The Life-Long Customer

Creating Content for Engaging Disparate Audiences - with Clarissa Horowitz, VP of Marketing, Treasury Prime

December 21, 2021 Revenue Rhino Season 1 Episode 122
The Life-Long Customer
Creating Content for Engaging Disparate Audiences - with Clarissa Horowitz, VP of Marketing, Treasury Prime
Show Notes Transcript

"It's essential to understand who your audience is and what they know.

Our CEO told me 'People tell me that our content is excellent. I'm sure it is because they're telling me that, but I don't get it.' I said, ‘But you know all of it already; you're not the target audience.' He said, 'Good point.'

In our industry, there’s no place to get this kind of information so we think it’s incredibly valuable to educate people."

-
Clarissa Horowitz, VP of Marketing, Treasury Prime

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Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.

Brad Hammond: 0:20
Welcome to The Lifelong Customer podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. Today, we have Clarissa Horowitz from Treasury Prime. Clarissa, it’s really nice to have you.

Clarissa Horowitz: 0:29
Thank you so much for having me.

Brad Hammond: 0:31
I'm really excited. So first, let's start off with maybe you could give the audience a little bit of background about yourself and then about Treasury Prime and what you do.

Clarissa Horowitz: 0:42
Thank you. I'd love to. So one of the things I always enjoy about talking with different marketers is we've all had different paths because marketing is so broad. And so for me, I actually started off graduating from college and wanting to be the next great magazine portrait photographer. Obviously, I'm sitting here with you now, so that didn't work out exactly as planned. But from there, I went into communications. So I worked with a lot of PR agencies, which I think is a wonderful way to really start to understand storytelling and the importance of understanding the interests of your audience. 

And then over time, I had opportunities to take on more and more of the kind of marketing functionality, so I went into demand gen and events and branding and website. And my last 2 roles have been building marketing from scratch at really interesting fintechs. The first one was a crypto startup. But now I'm at Treasury Prime, where we're connecting banks and fintechs.

Brad Hammond: 1:39
Very cool. So tell us about Treasury Prime. What is it?

Clarissa Horowitz: 1:42
Sure. So Treasury Prime is a 4-year old company. The way I like to explain our business model is if you think about what Twilio has done with communications, like you don't want to go off and have to do an integration with AT&T just because you want to put SMS into your app, right? So wouldn't it be so much easier if you could just plug into an API layer somewhere and just get exactly the functionality that you need and pay only for those API calls. So that's what Twilio has done. It's really kind of this idea of communications as a service. 

And Treasury Prime takes a similar approach, however, in a much more highly regulated industry, and we're trying to do the same thing for banking. And so banks have all of these terrible old systems that they're kind of stuck with. They would love to get rid of them in some cases, but it's high risk. It's very expensive. It's just very problematic. So Treasury Prime, we go out, we wouldn't deal with a bank. We say we're going to wrap or integrate with all of your systems. We put an API layer on top of everything. And then we actually act as their sales team and we go and bring them companies that want to embed banking services.

Brad Hammond: 2:51
Nice. Very cool. And what does marketing look like in this space? Maybe you can give us a broad overview then.

Clarissa Horowitz: 2:57
Yes. So I think what makes our situation really unusual and I, as a marketer, find that really interesting is that we can't say yes to a fintech as a customer until our bank partners have said yes to them as a customer. So in many cases, our sales team is not just selling the fintech customer on the value of a relationship with Treasury Prime, they have to sell them on the value of having a direct relationship with the bank as well, which in some cases, can seem more complex but is far more beneficial in the long term. 

And then a lot of times, they have to turn around and have to sell that fintech to the bank. So it's a really interesting model, where there are all of these different audiences and there are challenges that you don't have in sort of a normal go-to-market motion.

Brad Hammond: 3:51
Totally. So that kind of leads into today's topic. So creating content for different audiences, how do you go about doing that? And break it down for us and for the other marketers out there listening.

Clarissa Horowitz: 4:03
Sure. I think it's really important to understand who your audience is and what they know. And so I was having a funny conversation with my boss, our CEO, the other day, and he was saying, like I'm told by people that our content is really good, and I'm sure it is because they're telling me that, but I don't get it. And I was like, Chris, you know all of this stuff. You're not the target audience. And he kind of went, yes, that's a really good point. 

And so we had them at a conference the other day, and he was doing a very technical presentation on the benefits of different types of bank account structures that you could potentially set up with a bank. And he was like, why am I talking about this? And afterwards, he was talking with other presenters and one person was saying, yes, I just had a handful of people in the room for mine. And Chris had actually had 50 or 60 out of a conference of about 300 people. And he was like, oh, well, I guess that was really important. 

