Join Robert Bramley, the Demand Generation Manager at GoCardless. They discuss marketing strategies and how GoCardless tailors campaigns to diverse audience segments while maintaining consistent messaging and standing out in a competitive market.
Key Highlights:
Check this out for an insightful discussion that bridges the gap between brand and demand marketing, offering practical advice for aligning sales and marketing efforts, and creating memorable marketing campaigns.
Robert Bramley on LinkedIn
Summary:
Join Robert Bramley, Demand Generation Manager at GoCardless, as he discusses the unique challenges of marketing a product that addresses various needs for businesses of all sizes. He explains how GoCardless tailors its marketing campaigns to target different customer segments effectively.
Bramley emphasizes the crucial alignment between marketing and sales teams, highlighting the need for sales to be informed about ongoing marketing campaigns to promote them effectively. He also shares insights from a recent successful event, "Go Faster, Go Cardless," which combined education and entertainment with a racing simulator competition, ultimately generating valuable leads for the company.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: Welcome, welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ’s Podcast, brought to you by Pharos IQ. I am pharosIQ here with you again with another awesome B2B marketer to talk all things marketing, what's happening on LinkedIn, what's happening in the industry, and then obviously we hit it home at the end, every single episode with a unboring campaign idea that you may or be able to think through, use as motivation, use as inspiration to Drive demand for your own businesses on that side We bramley, demand generation manager for go cardless Based in the uk and ireland region, over the course of his career and b2b's managed A ton of stuff from a demand generation perspective, ranging from strategic direction all the way down to channel marketing mix and really diving in the details on the operational side of things.
So you spent a lot of time in the fintech industry and includes, some consulting for a range of companies across wealth management and even executive recruitment firms. He's really pumped to work with, companies in the U. S. here, ranging from East Coast to West Coast.
London is pretty much a global guy. So we're really pumped to have Robert here. Welcome.
Rob Bramley: Thanks so much for having me, pharosIQ. Looking forward to this.
pharosIQ: Fantastic. So before we dive into The details, tell us a little bit about GoCardless. What do you guys do there? And a little bit, give yourself a little plug.
Rob Bramley: Yeah. So GoCardless is, it's a relatively new gig for me, actually. I've been about six months in with the job at the moment. It's a great player in the UK. I've been around for over 10 years. They offer bank to bank payments is the sort of bread and butter, everything that the business needs from one off payments, recurring access to your bank account data and plugging in with a range of different partners.
I think we work with over 350 different partners at this point. I was absolutely thrilled to take the role with them and working with some best in class marketers. Here for sure. The company is just going from strength to strength at the moment. I think we've got 85 85 000 plus merchants at the moment and yeah, just been really excited to get involved in and diving into some of these demand generation campaigns and looking in all to the channels we're working in, and it's just refreshing to, to be alongside some really like fantastic and talented people.
That are, really showing how to get the job.
pharosIQ: And you lead me into my first question, with a product that's so diverse. Across different, that's that solves different problems for smaller businesses, medium sized businesses, large businesses, global businesses, tackling demand.
I can see probably being a little challenging, like, how do you wrap your head around having to serve so many different masters from a demand perspective?
Rob Bramley: It's a different kind of beast, I'll be honest it's not something that I've usually had to tackle at this kind of scale, as you say this is a company that can service, really micro businesses, one to two employees, all the way up to these massive enterprise and strategic organizations.
So there's obviously a real kind of different way of thinking how to plan that out from a marketing perspective, right? From a macro view, the company's done a great job of, building out subdivisions of the marketing org that handle different types of customer acquisitions, right? We've got a sort of team that handles more of this organic SEO A little bit of like organic social email affiliate marketing, you can even think of it with a sort of B2C lens.
That's how you're bringing in these much smaller organizations versus you've got these parts of the marketing org that are more aimed at getting larger firms on contracts, right? And that's where you see more of the typical B2B demand gen sit in. So like simple case in point here is I think that different Merchants in the payments landscape have different needs.
So for instance an enterprise company is going to be laser focused on Payments data in its most granular form right because payments and the efficiency of payments can shave off half a percent Of annual revenue, which if you look at that from a, from an organizational perspective, you're A CFO, that's a massive amount of money that you're looking at, right?
