#63: Brand Marketing with Stephanie Donily (Director, Corporate Marketing at Zapier)

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This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Zapier. Zapier is an awesome company and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring Exit 5. They are one of the secret Go to tools maybe not so secret anymore that I've seen B2B SaaS marketers use over the years and I'm thrilled to have them as a sponsor. Zapier is easy automation for everyone by connecting with more than 5,000 of the most popular apps B2B marketers are using, like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, literally thousands more. Zapier lets you automate almost anything you can think of without writing code, which is especially good for people like me. And with Zapier's easy to use workflow templates, you can start saving time and impressing your boss Fast. More than 2 million businesses automate their tasks with Zapier including top brands like Shopify, Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk and more. They choose Zapier to streamline their work, save money and find more time for what matters most. And that's more important now than ever. That's the reason why Zapier rhymes with happier. Bet you didn't know that. Now you know how to say it the right way too. Every day, Zapier customers save more than $10,000 in time per year. With Zapier, you can move new leads into your CRM. You can automatically reach out to new leads. Get slack notifications for important emails. Auto Generate emails with personalized content based on form inputs. Seamlessly synthesize data from multiple sour. Reduce human error and increase accuracy. You can try Zapier for free. That's one of the best things about it. Go to zapier.com backslash exit51 word, that's Zapier Z A P I E R.com forward slash. I guess it's forward slash, forward slash, exit5 zapier.com forward slash exit five one.

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Exit. All right, Steph is here. We're live. We were just talking about the pros and cons of email and slack and just constantly feeling like we're behind. And actually when I started my career, I graduated college in like my first real job was 2009. It was perfect because, well, I don't know anything earlier than that, but it was great because it was like I didn't have a way to bring email home at that point. Like, the only people that brought email home were like the highest level people at the company and they had a BlackBerry with email on it. And so there'd be like, I'd literally go in the office the next morning. Most people listening to this probably don't remember that. I'm not even that old. But I would go to the office and then I'd be like, oh, I have 12 messages today. And now it's like, you know, every 10 minutes, you know how many emails you have.

It's so true. It's constant. And I had a really similar experience when I graduated from college. If you were a low level intern or entry level person, you had a computer, you didn't have a laptop. So you couldn't take that work home even if you wanted to.

Exactly.

So you had to stay at the office till it was done, till like 9pm, 10pm the upside was that like nobody called you once you left because you were there so long. You were eating dinner at the office type thing. So yeah, things have changed a lot.

I worked at an agency and I was an intern and interns didn't get laptops at the time. And then I got promoted and I got a laptop but I didn't bring it home every day and it'd be like, oh, tomorrow it looks like it's going to snow here today. I better bring my laptop home. So interesting enough, we've done 62. I don't know, this will come up in the next couple weeks. This will probably be the 63, 64, 65th episode of this podcast. I don't know if you know it's Steph. It's become wildly popular. That's what you're supposed to say when you host your own podcast. But we've talked to a lot of people in B2B marketing roles and I'm really excited to have you because have not had somebody from the PR comms, corporate marketing background and I'm excited to talk to you about that. So today you are director of corporate marketing at Zapier. Shout out to Zapier for being one of the Premier sponsors of Exit 5 this year, which I'm really excited about that you helped make happen. But I would love to just kind of, before we talk about what you do today, just dig back into your career a little bit and like, how did you get into this world of SaaS of marketing and tell me a little bit about your career coming up through pr.

Probably not super surprising, but I stumbled into the tech world just like a lot of people did. I actually went to school to be a journalist and I really imagined that my career would be in the sports industry. Those are my first internships were at Cincinnati sports teams and I moved to San Francisco and big surprise, I wound up in tech. So I wound up at a big tech PR agency. And since then I've had a mix of in house and agency experience, mostly focus on B2B tech specifically. And that was a really interesting period. So I graduated in 2007 from college. And so that was a period where TechCrunch was this blog that was really like up and coming. And it was like really different to be pitching TechCrunch and not the New York Times for funding announcements, things like that. You know, we would be looking at inbound press from. We were like, who the hell is Gizmodo? Like no one has ever heard of this blog before. And so it was a really interesting time because news teams were shutting down. We were at like these blogs were coming up. Pitching was super different. You know, when I was in college, we were pitching via fax machine. I feel so old telling you this, but I mean, we were like faxing our pitches and like mailing them places and you know, moving into tech, it was completely different. I had to, you know, contact all the folks back in college, like, oh my God, so different. Silicon Valley. You're like emailing people, they don't want you to call them with a news story. But I think what was really interesting about like coming up in tech at that time is everybody really sounded the same. Everyone was trying to make Web 2.0 work, everyone was trying to like tell the story about how they were standing out. And one of the things about working in PR for that long is you build a really thick skin because you are rejected constantly. The story is not interesting for X, Y and Z. I'm not interested in this space because I've got to cover these other things that are happening at the time. Or they want something really gossipy, which is something that your clients typically don't want. And so you've got to have this mix of finding a story that is interesting, telling the story publicly, and then coaching your clients to tell the story in that same way. Many people will default. I mean, many people working in tech who were founders especially at that time were really not. Not everybody is a natural storyteller. Not everybody has the ability to find the story behind the product right away. They often need that coaching and that messaging done ahead of time before they get ready, before they get on the phone. So that was basically the field that I came up in. Mix of in house agency. As I mentioned, I wound up at Zapier about five years ago. I actually joined Zapier as the head of communications. So it was really about shifting Zapier story and starting to tell the story of the product. Zapier is an automation product. And then from there, as the company grew, my scope grew, my team grew. And now corporate marketing is a role that covers communications, it covers content, it covers brand marketing, it covers social media, it covers events, it covers video, it covers customer advocacy as well. At least at Zapier.

