This episode features an interview with Emily Wolfe, Senior Director Growth Marketing & Analytics at Collective Health. Collective Health simplifies employee healthcare with an integrated technology solution that makes health insurance work for everyone. Emily is a Digital marketing leader with an eye for analytics and a passion for developing stop-in-your-tracks creative campaigns. On this episode Emily shares her insights into building brand to human relationships in a digital world, personalizing your marketing to boost your brand value, and developing a 360 degree marketing plan.
This episode features an interview with Emily Wolfe, Senior Director Growth Marketing & Analytics at Collective Health. Collective Health simplifies employee healthcare with an integrated technology solution that makes health insurance work for everyone. Emily is a Digital marketing leader with an eye for analytics and a passion for developing stop-in-your-tracks creative campaigns.
On this episode Emily shares her insights into building brand to human relationships in a digital world, personalizing your marketing to boost your brand value, and developing a 360 degree marketing plan.
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“It's so critical to build that brand relationship with prospects. In B2B, we like to think about them as committees or we think about them as faceless organizations, but it’s just people and people want to work with funny people.” - Emily Wolfe, Collective Health
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:34) -Emily's role at Collective Health
*(03:03) - Segment: Trust Tree
*(09:50) - Developing a 360 degree marketing plan
*(12:38) - Segment: The Playbook
*(13:24) - Building a brand relationship with prospects
*(17:22) - Personalizing your marketing to boost your brand value
*(24:34) - Segment: The Dust Up
*(28:19) - Segment: Quick Hits
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Sponsor:
Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.
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Links
[00:01:44] Ian: Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries. I’m Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. And today I am joined by a special guest, Emily, how are you?
[00:01:51] Emily: I'm doing great. How are you?
[00:01:52] Ian: Excited to have you on the show.
[00:01:54] Ian: Excited to chat about Collective Health, one of my favorite companies. So cool to finally have you on the show chat about marketing and everything in between. So what was your first job in marketing?
[00:02:06] Emily: My first job in marketing, I actually worked at a. Doing internal comms mostly, but a little bit of advertising, a little bit of pr, and just kind of got my feet wet.
[00:02:17] Emily: But it really set me on this path for healthcare marketing. And after that, I realized could not do the big business, you know, established organization thing. I had to totally pivot to startup mode, and I've been there pretty much ever.
[00:02:31] Ian: And so tell us a little bit about your role at Collective Health.
[00:02:34] Emily: Yeah, so at Collective Health I have sort of my dream role in the sense that I get to oversee everything related to our top of funnel lead journey. So that's content, social, but a business development email. And it's really exciting, but I will say it's also a little bit scary because then if we don't , you know, our lead targets or they're not high enough quality, I don't have anybody else to blame.
[00:02:57] Emily: It's now all on me, but also makes it.
[00:03:01] Ian: Let's get to our first segment, the trust Tree. With
[00:03:14] Ian: This is where you can go and feel honest and trusted and share those deepest, darkest, demand, gen and marketing secrets.
[00:03:20] Ian: Okay, let's do it. Does Collective Health do? And who do you sell to?
[00:03:26] Emily: That's a great question. So Collective Health was founded to solve this broken employer health insurance system. We do that a few ways, but I think the biggest way to think about it is make it easier for employers to see how they can better support their people and make it easier for people to get the care that they need when they need it.
[00:03:44] Emily: And we sell mainly to employers, as I mentioned, But one of the kind of interesting things about our business model, Is employers rely on brokers or consultants to help them navigate this health insurance field. So for us as a marketing team, we really have kind of two audiences. Those employers, which are represented by HR leaders benefit.
[00:04:03] Emily: And then they're brokers and consultants, so trying to make sure we're messaging to
[00:04:06] Ian: both folks. Yeah, I've had the pleasure of sitting down with your CEO Ali a few times, who's phenomenal ceo. He's absolutely great, and there's just so many things that were illuminating to me about healthcare and about how much.
[00:04:19] Ian: Of that responsibility we put onto employers. And one of the crazy stats that I remember hearing is just this healthcare number rises every year. And you know, if you're a CFO who loves to count the numbers and make sure all the numbers add up, that this is a. An expense that they have no idea what's coming every year.
[00:04:37] Ian: Exactly. And every single CFO thinks about this stuff all the time, but like I had no idea that that was the case.
