How Sophisticated Link Management Unlocks Growth for B2B Companies

If B2B marketers can match their strategies to the moods and needs of their potential customers, they are more likely to get their attention. Furthermore, optimizing their link-building approach can have a positive effect on user trust and search engine rankings. How can B2B marketers leverage these for better outcomes?

That’s why we’re talking to SaaS marketing expert Scott Cate (Founder, 301.Pro), who shares powerful insights about how sophisticated link management unlocks growth for B2B companies. During our conversation, Scott explained what Time-of-Day Marketing is, what it means for B2B businesses, and how marketers can use it to improve engagement and conversion rates. He also highlighted how B2B marketers can optimize their link-building strategy, the key pitfalls to avoid, and how to scale link-building initiatives without compromising on quality or becoming spammy.

https://youtu.be/qGdt8_ZLFls

[1:50] What is “link management”?

[4:47] Definition of “Time-of-Day” Marketing with Pro links

[11:42] The common challenges with link management and how they can be resolved

[18:52] The use case of link variations in affiliate management

[27:23] How to optimize link building without compromising quality or becoming spammy

[30:08] Actionable tips:

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• Get started with link management
  
• Use the analytics systems you have in place
  

[40:59] How dynamic QR codes can improve the effectiveness of B2B marketing campaigns by providing a more personalized experience

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  Scott Cate on LinkedIn

  
  
  
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  301.Pro (Use coupon code “CK” to get 2 months free)

  
  
  
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  Rebrandly

  
  
  
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  Bitly

  
  
  
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  Hiro

  
  
  
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  Fathom analytics

  
  
  
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  Snowflake

  
  
  
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  Google Bigtable

  
  
  

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host. Christian Klepp. Today I’ll be talking to Scott Cate. He is the creator of 301.Pro, and has a career track record of delivering complex, high value products through invention, program management and product management. He’s also a proven technology leader who excels as a pivotal business partner. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:29

All right. Mr. Scott Cate, welcome to the show, sir.

Scott Cate  00:33

Hey. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Christian Klepp  00:35

Looking forward to this conversation, because I’m gonna say that this is probably the first time we’ve had somebody on the show to talk about this particular topic, and it’s highly relevant to marketers and marketers that are not paying attention to this should.

Scott Cate  00:51

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some people are using Link Manager of some sorts, but even the ones that are are sort of missing the boat on really how much time can be saved with just a little bit of forethought. So yeah, excited to be here, excited to share what we’ve built.

Christian Klepp  01:08

Absolutely, absolutely. So why don’t we just dive in. Right? Because, like we were saying, so for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of how sophisticated link management can unlock growth for B2B companies. So in our previous conversation, you said something about like, time of day marketing, so I know what it is now, but for the benefit of the audience, please tell us what it is and tell us why it’s important for B2B marketers to know about this.

Scott Cate  01:37

So we should back up a little bit, because you mentioned the concept of link management, and some people might have an idea or preconceived notion. So we should talk about what link management is, and then once we have that, we could talk about some amazing things you could do with our version of link management that is not available, like real time marketing, where you mentioned time of day. So let’s pause on that question for just a second. 

Scott Cate  02:05

Link management is really the ability to keep track of the links that you have in the wild and then do reporting on them. That’s what the world thinks link management is. And you might be using something like one of our competitors, rebrandly is great. They do a good link management system. Probably the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Bitly. Most people that you’re listening to have probably created bitly links, and those systems are great until they’re not. So like, let’s say if you’ve managed Bitly, let me ask you this question, have you ever had to go back and update like 200 links of a campaign?

Christian Klepp  02:43

Not personally, no, but I know people who have so I know you’re going with this, but yeah, go ahead.

Scott Cate  02:49

Okay. Or, let’s say, for Bitly, you have an affiliate program, or you have a team of people, and you want to keep track of who’s clicking the links. So like every time you create a new project, you have to go create 30 new links like that. That’s the link management. And at the end of the day, our goal is to keep track of the attribution like, what’s working. That’s the reason we use the link management system, and there’s a ton more benefits from it, but that’s sort of the core of link management. 

Scott Cate  03:18

So we have… this is going to sound way overkill, but we have reinvented the hyperlink, which sounds crazy like… So first, what is the hyperlink? Everyone on the audience hopefully knows like you type in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), put that in an email, you put that in the social media, you put that in your link in bio, and when you click that URL, it takes you to the destination. But here’s the fundamental problem, and everything that we talk about today is going to fall into this box. 

