How Creative Marketing Helps AI Brands Stand Out

Speaker A: In the age of AI, what I think marketers should consider is creativity. Creativity is how you will stand out. Think of how you can stay bold with your marketing campaigns and use your humanness in the age of AI to help yourself stand out.

Speaker B: Hi, and welcome back to SaaS Half Full, the only show serving B2B SaaS and AI marketers. I'm Lindsey Groper, EVP at PanBlast, and I will be both your host and bartender. Today I had an awesome conversation with Ashley McGovern, who is the director of marketing at Nurturebot, which is an AI prop tech company. Now, most AI companies are marketing in all the ways that we know. A lot of digital marketing, leaning heavy into social, paid looking at AI visibility. And Ashley's talking to us about how she has used more creative techniques to reach her audience and that are unexpected coming from an AI company. And yes, people, I am talking print and books and commercials. So if you'd care to grab a drink, join me as I speak with Ashley. Hey, Ashley, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Hi, Lindsay. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker B: I am excited to have you. You are an indie native, which I don't get many indie natives on this show. So glad to have you. But now you are, uh, living in Chicago, correct?

Speaker A: Correct. Yep. I am in the Gold coast old town area.

Speaker B: Love it. Um, before I hit record, I shared with you that I used to live there and it was definitely like a different time in my life. It was pre kids partying was like number one focus. Every dime I met made. I spent it on going out, but I would not change a thing. I loved it. It's a city that's near and dear to my heart. Were we able to get you a drink kit today?

Speaker A: You were. And my drink of choice was a Hugo Spritz, so I have my Hendrix with me. However, I told you before we started recording, I am in desperate need of caffeine. So I'm actually drinking a Celsius and it's a little bit earlier here instead of the Hugo Spritz, but I'm definitely going to be enjoying that a little bit later on after work.

Speaker B: Awesome. Yes. It is 10:30 in the morning for you. Uh, on a Thursday. It is in the a.m. m hour for me as well. But guess what's happening, Ashley? I always stay true to the process. There were two times in six years I haven't and one is because I was coming literally coming off the stomach flu and I just couldn't. And the other is when I had Covid back in the day And I just, like. I couldn't bring myself to, like, have a drink. But other than that, no matter the time of day, no matter the day of the week. Here we go. I'm drinking a Good Boy seltzer, which I discovered this summer, um, which I love. It's a strawberry lemonade because it is not carbonated, which is, like, key for me. I can only drink so many carbonated beverages. So the fact that this is flat, I love. So it is a Good Boy strawberry lemonade. Um, but I will cheers your Celsius. Thank you for joining me.

Speaker A: Thank you. I have heard good things about Good Boy. I'm the same. I don't like carbonation. I don't know if you've tried Mom Water. Mom Water. Love that one, too.

Speaker B: That is from Indy. That was, like, born out of Indiana. Yeah. And it. And literally it was the mom who would go to the pool with her kids and she would have in her water bottle her drink, which would usually be, like, flavored flat water, vodka, and what, you know, whatever else. And she started labeling it mom water so that her kids wouldn't drink it. And then she, like, would make it for her friends, and they would all have her own mom waters. And then they're like, this is, like, a thing. We should try to, like, sell it. And Mom Water was born.

Speaker A: I love that. And I like the history, the story to it. Absolutely.

Speaker B: Um, it actually. You'd like. When it actually matches what you hope it did, it's like, was this invented by a mom? And it's like, yes, it actually was.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, okay. Well, um, before we dive into our topic of the day, I do want to give our listeners, like, a bit of background on you certainly, like, your. Your history and how you got into B2B SaaS and AI marketing. And then also, if you could just give us a quick overview, um, of Nurture Boss, what the company does and your role there would be a great place to start.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Okay. So I have been in marketing for almost 10 years now. Um, after college, I actually got my start working in house at an orthopedic hospital in Indiana. And that's really where I say I developed my appreciation for complex information. Because I was like. Right. And Julia on your team, who actually reached out to me.

Speaker B: I worked out. I worked with her.

