My Digital CMO – Marketing Strategy for Everyone

Highlights

Introduction and Inspiration Behind My Digital CMO
Challenges in Marketing and Software Solutions
Evolution of My Digital CMO and Agency Adoption
Core Features and Functionality
Roadmap and Feature Development
Integrations and Future Plans
International Expansion and Marketing Strategy
Pricing Model and SaaS Strategy
Favourite Game: Galaxy Attack

Transcript

Chris Barnard: Hi, Kim. Thank you for joining me on this week’s edition of Bear Business. You are a business that I was very keen to have on My Digital CMO because I think you’re doing things in the marketing strategy space that I’ve wanted a software business to come into for a long time. When I saw your business on, I believe it was the AppSumo marketplace, I thought, how interesting, and how much it tickles my itch to talk about marketing strategy. So, thank you very much for coming on. Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself and what inspired you to create My Digital CMO?

Kim Rounsefell: Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me on. Yes, it was an interesting story, actually. We were living in California at the time, and I have a background in software engineering, really taking a business problem and transferring that into a software solution in my former career. I was running a small business in California and was really struggling with the marketing side of it. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just throwing a lot of things in the air. Ironically, my partner and co-founder is a corporate marketer. So, I was probably complaining a lot, and he sat me down, got a big sheet of butcher’s paper, and laid out all of the channels, all of the communications, what I should be doing, and how—what’s your purpose for being in this channel, and you’ve got to really know why you’re here and what you’re doing.

So that discussion evolved for quite a while, and I decided to turn that into an application, a product that I could use online. It was initially targeting small businesses that didn’t have experience in marketing strategy. Ben, being the marketer, was very instrumental in the framework around that. It took about three months to get a minimum viable product up and running, and the rest just evolved from there. We’re still developing it every week, every month—it’s evolving.

Chris Barnard: It’s a terrific story. I think it’s a classic case of why I enjoy speaking to SaaS business owners. They often spot an opportunity, discuss it—usually over a glass of wine with friends or partners—and then, very organically, a team comes together to tackle a problem. The key challenge you’re trying to solve is tying together lots of bits of marketing that used to be disparate and separated, maybe not having joined-up thinking. Do you want to tell us a bit about the challenges you’re trying to solve with My Digital CMO? Because marketing is one of those things, isn’t it? Every business could benefit from great marketing, but not everyone can afford a Chief Marketing Officer, can they? So, I think your software is perfect for trying to bridge that gap, Kim.

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we found was a gap in the marketplace. There was a lot of great software focused on tactical execution—getting your posts and everything out to your socials—but we couldn’t find anything that really looked at the strategy first. We always say we take a strategy-first approach in the tool. It’s very focused on why you’re doing what you’re doing. Why are you on Instagram? What are you trying to achieve using Instagram, for example? What are your objectives? What are you hoping to get out of it?

Even before that, with your customer personas and things, but to more directly answer your question, we really try to help small businesses and agencies pull together and manage their marketing strategy for their business and their clients’ businesses as well.

Chris Barnard: Marketing exists in that sort of ethereal space, doesn’t it? Often in businesses, companies will tell you, “Oh yeah, we’re doing our marketing, go and speak to the marketing team,” etc. But since channel marketing became a big thing, sometimes you’d get the SEO person sat over here, and then you’d get the email marketing person sat over there, and sometimes even web developers would be on different teams. It’s always been hard to collaborate together in these spaces. For the listeners who are not involved in marketing, I suppose a lot of the way that marketing teams would collaborate pre-My Digital CMO would be with lots of spreadsheets, Word files, PowerPoints, probably within a shared drive like OneDrive or whatever IT infrastructure tools your company uses. Then certain people would collaborate and work on these different tools, but you would never have a central repository. I think that’s what’s so interesting about your system. It does all those bits, particularly for the strategy document, which traditionally has been a dust-covered paper that no one really visits, except the CMOs and top marketing people. So I love that your software is looking to give greater visibility to all the aspects of marketing to a user.

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, absolutely. It’s all in the one platform. I totally agree. I have good friends in business who’ve worked with agencies in the past, and they’d get an Excel spreadsheet to fill out their personas and things like that. That’s one of the things My Digital CMO does. It has everything in there. It steps you through the process, so it’s very delineated with planning the strategy, then thinking about how you’re going to execute the strategy and evaluate it as well. It’s quite systematic, a real framework we’ve tried to put together.