Scott Cate  03:48

That hyperlink is hard coded, like if 1000 people click that link, they all go to the same place, and our fundamental problem with link management lies in that hard coding. So everything we’re going to talk about is now going to be called a pro link. So our version of a hyperlink is a pro link, or if you’re using Bitly, they have a cute name for theirs. They call them bit links, which is cute. So ours is a pro link. And what a pro link does is it stops at a rules engine, and the rules engine can change the destination. 

Scott Cate  04:26

So let’s just paint a really easy picture for people to understand. If you have a bit link, you have a short link and a long link. When people click the short link, they go to the long link, no questions asked. With our system, if you have no rules, you actually get the same thing. You have a short link and a long link. Everyone goes to the same place. So now we have a general understanding of link management. We’ve introduced this concept of the rules engine. Let’s go back to the question that you asked Christian when you started: Time of Day Marketing. Sometimes I call this real time marketing, but. But before we get into the technology, let’s ask a very simple question with an almost impossible answer. And I haven’t preceded you with this, so this is going to make you think a little bit…what time is it?

Christian Klepp  05:13

Well, on my end, it’s 3:15 Eastern.

Scott Cate  05:16

And so my time is 12 o’clock. But what if I’m in Sydney? Or what if it’s 3am for me and it’s 4pm for you? So let’s ask the question a little bit differently, what time is it on your website? The answer is, it’s all the time. Like, if there’s 1000 people on my website right now, should I be showing them all the same thing? And that’s really where the rules engine comes in, which comes back to your original question. Time of Day Marketing, imagine for a minute you have a Shopify store, and you have the same product. Let’s say it’s a makeup product. Would you sell that to the same person at 8am versus 11pm because it’s the same person, it’s the same buyer, same product, but I’m in a completely different mindset at 8am, right. 

Scott Cate  06:08

So we actually have a customer that does this, so it’s good to talk about it as an example. In the morning, their messaging is, here’s how easy our makeup is to put on. It’s going to last all day, and that in the afternoon, they’re like, stays on all day, but here’s how you reapply it. And then at night, here’s how easy it is to take off. And then overnight, after 11pm to 4am they actually do, like, a buy one, get one free, a flash sale. But here’s the thing that’s interesting, that you have that visual in your head now, how do you do it? 

Scott Cate  06:39

Let’s say you put a link on Instagram and 1000 people click that link, the magic is it’s all the time, like it’s 8am for this person right now, and it’s 11pm for this person right now. So how does your website get smart enough to actually divide that traffic? And we do that with the rules engine, and it’s actually as simple as it sounds. When you click a link, we create a rule says in the morning, whatever morning time it is for the person who clicked the link, then show them the morning advertisement, and then overnight, show them the flash sale. That’s a little more advanced. Some of your audience might be thinking, I’m not a makeup company, so that doesn’t apply to me. But like, what if you simplified it and you just did night mode and day mode? 

Scott Cate  07:26

Like, during the day, you might even have a light mode theme in your Shopify store, and at night, you have a dark mode theme, and it’s the same product. But now, when it’s 11 o’clock at night and I’m scrolling through my Instagram and I interested in your product, I don’t get blinded by a bright white background. So you can do that really quickly with a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) theme that just changes the look of the same product, light mode, dark mode. So that’s simple. People also use time of day for business hours like imagine your your support link if I’m open, then take me to live chat, if I’m not open, then take me to support an email ticket or submit an email ticket. And so that’s a different time, right? That’s literally my time where I’m saying my office hours in this time zone, like if I’m a restaurant, this is really popular for our customers. 

Scott Cate  08:19

When you scan the QR code to open the menu, I can open the right menu for you. Like, if you’re open breakfast, lunch, Happy Hour and dinner, when you scan the QR code, why make the user fumble through to find the happy hour menu? Like, if it’s three to five, Monday through Friday, or whatever the hours are that you determine. So all those are time zone examples. I did sneak in the QR code concept there, you know, when we say we reinvented the hyperlink, and we call it a pro link, if you’re using that with a QR code, then all the rules that we talked about with time of day are also applicable to the person scanning the QR code. But it’s not just time. I mean, we have 100 different variables, and we’ll get into some cool examples around location, device detection, all those things are great. When you combine them with a QR code. 

Christian Klepp  09:11

There’s some great examples. And I can see how that works if you’re, like, shopified, if you’re a restaurant. But like, let’s say, for example, that there’s somebody listening to this that’s, you know, surprise in B2B. So how would this apply to a company that’s, let’s say, for example, selling software?

Scott Cate  09:28

Yeah, completely. That’s me. Actually, I’m selling software, like 301 Pro is the name of our product. And so we use this all day long. So here’s a couple of examples. We have demos. So if you’re interested in the software, you can say, book a demo. And we have people that do demos in Europe. We have people that do demos in North America, South America, in Asia and in Sydney. 

