Katherine Keddie: The solutions we need to save the planet from climate and biodiversity crises are here, but they won't make a difference unless they are adopted at scale. We are Matt Jaworski and Katherine Keddie, and we have focused our careers on ensuring that this happens in time. Back in 2021, we started Adopter, Europe's first marketing company working exclusively with scaling green innovation. Since then, we've supported organisations from pre-seed start-ups and Earthshot Prize finalists to international unicorns and global NGOs. We've worked with green technology solutions across fintech, construction, food systems, nature and finance and more. We also mentor on some of the world's leading venture builders including Carbon13, ConceptionX and SOSV IndieBio. At Adopter, we are on a mission to support 100 high-integrity green innovation solutions by the end of 2025 and 1,000 by 2030. This podcast is the next step on that journey.
Welcome to today's episode of Scaling Green-Tech with Katherine Keddie and Matt Jaworski. Today we will be having a conversation about how to audit your online presence. So when I'm coming into a new role as a marketing manager or when I'm starting to build my online presence, what do I look for? What are my green and red flags? What are the tools that I use and how do I get started? So Matt is obviously our resident expert here, but we'll be discussing this together. So Matt, my first question for you is, how do we get started if you're thinking about an audit or big picture, which we would be considering?
Starting a marketing audit: mapping channels and existing tools
Matt Jaworski: Perfect question. So the first thing to remember, right, is that online presence is not just your website. It's also your social media. It's also your mailing list. It's all those channels and how they connect together and how they interact with each other. So that's number one. Number two is taking a stock of what you already have, what's active, what accounts you have available online, and what tools you are using across those accounts. One thing I noticed again and again when working with clients is that when a new person comes to a role, they begin asking us at Adopter, me as a person who's working with them on the website or someone from my team, can you add this tool on our website? Can you add Google Analytics? Can you add Google Search Console? However, very often, especially when it's asked who made the website, they already have those tools in place. So the first question when you are starting to get into this role, when you are trying to audit your presence, what do you already have in place, right? Because if you already have Google Analytics and you had it on your website for, I don't know, a year, two years, it means that you already have quite a lot of data on how this website is doing, how customers and the other visitors interact with it, and you can start analyzing this data. Otherwise, you will just end up, I don't know, adding another tracking code to your website, a third tracking code to your website. And you'll be building layers of analytics tools on top of layers of other analytics tools and it's not really going to be efficient or as helpful as if you actually understand your situation and spot any gaps, patch them, but also start going forward based on what you already have. So that's the beginning. Then, when you already know what you have in place, start reviewing it, getting familiar with those systems, with the data, and what information you can get from them. So when you look at something like Google Analytics, it will be the most obvious data, right, number of visitors on the website, number of site views, number of views per visitor, as well as those other types of data that might depend on how you configured your Google Analytics setup, such as specific types of conversions. For example, how many times was your contact form completed? How many times has someone pressed on a dedicated button? If you have not set them up, you can start considering which of those you need, how would you like to set them up, and possibly get help with setting them up then. It's also a question of what other data could be useful. When we're starting with the website example, you have tools like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity, which is free, which allow you to record how visitors interact with your website and view this data in the form of heat maps, seeing where their attention is focused, where most people click, as well as to see how far visitors scroll down. It might turn out that your homepage that has many sections describing the context of your work and organization actually is not generating the engagement you would hope for because when people have to scroll through five or six sections of context before they get to some tangible information that they can press on to route them to a different page, they will actually drop off very quickly and only half of the people or less will get to the more important parts of the site. Then when we think about the website, there is also the sister tool to Google Analytics, which is for Google Search Console. You can essentially get the insights into how your website performs in Google search results. and whether there are any errors that Google has noticed. One example could be that Google is unable to actually index your pages, and it gives you a notice there. It lists things that you should look into, you should improve. And then you can also notify Google that you think you fixed the issue and ask it to re-index those pages. When you add new pages or when you make changes on the existing pages, you can also upload those pages there and notify Google that, hey, Google, you should re-scan this page and maybe start showing it to people in search results. Again, greatly speeding up the rate at which your website is indexed and how it is being shown by Google in search results. You can upload your sitemap, and then you can also see what queries your pages show