Maia Wells:
Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Maia Wells, and I'm still your host. Today we welcome Marlee Gauthier, Marketing Director at StatSocial, and if I might add, a well educated MBA, so you better believe she's about them metrics. But in all seriousness, I am excited to welcome Marlee today to dig into evolving tools like social audience insights and how we can better understand our audiences, while respecting increasing demand for consumer privacy protection. Please join me in welcoming Marlee Gauthier to this episode of The Marketing Hero Podcast.
Marlee Gauthier:
Thank you so much for having me. So excited to be here.
Maia Wells:
I'm excited too. And I want to start with a question that we ask all of our guests, because I think you're going to have a great answer for this one. What is your favorite part of your career and how did you figure that out?
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah. So honestly, what I'm doing right now, which I'm so thankful to be part of the StatSocial team, and to be able to do what I'm doing. So I've always thought of myself and kind of having that entrepreneurial mindset, I've always kind of loved the idea of maybe starting my own business one day. We'll see if that actually ever happens, but I wanted a fast-paced environment, I really wanted to be able to come into an organization and start something from scratch, which is our marketing program. And so, I knew, when I made this move in my career, I wanted a startup. I wanted something in tech just because tech is changing so much and there's just so many cool things that the industry is doing. So, I'm really fortunate to be able to be doing what I'm doing now.
Before StatSocial, I was actually in the association space and that's really where I started my career, moving from a marketing coordinator to a marketing manager. And so, I had so many learning experiences within the industry. I came from a marketing department that was nearly 30 individuals. It was kind of an in-house agency, but within an organization. And so, I got to learn so much from so many individuals that specialized in different facets of marketing, from social media, to design, to web development.
But the area that I really kind of found my niche and where I found my passion was really more the marketing management and marketing leadership side. Working with clients, working with how do we position the product, the marketing strategy. How are we going to brand something? How are we going to talk about it? And so that was really the area of marketing that I gravitated towards most and really is kind of what projected me to my current role.
But I knew the association space, while so important for so many different professions that it brings the education, the mission-driven activities that they do, I just knew it wasn't something I wanted long term. And I really did want to pivot my career into more of the tech industry and with a startup. Which I think, if things keep going the way they're going, I think I found my calling in the tech and startup space.
Maia Wells:
Tell me a little bit more about that calling toward the startup life. Because it is very different than working in a more established company or organization, and I think it takes a special kind of crazy, if I may be honest. So tell us a little bit more about why you're so interested in the startup world.
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah. I think it kind of goes back to my desire to start my own business. And so, it was kind of like it fed that need without having to start my own business. And I do feel like it definitely takes kind of a scrappy individual to be able to just try new things and not be afraid to fail. There's been things where we've tried and we've pivoted 180 because we found it wasn't working.I do think there is, and I can't speak for all startups. Again, this is the only startup I've worked with, but you're working crazy hours, that you don't have a work-life balance. And for me, that's not true. And this is where StatSocial specifically, I was so attracted to because, while everyone takes their jobs and the responsibilities seriously, and that we want to bring in business to grow the business, everyone still really values their work-life balance. I think you also think of startups as everyone's kind of this crazy individual, who's a hyper spaz and it's not always the case.
I think for us, I work with so many laid back individuals, that they have families, they care about what they're doing off-hours too. But at the same time, we care about what we're doing on-hours. So I think there are a lot of misconceptions. I can't speak for the early, early startup stages, when it's just three to five people. Currently we're at a size of around just under 30 employees. So I think you get the startup feel, without kind of maybe some of the red tape of a larger organization. But at least for me, I do feel like there still is that good working-life balance, but still fulfills that ownership of kind of, in a way, owning a business, but not, if that makes sense.
Maia Wells:
Yeah, totally makes sense. And it sounds like there's a creativity aspect to it. Well, tell me a little bit more about, since you joined StatSocial, how you've set things up, a little bit more about the type of campaigns you run and what you oversee. I just want to get a little bit more of an insight into what you do.
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah. For sure. So when I started, it was really myself, my boss, who is our COO, and then our marketing coordinator. And so a lot of it, when I first started, was getting our lead gen efforts going within the marketing department. So supporting our sales team to try to get any inbounds that we could. So that was kind of a three-month period. But what we really saw the need for was a lead gen manager who really specializes in paid media campaigns and inbound marketing. So we brought on her in the beginning of the year, and she's been amazing. I mean, highly recommend, anyone who's a new marketing director at a startup, make lead gen, demand gen your priority. It's so important.
