folks used to think that content and SEO are two different things, but now they go hand in hand, right? So it’s very simple. You focus on delivering the right content and making sure that the content you have is up to date. Do that every month, figure out the content you need to churn out every quarter and make sure you have room to adjust. Ad hoc basis, articles, web pages, whatever some finds that you do because competitive audits are also important, right? So once a month you must do competitive audits and figure out if there is something that you are missing and somebody else in your space is doing that. So those are the kinds of topics that you want to push in as your ad hoc things in case there is any slippage from your keyword research perspective, which is prone to do that. We’re all humans, some kind of slippage is always involved. And of course, everybody has a different perspective. You and I cannot have the same way of researching the keywords and planning.

So it’s good to learn and it’s good to, that’s the entire, what do you call the essence of competition, right? You learn, you make them learn and you help them evolve too. At the same time, if they are ready to.

I would love to understand. Harshit, what tools do you use for your competitor analysis? Basically competitor audit. What are the key things also that you look into while doing that analysis?

All right, so there are tools everybody can look at based on their budget. There are some free tools as well that you can look into which will give you lesser insight. But of course, the most reliable one in the industry is Semrush AHERF. We use multiple tools. I can’t list the entire list here, but of course, I don’t want to promote any tool over here. But my point is that you can go ahead, and look for tools that give you good keyword research data. Pretty much any tool will also have the feature to do competitive audits. Now, as to what you audit is important, right? One thing that you need to keep in mind is let’s think of SEO on two broader umbrellas.

There’s on the page, and there’s off-page, right? And you have a competition to either catch or to beat or to stay ahead of them. So what will you look at on the pitch side? You want to check how many articles they have rolled out every month. If any new articles were pushed out, is there anything new that they have that you are missing, which had a certain scope of audience and they have been able to figure that out? If there is, put that in your direction as well and be upfront about it. And at the same time for the off page, make sure that you also want to see how many backlinks you’re gaining, right? How many domains are finding you credible, giving you the tying your domain to theirs and adding you to increase your domain authority? So of course, domain authority, it’s the entire essence of the marketing efforts and SEO and content and whatnot.

So accelerating is very important. It could very well be that you somehow figured it out, sometimes you figure out that one or two of your competitors have been able to partner with a very big publication, right? So you can then start reaching out to them as well, letting them know that we also do the same thing and we would love to be a part of it. But the reason you do that is not through a Google search. That insight comes from the competitive audit. So figure out, see what they are doing, what kind of content they are releasing. And content does not mean articles alone, right? It could also be web pages. It could support documentation as well. Content is content. So don’t refrain from thinking, okay, these are the sort of articles they are releasing or these are the sort of web pages they are releasing. Look at it from a holistic perspective and start thinking about whether this makes sense for me at this point. If so, add it. If not, park it.If you have something, that feature is probably something you are planning to release in the next quarter. Build a separate tracker for that beforehand.

If your competitor has that feature, right, keep those things collated, and keep those things drafted well in time. So competitive audit, it is very important you don’t do it in breaks, in my opinion. If you’re onto a competitive audit, make sure you have an hour or two of peace and focus involved, right? So that way you’re able to not just stitch things together, but stitch them well.

What’s your frequency basically like for competitor audits? Are you doing it monthly?

Monthly is fine actually, because as I said, we have scaled content quite a bit and our competitors have also done the same. And there comes a certain point where you realize that maybe I have been able to roll out now whatever was close to what I do, I have it with me. I have things planned. As I said, auditing once a month. If it does the job well and good if you are just starting new. If you have a lot to cover, then it wouldn’t hurt you to do that audit in two weeks because anyhow you’re starting new, you don’t have a lot to boast about, but it will be good to keep an eye out for what they have. Yeah. So entirely depends on the scale of the company. There is no ballpark figure that you should do once a month. You can even do it once a quarter. If you have a lot of things on your plate, you’re just starting. There is no way you want to be able to catch up to somebody who’s churning out 100 articles a month while you have only five to six articles a month going out in a month.

So having that sort of expectation will also lead to a lot of wasted bandwidth and effort.