Okay, I have 1700 follow ups for you because so your story, if you just change the year from 2007 to 2009, you and I have almost the exact same story. So I didn't know what I wanted to do. Got into business only because I wanted to be at journalism. I was a journalism minor. They didn't have a journalism major at my school. The only thing I was really Good at was like, writing. And I was going to do sports journalism because I love sports. I love writing about sports. And this was in. I was in Staten Island, New York. I had to pick a major. And so I've got a business degree in marketing. Because I had to pick something and I didn't even. I wasn't interested in marketing, but I was like, well, I can write. Not really good at math. Not a finance person. All my friends are going to finance. Okay. Marketing is close enough to journalism. And I really was trying to go that route and be a sports writer. Here's the thing. I'm sure you realize the same thing. Not a great way to make a living at that time.

Not so much if you like nice things. It's a really tough industry to be in.

So from, let's say, 2007 to 2010, like, there was obviously the 2008 financial crisis. Not many people are hiring. I'm digging on your LinkedIn right now. Your first job, it looks like, or one of your first jobs was at Edelman PR firm. I was at a PR agency in the Massachusetts area called Lois Paul and Partners, and I had no idea about tech, but I could write. They had an internship, and they were paying $10 an hour. And so I was like, okay, maybe this will be my wedge. And I got and started like, you know, I was just one of the people on an account team, you know, sending pitches, and all of a sudden I'm getting responses and I'm getting coverage, and I'm like, whoa, maybe I do like business. This is cool. Like, it feels good to, like, be good at your job and do good at work. And so I kind of grew through that. And then I eventually went in house to take a PR job. And then I went from PR to product marketing. But that's. I still, to this day, like, that. I credit that with how I came up. One thing I made a note of is you talk about pitching, and it is so different today. I get a lot of questions from founders who are like, hey, we're raising money. You know, we want to pitch Tec Crunch. And I'm like, oh, please don't let them, like, write some shitty article about you at this point.

It's not what it used to be back then.

It used to be like. I remember I would reach out to a reporter and they would call me on the phone at my desk and I would be afraid to answer it.

Or you'd go to New York and you'd visit them face to face and you'd Talk to them about something that was launching. And I think back then it was really about volume, like how many articles can you get for something? And these days the competition is so fierce. I mean, if you were to pitch TechCrunch today, today about a funding announcement or something like that, I mean, you're talking to someone that probably had to cover GPT4, Silicon Valley bank and whatever crazy stuff Elon Musk did today. And so how do you break through those three big things? And oftentimes you really can't. I mean, especially if you're raising like a series, a round or something like that. Unless you are doing something really different that matches the narrative out there, it really just, it isn't what it used to be. As you mentioned, I think that's why lots of folks are really thinking about different ways to break through. I know Owned Media is something that at Zapier we've been doing, we've been thinking about and starting quite a bit. Just because, you know, these days it's really hard to get somebody else to write about you in the way that you'd like to get written about. I think that the world is, when you do get the coverage or you do get the attention, it's typically a lot more skeptical than it used to be. It may not be as customer centric as you'd like the story to be. And so you've got to think of other ways to get that story out there.

I'm a big advocate of brands building their own audiences. We did this, I think, pretty well at drift at the time when I was there. I see what you all are doing, but do you think there's a shift in PR strategy like it used to be? We got to get coverage in this publication, but even now, if you look at your role, you own social media, video events, customer advocacy, comms. Like, it feels like the shift is from can we get others to write about us? But like more of like, how can we own our own channels? I mean, I'm a big advocate of like LinkedIn and the channels that the audience that you can create for a CEO or founder through LinkedIn or email or newsletter, having your own podcast, what is at the highest level, like, how do you think of Zapier's PR strategy today and those own channels within corporate marketing?

I like to think of corporate marketing as the different vehicles with which you can tell your company's story. PR is one of those ways that you can tell the story and that PR is reliant on somebody else telling your story for you so you get that credibility. But there are lots of other ways to bring that perception, that narrative that you want out there to life. So you can do it through a customer event where you can tell your story via keynote. You can do it through social, I mean LinkedIn. LinkedIn for us, TikTok, absolutely killing it right now. Short form video is a really great way to tell a product story.

