← B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#41: Connecting deeply with B2B audiences with Jason Ing, Gusto
00:29:57
Payroll isn’t exactly what you’d call exciting—so how do you take a - let’s face it - rather boring topic like that and make it relatable, engaging, and even funny enough to capture an audience’s attention? Joining us today is Jason Ing,...
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Transcript40 lines
- [00:01]
Jason Ng
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- [00:26]
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- [00:57]
Greg Kilstrom
The Agile brand Welcome to the B2B Agility podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. Greg I'm your host Greg Kilstrom advising Fortune 1000 brands on MarTech, marketing operations and CX best selling Author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show. Payroll isn't exactly what you'd call exciting, so how do you take a, let's face it, rather boring topic like that and make it relatable, engaging and even funny enough to capture an audience's attention? Joining us today is Jason Ng, Chief Marketing Officer at Gusto, a leading platform that provides small and medium sized businesses with payroll, health insurance, HR tools and more to empower their teams both locally and internationally. Jason has spearheaded innovative campaigns like the recent Choose Gusto campaign, proving that even the most unexpected topics can connect deeply with audiences. Welcome to the show Jason.
- [02:05]
Jason Ng
Thanks for having me Greg.
- [02:07]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in here though, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your background, your role at Gusto and what brought you into the marketing world.
- [02:18]
Jason Ng
Yeah, certainly so. I lead a world class marketing team at Gusto. We drive revenue growth in a high velocity inbound business. I oversee a full stack marketing team that includes demand gen product marketing, brand communications and creative and I previously spent nearly two decades at Microsoft and Amazon in leadership marketing roles across demand gen, product marketing and brand working on major brands like Xbox Prime Video and aws. And you know, what brought me to marketing was actually Procter and Gamble. I had no business working in marketing. I was industrial engineering major. But I transitioned into marketing as my first job out of school as an assistant brand manager. And it was a great opportunity for me to explore learning about business and learning about marketing. And here I am, still in marketing almost 25 years later.
- [03:16]
Greg Kilstrom
Nice. Nice. Yeah, I started out as an architecture major actually, and somehow ended up in marketing myself. So it's funny how things happen like that. So, yeah, we're going to talk about a few things today, but I want to start with the Choose Gusto campaign that I briefly mentioned at the top of the show. Can you tell us a little bit about the campaign and what inspired this bold approach to marketing, payroll, and team management tools?
- [03:44]
Jason Ng
Yeah, of course. Choose Gusto was really driven by two insights. The first is payroll and HR and benefits. These are critical things for small businesses, but they are perceived as tedious. And the second is SMB owners face endless daily decisions every day, especially when they start out. And, you know, let's face it, you mentioned this, like, payroll and HR are often seen as like necessary evils. They're, they're complex, time consuming, tedious, even draining, yet so important. And so our goal was to flip the script, show that Gusto makes these processes simpler, more enjoyable, and even stress free. And so we wanted to highlight Gusto as a trustworthy partner that cares about your business and gives you the peace of mind to take care of a lot of those back office tasks that allows business owners to focus on their passions.
- [04:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. So you mentioned some of the goals of the campaign, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that as well as how your team worked to make payroll, as we both kind of referred something. A dry subject at the least, to make it relatable and funny.
- [04:56]
Jason Ng
Yeah. So we had two main goals. First was to increase brand awareness and differentiate Gusto from some of the more well established incumbents like ADP, paychecks and QuickBooks. Gusto is a challenger brand. And while, you know, we're 13 years in, we're not 150 years old like our competitors that are very well known. So our brand advertising focuses on introducing us to SMBs who are unfamiliar with us. Whether you're already in the market or you will be in the market in the foreseeable future, we used humor to humanize the struggles of SMB owners. You know, we compare payroll benefits to things people love to Hate like root canals or elevator music or watching the grass grow. And although we didn't want to acknowledge this head on, positioning Gusto as that partner that takes care of that messy backend task so that users can truly focus on what matters to them, which is building their business and making an impact on their communities was something really critical for us. So the use of playful and smart humor versus over the top slapstick humor to show relatable situations in a smart, witty way was really our approach to making our ads memorable and helping them break through. And you know, we spent a lot of time on just iterating and getting that tone right, but we feel like we've, we've hit that right sweet spot. So really the creative approach just balance that relatability and clarity on how Gusto simplifies their small businesses business operations.