So think of it from a company scale and perspective as per your bandwidth, as per your operations. There is no point in getting insights over which you don’t have the bandwidth to act upon. So do that as per your bandwidth, if you have the workforce, if you have the time-bandwidth audit, audit daily if needed, if need be, if you have the bandwidth for it. Otherwise, keep it on a biweekly basis or a monthly basis.

Can you share some of the examples of successful end-to-end go-to-market campaigns for a new product line? And how do you optimize what exactly your CRO effort process looks like for better conversion yield?

All right, so we’ll take it in two parts. Successful end-to-end campaigns. There are multiple campaigns. As I said, I will talk briefly about some examples, right? And I’ll take it from a perspective where companies are just starting as well. So I’ll share some examples and where companies are at a scale where they are now thinking about venturing into a certain type of marketing, let’s say performance marketing. So performance marketing, usually people are okay with spending the budget on Google Ads, but at the same time, they are confused about what kind of budget should be spent over here and what kind of budget should go into content, right? And then again, if you’re running ads, you would want to take some time to figure out which are the right keywords that are giving you the conversion. So a very sweet spot to balance this is to make sure you’re focusing on commercial transactional keywords over your competitors as well, right? So if you’re just starting, make sure you are at least covering because you are just starting as a company, right? Your brand value may not be that much as of now.

Over time, you should run your brand campaign. That’s important. But at this point, you can easily poach if you have something strong. As a differentiator, you should be bold about running ads over your competitor and let the audience know that you too have something similar that they have, but you have it better in certain areas.

So that is something that I think pretty much every business can get a positive ROI from, right? Positive ROI. So definitely if you’re not running ads on your competitors, you should start doing that right away. That is one. Of course, I also talked about community, right? So community penetration. Figure out what kind of communities. And I’ll tell you a very small example for a minute.

The example that you shared is running bidding on your competitors. In your experience, what sort of landing page did well? Is it like a comparison page between X and Z that performs better? Or a simple landing page could be a home page or USPs of their own business.

So if you are just starting, I think this again depends on the scale of the company. If you are at a similar scale, you can have a detailed comparison on that landing page. You can talk about things you are good at and you can give a 360 things that you do, similar things that you do well, things that they don’t do well, but you somehow have them. If you are just starting, I wouldn’t recommend you put a comparison checklist but highlight the values. Like for us, as I said, community centricity, right? 24/7 customer support. Give those callouts or whatever. Give those callouts right. Let folks know that you are there to help them, that you’re a more affordable option, for example, right? That could be something that pricing has to be kept in mind for somebody who’s just starting, right? So let those things come out where people see that. If I take this tool, although this is young, it would save me either time, money, or time, you can also save by giving instant support. So back when we started, this was also something that a lot of our competitors weren’t doing right, that was providing free chat support.

So it was a part of the pricing model. Folks could get it inside the apps and not on the website. We came out, we wanted to be closer to the community. We made sure we were available there. Twenty-four seven. And we were there even on weekends. As a startup, we were hustling. I’m having my breakfast, I’m looking at the chat as well. I’m handling it right. And we are solving customers’ problems. So that’s the essence of a startup. But if you’re at a scale where you have a stable product that is competing at a very good pace, by all means, you should go out and give that detailed comparison pricing. Detailed feature pricing, my bad. And let folks know about what you have, what they don’t have. And at the same time, of course, callouts are very important. Make sure you let them know what you do differently. Not just from a features perspective, but as a company, what do you believe in? What is your vision? Of course, incorporate some customer studies. That is very basic. Every performance marketer should do that. But if you have a customer case study where you have somebody who has revealed that they have switched from this solution to that solution, right, showcase that there is no harm in that, you can go ahead and do that.

And of course, at the same time, you have to be very careful about not committing something which you don’t have. Sometimes people might end up thinking, what can this do? This wouldn’t bite me in the back. And they go ahead and boast things that aren’t practical, that they don’t have, don’t do that. Be simple, and be true to the folks who are landing on your page. It’s very important to give the right message, right? Especially because you’re spending budget here and there would be a heavy price to pay even in terms of cost per click, because you’re running ads on a different brand. It’s not your brand. So your quality score can never be appreciated to a point where your cost per click will come out decent.

So anyhow, if you’re spending more on every cost per click, make sure that every click you get to your website has a very thorough understanding as to how you stand out. That helps. Okay, so getting on to the community part. So the community side of things, again, as I said, dive into the community, right? And as I said, there are reading communities like medium. There’s also a tech side community, a very famous one, zone, where all these technical articles are uploaded, right, from DevOps, from QA to all different profiles.

