Scale-Up Challenges

This episode contains the viewpoints of five industry experts on Growth Marketing. Their experience provides valuable insights into strategies that can help navigate the challenges of international markets, adapt to growth and scale, and use creativity to create impactful content that stands out.

Guests

Charlotte Morris, Global Senior Director Regional Marketing, Hibob

Ted Eltringham, Growth Lead EMEA, Rippling

Audrey Vanderoost, Growth Marketing Principal, CyberCube

Borys Khodan, Head of Paid Media, Synthesia

Sarah Parker, Content Manager, Chattermill

Hello welcome to our podcast. I'm Joaquin Dominguez, head of marketing of Adzact. And today we are tackling the big challenges businesses face as they scale up, focusing on marketing pivotal role. So today we will split our discussion into four key areas internationalization, marketing models for scaling. We will explore marketing optimization and the surprises along the way. And finally how to prove the real impact of marketing on businesses growth. So let's start with a quick round of introductions. Um

Audrey, yes, sure. I'm Audrey vanderoost. I'm the principal growth marketing manager at Cyber Cube. My background has always been

in marketing and working mostly, for tech companies or in the tech space. And, cyber Cube is a cyber risk modeling, company. We help insurance professional to quantify the

financial impact of cyber incidents on, the companies that they're looking to, insure or, portfolios of companies as well.

Thank you. Sarah.

Yes. And my name is Sarah Parker, and I'm a content manager at Chattermill

which is a role I recently took on. They're a young, startup, selling, customer feedback, analytics, in a very holistic way. So across the customer lifecycle, looking at reviews online, and my background is 15 years in content across a sort of publishing and

tech.

Thank you. Sarah. Boris.

Hi everyone. I'm Boris, head of paid media at Synthesia. Looking after paid, ads, here we are. AI video generation platform. I won't go into much detail in the introduction, but I'm all about paid ads. Paid advertising. Ever since I started

my career, it's always been ads. Fanatic of measurements, optimization, conversion rate optimizations and all of this and love the details. I think devil is always in the details.

Brilliant. Chaz

Hi. I'm Chaz. I'm global senior director of regional marketing here at. HiBob

my career up to to now, um, has been 20 plus years, predominantly in technology. So I feel incredibly millennial when I say that, and in various size companies as well. So from co-founder right through to Microsoft and everything in between. Brilliant

Ted. Hi, Guys. I'm ted, I have around seven, eight years experience in kind of B2B growth. I'm currently growth lead, for rippling, for EMEA. What rippling does is it combines loads of kind of platforms in one all your kind of HR and IT and finance platforms

And makes them all kind of connected for like one place to kind of use them all.

Thank you Ted. And finally Tom.

And my name is Tom Gatton, and I'm the chief executive and founder of Adzact which is a B2B ad platform.

Thank you Tom. All right. So as we can see, all of your companies have

experienced an incredible growth. And internationalization is definitely, a way of of expanding and going after new territories. So let's talk about this. So for businesses looking to expand internationally, what are the key

considerations to ensure marketing strategies are sensitive and effective across different regions and cultures? This is an open question. So please who wants to go first?

I'm happy to, obviously as regional marketing at. HiBob and HiBob is an HR platform, particularly with the subject matter that we're dealing with, which is HR and people. It's incredibly important that we're making sure that our marketing is relevant and culturally sensitive. To Our audience

which of course, is HR professionals, who are dealing with the population of the country that we are marketing into. There's a huge opportunity with B2B and as we continue to scale across digital, and the efficiencies that can be gained, such as

you know, we are constantly in a regional, approach looking at the key differences between markets, but also actually finding what are the what unites those markets and leveraging, that. And I think for a scaling company that's important. Um, you know, when you're post IPO or if you're a much larger company

that's something that you can start to get much more into the localization and regionalization. And but of course, there are key markets that we have to do that from, from the get go. If we're dealing with Germany, for example, needs to be in German. But it also needs to be reflective of, the selling and the buyer journey

and how that might differ to other markets. But actually as, as, as we grow in scale, we're also finding similarities where we might not expect it. We've got a couple of key markets that actually, when you dig into it, are quite similar to the German market with regards to trust, brand discovery, sales cycles, etc.. So I find that

quite exciting.

What are some sort of anecdotal differences you've seen? What's the most unique buyer process? In a region?

Yeah.

I'm using Germany, again, the sales cycle is different. The expectations of pre-sale, differ quite a

bit to perhaps in the UK. And certainly with regards to the types of organizations that we might be going into, a company looking to be more modern and perhaps is more traditional. Therefore, their expectations of the sales process might be more traditional in that market. In Germany, more human

interaction.

You mean longer periods of time?

Longer, longer sales cycles?

Face to. Face to face meetings?

