Video - Robert Craven interviews Anton Shulke of SEMrush
VIDEO: 40:34 mins
AUTHOR: Robert Craven and Anton Shulke
In this GYDA Talks, Robert interviews Anton Shulke of SEMrush. A mathematician by education, Anton is now head of influencer marketing at SEMrush and the brains behind all of their informative webinars.
Robert and Anton discuss:
Background, Anton's history
Webinars - live or recorded
Experts as ambassadors
Core audience growth as the KPI
How to create awareness
35% attendance the stadrad metric; half that for paid traffic
It is a long game
How to differentiate your webinar
Quieter over COVID but now it is business as usual
The most popular topics: SEO audience, local SEO and experts
How does influence marketing differ from traditional marketing?
Growing one's experts
The influence of Covid
Get/Create your own influencer inhouse ASAP
Click the logo for a Special Offer SEMrush 14-days Free trial.
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:44
Hello, and welcome to the GYDA Talks. The guide initiative talks. We're here today. I'm absolutely delighted to have as a guest, Anton Shulke. Hello, Anton, how are you?
Anton Shulke 00:56
I'm fine. Thank you for having me.
Robert Craven 00:59
This absolute pleasure. So without further ado, for those of people who don't know about you and don't know about the business, Anton, would you just like to give us a quick introduction about you and the business?
Anton Shulke 01:10
Okay, I'll start with slightly backwards. Most of the time, in the been while I've been in industry, I was doing video life events, which people call webinar we don't like when they're actually webinar for SEMrush. SEMrush will one of the biggest SEO to produce and you can see I don't know if people can see video, I'm wearing an SEMrush t shirt today. But before that I was doing webinars for very small Ukrainian, I live in Ukraine, by the way, Ukrainian company, only SEO digital marketing. And I think I've got some result. That's why I moved to a SEMrush. Because five years ago, I didn't really know what I was doing when I started doing it. SEO webinars or content marketing was when I was very, very lucky I manage basically on the first season, if you can say I managed to get bearish was Rand Fishkin, Joe Pulizzi, which really made an incredible impact on major political content marketing. And eventually we gotta go Google, we have a series of Google, Google questions and answers. So now I'm doing monthly video events. I'm doing influencer marketing, marketing for SEMrush. But for my mind, I think video Life videos is such a great tool to influence marketing. So I thought I always want to influence marketing.
Robert Craven 02:47
So you said to me when we last spoke that five years ago, you knew nothing about SEO?
Anton Shulke 02:55
Absolutely. I think I just repeated this. I think I started in 2015 doing my first webinar on SEO. And Okay, the only thing I know was SEO stands for this was it.
Robert Craven 03:09
So tell me more about the philosophy behind webinars? Because especially right now, when offline events in hotels clearly aren't happening. And everyone's rushing online. They're doing various webinars. Now there's what I find interesting about webinars is they do charge? don't you charge? Do they sell? don't you sell? Do you educate? don't you educate? What do you do with the names of the people you get? Do you , only do them live? Do you do them recorded? So there's a whole philosophy behind webinarsю And I guess you're five years ahead of everyone's pretty much everyone because you've been thinking about it, and you've been tested, presumably a B testing the different formats?