And don’t think of it from, I’ll give you a basic example. Don’t think of it from a task-oriented perspective, but think of it when you dive into the community. Don’t come into community thinking. I need to post a blog. I need to write a comment, right? Follow guidelines. They are there for a reason, and it’s not just to help you not get banned, but if you follow the guidelines, you will also be aided with better visibility.

I’ll give you an example. So when we were exploring these communities, I’m not going to name the community here, right? But when we were exploring the communities, we realized that one particular community, we’re just about to drop that off, thinking that we are putting effort, but it’s not resulting in anything significant in terms of conversions of any sort. And that’s when we realized that they have a very exclusive program that you can get yourself a batch, and then when you write an article after that batch is there, they give your articles extra visibility. They will circulate that over their emails, and they’ll push it over their social media forums. So you’re not just pushing it onto their forum, they are circulating it for you. But to do that, you have to prove your credibility around something and you have to earn that batch, right? And once we did that, we started seeing three times of conversions that we were getting earlier in just a month.

And then that particular community, we continued to penetrate for almost one and a half, two years, up until where we thought that this was good for our scale. Then we went on to explore more communities. Of course, community penetration is important, but also keep in mind the guidelines that are there, right? And this is not an end-to-successful campaign example. What I would say, but more like a tip that I would want to give to folks, right, when you do your keyword research, a lot of time people park keyword difficulty, they keep it aside. What they look like is this is the keyword, this is the volume. Let’s get started. Let’s bring that traffic in because the volumes are huge. But then there’s also the difficulty. And some folks who are really into SEO content do focus on that. And those who have the time, who put their effort in correctly, keep difficulty in their mind. And that is a very important metric to keep. I’ve seen that, I’ve also consulted a lot of companies throughout my time here, and I’ve seen that they as well, don’t consider keyword difficulty in their final keyword tracker that they have, which is where they track the keywords.

And it is very surprising because you can’t be expecting to rank something that’s a very, extremely high difficulty. After all, there’s a lot of competition in that term. It might take you months with a lot of effort pre as well as paid to get some backlinks and whatnot to come out on top of that. And this is something that usually happens in early-stage companies, right, where they feel their keyword research is messed up, right.?They are not sure what they want to write. And sometimes when they’re sure that this is the kind of keyword I want to write upon, they start right from a two-tail keyword or a single-word keyword that I want to rank on this, right? You can’t rank that easily. So you need to find that sweet spot. And doing that, put some extra time, into figuring out which keyword difficulty is a sweet spot for you. I think somewhere around 30 to 40 is a good spot for folks who are just starting. If you have a very good scale, if your companies are a good scale, you can get additional backlinks, increase the authority of any blocks that you are churning out, then you can keep keyword difficulty of higher score as well as a part of your keyword targeting.

But of course, make sure that there will be a certain time gap, right? So of course, low keyword difficulty is going to rank much faster as compared to something that is, say, 70, 80 plus, right? So it might take you some time. So that expectation has to be set correctly, especially with the higher management.

So it’s not just the marketing folks, because some of the folks who might be listening to me, might think this is very basic.

This is basic, but at the same time, you need to explain this to the higher management as well, to whom you are putting out your marketing efforts, report, and results.

So when you present your chart, make sure you explain to them why it’s happening. So explaining is very important why you are prioritizing your keyword. So, yeah, those were some examples I could go on forever. But yeah, if you want to talk about your successful campaigns, as I said, connect with me on LinkedIn. And definitely, I would love to chat, chat about growth hacks and whatnot. Getting on to CRO, which was the second part of the question, if I remember correctly.

So CRO side of things, very important to have, of course, heat maps in place, the foundation of it. And I have also seen throughout my journey as well that there comes an area where you have a design bias.

You think I’ve designed this thing, this looks better because I have designed this thing. And it’s not just you as well, but even if you’re reviewing it in, a team would say, yeah, this looks better, let’s go ahead with it. And after getting that vote, when you push that design out, you figure out that the conversion rate has been dropping. Folks are not engaging because they’re engaging with the web page as they’re supposed to. And you get that visibility only if you dive into a CRO tool like a crazy egg or something like that. There are also free tools available, you can look into that as well, but they give limited insight.

