Benjamin Ard (00:02.272)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Katie. Katie, welcome to the show.
Katie Hickey (00:08.671)
Thanks, Ben. How's it going?
Benjamin Ard (00:10.552)
Good, Katie, I'm excited to have you on. This is going to be a great conversation, but before we dive in, we always like to get to know our guests. So tell us a little bit about yourself, your background in history.
Katie Hickey (00:21.971)
Yeah, so my name is Katie Hickey. I am currently the Senior Director of Revenue and Growth Marketing at D.Scout, where D.Scout is an experienced research platform. Previously was at SurveyMonkey, so very familiar in the research and survey space. And before that just served as leading small series B, series C companies, building up their marketing teams and helping them really get to the next level.
Benjamin Ard (00:51.31)
I love it. That's amazing. Well, Katie, today what we're going to talk about is communities and specifically the communities of our customers. So you have spent a lot of time on the growth and demand and all of those sides of things for companies. Why is it so important on the growth side to focus on our customers?
Katie Hickey (01:10.229)
For me, I've always found that customers, especially turning customers into ambassadors is really the secret weapon or the catalyst to growth. So I know a lot of companies are product-led growth, sales-led growth. I like to say customer-led growth is really a lot of the success I've seen in my career and really what's worked well for me at the past year at D.Scout is turning our customers.
into our lead drivers and ultimately the ones that will help close the deals and also expand into our accounts as well.
Benjamin Ard (01:43.094)
I love that. And it's interesting, I think anyone in marketing, if they're being honest with themselves, the number one channel that is almost impossible to track is word of mouth that comes from customers. You know, I've been in previous businesses where they did surveys with customers saying, how did you hear about us originally? Overwhelming majority was through word of mouth. So I love this focus and emphasis because I think a lot of times as marketers, we kind of feel helpless when it comes to like turning customers into advocates.
So I think this episode is gonna be really relevant. So Katie, how do you take a customer and turn them into an advocate? What are some strategies and techniques there?
Katie Hickey (02:22.761)
Yeah, I think this goes back to my good old days of understanding the world of CSAT and MPS. Also become best friends with your CS team and leverage adoption and usage metrics of the product. I think that's a great way to see who's using the product at all times, using all the features. Also who's participating in betas. Those are really the ones we kind of look towards.
to see, would you be willing to do a webinar with us on this new feature or give us a new testimonial on our beta release that we can turn into a case study? And then ultimately we're able to use those signals to figure out who will be best served to kind of become an ambassador in terms of the content side of things. But we also use things like user gems to identify.
previous users to kind of target more of our AVX dollars into accounts where we see a lot of former users maybe moving to a different company as well.
Benjamin Ard (03:29.058)
That's amazing. you're doing this really good job of segmenting your current customer database through the CS team, your CSATs and MPSs, you're getting them to create content with you, you're getting them to really participate in the testimonials and the webinars and all that kind of stuff. When you're doing that,
Do you typically have to incentivize your customers to participate or are they big enough advocates that you can just say, Hey, any chance you'd hop on a webinar or any chance I can get a testimonial or do you typically incentivize in some way, or form?
Katie Hickey (04:06.001)
It really depends on what the ask is. So it could even just be something as small as having our SDRs use our user gem list and be saying, hey, we have some new dscout swag. Would you be willing to have a conversation and see how we can bring this technology into your current company? For the webinar side of thing, we usually compensate people with just kind of a nice thank you or maybe a ticket to our customer conference, which we host annually.
And then for our referral program, we obviously incentivize that with some sort of gift card play or other incentive. So I think the best way to kind of look at it is if I was asking myself the same question, what would be the fair compensation for that ask?
Benjamin Ard (04:53.87)
Yeah, I love that. So when you're working with the CSM team, sometimes it will feel like maybe they're stepping on toes and things like that. How do you delineate working with them to provide value on the marketing side as opposed to the CSMs feeling like they should own that? How have you managed that relationship with those two departments?
Katie Hickey (05:15.103)
For us, I think it's really empowering them and also empowering the customer at the same time that we are kind of helping their customer be seen as a thought leader and having them tell their story. We're never asking them to be like, know, hey, do this 45 minute webinar on how cool D.Scout is or write a blog.
for us on how you're using our tool to do X, Y, and Z, we're really asking them to say, hey, would this person be willing to be a subject matter expert on this topic or theme? And that also empowers the CSM or the account manager to be emboldened enough to ask this person, like, hey, we have this great opportunity for you.
And also the customer at the end of the day says, this is like something I would like to participate in because it looks great on my LinkedIn. It looks great on my resume. Or maybe this person also expressed to them that they are willing to do a lot more speaking. This is something that they want to focus on. So it's just kind of balancing those directions and framing the ask in a way that is mutually beneficial to everybody involved.
Benjamin Ard (06:30.668)
love that. And I think the coolest point here is we're talking about using your customers to help grow your business. And what I love is that you are doing that through telling your customers stories and you're not asking them to tell your story. You're giving them the platform and the spotlight to tell their story and how you're just a small part of that story, which I think, you know, following the story brand guidelines and all that kind of stuff is kind of the right way of giving your customers.
Really the platform they deserve and that's kind of fun to be a part of their story as opposed to the other way around. One of the things though that I'm curious about, you know, there's, different techniques of getting down to like the five whys to help people tell their stories. Any strategies or recommendations of when you're working with a customer, you found them through CSTAT or through the CSM team.
of really getting them to share their story, their experience, like any tips or tricks to kind of really get that to come out in the conversation and your content.
Katie Hickey (07:31.391)
We do this really organically. Again, it's kind of based on maybe what that CSM is initially telling us that this person is actually using this product in a cool way, or they're actually doing it to solve this problem. So that kind of helps us go into those conversations. So it's more so our community marketing manager or our campaign and content marketing manager having these conversations with the customer.
