More 2 Marketing

Susan
More to marketing. Welcome to more to marketing, the podcast that explores marketing, product and everything in between. I’m your host today, Susan, and today we’re going to be talking about something very close to my heart. Go to marketing. I am so excited to introduce an expert in this field. Michelle Michelle is a product and growth expert. With the heart of an entrepreneur, I am very envious of the things that she’s been doing in startup and can’t wait to talk more. Go to market. Hello Michelle. How?
Michelle
Are you good? How are you? Thanks for.
Susan
I’m good. I’m so excited.
Michelle
Having fun tonight?
Susan
To have you here. But please tell me be more about yourself and your experience as well.
Michelle
Yep. So I run and I founded my own consultancy called Pizzella Media, and we focus on growth and product. And we primarily work with startups. Across APAC generally, but a little bit in Europe here and there as well. I’ve worked with a lot of brands and and taken them to market. And so I was talking about go to market and I’ve helped them scale in both a product and a growth capacity.
Susan
Nice. Fantastic. I can’t wait to to get into more detail. Some of the things we’re talking about offline, because I think there’s some exciting frontiers there, but I suppose let’s get started on topic at hand. How have you actually seen the role of go to market change over time?
Michelle
I think talking from a startups perspective, I’ve seen a lot more startups actually start to think about it a little bit more rather than just. Here we’ve built our product and our and they pay, everyone will come. Instead. It’s now OK, we don’t necessarily believe build it and they will come. We realise we need to tell people so they will come. There’s slight distinction there. So I think that’s really good because then you start seeing you know people like me being brought in or people hired. And actual resources dedicated to actually a successful launch. Of a product and it’s also considered as part of the delivery process rather than just kind of tacking it on at the end or just handing it over to market and to marketing and going, hey, we’ve built the product, your turn to go launch this thing you.
Susan
Know I think it’s one of the key things is it’s that collaboration within the organisation that just because you got a project coming down. Doesn’t mean that everyone knows the INS and outs are selling points or features. What the consumer is actually wanting it for. What is the need it’s addressing in the market and why it’s going out?
Michelle
Yeah. So bringing in all those specialists to work together with the go to market strategy, I personally think it’s key and I think it’s missed out quite a bit in some organisations. Yeah, I think so too. And as a product manager as well, I actually try and involve marketing into the process because I want to take them on the journey with me.
Michelle
Because they make they know kind of the struggles we’ve had to get the product a certain way or why we’ve made decisions about why we’re not doing things in the launch or you know if certain features are gonna come as part of V2 and things like that and why and so.
Michelle
That way they know the persona, they know why we’re building it, and how we’re building it. But by the time I get to hand it over to them to launch, they have a complete background of everything going on. And it’s not just this, hey, it’s done. Go, go. Work it out now. And it also gives them lead time as. Well. I think it’s been kind to marketing. When you’re working in product and going hey, so we’re estimating maybe you know, if we’re lucky, a month, two months out, maybe you guys wanna start thinking about the strategy, I’ll start involving you in the. Things and and that way we can even work it out together cause I I agree. Collaboration is everything siling kills. Product, you know?
Susan
It it really can. If you don’t have a successful marketing strategy for how you’re gonna go to market, you’re never gonna actually resonate with who you need to because they may not even have time to find whatever they need. Even something as simple as a budget. You need time to actually go. OK. This is my planning structure. I’ve got X amount of money. Where am I? Going. To put it towards, if they have no idea about this product coming down there, those poor marketing people, they’re not gonna be able to do much.
Michelle
And sometimes it’s even just alignment on things like personas. I remember consultant to one company product had completely different personas to marketing and then.
Susan
Oh.
Michelle
I kind of. Coming from both worlds, look at each side of the fence going OK guys, you need to talk and work out like you guys need to align because otherwise it’s going to be a fail. If we’re building for one persona. And then you’re gonna mark it to a completely different persona, you know, just like failure waiting to happen. And you don’t want to do that.
