Jeremy Balius: Hey, welcome to go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode, we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives and industry playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market.

Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to-market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is B2B Creative. I’m very excited because I’m joined by Chris Murphy from G squared. Chris is an award-winning digital marketing leader and creative strategist. He’s the head of creative at G Squared, a leading independent digital consultancy right here in Sydney, Australia, where I’m recording.

He’s led performance led campaigns for brands like San Disk, Braun, World First.
I’m really excited about this conversation that you’re about to hear the. Level of thought that is going into ensuring that the way that an organization is positioning itself in its go to market, the messaging and the storytelling that companies need to be reflecting both within their brand identity as well as in the way that they are communicating and advertising.
Is really powerful.

I think Chris brings a level of insight, both in experience in the stories that he tells, with different brands in the market to, his broader reflections on how community led marketing is the way of the future. I hope you get as much out of this conversation as I did.
Let’s get straight into it.

Hey, Chris, it’s so awesome to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us today.

Chris Murphy: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Jeremy Balius: Oh, it’s really great. I’m really excited about what we’re talking about today, but before we get into today’s theme, I’d really love to get into the backstory of Chris Murphy. What’s your origin story? How did you even get to where you are today?

Chris Murphy: Yeah. So, um, I, I like to describe myself to have an A and a B side. Okay.
So the A side is that I, uh, you know, I’m the head of Creative and Design at G Squared, which is an independent digital consultancy in Sydney. So we’re about 60 people strong based in Chippendale, and we’ve got about 20 other individuals based all over Australia.
A couple of other SaaS and B2B businesses as well. And um, yeah, I really enjoy it. I’ve been here about a year now and prior to that I’ve had a 14 year career in creative agencies. So I’ve done a stint at dtu, done a stint at s and what have you in here and London as well, working with brands like Qantas, Toyotas, and.
This has been my first soay, if you like, into a true blue digital experience. But to talk about the B side for a second more personally, I was, uh, born and raised in the Middle East in Abu Dhabi, specifically to a British father and a Filipino mother. I’m the eldest of three, and uh, I lived in Australia now for about eight and a half years, and prior to that I was in the uk.
And last Friday I became an Australian citizen. So, um, that’s, that’s the B side.

Jeremy Balius: That’s awesome. What a milestone and what a awesome, uh, world citizen, makeup you’ve got there. That’s really cool. I can totally relate. I’m, I’m very similar growing up, in different countries and being, from different backgrounds.
Hey, so we’re here talking B2B creative. We’re gonna deep dive into everything, uh, that you bring so much heavyweight experience and expertise to and I and the, and there’s so much that I wanna cover, so we’re gonna jump straight into it.

But one of your key statements that I just think is so incredible is your straight up saying B2B messaging is dead. And. That obviously packs a punch, but I wanna drill down into that. Beyond it being the, you know, the, the, the clickable highlight headline. Let’s, let’s drill down. What do you mean by B2B?
Messaging is now dead.

Chris Murphy: Well. What I’m sick of seeing Jeremy is the sea of sameness in B2B messaging, right? There’s lots of feature, heavy, dry messaging, safe, creative, and it all looks the same. Hmm. And really. You know, it’s how do you expect cut through? And we are, there’s, there’s this constant tug of war between, um, yes Chris, we understand, but we need to figure out these certain features and we need to talk about these things because that’s what’s really important to them and that’s what’s really important to us.
I’m like, but is it though? And I would actually argue. That emotionally driven advertising is the way to go. And that’s where we’ve been steering our clients. And so what I mean by that is we need to do away with, we’re the best in class this, we have a five star this, we have a five star that, that’s all well and good, but there’s a time and a place for that.
What is the headline of your business? What is gonna set you apart from your competition? And if you look at some of the research, for example, Bain Company did some research in 2023 where they said that emotional advertising has a. Times better return on your advertising. So it, it’s, and this, there are so many studies, I mean, there was even one from the LinkedIn B2B Institute last year that emotionally messaging drives seven times more significant business impact than feature focused messaging seven times.
So it, the data is there to support it so. I, you know, we, we have a great set of clients here where we are able to do that and test the waters. Now, Jeremy, I’m not saying let’s all be crazy and do, you know, let, let’s put a giraffe on things and, and go totally wild, you know, but I, I honestly don’t believe that there’s such thing as a boring product for a, a boring service.
Look at, look at Old Spice, for example, and how crazy those ads had launched like before. The dude on the horse and all that crazy stuff that they used to do, which I’m sure many of the audience know about. They, it was, it was a very tired old brand that people over 50 used, you know? And now everyone uses Old Spice.
So my argument is why can’t we bring that same thinking into the B2B space? We’re all humans at the end of the day. You know, marketing psychology doesn’t discriminate between B2B and B2C. So I’m not saying let’s go totally wild, but how can we do it a bit differently?

