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Making Big Bets and Awesome Ads with Alexa Kilroy
324 Plays1 year ago
Alexa Kilroy — the Director of Marketing at Stay AI, and former Head of Brand at Triple Whale — has a consistent, tenacious grip on what's new, what's working, and what's not in the world of DTC and e-comm marketing.
She joined Jess on the pod to talk about:
- Her non-linear path from high school teacher to tech marketer
- The marketing tactics that are working for Stay AI right now
- Why interactive content needs to be part of your marketing mix
- How to quickly test if a big bet will pay off or not
- What standout ad creative really means
- And why relying on atypical results in case studies can actually backfire
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Hosts
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 Shoutout: Air Cule and Automo
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.
00:01:11
Speaker
Welcome back everybody to another episode of That Marketing Baby. Super excited to have you guys here today because we don't have guests very often on the show, but today we have an incredible guest.
Meet Alexa Kilroy: From Teacher to Marketer
00:01:22
Speaker
We have Alexa Kilroy with us today, everybody. Get excited. Alexa's the director of marketing at Stay AI and former head of brand at Triple Whale. Before that, she was an ambitious high school English teacher seeking something to quench her entrepreneurial thirst. So I love that she has a very indirect path to marketing, as so many of us do.
00:01:40
Speaker
She took a chance and pivoted into e-commerce and within a few short years rose through the ranks to become an e-commerce marketer through and through. She's managed six figure ad campaigns for multiple D2C brands, spent hours studying consumer behavior and digital marketing data, developed creative strategy from the ground up, written lots of copy. If it's in e-com and it's related to marketing or leadership, Alexa has probably done it. So welcome, Alexa, we're so happy to have you. Hi, thank you so much, I'm super stoked.
Alexa's Career Path and Role at Stay AI
00:02:05
Speaker
Tell me a bit about yourself, your background, your journey to stay AI from teacher to now just brilliant SaaS marketer. Thank you. I wish it was a very replicable path where I could be like, oh, if someone's interested in doing what I do, here are the steps. But honestly, it's a series of weird and fortunate hop, skips, and jumps. But yeah, I'm Alexa. I'm currently the Director of Marketing at Stay AI. I live in Boston, formerly lived in Austin for the past five years.
00:02:32
Speaker
And kind of like you mentioned, your intro, I graduated from college at Boston College with a very specific degree that like literally set me up to teach high school English in every way possible. So in the way that nurses do clinicals, I was student teaching during the day and taking classes of my own at night. Very much like really narrowed myself into a very particular future. Taught for one year out of undergrad and was just truly got broke in a new city. Couldn't pay my bills, was like, rot row, we've made a critical mistake. And so,
00:03:01
Speaker
It was a series of just kind of fortunate events that happened. I got a six-month foot in the door job in EdTech and then another foot in the door job at an e-com subscription company that was selling supplements that needed just employee number four that could do everything from
00:03:17
Speaker
handling customer support calls to like repackaging returns to ended up running their ads. A lot of just kind of like crawling up the ladder in different ways of the ecommerce world on the brand side took like a hot break from that went through tech stars with a tech community tech startup with a founder in Austin that I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, back to ecom back to ecom for a while did some consulting and then basically like my last
00:03:42
Speaker
Air quotes, real standard job in e-comm was with a brand called First Day that makes family wellness supplements, vitamins, things of that sort, was kind of running up advertising for them there. And my former CMO at Triple Whale saw me tweeting about creative strategy and asked if he could pick my brain on some of the work that they were trying to do with Triple Whale's branding. I ended up getting the drinks a couple of times. He ended up offering me a job.
00:04:04
Speaker
Ended up there for a year. They went through a series A, then a series B. A lot of things change. I was ready for my next opportunity. And so I came to stay as director of marketing about three months ago now, September of 2023, and was given like the dreamiest job ever. I was given a company that's doing well with a robust product support and sales team, but basically a blank slate on marketing.
00:04:27
Speaker
equal parts very dreamy but also very stressful but got to kind of start building from the ground up and so we've been cranking for the past three months or so and I have a feeling that might be helpful to kind of talk a little bit about what that journey has been like for those who are maybe in a similar position or doing some revamping of their own.
00:04:43
Speaker
That's amazing. And I love that you have been going back and forth between Ecom and SaaS a bit.
E-commerce vs. SaaS Marketing: What's the Difference?