Anton Shulke 04:03
Yeah. And I've seen it as people doing very different things, what we were doing, as I said, I was under the influence of Joe Pulizzi. And Joe Pulizzi. I remember he was doing a webinar with us. And he was explaining what he thinks is content marketing and influencer marketing should work. He thought, and I completely agree with him. And I said, it's my no philosophy. It's more religion than philosophy. What he was saying is, you have to grow your loyal audience. This is a main thing for content and for webinars as well webinars even more because it's very interactive and everythingб is growing your loyal audience before trying to get your trust. First, and after that, you can sell them on everything but for example, talking about webinars themselves, I don't think we're ever a great tool to sell anything. Okay, you can sell if people already want to buy your product, and they just know how to work this button. But maybe it is good. But it's for a very, very loyal audience, when people are trying to get a new audience so there will be an after the selling. And I think it's wrong, maybe not everyone agrees with me. But I thinkб what we're trying to do, we're trying to grow our audience by just not selling anything. So because I've seen so many times, you get people to try to sell them, and they're not ready to buy. So just Why will he we don't want to be on a sales pitch? So if they're not ready to sales pitch is kind of cool this audience or not, audience ready to buy, we try only to sell knowledge of our experience and knowledge, which helps people. So by knowing our so for example, SEMrush audience is very, very practical. What if my audience before that was very more theoretical, because we're more experts in the audience, the audience was much narrower, but more experts really like to talk and every now is very big. But mostly people who are running their own business, they unfortunately, don't have to time for academic speeches and everything. They formed after 60 minutes of webinar, there was something very, very tangible, very usable. So we know that it's what we're trying to do it. And for us, at the end of the day, it's not a webinar whenever was a lead generation or sales tool for us. The main one of the main said, as a second one, as well, one of them was how many people will come back. So as for my geometrics was what we call core audience. So people, for example, who within two months, at least twice a went to our webinar, and we will look at this core audience and see how it counts. If it would growing or shrinking, as this was our main matrix for webinars. So we trying to build a loyal audience. But of course, we have another thing. Another thing for webinars, as well, another aim. Because we think our loyal audience is not flat. It's not only people who eventually we want to sell out or let's be absolutely transparent, we eventually want to sell our product, but not on a webinar. But we think it should be doubled to a big audience and the people who inside the webinar is our loyal audiences will at least we want to try to convert people, our experts, we always use external experts, external horse, we don't use our own employee, they will never be loyal to us, we think. And so we want to convert our experts into a loyal audience for us to into loyal experts, because we think it's extremely important. Because this is influencer marketing is why we think I think webinar live webinar is extremely good, too, for instance, is influencer marketing too, because it's much easier, of course to try to steal your soul, Robert, for example, if he will sit him down and having coffee and seeing each other and everything is easier. No doubt about that is much more, you need more resource, because you need to travel and go to conferences, we doing this. But for example, nowadays, it's impossible. So now there is the only way we can communicate is by zooming like that. And it's what we're doing with webinars. So we doing tests as well. And when we're doing tests, it's not only about technical tests, and everything is involved, to know how influenced on our speakers and eventually to find what really they like, and eventually to please them is one of the legitimate targets as well. When you said about life, non life and everything. Yeah, I personally have religious beliefs in a live webinar. So for example, you're smiling, and I said religious, because it's not really proving . And I've seen many companies. They have a pre recorded webinar, as is sent it is live and someone's sitting in the live chat and make some predictions, which is why we don't do it. We don't see the point of it. So our live webinar is going I think it's completely different animal, because it's a 60 Minutes video to sell. Yeah, I'm using individuals with combs to sell 60 Minutes video not really still, because webinar is very structured to sell it later is recorded, it is very, very difficult and hard job, usually you make a teaser. And you put timestamps, so people can only watch a particular thing. But life is a different story. In the life of everyone there are people engaged, they ask questions and good answer from a screen, and all this kind of stuff. So we only do live webinars, even the recording later is available. We also as I said, we never sell anything besides a knowledge of our excuse. Because what we try to do we try to be slightly behind the scenes. We never tell Excellent. Okay, you have to mention SEO, you have to use SEO but if they do, fantastic, we love them. But if they don't if the if the selling issue with other methods, we don't want see competitive tools easily have to be honest. But if they can sell the result, they don't need SEMrush to sell the product thats fine. We don't mind the main thing is to show our audience. Okay, guys use this, this works. And you didn't spend this didn't waste the 60 minutes on a webinar. So they have something something is the answer. They can use it. So we expensive coming back and we get trust. This is idea.
Robert Craven 11:37
For the new people that all the agencies who are desperately doing webinars all over the place right now. When you're in your early days of your webinar, How does one create the audience? Because right now everyone is saying come to my webinar on growing your business come to my business webinar or content strategy come to. So how does one stand out?
