It’s not so complicated: The intersection of growth marketing with brand and marketing strategies

Yiz Segall: Good day! My name is Yiz Segall. I’m currently the I run demand generation and marketing operations at a telecommunications company for floLIVE. I also, I also consult and several other early stage tech companies as kind of a fractional CMO or as an advisor. And I’ve been doing marketing for involved with growth for about 10 years now. And I’m looking forward to this topic.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Yiz, welcome to the GrowthMentor podcast, I am excited to discuss with you about a broad topic, but I think we will make it very interesting about growth brand and marketing strategies, and how will these interact. So let’s cut to the chase, could you tell us something that we don’t know about the mix of growth, brand and marketing strategies?

Yiz Segall: Sure. So let’s kind of first define each of these, these activities, I think it’ll help sort of understand what they are. So obviously, marketing is essentially at its very core, it’s the action of delivering a company before it’s more it’s what they make the introduction, they do all the essentially avoid all the activities that bring a company to, to the market into its target audience. And that really, that really covers like a broad range of activities, that anything involved with connecting a company to its target audiences involved with marketing brand is essentially the brand is about the perception, they maintain the data side, they manage, and they cost control everything related to the identity of the company, how it wants to be perceived, they look at how it is perceived, and then this and then sort of go and figure out how they can course correct. And they also present guidelines for other for other customer facing elements. As to other customer facing elements about how to appear before, before the the target audience marketing will, most, most regularly, they’ll be the ones that enact that, because they’re creating the content, they’re the ones actually getting in front of them. But it also involves things like things like you know, the logo, the signatures, things like it also impacts support a little bit, even how the invoice looks is it does, brand can also sort of impact that as well. Growth is even higher than that. It’s it’s about unifying all the different core operations like accord departments, marketing, sales, even brand, product operations, operations, engineering, and the all of those things fall together to show how the company will succeed. So it unifies everything, it creates a clear set of, of direction, and how different company how different departments will work together in order to achieve a unified goal. And so a lot of it will be based around marketing. So it’ll also it’ll, it also forced the different departments to sort of interact with each other a lot more marketing, to interact with the product to be understand the roadmap a little bit better. So it can prepare and prepare and deal with both prior to release. And after the release, it will deal with working with also with sales goals and brand affinity. And you’ll also work with helping even customer service with sort of retention in it, essentially, it it puts everybody on the same page for a single purpose.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thanks for getting in such a detailed explanation of how these three, let’s say basic pillars interact. Given all those experiences that you have been developing in the past and all this work you have done? What are the most common mistakes that you have observed when it comes to this mix.

