End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- Schedule regular conversations with customers to uncover repeatable pain points, not just opinions.
- Choose marketing channels based on where your audience already gathers, not on what your team is most comfortable with.
- Broaden your definition of content beyond articles to include experiences, tools, and interactions.
- Tie every creative idea to a clear path toward leads, pipeline, or revenue.
- Build a strong mid-funnel so bold top-of-funnel ideas have somewhere to convert.
- Run judgment-free brainstorms to let unconventional ideas surface before refining them.
What makes a great marketing idea… actually great?
In this episode of the BuzzStream Podcast, host Vince Nero sits down with Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor, to break down one of the creative B2B campaigns ever: The Rage Cage for Revver (Formerly e-FileCabinet).
Great marketing isn’t repeatable, and that’s exactly why it works—at least that’s what Paxton left me wondering about.
I saw Paxton speak at BrightonSEO and knew I needed to have him on our podcast to talk not only about his Rage Cage campaign, but also about how he and his team come up with creative ideas in general.
We dig into the creative process and strategic insights that you can glean from audience research.
Here’s a slightly edited transcription of our talk.
Where did the idea come from for this campaign?
Paxton
Sure. So taking a step back, one thing that I think a lot of people in the industry need to start thinking a little bit more about is less about channel tactics and more about holistic marketing and how those channel tactics fit in with the larger picture. And for us, we found like centering everything in audience is the unlock for how you can apply channel strategies and unique creative ways to get to bottom line objectives. So this campaign we call the Rage Cage Campaign…
Basically, the story is, and this is a bit of an older campaign, but it’s one of my favorite stories to tell. This client, they do document management systems. What that means is they’ll scan documents, use OCR to find out what’s in there, and then they will…manage where those documents go, who needs to sign what, and all that kind of stuff.
So B2B, kind of a drier side, which is, know, B2B is already dry, this is kind of the drier side of B2B, and they serve a lot of different audiences.
One of those audiences are accountants, and so what we did initially was what most people would do, which is we created some landing pages with some e-books, some downloadables, we retargeted them, we sent them some ads, and we optimized some pages for SEO that were targeted to their needs and it’s like, it all worked decently well.
But then we thought, like, wait a second, let’s take a step back and really get to know who this audience is. the team that worked on this campaign, they actually got on the phone with accountants, both customers and non-customers to learn a little bit about them and what they’re dealing with.
And there’s this theme that kept coming up over and over again with these accountants, which is this frustration around the paper, like the physical paper that they deal with and specifically the machines that deal with that paper so the printers, the copiers, the fax machines.
We also did some research and found out a lot of them were coming to, near us for a big accounting conference.
And so we thought, okay, here’s an opportunity.
We see this through line of this common pain point.
They’re coming here in person.
Let’s put our heads together and think what could we do to capture like this moment when they’re here?
And so the idea the team came up with is: we reached out to a local rage room and had them build a mobile rage room with us that we took to the conference, set up as a booth, and then we put cameras inside and filled it with printers and copiers and fax machines.
We gave them a sledgehammer and let them go nuts with some safety gear.
So you may be asking, how in the world does this have anything to do with SEO?
Well, when people were lining up, they would one, line up to sign a waiver.
As they signed the waiver, we also got them into our HubSpot so that we could drip and nurture them further.
Number two, we set cameras up inside, like I said, which we would then use for marketing materials later.
We also ran a contest that said, $1,000 is gonna go to whoever’s video gets the most votes.
So we would email them their video with a link and they would send it to all their other account to expand the reach of this campaign so they could get votes.
So we kind of turned them into marketers. And then we also reached out to journalists and we got news coverage, both print and video of this because it’s such like an off the wall crazy campaign. And the upshot from all of this is, I forgot to mention while everyone was lined up, their sales team were just working that line. So they got a ton of FaceTime with exactly who their target demographic is.
So they actually signed 90 deals from this event.
It was pretty significant.
They got all those PR mentions and links and all of the sharing and all the links and the traffic increased organic rankings and they saw a huge increase in organic traffic and a 281 % increase in SQL specifically from organic traffic because of this campaign.