Anton Shulke 12:07
And it's a very good question. And you know, very good questions, If you miss for, I don't know the answer. It's very good question because audience is, it's not everything, but it's very important even as influencer marketing. If you didn't bring enough audience, if is two and a half people watching it. Influence won't be pleased. Obviously, as I said, you grew up with some kind of core audience. So for example, we as I said, we have this core audience. And we do once a month we send at the end of the month, we send the email to our core audience, which it would be a few I don't want to say number, but it's not the 10000s, not 100000s, something in between, which is for our size is not a big segment, but we send them our programme for next month's webinars. And this is the main email for us the most registration, but this is not new, completely new audience is already core audience, or someone who just started doing weinar and they don't have email list. And they can't ask the influencer to send email because email would be the main source of registration for webinars, it's my knowledge, they probably will be strangling. The only thing they can really do the money and budget is paid traffic, but with the paid traffic we've ignored. So for example, our attendance rate usually is about 30 - 35% attendance rate is a ratio between people who attended and who registered. But if we use a lot of paid traffic, so for paid traffic, attendance rates are much, much more half of this 15, maybe 20% as much. So you can spend a lot of money putting a lot of registration, put on a webinar, you will get much worse people, but always this is kind of the same ideas that SEO and PPC kind of quick fix, but you need money all the time, and SEO which is you're doing something and you're doing it and you're doing in the doing and it's growing. Obviously if you're doing webinars, and you have 10 people on the first one, and you have 12 people on a tenth one, it means you know you did something wrong, it's not good for your audiences.
Robert Craven 14:36
Well, I suspect it's actually even worse than that. Because I think when we went into lockdown in February, March, April, every webinar was full. And now we're recording this in September going into October 2020. Now, everyone's over zoom, you know, everyone's had enough of zoom. And I think you know, people who have adding 100 in March or getting 10 or 20 now because for one because then people just like exhausted by it by the screen but also because everybody's doing it and you know why should I go to your webinar when it looks the same as all the other ones? I guess is the problem.
Anton Shulke 15:25
It is a problem, absolutely. To win all of them just after we see the just jump and we all especially people who've already been on the market because we say Okay it's a great great year for webinars and everything. When after that it's start going down very quickly because the same things you mentioned first people just get tired of a minute and after that because there is no online conference every single conference went online and now it's conference on a conference over conference, webinar over and over webinar. Yeah, it's very difficult, we had some point slightly dropped out of our regular, say a year ago but we more or less we get back to it so for us now is business as usual is no more novice but probably we do have our core audience which come back to us not to someone else.
Robert Craven 16:26
What are the most popular subjects? What are the subjects which are the ones that you kind of know as winners?
Anton Shulke 16:33
Yeah, okay even we cover basically all marketing is a tool we historically and everything is about SEO so if we do PPC webinar is or social media webinar we'll never be a winners, always is all about SEO and SEO for example how best one for all time when you're done I don't know maybe hundreds of webinars like that is SEO audit when public submitted sciences and experts, not our employ experts sometimes very very important in big experts and just do it live or when I say it Live it means it's there's a scene inside this before wizard they prepare life for your public is life of them it's obviously the show the fine. isn't always works for example what some as a local SEO is fantastically important wizzley And as one of our winner subjects as well local people love locals.
Robert Craven 17:41
Okay, that's interesting. So explain to me how you see influencer marketing being different from running webinars I mean just to be clear because you said that you started off with webinars Community Programme you've now moved on to influence and marketing you just explain to some people understand the difference in those terms. What makes influencer marketing different from other forms of marketing?
