Episode 18 – David Berkowitz – Serially awesome community building

09/17/20 • -1 min

Serial Marketer and former CMO of Publicis MRY David Berkwitz shares how he built up a thriving invite-only 1500+ member Slack community for his marketing consultancy serialmarketer.com

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Links

Find out more about Serial Marketers and join the Slack community here.

Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to The Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things quizzes, marketing – and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story... the highs (and the lows!) of scaling his successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Boris 0:34
Hello, and welcome to The Quiz Makers podcast. Our guest today is David Berkovitz. David was the former CMO of MRY, a huge marketing agency and has now moved to running his own company – Serial Marketers. Hello, David, thanks for joining us in the podcast!

David 0:52
Thanks for having me Boris. It’s great to be here.

Boris 0:55
David, the first question that I’ve actually always wanted to ask you and never gotten around to somehow.

Just how did you decide to move from being a big corporate CMO? You know, that’s a very well respected job at a huge company to being self employed. That’s a huge step.

David 1:14
Yeah, it’s a it’s a big step. And and some of it wasn’t entirely the plan.

Look life within Pubicis was a wonderful experience. So with the team and MRY, they’re kept shifting, like the organization, kept drifting considerably within Publicis. And so ultimately, they needed to step back from what they were marketing and kind of retrench. And then as I was taking some time off, there were just a lot of the companies I was initially talking to on the tech and product side.

Then I thought – let’s start doing some consulting... then in that four year span I’ve gone in and out of some of these in-house roles, but all of them have been a lot scrappier; it’s been fun being in the this building mode. And really, across the board, I’ve just been just been attracted to these entrepreneurial roles.

So that part has stayed fairly consistent. And a lot of it is even at MRY. We didn’t have a CMO before I joined, right so there was still room to just create things and build. It’s really appealing to track it, you know, going over to that startup front and having those as most of my clients day to day.

Boris 2:46
So but instead of going the usual route where you got to know a lot of people in your previous roles and you then set up consulting gigs.

You went a slightly different route as well. You started with a small Slack channel, I guess to keep in touch with people – which has now grown into a huge and thriving community of well over 1000 members.

Tell me about how that how that ideas started to build that community and how you manage to grow with that fast.

David 3:18
Well, the idea started pretty much the day I left MRY. It’s all very connected because I was I was going to be speaking at an event and after that transition, I wanted a company name associated with. (There’s a bigger sort of back story on the company name itself serial marketer.)

Once I decided on that, I thought, “Well wait, a lot of people identify as serial marketers. No one uses that term. Then I Googled it – and saw, right, barely any search results associated with it so there’s something thing to it.

And then I got to this point where I wrapped up this engagement with StoryHunter, this video production marketplace and in July of 2018, I started the community with a LinkedIn post. Yeah, I thought slack was the right place to try this then, like “Slack for business professionals”.

It was still very unusual for those outside of the startup community to have a Slack account. But it seemed like it was in that right place and something that you can customize a lot more than the Google, Facebook and then Li...

Serial Marketer and former CMO of Publicis MRY David Berkwitz shares how he built up a thriving invite-only 1500+ member Slack community for his marketing consultancy serialmarketer.com

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Links

Find out more about Serial Marketers and join the Slack community here.

Transcript

David 0:52
Thanks for having me Boris. It’s great to be here.

Boris 0:55
David, the first question that I’ve actually always wanted to ask you and never gotten around to somehow.

Just how did you decide to move from being a big corporate CMO? You know, that’s a very well respected job at a huge company to being self employed. That’s a huge step.

David 1:14
Yeah, it’s a it’s a big step. And and some of it wasn’t entirely the plan.

Boris 2:46
So but instead of going the usual route where you got to know a lot of people in your previous roles and you then set up consulting gigs.

Tell me about how that how that ideas started to build that community and how you manage to grow with that fast.

Previous Episode

Episode 17 – Merilyn Beretta – Lead Your World

Marketing maestro Merilyn Beretta shares how her quiz marketing funnel has generated a jaw-dropping 86% opt-in rate for her ‘Lead Your Day’ online learning academy. It demonstrates how a great product matched up with an insightful quiz helped grow her revenue by 500% – boom!

Check out her website at https://merilyn.com.

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Transcript

Mike 0:02
Welcome, everybody to this episode of “The Quiz Makers” podcast. And I am really flattered and honored to have as our guest today, Merilyn (I’m going mispronounce your name, but it’s just a cool name that I have to try it) Beretta.

You’re a happy customer of riddle and obviously really big into quizzes and marketing. And, frankly, you do so much in the entrepreneurial space, I think it’s better just to let you introduce yourself.

Merilyn 0:33
Sure. And as you can tell by my Australian accent, I’m not Italian... I married into an Italian family years ago. And yes, those guys are listening and it’s spelt like the gun. Guys think that’s really cool, but girls have no idea. They think it’s a ham, which is actually a ham brand.

Anyway, so back to the question. Yes, I have a personal brand – I’m a coach and a trainer. As an educator at heart, I have an education and coaching business for women entrepreneurs.

Mike 1:09
Fantastic and when did you start the business? And then it kind of a segue, how did that get you into quiz marketing?

Merilyn 1:16
Well, interesting enough, I did years and years decades and decades in corporate and various roles.

