9/18/2016

Interview guide - Round 1 - Anjini - Google Forms

Interview guide - Round 1 - Anjini

QUESTIONS

RESPONSES

5 responses
SUMMARY

INDIVIDUAL

Anjini's reference
Sep 2016

Company Name

Accepting responses

(4 responses)

15

16

17

18

(5 responses)

sharkbait
BlackRock, iShares Institutional Marketing
Capital One
Pinger, Inc
LeadQual

Customer Name

(5 responses)

Cathy Phan
Andrea Michaelian
Supriya Sundaram
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Interview guide - Round 1 - Anjini - Google Forms

Tara Samuels
Monica Niblack

Company Size

(5 responses)

17
10000
40,000
100
500

First of all, Id love to hear a bit about your current roles and
responsibilities
(5 responses)

Restaurant owner (SoCal), Tried different restaurants, we really like food and wanted to build a career around it
I am in nancial service marketing, which is a different beast than consumer products. So pension funds,
corporations etc...Sub function - content and strategy. & campaign execution. Our client content involves
power point slides, writing white paper, creating brochures and copy for ads. One of the thing I am working on
is video for a new site. Content is tailored to our type of client.
Brand strategy at capital one, we do nancial service products nationally and US. Some presence in UK and
Canada. In my role I am trying to drive access and usage within the product.
Used to work as a Marketing manager at Pinger for last 5 years and did other jobs in marketing before that.
Work with brand to build and execute campaigns. My focus is generating more revenue so we are very ROI
driven. Many different channels that exist, e.g content, social, blogs, paid media and then there is organic too,
there is display and programmatic buying and there is af liate marketing and brands. I work with many
different channels to build a campaign

How do your acquire new customers

(5 responses)

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Interview guide - Round 1 - Anjini - Google Forms

We spend on Yep, Referrals and personal contacts

Our content is more academic, our company is so huge so lot of different customers....so different messages
going to different people: 1. We look at leads that sales team generates 2. Response of existing users on
surveys and email materials. We do distinction for people who we market to vs people who are buying for us.
Two ways. - 1. We own certain channels such as our website, FB, Twitter etc and 2. media buying agencies these need all demographic etc details to buy ad space
Digital ads has worked best for us, its the most reliable way for us to spend - we have had bigger spends with
ad agencies but its just hard to attribute sales so we mostly stick to digital ads.
work closely with brands - will admit, we care about ROI.. We are open to any channel that can get customers
under a certain cost - most ef cient cost, at volume, which you know is tricky.
Attribution and moving up the funnel is the question we start with, with that in mind how do you create content
to grow the brand. have not seen people who can successfully connect sales to content, example-good:
"tribune media" - native ads, they were doing a lot of local af liate with fox news very very good at generating
impression, and clicks but not so much revenue.

Can you please walk me through the basic process <company> goes
through to plan a marketing campaign?
(5 responses)

Yelp has the biggest impact on our business and we spend a lot of time making sure reviews and photos look
great. We rely on word of mouth the most -- after yelp. We do run referral promos from time to time
Depends, typically we build some creatives, get feedback from sales team once it is polished enough we send
creatives to client team and iterate until we get their approvals. Client feedback is critical for us, it is no of no
use to build a brochure unless clients commit to sell using that creative. Once client approves we have an inhouse content team that creates brochure, videos or other materials.
For our own channels we create content in house - we brief the creative team and they produce creatives for
us. For external stuff we mostly hire an external agency to do work for us. These agencies are liaison between
the channel and content creatorwe would never reach out on our own -- that will be too risky
It varies, some campaigns are big and some are small promotions. Smaller cmapaigns, promos are easy to
run, usually I own the creative brief and send it to our designers and launch campaign with that. Oh and we
also use an in-house person to write copy. Bigger campaigns are more challenging, for example we hired a
video agency in Chicago to create few TV ads for us. That was a lot of work, just taking requirements from
stakeholders and distilling it as requirements and then iterating with agencies is a lot of work.
Example I have a client about to launch their 2017 product lineup - big company, takes longer so keep that in
mind as I describe timeline.
We started an year ago , what features they are building, who they contemplating this product line-up for
etc...thru this we identify one set of feature that they should sell to end user.
We started doing beta testing of that recommended feature, big change on how we had to market -- given
current market. Starting a few months ago we started putting together a creatives, CTA, copy etc....and now
we have been doing lots and lots of beta testing. We will soon go live, so lot more testing, in diffrent countries
localized texts etc. We are also evaluating -- In addition to existing paid media what other media should we do
it?
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In your mind, what elements of the campaign are critical to get right? Why
those items in particular?
(5 responses)

Usually for bigger catering events its important to present a recommendation from another business, it makes
the process so much faster
1. Client approval. 2. Our client type is hesitant is adopting new stuff unless there is a precedence -Recommendations or testimonials we have leveraged a lot. We call it as our star adoptersthey lead the way,
they come up with new ideas on how to leverage existing functionality, they help us create collateral, case
studies etc. We host conferences and have star adopters speak at events.
generally goal is to drive up sales and create brand awareness. So depending on the goal copy and CTA should
be clear and upfront. We have hired bloggers in the past and sometimes it doesnt look genuine and other
times it kinda gets lost in the overall story.
It should drive up the right metrics depending on the goal, so if we are running a campaign to drive download
in the store then those number should go up. Given our space usually copy of the campaign is most
important...
Like iI said - direct reviews focus - grow sales is most important. You have to prove a channel will bring in sales
for brands to invest in that channel

What is most challenging in executing on those items you mentioned?