Yeah. But if you're an SMB, your perspective is gonna be more along the lines of, I need a tool that is reliable. I need to be straightforward, I need access to good dashboard data and I need to be able to, onboard with it as quickly as possible. And this is a company that's well positioned to offer to both, but the value proposition.
Itself needs to be tailored to these different kinds of companies. So what we're finding is that the marketing campaigns that are being deployed across channels are going to be different and reflect the different kinds of verticals, the different kinds of company sizes that are applicable to them.
Yeah, as you would expect there's diversity in terms of the content that comes in, but also the channels are highly diverse to fit. Very stressful market we have. Yeah.
pharosIQ: Even at its root cause, I've noticed your site has two immediates, like for enterprise, for small business, trying to speak to those different, and and I'm sure you could probably segment even more, but even take, I've found.
My favorite websites and it's becoming more popular where it's almost choose your own adventure. Like when you get to the site, it says I'm a VP of sales. Okay. That's me. I'm going to click there, or I'm the CEO. So I've been loving those vibes, especially because the buyer's unit these days is becoming so diverse, especially in the enterprise, so software, even analytic software is that you're speaking to the VP of sales, you're speaking to the CIO, the COO, the CFO, maybe the CEO and every one of those messages is subtly different. So giving that old school book of choose your own adventure. Yeah, it's,
Rob Bramley: it's been great to see some tools out there as well, that have really taken that approach right into the forefront and you're seeing a lot of these things that can make custom journeys that apply super differently depending on the ICP profile of that individual or that account.
And I think these are the things that are just like an absolute gold mine for a B2B marketer. If you're working in that kind of range where. There's going to be totally different value adds for different people in the department, because products, especially in SAS, just that they encompass so much of a business, even though, it's just payments that can mean very different things for very different departments.
And so I think you need to translate that effectively across. Your website, your, the ways that you're, expressing content through your pay channels, whatever that is, you just need to make sure that it's always fitting the bill. And as I say, there's a lot of tools out there that, really help you tailor that, but it's definitely evolved a lot over the years.
pharosIQ: It's my favorite product segment, right? Where you're overarching, North star for the business is. Very singular, but the ways that it's executed can be in the hundreds. So you're, you have to all of your message messaging has to direct in one direction but just get there from different paths.
So it's a fascinating marketing play. It's one of my favorites.
Rob Bramley: Non linear buyer journey that you have as well these days. I think a lot of marketers like to take the final approach, and you should to the best of your ability but as you say if you're not, if you're not hammering home the right message consistently across.
Then it doesn't matter whether you're making a top funnel brand play, which is totally different to a bottom funnel. This is exactly where our product is best aligned to your industry or company or whatever. You're not getting the point across that, you've got best in class, Whatever it is.
And in our case, like bank to bank payments, then, you're going to find a lot of leads and a lot of companies will slip through the cracks. I think
pharosIQ: so shifting gears and, I would assume your space is somewhat competitive, right across, your small business enterprise, the payment space is that, and in MarTech, I don't know, I don't know how often you're frequenting the LinkedIn channels, but there's been a lot of, hubbub lately about, like some, smaller vendors.
Calling out incumbent vendors on features that may not be lacking and, and we all, from a marketing standpoint, can subtly poke holes in our competition, right? But there's been some direct attacks happening as of lately, right? And so what I'm curious, what's your thoughts, right? Is this a good play?
Does it hurt your brand when you directly attack a competitor? Because I've heard two different sides of the coin. So I'm curious for yours.
Rob Bramley: So it's an open question and I think it's context dependent on the reader, I think some people, love the confrontation, they love the drama, and I think that in, in some ways honesty is the best policy, I think that if you're going to bring, whether it is foul play or malpractice from a business that there's no reason that shouldn't be brought into the light.
I think there's a manner in which you do it though, you as a, especially if it's through an individual, like on LinkedIn, if you're doing posts. You need to remember that you have a reputation and you are effectively, a representative of a company and anything that you say and do, as you'd imagine, I'm sure some folks that do this, their legal teams are probably, sweating and having a real bad day.