Let's pause on that because I know a lot of people are going to want me to pause you and say, hold on. Every B2B brand that listens to this podcast is watching TikTok and thinking about it, but few are executing on it. So what are you all doing with TikTok?

Yeah, for sure. So TikTok is something that we experimented with in the last year. We do a variety of things on TikTok. So we have our brand account, that's our Zapier account and we talk about how to use our product. That's the main thing people really want to see from us is like, how do I use this thing? How do I get inspired and try a new workflow? So you'll see stuff from us. We recently did a announced an integration with OpenAI. So we have a lot of like steal this workflow type ideas for how you can pair Zapier with ChatGPT for workflow ideas.

And have you found that like it just is a good fit with your audience? I'm trying to pull up Zapier's TikTok.

Yeah, it's a good fit for our audience. We tend to have lots of success. We also work with influencers in the space. The way we find them is we think about, hey, what are like people who are fans of zapier? What else are they fans of? I mean they typically, like we've noticed, at least with our users, they tend to be creators. So folks who are influencers, Just thinking about how do I use zapier for my own business to cross post things in different ways and like to just save time on things. Anyone that loves zapier probably also loves an app like Google Sheets. We connect to 5,000 apps. It's a lot of opportunities there. And so we take a real how to approach with TikTok. And so you can show it does a couple of things for us. It tells our story in a visual manner really in a short, easy to digest way. And two, it shows how easy it is just because obviously these TikTok videos aren't very long. And three, like people are really liking that it is unpolished and that it feels very relatable. We end up finding some really strong content from our TikTok that we end up using for paid advertising as well, and they tend to perform really well for us.

So are you doing paid advertising on TikTok or you're taking the same create like you're taking the video from TikTok and using that as creative for other channels?

Yes. So we're doing that pretty selectively with videos that perform really well for us. So while a lot of the effort is organic, they end up being great fodder for paid creative too.

Yeah. So I'm looking at the TikTok page right now, and it's Zapier on TikTok. Anybody can find that. But it is pretty crazy. One video has half a million views and it's how I automated responding to leads. There's a video that has 84,000 views, 60,000 views, 158,000 views. So. And they're all very tactical. It's like zap Tips how to Automate X. And I do think that this type of content is perfect for TikTok because people like to show off the tools that they use to build different things. Do you think that can any brand in the B2B space have a page like this and be creating content like this, or is it you have the right customer and it's the right type of use case?

I think it depends on the accessibility of your product. It depends on like, is it something people can try themselves, or is it something where you're going to need like a lot of setup around, or you're going to need professional services around it, in which case you may want to think about specifically what you put out there. I would also think be really clear about, hey, is this going to target current users or prospective users? We made a very intentional decision to target people who use the product already to encourage them to use it more and to provide and, you know, if it as a bonus provides inspiration for somebody who doesn't use the product yet, then great, then they can try it. But our TikTok actually has. The crazy thing is, when we first started our TikTok channel, we got a lot of applicants for jobs at Zapier just because they, you know, what we had heard from the recruiting team was people would say, hey, listen, if Zapier is on TikTok, then they're probably like ahead of the curve and think and innovative. So I want to work there. And now we're actually seeing like sales leads come in because they're like, oh, I saw that There was this ChatGPT and Zapier use case and like, I think that's going to be super helpful for my IT workflow. So that's why I'm contacting you today. So it's pretty wild.

That's cool. There's benefits beyond like thinking of it from a lead gen standpoint. It's like people, whether for jobs or their own personal career are on TikTok as one channel, right? And so like they see you posting content, they're like, oh, this company like has a perspective and they, they get it. I think that's a good way to think about these channels. And it's actually a perfect example of just like owned media in general. Right. If you only had this TikTok account and you only posted zapier tips on it, it probably wouldn't have grown in the way that it's grown.

It helps that the algorithm is really favorable for this type of content right now. People love showing off what they know. People like learning things on TikTok. It's really like the new YouTube. It's the same with Instagram reels. For us, we tend to use some of our TikToks as Instagram Reels and they tend to do a lot better in the algorithm. Although these days we're trying to be nimble because these days the algorithm on Instagram now also prefers carousel static images. So we want to be able to be flexible and work and kind of showcase our tips in whatever format is useful for people.

I like how you frame TikTok as the new YouTube. I think people get obsessed with TikTok and like, oh, does that mean that my business has to do dances or make viral meme type content? And it's like, no. This is how people consume content. Like if you want to know about something in 30 seconds to a minute, this is probably where it's going to be. Another follow up to that is you mentioned the algorithm like Instagram specifically and the algorithm, does somebody own that on your team? You have a social media manager. Can you take me into the social arm of zapier? Like who does what? Who's responsible for what?

