"You Have To Create Content For Every Touchpoint In The Buyer's Journey!"

Anu Ramani is the founder of agency Isoline Communications Limited - a B2B Tech Marketing agency.

In this conversation we discuss:

• The importance of creating content for every touchpoint in the buyer's journey, from basic information search to in-depth technical content
• The power of generative AI to enhance productivity and innovation in marketing
• the need for curiosity and experimentation in B2B marketing

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Previous guests include: Arvid Kahl of FeedbackPanda, Andrei Zinkevich of FullFunnel, Scott Van den Berg of Influencer Capital, Buster Franken of Fruitpunch AI, Valentin Radu of Omniconvert, Evelina Necula of Kinderpedia, Ionut Vlad of Tokinomo, Diana Florescu of MediaforGrowth, Irina Obushtarova of Recursive, Monika Paule of Caszyme, Yannick Veys of Hypefury, Laura Erdem of Dreamdata, and Pija Indriunaite of CityBee.

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Transcript

Eric M. (00:02.088)
recording, it's just better for the audio quality in his editing.

Anu Ramani (00:06.542)
Do you do like a podcast a week or what's the kind of recording schedule that you follow?

Eric M. (00:11.688)
Yeah, usually it's once a week. I've been doing this for about three years and I only interview European, usually marketers or founders. And this is this season I'm focused on the UK. And so I'll probably interview 20 to 25 people in the UK. And so when I learned about you, the first thing I checked was, well, where is she based? Cause if you weren't in the UK, I would have said, no, thank you. But you're in the UK. So you lucked out.

Anu Ramani (00:39.886)
Lucky me!

Eric M. (00:42.6)
Okay, all right. Well, let's get started. I'm gonna open this up. Are you ready?

Anu, welcome to Innovators Can Laugh. How are you doing today?

Anu Ramani (00:51.694)
Not too bad, thank you, thank you for having me, Eddie.

Eric M. (00:54.312)
my pleasure. For those who don't know you, who are you and why should people listen to you?

Anu Ramani (01:00.014)
I am a marketing buff. I have traveled widely. I have worked with tech B2B clients in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, in Nigeria, and now I have my own agency. And I hope that some of my experiences add value.

Eric M. (01:20.392)
Okay, okay. Before we dive into that, into your experience, I got a few rapid fire questions. Just give me the first thing that pops into your head. The first one is, what is the craziest thing you ever did to either make money or save money?

Anu Ramani (01:36.142)
Anu Ramani (01:40.303)
I once dressed in a chicken suit for a pitch that did not go well.

Eric M. (01:42.92)
Hehehehe

Eric M. (01:47.408)
It was a client pitch and you were the client was

Anu Ramani (01:51.086)
Yeah, it was a client pitch and yeah, we thought it would be stand out and impressive and believe me it was stand out, it's just that it didn't sway the decision in any way at all.

Eric M. (02:05.832)
How long were you in that chicken suit? Okay.

Anu Ramani (02:07.854)
Just 20 minutes, but it was excruciating.

Eric M. (02:11.912)
Okay, okay. I haven't heard that one before, Anu. So that's dedication. That's commitment though. You got to get some points on the desire to win. I give you that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Next question for you. What's the best advice your mom or dad ever gave you?

Anu Ramani (02:14.862)
Hahaha!

Anu Ramani (02:21.102)
I'm alright.

Anu Ramani (02:29.83)
That was my dad and he said try your best to rise to the top whatever you do. I haven't told him about the chicken soup.

Eric M. (02:39.048)
Okay. All right. Last rapid fire question for you. I grew up in blank, the name of the city. And my favorite thing about that city is blank. Fill in the blanks.

Anu Ramani (02:50.958)
Okay, I grew up in Chennai, which is a city in the southeast of India. And my favorite thing about the city is its beautiful long golden sand beaches.

Eric M. (03:02.728)
Golden sandwiches? sand. Okay, nice. Nice. All right, right. So prior to launching your own agency, which is Isoline Communications, can you tell us a little bit about your background? And I know you were an associate director with a couple of other agencies before that, but I think you have a very interesting background because you lived in quite a few places. Is that correct?

Anu Ramani (03:04.014)
sand beaches.