00:04:50
Speaker
I would love to, before this show is over, just talk about biggest similarities and differences there, because I think that that could be super interesting for everyone listening.
00:04:58
Speaker
We can dig in. Let's just do it right now. I'm happy to dig in. Okay, let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, so what I will say is that I have that quick stint, six month stint in SAS in the beginning of my career, and I was bored to tears. I was doing post sales account management. So basically, like helping people go through their data and learn how to use the product better was just super bored.
00:05:16
Speaker
was not the path for me. And also, I realized that EdTech to me was not as exciting as teaching itself, even though it paid better. So for me, it was like, this is just not the right place in tech. But unfortunately, little naive me thought, I just don't like tech. So then I did e-com for a while, then I did a little tech. Yeah, went in tech with an early stage founder who was literally building her product as she was going through Techstars, which is like similar to Y Combinator, if you're familiar.
00:05:40
Speaker
And then I was like literally wire-faming and building products from the ground up. And I was like, I don't like this either. And I was like, oh, I just don't like tech. So then after I did econ for a while and my, my former CMO at Triple Well called me, I was like, dude, I don't like tech. I tried it. And he's like, no, you haven't really had a chance to market tech. That's why.
00:06:01
Speaker
So at the end of the day, I think being an educator, no matter what world of marketing you go into translates incredibly well because frankly, you get particularly like teenage boys care about books written by old dead white guys, you have some sort of superpower that you should be leveraging to get people to care about things. But I think when it comes down to it, it's it's not even like
00:06:22
Speaker
how you're marketing and if that's different based on the channel. Of course, there are different channels that you invest more and things like that. It's really who you're speaking to. And I think the reason that I found my niche in e-commerce tech is because I'm talking to myself. So my ICP is who I've been for the past couple of years. And so sitting down and reading copy and asking
00:06:39
Speaker
copy that I wrote and asking myself, does this compel me or not? It's one of the most effective ways of checking my own work. So I think there are a lot of principles that at the end of the day are very similar between the two. You probably have more budget to spend in tech, and you can do some of the bigger bet things with your marketing. Things like thought leadership and your content probably matter more than your e-commerce and direct response ads. But at the end of the day, if you know your customer really well, which is I know something that
00:07:08
Speaker
that you guys and pride kind of on your podcast, it's central to your podcast, then you're going to be good no matter where you're at. Yeah. I love that so much. I think that's so great. And it's so funny that you thought that you just, like tech was just not for you, but it was just, you hadn't found the right thing in tech yet. And I think that that's amazing.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah. I think there's something to be said about marketing to either who you currently are or who like a past life kind of career, because that's where you sit in that zone of genius, right? Like you're not only a good marketer, but you're marketing to an audience that you intimately know. And so you understand like the language they use, the kind of inside jokes, right? Like all the memes that go around the pain points and frustrations, like you inherently have those and know those. And so
00:07:54
Speaker
you can't help but create great marketing around that because it's who you are. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, obviously you have a leg up if you already were that person before, but I don't think that's impossible to get to that level of intimate knowledge. I mean, I think frankly, like if you're passionate about your job or the product or what you're doing in general, like you can definitely get there. I think like the biggest goldmine of really tapping into an ICP, obviously figure out what channel those people live on. But like Reddit is like the biggest untapped resource in the entire world that I think
00:08:24
Speaker
I don't think marketers maybe have the time to know how to really get the most use out of it because we're busy. But even when I'm working on a sub niche or something that I've worked in before, just proving I've read it for a little bit, maybe throwing some stuff through chat GPT and telling me what are the common words and phrases that people are using? Or how would you describe their tone? There are opportunities to learn and absorb that. You don't have to have the leg up. But if you can find a job where you're talking to yourself, that's pretty sweet gig.
Conducting and Utilizing Customer Interviews
00:08:50
Speaker
I love that. So good. All right, let's talk about you know, you've been at stay AI for three months now. What has that first three months looked like for you? Give us a little rundown of like, you know, how you got into that mindset of these customers. Yeah, totally. I think I mean, obviously, it's gonna be very different based on where you're at when you're coming into a company. I was like I said, I was fortunate enough to come to a company where we were closing our series. I we already had 350 established customers.