Speaker A: Um, she was an intern, so she can attest to this. But we had to write blog articles about, like, scoliosis surgery and make sure that it was digestible to our target audience. Right. So I really developed my appreciation for complex Information and telling a story. Well, a true story. Well, um, with the three years I was at that orthopedic hospital, the thing though was I had, I've always had this like entrepreneurial itch. So, so eventually I was like, okay, I need to scratch this and use the my minor which uh, when I went to college my minor was in entrepreneurship and I was like, I need to get into the startup world. So I saw this company called Reel Inc. They were actually acquired now by a larger property technology company in our space. Uh, but I ended up working there for like four years and it was a wonderful experience. True startup, um, then scale up and eventually it was acquired like I said. And then since then I left and went to the E commerce tech industry for a little bit where I gained a lot of insight too. So I actually compare a lot of property technology that I might refer to as prop tech to E commerce tech, ecom tech. But outside of that I have been a B2B SaaS marketer now for seven years in the property technology space specifically. So that's a little bit about me now. Nurture Boss is where I'm leading marketing. I was the first marketing hire. I am a solo marketer right now with goals to build out my team. But I am uh, our director of marketing in charge of leading our go to market efforts and really focus uh, on our messaging, positioning and brand awareness campaigns right now and in terms of who nurture bosses. So it's interesting because we target such a niche industry and we'll probably get into this a little bit later on, but for healthy context we target property management companies, a lot of owners, third party managers. And so the decision makers that we uh, are trying to make aware of our product would be more of like those, um, VP of marketing and leasing roles, property managers and then the end user usually is a leasing agent. So in terms of our product, I would say talking to our B2B SaaS marketers, it's, it's marketing automation. But this industry isn't familiar with that. So the way that we articulate what we do is that we are a uh, conversational AI solution that helps facilitate that back and forth communication through email, text, chatbot, voice, AI. So it's that true. Like virtual leasing assistant, specifically powered for the leasing agents who are just bogged down with mundane tasks. So we're an AI solution. But I have now been here for a little over a year and it has been a whirlwind. We're definitely at that scale, scale up stage, which is where I Thrive. So we're having a lot of fun with our campaigns that I know we'll get into.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, I've had several people on, um, this show who sell into very niche industries. I just had on Gretchen Eichen, who's the CMO at Avetta, and they sell into like contractors and that industry. And sort of one of the throughputs that I'm finding identifying kind of between that conversation and this one is what you said is that you can't really lead with AI and you can't necessarily like lead with features and benefits because this audience just doesn't respond to that. They're not as tech savvy as if you were selling like marketing tech, for example, or sales tech to sales leaders. Marketing leaders. You have to march them differently and a bit more creatively. And so the, through the topic, uh, that that we ideated on and landed on is that specifically with Nurture Boss is that you've created some different marketing approaches that are a bit contradictive to what you would expect from an A.I. company. Um, that have worked really well for you and so want to dive into that because I know we have, ah, a lot of listeners who do sell into either niche audiences, like one niche audience, or they're like very verticalized and are having to talk to a lot of different audiences, many of them who are not even necessarily tech forward, let alone AI forward. I, uh, do feel most AI companies are marketing more around speed and automation and features. So why did you decide to kind of look outside of that originally with Nurture Boss and really focus marketing efforts on what we would consider more traditional formats? And folks, I'm talking about book launches, I'm talking about print media, and I'm talking about commercials. Um, so just talk to us about when you came on, you know, a year ago, how you assessed this and why you ultimately decided that we need to do something a little bit different.

Speaker A: Yeah, so the why behind we wanted to do something different is because there are a lot of AI solutions in our industry. And the way, from my research and observations over the years that I've aggregated, is that a lot of people use color to make their brand stand out in property technology. And I think that's a great way to do it. It's what Nurture Boss was doing before people associated with the color, with the brand. But for me, uh, one of my guiding principles ever since after college, working at a place where we were taking that complex information and distilling it down, was looking at our audience and trying to speak their language. I think that our industry would have observed is that they're bogged down with multiple AI vendors reaching out to them, that they don't know how to decipher what's true, what's not, what's the best for me. Because once again, it's a very technical product in our industry. Many are technical, but some aren't. And so I was tasked when, um, I came onto Nurture Bosses, telling our story or telling our stories clearly in a way that also captures attention with this attention economy right now. So the why was that we needed to stand out, we needed to capture attention given that we are a little bit smaller than our biggest competitor. And so that's when we decided to start using print material. I started pitching some of my very bold ideas with a cinematic commercial set in a 1970s leasing office, um, and then launching a book, all with the goal of clearly articulating what Nurture Boss does. But more so from a thought leadership standpoint too, because that was another goal we had was we want to be the leaders for multif family teams when they're learning about AI and property management.