Susan
Ohh exactly I I think one of the the biggest assessors I ever saw in a A go to market meeting structure was bringing in all schemes for a weekly or every fortnight. Catch up on where things were at just so they had a road map. They could go back to their teams so I would have. Product marketing that people looking after the website, whatever team you wanna call, those guys call Centre so that they knew what they needed to build out if there was any training modules that needed. To be done. I’d also bring in because I had a retail presence as well as the online. So I brought in the retail team so that they had a representative, so if they needed to design out any pose or signage or even training for them. As well they could. And then the other piece, I also always ensured I kept informed because I’m like you, Once Upon a time, I used to do, GTM would be legal and regulatory just thing. And that’s for a bigger company, but it’s always important to keep those two in the back of your mind with the GTM is you you don’t know what you don’t know in some cases and particularly if you’re crossing borders. To ensure that you’re not going to get yourself. Trouble.
Michelle
Yeah. No, I agree. And I’ve worked with a couple of scale ups where they do have those resources and it’s great to just bring them in and then just go, OK, what do you think of this idea? And they either go, yeah, this is fine. I don’t know why you had to bother. Me or. Oh, my God. What are you doing? No.
Susan
Exactly. Exactly. So from your point of view then when setting up the success, how important is go to market and the whole involvement?
Michelle
I think if you’re launching a product, it’s paramount. I think it’s definitely going to help the success and whether you’re coming from the products or the marketing side from the product side, if you’ve spent all of this care effort, research time building this product to not like to fall down on the last leg doesn’t make sense to me. And on the marketing side, I want to know everything about the product. So I can do it justice so that when I devise a strategy, you know I’ve got the timings right. I’ve got my strategy sorted and I’m ready to go to support the thing. So I think I think it’s incredibly important piece of the puzzle and I think going back to what we were talking about collaboration is that really important bit for me because I mean coming from Startup land, I’m used to being given budgets where I’ve had to do things on a shoestring sometimes I’ve been kind and I’ve given me ample budget, but more often than not. At early stages, if it’s MVP, I can still devise a pretty smart strategy, but I just need to be aligned with product to know why, how, when and that just really involves just collaboration and communicate. And like even with the small resources like a small amount of resources. I can still. Like get some good jobs in. But I need to be able to be aligned with everyone else building that product, so they would probably be the top two things for me to kind of make sure that the go to market of a product is successful you know.
Susan
Yep, 100% agree with you there. I think that collaboration piece is what’s missing a lot of the time in those organisations because they simply just don’t think and they might be. In those silos.
Michelle
Hmm.
Susan
You just get so bogged down in your own world and you forget. Hey, I should actually tell that person over there. They got a job coming up.
Michelle
Yeah, yeah.
Susan
Sorry, I know you’ve just mentioned that you’ve done startups enterprise a few other things. Do you want to give us some examples of GTM that you’re able to? Share with us.
Michelle
OK, I can’t name names, but that’s OK. I built one brand in the fintech space. They were the Challenger brand and.
Susan
Love a good challenger?
Michelle
Yeah, we we had a decent, we had a decent budget and one example I did was we had a decent budget, but compared to the incumbent net. Really. You know, a company with a couple of 100 people making it. You know, you’re not gonna have as much budget as those guys with a fully fledged out team. And so with those guys, the way I went about it was I had previously worked in crypto. I actually took a couple of strategies from that space.
Michelle
I was really on point with my strategy. Because I thought, OK, being a bigger company, they’re gonna be slower to move and that’s the beautiful thing about startups. You’re a lot more nimble and you’re a lot faster. So you can definitely get some jobs in. So an example of what I did was I spent a lot of time on the strategy I looked at and cut. I just did your basic swat, good old swat.
Susan
Yep, swap. You can’t go wrong time and.