00:09:16
Speaker
I had really great internal resources on my team. So when it came to learning our customers and how our customers use the product, I, of course, conducted standard customer interviews. I actually was pretty much always running behind the clock. So I did the two birds with one stone situation where I would do customer interviews, but I would also use them as a case study so that it could be creating content at the same time and sales and implement resources. And so I would record the whole case study call and then only use the bits
00:09:45
Speaker
that were relevant for the case study, for the case study, and then chop out the rest that was really for my personal learning. A great tool for that is to script. If you've never used it before, you can do it.
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah. I'm not a representative for Descript. I wish I had a coupon code at this point because I've been slinging it. But super sweet. If you ever worked with audio and transcribable audio, because you can transcribe audio or video clips really fast, and you can edit the audio and video clip like a Google Doc. So you delete a sentence from the transcription. It deletes the clip from the audio. 10 out of 10.
00:10:17
Speaker
So, so good. So easy. We create all of our clips for this podcast because like I can just go in and do it and I don't have to be like a brilliant video editor. Yeah. It's like video editing for writers. So great. It's the, I describe it as like, it's like Canva where approachable design is like
00:10:36
Speaker
kind of the same thing for approachable video, audio, podcasting, whatever. That was such a tangent. Sorry, everyone. That's okay. That's important. You need to get to scratch. Trust me, it's not even that expensive. But my point is, I literally multitask to my customer interview calls. I was fortunate enough that, I guess for those who don't even know what say AI is or even get there yet, but we are in Shopify e-commerce tech space.
00:10:59
Speaker
subscription enablement and our product not only does the core subscription feature set that you need to run a subscription business, but it also has a variety of industry leading features that enable you to run things like AI powered and optimized promotional testing, proactive and reactive turn reduction tools, all kinds of stuff to really just maximize the LTV of your customers, increase your average order value with upsells and add-ons and then
00:11:25
Speaker
also reduce churn along the way. So really just kind of treating your subscription program as not a set it and forget it part of your business, but an optimizable library of your business like you would with digital marketing or anything else. And so we have a very niche ICP in the sense that it has to be Shopify based customers who are running or intend to run a subscription program. And we also have our sales reps verticalized so that our AEs like we have a food and beverage guy that just knows everything about subscription food and beverage and he's our sales rep, etc.
00:11:55
Speaker
So I was able to lean on those folks as well to really help me understand, tactically, how customers, what the pain points are by vertical, how they're implementing and using the product. Of course, got back into access. If you are on, say, AI, I know so many things. Got into your cloud. I've looked at every promo you've ever ran with us. But yeah, there was obviously some back-end digging. And then, of course, there's just general, like, market and customer research that you need to do, understanding your positioning against competitors.
00:12:18
Speaker
understanding why folks went from a competitor to you, all that kinds of stuff that you really just beef up. And then I create a variety of different resources for myself, be them internal or sales resources to help them understand our ICP, things to help us.
00:12:34
Speaker
I don't do like the standard persona cards. I do like different types of messaging and positioning from work, but did all that kinds of stuff to help us work on revamping, not only like base messaging on our website, but also helping us to determine like, where do we need to focus our resources right now? What do our customers want and need? Do we need to help them understand the product better? Do we need to help them understand the problem and why we're the solution better? All that kinds of stuff. Getting us towards the direction where we can actually strategize on our most effective and efficient marketing opportunities.
00:13:03
Speaker
So that's kind of the space that I'm in now where we did a lot of analysis and a lot of setup at the beginning. And now we're working on execution and testing to see where our greatest, you know, like levers of opportunity are within our own business.
00:13:17
Speaker
That's so great. Okay. A couple of things I just want to like reiterate there. One is like, it feels like you're back again in a zone of genius, right? Because you're doing SaaS marketing for a D to C like e-commerce audience, right? This is a world, both worlds, you know well. So I think that is super interesting too. I love the idea that you are like multitasking on customer calls. Like case of these don't have to be what they were back in the day, right? They don't have to be this lengthy text.
00:13:43
Speaker
like problem solution results formula anymore. Like they can be a really quick hit of here's three things a customer said about us and here's like three statistics about like how we helped them. So I love that you like kind of use that as an opportunity to learn and then also create content. So incredible. And I would love to know a little bit more.
00:14:03
Speaker
What is actually working for you all there? In this first 30, 60, 90 days, we get really into tactical weeds on the show. People that listen to us love the takeaways that they can try tomorrow. What is showing promise at STAI right now tactically that you can safely talk to us about?