[00:04:43] Emily: Yeah, and not only that, it's actually the biggest expense for a company after payroll. So it goes payroll and then health costs. And to your point. To not know what those healthcare costs are gonna be every year.
[00:04:53] Emily: Can you imagine how stressful that is for a CFO who likes to have everything projected and planned well in
[00:04:59] Ian: advance? I mean, it's stressful for me as a CEO and we have, you know, fraction of the number of employees that, that these other folks have. Exactly. And so it, it creates such an interesting challenge, as you mentioned with your marketing.
[00:05:10] Ian: So, You have these sort of this true committee approach. We talk about committees all the time as it relates to marketing, and you all have this committee of the CFO needs to take a look. The C H R O is interested, these brokers which have so much influence on this. Like tell me how you think about personas and looking
[00:05:29] Emily: at those.
[00:05:30] Emily: Yeah, absolutely. For us, it's such a challenge to make sure we're speaking to all audiences while still kind of staying true to key core message. So where we've kind of net. Is focusing different stages of the funnel to different personas. So our top of the funnel is really focused on that broker consultant, because often they're gonna be the ones who flag us to their employer clients.
[00:05:51] Emily: Then as we get into middle of the funnel, those employer clients, which are typically the benefit leaders, the HR leaders, that's where we focus our middle of the funnel tactics. And then as we get to bottom of the funnel, you're exactly right, That's where we pivot to the cfo, the cost savings, just the cost planning message that seems to really resonate with that.
[00:06:08] Ian: How does your marketing team, how is it structured? How is your sales
[00:06:12] Emily: team structured? Yeah, that's a great question. So our sales team follows a somewhat traditional structure in that it's geo-based and you know, we have specific sales reps for specific territories to really get in deep with all the employers in that area, that brokers and consultants in that area.
[00:06:28] Emily: The marketing team right now, we're grouped functionally, and that's worked well. I think as we start to grow, we might have to think, you know, a little more creatively about that. So for now though, we have a campaign and analytics team. We have a content and social team, we have a digital team, and then those folks obviously work closely with the brand, the product marketing, and the field marketing teams.
[00:06:48] Ian: What would you say is your marketing strategy holistically within that?
[00:06:52] Emily: It's interesting. It's definitely evolved recently. I think I used to think so much about channel versus channel and what would be more impactful. You know, is it a LinkedIn ad or should we really rely on seo or should we. Have a super aggressive persona on social to start driving folks in.
[00:07:09] Emily: But what I've since kind of come to realize, and maybe it's sort of an obvious insight, but it's this idea that it doesn't really matter what channel. These are all just brand interactions, and the most important thing you can do is whichever channels you decide to be in, cause you can't be in the mall.
[00:07:24] Emily: Be in them a hundred percent and make sure that when you are there, you're creating that thread of a relationship with the prospect so that the next time they see you, it can just start to build on itself. I think when you start to stack channels against each other, you really just start to cannibalize your own marketing efforts.
[00:07:40] Emily: So it's really important to kind of think about them holistically. And again, it doesn't matter where they see your message. What matters is how it all melds together and starts to build that relationship.
[00:07:50] Ian: Any thoughts on how demand fits? It fits into
[00:07:52] Emily: that? Yeah. I think a mistake that a lot of marketers make, especially in the demand space.
[00:07:58] Emily: Is they're really focused on claiming credit or claiming influence over opportunities that are generated by sales. And I, I totally understand it, like how are you gonna justify your budget the next year if you don't have a number to point to? But the risk that you can fall into there is you become really focused.
[00:08:14] Emily: On only marketing originated deals as opposed to, again, sort of looking at the whole picture, realizing that you and the sales team are kind of working towards the same goal and just staying super focused on ultimate revenue and however the, the fastest, most efficient way to get to that revenue goal.
[00:08:32] Ian: Any other things about marketing strategy or your personas that are unique? Any other thoughts? I think
[00:08:38] Emily: the only other thing that I'd add is account based marketing. Has completely transformed our strategy. And the biggest takeaway for me when I think about ABM is people can overcomplicate it, right? It feels like it needs to be super segmented, or you need to have a custom landing page for each prospect.
[00:08:58] Emily: But I think if you kind of develop two to three plays that you think will be successful, just run those plays with a limited set of target accounts, optimize them, find kind of the winning one of that three, and then try two more the next season and just sort of start iterating on it that way and not try and overcomplicate your whole ABM strategy.
