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Marketing in Hypergrowth with Amrita Mathur
365 Plays1 year ago
Amrita Mathur is a badass. As the VP of Marketing at ClickUp and former VP of Marketing at Superside, she knows exactly what it takes to grow teams and revenue at high-growth, high-value startups.
After Wayne-ing and Garth-ing out a bit (we're not worthy!) Jess and Susan chatted with Amrita about:
- Her 30/60/90 plan at ClickUp [4:37]
- Why every marketing team needs someone with an economist's brain [10:33]
- Why Payback Period is her one metric to rule them all [12:44]
- How she thinks about pipe and fuel instead of organic and paid [22:30]
- How her team at Superside balanced quality, creativity, and speed [24:35]
- Where to begin with content when you're starting from nothing [31:39]
- What to do when a program fails [39:13]
That's Marketing, Baby is sponsored by the incredible people at ércule (ercule.co) and Teal (tealhq.com).
Can't get enough? Subscribe to Rants & Raves, the official That's Marketing, Baby newsletter: https://bit.ly/rants-and-raves-sign-up
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Show Focus
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to That's Marketing, Baby, the weekly show where two marketing besties talk all things marketing in the world of B2B and B2C. I'm your co-host, Susan Wenegrad, and I've spent over 20 years in marketing focusing on paid media and email marketing. And I'm Jess Cook, copywriter and creative director turned content marketer. Every week, we'll tackle a topic that's on our minds and hopefully yours too. Ready? Let's go.
Sponsor Introduction: Air Cule
00:00:32
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to give a shout out to our sponsor, Air Cule. Air Cule is an agency focused solely on organic growth for B2B SaaS brands. I've worked with them before and I can tell you I've never felt so confident and in control of my content strategy, SEO, and analytics.
00:00:48
Speaker
They also have this great free tool, Automo, that translates Google Analytics into actual usable data. Which pages are killing it, which ones are declining, and what you can do about it. Check them out and give Automo a whirl at ercule.co. And now, on with the show.
Building Marketing Teams: Amrita Mather's Experience
00:01:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to another episode of That's Marketing, baby. I'm Jess Cook. I'm Susan Winograd. And we're really excited today. We have an incredible guest. The amazing Amrita Mather is here. She is the VP of Marketing at ClickUp. And before that was the VP of Marketing at Superside. You may have heard of those companies, small household names.
00:01:34
Speaker
And she's here to tell us about what it's like to build teams and to grow companies of that size and stature. So thank you so much for coming to talk to us on our little podcast here, Amrita. Well, thank you for having me. This is like my favorite thing to jam on. So it's perfect. This is we'll just freewheel it. Amazing. Love it. Can you tell us a little bit, just give us like the two minute background on yourself and how you got to where you are today.
00:02:02
Speaker
Oh my gosh, I have no idea. I wish I could have like a playbook for this or something. But no, yeah, just, you know, kind of been in tech my whole life. Been in on the B2B side for a long time. Never done the B2C thing. I'm always tempted. And then I'm just like, yeah, but everything in B2C is about brand. And like, I don't know if I'm that person.
00:02:20
Speaker
So yeah, I've kind of just hopped around a bunch of different companies, mostly done growth stage startups, like, you know, it was like they found product market fit, and now they're ready to scale. And then they usually bring me in to be like, okay, we need the machine, right? But at Superside, which was like where I was for four years, just previously, I joined them super early, like pre product, they were like zero recurring revenue, they had some ACV, and they had a product out there that wasn't like necessarily a subscription product.
00:02:48
Speaker
So they had some hypotheses, but you know, super early stage, like I think our company was like maybe 40 people, 30 people at the time. So I joined them super early stage together with, you know, sales and product. And of course, our CEO, who's amazing, by the way, and has like a perfect marketing and economics brain. We can we can talk about that later why that combo works. Yeah, grew the business to 45 million just before I left on track to do 50 this year. So
00:03:13
Speaker
Pretty good growth story. Zero to 50 in four years or four and a half years is kind of not that common in tech, which is bizarre to me. But yeah, apparently it's a thing. So did that. And then now I'm at
Challenges at ClickUp: Systems and Strategies
00:03:24
Speaker
ClickUp. I've only been here three weeks. ClickUp is way more established. I've never worked at a company like this, like ever. And there's a guy for everything. Like, oh, I want some data on blah, blah, blah. Can you help me pull this from the data lake, Snowflake, and put this in the Tableau? There's a guy. There's a guy for everything.
00:03:41
Speaker
So I mean, that's kind of cool, sort of. And yet at the same time, there's like, you know, they're like super established business, like 160 million, like, they raised 400 million a couple years ago, they get like 6000 signups a day for their freemium product, which is unreal.
00:03:58
Speaker
That's crazy. A day. And they convert quite a large percentage to trials and so on and so forth. But yet, even with all of that, there's so much opportunity. And honestly, there's so much broken. And you would expect that at every company. Obviously, there's always stuff that's broken and needs to be improved. But there's a lot of stuff broken. So now, in three weeks, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to be useless. I have a job.