Michelle
Place exactly and so I kind of just looked at stuff like that and worked out where the low hanging fruit was really spent a lot of time on the brand to make sure it’s authentic and kept reinforcing the authenticity every single. Time and so when we finally launched, I being our background in growth, I took a growth mentality to see what worked and what didn’t work. But I basically just overlaid this strategy where I was like, OK, I know what channels the big guys are not playing on, I’m going to put resources towards there, see if we get fights, if we do great, I’m going to double down on them. While I was building out kind of the foundations as well, and then I was just really iterating really, really fast. So if things didn’t work and I’d spent a lot of time in the channel kind of testing things out. Well, if it didn’t work, I’d just kill it and be like, OK, great. I need to move the resources elsewhere and kind of go forward and like, we were talking offline, one of the things I did with this brand was actually move. On to TikTok first. And so Fintech marketing on TikTok was a thing. It’s now not a thing anymore since regulations have kind of come in to stamp it out. But back then there was no regs around it and so. Being that we were going after millennials and again perfect storm COVID had happened, so all the millennials were now on TikTok and next was going up top and I had a cheap CPM as well. So OK, what does a little startup do that can act quick, run test, really, really fast and.
Susan
The audience. Captured.
Michelle
As a decent, but you know, not gigantic budget. Great. I’m gonna test out tick tock. And so I work with influencers and. I really focused on. I wanted every single influencer to play with the app first. If they didn’t do it, I wouldn’t work with them because I wanted authenticity. There’s so many influencers who will happily take the money, but they’re not touch the product, and then they basically just act. And in my opinion, audience sees through that so incredibly fast. So I work with all of these influencers. Australia tell me what you think about it and they go, oh, this is this is great. This is great. This is great I. Went OK, great. Just talk to camera. I’m not even gonna direct you too much. My direction is basically I just want a true honest review of that product and and it worked really, really well. We were smashing it when I had my account managers. I actually ran that content strategy across a couple of channels like so Facebook and TikTok it. We rolled it out afterwards and it worked on other. Channels as well. We were beating the finance vertical according to the account managers we were, I think maybe in the top 20% I got app downloads like a.
Susan
Amazing.
Michelle
Dollar, which was in Spain. Even the account managers were going we. Don’t know how you’re doing it, but this is. Amazing. And so it was just that. They’re believing in the brand, building out a consistent brand, being really authentic with the content that we were pushing out. And when I say authentic, it’s not about necessarily production value, it’s about the person who’s speaking as being honest and truthful. And it’s like a friend referring a friend. And so you’re honest. Exactly. And that works so much.
Susan
Genuineness.
Michelle
Better than someone going on about all these products is great and you can tell that they’re not that great an. Actor or actress?
Susan
No, I got my check. I’m just saying.
Michelle
These words exactly. So we did that and we kept refining it and we almost turned it into a playbook and we did quite well. So much so that our competitors. So we could tell they started copying some of our videos, which we found like internally a little bit funny but. Yeah, that’s never good.
Susan
The the flattery of that compliment, isn’t it?
Michelle
There very much, so very much so and like I I’ve worked on another project as well which was completely different in the car loan category. Just to go back on like examples of how to run a go to market with that go to market, apparently it was the first product manager. With those guys. Who had ever started bringing in marketing early on and they were like, this is amazing. No one ever tells us about.
Susan
Stuff coming down the line. The silos.
Michelle
And they loved it because by the time we were ready to launch the product product from a a development perspective, marketing were already on it. They were like, Yep, we know exactly. And I was pulling them into meetings, probably about six months, sorry. Six weeks beforehand. And so they were already. They all had their lead time. We were all coordinated that we were just ready to push the button. By the time it was Q8. Need to launch like I was. Yeah, I’m guessing.
Susan
I love it. It’s just such a a something that sounds so simple, so many.
Michelle
Places aren’t doing yes, OK.