00:14:22
Speaker
Totally. I have a little cheat sheet next to me. So if you're seeing this in a video clip, I apologize while I look down.
Interactive Content and Case Studies for Lead Generation
00:14:30
Speaker
But what's working? So one of the things I wanted to expand upon is what I've learned from making case studies over the past couple years. Because to your point, I think a lot of people are doing them no offense, wrong, or not maximizing the results that they can really get out of them.
00:14:43
Speaker
One thing that I've learned, particularly when your ICP involves busy people or people that wear a lot of hats, which is very common in the e-commerce space, is that they don't just want the tool that's going to help them get the result. They need the strategy and the contacts and basically the product enablement that helps them not only understand how they're going to get to that outcome when they're in the sales process, but stuff that they can actually implement once
00:15:10
Speaker
they are in the product so that they can start achieving those results. And then you can use them as a case study. And so my case study framework is actually quite a lot different than what I see other brands do. You look on our webpage, you'll see its results statistics, i.e. the stuff that catches people's eye, what they want to get first. A little bit of background intro or context, like I'm talking three sentences on the brand, one or two sentences on the challenges and the pain points.
00:15:35
Speaker
I'm trying to cut out all the fluff and then what I actually am using are basically three core bullet points that I call strategy. And that's how they're implementing our product and how it's actually resulting in those critical statistics that I'm putting at the top, those deltas that make people really excited to look at.
00:15:52
Speaker
I think I see it particularly in the SaaS space. I see a lot of what I call feature vomiting, where people are like, here's this feature we have. Here's what it does. Yes, it's going to get you an outcome. Here's some case studies about some people, but they're really not telling the story of how that outcome is truly being achieved. And so by all means, lead with the juicy numbers, but make sure that
00:16:13
Speaker
in the content that you're producing like case studies that it's trying to prove how effective you are, you're helping customers understand the answer to the critical question, which is like, what do I need to do after I buy this or download this to actually get to that outcome? How heavy of a lift is it going to be for me? How much do I have to do on my own with my own brain versus like how genius do I have to be to figure it out? Not just the UI. And so that's one of the biggest things that I've learned is
00:16:40
Speaker
Displaying our product in action and highlighting strategies that people are using to get great results out of our product, one of the best lead gen mechanisms you can use regardless of if it's in a social post or on a case study on your website, all that kind of stuff. Another thing that's working is what I kind of call interactive content formats.
00:17:00
Speaker
A lot of people love to write blog posts. We've got the SEO optimized stuff. We have to run up our Twitter posts, whatever. There's a lot of content that's downloadable or readable, but it's not interactive. And we as humans, between our personal life and our work life, are constantly consuming and reading so much, regardless of how much you actually like to read. And so where you can cut down on words and give something some dynamic movement and get people to really engage,
00:17:28
Speaker
Not only are you literally roping them into the funnel by getting them to engage, but you're also giving them just a better content consumption experience. So whether that's some sort of content flow where they're reading something and then they're clicking and expanding something to get more information, it's a calculator, it's a template that they can use to implement in some aspect of their own business.
00:17:50
Speaker
that sort of kind of interactive content as I'm calling it just tends to be much juicier for getting people to not only care about who you are and what you have to say, but also building some trust and affinity with your brand as a fast brand.
00:18:05
Speaker
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00:18:28
Speaker
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00:18:42
Speaker
I think too, just to double click on that a little bit, not everyone does that, so it feels really different. It feels like the brand experience is elevated when you come across a piece of content like that. Laudable just did this great, it's called Grade My Case Study. I don't know if you've seen it yet, but it's this amazing interactive experience where you put the URL of your case study in there.
00:19:03
Speaker
And it uses AI to grade it on eight different factors. It gives you feedback on what you could do better. While you're waiting, it writes a poem using AI. So it's like there's humor and entertainment, but you're also getting value out of it.
00:19:19
Speaker
It could have just been an ebook about how to build great case studies, but the fact that it's personalized and interactive. I've talked to 12 people about it, and I think it just spreads the shareability and it's like, oh, they're the kind of brand that does stuff like that.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah absolutely i'm seeing a lot of creative tech brands like like literally like fintech but creative tech doing all sorts of cool things that the h1 on the website where if it does something with generator they are you can type in a keyword of your choice and actually see.