[00:09:18] Emily: To me, that has probably been the biggest driver of revenue that we've seen is really like focusing on that ABM playbook. And just optimizing every play every year. . Yeah. What would be some examples of those plays? Yeah, so probably my favorite one, I call it the white whale , and it's this idea of, typically the target list is gonna be some of your competitor's customers who have refused to have a meeting with your sales representatives in the past, so you know who they are, the sales people know who they are, everyone knows exactly who these target accounts are.
[00:09:50] Emily: Then you create kind of an internal Tiger team and you're gonna figure out how to surround these folks with a 360. With email ads, events, social media posts, we are gonna be tagging the employers that they kind of benchmark themselves against. And you do that in a very calculated three month sprint and your only goal for the campaign is to get a meeting.
[00:10:12] Emily: And what's so nice about that is for the sales team, they've been trying to get a meeting with these folks for years and years, and they haven't been successful. So then when you're finally able, Get them that meeting and at least kick off that conversation. It really just, again, creates this credibility internally like, Hey, if we all band together, we can make some magic happen.
[00:10:29] Emily: We can make, you know, make it work. So that's probably my favorite one, I think. Other one, I love that. Yeah. No, it's, That's so cool. It works really well. I think the key though is definitely keep it short timeframe, like a three month period. Have a super discernible goal. Like if you start with a hundred target accounts, your only goal should be get like five meetings, cuz then you're gonna blow it outta the water.
[00:10:48] Emily: Everyone's gonna be super excited. The other campaign that I've seen work really, really well are late stage prospects. So what I like about this campaign is it will result in revenue, but also you should have a pretty good benchmark to determine success. So you have your historical conversion rate of like a late stage opportunity to one, and then what you're gonna do is have all your closing messages, all the messages you think would work really, really well to push someone over the line, and then you compare that group to your historic conversion.
[00:11:17] Emily: And you should be able to see a big boost in closed one revenue. Cause these folks, especially for those committee decisions, if you kind of surround sound, those groups, they're like, Well, I see these guys everywhere so you might as well go with them. They're definitely the safe choice.
[00:11:30] Ian: Yeah. It really makes me think of something that I talked about a lot on the show, which is in your committee.
[00:11:35] Ian: There's, let's just say 13 people in in your committee, and there's probably seven of 'em that they think about your product. 15 minutes a year. Yeah, So true. Like that's it. It's so true. And it's like you gotta make sure that when they show up to that 15 minute meeting, or let's say it's a 30 minute meeting or it's one of the tools Absolutely.
[00:11:52] Ian: In the discussion in that hour that when you get brought. That they're not gonna be like, Who's that?
[00:11:58] Emily: Exactly. I mean, there's that thing that, you know, saying no one gets fired for choosing IBM or McKinsey or whichever industry you're in. But I think it's also true that when there's a younger company that has seemingly has a lot of momentum, That it's kind of a similar idea, right?
[00:12:14] Emily: You have this third party validation cuz they're everywhere. I see them everywhere. So that's how I typically tell a lot of other startups, sort of like get those late stage deals when you're up against some of the more established players.
[00:12:27] Ian: I love it. Late stage play. It's dawned on me after a hundred plus episodes of DG V that in the playbook we should probably talk more about plays that, That was really fun,
[00:12:36] Ian: Okay, let's go to our next segment, The playbook.
[00:12:47] Ian: What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncut budget items?
[00:12:55] Emily: Okay, so definitely won't be a surprise. Number one, account based marketing. I think if you have a limited budget, which so many of us do, you can't use spray and prey anymore. It just as irresponsible at this point. So that's number one. Number two is actually from a staffing perspective, having really great content creator.
[00:13:14] Emily: People who are good writers, people who can deliver great copy, clever captions, you know, funny emails. That is so, so critical to build that brand relationship with prospects. In b2b, we like think about them, you know, committees or we think about them as faceless organizations, but it's just people and people wanna work with funny people.
[00:13:34] Emily: So having those writers is very underrated, I think, in a lot of organizations. And then I think the third. I would probably say is just a really good measurement tool, and it doesn't need to be an expensive one. It doesn't need to be an all-encompassing one, but you need a way to understand what's working and what's not, because especially if you're in a cutting budget situation, you have to have numbers to kind of back up those assumptions.