Susan
And and to go back in your example of regulations and authenticity, I still remember when I worked in a skin care company. It was American based, so we got all the American assets to utilise and I was partly product, partly marketing in that company and I was sitting in those sessions and we’d have our legal counsel there going through all the claims that America was doing. Me. Say says 100 of them and only 2% we could do in Australia because of the regulations for the beauty industry. So that’s that’s one thing. I don’t think people understand enough about is depending on the country you’re in is what the marketing message may include or not include. So Australia is very strict. Particularly in the beauty Pharmaceutical industry.
Michelle
Fintech as well.
Susan
100% believe that because there are so many regulations on there so that you don’t, not conning your customers or misleading information. And that’s one piece we go to market again we we come back to this for collaboration, don’t we if we’re at least talking and making sure we’re working with legal or regulatory or whatever it is we’re getting advice, we’re then at least know that what we’re building from the product side. Is going to be able to. Go to market.
Michelle
No, I agree. And even sometimes I’ve I’ve worked with one funders management company, everything used to get passed by legal and I was OK with that because I’m. You guys are protecting us. I don’t want to necessarily write something that us it comes knocking on the company’s. Door, you know.
Susan
Oh.
Michelle
Like I’m more than happy to work with legal and, you know, sometimes it’ll be things like oh, they want us to strip this whole thing out. And you’re like, wait, why do you want to strip that out? And they’re like, oh, because you can’t say this and this and it’s like, OK, so if I just take the word and out, is that OK? Yeah, that’ll work. OK.
Susan
Exactly. It’s working with them I. I always made sure that. Little regulatory and risk I work closely with and I was 100% transparent with as well because I wanted to have that relationship. If something happens like cause **** does hit the fan, particularly for go to market and you’re like, oh ****, something’s gone now or something’s happening, whatever it might be. Then you can call on them and they trust you.
Michelle
Does. Yes, very much so. And like they usually wanna bet like they’ll they’ll bat for you too. Like it? It’s not like they’re the guys you need to hide from. They usually just wanna help. Right. And then again, it goes back to collaboration. You just collaborate with them to work out the best way.
Michelle
You know.
Susan
Exactly. Yeah. So have you come across any myths out there that go that go up against all these marketing specialists that we need to try and bust? For me, one of my ones, I keep thinking of is that they think there is no good market. That just happens.
Michelle
Build it and they will come right.
Susan
Exactly. I I think that’s a a big myth out there to to put out because. You have to work. Yeah, nothing comes to you unless you’ve already got something established.
Michelle
And there’s so many products and markets and personas out there and so many channels. It’s like it’s impossible for everyone to to know or know of everything. I mean, when I give talks on, say, marketing stack building for example, I always show this this image of what used to be called the MARTEC 5000. All the different software that you can utilise in building a stack, right? And people have a shock that there is just so much out there, no.
Michelle
And it’s just kind of like, well, yeah, and it’s impossible for you to know every single product on the market. It’s the marketers jobs of those companies to make sure they get their product in front of you. Right. So so you know, you just gotta like to. I learned the hard way build it and they will come. There’s not is not a thing, you know.
Susan
No. And and again it. Comes a bit to quality as well. Umm, because I think another myth is that if I just make, it doesn’t matter how I make it, but it does. The end users. They need to be able to believe in it, or else you can do worse by going out to market with those products are actually going to be making a negative impact coming through.
Michelle
And you don’t want to do anything that affects brand necessarily as well?
Susan
Not with socials.
Michelle
Exactly. You will get flamed so hard, particularly depending on the demo.
Susan
Ohh definitely what? What are the key mistakes? Do you think that marketers and product managers do when it comes to GTM?
Michelle
I think that big mistake of. Not involving people. Too many times, and then everyone’s just running around going like that. We’re we’re launching a product. Wait, we don’t have time to delete. We’ve got no lag time. What do. You mean it needs to be done? Yesterday it’s mistake I. Keep saying over and over, but I think. Even just not giving resources to. Tim, I mean, not that land. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it start to change, but just that. Ohh yeah. No, it’ll be great. You just go run a couple of organic social posts that that can be.
Susan
Yeah.