But in terms of my day-to-day and the things that I'm working on, not only supporting the things that my lead gen manager and my marketing coordinator are working on, but growing our social efforts, really creating more awareness around what it is we're doing, our platform, what our social audience insights, and also trying to create connections with publications and journalists who are able to help just elevate the buzz and the education around that. So creating relationships with press, growing our social efforts, growing our paid media and paid search campaigns is my day-to-day oversight and execution.
Maia Wells:
And there was one thing that you said in that I would love to expand on. So you talked about social insights and I want to know, first of all, what are social insights and why are they important for SaaS marketers?
Marlee Gauthier:
A 100%, I love this topic. So I'll be really honest, before joining StatSocial, I had never heard of social audience insights. I think the easiest way for me to explain this to someone who hasn't heard of this before is to start with what it isn't, which is social listening. And I'm sure you know, as I'm sure most of the people listening this podcast know, social listening is tools that help identify the buzz and the trending topics that are happening on social media. But where social audience insights come in is being able to identify and understand the audience and the individuals that are creating all of that buzz and chatter on social.
So what social audience insights can do is obviously we can look at these demographics. But the really cool aspect of it is being able to see not only at the individual level, but at the broader audience level, a person's interests, their passions, the media channels they're engaging with, whether that's a podcast, a magazine, websites, the influencers they're actively engaging with, the brands they have affinities for. So that's a lot of the information that we can glean from this.
And what's cool about it is that, specifically for our platform, it's powered by a patented identity graph, which is taking 1.5 billion social users from across major platforms, so LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and then taking all of that and verifying over 300 million individuals. And so, how do we know they're verified? We can identify them with a name, a ZIP code, a phone number, so that we know that these are actual individuals engaging on social.
So it's just really cool to be able to see all of this audience data. And I think what's important to also note is that it is publicly sourced. So let's say your Instagram account is set on private, or let's say you're part of a private community, none of that information is sourced. So only things that are public, is audience data that marketers can utilize.
Maia Wells:
And what can marketers do with social audience data like that? How does it really fuel either your particular marketing efforts at StatSocial, for yourself? Or maybe some examples of how your customers use it to really create campaigns or other types of marketing efforts?
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah. So there's quite a few different use cases that our social audience data supports. Which one of the ones we see the most traction with is actually market research, which makes sense, right? Because of all of the user generated data that we have.
So a really great example is we recently had a client who was looking to target Tesla owners. And so, instead of casting this just wide net to see whatever person they could get that might be a Tesla owner, we were able to use social audience data for survey profiling so that they could really target their dollars to the right individuals that they're trying to understand.
So how does that work exactly? So, within Silhouette, a market researcher is able to build an audience, looking at who are the individuals engaging with Tesla influencers? Who's engaging and following Tesla introductory channels on YouTube? Who on social is actually self declaring that they own a Tesla? And being able to stitch all of that information together to identify who's actually a Tesla owner, to then survey them.
Another aspect is survey panel enrichment. So, we can only ask so many questions in a survey before someone's like, "Yeah, I've had enough. I'm done." So we are able to use our social audience insights data to enrich and append to our surveys, to just really better understand the individuals behind who's answering the surveys.
And then one is actually brand health studies and surveys. So this one's really cool because we'll work with PR agencies. Let's say they have a client who's going through negative press. Something's gone viral that they don't want to go viral and they want to see how that's really affected their brand. So what we can do is we can understand who's been exposed on social media to this negative press, and then we can target them with surveys to then actually understand what's the impact been. Conversely, what we can do, is once we identify that exposed audience, we can then target them with paid media to counteract the negative press. So it's very powerful within market research.
Another area that's been kind of just a fun one for me personally, is influencer marketing. And this one is really twofold. So we have the influencer discovery side and then the attribution, ROI, understanding sales lift resulting from the partnership. So from the discovery standpoint, I think what we see is a lot of influencer management platforms will recommend influencer partnerships based on follower counts, engagement rates. But with social audience data, what you can do is create your audience and then identify who are they actually engaging with, to inform your partnership. Conversely, we can also validate influencer partnership. So what your influencer management platform recommends, we can then see, is your audience actually engaging with that individual, before you spend thousands, if not millions of dollars on this partnership.