So better too, if you’re doing it from a business perspective, it’s better not to hold a budget on these things. These are very essential. Get a good CRO tracking tool, put some effort into the heat map, and also look into the scroll map, to see how many where people are clicking, and what is the click percentage. And try to experiment. Of course, put AB testing in place.

And see if, for example, a text that you have as start free testing, you can try changing that to get started for free and see which text variation has more click rate. So that’s the way you’ll be able to figure out which text on certain buttons is doing well for you.

In terms of a three-week gap, which is very minimal, you need to have a very decent amount of data before you make any call. Don’t go with the bias that, yeah, I think this version was better and this version is turning out to be better in a week. Do not rush your decisions when it comes to CRO. Let that happen for at least, because sometimes there is also change, that helps. Sometimes people like to go ahead with the change. When you change something, they find it amusing. But then later on, when you get fresh users to your site, you will realize with more data that the previous design was more simplistic and easy to use. It could happen. You will get those data and those.

What sample size that you trust?

I would say somewhere around, again, a very debatable topic, right? For us, we get 100,000 traffic in a month, so a sample size of anywhere around 15,000 to 20,000 is also sufficient.

On a page. But a very good question. Because sample size, as I said, don’t go ahead with the data too soon because you need a sizable amount of people visiting that page. And make sure you are running these experiments on pages that have a good amount of traffic first, right? Don’t think that you’ll be doing AB testing directly on a landing page that you have built for your ad campaigns with a very narrow budget. You’re hardly getting folks there. You should track them as well. But don’t do site-wide experimentation based on what has worked for you on ads alone. Make sure something that is contributing organic to your site and doing that well, you do that. You take those out and you experiment over them and make decisions. Hope that helps. But in case, if there is anything, again, feel free to follow up with me on LinkedIn.

I would love to understand, Harshit, what processes within your marketing have you automated? It could be anything. Maybe something around SEO or some process around SEO that you have automated or any other channel.

For any other channel, yeah, at scale, as I said, different things. CRM automation is also there, right? You have to have that CRM at one point. If you’re getting the conversion sign-ups that you get. For example, if sign-ups are your conversion metric, if it is a number that can be monitored daily, no need to automate up to you, up to your budget and bandwidth. But if you are getting tens of thousands of sign-ups in a week, of course, you need some sort of clarity over there, right? So you can have some sort of automated mechanism that can figure out certain IDs that are to be kept in junk, which are some suspicious sign-ups that are coming on, and which are some hot sign-ups that are coming on so that sales is notified accordingly.

There is also, and speaking of marketing automation, I’ll also get into it from a different perspective, but yes, of course. So there are also productivity tools like Slack, for example. So even that kind of minute automation can help you be notified better.

So there are slack workflows that can help you notify the team, the entire team about something new that has come up.

You can also do that to manage your marketing team by just asking them to nudge once a week about the things that they have done, for example, a retrospective meeting that happens. What did we achieve this week? Everybody can go ahead and put their pointers. You have the weekend to analyze if you want to spend time on weekends. Otherwise, there’s always next week. But any kind of minor to major automation is there.

So the list could go on. But yeah. So CRM automation you can do, you can also do productivity tools-based automation. You can also have email automation, for example, to get some clarity as to how the data is flowing. And you can also incorporate some. There are tools like Mailmodo that help you put up polling mechanisms inside the mail. I’m not able to get the right term, but they let you deploy interactive emails, right? So that way you’re able to collect that data and push that out to the CRM again from your email. That sort of filtering you can do. So there are different types of. But of course, there are marketing automation tools available in the market as well if you think you need them. Again, it’s not a mandate by any means if you ask me. But if you feel your automation, it is a must to have a marketing automation tool at the scale you are at. By all means, go ahead, set up a demo, see what they can do to help your processes, and get it done.

Because Harshit, you’ve been doing and putting in a lot of effort on the videos that you’re pushing out on YouTube as well. And video content is sure. So video efforts are again, video content is again like a focus area. I would love to understand how you optimize videos SEO-wise.