We have a social media manager and a social media coordinator. So there's two people on our team that do it. And so they stay on top of trends. They stay on top of it via like networking with other social media managers. They just pay attention to the space and news coming out of each of these different platforms to see what's changing. We also get in touch. We work with a Lot of creators through our Influencer program. And so they also are very much in the know of like, hey, what kind of videos are going to do really well? So we do like get feedback from them as well in terms of like, hey, noticed that these types of videos tend to perform really well or these types of formats perform really well based on how the algorithm is, what the algorithm is favoring these days. So it helps us stay flexible.

Are you doing all the social media work in house? Is it like those two people or do you have an agency or anybody that you're working with on the outside?

We do a majority of our work on corporate marketing in house.

Do your social media people have design skills? Are they working with existing designers to get creative? How does that process work?

I mean, they do their own stuff via Canva, but we have an in house creative team and so they help us get set up with templates, things like that. So the team can work really quickly. Just because as you know, when things change, you got to be able to just post on social right away and just move really quickly. So, you know, they've helped enable us to do that. But we tend to just kind of like create our own memes, things like that work as fast as we can using Canva. So it helps us move quickly.

I'm asking all these questions because I was hoping that you would say that. And I want people to hear that like two people on your team use their brains and Canva and the resources from the existing creative team and like that's what makes this work. Right. And it's not going to be hiring some magic agency that's going to blow up your TikTok account or your YouTube channel or your, like, it's got to come from smart, creative people on your team and you got to give them the tools to be able to figure it out. And then in order to be successful with social, you have to actually know the channels. Right. I see so many B2B SaaS, companies that just like take one average piece of creative and it's on Instagram, it's on TikTok, it's on YouTube, it's on LinkedIn, and each one of those things has 17 views.

Oh, it's copy paste everywhere. Yeah. No, you have to think about what are people's mindset like when they're using this particular channel. Like somebody using Twitter is just like, it's a quick conversation versus somebody looking at Instagram or TikTok might be looking for inspiration for something. I think one of the things that.

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Go check them out we've learned in building the social media program at Zapier is we were pushed really heavily to have this built out, very compelling and thoughtful strategy. Well, at the end of the day, like one thing to keep in mind is people are on social media to be social with each other and to have conversations and to just, you have to, in addition to being this educational follow, you've also got to be a fun follow. People have to like what you're putting out there. And I think it builds a lot of affinity for your brand, especially in B2B where you don't have the benefit of being a consumer brand that everyone can find really easily on a shelf.

I love that and this is great advice and I hope you're listening to this right now. You, wherever you are, because it's not about just, well, the CEO and so and so has a thought leadership strategy and we think we should be on these channels. It's like, okay, maybe that's one track here, but like truly. And I bet if you scroll all the way back in your videos over the years, like you started with nothing and you just got to keep iterating and trying different new ideas to figure out like what lane and now you know what resonates on social and then you can find, figure out how you might use that to tell your brand story. But if you just try to get on these channels to like hammer home the Zapier story, it's never going to work.

Yeah, absolutely. To be very clear, we have had some content that has flopped. We do a lot of experimentation, a lot of stuff we put out there doesn't get the engagement that we want. And by the way, the main way we measure success for our social program is engagement, which we define as the total of likes, comments, shares, saves.

I was going to ask you about that next. So likes, comments, shares, saves across all channels. Is someone like manually adding that up? How do you track it? How do you set goals against that? How does that fit?

We use hootsuite and they help us track that stuff often and then we do the analysis ourselves. You know, I think it's one of the questions that we always used to get when we started this up was like, well, what does that get me? Like, what does that mean? Like, can I turn that into who became a customer? And the answer is no, I can't make that tie for you. But what I can tell you is what people are responding to, what they're liking and what we're gleaning from like the comments and the, the Sentiments they're sharing with us. I think there's probably some businesses where you can make that tie quite well. But in B2B, somebody could be looking at a TikTok video of ours and then go search for Zapier in search. And then Social, of course, doesn't get the credit for that, but it is valuable that we are out there and sharing some helpful content for people. We, of course, also look at follower growth over time. I mean, obviously what we want to see is that we're growing and that we're getting bigger each and every year. But that does fall secondary to, hey, are we creating the content that people are engaging with in the automation community?

Also, your company is. You don't go to an office, right? You're remote first.

No, we are 100% remote, and we have been 100% remote since we were founded.

Which I bring that up only because I do think it's a myth that a lot of people say, well, we got to be in person to film this content, to create this. But it's. You all have a distributive team and you've done great with social.

I mean, it's actually quite nice just because people can film it themselves. We have different people that can be on camera. Obviously. We do company retreats once or twice a year where we're all together and we'll try to film some stuff while we're all together. But, you know, we make it work.

All right, so we talked about social. Tell me more about, like, the things that your team owns and how you see that fit into this vision of. I like what you said. We have all these different vehicles to tell the company story. I obsessed over TikTok for a couple minutes. What else is in there that's important?

