Chris Matty Of Versium On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Be flexible and be able to do many things. Have a broad understanding of many specialties within the digital marketing ecosystem.

Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.

In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales”, we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Matty.

Chris Matty is the founder and chief revenue officer at Versium.

Chris Matty — Founder — Chief Revenue Officer at Versium, Inc.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismatty/

An inspirational and creative executive with expertise leading technology ventures to rapid market penetration and high revenue growth. Tactical Specialties: executive management, business development, sales and sales management, negotiation, contract development, strategic marketing, strategic planning, marketing communications, competitive analysis, messaging, pr, presentation skills, M&A and fundraising. Internet, SaaS, Data & Telecommunications industries. Driven to succeed.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

At 26 after concluding my MBA, I joined a well-funded startup in the telecommunications industry where I learned what it takes to go from an idea to executing success. My boss once told me to run my operation like it was my own business and make whatever decisions necessary for success unless the decision had a million-dollar impact, in which case “come get my help.” During this journey, I learned the true meaning of empowerment and one of the most important mantras in building a successful business: Hire very talented, great, driven people and empower them to be successful.

This advice got me interested in starting my own ventures, and after a particularly bad digital ad I received for a Brazilian wax 45 miles away from my house (which I had zero interest in using), I wanted to help marketers better reach their target audience. That was the inspiration behind Versium.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

It wasn’t funny, but it was a mistake. When we first launched DataFinder, our first automated data UI service for enriched data, we were all eager to get the product out and set aside a budget, so we started doing CPC on Google AdWords. We got decently far into the budget before realizing that the landing page with the registration was broken. It was a waste of traffic because people couldn’t fill out the form to learn more.

The biggest learning for me was that you have to ensure your funnel is working properly from the get go. We missed the most critical step in our rush to get going and wasted thousands of dollars in the process.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

When I was getting my MBA, I met Neil Dempsey, managing general partner at Bay Partners VC firm, and told him about my career aspirations. He asked me, “Why don’t you just start a company?” Ultimately, I did! And it failed. But I had that passion and I tried again, and it worked very well. I started an early stage company that ultimately became very successful. It’s about facing fears and having the drive to face your dreams.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Everything we have at Versium, we built ourselves. Our data is proprietary and unencumbered. We built our own capabilities specifically with the use cases. We are one of the very few companies that do both professional identity resolution as well as consumer identity resolution. We set out to combine both — not just the data, but also the intelligence to map both identities to a single person. It changes the game for B2B marketers who want to engage in digital marketing that was fundamentally impossible before. The fact that we own our own data that sits under that technology is also a huge selling point for us.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

To build a successful business, it’s about managing people and treating them with respect — all very important. But to start a company from scratch takes tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, because you will have a lot of that in the beginning. Also, you need passion to overcome the challenges you’ll face. When making decisions on the journey, think of them as essential variables and ensure that you have a clear train of thought. Always keep a positive outlook because that gives you a better chance of being successful.

When people have an aspiration to start a business, I tell them this story: I went mountain climbing in Chile once. From the bottom of this mountain, you could see the peak — it was a tangible problem that we could see, and one day we decided to climb it. Once we started our ascent, we ended up with a wall in front of us and couldn’t see the peak. Climbing a mountain and starting a business share common challenges and require a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, while requiring you to make decisions about which direction you’ll take. It’s about looking at the beauty of the challenge. You need confidence that success is out there and that, in the short term, you will overcome your challenges and achieve your goals. You will run into problems — an overhang, a crevasse — and you have to make the right decisions to get to the top, and that’s where you’ll find success.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I’m busy with three early-stage ventures: Versium (although it’s been around awhile) as well as Jack and Nick Matty — my two boys.

From a business perspective, we’re working on a really exciting project at Versium. As more and more emphasis is being put on first-party data — data that the enterprise owns — with third-party cookies going away, we are launching tools that improve the quality of first-party data automatically via a no-code UI tool.

Anywhere from 30–40% of CRM data is bad — it’s outdated and/or someone mistyped an email address along the way. We are launching tools that help businesses get more use and value out of data by fixing it using a set of automated UI tools.

We recently had a major retailer come to us with a customer list of 50 million households, but they only had 18 million email addresses after gathering info for 20 years. There is going to be a lot of bad data in there, not just because it’s old, but also because there will inherently be a lot of errors. Data has shifted and our platform can fix a lot of that.

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned in the beginning, sometimes companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.

I think it goes back to a mistake we made in my story earlier, which is blindly throwing budget at advertising without the correct planning systems and procedures in place to ensure success. It takes strategic planning and answering questions like “who do I want to target?” and “am I sure I’m targeting the right people?” You absolutely must rely on data and strategic planning. You can’t just throw an ad budget at the wall and expect good results.

It’s like the mountain story again. If you’re just starting out with an ad campaign and no digital expertise, the top of that mountain is a very high positive marketing ROI, and once you get into it, you’ll learn a lot of things and will uncover a lot along the way. You need to navigate towards that and you have to take in data and information on the journey to adjust throughout the process to get that to the top. You don’t want to start climbing without thinking about your path. Even though you may have to adjust it once you get there, you need an initial plan.

If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.

Going back to my engineer training, I think of marketing as an equation — what are the key essential variables of that equation to yield the most success?