00:04:24
Speaker
Job security, that is good. And with you, they can only go up, so that's amazing. Tell us a bit about the team that you have inherited there and maybe what you're thinking, kind of 30, 60, 90 plan.
Achieving Product Market Fit and Scaling
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, 90 days just seems so far out. Well, 30, 60 then.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, so they're they're unique in the sense, or maybe not that unique, actually. But I think a lot of companies that achieve scale, like I always look back at like companies that I like tools that I use. So I look at Atlassian, I look at HubSpot, I look at Figma and how they grew and blah, blah, blah, because I'm familiar with the product.
00:04:57
Speaker
And I think a lot of them, Notion included, they all find groundswell kind of with almost like a consumer audience and maybe a micro and SMB audience, right? And then they say, okay, we've got a bed of customers. We have product market fit, at least with the subset of them. Now we have a beachhead strategy. Now let's go after other ICPs, other markets, maybe go up market, so on and so forth.
00:05:21
Speaker
That's every company, like every company that's made it has kind of done it like this, right? So ClickUp is in the same boat they have.
00:05:27
Speaker
really good product market fit with like a couple of ICPs, but because they're such a horizontal product in the sense that, I mean, they're sort of, if you don't know ClickUp, they're in the same, they overlap a lot with Asana and Monday, like a huge amount of overlap, but they also overlap with Notion and SmartSheets and Airtable and a whole bunch of other people in this productivity suite of things.
00:05:51
Speaker
So that's the TLDR on ClickUp. So they do a bunch of things from in the productivity sphere, but they're a horizontal product, which means it's not like they're known in any specific industry or any specific ICP or team. It's not like marketing teams are like, I love ClickUp, or there's no engineering team that's like, I love ClickUp. Some engineering teams use us, some finance teams use us, some marketing teams use us. It's all over the place.
Team Dynamics and Structures at ClickUp
00:06:16
Speaker
So there's no
00:06:17
Speaker
depth or rather like stronghold from a market perspective so that's that's something that we know we need to sort out and figure out what are the campaigns we're gonna run who do we actually want to go after that's like part of the first three months plan and then i guess the second piece is that
00:06:34
Speaker
They have the mid market i should say micro and smb machine quite figured out they're quite good at that so what my boss the chief growth officer has decided is that because there's so much heavy lifting to be done on like figuring out how to go up market,
00:06:52
Speaker
he's actually put a lot of teams in that bucket and he said okay down market the machine is built you guys do whatever you're doing but it's like a smaller more ragtag team because they're kind of in maintenance and optimization mode not really building mode so from a function perspective i have taken over supporting
00:07:13
Speaker
basically product marketing, all of content marketing, which is a whole thing we can talk about in the show, given your guys' areas of interest, and just sort of like life cycle and like field marketing as well. Those are like the sort of three, four factions that have all moved into this upmarket team. We call ourselves upmarketing, like upmarket marketing. Perfect.
00:07:37
Speaker
I love it. What is that called? Where they put like Benifer together? What's that called? Portmanteau. It's a nice little Portmanteau. Oh, I didn't mean it. Yeah, there's a name for that. That's right. There's a name for these things. How many people are on that up marketing team? I haven't done the count, but something like 20. Wow. Okay.
00:08:00
Speaker
Yeah, maybe 15. Because that's amazing. There's also what what they've also done uniquely at ClickUp is that inside the growth org, they have shared services, there's like two teams that service other teams. So creative, as you can imagine, which is often the case, but also ops and like CRM, like they are shared
00:08:20
Speaker
they sit separately and the down market and the up market team shares them. So let's say we were like, hey, we want to send this drip, this complicated drip to like this group of MQLs or whatever to make them into PQLs or hand raised or whatever. We might come up with a strategy, but the actual execution of it would be like the CRM team.
00:08:42
Speaker
So that's not included in any of our teams. Yeah, but still sizable team. And I mean, I'm not necessarily used to that many people. Like at Superside, our team grew quite a bit. But even then, the core team, if you don't include the BDRs
Leadership and Metrics in Marketing Decisions
00:08:57
Speaker
and like the creatives, was still like maybe 10 of us. Like the actual strategists and program owners were like maximum 10, maybe eight, actually. So this is definitely like more sizable than I'm used to. Yeah.
00:09:10
Speaker
there's like, everyone's overflowing with all sorts of work to be done. So just, yeah, I think that's always the case. I think it's like you have a bigger house, you just fill it with stuff, even if you didn't have the stuff to begin with. It's the same thing when you grow your team, you still fill it with work, right? Like you find a way. It just always happens like that.
00:09:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and the goals are like quite scaled and like the level of operation is totally different, right? So everyone has to fire on all cylinders and you're doing like the maintenance stuff of like whatever you built last year or the quarter before, but then you're also like standing up new programs all the time because guess what? The target for Q4 is a lot bigger than it's just like it's the whole operation is like a totally different scale.