Michelle
Our. Launch. No, that’s not gonna do anything. It’s pay to play these days. You know what I mean?
Susan
But but even. That just simple example you gave. You’ve got to do copywriting skills. Yep, potentially design for whatever the imagery is going to be. There’s design skills then. Plus you need to have the know how. If you don’t have an agency doing it for you, how to actually put it up there at the right time, that would make sense. And whatever the hashtag is of the day.
Susan
There’s actually just that one small piece of there’s a social, and that doesn’t even include building the story out, recording it, editing it, whatever else might be happening there too. There’s actually a lot more to it than just just track a. Social one, would you?
Michelle
Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. And sometimes I think sometimes stakeholders forget that like they’ll underestimate how much goes into a successful campaign and launch and they’ll be just like.
Michelle
You know, you just gonna run some ads, do a couple of socials? That’s what you mean. You can do that in a week, right? That’s like, no, not if I’m gonna build a proper campaign. And then if I have to reach out to influencers and PR and all these other external agencies, if I’ve got budget and all of. That and.
Michelle
Then keep everyone internally aligned as well, and then have a a campaign. That’s all. So that that you’re from the metric driven and everything set up. Ah, no, I don’t. I’m not gonna do it in a week, you know.
Susan
Yeah. I think you’ve touched on a really good point. I think another mistake is not measuring. Not actually measuring the success of the go to market based on needy channel and other metrics as well.
Michelle
Yeah.
Susan
I think I think that’s a key mistake as well to be able to do the. Successes and possibly even celebrate.
Michelle
Yeah, that’s very true. That’s very true. And I think if you don’t measure as well, I mean look, awareness is always going to be relatively difficult, but conversions are not tracking for things like that. How do you know what channels to then double down on?
Susan
Exactly.
Michelle
Really, taking that growth approach, you want to double down on what works well, if it doesn’t work well, that’s great. At least you’ve got something conclusive to say why it didn’t work and then. You. Can just redistribute, spend and be efficient, you know.
Susan
Exactly. And I I love the the situation where I’ve got a pre benchmark as well. If the product hasn’t launched so that I can see how it’s performing. And then when say MVP two comes in or whatever it might be, whatever. It’s featuring thing that I can actually see how it’s newly performed as A at. A product level as well.
Michelle
Yeah, that’s a. Good idea.
Susan
Because I think I think a lot of my peers don’t think like that. There’s been quite a few companies I’ve worked with overtime that there is no benchmark or there’s no keeping of benchmarks. So you don’t actually know what is performing. Generally any way to be able to know if this new campaign coming through?
Susan
Is. Gonna work.
Michelle
That’s true. One company where I’ve consulted with it was a really good idea, actually. So they had internal product marketers. I was working as a product manager. And we actually met together to align on the metrics that we wanted to determine for success together and.
Susan
Oh yeah.
Michelle
I like that. Yeah, right. Because then they know what they’re driving for from a marketing perspective. And I also have got metrics that I know I need to drive for that relate to the OK arts anyway and so. We’re all aligned. That’s the best thing you know.
Susan
Ohh you you. Need to do that. Another huge one for me that I think it’s a mistake done is. Thinking of the agile methodologies that are coming through, but this is something that pre existed that was just the simple retro.
Michelle
Yes.
Susan
Sit down with your GTM team or like the GTM and then all the team that have worked on it get all. Those. Memes back in, I call it the good, the bad, the ugly. Let’s just tell it how it is safe. Space. So we.
Michelle
Oh yeah.
Susan
Learn so we don’t do that again.
Michelle
Yeah, no, I agree. And that’s the thing that growth methodology always says, like failure is never a bad thing. Like it’s just a thing. Yeah. It’s about the learnings you take from it. It’s it don’t put like a shame based prism on top of failure. It’s not a. Failure. You learnt something and you probably learned something quicker. And cheaper than not, right?
Susan
Exactly, and together as attained to then. All of you learn.