Scott Cate  09:53

So normally, when you have this type of international audience, you ask them, like, where are you? Well, we already know, because when you click the link, we have the location detection. So when you go to 301.pro/meeting, we don’t have to ask you where you are, but if you’re in Europe, you’ll end up in a European Calendly link, and then the time zone is booking space with our people in Europe. That is Time Zone specific. So really the question to ask for B2B, or any marketer is, what’s the mindset of the person clicking this link, and can I reduce the friction to get them to give me money faster, like cutting to the chase? That’s really what we want to do, and most of the time, a link will just end up at the same destination for everybody. And you know, if you’re in a paid ad campaign and you have a one to one relationship with the landing page, then you might think to yourself, I don’t need any of this. 

Scott Cate  10:56

But let’s introduce something that’s not time of day, another very simple concept with a difficult question, A|B split testing. So a lot of the ad networks will give this to you, and so if you pay, you know, $2 for a click on Instagram, you can do A|B split testing. Here’s my landing page one, and here’s my landing page two. But how do you do A|B split testing outside of paid advertising, like even in a product or on your home page, like your support link or your pricing page. How do you randomly get people to two different versions of that? If you’re a developer, then that’s easy, because you’re in control of the programming. But in my experience, when I’m talking to a marketing agency or someone in a marketing role, we’ll call them the campaign manager, whether it’s for their individual product or they’re managing campaigns for third party for their customers, like an agency would do, that person is going to not have the capability of owning the server to do some programming for A|B split testing. 

Scott Cate  12:05

So with a pro link, you literally just give the same pro link two destinations, and then it cycles through them, or three destinations, or five destinations. And we make it really easy. When you add a pro link, we say, what’s the rule that you want? And if you want to do A|B split testing, we just ask you for two URLs. You put in the URL of landing page A and the second URL of landing page B, and now boom, you do A|B split testing at the link level. And you know, links for everywhere. It could be your email signature. Could be the navigation in your website. It could be in a PDF, like there’s lots of places that you put hyperlinks that’s outside of that paid advertising campaign.

Christian Klepp  12:44

Very cool, very relevant example. So thanks for sharing that. I’m going to segue to the next question, which is about key pitfalls the B2B marketers need to avoid when it comes to link management. So what should they avoid and what should they be doing instead? 

Scott Cate  13:01

Absolutely, this is one of my favorite questions, because it truly solves a deep pain problem for every B2B market marketer, and I call this “after the campaign”. So I worked inside Microsoft engineering for five years, and then followed up with that in AWS (Amazon Web Services) engineering and in the cloud computing space, we did a lot of product launches, because in cloud computing, there’s a new product every other Monday, every B2B listener, every B2B marketer listening to this podcast has a formula in their head for a product launch. 

Scott Cate  13:42

So let’s say you’re doing that. You’ve got a product that’s coming out on the first of the month, and you’ve got YouTube videos talking about it, you’re promoting webinars, you’ve got press releases, maybe you’re even doing something in multiple languages, so you have many links that are in the wild, and if you’re keeping track of who on your team is promoting those links, you may have a multiplication effect where, instead of just one link to the press release, if there’s 20 people on your evangelism team, you may have to create 20 versions of that short link so that you can keep track of who’s doing what. We have a problem. We can solve this problem also. In fact, we should talk about that next. 

Scott Cate  14:24

But to answer your question, here’s the pitfall. You’ve got all of this, all these links in the wild. You’ve had your best customers write blog posts about you, and the link in that blog post is linking back to your product announcement. So here’s the big question, what happens after the product launches? Like the pain point is going backwards and updating all of those links, because now you don’t want to drive traffic to the press release, you want to drive traffic to the product page. 

Scott Cate  14:59

And so, earlier, I asked you the question, like, if you’ve ever had to go back and update a library of links, it’s painful, it’s time consuming, and the truth is most people just don’t do it. And the negative effect of that is those links die. Your press release gets taken down, and now people are linking to your site through and they’re getting 404, like that. 

Scott Cate  15:22

The problem is so here’s our solution. We have something called a campaign manager, and the campaign manager, very simply, is an umbrella that connects all the links together. So when we created those 50 links to put them in the wild, we added them to a campaign, and the campaign has rules so it can do things like enforce UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) links. It can enforce that every link is universally doing something, whether it’s appending a query string for like a high rows injection for your analytics, or something for Google Bigtable or some other HubSpot link like at the campaign level, you can say all these links have to follow this rule. 

