How DG Should Work with Design, ‘COMO’, and Superside’s Top Ad Creative | Amrita Mathur @ Superside

Episode Description

In the newest episode of Demand Gen Chat, I caught up with Amrita Mathur, VP Marketing at Superside. Superside has gone through amazing growth since Amrita joined as the first marketer in May 2019. We cover a wide-range of topics from the history of Superside’s marketing team, to how demand gen marketers can work better with design teams, to what ‘COMO’ is and how marketers can take advantage of it to stay ahead of the crowd in SaaS.

Show Notes

Follow Tara: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taraarobertson https://twitter.com/taraarobertson

Follow Amrita: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amritamathur/ https://twitter.com/amritamathur

Check out Katelyn Bourgoin’s newsletter: https://customercamp.co/whywebuy/

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About DGC

Demand Gen Chat is a Chili Piper podcast hosted by Tara Robertson. Join us as we sit down with B2B marketing leaders to hear about the latest tactics and campaigns that are driving pipeline and revenue. If you’re looking for tactical ways to improve your marketing, this podcast is for you!

Episode Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Demand Gen Chat. I'm your host, Tara Robertson, and I'm really excited to introduce you to my guest for today. Today we have a good friend of mine Amrita. Amrita Mathur is the VP marketing at Superside, an always on design company that delivers great design at scale. Amrita also happens to be my former boss and is an amazing SaaS marketer. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me and great to reconnect.

Really fun to reconnect with you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey at Superside so far. I know there's been a ton of change in the short time you've been there.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Oh, my gosh, change doesn't even begin to describe it [laughs]. When, when I joined Superside back in 2019, it feels like forever ago, but it was really only three years ago. Um, we weren't even called Superside. We were called something else, Konsus, which no one could spell. It didn't mean anything. Um, so the fir- like, literally was, like, my first week and my, my CEO, my boss was like, "I think we need to rebrand and like rethink this whole, like, what is our go to market? What is our product? What is it that we're even selling to people?" Um, and at that point we were strongly considering moving entirely to a subscription model, but we hadn't done it yet.

Like, we really had no idea what that would look like. What would the dip and revenue be like? We were very much like this, like interesting call it, like pay as you go sort of model, which obviously doesn't have the same recurring revenue, uh, possess that comes with typical SaaS businesses. So we knew we needed to get there and it, like, he was just like, "Okay, make it happen, figure it out." And I was just like, "Oh, okay. This is a, this is a big job."

So we broke down the problem into like much smaller problems. Um, it was compounded by the fact that I was also marketer number one, didn't have a team. We didn't have like our product team fully stacked up. We didn't have our engineering team fully stacked up. We barely had anybody in sales. We had no customer success. Like we had nothing. It was just like a team of like 30 people. And everyone was doing all sorts of things and wearing multiple hats. So we really had to figure out, "Okay, like what are the big, big experiments we had to figure out?" Um, and then we just went forward. So we rebranded, bought the Superside.com domain, uh, figured out what our subscription plans would be, or at least the first iteration of it, promised ourselves that we'll just like constantly iterate on them as we learned, which we have.

I think since I've been here, we've reiterated just on the pricing and the sort of SaaS packaging alone six times since I've been here. So that's like almost twice a year. So that's been huge and that has directly coincided and shown incremental revenue over time. So it, so, you know, pricing strategy is like very important. Of course. Um, so yeah, we did all of that stuff. Went to market, uh, learned a lot along the way. And really in four, I think four-ish months, we kind of already saw where we had product market fit. And then again, we just like doubled down. We were like, "Okay, these segments, get it. This is where the deal cycles are short. This is where the sizes are big. Uh, this is where we can go from lead to demo, to closed one, like really fast." And, and-

Mmh.

... so the velocity was just like so good at certain segments. We were like, "That's all we're marketing to." So we just like hopped on that. Um, and then, you know, run some experiments on the side, but really tried to milk that as much as possible. So it's been good. And as I was telling you earlier, like we're blessed with the fact that clearly we're solving, um, a tangible problem. It, you know, there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of businesses and I think there's lots of room for these types of businesses that are creating an entirely new category, solving a very poorly understood problem.

