The Art and Science of Marketing: Ardyce Taylor's Approach at Filevine

Thanks. I’m happy to be here.

Yeah, so I’ve always been pretty ambitious. Anytime there was the next step to take, I always wanted to figure out how to take that. So I came into Filevine as head of performance marketing and have been taking on a broader and broader scope over the years till this year where I got the opportunity to not just do performance marketing and demand, but started working with the PR teams and the creative team as well, which was just such a different kind of scope for me that creative team works so much differently than a performance marketing team. There are a lot more left brain where performance marketers are right brain. So it was a shift in learning how to communicate with people who aren’t stuck in spreadsheets all day and are thinking more artistically and creatively about the business and how to get those messages across. It’s been great. I inherited a high-performing creative team and they’ve been so nice and teaching me all the things I don’t know about the art that they produce. Now, your background spans several roles in performance marketing and digital advertising. How is this diverse experience influenced your approach to leading marketing by Vine? Sure. So I’ve always been a numbers person and that makes me a great fit for Filevine because they’re a very sales-led organization. So like I get relaxed by doing the math to optimize a business. Even if the math and product make me very worried that we’re not going to hit our goals. Just that exercise of putting those things into place just is a very, fits my background very well.

And when you’re running performance marketing, you’re spending a lot of time with spreadsheets and Excel formulas, and you’re getting organized in that kind of linear way. So that sort of organization forces a framework for campaign launches, product launches, and performance grading. We use project management tools and things like that, but anytime I need to organize my thoughts around a campaign, it all starts in a spreadsheet. I’ve been on a one-person marketing team plenty of times in my life. So not only do I know how to plan, but I also know how to execute everything that goes into launching a marketing campaign. I just, know where to put people and what actions to give them to have a successful launch or successful campaign. That’s brilliant. And since you mentioned numbers, I would love to understand which APIs you prioritize the most for your marketing efforts. Yeah. So we’ve split up our numbers into two different categories. We have our engine room numbers and our cockpit numbers.

And that kind of changes with what your level is at the organization. So for example, for me, my cockpit numbers are the ones I’m communicating to my CEO and my CFO. So that’s going to be like marketing source pipeline, the number of sales accepted leads, and it’s almost like the simplest version of success. My engine metrics are the ones I’m communicating to my campaign managers and my channel managers. And those are the things that create those SAOs. So we use MQLs and SQLs. Those are our two very top-of-funnel kinds of metrics. So we look at that, we look at the cost per lead, and then we look at everything according to what the plan was and then how we’re hitting on that plan. Say I have $100,000 to spend. Am I on track to spend that this month? Am I going to go over? Am I going to go under? Maybe I need to get 500 MQLs. Like, how are we tracking on that? It’s all in a target-be-actual kind of way. Then from my channel managers and my campaign managers, the cockpit metrics that they’re communicating are my engine room metrics. But then the things they’re looking at to optimize for those cockpit metrics are going to be cost per lead by channel or by actual campaign and the lead volume they’re getting from those campaigns. Makes sense. And what’s your go-to analytics and reporting platform?

So we use a variety of things. Everything is stitched together with our BI tool. We use Domo, which is a local company around here. They’re local, meaning they’re headquartered here.

They’re a global company from what I understand, but they’re like a Tableau if you’ve heard of them. And so what that does is it allows us to stitch together data from Google Analytics and Google Ads, really anywhere, HubSpot, anywhere that has an API connection, we can stitch that together and come up with more comprehensive reports. It’s like the marriage between your marketing automation platform reporting and your CRM reporting that can all come together in Domo, which makes it a lot easier than building out all your spreadsheets by yourself. Now, Fire and Wine operates in an extremely competitive space, right? What unique strategies do you use to differentiate the company and build a strong brand presence? Yeah, you’re right. It is very competitive. I think what sets us apart is that we have so many different motions. We don’t just sell case management software. We have an intake software. We have reporting software. We have document management software. We have an e -e-signature tool. We have a big conference that we get everybody, all of our customers come to. So really what matters for us in having success across all these different products is segmentation. So for example, we’ll have some comms that need to go to customers to come to the conference, but no, we also need to upsell them on another product. And so we spend a lot of time calendaring out these comms. So people are calendaring out these comms in different audience segments so that we can be very clear and not muddy the waters and keep the message the same for any given segment for a certain period. So they’re not getting a conference email one day and the next a webinar email for something different. So that kind of organization is really important for us to be competitive on all these different kinds of products and campaign motions that we’re running.

Yeah, so we don’t even have a product marketing team at Filevine. Everyone on our team is expected to come to three products and go to market meetings a week so that they can become product expert for marketing purposes. They’re not going to be sitting on support calls, but they can write ads and emails to sell those products.