Scott Cate  16:06

So after the campaign, our rule is, if the date is after the first of the month, then change the link to go to the product instead of what it was originally doing. It literally takes you less than 30 seconds, and now those 50 links that are in the wild, now auto magically just start going to the new destination. Your reporting continues, so you still see the links that are being clicked, but you’ve been able to change the destination based on a date, and you can actually change it with any of 100 different rules. But for that specific one, your question was, what’s the pitfall? Like, what could I do a little bit now to save myself the pain and the time in the future? And it really comes down to that campaign management and the campaign rules that you can change later, right? Like, if I’m a marketing person. I know I have a product release on the 1st I might not know the URL of the product destination, because it literally doesn’t exist yet. But when it does exist, I just go back to the campaign. I update it. I say, everything in the wild. Now start going here. And you could get more advanced with language detection. You could say for Spanish, go here. Japanese, go there like it doesn’t have to just say the entire campaign now goes to one place. But the point is, I can retroactively change all of those links in the wild, very simply to match my business rules. And now I don’t have 404 as I have happy customers that are interested in the product that land in the product page. So that’s probably our biggest time saver and pitfall to avoid with the campaign management.

Christian Klepp  17:46

Yeah, no, absolutely. By the way, did you say automagically instead of automatically?

Scott Cate  17:53

I did make that word up. I think I can’t take credit for it. I think other people have used it as well. But yeah, automagically. Yeah, that could be a website. I bet $100 that domain is taken. (laugh)

Christian Klepp  18:07

Probably, probably check it out after this conversation. But you know what? Since you played it out so beautifully, it totally makes sense, because that was actually what was going through my mind as you were answering the question, it’s like, well, how do you… pre campaign and during campaign and post campaign? Like, isn’t somebody responsible for having to update those links? And that must be such a painful, just process. And like, oh my gosh, I can just imagine somebody, people on the agency side, just saying, like, Okay, we’ll leave that job to somebody else, right?

Scott Cate  18:48

If somebody is doing it, it’s painful. The reason that I know people are doing it is because it was me. I was the one updating my bitly links, and I have to do them one at a time. And actually we’ll segue into this affiliate management or team management, because on our team, we wanted to give credit to who’s doing the promotion. And, you know, you could have a contest. You could have an affiliate where it’s monetary, like you could actually pay commission on people clicking the links. And so, you know, some people have a small team. You’re keeping track of 10 people, and then your go to is like, well, I’ll just create unique links. Like, okay, Scott, here’s your link. Okay, Christian, here’s your link. Michelle, here’s your link. And then it’s easy because there’s only 10 of them, but even that’s painful, because you have to go back and update something. 

Scott Cate  19:39

Or let’s imagine you get a new person on the team. You’re like, Okay, Hi, Nicole. Here’s all the links that you’re gonna promote, but hang on, I gotta go create them. And because there’s like 20 active campaigns that we’re working with now, I’m gonna have to just painfully create 20 links for Nicole. There are people listening to this right now, like crying. They’re like, Oh my gosh, I have to do that. And we’ve come up with a very simple, very elegant solution. So let’s get a little nerdy for a second. We call that a link variation. And the important part of a link variation is that the link itself doesn’t change. And the reason that’s important is because for attribution, you don’t want to create an entirely new link. Why do you want to keep track of something else when your core goal, let’s say you have page A on your website, and your core goal is to get people to page A, it’s a product announcement, it’s a press release, it’s a landing page. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just call it page A. What most people do, because they don’t have any choice, is they create 100 different links that point to page A, which, of course, creates a management issue, creates a reporting issue, it creates an attribution issue, like, where did all of this stuff come from? And we’ve basically gotten rid of all of that, and I’ll show you how this works. It’s really simple. 

Scott Cate  21:06

So imagine in your head you have a short link. So you have a go.microsoft.com/pageA and people call them go links. It’s a pretty popular term inside the advertising agency or inside of a big company, like when I worked at Microsoft, we literally call them go links. Create a go link that ends up at this landing page, and so you have that short link. So let’s just say your domain.com/pageA and then when people click that link, it takes them to www.blahblahblah/landing page, or whatever it is, right? So you have the short link and the long link. Well, that’s what the world has today. 

Scott Cate  21:47

Here’s what we’ve introduced as a variation. We just add another parameter to the short link, so your domain.com/pagea/ whatever you want to put in there as a marker for who clicked it. So let’s say that you and I are on a team, Scott and Christian, and we want to keep track of how many page A you’ve driven and how many page A I’ve driven. So all we would do is come up with some sort of naming convention, either for our person or our team or our affiliate ID, and we tack it on to the URL. So now the URL is something like your domain.com/pageA/SC, my initials, and that forward slash sc, we call it a variation, which is a little bit nerdy, but think about it. It’s a variation of the core link. And here’s the magic. 