00:09:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But the good news is the company is like very, they're thinking very thoroughly about efficiency. And so they don't want any more extra spend, extra bodies, extra blah, blah, blah, you know, like things were, I think, quite different last couple of years, we've all experienced like hyper growth and like lots of free money. But they're just like, nope, pare down, we're only going to do the things that actually matter. If this doesn't work, we cut it. See you later.
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, so that's good. That's nice to see smart. Yeah, that's how I think at least totally I wrote down a note and I want to come back to this the market marketing and economy brain that you said your is that your manager you said has so my old boss at the CEO who's also the founder Frederick I've never encountered someone like him. I hope he doesn't listen to this but I was like fascinated because
00:10:41
Speaker
he had such a marketing brain. He could jump into deep conversations about all sorts of stuff in marketing. Everything from performance marketing to search to content marketing to ABM stuff and whatnot. And yet he was like,
00:10:53
Speaker
an economist by training and he went to like London School of Economics and all that. So like literally in real time, we'd be in a one-on-one and we'd be like talking about, hey, is the LTV still the same for the segment, blah, blah, blah. And he'd like build a model in the spreadsheet right in front of me and plug in all these numbers. And it would be, I would be like, what is happening? Like, and he'd be like creating all these formulas and whatever. And like literally in a 20 minute meeting at the end of it, he'd have a graph that would show like how, which cohort was trending how, and he'd be like,
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah, okay, now, now we know where to focus. And I'd be like, Oh my god, I'm so happy you're here because this just tells me like, this gives us focus, but also gives us the backing that these are the decisions we need to make. So honestly, like that opened my eyes because I was like, this is a skill set that I don't have. I can't operate at that level. And
00:11:41
Speaker
either I need to hire for that or I need to have a RevOps partner who's really, really good at that and can proactively tell us these types of things. So that was quite enlightening, but that was very cool to see in a CEO. And the altitude that he could traverse, all the way to being super high level and thinking about, what's the strategic narrative for the company? And then just go deep and like, how do we get a backlink for this blog post? It's like, all right, OK.
00:12:05
Speaker
That's amazing. Yeah, I think especially like you say, it gives you the proof that sometimes you need to walk into a room with and be like, this is why we made this decision. And that that's a really tough skill for marketers, especially to to pick up for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
00:12:22
Speaker
I know something I've always been really in awe of with you is you, I think, I've heard you talk about this on a couple other podcasts or just in our conversations. You're really well known for one of the metrics that you pay attention to is
00:12:36
Speaker
payback period. And I don't feel like a whole lot of like marketing leaders pay as much attention to that. So I would love for you to talk about like, how did you come to realize that was a really important thing to measure? And like, how are you? How are you implementing that?
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a great question actually. I think marketers have become wiser to that more recently. I think for a long time we were all obsessed with like what's the number for acquisition and how do I generate pipeline, which are absolutely important. And then we also obsessed over CPL and whatnot, or CAC. I think the payback period thing is all of that combined in one metric. It's basically like
00:13:16
Speaker
If you're going to do this new thing, you're going to stand up a new program, some new endeavor. How do you think about how that's going to be successful? And traditionally, I would be like, OK, let me model this out. We've done something like this before. This is what it yielded. And by the way, these leads converted like, you know, classic waterfall funnel. And so that would be how I would do it. And then I just learned over time that that is OK, but it still doesn't allow you to compare each program to the other program efficiently.
00:13:41
Speaker
The only way I could say, I have 10 things I can do. If I have 10 things I can do, how do I compare all of them? That was where I was getting stuck, right? And I was like, there's got to be a rubric, a metric that tells me of the slew, something that unifies them. And I found payback period to be like the best thing on that because it actually says,
00:13:59
Speaker
If you do this for this dollar that you spend, you are going to pay it back in three months, six months, 10 months, whatever that is. And based on your tolerance and risk appetite, you could decide, oh, is this worth doing or not? And is it worth sunsetting something else that you might have been doing? So that just became like an easy way to decide. A classic example was we decided to go down the ABM rabbit hole
00:14:25
Speaker
But ABM can be very hard to stand up. You have to give it many, many quarters and months to make successful. You have to hire bodies. We had never hired an SDR before. So we were like, you've got to go hire. And if it doesn't work out, then what are we going to do with them? And it's not fair to let them go. It was horrible. So we did this pilot program, that failed. There's some glimmers of hope, but it failed, and yada, yada. And then the way we resolved that over time was just to say, OK,
00:14:53
Speaker
We're not, we're going to do all this work and yeah, it could go to shit. But if we can, every deal, every whale, like we're only going to focus ABM on hunting the whales. And if every whale that we hunt, if the payback is such that we can pay it back within like six months because it's a whale, we were able to talk, not actually, sorry, it was more than six months. Our payback period across the board was about six to eight months. We were like, we were willing to tolerate 12 months payback period for the ABM program specifically. That was how we defined what success was.
00:15:22
Speaker
And that gave the team the ability to go do what they need to do without this repercussion of, oh my god, our standard payback period is ballooned through the roof because, oh my god, we've hired all these people and our costs have gone up. And it's harder to hunt the whales. So I think that just normalizes the conversations and allows teams to know where they can take risk and where they can't.
