← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
Beyond Clicks: Building B2B Brands with Offline Ads with Amrita Gurney
00:42:20
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- [00:00]
A
Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails, well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love knack here at exit 5. Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performance, forming emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in NAC first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part, everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in action@knack.com exit5. That's knock.com exit5. Or just let them know you heard about Knack from exit5. That's us. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.
- [01:26]
B
All right. On this episode of the Exit 5 podcast, Take talked about out of home advertising, things like billboards, newspaper ads, TV ads, bus ads and how that really is making a big comeback in B2B. We're specifically talking about how this marketing leader ran a campaign using these channels and the results that they saw from it. We broke down why they chose it, the measurement, all that good stuff. So you're going to learn a bunch about that. I'm talking to Amrita Gurney who is now a fractional marketing leader, but at the time she was an in house head of marketing, VP marketing, one of the fastest growing startups in Canada. I think you're going to love this episode. We'll see you inside. All right. All right. I'm here with Amrita Gurney. Amrita, how's it going?
- [02:10]
C
It's going really well. Nice to see you.
- [02:12]
B
Yeah, nice to see you too. Still in Toronto, right?
- [02:15]
C
Just outside of Toronto. Very much enjoying being based in Canada and no plans to change that.
- [02:22]
B
That's it. Yeah. Same here. Same here. Bit of a cloudy, rainyish day today. Looks like it's getting nicer, but it's great. I don't always get to speak to people in Toronto, so I always like to bring it up when I do. Nice but cool. First Things first. Would love if you just, you know, told the audience a bit about yourself.
- [02:38]
C
Sure. So I'm a veteran startup marketer, typically have been a founding marketing leader over the last 10 years, joining companies shortly after their seed round and growing them up to the sort of 50 million ARR range. In terms of my own background I would say that I lean more towards brand and product marketing. Although my very first job was actually in demand gen. Did that for many years. But I would say over the years I'm more of what I call a full stack marketing leader and I know we're going to get into this. Worked at three of Canada's fastest growing startups over the last 10 years as founding marketing leader and this year I've decided to go off on my own and be a fractional marketing leader which has been a great change of pace. I'm working with early to growth stage startups right now.
- [03:30]
B
Awesome. Awesome. Cool. No, that's great. I've noticed you've always worked for companies that I've seen experience a lot of growth, so that's really cool. You know, I know you've had a really great experience. You've, you know, went through a lot of things that a lot of marketers don't always get the chance to. So that's great. You know a lot about a lot of things today. You know, as people can tell by the title of the episode, I really want to talk about out of home advertising and B2B in your last stint with Float did a big campaign around out of Home so I think that'd be a really great topic to go super deep into today.
- [04:04]
C
Sounds great. I love talking about this stuff.
- [04:07]
B
Yeah, super cool. We don't really talk about it much on this podcast so I think it's going to be a really good episode. So yeah, I would love if you just started with like okay, your last roles with Float, you it was VP Marketing, right?
- [04:17]
C
Head of marketing.
- [04:18]
B
Yes. Yeah, VP marketing, Head of marketing. And you did some billboard TV advertising. Why don't you walk us through like what was your goal at the time and what led you to pick that or those channels?