Scott Cate  22:48

If I’m a B2B marketer, I don’t have to set them up ahead of time. I just have to set up the page a link, and now I can add any variation I want to the end of it. It could be slash marketing, slash Twitter, slash Instagram. Or if you have an affiliate paid program, you just put instructions to your affiliates. It says, append your affiliate code, Sc123, and then if 1000 people click the Page A links, and all the variations of the page a links, I only had to set up one thing. I get reporting of all 1000 clicks that come through, and I get a nice little diagram of how many variations of each link. So Scott, you got 27 Instagram came 252 but it’s the same link, right? So I only had to create it once, but I get to use it in infinite combinations. 

Scott Cate  23:41

And so what you can do with the rules engine, you have to put this whole thing end to end, because the example that I showed you so far is only the first half. If you want to actually feed attribution into another system with whether it’s your analytic system or it’s your commissioning system, you probably need a query string when page A loads on the other side of like, who is the affiliate? Like, who’s going to actually get credit for this? The Amazon works the same way. If you have an affiliate code, you want to get people to click that link, and then when they get there, you’ll see in the URL it’s like the affiliate store is SC123, or whatever it is. So here’s where the rules engine comes in. 

Scott Cate  24:22

Remember, the domain is your domain.com/pageA/Sc123, let’s pretend that’s my affiliate code. Now you can say the rules engine, if there’s a variation, take the destination, which was the in the original link that was created, and append a query string of affiliate ID equals variation. And so without doing any more work, the marketing B2B person has to create one pro link. They have to set up the rules engine, and now they can use that pro link in infinite destinations out into the wild. They can keep track o the affiliates that are clicking them, and they can pass that through to the payload of where the landing page is loaded, which is important, because then analytics pick it up. The commissioning engine picks it up like you have full access to that affiliate code from top to bottom when they click the short link all the way through to when the landing page loads.

Christian Klepp  25:24

It sounds to me like, and I’m oversimplifying it here, right? Because I’m not a I’m not a developer, right? But like, it sounds to me like you’ve cut the Gordian knot a little bit here.

Scott Cate  25:35

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it. This is also not for everyone. Like, you could say… some of your listeners are like, I don’t have an affiliate program, then that’s not going to work. But let me show you an example where I use this because you asked the question earlier about, how do software companies use this? I have a short link called register. If I was just talking to you on the street, like we met in a restaurant, and you’re like, hey, I want to sign up for this, I would actually write down on a napkin, 301.Pro/register, and it’s not slash login. It takes you. There’s a difference. Even though the forms look the same on our website, registration has the intent to create a new account, right? You’re setting your password, blah, blah, blah. You’re accepting Terms of Service. 

Scott Cate  26:17

So when I’m promoting the registration on Twitter or x, the link that I type in, I use the variation, and I do 301.Pro/register slash x or slash IG, because I want to attribute where the traffic came from. We can actually do that based on the refer as well. So there’s a number of ways to slice and dice that particular scenario, but it’s a ton of fun to use the variation. It really amplifies your reporting to keep track of where the link came from, or at least what the source of the link is, particularly if there’s money involved, like commission to affiliates and and it’s very simple, like I, I literally, I cut out five to 20 hours of work now on affiliate management, where I just basically say, if you want to get paid, here’s how you format the URL. And that’s very easy to do in automation with mail merge. And you know when you’re onboarding a new affiliate. So yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of fun in that. 

Christian Klepp  27:23

Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. We’ve been talking about it for a while now. But like, let’s, let’s dive a little bit deeper into link management. So most especially questions like, okay, how can what components, what are those key components that need to be in there for you to consider it effective link management. And that’s the first question. The second question is, how can B2B marketers optimize their link building strategy without compromising on quality or becoming spammy? Because I think that could be an issue too, if you’re not if you don’t know what you’re doing. 

Scott Cate  27:59

If you’re using the free version of many products, we actually don’t have a free version, so this doesn’t quite apply to us, but there can be some blowback on link management if you are not using a white label version. And what I mean by that is, when people like if you have a newsletter system, a lot of newsletters will automate into Bitly and it’s amazing, because they’ll basically take all of the links that are in your newsletter and they’ll convert them to bitly links. The drawback to that is, especially if you’re using it on social media, a lot of the bitly links, because of the spam, actually gets blocked. So that would negatively hurt you, because your email will never even end up in the inbox. And I don’t want to paint a negative picture about Bitly, so I just want to factually say I love Bitly. I’ve been using Bitly my whole life, but there are some things that are gotchas because of the amount of spam that is run through their system, eventually, that will happen to us as well on the domains. We’re just not as big as Bitly, so it hasn’t quite bitten us yet, but the solution to that is white label, or what some people call custom domain. 

