Hey y'all, welcome to Stacking Growth, a Friday check-in where I take the tips we drop in the Refine Labs weekly newsletter and apply it for our own brand marketing team, stacking them up for our continued evolution and growth. I'm Steph Kreniola, and this week is focused on brand demand expand. So you may have seen in the last couple months, this shift from the old way that Refine Labs was approaching marketing to this new brand demand expand concept. Our CEO, Megan Bowen, and our VP of Marketing, Evan Hughes, have been breaking down these three pillars and reinforcing the Y behind them and how they're implementing them in the Refine Lab strategy.
That's what our newsletter was mostly about this week, Evan wrote a really great article. It's super clear, it breaks us down in a really easy and adjustable way. So I'm going to read, digest that and share it out with y'all. So the tagline here is, Evan says, treating all marketing the same breaks it and he's done it.
I think we've all done it. I think that this is something that's really relatable across all avenues of marketing where we've tried to use the same strategies, the same techniques over and over and over or treating all of our different pillars the same and it just doesn't do what we need it to do. One thing could work for one area, it's broken in another area, but the more we try to shove a square peg in around whole, the more frustrated we're going to get and the less it's going to work. So why are we switching to brand demand expand?
It's honestly pretty simple when you break it down. We've been listening. We are listening to our customers, we've been listening on LinkedIn, we've been listening to everyone in the market who is having the same difficulties, we're noticing patterns across these problems over and over and over. Paid media performance is dipping, even when your budget is staying the same.
Teams are hitting traffic goals, but pipeline isn't keeping up the targets. Retention is becoming a bigger priority, but most teams don't know where to start. So it's not a fact of marketing being broken. It's the fact that too many teams are expected to make everything tie directly into pipeline.
So when every team is treated the same, you're trying to get the same performance from each of your teams. You end up with short-term wins and long-term trash confusion. It's not working in the long-term. There might be little bumps, little boosts here and there, but in the long run it's just not working.
So this is where brand demand expands comes from. It's just a way to get clear on the role of each part of marketing. So brand is what makes people remember you before they're ready to buy. It's reputation, it's credibility, it's familiarity.
You're not measuring leads. I know that that's a scary prospect for so many of you. You're not measuring leads, but you're going to see it later in the sales process. When you think of something you want to eat for a snack or drink for a refreshment, you're going to have certain brands pop up.
It's the same in B2B, it's the same in SAS. You might not have the visibility of a Coke or an Amazon or a Snickers or whatever. We've been talking a lot about Coke and Snickers internally recently, so those are the ones that are on my mind. But we're not going to get that level of credibility, reputation and familiarity across the broad spectrum of millions of people in the population.
But we are going to get that credibility in our lanes. So just because it's not on this billion person scale doesn't mean that it's not as important to reinforce it on the small scale of your own market. So make people remember you. Make people trust you.
Then when they're ready to buy, they'll be like, oh yeah, refund labs, I know them. I've seen them on LinkedIn. I've seen Brando Manic's band. So that's brand.
Demand is what turns that interest into pipeline. So normally we think about it as campaigns, content and the website. It needs to be efficient and aligned with intent. So demand is when you take that person who's in the market, they're ready and you make it easy for them.
If someone goes to your website and they can't find a way to book a demo, if they can't find the pricing, put your pricing on the website. If we could yell one thing over and over and over, put your pricing on the website, let people find before they have to talk to you. Let people find out if they can afford your services or if they're going to be looking into a different company. You want to make sure that you're making it as easy for them to buy as possible.
If they go to your website and it's a clear path, they're probably going to follow that path. If it's like a Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs, try to follow the way back home journey on your website, you're going to lose them. They're going to end up at a witch's house eating candy. Expand is everything that happens after someone becomes a customer.
So it's how you drive retention, growth and advocacy. Most marketing teams are going to ignore that part because it's not part of their sphere, but it can be the most profitable. So just because someone has signed with you as a customer doesn't mean they should stop being treated with more potential. I guess just because they've signed on doesn't mean they're going to stay.
It doesn't mean they're going to stay stagnant. You want to find new opportunities to build that trust with them, build your program with them, keep them. So that's so important and I think really often overlooked in marketing in general. So brand, make people remember you, demand, get them an easy path into becoming a customer, and then don't ignore them.
Expand. Find ways to keep them happy, keep them growing. Each of these motions needs to be planned, measured, and resourced differently. It's not the same team doing all three.
If it is the same team doing all three, they're probably overloaded, overworked, and not doing a great job in any of those three pillars because they just don't have the bandwidth to do it. So brand, demand, expand. We're going to keep pushing this concept because it's really crucial in a way that you can help your marketing teams show up to be the best that they can be. So stop over complicating it more and more and more.
Get down to the basics. Listen to Evan. Listen to Megan. They've got some incredible resources unlinked in that their profiles are in the show notes here.
So make sure that you are following them for more on this. Make sure you're following the Refine Labs page to stay on top of all of this information as we keep reinforcing it over the next couple of weeks, couple of months, couple of years. We'll see how the market changes. Thank you so much.
I really appreciate Evan breaking this down in such a clear way in the newsletter this week because it's made me able to take it in, absorb it, and get it out there for y'all who are watching to have a different delivery of that information. So thank you, Evan. Thank you for watching. Let us know if you have any questions, any comments, anything that you're excited about with this brand, demand, expand pillar.
And I will see you all next week.