- [04:35]
C
For sure. So for those who don't know, Float is a Canadian fintech, similar category wise to Ramp and Brex, which are I think two well known brands in the US and I joined when we were about 15 people about four years ago and at the time of course I do want to preface this by saying, you know, the market was very different. Float had just raised a $40 million Series A when I Joined, so definitely had a lot of capital. But one really interesting thing was the founders were big believers in brand, which was part of the reason why I took that job and probably why they chose to bring me on. And as you can imagine, you know, fintech, especially B2B fintech, you're dealing with companies, money. You need people to trust that your brand is credible. And we were competing against five big banks in Canada. So in Canada, there's not that many options and there's five that have been around for about 100 years. And so even in the interview process, we talked a lot about different ways we were going to be able to reach people. And at that time, we just felt like using a channel or using out of home in particular was a way to really aim big and look bigger than we were and also be in an environment where very few B2B companies were. And so very early on, in fact, I think when I joined, we originally wanted to launch our first billboard campaign in six weeks. But I pushed a little bit to get that timeline changed to about three months because I did want to bring on an agency, a small agency called Berners Bowie Lee, who were truly instrumental in the success of that first campaign. And the reason we justified it was we felt that again, it was kind of our debut. It was our way of coming out to the market who had never heard of us and saying, hey, we're here, we're different, we're not like a typical bank. And we are here to give something to businesses and finance leaders at these businesses that they're just not getting with their traditional banks. So that was kind of the reason and rationale for us going ahead and deciding to invest in billboards at that time. And maybe the last thing I'll say is that billboards were just one part of an integrated strategy. So, you know, just throwing up a billboard is one thing, but we wanted to make sure that in addition to the billboards, which were a big brand building component, we also took out a full page ad in print news, which is kind of a dinosaur in some ways. But again, for our market, we felt that it was sort of making a bold statement. And then we had a ton of digital to capture the demand that we were creating.
- [07:26]
B
Very cool, very cool. Okay, so lots to unpack here. I love the piece about when you spoke to the founders in the interview, you were thinking about how you can, you know, build awareness and more specifically trust. And I feel like just billboards, maybe, whether it's TV ads or print paper ads, I think that physical Component, like psychologically for the average person makes it feel like, oh, this is a big company that I can trust. Right. Like, who do you see on billboards? Typically companies who are like doing well or have lots of money. You're not just going to see like a 10 person startup up there. So I think that's a. Or at least maybe not a lot in Toronto, maybe in San Francisco, but not here. So I think that's pretty cool. And then also I like that, you know, one of the decision criteria seemed to be the fact that this was just differentiated from what's out there, which exactly, looking back now, it seems like, oh yeah, that makes sense why you would do that. But in the moment, it's actually really difficult to pick those things that are differentiated. So was that just like the founders were cool, taking, you know, bigger, maybe riskier bets, or did that take a lot of convincing on your end to make them take a bet on that type of marketing?
- [08:35]
C
Yeah, luckily it did not take convincing. And again, I think we were really in simpatico when I joined the company and I think they were excited to do something like that. I think one thing we really admire about American companies in general is that they have a lot of confidence and they're bold and they think big. And so one of the values of Float is to take big gold bets. And this was a great example because no other early stage company that was that small was doing anything like that in Canada. So it was really making a big, bold statement. It was risky in the sense that it was a reasonable amount of capital. It wasn't risky in the sense that if it didn't work, the company was going to run out of money. So it was a measured risk. But it was risky in that we were also going out with creative that was not very safe. And I think that's another topic that I love to get into when it comes to out of home or any type of offline channels, is that the channels are one thing. Yeah, billboards are. They're very big and bold, but what you put on them is also such an important part of it. And I see a lot of B2B brands that do actually buy billboards. But the creative is so boring, it's not really going to draw a lot of attention and recall, in my opinion. And I really appreciated that at Float, our creative was actually very different. So just to kind of give people a snapshot, our colors were unusual for a bank. We use sort of this very vibrant turquoise as one of the main colors in the billboard. And we chose that specifically because when you walk around a city or a neighborhood block, you see a lot of gray. And even the billboards, like, a lot of them are not really that attention getting. And we just felt like that color, which happened to be, you know, one of our brand colors, also was one that was going to really stand out. And then what we decided to do was instead of just copy, which talked about, like, the benefits of the product, which is like the way B2B marketing is typically done, you just focus on logic. We really drew on emotion. So we. We worked with a portrait photographer, and he took these four portraits of Personas you typically find in an office. So the receipt loser, which was actually inspired by me because I'm that person whose desk is usually messy and I always lose receipts. The big spender. I think we all know those people who work in companies and just ignore all the expense policies. The corporate card sharer, I was guilty of that as well. For a long time. I had the marketing corporate card, and I would hand it out to my team as needed to use, and then the bottlenecker, which was the person in finance who was typically overwhelmed with the volume of manual work that was required. And so by going with that approach, I think that we also showcased people in a way that a traditional bank never would if you looked at the expressions on their face and the props that we used. And so I think, again, you know, billboards were the story, but the creative was really what got this campaign to take off. And to this day, it definitely put Float on the map. But I'm really grateful that anytime I meet anyone in Canada and I tell them I worked at Float, the first thing they say is, we love your ads.