Anton Shulke 18:16
Well everyone's is a professor or academic in influencer marketing obviously everyone knows how to do it, what not everyone very few people I think do it effectively and everything. The easiest way is EPC just going by influencer give him a money or her money and ask them to tell what you want to tell them and always it's been before Internet has been on television for ages are the influences of pop-singers. The problem with this way is that as soon as you stop paying for your influence, not between your influence is a problem and another thing is you can pay influence people have much less to ask to them. So our idea is influence shows okay we are producing two and I think as in as a religious belief if someone doesn't love YouTube, doesn't use it is absolutely useless absolutely no point right to convert him or her into your influence. If someone doesn't like something else and you pay him or her money and in front of public he or she will be using your is absolutely useless and probably in a strategic is counterproductive. So first, we've tried to find Express practitioner SEO practitioners and after that you can get into influence you give them for example exposure. I don't want to drop names now. But we found some influencers, they were no influencers, they were mostly young, and probably a rising star, so we take them, we give them an audience, and they grow very, very quickly. I'm not saying we did grow them up, but we help. And after that they feel it, they know it. And I think it's a good synergy. And it's a good combination. Win win situation. So we win. And after that, we have a couple of big names. And they love to work with us because they come up with us.
Robert Craven 20:49
Correct. Got it. Got it. So how did to COVID influence your business?
Anton Shulke 21:00
Well, in terms of SEMrush, as I said, It's Seo, mostly SEO to produce. And it's international, we have clients everywhere, probably even in Mongolia. And obviously, some countries were affected much more than others. And we have a lot of clients from travelling, this travel industry is dead and buried. Obviously, they had to most of them, they had to cut transit subscription and everything. Even our transition maybe with not the main thing. But still we can see those segment of clients, they go on, maybe they go forever out of business, or I don't know, but some clients are always new on some clients who are producing online. Online stuff, yeah, from Netflix to Amazon, as those people are going. And we have a lot of our clients who gain tremendously be. So for us it's not zero sum. All together, probably it was slightly go region. And after that it's goes up. And sometimes we want some kind of loss, we try to help during lockdown, we try to help our clients to give them some kind of paid holidays for clients who were really affected in order to keep them. But as for EMrush itself, we didn't really suffer, I should say, very, very minor. And after that it came back because as I said, there are some winners and some losers, and so much business went from offline to online. And SEO probably will not fix our problem today, which is true. But still, most of the people understand they do need it. And so we didn't really solve for but we can see so much difference in inequality.
Robert Craven 23:11
Yeah, it's been really hard for people to tell the impact on the industry, because I mean, Google's figures for q2, so that April, May in June, which is kind of the worst bit of COVID. Their revenues were down 10% on search, on search and PPC. And of course you go 10% Well, that's kind of not what I see in the outside world. But of course, you got to remember that, you know, the grocery stores and the bike shops. They're all doing really online gambling, they're all doing really, really well, you know, whereas you know, travel and transport isn't doing really well. So it's trying to figure out what the average is, like they're saying, if your heads are in the oven and your feet are in the freezer, the middle of your body is the average, but it's not always helpful to know the averages. It's not always true. So if you just talk about the agent because you've come across at conferences, and so on and so forth. You come across lots of agency owners, What is it that you think makes the really good agencies different from the average agencies? What is it that the great agencies do in your opinion?
Anton Shulke 24:27
Well, I was not an agency but we have plenty of clients agencies and own for our experts. We have plenty of people from agencies and that's in two conception, and I think to successful concept so I'm not trying to criticise but what I've seen for example, one type of agencies they trying to do every single trick to look client, so kind of long contract and you can't pull out of contract before and all this kind of things and I've seen successful guys, successful guys still trying to, I'm not saying Squeezy client. But try, from my point of view, to few clients in a very very rigid formulation even doing very very well. And I've seen other guy's in other guys, and I don't know why it is self confidence or something but I've seen guys who put in absolutely nothing. So for example you might climb you came out today I'm giving you my price and everything but you can leave tomorrow or you can even leave today. So I've done something, you happy, you not happy, it doesn't matter, you pay what I've done you for. And you can leave at any anytime I've seen this as well, for my religion, as I said, Yeah, I said too much about religion today. So from my understanding this, the second way is much, much better. And it brings much stronger, much stronger relationship between agency and the client. So instead of trying to put the client in an actual in this very rigid position and not leaving, instead of this edge is trying to be irreplaceable, which is very difficult to reason because so important agency, how can you do, but I've seen very good ones, they made things. They make things happen for the clients, clients stay with them. And that is absolutely, because always it's much easier for me to say, than to execute, it's very difficult to execute something because I wrote SEO and everything. For example, most of the clients nowadays with all tools and everything they come to agency, and probably on page SEO is already done everything, sometimes it's mistakes, of course. And a client is there is no real arrows and clients say I don't want to be on a site owner top 20. I want to be on a top 10 Google. This is because I want to stick out and I want to be visible. This is the issue for the agency. So it's not that simple with it. But I believe if you can do it, don't try to squeeze your client, just let him be very comfortable. And he probably will stay for you forever.