But as you say, I think, You can strike a fine balance in there somewhere and obviously sales people have been doing this in the background for years with battle cards and all of these kind of strategic focuses. As soon as they find out that they're using a competitor, they've got all of the answers in the back pocket, to break down the why and how these guys won't be suitable for you.
And I think now that it's being brought into the public sphere, Opinions are starting to, become consistent in a lot of ways. I think people will say, yeah, no, I think you are right to bring it up. But as I say, if you are going to go down that route, make sure you have some decor and make sure you're gonna, you know, be honest and polite about it and not totally drag another company down.
pharosIQ: And understand that you're gonna alienate, you're gonna alienate some people, right? Like there are, it's a B2C example, right? But there are some people who are anti Tesla just because of Elon Musk. Just because of his persona and some of the things he says and some of the, like his overtness, right?
Like some people are like, I'm never going to buy a Tesla. It could be the greatest car ever. I'm just not going to do it. But he's making the bet that more people are going to be like, I'm totally going to buy a Tesla. Cause I want that kind of innovator to be my car manufacturer. So it's a bet.
It's a gamble, but I would assume every once in a while, when you make a gamble, you lose. And I think that's one thing to consider, especially To your point if you are the person who tends to be the face of a brand when they think, and that's happening more and more in B2B now too, right?
Like when you're becoming a bit of the brand, I get a lot of, I get a lot of feedback on my, my stuff. Oh, maybe you like, and now I've actually slowed down a bit and been a bit, a little bit less edgy and I'm just like, okay, I have to, I still have to be me, but I can't be as.
Aggressive as I normally would, but mostly on like comments. Cause that's where I usually lose it. Like my own personal post, I think through like a lot of it's that, but like sometimes somebody says something and it just puts you on tilt and you just want to like type really fast and I'm like, okay, that's not a good, that's not a good look.
We should probably slow down from that perspective. I
Rob Bramley: think they say, don't they, it's and I totally agree with you, I think Musk is the case study of this kind of question, right? And has been, and it's more owed to the point because, he's the one that bought a social media platform so he could go ahead and say these kind of things, right?
And I think, as you say, you can make a lot of good points and call out bad practice. And I think, make people more aware, which is not a bad thing, especially when you do think that there is genuinely wrong things being done by certain organizations. But as you say, I think the other issue is that it only takes one in a hundred bad posts or bad things being sent to damage a reputation of not just an individual, but the company that's behind it.
And that's where, especially in the world of places like LinkedIn, you got to be laser focused. Almost being said,
pharosIQ: and really it's fascinating times though, so it's just an exciting time to be in marketing, I think, for all these reasons, right? Because it, it's not, it's, there's so many channels, but then you have to watch your channels and then we, it's really exciting times.
So similarly, similar thought process. I'm hearing a lot from my customers. And then talk and, event channels and things about brand and demand and how more than ever, they're like this intertwined. They need to be this intertwined pairing of, I've always thought they have been even more.
Used to be, you have your I'm all about brand. Yeah. Yeah. Those marketers. And then you had the, I'm all about demand. Marketers and it seems like everybody's coming together, right? Are you seeing a lot of that? On your side, you're obviously you're on the demand side heavily, right?
Are you working more with brand? Are you focused more on brand? I just asked you about 62 000 questions. So Let's yeah Pick choose one and we can expand from there
Rob Bramley: like I think the best part to start with is as you say Brand has been a very like open to interpretation, I think, in different places I've worked.
It can be quite an all encompassing team that are within it and sometimes it can just be people that are based around nothing other than the design elements, right? I think currently I'm seeing more brand teams, taking a wider role in terms of handling PR not just that design element, but also working in things like some of parts of events.
Handling all of the social media or at least being involved with the social team that are running those accounts. And I think it is positive because, you have a reliance for each other in terms of campaign execution, like absolutely you do. And it's good to collaborate with them on things like event activations and feeding back.
performance because sometimes brand teams can't always be close to, the more revenue related numbers your pipeline and how many accounts, you've got engaged these kind of things. So collaboration is always important, especially as along two sort of parts of the the marketing organization for sure.
I think in B2B, especially like with SaaS companies, you need a brand team to maintain your standards, as well as, provide that creativity, whilst the demand side tends to have, the responsibility of the tactical deployment of that creativity, right? And then I think Another point that I've always heard this saying, which always interests me is that you've got to raise credibility before you raise your visibility, right?