Maybe a lot more like proof of concepts. A lot more proof of the product. And certainly for, for the UK. and just, just because we have I would say a stronger tech sector. Anyways

the people that we are then this is not just cyber, but just, you know, any company I've worked in, when we're going into the UK and into like a high tech company, they are a bit more willing and open to, to take a risk, versus perhaps more of the sort of conservative buying cycles where prove

it to me. You're talking a great talk. Prove it. So yeah, I'd say that's a key. Key standout.

Yeah. And what about the rest? Can anyone share also challenges or success stories related to adapting, marketing

strategies to a new territory?

Yes, I can actually jump in. So for for us, it's a little bit different as well, because the maturity level of, um, the market differs from one region to the next. So because we're in such a niche market, the needs are not there yet. Everywhere

So there's a lot of education work that is being done to prepare that market that will face these needs at some point. So that has to be taken into account in the marketing approach that we developed. In some, some regions. Um, An example that I have

two examples in mind. We're an American company and our market is really mature in the US and in the UK, but in continental Europe, france in particular, we've seen that market mature, quite a bit over the past year. So we increasingly

intensified our marketing efforts in that region and started like translating, translating or more educational, like content to start with. That's how we, we use our different, channels to, to promote them educational content there. And the

second example is that the APAC region and this is a region as well. So it's hard to, to talk about, the market there as a whole. But if you take into account some insurance or financial hubs there, like Singapore, for example, it's all about, making sure we're visible

that we start that brand awareness, journey with, with those pieces, but in a different way that you would do it in France. Taking into account, like the demand for your product and the maturity of the market is also, in my opinion, super

important.

As any any of you have have gone to market with a local partner, for example.

Have you tended to have individual like regional teams? I know, Ted, you obviously the company is a US company

and then you have a global marketing team that's doing stuff at a very, very high level for the entire world, providing resources and things, implementing strategies. But then you also have had regional teams. Is that a common, thing, or has a central team done their own regionalization, language translation and

any kind of learnings on what works and what pitfalls there are there?

Yeah, sure. I've done this a bit. So I've done it centralized and I've done it more regionalized. And what I find is kind of a hybrid. So you want, like, close connections with your kind of central market, like, really understand, like what's working and then essentially have someone

in probably like one hire who, like, owns the market and really understands the regional differences. I think the biggest thing companies underestimate when they go into international markets is the way people buy and respond to marketing is like completely different. For example, Chaz was talking about like Germany things. They're like people are naturally a lot less trust in and need like

really strong social proof. There's also kind of different norms in how you'd market your product in somewhere like Germany or France. If your product automates things, people don't necessarily like that because it's essentially like taking away people's jobs, which is a lot more kind of taboo in Europe compared to in the US, where, increasing efficiency and reducing costs is like a really strong kind of value proposition

So you need to kind of rethink how you're kind of positioning your value proposition more around, like making people's lives easier, making it less likely that they make mistakes, and really changing that from like cost and efficiency savings, because there's a big kind of cultural difference, mainly between like, mainland Europe and like the US, where I'd say, like people

people care more about like keeping employees happy in Europe. But in the US it's more about like driving profit for the company. So I think you often like really need to rethink, like your kind of like value propositions. And if you go in with something that's like working well in the US and same thing in Europe, like often people will just like scoff

at you and be like, we don't kind of want to automate and take people's jobs away. There's a huge amount of like regional like differences between, like, each country and like how you position and how you sell. So I think, having someone with that kind of market expertise, at least for like a region. So with Europe, we tend to divide it by like Dach Benelux

France and have someone own one of those regions and then they can you can have the test in velocity where you're running things and your kind of main market. And then those people take those insights and kind of adapt them, reach those markets, and then kind of retest those hypotheses. So you, you have like this kind of sectoral infrastructure. And then people kind of take it and localize. And I think that that finds, what's the best

way. But yeah, like newer markets is always like very difficult, especially, in Europe because like new entrants, people are pretty like not trusting. So, so yeah, I think the cool thing is you need to quickly build, like, social proof, and be able to, like, demonstrate

that on sales calls. And I think the best way to do that all the time is niche down, like find where you're kind of closing customers. Uh, So For example, like a previous company I worked at, Samsara in Germany, we found we sold to like trucking companies essentially, and logistics companies. We found like lorry logistics companies were working really well in Germany. So we really niched down

there and we landed a few big names and we kind of got this snowball like momentum, and we cut out like 7 or 8 other kind of industries that we could have gone after and really focused there, because we knew we could build social proof and build a brand. And then once we'd done it in that area, we could go on and build into the kind of next ones. I think, I think it needs to be like more very strategic about who you're going

after in a new company and maybe not trying to attack the whole market that you have in other regions.