Um, but I think in our case, we're solving a problem that's somewhat known and well understood. And now we're just trying to tell people like, "Hey, there's a better way to do this. You don't have to use whatever, slow moving expensive agencies or poorly managed freelancer marketplaces. Here's like the third, fourth, the alternative, and a better way of doing it."

So that's easier. I would, in some ways it's easier to go to market it's saturated and you have, "Competition," but the problems understood. So we're blessed with that. We're blessed with a huge TAM, a huge market. And we're, I think like we're at a, you know, I would say there's definitely been like a shift in the thinking of companies all over the world, regardless of the, uh, vertical that they're in or the industry that you're in. I, I think everybody generally kind of understands that design is important. It's not just like making things pretty anymore. I think people get that.

So we don't have to do that level of education. You know, I think this, if this was like five, six years ago, we'd still be educating people why design is important, why you need to be design led and all of that stuff, but like Nike and the Mints of the world have solved that for us. So, so we're a little bit right place, right time.

That's awesome. And with all those changes especially on the go to market and pricing side, have the KPIs for your team changed along with that? Or have you always just been focused on pipeline and inbound revenue?

Yeah. Good question. I, you don't, I kind of, there's definitely issues with the OKR model, but I think though what I love about it is that it allows teams to keep like a couple of important things constant. Like we'll always be-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... measured and always be focused on pipeline and revenue, right? Like marketing's 100% focused on ARR. Like we have a $75 million rut number. We're gonna try to hit that. That's, that's it. But every quarter we try to keep our eye on, um, certain things that are very important, perhaps that particular quarter. Doesn't mean we change it every quarter, but it's just like a revolving door of like, let's just call them leading indicators. So they're metrics-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... that are important to hitting that 75 million. Um, but it may not always be important to keep your, um, eye on it because maybe you've solved that problem. And now you can go onto other problems. So I'll, I'll give you a couple of examples. Number one, bringing, um, existing leads back into the fold. So like that repeat visitor, that repeat engagement is very important. No us, 'cause we know we've seen now that more repeat, uh, engagement with us leads to pipeline, um, much faster.

So like we already have whatever, 30, 40,000 people in our system that have come to Superside, filled out a form at some point we know who they are, we're tracking them. Um, and now I need to find a way to like bring them back and engage them further. We're super focused on, um, the last couple of quarters on what we just called mix of leads and that that's because we've seen that certain segments have higher correlation to better retention. So for us mid-market and the smaller enterprise companies are really important, we have amazing retention with them.

If you're really, really big, like really gigantic and massive, like a, like a Fortune 2000, maybe not so much, but if you're a mid-market like a Chili Piper or uh, a little bit bigger, like maybe like early days of Facebook or, you know, we have a ton of customers who are like just kinda like have employees that are like maybe 2,000 people, they're really great fit for us. So now that we know that retention's great with that group, marketing is hyper focused on bringing in those types of leads. It may be lower-

Mmh.

... quantity, but we see them as higher quality, uh, over time. So, so yeah, um, that we'll keep an eye on these, these days. And we also keep an eye on just sort of customer engagement by our community and all the community, um, activities that we do. There's a couple-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... of other leading indicators in there. But my point is, I don't think that any company ourselves included should be so buried in the numbers that you lose sight of like the bigger things. Um, I think it's important that you pick your battles and our, our battles basically change every quarter or so. That that's really-

Mmh.

... our philosophy. And I, and I like that about the OKR model. I, I'd say like most importantly, some people are really not great with change, right? And so when you give people advanced warning, like, "Hey, this is what's important right now, but it may not be important later 'cause you've solved that problem." I think it just allows marketers to be comfortable with that. Uh-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

So yeah, we, we try to, we try to do some like planning and team building every quarter and roll that in there.

And how do you do that remotely? 'Cause that's one thing just personally we're struggling with as we've always been remote first as well, but trying to do things like plan for the next year or the next quarter. I just love doing that stuff in person. So is there anything you guys are doing to get that done remotely or?

