If you don’t follow trendy things, your clients might think you are dropping out and unable to give them the hottest things.
MEDIA 7: Could you please tell us a little bit about Duda? What does your role as Head of Influencer Marketing entail?
ANTON SHULKE: Duda is a website builder, for professionals (meaning for people who lives from websites, no free accounts) Duda was born in 2009, and now has offices in Palo Alto, CA | Louisville, CO | Tel-Aviv, Israel | Quebec, Canada, and London, UK
Duda has 18,000 Agencies as clients, also some SaaS companies.
We involve Influencers from SEO, PPC web design, and similar fields to work on join events, like educational live streams and conferences with the idea to convert them into friends and later (hopefully) into brand advocates.
M7: That’s impressive. Recently, G2 recognized Duda as one of the best software in content management product category. What has been the strategy behind achieving such prestigious recognition?
AS: The main strategic idea of Duda (low to no-code site builder) is moving the creation of webpage (and maintenance) from developer to designer. As there is almost no code, you don’t really need a developer so you can concentrate on what your (your client’s) site should be to get its objectives.
Another important point is a balance between flexibility and the ability to scale. I'll explain: if you have one site to make (for your client or yourself) and money/time is not the issue, you probably will go for custom made CMS, 100% flexibility 0 scores on the scale - it is done for your site only and will fit fantastically well, but you need to build another one for a different site. Duda wants to score maximum points on both, but obviously, it will never be 100 on both). So Right now, Duda (especially with the new Duda Flex editor) offers a lot of possibilities to a designer, and a great ability to scale (especially using Duda API)
Go with trends! People pay a lot of attention to trends, even sometimes it is not as important as it seems, but if you don’t follow trendy things, your clients might think you are dropping out and unable to give them the hottest things. AMP as an example, it is basically dead now, but it was a big thing when Google just introduce it. So, at that time, you had to have AMP for your mobile page.
Today Core Web Vitals is a new big thing, will it stay and prove self-importance - romance to be seen, but people want to pass it and get a high score. Go and make sure you are good with CWV. Well, Duda is the champion.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/core-web-vitals-wordpress-drupal-duda-wix/425071/
This is Google Data Studio Technological Report, shows % of sites (from particular CMS) that passes CWV - monthly report.
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Make your product so you will love to use it, and customers will value it.
M7: Duda really seems to be the champion in this regard as you mentioned. It also provides Website Builder, Client Management and Team Collaboration platforms for some of the world’s most ambitious organizations. How do you anticipate what people want?
AS: Carlos Ghosn, one of the most successful managers in the automotive industry (infamous now) told his engineers they have to make cars they want to drive.
This works for any industry - make your product so you will love to use it, and customers will value it. That is what Duda does. You cannot do absolutely everything that people want, so you need to prioritize. And this is probably one of the most important tasks. We do have a very lively community so we try our ideas there first, some features seemed very important for us don’t get real engagement with our clients, and well, won’t go into production. But some became a hit. We also collect huge feedback on a daily basis from our clients via our support team, so some new ideas come from there.
M7: You have produced over 500 webinars, led roundtable discussions and demos. What marketing tactics according to you generate the highest webinar attendance?
AS: 500 for Semrush, my previous employer, but a total of about 600. Talking about attendance (not every webinar is about the highest attendance btw), tactics is very simple: no sales pitch.
a) try to solve the problem a lot of people struggling with
b) good promo
It could be a sales pitch of your product, but make it very clear when you announce it, make sure you are getting your message to people who are about to buy your product, and interested in listening to your sales reps - and you get a success (still probably not numerically high attendance) I always believed in educational webinars, trying to “sell” experts’ knowledge and experience. Find a pain point where a lot of people struggling and get them a practical solution. And it should be a show, not a boring lecture) Break the monotony with different parts (presentation, panel discussion, Q&A) Add some humor. Steer up people’s engagement during the webinar.
Keep doing them, grow your own “Regulars” community (people who regularly attend your webinars), make sure you grow a strong mailing list - nothing works for webinar registration as email. But coming back to “not every webinar is about attendance”, I have done “invitation-only” webinars, where direct registration wasn’t possible, and promo was not easy (it is not an easy task to promote “invitation-only” event), and instead of, say 1,000 registrations, I only was getting 250-300 - but “the quality “of the attendees were astonishing.
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If you can measure something, and then use the Statistical method to arrange your data - you will get there.
M7: Speaking of marketing tactics, What is your approach to market research, both customer and competitor focused?
AS: I used to work with Melissa Fach and she used to say: Give me facts, not opinions. If you can measure something, and then use the Statistical method to arrange your data - you will get there. No data - no research, it seems pretty obvious, but if you look at tons of “research” published every day, you might think otherwise. Also, use tools, like Semrush or Similarweb (or many others), don’t just trust your feelings.
M7: What do you read, listen to, or watch, to stay on top of your game?
AS: I read Search Engine Journal and Bary Schwartz SERound Table for SEO. Watch/listen (there is a video version) WithJasonBarnard podcast https://withjasonbarnard.com/ And I do spend time reading Twitter. Yes, guilty.