And then from the attribution standpoint. So this really hasn't been done up until the ability to use social audience data. So, how does this work? We identify the exposed individuals to an influencer's campaign and then look at, of those exposed, the verified individuals. So looking at the hash emails, the ZIP codes, and then overlaying that information with first or third-party purchase data that is then sent for third-party attribution. So then we can see, pre and post campaign, exposed group compared to a control group. Really, what was the sales impact resulting from that campaign? Which is just really cool to see, because I think, traditionally, many marketers are using promo codes and affiliate links, which, from a buyer motivation, are great. I personally love them. But, if they can be easily abused, think of browser extensions like Honey and Rakuten, which I also use. Great for the buyer, but can be really infuriating for the marketer who's trying to better understand ROI.
And then we also have two other use cases, one which I can dive in a little bit deeper, which is our paid media campaigns. But before that, audience intelligence, just the sheer amount of data that we have on social users, really being able to see your customers from a 360 degree lens. What's motivating them? What are they interested in? To really understand who they are.
The other cool thing is actually being able to see how your audience differs from your competitors. Don't tell your competitors. It's going to be your secret. But we can identify, and marketers can identify really, how are your customers different than that of your competitors, so that you can hopefully capture your competitor's audience and gain market share.
The other one is persona creation and validation. And then the other one that's really cool that we also do in-house is really CRM data enrichment. Looking outside of just basic information, like maybe it's job titles or what did they purchase, but who really they are that we can supplement. And so then the paid media aspect, which we actually do from a lead gen standpoint and also help inform our media buys, is we build our audience in Silhouette. So for us, our target market's obviously marketers, so we could build an audience. And this is where really our LinkedIn data comes in, is being able to create an audience of CMOs, of VPs of marketing, marketing directors, and identifying those individuals to then target them with paid media campaigns.
The other part of that is seeing what are the podcasts they are listening to, what are the websites they're engaging on, so we can inform our media buys so that we're actually ensuring that our audience is on those websites and engaging with them regularly. So that's another area where our clients can really benefit.
Maia Wells:
Yeah. It seems like StatSocial and your product, Silhouette, really can accomplish a lot. And in all those use cases that you're talking about, say for maybe the CRM enrichment, it seems like it could be techniques that are used in the B2C environment or the B2B environment. Can you speak a little bit to the differences between those and how social audience insights can be applied to different types of industries?
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah, a 100%. So like you said, we do support both B2B and B2C. So from a B2C standpoint, being able to look at, let's say, the consumers of Dunkin' Donuts and being able to see, how do they differ from those of a Starbucks audience. And then from a B2B standpoint, with our LinkedIn data, we're able to build audiences on very niche or very specific job titles to then see who they are, what are they engaging with?
And we also do a lot also in the media space as well on media and entertainment and then healthcare, which is one that's been pretty cool, with HIPAA compliance and data security around patients, it's very hard to target likely patients or other caregivers. I think it's not uncommon to be just watching a show on, let's say on ABC and you see a commercial for a certain medication, but with social audience data, we can target individuals that might be likely patients or their caregivers based on what they're engaging with on social. So if they're engaging in public forums around a certain diagnosis, like let's say multiple sclerosis or MS, are they following certain topics around that? So we can kind of then infer that, maybe these individuals are diagnosed with MS or maybe they are caregivers that are also doing the research on their own. And then so healthcare companies or pharmaceuticals specifically can then target these individuals through paid media. So it's a little bit more informed than kind of more broad based commercials that probably don't apply to most.
Maia Wells:
And are probably very expensive, I would assume those big [inaudible 00:20:03] commercials. I'm wondering if we can kind of bring it into the SaaS space because this is a podcast focused on SaaS marketing. Do you have customers who've built their own apps? Do you have insights into the experience for maybe an app or a software that's primarily for kind of that B2C use, I'm thinking games, other apps on your phone kind of stuff, or for B2B software, marketing automation software, how can they use social audience data to inform their programs?