00:15:44
Speaker
And yeah, that's just, that's just something that I've brought myself, you know, brought with me to ClickUp as well. ClickUp actually already thinks kind of like that. Maybe not at the program level, but yeah, it's a good metric for- It would be helpful if more places did that. I think there's, to your point, it is very much, especially, you know, in like B2B startup role that kind of, in the beginning, you're really just running on the treadmill and it's like, let's just get people signed up as quickly as we can. And then after a while,
00:16:10
Speaker
those nuances of like, well, they signed up, but they're not, they're not the ICP we want. Like as the ICP and what you're trying to do becomes clearer. Sometimes I feel like we're still lacking that the economic influence from the financials, you know what I mean? We kind of like get like, Oh, we can acquire for this, but especially like on the pay media side, I'm like, but could we acquire for more if we know that they stay longer? And a lot of times things like,
00:16:34
Speaker
Things like LTV and all of that. Like a lot of times that doesn't come over as much in the communication of what the goals are. And I came from B2C. So that was my background for like the first half of my career. So it's like I'm very used to knowing like every little
00:16:49
Speaker
financial detail, like I know cart values and AOVs and return rate and all of that stuff. So in the B2B world when that's not communicated, I felt very uncomfortable at first because I'm going, okay, we can, we're trying to acquire people for this, but how long do they stay? And a lot of times that just was not communicated, for whatever reason, was just not shared with the marketing team as much. I think to your point, like you said, that's changing.
00:17:14
Speaker
But it's definitely still something I find I have to proactively kind of ask for just to understand. And it may not necessarily change my goals, but it sure gives me much better perspective about what it is I'm going after and how long it might take and does it make sense for things to take that long, etc. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, well said. Absolutely. Yeah, and I do think like B2C people are a little bit ahead on stuff like this normally.
00:17:36
Speaker
I think because they deal with like millions of technical customers, right? Like, whereas in B2B, you know, I mean, if I think about Superside, we would create like 100 or 200 opportunities a month, right? And we had 500 customers or 600 customers total. And it's just like not the same scale in terms of like volume of like people to deal with. So yeah.
B2B vs B2C Marketing Approaches
00:17:55
Speaker
It's also in B2C, it's like you're dealing with widgets that have a very set cost to create. There's nuances as far as how long it takes to sell things. Luxury items might take four to six months or whatever, but you know what that looks like. It's a lot clearer because they're not dealing with the sales person. There's not that soft middle of funnel thing. There's not a pass off from marketing to sales. It's a pass off from marketing and the site handles the rest.
00:18:22
Speaker
Yeah. So it's a much more transactional environment. And so things are much more clear cut. I feel like B2B has tried to do that with things like lead scoring and all that, but it's still imperfect because it just involves more, it's human stuff, right? And it's like, it's very difficult to measure human things. Whereas, you
00:18:37
Speaker
you know, Ecom and D2C, it's just very like, here's the thing, do you want the thing? And this is what it cost us to make it. Here's what we sold it for. So this was our margin, right? It's, it's very, very, very math driven. And it's very unemotional. I feel it's oddly, it's like, I feel like it's
00:18:53
Speaker
Econ is in B2C, it's very emotional in that it's stressful. But I feel like when it comes to the numbers and what's working and not working. The unit economics or the unit economics? Yes, it's so much more straightforward. It's so much more straightforward. With B2B, there's usually a very long educational curve. There's so much, and a lot of it's demand, Jen. A lot of times with Econ, you're solving a problem that people are already trying to fix. Already exists. Yes. And I was like, in B2B,
00:19:18
Speaker
You're fixing problems that people don't even know there's a solution for yet, right? So yeah, it's exciting because sometimes you're like a category creator But other times it makes it that much harder because you're like they don't even know what this thing is So now there's this whole lead time of just explaining what the hell this thing even does totally. Yeah, it's it's interesting
00:19:36
Speaker
It's much more abstract on the B2B side. Yes, agreed. All of it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Because often the B2B companies that solve big problems, it's an existing problem, but it's a new solution to that existing problem. Or it's a problem that no one considered. Like you were saying, Susan, they didn't consider they had that problem in the first place. I actually like a great example of that is I think about this company like Clary. I don't know if you guys are familiar with them.
00:20:00
Speaker
And I'm always like, which one are they? Did they solve an existing problem or did they create the problem and the solution? I'd love to know if you guys have a take on that. I don't. I don't know. That's not my world. I don't know about that company or that problem.
00:20:19
Speaker
It's like when you see, I think that the kings and queens of that were like the heyday of the Facebook ads. You'd see these weird things that people were drop shipping off of Alibaba or like directly and you're just like, I don't think I actually need that. But that would really make my life interesting. Like you'd see like the flip flops with like the brushes on the bottom that you put in your shower and like move your feet back and forth to clean or they have these weird pet products. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's not necessarily a problem.