Okay, so again, there are certain guidelines. Google is open about them. YouTube is also open about them up to some point. And the good part about it is there are YouTube-certified tools out there that help you understand how your video is doing in terms of analytics, right? So of course you have YouTube analytics which gives you insight into engagement, interaction, and whatnot. But there are certified tools like, for example, Tubebuddy and Vidiq and many more that have good deep penetration insights from YouTube search perspective metrics. You also get these insights on 360 degree tools like I believe where your keyword research is on. Some of the tools do give you insights into YouTube as well. But again, I would then again suggest you go with a tool that is specifically known for YouTube because they are in general niche specific. So their data points, accuracy, and practices are very well highlighted. You get these plugins installed and you open a video, they will give you a lot of suggestions, like you also have some WordPress plugins which give you generic data about how your WordPress blog can do better, right? You have some extensions that you can download from the market space and get those sorted.

Similar extensions also exist for YouTube. Do that Google search, evaluate them, and get them sorted. They will give you a certain reality as to how your videos are doing well, right? Which videos are doing well? But when you deep dive open their analytics and when you look at the practices that these tools are highlighting, you’ll be able to see, okay, this is why this video is doing well because it has a certain parameter and that tools also highlight. These tools will highlight that you need to have the tags incorporated in your headline, incorporated in your description and you need to have them not too overly populated but not underlaid and not populated in a deficient way as well. So they highlight that from a keyword density perspective. You can say tag density for YouTube. That makes sense. So you can have these give you a fair amount of idea as to what practices to keep in mind as you push out a video. But a very important metric, again from YouTube, is the content, right? If your content is not engaging, no matter what best practices you put in place, if folks are dropping off right after they visit your content, maybe it could be because of bad lighting.

Because YouTube is a very different ballgame than a blog post, right? It’s very different. From an organic marketing perspective, you need the perfect lighting, a good audio setup, and all those things, right? And anything that deteriorates that. I would not want to watch a video where I hear a lot of noise in the background. I’m pretty sure nobody likes to hear that. So of course, having those things tied up properly and making sure that when you’re presenting videos, you are an engaging user. You don’t want to be dull out in front of the camera, right? Anything that helps. And very importantly, YouTube has a very good algorithm to measure engagement over your videos, right? There are certain things that you can do and you should not be shy about. It is of course everybody asks to go ahead, subscribe to the channel, and whatnot, right? But at the same time, doing that at the right point also counts, right? You do that when you’re starting the video, but while you’re providing the solution, you can again remind them that if in case you have not liked the video, please go ahead and do that.

It would mean a lot and would support me. I will be more than happy to roll out similar videos or will be more than happy to roll out similar videos, whatever. That minor push is also enough to get some additional likes on your video, right? So wherever you can, don’t spam them, don’t tell them after every minute like my video. But at the same time, be very subtle about these nudges that you have in place. There are also ways in which you can tie up your end videos, right? You can create an entire playlist to make sure that the person is staying on your channel, right? You have end screens out of every YouTube video where you can attach and everybody does that. They highlight related videos toward the end of the section. But even while you’re watching the video in between, you can interlink that with another video and give the reference to that in the notification icon over there on top of the video, right? So just as you interlink your article to another article and create that model of wheel spoke, you can do similar sorts of things for YouTube as well. Create long-form content where you have end-to-end things covered.

Very important to make sure if you have something that is two to three years old, of course, that’s not relevant in some cases. For example, if you have an overview of a process of a tool, if you’re covering a process, this is what you can do with this tool right now. In two to three years, that tool might have also had a change of UI or the way they process your video might not be helpful. So users are realizing, right, from, say, for example, Google Ads, right? If you look at a Google Ads tutorial, you would not want to look at a tutorial that is 2020-dated, right? Because the UI back then was very different from the UI now, right? So UI also keeps changing experience strategies. Everything keeps changing, especially in tool-specific videos. So make sure those are on your high radar for content refreshment from a YouTube perspective. Hope that helps.

Yeah. And Harshit, I would love to know concerning your branding efforts, are you actively doing digital PR or content syndication? Harrow, all of those activities, what’s on your plate right now?

So yeah, you addressed a very good point out there that is aHarrow’s very good area. If you’re able to get some additional brand visibility as well as backlink juice. If you’re not looking at Haro as of now, you should look out on that platform, find relevant threads, and try to address them, right? Of course, if they get accepted. It’s a win-win-win situation for both the one who’s asking the question and the one who’s writing the answer.