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Look, I’ve got, I’ve got a lot of thoughts running here and it’s, it’s fascinating that, that you’re picking this apart in the way that you are.
, if we could take a step back. Briefly in,, especially for those listeners who perhaps come from a non-marketing background or, they come from product or they’re very technical. Mm-hmm. Uh, when we’re talking about creative, are we talking about look and feel? Are we talking about messaging?
Describe for me what is included in B2B Creative.

Chris Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s, there’s two key components as you’ve mentioned there. One is the message. So what are we saying to who, to when, and why are we saying it? Then on the other lever, on the other side is your branding and your visual identity. So to give you an example of a brand that I think does this really well is Vanta.
Do you, have you heard of Vanta before? Yeah,

Jeremy Balius: yeah,

Chris Murphy: yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they basically, it’s, it’s compliant. It’s security compliance software.

Jeremy Balius: Yes.

Chris Murphy: The most niche B2B thing you can ever heard of. Mm. But if you look at, um, if you look at their visual identity, they have this really awesome purple and they use like an alpaca, I think it’s an alpaca anyway, some sort of animal like that.
And it has a rocket ship on the back of it, and it’s just totally wild. But it’s nothing like you’ve ever seen in that category. So you remember it. Right. And then you look at their messaging. And instead of it being really technical led, which don’t get me wrong, Jeremy, there is a time and a place for that, but it’s further down the funnel.
Uh, their headlines are being like, don’t get caught out. Um, you know, when you are doing business or, um, you know, they talk about be super, like, super simple messaging that. Just speaks to the product truth and that’s all it needs to be. And you know, I’m not saying to everyone they need to go out there and create their own purple alpaca, but you know, Seth Godin talks about this in his Purple Cow book as well.
Like, what is your purple cow? What is the one thing that sets you apart from your composition?

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, look, I think that’s really interesting and it’s a good question to be asking in terms of what sets you apart. Uh, I wonder from your point of view, because you’re exposed to so many leadership teams and organizations in the B2B space.
As you’re taking them through this process of, compelling, creative by way of identity, by way of cut through, by way of value proposition, by way of underpinning messaging frameworks. I. Why is it bland? These are really smart people. I mean, with the, the, these, these are companies led by incredibly hyper intelligent people.
Why is the most common approach to be, as you put it, bland,

Chris Murphy: yeah, I think it’s, and it’s, it’s, it’s not something that is unique to the B2B space. I think it’s something that we see across the, across a range of different industries, and I would argue that it’s, it comes from a place of risk avoidance.
If everyone else, if everyone else is doing it, then we should be fine. And this is where I have a real problem with. Um, best in class guidelines or, you know, here’s, here’s what tips and tricks and best you, you end up creating a benchmark for mediocrity. So, you know, I would always, I’d always encourage people to think Cool, but no one else is good at being you as you.
As a business, think of it that way. So how can we, how can you push it further by sending yourself apart? Sure, you might alienate some people from you, but the people that you have, those customers that you have will love you. And the customer lifetime value of those people will be higher. Right? Would you rather have 50% of those people who are gonna stick with you for five years or would you rather have 80% of people who are gonna drop you in three months?
You know, it’s kind of, it’s conversations like that and I think that’s where a lot of. Um, creative agencies end up talk, end up talking about the wrong conversation with their clients, where they’re going, no, like, we need to make this pink instead of blue, and all this. It’s like, no, let’s zoom out. What proof do we have around creativity?
What, what third party research can we use to leverage these conversations so that we can take informed steps in the right direction?

Jeremy Balius: I deeply value how you are talking about this in the context of risk. Just to play this back to you, the, what, what I’m hearing is that leaders within a business see, uh.
Radical differentiation or looking too unlike what an industry is accustomed to as, as a certain level of risk. And, that risk is beyond what the business may be able to tolerate, and therefore they backtrack into a sameness so as to feel like they are, trustworthy to their prospective customers because they appear to be a cyber company, a certificates company, a a SaaS company, whatever it is.
Is that, is that what I’m hearing?

