The more AI companies sound alike, the more valuable creativity becomes.
In this episode of SaaS Half Full, host Lindsey Groepper sat down with Ashley McGovern, Director of Marketing at Nurture Boss, to talk through how to make AI features feel concrete to less technical audiences. Not everything has to be digital lead-gen. She’s using books, print, and unconventional campaigns to connect with her audience.
Every AI company is starting to sound the same
Nurture Boss competes in a crowded PropTech market where property managers and leasing agents are inundated with AI vendors using similar messaging, digital, paid, and social tactics. For a less-technical audience, that makes it difficult to distinguish one vendor from another, and feature-heavy messaging often fails to land.
“What I’ve observed is that they’re bogged down with multiple AI vendors reaching out to them that they don’t know how to decipher what’s true, what’s not, what’s the best fit for me.” — Ashley McGovern
That fatigue is why Ashley and Nurture Boss CEO Jacob Carter agreed early on to look beyond the standard MQL-to-SQL playbook and focus on telling the company’s story in a way that feels clear and relevant to their audience.
Making the abstract concrete
AI technology is inherently abstract. Ashley knew the only way to cut through was to give people something tangible to remember, rather than asking them to parse another list of technical features.
She points to Apple’s iPod marketing as inspiration. Instead of explaining the technology behind an MP3 player, Apple made the product concrete with “a thousand songs in your pocket.”
Nurture Boss applies the same principle, using print materials, direct mail, a physical book, and even a cinematic commercial set in a 1970s leasing office. To promote a webinar on AI adoption, Ashley skipped the usual email graphic and had the event details printed on bakery bags ordered through Etsy, timed to a lunchtime session, and photographed for social content.
It’s not about print for print’s sake. The goal is to find an unexpected way to make the message feel more human.
Why niche audiences need a different playbook
Ashley also argues that marketers can’t assume every audience follows the traditional B2B funnel.
“We have to rewrite the inbound playbook that HubSpot got us all familiar with as B2B marketers. Our industry and our customers are fatigued by these resources that we’re gating, and our audience doesn’t buy in a straight line.” – Ashley McGovern
Nurture Boss still uses e-books, webinars, and paid media and measures the standard marketing metrics. But because the property management industry is highly relationship-driven, Ashley pays attention to anecdotal feedback and the conversations happening around the brand.
Where AI belongs in marketing (and where it doesn’t)
Ashley isn’t suggesting marketers abandon the channels or tools they already use. The difference is what comes first. If AI is going to create results in your marketing, creative thinking has to come before technology. Now’s the opportunity to be more unconventional.
“Creativity is how you will stand out. Think of how you can stay bold with your marketing campaigns and use your humanness.” – Ashley McGovern
Knowing what buyers care about, how they talk about their problems, and what stories will resonate with them can’t be reduced to a prompt. AI can help marketers move faster, but when everyone has access to the same tools, the human perspective behind the work becomes what makes a brand worth remembering.
Check out all the SaaS Half Full episodes on YouTube.
Episode Transcript
This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.
[00:00:00] Ashley McGovern: In the age of AI, what I think marketers should consider is creativity. Creativity is how you will stand out. Think of how you can stay bold with your marketing campaigns and use your humanness in the age of AI to help yourself stand out.
[00:00:22] Lindsey Groepper: Hi, and welcome back to SaaS Half Full, the only show serving B2B SaaS and AI marketers.
[00:00:27] Lindsey Groepper: I’m Lindsay Groepper, EVP at PANBlast, and I will be both your host and bartender today. I had an awesome conversation with Ashley McGovern, who is the director of marketing at Nurture Boss, which is an AI PropTech company. Now, most AI companies are marketing in all the ways that we know. A lot of digital marketing, leaning heavy into social, paid, looking at AI visibility.
[00:00:51] Lindsey Groepper: and Ashley’s talking to us about how she has used more creative techniques to reach her audience that are unexpected coming from an AI company. And yes, people, I am talking print and books and commercials. So if you’d care to grab a drink, join me as I speak with Ashley
[00:01:09] Lindsey Groepper: Hey Ashley, welcome to the show
[00:01:11] Ashley McGovern: Hi, Lindsay. Thanks so much for having me
[00:01:14] Lindsey Groepper: I am excited to have you. You are an Indy native, which I don’t get many Indy natives on this show, so glad to have you. But now you are, uh, living in Chicago, correct?