- [06:43]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. And you know, as with campaign, any campaign, any successful campaign, it's a lot of it comes down to the execution as well. You know, even, even some great strategies can look good on paper, let's say. And then, you know, when, when executed may leave a little, a little to be desired. But you know, can you talk a little bit more about, you know, how you developed the creative strategy and you know, how you identified what would resonate most with, with your audience?
- [07:16]
Jason Ng
Yeah, when, whenever you start a campaign and you start with a blank sheet of paper or you're starting the brief, there's always some functional benefits, things that you need people to understand about what you do, that's critical. But then you also have to balance that against what are the emotional needs of the consumers and the customers that you're trying to talk to and appeal to. And so for us, it was really about communicating the breadth of our offerings. Payroll, HR benefits with some of those emotional needs around peace of mind, time, freedom, and even the joys of running your business. Our process had several phases. The first was we really needed to define who we are as a business and make sure that the creative and the messaging really captures that. And that's about clarifying our unique point of view, staying true to our brand DNA and understanding how what we communicate fits into a longer term vision for the company. And in short, for us. We stand for small businesses. We simplify the complex to give peace of mind and we are joyfully expressive in our tone. We're even known for having a pig mascot that appears in our product that a lot of customers like to talk about. And then there's understanding the customer perspective. So this is about deeply analyzing customer pain points, needs and Expectations. So the key here is how do you bring these two perspectives together? How do you align our authentic brand story with what customers truly care about? And customer obsession is critical. Every company talks about how they're in it for the customer and how critical that is. But it's not just about telling people what they want to hear. Great branding and great creative is telling the truth. Well, ensuring that the messaging reflects both your core identity and what those real customer needs are. And you know, we are not by any means competitor obsessed, but we are mindful that the choices our customers need to make often look at us in relation to our competitors. So we have to make ourselves stand out and, and make ourselves a very clear choice to them.
- [09:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah, I love it and I love the, you know, telling the truth. Well, I think that's a great, that's a great thing because I think that otherwise you're going to say something and it's going to feel hollow. I think we've all seen, heard, watched those campaigns where it's just like, oh, wow, that does sound really nice. But you know, I use their product or service and that's not my experience. Right. So I think that's such an important point and, and I guess, you know, give a, give us a sense of, you know, campaign results. So, you know, what's, what's been the response to the campaign so far and you know, based on that, what's, what's next for the campaign?
- [10:19]
Jason Ng
Yeah, there has been a very strong positive reception which we can look at qualitatively and quantitatively. So when we look quantitatively, we look at awareness and we look at some of our top and mid funnel acquisition metrics. We've seen meaningful, statistically significant increases in brand awareness, particularly amongst certain audience segments like accountants who are critical in helping advise a lot of their small business clients. We also saw incremental lift in our mid to bottom of funnel metrics, from traffic to leads as well, and our bottom funnel efficiencies. So when you look at things like paid performance channels like search, the efficiencies also increased in terms of what we were paying from a cost per lead standpoint. And one other thing we've started recently looking at is how does gusto show up in generative AI and in tools like Gemini and ChatGPT. So if you type in best small business payroll, you will see gusto come up first. And I credit that to the cumulative results of all of these efforts combined. And you know, most importantly, we often keep our ears close to social media and we've seen very positive anecdotal feedback from our customers and employees. And it gives Gusto, our employee base, a real sense of pride and recognition in seeing what we're deploying in market now. As far as what's next, we will continue down this campaign. We believe consistency and distinctiveness is really critical in creative execution. So we are working on a new set of ads that will launch into 2025 with bigger media investments. You know, I was really excited to see some of our ads run in some NFL programming and the Golden Globes. We are really putting ourselves out there because we feel very confident in the message that we're giving and what it's and how it's resonating with small businesses. And so really the key is how do we make this fresh, how do we continue to refine this voice, but to continue to build that recognition for how we support small businesses and doing it in a way that only expressing that in only a way that we could.