Yiz Segall: So there’s a few. So the common mistakes that I would find is, is the first one is obviously is a tactic led approach, or even myself in the past I’ve had to train myself out of this is, you know, you find like something that you want to do, it could be a podcast, it could be a it could be demand generation or events, whatever it is, and you try and find a way to fit that into the mix. And that’s a tactic led approach. But at the end of the day, you kind of have to be a blank slate when you come up with where you want to be at the end, and then work out and then once you’ve got to where you want to be then then you can sort of go back and say okay, these are the tactics that are that we’re going to use and in that sense, the tactics don’t really make a difference so much. It’s just because the tactics are there just a medium to achieve the goal. But if you start off being tactic led, so then the tactic is the end rather than the actual means to the end. So that’s one of the common things that I see. Another common thing that I see is, I would say, almost like an inappropriate or an inability to sort of understand the focus on different time ranges. So obviously, when you look at growth, growth is obviously a long term goal, if you want to get to a stage of, obviously, startups aren’t in a stage of hyper growth. But let’s say you want to get to a state of hyper growth. Or even if you’re already in a state of hyper growth, you want to get to a state of you want to be in continued state of growth, and you don’t want to kind of peter out a lot. So that’s more you do actions that have a long term impact. But you could either be you still have to fight for a budget. So sometimes, one of the common mistakes that I see is that companies focus way too much on the long term at the sacrifice of the short term. And they’ll consider this a bit of a, that’s a necessary sacrifice for the long term gain. Other companies focus, like they would go like 90% on the short term, or 80%, in the short term, too, and then buy out their long term growth as it goes along or as they find more budget. But what really needs to be as a consideration because you have sales that need sales as part of the mix, and part of growth is unifying all the departments together. And so you have to take care of the short term and prepare for the long term at the same time, and because you need a company to grow at the end of the day. So that’s one of the other common mistakes that I see. Another common mistake that I see with regard to this has more to do with goal setting and creating strategies is the difference between setting a vision and setting a goal. And, obviously, a vision sounds like a nice little like, airy fairy thing. It’s very inspirational. But the main difference that I see the difference between them is, is one is vision is a transformational is is, is looking future, from a transformational point of view. And goals are from a transactional point of view that if you when you look at having vision, you’re not looking at, I use the metaphor of Google Maps, you want to get to a destination, you’re going to the shops, or you want to get to an event. So you put the destination in Google Maps, that’s your goal. And but a vision is what are you going to do when you What are you going to do when you get to that got when you get to, when you get to that place? That’s a vision. So it’s that transformational impact of what happens when you get there. And the difference that this makes the difference? So I’ll give you an example. If I say I want to grow pipeline, right, let’s say you’re an early stage startup, why do you want to grow pipeline, obviously, you need more revenue. But when you’re an early stage, when you’re an early stage company, the reason you want to get customers is not just because you want customers, because if you if I say I want three new customers, and your recurring revenue business, well, I can do whatever I want to get a customer to sign up for two months, one month, two months, three months, but I put no effort into actually keeping them afterwards, what I really need is product validation. And when I look at product validation, then that also gives me first of all it gives me it gives me an understanding of the activities that I need in order to get that so that that comes about in you know, I need to make sure the product has a good user interface, the message needs to be right, I need to have good retention, there’s a lot of activity, when I say Product Validation versus pipeline. At that stage, it becomes much clearer of what we need to do, it’s almost a completely different set of, of activities that you require when you go for the quantitative route when you say I need product validation, rather than I just need to get some customers. And the other thing is, and this is what my own manager, the VP of Marketing flow live. The stuff he tells me is that you got to tell people why they’re doing things. Because if you just tell somebody do this, do that, but they don’t understand the big picture, then, not only does it impact what they’re doing, but it’s also harder to get them to do stuff. And it does actually impact what you’re actually it does impact the quality of what’s going on. And so when you’re kind of vision focused, versus I just need to get to I just need to get your pipeline, then then it does you give you actually provide that bigger picture when you end and when you have also that sort of unified growth strategy that allows everybody to sort of see what this is going to accomplish and the trends informational impact that it will accomplish for the business and it gives them a purpose.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Thanks for a very detailed explanation and analysis of all these different and very functional activities that companies or startups do. Having looked at your work in the past, I know that you have like your own way of working with growth goals and the way you help founders or companies visualise what they do. Would you like to tell us more about this framework or process that you follow? Which I think comes closer to what startups should be doing? Instead of all those mistakes, for some of them, they could be applying the way you think around this topic?