1. Understand your customer — Understanding who you want to target is essential so you can deliver the most compelling message. You need to understand who they are and what’s going to resonate to them based on their characteristics. What’s compelling to someone over 50 may not be compelling to someone in their 20s. So you need to understand who your target audience is, whether they’re your customers that you already have, or your future customers.
2. Identify where to target to best reach your customer — Once you create a customer profile, then you need to figure out where to find those ideal customers. Which medium will help you reach them? And once you’ve done that, you can be assured you have the right message in front of the right customer, and now you see advertising performance go up. They engage because they hear you and they’re listening.
3. Measure and monitor key metrics and adjust based on this intelligence — Now, you’re getting traffic, so you want to monitor and measure. What’s your click-through rate? Engagement rate? How many people filled out a lead form? What is your cost per click and cost per lead? What is your cost per opportunity? Cost per demo? As you start monitoring your metrics, you can adjust your targeting and see if it goes up or down — this is your journey up the mountain. As you measure and take in the journey, you will have guidance and it will help you make your decisions. It’s all about data and using results to adjust and make the right decisions. There are a lot of tools to help you do this, Versium being one of them.

Let’s talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?

It really all depends on what you’re promoting, because each environment has a little bit of a different scenario.

Google AdWords can easily be set up and turned on very quickly, and get fast results. But depending on what you’re promoting with Google AdWords, you can get diminishing returns — people have to be specifically searching for your terms, and if they aren’t, they’re not going to find it. CPC is search based, so top-of-funnel awareness building isn’t necessary because people have to be searching in the first place. They may want to know about your product, but you’re never going to find them because they’re not searching for your products.

On Google AdWords, you need very tight contextual relevance because you have a very short number of characters to get your message across compared with a graphic creative that’s set up as a CPC. If you’re promoting a business product, it might be a challenge to promote on Facebook unless you have a way of knowing you’re reaching the right business people. You can address this with B2B2C identity mapping. B2B marketers have trouble unless they have the ability to overlay this consumer identity to make sure they’re reaching their ideal business customer because it’s difficult to find them within those consumer environments without that.

Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?

1. Messaging that is going to hook your ICP.
2. Areas where your competitors are advertising.
3. All the performance metrics need to tune success from cost per click and cost per lead to spend budget and overall cost per acquisitions.

What terms are your audience searching for, and what is it they’re looking for? What is going to cause that engagement? If it’s Google AdWords, you need to have keywords and if it’s creatives, you need to put those keywords into the creative and what they read. You need to resonate with what you deliver. All of the performance metrics get back to the blueprint. You need to gather data on cost per click, cost per acquisition, overall cost, etc. That way, you can tune all your campaigns to drive your ROI up.

Let’s now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?

1. Understand ISP rules and metrics — If you get too many bounces on your emails, your domain reputation goes down and can even get shut down. You need to make sure the recipient is relevant, they’ll open, click, and it doesn’t bounce at certain rates. If there are a bunch of bad email addresses in your databases and they bounce, it looks like a purchased list and gets flagged as spam. Make sure the campaign is performing within the boundaries that these ISPs set forth. This is the single most important thing to know. Versium validates all emails we send out to their contact points. A 30% bounce rate would be a big signal you’re doing something wrong, and can literally shut you down. You start out slowly — send out 1,000 emails and ensure it’s falling within these boundary criterias. If you have a very low open or even click rate, dig into your data further to validate.
2. Open and click rates. Open means they read your email beyond the subject line. Click means they’ve gone to your site — it’s a conversion. To achieve good open and click through rates, you need to ensure you’re targeting the right people and delivering the right message to them and delivering value to them, not just a discount promotion. Send them a useful guide or something where they get a benefit..
3. Ensure you’re targeting the right people. Do these people even want an email? Make sure you’re targeting the right people in the right department with the right characteristics to buy your products. The messaging needs to be something of value.

What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?

Effective marketing is all about getting the right message in front of the right person, having it be of value to them, and making sure you are falling within those boundaries. That’s why I’m very passionate about our B2B2C identity mapping. The entire advertising ecosystem is built to market to consumers. Even LinkedIn targeting relies on consumer data. 70%+ of LinkedIn profiles are mapped to a person’s personal email address, so you need consumer identity data to effectively target on LinkedIn. You need to get your message about your business product in front of business people. If you just have a list of 100k marketing decision makers, you’re only going to be able to reach 10–11% of those people with their business emails on platforms like Facebook or Google. You aren’t reaching your ideal customer. But, with B2B2C identity mapping, you can get that message in front of 85–90% of your ideal business customers on these platforms. B2B2C identity mapping results in a 5–7x increase in reach and is a game changer in B2B digital marketing, and I’m super excited about it.

Here is the main question of our series. Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. First and foremost, you need to understand the digital ad tech ecosystem. It’s very complex with a lot of moving parts and nuances. Becoming an expert and staying agile will set you apart.
2. Be flexible and be able to do many things. Have a broad understanding of many specialties within the digital marketing ecosystem.
3. Be able to communicate across different departments. You will need to speak to sales people, graphic designers, developers, and engineers. Marketers are a bridge between the product or service and the market. There is a lot of transfer of knowledge and internal coordination — not just external messaging.
4. There are a lot of aspects of digital marketing: you’ve got digital advertising, email marketing, etc. Find what excites you the most and you’re passionate about. You’ll be most successful if you’re doing something you love.
5. Cultivate your personal brand, get involved in marketing-related group activities outside of your employment. You will learn from the network you start to establish, especially in areas that you enjoy.
6. Bonus: Look for and receive mentorship and help for senior successful people.

What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?

I love MarketingSherpa!

It’s a tough one for me because I spend most of my free time with my family.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

Be more like a dog. The more people care for one another, their neighbor, and set aside some of their own driven motivations to help people out, the world would be a better place. We’re all chasing and pursuing dreams and accomplishments and the American dream, getting caught up in the rat race. I think if we enjoy the journey more and can find satisfaction and help people out more along the way, there’d be a lot less conflict.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismatty/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

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Chris Matty Of Versium On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.