So we have a big meeting on Mondays to go through everything the engineering team is building. And then midweek, we have a meeting with product managers to get a little bit more in-depth and be able to ask more marketing questions. And then finally, we’ll have a marketing task meeting where it’s just the marketing team saying, okay, we have this new product. What are my action items? What are the assets I need to create? We have this great flow that my boss, Keegan Chapman built with the product team to make sure we stay current and ahead of the game.

And it’s super important for Filevine marketing team members to not just be marketers. They are expected to know a lot about every different aspect of the company. And that just, helps us know what we’re walking into because so many of our ad hoc meetings are just like people from so many different departments and everyone speaks a different language. You’ve got products speaking their language, sales speak their language.

Marketing has its own sets of acronyms. So having this well-rounded experience is what we strive for with our marketing team. So everyone’s a product marketer is what I say because no one is just a product marketer. That’s amazing. know, it’s rare to see such synergy within companies.

Sure. So we treat the website as an iterative process. Like it’s never done. About 18 months ago, we had a rebrand and we’re still in the process of tweaking some pages to be more in line with that brand because we recognize we can’t just do all tens of thousands of pages at once.

We add a lot of business motions to, we’re a very agile company. We launch a lot of different products that change maybe how our pricing structure might look or different practice areas that we’re going to serve. Being able to change those things quickly, but thoughtfully is very important. In the past, I’ve worked with teams where it was just the design team working on the website and then, at hurts conversion rate optimization if the design team isn’t thinking of that because If you’ve ever worked in any kind of advertising, you may know that like the prettiest thing isn’t always going to be the most converting thing, right? Sometimes it’s like really hideous things that a designer would roll over in their grave about, over here on the performance marketing team, we’re like, Hey, it’s working. It’s getting us leads. And so there’s that just a difference of opinion there. What we’ve done is we’ve employed a CRO agency to help us right now, because, in my opinion, CRO is a full-time job. There are so many different things to be checking on. just, we don’t have anyone dedicated to doing that, but this agency they’re called Spiralize has been doing a great job. So they do this iterative testing process on just right now, just demo request pages. Cause that’s like our ultimate goal on my marketing team is how many demo requests are we getting? And we’ve been doing it for a couple of months and it’s been working very well. And it’s just like AB testing and then reporting our bottom line metric as those demo requests. So whatever is working and then we’ll do it. We’re doing a pilot for about three months and then we’ll see where that lands us. Do you have any specific tools on your website that are doing wonders for you?

We don’t have a lot of that. used to have, we used to have, we have more like content pieces because our audience is lawyers and legal teams and they love to read. Their work product is documents. They read a lot more than any other internet user I’ve met. We’d like to say video for everything all the time, but really for our particular market, we’re creating a lot of written content and it’s more like the thought leadership kind of content toyed around with doing some sort of calculators and things like that, but our, most of the people coming to our website are not going to be those managing partners that are interested in ROI. They’re in there trying to figure out how to make case management easier for themselves. And so that’s where we’re educating them on, this old way that you’ve probably been using isn’t going to be as effective as if you were to employ technology and AI to help streamline your processes.

And I know you’ve got tons of engines running, right? You’ve got paid ads, you’ve got social engine optimization, social. How do you balance the allocation of budget and resources across these different channels? Yeah, so most of our performance marketing budget is spent on PPC. I would say 90 % because we are a lead gen organization. our job is to create sales for the revenue team.

I would say though, as we mature as a business a little bit more, I would like to see it spread out more evenly like 30, 30, 30 between PPC, SEO, and PR. I think PR is getting more and more important and it works hand in hand with SEO and you can pay for PR too. So it all goes together, but we’re still very much in the business. So let’s get those leads in the door. Let’s get them to sales. And the fastest way to do that is through PPC.

We are. So we have an internal PR team. We target our PR that’s about features mostly to industry publications. are like, it’s, we have such a product that CBS News probably won’t pick it up but things like Legal Tech Publishing and Law .com and these very lawyer-specific publications will pick it up. And then I also have a few relationships where we do the pay-to-play thing with some thought leadership pieces to fill that top of the funnel. Some of, there are kind of other stories we like to tell. Like we do a little bit of volunteering and we just talk about those on social. We don’t make big press releases about it because

The nature of the volunteering is to build community, not so much to get a PR pickup, although it would be nice, but that’s not the goal there. And then things like when we win awards or things like that, we’ll push those out over the general wire. But for the most part, we limit it to either social or industry-specific publications.