Scott Cate  29:16

So in the example, we’ve been talking about me 301.pro, because that’s my website. But, you know, if you have your own website, I just say your domain.com, whatever that is. And every business marketer understands that you can actually put a sub domain in front of your real company domain, and then, you know, we said go.microsoft.com earlier, as the example, or go.yourdomain.com that actually does a couple of things, because it’s now first party. You get treated differently by the ad blockers and the email engines and your SMS (Short Message Service) provider, which is, you know, Twilio, or however you’re sending SMS. Are different when it’s first party brand versus something generic like Bitly. So that’s one of the gotchas that people can fall into with link management. 

Scott Cate  30:12

The other thing is sort of daunting. It’s like, how do I get started with this? And you know the answer really is, you can’t change yesterday, but you can start preparing for tomorrow. And you know, if you already have a link management system, there’s migrations. So we can actually copy from one system to another, if you’d like to switch to 301.Pro or just get started. And then by next month, you’ll have 100 links, you’ll have a couple of campaigns. And you know, you do just have to start somewhere, and there is work involved, like you do have to sit down and think about it. It’s not going to just magically do itself. But there, there’s a couple of things there to think about, with regard to to the link management. 

Scott Cate  30:57

The next thing I would say is analytics. We have a very basic analytic system, and we’ve intentionally not put time and energy into building like this huge analytics system, because it’s, it’s my personal belief you should not use our analytics system at all. You should use the your own analytics system that you’re already using for networking or for paid ads, for Google traffic, Google Trends, and there’s 100 of them out there. A couple of our favorites are Hiro. There’s another one called Fathom analytics. Of course, the 800 pound gorilla is Google Analytics, which is amazing because it’s free, but it’s also not that great at the same time. And I say, not that great, not in a technical sense, all the data is there. Some people talk about data being delayed. Some people talk about the confusion of how difficult Google Analytics is. And if you listen to a company like Hiro, which I don’t have any affiliation with, but I do actually have a lot of customers that use them, they claim to have better, easier, cheaper, faster, easier to understand analytics. So the whole point of that is, if you’re using link management, you might rely on me for something like a click number, which you could sort of visually quickly see popularity. But ultimately, your analytics engine, you should you already have that, and maybe it’s snowflake, if you’re a larger enterprise, or maybe you’re dumping data into Google big table, or maybe you know, you’re doing something more advanced. On your side, it’s my opinion that we should fall in line to what’s happening there. 

Scott Cate  32:35

So we have a couple features. One is called real time analytics. Every time a link is clicked. In our link management system, we can actually push data into your analytics in real time, so you never actually look at the 301 dashboard for analytics. It’s a little bit more advanced. Not everyone is going to qualify for that, but most agencies will have a good set of analytics. And of course, we work with Google Analytics, you know, we enrich data on the query string that flows all the way through to Google Analytics. So if you’re using Google Analytics, I don’t want to, you know, turn you off to it. I’m just saying there’s a lot of alternatives, and there’s pros and cons to everything, but we have just basic analytics, which effectively gives you click count, locations where people are clicking, from what time of day people are clicking. It’s enough to understand that your link is working, but it’s really not going to give you deep analytics about conversions and if your traffic is, you know, working the way that you want it to. We think there’s another better system for that on your side of the fence.

Christian Klepp  33:39

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning, where you were talking about like white label, right? And just from your experience, have you seen situations where marketers are choosing not to go down the white label route, and then that gets them into trouble when it comes to like, link building?

Scott Cate  33:59

The white label is a small hurdle that you have to jump over in the beginning, but it’s also a set and forget, so once you’re done, you probably never have to go back and change it. The difficulty that we have in support with white labeling is it’s a little bit more of a nerdy part of the internet, and you have to get into the domain naming system of the domain, which is going to be your GoDaddy, or your Cloudflare, or your Name Cheap, or it’s sometimes where the domain was registered. But it also can be a different DNS (Domain Name System) Made Easy, or some other DNS system, because in order, the way white labeling works is, if you were to use a go sub domain, then you have to basically tell the internet when somebody clicks on go.mydomain.com, that go, the ‘go’ part of the domain is called a subdomain, and you have to basically tell the world that you want that to come to the 301.pro servers. 

Scott Cate  35:05

Now you’ve probably done this with Gmail and with HubSpot and with any of the other white labeling systems out there. The benefit is that now you’re on brand instead of using Bitly or rebrandly or 301 pro, like not 301.Pro/ my home page. Go dot your domain. That’s the white labeling part that we’re talking about, of just being able to brand your short links. If you want to send text messaging, it’s very important to have your primary domain, linking in the message a lot of systems, and I know that I’ve had a problem with like go high level and bouncing a message through Twilio. You have to have that 10 DLC, the 10 letter domain certification. Maybe it’s, I don’t remember it exactly, but you have to basically prove I’m a real person, I’m a real business, and these are how I’m going to be sending my text messages. And the networks will block non branded domains, like if you’re sending a bitly link or a generic link of some sort that’s not matching your domain, then you’re going to have a much lower throughput and send rate on those messages, but you still have to pay for the messages that you didn’t send, the blocked messages. 