Have The rest have also experienced that snowball effect that, that Ted was mentioning that you tackle one, one big name, two big names, and then that snowball starts rolling

yeah, I think definitely, with a strong community and customer focus, that starts to happen. We see, you know, building momentum, particularly in the HR space, it's a smallish community. Again, it's people first, people focused, a great community. Well, word gets around fast. So yeah, absolutely. Snowball.

I think it's worth thinking about how, you know, the, the kind of things that are top of people's minds and zeitgeist, things that are very useful for selling sometimes are very useful for tying a brand to

like sustainability, etc., are differently appreciated or valued around the world. But you know, Boris, you've had an experience of obviously working for a very zeitgeist or working for a company that's very closely aligned with a zeitgeist, you know, concept of AI generated synthetic

people, videos of synthetic people. How have you found people's responses to that differ around the world uptake of it, enthusiasm for it, uses of it, ways of understanding it?

Yeah. I was actually going to add a general point on internalization, going like international as well from our

perspective, because like the point I wanted to make, you can go international without necessarily tailoring to these nuances of local cultures. So for example, that's how we do it at the moment. Right? So We don't localize our marketing. We just would go like English collateral and English language. And it's possible to do it like we are moving to the direction

where we're going to start personalize even more. But it works like you obviously won't be able to drive the same amount of volume as, let's say you can if you're super, super personalized, let's say you're a fully localized, you have local clients across all of the regions, your sales teams, your customer supports. They're also localized. And obviously

the product is localized in a language that you need. That's the ideal case scenario. But getting to this stage is hard. Because imagine like localizing pretty much a whole business. And if you go with couple languages like French, German, Spanish, etc., that's a lot of work and that's a lot of resources. So so far we have been able to hack it with English only. Yeah, just

you just accept that the return on ad spend is going to be lower. We accept that the volume is going to be lower. Right. So you're still kind of can we just kind of capture the creme de la creme or the top customer or the like, the customers that would still engage us despite the fact that we are not localized and based on ROAS, we can say, okay, this year is working, we're going to keep spending

or increase the budget in this year. But if we quickly see that the Geo is just not working, let's say like we try Japan with our collateral, with our ads and it just doesn't scale. We killed the country. So within like two weeks we can say what works and what we can can kind of keep advertising on and which geo we just like. Not yet. We have to, you know, change something on the business side before

we even try to, you know, even try to go there. But for us, like in terms of, cultural differences in how people respond to ads, I can't say that I picked up that much difference, to be honest. The theme that we see quite a lot is like, people are afraid in general of of AI. Like, what is it going to do

to different industries, not only like video generation industry, but in general what's going to what is going to do to jobs and how the future is going to look like, that's one thing that is like kind of appearing across geos regardless, you know, where you go to and like which which language people comment in and so on.

I assume that that's related

to the nature of of your businesses. I guess in and in age are you need to be very localized and talk about cultural things. Maybe in your business, talking about AI, and you could be more generic and use global strategy 100%.

Yeah. And maybe

one more point here. Just just to close this one, from my side is the channel selection as you go, international. Because like you do have markets that are, let's say like super traditional, right. Like for example, Italy, like The view TV viewership is insane and TV penetration is like 90 plus percent. So most of the people like that's what they do. They, you know, they

watch, they spend a lot of time watching TV versus like other markets. That might not be the case. Or let's say if you're talking specifically about digital, germany again is a good example because, for example, LinkedIn penetration in Germany is quite low when you compare it to UK or when you compare it to France. So even if you know, like your ICP really well, you know

you're targeting really well and LinkedIn would be your, you know, preferred choice. If you go to Germany, like you're not going to scale as easily with LinkedIn because it's just a small audience size and people don't use LinkedIn there as much as, let's say they use it in the UK. So definitely like channel selection and which type of ads and which type of channels you go

with. That depends like the market and and so on.

What what's been your experience of channels, Sarah, like using, different channels in, region to get the right effect. How have you changed your content or channels or choice of. Yeah, both. Yeah

So so for us the the video content is is king. So regardless of the of the channel, like first of all like we are purely digital, right. We don't do any, any traditional advertising whatsoever. So it's purely, purely digital. We do a lot of organic content. So like owned content, think of like TikTok channels, youTube channels, etc. but that sits

within the other team. And like for us as a, as a paid ads team, it's like 70% video, right. So let's say if we go for paid socials like LinkedIn, facebook, Instagram, etc., it's primarily video content. Quick, snappy, engaging, video. Unlike LinkedIn, obviously

has images as well, which like would be 70:30 split in terms of like how much budget we spend to to each format. But for us it's video, which kind of makes sense because we are video generation platform. So we want to show people how, you know, how we can generate video for them. And it's really hard to do it in, let's say, a text format or an image format

or any other like, you know, more experiential video format, like ad formats. So for us, it's it's primarily video. And then we just launch and we see what works. Right? If we see like in one specific country, like on LinkedIn, images work better than videos. That's it. So essentially performance dictates where

we spend, you know, where we spend our money. What about you, Sarah?