Other stuff that's in there that's important. We also. Brand marketing is a relatively new function at Zapier, and it's an incredibly important one for us because we're trying to figure out who are we in this space, how do we tell our company story and then how do we want people to perceive us and how does that really translate not just in our external storytelling, but what are the touch points within the product, within the onboarding experience, within the signup process, within all of these other different things where we're really able to bring that to life and make it feel really cohesive?

What does brand marketing mean to you? How do you see that?

So for us, brand marketing really covers the strategy behind, like, who is the company and what is the reputation you want out there. That's like the simplest way I can put it. And the way that it comes to life tactically for us is a mix of understanding our awareness in the market, understanding our awareness versus competitors, understanding how we bring this brand story to life through things like brand ads, through campaigns, through partnerships, like one with Exit 5 in a variety of different ways. So it's a pretty all encompassing role.

How do you measure that? So it starts with. This is great, starts with awareness. Right? Like, do people, do you have a specific way that you decided to tackle this from like a measurement standpoint to get a benchmark?

Yes. So we do a twice yearly benchmark brand tracker and that looks at aided and unaided awareness. And so we look at both to see growth over time. It's helpful for us to see what does that growth look like across the segments that we care about. And then the other thing that we look at as well is, hey, what are the attributes that we want people to associate with Zapier and how are we doing with those different attributes? Are they growing over time? Are the right attributes growing over time? So those are. That's something that we look at just twice a year. It's really hard to make movement on those numbers, as I think your listeners know, it's really hard to make movement on those numbers, which is why we don't tend to do it more than twice a year. And it's really a view of the collective marketing efforts over time rather than just brand marketing. But it is our main metric.

And do you do this in house or is there somebody that you work with to do it or a service?

We work with research partners to do that. And so that's usually recommended is to work with an external research partner. Or you could even do like a survey partner to do something like that.

Is that the actual name of the company or you're saying that you work with a research partner?

No, the name of the company is called Zeitgeist Research.

Zeitgeist Research. Cool. And do you think that there's a stage, could you be too small to do this? Like, obviously Zapier has amazing scale now, you know, well into the lots and lots of figures of arrow that most people listening to this would hope to achieve. But if I'm at a 20, 30 person startup, how should I be thinking about this?

So there are lower cost ways to look at something like this. As I mentioned, if you work with a survey partner, like a Harris Poll or Centimeter, I think is the other survey company that you could try that's a really quick way to get a sense for who is aware of you and who is aware of you relative to other competitors in the space. You're probably too small to do it if you are like 20 to 30 people. But it is something where maybe you'll do that just once a year rather than twice a year. I recommend not doing it twice a year until you have concerted marketing efforts where, okay, I want to see what is the effect of all these things together and how has that grown for me over time. There's other things you can look at in the meantime, like just seeing that. You want to just see that. You can get press mentions, you can get customers in the door. You have like leads coming in from your marketing efforts first before you really think about, like, okay, who is our brand? Zapier really looked into brand marketing a couple of years ago because, you know, we were founded about 10 years prior and we hadn't really refreshed our brand since then. And our company had grown, our customer base had changed over time, and we wanted to make sure that, like, hey, is the story that we're putting out there, is that still right for our customers? Because one of the things that we learned is a lot of our customers grew. You know, we were working with like 12 person teams and that's still like a majority of our customer base. But some customers were really successful with us and we're now medium sized businesses. We had to think like, hey, is our story still working for them? Because they want to stick with us and we want them to stick with us. So, you know, how does the brand story change in order to accommodate that?

By the way, I show this to everybody, but usually as I'm interviewing, I'm like feverishly scribbling notes of things that I want to remind myself of later or get back to. So this is awesome. My interview technique is often grilling, but it's for the benefit of the listener. So you're doing a great job. Couple things I want to come back to. I love that you do this and even for smaller companies, because I think that there's a lot of people who believe in brand marketing, but it's really tough to measure and it's tough to prove. And it's like, you know, I have strong beliefs that, like, yes, if we have a presence on social media and if we have a podcast and if we have a community or we do X, Y and Z things, more people will know about us. But it's hard to like directly translate that into sales. And so I love when you have this benchmark. If you're like, hey, last year before we did these things, only X percent of people in this industry knew us. Now it's this. I think it gives you that ammo or that leverage to then like go ask for the budget to go and do more of these things. And so I love, I love that as advice. And as for me, as a former marketing leader, that's a mistake that I made and I wish I had that as a piece of data to be like, yeah, like we did all these things and like now all these people in this segment know about us.

I think it can be incredibly helpful for growing companies because here's an example is if you are a company with one product and you are thinking about how do we go from one product to many products? You know, before you get there, it's probably helpful to figure out, like, wait, how are we thinking about our brand here? Are we going to be like Atlassian and have all these products that have different names, therefore different brands, or are they all going to be branded under one company?