- [12:49]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. I love it. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about your role as a cmo. And you know, we've got a lot of marketing leaders and aspiring leaders listening to this show. So I want to talk about start with something that is very near and dear to my heart, which is prioritization and setting priorities. And you know, as a cmo, what are your top priorities when it comes to building and executing, in this case, Gusto's marketing strategy?
- [13:20]
Jason Ng
Yeah, I first prioritize customers and how do we reach them depending on whatever stage they're at in the buying journey, sometimes that's before they're just thinking about starting a business to their well in market. And so I do think a lot about how I'm allocating my investments from bottom of funnel, mid funnel and top of funnel. So that's really important as a leader that to drive credibility in the marketing function in today's world, especially in B2B SaaS, you have to be driving measurable business outcomes and thinking about how are the things you're doing, how are they driving revenue growth through acquisition, expansion, retention, how are you educating customers and ultimately how do all these things collectively deliver a message that drives more people to understand your brand and like your brand. And so there's always a trade off between short term revenue goals with long term brand building investment. And I would always advise anyone in marketing to, to think about it holistically, deliver the numbers, but also think long term. So it's not about, you know, you do brand here and you do performance here. In silos and it's the accumulation of brand plus performance. I see it as brand times performance or multiplied by performance to ultimately get to the outcomes you want over time. And really it's all about looking at understanding your customers to make sure that when you're doing all these things across channel, you're not forgetting about you're creative, your messaging and how you're really carving out a clear space in people's minds. And so that's how I think a lot about just how I prioritize. It's really about delivering results, thinking about things through brand and performance and then making sure your messaging is sharp.
- [15:18]
T-Mobile Ad
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- [15:47]
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- [16:02]
Jason Ng
Let's go.
- [16:03]
Zigly Fiber Ad
And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without freezing.
- [16:09]
Greg Kilstrom
The numbers look good. Brad, you're on mute.
- [16:11]
Zigly Fiber Ad
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- [16:18]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, and I love that integrated way of thinking as well because otherwise you're, you're invariably going to get things that feel it's this fits in one bucket versus the other. You know, it's going to feel very binary or something. That said, you know, there's, there's always, with prioritization, there's always things that you have to kind of put above others and then sometimes you have to, you have to either make cuts or cut things altogether. Where do you or you know, what budget items or what areas do you consider uncuttable regardless of economic priorities and things?
- [16:59]
Jason Ng
Yeah, I would say there's really no budget item that is completely off limits. But to me it's about making sure you're balanced across the purchase funnel. I think that's very critical and too oftentimes CMOs will look at well, I will only do the things that I can measure and cut everything out. And I would caution against that. I think you have to have things that are top of funnel, whether that's. If you can afford to do TV ads, great. But I also recognize that not everyone can or should do TV ads depending on their audience. But you need to manage some level of PR or thought leadership to get the word out there. You can leverage a lot of community or social media, but so to me it's not about cutting out like sections of the funnel, but it's just about paring down and focusing on the things that you know are most important. But like mid funnel SEO, content marketing, paid search and paid search, SEO and paid search, if you had to really prioritize ruthlessly and you have the team that can execute on it, make sure that your own channels are strong, people are going to your website, your website is your storefront. So you definitely don't want to skimp on that. You want to think about design and optimizations constantly on that. And then when I think about just other things, just budget mix, there is, I applied this rule where roughly 50% of what I spend has to be measurable in some ways. 30% would be what I would consider an experiment and 20% is what I'd consider feels right. You're not always going to be able to measure everything down to a science depending on the state of your martech stack or where your business is and its journeys. And some channels are harder to measure than others, like at a home or if you do a sponsorship activation. So what you need to think about there is just making sure your mix of budgets is aligned to some kind of framework based on good judgment. But if I were, if someone were to tell me like 90% of the marketing I do is a feels right category, I would say, okay, that's a little bit of a dangerous place to be. Your CFO is not going to like that. And just think about how you place your bets. Well, because at the end of the day, as a CMO or any marketing leader, you are stewarding precious company resources. And for the executive team and others to feel confident in your ability, you have to show you can manage those resources well.
