Interview with Liz Dubelman

hi this is Bob Samuels founder tech
connector that connector is a
marketplace and campaign management
platform a Best of Breed account based
marketing lead generation solutions
we’ve partnered with the serious
decision summit to bring you wisdom from
leading account based marketing thought
leaders to that end I’m happy to
introduce you to Liz Doublemint Liz’s
founder and CEO of visit productions a
world-renowned book marketing and
content creation company
she’s also executive editor for an
excellent organization called women and
Technology International or witty I
caught up with Liz at the witty event in
Santa Clara Liz it’s a pleasure to speak
with you how are you today
I’m great because I’m a witty and women
in technology international and not only
are they one of my clients but I’m a
member of the organization and I have
been for many many years and it’s just a
great organization that supports other
women particularly in underserviced
areas beautiful cause I’m a father of
two wonderful daughters and I’m on the
women’s team so I’m rooting for you so
it’s nice to be here
it’s it’s nice organization to be tied
to the organization like that and it’s a
pleasure to speak with you so well what
exactly are you doing for the
organization which you’re what’s your
role so I’m a partner in column
marketing agency which is we do a lot of
content marketing for the most part
which is great for witty because witty
has tons of content and my background is
in marketing but it’s slightly different
marketing my oh I started out many years
ago probably more than 10 years ago
marketing books for large publishers and
the book business has changed so much
they brought a lot of that in-house and
a lot of it still isn’t a lot of it is
individual authors be easier if they
brought all of it in-house but a lot of
it is individual authors and they need
to really market their own books
part of the problem so that’s what I do
and so as part of that we do a lot of
creating either new content or taking
excerpts from various things that exists
we use it to build up our in in the case
of woody to get people to register for
the events in the case of marketing
books we use it to build up an author’s
sort of social media profile and their
rep you proof of reputation their
reputation because when you go into a
publisher they do a quick back of the
envelope calculation and they see how
many people do you have following you
how will that be amplified who will buy
those books and what sort of books are
comfortable to your books and so what
are the models the models are the books
if you’re writing a mystery book what’s
the biggest mystery book that you can
think of that’s like your book that has
a female protagonist or whatever we do
comparables based on that with Witte
it’s the same thing what organizations
are like Witte that we can model
ourselves after in order to whatever our
particular goal is and it has to be a
single goal we try all the time to do
multiple goals because everybody has
multiple goals they’ll have five goals
it’s very hard to do that because it’s
hard to measure it and it’s and it’s
hard to be successful in any one place
so it’s either driving traffic to the
summit as we are now driving people to
the website driving people to the email
list driving people to take the survey
but you can’t do all of them at once
people get confused and they know the
difference they’re very very smart very
savvy customers these days and even if
they don’t know it consciously what’s
going on they receive confusion so in
this case the goal is driving attendees
for the event and and it’s different
people I imagine so you’ve there’s all
different personas or different types of
people what types of people were you
targeting and
did you have different sorts of
messaging for different personas or
different roles at different company
sizes or different types of people
you’re reaching yes we had different we
had a couple of we did a few interesting
things we had different people that we
wanted to drive to the summit so let’s
say there were a group of women inside a
larger corporation but there the women
in there executives and there c-suite
where there weren’t that many of them we
would go out and target them and tell
them they could hold the retreat here
they could get a group of women together
who would be empowered they would have
all the lectures and they can meet in a
smaller room in a suite and they could
talk about their issues we also have
people on the manage manager level or or
new newer people than that newer to the
workforce and we had that we created a
letter all the reasons my boss should
send me to this conference
why would be beneficial to the comp to
the company which is really what your
boss wants to know why am i sending you
here what are you going to bring back
with you and we also had different we
had a bunch of different emails with
various discounts that went out to
different partners or people who were
sponsoring us so that was a whole
different sort of vertical and as where
we targeted emails we could see you know
we would write a letter for an HR person
so for example someone would buy a
package a company would buy a package
and they wanted to offer this discount
to all their people we would word the