Speaker B: And what kind of conversation did you have to have with your internal stakeholders? Sort of, where do they fall in the spectrum? Are they, uh, like, were they open to the traditional side? Is that sort of what they're used to? Or were they like, you know, what, actually, like, where's all of our, like, digital campaigns and paid media? So what conversations you have to have internally?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. So I reported to our CEO, Jacob Carter, and he is phenomenal. Phenomenal. And I got really lucky because he has more of that mindset that we don't need. And eventually this matters. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but instead of focusing on, like, the typical MQLs, to SQLs, to gating content, to focusing on marketing influenced or close one deals. He really had the same intention that I did, and I vetted this when, um, interviewing with Nurture Boss when they brought me over here is that we have to rewrite the playbook, the inbound playbook that HubSpot got us all familiar with as B2B marketers, because our industry and our customers are fatigued by these resources that we're gating and our audience doesn't buy in a straight line. So we had the same marketing mindset that we have to be bold. We have to focus on anecdotal feedback because we know a lot of this industry is built off of relationships. So the same B2B SaaS metrics that we're all familiar with don't apply right now. And the same intention that once was when filling out a form for an ebook isn't the same anymore. So we kind of saw the writing on the wall. And again, luckily for me, I also made it very clear that I am a contrarian. I have these bold ideas that I want to execute on and I want you to push back. And we have that dynamic where we can ask thoughtful questions to get to the outcome that is the best fit for Nurture Boss. And so I again can't stress enough that I feel like we were on the same page from the get go because I asked some pretty tough questions in the interview phase to make sure that him as the CEO had the same marketing mindset that I did and vice versa. He's taught me a ton of ton about marketing as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, when you. And that is lucky for sure. What were some of the, I guess, more conventional marketing tactics that you were seeing across your category that were aiding to this sameness or making the, you know, making the competitors look interchangeable? What types of strategies were being deployed that you knew, like, hey, we're not going to play that same game?

Speaker A: I would say, um, in the vein of thought leadership, what we saw that wasn't working as much because it worked at one point. And I had to go through all the, you know, playbooks to see what was resonating with our audience and what wasn't. But the ebooks, the checklists, the webinars, the paid ads, like those are the traditional conventional marketing methods that are important. And I don't want to, you know, it doesn't work right now. It doesn't say that doesn't mean it couldn't work in the future. Although I do think it's still important to have those resources available. So we are still focused on building out ebooks and uh, we still have paid ads, but we focus on LinkedIn because that's where our audience lives and we're really focused on more so the creative. Not necessarily a knock on the channel. We just want to get the message right and capture attention quickly and then make it easy to digest what Nurture Boss does.

Speaker B: Okay, I want to dive into some of the specific tactics is one of the things that was a little surprising to me was launching a book authored by your CEO because I feel like that's something that like, you know, five, six years ago. I feel like every like CMO and sassy CEO was releasing books at a pretty like regular clip. I Mean, I remember even for some of our clients doing that. I mean, we worked with six Sense when, um, Latin Latney Conant did her. No, you know, no forms, no cold calls, whatever. It was, um, book, uh, launching that. And I know, um, Lessonly was big, you know, on the book train back then. So I was, like, partially, like, excited. Like, okay, people are still doing books, but talk to me about the decision to launch a book and, you know, in its physical form on Amazon.