- [19:39]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I like that. And you know, as with some of the other things, you know, just, it feels balanced and leaves room for some to your point, some experimentation Leaves leaves room for some things that to your other point, just feel right. But yeah, it would be a bit challenging if 90% of the budget was things that were not attributable or anything like that. So that sounds like a good balance. One other thing that certainly a common thread on this show and just everywhere is the role of AI and in this case the role of AI in marketing. What are your thoughts on where is your team and your approach to implementing AI and marketing and where do you see it going?
- [20:31]
Jason Ng
Yeah, if I could get on my soapbox, I would tell all marketers that we as a profession were not adopting this quick enough. And I have been very clear with my team who has been really great about testing into AI and looking at all the different ways AI can improve productivity and creativity by not just automating routine tasks, but like using AI tools embedded in things. Like, you know, we use Brightedge and Clear Scope for our SEO and a lot of the AI comes in in terms of making sure that gets well optimized for searchability. There's so infinite ways in which AI really helps marketers and in some ways it's very purpose built. Like we are one of the, we should be the early adopters because of, you know, ultimately what we do is we put content out there, whether it's creative in visual or in words. And like in words in particular, a lot of content generation is really made better and faster by AI. Now you have to be careful. You have to navigate through legal considerations, especially things related to copyright and video and content. But you also need to be mindful that you're not just farming it all out to AI. You have to be what they call the human in the loop. You have to be inspecting everything that comes out of AI. And it's just really, really important to make sure that you treat it more like you treat. I like to say ChatGPT is like my intern. I bounce ideas off it. I'm very clear on how I prompt it and it gives me an answer that, you know, I can trust a lot of times. But like an intern who's new at this and learning how I work, I'm not always going to, it's not always going to get things right. And so I think just, just be on the edge of that learning curve. And I certainly think my team has done a great job in terms of just heeding the call of being very AI and future focused.
- [22:37]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I love it. And I think AI and AI adoption is certainly part of a lot of different types of B2B marketing has evolved quite a bit over the last several years. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how do you see whether it's AI's role or some other customer preferences and the preference changes. How have marketing programs evolved in the B2B world?
- [23:07]
Jason Ng
Yeah, more and more campaigns and marketing outputs have to be data driven and more personalized than ever before. SMB marketing, it's kind of like this hybrid between it's B2B but it's also B2C because there's so many of them out there. It requires highly relevant and targeted messages that speaks to pain points. And what I often notice is a lot of marketing, I'd say like mediocre marketing or mid marketing as the kids would say. It's just very self expressive like we do X and it's like, well do people really care that you do X because you do X and so does 10 other vendors. Right. And so speak to customers where they're at, speak to the problems and the solutions that you offer. And I do think AI driven strategies like content personalization and trigger based marketing, it's really key and I'm liking a lot of tools like Typeface for example, that really help automate that at scale and help kind of ease the burden of like having to make things so tedious when you're launching a campaign with like thousands of assets. I do also think that brand messaging, there was a time when people are like, oh, you don't need to do brand because everything is performance driven. I'm glad to see that that's coming back in terms of people recognizing that there are limitations when you're just focused on performance based channels. You need them to work together. As I mentioned earlier, it's a multiplier effect. And so I think those are some of the things that kind of come and go. But the channels change, the tools change, but the fundamentals ultimately are the same.
- [24:54]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, well, and so talking a little bit about, you know, we've got a wide range of people listening to the show, some earlier in their career, some later. But you know, for those starting off, certainly it's a different world than it was when I was starting off my career and you know, we talked about AI and things and you know, you've had an impressive career in marketing and you know, just wanted to get your advice on what should young marketing professionals just starting their careers, what should they be keeping in mind now?