00:19:53
Speaker
in real life something that generates for you and how you would use that product. So again, it's like product in action is also an interactive thing that you can offer. But even something like pricing calculators, stuff that is not super advanced, doesn't have to use AI, can just use some sort of logic that you build or that you know your product already works with. Huge. And then a couple other things that I was thinking of, particularly in the SaaS space, I think
00:20:20
Speaker
thought leadership, you just can't express how important it is. I think we all make it sound kind of boring and gross because I think thought leadership is just like the most tired term ever. But if I say that, you know what I mean. I think taking your thought leadership to the next level and again, like literally getting technical, providing strategy like you're saying with this podcast even like people don't want your thoughts on subscription as a business. They want your thoughts on
00:20:46
Speaker
three different email flows that you've seen implemented that have made a huge difference because then they can bookmark it and then actually go do it later. And so leveraging your thought leadership to be tactical and also just like personal, personable and normal. I think unless you're really deep in the weeds in like healthcare tech and tech where you know your audience wants clinical language, you can be
00:21:06
Speaker
real with people. I appreciate it. And then also just above and beyond support. I think one thing that it's easy to forget is we live in the land of Amazon Prime, DoorDash, whatever, where you're anything less than completely satisfied. One of these major conglomerates is just going to give you a full refund, give you a frictionless cancellation experience, whatever it is. And we're just
00:21:30
Speaker
not in the world anymore where people are going to tolerate crappy support, frankly. And so making sure that your support team is not just capable, but very excellent, giving them the resources that they need, making sure that your marketing team is providing them with the resources that they need so that
00:21:46
Speaker
You have happy customers, you can then keep using, you know, to build off more marketing materials off of. But that is also just a winning marketing campaign. It's frankly like you against your competitor. Does your competitor take 48 hours to respond to a ticket?
00:22:01
Speaker
can you beat their SLA? Like that's huge for a lot of people. Yeah. Sometimes that is like the unique differentiator right there is like they're essentially parody products, but like I can actually talk to a human over here and over here it's like chatbot, I can't find a phone number. Like that will make the decision for people almost a hundred percent of the time. Absolutely.
00:22:22
Speaker
So Alexa, I found out about you through Twitter, because you tweet all kinds of like, just really, really interesting things when I found you, you were on kind of this kick of like, creative testing, creative strategy. And so I think like, that's how I first found you and kind of came to know you. And I think that's how a lot of people are like, Oh, Alexa, she's like, create a strategy, like, go to right. So would love to know just
00:22:50
Speaker
a handful. And I'm sorry, I'm springing this on you. This was not part of the collection. This is a safe space. Okay. I would love to know like, for those of us who are trying to bulk up or flex that creative strategy muscle a bit more, whether that's in interactive content, or as we're building like campaigns, like what in your eyes, one, like makes good creative, and two are like must haves for
00:23:19
Speaker
making sure it is actually going to work for your audience. Yeah, I love hate when people ask me this question because they always frame it so sweetly like Alexa, you know, things about creative and
Creative Strategy and Audience Alignment
00:23:28
Speaker
then I always give them the worst answer, which is that there is no blanket answer because it's so it depends on your ICP and it so depends on what you're selling. And so like to my point earlier, right, a fintech product, like the way that I would interact with buyers of the fintech product versus the way that I interact
00:23:43
Speaker
and develop creative for my product now are just comically different. I mean, they might as well be apples and oranges. And so I think it really depends on your ICP. But that being said, I think there are a couple of different ways that we can like talk and think about creative. So I guess I want to focus it tactically as opposed to like broadly. So the first thing is like, if you're feeling creative burnout, I have a couple of great resources that I would love to share that are things that I go to when I feel brain touched.
00:24:12
Speaker
The first one is I'm a huge fan of Emily Kramer's MKT1 newsletter and website. If you don't dig into it, you really should. I think that's her name, Alan Kramer. Forgive me if I got it wrong, but I have it bookmarked at this point. But essentially just an incredible newsletter and resource that has a lot to do with content marketing, ranging from prioritizing to executing on innovation and making sure that the content marketing that you're doing is actually worth it and creative ways that
00:24:41
Speaker
You're not only, when we talk about creative, I think both copy and visual creative. Hopefully that's what you were thinking. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So just innovative ways that you can produce content for your brand, the words you use, the way that you design them, thinking about what you can do at your company that actually provides unique perspective to your space. Cause frankly, we could all write a 300 word article about whatever thing that is like,
00:25:08
Speaker
broad and SEO optimized. But at the end of the day, that's not really going to build a relationship between you and a customer or you and a prospect. So MKT1 is a great resource. I always recommend that people read or reread Cash Fertising by Drew Eric Whitman. It's an oldie but a goodie. It's like one of the most cliche copywriting books. But I think whatever you're feeling a little bit dried up, it's one of those resources that helps ground you and remind you like, how do I actually talk to people? How do I figure out what they really want?