Chris Barnard: And do you want to walk us through some of the main features of My Digital CMO? As you say, around the planning, executing, and evaluating. Do you want to talk us through the reasons behind those areas being in your platform and how it’s being used by users currently?

Kim Rounsefell: Absolutely. The way we think of the platform is, you’ve got the real foundation, which is the marketing strategy, and that is broken down into those three areas: planning, executing, and evaluating. The planning side is quite involved in terms of working out what your brand vision is. What’s your mission for your business? What are your core values, and how are you going to communicate those to your customers? What do you really stand for as a business? That can be really difficult, particularly for small business owners. We found that a lot of small business owners would be presented with the brand vision upfront and be like, “Where do I start with this?” because it involves a lot of thinking.

Then you’ll step through to your personas—who are your customers? Who are you trying to target? What are their pain points? What are their motivators? Really understanding and digging deep into who your core customers are. Another part of planning is understanding your own product and the benefits and potential objections customers might have to your product so that you can talk to those and communicate effectively.

Once we’ve gone into that side of the marketing strategy, it’s time to think about what channels you want to be in. What platforms or assets do you want to use? Where are your customers currently? That’s probably where you should be. So, it really steps you through that thinking process.

The second step, once you’ve got that foundational strategy in place, is to start executing or delivering on that strategy. You’ll have a marketing calendar, your marketing mix, and you can see where everything’s at and start delivering—create content with the AI tool. And probably last, but definitely not least, is the evaluation. Throughout the process, you can set up your aspirational goals, your objectives, your KPIs, and really evaluate how you’re progressing. So it’s got those three core areas.

Chris Barnard: What I particularly like about your software is that it encourages collaboration and gives that visibility and transparency that so many businesses are looking for these days. With your software, you can put in that task, show everyone what you’re doing, what goals you’re aiming for, and the underlying strategy behind it, which I think is so important, Kim, and something that, if you’re a small business owner or part of a small business without a chief marketing officer or a marketing background, a lot of these aspects get missed. Don’t they? Do you see businesses come to you who… it must really open doors for them in their minds in terms of thinking about their business more strategically?

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, absolutely. Particularly small businesses, they often don’t have the capital to invest in a marketing team or marketing experts. That’s where we really started with My Digital CMO, to make marketing strategy more accessible to those small businesses. One of the challenges with that is also time. Small businesses have a lot to do; they’re often juggling multiple roles within their own organisation. So how do we make it as easy as possible for them to create a marketing strategy, use that, adjust it as they go, and rely on that to build their business?

Chris Barnard: The strategy piece is absolutely important to give a North Star and to guide people on what they’re looking to achieve. But I also think the evaluation part is sometimes overlooked. We’re all guilty sometimes, whether it’s a marketing campaign or changing operational procedures or moving to a target operating model—any of those business changes—you think, “Oh, thank goodness, I’ve finished, we’re all done,” but actually, you’re not done. That should be when you’re doing your project wash-up, looking at what you’ve achieved this time, and considering what to change and make better next time. Is that a key driver of what you’re trying to do with your software?

Kim Rounsefell: Absolutely, absolutely. So the objectives and KPIs we’ve got in there are calendarised as well. They make you go back and evaluate where things are at on a regular basis. The marketing strategy is not a one-and-done thing; it’s an evolving thing, and you’re not going to get it right the first time either. So it’s important to continually evaluate what worked, what didn’t, go back and make some adjustments, and then keep going. That’s what we try to do. It’s really interesting that it’s become so much more of a workflow than we ever imagined it would be, just through its evolution.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, yeah. And that’s interesting because I imagine a lot of businesses, when they start to use your software, embrace it, and integrate it into their daily operations, it takes a lot of pain points away from how they

were running their operations before, just because of the range of features in your software. So, do you want to tell us a bit about those businesses, Kim, the ones who have adopted your software? I believe it’s been three years since you’ve been on the AppSumo marketplace. Do you want to tell us a bit about the businesses who have adopted your software and are using it now?

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, absolutely. What’s really interesting is that we originally built the software targeting small businesses, the solopreneur, or someone who might have a couple of businesses running. But what we found was that agencies really showed an interest in the software. When we first deployed, we only had our free tier and our basic small business tier, but we added a team’s tier geared towards agencies who wanted to onboard their team members, other marketers within their team, and also clients.