[00:14:02] Emily: So something that will allow you to say, this type of content performs better than this type of content. Or, you know, this blog led to so many more conversions than this blog, so therefore we should probably focus more on this type of content in the future. That to me, is mission critical. What
[00:14:17] Ian: types of tools are you looking at for
[00:14:19] Emily: stuff like that?
[00:14:19] Emily: Yeah, so right now we use Google Analytics, of course, we use HubSpot and we use Demand Base as kind of our three core sources of truth. I am very intrigued by a lot of the content marketing analytics platforms from the social listening. But I think again, when you have sort of limited budget, you're a smaller company, you really have to stay focused on the ones that can, that are more of the Swiss Army knives that can do more with fewer investment dollars.
[00:14:47] Emily: Yeah.
[00:14:48] Ian: We've talked about it in the past year about like this sort of dark funnel stuff. Yeah. And how important listening is just in general now. It's like classic sales 1 0 1 is listen twice as much as you talk sort of thing. Like I think as marketers we're always trying to figure out better ways to listen.
[00:15:03] Ian: So I'm really excited. How far the industry's come so far, and how it continues to go. But I, I need that listening stuff even better. Right. And to
[00:15:11] Emily: be way cheaper. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, there's actually one other thing that I didn't mention, which is a can't cut and it's relatively new for me, but probably not for most of the listeners, is any, you know, fully branded chatbot.
[00:15:24] Emily: And having that sort of ability to be able to engage with visitors to the website in a much more real, authentic way. I've just never seen a better demand gen tool than that. I
[00:15:35] Ian: mean, you're preaching to the choir. This is, I've qualified makes the show so, Oh, do they?
[00:15:39] Emily: There you go. Well, I mean, honestly like.
[00:15:43] Emily: I was, you know, trying to optimize pennies. Right. And then we got a chat bot and it was like, oh wow, we can get this a lot easier.
[00:15:51] Ian: So content creation, you mentioned that as having people on your team that are just kinda like thinking of funny stuff. Mm-hmm. thinking of cool stuff. How do you do that? Are you doing like marketing power hours or is it just people grinding in their sweatpants on their couch thinking of funny stuff?
[00:16:05] Ian: Like how do you do that? You know,
[00:16:07] Emily: the best idea. Have come recently, we transformed our marketing meetings. So instead of just being kind of a one hour status update or presentation circle, we actually do the old Zoom breakout rooms and each team has to come back with a few ideas. And what's really helpful about that for larger teams is that it kind of removes, removes the stress of throwing out kind of a wacky.
[00:16:30] Emily: Because in a smaller group, people might laugh and be like, Actually, it's pretty good. We should put it on the list. And it just, I think it creates more of a glide path to coming up with those ideas that ultimately will lead to something really different and clever and
[00:16:42] Ian: fun. I love that I saw something somebody was posting and was like, you know, companies should be, you know, remote, asynchronous, except for creative teams.
[00:16:53] Ian: And as a company who's a hundred percent remote and we're basically all, our whole company is creatives. It is super hard to do it remotely. But I think that the younger generations of folks are kind of learning that piece as they go. Yeah. They don't necessarily understand. How to be a business professional part as much, cuz that part is harder to learn.
[00:17:13] Ian: Like when you're not sitting around with your peers, you're
[00:17:15] Emily: absolutely,
[00:17:16] Ian: But from a creative standpoint, I think it's actually like, I think you can still be super creative remote, but you do need to figure out how to. Make time
[00:17:23] Emily: for it. And I think the big thing too with that is having that psychological safety in your team when making sure that your team knows that there are no bad ideas in a brainstorm and just having fun with it.
[00:17:34] Emily: It's so hard over Zoom, but I definitely think it's possible in kind of like smaller
[00:17:38] Ian: groups. Yeah. Don't bring an umbrella to a brainstorm. Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:42] Emily: That's the worst when someone's like, We actually tried that two years ago and it didn. Okay. Super helpful.
[00:17:48] Ian: Thank you, . We hear that with content all the time with like podcasts or video series.
[00:17:52] Ian: Someone's like, Well, well, we tried a podcast, you know, like three years ago and you're. Well, like how'd you do it? A lot has changed. Have you noticed as if nothing has changed in three years? Yeah. And as if that would be like, Yeah, we wrote, we wrote a blog post three years ago and that thing did not convert.