Oh, gosh, honestly there's, there's no magic number. There's no magic wave-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... or, or tools or, you know, lots of people would be like, "Oh, we use, you know, this sticky notes app or whatever." And it's like, "Yeah, sure. Like that's, that's fine." I, I think it kinda... The thing that's work, the, there's definitely things that don't work for us. So don't get, I don't think we've figured it out, but what's worked for us is that we have like a culture of making decisions locally. Um-

Mmh.

... so we're very non I'd say like consensus driven. So what we actually end up doing is we tell each of the squads in marketing that these are like, this is, this is what's important to the business. And then each squad actually does their own planning and they surface up what they, that they should be focused on. We do debate it like there is like some poking and prodding that happens and we're just like, "Oh, what about this? And what about that?" And we, we kind of have that back and forth and that back and forth is actually in a public, uh, forum. So it could be like a team wide meeting or some kind of ritual, uh-

Mmh.

... but it's quite public so that everybody has a chance to weigh in. And then we try to ensure that there's alignment across all the squads. I, I think you know the, the, the philosophy that I subscribed to like squads for me are everybody has a swim lane. You have your specific, uh, KRs, but they need to be aligned across the entire team. Um, and they need to be extremely flexible of collaborative. So even though you have, you can have your own swim lane and you know exactly what you're executing on and, and what, you know, needle you're trying to move. Um, you, you, it has to have a line that so it's not worked perfectly, I would say.

And it does take, I'd say by the time we finish our planning process, it's usually like this when we planned for 2022, that was like all of January, basically there was tons of back and forth. But once that larger plan is set, the quarterly, planning's a lot easier. 'Cause it's usually just adjustments and tweaks and we can usually wrap it up in a week. Um, that's, that's how it's played out. But because of this, like make decisions locally, um, framework that we operate under, it's not horrible. I think it's harder for companies where everybody has to be involved in everything. Uh, there's definitely-

Mmh.

... lots of companies like that. I was just reading on Twitter like last night where this lady I follow is interviewing at this company and she has like nine people that she's interviewing with because they all, they're just like a very consensus driven orb or whatever it is, you know?

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

And it's like, "Oh, gosh. Yeah. Like how, how you make decisions in organizations like that? I can't even fathom."

Yeah. That gives you a preview of how they work internally. So maybe that's not a great, a great sign if you don't like that kind of culture. On the topic of planning. One post of yours that I really wanted to touch on is you had a LinkedIn post around, I think you just say it COMO like FOMO, but cost of missing out. Um, so I'm curious how that factors and maybe you could quickly describe what cost of missing out is, and then also how that factors into your planning.

Yeah. So cost of missing out is just a random term I made up. It's basically, it's a way to think about marketing activities. You know like everybody says no to stuff, right? You can't do everything. You can't, even if you had unlimited budgeted resources, you just can't possibly do everything.

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

So cost of missing out is just like a way to think about are, are these opportunities things that maybe may not exist later for whatever reason, maybe increased competition, reduction in budget, whatever, like there's all these various factors. So now that we're in a place where we have the machine built, the, you know, we, we have a predictable way of bringing in leads, bringing in pipeline. I mean there's tweaks to be done, but like the, the bulk of the machine is built. And just for context, like we're 100% inbound, like at, at Superside.

So everything that sales touches has been produced by marketing. There's no, it's not like sales has its own revenue target and marketing does. So if we fail, sales failed, customer success fail, right? So it's like a, it's a train. So we had to be very careful that if we are gonna start doing risky things, um, that it did derail the machine that was built. So in, in my mind, because we've been so focused on that and because everything's so supremely interconnected, I personally did not wanna do anything that was, let's just say not properly trackable, didn't have a straight line to revenue, et cetera, long story short. I describe COMO as, um, let's just say risky moonshot that could be high reward. Um, of course they're high risk, but they could be high reward. And it's just, um, again, activities or initiatives that may not have a straight line to revenue.

And I think every marketer has a responsibility to try that at some point in their company's journey. Uh, somebody actually on that LinkedIn post made a very good point. She said, "Uh, this is a true sign of a organization growing up." Which I think is so smart because obviously if you're an early state startup, you can't afford to do that. But when you're in that high growth phase and you've got the machine built, then there's like, there is an optimal time to start moving in that direction. So this is that time for us. Um, we have decided to do a lot of high spend type things. I'll give you two examples. Uh, this is not blocked in, but we're considering strongly being at SaaStr Annual, the conference this year. You can easily blow 250K and get nothing in return. You don't really know if like your audience is gonna be there, how they're gonna react.