Robert Craven 27:04
I mean, I agree with you. I think we both see agencies who don't see the long term relationship, I guess they see the client is how they're going to earn money as opposed to do they see it as a transaction rather than a relationship.
Anton Shulke 27:59
I talked to one a friend of mine, and he's got an agency. And he said yes, I agree. And he's a very successful one, but he's doing his very oldest contract and has absolutely everything. And he said, Look, I have people and I have to pay them their salaries. And if tomorrow, two big clients are gone, crucial, gone tomorrow, how I'm going to pay them and everything. So I didn't know my mind base lack of confidence or maybe is lack of capitalization because the other guy I've seen who was doing this, he said, Okay, you have at least six week deposits, whatever you go six weeks in enough money for six weeks to survive, even if you have no clients, six weeks, probably in terms of when it's lockdown, maybe it's a lot of money, a lot of money to have. Not everyone buys a contract and everything by the timeline. They try to kind of parachute the situation. So well. I don't know.
Robert Craven 29:07
I think the interesting thing is in lockdown, all those contracts went out the window in any case that clients would just say, actually, we can't pay but we'll be back in the summer. And so the contracts were actually torn up and who's going to take their client to court. So that's a really tricky one. So just moving on. You know, the question I'm asked all the time is about how I imagine the agency landscape changing over the next 12 months? Five years ago, Google was the only gig in town and everything was really quite straightforward. Now it's not straightforward. Yeah, every month we're told this is the year of video. Every year, we're told, links are dead. Every year, we're told, SEO is the last year of SEO. I mean, we have these recurring themes, which we almost don't listen to. But if you're running an agency, you need to be kind of ahead of the curve. In terms of what the next thing coming is you need to be aware of what the clients want. Can you imagine what the world will look like in 12 month time? Are you just going saying it's okay? SEO will still be really, really strong and we're quite relaxed? Or do you see there being some changes going on?
Anton Shulke 30:45
I think SEO it's just like a Content is king, win forever. Arrows Tyrion Dale, when he's doing his video, he will have a site. SEO is there. And he's talking about SEO. So yeah, basically is not going to gonna go anywhere. But of course, we see that, for example, a couple of years ago, content marketing was content marketing, and SEO, mostly technical SEO. Nowadays, content marketing, and SEO is basically the same discipline. So people doing content, and the thinking SEO, and not only technical, but all everything. And always the Google getting much. I'm not saying anything new, of course, Google getting much better. So everything you can do 10 years ago with keywords and everything is impossible. Google telling us do things for your client, for people who don't do it for searching, which is not true, which is never tell you still have to do a lot of SEO, because Social Engine is still not good. As you and me in terms of decisions, you cannot really look at the site. So you still have to help them using schema and all the things it probably won't grow in 12 months. Maybe in 12 years time, it will change maybe in 12 years time SEO. So if today as a kind of thing a search engine is like a four years old kid or five years old, maybe in 12 years time, it will be like a 12 years old kid. It makes a lot of SEO redundant because you don't need to put a chef once or something else because such an as you will see straightforward. It's not going to happen overnight, probably a long, long way. And about Google and everything. Yeah, there are other things than Google. But Google is still here. And several big companies we're saying, as if you introduce a new one, Apple probably was in the last one. And everyone expects Apple to be a new one that we've seen before we've seen Microsoft, which is probably as big as an Apple or at least was always experienced. And Bing is not really changing things. Most of people are using being. I know at least people they tried being is much more open. Because it's much smaller they try to talk to Bing and try to experiment with being is much easier. And seeing the same ideas moving to Google because Google was much security and everything. But in terms of such an agency with Google Google's is everything
Robert Craven 33:39
I'm certainly seeing more and more agencies spreading word, where they work, certainly the PPC agencies, if only because clients can't see, every time a client goes on to Facebook, it says you can reach 1000 people for 10 pounds. Every time the client's parents go onto the computer. They think the clients' parents think they're on Google, but they're really on Bing. And also there's that sort of like that thing your ACT ABS has to try harder because it's number two, I think there's something about being in the position that not Google or Microsoft are in that they have different pressures on them. Google is an American advertising company, that's where it gets its revenues from whereas for Microsoft, it's just one part of the you know, the income stream.
