Maximizing Marketing ROI With Web Site and Cloud Systems Reliability

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest is Mark Firth.

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He is the co-founder of the cloud transformation firm, fernie.

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He comes to us from London and he's here to talk to us today about some of the great work he and his firm have been doing, helping their customers on their journey in the cloud.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you.

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Eric, hi everyone of the show.

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Thank you, eric.

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Hi everyone.

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So I believe you have a story for us about how one of your customers achieved growth over time in an unexpected way that most marketers probably wouldn't think of, but was nonetheless remarkable.

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So let's hear that story.

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Yeah, sure.

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So I spent my career building a variety of sites, scaling up to enterprise grade sites, and one of the key things that we've built over the years is landing pages.

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And this particular client was an education client and they had an incident where essentially, they're running this landing page, feeding a lot of ppc pay-per-click traffic to the landing page, and one weekend one bank holiday weekend, so a long weekend the site went down and the PPC spend continued to send traffic to that landing page but the traffic wasn't converting.

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Essentially they were going through to the form, but when they filled out the form the data was not going anywhere because the connection with the customer relationship management system had broken, so the data wasn't being captured.

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But because they didn't have the alerts and notifications in place to tell them of these outages, they essentially they didn't know for nearly four days and they spent nearly a hundred thousand on their PPC spend in that weekend and, yeah, it didn't go very far.

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So that was one of the things we essentially realized that the reliability and security are really paramount to success at that enterprise level.

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So we started working on building out more, more comprehensive monitoring practices so that we were able to detect whether there was a change in the usual amount of leads that were getting captured at that time.

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We put items in place to be able to catch the leads before they got pushed to the customer relationship management system, so that enabled us then to re-sync with that CRM should the connection get dropped.

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And yeah, we learned how to do these things time again to make the process more repeatable and automatable in terms of the deployments to of that website.

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It was a website being updated all the time, really frequently, and we saw that when we were doing those deployments.

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Obviously, everything, anytime you do a deployment, there's a risk.

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There's a chance that you're uploading something that is broken, it is going to knock something out.

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So we wanted to put as much automation into that process in terms of the checking that all of the deployments that we're doing are fully tested, that they're tested for security, they're tested for bugs, we're testing that the libraries and modules that we're using to run that site are being checked for security vulnerabilities automatically and sometimes even patched automatically as well.

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And yeah, being able to deploy reliably and quickly and keep the site with as little downtime as possible is one of the things that enabled the real growth in that landing page and enabled it to scale to a massive audience.

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So once they had that reliability there, they were able to get a lot more sales because they didn't have not only the downtime, but customers had the confidence right let's say it's building that brand perception that essentially you've got a site that's not going to go down.

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Even the other day we had meta had outages, didn't they?

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And that's everyone's talking about.

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But the yeah, the when the customers can see that reliable, that your site is reliable and that you can essentially capture that data and if there are any issues, that essentially have those processes in place to push through that data and make sure that you're not missing out on any of those leads, then you know on your side that you're safe, essentially, and that lead data is not getting lost.

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Right, I think the outage is For Meta and the other social sites.

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This week people panicked when they were down just for a couple hours and some people would be like what's the big deal?

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But I think what marketers realize is a lot of organizations are spending millions per month on advertising, on advertising.

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So any amount of downtime whether it's over a weekend or for a day, or for even a couple hours in a day that can result in a massive hit on the marketing ROI.

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If you're running advertising and then it's not generating anything because the plumbing is broken and I've had that happen in cases where, with CRM outages or marketing automation system outages, when HubSpot or Marketo or Salesforce would have outages that weren't scheduled, there were a couple hours and we had a hundred lead forms.

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If you didn't have the right infrastructure set up, like you were talking about, where you capture the leads before you send it into the systems, for example there's nothing you can do in that moment.

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There's nothing you can do except for maybe pause the advertising, but sometimes it's not that easy just to pause things and then start it up again.

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That causes other issues.

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I think it seems like a smaller point perhaps, but it actually is one of those small points that has a huge impact.

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If you don't have the reliable infrastructure in place and you're spending a lot on your marketing whether that's advertising or other campaigns or programs and you don't capture it, because of issues like this and it happens more than once which can happen if you don't have the right process in place, it can be really frustrating.

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It's all about putting those key alerts in place to let you know if there's problems anywhere along that kind of critical path that the user takes through your site.

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So, from the moment they land on the site, what are the actions they take?

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Do they log in, do they fill out a form?

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Depends on the purpose of your site, whether it's lead gen or if they have some kind of quote process to go through or it's e-commerce.

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You want to make sure that every step in that main process is cracked so that you're able to tell what's happening and when.