Chris Murphy: Absolutely. So, you know, for example, there is no rational reason as to why. Alpaca purple alpaca is the way to go for, for a AI driven compliance company. But that’s where, you know, you work in, you work in the same industry, Jeremy, sometimes you just can’t rationalize stuff.
It just makes sense and it just works, right? Mm. And I think that’s where, that’s where taking informed risks help. I often talk about the notion of performance, creative, and what I mean by. Gone are days of doing a big campaign and launching out there kind of crossing fingers and for the.
Taking, casting the net wide and go, okay, we know that these eight different messages resonate with these, these different audience types that we have. Let’s put them out there and see how they perform. Then you check in after two weeks. Okay, messages one and four are doing really well. These others not so well, and these others are definitely duds.
So then what we do is we start going more convergent and say, right, let’s dial up the spend behind the ones that are working, drop the ads that aren’t working so well, and then make new ads akin to the winners. So that’s what we do here at G Square. So we constantly think of it as Russian dolls, where every time we unpack a layer of the campaign, we’re getting more and more precise in terms of where we’re targeting and how we’re resonating and building all of those really loyal customers.
And it’s going gangbusters. And I honestly think that’s the way of the future, and that’s how you can mitigate risk. Indirectly cure something else, which is very closely attuned to risk is the notion around short-termism, which I’m sure you’ve seen in the industry where people want instant results.
Great, let’s have those results, but why not improve as we move along with that? Right? So, you know, a lot of our clients trust us because sure, we can come up with a big platform idea, but it’s one campaign that has many faces. So then that, that campaign can then say a slightly different to each, each person.
To then get the result we wanna get to

Jeremy Balius: performance creative. I love the idea that you are taking a broad strategy so as to be able to iterate within that. Is that, am I getting that right? It’s absolutely, you’re, you’re not, you’re not developing a concrete strategy that. Is deployed over 90, 180 days , and is unmovable.
You’re figuring out what is the broad direction in the broad context of what we’re putting to market. But within that, you’re able to iterate based on performance.

Chris Murphy: Yes and no. Okay. So in part, in part we, we often have a very clear picture of where we wanna be. We always say, begin with end in mind. So let’s say for example.
We’re a, um, a B2B software company. We know that we want X amount of leads or x amount of downloads or x amount of inquiries by the end of q3 and we’re launching in q1. We know that message, broad message a resonates with every single target audit that we have. However, we also know that, um, some of those certain audiences, um, you know, the way that we layer the messaging or the different creative vehicle that we use, or the certain feature actually resonates more with audience A as opposed to audience B.
So then that’s why I talk about one campaign with many faces. We, we say, right, okay, the broad stroke idea is X, but then in this banner ad that appears here, or in this lead gen report that comes here, it looks slightly different. And resonates with that person at that point, and that’s how we’re able to drive incremental results.
[00:15:26] Jeremy Balius: Fascinating. Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. Just being that close to the, the performance and using data to make decisions along the way, I think is, I mean, talking about it, it just sounds so logical, but. It, it’s not the norm, right? I mean, that’s why this is so cutting edge.

Chris Murphy: Well, that’s right. And you know, people, when I say I’m one of apacs leading performance specialists, people go, what?
And I go, well, you know, and, and when I explain it exactly, they say exactly what you say. They go, yeah, Chris, that makes perfect sense because Jeremy, why wouldn’t you, if you’re investing all this money for the next quarter, why don’t you want to course correct when you can? Why would you put more money behind ads that aren’t working so well?
It makes common sense. So, um, it requires a lot of work. We have a big team here, so, you know, we’re constantly looking at, across all of our clients, which ones are doing our, which ones aren’t. My studio team are pumping out ads all the time to try and get, you know, uh, get things going. And we’re looking at AI to help sort of take the, you know, the toil, so to speak, off the manual sort of stuff out of it.
But at the end of the day, if you want the results, you’ve, you’ve kind of gotta get in there and have a look and just see what’s resonating.

Jeremy Balius: Hmm. I wonder if, uh, and this is just springing to mind as you’re talking, whether there’s a broader belief within organizations that aren’t multinational, so let’s say, uh, mid-tier and large, right down to SMB.