Now, we have a lot of agencies on the platform who have their clients on there. They have multiple businesses running through the software. They use features like CNAME and custom emails, so they can set the portal up as their own branded experience for their customers. They’ll invite their customers to the portal, and the clients can see their own marketing strategy and how it’s evolving. It’s great. We’ve received a lot of really positive feedback and excitement around that aspect of the product from our agencies. It’s very exciting.

Chris Barnard: I think this type of pivot is synonymous with the space in SaaS. No doubt some of our SaaS listeners will chime in and either disagree with me or say, “Yeah, you’re right, Chris,” although they probably disagree with me more often than they agree. But what they would say is that a lot of them, when they create a product—like you said in your backstory—they spot a problem, see in their minds the people they are fixing the problem for, and then, when they open it up to the wider mainstream or the populace, other people find other problems that your tool also fixes. They start coming to you and take your vision in different directions.

For example, agencies, especially top agencies, might say that one of the reasons to work with them is because they have such a great operating procedure. And I imagine the businesses that have come to you are hot on their operational procedures and can see your tech fitting into their stack. You also do the white-label side, allowing them to put it as their own platform and feel part of your journey. Kim, are you starting to find that some of these agencies now talk to you as if they’re part of your business as well? That must be a wonderful feeling.

Kim Rounsefell: Oh, absolutely. We’ve built some really close relationships with some of our agency customers. We work together; they give us a lot of feedback on their own workflow, how they work, and the sorts of things they’d like to see My Digital CMO do. We work with them to build those features, which has been fantastic. It’s great for the product because it’s made it better and better as we’ve built and gone along. It’s also really nice to have those partnerships and know that we’re making a difference for our agency clients working with their customers. It’s been really great.

Chris Barnard: It must be challenging from a roadmap perspective. Something I’ve loved in the evolution of SaaS software businesses over the last few years is this movement towards community-based building. I’ve noticed on your website that you have a roadmap where people vote for features. The features chosen by a small business owner compared to an agency must be very different. Do you want to tell us a bit about your process of putting your roadmap together? How do you choose which features to prioritise? I suppose, on the whole, you go democratically with what gets the most votes, but you also must want to maintain control of your own vision and ensure that My Digital CMO stays within what you want for the software.

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, absolutely. We have a very active roadmap, which is fantastic. Our customers can post requests on the roadmap, and we make it very visible so they can see exactly how we’re prioritising different features, from design through to development. It’s really important for us to show that transparency and involve customers, making them feel like the platform is their own as well.

When it comes to choosing which features to implement, we usually have a fair idea of where we feel the product needs to go, and a lot of the time, our customers confirm that with their feature requests. My role is really working with the customers, as I handle all the support and communication. I’m constantly on email, discussing different things with them, including the roadmap. Ben, being the marketer, can look at things from a marketing strategy perspective, and together we can easily assess a feature and decide if it fits within our vision. Ben will determine how it needs to work from a marketing perspective, and I handle the technology and development side of it. So it works pretty well.

Chris Barnard: I imagine, as a SaaS, that the ecosystem of integrations is something you must get a lot of requests for, and it must get voted up a lot in your roadmap. Certain integrations, like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Zapier—things that allow people to start automating different aspects—must be common. Do you have many integrations with My Digital CMO at the moment? Are there any integrations in the future that you’re particularly looking forward to or that your user base has asked for?

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a few integrations, and it’s a real focus for us at the moment. We have our Google Analytics integration for metrics, evaluating the website, and seeing how that’s going. We’ve just set up our first Zapier integration, so customers can now create a business directly into My Digital CMO from their CRM platform. We also have integrations with email platforms like SendGrid and Postmark for custom emails.

There’s a lot on the horizon when it comes to integrations. We’re really looking at bringing in all the analytics from socials—that’s something on our roadmap. We’re also about to integrate with QuickBooks, particularly for our agencies who bill on a time and materials basis. They will be able to turn on timers within the platform, log time logs, and then send it off to QuickBooks for billing. We’re getting there—it’s hard to keep up with demand sometimes, but we keep developing and getting them in there.

