Jesse Nobbe

I attended a great panel this morning at Denver Startup Week called "How Hiring Fractional Talent Can Drive Quick Wins for Small and Medium Size Businesses." I'm about to hit my one year anniversary of becoming a fractional SEO Director, and a lot of what the panel discussed really resonated with what I see as the value I bring to my clients every day. Some of the key advantages of working with fractional talent include: - You are able to hire higher caliber talent than you may be able to afford if you were to hire a full-time employee. - You get a brutally honest voice in the room. We aren't politicking or angling for a promotion. Your success is our success too. - You get quicker execution from fractional talent. Onboarding is shorter, meetings are fewer, and there is more intentionality around our goals and work because our time is more limited. - Your organization benefits from us working with other clients. We will get you out of the "we've always done it this way" mindset and provider fresh perspectives on how others have approached your challenges. If you're looking for fractional SEO or content strategy help, or you are interested in getting into the fractional world, my DMs are open! #denverstartupweek #fractionalleader #fractionalhiring #fractionaladvantage

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Want a content hack for your SaaS company (that most companies aren't doing)? Here ya go: You've probably got a bunch of customers doing really cool stuff with your product. Tell their stories. And I'm not talking about a formal 'case study' or anything. Sit down with 'em and see what they're up to on a call. Record it. Share the snippets on YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. Repurpose it into blog posts and LinkedIn posts. Get a list of objections your sales team is hearing, then give them a library of quotes and snippets, categorized by the objections they're related to. Harsh truth: People would rather hear from your customers than from you, anyway.

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It's that time of year again! Experiment Nation is working on its Annual CRO Salary Report. Every year we survey the Experimentation and CRO community to help folks in our industry get paid what they are worth. We break down our report by country, gender, titles, years of experience, and minority status. Subscribers to our Experiment Nation's newsletter will receive the report once its ready in the spring of 2025. Fill out the ANONYMOUS survey below. The sooner we get replies, the sooner we can wrap up the report - nudge nudge! https://lnkd.in/gDp3PRhS #salary #survey #experimentation

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Don't get relegated to the Promotions tab in Apple Mail after the iOS18 release! In Ann Handley's most recent newsletter, she shares what she learned from Jay Schwedelson about Apple’s news on the email routing approach they’re unveiling in the upcoming iOS update. It seems they're catching up to what Google rolled out several years ago. They're going to start sorting incoming emails into five tabs: Primary, Promotions, Social, Updates, and Forums. According to Jay, brand email and newsletters will be relegated to the “dreaded” Promotions tab, where they can easily fade into obscurity since presumably people simply don't check that tab as often as their Primary tab. Handley goes on to quote Jay as saying: "What we're seeing from the beta testing is that newsletters that come from an individual within a company AND that are written in the tone of a human being will stay in the primary inbox." I want to focus on the 2nd part of that statement. “Written in the tone of a human being.” Not necessarily written BY a human being. So Apple may not penalize brands that use AI, but if an email doesn't sound like a human, it WILL be penalized by being sent to the Promotions tab. How do you ensure your AI-written or AI-assisted content sounds like a human? You hire a human copyeditor. A human AI-adept copyeditor understands how to "transform" (haha, IYKYK) the machine's writing into something much more human-esque by: • Infusing it with emotional intelligence • Checking for errors and hallucinations • Reviewing it for human-like word choice and sentence/paragraph constructions • Eliminating those pesky AI-isms (like "delve" and "transform" LOL) • Making sure it maintains brand voice • Injecting personal experience • Weaving storytelling throughout (and not the made-up stories that AI will create if you ask it to) • And more... I have been copyediting AI output almost since ChatGPT brought generative AI to the mainstream. At the time, I was the Marketing & Communications Director for an international training organization, and my job included reviewing every outward-facing word (copy and content) before it was published. When I learned how to use AI, I taught my team how to use it, and then I edited their AI-assisted email marketing, social media posts, and blog posts. In the process, I developed an 8-point process for copyediting AI-written or AI-assisted copy and content. And I can put that process to work for you. Don't get relegated to the Promotions tab by sounding too robotic. Let me help you humanize your copy so you: • Land in the Primary tab • Stand out amongst the competition • And keep your loyal followers DM me today to learn more about how we can get started. ---- Picture: Me and my husband on vacation in July. Not a robot! 😊 [An image of a smiling white woman wearing a large floppy white hat, sunglasses, and a blue beaded necklace next to a white man wearing a black ball cap, sunglasses, and a blue & white checked shirt.]