I’m wondering if there may be misunderstanding how something rolls out at a smaller, locally regionalized scale where you’re able to iterate and constantly deploy.

Chris Murphy: Yeah. It’s amazing. Right. Scale up, you know, really early stage startups as well, and they go, yeah, you know, we, we don’t have the budget budget to do that, but how do we do something? How do we do this guys? Just the brakes a. You don’t have to do that. Going back to my, my first point, right? Let’s talk first principles.
You have two key levers that you can pull here from a creative armory perspective, if you have one, creating a distinctive brand imagery, and two, having unique messaging that none of your competitors are saying. So I always, I talk about this jokingly slash not jokingly with some clients that.
Day I live in, I live in the inner West, I drive and there is one shop there.
Their positioning and their branding, and it is called the Irish Shop. It is a bright green building that is totally Irish green, and on the front it says, get whatever you need from island at the Irish shop. And I just go that like both of those boxes, tick and tick. It’s as simple as that. Hey look, I’m called, but you know, if I ever need anything in regards, I.
Only you know, five. What’s the research say? This is something like 5% of your audience are only willing to buy right now. Right. And all your competitors are competing for that 5%. Hmm. The 95% are, are anywhere between awareness and dunno who you are. And then they’re considering, you know, they’re considering you, but they’re not really thinking about you in particular, all that kind of stuff.
Right. I would say, let’s just strip it right back. Think about the Irish shop. What can you do visually to make, to set you guys apart from other people in your category? And then secondarily, what can you talk about yourself, um, that makes you different? Lemme give you on the other side of the spectrum, really large, um, example.
In 2020, I worked an called a.
Going back to the same principles, right? No other streaming service had a gradient from orange to maroon, magenta color. No, none of them had that. We did a color analysis, right? Stan is blue, Netflix is black and red, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So we said, right, okay, let’s, that sounds locked in, right?
Then we use this typeface that’s really unique to them, and no one else uses. Okay, tick, tick, visual identity done. Then, okay, how do we, how do we talk about ourselves in a manner that’s not like the others? Our competitors. Were talking about their content, right? Content. Content, content, yeah. We have, uh, Netflix, we have Stranger Things.
We have this. Stan was saying, oh, well we’ve got power and we’ve got something else, and we’ve got, and we said, right, okay, well we don’t really have anything unique yet, so why don’t we turn ourselves, turn our attention to the people consuming our product, the binges. So then we made the whole campaign around, we are for the binges.
And it went gangbusters. So, you know, and really when you look at it, you go, oh wow, that was really brazen. That was really bold of them to do that. But it went gangbusters, right? We had the objective of getting 500,000 subscribers in the first year. We got that within four months, and at the end of the first year we had 1.4 million subscribers.
So there, there is merit in doing it differently, both at shop. As well as a national streaming service. And that’s why I always encourage people to say, you know, we, we just need to, we need to make sure that we go back to first principles, lock in a unique brand, uh, identity, and then lock in a unique messaging that sets us apart from the competition.
It really is as simple as that in a B2B or B2C context.

Jeremy Balius: There’s two key things that I’m pulling away from what you’re talking about. There is the opportunity to be truly differentiated and memorable at brand level in a sea of sameness. I. And I think in tech that’s particularly poignant because the, um, because a lot of the businesses in B2B who are building products and services on top of vendors or in partnership with different types of other organizations in an ecosystem, they tend to gravitate.
A lot more towards the same output. They’re doing the same types of services. Maybe if there’s some differentiation, it’s so infinite that they, no one can even understand unless you’re a hyper-technical person. So the, the brand becomes the core. To that go to market, right? It’s, it’s the ability to be able to stand out and and mean something.
Um, but then conversely, in what you’ve just described, which I think is particularly powerful as well, is you were looking competitor, looking at competitors of, of a streaming service in the way that they were positioning themselves as a product, which had a whole range of things on a shelf. For which you can choose.
And they had the best things on that shelf that you can choose, but you came in and you brought them to market with. Uh, we are for a certain type of person and we solve a whole range of pain points but we’re all about. Wrapping ourselves around a specific streamer, you know, someone who streams, I know that name has a different context now, but someone, someone who streams content, who watches content, consumes content.
Um, you made it about the person, you made it about the customer. And I think maybe in B2B creative, that’s a significant lesson that many companies can take away. They’re not focused on brand, they’re not focused on customer when it comes to creative.
This is really cool.

