#11 - Alex Fine

Hey all,

Excited to share the second newsletter of the year.

This week I talked to Alex Fine, Co-Founder at Understory, an agency focused on building multi-channel GTM engines. They’ve worked with top experts from RB2B to Hockey Stack to Clay on everything from paid ads to outbound.

Alex’s approach to marketing in general is unique. His whole angle is that, when we look at content types in silos — paid ads, organic content, SEO, outbound — we lose. 

It’s a tale as old as time: sales says marketing is sourcing crappy leads, and marketing says they’re generating high-quality leads but sales isn’t following up. The team at Understory believes the solution is to bridge the gap and create a strategy that spans across both sales and marketing — no silos, no room for prospects to slip through the cracks.

Alex calls this allbound marketing — and it works incredibly well for his clients at Understory. 

Here’s an example of how an allbound flow works together for clients who are doing paid social, paid search, outbound LinkedIn, and outbound email through Understory:

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1. They start by building all their lists in Clay based on an extremely granular ICP. 

(The Understory team are all Top Clay experts too — so they really know what they’re doing).

2. Then, they send an outbound email. They use a tool called Outbound Sync to push all their outbound correspondence directly to HubSpot, so they can create a contact record associated with a company record.
   
   In that company record, they can track every little activity that’s happened, as if they were sequencing natively out of HubSpot. They can track the email, the timestamp, and the actual correspondence, as well as the name of the person and their work email.
   
   
3. At the same time, they’re overlaying the same company with LinkedIn ads, which they can see in the LinkedIn dashboard. You can’t see the contact, but you can see that the company is getting a ton of impressions on their ad campaign.

4. They’re also running paid search ads, with the tag manager set up to send all the information into HubSpot. 

The result?

The prospect… 

Got a cold email that they never responded to → 

Searched the name of the company directly into Google → 

Clicked on a branded search ad → 

Converted into a demo request.

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That’s allbound marketing in a nutshell. 

It doesn’t matter which one they convert on, because they all work together to build awareness and drive them toward conversion.

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“Well what about attribution?”

If you look at it in a silo, you can say outbound is not working or paid media is not working. But if you look at it from a holistic perspective, you can see all of these things influence one another and the strategy actually works.

Alex said: “It doesn’t matter where you hit somebody. You just want to go wherever your audience is and make it really easy, really low-friction, to actually convert on your product or service.”

So before you go cutting your paid ad spend to zero or telling sales to quit their cold outreach — consider the way these things can work together. 

Meanwhile at Good Content…

Top wins:

• We are excited to welcome 1 new client this month
• These convos mean everything to us:

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Top learnings:

Which roles are the most active on Linkedin? I analyzed user activity across departments to find out. Surprise: It's NOT salespeople...

• 1. C-Suite
• 2. HR
• 3. Marketing
• 4. Biz Dev
• 5. Product Mgmt
• 6. Legal
• 7. Finance
• 8. Sales
• ... (continued)

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Click here for full list & context.

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Top recommendation:

My colleague & friend Em Thomas has officially kicked off her newsletter, the Struggle Huddle. Each week, she's interviewing a marketer to learn about a struggle they had, how they solved it, and what the results were. Join the newsletter here.

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Thanks for stopping by, folks. As always, feel free to reach out with questions, feedback, suggestions, or anything else that’s top of mind for you.

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Peter

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