Yeah. Well, I think it's an interesting question, just to go back to the regionalisation, because I've worked in a lot of companies. I worked in an Indian based company, Massive Tech Company, and then now I'm working in a UK based company. And I think also I'll come on to the channel thing, but also

it's important to note that the way that people perceive marketing in the sales process is really different. So in a country like India, it's still very referrals based. So it's still very sales conversation based behind closed doors. And then in a country like the US, where conversion copywriting is very accepted and marketing is very mature, obviously

you need to use a different type of content and a different type of channel mix, which is something that was just just being touched on. So I think it's about understanding also just very fundamentally and foundationally, where marketing works, and where actually the strategy may be more sales led. So just sort of

thinking about those things. And then I think in terms of the, approach sorry, I can't remember what the question was.

The second part of the question, I guess I was, I was talking about the channel mix. So we're talking about, you know, what, how do you change the content? That's the really interesting point you're talking about, you know, networks of people

being super important, sales relationships being really important in India. Whereas I think what you were saying in the US is that conversion messaging, as in like basically landing pages really, really work in the US, it's kind of conversion messaging, just people click on stuff. People want to people sign up for demos, whereas in other countries maybe they just wouldn't unless they know someone or I think

Content has to be.

It's an interesting thing and you obviously have to be careful, but I think the messaging, the layers and complexity of messaging when you're going into a market like the US are probably very different from when you're doing a network based sale in a, in another geography. And that really comes into sort of websites. So what I do, I specialize in is conversion copywriting. So

it's basically where you start with a jobs to be done framework. And you refined the messages for that very particular customer. So you might have your top 3 or 4 jobs to be done. And you want to think then about, how to translate that into website copy. And, you know, the effect can be incredible. So for a small SaaS company that's trying to

massively increase or double its pipeline in three months, rewriting a website just works. For a recent company I worked with, you know, increase, bottom of the funnel conversions, by 80%. So pipeline increase by 80%. But what's really interesting is hot leads are down

by 8%. So actually what's happening is the messaging is going into the ICP. So the people that you're messaging resonating with are the people who want to buy and the people who want to buy your product, and you're losing the people who don't quite understand what the product is or aren't quite in your market. And I think that's what's so interesting, because that actually creates a much more efficient sales pipeline

So it has a massive benefit for your sales process and resource commitment as well. I hope that sort of answered the question.

Absolutely. I'm really interested. Ted, have you found when you're using, I think you were using, some smart kind of AI style systems to slightly change the messaging, to different people with different experiences

at different types of companies. Have you also been able to do the same with geography, like, has AI been able to tailor, messaging successfully for different geographies, or is that not really been something you tried yet?

I've only done it in English speaking markets so far. So mainly like America

UK, Australia, I think the biggest constraint is with other markets, especially in Europe, is around kind of like data regulations. Just like acquiring and scraping data is a lot more complicated, especially companies like Germany. But I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work. And I mean, the latest LM

models are pretty good at international language. I think you need some level of like QA from a local speaker to make sure you're not spitting out like gobbledygook, but I'm like reasonably bullish on it. And a lot of the things you can do around scraping public data like websites and stuff wouldn't be banned. It's more kind of like how you source like personal information and making sure you're

kind of like GDPR level compliant. Email is extremely, geographically, spread channel, I suppose, isn't it? Unlike perhaps something like a social network?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's pretty much universal. The biggest constraints, again, are around like, legal things. So example in Germany you need kind of

double opt in. So actually acquiring people's email data and having the right to contact them. So a lot more difficult. So I think in a market like that, you almost have to take a more kind of traditional approach to marketing where you kind of like build lists and get people to kind of sign up for like newsletters or content stuff and acquire those emails and then find out how to nurture them in a better way

I don't see any reason why it can't work. I just think the biggest challenges are like legal consequences. But I think universally personalizing emails and making it relevant to their pain points is always going to work, no matter what kind of market you're in.

And what about the new email restrictions that Google is

imposing now? That's pretty much universal to my knowledge. Again, like, I haven't run as much volume outside of English speaking countries, but I've seen it across like UK, US and Australia. The the level of kind of like open rates and emails is going down a lot. They're essentially cracking down

on sending large volumes of like cold email. The things you really need to be aware around that is making sure you're not like, irrelevant emailing irrelevant people, which again, is super important with international like GDPR, you don't want to hit irrelevant contacts because that's how you get flagged for GDPR compliances. So you need to make sure you're targeting the right people who

your message is like essentially relevant for. And then you need to balance your volume across kind of multiple email domains and making sure you're kind of warm in, different email addresses. Essentially, you can't just send like a thousand volume, a thousand emails a day from the same email address. Now, because you're just you're deliverability and your domain

reputation will just, like, essentially go down the toilet and no one will be able to open it. Like deliverability is the fundamental of cold email if you can write the best message in the world, but if it's not going into the inbox, you're not going to drive any kind of demos or awareness.