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B
Yeah, no, I'm the same. I remember they're on the subway, too, from what I remember. Right?
- [12:09]
C
Yes.
- [12:10]
B
I remember riding the subway. I think I remember them being. I could maybe on buses and stuff. I could be wrong. Maybe they're on.
- [12:15]
C
Yeah, we've done it all. Airports, buses, billboards on highways, billboards on city blocks, bus shelter ads. Like we really did. Over the course of my three years there, we did multiple brand campaigns. And so we did test different types of out of home as well, because it's not just one type of buy. So, yeah, we really were everywhere. And I think that was part of the success as well, was you can sometimes get attention with just one billboard if you make a lot of noise around it, if it's very controversial. But in general, marketers need reach and recall. And for us, that meant we had to be in certain neighborhoods with a certain type of frequency so that you started seeing our ads over and over again. And that's what created that recall.
- [13:06]
B
Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Okay. I really love that part about the creative. You know, one, the bright colors. I agree. I think obviously you're walking through a neighborhood and you typically don't get that. It's typically more monotone colors. The messaging of the ad was you were playing on emotion as opposed to logic, which I think is smart. You see a lot of B2C companies do that. Whenever I see ads driving on the highway, that is typically the strings, or at least the good ones, the strings that they're pulling on. And then the last piece is you've made the ad human by taking pictures of your ICP and making that the center of your ad as opposed to like a screen grab of your product in action or not including any kind of visual at all. So I think those are three really good components and takeaways for creative. For this type of advertising. You talked about testing different creatives, and when you test a creative on Facebook, advertising, meta ads, whatever, you know, you can see the data that tells you, oh, more people clicked on this one or saw this one. So what is the testing process like with an out of home type advertising?
- [14:13]
C
Yeah, it's a great question for us. You know, it was our first time doing anything like this, and I think even I look back at myself and how much I learned. So my honest answer is we didn't test it. We just went out and just put this everywhere. I think bigger, more sophisticated teams and companies, they often will do things like focus groups with certain creatives or they'll run a small test on a digital channel to see how people respond. We didn't do any testing. We did a little bit of informal testing with our customers. So we have a group of friendlies that we would reach out to in marketing for all kinds of things, and we actually brought them along through the whole creative process. So even before we chose this campaign concept, there were two other concepts that we also considered. And so we would bring people in and just ask them, like kind of more specific questions. And that helped us narrow this down. So I guess in some ways that probably was a big risk, you know, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on something that could land or could not land. And again, that was our big, bold bet. And we didn't do any testing. And even since then, actually, I don't even think we did see testing in future campaigns. I think we just felt in some ways, too, that we felt pretty strong about our convictions in terms of how we wanted to portray ourselves. But again, I'm sure there are other people who might be listening to this podcast. Certainly in the B2C world, they are very used to doing a lot of consumer testing. In our case, we didn't.
- [15:51]
B
Got it. Okay, cool, cool. Another thing that I wanted to touch upon that you mentioned is this term called recall, which I hear a lot of brand marketers talk about. For people who don't know. Can you tell us, like, what recall is and what the importance of building that is in when you're building brand.