the email that the HR person would would
then take and and distribute to their
people you would craft the messaging and
they would deliver it with their own
letterhead or not gave them a lot of
suggestions and that was it was the best
we could do I thought that that worked
pretty well I think that this is our I
could be wrong about this but I think
this is the largest attend attended
conference and I know that it’s better
than every year before because we you
learn and you get better it’s wonderful
congratulations so are you able to
determine which method or which
messaging work best for which types of
audiences that’s a really good question
and I I would only be going off a
feeling at this point because we need to
go back really so we’re in the middle of
the conference now tomorrow is my panel
so we have a lot to go through and then
we need to go back and the most
important thing you can do is the sort
of I hate this term the post mortem
about how you did it cuz it sounds
terrible it’s really the start of
something not the end of something
because this starts our year at witty
you know so the conference is the year
ender and so we’re gonna we’re starting
our new year everything’s fresh and
let’s look at what we’re going to do to
drive revenue and then to drive people
to the summit planning meeting yeah I
like it so what’s your what’s your panel
discussion on what type of people are
gonna be on your panel my panel
discussion is on marketing and we have
the best panel I promise it’s the best
panel we have we have a person who is a
guy we have one man on our panel who’s
the head of data for Ticketmaster we
have a woman who is from LVMH the luxury
brand she’s the chief digital officer
she’s got 80 brands some our baby brands
and some are mature brands we have Liz
Kelly she’s she owns her own PR agency
and so she’s going to talk about the
difference between marketing and PR and
Bonita is a professor in gender studies
and she’s going to talk about the gender
bias in marketing because even though
they’re on these algorithms out there
that claim to know you so let’s say we
want to you want to put an ad out on
Facebook and you claim to you you say
you want women technologists how does it
know it knows where women are and it
might know where technologists are but
how does it know where all the women
technologists hang out so we have a we
have an interesting and lively
discussion we did a big zoom call and
it was so funny and interesting it was a
lot about wording it was a lot about the
difference between for example the
difference between socialism and social
responsibility which may in fact mean
the same thing but socialism is a
triggering word so you want to sort of
stay away from that and we because it’s
such a broad topic marketing is a very
very broad topic and we have two
different audience members here those
who are interested in marketing their
business and their company and those
people who are interested in marketing
marketing themselves personally so they
want to change careers or they want to
just summarize their career or figure
out what their next step is and so we
talk of where we’ve crafted the panel to
talk about both things
overall what marketing is what marketing
is personally what is marketing for your
corporation your company and what what
are the new tools and things because the
new tools are really interesting because
they allow somebody with a very very
small budget to go out and market
themselves we never had that before and
in some ways that’s great some ways it’s
terrible I don’t know but it is what it
is so so there are any cool tools that
you found that you can share my favorite
tool these days and and I don’t know if
this is good to do a shout out to them
but it’s I really like sprout social
because it it allows me to schedule
allows our whole team to schedule all
sorts of social content but also to
measure it and to know exactly how it’s
doing and that’s the most important
thing that’s that’s the tools that we
have now is we can actually put a
quantitative amount to anything that
you’re doing even if it’s you know even
if you say a customer is worth a dollar
71 a customers run at the dollar 71
let’s see how much how many customers we
have and how that’s gonna work out I
love it being able to measure
and and like you said improve every time
you’ll probably cut this out but this is
interesting so I have a little side
hustle that I do and it’s called digital
daughter and I help older people with
their technology I go into their houses
and help other people with it so this is
some my older an older woman who’s in
her 80s who’s clearly having a problem
with her technology but I can’t help it
right now that’s pretty funny so so what
about a BM so what is a BM to you and
how are you is that is that a big topic
for this event or in your in your real
life as a marketing consultant is that
something you pay much attention to I
don’t I know you would rather be say yes
but we just have it I don’t know why we
haven’t I mean the idea is to is to try
to try to give as much relevance as
possible to people and and for instance
to make your messaging really customized
as much as possible to for one-on-one
marketing for the most important people
you have and then for less important
people maybe make it a little you know
still relevant but it can’t be as
