Author: Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Darby Sieben - Unbounce

The internet is an increasingly crowded place, with competition rising and ad costs increasing. Ensuring landing pages are as optimised as possible is more important than ever. In our latest podcast episode, we interview Darby Sieben, Chief Product Officer at Unbounce, who shares top tips and insights about creating effective landing pages.

Darby shares how Unbounce continues to evolve to build tools that drive better conversions for marketeers, and his opinion on how pop-ups can be used for success.

He also shares the advice he has gained from throughout his career and discusses his goal of helping marketeers get better at what they do and levelling the playing field between small and large businesses.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Darby Sieben – Unbounce

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Darby Sieben

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Darby Sieben, Darby is the chief product officer from Unbounce. Welcome to the podcast Darby.

Darby: Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you on. I mean, I'm particularly interested, I had to look at LinkedIn and seen you've had like this amazing career where you've worked for the Yellow Pages in Canada, you've been an investment advisor. I mean, can you just give us a bit of a background about your career and how you've got to the point of working with Unbounce?

Darby: Yeah, I'll give you a very quick two minute overview. You know, I won't, I won't give my exact age to the users, they can probably figure it out some of your podcast listeners. But when I graduated high school, I had a vision and a dream to become a computer programmer. And I realised there was a difference between a good one and a great one. And I would never be a great one. But I was always fascinated in the 90s with the intersection of business and technology, and really had a deep passion for where the internet was actually going to go. So typical, you know, story I dropped out of school started a company hired by friends who are great programmers, we built our first company, and then in 90s, sold that, that I built the second agency in Calgary, Alberta, which we sold the Yellow Pages group, and then I joined YPG, to help them with their digital transformation as we were moving from a print focused company to a digital focused company. And so that was a really interesting journey around, you know, how do you take 100 year old organisation, and rethink the business model. And so you're offering to transform the entire company, literally an order to become a digitally focused company after 100 years of print. So it was a really, really an amazing journey.

That from there, I went to Royal Bank of Canada, which is the largest bank in Canada, one of the top banks globally, as part of their ventures group to build out one of their largest ventures called amply, which is a cashback application.

Darby: And that was really designed to, you know, connect merchants and consumers within the Canadian market, and reward them for purchases with those particular merchants. And then earlier this year, I joined Unbounce as their Chief Product Officer after speaking with Felicia who's their CEO, understanding the vision of where the organisation is going. And it's, you know, another one of those great, I think it'd be great transformational stories, as Unbounce evolves its business and continues to evolve its business. And then as you mentioned, I do some investing and advising technology's been really good for me and parlayed that into now helping some of the startup founders on not necessarily what to do, but maybe some of the things that I've learned in my career on what not to do, as a way to, to accelerate their businesses as well. So, you know, just I just have a really deep passion for technology, the intersection with business and how, you know, businesses can use tools to continue to grow and expand. It's kind of always been my mission over the last 30 years, as you know, how do we help marketers get better at what they do? That's kind of been the theme across my entire career.

Mike: That's awesome. And I think, you know, a lot of people know Unbounce as being a product that's designed to help marketers in a very specific situation, which is to get people onto a landing page and get them to convert, but he just give us a bit of a view as to all the things Unbounce does, because I think you do a bit more now.

Darby: Yeah, so as you mentioned, you know, Unbounce is really one of those kinds of iconic Canadian brands started about 13 years ago, for the most part really invented a landing page space. And it started with a group of founders that really looked at the market and said, you know, people are spending money on digital advertising. They're driving traffic to their web page. But the web page may not actually be the best conversion engine. And so henceforth, you know, the creation of a landing page to say, let's really direct your traffic to a page that's focused on conversion. And that did really, really well for Unbounce. We created I would think the category and obviously what happens when you create great categories and categories that work. Lots of players come into the marketplace. The shift, you know, where Unbounce is today. And landing pages is still very important part of our puzzle because you need to be able to create content. But we talk about conversion intelligence. And so when I talk about conversion, intelligence, what problem are we really trying to solve?