Scott Cate  36:31

So while there is a little technical hurdle, because the marketing person typically is not the same person who has access to the domain registration and the domain name services. It’s really worth it that for the day or two that it takes to get all those parties involved, to have a nice, white labeled system. And then once it’s working, you probably will never have to change it again, but it’s definitely worth the time. You’re going to get a much higher click through rate, much higher return on ad spend when you have an on brand domain, versus something that’s generic.

Christian Klepp  37:08

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. That totally makes sense. All right, my friend, we come to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty to work with already, but let’s just assume, as you’ve said before, that there’s a B2B marketer listening to this and going, Wow, this Scott really knows his stuff, um, but I really want to take action on this right away, because I don’t have 12 months to deliver, right? So what are, what are like, three to five things you would recommend they do to leverage link management for better growth?

Scott Cate  37:43

Well, I mean, the first thing is to get started. The second thing is pricing. Our software ranges from $50 to $500 a month, and on that lower level, what you’re really limited with is team size and the number of rules that you can create. But for most small teams, you can start at like at that $50 range, and then it will go up from that. You have to just start somewhere if you think that this is valuable, if I can save you 5 to 20 hours a month, like we talked about, for the affiliate marketer, or give you the ability to retroactively change an entire campaign without having to go back and spend the hours of updating those links. Then, of course, your time is valuable, and that’s a small price to pay for some software to automate it. 

Scott Cate  38:35

I do have a coupon code that gives you two months of free software, and I just actually used your initial ck, so if you, if you’re on the checkout page of 301, Pro, and you buy any of the products, then you can use the coupon code ck, and it will give you two months free. We don’t have any free software. We do have a demo the demo links are, you’re limited to five demo links, and they’re not for production, but it lets you actually exercise the software to see if it’s working. The two months free, literally will give you 60 days at zero cost. You can then use all of the features of the plan that you’re interested in, and you know, you can cancel if you if it’s not working for you, or if it is, then you know, you found some magic, and for a small monthly fee, you have this, you know, masterful link management system. So I would say, get started. You know, we’ve talked a lot about when I say 301, technically, that’s a mistake. So here’s a little quiz for you. Do you know what a 404 is?

Christian Klepp  39:40

That’s what shows up on a web page that’s no longer that no longer exists, like an error, right?

Scott Cate  39:45

That’s right, 404 is broken link, 301… so 404 is the internet status code for broken link, 301 is the internet status code for redirect. So that’s where the name of our company comes from. 301 Pro and. And here’s a funny little story. When I once asked the user to give me feedback, I’m like, my website is 301.Pro, and they type in the URL 301.Pro, and it doesn’t come up. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, our website’s down. Like, what’s wrong? But I look at it on my phone and it’s working. So the problem was the user actually typed in the number three and the letter O and the number one. Because I’m so nerdy, I say 301 Pro, and I just assume that people know that that’s 301 like the error code is 301, so since then, I had to buy a whole bunch of new domains. And if you actually do go to 301.Pro. It now works, but yeah, so 301 is redirect, and that’s what we sort of build for professional marketers, which is the name of the product, 301.Pro. So get started. Use the code CK for two months free, and we hope you love it. 

Christian Klepp  40:59

Very cool. Very cool. All right, two more questions, and I’ll let you go. All right, okay, so a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why? 

Scott Cate  41:13

I have to say it’s QR codes being hard coded. I could also add, and this is sort of related lack of QR codes. So I’ve got a buddy who does nationwide marketing in the hundreds of millions of dollars for an automobile company, and I cannot understand for the life of me, while they spend so much money on television commercials, but they don’t have a QR code on the commercial. And they’re very smart people. Let’s just say, because I have a difference of opinion doesn’t make me right and then wrong. I’m not saying what they’re doing is wrong. They have awareness money. They’re trying to just, you know, populate your head with the automobile that they’re trying to sell so that a year from now, so that they don’t have a direct call to action so to say. I don’t personally agree with it, I would like to have an easier call to action. Like, if you’re interested, click here and we’ll send you a postcard. Like, get give me some sort of instant gratification. 

