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Anne Holland, president of MarketingSherpa, proves that giving advice to marketers can be big business.
Anne Holland is the president of MarketingSherpa, which aims to help marketers advance by sharing real-world marketing data and hard-won lessons. The Rhode Island-based company publishes a wide range of metrics guides, buyer's guides and howto reports, as well as a 500+ case study library. Prior to founding MarketingSherpa in 2000, Holland spent 20 years in publishing. She also served as the head of marketing for Phillips Business Media – a $100 million publishing company where she helped launch one of the world's first profitable subscription sites in 1995 – and the trade publications Interactive Marketing News in 1994 and min's New Media in 1995. Started in Holland's spare bedroom, MarketingSherpa was recently acquired by marketing research firm MEC Labs out of Atlantic Beach, Florida. Revenue Senior Editor Eric Reyes asked Holland about her company's role in moving marketing forward and what lies ahead for the performance marketing space.
Eric Reyes: What was the genesis of the MarketingSherpa idea? How did you perceive the need? Anne Holland: Before I led MarketingSherpa I was a marketer myself, so I had a pretty good gut-level understanding of what marketers needed that wasn't being provided by research firms or publications. However, that doesn't mean I trusted my gut! Instead I toured the U.S. and U.K. for about six months, asking marketers themselves what information they really needed to do their jobs more easily and/or with better results. The final company – MarketingSherpa – was built directly from those suggestions. Turns out our target audience wanted lots of case studies, benchmark data, creative samples and how-to instruction at a practical yet advanced level. So that's what we provide. We still tour regularly as well as surveying and talking directly with customers weekly to keep on track.
ER: Can you outline your inventory of content – how much is available and how has it grown? AH: There's a lot! Basically it breaks down into three areas – all of which are created by research and reporting teams inhouse here (we don't accept contributed content).
Case studies and how-to articles – based on hour-long interviews with actual marketers. We delve into what worked, what didn't, what the data was and include creative samples. We've got a library of thousands of these, searchable by tactic and by company/brand name. They're all exclusive.
Benchmark guides, buyer's guides and tactical handbooks – based on research into what's working for real-life marketers. We survey tens of thousands of marketers every year, and profile hundreds of consultants and vendors. These 200- plus-page reports come in PDF for instant question answering, and we also ship a printed-and-bound copy to every customer for easy reference.
Summits – every year we hold three big summits for marketers: in New York, San Francisco, Boston and a fourth city (next year it's Miami). The topics include email marketing, selling subscriptions to Internet content and B-to-B demand generation. Naturally our summits feature loads of peer-presented case studies and new data.
ER: Now that MarketingSherpa has been acquired, what will change for you and the company? AH: Pretty much since day one, there have always been a lot of people who wanted to buy us out or invest in us. I held out for seven years because I wanted our growth to be driven by our readers' needs, not some board of investors. Every six months I take a few days to step back and review the progress and future of the company. When I did that this past June, I realized it had gotten too big for me to handle alone anymore. It's a common fate for an entrepreneurial- driven company. You grow it as big as you can and then you hit the ceiling of your own desires and abilities. I wasn't born to administer this fast-growing multimillion- dollar organization. I was born to research, write and keep in touch with the needs of the readership.
So that's when I started looking for a new corporate parent for Sherpa. The goal was to find someone who would understand and appreciate our readers and our mission, plus appreciate the great team of employees and researchers we've built – not just someone who would wave a bunch of cash at me. By finding the right buyer, in effect I was hiring Sherpa's new boss. Several organizations were in the running – after carefully interviewing several of them, I chose MEC Labs based on fit.
They are a research firm that partners with folks such as The New York Times to conduct experiments on live campaigns to discover what works (and what doesn't) in marketing. We are a research firm that partners with our 237,000 readers via surveys and studies to discover what works in marketing. Culturally the fit works too. We are all fairly intense, hardworking people who also like the ocean. Their headquarters are on the beach in Florida. Our headquarters are about a block from the beach in Rhode Island.
MarketingSherpa won't change much – aside from continuing to grow and serve our readership even better. We'll just have even stronger corporate leadership to allow us to reach bigger goals and do some pretty amazing research projects. On the personal side, I'll still be here. Only instead of being stuck in meetings with accounting, HR and IT, I'll get to focus all my time on the things I really love – research, writing and the art of marketing. And, maybe a little more time to walk on the beach.
ER: What are some of the most important goals you have for MarketingSherpa next in the 12 to 15 months? AH: Keep her on a steady, focused course. It's easy to get overwhelmed with expansion opportunities, or to let success go to your head so you do crazy things, launch big new ideas that don't hold to your core business. I'm an idea person, so it's probably toughest for me. But our big idea is No New Ideas.
Aside from that, you'll see several launches that have been enormously researched and several years in the making, the biggest of which is our upcoming membership site launch. At the base, it simply means instead of paying $5 to $9 per article every time you want to read something, you can pay one flat annual fee. Convenience is a wonderful thing. There are also some new features – but the dev team will shoot me if I talk too soon. Watch for December-January and you'll begin to see.
ER: Are there industry segments that MarketingSherpa is not currently focusing on but would love to get into, and why? AH: We set our course for a very specific marketplace from day one, and it's a darned big one that will take us many more years to serve completely. Continued on Page 2...
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