for, how well they rank, what's the visibility of your website in search results, and what's the click-through rate. So whether your website shows up in the results and whether people press on it once they can see it. Simple things, but they can be very, very, very useful. And then if you are, for example, publishing content aiming at SEO, if you look at it, you should be able to see some correlation between, for example, pages' total visibility and where you started making this content. We've been recently experimenting with this on our own website, and we can clearly see where the visibility of the site is going up. Then, we also have tools like Microsoft Webmaster Tools and similar that essentially work like Google Search Console. They're just provided by different search engine providers. And obviously, a question that many people will have, right, is, oh, what's the point of being on Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools if no one's using them, right? Well, even if Bing has, let's say, 3% or something like that, it's still millions of people. And in some industries, people might be stuck having to use a tool like Bing due to many different data privacy and processing reasons. For example, in some finance or local authority sector organizations, you're not allowed to use Google or connect to tools like Google Meet and devices are locked into having to use Bing. So if that's your sector and you're not using Bing Webmaster Tools, you're missing out. Then there is also a layer of AI and visibility of your website for the AI tools. The most popular, arguably at least, in the West, ChatGPT, Its creators have a close partnership with Microsoft, and it's widely reported that by being visible in Bing, you get more visible in chat GPT results. So again, it's very much a low-hanging fruit. And connection with Google Search Console actually allows you to connect to Bing Webmaster Tools with one click on the Bing Webmaster Tools website. So again, another easy win. Now, Kat, I've been talking for a while, I don't want this to turn into a lecture, so what's your perspective on those other tools, those other areas? So for example, social media, LinkedIn, what would you add to what I've been describing?
LinkedIn analytics, data exports, and custom dashboards via Looker Studio
Katherine Keddie: So I think the way that you've laid it out as a process is really helpful for people. So the first step would be mapping out all of the channels and online touch points that you have. So often people will have one random social media channel that they haven't touched or isn't getting much engagement. So it's useful, especially if you're coming into an organization and say it's a scaling startup, to work out what you're working with. The second step would be what data do I have access to and how can I pull all of that data? The third is obviously analyzing that data. And the fourth is what is my action plan and what are my priorities, which obviously relate more broadly to your marketing strategy as a whole. When it comes to social media, I mean, there's lots of different ways that you can approach this. Social media tools obviously contain a lot of data within the platform themselves, which can be very useful. I think very useful things that we tend to look for are who is following us, so what is the demographic data behind that, specifically when you're looking at LinkedIn, which is a channel that lots of our clients use because they tend to be B2B. When you look at LinkedIn, there is a lot of data that the platform gives you, and actually the only way that you can really pull out a lot of that data is either through spreadsheets, which can be limited in the sort of information they give you, or you can request to pull all of your personal data and they'll send you a file of everything that they have on you, which is really useful as well for tracking who your followers are, for example, and where they come from. So quick tip there, if you want to look into that, I would recommend it if you're trying to understand your personal following.
Matt Jaworski: Is that actually how it works? Because I heard that, you know, you can do like GDPR data requests and different things, but I never thought that it would be a way for a company, right, for an organization to get extra insight into the analytics. I knew that there are spreadsheets that you can use. I knew that you can integrate LinkedIn with something like Google Looker Studio to make customized dashboards typically much better than dashboards of any social media management app, like HubSpot, Hootsuite, or anything else. But again, I never heard of the data pool idea.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, so it's more as an individual, but I think, you know, when you're, especially when you're mapping out the different channels that you focus on, something to definitely include would be individual channels. So like personal channels, founder channels, anyone who talks about the business is a really valuable touch point and something that is worth considering. How do we, how do we use this to achieve our marketing goals? How do we use this to authentically engage with people, which is really the goal, like obviously, AI is fantastic in that it's helped us create lots of content really fast, but it means that the internet is flooded with content that's sort of cookie cutter and follows that kind of recognizable AI pattern. So having personal channels is a really good opportunity for the business to get the message across through people's individual relationships, community building.
Matt Jaworski: And to have those personal connections, personal relationships, isn't it?
Katherine Keddie: When we're thinking about social media auditing and we know exactly which platforms are on, obviously we've pulled all the data we can from those platforms. There's lots of tools that you can use to analyze that data. I mean, Matt, you know quite a few, maybe you can jump in and offer some to the audience.