Chris Murphy: No, I’m, I’m glad, I’m glad you like it. And yeah, it’s, it, it, as I mentioned earlier, resonating with people at an emotional level. It doesn’t discriminate between B2B and B2C. Hmm. So, you know, if you can talk to people’s emotions, if you can make something sort of tick inside them when they see your ad, you go, you’ve done your job right now.
I’ll give you a perfect example of Employment Hero. I saw an ad earlier today which had their unique brand colors in it, and I thought, you know, look, fair enough. But the headline caught me. Whereas it, uh, employment Hero, by the way, is a HR software. They said it was a bit dramatic, but everyone was a bit of hyperbolic in advertising.
They said, don’t make, don’t make your next hr, uh, query or court case or something like that. And I just, I saw it. I stopped and I just laughed. And I was like, fuck. I was like, fair enough. You know, I’ll, um, whilst yes, totally hyperbolic and there must have had some challenges getting that pastor legal team, but it, it, it resonates.
Right? I couldn’t tell you any other HR management software. Same with, same with Vanta, which is an ai, you know, the ai, AI powered, um, compliance platform, you know? Yeah. So we are seeing a shift towards it, and you know it, by no means do you need to be gorilla and super brazen, but you can just start taking small and incremental steps that’s start resonating, and over time, before you know it, as long as you’re ruthlessly consistent with how you articulate yourself, then you’ll be fine.

Jeremy Balius: Chris, how does a SaaS company, tech company, hardware company, whatever, um, how do they engage emotionally?

Chris Murphy: So I would start, and you know, it sounds like such a hack, but it’s, it’s, it’s really not, is just getting a really thorough understanding of your audience, specifically their problems and what product, what, what solutions that your product solves or a service. So to give you an example, we worked, I guess this is a B2B example, we worked in an event management company.
And they put on events, corporate training events and all that sort of stuff. And they have three, three key audiences. They have HR professionals looking to do training and all that sort of stuff and, and higher up venues to do big compliance training. They also have office managers for like, you know, high stakes meeting.
Let’s say that you’re a small, medium business and you wanna rent out a big boardroom for a big, you know, you can go to those guys now. We then dove right down and said, okay, well what makes each, what each of those people. What, what would be worst case scenario? What, what? What’s keeping them up at night?
Both of those sets of people. For HR professionals, it’s about having an environment where the tech just works. Things just work when you have a hundred people in a room, and it’s also about having. Uh, about having an environment where your people feel engaged. Okay, so we’ve got two things over here then for the office managers and, you know, more broadly just EAs or what have you, you wanna make sure that, um, yes, sure things need to work as well, but the setting looks super professional and.
So that when your boss is doing a big deal with some suppliers or with some new clients, you know, we’re in a setting that makes, that puts the company forward in the best life. So then what we did was we made he a headline driven campaign around, uh, the, around the pain points and the benefits of what that company does and how they solve that.
So let me give you an example with the HR one almost playing into their fears a little bit. We said. Um, gosh, I’m trying to think of the headline now. I’ve just had a, had a brain fart, but basically it, it said something to the effect of like, seamless events. Start here. Okay, cool. I’m interested, I’m in what is here.
We have, you know, state of the art tech full 24 hour support. We organize everything for you. Excellent. Five Star catering, 5,000 other companies. Trust us. Book with us today. On the other side of the fence, executives expect the best. Gosh, you got my attention. Alright, I’m an ea I’m organizing a meeting for my boss.
I wanna make sure it looks good. Um, you know, a venue that where your guests, guests or clients will be impressed. Um, a concierge, all these other things. And then that’s how you do it. And it really is as straightforward as that. And it’s, it’s gone and it’s gone gangbusters. You know, they’ve seen record booking since covid, and it’s one of those things where that.
You could argue that wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but all marketing doesn’t need to be right. It, I’m a big believer in brevity, right? So John Ty said it himself the other day in one of his LinkedIn posts that, you know, the, the key to creativity is brevity, right? Look at Nike. Just do it right. So simple.
And yet it resonates so much. So we always encourage. We always in, in terms of, let’s think of it as like a three step process. One, get a firm understanding of your consumers and what their pain points are. Number two, design a message that talks to those pain points, and number three, deliver it to them in a place where we know they hang out and they’ll be.
So that you’re making the best bang for your buck and this, it really is as simple and arguably as complicated as that.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, that’s right. I am so on board with everything that you’re saying. Within that, something that I know that you’ve. Been putting out how brands need to start, moving away from cold outbound or traditional types of demand generation activities.
Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by, uh, the decreasing effectiveness of what is. Been fairly traditional. And what do brands need to be thinking about in terms of, their growth strategies?