Everybody has that question, yeah, how are.

We going to approach this? And then that's really tied to like, well, who's your customer and what are they interested in? Do they want like, you know, are they people that are interested in that sort of thing? Is that how they buy? Or, you know, or are they like, you know, in Zapier's case, they're very operational minded, they're pretty, no nonsense, and they want something that's easy to understand, that should probably play a part in what you name the products that come out afterwards. So I think that what has been so interesting about brand is how all encompassing it's felt around like the company and product strategy as well.

Yeah, 100%. It's tough. I mean, you can't. This is why, like when we talk about brand a lot in this podcast, not the colors and the logo and the font and those things are important, those things are design elements. I'm so happy that we're doing this episode because I think these are the elements. This is, I think, I mean, and others, when we talk about brand marketing, you talked about the company story. Who owns that? Do you own that? Is there a framework that you've followed to wrangle that? Is there someone's, you know, system, a book or something? Like, what's been the process for developing the narrative at Zapier?

Yeah, well, I will say that, like, we'll take a first stab at it, but at the end of the Day the CEO owns it. Because if the CEO is not helping you tell that story, then maybe you don't want to do marketing there. But I think that in terms of how we create the company story, we've looked at a lot of different inputs. So we've looked at leadership executives. How do they want to tell the story? What is the story from their different perspective? And then for us, we also tested it with. So we've taken where we want to be in the space versus where we are in the space, and we actually tested it with customers and we worked on, hey, what lines really stood out to you? And tell us why. So for Zapier's company story, like, one of the lines that really stood out for our customers that we made sure to include in the final narrative is like, hey, Zapier is something that works for you regardless of your IT infrastructure. Like, once we had tested that with customers, they were like, that is the money line that I'm ready to give you my credit card now. It's helpful to have that validation to make sure that you're not just coming up with some story that sounds great to your executives, but it also sounds good to somebody who may be considering your company across a variety of competitors, the CEO.

I hope we frame that line or clip that or something, because obviously it's something that I believe in. But the reason why it's so important is because it's so tough to be able to tell that story as a marketer if you just have marketing stuff to tell it. The company story is not a marketing story. It has to do with the product strategy, with the competitive landscape, with the growth goals and vision of the company. And that can't just come from marketing. You can't. I'm a huge April Dunford fan, as an example. I love her book, obviously. Awesome. I recommend it all the time. But you can't, as a marketer just read that book, put some words in a Google Doc, and say, this is our company story. But if you have a visionary CEO like Wade, for example, and you're like, hey, what do you. What's your take on the market? Where are we going? That gives you so much more to work with, to then work together to develop that story.

I think beyond the CEO as well. Like, it's important that, you know, you get the rest of the company on board with the story. If they're skeptical about, I mean, first of all, they are your biggest brand advocates, and if they are skeptical of the story, then you should probably ask why and see what is missing and perhaps maybe the story is a little bit looking at the future a little bit. And in which case, okay, maybe this is a little future facing and let's talk about what we use this for and what we don't use this for. You know, perhaps it's something that's really attractive to prospective customers, but maybe not prospective employees. Those insights tend to really help drive. Okay, what is, what's the altitude at which we like push this brand story?

All right, couple, not necessarily like rapid fire, but I just want to get like your quick perspective on a couple of these other things where people. You mentioned that your team is responsible for events. How do you see events? How do you measure events in this vision of brand marketing?

Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. So we have a annual customer conference and our conference is virtual. And a big reason it's virtual is just because we're a distributed team. Majority of our customers are small businesses as well. So we want to have an event that feels accessible to our user base. So that's just a choice that we've made that makes sense for Zapier as a company. And our user base, that's our main event. Although we also run webinars, we also are testing out in person meetups for users as well. So it's a pretty small scale events operation compared to, you know, let's say like Dreamforce. So that is basically what our events team does. We are measured by registrations and attendance. And then of course, like we look at other stuff like, hey, did they start using the product more after they attended this thing?

When you say events, does that encompass those webinars also? So is it like physical and digital events?

Correct. So our webinars, it's a mix of effort between us and the demand generation team and lifecycle marketing teams.

Got it. I don't know if it's right or wrong, obviously you all know that, but I like the focus. I like the we do one big event and we're doing these things. I talk to a lot of companies and it's like, yeah, we want to do this and we want to do that. And it's like you need guardrails. You can't just. Events as a strategy can just go nuts if you don't have clear guardrails around that. And I'm sure doing one big event a year is plenty of work for everybody.

It is. And the thing about events is they get expensive quickly. And so you could have your team deployed and doing like a million things and maybe for your industry, lots of Field marketing events make sense. I'm sure one day that'll make a lot of sense for Zapier. But at the stage where we're at, like, we're getting a really strong signal that people like joining us from where they are. Like, people like, they like webinars, they like short form video, they like things that teach them how to use the product well. So we're really leaning into that and giving people what they want.