Chris Barnard: You’re doing a great job at it. It’s difficult, and alongside these integrations—of course, that’s a constantly shifting landscape—there’s so much different software that people use daily. But alongside the software side, I like that you’re covering so much of the strategic angles, particularly marketing topics that, while not exactly dirty words, are certainly not spoken about enough. People might say, “You’re bound to say that as a marketing consultant, Chris. You want to know things like what the budget is for this project.” And that’s true—I do want to know what the budget is for this project. I know that’s something in your roadmap, your budget allocation tracking.

Kim Rounsefell: Yes.

Chris Barnard: I’m pleased that’s been highlighted because clearly, in an environment where you have agencies adopting your product, the big thing for them is the client’s budget and how it’s allocated, which is typically a conversation that happens through emails or during late-night discussions over a drink. But I love that your software, with its theme of visibility and tracking, allows that to be managed openly. Do you want to talk about other features like that on your roadmap? We often discuss on the Bear Business Podcast the importance of competitor analysis, knowing your audience, and budget allocations—things we feel don’t get enough representation in marketing discussions. Your software seems to be bringing that conversation back. Positioning is another great one I know you’re looking to include. Do you want to talk about those sorts of strategic elements and how you’re now focusing on adding more strategic and evaluation features?

Kim Rounsefell: Yes, we see these additional features as building around our foundational marketing strategy to give it more strength and insight. The marketing budget feature is one that’s coming in very soon, within the next month. It involves allocating your budget at the business level, filtering that down through your campaigns and channels, and tracking your costs and how they’re going against your KPIs and ROI.

Competitor analysis is another tool that’s very popular, and we’ve received a lot of votes for it. We’re at the point where we’ll be looking to deploy that soon, though we’ve still got to spec it up. Positioning strategy and content pillars are also popular requests. There are so many suggestions for tools that agencies find important in their toolkit to support their customers, and we’re very motivated to get those in as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Chris Barnard: Alongside the importance of the strategic side, a part of marketing that I suppose is on the way down, not up, is the analytics and tracking side, with changes in privacy laws and how Google is tracking things. Do you have many conversations with agencies about this? Is tracking important when they’re evaluating your software? Are they looking at how much tracking you can do to align with KPIs and prove the value they contribute to a client?

Kim Rounsefell: Yes, to an extent. We get a lot of feedback on the types of analytics they want to see, particularly expanding more into the social space so they can evaluate their strategies. But one of the key pieces of feedback from agencies is the ability to be more visible to their clients and help educate them about marketing and its importance. As you know, it takes time to get results, and often clients might wonder what’s going on, particularly with SEO and similar efforts. So having that visibility, seeing that things are happening and evolving, and having discussions around the strategy are really important for clients to feel like things are progressing.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, I completely agree. Having been on both sides of the fence, I think sometimes on the client side, you can feel out of the loop or not in control, depending on certain pressures, targets, or what size of business you are. It’s easy to get lost in the BAU (business as usual) and miss out on these aspects. There has certainly been an underappreciation of how much work goes on at agencies on client accounts because, of course, you can’t see it if you’re not there.

Particularly if you’re in-house, you’re focused on the brand and trusting the agency to do their part. But it’s been very hard in the past to see that, even with tools in the same space but not like yours. For example, we used Basecamp back when I was in London, maybe 10–15 years ago. It was good for sharing documents, but it seemed to be missing key areas along the collaboration point and the ability for the agency to prove their value. Also, it wasn’t as easy to use as your software and probably had more of a project focus than a specific marketing focus. So, you’d sometimes be trying to force a square peg into a round hole, trying to get the software to do things it wasn’t meant for. It might solve some problems but leave others glaring, like the education pieces and everyone understanding why certain things are done at certain times. I think your software is really good at solving that.

Would you like to tell us a bit about your pricing options? As a SaaS business, that’s a big thing—a monthly subscription model outside of the AppSumo deal. Would you like to tell us a bit about how you chose your different pricing tiers and what the most popular pricing tier is for you at the moment?

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, absolutely. We set up our pricing tiers around the structure of the business. We’re actually going through a bit of an evolution with our pricing tiers at the moment, but they’re essentially staying the same in structure. We have a free tier, which is the foundation of the strategy—the main components. We started calling it a side hustle tier for someone just starting to dabble in marketing and planning out their strategy.

Our first premium tier is called Business Smart, soon to be called Strategist. This is for a solo marketer who might be working with clients, a consultant, or a coach building their strategy. They’re really a solo operation. Finally, we have our Team Plan, soon to be called CMO Plan, where you can invite your clients and team members, build multiple strategies for different customers, and that’s actually our most popular tier. You always see the “recommended” or “popular” option in the middle, but for us, it’s the team plan that’s the most popular.