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This is so obvious yet so difficult to change in many organizations.

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Hey #HubSpot folks! I'll be at INBOUND next week and eager to connect with those who use both HubSpot and Salesforce. I’d love to hear your feedback on the integration between the two platforms—what’s working, what’s not, and what could be improved? I'm happy to provide some gift cards (the types that aren't "maybe I can buy half a coffee") in exchange for real-world feedback. #inbound #inbound24

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“Go see what the competitor is doing.” I’ve heard it too many times in my career. We’re pressed for time, need new copy, have a website update, building emails—anything. And then the shortcut appears: copy what’s already out there. Sounds smart, right? ...not really Sometimes you should reinvent the wheel. → Your competitor’s audience is not your audience. → Copying skips learning what really works for you. → You miss out on true originality. → Your brand loses its unique voice. → You become second-best, not first. Sure, the top-down request to “just copy” seems easy. But long-term success? That takes fresh thinking. New ideas. Risk. Next time someone says, “do what they’re doing,” remember: Your brand can’t be #1 by duplicating #1. Build your marketing foundations around your customers and what you do best → not what somebody else does best. #metoomarketing

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Public Service Announcement... This is NOT a legitimate promotion to buy the list of visitors/registrants for the upcoming Email Innovations World conference. This conference is co-produced by Only Influencers and Rising Media and we don't sell our registrants list -- and neither do most industry conferences. Did you catch the domain name in the from address? Even if a reputable industry conference were selling their list they would use their own brand name or a legitimate list broker. Not a 'gmail' address. Legitimate list brokers have email addresses with their company's domain. Most likely this is a junk list of random names scrapped from the Internet - they may or may not have anything to do with email marketing. And they are likely not worth whatever price they are asking. Also... this was sent to a 'role' email address -- 'support@' -- a sign that the list they are sending this query to is not quality. If they are using poor quality lists for their own promotional emails, do you think the lists they are selling are any better? Probably not. I almost didn't blur the sender's info, why protect the guilty -- but it's probably a fake name and a throw-away email anyway. Don't be fooled by this or other sleazy email list scams.

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You don't absolutely need 45-60 minutes of someone's time to get good information. If SME and customer availability is what's holding you back from conducting in-depth interviews, why not use remote capture tools to drip the questions out so your interviewee can answer on their own time?

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I’m gonna mix a little bit of info with a lil sharing. If you know me this is pretty standard behavior. I was chatting with someone about programmatic direct mail and incrementality. When I think of incrementality I think of stickiness vs reach. Showing your ad to a new person is dope, but the data shows that channel diversification is more about breaking through the noise then unlocking a new audience. If you’re spending in the millions there’s a pretty good chance you’re hitting a lot of your target demo on digital channels. Tell me the last 10 meta ads you saw? 5? Tell me one meta ad you saw today? (This brings up another convo of frequency in this evolved digital age but Idk best practices) it takes a lot for something to stick so if you’re going to a new channel for incrementaltiy choose channels that are going to stick. Hence programmatic DM. When you start testing I’d think of it as a lift channel. Part of your lifecycle nurture flow. Test with unconverted audiences and see if it lifts. Then use the lifted to lal for prospecting. Ok the other thing. I was chatting with a brilliant marketer who complemented my posts and it gave me the biggest imposter syndrome ever. I thought about it a bit and I think it’s because all of these posts are the results of failures, experiments, and learning from other great marketers. Plan A has worked so rarely I could count it on my hands. The speedy pivot to plan B, C, & D is the real gold. I’m learning new stuff constantly because I care about marketing (I’m learning about social media right now). I’ll probably suck at it for a bit and then I’ll get good and write something about it if I think it can be helpful. Idk just thought I’d share.