And so you can see it’s quite a roundabout way but it does connect back to the ultimate objective for us which was use digital marketing to increase SQLs.
By getting outside of that kind of narrow view of what this channel is and what is normally expected of it, it allows you to unlock some cool things that will generate like game-changing results.
How did you identify customer pain points to turn into a campaign?
Paxton
Um, you know, one thing I’ve found in the years of doing this is that what everyone wants is the exact step-by-step process.
But the fact is, there’s a lot of serendipity in audience research.
So we have found that what works really well are actual phone calls, talking to people, recording and analyzing those. Reddit is a really great platform for audience research. Um, if you’re looking for tools to scour Reddit, Gummy Search is a fantastic AI tool to help scour and assimilate lot of the content on Reddit.
So, and going to conferences is a really great way to get a ton of reps in with that audience. So really, there are myriad ways to understand an audience, but what doesn’t change is what you’re looking for are these through lines where it’s like, Oh, this, this keeps popping up over and over again.
Either this language keeps popping up or this pain point keeps popping up, or this is the way that they see the world or just some sort of like, you know, if you draw a Venn diagram, like most of them fit in this area, that’s kind of what becomes the initial spark that can create a really powerful campaign.
Why did you do an in-person campaign if you are a “digital” agency?
Paxton
Yeah, you know, I don’t think about us as a digital marketing agency, and I don’t think most digital marketers should think about themselves as digital marketers. I think of us as marketers driving bottom line results and we happen to use digital channels to do that.
So like why, to me it’s like a, a question that I don’t know that I’ve thought about because I don’t know that that’s like that didn’t go into our thinking.
It was like why in person versus digital? It’s like, well, that’s where they were.
And so you go where they are.
And, know, like that’s as much as we thought about it. We didn’t think anything more.
You know, it’s like, hey, our whole market is assembling here. So it’s like obvious that we need to be there.
In terms of buy-off, I think we had already earned a lot of trust, especially for the other agencies out there.
You’re not gonna take some, it’s gonna require a lot of luck to be able to pitch and actually pull off something like this without a bunch of trust that you’ve earned. So that’s a significant portion of it. The costs weren’t extreme. One of the things ⁓ in marketing is big factor that people don’t talk about often is like first mover advantage.
I guarantee you the next year, and we didn’t look at it, but the next year or the next conference, where if we wanted to raise them again, they would have charged us double.
Another accounting company is doing rage rooms.
And so this conference, like, I don’t know, like, I don’t know how to, like, and so we got a great deal.
The rage room itself, you know, they got exposure and part of that we worked out a great deal for them.
And so they handle all the manual labor for it. We had our team scouring, like secondhand stores for all these materials, like the printers and fax machines and stuff.
And just in case anybody’s interested, we recycled all of the refuse from from that so, you know, there’s a lot of just like “hey No one’s ever seen this before” that you get a big advantage often in pricing because people don’t really know what to do with this.
And so that that made the the sell a little bit easier, but honestly like great ideas should be so clear and obvious if you’ve done the research.
And so really all we had to do is say like, look at what these people keep saying over and over and over again.
And they’re all coming here.
So like, this is almost like an obvious next step.
It’d be crazy not to do something like this based off of what we know, you know?
And so these big swings that I’m advocating for, they’re not big random swings.
They’re big, well-informed swings. They’re like the obvious swing. It doesn’t mean you’ll connect 100 % of the time, but it’s definitely not random chance.
You know, I’m not asking them to go to casino here.
It’s like, hey, this is probably like has a 70 % chance of working here. That’s a good bet to take.
And so that’s the data you need to bring to the table to get that kind of buy-off.
What else is needed, besides trust and data, for this?
Paxton
The only other thing I’d say is if you are looking, like if your idea is from someone else who’s already done it, it’s already not gonna be a great idea.
The only great ideas that exist in marketing only work for only this company, only this audience, at only this time.
Anything else that’s not that, it could be a good idea. It could be fine. I’m not saying it’s not gonna work. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, but that’s not great. It’s not gonna be great.