[00:01:23] Ashley McGovern: Correct. Yep. I am in the Gold Coast old town area
[00:01:28] Lindsey Groepper: Love it. Um, before I hit record, I shared with you that I used to live there. and it was definitely, like, a different time in my life. It was pre-kids. Partying was, like, number one focus. Every dime I met- made, I spent it on going out. But I would not change a thing. I loved it. It’s a city that’s near and dear to my heart.
[00:01:47] Lindsey Groepper: were we able to get you a drink kit today?
[00:01:50] Ashley McGovern: You were. And my drink of choice was a Hugo spritz. So I have my Hendrick’s with me. However, I told you before we started recording, I am in desperate need of caffeine, so I’m actually drinking a Celsius, and it’s a little bit earlier here instead of the Hugo spritz, but I’m definitely gonna be enjoying that a little bit later on after work.
[00:02:13] Lindsey Groepper: Awesome. Yes, it is 10:30 in the morning for you, uh, on a Thursday. It is in the AM hour for me as well, but guess what’s happening, Ashley? I’m doing the thing. Um, as my listeners know, I always stay true to the process. There were two times in six years I haven’t, and one is ’cause I was coming, literally coming off the stomach flu, and I just couldn’t.
[00:02:32] Lindsey Groepper: and the other is w- when I had COVID, um, back in the day, and I just, like, I couldn’t bring myself to, like, have a drink. But other than that, no matter the time of day, no matter the day of the week, here we go. I’m drinking a Good Boy Seltzer, which I discovered this summer, um, which I love. It’s a strawberry lemonade because it is not carbonated, which is, like, key for me.
[00:02:53] Lindsey Groepper: I can only drink so many carbonated beverages, so the fact that this is flat, I love. So it is a Good Boy strawberry lemonade. Um, but I will cheers your Celsius. Thank you for joining me
[00:03:02] Ashley McGovern: you. Thank you. I have heard good things about Good Boy. I’m the same, I don’t like carbonation. I don’t know if you’ve tried Mom Wa- Water, Mom Water? Love that one
[00:03:11] Lindsey Groepper: That is from Indy. That was like born out of Indiana. Yeah, and it, and literally it was a mom who would go to the pool with her kids and she would have in her water bottle, her drink, which would usually be like flavored wa- flat water vodka and what, you know, whatever else. And she started labeling it Mom Water so that her kids wouldn’t drink it.
[00:03:33] Lindsey Groepper: And then she, like would make it for her friends and they would all have their own Mom Waters. And then they’re like, “This is like a thing. We should try to like sell it.” And Mom Water was born.
[00:03:41] Ashley McGovern: I love that and I like the
[00:03:43] Lindsey Groepper: Yeah.
[00:03:43] Ashley McGovern: It has a good story to it.
[00:03:46] Lindsey Groepper: Absolutely. Um, it actually… You like when it actually matches what you hope it did. It’s like, “Was this invented by a mom?”
[00:03:51] Lindsey Groepper: And it’s like, yes, it actually was. Yeah. Um, okay. Well, uh, before we dive into our topic, of the day, I do want to give our listeners like a bit of background on you. certainly like your, your history and how you got into B2B SaaS and AI marketing. And then also if you could just give us a quick overview, um, of Nurture Boss, what the company does, and your role there would be a great place to start.
[00:04:15] Ashley McGovern: Absolutely. Okay, so I have been in marketing for almost 10 years now. Um, after college, I actually got my start working in-house at an orthopedic hospital in Indiana. And that’s really where I say I developed my appreciation for complex information, because I was like, right, and Julia on your team, who actually reached out to me, I worked, I worked with her.
[00:04:37] Ashley McGovern: Um, she was an intern, so she can attest to this. But we had to write blog articles about like scoliosis surgery and make sure that it was digestible to our target audience, right? So I really developed my appreciation for complex information and telling a story well, a true story well. Um- With the three years I was at that orthopedic hospital.