perfect because you don’t have enough
time to research everybody’s interest
and so forth so you can try it but the
idea is to try to target who after who
you want to go after try to give them
what you can as far as giving things
relevant for them and and try to you
know connect and try to engage them I
really do I hope we do that but really I
come out of the world of writing and
publishing and movies and things like
that so that’s how I got involved in
content marketing because I could create
content I did – I started off in
newspapers and but but you can you have
already got the same content and now
with with the digital world you can you
can know more about people and you can
give them very specific everybody’s
article could look very different based
on their personas and base of their
interests and based on what they’re
about so lots of opportunities
it can get interesting can get confusing
too but no and I didn’t I didn’t deliver
the papers either I was actually in
accounting but it’s a different matter
but it’s interesting and I really you
know I’m a numbers person and so I love
being able to measure results and being
able to give target and targeting as
much as possible so with newspapers you
don’t know if someone read the ad or not
or what the impact was but with digital
marketing you know you know what people
did and you know how they reacted and
you know you can change the color and
you can see the difference and there’s a
lots of change chances to measure and
effect
I wonder if today you do know in
newspapers who was reading I mean most
people don’t get print newspapers I
imagine that’s a very small so you
probably know what articles they’re
going to and they’re very vocal I mean
you get probably if they’re sharing it
on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or
whatever you probably know that share
count and things like that yeah you can
you can have different calls to action
and you can see what people did when
they when they read it
so yeah the worlds are better but it’s
it’s more measurable and more more
impactful it feels like you have more
control so that’s kind of a that’s more
secure feeling I need to be careful
about about privacy and not being too
you know want to spook people too much
or well we were talking last night to is
Senator Hannah Jackson about this she’s
very concerned about privacy and whether
you can legislate privacy or not my
feeling was that you couldn’t legislate
it but her feeling and she had very good
point was HIPAA laws you know the idea
that you can legislate it as we do in
the medical business but Google knows
more about her health that her doctor
does because she her doctor only knows
what she chooses to share whereas Google
knows a lot and you know we talked a
little bit about facial recognition and
about how there was an article that in
San Francisco I think it was that there
there was the facial recognition is so
good that it
when a woman was pregnant before she did
we talked about all the different ways
that you could use facial recognition
for good and bad and why she felt that
we needed to legislate that yeah so that
was fascinating the better we are you
know you need to be we need to have some
sorts of rules whether it’s internal
regulations or not but using for using
the data for good and not for evil it’s
great it’s it’s um it’s difficult but I
think well I personally I could be wrong
think most people are good so hopefully
most people use it for good I think so
so what is your you’ve seen some changes
over the past several years but from a
technology standpoint and from privacy
and legislation issues and so forth so
where do you think things are going
where what is this world going to look
like in when you were in five years I
think it’ll be highly personalized which
is a good thing my fear is that we’ll
all live in little bubbles and we’ll
only talk to people that make us feel
good and I don’t think that’s a good way
to grow in fact I had this idea to save
this but breaking news I have this idea
to save the country and it doesn’t cost
a single dime and it makes no one famous
which is why I couldn’t get it done the
idea is that and maybe you did this when
you were a kid is that everybody in the
country like a WPA program everybody in
the country gets a pen pal that’s not
them it’s lined up by their birthday so
that you don’t have like a fifty year
old guy talking to a third grader but
every single person in the country can
do this and you you have to talk to them
for one year you email with them for one
year you get you can’t put any of it on
social media
you can’t publicize it and you talk
about things going on in your day you
don’t initially you wait you’re six
months or something before you talk
about politics or religion and I think
then you would get to know someone who’s
not you and that’s my biggest fear is
that all this technology which I really
of Technology but I just don’t want it
to I just don’t want us to be isolated
and only talk to the people that agree
with us observation it’s a great
suggestion
beautiful it says great I like that
alright so I think it’s great any other
words of wisdom or you’re on a roll
that’s it I have no more words of wisdom
I think we should go in and watch the
Hall of Fame panel
I look forward Thank You Liz