We know that the internet's more and more crowded. We know there's lots of builder tools that are out there. competition continues to increase ad costs continue to increase. And we started to look at the assets that we built as a company and realise we have a lot A lot of data and a lot of understanding about what actually converts. And so we started to think about how do we leverage this data and its non PII data. But how do we leverage this data, to start to build intelligence tools that actually can augment what a marketer is doing using AI and ML. So we started with smart traffic. And what that means, typically, a marketer before would create an A variant and a B variant, they'd throw some dollars at a throw some dollars at B, then they would do the analysis and figure out which one works and then decide how they're going to go from there. Smart traffic was our first foray into conversion intelligence, which is really letting the machine do the optimization. So you can create those pages, and the machine does the optimization. And we see great results on that particular side.

We've also acquired a company called snazzy.ai, which is now called Smart copy, which is how do we use AI, to, you know, help get the initial set of copy that a user might be looking for. So as opposed to the blank page, and I got to write something out, let me throw in a couple of key words, and the machine can come back and say, here's a starting point, and then the user edit from there. And then a big area of investment right now is our smart builder, which is our second version of our landing page product. Our first one is called classic, which is the one that we built 13 years ago, the new builder is really how do we give eyes to the machine. So we know on the page, what the content is, where it's actually positioned. So we can actually do further optimization as opposed to just traffic, we can actually start to optimise the content on the page, based on all of the things that we know about that in order to increase conversion. So the mission of Unbounce to build tools to help marketers get better conversion still exists. What we're really thinking about now is how do we leverage the billions of visitors that we've seen in the billions of conversions we've seen, and productize those products to really help marketers accelerate what they're doing in terms of conversion, because it's all about ROI for the marketer.

Mike: Wow, I mean, there's, there's a lot there. I'm interested, because, you know, you talk about billions of page visits, which actually, I think is one of the challenges of a lot of people in B2B is a lot of the datasets we have are quite small. And do you think that's something that, you know, a company like Unbounce, can bring is this view over a very high level of traffic, rather than the small numbers that you know, of hundreds or 1000s that you might see in B2B?

Darby: That's exactly the mission that we're on at this point, is we have all of the companies, large, small, different segments, and what have you, building landing pages across our ecosystem gives us a really interesting view of seeing globally, what actually works. And again, we do that in a non PII way, in other ways, you know, merchants can partners can connect their data, but we don't do anything with that particular data, because that actually belongs to the to the merchant. So we're just looking at the conversion data. And so yeah, we think that's a really competitive advantage, when you can start to take the insights, the learnings and the recommendations at a much higher global view, with a billion data points that we have, it starts to become meaningful, you know, provide those insights back to the marketer, and then the marketer can decide how to action on those. And so you're absolutely right, we think that the creation of a page is still very, very important. We think that the competitive advantage is that Unbounce is really starting to lean into is we've got a great set of data, that if we use it in an intelligent, smart way, we know can help accelerate and help produce a better return on investment for marketers.

Mike: I mean, that's amazing. And this is probably a bit of a cheeky question. But there's lots of products, particularly information platforms that have landing page functionality within them. But nobody's really either offering that the same user experience in terms of building that landing page, or this route to actually providing insight from data to help you enhance it. I mean, why do you think these other companies are so far behind?

Darby: I think there's a couple of things. One, we all know that, you know, in the AI and ML space, it's an emerging space. And there's still lots of toolkits that are being built and but you got to fight for talent in order to get really, really smart people that understand this. And that's only one side of the equation. I think the second side of the equation is you know, to do AI and ML really, really well. As you mentioned earlier, you need to have a large data set. And so starting from ground up, it's really, really difficult to do that. Unbounce you know, because of the length of time that we've been in business And what we've seen over the past decade, has really given us that ability to have those insights. So you know, we built a great builder years ago. Now, you know, we have really great pool of data, and the new products that we're building, both have the focus on how do we make it simple for the marketer to build. But then more importantly, how do we make sure that we've got all the semantic labelling in place to give them machine eyes on the page, so we can really understand the text, copy, the tone, the image, the call to action, and start to look at all of those factors that play in to help in a market or convert. And so I think that's probably one of the big reasons why it's difficult to become really strong in the AI ml space is because you got to have that large data set. And then bonds is in a privileged position, because we do have a large data set that we can build off of.