Matt Jaworski: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. At the basic level, right, it's the social media management tools like HubSpot, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and countless other platforms. Although, in my experience, what they give you tends to be quite limited. You tend to run into different roadblocks that you're stuck with. Only some averages or some data is shown together, some separately. A step up from this can be manual processing in spreadsheets where you can do some really amazing things, but that tends to be quite time-taking. Obviously, there are ways to automate it, but it's still not necessarily as, you know, as easy as pretty. But then you can also use tools like Looker Studio and others to make custom dashboards that get updated via LinkedIn API and which you can customize at a level that you can't achieve with those sort of out-of-the-box social media management suites typically.
Katherine Keddie: So we've talked generally about how do you start auditing? What are some of the tools you can use to audit a website? How do you start with social media? But what else can you audit? What other information goldmine is there that we can dig into as marketers?
Competitor benchmarking on LinkedIn
Matt Jaworski: So you reviewed what channels you have and where your marketing activities are taking place. You reviewed what systems you have in place to gather data and analytics, and understood your audience. Now, how can you learn even more? One area is the technical performance of your website. So for example, how fast it is and where you can make improvements. or were there any easy wins in terms of SEO that wouldn't show up on the surface level like the one provided by Google Search Console. In terms of speed, a good starting point would be Google PageSpeed Insights or maybe GTmetrix, which allow you to scan the page on your website. In a nutshell, it will flag up if, for example, pages on your website are bigger than they should be due to, for example, too many images or videos. It will show up when you have loading time on desktop or mobile devices that could use an improvement and any other technical issues that might be affecting your performance in a negative way. Then you can also use tools like SEMrush or SiteChecker to get an understanding of your on-page SEO, whether you have, for example, headings and other structural elements in your content that allow Google and also AIs to understand what is important on the website and what is the structure of the content. You will also have information on whether images have all descriptions that allow automated systems to understand them as well as make them accessible to people using screen readers and similar kinds of data. Then, after you reviewed the website on the technical angle and mapped out what improvements to make, there will be also other areas related to the broader marketing, right? So there will be the performance of your social media content. So something that might be, I don't know, I wouldn't even necessarily call it a hack, but something that Not everyone thinks about, surprisingly on LinkedIn, is setting up the competitors. You can actually set up, I think, up to 10 accounts that you consider to be your competitors, but they don't have to be direct competitors. They can be companies at the same stage of growth and, for example, funding. that are in other industries. So let's say you are a cultivated meat company and you can add there some other cultivated meat companies, but you could also add there, let's say, more materials focused biotech company at a similar stage of growth. Exactly, and use it to see if your content is performing as well as their content and what you can learn from their approach, what's their engagement rate like, is there a difference, for example, in the follower growth rate and other key metrics. Then, finally, depending on your marketing mix, you can also review analytics and data you have access to from your email automation and newsletter provider. You can review data from your CRM, if relevant, and see, for example, were there any patterns that your sales team is noticing in customers who interacted with marketing content and how you can learn from it to improve social media content, website content, and overall engagement so that, for example, leads take less time in the sales pipeline before they are closed.
LinkedIn algorithm factors: comments, vertical video, and individual creators
Katherine Keddie: Yeah I think we can dive in a little bit more to the social media content because there's so much data that you can pull from this and I think like you say there's a few areas that people tend to ignore. So the competitors I think are a great example and just to add to that I think it's really important that when you're choosing the competitors to track on LinkedIn you're choosing companies that have a reasonable similarity to you in terms of size in terms of growth in terms of sector. So there's one thing to you know list your competitors but say you don't want to be listing IBM for example as your competitor because potentially you may be like that is the incumbent we're trying to disrupt. But fundamentally they have a totally different follower count, engagement rate, like it's going to be really unhelpful for you because fundamentally the goal behind this is to benchmark your success. And it's actually the thing that we tend to lead with with most of our clients when we're thinking about LinkedIn performances. You know, a good number is a good number and that's fine, but how do you rank in comparison to the other people you can compare your company to? So I think that's a fantastic point, Matt. Other things you can look at is you can look more now into the specific analytics behind video content. So LinkedIn had a big interface switch up and algorithm change in the last year which means that it now has a scrolling function for vertical video. Video is also seen as something that tends to perform better and that is what we see across all the accounts that we manage. Fundamentally you can look at the breakdown of content there and see at what point do people click off the video, which is a key ranking factor for LinkedIn now. Um, according to the way that people are taking assessments for LinkedIn, obviously they don't publish what does well, but, um, that's our experience. Um, so that can be really useful other things to look for, in terms of post-performance and the 2025 LinkedIn algorithm, are comments, so are you creating discussion, particularly within the first 60 minutes of the post going out? And other things like, do you have individuals that are performing particularly well? So there's been a big emphasis on individual creators coming through on LinkedIn. So that goes right to our point at the beginning of the episode, which is when you were thinking about the channels that you want to audit, do you have the personal accounts, particularly if you've founder or other notable people in the business that could start to get a little bit more traction this year.