Why?
(5 responses)

scaling up is a challenge for us right now, for other reasons as well as our concern that we might not be able to
bring enough orders
Challenging part in executing - digital marketing tech is behind the time - trouble tracking people, there is also
no way to buy etf online so people come to us for information, or guidance but we data an dieting it quickly.
if they are gonna make a big trade our sales people will know about it, but for smaller people we might not
know that until. WE try to segment as bets we can, but there are competing problem thereare they chief
inform wheat is there decision making capacity, what type of
In content of our channels and social media speci cally --- social media is great for brand awareness - its good
for clicks etcnot good at acquisition or usage. We are spending on social anyway, if someone can crack the
code to click to convert. Our conversion cycle is long so that is why it is harder for us.
its tricky to get the copy right, we have space constraints and same for CTA, we spend a lot of time iterating on
that and making sure our team likes it. Often we run a few user tests before launching a camoaign
looking for new ways to have customer's attention. Users see lot of ads are are now numb to it. For example I
see on my FB StitchFix and 50 other brand that want my attention, but I sorta ignore them all. Another
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challenge we have: we have very strong brand guidelines so we have to follow that and that can be
challenging. How do you create branding team happy vs create content that will actually sell - because brand
guidelines are never as current.

How do you measure the success of your campaigns?

(5 responses)

NA
Hard to measure, we have analyst to correlate nal sale to initial lead gen
Sales should increase, we would run a campaign for couple months or weeks and if sales go up then we can
attribute it to a speci c campaign. And ofcourse digital ads is easy to track conversions
just looking at data, since we are in digital space we tracking everything!
Sale attribution

How does your company build trust, connect with your customer - is this a
criterion you measure - how?
(5 responses)

Photos and referrals

imp to be in touch with these people and give them all the info they need before that actually do it. Long sale
cycle and a lot of people are involved in decision, trust is build at every interaction through educational
materials, brand name and recommendations
We are trying to use social but when we use in uencers its like really generic or it does not come off
genuine. Other than that we use ad agencies and just depend on them to create best possible content given
the brief
We have a beta community that we use to collect genuine feedback from people and we use that on our
webiste and other social channels. For trust, we also have a big support team that makes sure every customer
complain is followed up on
It is important, but we focus more on brand guidelines. This could be because my company is an agency.

Why you think this is important or not important?

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(5 responses)

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NA
Very important for full sale but it is a small factor in marketing
we spend so much money and time to be authentic.....It is important overall because for nancial services,
banks etc...market is somehwhat like a parking lot, hard to differentiate one from another. So creating a
genuine brand image that people can trust is a strategic differentiator for us.
We do want to build a brand that people like and trust. There are so many apps that do the same thing so it
trust is important we use a lot of personal data, so we have to spend time in our marketing material that we
build a brand that people can trust
for us its is branding

What factors help build trust or connect with customers? Does Social
media help?
(5 responses)

NA
NA
Its been challenging - 1. Long acquisition cycle so we cannot measure effectiveness of a campaign 2. Harder
to create social content than for consumer products - like imagine we dont about write nancial services in my
free time.
No, we stopped using social...this might be different at other companies, but here we kind of think that FB is
dead and attribution is hard on Instagram so we dont use it anymore. Twitter is too much work.
I would say though - reviews are very very useful when positive, but I am always skeptical of that because of
the behavior i see in industry. Worked in this 7 years. what used to work so it no longer works. to continually
innovate

How and how much do you budget for these initiatives?

(5 responses)

budget around $3000

16k for a 2 min video, 80K for a campaign etc.
totally varies, 80% actual media buy 20% creative -Per creative we spend about 200K- 500K
varies, big campaigns are upto 500K and smaller ones like I said are all in house, or as small as 3K
varies - from 10K to 5M!!! For you - 25K is something a brand would give for trying out a channel, nothing more
than that
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Interview guide - Round 1 - Anjini - Google Forms

How often does your company rely on user-generated content for your
campaigns? How do you source it? How much would you be willing to pay
for the right type of content (ballpark)?
(5 responses)

Thats all we rely on currently- if it is an event we follow up after to get some pictures or just advertise to post
on twitter and yelp
almost never, except for conferences where start users share their experience
answered above
NA
No we develop our creatives.

Any other thoughts on marketing/advertising/campaigns/content that you

think would be helpful to know as were going through this feedback
process?
(5 responses)

NA
NA
NA
NA
We are spending on social anyway, if someone can crack the code to click to convert

Thanks so much for your time, this has been enormously helpful for our
team. Might you have any colleagues whom you think would offer an
insightful perspective as well?
(5 responses)

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Interview guide - Round 1 - Anjini - Google Forms

Yes
No
Other

100%

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