Definitely. Let's keep

the conversation going about the importance about investing on, on the creative. Could someone speak about the importance of creative investment in marketing campaigns? The thing that we have been discussing, refining the marketing messages and targeting what kind of

things that you have been doing about this?

I definitely believe with the, the art and the science of marketing, but I think also increasingly the, the merging between B2C and B2B. So where B2B may have traditionally been more focused on

the feature function and just very it's really exciting that we know we're starting to take in like the creativity and the, flexibility, I suppose, from B2C. Now, of course, this this varies from brand to brand. I'm incredibly fortunate with. HBob, we have a very creative expression. Um, But, you know, it's something that has evolved

and is continues to, develop even when actually we just launched our, new logo, last week. So, you know, it's important and I think, particularly again with the audience that, that I'm working in with HR professionals, people first, stories like the storytelling, mantra. I suppose that comes

out of B2C. It's it's really exciting to see it in B2B. And I really love it when people switch lanes right between B2C and into B2B and bring that with them. But in terms of like, you know, getting down to the performance of creatives, something I I think also comes as a, as a growth stage of

really being able to to put the numbers next to the creative and being able to feed that back in so that the creative team actually understands that. Yep. This might visually satisfy me, but does it answer the brief, which is it drove pipeline, right. And it's something that again

from a professionalization of, as we grow and we continue to, it's great to see those two worlds coming together, and, and starting to see. Yeah, A/B testing whatever it might be, but actual like data driven, creative. Which again, when you're growing in your scaling, you're

going as fast as possible. Yeah. That looks great. Like, let's let's throw it out and see what happens. But actually getting that program of optimized creative, that is driven by, by data is, is certainly the stage that we're in.

Think there's a very important point there. But about the connection, I was thinking we've got some really powerful

demand gen people on the call. But what's really interesting is that there is a very sort of interdependent link between demand gen and creative. So if you work in an organization where you haven't got your messaging and you haven't got your creative and you're pouring in tens of thousands a month into ads, you're not going to see results, and then someone with that creative comes along, and then you've got that paired

sort of team effort on the demand gen front. And I think it's really interesting, what Chaz was saying about, creativity because drift did a really interesting, article actually a few years ago, where they had interview with one of their personas who said that he used the tool, you know, whilst brushing his teeth and on the train. And then they had this really

nice sort of selfie series of images of him doing that. And that's a really interesting use of that sort of B2C, Cecil creative and B2B context to actually make a point about how the tool is used. So you've got the connection between the different elements of the sort of marketing hierarchy there. So I think that's a really interesting way to sort of think about creative

as linked back to that. It's not something that exists, you know, as a cloud in the sky. It has to be sort of linked to everything else.

I'm keen to hear from you, Boris, given what you told us before, like you use a more global approach. So what's important you give to to creatives

Yeah, I can talk about creative for days with like that's that's me being serious actually. Like 50% of my job is dedicated to creative at this point.

I think the creative team actually reports into you, which is quite unusual. In my experience, you tend to have. Yeah, like a brand and creative team and then a paid team.

But in this case, that's

really interesting.

Yeah. We don't we don't have a separation because we want to have we want to have the same KPIs. Right. We are focused on on demand gen, and we want to make sure that on the performance side and the creative side, we all understand what are we going for and what is the end goal for the whole team. And having this the same KPI

the same OKR for the whole team, for creative and for performance? I think it was like one of the best decisions that was, that was ever, ever made, like specifically for, for our team, because we have the same team meetings, we discuss the same things. We talk about the creatives that are in the pipeline. The performance team is there to share the insights and knowledge that they have learned

from the previous creatives that we were running and what was working, what was not working. And we really dissect it into a lot of details. Like we we look at the engagement metrics, we go all the way to viewership metrics as well. We look at the hook rates, we look at the click through rate. We we look how much people actually watch till the end of the video

and do they click or not. And from these type of metrics we can draw insights. For example, the first three seconds of our creative is not catchy enough, or the first three seconds of our creative is not speaking to our audience. Let's try a different hook. Or it could be the opposite. We had a many, many of these instances where you first

three seconds of your ad just amazing, like it blows all of the other metrics out of the water. But then if you look at the 25% view rate, it's down substantially. So it means that your hook is kind of too good. You have to tone it down a little bit, or you're capturing two of a broad audience and you, you need to kind of iterate on that.