[00:04:59] Ashley McGovern: The thing though was I had, I’ve always had this like entrepreneurial itch. So eventually I was like, “Okay, I need to scratch this and use the, my minor,” which, uh, when I went to college, my minor was in entrepreneurship, and I was like, “I need to get into the startup world.” So I, saw this company called Reelink.
[00:05:17] Ashley McGovern: They were actually acquired now by a larger property technology company in our space. Uh, but I ended up working there for like four years. and it was a wonderful experience, true startup, um, then scale up, and eventually it was acquired, like I said. And then, since then, I left and went to the e-commerce tech industry for a little bit, where I gained a lot of insight too.
[00:05:37] Ashley McGovern: So I actually compare a lot of property technology that I might refer to as prop tech to e-commerce tech, e-com tech. but outside of that, I have been a B2B SaaS marketer now for seven years in the property technology space specifically. so that’s a little bit about me. And now Nurture Boss is where I’m leading marketing.
[00:05:57] Ashley McGovern: I was the first marketing hire. I am a solo marketer right now with goals to build out my team. But I am, um, our director of marketing in charge of leading our go-to-market efforts and really focused on our messaging, positioning, and brand awareness campaigns right now. And in terms of who Nurture Boss is, so it’s, it’s interesting because we target such a niche industry, and we’ll probably get into this a little bit later on, but for healthy context, we target property management companies, a lot of owners, third-party managers.
[00:06:29] Ashley McGovern: And so the decision-makers that we are trying to make aware of our product would be more of like those, um, VP of marketing and leasing roles, property managers, and then the end user usually is a leasing agent. So in terms of our product, I would say, talking to our B2B SaaS marketers, it’s o- it’s marketing automation, but this industry isn’t familiar with that.
[00:06:54] Ashley McGovern: So the way that we articulate what we do is that we are a conversational AI solution that helps facilitate that back-and-forth communication through email, text, chatbot, voice AI. So it’s that true like virtual leasing assistant specifically powered for the leasing agents who are just bogged down with mundane tasks.
[00:07:17] Ashley McGovern: So we’re an AI solution, but, I have now been here for a little over a year, and it has been a whirlwind. we’re definitely at that scale-up stage, which is where I thrive. So we’re having a lot of fun with our campaigns that I know we’ll get into.
[00:07:33] Lindsey Groepper: Yeah. Um, I’ve had several people on, um, this show who sell into very niche industries. I just had on Gretchen Eischen, who’s the CMO at Avetta, and they sell into like contractors, and that industry. And sort of one of the throughputs that I’m finding, gonna find kind of between that conversation and this one, is what you said, is that you can’t really lead with AI and you can’t necessarily like lead with features and benefits because this audience just doesn’t respond to that.
[00:08:00] Lindsey Groepper: They’re not as tech savvy as if you were selling like marketing tech, for example, or sales tech to sales leaders, marketing leaders. you have to market to them differently and a bit more creatively. and so the sort of the topic that, that we ide- ideated on and landed on is that specifically with Nurture Boss is that you’ve created some different marketing approaches that are a bit contradictive to what you would expect from an AI company, um, that have worked really well for you.
[00:08:27] Lindsey Groepper: And so want to dive into that because I know we have, uh, a lot of listeners who do sell into either niche audiences, like one niche audience or they’re like very verticalized and are having to talk to a lot of different audiences, many of them who are not even necessarily tech forward, let alone AI forward.
[00:08:45] Lindsey Groepper: I do feel most AI companies are, are marketing more around speed and automation and features. so why did you decide to, to kind of look outside of that originally with Nurture Boss and really focus marketing efforts on what we would consider more traditional formats? And folks, I’m talking about book launches, I am talking about print media, and I’m talking about commercials.
[00:09:09] Lindsey Groepper: Um, so just talk to us about when you came on, you know, a year ago, how you assessed this and, and why you ultimately decided that we need to do something a little bit different.
[00:09:19] Ashley McGovern: Yeah. so the why behind we wanted to do something different is because there are a lot of AI solutions in our industry. And the way from my research and observations over the years that I’ve aggregated is that a lot of people use color to make their brand stand out in property technology. And I think that’s a great way to do it.