There's like a bunch of stuff that you know, is like out there, but we figured, okay, if there is a time to try it, this is a year to try it. Right? So it's high risk could be high reward. Uh, we're thinking of, we're, we're launching this huge campaign in, um, in Q3. Uh, and we're thinking of number one, entering new markets like geographically, which we've never done before.

Mmh.

We've been so supremely focused on just America. Uh, but now we're thinking, "Oh, Germany, oh, UK." Um, so there's that. And then we're also thinking of actually doing some out of home advertising. We're like extremely digital. We've never done anything in person. So both SaaStr Annual. And like out of home advertising will be like something we've literally never tried before and have no idea how it's gonna do. And again, it's something that's like big bucks. You can spend a lot of money very quickly.

The way that I've thought about de-risking that is ensuring that we have evidence, that those things could work in advance of pulling the trigger on that. So that includes, "Hey, do we have hero customers of the UK and Germany? Do we have anybody who are they, are they, are they just like random one offs? Or like, is there some consistent thing that we've seen from those markets?" So just like, you know, trying to, trying to take an evidence based approach, but still taking that moonshot and being okay if it doesn't work and, and not having to explain to the org like, "Well, you know, this is why we blew $250,000."

[laughs] Yeah. I think that's the hardest part, especially to your point with an inbound business is you don't wanna screw over the sales team and the customer facing teams by taking this risk, but you're in a good spot with all of your other programs. So it's the perfect time. And there might not be another time where you're having a great quarter and you can commit to these things, so.

Exactly, exactly. And there's like also, like, there's just, you can't anticipate competition. Like what if random other companies come out of the wood works that are copycats of ours? Like we literally see-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... companies that don't have the exact model, but they've stolen our, uh, like our messaging from our homepage, even our, um-

Mmh.

... brand like our whole space theme. Like literally companies have ripped that off. And so back of my mind, I always have like, someone's just gonna come outta the wood works one day and say, "I'm gonna do Superside, but only target the UK or whatever." So yeah, just-

Yeah.

... that, that's what COMO is, you know, and it's not applicable to all startups. It's, you have to do it when you're ready. And when you have money in the bank, I, I think.

Yeah, you mentioned that you're pretty much 100% digital today. I know at least I've seen a bunch of your retargeting ads that I love, but one, I forget what you call him. Is it space dog? What's your dog as to [laughs] [inaudible 00:16:59] yeah, I wrote space dog. Guess that was smart. [laughs] Um, but that's probably the number one ad I've seen on Facebook with so many positive comments, especially Facebook can be very kind of a dark place sometimes. [laughs] But it has, I came across it just the other day. It has hundreds of comments and they're all, "Wow, this is the best ad I've ever seen. This really stands out." I'd love to hear a little bit just kind of how, if you can share how that's performing and how that came together, because it's, I'll have to share a screenshot when we share out this episode, 'cause it's really cool.

So yeah, it's been one of our highest performing ads of all time, in general I'll just say that, uh, ads with motion do extremely well. It kind of, again is one of those things, like, of course it does better 'cause they're more engaging, duh, but that I have seen some shitty motion ads too. Like they could be like very jarring and over the top. So there is like a certain, um, I guess way to do it, but yeah, our head of performance marketing, smart dude, really creative actually he wanted to do an ad that obviously utilized motion 'cause we'd seen positive momentum there, but he wanted to like do something that broke like the grid and would take you out of like, as you're scrolling, which many people just kind of like scroll really fast, as you're scrolling it like kind of like jumps out at you.

And so with that challenge in mind, uh, and we, and we, and by the way, we had another piece of evidence, which we, and we knew that everybody loved, Astro Pop, like from the website, 'cause he's featured on the website-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... he's on the book of demo page, he's on a lot of different pages. So we already knew that.

So you knew that he worked as a project.