[00:18:08] Ian: And you're like, Yeah, well maybe like, you know, a three episode podcast series that's like titled the name of your company. Yeah. It probably, it's was a terrible strategy, but I think that that's the sort of stuff that content is like, what happens is everything gets noted to death. Totally. Then it gets to the.
[00:18:24] Ian: Senior leaders, then they noted to death and then now you have something super safe, super boring. And all of us are trying to make stuff that isn't boring. Exactly.
[00:18:31] Emily: Like, and it's so easy to spot the stuff that was decision by committee. Cause it doesn't mean anything. It's just more buzz words and Yeah, the creative that really stands out as the one where it was like someone's crazy idea and they kind of got it through.
[00:18:44] Emily: In the back end. I
[00:18:45] Ian: did something the other day, I posted on LinkedIn, we were about to run a bunch of ads for Caspian and I posted all the ads on LinkedIn and I had people and I was like, Hey, could you just comment what, which ones you like the most? So smart. And we got great feedback on the ones and someone was like, Couldn't you have done AB testing?
[00:19:02] Ian: Like why would I spend money on AV testing, whether like, gotten this for free. Yeah, get a bunch of the stuff for free. But the, there's like little things in. With creative. That's so tricky. And we can use ads and we can do all that sort of stuff, but figuring out the copy and like one of the, This is always the case with creative, One of the ones that we didn't think was the best one people thought was really funny.
[00:19:22] Ian: Always, always
[00:19:22] Emily: happens. Yeah. And I've seen that with message trusting too. Well, you'll. Do you formal focus groups and you'll say, Which one do you like best? And it's always the one that you least expect. The funny thing about that though is unless sometimes you have that external validation, like, Yep, this focus group approved the weird idea that sometimes it's still hard to push that stuff through.
[00:19:43] Ian: Well, and and it goes back to abm, right? Because like part of the thing that I think is often the mistake there is when you ab test yourself to get to like, okay, this copy is the best. But if you look at the LinkedIn example that I just gave, there was like a group of people that loved number one and number two.
[00:20:01] Ian: Yeah. And then there's a group of people that loved number four. And then there's people who are like, Oh, I actually really. Three and five. And so what's interesting to me is that so often we like ab test ourselves to get to like the one answer. Totally. But the truth is, is that like people convert off of different types of content.
[00:20:18] Ian: They, some people like really funny, silly stuff. Some people like Zaney stuff and then you're like, Well that's off brand. For us it's like, well, on brand is making money. So yeah, , so,
[00:20:27] Emily: Exactly. Exactly. And but the other thing about the AB testing too, that's kind of funny. You'll get an insight and then I think it's easy to overly it.
[00:20:36] Emily: So one test we learned that the word discover for CTAs significantly boosted ad performance across the board. And we were like, Oh, that's great. We'll start using Discover everywhere. And we got to a point where we never, were not using Discover. And so I think there's like this point where all the data is helpful for a directional perspective, but I think we sort of lose it a bit when we use it as like the only recipe that we can use for a successful campaign.
[00:21:03] Emily: Like there has to be that element of creativity involved.
[00:21:06] Ian: Yeah. And like with this crazy circuitous buying cycle that we're all in now, this crazy customer journey. Yeah. Is. Discover is a great, maybe that word was super great for 80 to 30% type opportunity people, but the person who's like needs to buy right now, like I'm screaming hot, Like I don't wanna discover anything.
[00:21:26] Ian: Just solve this thing for me.
[00:21:27] Emily: Totally. And I think that actually is the most underinvested in buying group and it's such a shame cuz they're the easiest to snap up. So many companies make it nearly impossible to buy or even just to get pricing information, even though we know that most buying cycles start with the, you know, the team getting, trying to get budget estimates together.
[00:21:48] Emily: So if they can't get a budget estimate for your service, then maybe you fall off the short list cuz they get it from your competitors.
[00:21:53] Ian: Yeah, great point. It's the stat, it's like if you don't respond within five minutes. Yeah. Or like if the CEO. Of your number one prospect walk in the door, your headquarters, everyone would be like flipping over tables to like run and greet 'em and show 'em whatever.
[00:22:07] Ian: And if that happens on your website, it's like they fill out a lead request. Like, yeah, exactly. Okay, we'll get to it tomorrow, but what
[00:22:12] Emily: if our competitors see it? It's like, spoiler alert, your competitors already know your pricing. Don't worry about it. .