[00:09:41] Ashley McGovern: It’s, it’s what Nurture Boss was doing before people associated with the color with the brand. But for me, one of my guiding principles ever since, you know, after college working at a place where we were taking that complex information and distilling it down, was looking at our audience and trying to speak their language.
[00:10:01] Ashley McGovern: I think that our industry and what I’ve observed is that they’re bogged down with multiple AI vendors reaching out to them that they don’t know how to decipher what’s true, what’s not, what’s the best fit for me, because once again, it’s a very technical product in our industry. S- many are technical, but some aren’t.
[00:10:22] Ashley McGovern: And so I was tasked when I came on to Nurture Boss is telling our story, or telling our stories clearly in a way that also captures attention with this attention economy right now. So the why was that we needed to stand out. We needed to capture attention given that we are a little bit smaller than our biggest competitor.
[00:10:45] Ashley McGovern: And so that’s when we decided to start using print material. I started pitching some of my very bold ideas with a cinematic commercial set in a 1970s leasing office, um, and then launching a book all with the goal of clearly articulating what Nurture Boss does, but more so from a thought leadership standpoint too, because that was another goal we had, was we want to be the leaders for multifamily teams when they’re learning about AI and property management
[00:11:18] Lindsey Groepper: And what kind of conversation did you have to have with your internal stakeholders? Sort of where did they fall on the spectrum? Are they, uh, like were they open to the traditional side? Is that sort of what they’re used to? Or were they like, you know, but actually like, “Where’s all of our like digital campaigns and paid media?”
[00:11:33] Lindsey Groepper: so what conversation did you have to have internally?
[00:11:36] Ashley McGovern: Yeah, that’s a good question. so I report into our CEO, Jacob Carter, and he is phenomenal, phenomenal. And I got really lucky because he has more of that mindset that we don’t need… And eventually this matters. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, but instead of focusing on like the typical MQLs to SQLs to gating content to focusing on marketing influenced or closed one deals, he really had the same intention that I did.
[00:12:03] Ashley McGovern: And I vetted this when, um, interviewing with Nurture Boss when they brought me over here, is that we have to rewrite the playbook, the inbound playbook that HubSpot got us all familiar with as B2B marketers because our industry and our customers are fatigued by, by these resources that we’re gating and our audience doesn’t buy in a straight line.
[00:12:27] Ashley McGovern: So we had the same marketing mindset that we have to be bold, we have to focus on anecdotal feedback because we know a lot of this industry is built off of relationships. So the same B2B SaaS metrics that we’re all familiar with don’t apply right now. And the same intention that once was when filling out a form for an e-book isn’t the same anymore.
[00:12:50] Ashley McGovern: So we kind of saw the writing on the wall. And again, lucky, luckily for me, I also made it very clear that I am a contrarian. I have these bold ideas that I want to execute on, and I want you to push back. And we have that dynamic where we can ask thoughtful questions to get to the outcome that is the best fit for Nurture Boss.
[00:13:11] Ashley McGovern: And so I, I, again, can’t stress enough that I, I feel like we were on the same page from the get-go because I asked some pretty tough questions in the interview phase to make sure that him as the CEO had the same marketing mindset that I did, and vice versa. He’s taught me a ton about marketing as well
[00:13:32] Lindsey Groepper: Yeah. When you– And that is lucky, for sure. what were some of the, I guess more conventional marketing tactics that you were seeing across your category that were aiding to this sameness or making the, you know, making the competitors look interchangeable? what types of strategies were being deployed that you knew like, “Hey, we’re not gonna play that same game”?
[00:13:52] Ashley McGovern: I would say, um, in the vein of thought leadership, what we saw that wasn’t working as much because it worked at one point and I had to go through all the, you know, playbooks to see what was resonating with our audience and what wasn’t. But the e-books, the checklists, the webinars, the paid ads, like those are the traditional conventional marketing methods that are important.