Then I moved home after living in England for many years – and I moved home to Australia. I was still self employed with number of clients but more of a consulting role doing different things from brand architecture to strategic director, marketing... I was a bit of a sort of a Jill of all trades.

So when I had in my heart to start my own brand, I always wanted to teach online and reach a wider audience. In the past, I was that sort of person that was thrown into businesses to sort of fix things? So when we started online with zero, literally zero audience, what do you do?

I actually started late – I was a little bit older and I only started just about just over three years ago. So not long at all. And I started with creating some online courses. And it’s interesting that I started right from the start with quizzes.

So I learned how to do quizzes, with customer segments, buckets and different categories, which was right up my alley, because for decades I have taught personality profiling.

I think it was the training and learning development person in me, but I’d always naturally categorize people – not to stereotype them, but to understand them.

Mike 2:57
Imagining which broad buckets they fell into...

Merilyn 3:00
Yes. And so I knew I wanted to start some sort of quiz because I thought that they were really cool and fun to do. I actually stumbled across the careers quiz that I’ve got now – I actually started with sort of a course on life direction.

I spent a lot of time doing surveys online and so I have hundreds of thousands of data points. And I actually discovered that the core motivation of what entrepreneurial direction to take fell into four buckets or categories.

So I looked at them and I thought, “Oh my gosh, they relate completely to the person to the broad personality types I’ve been teaching for decades!”.

So it morphed into what I’ve got now – which is my “Wow archetype”. I’m a bit tongue in cheek – I love being a little bit corny, but it’s memorable and everyone loves it. So my “Wow archetype” really focuses on the four core motives of different personalities.

I use it as an icebreaker but I also use it to actually target the different results. It really does work to categorize my people like that and we have a lot of fun with it.

Mike 4:19
With four archetypes or segments, that actually lends itself to personality tests because there are four broad areas that you can say “Here’s a broad area, I think you fall into...”

Merilyn 4:32
And what people love about mine is it’s easy...

Next Episode

Episode 19 – Steve Sarner – Amazon / Goodreads

Quiz marketing veteran Steve Sarner (VP of Ad Sales & Program Management @ Amazon’s Goodreads) shares his insights about why quizzes and ‘opt-in’ lead generation work so well together – especially in this era of increased privacy regulations, ‘banner blindness’, and ad blocking.

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Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to the Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things, quizzes, marketing, and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling and successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Hi, there, welcome to this episode of the Quiz Makers. My name is Mike Hawkins. I’m one of the co founders of Riddle which is one of the major quiz makers on the market. And in this episode, I’m very proud to be chatting with Steve Sarner, VP of ad sales and program management. Is that right, Steve?

Steve 0:56
Pretty close, Mike.

Mike 0:58
I was stalking you on LinkedIn and that’s the current title I saw. So maybe I should have Steve introduce himself.

Steve 1:07
Right. Hi, everybody, Mike, thanks for having me on. I’m Steve Sarner, VP of sales and program management at Goodreads which is a subsidiary of Amazon – we are the world’s largest community of readers with 110 million members. Basically, we are the place to come to find and discover your next book, see what your friends are reading, and follow your favorite authors.

And it’s a great place to be during this time, where people are finding a lot of great content to to engage with. So it’s great to be on the Quiz Makers podcast.

Mike 1:43
Thank you. And I have to say, just in the interest of transparency, I am way too much a customer of Goodreads at Amazon. The number of times I get prompted, “Oh, hey, you’ve read this author” or “We think you might like”... then sure enough, I bought yet another book, especially now!

Steve 2:03
It is working.

Mike 2:04
Yeah, it is. So Steve, you and I worked together. And it feels like five years ago. But really, it was quite some time ago. I used to work with you at Tickle and then Monster.com.

Steve 2:16
Yeah, exactly. Those were fun times together, for sure. Mike. We did a lot. We invented a lot.

Mike 2:25

We did indeed. So the reason I wanted to have you on this podcast is that Tickle was one of the very first quiz online sites.

This is centuries in internet time, way back from 2001 to 2006 or so. And Tickle was one of the very first sites to do the “What type of dog are you?” and “What is your IQ” tests, things like that.

And after all, this is the Quiz Makers. So I wanted to catch up with you. What was your role in the use of quizzes for marketing?

Steve 2:57
Sure, exactly. Back let me go back a little bit before that – you may not know this, do you know where I was before I joined Tickle?

Mike 3:03
I do not.

Steve 3:04
I was at a company and a site that still exists today called Real Age, which was a health assessment site. So that was kind of my first introduction to quizzes.

I’d come out of the travel industry and joined the health interactive side as VP of marketing to help them grow their acquisition base. And you know, that was very much in line with the whole test quiz model.

In this case, it was actually health assessments, a number of them. And you know, I think one of the beautiful things about tests and quizzes is that you’re actually providing value for the person taking them. I’m a huge believer in advertising, ALL advertising, particularly digital advertising should be invited versus invasive – anywhere where we can add value to the user experience.

So when advertising feels like it’s part of the product, part of the experience, it’s just such a plus. And so Real Age, we were giving people some great, you know, health tips and advice, and then at Tickle, our IQ test and ‘What breed of dog were you?’... and we had hund...