Mike: I mean, this type of data is amazing. I think we'll come back to it in a minute. But you mentioned something about simplicity, making it easy to build landing pages. So you know, I'd really like to start there, because fundamentally, a lot of what people are doing in marketing is having to build landing pages. How do you make it simpler? And what can people do themselves to make that process maybe a little bit less difficult?

Darby: Yeah, so there's a couple of things that and I'll just speak a little bit from an Unbounce perspective, and just maybe more generally, some tips. Marketers are original builder, we call it classic, but let's call it the original builder, was just, you know, your standard Perfect Pixel Perfect, I could come in and build what exactly what I needed to do. Our new builder, smart builder does have some restrictions, it is more templated based, it's more container based to drop and drag. And we've done that specifically to make sure that the machine has eyes on the page. So it kind of knows where everything is, in order to actually do the optimization on the back end. If a marketer starts to play with our smart builder product, we start off by simply asking some questions. What is it you're attempting to do? What is the tone here, some templates, just to give that kickstart for the marketer to get going, even to the point of copy assistant, which is, hey, just tell us about your business. And if you want to have more content, you can, and then our AI will actually go and give you the starting point of text.

So we find it's easier for somebody to edit something that's already there, maybe as opposed to having to create it. So those are some of the simplicity tools we're trying to do on the front end, make it more templated, make it more walk through templated, but still with the flexibility to give the marketer that ability to you know, put their own brand and what have you. And we're going to expand that we're going to do stuff like you know, dropping your URL, and we can use your URL and actually detect all of that information, and just help you streamline the creation, then that's when once we got it up and built, then that's when we can really kick in with our conversion intelligence side. So we do think about the building side, how do we make things simpler, and in some cases, using our tools, so we can say to a merchant, you know, you're putting in that headline, that's great. But if you actually shrink the headline, it's actually going to be a little bit better based on our data, because we know certain headlines produce better size than others as an example. So those are a few of the things that we're tackling for, for simplicity, I think generally, for anybody that's building a landing page to drive traffic to, I think it really does come down to synthesise the core pieces of information for your audience, make the call to action extremely clear, and give them a really good compelling reason why they want to go forward from there. Because clearly, the fact that they're on your landing page, they've expressed some sort of interest. What we're attempting to do and smart builder is, you know, I talked earlier about a testing in a very intended to be variant, we actually see a world in the future where there is no variance, where if a marketer is comfortable with the intelligence that we have in place, I can build my page once I have the guardrails in place, but let the machine optimise the headline and say, Oh, for Mike, who's coming in here, not Mike specifically. But for this user that's coming in here. This is a better headline to present to that user than, say this user and provide all of that to the marketer. So the really the machine starts to become the let's just optimise the how to get that conversion. But the marketer still has to determine the story. They still have to determine the simplicity of the story. And they still have to be very, very clear on what that call to action is. And then we can kind of take over from there.

Mike: So that's really interesting. So you're thinking about, you know, a world where I'm going to give a simple example, perhaps someone who came came in to the landing page through Google ads, might see a different headline to someone who clicked through from the company's website.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. When we think of optimization, there's traffic optimization, content, optimization, placement, and then image optimization, all of those play factors and conversion.

Mike: And I think we're all looking forward to that world where we can pretty much kick the machine off and let it run. I mean, presumably, whilst you're getting close, we're not quite there yet. So if I'm building a landing page today, one of the tips or the guide you can give me to help me build a landing page that's going to convert at a decent rate.