And a brand team is always going to be great at that credibility side, because as mentioned, they maintain the standards. They bring in quality of your perceived value. They work with perhaps different customers and create Lots of interesting content and use case studies and things like that.
And then the visibility is always going to be handled by the demand side, right? They're the ones that are very good, pushing it to the right channels with the right budget allocated at the right time to the right audience. So collaboration is super important there, I think.
pharosIQ: It's interesting, yeah, and I've always said that when talking to my teams or, like brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.
So if two marketers are at a comp, if two B2B marketers are at a conference, someone brings up Ferris IQ, what that, what said in that conversation, that's your brand. And usually three things are said, who the hell is that, which means I don't have a brand, awesome, love those guys, which means you've got a great brand or see which means you have some work to do.
So I think too much of the brand stuff is focused on the messaging and that. And really, I think brand happens, customer experience, right? And what happens after the sale, right? Because again, that's where if you think about all the great brands, again, even on the B2C space, right? It's. It's not, you can't say you're a quality car like Mercedes.
If you're constantly breaking, you can't say that you give people a great luxury experience. If it takes two and a half hours to get your tires rotated, so it's brand. I think a lot of the times happens after the sale or, and then becomes the implicit channel of kind of go from there, but that's just me rambling and being holistic for my, my, my midweek thoughts.
Rob Bramley: I think it's a great point. As you say, proof is in the pudding, right? And a lot of that, the brand equity, as you say, is carried out in especially in B2B, the quality of the service. Obviously you've got the visual element, which is more what I think a brand team is more known for. But yeah, I should say quality and consistency is something that needs to be run throughout the organization and
pharosIQ: we're going to talk a little bit about campaigns in a bit, and before we get there, I think something I'd love to chat on is, when I ever asked people you love the campaign, but did it work one of the usual disconnects and why it didn't work is because, There wasn't a lot of alignment with the sales team on the campaign, right?
So you've been doing this a long time, lots of sales team, lots of stuff, right? What do you usually focus on from a sales enablement, internal promotion perspective when you really want a campaign to succeed with sales?
Rob Bramley: Yeah, it's such a good point because I found I've been on both ends of the spectrum, right?
You can create what looks like on the surface of it, a really well thought out campaign with a lot of bases covered and a great message behind it. And you can fall at the final hurdle, which is raising the awareness within the organization of people to leverage it. And this could be like any kind of campaign.
It could even be an event, right? Securing. Like internal promotion is, I think just overlooked and isn't always the easiest thing to do, and I think a lot of it. We'll always come down to obviously stakeholder management and relationships within the company. You need to make sure that even if you're working in marketing, that you have those relationships outside of your department, that you can lean into them for encouragement and motivation where it's required to leverage marketing campaigns.
And then additionally you have to double down on enablement to make sure they have everything at their disposal to promote it successfully. So I think, a good example of this is if you're working with a sales team to promote, let's say you've got like a, an expensive research report that you've conducted on payments data, or, you're doing an event for a certain type of industry.
You should be taking off that first call. with your sales team, having everything you need at the disposal in terms of written out documents and templates that they want to be using. Perhaps, if you want them to promote it on their LinkedIn, don't just write out a post for them. Make it something engaging.
Make it like a poll. If you've got like a research report, don't just say, we've released it. Say, take a data point and see if their community knows whether They understand the industry or not, right? Think like a marketer, but make it applicable to someone that works in sales. And I think if you can get the assets down and you can get the stakeholders engaged.
That's two massive check boxes. And I think the only final thing you need to accomplish there is just leveraging some kind of tool that makes it nicely compartmentalized into a space that's accessible. People use like their Slack channels and folders and stuff like that, but just make sure it's organized.
And cause salespeople, they've got a hundred thousand people they need to be talking to every day. They don't want to be, digging around for all these things. Just. Make it as easy to access as possible.
pharosIQ: Interestingly enough, what I've seen, so many campaigns, sales doesn't even know are out there.
They just don't even know. As a first step, how many campaigns have you asked your sales team? What campaigns is marketing running right now? They'd be like, Oh, I have no idea. That one tells me anything, right? So just that simple active communication, right? Slack channel teams channel. Hey here's what marketing has going out in the next 30 days, right?