- [16:08]
C
In B, for sure. So definition wise, there's sort of two kinds of recall that we care about in terms of building brand. The first is unaided recall. So that means if I were to ask a finance leader, what are the trusted or leading business finance companies in Canada, what would be their answers? So that is unaided recall. Like, do they think of you without you, you know, kind of mentioning your name? And then the other is aided recall, which is, have you heard of xyz? You know, I'm on Reddit a lot, and I feel like I'm seeing these surveys all the time now. Like, do you recall seeing an ad from one of these five institutions? And so that's more of an aided recall survey. And ultimately, though, recall is just, are you remembered and are you remembered for the thing that you want to be remembered for? I'm sure you've experienced this where you've seen an ad and the ad is really clever, but you can't remember whose ad it was. That is not really what the brand wants to do. We want to get to the point where when you think of something that you want to buy, that that brand is on the short list. And certainly if that brand is put in front of you in form of a Facebook ad or some other kind of, like, performance ad, you do a Google search and there's five responses that come up at the top. Hopefully the recall is going to make you go, oh yeah, float. I've heard of that company versus some other brand who may have purchased, you know, or spent that money on that Google campaign. But they might be a company that you've never heard of before. And we know that recall does really make a difference in terms of performance metrics.
- [18:03]
B
Gotcha. Okay, cool. I don't want to steer us too far off the original topic, but how do you know that? I guess a couple things. One, if you do a big brand campaign, let's say, like what you did with Float a lot of the billboard, tv, newspaper ads, are you running these? Like, are you running recall surveys in between the campaign or after the campaign to see if your stuff is actually working? Like, is that how you tie it in?
- [18:30]
A
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- [20:04]
C
Yes. So the first year we didn't do any recall surveys. We mostly just looked at our performance metrics and I was really happy to see we'd never tried this before. I was very happy to see that when we were running those campaigns and for about four to eight weeks after all of our performance metrics, whether not just website visits, but you know, demo requests, opportunities created, even our performance campaign performance. So like our LinkedIn ads, our Google, everything was lifted at the very beginning. It was lifted as high as 30 to 50%. Like we had amazing lift on all of our performance metrics. And then as we got a Bit more mature, and we felt like we wanted to be more structured about how we measured things. We did start running these recall surveys and they also showed some really positive results for us where we were making traction at the same level as brands that were much more established or had much deeper pockets. And so that really helped us see that we had moved the needle in terms of that aided and unaided recall. So we did start to do much more tracking around that.
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B
Okay, very cool. Yeah. Because I feel like the measurement is where a lot of people could get hung up when it comes to a campaign like this. And it makes a lot of sense. Like you said earlier, like, if budgets are slim and you don't have a lot of money, then making putting all your chips, you know, on that bed is maybe not the greatest idea or maybe tough to justify because it's like you won't know right away if there is this immediate impact without spending all the money first or spending a lot of it. But it's also really that simple where it's like you did this campaign and then you looked at are more people visiting our site and interested in what we have to sell, and the answer is yes. And it's like, okay, it's working. I feel like that's. That was great. That's really like all it took. Right?
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C
For sure. And I think that, like any investment, you have to think about what portion of your spend do you want to spend on experiments. And I remember back when I had a podcast and I would interview marketing leaders, one of the questions we would ask them is sort of, how are you thinking about brand versus performance spend? And I was really surprised. Like the range was anywhere from 20% of our marketing spend as brand to 50%. And so that was kind of interesting. And I think it's always a conversation. It's hard to give even blanket guidance on this because I think it depends on your product, your market, your audience, how crowded it is. Like, there's so many different factors there. And so just because I did billboards at float or TV at float, doesn't mean I would necessarily do it for another company. But I think the lesson I learned from my time there and even from prior roles is that these offline channels or kind of non performance channels, whether it's billboards, but you could even expand that to say, tv, even direct mail, I think that these are in a lot of ways kind of the forgotten art of marketing that B2B brands need to be embracing. And I'm really happy to see that there's more conversation around that now, partly because of the impact of AI and you know, search kind of disappearing overnight to some degree. I generally feel like we can learn a lot from our consumer marketing counterparts who have always gotten brand. And I think in B2B we always felt like the product functionality is going to be the main reason why someone chooses you. And we know that even in B2B. I mean look at exit 5 like there's other marketing communities out there, but there is something very specific and special about Exit 5 and I would argue that that's about your brand or your reputation. So I'm hoping, and part of the reason I was so excited to come here and talk about this is I hope that people will start to pull back from just looking at very short term marketing plays and think about some of these channels and tactics that have actually existed for decades but became kind of out of fashion when performance marketing came to be.