Anton Shulke 34:44
For Microsoft maybe but Bing is almost like a separate company probably if it was separate a balance sheet and everything's.
Robert Craven 34:55
Good. What projects are you on? What do you see you're doing over the next 12 month?
Anton Shulke 35:05
I don't see that I am living in a simulation. I'm quite happy and this is an internal rush, not people haven't seen it but internal structure for marketing changes tremendously. For good or for bad, we will see. Sounds very sad to say probably I will be doing the same. So generally the speaker probably is Yeah, it really sounds like saying I hate this sound set, I will be doing the same till I die. What is always exciting is a day that lives in detail. So I'm doing a podcast with us and it is the thing. So I probably would stay with a similar I would probably would deny to approve more influencers. And we probably try to find we still work with, we don't buy influencers, we try to create relationships with influencers, we try to please reference and we try to give influencers a value. But it's not only we try to give some influencer exposure. And I think we will push more on growing influence helping small guys, but small but smart guys and girls, small guys and girls, make slightly bigger go up there.
Robert Craven 36:46
That's great as a real sort of insight into what you're doing and what you're doing with the business. It's really fascinating. So finally, what pearls of wisdom would you have for an agency owner if you've met an agency owner at a conference or wherever it was? And they'd say what, you know, what are your thoughts about running an agency? What would you do differently? I'd be curious to know if you have any pearls of wisdom that you wish to share.
Anton Shulke 37:11
No, I'm not sure if pearls were the same idea. I just said, I think every agency has to have influence and influence or many, many influence, always in some big ones that can just buy a one as easy for small guys are small agencies. It's impossible to buy influence. So why don't you grow your own influence? Why don't you find among your people, someone who can talk and staff who feel he or she'll always say him or her. Because we need this. We have so many great, absolutely fantastic women. And I personally never said we have a diversification problem. Yeah, maybe some we do still have technically more men than women. But we have such a great woman for example when we do the webinars we have no problem to find for even for particular topic no problem to find your a speaker woman. When I say go up you'll grow your own influence, invest money in not only money time and everything you need, send your influence to a conference supported, send you an okay conference, probably the next step but first step would be the easiest step and get your influencer published somewhere. Get your engineers on screen, webinars why life livestream podcast make sure your guy or girl will go and we will visit and maybe in 12 months time after you started your influencer will be well known or maybe not as well, but still and it will gives you agency as something which you can stack out of every which you could be different from most of them because most of the agents they don't have their own some of good ones they do have, but most of them they don't and you do have you will have this idea.
Robert Craven 39:15
Absolutely, absolutely fantastic. And I agree with that. I think that it is setting off early and I think it is about demonstrating your value. It's about sharing your values. It's about showing people what you do and in this world of getting rich quick. I think it is a slow, gentle thing and I think you've proved that in the business. And thank you so much for being a really great guest. I've really enjoyed talking to you. I really enjoyed the insight into your philosophy or religion and I really enjoyed just understanding how your approach to business has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much.
Anton Shulke 40:07
It was very nice being here. Yeah, I thought it's gonna be difficult and complicated because I'm not very often doing it like for someone if you make it very easy.
Robert Craven 40:18
Thank you very much indeed. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much indeed.