So of course Haro is not something to ignore. Everybody should keep an eye out for that. But at the same time, branding side PRs again have been very pivotal for every company. It is very important to let folks know, again, PR costs as well. So good PRs will generally have a certain amount of budget taken away from you. So you need to be, again at the scale of your company, at the scale of your budget. You need to plan whether you want to talk about PR every week for every feature that you release, or you want to talk about PR, which is once a month and talks about the entire thing that you have had as a plum something or an interview that you want to push out or some sort of funding news or whatever. Funding news. Of course, go ahead, and have a PR. At least you’ve had funding. That is the bare minimum. Everyone should do that. But of course, apart from that, feature-specific PRs as well are something that folks can go ahead and do to ensure that this is happening in their product. It adds to your branding.

But yes, of course, I see that the majority again is a community, right? So if you have something that is built for the community, for example, we had a testimony conference done last two years. We just wrapped up the second edition last year, which was the biggest testing conference virtually done. So we received around 20,000 registrations for that. And it was of a kind testing conference, virtually gathering a lot of keynote speakers from big-time companies like Microsoft and whatnot, Wipro, and other areas, right? So having that sort of, if you have something like that for the community, and by the way, it was pretty to attend for everyone, right? So if you are at that scale, you’re doing something well for the community. Make sure you boast about it on your PRs. You let folks know that you are there for the community. Very important to be close to the community and let them know that you are there. So if PR aids in that, by all means, you should go ahead and do that. That’s good branding.

Okay, how do you approach leadership in marketing, especially in terms of contributing to hiring knowledge, KD transitions, and fostering growth within the team?

All right, so three very different umbrellas, but somehow connected phases, right? Let’s take it from phase one, hiring, right? So I’ve of course been hiring right from the get-go. After I grew up for a year or two, I was involved with the hiring for a marketing site and there are some things you want to keep in mind, right? Cultural fit.

You, being a part of the company, know what the culture is. And I think it’s very important to be transparent when you hire someone and let them know. A lot of times people, when they are hiring, all they want to see is whether the person has the right skills.

Are they able to get a grasp of the questions that I’m asking? But when they onboard that person, they realize that the cultural fit is not as par.

The person you have on board has different priorities and that is cool. But you have different priorities based on the pace and scale that you are at to have that kind of judgment. Of course, HR does that as well. There are different rounds. But if you are recruiting somebody from a technical perspective as well, let them know the reality of how you work before you get them on board, right? It’s very important. Let them know what you do as well. Don’t ask them about what they have done alone. Let them know that this is what you do. This is your problem area. This is how you contribute. And that way they are also fully transparent. I’ve seen a lot of people who are eager to join, right? But at the same time, they realize that, okay, maybe right now I think you have expectations for something which I am not best suited for, right? And that is not something they were able to get a good grasp out of JDs because again, there’s a difference between textual and verbal conversation.

So let them know about yourself while you are hiring. After you have hired somebody, you’ve got them on board. Make sure you’re touching base with them right from the get-go. You should have a KT plan for them, right? There are certain things for every business that folks have to go and learn about. It could be some glossary terms, or it could be some product-based tutorial videos, right? Some onboarding material. Get those things collated if you don’t have that done already. And don’t just pass it on to them and tell them to keep at it, go at it at their own pace. Personally, if you have a team that is sizable enough, assign buddies to folks, right? Make sure that you are catching up with buddies every once every two days when new hires are on board and buddies are touching bases with them daily, and open up a question-based forum. It could be a slack channel. It could be a WhatsApp group as well. Anything that works for you or your business or your company, right? And make sure that the channel is there to invoke questions.

You too can ask questions and you can ask. It’s very important to let the new folks know that no question is a stupid question.

You have just joined a company and of course, you’re going to have questions. Don’t worry about how you would be portrayed when asking questions.