00:20:46
Speaker
But I wouldn't mind having that to make that part of my life easier. You know, there's like that fine line between is it a problem or is it like a first world nice to have, right? Yeah, is it a product in search of a problem? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
00:20:59
Speaker
I think, again, in B2C, they have nailed that. Absolutely. All the QVC stuff, all the Alibaba stuff. Half the time, it's like, does anyone need this button? But they still do millions of dollars in sales. I feel like in B2B, that's the challenging but also fun part. It is fun. Even at ClickUp, it's only been three weeks. But it's fun to think about, hey, what is that strategic narrative that we want? How are we going to differentiate? We're in a somewhat saturated space. Gigantic Tam. Gigantic Tam.
00:21:27
Speaker
But how are we going to differentiate from us on a Monday or table notion, et cetera? Like how do we stand out from the crowd? How do people think about us? What is the emotional hook and connection? Like all of that stuff is so fun and so interesting. Yeah, that's awesome.
00:21:41
Speaker
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00:22:03
Speaker
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00:22:18
Speaker
Something Susan and I spend a lot of time talking about on the show, cause she's like the media brain and I'm on the content side and we always try to like find kind of the middle of the Venn diagram there and talking about kind of paid
Balancing Organic and Paid Marketing
00:22:29
Speaker
and organic. So I'd love to know like in your mind and what you've seen at Superside and what you kind of intend to do at ClickUp, the yin and yang of organic versus paid. Like how do you look at one to inform the other? That's a big question.
00:22:42
Speaker
It's a big question. And I feel like this comes up a lot. This is like the simplest way I think about it is like, you need both. You absolutely need both. You can't survive. Like anyone that's like, Oh, I can grow this business organically. Sure. Maybe for some time. Yeah, you need both. But I think the actual like larger question that we don't talk about enough is more like, what are the offers and call it campaigns or asset or let's call it the offer. Actually,
00:23:12
Speaker
A better term is pipe and fuel. Like what is the pipe? Let's say it's a Facebook ad or let's say it's search or let's say whatever, right? What is the pipe and what is the fuel? And pipe fuel fit is really important. That's what I try to figure out ASAP. I don't worry so much about, is it organic versus paid? I mean, later, later I'll figure that out. But it's more like, does this offer fit with this pipe? Like this content, does it fit with this YouTube strategy, this huge pipe that we have?
00:23:42
Speaker
And if I can make that work, then the paid versus organic thing is almost arbitrary. Like what is that? If it works organically, then I pump like dollars against it and like make it go viral or like have a lot more people see it or what have you, right? So I think it's like, yeah, you said Ying and Yang, I kind of feel like they're like two peas in a pot, like they're parallel racks, you know, they're not opposites, they're parallel. And some things will do better organically and some things will do better
00:24:12
Speaker
with a bit of paid help. And sometimes you have to start with paid to get the organic and vice versa. But as long as the fuel fits the pipe, that's step one. And then you worry about how are you getting distribution on eyeballs. I don't know if I answered your question. Yeah, that's beautiful. You took it and flipped it on its head. That was great. Loved it. Yeah, I'm a politician. It's like, you asked it. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to give you a different answer.
00:24:39
Speaker
But some of you still answered the question and it was really
Creative Standards and Speed at Superside
00:24:41
Speaker
lovely. Something that I think, like, I know you helped build at Superside was just the quality of the marketing that came out of there in terms of just like the polish and the consistency and the creativity. And I think when you saw something from Superside, it was like, oh, that's from Superside. Like it was very familiar every time. Yes.
00:25:01
Speaker
Right down to little things that I noticed where, and I actually shared this with my team on Slack one time, I would drop a link from Superside into Slack and the unfurl image, beautiful, perfect size, easy to read, right down to those details, right? And so I would love to know, because there was a decently sized team I think you had over there, how did you balance quality, creativity, and speed to always deliver every time?
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no, totally. So number one, given the nature of what Supersight did, like we were a design at scale company. So we knew that in order to sell this product, we needed to exude that ourselves. So obsession all the way down to the details was like obsession with creative and consistent creative.
00:25:49
Speaker
was like a non-negotiable. Like that was absolute non-negotiable given what we did. I think if Superside was not Superside, it was a different company. Maybe we could have like let that go a few times, but it was not a negotiable thing. The team knew that and
00:26:03
Speaker
they were like, they knew if I caught it, it'd be like game over. So everyone was like, it's got to be good. But I think beyond that, I'd say like the need for speed was like real. And we really optimized for that our creative director that we ended up hiring actually like he had really good video chops. But then he's just such a great jack of all trades that he just stretched and took on like everything.
00:26:25
Speaker
else, he totally got it. I think this is the thing with creatives, I feel, and sorry for all the creatives listening here. This is not disparaging. This is just how you guys are made up. You're wired a certain way. I think what he got, and I love him for this, is that he saw creative as a part of the marketing and growth machine.
00:26:47
Speaker
And he aligned every single person on his team to at least one or two mini machines. So he was like, okay, like Alex, you're the animator. So most of your skills are going to go to the ads team. So you're perfectly aligned with the performance marketing team. You're going to go to those meetings, by the way.