And you have any questions, let us know. Or, like that type of stuff is a lot of times like sales can. If you're speaking the same language and in outbound, as you are in brand and inbound and all of that, it just becomes cohesive. And I think when I think sales and marketing misalignment, which is, what, of course we hear about all the time, right?
Like it's either in it's basically there's two But head butting standpoints, right? There's the Leads conversation. The leads are great. The leads suck. Everybody disagrees there. That'll happen. I believe that'll go on until the end of time. I don't think that's ever going to change. But there is the communication standpoint, right?
Tell me what you're doing. I find my one of my things that I started doing years ago with the emergence of call recording technology, right? Is I just send calls to people. Hey Hey, marketing, here's a call. Listen to it, right? This is live. We're talking to the customer.
We're getting pain points. We're pitching the product. We're everything that, and if I do, if I send one a week, to the team, then everybody understands where everybody's going. And now I've taken it a step further. I'm sending it to the other executives, right? CFO, CIO, C and chief product, everybody should hear What is going out into the market so you can make decisions about the product, the tech that, what are we going to invest in with the customer in mind versus just sitting in your own little silo?
Rob Bramley: Yeah. The full feedback loop is super important there. I have to agree. And yeah, I think on the other side from the marketing side, I always find, as you say, that buy in part, if you can demonstrate the touch points and the creation of successful deals through demand generation activity.
It's always like a great starting point for a sales team to recognize the value that you provide because it's not visible in a lot of ways, right? But besides those kind of QBRs, a quarterly report or anything like that you won't always, if you're like a sales development rep or an account executive or anything like that, fully understand How we've influenced the deal up until we flag it to you guys
pharosIQ: Or and then you disagree oh, it was mine.
No, it was mine And then there's that whole conversation from there, but not going to go there as well But it's as a lot of times like hey, we need to kick off marketing gives a big presentation and especially the bigger the company you are the more disconnected you become to that engine at smaller companies It's easy because marketing's right over there You're just constantly talking because there's two sellers and a marketer and everybody's having a day but yeah, it's really interesting stuff.
So we've reached the point, my favorite part of the pod and everybody's favorite let's talk campaigns, right? Everybody's got those campaigns that stick with them as unboring, where they got a little creative or push the edges. And we love hearing about them. So whether it's messaging, tactic, all that.
Tell us about your unbeataboring campaign. Why did you love it and what made it creative?
Rob Bramley: Cool. Yeah, so I think the campaign I want to highlight, it's actually a hosted event that we did with GoCardless. I think taking a step back when I look at events, I think a big question you need to ask is, for someone that's going to register, why are they going to give up their free time out of working hours to come to an event?
And let's think about that for a second because there's 10 other competitors in the space that are doing the free bar and food. Idea networking event. Everybody's doing it. And I think to go the step further and to make something that's truly engaging, you need to come up with an idea that, combines experiential elements as well as the best in class thought leadership that provides the justification and education for them to turn up.
So I think on the experience side, it's worth making it something, that's relatively broad that people will like. But on the education side, you need to make sure you're bringing in respected thought leaders that are going to tackle cutting edge issues in the industry, whether that's like strategic focus, whether that's, something around legislation, whatever it needs to be, okay, like you, you can work with your product team on that to help define it.
But basically, You need to connect the two together. And so the idea that we ended up coming up with was an event called go faster, we'd go cardless. So what we did is we found a special venue a private suite in this place called the F1 bar, which had unique racing simulators that were built into it.
They look just like sitting in one of the real race cars. It was in its own private. We looked over the St. Paul's Cathedral. Still have that kind of nice professional feel, but had this interesting experiential element that we could tie in, especially into the content, because go faster is something that everybody's trying to do in the payments landscape, right?
Whether you're trying to get an efficient payment strategy, which helps you grow and think faster in other ways to expand your business. Or you're looking at just genuinely getting faster payments to help manage your cash flow. So we made it so it had two meanings, right? We have people turning up to do this event.
And, you've obviously got like a sort of racing competition. We had a leaderboard. People were inviting folks to this event, challenging them to represent their company in this sort of competition. But at the same time, we've got this great panel. That is all tied into the theme and I was planning to talk about and, with F1 it's massive in the UK, people love it.