And so what I really learned when I came in was that we have these fintechs who have this brilliant idea, they need a foundation like a bank and Treasury Prime to be able to build on. And they have great insights into the market that they're going after or the consumer or end user that they're targeting. And many of them know very, very little about banking. And so they come in with unrealistic ideas about the amount of interchange revenue that they might get or how things might be structured. And so it became clear to me after sort of joining the company and watching this for a few weeks, like, oh, there's so much educational content that we can create that people find incredibly valuable. 

And in many cases, for my colleagues, it seems really basic, but there is no place to go get this kind of information. Like we don't have Gartner or Forrester-type resources for this kind of project if you're trying to do it. So it puts companies like Treasury Prime in this wonderful place where we get to spend a lot of time educating people about let's help you understand this. And basically, my tagline for everything is learn X, Y or Z and get to market faster.

Brad Hammond: 6:26
I love that. And I think that really a key insight is we're the experts in our spaces as marketers. But our customers aren't always those experts. So it's interesting. How do you figure out the right level of content, whether it's like really complicated or just breaking down the basics? How do you gauge that and figure out the right content for that right audience and the right level of content and complexity?

Clarissa Horowitz: 6:55
Yes. So I think you kind of need to think about doing it all, but you have your insights. You listen to sales calls. We use Gong. It’s such a fabulous tool because it gets awkward in a Zoom age to have like 40 people who want to listen in on a customer call. It's like, no, we're just going to record it, and then you can listen to it. So I think that's a great source of data. 

The other thing that I find so interesting about our particular industry is the fintech piece of it is very -- insular is the wrong word, but it is a small and very connected community. And so when somebody puts out a piece of content, whether it's us or somebody else, that's good, there's a certain amount of chatter about it and sharing. So it's very easy to say, oh, people thought this was a good piece of content, let's develop our own version. So there's that. 

And then there's the stuff that you do that is differentiated, and you want to figure out ways to talk about it so that you can ideally influence how people are thinking about the decision they're going to make in terms of choosing a vendor, right? So you've got stuff that I think of as the top of funnel, the tofu, that is like purely educational. And then I think even within that, there's an opportunity to try to do a little more to set the agenda for how people should be thinking about things. 

And I found it really effective to say, here are 5 questions you should ask every vendor you're talking to including us. And then we'll have our answers as well for those, right? And I think it's helping people navigate this very complicated landscape because the thing about the types of decisions that our customers are making is they're about the company decisions. This is not like making an IT purchase, where if it doesn't work, okay, like you screwed up a firewall or something like that, right? This is -- if this banking and technology partnership relationship don't work, you don't have a company. You are not in market. And if you're early stage, you are just watching your burn rate go up, and that's really, really alarming. So helping people understand what they should be asking to be able to make these decisions is really valuable, and we've seen a lot of traction with those kinds of pieces.

Brad Hammond: 9:20
I love that. So for the other marketers out there listening that maybe have these different audiences to create content for and maybe that isn't like quite to a place where they'd like it to be. What are some actionable steps that they can take to really get a solid strategy in place here?

Clarissa Horowitz: 9:38
So I think you've got customer calls you can listen to. I think your sales team is a wealth of information. Because if you sit down and you ask anybody on the sales team, like give me 3 topics that if our customers understood them better, it would make it easier for you to sell. You will have no problem getting that list. And you may not agree with all of them, but you will start to formulate a really good list based on that. 

And then you start to put some of these ideas out there. And in some cases, I think you could do simple tests like blog posts, promote them on social media, see what kind of traction they get. If it's really good, double-down on it. Do a webinar. You now have the white paper that comes off of that, like really built. I think we've got so many ways to test things these days that you should never start by feeling like you have to have a fully baked strategy. 

It's like just get things out there and iterate, and some things aren't going to work. And every now and then, you're going to be surprised, like our CEO has been at the interest level for topics that he just would not have found interesting to him.

Brad Hammond: 10:44
That's very cool. I love that mindset of get out there, start testing things and see what works and what doesn't.

Clarissa Horowitz: 10:49
Well, I will tell you, I think one of the things that I learned very early, actually after I found out later after I interviewed for the job that I said one thing and everyone was like, oh, she’ll be perfect. And they had gotten an email and it was, hey, for $3,000, we will do this, we'll create a piece on you that will run in this not real magazine, and it will be great for you. And they said, hey, what's your opinion on this? 