00:27:06
Speaker
And similarly, oh, you know, our illustrator and whatever you're aligned to the content marketing team because you need to actually help them with blog posts and ebooks and webinars and whatnot. And they would come to those meetings and so on and so forth. So he had like people in these like cross-functional work streams with everybody else on marketing.
00:27:22
Speaker
And because those creatives understood what was happening and what the numbers were, the speed thing was just naturally solved, organically solved. It was beautiful. It took some time to get there. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't overnight. And there was some pain and people complained about each other and blah, blah, blah all the time. Oh, marketing always gives me the brief, the classic standard stuff. But then that just fell apart eventually because they were just all in the same rituals. That's amazing.
00:27:51
Speaker
But yeah, for us it was like the non-negotiable was like a table steak. So that was like obviously how it was going to be. And we created a lot of like templates for like standard, like repeatable things. And then the need for speed was the second piece. And I think like, I think if I'm being honest, we kind of hacked the creativity piece. I think what looks super creative and original to people outside maybe was way more process driven.
00:28:16
Speaker
then it really looks to other people. Like we knew, for example, UGC style, skit style ads work for us. Like we had gotten to that place where we were like, that works for us. So we said to ourselves, okay, the formula is 50% of other media that we put out there is going to be this skit style media. Okay, great. We have a video, a small video studio set up in Toronto. So we're going to shoot everything there because it's just like,
00:28:41
Speaker
Like literally you can shoot it in four hours, throw it up, test it, see what happens. And then if it doesn't work, then you have a slew of other stuff that you can test. So that process just became so repeatable. And it looks like super original and creative, but I mean, we just knew the formula. 50% has to be skits. These are the type of topics we like always do the skits on, you know, small variations here and there. We knew like the punch lines. We knew the message that we had to come across. All of that was in a spreadsheet. And then the team could just turn that out.
00:29:08
Speaker
That's amazing. And I think those are the kind of things that happen when you bring creative into the business process. Because I think where you were going with like, hey creatives don't take this personally is like, they're not always plugged in. They're often an afterthought, right? Content and everybody else and everyone on the team aligns to a strategy, content goes off and writes it. And then they're like, here, like just make this look good, right?
00:29:30
Speaker
Exactly. And they don't understand the why they don't know even like the business like reason we're doing this thing. And so they're not involved at the layer. They're just Yeah, like sometimes I mean, it's not just as simple as bringing them in to the conversation. Like they literally have to be in and out of all of the same meetings. And yes, with you.
00:29:49
Speaker
But I don't think, I've never seen, maybe it's like this at some innovative companies, but I don't actually see, like, let's say I had to do that at ClickUp. That would be incredibly hard for me to know which creative to invite to which meeting, just as an example. Sure. There's no alignment of like this person with that squad and this faction or whatever. There's no alignment. It's just like a bunch of people that work on all sorts of stuff. Yeah. And they have like a classic ticketing system in place. Like it's,
00:30:15
Speaker
I think that setup doesn't allow for the creative to have the full context, no matter how good the brief is. They just won't have the full context. And to be honest, they won't give a shit. I think they're checking off the box, the to-do box, but they won't actually give a shit. But when you're in that ritual with your buddies, who you know, and you've been doing team exercises this whole time, and you see the numbers pop up, and you're like, woo-hoo, we nailed that. That's a different feeling.
00:30:41
Speaker
And I think the justice point, it's like the problem is by the time they're handed something, it sounds like it's a box to check. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like 95% of it's done. It's like, can you just, we just need a visual for this. So it's like, it doesn't inspire them. Yeah. 100%. I'm like, I'm like, how, how they wouldn't be able to treat us anything about that. Cause they're like, Oh, okay. You don't really actually need my expertise or my input. You just, you want to think, I'll make the thing.
00:31:07
Speaker
Yeah. That was my list of questions, Susan. I don't know if you had anything else. I remember, Rita, if you have anything that you were like, I got to talk about this on the show. Yeah, no. I mean, we could talk a bit about like the role of, I should interview you guys because I'm trying to figure out if you have no, okay, we talked about pipe and fuel, right?
Starting a Marketing Strategy from Scratch
00:31:26
Speaker
If you have no fuel, like let's say you have zero fuel, where do you start? That is my conundrum right now. Yes, and I had to do that actually.
00:31:34
Speaker
When we worked together, they had hired Jess first and it was funny because the first few months it was hard because on the paid side, I didn't have anything to promote yet because we didn't even like we had both just started. There was no content. I mean, there was nothing.
00:31:50
Speaker
And I think it worked out well because I told Jess, I'm like, I've written before. So if you know, she's like, Oh my God, thank God. So it's like, we were able to kind of collaborate on some of that stuff to at least help it go faster or have ideas. And so it was, some of it was a waiting game where at least on the paid side, it was very much, you know, they had just gotten around to funding. So it's like, let's spend it and start trying to get demos lined up. So it was much more like transactional in nature.