- [24:35]
B
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I feel like, you know, even just doing this conversation now, like this is the kind of marketing that makes me love marketing. The other just like short term, quick get ems, they can be great too. I mean look, if you're running a paid ad campaign and you're raking in demo requests or new contacts or sales, that feels great too. Don't get me wrong, but we've all seen like that at some point gets a lot more difficult and starts to run out and then you find yourself stuck on this hamster wheel of spend. So yeah, I mean this is the stuff that I love too and the stuff I like, wish I could do more of and maybe I will in the future. But I think a big meta lesson too is just like going in places where others are not as well.
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C
That's a great point.
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B
Like at a past company, my first company I worked at, my first marketing job, we didn't have a lot of money and we looked at our competitors and what they were spending on and they were all spending a ton on Google Ads, a ton on LinkedIn. They were doing a bunch of know SEO at the time and they were just spending a lot of money in all those areas and crushing it. And we decided to run ads on Facebook. Now that is more of a short term play, but it was the only channel they weren't running ads on and for years to come I think even still to this day that channel crushed for us with a much smaller amount of spend. So I think that's a big part of this too is like even if you may not think your customers are in that other place, it is Always worth trying and experimenting and seeing if you can get stuff from it. Which kind of also makes me think like with this out of home advertising, like your targeting is not as specific as like a performance marketing play. So how did you think about who you were targeting, where to put those ads, and how that all played into each other?
- [26:19]
C
Yeah, I think media buying for out of home, I mean, it's a profession. There are companies that, that's all they do. And so again, working with Berners, Bowie Lee, we worked with one of their media buying partners. Since then I've also worked with a great freelancer based out of Canada, Simon Mills, who did a lot of this work for us as well. And then there's another team at Kingstar Media I want to give a shout out to. But ultimately it all comes down to, it's actually quite scientific. What we did was we mapped where our customers were. So we actually, you know, we had all their office addresses and we master mapped that literally across the country. Then we narrowed it down to where are their concentrations. So for argument's sake, you know, we picked Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver for our very first campaign because the highest concentration of people who looked like the people we wanted to reach were in those cities. And one thing I learned is that, you know, it's better to go all in in a region versus just trickling a little bit throughout the country because you do need that repetition in order for people to remember your ads and your brand. So that's kind of where we started and then we had our budget. I mean, all of these billboards are owned by a handful of different companies. And so whether you work with them directly or through your media buying team, they will then map out to say, okay, these specific neighborhoods are where you want to buy these billboards. And in a lot of cases we would actually visit the neighborhoods to say, okay, yeah, we like this intersection. And even on an intersection, I learned, for example, on the highway, like you don't think about it when you're just driving by, but some billboards are in a better spot than others. And so we learned things like that, that like just because you're buying it on a major highway, you know, this media company, their billboard is a little further away, the other one is a little closer and bigger. And so we spent a lot of time mapping that out and then deciding kind of where we were going to allocate that budget to. And that's where you have these trade offs of, you know, billboards are the most expensive. Then you also have digital billboards. Then you've got transit or shelter ads. So in bus ads, I remember when we were thinking about transit ads, there was some conversation internally about, well, our audience, they're. They're not taking the bus to work typically. But then we realized that, well, if you're sitting in your car and you're commuting to work, you're often sitting behind a bus. And so we actually bought the outside of the bus, not the inside of the bus, because it was going to be in front of where people were. Same thing with transit ads. Like, you may not be standing at a bus stop, but you are going to be parked at that bus stop. As everyone knows, Toronto traffic especially is horrendous.