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I've tried a bunch of subject line testing tools. I'm not a fan. 🥱 They seem gimmicky. And they contradict each other. What's a positive to one is a negative to another. Plus their data is an abyss of mystery where you can't be sure what led to the algorithm in the first place. Is it the right way to approach subject line writing anyways? Writing a subject line is not a formula, where if you include an exclamation point your open rate decreases by 4% or if you include an emoji it increases by 9 percent. Sure, maybe you find macro trends like that across a massive data set, but who's to say those trends were held to statistical standards keeping all other variables constant? And assuming massive macro trends hold for your industry and segment seems... unlikely. So I'm looking for a better way. Am I wrong? Do you use them? If so do you think they've helped? #emailmarketing

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When ClickUp told us we were moving all our internal comms to Chat, I wasn't sold. I've been in Slack's ecosystem for years. From weird sneaker reselling groups in early college (a story for another time). to the hundreds of clients I collaborated with at GR0 in Slack, I didn't want to use anything else. Not to mention the tech-debt of migrating all of our Slack automations and integrations—I was concerned it wouldn't work out. I also worried about missing critical messages during the transition period. Then, I started using ClickUp Chat, and I found the "Create Task with AI" button. From any chat, any message in the workspace, I can click one button and create a task with ALL the context, due dates, and any other info I need in just a click or two. That magic moment was what made it click for me. Now, after 2 months using it internally, I see the vision. It's SO good. I can't imagine going back to Slack anymore. A keyboard shortcut to move me from work/tasks, to chat, and back feels like a superpower. If you're still using Slack + a different PM solution, look into ClickUp chat. The time + cost savings add up pretty quick. It's hard to find a better solution.

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Shout out to HubSpot support to handling my latest (very stupid, waste of time) support ticket. "Why didn't this deal enroll in my workflow? It's not even showing the events in my troubleshooting." "Hello Danielle, I see that the workflow has been turned off since 12 June, see revision history here. This is why the deal did not re-enroll. Checking the enrollment history, we can see there's been no deal enrollment since the workflow was turned off. You may wish to turn the workflow on again." I'll see myself out. #moops #mops #hubspot

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Starting to sense a lot of anxiety setting in with all this TCPA 1:1 consent compliance stuff. And rightfully so... Lately, I’m in the weeds with performance marketers, lead generators, and agencies who are feeling the pressure to get their lead capture processes TCPA- 1:1 compliant before the January deadline. For some, it’s a kinda straightforward checkbox fix; but for others, it’s more complex, needing to pull data—like zip codes—to dynamically return the right company name(s) in lead capture forms. And that’s no small feat, which requires the vendors (like me) to build new tech that makes the querying possible. Then there’s the conversion challenge. Since prospects need to actively check a box to consent to be contacted, there’s a real concern about how this will impact conversion rates. I have many thoughts on this and what to do about it, but it's going to be a challenge. To make matters worse, most form and funnel builders just aren’t optimized for this level of compliance yet, and especially not for those more complex cases that require database queries. And the majority of CRMs out there don't even know what TCPA 1:1 consent is, so they have done very little to optimize around it. That’s why over the next couple of months, I’m fully dialed in to help get LeadCaptureIO ready for these changes. I believe it’s on me to make sure everyone using my platform can easily stay compliant—and hopefully stress a bit less along the way. If you have no idea what TCPA 1:1 consent is and if you're passing leads off to buyers, clients, or referral partners then I highly recommend following me because I'm going to be posting a ton about this in the coming months. Feel free to DM me as well if you need to get up to speed about what it is and what to do about it.

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Email unsubscribe landing pages fall into a few categories: * Impossibly complex trees of various sublists that I was involuntarily added to that I need to opt out of * The 'sad cat' gif that guilts me into staying * Broken Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, etc. pages that were never designed properly in the first place * Or this one... from my second favorite app, Cornell's bird-call identifier (tweet! tweet!). Super simple, and it makes a surprising sweepstakes offer for re-subscribing. Which I did. What could make it better? Would adding something about the mission of the app or something about the quality of the content have been better or just noisier?