Darby: Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of very high level things that we've learned over the years. I mean, these are just general for any landing page that you would you would see out on the marketplace. First of all, make sure that the landing page message aligns with your marketing message. So if I see that ad on Google, or I see that ad on Instagram, or Tiktok, or wherever it's going to be, there has to be some continuity with what drove my initial interest than what I see on the page. And I would say, in a lot of cases, marketers do a good job of that. But I think we've all seen those cases where you click on an ad, and is this the same company that this just doesn't make sense. So be very clear that your landing page copy and your ad copy are in line? I think the second, which we know for sure, is the call to action, because at this point, we know what user has interest, bring that above the fold, that's a really, really important thing, especially for users that might say that, you know, some will require more information. So they're gonna want to go deeper, some will want to have a, I just want to actually start to action. So bring your call to action on top. The third thing we say is, you know, keep it authentic. Keep it authentic to your brand, keep it authentic to your tone, I don't think landing pages are there to replace anything that your marketing departments already doing. But just be consistent with, you know, your brand colours or imagery or tone. So that you've got that continuity on your landing page is not that thing that's just sits out here. It's actually part of the overall story. Its job, though, is to convert, but I think its secondary job is also to make sure that it's continuity from a marketing message. A few other things, you know, keep it fast, make sure whatever you're doing, if you're driving stuff to a landing page, it's got a load quick, it's got to be really, really fast, latency is going to be a thing that's going to kill you. So whatever service you're using, make sure that they've got speed and top of mind in terms of delivery of your content, because that's really critical. Design for different devices. Well, you know, we're in a world of desktop and tablets and mobile. And so just be very mindful as you're building a landing page. How is it going to render on all three of those because you know, users today, we don't get to tell users anymore, how they want to interact with us that they're going to choose. And so we've just got to meet them in the right area. And then last, and most importantly, is, you know, test and iterate, do a B testing, do multivariate testing, or come to Unbounce and use smart builder. And we'll do that for you. But no, it's you know, you got to continue to test your landing pages, what works today may not work tomorrow, and so you do have to continue to innovate on top of it. And then maybe the last one is keep the call to actions, probably to one, I think, you know, some of the worst landing pages are the ones where you're trying to do too many things. And that's going to be really confusing to the user. You know, lead them down that journey, get crystal clear on the one action you're happening, maybe there's a second, I'll be really, really crystal clear on what you're attempting them to do and try to remove any of the other clutter. That's why we think landing pages are still an important piece of the marketers toolkit, as opposed to your website, because your website is likely designed to do something else than maybe what your landing pages

Mike: Definitely agree. I mean, I think people who aren't building dedicated landing pages are missing out because you can achieve a much better conversion rate, if that's what you're designing for. Yeah, and I guess my my next question is going to be so how do I know if I've got a good conversion rate? What would be a good conversion rate for a landing page?

Darby: That is a absolutely great question. And you're the answer is it's it varies. And it depends. There's always a caveat to that. But this is by far one of the most common questions that we get from our customers. Is the rate that I'm seeing a good conversion rate or not a good conversion rate. And, you know, as we said, we call it it depends. So one of the ways that we've tried to address this a few years ago, again, we started to look at all of the data that we had over the past 10 years and said, Could we create a Do we have enough intelligence to start to give what would be good industry conversion benchmarks across different different industries. So We produce a product called our conversion benchmark report. It's available on Unbounce. And it just talks about conversion rates that we've seen across different industries. So for example, you know, media and entertainment industry, on average, you'll see about any percent conversion rate, finance insurance, you know, is going to be over six, SAS is around three. And we have a report, though, that actually captures this across all industries. And we continue to produce that report annually, keep it refreshed, keep it update, and we use the data across our entire ecosystem to, you know, help marketers understand this is what we see as a benchmark. Obviously, we want you to beat the benchmark, we continue to go from there.

Mike: That sounds like an amazing resource, actually. So I'll go take a look at that. I mean, I've certainly seen very variable conversion rates, I mean, from client to client, we'll have some clients in a sector Well, there are achieve, you know, relatively low single digits, we will have other clients will achieve 20% conversion rates around particular campaigns. And I think it's, it's always hard to give an exact number. But it's great to have industry benchmarks, at least it knows where you should be aiming.