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B
Yeah.
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C
So you get a lot of dwell time because people are just sitting there and they're just looking around. And so that was another way that we thought about where we wanted to put that money.
- [29:23]
B
Got it. Okay. Very cool. Very cool. Okay. I love that piece about, like, just thinking about the customer and what their day is like. And obviously you're not going to nail it 100%. But even just like, what are majority of them probably doing, it's like, okay, they probably drive into work. They're not bus people. They're these finance people who are parking under their big, expensive buildings. So that's really smart and cool. Budget. You just talked about budget. I want to go deeper here. I think that's probably the area where a lot of people would get hung up. You know, outside of measurement, I think that's another big one. Obviously there are people who could probably just not afford it right now. And then there are some people who can but don't know how to think about how much to allocate. So I want to break it down. Can you talk about. You don't have to give an exact amount, but what percentage? Well, I guess it was a integrated campaign where you used a lot of channels. So maybe let's talk about, like, what the budget was there, like in terms of percentage of your entire marketing budget. And then let's talk about what percentage the went to, like the billboards and TV ads and things like that. Just like roughly.
- [30:27]
C
Sure. So I think our very first campaign at Float, the billboard campaign, was less than 5% of our annual budget. So. So again, it was a lot of money, but we had raised a lot of capital at that time as well. And we had decided to kind of go all in because it was our. Again, I look at it as it was our debut. It was our first time that we went out into the market. And we didn't, to be honest, like, we didn't really know at the beginning. We had kind of a rough idea of what it would cost. It was only when we did the media planning that we got a much better sense of, okay, we need to spend this much on creative and then this much on the channels themselves, themselves. But the other thing you just made me think of is I would say, you know, one thing American marketers have to their advantage is that there are so many major markets in the U.S. and then there's major, like there's quite a lot of secondary markets as well. So one thing that if I was doing this for an American buyer, you could actually do a test at a reasonable cost, meaning less than 100k, where you pick two cities that are kind of sister cities, so have very similar profiles of buyers and you run your normal performance campaigns. And then one city you add on this additional layer of these out of home or TV or whatever you choose to do, and then measure that to see the lift. And that will really tell you very mathematically that if we spend this much money, we're going to get this much back in terms of pipeline or revenue. In Canada, it was a little bit tougher because as you know, we don't have that many business centers where at that time there was enough of a concentration of people, so it was a little bit harder to do those tests. So I would say for us, if we did want to do that again, you know, we would then just choose one market and again, just measure lift. So even a market like Calgary, you could see what your typical pipeline gen was during a quarter or even a month and then see what that would be like when you added on, you know, that ad spend. And that's how we were able to start forecasting and deciding how much we wanted to spend. Because even though we all talk about the fact that you can't directly measure brand, maybe to the same degree as you do with some of these performance channels, it's not like zero. So you can measure some things and we could measure that lift. And I know Exit 5 has. Is it Pranash, I think, or Prayash, who is part of the community. And he talks a lot about measuring brand as well. And so he's probably a better expert than me. But you can certainly think about allocating budget by, number one, looking at your overall spend and then looking at maybe doing a test first, if you have a market where you can do that and then using that to forecast spending that money on out of home. Or direct mail or any of these kind of offline channels versus spending it on performance.
- [33:39]
B
Right, okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. So did you find like when you started putting up these ads that you saw like a pretty quick lift on your website performance?
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C
We did, I think it was within days.
- [33:54]
B
Within days. Okay, yeah. Cool.
- [33:55]
C
And then we also did tv. Not in our first year, I think we did that in our second or third year. And TV was really interesting because what we did there with the help of our partner Kingstar Media is we were able to measure the impact within the 15 minute window after a spot had aired. So you can go into your analytics because typically with tv, I mean there is going to be recall that's going to help you later on. But we also wanted to see like if we have a commercial on tv, will someone do something like right away? And so that was another thing that we actually were able to measure. And until I had done it, I didn't even know that that was something that we would do. So that also gave us more confidence in knowing whether or not to spend that money on that type of channel as well.