00:32:14
Speaker
which, you know, those things check the box of like, Oh, we have these MQLs, but the show up rate is very low, which was what I suspected was going to happen. So it's like, you know, the front end metrics looked great, but they wasn't translating into anything actionable. And then that was in like, Oh, I started in October, I guess. Yeah. I started in September. So by January, we kind of felt confident, like, Ooh, good. Yeah. We have this plan that we think is going to work great.
00:32:39
Speaker
We had spent a quarter just pumping out good content. Amazing. What kind of content, just as an example? I was going to say, I think part of it is finding that point of coalescence of the most impact. The ICP that is most likely to book a demo or sign up for a trial in the industry use case that is most likely to really love the product, just finding the stars that align.
00:33:05
Speaker
And then what are the stories that you have to tell those people to get them to choose you? I think that's kind of where we found that, right? Susan was like, we know it's performance marketers for this specific case at Marpipe. We know it's performance marketers. Those are my people. So it's like, okay, check. They're very dry. They're very sarcastic. They're highly jaded individuals.
00:33:28
Speaker
Beautiful. Like just appeal to their sarcasm. And that was actually what wound up working. Like the memes that we created did great. Nice. Yeah. And they weren't polished. I mean, it was not. I mean, memes aren't supposed to be. Yeah. Well, what was funny is we attested like really polished looking stuff. And then it wasn't until we launched the memes, those went because everybody started tagging their coworkers and they're like, Oh my God, it's us. And like,
00:33:49
Speaker
that's when that stuff took off. But part of the thing on the paid side too is that we were like, okay, we have, we've been building up this good content, but we also weren't at the point yet where we're like, we really want to put money towards amplifying it because if there's not enough other content, it's like they come for the one thing and then they're done. And then they're done. We were kind of like,
00:34:08
Speaker
I think at that point, the newsletter had just started like once a month. And so we weren't even at the point where we're like, let's get everybody on that yet. So it took months to kind of felt like we had a machine running that we're like, okay, now let's just start inserting emails into it and start building this thing. Nice. But we switched actually, like our whole strategy at that point, we stopped going after trying to book demos and refocused pretty much all of our media.
00:34:33
Speaker
on content amplification, building our newsletter list. And it went so well. That was when Jess and I were like, will you marry me? Never leave. So, but that was kind of, we, you know, we kind of had to parallel path it. And I would have preferred to have saved the media money, honestly, but it's just also, you know, understandably, it's a high pressure environment at a startup to like show investors that you're booking whatever. So we kind of had to do that dance a little bit of like, yeah,
00:34:59
Speaker
We're building MQLs, we're testing. We certainly learned a lot about what it took to sell the product on social and everything. But once we had the content, that was when things really started becoming a little more predictable. I think that was the other part was like the predictability of... Like you could say after a certain amount of time, you were able to say like, oh, if I spend this much on this tofu asset and we get this many leads, that'll convert at this rate. Yeah. And we knew if someone was on the newsletter for four months, those are the most likely people to convert.
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah. Right. So it was like, yeah, how moment because they was, Oh my God, I love that. So that was what we pumped all the money into the newsletter. And it proved out the value of it too. Like I feel like there's the struggle that I always have as a paid media person is like, I've always been a holistic marketer. So it's like, I can spend the paid media money, but it's like, I always look, I want to see the end result. Cause it's like, if it's not coming out of the machine to what we want, there's no point in stuffing money. What's it in service? Right. I'm like, what's the point of this? So
00:35:53
Speaker
When we started seeing like the engagement was really high in the newsletter the open rate was good really seem to be the right people and so then we started building hub spot reports where it would show like how many of the demo requested we gather also a marketing contact.
00:36:08
Speaker
And then we would pull the date when they joined versus the date when the demo happened. And that was how we started figuring out like when did they join the list and how long did it take them to convert to a demo? So then it was like you were saying it made the forecasting easier because we're like, okay, we know it's costing, you know, and there were there's obviously waste on the list where it's like there were people that were not our ICP.
00:36:27
Speaker
But we were able to kind of get down to like, this is how much it costs to get an ICP on the list. We know within four months, X percent of them are going to ask for a demo of those this many will close. So it started to get easier to understand. It's like the hardest part in the beginning is you start spending, everyone's like, oh, we're the MQLs. We're like, just give it. You have to wait. We're like, they're coming. We know they are coming. And they finally did. They all kind of started hitting at once. But it took about 20 days, I would say. I mean, we started.
00:36:54
Speaker
It's not that long. No. We started pushing it pretty hard in March, April, I think was when we really turned all the media over. And then we started seeing the meeting spike in June, July. That's a great story. Yeah. It was more consistent after that. It's like we felt like we could consistently say, hey, probably be getting between X and X MQLs per month. And this is about what they will cost. Yeah.