Yeah, I mean, it matches. Ultimately it has to match how people buy. And like, if you go to your website, right, it's all about get started free and your product is free. Like, you know, I've been inside of a company and we've, we've bought Zapier and we've used the free version until we ran out of zaps and then upgraded. And I'm sure that's like how most people buy. And so, yeah, it doesn't make sense. Maybe there is a dream list of 100, you know, tier one accounts that you want to go after. But the event strategy, just like any other strategy, has to actually match the company strategy and how people buy it.

Exactly. We are product led and we did not have a sales team until about two years ago. So that is part of why content and events is structured in this way. Because it's really not about delivering leads to sales, at least not yet makes.

So much sense and it's just worth like double clicking on that point for people at home. This is why you can't have a marketing strategy without the company strategy. This is why these things are so connected and why in the Exit 5 community and on this podcast, we talk so much about, like so many times. We get really specific or nuanced questions and the answer comes back to like, well, I don't know, it's what's the company strategy? It all comes back to what are you trying to accomplish? Okay, next thing I want to ask you about that you own is customer advocacy. What is that? Is it a person on your team? What do they do? What's customer advocacy?

Yes. So that's a new team. So right now our goals are really focused on operationalizing and delivering customer testimonials. But we found ourselves in a place where, hey, we really need a customer for this webinar. We really want a customer story about this use case. We want a customer from this size of company. What we were noticing was like, there wasn't a centralized effort for who's collecting these customer testimonials. Who is the single person that is responsible for Building a relationship with customers so that they give us feedback and they work with us on testimonies. And so that is actually a function that sits within our comms team. Just because the comms team is like a relationship, a team that's super focused on relationships. So we have one person on the team right now. Although I expect that will grow as our needs grow over time. I mean, our end goal, what everybody would love to have, is a database where you can easily find a customer that fits this particular need. And maybe that's a pipe dream, but, you know, hopefully we'll get there.

No, it's not. Every marketing team I've been around or part of has always had that. And because that database is useful for like so many different things, it's like.

Like who should speak at our event?

Which testimonials could we have on the website? Sales wants to know which customers in this vertical, in this industry, there's many use cases for that. So I think typically it's owned by no one. And so it's very hard, but I think it's wise to have somebody own it. You mentioned this two words earlier, press mentions. Press mentions, do they matter and what are they?

I'm going to give you the unsatisfying response of it depends. And it depends on what stage you're at and what press really will do for you. So I will tell you this. When you are really early and you are trying to get customers and you are trying to find product market fit, it probably means a lot to get a TechCrunch mention. Like I've worked with really early stage startups where we've had to before we got the TechCrunch article up, I've had to ask, is your site ready for the traffic that's going to come from this TechCrunch mention? Because if it goes down, then you are screwed. And so when you are at that stage, yes, it will matter. You will hit another stage where the quality of the press mentions will matter. It will matter that you are in the Wall Street Journal. It will matter that you are in the New York Times. If you are courting a very big customer that needs to see that kind of validation from like a big tier one outlet. When you are kind of in between, it may not matter as much. It may matter more to have the right coverage and the right perception of you more than the volume. And again, it just, it also depends on what space you're in. If you are a consumer product, press will matter a lot. Especially if somebody wants to see Like a review of some of something before they try it. If you are in B2B, first of all, I don't know anyone in B2B that is getting the amount of press coverage that they would like. No matter how big you are, no one is ever satisfied with the amount of press mentions they have in B2B.

I think you're completely right. I don't ever think it's a bad thing. And I don't mean all press is good press. I just mean like if Zapier was written about in the Wall Street Journal in a positive way, would that be good? Sure, of course it would be. But I just feel like sometimes founders have an irrational we need to be in TechCrunch, we need to be in Wall Street Journal. And I'm like, but do you though? Or would you have more impact doing your own thing via social and having your own site? And I also feel like, I guess a thing that I struggle with is just the shrinking landscape, right? It's not like when you and I started in our careers in PR as an example, there's not 50 influential blogs, there's very, very few. And so it's like who do you even pitch is what I struggle with sometimes.

I think the other thing to keep in mind is lots of press articles are behind paywalls. So is your customer someone that's likely to pay for like a Wall Street Journal subscription? Or is it maybe better for your CEO to tell their own story via LinkedIn? You know, maybe just build a following there. Maybe it will be a more meaningful audience. It really depends. Just because there is no one size fits all like press strategy. And I do recommend really understanding what you want to get out of it and what you're hoping to do. For example, if you are about to fundraise, then yes, it makes a lot of sense to be in tech press. It makes a lot of sense to build your reputation that way because not only are you like attracting the right investors, but you also probably have some potential engineers or early employees that can find out about you that way. There gets a point where that won't serve you in the same way. And so you'll have to think about a different strategy or the press won't want to cover you in that same way because Elon Musk Silicon Valley Bank GPT4 and you'll have to tell your story a different way for that reason. So I think it just helps to have lots of options and all those different vehicles to try to tell your story and at least an openness to experiment.