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah, so I would say it's pretty similar to kind of what we're doing from our marketing's perspective. So really informing your paid media campaigns, also the CRM enrichment, being able to better understand who these individuals are, what motivates them. So from the B2C standpoint, it's very similar to B2B instead of maybe looking at specific job titles, you're looking at maybe an audience who has a brand affinity for a certain brand. So kind of tying it back to our Dunkin' versus Starbucks example, creating an audience who has an affinity for Dunkin' Donuts. And maybe you're looking at some other parameters of what they're engaging with to really better understand who they are, to really then again, fuel paid media campaigns, your market research activities.
So really they're kind of interchangeable in terms of the capabilities. Anything you can do for a B2B audience, you can also do for a B2C. And the reason being is really that's where LinkedIn is really so key for us, without it would be very difficult to offer that B2B.
Maia Wells:
Sounds like a lot of it is similar up until that sales process in some ways where then you're passing on the leads to the sales team, in a B2B context, whereas B2C, the person might just, install the app, which is your end goal.
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah. And I think adding a little bit more to the B2B and the sales cycle, for us we're using Silhouette to inform our paid media and deploy audiences that are very targeted to hopefully bring an inbound for our sales team. That whether it's a demo class, it goes right to sales. But if it's kind of a case for we're targeting individuals to download an ebook who are now in our sales process, now being able to nurture them and better create even more awareness around social audience insights and really all the capabilities that it's able to do.
Maia Wells:
So, one thing I do want to ask you about in this conversation is consumer privacy, because I think it sounds scary to think about audience insights, like somebody knows what I'm looking at. And even if it's something that we might be participating in publicly, we might be posting things publicly. I'm thinking about things like the death of third-party cookies, even things like email protections, how do you deal with privacy concerns in a space where the public part of it is so important to your product?
Marlee Gauthier:
I think that's a great question. And for us, we've gone through very rigorous verification to make sure that we are future proofing ourselves because data regulation is here to stay. If anything, it's just going to become more and more regulated, which is a good thing. And so, there is a lot of pressure on companies to make sure that they are providing solutions that is respectful to user data.
And so for us, we really do respect when someone's data is private and on a social platform, that is untouchable. And so last year we did become Neutronian certified, which is an independent verification of our data quality and compliance so that our clients feel very comfortable using us as a tool to support their marketing efforts. And then specifically from the cookie standpoint, we also went through Neutronian cookieless certification. And so, because our data is social data, it doesn't rely on third-party cookies. And so, how can marketers benefit from that? Third-party cookies, we can't now see everything that someone's doing after maybe they leave someone's website, but with social audience insights, we can inform that they are engaging on certain platforms based on what they're self-declaring on social so that we can still reach them in a personal way. But that is maybe less intrusive.
Maia Wells:
Yeah. And I think at the end of the day, it's about providing value, right? Everything we do in marketing comes back to providing value. If you don't provide personalized segmented messaging that provides some type of value to that individual, you're not going to make the sale.
Marlee Gauthier:
Yes. I totally agree.
Maia Wells:
So I'm going to bring it back to the personal, real quick Marlee, before we go. Because I'd really like to know what is a strength that has really helped you to grow in your career? I know that you have that entrepreneurial mindset, so maybe that's what you'll say, but even on that personal level, for me, I think a lot of times it's empathy, it's that idea of empathizing with the customer? How are they going to receive this message that I'm putting out in my campaign or whatnot. So what is that for you? What's a personal strength that's really helped you as a marketing director in the technology field?
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah. So for me, I just, I'm a constant learner. I feel like I'm just that person who will be a student, even when I'm hopefully 85 years old, one day even going back to school. And just, I enjoy the learning process and I think where I'm so thankful also to be a part of the StatSocial team is taking the chance on me that I came from a different industry background, but I really wanted to learn and be a part of kind of the tech startup industry. So I think that's one area that I always want to keep learning, advancing my skill sets, when I was really early in my career and even still to this day, but I try to take on as many projects as I could handle from the grunt work to the things that might be more of a stretch project, and some things I crashed and burned and that's okay, I learned from them. But being able to take on as many experiences as I can, just to grow my skill sets so that I can ultimately to be a better marketer.
Maia Wells:
There, you have it. That's some great advice. Keep on learning, keep on trying things, and don't be afraid to fail. Straight from the mouth of Marlee Gauthier, from StatSocial. We really appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you.
Marlee Gauthier:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