Founder-led social media as a growth channel
Matt Jaworski: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it makes so much sense for the CEO, for the founding team to be the face of the company. And typically, right, their personal pages can be doing so much better in terms of engagement and driving results for the company than a company page ever will. Both due to the algorithms on LinkedIn and other platforms, but also due to, you know, the social aspect of social media, right? People liking people, people wanting to follow people. and that's one of those areas that many companies don't focus on, don't invest in and where they have an untapped opportunity.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, absolutely. Another thing that we encourage people to do and I would really encourage any startups that we're mentoring on various accelerator programs or anyone listening is I would map out a list of bets that you want to make So fundamentally the success of your social media in particular, but I guess this relates to any marketing, is really trial and error. So you go through what is best practice, you obviously draw from your experience and what works and what experts are saying and recommending, but fundamentally you also have to really track your data. A part of that would be I would make a list of the bets that I want to make. So for example, I bet that doing a bi-weekly founder post where we use video and we try and encourage conversation and we get different people from the company commenting on that post. I bet that that's going to result in a percentage uptick in follower growth for example and then I give it three months let's say to see if that actually happens and then I would go back to my bet list and see what we've worked on. So I think this relates to firstly mapping out what bets have we previously made and what have the results been which I think is challenging when you're coming in potentially as a new employee or a new marketing lead to a company that was previously a startup. where everyone was kind of doing everything and maybe the tracking isn't as good. But it's also crucial for your next step planning, so when you're mapping out what you're going to do going forward based on the results of the audit.
Stanford Web Credibility Guidelines and credibility versus speed in B2B
Matt Jaworski: Yeah, that sounds like such a good idea, right? And even if you've been doing things for a while, but maybe you want to reassess, just do a sense check of the direction, you can still do this exercise and see what the results are. Just get a bit more organized every time, because with marketing, right, it's easy for things to become hectic and to be pulled in one million different directions, depending on what are the requests from various stakeholders across your company. Now, before we start wrapping up, I was thinking that there is also one area of website and maybe a bit content, but primarily of websites review and auditing that is slightly less counterintuitive and slightly more difficult because it doesn't necessarily rely on such clear numbers as, for example, using Google Search Console or using Google Analytics. which is reviewing things like credibility and whether it takes off frameworks like Stanford Web Credibility Guidelines developed by Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab. And I think, you know, we should do an episode about just this framework at some point, but to give everyone a flavor of it, it's a set of 10 guidelines on how to make your website authoritative and avoid red flags and issues that make it less so. It includes such things as listing your physical address, providing easy ways to contact you, which both tend to be legal requirements in most countries. Anyway, but going back to the framework, it's avoiding errors, big or small. It's showing real people across your website rather than AI, avatars, or anything like this. And then assessing your websites on this framework can make sure that it's more authoritative, trustworthy, And thus, whether it's more likely to drive conversions in B2B, especially in a B2B setting where purchases are much less impulsive and people are scrutinizing things with much more attention because of the sheer deal value and number of people involved in decision making. Then there will be also things like ensuring your copy on the website is easy to read and accessible. There are free tools you can use in addition to any other automated tools. There are free tools that you can use like the Hemingway app, which after you copy and paste text will show you the sort of the school class year, let's call it, that it's written at level of. No matter how scientific, right, or technical you are, if it shows you that your text is at postgraduate level, you need to simplify it. Because even if you're targeting people with PhDs because you're working in the space of something like sustainability-linked sovereign debt, people are reading your website when they're waiting for their kids at school, people are reading your website when they're on their phone between meetings, and they're not giving it the attention they would give to a report that they're writing or that they're reading, and they want things to be accessible, simple, but obviously at the same time not simplistic. But I think that might be also another topic for another time.