Sure. So in my opinion, every channel has a purpose. So trying to run your entire funnel on one channel hasn’t worked for us. Like I’ve seen a lot of e-commerce thought leaders talk about running the whole funnel on Facebook only or B2B people running their entire funnel on LinkedIn. But for us, that just really hasn’t worked because different audience members are going to be in different places. So most of our top-of-funnel and aness comes from our events team. have a super strong awareness motion with them. Our events team is super robust and very high-performing. We’ve also tested out connected TVs with a vendor called Mountain and they allow for really niche targeting. Not only can I target lawyers, but I can target specific practice types of lawyers, which is just, they’re the only platform we’ve seen that will let us target practice types.

And when we started using them, we noticed a 10 % increase in paid search and direct traffic leads. So that was a huge win. Most of our content marketing, like middle-of-the-funnel stuff, comes from industry publications and paid social. And then we do most of our demo request things on a paid search where people are super low in the funnel. They’re actively looking for Filevine or case management software. We do a little bit of affiliate as well with Gartner properties but even Google knows that you can’t run your entire, campaign just on paid search. That’s why they have their performance max and their discovery campaigns and like smart shopping they’re putting different funnel stage pieces of content everywhere and then optimizing that journey for you, which is nice. In terms of the automation we use, we use a lot of the actual lead gen part.

There isn’t automation there, but when it comes to routing those leads to our outreach team, that’s where we use things like Zapier and Workado to collect all the information from our HubSpot forms, push them to the appropriate people, put them into the CRM and enroll them in their outreach sequences.

Absolutely. There’s a lot of excitement every time a new algorithm update is whispered about, something’s coming. Everybody runs around and freaks out. But I found that the basic tenets of SEO from like 10 to 15 years ago have to still be your backbone. So start with your keyword research and understand what it is you want to show up for. From there, do the on-page optimization to make sure your site is ready to show up for that, and then build your links to those kinds of things, to those pages. We’ve started looking at other search engines too. There’s this AI one, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s very big in Western Europe, but we have an entire team of futurists at Filevine that’s telling us it’s going to be the next big thing. So we better figure out how to rank there. My SEO and web development team are very much in the weeds with child and support pages and URL structures and things like that with enhancing credibility based on the pages pointing to the main pillar pages is what we call them. The ones we want to rank for.

And passing that authority as much as they can and not just like the page authority, but the content authority is what we’re calling it. Well, what the actual words on those support pages are saying, and how,w they can support the content on the pillar page? So a lot of those kinds of like copy things, what we’ve been doing a lot of is marrying the function of writing for bots and then writing for humans and making that all one motion instead of, we have these blogs that are just for SEO, like keyword sprinkling versus these blogs, which are written by a thought leader that has no SEO value at all, but putting those together in the same thing to optimize our resources and only write the same thing once instead of writing it many times. Yeah, that’s good. And then you mentioned that topical authority is extremely crucial in today’s age, not just for the solution, but also for you.

AI-driven social engineering, new gen.ai as well, increasing your visibility on those platforms. Yeah, that’s one of the top factors altogether. Kudos to you and your team working on that front.

Sure. So our SEO guy comes to all of our go-to-market meetings. So he stays really up to date on all of the new products that we’re launching or features that we’re launching. so he’s, I’ve tasked him, I’m like, you’re the website librarian now. So every time something updates, you have to know where to go and update that. just by being involved, he’s a really smart guy. He starts and he starts to see the holes we might have, and it’s one of my favorite employees because he’ll just think, Hey, I noticed we were missing this and this. So I just went ahead and did it. And I said I’m just so happy about that. He works closely with the go-to-market team. And then, as I said, we’ll be creating this content as well to link to get, well, not link together, but make a single content piece that will fit both SEO needs and a human reader’s needs.

So that they can stay up to date. And coming back to my question, any specific strategies in general that you have, which is helping you with customer retention specifically? So we use a tool. It’s like an ABM tool and what it can do is we’ll feed it account lists or integrate it with Salesforce and then we can see what these people are searching for online.

So if they’re searching for competitors, we have little alerts going to our account retention team saying, hey, this person’s searching for a competitor. It might be a good time to see why they’re unsatisfied and looking for competitors right now. So that’s one of my favorite things that we do. There are a million tools that’ll do that for you. They’re all paid. But I think one of the cheaper ones is Leadfeeder will do that. And ZoomInfo, everybody uses that at this point, I think, in SaaS.