00:25:36
Speaker
what are the right ways to test and spin. And sometimes I've tested things that that book suggests that I would never test on my own, like digging into pinpoint adjacent things or broader issues that might be inspiring someone to purchase something, never would have gotten there on my own. And that book really, that is like the tactical legendary book of laying out copywriting and messaging positioning for you. And then the third thing, kind of like I was mentioning is keyword searching on
00:26:02
Speaker
Twitter, Reddit, Ahrefs, whatever you can get after it just to see what's going on in the space, what your competitors are doing, that kind of stuff. When it comes to being stand out creative, I think that there are a lot of different answers based on your ICP. I think there are a couple of broad sentiments that I have related to the SaaS space in general, one of which is that SaaS does not have to be boring.
00:26:24
Speaker
If you think about it, no offense to the baby boomers and beyond. They are starting to phase out of leadership. Who is phasing into leadership now are literally people from 21 to 50, right? Like 45. Your people that are making purchasing decisions are younger and their preferences are different than
00:26:45
Speaker
the old ceo or the old decision maker and so thinking about how you might approach these people differently and think of a tactical example at triple whale we knew that our Key decision maker was often a founder or a cmo that was somewhere in this like 20s to 30s range We were like what's something that might trigger a fond memory and build affinity with them mtv is the real world
00:27:08
Speaker
I get it. These are long botical jumps. There were long conversations in this process. And then we built a reality TV show as a lead generation capture mechanism. I don't even know how you want to explain it. It was such a crazy idea. But we just did something kind of bonkers and creative, capitalizing upon something that we knew would be tasty to our ICP.
00:27:30
Speaker
And so that methodology applies on your big back marketing, as well as things like literally how you do your branding on your website, whether it's bold and bright or it's refined and it's like New York Fashion Week or Paris Fashion Week versus, you know, it's very, like it is very finance and science oriented and you know who you're talking to and they do want that more like clinical messaging and visuals. And so I think just being really aware of who your purchase decision maker is.
00:27:56
Speaker
and then thinking ways that you can get creative and speak to them. And other notes that I had, some thoughts I had on staying that creative. Kind of to my point about SaaS in general, you can absolutely be real. You can be authentic with people. If your website isn't the place for that, leverage your CEO or your head of sales or your head of marketing's LinkedIn profile or Twitter profile and be a real person there.
00:28:20
Speaker
And then make sure that when you are developing creative, any sort of asset, really, you tread the line between like hyper exaggeration and being underwhelming, you know, like very, it's actually like a fine line where
00:28:35
Speaker
you want to be roping in the right people into your funnel. And so if you're like super hyper-exaggerating and inflating statistics on a case study or choosing deltas that look really good, but when reality, you know, the numbers aren't so great on the back end, it just looks like a great shift in a delta. You run the risk of bringing what I call curiosity clickers into your orbit who are not your ICP and they're not going to be the right customers for you. You end up turning folks yourself
00:29:04
Speaker
And then you also need to make sure you're like exciting and interesting enough to get people into your orbit in the first place. So being mindful of that line to toe when you are writing your copy and developing your creative. And then my last big kind of point is we live in a world where we're inundated with advertising. It's an ad. Get to the point.
00:29:24
Speaker
Particularly this generation of leaders who are key purchases is your makers that are in that twenty fifty range like they know what an app looks like video display app looks like they know what a sponsored google ad looks like at the top of their search they know so get to the point give them the outcome that they're gonna achieve and how they're gonna achieve it don't waste time on these like
00:29:43
Speaker
gimmicky scroll stopping clickable items that don't actually really achieve anything for you you can be bold and bright and tell people what you need to say. You can use fun words but like i would cut the fluff i get to the point and make sure you're advertising as concise and just as meaningful as you can be because.