Anu Ramani (03:27.15)
That's correct, I've been quite lucky. So I started my career selling watches in India, and I rapidly learned that life in sales was not for me. And then I moved into advertising. I was always the kind of person who, back in the day, I used to flip through magazines and stop at the ads. I used to enjoy the commercial breaks in any show. I used to love advertising and marketing, and I knew that I would end up there in some way.

So I then joined J Walton Thompson and then I moved to Singapore where I joined the Codion Communications Group and that's when I entered tech. I started working on the Nokia business. Do you remember the banana phone and the flip phone? It was that era of when the cell phone was just becoming ubiquitous and I handled a Nokia business in 13 countries. So.

We were rolling out content, we were rolling out collaterals, materials, point of sale, all that sort of thing for 13 countries across Asia Pacific. And after that, I never moved out of tech. I worked on SAP, I worked on Singtel Mobile, Cisco, then I moved to Hong Kong and continued with tech degree. And this time I was poached into PR. So that became another sort of area of exposure for me. And then I moved to the UK and again continued. I found it's quite a transferable skill set.

So if you understand tech and you can talk tech B2B, you tend to be able to move those skills around the world. So yeah, here I am. And at some point I thought, I need to find something a little bit more dynamic and growth oriented than PR because I felt that PR was kind of stagnating. It was the same thing again and again. And content marketing was just taking off and it was just what back in the day used to be called below the line.

advertising and so I got into it and I told myself in five years if you're having fun and making money I didn't set myself a target I just didn't want to be losing money so in five years if I'm having fun and making money I'll try it for another five years and that's how I talked myself into becoming an entrepreneur and yeah here I am it's been nine years and I'm still having fun.

Eric M. (05:37.672)
Okay.

Eric M. (05:43.112)
Alright, you almost doubled the period that you gave yourself. It's been almost 10 years, so good for you.

Anu Ramani (05:47.118)
no, at five years I thought, yes, I'm having fun and making money. So now I'm going to try for another five years. I'll ask myself the same question next year.

Eric M. (05:52.348)
Okay, now I've read somewhere that you said you've made every mistake in the book and I thought maybe there's a couple of stories that you wouldn't mind sharing. You kind of gave us a sneak peek about your chicken costume pitch. You can elaborate on that or maybe there's another story that was kind of a mistake on your part.

Anu Ramani (06:08.75)
Ha ha ha.

Anu Ramani (06:15.982)
Okay, let me think which mistake to share today. I think one of the...

I would call it a mistake, but something I wish I had done sooner, right, was I wish I had backed myself to hire people sooner. I spent a really long time questioning my business model and thinking, is this viable? Is there a market? Is this, okay, I've done really well this year, but is this going to continue next year or was this a flat in the pan? Somehow I felt becoming an entrepreneur on my own was easy.

compared to the pressure I put on myself when it came to hiring people. And I thought, do I back myself to put bread on somebody else's table? I just made it so big in my head. And obviously, you know, you can do so much more when you have a team. And now we are 18, 20 people. And I just wish I had done that a little earlier and expanded our abilities and offering a bit earlier.

rather than waiting for two or three years before I even decide, okay, I think I'm going to start writing.

Eric M. (07:25.8)
Yeah. And tell us about the team. Are they all full -time employees? Are they remote? Are they all based in the UK? How does that look?

Anu Ramani (07:31.726)
It's a mix. So the vast majority are based in the UK and we go into the office twice a week. So hybrid like everybody else, we have some people based in, you know, France and then further out in other parts of the UK. So they come in less frequently, but when they do come in, it's a big occasion. We all have a lovely time. Yeah, but that's the morning. Most people work full time, but obviously there are people who prefer, you know, part -time or have small children and then we just work around that.

Eric M. (08:02.312)
Okay, okay. Now tell us about the niche. I know you primarily focus in tech and B2B. And are there specific industries like electronics or something like that?