And they really kind of collaborate together to develop that talk track. And they kind of use that as a guiding rail saying, Hey, it would be great if we can do this story around, you know, this or where we heard you're like an expert at AI. We'd love to talk to you about, you know, how your company's using AI to do X, Y, and Z. And then we're able to kind of weave it in organically. And again, empower that customer to tell that story that way is beneficial to them.
But it also allows us where we can probably sprinkle in those sound bites to promote our product and our brand as well.
Benjamin Ard (08:40.398)
That's cool, I love that. So you talked about an interesting role right there, the community marketing manager. I feel like this is a role that is often misunderstood by most businesses to the point where they often don't have this role. What do you look at with this role? What's their responsibilities and how are they actively promoting community within your customer base?
Katie Hickey (09:03.945)
Yeah, this was actually the first role I was able to bring on at D.Scout just because we knew our customers are our greatest sellers and our greatest ambassadors. So their role, she is tasked with running our monthly webinar series. So finding customers to speak on our behalf. So aligning it with around our content themes, so working with our content marketing manager.
to identify these folks. We also have a monthly Slack meetup for executive leaders. So that's something we partner on with our VP of UX, who our VP of UX is identical to the persona that we are selling to. And through that community, they have conversations. So she's helping prep the speakers, she's helping get the Slack going, the email coms. So really just kind of bringing everybody together.
and ultimately empowering and championing our customers. And that's really kind of her job is to help them get to that next level, but also has a great fun job of also making sure we have the best swag that we can also use in our virtual swag shop and have people also represent D. Scout in the wild.
Benjamin Ard (10:23.576)
very cool. So one question I have before we started recording, you mentioned how cool it was that you have a product where internally you have customers of your own product. How do you leverage those internal customers to connect with your outside customers and kind of build this community? Do they interact with each other? Are you able to do much with that?
Katie Hickey (10:49.235)
Yes, so for context, we're an experienced research platform. So we do everything from usability studies on websites. So case in point, as a marketer, our brand team used our own platform to do usability tests when we launched our new site. But also, we're able to share our own insights and saying, hey, we wanted to gain some feedback on our product or do some customer interviews with our product.
Here's how we do it. And really, I it goes back to that previous Slack community I mentioned, where that's kind of where the behind-the-scenes conversations are happening, the kind of how the sausage is made. And what that allows us to do is have our potential customers and our future customers meet up to have conversations and really problem solve. And almost by just being within that environment, it's like,
this person was able to solve my problem. This person's also using dscout. Maybe if I use dscout, that can help solve my problem as well. So really just kind of the same room to have that conversation and solve all the problems together.
Benjamin Ard (11:59.052)
I love that.
Benjamin Ard (12:03.726)
That's super cool. So the Slack community, I'll be honest, every Slack community I've joined, they're just radio silent, 100%. What have you done to kind of build engagement and have people actually participate in the Slack community?
Katie Hickey (12:21.205)
You know what, it's a ever-growing task. I will say sometimes it's like your houseplants. Sometimes they look better than they do. So we definitely do a good job of using it to align with our content calendar, having our guests also promote. But I think where we really shine is not those big channels where there's the 3,000 people happening.
But dedicating those smaller channels, whether it's people that met at one of our previous trade shows, that VIP channel for senior leaders, where there's a lot more closed the door conversations or continued conversations from those round tables, that's where we really see those beneficial things happening because to your point, it's either the general channel is just radio silent or it just becomes a billboard for
their own brand or somebody's just always constantly promoting their own thing in there. So we prefer to have those conversations happening in a smaller channel or even people taking it asynchronously from one of those larger channels and connect one on one.
Benjamin Ard (13:34.378)
I that. And I like this concept because you're right. I think a lot of these communities, make three, four channels, put everyone in them, and hope that the conversation happens. But the real magic is the one-on-one or one-on-two or one-on-three conversations that people have. And so I think that's great insights about how to do a Slack community or any kind of community. No matter how big it is, people really care about a handful of connections as opposed to connecting with the entire audience.
How active are employees in that community and how are they driving the conversation or are they kind of letting organically people just amongst themselves communicate and build their own network?
Katie Hickey (14:19.007)
Really, it's more organic, but we also do a great job of kind of passing those signals over to our sales team to inform, you know, this seems to be like a reoccurring topic or a conversation to kind of help maneuver, you know, the deal. So they pop in there more so just to kind of see what the chatter is happening, if any of their accounts.
are engaged in there. And not to be super big brother of it all, but it's like, they're talking about this topic. So this will help me kind of understand where I should maybe take this next demo or follow-up call or what content I should send them next because they seem to be more interested in this topic. And we also use that with just other intent signals we use, whether it's what blog they're visiting, what webinars they're visiting, really just to kind of
make sure they're kind of speaking the same language and our reps know what topics they're interested in.
Benjamin Ard (15:25.582)
I love that. That's amazing. All right, Katie, I have learned several lessons about how to turn customers into advocates and build communities with customers. This has been amazing. As promised, these episodes go by quick. It's our daily dose of marketing for our listeners. Katie, if anyone here that's listening to this podcast would like to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Katie Hickey (15:49.213)
Yeah, the best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn. So if you search Katie Hickey and just also type in dscout, I will probably pop up. And that's the best way to engage with me. Feel free to shoot me a message, connect. I'm always happy to chat about community-led growth or anything ABX. Favorite topic.
Benjamin Ard (16:11.064)
love it. For anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, we will link directly to Katie's LinkedIn profile so you can connect with her there. Katie, thank you, thank you, thank you. This has been amazing. I really do appreciate the time and insights today.
Katie Hickey (16:24.947)
No, thanks, Ben, for having me. Really enjoyed our conversation.