We knew he worked. Yeah. We knew that character, that illustration worked and we knew motion worked. So how do you now combine that, right? So then we just ran a bunch of in the background. Like we just created a bunch of different examples of ads that broke the grid and utilized these two things. Uh, we, I'll talk about this more in, in a second, but we have a creative process that we utilize to come up with really innovative ads. Uh, but yeah, we just created a bunch of them and honestly I think Andy who runs this picked like what he thought was the best one. He has very good hutches-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... too, 'cause he's just all into this and, and it worked, it, it really worked and we got early evidence of it from the comments. And then we knew that when people make a lot of comments, even if they're negative, we know that the distribution of that will be much better. So-

Yeah.

... we saw that early indicator. We just kept running it for a couple of weeks and then it just became our high, high performing, um, ad. So...

Yeah, so neat.

Yeah. And we have other motion ads that also do almost equally well that don't have any of these, like let's just call them, um, like Facebook, you know, break the grid tactics, but-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... yeah. This one is, uh, I'd say this is one of our, maybe top three or top four ads in the last three years.

Wow. That's great. And when you come across an insight like that, how do you share that across your customers? Is it obviously you put out content on your blog, but do you also empower your CS team to share this kind of thing with customers? Or how is that process?

Yeah, we do. So yeah, we, we put out our own content share with the world, like what we're, where we're find, finding success, et cetera. Um, our customer success team has a process to which they share all sorts of insights or, you know, so we have, we have customers that use us almost exclusively for ad creative for example, that would be the most direct application of an insight like this. Right? But I would say that not everybody cares, not all of our customers would care about this. We have, I think the one of the problems, it's not a problem really, but one of the issues that our customer success deals with is that we have a lot of different buyer personas and a lot of different user personas and not everybody cares about the same things. So hypothetically, if you're on a subscription plan with Superside, that does not include ad creative, you are really not gonna care about this one little detail or insight.

Um, so, so yeah, the customer success team like arms the right customers with whatever they find out, it could be from a report that's publicly published. It could be something that's worked for us. It could just be another insight that they themselves can see from the creative that we've produced for, for them. Um, so there's like-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... that bi-, bidirectional feedback that happens. We've actually hired, um, this is part of our secret sauce, but we've hired marketers on the customer success team that act as-

Mmh.

... floating advisors for our customers. So they'll just jump in to random conversations. It could be, "Hey, I'm on the monthly call, the customer success, person's on the monthly call with the customer" and they might just say, "Hey, these are the things, this is on the agenda." And that marketer will say, "Oh, I have value to add here, here, I'm gonna join your call."

Mmh.

So we, we've got a few of these people just like floating around, trying to add value wherever. And there's no like charge for it. It's just like, "Hey, have you thought about Pinterest? I think you guys would do great on Pinterest. Here's why." And then, you know, we'll come up with some examples and then the customer has a chance to be like, "Yay or nay, use Superside, or don't use Superside, et cetera."

That's a really great value ad because obviously they're already using Superside anyway. So if you can get them to try a different channel or try a different tactic, that's great. Kind of a win-win, so.

Yeah, it's a great win-win 'cause often they'll say, "Yep, let's do it," and we'll use Superside for it.

That's really cool. Um, you mentioned your design process that you follow internally. I'd love to hear a little bit about that and how you approach things like AB testing as well.

So I think, uh, let me just give the backdrop. So we've got our own creative team on the marketing team, but we're also on a Superside plan. Obviously could do like a million things to do. [laughing] Uh, what we've done. And I think again, in retrospect, I should have done this at all the companies I've ever been at, but, um, I guess I've never really had the creative team report to me until this job, but what we've done. So we've got a, a, a whole host of people on the team. We've got video people, we've got, um, classic designers and illustrators. We've got web and UI people. Different skillsets essentially. But we have assigned one or more people, two specific squads. So our squad structure is we've got performance, SEO, influencer, all the super experiment and stuff under one person we've got demand gen and ABM under one person, we've got content marketing under one person, we've got product marketing under one person. Those are the four squads. And then of course the creative team supports all of these guys.