Speaker A: I'm so glad you brought up Lessonly, because I use that in my pitch to my CEO. It's so funny because outside of Nurture Boss, I'm also a content creator specific to Chicago. So I capture a lot of these moments that I think could maybe have an impact later on. And so when I pitched the idea to him, I was recording audibly his reaction. And all you hear from him is saying, with what time do you want me to write a book? He mentioned Fair. He's the CEO of this company. He's also an AI engineer. So he's again with what time? Um, but to answer your question, so I use Lesson Lee and Max Yoder and the marketing team there who I spoke to. I actually, when I had a podcast a couple years ago, I spoke with a couple people from that team that worked on that project. So it was always this idea, uh, that I had in my back pocket that I wanted to eventually execute on. But all the puzzle pieces had to be into play, meaning I had a credible CEO that was willing to do this, and he also wanted to do it. I think that getting him motivated to do it was a big part of why I think that puzzle piece needed to be put in play to execute on it. The icp, our industry, it had to be the right industry, and then we had to have the right angle, and we made it all come together in a way that now we're actually seeing the fruits of our labor, and it's having a huge impact for us. That was one piece to why we decided to do that. Another piece is. So I'm really big on behavioral psychology and really learning about how to capture attention and how to do it in a very thoughtful way and focused on positioning and messaging and all that stuff with that. So when I was thinking about AI marketing and where I want to take this brand to make sure it's clear to our market is I wanted to take a very abstract concept like AI and make it more concrete. And a part of that is doing print material. And you'll see if you look at our Marketing campaigns, we use a lot of print to make what we do more concrete. And I like to think of, um, Steve Jobs, because I looked to him obviously, and how they were successful. And when thinking about messaging, the ipod, they weren't using MP3 compression algorithms in their messaging. Instead they made it concrete by saying a thousand songs in your pocket. And so learning from those that have been successful in trying to apply it to AI marketing is really where a lot of these ideas have come from.

Speaker B: And I want to go back to the book for a second. How did you ensure that the book was a company marketing strategy and not just a individual, you know, CEO, like personal brand project?

Speaker A: Sure. So, yeah, we definitely had to zoom out because I, I wanted to. When building it out, I was thinking of how can I make this a sales resource? How can CS client success get behind this? And then from Nurture Boss's marketing campaigns, uh, what does that look like? So before even like tackling the, the campaign, I actually do a lot of my campaigns this way where I think of the distribution plan. And one of the areas that we wanted to strengthen was our direct mail campaigns for the sales team. And so with thinking about how can we easily send a, uh, resource to our top prospects and customers, we think of Amazon and that's where we're like, okay, we could easily publish this on Amazon, make it easy to order and send to. And now it's been a part of our events too. Actually. My sales leader was at a conference yesterday for one of our customers and ordered 30 copies and left there with everybody getting their own copy to learn about AI. So I think a lot of it, uh, to answer your question more directly, as thinking from the lens of our customers in this industry, they're hungry to learn about AI because it isn't figured out yet in property management. And given we have a CEO that is gung ho about helping this industry and solve their pain points first. And that's how he approaches building out certain solutions. At Nurture Boss, I always had the understanding and I guess what would the word be, um, confidence in him that this was going to be more about Nurture Boss being a thought leader and less about him because that's just genuinely him as a person. He's. This actually made him very uncomfortable to like author a book because it's not his personality as an engineer.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely. We, uh, at Pan Blast is our clients work with a lot of technical founders and they are, we call them endearingly awkward. We love them very much. We have a lot of technical founders that we have to work with. And it isn't, you know, it's not all of them, but many of them, it is definitely outside of their comfort zone. So you had that layer also to deal with of like why I need to do it and you know, what's this going to mean for you personally? Like do you have to be out there a little bit more as the author of, you know, of this book. So I totally understand that. Can you um, detail us a little bit more about your print strategy? You mentioned direct mail. Is that where your sort of print strategy stops and starts? Or do you have others like other formats within that print?

Speaker A: So print strategy, when thinking. So I'll just give a couple of examples because they're top of mind. I actually just made a LinkedIn post about this. So when thinking of um, the promotion, I brought this up earlier. If I know that we're going to do a webinar, I think about the distribution plan first. How can I get people excited about this? How can I get people to care about this topic and what is the best way that I can promote this? And oftentimes because we've established print material is a, ah, strategy that we want to take and it's working for us, I usually think about what print material can I create that would align with this topic. So an example would be we did a webinar, uh, where we brought our AI PropTech competitors together to talk and start to build best practices around how to successfully measure AI, how to adopt AI, how to roll it out with a change management process. So different topics around that. I was like, okay, well this is happening during lunch, so why don't I get on Etsy and see if there are any like bagel bags that I can print out. Maybe I can, I can show an example, um, later on. And we ended up printing the, the webinar details onto like a bakery bag that usually you would see a bagel in. And then I ordered those and that's what I ended up using to promote the webinar in our campaign. So it's a picture, obviously we're taking pictures, creating content, trying to get some UGC content of other people in our industry promoting it. But that's kind of like a little insight into my thought process because it sounds, yes. Like I can use the buzzwords to explain like how cool this is. But it's really, it just starts with like getting the idea and seeing if you can execute it with Etsy or Amazon.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, and you know, it's, it's Memorable. Right? It's definitely different. Um, I do want it to talk a little bit about the measurement side of the house. You know, you know there's some of this stuff is you know sounds more top the funnel, even pre funnel, you know brand building. It does take money, it takes investment of time and resources. Are your measurements different? Um, I mean obviously this is not a direct click ROI pipeline building um type of activity. Especially when you're going offline it's just harder to track. So what measurement uh, benchmarks do you put in place for more of these non traditional ways of marketing?