Yiz Segall: Sure. So my, my goal in any sort of company that I work with, or one of the starting things that I do, is that I ultimately want to become a subject matter expert on that topic. Because if I don’t understand the depth of the value of the what I’m trying to do, then, is that I can appreciate the value it’ll give to clients, because I’m not the target audience. Obviously, I’m the one marketing the product, I’m not the one using the product, on the most case. But if I bet as a subject matter expert, I can appreciate from the audience, it’s a much bigger step to then to be able, it’s a much easier step to then go and say, obviously, you need to do customer interviews and sort of see their perspective. But if you can fully appreciate the value of the product, then itself, then you can also understand the mix of what could be beneficial to them, it also means that you won’t miss out on things because product doesn’t product. A half decent product manager has a reason why they put things in the roadmap. And when you have companies that are getting user sourced ideas, definitely they have they see the value what’s going on. But any product manager worth their salt will essentially when they decide how I’m going to invest my time in building a product, it’s because they see a value that can add value to a product. That means keeping customers there and adding more market value to the product for acquisition and retention. They’re not just building most product managers aren’t just building a product for the sake of it. So you have to understand, as a marketer, you also have to understand the value of the different features and then be able to frame them being able to frame it in a way that the audience can appreciate. And you can’t do that if you’re not your own subject matter expert, because you only get this this kind of superficial understanding of what’s going on. So what I like to do is, first of all, if there are any activities that are going on, I always do an audit, but I don’t necessarily stop it. Because if it’s working, it’s kind of working. But I do, I always do an audit of going things on and I try to set things up for short term even just to get things going. But I always talk to product, I always try work out the brand. So I will spend, I spend a lot of time talking to different people in engineering and product and operations, I even what I do is I get their opinion on what they think is the most beneficial item, that beneficial feature of the product, what they’re excited about. Because we really, we really undervalue the impact of putting a little bit of emotion and passion and how they conveying the topic that we are even in writing. If you can be excited about what you’re talking about, then you then your audience will be able to feel that as well. And then they can get excited about it as opposed to saying the exact same thing but very dryly in a monotonous way where there’s no emotion. Which one do you think your audience is going to remember the monotone or the one with that sounds excited that they actually care about what they’re doing so So I talk a lot with product with engineering. I also like to talk I do like to talk with customers I focus mainly on around to how they make their decisions and we spoke a little bit earlier I like to know their way of thinking. I also talked to the executives not so much I want to know where they see what their perspective and what the vision is for for the product and for the company itself and helps me see the kind of the direction it’s going on how they view their own advantage and their own uniqueness. And then you do you go the obligatory talk to sales. I don’t like listening to sales calls at all. I think they’re a waste of time. But I do like to talk to sales, I do talk to customer service. And, and that’s essentially that’s, that’s essentially I put that together, I put all that information to to sort of create the ideal audience to create, how we’re going to attack them, what they’re looking for, how they make their decisions, who to target. And to try and figure out, okay, we can realistically get to this point by the end of the year. Or, if I am, if we want to be ambitious, add, like, last like 25-30% onto that. And this is how we’re going to get there. And it’s all based around, I want to see the end goal here and reverse engineer that process.

Spyros Tsoukalas: That was amazing. I really enjoy understanding how other people structure or reverse engineer or whatever the verb should be here, their processes and how they work to achieve their goals. So last question for you they use after all these insights and the tons of value you have thrown at us in such a small episode. So are there any tools that you are a big fan of recently and might be related well these processes?

Yiz Segall: I’m, I’m a kind of a work around type of person. I mean, as we I mean, as we spoke a little bit beforehand, I’ve actually been kind of building my own stuff on the side using a playing around with like Google Apps, Scripts to, to kind of find workarounds to things, especially for companies that don’t have the budget. But ideally, in terms of information, I, in terms of getting information, I think, if you’re gonna go for a BI system, Pyramid Analytics is one of my favourite. But if you don’t have the budget, I would generally Data Studio is enough. I think for most, for most companies, if you do it, right. I go through what’s going on very, I go through what’s going on, keep my pulse on the check. I have a system that I do an audit on different things, every single week. A lot of that time, I just write things down into Word document, all my notes, and then I action it out in Asana. But I think for this point, I can’t really say that I have, like, I don’t there could be one on the market. I haven’t really found any anything. What I have is kind of sufficient for me at this point. But I just use very basic tools like that.

Spyros Tsoukalas: Yiz, thank you so much for sharing all these insights and your personal experiences and ways of working with us today. I hope that our listeners will find your insights as interesting as I found them today. Thank you so much for your time.

Yiz Segall:  Thanks for having me. Have a good one.