- [25:27]
Jason Ng
Yeah, I think I'm a little old school but what I would say is be grounded in those marketing principles or Their fundamentals. And if you forget any of them, there's like the four P's and things like that. The most important one just to remember is always be grounded in customer understanding. Be the voice of the customer, Know the customer inside and out. That is so critical. The other is, you know, master the details and work hard, but never lose sight of the bigger picture. Especially when you're early on in your career, you want to understand how things work, how to execute a campaign, what makes a campaign great or not. Just working hard and being really attuned to the details. And then when it's done, understanding, like, did it work? Did it not work? How did this fit into the bigger picture of the strategy is really important. And as you progress in your career, like, that wasn't clear to me when I did my very first campaign, which was a diaper direct mailer. We put a sample in there and we mailed it to a bunch of people. But then when I look back, I'm like, oh, that was a great example of direct marketing, of targeted marketing, of measured marketing approach, like, and a lot of those principles. While, you know, I'm sure P and G still does that today, it was like, I have done versions of that type of campaign in a more digital or an automated fashion today, but I still think about that very first campaign that I did because I worked so hard to get that done. And then the last thing I'd say is, be a truth seeker in all things like challenge biases. Disconfirm your beliefs, look at alternative perspectives, and use data wisely. But at the end of the day, great marketing, as I mentioned earlier, is truth told well. But know the truth. Know the truth about your customers, your competitors, about yourself as well. I think those things collectively will serve you well in your career, regardless of what type of product or type of marketing you do.
- [27:27]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Well, and maybe to that. To that point about seeking the truth, last thing I want to talk about with you is so Gusto has an economics research program that helps, that does research on small business economy. I would love to hear a little bit more about that and how this influences the marketing strategies and campaigns that you run.
- [27:51]
Jason Ng
Yeah, I mean, again, this goes back to being truth seeking and data driven. We have over 400,000 customers, and so we can glean a lot of insights from different industry types, how they're reacting to things like wage increases or macroeconomic trends like interest rates. And we were even just looking at the impact of tariffs and how that could impact small businesses. If some of These things go through and it's really about looking at that and then figuring out how do you derive these insights, deliver them to customers in a way that's relevant to them through, you know, we have a research blog, we have a blog for small businesses. It's embedded in our product marketing message as well as how we speak to customers more at the upper funnel through some of our lifecycle programs. So like recently we also did a study on year end bonuses around December to help SMBs benchmark what their compensation strategy should be going into the year. And so doing all this work, it not only helps small businesses, but it's managed to get us, you know, on Wall Street Journal articles and Forbes and Fortune and the New York Times because we are very transparent and we're speaking to data and trends that, you know, millions of small businesses care about. So it's really kind of taken a life of its own as far as helping us deliver something that was, that's really important to small businesses. But to help also shape our brand and to get feedback on the types of things that our customers are responding to so that we can find more of those type of insights and be even more relevant as we continue to develop our content.
- [29:44]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like a win win. I mean, it helps the small businesses and it helps the brand. Yeah, that's great. Well, thanks again for joining today, Jason. One last question I'd like to ask everybody here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [30:02]
Jason Ng
Yeah, always be learning. Always come in with a day one mindset. Like I start every week pretending. Well, not pretending. Often I don't know something and trying to learn it new, but also looking at, okay, what am I doing now and where could I be wrong or where could something have changed that might require, require pivoting? And so it's this idea of having a, like I worked at Amazon for many years, but it's like this thing they call day one mindset. And it's really important that you always be intellectually honest with yourself and realize like you there's, the world is changing, our customers want more, competitors are coming out all the time. How are you staying ahead of those things? And it's not a paranoia, but it's more of a curiosity driven approach. I think for me, that's really what drives me to stay agile and on top of things as best I can. Of course.
- [30:59]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Jason Ng, chief marketing officer at Gusto for joining the show. You can learn more about Jason and Gusto by following the links in the show. Notes thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b agility.com. that's b2b agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile. The agile brand.
- [31:53]
T-Mobile Ad
Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from big cities to your hometown on America's largest 5G network. Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid cart. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card last 15 days. Qualify and unlock device credit service port in 90 plus days device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access and expires in six months.
- [32:23]
Zigly Fiber Ad
When the Moore family ditched cable Internet and switched to Zigly Fiber, they got so much more. Mr. Moore got more upload speed for next level gaming and live streaming to the masses. With reliable service, Mrs. Moore is no longer her family's IT guru, leaving her more time to stream games into overtime. Let's go. And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without freesight, the numbers look good.
- [32:46]
Greg Kilstrom
Brad, you're on mute.
- [32:47]
Zigly Fiber Ad
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- [32:52]
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