Speaker A: Yeah. So um, just because we were on the topic of webinars I definitely look at the typical methods because we still use email marketing. So I'll look at um, click to open rates. I don't really care about open rates as much. I want to see if somebody clicked and signed up from our emails. So that's a big M benchmark for me. Registration numbers is a big number for me as well in terms of webinars. And then if I zoom out and just talk more about like marketing as a whole. In the past when I was at the other startup I mentioned prior to Nurture Boss, we focused a lot on MQL to SQL conversion rate and building uh up that demand gen marketing nurture program to support that. I've still started to build out that infrastructure Here we use HubSpot as our CRM and so I'm looking at those numbers too. I'm not held accountable to them quite yet but there's a time when I want my team to be held accountable for marketing influence. Clients close one and close lost deals and marketing generated close one and closed loss deals. So I think that's important because that shows how we're helping build pipeline and demand and then you know turning it into potential deals and if and if we don't win those deals then it gives us some um, insight into figuring out why that is and we can iterate on our messaging. So those are like the high level numbers I care about from a brand awareness standpoint. That's all anecdotal feedback like I mentioned because this industry like and that's so manual, that's like me taking screenshots of UGC content on LinkedIn, of uh, people talking about the book or our activations at the different conferences. So we're still building out the infrastructure for that. But it is something top of mind that I want to have a more robust uh, measurement system around eventually.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean some of the biggest, best, smartest Most well known markers that I know all agree that there's, you know, a good 20% of your marketing budget that is dedicated to brand that you can attribute no direct roi, but you know that without it, everything else suffers and that they just, people should just stop trying to measure brand. It's a cost of doing business. You need it. And everything else, everything else decreases without, you know, without brand. And they've even like, run some tests where like, okay, CEO, like you don't believe in all these brand activities because it's not driving direct roi. Well, let's cut it and see what happens. And that's. There's not an immediate, right? There's not an immediate, like next day, next week, but they start to see after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, that everything else starts to suffer. And so it's, it's tough to prove the direct when it's happening, but without it, it's really easy to prove what's missing. So you're definitely like, you know, not alone. No one has figured out exactly how to, you know, how to measure brand. Just know that it all works, you know, all works together.

Speaker A: This has been awesome.

Speaker B: Ashley, is there anything on this topic that we didn't cover that you want to make sure that we tackle today?

Speaker A: Honestly, I feel like we, we covered just about everything.

Speaker B: Uh, well, I do end all my episodes the same way, which is. I asked if you have a favorite or signature toast to send us out. I was. Oh.

Speaker A: I would say in the age of AI, what I think marketers should consider is creativity. Creativity is how you will stand out and being able to tell your story and the stories that you can execute on for said company, whether you're being hired or you're at the company. To think of how you can stay bold with your marketing campaigns and use your humanness in the age of AI to help yourself stand out.

Speaker B: Well, then we will say here's to creativity.

Speaker A: Here's to creativity.

Speaker B: So much for joining me.

Speaker A: Thank you. This was so fun. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: You bet. Thanks again to Ashley for joining me on SaaS half full. That was a really interesting conversation. It strikes me that I was referring to some of these marketing techniques as non traditional, when actually they used to be super traditional, but now it's gone the other way.

Speaker A: I, uh, hope you took a few

Speaker B: things away from that conversation.

Speaker A: Specifically, if you are marketing to a

Speaker B: niche audience like Ashley, we always appreciate the listen. And until next time, bottoms up.