Marketers of Technology
00:08:38 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:08:38] S1: Okay. And what channels are working best for you when you come to the need of educating your clients? [00:08:43] S0: Yeah, it's going to be largely digital, right? As probably comes as no surprise. So we are fairly traditional in that a lot of Google search engine marketing, a lot of display, but it's really different by ICP. So we might find, hey, there's more architects and more owners and lawyers that exist on LinkedIn. Our subcontractors, you're going to find them a lot more through like Instagram and TikTok. General contractors will be in between. And then lately we've had a lot of success using Connected TV, believe it or not, where we were using Vibe today. And that's actually performing really well for us of getting in front of the right audience and the amount of view through conversion that we're seeing from it. [00:09:25] S1: Okay. And also when I think about AI, how are you using AI internally to help you out with everything you do regarding marketing?
00:09:25 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:09:25] S1: Okay. And also when I think about AI, how are you using AI internally to help you out with everything you do regarding marketing? [00:09:35] S0: Yeah, great question. So there's, there's a few, what I would call like my AI helpers that I personally have. So maybe I'll start there and then kind of go to some of them that the team uses. And so a few things that we've kind said is, Hey, you know, we're a team of about eight with a few external contractors that help us. We do not have like a project manager on the team. And so one of the things that we built to help us in that is what we call kind of our little PM agent. They sit on-site on all of our calls, they track all of our Slack and team conversations. And at the end of the day, they then look through and say, tasks are missing from Asana that somebody might have asked for, somebody might have signed, might have been the output of one of these calls. And it will actually go through and it'll create in our right project boards, all those additional tasks. So nothing gets dropped. Then each morning that same project management bot sends out basically your daily digest of things that you need to do, things that you're behind on. Where do we have gaps that are preventing projects from moving forward? And so that's kind of one unique thing that is different than your like editor bots or persona bots that maybe a lot of people talk about that says we don't necessarily need a headcount for that because we've helped create some of these, these bots to help and support us just from a, from a PMO perspective.
00:10:52 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:10:52] S1: No, I get that. And since you have, for example, this project manager agent and these different types of utilities for AI, how big is your team that you have helping you out with all this endeavor? [00:11:02] S0: Yeah. So we're about a team of eight internally today. You know, it spans product marketing through to content editorial staff, media internally, SEO internally and then marketing operations. [00:11:15] S1: Amazing. And in general, how big is AIA Contract Documents? [00:11:20] S0: We're a little over 100 people as it stands right now. So we're slightly under about 10% of the staff, of AIA. And so and then on a yearly basis, you know, we've got almost 40,000 customers that are buying from us and we process probably over $100,000,000,000 worth of payment contracts on a year by year basis. [00:11:43] S1: Okay. And also Travis, when it comes to the customer journey with you guys, how does that work? If potential customer is interested in what AIA Contracts is offering, like how do they go about using you and understanding how to really work with the company?
00:12:01 · Travis Cameron
[00:12:01] S0: Yeah. So we're a lot like kind of your smaller end or your SMB SaaS type of tool, right? And so, you know, today it's a really interesting business in that the front end is an e commerce engine. So where we list the 300 contracts for sale. And so in a lot of ways, we're similar to an e commerce business there where we are trying to find that right user for the type of contract that they need for the job that needs to be done. And you think of like jobs to be done framework of saying, this person needs to get an agreement signed. They need to kick off a project. They need to do a change order on a project and get a new billing and agreement signed. They need to get paid on that project. And finally they need to close out that project. We align kind of the documents into those things that need to be done and try and find the right point to sell them at. Once we've sold somebody and we get them used to using that document, we refer to that internally as document on demand or DOD. That's effectively like you would think of it as a trial in your normal SaaS sense. Then it's the job of how do you get them from that trial or that first time using to becoming a subscriber. And subscription for us is, hey, you essentially have an all you can eat bucket for $2,400 on a year by year basis per seat to access all the documents that you and your company needs. So back to education element, the first step is how do I get them in, get them comfortable with using that first agreement? How do I then educate them on the other documents that they can use and then turn it into that they're using us for every construction project and with every contractor or agreement that they're doing is on AIA ACD paper.
00:13:39 · Andres Figuera
[00:13:39] S1: Okay. Okay. And Travis, whenever you're trying out a new strategy or a campaign or trying to just build more, what's it called, like more information regarding the company so that customers understand, what are the metrics that you value the most? And especially since you're into the data and analytics side of marketing? What do you look for when you want to know if something was successful or if it's failing and you prefer to just try something else? Like when do you decide that?
00:14:05 · Travis Cameron
[00:14:05] S0: Yeah. So we try and reserve like 10% of our budget, 10% of our time for testing. Right. How do we figure out if it works or not? One of the first things I've been here for about a year. And so one of the things I did was say, we need a really robust prospect database so that we can move to predominantly first party targeting. We were trying to do platform targeting. It really wasn't working for us. So we moved to say, let's build out this entirely first party prospect database that covers about 60% to 70% of our TAM. That allows us to give a little bit more time for testing because we know we're targeting the right people. Then like when to cut it, when to not, and what are the data points that we looked at first? It's like, how do we get in front of these people? And what are the channels by with that, by with that will work? And so we start with always audience ideation. Who's the person that we want to go at? How big is that audience? Next step is where can we find them and are we getting a match rate? If we can't find that audience through match rates with Google, with Meta, with anybody else, that almost kills it at that point, because you don't want to create a campaign that only might have, you know, 500 people that you're able to get after in it. And as I said, we're a lower price point product, so we're not doing kind of mass expensive ABM type campaigns. Then once you're getting it live, are we getting kind of the viewership? Say it's a video. Are we getting the extended length view of that video or are people cutting it after three seconds? Are we able to get clicks through to the website or is that just coming through as 100% fat finger click bounce rates? Right. So what's that type of engagement? And are we able to get that click to purchase? That's not really my objective, but it's great if it happens. It's more so are we getting some of that view through that we've been exposed to that ad? We know they haven't been a buyer before and now they're making purchase. That's where I really start to say that campaign has legs and that's really starting to work. Let's start to put more money behind it.