00:37:16
Speaker
And I think a lot of it was we knew the story we had to tell was everybody's A B testing ads. Like the thing with Mart pipe was you could multivariate tests. So you can throw 40 ads into the space, right? And see which one worked and know exactly why. And so a lot of it was just
00:37:31
Speaker
just education around like what even is it? How does it work? Why is it different? And then we just kind of built like everything around that. Case studies focused on that, right? Like the differences and like the little things that they found to be like unbelievably performant for them. And so it was like, once we kind of knew like, okay, that's the story and this is the best place to tell it. And like, we just had, we built this really beautiful little funnel of like, once you become a newsletter,
00:37:57
Speaker
Then you get the subscriber, you know, odds are, you know, after four months, this percentage of them are going to convert. So it's really, it's really lovely. I love that. But it's, I mean, I feel like it's 50 50 when you start from scratch, if it's going to get there, you know what I mean? Because it takes so long to test. You have, there has to be like a culture of patience for understanding that like there isn't, we're starting from nothing. So it's like, we have, even if something fails, we just have to learn something. You know what I mean? It's like, and even if we're learning that this didn't work,
00:38:26
Speaker
Yeah. That's one step closer to figuring out what does. Did you have backup? Let's say that failed. What would you do in that situation? Usually, we would just pivot. There were certainly things we tested that just didn't work. Luckily, we were in an environment where we could just be like, that didn't work.
00:38:42
Speaker
We didn't have a shortage of ideas, right? It was like, if that didn't work, I've got seven other things that are in my brain in this document. And that was fine. It was expected. I mean, that was kind of the benefit of working for a software company that does testing, because they know that it's all about just testing. You know what I mean? So there was never
00:38:58
Speaker
We had a lot of freedom, really, to test whatever we thought might work, which was nice. Because it wasn't a big company, we weren't constrained by, oh, it has to have this gradient on the brand. We didn't have to obsess over lots of small details. It was like, just push it out there. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Just get it out there, and let's just learn something. So we were lucky we were in that kind of environment. Yeah. No, that is super cool. And if I could just ask one last question about that, given that you were starting from scratch,
00:39:25
Speaker
If you think about the funnel, where in the funnel did you choose to concentrate?
Optimal Point for Content Creation in Marketing Funnel
00:39:31
Speaker
Assuming you got your bio persona ICP figured out, industry figured out, where in the funnel? Did you start with top, middle, bottom? We started more at the top first because we were trying to figure out the targeting. That was kind of the biggest thing was we had not limited funds. I mean, it was a healthy enough budget, but we certainly didn't have unlimited ways to test it. So we knew that the content
00:39:53
Speaker
was right because we're like, when we put it into newsletters or put it into things, the engagement's there. The thing that was hard was this was like post iOS 14. So it became a question of like, how do we target in ways that are going to be trackable, efficient? And that was part of the reason the newsletter worked well was because it was a more top of funnel thing. If we had gotten a bunch of newsletter signups that didn't convert to anything, we wouldn't have kept doing it.
00:40:17
Speaker
But that was just a higher up signal that we could start with, to be like, where are our people? And we deliberately, when we did Top of Funnel, we built in like a question that would help us understand, is this our ICP or not? So as we were getting it, we're like, is the targeting right? Are we getting who we want? Once we knew that, that slimmed down, and we really put a lot more effort towards the retention stuff. Wouldn't you say that, Jess? I kind of feel like that's when we were like, let's do the newsletter weekly, and let's do the podcast. And once we knew kind of the formula,
00:40:47
Speaker
for the top on the paid, then it was like, okay, they're coming in, they're signing up, so now we can leave that running, but let's focus our efforts on what can we produce to keep them engaged. And I think it was, we had so much education to do on AB versus multivariate, what it is, and everyone always wanted to know, does it get you to stat SIG, right? And so we had a lot of education to do around, you don't always have to hit stat SIG, at least you're getting signals. So it had to be a lot of top of phone, because there was just so much education to be done on what is this thing.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody has been misinformed about statistical significance. It's like, oh, if you look into Bayesian theory and it's like, relax, you can tell like this is working better than this. Yeah. It's like pretty easily. Yeah. And I was like, you want to spend $5,000 more just to get there? Just to get there? Yeah, the rest of this. And you can say it's 95% sure because I'm like, it's at 80, which is good enough for me. And we don't need to spend any more money on this. Totally.
00:41:38
Speaker
This has been such an amazing, amazing conversation,
Conclusion and Future Collaboration
00:41:42
Speaker
Amrita. Thank you so much for joining us and taking the time. I know you're like on vacation right now, so. Just today. Yeah. Okay. Well, hey. Still one day they're recording. One day you're off. You spent it with us. We really appreciate it. No, I learned a lot. Thank you so much. And I'll be picking your brains for sure as I try to figure out what are we going to do with our content marketing.
00:42:01
Speaker
Amazing. Gladly. We will be here anytime you need us. Amazing. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening to That's Marketing, Baby. If you dig what we're putting down, be sure to subscribe and share with your marketing besties. Because, you know, hot marketers don't gatekeep. And if you're like, this is not enough, I need more, we got you. Rants and Raves is the official newsletter of That's Marketing, Baby. Every week, Susan and I share one thing we love and loathe in the world of marketing. Get on the list at thatsmarketingbaby.com.
00:42:53
Speaker
Okay, bye!