Yes. We have a marketing operations person on our team and he’s been there. I think he was employee number five or six at Filevine. I could have that number wrong, but he has been there forever. So he’s like basically building the systems and the automation that allow us to scale. So he comes to most meetings about new launches or anything where we’re going to need any tracking or lead routing. He’s involved with those. And he’s also one of those people since he knows so much about how everything is built, he’ll be the one to say, Hey, have you thought about this? How are we going to report on this or what are your plans for this? So it’s really helpful to have his knowledge there. For sales, it’s a little bit different. When we have a big initiative, then we’ll go to one of their all-hands meetings and make a big presentation about it. And we always try to drive it home with this is how we’re going to help you close faster. Cause that’s their ultimate goal is to close deals faster. And I didn’t know that the whole time I was there. So for a lot of my career, I was like, it’s sales. You just have to compensate them for everything that they want to do. So if I want them to do something, I’ll give them a present. Like here’s a gift card or here’s some AirPods or something like that. And that’s fine and dandy, but at some point, you run out of innovative presents to give. So really illustrating that value and making sure you only wrote them in on things that are going to help them close faster is going to get you the results that you want. If you’re just giving busy work that’s not going to help people close faster, they’re not going to be interested. Any new initiative that you have in mind you’re to launch very soon when it comes to your marketing and something that you might be seeing in the legal tech or tech industry in general?

So we’ve identified a couple of, this is something I’ve never done in my life, but it just, the pieces all fell together and this is more of an awareness play, but our audience watches a certain TV show religiously, we’ve discovered. And it was something I never would have thought of, but we’re going to work on some product placement for this TV show.

Talking to the customers, talking to our, a lot of people on our leadership team are our customer profile and they’re swearing by this as well. So what do they want? Suits? Yeah. Okay. How did you know? Because that’s something that might resonate.
Yeah, so, you know, I’ve never really thought of just because a show is about a certain profession, does that mean that profession is watching it? Like that, who knows? But we’ve done some research and it sounds like they are. We tried to get our product placement on there, but it sounds like the pilot’s been made, so it looks pretty good. So that was just like a really fun little exercise we got to do. We had a brainstorming meeting where we were like.

Okay, what are, aside from having showing people using the product, cause that’s like a stretch, but we’re going to try. Aside from that, how could we put another kind of Filevine piece of swag on this show? And so we had this brainstorming meeting and came up with a list of 300 things that could be used. And then we had the creative, we narrowed that down to about 150 after a second pass. But in my brainstorms, I say any idea is good. We don’t do any whittling down of the ideas and brainstorms just create ideas you can whittle down later in a different meeting. So we whittled that down to 150 and the creative team just went nuts putting our logos on all these little things in a catalog. And we sent it over and the people were so pleased at the breadth that we had done. it wasn’t, it didn’t take long for our creative team to just stamp logos on things. So it was like, a little lift. There’s monetary involvement there. There’s an investment, but we’re excited about it because I just, I don’t think anyone’s doing that. So, please, I mean, once you run that test on just showcasing a product on suite, let’s do another round of this thing and we’ll able to hear about the outcome that you achieved. I think that’s going to be interesting to watch. I think it will be. We’re hoping it’ll function a little bit more on the customer. It depends on what we get the producers to approve. So if it’s product placement in terms of showing how the product works, match .com did this with the original series of suits, then I think we could probably get a lead lift. If it’s just showing our swag, I think it’ll be more of a customer affinity play and keeping our customers happy and proud that they’re using Filevine. like, Hey, it was on TV.

I’m ready for that. Sure.

Okay. So one of my favorite ones that I do all the time is I will take one of our support website pages. So like a customer support article, I will say you are an AI trained in writing web pages for the Filevine marketing team. Write me a highly converting webpage using this URL explaining why someone would want to use this product. Be sure to include witty headlines and then I’ll give it a little bit more depending on what kind of wit I want. But we like the witty stuff over at Filevine. FAQs and how it works and why you should buy it promptly.

I’m not a morning person. I typically get to the office at 8 and I’m just like dead for two hours, like really trying hard to be productive, but maybe finding myself in more conversations than actual productive work at 8

Back when it may not have been bizarre, but it was amazing. Back when Facebook lookalike audiences first came out, that worked amazingly. That only lasted for a couple of months before Facebook targeting got bad. And now you can’t even advertise on Facebook because the targeting is just so hard to get so much junk. But for a while there, we had a nice period where you can make your lookalike audiences and I always did value-based lookalike audiences. So I would assign value not based on revenue number, but based on stage they were in the life cycle. And I would make a very disparate scale of value. So I would have zero upzeroededa hundred thousand. And that I think sent really good signals and gave us great leads with a lot of volume until it didn’t anymore but there were months there where it was just our bread and butter.

It’s not marketing-related, but I do love to ski and I will talk about skiing all day long. As well, right? Yeah, I was. huh. you were?

I work at Filevine now and I don’t have time.

Tiktok.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.