Chris Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. I think just broadly speaking, we’ve seen in the last year that there’s been a real shift from brands to individuals that represent those brands.
So, you know, if you look at, if you look at, um, Elon Musk and Tesla, for example. Elon has four times the amount of followers that Tesla has. Right. If you look at Richard Branson, he has three times the amount of followers that Virgin Group has. People follow people, people like people. So what, whilst I say they’re not as effective is, is really what I’m saying is let’s hedge your bets, right?
Don’t, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, try other more community based stuff, right? You are winning customers, you’ve got customers, hold onto them. There are ways to extend the lifetime value of those customer, right? So. You know, what can you do? What can you do to serve them? You’ve, you’ve, you’ve given them all these promises around, um, product efficacy, but give them tips on how to use the product better.
Give them tips and show them a case study on how you’ve helped another client do something and here’s how it might translate to you something. Just keep delivering value on that basis, and so, and, and add it with a personal touch and put a face to that stuff as well, because people buy from people, you know, it’s.
More and more with the things of, you know, rise of, I mean, I know influencers already pretty big and all that sort of stuff, but I mean, that’s, that’s a case in point, right? People follow people.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, the shift has been really fascinating. This shift into. It’s founder led brands or, or executives being ambassador or, or, or leaders being ambassadors of the brands. Do you think that it’s not, it’s, it’s the people buying from people, but do you think that the individual effectively represents the values and the go to market of the organization as well?
What is driving that shift more towards following individuals over brands?

Chris Murphy: I think there’s kind of two parts to it and you know, this is just my opinion. I think, you know, people think that in the world of keyboard troll and all that, I generally people.
Richard Branson, he’s a hard guy not to like, you know, he’s, he’s like me, mega dyslexic, except he’s gotten made bajillions, but that’s beside the point. But, you know, he, he’s, he’s a very likable character, and that translates into all these companies, right? If you, he wrote a book called Screw It, let’s do It.
And that’s, they have that in every single version company. You’ll see that in there.
Active, uh, Virgin active in the city, and that’s, that’s in big, bold writing as you walk into the entrance. And I think, you know, it’s, it’s, you are absolutely right. The, the person, the, I’m trying to think of a way of how to say this. Their company is just a byproduct of their personality. And by following the person, it inherently has this kind of weird halo effect on the company itself and drives it that way.
Now, the only, the only company I can think of where the company is doing really well without some sort of, um, like literal person ambassador or two companies. One is duo.
Who have.
They use like a mask basically, and they put like a person’s face imposed onto an airplane and they’re constantly trolling people. Oh man. It’s next, next level. Yeah. It’s the, it’s next level’s the best. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly, it, it absolutely cracks me up and, you know, I hope they clip this and start doing things about you and me, but, uh, that would be my claim to fame.
But mate, yeah. Honestly, it’s, it’s next level, but it is very hard to do. You have to see it the other way around. You know?

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I know the Duolingo bird very well every day. I get absolutely annoyed at that thing for reminding me that I haven’t kept up on my daily streak. You mentioned briefly around this community led go to market or comm or, or, or launching into community or building community, what.
What would a community led go to market motion look like for you? In the ways that you’re thinking about content, in the ways that you’re thinking about advocacy? What is community marketing for you?

