Watching out for the spectrum of Personalization
Lucy Literado Tsotsorina, VP-marketing at Reply.io started with some interesting freelance gigs. She worked up her marketing career ladder from a junior copywriting position and wanted to become a full-time marketer. And this is when she joined Reply to lead their marketing. Trying a lot of new things and a lot of new fields brought her to worthy positions with great organizations.
Highlights you should not miss:
- Knowing customer sentiments and using them for better marketing
- Levers required to create a community around a brand
- Including personalization into your marketing strategy
- Content Strategy as a whole
What attracted you to marketing?
Lucy: It was interesting to see how marketing evolved from being a function of writing slogans to get the type of customers you want. So, it grew from being just art to something more predictable like being a science. Marketing is infinite and endless. I have been in this field for more than ten years and I am still learning. Over the last few years, it is good to see marketing evolve into being more transparent and honest where actually we reach out to people who are willing to explore a product.
Knowing customer sentiments and using them for better marketing
Lucy: There are many tools to draw insights about customer sentiments. Right from Google analytics to Hotjar where you can actually see where your customers are leading and where they have come from. But, despite all the tools, I think it is always more useful to talk to your customers. Recently, we had a series of customer development calls because we wanted to update our positioning and messaging with our buyer persona and there’s nothing as insightful as just human-to-human talk.
Levers required to create a community around a brand
Lucy: We are building a lot of educational content that helps our customers on how to interact better with their target audience. This is the customer success twist with content. We also do community building on Linkedin. And through our customer interactions, we realized that our customers want more sales coaching and training from us.
Including personalization into your marketing strategy
Lucy: Personalization should take place when it is appropriate. It is about letting your customers feel that you have made efforts to know before reaching out and selling something to them. There is also a thin line between being personalized and being creepy. You could use Clearbit to use their IP address and target them appropriately.
Campaigns that worked and didn’t
Lucy: One of the successful campaigns in generating leads and that has been given out as a lead magnet was to use a copy generating AI assistant to create email subject lines. Here is the link: https://reply.io/cold-subject-line-generator . It worked well for us.
Another campaign which was a social media contest for salespeople on Valentine’s day didn’t fly off at all despite having rewards. It had articles around dating rules for sales.
We also made a sales commission calculator. We were the first to make it for SaaS sales teams. We need to have some amount of customization and simplicity for creating great campaigns.
Content Strategy as a whole
Lucy: We used to keep track of content strategy on spreadsheets and now we have moved to Curate to bring our strategy to one place. We updated our buyer personas. Now, we have them recorded in great detail. We have been able to focus on creating great content for a blog and then we go on to repurpose it for a whitepaper or a blueprint. This also helps in writing guest posts for our partners. It also helps with our SEO strategy. Content and SEO are so closely tied to each other.
We are also going to mid-market and our top-funnel content is still useful when we are moving from one person to a team. It is not just about using modifiers. We need to cover different topics for different buyer personas.
Advice to marketers
Lucy: You can never know everything and being a marketer is an ongoing learning process.
"Despite having tools, human-to-human connections always work."
Contact Lucy Literado Tsotsorina
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lucyliteradotsotsorina