It's a bit like Sarah's

experience of the website that kind of puts people off, but that's okay because they're the wrong people. You know, an ad that puts the wrong people off in the first three seconds is great, because then the rest of your metrics make more sense. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah. So I cannot like everybody has to focus on the creative if you have your measurement right. If you like. Very

very confident that you can measure your marketing activities, if you understand really well who your audience is, who are you targeting, what is what is the pain point that you're solving and why they would be interested in you, then the only thing that is like left apart from like small tweaks and like optimizations in which bit and strategy you use, and so on. And like all

all of the nitty gritty details like creative is your is your best bet because that's like you're fighting for attention really. And if you have boring creative that doesn't really speak to your audience or the creative that just doesn't like that doesn't catch the people you want to catch, then you just won't be able to scale. Creative all the way

Like, I just think you really have to spend a lot of time on the creative and a lot of resources. And in my opinion, that's often the area that is under prioritized the most because it's it does require resources. You need full time people who will be focusing just on making the creatives, and it's just it costs lots of money. Yeah, I think it's, it's

often under and you're both Chaz and Boris.

You've both been through experiences where the business has grown so successfully that the initial, kind of use case, the initial ICP, has been very, very well saturated. And then then you've been working through a process

of identifying many, many different additional use cases, working through additional creative. And, obviously that's very highly relevant scaling. You don't want to hit don't want to hit like glass ceilings.

And, you know,

it gets very interesting again as you're growing and you're scaling. Is that

sort of shifting out of the B2C of like one person that you are, you're one persona that you are targeting versus your buying committee. And so making sure that your creative is relevant for the CFO or the CEO or the chief people officer in, in our case, it doesn't then get watered down. So this is, it's a, it's a

tricky time and getting it right. But it's also a really big milestone in a company's growth that is this creative needs to needs to be specific to this persona, this persona, this persona. And everyone is going to be in the buying committee and have an opinion and a view of, of your company

and I certainly feel like that's the stage that we're in. It's a creative time. Definitely. It just comes back to that data data piece driving it underneath.

And I think also fundamentally, um, and this is as you start to scale as well, is you have to think about what is your content differentiator

So you look at the content that the people in a space are putting out. And it's going to be pretty much identical. I mean, you could close your eyes and you could probably name how to the three things, the six challenges. You know, I think what's becoming more and more important is, thought leadership. So actually, what is it that you offer that can

be unique to your customers? So that's when we start to think, you know, we're offering a product, but how do we offer growth or how do we offer the business goals, and what is the methodology or framework or approach that we have that's unique to enable the software in a very complex B2B environment? So how do we start to think outside? What's so

creative is really important, but there has to be a sort of really, mature content program behind that. There has to be substance behind that, in order to persuade people to sort of choose you over everyone else. And I think a unique proposition in a way for content is really important.

Yeah, especially I mean, many of your companies

were scaled to the point where you have to go up against competition in maybe even in a new market, you know, a new geography where there's very, very intense competition or one very dominant kind of player. And yeah, if you just do, if you try and compete with them on their own terms and put out the same sort of content, you're likely to lose, I don't know the

answer as to how you come up with how you reliably come up with a content differentiator. To be able to say something different, Is that an indirect question? I think I think what's really important is I was talking to someone in the HR space the other day, actually, and she's at seed stage. And I said to her, you're publishing some incredibly

interesting content things that HR people want to know that aren't necessarily directly linked to your product. So the psychology of HR you know, the sort of frameworks within which HR people need to think in order to make their organization healthy for the people which work in it. So not just, you know, how to solve your recruiting problem in

September, but talking about how actually what the fundamental sort of psycho psychometrics in a way, are of HR and that's sort of where we start to get this content differentiation. So you're offering value to your audience outside what they may want to know about the product and what the product itself. I'm keen to hear, audrey, I know you have an ABM go to market, and I'm keen to hear how you how you use ABM and thought leadership, to drive engagement with key decision makers and also this idea that we are

talking about the importance of the creative.

So we have different layers, of campaigns, that we use, towards our different segments and personas within those segments and that are part of the buying committee. So

because this is like still a new market, overall within the insurance industry, as mentioned, there's a lot of work that was being done on education and thought leadership is really that first hook for us to talk about the trendy topics that initiate that, that demand

really. So we have them always on layer of, thought leadership, and brand messaging. And then we really develop the full funnel approach for all the key different that

There is also like always on, the idea here, because we have really, really long sales cycles is to nurture the leads that we create, along the way. So based on their intent levels that we can capture using various tools, then, they

get targeted with what we think is, is probably the, the most impactful messaging, at the different stages of the funnel before heading to conversion. So it is a very much a long term play. But that's what was required. Over the past

two years to, really go along that market growth.