[00:14:18] Ashley McGovern: And I don’t want to, you know, it doesn’t work right now. It doesn’t say, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t work in the future. Although I do think it’s still important to have those resources available. So we are still focused on building out e-books and, uh, we still have paid ads, but we focus on LinkedIn because that’s where our audience lives.
[00:14:40] Ashley McGovern: And we’re really focused on more so the creative, not necessarily a knock on the channel. We just want to get the message right and capture attention quickly and then make it easy to digest what Nurture Boss does
[00:14:56] Lindsey Groepper: Okay. I want to dive into some of the specific tactics, because one of the things that was a little surprising to me was, launching a book authored by your CEO. Because I feel like that’s something that like, you know, five, six years ago, I feel like every like CMO and SaaSy CEO, was releasing books at a pretty like regular clip.
[00:15:15] Lindsey Groepper: I mean, I remember even for some of our clients, doing that. I mean, we worked with 6sense when, um, Latane Conant, La- Latane Conant did her no, you know, no forms, no cold calls, whatever it was, um, book, uh, launching that. And I know, um, Lessonli was big, you know, on the book train back then. So I was like p- partially like excited, like, oh good, people are still doing books.
[00:15:35] Lindsey Groepper: But talk to me about the decision, to launch a book and, you know, in its physical form on Amazon.
[00:15:43] Ashley McGovern: I’m so glad you brought up Lessonly because I used that in my pitch to my CEO. It, it’s so funny because outside of Nurture Boss, I’m also a content creator specific to Chicago. So I, I capture a lot of like these moments that I think could maybe have an impact later on. And so when I pitched the ide- idea to him, I was recording audibly his reaction, and all you hear from him is saying, “With what time do you want me to write a book?”
[00:16:08] Ashley McGovern: Again, he mentioned
[00:16:10] Lindsey Groepper: sure, fair.
[00:16:10] Ashley McGovern: he’s like the CEO of this company. Like he’s also an AI engineer, so he’s again, with what time? Um, but to answer your question, so I use Lessonly and Max Yoder and the marketing team there who I spoke to. I actually, when I had a podcast a couple years ago, I spoke with a couple people from that team that worked on that project.
[00:16:31] Ashley McGovern: So it was always this idea that I had in my back pocket that I wanted to eventually execute on, but all the puzzle pieces had to be into play. Meaning I had a credible CEO that was willing to do this, and he also wanted to do it. I think that getting him motivated to do it was a big part of why I think that puzzle piece needed to be put in play to execute on it.
[00:16:57] Ashley McGovern: the ICP, our industry, it had to be the right industry, and then we had to have the right angle. And we made it all come together in a way that now we’re actually seeing the fruits of our labor and it’s having a huge impact for us. that was one piece to why we decided to do that. Another piece is, so ano- I’m really big on behavioral psychology and really learning about how to capture attention and how to do it in a very thoughtful way and, and focused on positioning and messaging and all that stuff with that.
[00:17:30] Ashley McGovern: So when I was thinking about AI marketing and w- where I want to take this brand to make sure it’s clear to our market, is I wanted to take a very abstract concept like AI and make it more concrete. And a part of that is doing print material. And you’ll, you’ll see if you look at our marketing campaigns, we use a lot of print to make what we do more concrete.
[00:17:56] Ashley McGovern: And I like to think of, um, Steve Jobs because I, look to him obviously and how they were successful. And when thinking about messaging the iPod, they weren’t using MP3 compression algorithms in their messaging. Instead, they made it concrete by saying, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” And so learning from those that have been successful and trying to apply it to AI marketing is really where a lot of these ideas have, have come from
[00:18:27] Lindsey Groepper: and I want to go back to the book for a second. How did you ensure that the book was a company marketing strategy and not just a individual, you know, CEO per like personal brand project?
[00:18:42] Ashley McGovern: For– So yeah, we definitely had to zoom out because I, I wanted to, when building it out, I was thinking of: How can I make this a sales resource? How can CS, client success, get behind this? and then from Nurture Boss’ marketing campaigns, uh, what does that look like? So before even, like, tackling the, the campaign, I actually do a lot of my campaigns this way, where I think of the distribution plan.