Scott Cate  42:17

The other side of that is, I got another buddy who owns a software company. They do TV commercials, and their entire call to action is download our app so they have a QR code on the commercial, and they use our links with device detection. And it’s beautiful. The device detection basically says, If I’m an apple, go to the App Store, Apple App Store, if I’m Android, go to the Google Play Store, and then they get analytics on who’s what, but we don’t have to ask the customer. Like, sometimes you scan a QR code to download an app, and then it’s like, do you want to go to the Apple Store or the Android store? It’s like, why are you asking me that it’s such a simple thing to do with the user agent that comes along with the click request, and so we sort of magically do that. So to answer your question, I think the status quo is no QR codes, but when a QR code is used, I just cringe that it’s hard coded. There’s horror stories you can read from people. One of them is a national billboard campaign, and we’re talking about millions of dollars to spend with a QR code that’s wrong. Like, like, you can’t change a QR code. You can’t just, like, reprint it. This is in the wild, and so I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever print a QR code that’s hard coded to a single destination. I would always send it to a rules engine of some sort that says, let me do something. 

Scott Cate  43:42

I know we’re out of time, but can I just show you one quick example of a QR code that is amazing for us? So one of our customers, it’s in the automobile industry. In fact, this postcard might be in your house or your listeners house. So if you have one look at it, it’s a postcard that goes out to 250,000 people a week. Like this is a major expense on the marketing side, to send postcards, and the postcard has a QR code on it now. It’s our QR code. Here’s the magic, and this is what I want some of your listeners to think of. It’s the same QR code nationwide, but when your phone scans the QR code, we know the data center that the traffic from your phone is coming through, or the cell phone tower. So we know the location. We don’t know the exact location. It’s not creepy. We can’t walk on your front door, but it’s within about a 10 mile range, and within that 10 mile range, we can then get you to the closest dealership. So in the old days, it was like, hey, we need you to change your oil. Call this one 800 number, or go to our website, North American automotive.com, I won’t use the real name. We’re building a case study for them, and then I’ll be able to use it but until then. And then, on the website, it’s like, where are you? What state are you in? What kind of car do you have? But with our QR code, they literally just go right to the closest dealership to book an oil change appointment, and they’re getting like, 80% more oil changes than with calling in from the 800 number.

Christian Klepp  45:13

Isn’t that incredible? It’s like, incredible.

Scott Cate  45:15

It’s such a beautiful story because it’s so simple. There’s no more management for the B2B. The all I had to do was convince the marketing agent to put a QR code on the flyer. But they never had that capability before, because the QR code at best would just go to the national website. It’s not helpful. So like, once you understand the location marketing, especially if you have a franchise or a national or an international retail or automotive chain, there’s really some just phenomenal magic you can do that eliminates the pain point for the person clicking or scanning the link to get them to I mean, this is, this might become our new tagline, get your customers to spend money faster. Like that’s our whole goal is to make more money, and even in the B2B space, where we have a longer sales cycle, you know, we talked about the call centers in different countries. Like there’s just so much you can do, light mode, dark mode, that will help you better attract the person you’re talking to at an anonymous level. Like, we don’t actually know who the person is, but we can guide them based on time location. Oh my gosh, we didn’t even talk about weather, but we also have live weather once we know your location. Like, here’s here’s a question for B2B to ask, and the end user that’s clicking the link, are they the same person if they’re snowed in Chicago, or it’s three o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday, and they’re sunny on a beach. Like, is that the same person? Is that the same buyer? And so, like, you could do things in real time to show them a different product. We have one of the, I don’t know, top five largest clothing companies in the world uses us, and they use us for their awareness marketing. So though, in that example, they’ll either show you rain coats or they show you flip flops or suntan lotion or sundress versus mud shoes in a mud room, like snowy related product versus on a beach related product. And you can do it all in real time to just get the person to buy and connect with you faster. That’s our whole goal. 

Christian Klepp  47:23

Absolutely, Scott, we could have talked for another 10 hours, man.

Scott Cate  47:28

There’s so many good examples.

Christian Klepp  47:30

Absolutely, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Please,quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you. I guess it has something to do with a QR code. (laugh)

Scott Cate  47:44

So my name is Scott Cate. I have Scott Cate as the social media on everything, even on Google, if you just Google Scott Cate, I’ve got a nice knowledge panel that gives you links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter. So that’s on the personal side. I’m also super nerdy in the marketing world. So if somebody just wants to brainstorm ideas, nothing to do with buying the software, but just like looking at or talking about new ideas, I’ve learned some stuff recently that’s just mind blowing that people are doing in the world. So I love just talking to people. I love big marketing, and that’s how to get in touch with me, personal and then 301Pro is really easy to find on all the socials as well.

Christian Klepp  48:26

Fantastic, fantastic. Scott once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Scott Cate  48:32

Thanks for having me, Christian. Take care. 

Christian Klepp  48:34

Thanks. Bye for now.