And what's been the hardest and easiest parts of that ABM process to scale? Like have you found really useful tricks or techniques to scale, like the kind of relationship development part of it at the beginning of the process, or the kind of personalization and nurture or events or

I think, ABM is really resource intense.

At the time we faced some, some budget restrictions, I was so alone, running the, the show for, for quite some time. And I had to figure out a way to efficiently work, and develop this strategy, to move on and generate pipeline. So developing tools like huge like message map that allowed me to efficiently collaborate

with, the content team, for example, was was key, translating that tool into creative side as well, um, helped me. So we built like a huge matrix of different formats and messaging. That allowed me to

update the campaigns, on a regular basis still. So having those small tools that will actually, allow collaboration, is really key, when you have like reduced teams. And then when it comes to budget, it's all about

testing, testing, testing like what is working, what messages, resonate the most, what creative resonates the most and invest in what performs the best. So that that was really, the key challenge, at the time and was it the people and

people doing, building those relationships more personalized messaging and, and genuine relationships.

The first thing you scaled when you had a bit more resource?

We don't have a lot more resource when you have a person in my team since then. And what we're developing today is

is really the extension of that, in other channels as well. So again, using the tools that are available to us with smart content on, on our website, for example, on the landing pages and, and using the other tools like the messaging matrix, really, to leverage, that in a multi channel approach. That's what we're doing today as well. I interesting to see different, different approaches and something that is way more personalized and starting small. And then

growing up and others that are like Boris was mentioning before, very scale up. Really interesting. Thank you. And what about the, the innovation in your marketing models? So as your businesses are progressing

and gaining traction, have you seen a risk on of alienating your existing customer base as your businesses scale?

I think there's a really important point. I think Chaz might have touched on it earlier, where you're in this point as well, where you're transitioning from

maybe one ICP to another. And that's not just to do with saturation, that's to do with maturity. So if you look at Gong, they designed Revenue Intelligence. And you know, there was a point if you can use the Wayback Machine, which is an amazing thing, but you can look at their website from when they started out and it's basically pain point led. And then when you map up to now, it's now revenue intelligence

led. So they've got to a point where they have market, recognition. But, you know, for example, I've worked with companies that find themselves in the position where they're working at pain point level. So manual tasks and that kind of thing, lack of collaboration. But actually the market is gradually maturing towards an ICP that's focused on profit. And then it's about how do

you create your messaging. So you're following that transition so you're not still doing, you know, pain points when everyone else is talking about profit. So it's about also working with demand gen to test those messages, but having a sort of way of evolving so that you don't reach saturation in a particular area and you're still transitioning forward

I don't know if anyone else has any experience of that.

That's a really interesting thing to analyze the evolution of a website in in time. You can certainly get it wrong. I mean, I've got it wrong

before building the website to be to, as you know, because I'm, I guess I'm the founder of the business I tend to want to talk about like super long term future because I, I guess that's what I talk about with investors and things. But for, for, you know, potential users at a very at an early stage company, it's completely

meaningless in a relevant and they don't want to know. It should be much more the pain point led very specific tactical benefits, ROI benefits. Most of you guys would have been through this transitions, I suppose.

So with, cyber Cube, we're

currently going through a rebranding and a website refresh, and I was lucky enough to be there to build the first website as well. So it's quite, um, funny to see the evolution between both from like a messaging and how we present ourselves and decide where we use the website

to actually do and convert on the marketing side as well. It's quite interesting. And it's where I think you see how your own business like, evolved, and how your internal processes evolved as well. And also technology

allowing you to do more. So that's quite interesting.

Yeah. And what about the, the audience size? Because also when, when you're your businesses evolve, you are tackling different audiences and every audience has a different addressability. So how do you select the right audience and then the right channel to address, that audience? Could anyone elaborate on that?

I'm happy to. I mean, experimentation, if you don't know. And it's not obvious, it's getting

out there and test, test, test. Certainly. Not even just HiBob. Every company that has been the, the the way forward, there's a hypothesis, there's a hunch or something. There's a reason to, getting out and experimenting. The more, scale up answer, I suppose, is, the tech stack. Right. So sort of touched upon it there. We have, great tools, here at hiBob but, you know, in other previous companies, you know, ranging from demand base or $0.06, for example, like that really helps us before we spend even spend a dollar is what's that time looking like. What's

the intent looking like? What are the signals to help us build that hypothesis and then go get the business case, get the money, and then go out and experiment with it? Of course, not every company has that luxury of experimentation and testing, but I think, all of us on the call, you know, we're in similar sized businesses or, modern and looking forward company. So I hope that everyone has that. The tech stack give you the initial hunch, the hypothesis, and go out and prove it or disprove it.