[00:19:07] Ashley McGovern: And one of the areas that we wanted to strengthen was our direct mail campaigns for the sales team. And so with thinking about how can we easily send a resource to our top prospects and customers, we think of Amazon. And that’s where we’re like, “Okay, we could easily publish this on Amazon, make it easy to order and send to.”
[00:19:30] Ashley McGovern: And now it’s been a part of our events too. Actually, my sales leader was at a conference yesterday for one of our customers and ordered 30 copies and left there with everybody getting their own copy to learn about AI. So I think a lot of it, to answer your question more directly, is thinking from the lens of our customers in this industry.
[00:19:50] Ashley McGovern: They’re hungry to learn about AI because it isn’t figured out yet in property management. And given we have a CEO that is gung-ho about helping this industry and solve their pain points first, and that’s how he approaches building out certain solutions at Nurture Boss, I always had the understanding and I guess, what would the word be?
[00:20:15] Ashley McGovern: Um, confidence in him that this was gonna be more about Nurture Boss being a thought leader and less about him, because that’s just genuinely him as a person. He’s– This actually made him very uncomfortable to, like, author a book because it’s not his personality as an
[00:20:33] Lindsey Groepper: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. we, uh, at Pam Blast as our clients work with a lot of technical founders, and they are, we call them endearingly awkward. We love them very much. But we have a lot of technical founders, that we have to work with, and it isn’t, you know, it’s, it’s not all of them, but many of them, it is definitely outside of their comfort zone.
[00:20:54] Lindsey Groepper: So you had that layer also to deal with of like, why you need to do it and, you know, what’s this gonna mean for you personally? Like, do you have to be out there a little bit more as the author of, you know, of this book? So I can totally understand that. can you, um, detail us a little bit more about your print strategy?
[00:21:10] Lindsey Groepper: You mentioned direct mail. is that where your sort of print strategy stops and starts, or do you have others, like other formats within that print?
[00:21:19] Ashley McGovern: so p- print strategy when thinking… So I’ll just give a couple of examples because they’re top of mind. I actually just made a LinkedIn post about this. So when thinking of the promotion, I, I brought this up earlier. If I know that we’re gonna do a webinar, I think about the distribution plan first. How can I get people excited about this?
[00:21:36] Ashley McGovern: How can I get people to care about this topic? And what is the best way that I can promote this? And oftentimes, because we’ve established print material as, as a strategy that we wanna take and it’s working for us, I usually think about what print material can I create that would align with this topic.
[00:21:57] Ashley McGovern: So an example would be, we did a webinar where we brought our, AI PropTech competitors together to talk and start to build best practices around how to successfully, measure AI, how to adopt AI, how to roll it out with a change management process. So different topics around that. I was like, “Okay, well, this is happening during lunch, so why don’t I get on Etsy and see if there are any like bagel bags that I can print out?”
[00:22:27] Ashley McGovern: Maybe I can, I can show an example, um, later on. And we ended up printing the, the webinar details onto like a bakery bag that usually you would see a bagel in. And then I ordered those, and that’s what I ended up using to promote the webinar in our campaign. So it’s a picture, obviously. We’re taking pictures, creating content, trying to get some UGC content of other people in our industry promoting it.
[00:22:52] Ashley McGovern: but that’s kind of like a little insight into my thought process because it, it sounds, yes, like I can use the buzzwords to explain like how cool this is, but it’s really, it just starts with like getting the idea and seeing if you can execute it, it with Etsy or Amazon
[00:23:06] Lindsey Groepper: Yeah. Um, and you know, it’s, it’s memorable, right? It’s definitely different. Um, I do want to, to talk a little bit about the measurement side of the house. I mean, you know, there’s some of this stuff is, you know, sounds more top of the funnel, even pre-funnel, you know, brand building. it does take money. It takes investment of time and resources.
[00:23:25] Lindsey Groepper: are your measurements different? Um, I mean, obviously this is not a direct click, ROI pipeline building, um, type of activity. especially when you’re going offline, it’s just harder to track. So what, um, measurement benchmarks do you put in place for more of these non, non-traditional ways of marketing?