Anu Ramani (08:13.166)
Okay, telecoms is our sweet spot. There's literally not a part of the telecom ecosystem that we don't know inside out. Go as deep as you want into the network, go, we are there. IT services, very strong. Cyber security, very, very strong. So yeah, I think we haven't done much competent stuff like chipsets and antennas and...

you know, whatever, but we do agri tech as well. I mean, the thing about being tech P2P, right, is that a lot of the learnings you get from say telecoms are very applicable to broadcast, which is another field that we have a number of clients in. And what's applicable, you can take it into the decision making process. You know, the fact it's not linear, it's more like a, you know, a ball of string where you have a number of subcommittees and influencers and so on. It's not like you talk to one person who talks to the next, you know.

and as a field that's evolving. And now we are talking to Gen Zs who are now your B2B purchasers because they're all like 27, 28 and they are part of the process. So knowing how that works makes it very easy for us to get up to speed and you know, it just becomes, I always say it's easy to find clients, it's hard to find people.

Eric M. (09:31.656)
Okay. Now regarding the buyer's journey, because like you said, it's sort of all over the place. It's not linear. Are you and your agency, are you guys producing content at all the various touch points in a typical buyer's journey?

Anu Ramani (09:41.902)
Yeah, every single touch point, yes. So, and especially with a lot of tech PDB companies who have a purchase cycle of a year, right? The deal value, the ticket value is in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. Therefore, that purchase cycle lasts anywhere between, I don't know, 10 months to one and a half years. And how do you keep your prospects engaged? You can't keep saying, hey, can we have a meeting?

Eric M. (09:46.536)
Wow, wow.

Anu Ramani (10:08.462)
Hey, are you ready for that call? Hey, you can't, you have to reward people for their attention. So if I send you an email and I don't want you to be irritated with me, I better make very, very sure that that email gives you somebody. It either puts a smile on your face, tells you something you don't know, offers you something you don't have, right? Every touch point. And that's where content works because, you know, let's face it, that's basically digital is where all communication is now.

Eric M. (10:38.472)
Right. And how is your team structured, your agency structure? Do you have, and I'm taking a guess here, but do you have certain team members that really focus on a specific point of the buyer's journey? Or do you have some team members that are really focused on the channel and they're experts in that specific channel and they know where in the buyer's journey that they should operate?

Anu Ramani (10:59.31)
Okay, it's a very, we are too small for hardcore specialization. So it's kind of like a matrix structure. We certainly have team members. We have two or three people who just know telecoms. A few like teams who know IT services, who know broadcast extremely well so that they understand the tech because you have to learn the tech really quickly when you join, you know, when you get a new client.

And then we also have team members who are really strong at social media. We have a team member who just does memes, like just amazing memes. So our meme game is really strong at times. Some who are really strong on long form content, you know, some people who do interactive content really well and who can work out that, you know, that super dynamic reader journey in their heads, better than others. So we tend to bring people together for different projects. Does that make sense?

Eric M. (11:52.488)
Okay, I guess given your experience working in the telecom industry, are there certain content formats that really work well, like at the top of the funnel and other formats that work in the mid funnel? I'm taking a guess here, but are memes really good for the telecom foams at the top of the funnel?

Anu Ramani (12:11.182)
I think memes are, yeah, that kind of silly, silly content, right? It's just, it helps keeping, to keep conversations going. It's good for newsletters, it's good for, so there are places you can use it, where people are just in a light mindset. Definitely as you go deeper and deeper into the funnel, the content, more and more technical content works. More implementation level, very practical level kind of content works. The length and the form factor of the content is not important.

It's the content of the content, right? So at the early part of the bio cycle, you want to be talking about, you want to be answering basic information search, right? I want to launch a travel sim offer, or I want to launch a new analytics platform for my streaming video service. How do I do it? What do I need to know about it? Because there'd be somebody within the client who has been tasked with go and do, you know, go and.

implement this campaign. So the first thing that person will do is Google. So you better be there when that person is doing his information search and you better answer it at that point he is not ready for a factory. He wants so you that's how you have to think how how do I narrow my process if I were buying this product how would I go about it and then start thinking in that manner whether you do it through a white paper or a video or an interactive ebook it doesn't.

It doesn't really...

I think that would depend on the campaign itself. But it's more higher level to in -depth content. That would be a rule of thumb by a lot.

Eric M. (13:53.096)
I've read somewhere that TikTok is competing with Google in terms of like the search, the number of search queries. Do you have somebody on your team? Are you guys also doing TikTok as well? Are you trying to be present there?