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Where are the issues that we're seeing?

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Where are the delays?

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Because any downtime, any delays, it's going to affect your brand perception.

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It's going to affect your SEO rankings even.

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Yeah, it's important to be able to track and detect so that you can then restore in the fastest time possible and roll back any changes that may have impacted that somewhat.

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And, as you say, part of the issue is reputation, right, because if you have an outage and it becomes well-known or it affects customers and they're frustrated by it, that sort of thing spreads pretty quickly and then it's hard to build back that trust that you're reliable.

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I think that that's an important point of it is that when you're looking at the tools and systems and processes you're using, the reliability is important because it affects your reputation.

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It's not just like it goes down and we can pause our advertising and it won't really hurt our efficiency or our return on ad spend, but it does from a reputation perspective if people can't count on it.

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I just think about when there's outages and Amazon went down and Netflix went down and people were just frustrated.

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The frustration felt pretty widely when there's outages like that all the way through to other sort of security things, when there's breaches and credit card data is exposed and companies have to do a lot of things to remediate that.

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So I just bring that up, not because it was part of your story, but because there's a lot of aspects of reliability that marketers should think about rather than just getting things out fast, getting things out in a reliable way across all of these areas because it can really hurt their reputation, right?

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yeah, absolutely it's.

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It is, yeah, maintaining that brand perception.

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It's even things like a, a delay in the, the time it takes to actually load your page.

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You've probably seen some of these metrics around core web vitals.

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Essentially, that delay can lead to a lesser amount of leads, less.

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Less people will load that page, the less people will stick around.

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And even with things like if you're, if you have a form of your site and you're capturing lead data or you're capturing e-commerce data, being able to account for the fact that sometimes those users are going to be using mobile devices, they're going to be on 3g, 4g, 5g connections and essentially, when they're on those connections, if there are a lot of people around or they're going through a tunnel, those connections are going to be affected.

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So, even on the website side, you want to be able to essentially capture any actions they make and then tell the user.

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Actually, you know what you've lost internet connection.

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We'll send your data through once your internet connection is restored as well.

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So it's about that end-to-end experience of making sure that from the moment the user arrives all the way through to their conversion, that essentially you're doing what you can to capture those errors and not just allow the site to fall over.

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But by putting those protections in place, essentially you're helping your site capture every lead, capture every user and give every user a great experience that keeps them coming back and helps them to recommend your site to a friend because they had such a good experience with you.

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I think the motto should be capture every lead, Don't let any fall through the cracks.

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That should be probably the motto, but I think a lot of almost all solutions that I use today so I won't say all of them, but probably a super majority are on the major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Google, and you all resell Google's cloud services.

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I think the importance of understanding that it's a different world because people are hosting things on these cloud platforms platforms rather than running their own data centers like they were many years ago.

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That was the super majority 10, 15 years ago.

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Now it's really more about if you're going to run it on the cloud.

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There's a lot of different ways to run it on the cloud and I think what your firm does is the optimization and the management and the nuances and the finesse of that, if you will do, Is that right?

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Yeah, absolutely so.

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We built it around this concept of reliability.

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Essentially, we sell Google Cloud services.

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We essentially provide support.

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So out of our support and we'll help the businesses in the early hours in the morning when there's an outage, recover from those errors and essentially roll back to a previous known working version of the landing page or website and that essentially helps with that reliability, especially for some of these more global businesses where they may be, part of their team may be in the UK, but another part is in the US and the customers in the US and they're running five hours behind and meanwhile you're in bed at 3am in the morning and the site goes down for the user in the US.

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So you want somebody around the clock being able to essentially recover from those errors in the fastest time possible and get everything up and running so you don't have any of those outages and, yeah, you maintain that exceptional user experience.

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That makes sense.

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So tell us about the special offer you have for listeners if they want to learn more about this wonderfully complex and important world of avoiding outages, having great reliability and protecting your reputation.

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Yeah.

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So we've got a great offer at the moment.

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So we're offering up to 10% discount on our customers' Google Cloud spend, and that discount can also be used to offset the cost of instant support, out-of-hour support and business-as-usual cloud work as well.

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So any day-to-day changes and at the moment we're also offering a one-month free support for new customers as well.

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So if you're interested in that, you can go to fernycom forward slash calculator and input your cloud spend and you'll be able to see how much discount you could get and see the impact of adding instant support and business as usual support to that as well.

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Thanks, mark, for joining us today.

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Everyone should share this episode with your friends.

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It's an important reminder about how to build systems that are reliable for your marketing programs so you get the best return on investment Rate.

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Review and subscribe so that we can continue to have great guests like Mark on the show.

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Thanks for these insights, mark.

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We appreciate it.