Best of Season 3 - Rocket Mortgage, Cisco, Ricoh North America

Speaker 1: Maybe big data has gotten too big. Whether you're a B2B marketer or a consumer brand, your data needs to be viable, relevant, and accessible so that Stirista can help you retain customers, acquire customers, and make it personal.

Ben: Welcome to The Marketing Stir Podcast by Stirista, probably the most entertaining marketing podcast you're going to put in your ear. I'm Ben, the producer here at Stirista. The goal of this podcast is to chat with industry leaders and get their take on the current challenges of the market, and we'll have a little fun along the way. In today's episode, we take a look back on season three thus far with some of our favorite guests, including Casey Hurbis, the CMO at Rocket Mortgage, Andrew Harder, the senior paid media manager, WebEx events at Cisco, and Lauren Sallata, the CMO at Ricoh North America. Give it a listen.

Vince: Casey, let's talk about different marketing channels. Right. This is The Marketing Stir. So we get into the nitty- gritty here. Obviously people know Rocket Mortgage, you're watching television, you're watching the Super Bowl. We'll get into that in a moment. But what are some other channels that people might not know that Rocket Mortgage is in that have been working for you?

Casey Hurbis: A great question, Vince, and I will tell you, I would be hard- pressed for you to say, to give me a channel that we haven't been in, tested or we're in the process of being in, which we're very blessed here at Rocket. Budgets are healthy, as you mentioned, people see us a lot. Share of voice is very strong. I'm very thankful that our executive leadership with Dan Gilbert and our CEO Jay Farner and Bill Emerson, they see the value of having a healthy brand in which we've been in. We invest heavily in this brand. And when it comes to channels, again, knock on wood, even in these challenging times, we are a 365, 24/ 7 advertiser. We might not be as deep as we were a year or two ago in some of the channels, but to answer your question, we have, we're in all the channels. Right. We're still primarily, if you will, a heavier linear broadcast marketer, we'll call it the traditional media channels, mid upper funnel in broadcast, linear, audio, both terrestrial and streaming, investing more and more, obviously in the connected OTV, OTT space. The world is going to much more one- to- one targeting. And then if you were to ask, Hey, what's your TikTok? What's your TikTok strategy and emerging media? I am a big fan of testing and learning. I'll never forget four years ago as I was watching TikTok, I was like, okay, I'm now at the point with TikTok where I don't feel like it's going to be a platform that has a moment in the sun and then goes away. So what are we going to do? And I gave my team, I don't know, 100, $200, 000 or something like that, and I was like, come back with a TikTok plan. You're not going to screw up the brand. We're not going to, we have to. Why not learn now?

Vince: Yeah.

Casey Hurbis: And I believe in what we'll call a TikTok in this space at that time, like where that's going to go. Obviously, you've seen the other big portals try to come with their own competitive products. And so I'm always a fan of, as we see emerging technologies come about, let's invest. Let's test and learn, and we're not going to, the worst comes or worse is we make an investment and it doesn't have a ROAS, or maybe it affects our CAC a little bit, but that's okay. How else are you going to know unless you try and let's not be afraid to take some risks.

Vince: Yeah, we love that. And I know our listeners will love hearing that because it's kind of, even in these uncertain times where people are like, what should I do? Still test. You still have to.

Casey Hurbis: How do you not. You don't know. I mean, people,

Vince: Exactly.

Casey Hurbis: I can't tell you how many times I sit at conferences as you mentioned, and people are like, well, eSports was one where we were very early in the eSports as a brand. And still, I mean, I sit in meetings and I'm like, how do you know unless you try?

Vince: Yeah.

Casey Hurbis: What's the worst that's going to happen? I mean, you got, obviously it all depends on budgets and blah, blah, blah, but man, unless you know, like jump in and learn. And that's the best way to find out.

Vince: And you have to. I mean, you look at something like TikTok where I remember we were talking to a brand that it was very traditional brand and we were like, you're on TikTok? They're like, yeah, this is the future bakers of the world, the electronic, this is the future. People are going to be buying, inaudible going to looking into mortgages in the future so.

Speaker 5: How do you keep yourself proactive rather than reactive when it comes to marketing?

Andrew Harder: Yeah, great question. I think the two most tangible ways for me is talking to sales and customers directly. So what that looks like for me and what anyone can do, I think a lot of times it's easy to get just kind of pigeonholed and you work for marketing, you just kind of talk to your inner marketing team. But I have a few people I reach out to on the sales team. We talk regularly. I get feedback from them. I had a meeting a few weeks ago with these sales leaders. They pulled in a few other people and just asking them like, Hey, what are you guys hearing about virtual? Virtual is not really important right now. What's the input? Just little things that do feel like our strategy going forward for the next quarter. And then customers is, I wish I would've talked to customers directly years ago. I did not realize how, it's like a secret weapon I feel like, that if you take advantage of asking, how I did this was asked our customer team, Hey, who are five, 10 customers I can talk to that won't be annoyed that marketing's reaching out to them. I'm not talking to them to make a case study. I'm not asking for anything. I'm just simply wanting to understand how is our platform solving their needs, but also the sales process. What was that like for them? What type of content do they care about? Where are they hanging out? We think we know. I certainly fall into, oh, I'm going to do this thing because I know this is going to work, and then it doesn't work. So talking to the actual customers themselves. I also have a unique advantage like marketing and event software. We have event marketers on our team, so I talk to them and they're super helpful at giving me ideas for content. I take a ton of their video cut downs and use that. So I would say the other thing too is just following other brands that are outside of our industry. There's a few different B2B brands that I just respect. And I won't ever purchase their software or do anything with them, but I like seeing different examples. Stord is one. Shout out Stord to anyone listening from Stord. I don't know if there is. I love I say, I don't know exactly what their software does. It's kind of like for logistics and that type of thing. But I love their marketing. It's so unique and creative and it does cut through the noise in my LinkedIn feed I do. It sticks out to me. So I think that's another thing that I do to be more proactive.

Speaker 5: Yeah. You've mentioned you've been brought in to rebuild the team. Would love to just understand what your general philosophy is on management outside of marketing per se.

Lauren Sallata: Absolutely. So at Ricoh, we have something that's called the culture of excellence, and it's really a collection of behaviors that we hold ourselves and each other accountable. Things like aspirational mindset, root cause analysis, data- driven analysis. And there are some attributes like open- mindedness and inclusiveness, adaptability and being future focused. And we have rolled this out. It's a program and we have playbooks and training and KPIs around this as a leadership team. And we also have a very open culture where our CEO is on the front lines with our frontline employees as well as doing things like coffee with the CEO on a regular basis. So all of these things have created a culture that really supports the idea of servant leadership. And I really try to replicate all of those things and walk that walk every day with my team. So one of the things that was very important to me when I took this role is, as I mentioned earlier, sort of putting marketing back together. Right. And also transitioning it from a product centric product launch team to more of a customer- centric, customer focused team. And so one of the ways tactically that I've done that is build what I call a community of practice within marketing. So I don't have what I call an all hands call. It's actually a community. And we've built over the last year and a half or so, a monthly meeting of our community and we leverage all the tools that we have available to us, things in Teams and chat and things like that. And we really encourage people to speak up and have it to be interactive. We focus on a culture of recognition and a culture of collaboration. And that has really, really helped bring about 400 people together between the US and Canada as an integrated North American marketing team.

Ben: Thanks for listening to The Marketing Stir Podcast by Stirista. Please like, rate, and subscribe. If you're interested in being a guest on the podcast, please email us at themarketingstir @ stirista. com and thanks for listening.