Darby: Yeah, 100%. And I would definitely encourage your listeners, go to the Unbounce website, look for our conversion Benchmark Report. There's great information in there, we have a lot of thought leadership information on our website. You know, I would definitely encourage your listeners to go check out some of that stuff, because there could be some some really good information in there for them.

Mike: Perfect. I do have one other question around numbers, because I've noticed that you've got some other features like pop ups and sticky bars, which haven't always had the best reputation. So I mean, when should marketers use features like pop ups? Is there a rule? Or is there cases where you've seen it working?

Darby: Well, the think the key there is you've got to be really, really cognizant of when you're going to disrupt the user and throw something in front of their face, especially when they land on the page. So I think you've got to be really clear around, you know, the, why am I doing it. And then second, you know, you've really got to test it and make sure that it's there. And so some of the things that we see, when you're looking at, I don't know, a new white paper as an example. And it could get buried on the page. There's that moment in time or a pop as a good reminder to go. Okay. The other thing too, is depending on your ad copy, if you're looking at different long form stuff that's coming in, and then you're going to the landing page, there could be a hey, you know what, if you came in on a certain link, we see that that a user has a propensity to do this, that might be better to manifest it within a pop up. But the key there is you've got to be really clear, because I'm most of us don't like pop ups, I think done well. They can be really, really effective tools. But if it's just you know, hey, we want to throw something out, to just try to get as many emails as possible without really thinking through it. I think it's going to damage your brand more than ever possibly would help.

Mike: Yeah, I think we've all been to those sites that as soon as you scroll, you get a pop up asking you to subscribe, and then get rest wherever you go. Yeah, it's not it's not a good experience, making it work at the right time. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm interested. I mean, obviously, you know, are they your response responsible for the product, you are also involved in promoting? Unbounce? So when you promote Unbounce, what works for you? What are the best marketing channels?

Darby: Yeah, I think, you know, there's the standard marketing channels, we have an amazing marketing team at Unbounce, that optimises, you know, all of our spend across all of our different paid channels. And like every other marketer, you know, we are a product lead growth organisation. And so you just got to go out there and do some targeting. Word of mouth is incredibly big for us. Same thing with SEO people doing a search for landing pages and the education of being a thought leader. We do pride ourselves on trying to provide information back to the community on how to grow because we think, you know, a lot of the industry grows, then, you know, as they often say, title but all boats. So we do really want to have that key leadership position as thought leader. So word of mouth is very big for us. Then we do some other stuff. We have a really robust affiliate programme. We work with our agency clients who definitely are number one fans, you know, I'm building on behalf of their customers. And going into 2023, we're really going to start to think about a partnership model, which is how do we start to look at our toolkit, both used within our environment and use outside of our environment, to help marketers who might be using other tools or other workflows, but could use some of the aspects of our toolkit, more of, you know, an API licencing type model. So we you know, we grow like a traditional B2B business would paid marketing, word of mouth, thought leadership, affiliates, partnerships. It's kind of you know, the big Big trucks.

Mike: That's interesting sounds like, you know, are you doing paid marketing to get conversions a lot of what you're getting word of mouth and things like that. That's actually a very long term marketing strategy, you know, that's built on. I mean, fundamentally being the brand in the landing page space, I guess.

Darby: Exactly. And that really comes from the roots of the founders, who, when they built, you know, Unbounce, really focused on the marketers, really focused on thought leadership, and really focused on how do we move the industry forward. And we want to continue doing that, because it's been very effective for Unbounce. And we're going to continue to do that forward. And, and we know when we do that, it helps our competitors as well. And that's okay. Because, you know, it's the industry of landing pages that as you said, you know, I think more marketers should be using landing page products to get better conversions.

Mike: Yeah, and I'd say sounds great. It sounds like it's this overnight success that's actually been built over a huge number of years. It's, it's awesome to see how you've built that momentum and that reputation.