[00:22:18] Ian: Yeah, right. Back to the ABM as an uncut budget item.
[00:22:21] Ian: What sort of ways are you spending money on those ABM activities?
[00:22:25] Emily: So one of the really cool things that we've been able to crack the code on is doing more campaigns across social channels. So in the past it was sort of like LinkedIn or display or forget about it, but some of the data now we've been able to get out of demand base has allowed us to create ongoing campaigns on Twitter, ongoing campaigns on Instagram stories.
[00:22:45] Emily: And just really targeting our buyers wherever they are, even if it's not necessarily kind of the traditional b2b, you know, ABM channel. And that's been so huge for us cuz you can spend so much less on those networks than you know, when you go to a lot of the trade pubs and are just one of a sea of vendor logos.
[00:23:05] Ian: Yeah, it's exactly right. We see a lot of the same stuff as we're promoting podcasts, the various different series, because same sort of thing. It's like we just can't compete promoting ads on
[00:23:14] Emily: LinkedIn. Yeah, it's insane. And it's frustrating too because you know the results are good and you know who you're getting when you do it, but.
[00:23:21] Emily: I don't know. I think there's an overreliance or an over index on, people are on LinkedIn, they're ready to do business, so we have to show them the business ads. I think people take time throughout their workday to distract themselves, and if we can pull them back in with a business related ad, like that's not a bad thing.
[00:23:37] Emily: How do you view your website? We're actually launching a new website next week, which is super exciting. I know a little stressful, but very exciting. But it's given us a chance to kind of step back and say like, what do we want in a. And for us, the most important thing is really helping to build that relationship, make it as easy as possible for people to find what they're looking for.
[00:23:57] Emily: And chat honestly is probably one of the main drivers of that. For us to just try and get in front of people, let them kind of self select before they have to navigate the website, but then if they choose to kind of explore on their own, just making. Even silly things, but like nav items are super clear what you're getting.
[00:24:15] Emily: You know, if you wanna get specific information about this piece of the product or you need to understand our founder or anything like that. Just making it as easy as possible for people to get there. All
[00:24:25] Ian: right, let's get to our next segment, The Dust Up
[00:24:30] Emily: Uhoh
[00:24:43] Ian: We talk about healthy tension
[00:24:46] Ian:that's with your board, your sales teams, your competitor. Anyone else? Emily, have you had a memorable dust up in your career? Oh
[00:24:53] Emily: man. I've had a few. I think a recent one that was kind of interesting, not at Collective Health, but another organization was the tension between growth marketing and the more traditional marketing function.
[00:25:05] Emily: So like the brand world and how. In this world where so much of marketing budget needs to have an ROI attached to it, how you can kind of make room for your friends and brand marketing. When you know your work in growth marketing, you have to have that roi and you kind of feel like the sales team, right?
[00:25:23] Emily: Like you have a number attached to your work. Whereas the brand team can kind of exist in maybe like a safer area. But the way around it I found is again, like really remembering that all of us want the same thing. We all want the company to achieve or exceed that revenue goal. And really trying to get on the same page with the brand team to sort of say like, Listen, for us to be successful, this is what we need to do from a campaign perspective, which.
[00:25:52] Emily: We need super quick turnaround with creative. We need, you know, this type of video asset and we need it on these dates so we can really run these campaigns with fidelity. So I think just being super clear with expectations was kind of the way to solve it in that scenario.
[00:26:07] Ian: Any other marketing stuff that we missed?
[00:26:10] Ian: Before we get into our quick hits here, any other stuff that you're excited about investing in or maybe a favorite campaign or, or anything like that? Big trends coming up. Mm.
[00:26:21] Emily: Yeah. I mean, I think we talked a little bit about it, but the dark social stuff. The dark funnel, that's super interesting. Super terrifying.
[00:26:29] Emily: We've seen some of it impact our business now in both positive and negative. And we're still trying to figure out how do we harness this? How do we measure it? How can we, you know, maybe covertly impact it, but to me, I think that's gonna become a huge area of marketing. So if there's anyone starting their career, that's a good place to focus and become an expert in.