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Should you be investing in new buyer enablement content or optimizing your old one? I've been noticing that may teams don't get a lot of support with the pre-launch and the post-launch parts of content rollout. If you know that the lead magnet / report / resource bundle is bringing in the right prospects (and you would like to see more of them), then it might make sense to optimize at least these elements: >> landing page >> nurturing sequence for new downloads >> recurring promotional posts on socials It's less of a heavy lift that building a new asset from scratch, so seems like an easy win - assuming you know which buyer enablement assets are working. What do you think? Do you do content funnel maintenance and optimization? If yes, what are the outcomes? If not, why not?

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“Can you make an editorial calendar? It can be quick.” 🫣 I’m guessing every content marketer has been asked to create an editorial calendar in their role. Watch my video to see 4 things I’ve done wrong when making editorial calendars during my time at Salesforce. Managing an editorial calendar SHOULD be pretty straightforward. At its most basic level, an editorial calendar answers three questions: 🎤 What’s being posted? 🧐 When? ☕️ Where? But I’ve run into plenty of complexity when managing editorial calendars over the years. Questions come up like: 😛 This calendar is too detailed. Where’s the exec-facing view? 🤓 Can we include <these other company milestones> in the calendar? 🤠 How do these individual pieces of content support <these company themes or priorities>? 🤩 Who is the audience for this? How much content are we making for each audience? You can up-level the complexity of your content calendar depending on the size of your company and what you’re trying to do. Our editorial calendars at Salesforce are now pretty robust. 😂 But ultimately, I think content marketers should be focused on making a rock-solid content strategy first. THEN you use the calendar as an important planning tool in your toolkit. Making a great editorial calendar is usually not “quick.” But it’s definitely valuable. If your current calendar is not working for you, change it up! ✌️ Check out the video for more editorial calendar pitfalls from my experience. What’s your approach to editorial calendars? Simple or fancy? Updated by many folks, or managed by one content lead? I’d love to know! Shoutout to my bud Devin Reed for requesting the topic of editorial calendars! I’m open to more suggestions, y’all.

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Hot Take: You shouldn’t outsource technical content creation to your marketing department or an agency. They don’t have the chops for it. For consulting firms, two types of expert-led content drive value: Thought Leadership Knowledge Base The first captures your methodology, customer stories, and views on topics in your space, great for showcasing your approach. The second covers how you do what you do, great for showing your team’s skills before any sales call. Thought leadership is easier to create. Run an interview. Ask questions. The SME or MD answers. Make it “pretty”. Distribute. (Lead Comet does this all the time with no problems.) Knowledge base has more friction. Your engineers need to identify a problem, get approval on the topic, draft the solution, provide evidence/supporting assets, and submit. On top of their existing workload. It's work. And as a result, firms try to outsource this… But outsourcing your knowledge base is problematic because YOUR engineers have their UNIQUE approach to problems and years of experience. Marketers can’t land anywhere near that. Any content they create isn’t worth reading. Your SME will have to rewrite everything. Technical writers who can create knowledge-based articles are extremely rare. Most engineers do the work. If they write, they write for themselves. Even if you find one of these unicorns, they can only provide a general framework for solving problems, which defeats the purpose of creating a knowledge base (to showcase YOUR team’s approach). Both workarounds are packed with friction, leading to failure. Marketing can provide support in other ways, though. For example, we give our clients a template for knowledge base articles (if you want it, let me know), stir excitement around content creation, sell the outcome, build the process, and make the output “pretty”. All this saves time and increases success. But the SMEs still have to do the leg work. That's why you need top-down buy-in from leadership. You must have a culture that embraces content, sees the value. There also needs to be incentives of some kind. (For example, large consulting firms make content creation a priority for SMEs to advance.) Otherwise, you won't see success. “But our SMEs don’t have time.” I get that. SMEs are busy. And creating thought-leadership and knowledge-base content is time-consuming. The barrier to entry is high. But that’s how you stand out. By doing the unscalable to scale. There’s no way around this. Half of business success is doing the work. The other half is showing people the work you do. Agree? Disagree? Would love to hear your views on this. #content #thoughtleadership #contentmarketing #contentstrategy #developers #engineeers #softwaredevelopment

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