It’s very important to break the ICE when you hire somebody from the get-go. And that is especially true. The reason I’m saying this so much, and I’m emphasizing it up to this extent, is because I’ve seen, that when you’re hiring marketers, for me, the transition was substantially easy because I was a developer. In the background, I was a developer. I have seen the problems of devs and QA firsthand. So when I transitioned to the LambdaTest, I knew what the mission was. I know the problem we are trying to solve. I know the community I’m attached to. So my learning curve was slightly, considerably less, I would say to somebody who we have hired, who is coming from a fintech background, who is just about to, who has no idea about what test orchestration is, execution is, and all these jargons are new to them. And they also have to look at the marketing you are doing. They also have to look at the product offerings. They also have to look at the glossary terms and whatnot set a proper roadmap, and touch bases with them frequently. Break the ICE, and ask questions. It’s very important to address questions when you’re asking questions and the other person is not able to correctly answer them. How you convey the answer is also very important. So it is supercritical.

Something that you will also learn as you grow in leadership. Eventually, people might think, I know how this can be sorted out, but why can’t they figure it out? Why can’t that happen? But everybody learns and works at a different pace. There are things the new folks would be better at than you, and there are things that you are better at for whatever reasons, but make sure you are helping them out and giving them the right answer in a way that is acceptable to them. Don’t be too harsh. I especially like to relay, that a philosophy that I follow is that if you have to give feedback to someone, if there is some correction or something, make sure you do that on a personal basis.

Because everybody has their thought process going on. Doing that on a public channel or something, again, is a debatable thing. Folks like to do it on public channels too. But if you ask me, if there’s anything that you feel can be improved, relate that to them on a personal note.

It doesn’t take much time. We have lived through the new normal. Just huddle them or get on a team, call whatever, and let them know one-to-one that, boss, this is how you could do this. This is how it happens. And then it comes to we have talked about hiring, we’ve talked about KT, and then the growth, right? So growth is something that although you can devise a plan for somebody, but on the other hand, they have to be accountable for it. So as a leader, you must instill that feeling of accountability in new hires, right? Start giving them minor responsibilities and let them know that they are helping you. You have to let them know that you are also leaning on them just as much as they are leaning on you. Learning goes both ways.

And while you do that, make sure that you tell them. And you tell them very concretely that don’t think of tasks as tasks alone. Don’t be a task-oriented person, be a result-oriented person.

For example, if you have optimized an article that I had given you or a web page that I had given you, and you are showcasing to me that, see, the rank has elevated from twelfth position to 6th position. So we are now ranking way better than we were ranking earlier.

But is rank the only metric I want to see is whether that elevation gave me better traffic? Will I go into the search console and check that? When you go into the search console, there could also be a possibility that you will find out that, yes, your rank has improved but your traffic hasn’t. And the reason for that is because you were inconsistent in terms of ranking. So in a month, you were only able to rank, say, for example, ten times out of 30 days. So those instances were narrow.

So rank is the only metric that you need to gauge now because you are the leader. So you have to tell them that anytime you present something or if I give you an accountability, try to look into the results that you’re getting out of it.

The idea was not just to elevate the article but, to improve its rank. That is not the reason why we give you the article. The article was to help you thoroughly get that consistent traffic or whatever. So help them be more result-oriented and more accountable. That is something you need to instill. Once you do that, the folks who have the zeal, have the drive, will turn out to be good leaders shortly. And just as a basic example, I believe that in every quarter, every new hire should go from one stage of learning to another, right? So stagnancy can be a very major red flag, right? For you as well and for the team under you. So everybody’s work is important, right? And if I feel like folks are usually very hungry to learn new things, right? Everybody is out of insecurity and whatnot and whatever is in their mind. But if they are hungry and you have somebody hungry to learn and learn more, make sure you give them additional responsibilities, give them additional tasks. How they manage their bandwidth is up to them, right? And at the same time, bandwidth is another very important pointer.

Let your team know that if there is at any point you feel like you’re flooded with multiple tasks, right? Make sure you get these things prioritized by a team lead, right? So you should be there to help them prioritize what is important because if they are new or even if somebody is not new in the system for too long, they do feel bombarded sometimes. I also feel bombarded about a lot of things that happen, right? So it’s very common. But it’s important to take some time out as a breather and prioritize the things that you know cannot be missed out in terms of deadlines. So that helps.

Brilliant input Harshit and thank you so much. We’re coming to an end here and I had an awesome time chatting with you. All things LambdaTests, your experiences, your wisdom, to be honest. Thank you so much for sharing and thank you so much for your time here. I really Appreciate it.

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