Darby: Yeah, and we think, you know, now we've got a new challenge ahead of us, which is not on just the creation side. But now is the conversion side. And we are really investing all of our time and energy around. How do we complement the marketer with AI and ML tools. So we don't believe in a world where the machine who's going to replace the marketer, we think this is a connection of the marketers know how and their instincts and what have you complemented with strong AI and ML practices and the to go hand in hand, because we can be right in a lot of cases and other cases, there are those nuances, but we can learn on those nuances fairly quickly. So we really do believe in a world of how do we marry the two together to make one plus one equals three, it's not the machine is going to come in and just you know, figure it all out? No, but the machine can really help the marketer get faster on acceleration and optimization than trying to do it on their own, or trying to do analysis within an Excel spreadsheet as an example.

Mike: No, I think we've all used too many Excel spreadsheets for sure.

Darby: It's still one of the greatest tools, though, for for a marketer, Excel has continues to be a good tool, I guess, in some aspects.

Mike:  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think everybody, everybody uses it more than they'd like, but value of that more than later myth as well.

Darby: Yeah, I agree.

Mike: So one of the things I mean, obviously, you know, you've had a, perhaps a more business focused career than a marketing career, but you've always seemed to have been involved in in marketing and one aspect or another. So what do you like about marketing, what's drawing you back into the world of marketing.

Darby: So for marketing, well, I've always been passionate about the space. And I've been very passionate about the small business space. And part of it comes from the roots of growing up, I grew up in the standard, middle class, lower middle class family, both my parents were entrepreneurs, in what I witnessed firsthand, and why I think it's really, really important to help marketers out was, you know, especially in the small business marketing area, these marketers are putting in money, and they do need a return, but it's really tangible, this is going to be the return that's going to put food on the table for their kids or send them to university. And, you know, as we've seen, in marketing, in a lot of cases, sometimes there can be a lot of misconceptions, and people, you know, just trying to get people to sign on the dotted line. So I've always had this view of the small guy is at a disadvantage, because they don't have the big data sets of the big companies, they don't have all the resources of the big companies. And the risk profile of ROI not panning out actually has more of a meaningful impact. And so I've always looked at how do we level that playing field to give the small and medium sized businesses the same leverage, and the same access to the toolkits that the large guys get access to?

And I'm not saying the large guys are doing anything wrong or bad? That's not it? I mean, we know how it works. But I think there's always been that underlying, you know, I saw what happened in my own family when marketing didn't work, and the impact that I could have, and so that's where I've always been passionate on is how do we democratise this and make sure that everybody has equal footing to the toolkits in the leverage to be able to use it? And then of course, you know, great run companies, whether they're small, medium, or large, or are just going to continue to go from there. So that's kind of the thing that's always driven me and why I've always been appeal to marketing and I like this notion of done right. The consumer wins because they get to buy something from the business. The business wins because they of acquiring a customer or they retain the customer. And it's just a good synergy when that magic happens, where I pull up my credit card, or my cash or my debit, or whatever, and I buy that thing, and it's delightful. You know, it's, it's, I think it's a great experience to see that happen, because it's both sides that are gonna win.

Mike: I love that concept of levelling the playing field, it's almost like what we hoped the internet would be like at the start, where it's all down to quality of product or quality of company or quality of marketer. But as it turned out, the big companies got big tools and lots of data. Now you're coming in and loving that playing field? I think that's an awesome concept.

Darby: Yeah, we think it's, it's going to be beneficial for all stakeholders in the ecosystem, both the consumer, and the merchant, and some merchants who are B2B, it doesn't matter, their consumer happens to be a business, but it benefits all sides of the ecosystem. And anything we can do to help that out, we think is a good thing.

Mike: So awesome. I'm interested, if you were talking to a young person who was thinking of marketing as a career, would you recommend that?