The great stuff, it’s like you can’t repeat it.
And I have to say as an agency, boy, I wish I could repeat it. know, cause it’d be super efficient, but it’s like, no, how many times have we done a rage cage since then?
Not once, because it only worked at that time for that audience and that company.
I’ll also say too, just like peek behind the curtain, we don’t get to execute every single campaign that we pitch.
Sometimes it’s like, hey, this is a good idea, but no, we’re not gonna do it. Talking to other agencies out there, like you gotta take swing after swing on these pitches and don’t get discouraged if like your first two or three pitches get shot down.
That’s the name of the game, that’s how it works.
And then if they get buy-off, sometimes it doesn’t work too.
Like, generally, when you go to conferences, you’re hearing the highlights.
It’s the Instagram of marketing.
You only see the best, but there’s a lot of hustle, a lot of work, a lot of failure and trying that goes into that. But that’s how the game is played.
And the faster people can understand that, I think the faster they can play that game.
Have you learned things from this event that you can take to other campaigns?
Paxton
Yeah, so I was just talking with my executives about this yesterday, but it’s about principles thinking. we live, like especially marketing, it’s full of randomness and chaos and uncertainty.
And what everyone wants is certainty, but like you’re not going to get it at a certain level.
But what is certain, what never changes are the first principles.
And so like what can we draw from this campaign? What we can draw from this campaign is audience research.
The thing that most digital marketers keep doing and want to do is sit behind their computers and look at analytics all day and try to, you know, build from there.
It’s like get out from like talk to people, get some face-to-face time.
There’s a reason that there’s like one of the biggest reasons for conflict between sales and marketing is sales is talking to your market every single day, all day.
And they’re developing a mental model of who that market is and what they like, what resonates with them, and what doesn’t.
And if marketing puts out something that’s inconsistent with that mental model, boom, you just lost all trust with the sales team. And so what we as marketers need to do is take a page from the sales notebook and get reps in.
And so that can look like lots of different things.
It doesn’t have to be sales calls, but we could be listening to sales calls.
We could be talking to people, go to conferences, survey, like learn more about the audience.
That for me, that’s the principle that doesn’t change. AI will come, maybe AI goes, social media platforms rise and fall, but what doesn’t change is I have to understand how this person ticks in the world and I have to meet them where they are.
So that’s what I draw from it.
And so have we done a rage cage since then?
No, but what we’ve done is a ton of phone calls.
We’ve done a ton of audience research and I have dozens of campaigns that I can point to where we’ve had killer results because of some insight that we drew from this audience research.
And it’s audience research that’s tedious, it’s not fun.
If you’re kind of introverted, it’s not comfortable to do. It’s like you embrace that, bite the bullet. Like honestly, that’s the unlock because we can tweak all day into like I’m gonna change my bidding strategy or I’m gonna optimize these tile tags and you’re gonna get five, six, seven percent increase.
Great, that’s good and you should do that but like that’s table stakes.
If you want 300x, if you want to like 10x, like you know blow up what we’re doing here, you have to base everything in audience research.
It’s not going to come from following best practice or copying what somebody else is doing.
There’s no way you will build a multi-billion dollar company doing that.
You have to take these big swings based on the data from the audience.
Is it important to create content that doesn’t necessarily impact the bottom line but is helpful to the customer?
Paxton
You can make a case for that.
I think you can get lost in that pretty easily though.
And so you need to have the strategy for how this will connect to the bottom line.
You can’t, at least my opinion is I don’t think you should just create content because there’s a search volume there.
I don’t think you should create content just because it’s cool or just because it’s helpful.
All those are good things to have as part of your content creation, but ultimately, marketing is about driving the bottom line.
If all we do is create really cool stuff, that’s art.
And art is great. Art is good.
But we’re not hired to be artists.
We’re hired to be marketers, which means driving revenue.
And so ultimately, you have to be able to track that down to revenue. Now, I think there’s a big wide open field for top of funnel which I think is kind of what you’re saying here.
It’s like that would be more top-of-funnel.