Um, what we've done is we've said, "Hey, you two designers with these skillsets, you are largely aligned with this squad." So there's like very tight knit discussions and processes and data sharing that happens. This is particularly important for performance marketing where tons of experimentation happens on a weekly basis. We ship an experiment basically every week, sometimes more than one. Um, and so that designer who does all of our motion ads for example, is very, um, in the know of what's working and what's taught, like about the most like nitty gritty. Like you can't even imagine, like they talk about shape of the button, color, like Astro Pops is like an example of like one large thing that came out of it. But I'm talking like really detailed stuff 'cause they, they'll run experiments that are so subtle.

They, as a, as a user, you won't even necessarily see the difference. It could be a smaller change in the copy. It could be a tiny, um, difference in the size of the buttons. Like, you know, download here or click here. Uh, but that designer is fully in the know and he joins all of the weekly performance marketing meetings. So even though his skillset is designed in illustration and motion, um, he's sitting with the guys who are like clicking the buttons and making the decisions on the tests that are being run. Um, so that and actual, that actual process has been great. Our, um, experimentation process is like, number one, like there's lots of rules of thumb. This is kind of standard, but it's the usual stuff where we say you gotta ship fast, gotta run a lot of experiments.

Uh, follow your gut obviously to figure out what the experiment should be, but then rely on the data to actually make the call. Um, and then we also know that it's not just the ad that does the work, right? Like it has to have continuity. So the landing page is equally important. So we run lots of experiments there as well.

Mmh. And where does copy come in? 'Cause that's something that happens a lot. When I work with designers is some of them prefer to start kind of with you and some want you to hand them copy. And then they work from there.

Uh, great point. So we write our own copy. Like the marketer writes their own copy, but-

Mmh.

... to make things simpler, we actually innovate more on the design aspects and less on the copy. 'Cause we've, we've got our standard messages. We know that they work, they worked across other channels. You know, whether it's the website or what have you. So we already know like, hey, these are the three or four things that constantly work, prospect love it. They get it. Uh, this is a good way to like quickly shift someone's mind from this to this or what have you. So we kind of don't stray-

Mmh.

... from that too much. Um, the specific copy may change, but the message doesn't change. And of course the performance, uh, marketers have full leeway on that. Sometimes they'll run it by the team. They'll be like, "Hey, we're trying something new. Does this sound right? Does this look good?" And then we'll, you know, the team will provide feedback. Um, but they have like a pretty button down process. But we're very, um, I would say like concept led, like we'll come up with, these are the three concepts there's quarter and then the designers actually go off and produce stuff without even seeing a copy necessarily. I actually think for ads that's better. It's not great for landing pages, but it's a great process for advertising specifically.

Yeah. Especially if something like a Facebook or a social ad, that's what's getting people's attention. It's normally the copy kind of blends into the background. Like I couldn't tell, I normally am someone who focuses on copy, but I couldn't tell you what the Astro Pop copy was. I just remember Astro Pop. So, [laughs] that's a great point. Yeah. Start with the concept.

And it's, it's funny because I have this debate with people all the time. It's like, you know, back in the, maybe even now actually, but like the, the typical creative agency or ad agency, they always pair you up. Like if you were, you were a customer of, of an agency like that, they'll give you a designer and a copywriter. And I actually-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... can't fathom how that could possibly work. Like I just don't understand what that trio would do. Like, so you have a performance marketer and a designer and a copywriter, like shouldn't the performance marketer generally be able to write half decent copy and know enough about design? You know, I just, I just don't think that that's three different bodies. I think, I think today it's like one person with a lot of help from a creative person.

Yeah. Maybe you need a copy editor, but hopefully the person internally knows enough about the product to write that copy.

Exactly. And your message and you know who your buyer personas are. And yeah. It seems-

Yeah.

... silly to me that it would be like different people. You asked about AB testing. So like I said, we ship an experiment every week, sometimes more than one experiment a week for us to get statistical significance. Like we know that sometimes it's hard to get data back in just one week, depending on the-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... fact that we're going after. So some experiments are quite long and some are like fairly short depending on which group it is. When we market let's just say, let's just say like some kind of top of funnel, um, content download asset that we-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... and, and given what, what the asset is. We know tons of people could see it and tons of different people could react to it. And by the way, there's like five or six different buyer personas that might download it. So when the results start coming in, we always have to keep in the back of a mind that it could be one segment that loves it. And one segment that hates it. So not to take the results as gospel. So that context setting is really-

Mmh.