Yeah. I think when you're it gets complicated as you evolve and you, you

sell to more and more different industries and different personas. So I think the best way I kind of approach this is build really accurate, kind of like customer personas. And the way I do this is I'm constantly listening to sales calls and figuring out the trends and what consistent things people are talking about and the pain points, and then divide that into customer personas and

then I think the challenge is like, how would you reach these people? You can use more like targeted channels, like your kind of socials and LinkedIn's where you can specifically like focus on one persona and have the data to be able to go after them and send them ads relevant to those pain points that you've observed specific to those personas, and then send them to a relevant landing page, coordinated

through that. The bigger challenge becomes when you're driving more kind of like typical inbound if you're doing like some kind of paid ads like that, you it's you can't control, like who's coming onto your website. So how do you make sure they're seeing the kind of right messages. And there's kind of tools out there to be able to do this. Things like mutiny, which allows you to detect

identify essentially who your customer is, what industry they're in based on their IP address. And you can personalize your website in real time so you can show them like a relevant value prop. If they're in a certain industry, you can even send and show them like relevant logos to have really strong kind of like customer proof. But I think it all essentially like comes back to really understanding

the different kind of personas and different people you're going after and how they vary, and then figuring out like how you can segment and target them and then just reusing that messaging so they see something very personalized and relevant to them. I think the biggest issue is company scale is like you just end up with this more and more kind of like generic message, in your marketing that doesn't

really it kind of appeals to no one. Rather, when you're kind of at an early stage and you're very focused, it's easy to get that message because you know exactly who you're kind of going after.

So like it's like, how do you figure out how to do that scale, which is

it feels like, in a perfect world, you would have like you'd go through the product market fit, fit, exercise as if

you were 15 different startups rather than just one with 15 different menu items for different industries.

I agree with that. Essentially, like as you as your company grows, you do become more different startups. You're going after different people. You have different kind of product lines. So it adds these kind of layers of complexities. And you almost need to like break them out and treat them

almost like separate kind of startups and separate products that you're going after people.

I think there's also a really interesting point about investment there as well. So, you know, from a content perspective, if you're going to suddenly jump from two verticals to six verticals, then you've got to think, actually, how much is that going to cost me to produce that kind of content? Can I credibly and reliably produce it

to the time frame that I need to go to market? And, you know, is it better to sort of scale down rather than to take on too much? So I think there's some interesting questions in terms of, how you scale content as you scale to different personas, because obviously, different verticals require persona

level content, vertical level, level content, tofu level, vertical content. You know, you need to sort of be working at the different levels of the funnel for each vertical. And that's not necessarily going to be cheap either. So you just need to think about how to do that.

I think that just to add to that is that it's also, again, a sign of stage of growth

that you're in. Having been a co-founder and a very, very small team, this is like years down the track of, of getting to, to scale. I think that's, you know, as people who move through the industry is also just like, you know, those first 90 days when you're coming into a new company, it's like it's discovering which gear you're in to understand, that's the next that's the next logical step. Of course, that's attached to the revenue of the company. I suppose it's almost just like anyone who's coming into this and thinking like, this is how Microsoft or, oracle or, you know, the big, the big folks, take a breath

It will come.

That's what I often find about business. Business books. I have to often remind myself of, it's coming. We will get there. Like we're on the right path.

I'm very much on the same boat, to be honest. Like, it's, what you want to achieve

down the line and what you're actually able to, to deliver. So that trade off is not always easy to identify as well.

I think it's important to do less really well as well with content, because otherwise you can have a lot of blogs which are completely, they're just not going to do anything. So from a content perspective

of two verticals is preferable to six if you're at early stage. Just because then, you know, you can do it really well, grow that market share, use that extra investment to move on to the next thing.

Definitely. I think the future of SEO is, is, well, it's not the future. It's always been like that, but it's a specialization

It's how you can create the most specific content and have a lot of articles about that specific topic.

And if this particular industry is less mature, then, you know, you could imagine a CMO or a CEO saying, okay, well, we know what works for that industry. So now replicate all of that content in those six other verticals or those six other geographies

and it might be completely wrong and very expensive, because actually you need to do something way less mature and way more startup in this particular vertical or this particular geography for ages, for like two years, there wasn't a lot a great deal that you can do to speed it up. Unfortunately, Mr. CEO, I think people think content

is free because you have somebody who just like a content manager who sits there, but you're actually paying that person, right?

So your blogs, how long it takes them to write a blog is the your investment.

You can just get ChatGPT to write it these days. So I don't know whether you've heard of that.

Yes, I'll probably not comment on.

All right. Well, we are coming to an end, so I would love to to give you the opportunity, if you want to ask any question to someone in the panel or say something please. The microphone is is open.

Just thank you very much guys. It's been wonderful to be on a, on a podcast recording with you and really looking forward to listening to it back and speaking with you guys afterwards.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you everyone.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you. See you later.