And we had that kind of type of sport or event series that, that people just wanted to come to because it was a fun, memorable experience, right? I think, What we managed to nail there was, yeah, tying in that leisure side. As well as the education side. And I think I think it
pharosIQ: went
Rob Bramley: pretty
pharosIQ: well.
Yeah, I love the gamification part of it too. The challenge, right? I remember we did a sales kickoff many years ago, and, I had we went to one of those again, outside of Vegas, there was like a race car, Ferrari, high end car type thing and it was fun! To do it. But what made it really fun is the leaderboard, right?
Who had the fastest time, who had just, that's just natural sense of competitiveness, right? Really adds. And then that when we get to the point where you have your target customers inviting other target customers to the event, you really rocked the event. And I think that's a really great example.
When you're looking at a bet promo, right? Do you find it's, like putting is it just. You think it's almost viral, if you will, right? If it's a, you think if it's a good event, people are just gonna show up, or did you put a lot of thought into the, does it, do we e email, do we do paid search?
The tactical side of the event?
Rob Bramley: Yeah, I think on this one we were fortunate in that it was, people liked the idea and it overs supped and we just had to rely on sales guys. Just firing it out themselves to, to carry in 90 percent of the RSVPs. But to your point, more generally, if you are promoting an event, like you've got to make sure you get full coverage on channels, right?
Like marketing should be leveraging the email database and should be refining it to make sure it's, folks that are on target. You can use like some third party contents indication groups as well. A lot of them have really clean and good data out there and you can get registrations for quite good on target.
People that never would usually subscribe through it. So I've found that can be an effective tool, which maybe is not leveraged that much for event invitations. People tend to use it for just general lead gen, through a gated asset. But yeah, if you can, ring an event into that, I think the third parties and content syndicators love that just as much as you will.
And I think, some other things to think about is you've still got a few other channels, you can run through your paid LinkedIn, as long as you've got a ring fenced group of accounts or people and, there's a couple of other options you could explore there, but, yeah, as you say, if you've nailed the event and concept, I think it will promote itself.
pharosIQ: think that's the takeaway. Like it's, if it, especially with events, if it, if you hit it, people just walk in. It's almost you throw a good party, people just start showing up who you don't know. You rocked it right either. And some people get people to show up to their party because they have the big name or the big brand, everybody just knows that it's going to be an awesome party because the big brand showing it, but really to get people to, events are one of those things that like, yeah, you can't, you can, if you hit it just. Falls into place, but if you miss it ends up being a big struggle. So awesome. So I print them.
That's killer feedback. Love diving into different programs. Again, if you're inspired, right? Gamification, really put thought into connecting quality plus fun, right? Because to your point you know. Everybody's at the point now where do you really want to go out anymore?
Do you want to go to the thing? Like it's, you got, you're driving your kids around everywhere. We were just talking before this, you're driving your kids around, you work an eight hour day, you're up early, you try to get a workout and you have all that stuff. Do you really want to go to the networking event at 7 30 PM on a Tuesday?
You better really love that vendor or you better really love that product or really need it to do that. So I think stepping up the game from a demand perspective, not just at events, but I think you could use the same advice overall, right? Combine fun with value. And you're cooking with gas from a demand perspective.
So with that, Rob, it's been really fantastic having you. Thank you so much for joining again. You can reach us at pharosIQ.com. We're on linkedin pharosIQ. Go find your little provider there of podcasts, whether it be Apple Music or Spotify, hit the little button that says subscribe, or, give us a positive review.
The more positive reviews we see, the more times we show up in things like B2B marketing searches on those platforms, and the more we can share our audience. So thank you again so much, Rob. It's been awesome to connect Thank you, Rob. Rob, where can we find you and GoCardless at?
Rob Bramley: Yeah, you can find us at GoCardless.
com. We're available in the UK, Europe, North America Australia, and New Zealand. Feel free to head over to the website. And if you'd like to speak to me, you can always find me on LinkedIn as well.
pharosIQ: Thank you so much. Till next time. Appreciate it. Have a good rest of the day.
Rob Bramley: Thanks very much, pharosIQ.