Michelle
Yeah, exactly. And then you can move forward with it and then take the learnings and iterate on them and turn that into like working codes for the, for the team or something like that.
Susan
Exactly no 100% agree with that one. So I know GTM excites you, but what excites you so much about GTM?
Michelle
I think I love working on like I love building brands and I I think I like being able to kind of take something from the get go and build. I love doing the zero to. One that’s my favourite. Part, and I think it’s cause it’s. It’s almost like being very entrepreneurial focused. I kind of love that that building. Stage I’m a builder at heart, so anytime I’ve worked on GTM it’s really fun for me because. It’s like getting to build this like little baby and then kind of releasing it into the wild and then seeing how it grows and then working out how to build it and and grow it. And yeah, and like a full on problem solver with it. I just love it cause I feel like it’s the hardest, like the hardest bit to do in a way, because once you get it from 1:00 to 2:00, there’s, you know, obviously still a lot of skill required. And a lot of, but you’re kind of changing tactics cause then you’ve got an idea of what actually works, but when you don’t know what works, it’s like it’s even more of a challenge to try and figure that bit out. So. That’s why I kind of love about it, you know.
Susan
You must love puzzles.
Michelle
Yes, yeah, I I. I love it. I love you.
Susan
Know I love JTM too, so.
Michelle
Like I’ve been doing like for a hobby. I do family tree in my own like as my little hobby at the moment and I’m like it’s such a puzzle and I realise I’m like I now I know why I’m finding it so fun, because I have to piece all these things together and then work out if this is accurate or not. Yeah. And I’m like totally. Nerding out on it, but it’s just so much.
Susan
Which you may have answered. The next question. My final question I ask, can I ask everyone this what brand it can be any in the whole wide world best represents you and why?
Michelle
I’m gonna say you bank at the moment is that is actually maybe two you bag. You can have two. Yeah. What’s it called? The fact I forgot the name. You know what? I’ll stick with the one. You may. They are just killing it at the moment. They’re they’ve got a really good brand idea of, like, no frontiers.
Michelle
That they’re running on TikTok at the moment with our manager will get a capybara tattoo like it’s already it’s touching on a capybara means on TikTok Plus also getting all of this audience to engage behind it to get them where they want to get to. And it’s like whole kind of thing and I just love it because it’s it’s original, it’s.
Susan
I’ve seen it.
Michelle
Even though it’s a bigger brand, it it kind of is that scrappiness that I really love to see, you know, and it’s authentic and it’s relatable. So I really love those brand values and it’s like just my favourite.
Susan
Estan. No, no, I have to agree that one is actually good fun. I can see. How that fits?
You as well.
Susan
Is there anything else? You’d like to add before we leave on go to market. Any final thoughts?
Michelle
I think I think for any marketers out there who haven’t worked on a go to market strategy before, don’t don’t be scared if you get thrust it on your across your desk one day. It’s a lot of fun and you’ll get the opportunity to try a lot of things you might not. If the brand is already established. And it definitely gives you an opportunity to. You know, broaden your skill sets and try a tonne of. Different. Things. And so I think if you can in your career try and at least be a part of a go to market at least once, because I think it’s a really good opportunity to work in that area of. Marketing and it’s just.
Susan
So much fun have to agree with you. Thank you. Just to recap. So in regards to go to market, when you’re doing your strategies, try and make sure they’re authentic. Utilise what where you can. It does have a fit purpose here, particularly finding some gaps opportunities from those low hanging. Collaboration is just key. So if you bring everyone in on the journey, you’re going to have a better time and probably a more fun time, and it means they’re helping with learnings when it comes to Retros. Are even better, but overall. Go to market is very satisfying when it’s done.
Michelle
Right.
Susan
So Michelle, thank you again so much for today. I have appreciate you coming. On.
Michelle
Or is it all?
Susan
Don’t forget to add more to marketing to your playlist so you don’t miss out on future. Fabulous guests. More to marketing.