And I realized I actually had done an experiment once with one of these things. So we just had a little extra money in the budget. And it's like, let's just see if this does anything for us. And the answer was no. So I was able to write back and say -- as a matter of fact, I experimented with this. And we saw really -- we really got nothing from it. And that word experiment was what made them say like, oh, she's willing to experiment. 

And so I've found at least at my company that framing everything as, hey, we're going to experiment with this and see how it does. And here's how we're going to measure if it's working or if it's not. That goes over really well. And I think when you're dealing with a technical executive team, that's an approach that people find very familiar. 

Brad Hammond: 12:14
Totally. I love that. So as we think about implementing a strategy of targeting these different audiences, experimenting. What are some of the pitfalls that you can run into? And what are the traps to avoid?

Clarissa Horowitz: 12:29
That's a wonderful question. I mean, I think one thing is like you could end up putting out really boring content, right? And that's actually always my concern because I feel like there is so much stuff out there that's being produced that is really just not that interesting. And so I try to really set a bar for us, which is that if anybody is spending even 5 minutes of their time watching something, listening to something or reading anything that we've produced, they absolutely have to walk away with either something actionable that will make them better at what they do or a new idea that they really haven't heard before. 

And that means when you sit there and you say, hey, let's do something about card issuing. It's like, what has not been done? And what can we tell people that is really going to be useful? And in some cases, I find the easiest way to do that is going way into the details and into the weeds and saying, here is exactly how you do this. Let's get into the technical details of what setting up a program looks like as opposed to the sort of higher level stuff that I think can be easier to create because in many cases, you can do it without needing to lean on somebody in your customer success team or an engineering resource. 

But I think taking the time to really push the envelope and ask, is there something here that's new, that's interesting? If it's an opinion piece, is it contrarian? Are people going to get some value from reading this?

Brad Hammond: 14:07
I love that. All right. So we got a fun question for you. And that is, what is the craziest marketing initiative that you've done in the past?

Clarissa Horowitz: 14:16
All right. So I'm going to take you back to my PR days. And I had an online sporting goods retailer as a client. And Memorial Day is when usually all of the watersports kind of start up. And so we were brainstorming how we could get attention for them, specifically on broadcast TV stations. So we did a couple of things. We put together a list of watersports safety tips because news anchors, broadcasters love being able to read these things. 

And the other thing that we did was we decided to send them to meteorologists. And not only did we sell them this list of tips, but we sent them life jackets and I glued the patches with the logo of the company onto them. And so the idea was that the meteorologist right around Memorial Day weekend would put on their life jacket and read the tips. And so then, of course, this was like the old days, so lots of follow-up to make sure people have received it. Did they have any questions, all of those things. 

And it was so amazing to get the clips back of people actually doing this on the air, and it was incredibly successful. But here's one of the things I've learned from when the company, when the agency had done this the year before when I was not involved. They had sent out beekeeper hats, right? So you put them on and then you've got this thing. And I was like, how can you do that? Like no anchor on TV is going to do anything that's going to like cover their face or mess up their hair. 

So as we were thinking about what is it that we're going to send them? That was one of my requirements, like it's got to be something that doesn't affect anything from the neck up. So when I landed on life jackets, we all said, yes, that's perfect. And that was part of the reason we got such a great pickup.

Brad Hammond: 16:14
That's perfect. I love that story. That's really cool. So as we wrap it up here, what advice do you have for other marketers out there that are looking to target different audiences with their content strategy?

Clarissa Horowitz: 16:26
I think the biggest one is just really push yourselves and the team on the topics you come up with because a lot of times, we start off with an idea that it's probably the right idea. But how do you really, really make it interesting? And then once you've got that interesting idea, I think of this, you've probably heard of this, but the Taco Bell model. It's like, would you like this in a taco? Would you like this on a salad? Would you like this in a fajita? 

And so I think it's really doing that. Like once you have that great idea, they are like half a dozen at least things that you can do with it. So you don't have to have that many great ideas to have a really great content program.

Brad Hammond: 17:08
I love that. Get a great idea and then package it in different ways.

Clarissa Horowitz: 17:13
Every way you can, slice and dice it.

Brad Hammond: 17:15
Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing all your wisdom and insights. Really appreciate it.

Clarissa Horowitz: 17:21
Not sure how wise or how insightful I am, but I appreciate the opportunity.

Brad Hammond: 17:25
Oh, very wise. Thank you.