Cole Fraser is Marketing Lead at Gravity Wiz, a “small company dedicated to providing awesome Gravity Forms resources in the form of snippets, tutorials and plugins.” He is from Vancouver, Canada, and got involved in WordPress over a decade ago with his own business projects.
Tell us about your career – how did you get started and what are you doing now?
Tell us about your career – how did you get started and what are you doing now?I’ve been in digital marketing for ~15 years. I started freelance writing as a student to help pay for journalism and business tuition and ran a few of my own business projects at the same time. This led me into a number of marketing roles. I started my own marketing company around Covid, and that eventually led me to Gravity Wiz, where I am now marketing lead.
What do you specialize in? What’s your superpower?
My superpower is a combination of experience range and being T-shaped, with a focus on writing and storytelling. I’ve had a lot of unique marketing roles, and combined with a few of my own businesses, I developed a lot of in-the-trenches experience with everything from SEO, writing, inbound strategy and content, to ads, email, web design, and high level strategy, campaign design, and pretty much everything in between. Having a diverse mix and deeper experience with each expertise area has given me a lot of insight when coordinating larger ideas into tangible, cross-channel campaigns and managing marketing from a high level.
Tell us about work you are particularly proud of
Through my own company I had the opportunity to develop and execute a customer acquisition strategy for a client focused on Canadian immigration consulting. I’ve never worked in that industry before, so the approach was new to me, and delicate compared with something like B2B software. We had a lot of success with a new web, content, and paid acquisition strategy.
Seeing firsthand the number of new customers our efforts brought and interviewing these customers and writing about their successful immigration into Canada made it a special kind of rewarding. Through this work I ended up getting the opportunity to guest lecture at McGill University as part of their marketing program, which was a cherry on top of the whole experience.
What’s your favorite brand and why?
I wouldn’t say I have a favorite brand, but there are some things I love about individual brands. I’ve always respected companies in the tech space genuinely attempting to remain privacy first — Signal, Mozilla (Brave), Bitwarden to name a few. Khan Academy’s mission is admirable — free education for all. Lastly, I’ve always gotten a kick out of how Costco’s business model works (and their inflation-proof hot dogs).
How about your favorite campaign or ad?
As far as content marketing goes, Good Work is killing it. It’s great business-oriented, funny content. There’s not much not to like. But people often don’t know it’s a content marketing initiative run by Morning Brew. Slidebean does something similar, albeit more explicitly tied to the Slidebean product. I also love Ahrefs’ YouTube channel for their SEO content.
For something more cutting edge, Gymshark’s influencer and partner marketing campaigns will probably be studied for some time.
Can you tell us about a current campaign you are running, or have run recently?
Gravity Wiz’ customer spotlights have become an increasingly valuable asset for us.
“Case study” has become a bit of a marketing-speak term. When I see a website’s case study sections I don’t feel pulled in. We opt for spotlights, where we keep things simple and informal. There’s a lot you can build with our products (we have 3 product lines — with our flagship suite, Gravity Perks, containing 47 plugins). Through our spotlights, we showcase exciting things our customers are building, while focusing on one thing at a time and keeping it casual and fun. Think of it like a case-study-light. These assets have accrued a lot of organic search value on their own, and customers have told us that they’ve been helpful in inspiring new ideas.
What’s your favorite Marketing tool these days, and why?
After ditching Google Analytics, we’ve worked hard over the last while to make Matomo our single source of truth for data. That includes all website metrics, paid advertising, email revenue metrics, and campaign insights.
We pipe a lot of data into PostHog and Looker Studio (AKA Data Studio) and, with Matomo, run reports on events happening on-site, through Drip (our email platform), and through EDD, with the goal of a holistic view of our pre-purchase and post-purchase customer journeys.
We also use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Notion, Search Console, and of course WordPress, Gravity Forms and Gravity Wiz. 😉
Who do you follow for inspiration?
A mix of indie builders, writers, and AI tinkerers. 😄Peter Levels, Kevin Indig, Julian Shapiro, Jeremy Moser, David Perrell, to name a few.
To conclude, can you share a tip that can help WordPress businesses grow?
Being able to ship, test, and iterate on ideas quickly can be a superpower. Embracing this mindset has allowed us to try new ideas, iterate quickly, and fear failure less.
Also, with WordPress, community is huge. Remaining customer-centric and working directly with customers is essential to what we do. We really prioritize support and our support team are rockstars. We try to maintain an ongoing two-way conversation and feedback loop with our customer base to develop these new ideas, make sure we are meeting their needs, and we listen to new ideas. We really do try to implement new ideas based on that feedback loop.
Follow Cole Fraser & GravityWiz
- Business website: gravitywiz.com
- Personal website: fraser.media
- Twitter/X Company Account: @GravityWiz
- LinkedIn Company Page: www.linkedin.com/company/gravity-wiz
- Facebook Company Page: facebook.com/gravitywiz