Chris Murphy: Yeah, it’s, I think it can be, it. It’s taken lots of forms and I think the, the best, the way I can help best serve the audience listening to this.
I would be to give you examples of what we’ve done for some of our other, other clients. Great. And the first thing you can do to, as, as a quick hack, it’s so cheap to organize and you can do it internally, is to nominate brand ambassadors. Do you know who are experts at doing this? Asana, the, um, project management tool, right?
They get people who are mega users, they can see all the data of who uses profic.
It gives you a sense of feeling special, right? They lean on you for insights, and it’s super valuable because you have a Petri dish where you can test new features, new products, and get instant feedback, right? And the customer loves it because you feel super valued, right? You have like a little star on your profile or you get invited to special events and all that sort of stuff, but that’s what makes it.
That is such an easy and quick hack and you can do it in B2C as well. So we did it for a Chinese automotive brand here where we reached out to four different, um, we reached out, sorry. We reached out to 12 different individuals and then we got them to test drive four new vehicles that haven’t been driven in Australia by anyone else other than these people.
Right. The look on their faces was amazing when we rocked it to the drive day in Melbourne and they’re like, wow, you know. It’s not scripted, they’re not paid, you know, we’re not paying them. They came there on accord. We just, we just shouted them, the flights in the hotel that evening, you know, and it’s, it really is such a quick way to build, uh, build ambassadorship and community.
Now, a further step from this is organizing events. So you went to, uh, Salesforce via Salesforce event yesterday, right? Yes. It’s, it’s one of those things where, um, you know, you kind of bring in other, you’re bringing your loyal customers into your world.
Expensive, but you can still be. B2B, smaller B2B company and have 12 of your closest customers and have them in a room or a lunch or something. You know, it’s not, it’s not hard. People think community and you need thousands of subscribers and followers and like a portal and you need to, it’s like this, this, you know, we don’t need to make mountains out of Mo Hills.
You, you literally just need four or five people and build it from there.

Jeremy Balius: I agree a hundred percent. What do you do with it?

Chris Murphy: In terms of like marketing too or,

Jeremy Balius: uh, using, using it for your marketing and how, how do you leverage it? So I’d love to hear more, where do you go from there?

Chris Murphy: Yeah. I’ll give you a personal example, then I’ll give you another example of, um, a friend of mine who worked on another brand where it actually.
The Chinese automotive brand, they wanted to know whether there was an appetite for new diesel four by four in this market. So one of those four vehicles was the diesel four by four. Really, really great looking car and what have you. And in interviewing those people who, let’s call ’em like our mega users, you know, they’re really, um, they’ve, and by the way, these people were people that set up their own communities about the brand on Facebook and have thousands of people.
Right. Ah, incredible following that. So, I mean, and that’s not even instigated buyers, right? We just found ’em on the internet and
very. Because they take their own communities very seriously. We knew very quickly that there actually wasn’t an appetite for that. So we were able to turn around and say, in good faith to headquarters and go, th this, don’t send 4,000 of these vehicles down here. You know, it is not gonna work. And, and they listen, you know, and it, so what do we use it for?
It’s a very quick way to sense check your products with the market and optimize it before anything goes to market. You spend a load money, that’s one sort of. Um, useful way of doing it. Now, where building a community is super useful is also in messaging and testing your messaging before you go to market of a new product.
So, you know, the chocolate milk, um, drink called oak, you get them in like strawberry flavors and chocolate flavor, the s petrol stations, things like that. So they were coming up with a new brand campaign for it, and they were like. It’s hard because it’s not, it’s not quite a snack. It’s very, it’s very filling, but it’s not quite a snack.
But at the same time, if you’re really thirsty, you probably just go for water instead because it’s a bit thick, you don’t wanna drink that. So they’re kinda like, well, what do we do with it? So they ran a load of research groups with, you know, die hard fans, and don’t ask me where they got these people from.
But the agency managed to find die diehard Oak fans, and they interviewed this dude from South. And he turned around and said, oh, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like, it’s really good when you are like hungry, thirsty. And then there the creative director was like, oh my God. Like, that’s the line. That’s the line.
And um, yeah, they went to market with kill, hungry, thirsty, dead, and it went gangbusters. Wow. So, you know, it’s, it, it really is a treasure trove of doing that. So, you know, by all means, when we say build a community and go for community based marketing. It has so many benefits from market research through to new product features that you didn’t even realize people needed to insights on how people use your product and you didn’t even realize.
Right? And I think it’s, it’s such a valuable tool. I encourage any business to do it. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to develop a whole EDM system and constantly email them or what have you. You can literally start by cherry picking your most active half a dozen people and just start talking to them.
And make them feel loved and make them feel special. It’s customer service 1 0 1, and you’ll reap the benefits from it months, months, and months in return.

Jeremy Balius: Amazing. Chris, this has been really special. I think there’s so much to take away from this. I’m loving, in the way that you’re thinking about, brand.
You’re thinking about wrapping yourselves around customers as well as building communities out of your customers to create a flywheel of the way that you’re engaging the market., really appreciate your insights here. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Chris Murphy: No worries. Thank you for having me, Jeremy.