... important. And we, we make, we try to maintain like our own documentation. We'll say, "Hey, we're running this experiment. This is our expectation. This is what the data suggests. Uh, we are gonna discount this data because of blah, blah and blah." And keeping that, um, keeping that documentation for yourself and being true to what your experiment actually was, is super helpful. 'Cause you forget like one man down the line, you've just ran like 12 experiments you've forgotten. Um, so that, I think that framework is-

Yeah.

... very important for people to have.

Yeah. Especially to your point, if you're targeting multiple personas with the same creative, same landing page, you need to keep that context documented somewhere. However you do it, but yeah. Makes sense.

And you can't separate them out because you may just not have enough people matching in, in-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... Facebook at a campaign.

Great. I know we're coming up on time. I do have a couple quick fire around questions for you before you go. Um, so first is there another marketer you follow that our listeners should go follow? Maybe it's someone with a podcast or a blog newsletter, anything?

There's tons. I'm so bad with names. So I actually never remember her name, but uh, she writes about sort of like user for like buyer psychology, Caltlyn, I think Bur-, Burgoin or Bur-, boy, I think... [laughs] Anyway, she's like an independent marketer. She runs this like-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... um, sort of like, I guess like sort of like a consulting, um, agency sort of thing, but I've subscribed to her, um, emails and every week or so she sends something out, but it's very like, very much about how people think and-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... so many people have made this point that, well marketing is mainly just like buyer psychology, which I think can be true. It isn't just that, but it can be true. But it definitely brings me closer to that. I think like that's the one area that I'm personally a little bit weak on. Um, and yeah, she's always educating or at least like making you think differently.

And what's an under the radar channel or tactic that your team is really loving right now.

Ooh. Uh, I don't know if it's under the radar, but given that we're like a design company, we're obviously-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... like our, our big, highest performing channel is Instagram for example, people have suggested that it could be, be hands or dribble. Um, I don't think that's true for us because it tends to attract a lot of independent designers, whereas we're, we're B2B, right? Actually we're more like B2E. And so those people aren't hanging out, the head of creative at Airbnb is not hanging out on be and to dribble. He might be, but he's looking mainly for, to, for, you know, designers to join his team. His frame of-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... his, uh, his frame of mind is quite different. So we've actually found great success with Instagram, uh, both in terms of organic and paid. It's done beautifully for us. Uh, and we're starting to experiment a ton with YouTube. I actually think that for B2B, YouTube could be huge. It's very hard to produce good YouTube content. Obviously that's why a lot of companies-

Mm-hmm [affirmative].

... don't do it, but when, we've invested huge resources into that area and it's actually great for SEO, um, and there's a ton of white space to exploit there. So yeah, that's, that's something that, um, B2B marketers can sort of start paying attention to if they haven't already.

Yeah. Those are two good ones. You're right. You need that video resource though. 'Cause that's, it's tough to produce something solid. Yeah, for sure.

We just like found this like unicorn guy, uh, who is, who can write, edit, uh, and he can be on screen, uh, talent, which is the hardest part in some ways.

Mmh.

Like how do you find somebody who knows the, the subject matter and is good enough to be on camera. You know? Like I would hate to be on a, like, I, it would take multiple takes for me to produce a good YouTube video, you know? So, so yeah, I think, um, you almost need like a team if you're gonna invest in YouTube, you need like at least two or three people. A great editor, a great onscreen, uh, talent and someone who can obviously write the scripts.

Great. And lastly, where can we go to find out more about you? What channel are you most active on?

Ooh. Um, I'd say like, quite active on Twitter and LinkedIn, Amrita Mathur on all of these channels and uh, my DMs are open and I try to help out where I can.

Great. We'll drop those links for our audience as well. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Really appreciate the chat.

Awesome. Thanks, Tara.

Thanks everyone for joining this episode of Demand Gen Chat, we'll see you in a couple weeks for our next episode.