00:30:05
Speaker
people are at the point where they're just sick of being advertised to as stuff that's irrelevant to them. Yeah. Clear over clever. Things that catch my eye now are like, oh, that actually says what it does. Oh, okay. I would like to learn more about that because I feel like they're going to be real with me. They're not just like,
00:30:21
Speaker
using a bunch of buzzwords. I love that. I wrote down two notes. One, I would love to know, did you test something small or like a pilot around that real world idea to like know that it was gonna hit before you went with
Testing Creative Ideas Effectively
00:30:35
Speaker
it? Or were you just like, nope, this is gonna work and you went with it?
00:30:37
Speaker
My test was definitely qualitative in like, what if we did this, kind of bringing that sort of thing up at happy hours and events and gauging for people in our space who are customers or prospects. I came to credit for the idea. It was not my idea. It was my former CMO's idea. And admittedly, he will tell you to this day, it was a little bit half baked when he came up with it. And it was definitely a big bet marketing play. But I think the sentiment
00:31:01
Speaker
the foundational sentiment behind it, which is test something that hits your people hard in a unique and innovative way, that is very real and that is very provable. But I'm always a fan of build an LP or build a beta test and see how many people sign up before you do the thing. Yeah, exactly. Don't spend all your money to find out, that didn't work so well.
00:31:29
Speaker
mistake to make. And the easiest way to fix it is literally you just build, it can even be the jankiest of landing pages, but build the landing page, market the landing page and see how many people sign up for the thing before you spend the money on it. Yeah. Get a little weightless going. And if it doesn't pan out, like, oh well. We have this other thing instead. Look at this other thing. Use distraction techniques. That's right. The other thing that you mentioned, which I thought was super interesting was like,
00:31:56
Speaker
Don't rely on those outlier statistics for all of your content. You might have a case study where someone really had an incredible return on their ad spend, or they cut this amount of time, which is
00:32:14
Speaker
not typically the case with other customers. And it makes a great case study, but it also raises a point that then you also need to have some sort of typical result. There's one thing to have a really awesome case study that's an outlier that was like, oh, this is the holy grail of what a customer can do.
00:32:32
Speaker
do on our platform or with our tool, but then there's also the reality of like most people see this kind of result. And like having that builds trust as well, because it doesn't feel like you're getting hoodwinked when you come in and okay, now I bought the product, but I'm not seeing the returns that like were kind of promised to me in these case studies. So I love that you brought that up. Like don't overly rely on those big, like exciting numbers if they're not like typical.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the ones that really grinds my gears that I see people doing is like, for whatever product they're selling, let's say the customer went from generating zero dollars from this effort in revenue to a thousand, right? They're going to show that Delta and that's going to look insane, but it's like they hadn't even spun up that program before. They haven't even turned on that lever of their marketing before. So obviously that Delta is going to look insane and while they're going to look incredible, but okay, now if you're at scale and you're already running that program and you're already making
00:33:27
Speaker
and revenue like you can't expect, you know, that thousand-point return. So I think just being mindful that there is a delicate balance between showing great results and then showing great results that are actually like statistically significant and contextually meaningful. This is such like a
00:33:44
Speaker
sad example, but I think about when you see those weight loss ads, right? The reality is the aspirational version of you is like, well, not you, obviously, but the hypothetical you. It's like, wow, look, this woman took this smoothie and she lost 100 pounds in 10 days. It's like, wow, that's insane. But also if you got served the same ad and she lost like 25 pounds in 10 days, you would probably be more likely to believe
00:34:09
Speaker
The 25,000 Sunday is one anyway because that seems way more achievable and healthier and reasonable for yourself. But the same role applies to your business. And so I think just being mindful about what you're promising people and the timelines in which you can promise or they can expect that thing goes a long way. And you'll find that you don't have to hyper inflate or use those crazy deltas. There are equally as exciting
00:34:34
Speaker
achievable results that someone with a critical lens will look at and trust more and be more interested to action on anyway. Love that. That's a good sound bite right there. Let's end it right there. That was lovely. Alex, it was so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing all of your knowledge. Where can people find you if they want to know more about you and learn more from you?
00:35:01
Speaker
So I am on Twitter at Alexa Kilroy, A-L-E-X-A-K-I-L-R-O-Y. And then if you're interested in learning more about stay or the work that I'm doing there, our website is just stay.ai.
00:35:13
Speaker
Amazing. Awesome. Thank you so much. 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 get cute. And if you're like, this is not enough, I need more, we got you. Ransom 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. OK. Bye. Bye.