Like this is serving a need, doesn’t directly connect to bottom line, it’s building my brand.
All that’s great.
You can connect it by saying like I’m building the brand, I’m building trust, and then I’m gonna send them this.
That is a little bit further down the funnel.
Great, I’ve connected it, done.
And most brands, especially the leadership of these brands, are really hesitant to do stuff that’s more top of funnel, and it’s because their mid funnel’s super weak.
But if you can have a really predictable mid-funnel, it makes the upper-funnel investment much less risky.
And so, right now, most brands have a very, very weak or non-existent mid-funnel.
And so if I were, you know, running a company and building out my marketing from scratch, I’d be really focused on that mid funnel to consistently drive people down to the bottom funnel.
And then from there I would start investing heavily in the upper funnel.
Vince Nero
Does that mid funnel only live in like the sales team or is that email drip campaigns and like kind of automated stuff you can do as well? The, you know, eBooks, that sort of thing.
Paxton
Yeah, I think it could be all of that. I mean, it really is dependent on your audience and what that journey looks like.
And, you know, even the funnel analogy is a little bit outdated in terms of how people actually interact with brands.
But just as a way to organize, I think it’s still helpful.
But yeah, I think it can be many, it can take many different forms. It does not have to sit only with the sales team.
How do you turn customer interviews into ideas?
Paxton
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the beautiful things about working at an agency is you’re just surrounded by these people who are thinking about the same goals as you and have similar context to that.
And I’d imagine at some in-house brands, it might be kind of difficult to be creative.
There’s probably a lot of people in marketing just getting shot down left and right. I can understand that that would be a hard situation.
But so what we do here is we gather tons of data as much as possible looking for these patterns.
And then we stole something from Google’s rent system where basically we share all that information out to a group of people who want to participate in a brainstorm.
They come up with their own ideas solo.
And then we get the gathered together as a group.
Everyone pitches their different ideas.
We vote as a group on what we think are the top three, and then we flesh those out more, and then usually like one, two, maybe those top three will get pitched to a client.
So there’s this massive refining process before anything gets in front of a client.
But like I got to tell you, it’s probably my favorite thing to do here at the agency of the brainstorms.
It’s just like fun.
You don’t have these like critical negative voices.
You get to be free and flex a little bit. Tons of stupid ideas.
But it’s like fun and we revel in the stupid ideas and it’s those that like those stupid ideas that eventually birthed the really great ideas, you know.
And so I would say if you’re in house as much as you can try to recreate a system like that, that would be my recommendation.
I can see that being difficult, but that’s the system that we use to go from data and like this initial research to killer idea.
Do you use AI in the brainstorming process?
Paxton
Not in this official process. We have used it for some like call analysis, for pull out friends.
And then, yeah, I find it’s just a really great, when you’re blocked for some reason, it’s a really great tool to like bounce ideas off of.
But we haven’t like officially integrated into that like set brainstorm process. It’s interesting though.
What are the keys to a good idea?
Paxton
I mean, I won’t, I can’t lie. Part of it is an intuition. It’s just like, man, like, like we’re just on fire about this. I will say one of the hallmarks of a great ideas: it’s well thought through so sometimes people will get really excited about an idea, but they will totally neglect some aspect of like how are you gonna distribute this or production on this is absolutely insane.
But the more you can think through those details and like why it won’t work and now we’ve thought about that, that’s the polishing that like these ideas need but if it makes it through that then it’s like that’s a solid a solid idea.
Any tips for tackling a really involved project like the Rage Cage?
Paxton
You know, I think that’s one of the benefits of experience.
Like the more experience you have, the more you can see where things will go wrong and you can take care of them before they go wrong.
In general though, my advice would just be like adopt, get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Just like developing that mindset of I don’t know how we’re gonna do this, but I’ll figure it out.
You know, like, because there’s sometimes there are people out there who are just like, I don’t know how we’re going to do this.
So I won’t because I don’t know how, you know, it’s like, man, don’t do that. Like say like, I don’t know how yet. You know, Matthew McConnay, think is, he’s like, you don’t say I can’t do something.
