This week we feature, Brian Casel Founder of Audience Ops. Audience Ops offers done-for-you content marketing, blogging, and email marketing to online businesses, along with content marketing tools and resources.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Audience Ops, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

Your location: I’m from Connecticut, but this year my family is traveling and living in various parts of the US.

‍

‍

Your favorite gadget: I recently caved and bought an Apple Watch.

You start your day with:​ Bulletproof Coffee and NYTimes.com.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Work less. Give yourself less time and you’ll get more done in that time.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: These days… Seth Godin, Signal v Noise, Wait Buy Why and Vooza

“Focus on who your most ideal customer is and what they actually need and what you can teach them.”

Describe an average day at Audience Ops?

My role running Audience Ops consists of the following:

- Working on new marketing strategies- Sales calls- Creating systems and writing procedures for my team to follow- Working with my team on making our processes better.- Interviewing and hiring

As a startup founder/ marketer, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

- Generally making sure I spend my time where it’s most valuable and delegate the more repetitive stuff.- Calendly.com for appointment scheduling.- Making lists :)

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3–5 tools you use?

In terms of “tools”, these are more for productivity and getting the work done. Trello, Slack, Google Docs come to mind here.

Marketing, to me, is more about writing educational material and getting that material in front of your target customers. So I spend a lot of time in Google Docs when I work on marketing stuff.

Drip is the tool we use for email marketing and we recommend to most of our clients.

WordPress for the company blog (no brainer).

We also develop our own marketing-related WordPress plugins, which we use ourselves and also release for others to use. These include tools for creating email opt-in forms, landing pages, and the like. See those plugins at http://shop.audienceops.com

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

I always start with who our best clients are and figure out how I can attract more people just like them. What are they struggling with, what are their goals, and what can I teach them (through content marketing) that will help them get ahead and build trust in me and my company.

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

It starts with producing content that is genuinely helpful to the people I want to attract. Organic search and social traffic builds over time when quality content (that solves real problems) is being published consistently.

Then we focus on getting that traffic onto our email list, so we can follow up with more content, bringing them back to our site again and again.

We have email sequences that lead prospects to request a consultation (or buy one of our plugins). Sometimes we experiment with paid acquisition like retargeting ads, but this is always in support of an organic-first approach.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding startup marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

Focus on who your most ideal customer is and what they actually need and what you can teach them. Then focus on getting those people to join your email list, then continue sending them useful, educational content. Conversions and sales become much easier once that trust is built.

A big thanks to Brian for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out Audienceops.

The ‘How Marketers Stay Productive’ series asks marketers their tips & strategies for staying productive. Every week we’ll feature a new guest and the tricks that keep them working smart. Know someone you’d love to see featured? Email Us.