This is great. Thank you for saying those. Because maybe there's some like deep scraper that like listens to podcasts and because we've now said SVB, Elon Musk and and GPT4 the this podcast will just go through the roof. So thank you.

I hope so. I hope you hashtag it with this.

I will use all the hashtags, I promise. All right, let's wrap up with this question. Just I want to talk about just a little bit of career advice from your perspective. You've gone from pr, you know, account exec at a PR firm to PR manager to now you run, you're a director level marketing leader at a hundred million dollar plus revenue SaaS company that you know, oversees a bunch of different functions. Take me back to like what I'm trying to ask is like being a specialist in a channel to marketing leader. And I'm asking you with the leading question of I've seen many people who want to become marketing leaders, but they're like, ah, you know, I only know pr, I only know product marketing. And it seems like you've kind of parlayed that into now someone who owns all of these different channels. And I'm sure you've had some reflection on that in your career. I just want to ask you that.

Yeah, for sure. It was something that I was really worried about, pigeonholing myself into just staying in the PR industry for the rest of my life. And I did ask myself, like, is this something that I want to stick with or do I want to do more? Like, I think the question that I had asked myself at a certain point is like, do I want to be a CMO someday or do I want to be a chief Communications Officer someday? And I think once I figured out like, no, I'd actually rather learn other disciplines and like learn a lot more about marketing. That forced me to be a lot more curious about other things I didn't know about. And then also like once things like content were reorged underneath me, like just unapologetically dive in knowing that, hey, today I am not qualified to lead this, but probably this time next year I'm going to be extremely qualified at leading this. And so this is the time to ask all the questions, don't feel dumb about figuring out a new strategy and just kind of like learn to fly the plane while I'm building it. And it was really scary at first. I think if you're anybody that's experienced imposter syndrome, it can be really tough to get through and like, my best career advice for you is to find other people. Hopefully there are other people that have made that transition as well. Lots of folks in corporate marketing started out with either a content or a comms career. I do try to network with as many people as I can to figure out like, hey, what are the things that you learned along the way? Maybe I can learn from your mistakes, maybe you can learn from some of mine and be open to being vulnerable in that way just so you can get smarter.

That's great. And I wanted to ask you that specifically because nobody that's been whether you want to be chief communications officer, chief brand officer, cmo, CEO, whoever. No one has all of the perfectly balanced disciplines. Like everybody's come up, they've used that wedge. It's like you use your wedge and PR to then like expand into content and social and events and you have to go and learn about those things. But that's how you become. You don't need to become an expert, but you need to know what good looks like and how to hire and how to manage in those areas.

Exactly. I think it also helps like, you know, for me, as I've been coming up, I have really strong thought partners across product marketing where I am never going to be as deep of an expert as they are. But it is helpful to figure out like, how can my org help you and what can you teach me about the way that your org works? Just so as I'm learning, I'm making sure that we're like helping each other. That sort of thing is helpful too. Just making sure that you build relationships across the org and then take the time to like, like be curious and ask questions about and don't be afraid of sounding really dumb and being like, how exactly does that work?

It's great. I'm glad people can hear you say that because I couldn't agree more. And if you're listening, rewind the last two minutes and play that. That can be your positive affirmations whenever you need it and you're in a rut. I was going to end, but I wanted to ask you this because I wrote about it yesterday. Do you think an interesting use case for AI, generative AI, different types of tools is like brand style and voice. Brand tone of voice. I was thinking about this the other day, which is like imagine you could have the AI just be like, this is how we talk and then you can scale, copy and tone across a company. Is that interesting?

That's absolutely interesting. To teach it voice and tone and then to just be like, write a landing page that matches this voice and tone. Yes.

It's hard to manage that. Like, there's always that one person on the team who's like, oh, Steph gets the tone and voice. And then like, you just become the bottleneck for copy and content.

I mean, it already is saving a lot of time. We use ChatGPT to write our landing page for our OpenAI integration, and it's come up with some really, some great phrases. We're like, oh, that's pretty good actually. And then the rest we've had to edit a little bit to match our voice and tone. But to be able to teach it voice and tone and then have it just correct itself and show you where it made those corrections, that would be the dream.

All right, Steph Donnelly, thank you so much for doing this. Love having you on the podcast. Listen. My favorite thing when people listen to a podcast with a great guest like Steph is when you go to Steph's LinkedIn profile and you send her a LinkedIn request and you send her a note or you connect with her and you say, I loved your conversation on the Exit 5 podcast. That makes me happy. We've gotten a bunch of great feedback lately. So go find Steph on LinkedIn. Go and check out Zapier. They are supporters of Exit 5. Ow. Mo is biting my fingers right now. Being fresh. Thanks for doing this. I will talk to you later and we'll see you on the next episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros.

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Want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see.

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About B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fx. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and.

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