You say I have trouble with it.
And it’s like, I love that.
It’s like, I’m having trouble with this.
Doesn’t mean I can’t.
I will do it.
I’ll figure it out.
And it’s like that mindset is like, how are we going to get a mobile rage cage? I
don’t know. You know, but I know, I know, I know the phone numbers of some people who have built rage cages.
So I’m going to call around. That’s going to be my next step.
And then I move forward. I’m not going to sit here be like, I don’t know how we’re going to build this. So, so we won’t do it, but that was a good idea. Like, man, don’t do that. You know?
Can you talk a bit about any other campaigns you’ve done that came from audience research?
Paxton
Yeah, yeah, we’ve got a bunch.
One of my favorites is, again, it’s just like subverting; I’ll share two.
One is another B2B for a company called Algorithmia.
So their audience is engineers, like computer engineers, like hardcore engineers too.
And so, you know, we talked to them a bunch.
And one thing that we learned is engineers, like everybody hates advertising. Engineers really hate advertising.
One side note, I remember years ago I was telling somebody what I was studying and he’s like, what are you studying?
I said, oh, I’m studying advertising.
He goes, oh, so you guys are the, you guys are the bane of all existence.
I was like, what? And he was an engineer, you know?
And so they really hate the clutter on their feed.
They hate it so much.
And so we did these ads that basically they were blank and we said, Hey, we’re giving you your feedback.
And it was their best-performing campaign ever.
We got tons of comments like, is the best ad I’ve ever seen.
I don’t hate ads that much, but these guys really hate it and we just spoke to that and it was one of their highest converting ad campaigns.
So it’s pretty simple, straightforward.
Another one is we did some work for EOS, a chapstick brand, and their target audience.
We did a bunch of research. There’s different demographics. It’s 35 to 45 year old women, then there was a 20 to 25 year old women, each have different desires and things, but we found this overlap among all of them, which is a high percentage of all these groups are really into zodiac signs.
And so we thought, well, what do we do with this? You know, they’re all kind of interested in this. What do we do with this?
And so, so like I was saying before, when you know the data, the next idea is obvious.
I think probably people listening are like, Oh, I know exactly what I would do. And it’s what we did. We paired up all of their products and said, Hey, if you’re a Sagittarius, this is the lotion for you. If you’re a Capricorn, this is your lip balm.
And I got to, it was their best converting ad campaign I’ve ever run.
Just taking this weird insight about the audience and applying it to ChapStick.
Again, so anyway, those are a few of my examples.
So they’re not in-person activations or anything like that, but it’s just like what do you with this insight that maybe goes against a grain or is outside best practice?
You’re not gonna go to an advertising conference and have them tell you run blank ads. But it worked, it worked for us.
Only worked at that time for that audience that one time. No one else should go do that again, because it’s not going to work again, you know?
Is there a way to replicate any of those?
Paxton
Yeah, and I can tell what you want, what you want bad, and I think what everybody wants is the process. And it’s like, I gotta tell you, there’s no process. All it is is like talking. And it’s like, eventually you’ll hit on this thing. You’re like, hmm, interesting. That was weird that they said that.
I’m gonna ask the next person about it.
And they’ll repeat it. And you’re like, I’ve struck a vein here. There’s just so much serendipity that you just cannot, in my opinion, the process for it is what, like you can Google it. That’s the process we follow, you know?
SparkToro is a really great resource for audience research for us too. yeah, like Gummy Search and then in-person sales calls, that kind of stuff.
I’d also say like we need to, as an industry, the word content is one of my least favorite words because it means nothing.
Like by definition, everything you see is content. so everything, it means nothing.
But the default assumption when everyone says content is article. Like that’s almost what they mean almost all the time.
So get outside of the article.
This is an art campaign, ClickUp, they did playlists for sales teams.
And I was like, cool, I love it. Dope content.
They did playlists on Spotify.
You can go download the play, it was really cool.
Just get creative about what the word content means.
And I think that can be a big unlock for a lot of people.
Get away from articles. It doesn’t just have to be articles.
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