One decision we made with our pricing model is that you often see per-user pricing—we don’t do that. We enable our users, particularly with the team plan, to have as many users as they need on the platform because they tend to be smaller agencies. We want to be inclusive and make the product accessible to our customers, not price exclusive, if you know what I mean.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, I do. I exactly know what you mean. I think these are great. Particularly when you work in the marketing space, a lot of people like to ask you marketing questions and try to understand what underpins some of the decisions you’ve made in your marketing. Something I know we’ve discussed is that you made a focus to be very accessible with your business in terms of languages. Would you like to tell the listeners a bit about the grant you received to promote your business overseas, your plans behind that, and how you’re going to market My Digital CMO in the future?

Kim Rounsefell: Absolutely. In Australia, there’s a government department called Austrade, which offers an annual grant to businesses that meet certain criteria. The idea is to promote Australian businesses overseas. The grant we applied for was to help promote our business to an overseas, exported audience. We were awarded that grant, which was really exciting, and it was focused on our marketing efforts for an overseas audience.

One of the requests we started getting was to have My Digital CMO available in different languages. We started with about eight languages, and now we’ve got 16. So, it’s pretty exciting to see users all over Europe, Asia—everywhere—using the software. It’s great. I’m quite excited about that, and we’ll continue to build on those features for international audiences.

It’s interesting because you get emails from different locations, and the needs for marketing and marketing strategy are very similar, which is really good. In terms of marketing My Digital CMO going forward, one of our big focuses is our own content and supporting businesses in marketing. We do a lot of articles and publish them to our audience about different aspects of marketing. Another big focus is on support and video. We do a lot of educational videos on YouTube, and we see that as an important part of our relationship building with customers. So, those are some really big focuses for us in terms of marketing.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, and I suppose your feature roadmap and things like that are going to be highlighted. Are you now…? I know you said it’s been about three years on AppSumo. Are you looking to come off AppSumo?

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, it’s been about two and a half years, I think. AppSumo has been fantastic for us in terms of getting a really good customer base involved in the product and giving us a lot of feedback. We are in the process of merging off AppSumo. We feel like we’ve hit that time where it’s important for us to do that for our own brand and business going forward. But I’ve only got great things to say about AppSumo and what they’ve done for us as a growing SaaS business. It’s been really good.

Chris Barnard: Yeah, terrific. And I’ve got one last question for you that we ask everybody on the Bear Business Podcast. I think you’re a listener, so you might know which question is coming. It’s about your favourite game. It can be a video game, board game, a specific Australian game, a game you played in California, a dice game—any sort of game you like. So, what games do you like to play when you finally turn off My Digital CMO and have some time to yourself?

Kim Rounsefell: Well, it’s funny—on my phone, if I’m playing games, I play a game called Galaxy Attack. It’s like a…

Chris Barnard: Galaxy Attack?

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, it’s like a space game where you’ve got a ship, and you’re shooting different things. It brings me back to the old Atari days. So, that’s pretty funny. I always loved board games like Monopoly—bit of a classic—or Uno, which is a good one we play with the kids quite a bit.

Chris Barnard: Is it a classic space-invaders type game? I’m picturing the arcade with the joystick and buttons, that type of thing?

Kim Rounsefell: Yeah, it is. I’m at the point now where I can’t get through the levels—they’re getting too hard. It takes me about 10 goes to get through a level.

Chris Barnard: Is it gamified? Do you have a high score you’re looking to beat, or is it just a level cap you’re trying to get through?

Kim Rounsefell: I’m just trying to get to the next level. I don’t worry about the score so much—it’s just trying to get through them. They’re all pretty advanced now, so I’m not that good.

Chris Barnard: I’m sure you’re brilliant at it! It’s a terrific choice. We like it. Kim, thank you so much for being on Bear Business this week. What I’ll do is put in the show notes a link to the 14-day free trial of My Digital CMO, inclusive with lots of social media links so you can connect with Kim. Come and talk to us in the comments, and I’m sure Kim would be delighted to answer your questions. Thank you so much for being with us this week.

Kim Rounsefell: Thanks for having me, Chris. I really enjoyed it. It was great.