[00:23:43] Ashley McGovern: Yeah. So, um, just because we were on the topic of webinars, I, I definitely look at, the typical methods because we still use email marketing. So I’ll look at, um, click-to-open rates. I don’t really care about open rates as much. I want to see if somebody clicked and signed up from our emails, so that’s a big m- benchmark for me.
[00:24:02] Ashley McGovern: registration numbers is a big number for me as well, in terms of webinars. And then if I zoom out and just talk more about like marketing as a whole, in the past when I was at, the other startup I mentioned prior to Nurture Boss, we focused a lot on MQL to SQL conversion rate and, uh, building up that demand gen marketing nurture program, to support that.
[00:24:27] Ashley McGovern: I’ve still started to build out that infrastructure here. We use HubSpot as our CRM. And so I’m looking at those numbers too. I’m not held accountable to them quite yet. But there’s a time when I want my team to be held accountable for marketing influence closed won and closed lost deals and marketing generated closed won and closed lost deals.
[00:24:48] Ashley McGovern: So I think that’s important because that shows how we’re helping build pipeline and demand and then, you know, turning it into potential deals. And if, and if we don’t win those deals, then it gives us some insight into figuring out why that is, and we can, iterate on our messaging. So those are like the high-level numbers I care about.
[00:25:07] Ashley McGovern: From a brand awareness standpoint, that’s all anecdotal feedback, like I mentioned, because this industry like… And that’s so manual. That’s like me taking screenshots of UGC content on LinkedIn of people talking about the book or, our activations at the different conferences. So we’re still building out the infrastructure for that, but it is something top of mind that I want to have a more robust, measurement system around eventually.
[00:25:34] Lindsey Groepper: Yeah. I mean, some of the best, smartest, most well-known marketers that I know, all agree that there’s, you know, a good 20% of your marketing budget that is dedicated to brand that you can attribute no direct ROI, but you know that without it, everything else suffers and that they just– people should just stop trying to measure brand.
[00:25:56] Lindsey Groepper: it’s a cost of doing business. You need it and everything else, everything else decreases without, you know, without brand. And they’ve even like run some tests where like, okay, CEO, like you don’t believe in all these brand activities because it’s not driving direct ROI. Well, let’s cut it and see what happens.
[00:26:10] Lindsey Groepper: And it’s, there’s not an immediate, right, there’s not an immediate like next day, next week, but they start to see after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days that everything else starts to suffer. And so it’s, it’s tough to prove the direct when it’s happening, but without it, it’s really easy to prove what’s missing.
[00:26:30] Lindsey Groepper: so you’re definitely like, you know, not alone. No one has figured out exactly how to, you know, how to measure brand. just know that it all works, you know, all works together. this has been awesome, Ashley. Is there anything on this topic that we didn’t cover that you want to make sure that we tackle today?
[00:26:46] Ashley McGovern: Honestly, I feel like we, we covered just about everything
[00:26:50] Lindsey Groepper: Uh, well, I do end all of my episodes the same way, which is I ask if you have a favorite or signature toast to send us out
[00:26:58] Ashley McGovern: Oh, a s- oh. I would say in the age of AI, what I think marketers should consider is creativity. Creativity is how you will stand out, and being able to tell your story and the stories that you can execute on for said company, whether you’re being hired or you’re at the company, to think of how you can stay bold with your marketing campaigns and use your humanness in the age of AI to, help yourself stand out
[00:27:32] Lindsey Groepper: Well then we will say here’s to creativity.
[00:27:36] Ashley McGovern: Here’s to creativity.
[00:27:37] Lindsey Groepper: that one. Thanks so much for joining me
[00:27:40] Ashley McGovern: Thank you. This was so fun. Appreciate it
[00:27:43] Lindsey Groepper: You bet.
[00:27:43] Lindsey Groepper: Thanks again to Ashley for joining me on SaaS Half Full.
[00:27:46] Lindsey Groepper: That was a really interesting conversation. it strikes me that I was referring to some of these marketing techniques as non-traditional when actually they used to be super traditional, but now it’s gone the other way. I hope you took a few things away from that conversation, specifically if you are marketing to a niche audience like Ashley.
[00:28:04] Lindsey Groepper: We always appreciate the listen, and until next time, bottoms up.