Katherine Keddie: So we mentor on some really top tier startup accelerators like Carbon 13 and ConceptionX. And with them, we go through the same process where we go, you know, map out where your touch points are, pull the data, review the data and work out what kind of valuable information you can get out of it, and then obviously create a next step execution plan. 100%.
Matt Jaworski: And to put also different things we discussed in context, right? Something like Stanford credibility guidelines could be where your focus should be, where you are a scaling green tech company, even though it might not be as measurable as site speed, because bumping up your perceived credibility and authority of the website and generally online presence might be the factor that helps you get those five additional deals you need at this stage to get to the next stage of your business, while improving your loading speed by 5% might actually be something that people won't notice. You're not Amazon, you're not e-commerce, where you have millions of people and, you know, 100 milliseconds change can lead to more sales because less people get frustrated, because it's a B2B setting where people want to buy things quickly by now. Here, things tend to be more sophisticated, so we need to make sure that you prioritize things that make sense to prioritize, for example, like user experience overall, and intuitiveness of the website, and it being broadly accessible. over some sometimes purely numerical metrics like getting the score on Google PageSpeed from 79 to 80 where it becomes green rather than yellow or anything like this.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, totally. I mean, if I'm a customer, I'm trying to make a decision about whether I'm going to go with an incumbent solution or this exciting startup solution that promises to be significantly better. Am I going to care more about 5% faster loading speed or about the fact that you have real people, you have an about, you understand who the team are, and there's great case studies, customer success, and testimonials on your website?
Matt Jaworski: And as a customer, I can actually understand what you're doing, right? Because if your website loads quickly, but I'm still struggling to understand what is it that you actually do, that's not actually that good.
Katherine Keddie: I think that the useful thing about using a framework like the Web Credibility Guidelines is that it is based on a huge amount of research. So you're not coming in and subjectively saying, I think we need to rework this. I like it. I don't like it exactly. You're going, this is a framework that we can follow. It's a clear list of exercises and we understand why we need each thing. And it's something that's maybe easier to make a case for internally. and to give you a really clear guidance on what you should be doing and prioritising and thinking about.
Customer-centric prioritisation in online presence decisions
Matt Jaworski: If there was one takeaway I would like to leave our listeners with is to keep their customers front of mind, no matter what they're trying to optimise, analyse and understand. When you touch something like online presence, social media content, website, there will always be many opinions among the decision makers, within the marketing team, within the broader company, within all the different stakeholders. And among all those opinions, you need to make sure you prioritize what's more important to customers. With websites, is the customer going to want your website to have a bigger logo of your company at the very start? Or is it going to be better for them to understand really clearly from the start what your company does in simple words that, you know, even a 10 year old would get? I'm sure it's the second. So stick to that and use data to find those things that will be most impactful for your customers.
Katherine Keddie: I love that. So making sure that you are customer centric in every decision that you make that can include customer interviews at the start of your execution plan. We don't have time to get into that fully, but if you would love to hear more about customer interviews, we have a great resource on our website for B2B climate tech companies that are trying to understand their customers. We have a full script to run your customer interviews.
Matt Jaworski: Oh, and we even recently used it ourselves when we were revisiting some things and what our customers want from our website. So, you know, even if you're not just starting out and you feel like you've done a hundred rounds of customer interviews when you were starting your company, you know, people's needs change, people's perceptions change, times change. So it's worth revisiting at least once a year and doing some more research.
Katherine Keddie: Absolutely. You're never too experienced to do customer interviews. I think that's my takeaway from the episode. OK, thank you so much, Matt. I think this has been such a useful conversation. We will be back every single week with the Scaling Green-Tech podcast. So stay tuned. Follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And we will be back next week with something new. So goodbye, Matt.
Matt Jaworski: Goodbye, Kat. And thanks for another great discussion.
Katherine Keddie: See you later.
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