[00:26:50] Emily: For sure. Yeah, I think
[00:26:51] Ian: it's about how do we figure out how to accelerate word of mouth and. Our customers and our fans posting in these private groups. Yeah. Right. There's so many of them. We get it all the time where it's like, Hey, you know, we heard about you on this Discord. You're
[00:27:08] Emily: like, What? Yeah, that exactly.
[00:27:10] Emily: You're like, Wait, can you send me their link, ? Yeah.
[00:27:13] Ian: No, exactly. The thing is they're invite only, right? Yeah. So it's like your SDRs can't join. I mean, we do this with developers like developer relations, right? Mm-hmm. . And so like I wonder if there's gonna be more sort of like relations type people in the future, these community leads or sub-community leads or something like that.
[00:27:30] Ian: Because it still doesn't solve the answer of someone posting about your company, but at least like technically someone from your company is in the chat.
[00:27:37] Emily: Exactly. Which is nice. The risk to brands cannot be overstated. I, I've observed a lot of executive teams are kind of slower to realize the brand risk that's there.
[00:27:46] Emily: One negative interaction with a customer or. promise that wasn't kept. It can do such serious harm for your business because late stage prospect sees that feedback and they're like, Oh, okay, well I don't want that. I don't wanna deal with that. Even if it was such a unique situation, that would never be repeated.
[00:28:05] Emily: So yeah, , I don't have a solution. I would love to hire someone who. Knows how to help us in that area, both from a proactive and a defensive perspective, but maybe one day. Okay, let's
[00:28:16] Ian: get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Just like how quickly qualified helps companies generate pipeline faster.
[00:28:27] Ian: Tap your greatest asset, your website to identify your most valuable visitors, and instantly start sales conversations quick and easy. Just like these questions, go to qualified.com to learn. Quick, its Emily. Are you ready? I'm so ready. number one, What's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
[00:28:45] Ian: Ooh.
[00:28:46] Emily: I am very good at asking trivia questions, even if I don't always know the answer. Like in any situation, I can ask really good trivia questions for that group.
[00:28:56] Ian: What is one tri question that you would often ask?
[00:29:00] Emily: I would, So for you, if I was at a party with your team, I would. What is the number one podcast on Apple right now?
[00:29:10] Ian: Uh, it's probably Joe Rogan, but that's a good trip.
[00:29:13] Emily: Maybe it's question right. People that haven't been, maybe
[00:29:16] Ian: it's near times daily. Yeah, that's, Yeah, it's great. Great trivia. I don't know
[00:29:19] Emily: the answer, but I know , I know this group will fight over it, so it's perfect.
[00:29:24] Ian: That is true. What is your favorite book, podcast TV show that you've been checking out recently?
[00:29:28] Emily: Oh, so I love this really silly Hulu show. Only murders in the building. Just soup. I'm still like halfway through. Oh yeah. Yeah. Slowly plotting through it, but it's just one of those shows that really guilty pleasure can turn your brain off and just totally enjoy it.
[00:29:43] Ian: It's so good. Do you have a non-marketing hobby that maybe indirectly makes you a better marketer?
[00:29:49] Emily: Oh, that's a good question. You know what, I got really into cooking during the pandemic, and I think what it taught me is it's okay to go off script a little bit. Unlike baking, which I had done prior, which you really have to follow the recipe. With cooking, it's okay to kinda improvise a little bit, and not to stretch the metaphor too far, but I do think it's helpful in marketing as well to remember that you don't always need to follow the exact same process that worked previously, like try new things and that's how you're gonna find the stuff that really works.
[00:30:18] Ian: What is your best piece of advice for a first time head of marketing?
[00:30:23] Emily: I think the most important thing is, Become best friends with the sales team and prove to the sales team that you have their interests at heart. If marketing and sales are walking in lockstep, there's nothing that the organization can't do and there's so that the organization leadership can say no to because marketing and sales are gonna drive everything together.
[00:30:44] Ian: Any final thoughts?
[00:30:45] Emily: Well, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't say, If you are unhappy with your company's health insurance to go to collective health.com and explore a offering cuz you deserve better.
[00:30:56] Ian: You absolutely deserve better unequivocally, that is the case. Yeah. Go to collective health.com. It's been wonderful having you.
[00:31:04] Ian: For our listeners, go to collective health.com, so learn more. Go nudge your, your cfo, your C H R O, and say, Hey, we should use Collective Health for self-funded employer health benefits. Emily, thanks so much, and we'll talk soon.