Darby: I would, I think I think marketing has been around, almost since the beginning of commerce, I don't think it's going to go anywhere, it is an industry that evolves, changes, you're never going to get bored. It's constantly in an evolution mode. So I think if you're looking for something incredibly challenging is there. But also marketing is starting to become very technical as well, you know, and all the data points that are behind it. And there's so many segments of marketing, I mean, whether you want to go into being a tactical numbers driven marketer or brand marketer, but really, you know, both of those interconnected together great brand, great storytelling, great mission, great vision, combined with really tactical marketing plans, there's just a synergy that can really happen there. So I think marketing is an interesting field, because there's so many directions that a young person can go, that could really align with their passion, whether they're more creative, or whether they're more, you know, numbers focused, or whether they're more technically inclined. marketing as a category can fulfil the dreams of a lot of different individuals based on what they want to do. So I think it's an exciting career. And we know marketing is not going to go anywhere, there's always going to be businesses that are going to need the market to get more consumers and businesses buying their product.

Mike: I think that's great advice. And the the range of opportunities. You're absolutely right is bigger than it's ever been that sort of some one of the things I'm interested in from you Darby is, you know, have you ever been given the great advice or marketing? What's the best thing that you've been told?

Darby: Yeah, that is, that is a great, that is a great question. Probably the biggest piece of advice that I found, or or one thing that I've kind of learned time is lots of experiments. Some are going to work, some are not going to work, you almost can't do anything wrong, because it's all a learning step and a learning journey. And so I've had some, some great bosses in the past, that's, you know, don't take everything so seriously in the context of, you know, no, we're not going to go and spend $10 million without having some validation. But if we're going to spend $1,000, to figure something out, you know, let's, let's make that happen. But really try a lot of different things. What may have not worked a year ago, could work today. So in some ways, you just almost need to unlearn the stuff that you've learned in the past, and then apply it going forward, because things will always constantly change. So I think marketers need to always challenge their assumptions, keep moving forward, fail really, really quickly. We live in a great environment now where you can doesn't cost you a lot of money to get some initial sense, are we going in the right direction. And if you are, you throw a little more at it than when you've got the real confidence. You throw the big, big money behind it, and you go, but test fast, don't don't, don't be afraid to fail, because even the failures depending on how you define them are probably not failures are actually good learnings that you can just apply somewhere else. And don't take it too seriously. Like, it's serious, but don't take it too serious. We're not you know, marketers are not doctors, patients aren't gonna die on the operating table. If we do something wrong. You know, it's just going to be degrees of of right. That's what I would call it.

Mike: That's awesome advice. I love that. I'm mindful of time. You've been very generous with your time today. Is there anything else you feel we should have covered?

Darby: No, I think we covered a lot. I mean, I would say you know, to all of your listeners for the ones that use landing pages, if they if they haven't experienced our spark builder product, test it out. They got a 14 day trial. Don't doesn't cost you anything, test it out, we think there's some really interesting stuff there. And then for all the other marketers that may not be using landing pages, whether they think Unbounce is the right product, or whether the the other companies out there that do it, give some thought to how you might want to, you know, test these things. Because done right landing pages can really extend your marketing dollars, and they're not a replacement, they really are just an extension of what you're doing. And if you've never used them, you know, I would try to find the time to at least give it a proof case to say, will it work for us? Or will it not work for us? What we see in most cases it will work? I think our competitors would probably say the same thing. So that would be my advice to to marketers.

Mike: Actually sounds like good advice. Just go try it, whatever it is, and see if it works. Yeah, exactly. I mean, thank you very much for your time again, Darby. If people have any questions, or would like to follow up anything you've said, Is there a way they can contact you?

Darby: Yeah, absolutely. You can easily find me on LinkedIn. If you do a search for diabetes, even you'll easily find all the locations on the internet that you can you can tackle me. You know, or feel free to just drop me an email. My email is darby@unbounce.com. Really easy. Happy to hear from from marketers. Yeah, that'd be your have your have your listeners reach out. We'd love to learn more about what they're up to.

Mike: Thank you so much for that. It's very kind of you to share your your email as well. I mean, this has been a great conversation. I hope everyone listening will you know, take away the idea that they should go out and they should try different things and try and improve their landing pages. And obviously, hopefully, some of them if not all of them will visit Unbounce to do that.

Darby: That's you know, we we're ready to we're ready to take them on as clients if they're willing to give us a shot. Absolutely. Thanks.

Mike: That's awesome. Thanks so much for being on the podcast Darby. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale