Start up or established business - is marketing the same?

Deep Dive with David Low, Head of Growth at Hnry

Many employees tend to stick with a similar category or type of business throughout their careers. Perhaps there is a hesitation to dive into something unfamiliar, perhaps there is a lack of confidence that you’ll be great trying a different path. Or quite simply that you just love the category that you are in. If you are considering a change, this episode might offer some great insights. 

I worked in travel and tourism for more than a decade and that enabled me to live in America and through my work, experience some pretty remarkable places around the world. My network was strong, my career path was easily defined and what a topic area to have the privilege of marketing!

At some point, curiosity got the better of me and I took the plunge to work for multinational businesses, digital platforms and scale ups in categories initially foreign to me. The principles of marketing are enduring but the nuances of different industries offer fabulous opportunities for your growth and development, and with fresh eyes coming into a new business allows you to add immense value. 

Someone, who has no fear about trying new categories is Future Fit Marketing’s latest interview. From FMCG, sport, digital marketplaces and scale ups, David Low is establishing a career with breadth and depth and offers a diverse view on marketing across the spectrum of industries and tells us what it takes to thrive in each. 

David has worked in various Marketing and Sales roles with over 20 years experience in a number of industry sectors. From FMCG brand marketing roles with large multi-nationals such as Frucor Suntory, Nestle and Coca-Cola Amatil, to the world of sport and fan engagement with Rugby Australia. More recently David has led marketing teams in a mix of technology and scale ups such as Gumtree, Employsure and currently as Head of Growth at Hnry, a young fintech company.

If you reflect on your roles, can you talk to the skills and any differences in behavioral traits, or even attitudes across each of those business types. 

The marketing skill set is fundamentally the same across all industries and a core understanding of it is your consumer. The insights are driving how you take a product or service to market. That is fundamentally the same.

What I see is probably the biggest change is linking to planning cycles and your access to budgets. Larger FMCG players are running on annual cycles and you're beholden to retailers in their six months planning cycles to get product on shelves and therefore hitting campaigns and product launches around certain cycles that are longer.

If you work in a smaller startup, it's actually more quarterly. Take my current role at Hnry, we're changing our plans every month. We're really looking at fast changes both on budgets and execution.

So I think the skill sets required are fundamentally the same. But your assessment, your ability to diagnose quickly and therefore make a change is required. It becomes a little less risky, because if you don't get it right, you can change it. Whereas, in larger organisations, you're really putting a case in for big budget planning and fundamental launches around seasonality which, if you get it wrong, you've got a big cycle to get it right again.

Thinking about yourself as a leader or your team. What sort of attitude or resilience do you need to apply across either one of those businesses?

At a large organisation, you might have a very organised leadership team, sub-leadership team structure that requires presentations with strong insights backed by research, competitive data that you can compare. You've got potentially a launch of a product that might be similar. So using what has currently been set historically to project forward.

If you're in a startup space, you're sometimes paving the way and disrupting other industries, so  attitude wise you just need to be adaptable to that landscape and understanding you might not have all the building blocks and the measurement tools in place, so you have to get comfortable with an incomplete picture. We talk a lot about, progress over perfection, you just aren't going to have all the bits and pieces, so from an attitude point of view, it's adaptability and being comfortable with not having the most perfect brand plan, go-to-market plan and customer insights which might have a few holes in it because you're using, maybe a Google review and some customer service feedback instead of complete third-party research piece that is segmented. 

Pace to adapt. You look at metrics quickly, you’re not waiting for the weekly Media Agency report. Our team at Hnry meet every Monday morning and look at last week's results and pivot every Monday morning for the week ahead. So it's just a different way of working with fundamentals, all the same. You're still looking to see how you can get the right communications out to market. You're just doing it in a slightly different way.

Working at Hnry now, which, as you described it as a startup to scale up. What are the biggest challenges? And what are you enjoying most about it?

Hnry, it's a digital accountancy solution for sole traders. So anyone who's contracting, from a tradesman, healthcare worker or Uber driver, we can help them organise their tax. We do that automatically. We're not quite accounting software, like Xero or MYOB, but we're also disrupting the traditional accountant. We sit in the middle with a solution that has not existed before. 

Building awareness around Hnry first and foremost is important and actually letting people understand there is an alternative solution out there. Consumers love context and we are trying to help people understand where we sit in the market and we're having a bit of fun with the Hnry brand. It’s a little less risky because we’re less established. We're trying to find our way into the Australian market. We're playing with humour. We're playing with a bit of irreverence which is quite unusual for brands in this space.

Let's compare that to known FMCG brands for example, does the marketing mix change, what areas of marketing are you focused on. Does building brand awareness in a scale up look different?

For FMCG brands, they usually have an established brand based on awareness and looking to drive consumption, changing considerations around a fairly established category. You’re playing in the norms of a category with a good understanding of a classic purchase. 

What we're doing is having to explain ourselves and building that understanding which is very much in content. The classic starting place is always paid search, unfortunately! We're then testing both our message and also making sure we can solve a problem from a search point of view, such as long tail keywords. “I'm a sole trader with a tax challenge. How do I find an alternative to my accounting software?”

So answering a lot of interesting, deep queries is one area, but also building awareness with video content, and then retargeting in that space and hyper targeting to get the right audience coming through to our platform. How we talk to a tradie vs a healthcare worker or Uber driver is different so segmentation and message testing, that’s measured through to a conversion point. 

With search, there is always high intent. So we're leveraging a high intent audience where we’re trying to convert them. We're also playing a lot around how we create trust and social proof, so constantly looking at ways we can bring trust into the brand, showing we’re a new solution to look after your taxes. It's definitely an area of friction, so how do we get people comfortable? That’s through content which goes right through to onsite and email. Follow up with product video demos for example. We also pick small markets to test to see if we can get a nice pick up where we can then scale. 

Is there much difference in the relationships that you have forged with other teams within each type of business?

I don't think it's any different in terms of the strength of relationships. At Hnry, I’m working closely with Product to understand how we can interact to drive product growth and understand what's actually happening on the platform. But also I’m really keen to see what else we can do to support new product development. Our customer service teams are really important, they really understand the pain points, did our marketing messaging hit the mark? What’s missing?

I’d like to think the same conversations are being had in larger organisations. In FMCG, you're working with different teams, R&D for example, what are retailers telling us? In a smaller company, ideas might get spun up very quickly. You're testing something that Product can launch within weeks, not months in a larger organisation.

Do you think there's a difference in marketing teams and their influence across the business?

I think it comes down to where the marketing team is positioned within the total business. And what's driving the business metrics? Is it a product lead business? I think there's examples where marketing is a lead function at times, and you're looking for growth from your marketing team. As a result, it's got a strong seat at the table to be able to drive that customer innovation and voice. I’ve worked in other organisations where it's more sales led and really trying to push a product market fit from the sales side, and then others which are products led. And you're then really waiting for that point of innovation to launch and support. 

How would you compare data literacy with the teams, and what are the most important metrics?

There is definitely an inherent closeness and detail in a small organisation, because you're just looking at the numbers more regularly. You're looking for the upside to then further invest and if you are a digital product, you just have better access. Where I am right now, I can see from first click through to conversion so right through the customer journey. 

In a larger organisation, sometimes they don’t exist for your products. Sometimes the habit also has to come from the top. Overall, literacy is constantly taking leaps forward, which is fantastic. I just think touching data though a startup is a lot more frequent because you are more clearly driving the business direction where you can shift teams and resources to certain areas to solve or pitch for more funding. 

You’ve touched on investment, is there much difference in terms of the volatility of investments?

Yes, very much! The larger enterprise established business are very much top down budget setting, based on last year, based on future growth, new product launches or where we see the market going. With a scale up, it’s more about testing and building business cases to scale and extend. So you've effectively got an untapped budget. But you’re keeping a close eye on CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), types of customer, lifetime value and cost to serve. Budget setting in a small organisation is normally up to you to prove the uplift, and therefore much easier to put a case forward to extend next month. It's not next year. It's next month. So you're looking at chunks of money with very clear metrics and goals. Essentially it can be uncapped effectively as long as you can hit those metrics and then keep it under the ceiling.

What advice would you give for someone who is looking to switch from scale up to an established business, or vice versa. As leaders you might get applications for a type of role, you tend to quickly skim through someone's background and quite quickly dismiss people because of their category experience. What advice would you give for people looking to switch?

Reach out to those already in a network, in an industry or a sector you want to know more about. Ask for one-on-one conversations over a coffee or a beer, and you’ll probably hear about really interesting nuances. What does an average week/month look like? Who's dictating budgets, planning cycles? How do you get things approved?

You’ve likely got transferable skills but do you have the mindset or the attitude to go after something different. I'm a big fan of switching industries, I keep doing it! so. You need to be adaptable, and I find that fun and refreshing, and I like to bring different thinking across categories. I know there are others that just stay in a straight line through a category and become absolute domain experts, that's awesome. But even within that sector, say, the financial sector where you might have been 15-20 years at a big bank. Have a look at some of the smaller Fintech startups and see if they are transferable. It's the same sector, but operating very differently. Try a contract or a project without being totally locked down to a category change to get you confident in your skill set. But it’s all going to come back to your network, and if you need to have a conversation with certain recruiters, they could put you forward for slightly different roles to help you break away from your norm.

What about the biggest opportunities at Hrny and how are you really capitalising on them?

We're not getting too far ahead of ourselves! It's still just scaling up. We picked up a people’s choice award in the Fintech awards just this year, so we're on the right track from a customer point of view and we're getting some good recognition which is coming up. We are picking up business across different sectors which is leading to some additional product innovation. 

So what we have as a business model right now, how do we try and extend that to keep answering and providing solutions to suit sole traders and link to our mission led by our founder when we originally launched. 

What advice or resources would you give to marketers to remain Future Fit?

Sadly, I get too much information from Linkedin, and I say that in a nice way! I'm also across all the classic trade press and publications, and I think if you are in the startup space there are some different titles, but it's all by sector. So if you have an interest, whether it’s in the tech space, have a look around because there are some more tech commentators that actually talk about the metrics you need to know as a marketer. Again, it's just a case of staying in touch and I think you learn a lot from your peers as you have these conversations. I encourage you, just have one coffee a month talking to someone else in the industry, and understanding what they're up to. I saw what you're launching. How did you get to that?