- [34:45]
B
Got it. Okay. I want to talk about time frame. Are these ads running? Is this a campaign you're doing like just always on or do you run it for a specific period of time? Like how do you think about how long to do it for?
- [35:00]
C
Yeah, I think this is the million dollar question. Quite literally billions of dollars. So for us again, you know, growth stage startup, we were, you know, at that point after our first campaign, you know, in our first year or two, like we did go from that one to 50 million in three years. We didn't have the budget to run it as an always on campaign. And so we would keep brand ads on YouTube and other digital channels on to kind of keep that campaign top of mind. But the actual at home campaigns, we typically did them twice a year. So we picked sort of times of year where we felt like, you know, people weren't going to be on vacation. You know, it wasn't going to be a time where people were otherwise going to be distracted, like when they were closing year end, something like that. And so we would just run the campaigns typically spring and fall.
- [35:55]
B
Okay, got it. Okay, cool. Let's say that there's someone listening to this and they've been thinking about running these type of ads, doing a campaign like this. Is there anything that you think they should either A, for sure do and look out for and then B, like what are some things? And I guess it relates, but what Are some things where you're like, ah, if I could have done it differently in year one, I probably would have done this thing differently.
- [36:20]
C
Yeah, I would say the first thing is don't start with the channel. And that's advice I give no matter what the channel is. You know, I think there's a lot of swagger of using billboards, but it has to come back to your strategy. So for us, we chose billboards because of the strategy of wanting to create an impression, to come out of the gate with, you know, kind of a big bold statement. We didn't say, hey, let's do a billboard campaign and then kind of figure out later why. And so, yeah, I would say like, start with the strategy, then choose the channels to fit that strategy. That would be one thing that I would say. The other thing too is, you know, a lot of my advice was based on a company that was targeting tens of thousands of businesses. If you are an enterprise orientation sales led, you probably don't need to take the same approach as I did. So again, I've spoken to other people who have gone after really high value, you know, six figure enterprise accounts. I mean, I think segment is one of the most famous ones that were even earlier than us in terms of using billboards for that purpose. And they would buy the billboard outside that target company's office and they could measure, like in sales conversations, they could actually measure that people recalled seeing that ad and actually did help them move the needle. And that approach was in some ways maybe even more cost effective because they were buying a billboard next to, I don't know, let's say 100 companies, offices versus us where we were trying to reach tens of thousands of people. So again, come back to the strategy. And then the last thing I would say is, you know, think about how much your overall spend is. So if you're already spending, I mean, you have lots of community members who work at companies where you're already spending, you know, six figures a month on performance. You certainly have budget at that stage to be considering out of home. And again, you can start with one market to test it, measure the lift. But I think, you know, it wouldn't make sense. If you're spending $5,000 a month on paid marketing, then of course it's not a good fit. It needs to be at the right stage for your company.
- [38:41]
B
Got it. All right. Well, Amrita, this has been such a great episode. Again, a topic that I don't think we talk about enough at exit 5. I don't really ever see it getting talked about a lot in B2B. I have seen it a bit more in the last year but still not that much. So this is great. I'm sure people will have some follow up questions for you. So if they do, I know you're in the Exit 5 community and you're pretty active on LinkedIn, so I'm sure people can hit you up there. But yeah, I just want to say thank you so much. This was awesome and yeah, I look forward to seeing you around.
- [39:12]
C
Thanks Matthew. This is great. And yes, I've been a member of Exit 5 for a long time and would love to answer any questions if people want to reach out to me.
- [39:21]
B
Awesome. Awesome. I appreciate it. All right, we'll see you soon.
- [39:27]
A
Hey thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what, I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private company community for B2B marketers at exit 5 and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.
- [40:30]
C
Me.
- [40:39]
A
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