Anu Ramani (14:06.414)
At this stage, we are still exploring the potential of TikTok as a channel for tech B2B campaigns. There is an employer brand story in there. And we are, I mean, we have a TikTok account. We are just experimenting with it like most tech, most companies in the B2B space. At this stage, we haven't yet launched any TikTok campaigns.

Eric M. (14:33.096)
Okay. Isn't it crazy?

Anu Ramani (14:34.19)
But I see the power of it, especially when all these TikTok users who are at a younger demographic, as they go up and become part of the purchase cycle, are they still going to be doing information search there? In that case, we need to start atomizing content into that TikTok form factor.

Eric M. (14:54.632)
Yeah. Yeah. My son, he's barely seven years old, but he's so excited that we bought him. Well, he was at the grocery store and he saw Mr. Beast chocolate candy bar. This is in Bucharest, Romania. This is not like in Chicago, Illinois. This isn't in Romania, Eastern Europe. His friends at school are talking about Mr. Beast. He's never seen a Mr. Beast video, but when he saw the Mr. Beast chocolate at the candy store, he practically begged us to buy it, buy the chocolate.

And it's just crazy how, how brands now are have gone from like a really mass media push where you think TV commercials, outdoor advertising, and now it's kind of like coming very personal into a YouTube channels like, you know, Tik TOK and YouTube. Isn't that, isn't that crazy? I mean, 15 years ago, it was a different world when it comes to B2B marketing versus today. So when you're, when you're trying to recruit talent,

to join your agency, what are some of the things that you're looking for that's going to be right for your clients, the right fit?

Anu Ramani (16:03.086)
Actually, the one thing I look for personally is curiosity, which, you know, wanting to learn about technology and as a finding it enriching to understand how that little part of your world works. Why, when you turn on Netflix, do you have a home screen that looks different to my home screen? And learning the analytics that goes behind it. And you have a moment.

That little moment in your day when you think, I know something I didn't know before. And if you find that enriching, you're the right fit for us. Apart from that, yeah, this whole attitude of wanting to learn and be more curious, and we try to have as many people from as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible, because then you get the different perspectives and different ways of looking at problems.

Eric M. (16:54.6)
Yeah, no, it's the personalization on Netflix. And I actually get an idea of what my sister -in -law is watching because she uses her password. And so I log it to my account, I'm like, she already saw this. And I guess she saw the whole series, so it must be good. Yeah, yeah, it's a little, it's a little confused, confusing sometimes, because I see the recommended shows and it shows I would never watch, but it's there. Okay, what?

Anu Ramani (17:06.99)
Your homepage must be pretty confused. Let's try to cater to you and her.

Anu Ramani (17:20.846)
Well, I went on Amazon earlier this week and I was going into it for the first time ever. So I was buying cycling shorts and I was looking and I picked something based on ratings and what have you. And it told me that based on analytics of millions of purchases and searches, we think you should buy a size And I was like, wow, okay, I've not seen that before. Interesting.

Eric M. (17:44.584)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, I, I read something about target that there's like 32 different items. And if they know that if somebody purchase, several of these, these items, then they know that they're pregnant and, they start serving direct mail.

Anu Ramani (17:59.598)
Yeah, then Pampas will start sending in his letters. Yeah. Yeah. I'll put that as well.

Eric M. (18:03.24)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now what, in your opinion, what should B2B marketers be doing today if they're going to succeed tomorrow? I knew.

Anu Ramani (18:13.006)
I think that everybody should be experimenting with generative AI right now and see where it takes you, whether it's ChatGPT or some other platform. Everybody should be and is exploring how that can make our jobs more productive, more innovative. At this moment, I can't think of any way that...

Actually human expertise and insight can be substituted, but there are so many other ways by which I think generative AI is going to transform marketing. And I think everybody should be thinking about it. I don't have any answers yet, but I'm looking at it as well.

Eric M. (18:54.696)
In terms of output and creativity, have you guys seen big gains by using chat GPT or other AI tools within your agency?

Anu Ramani (19:04.142)
At this moment, no. So if you look at productivity gains, you just measure it by the amount of time that you spend doing a piece of content, right? So we have found that for content as deep as ours, where you need so much of expertise and insight, it's not broadly freely available on the internet. Therefore, we have to, I mean, what we get is lots of words, lots and lots of words.

And that basically just goes against our very principles where, I mean, something I keep saying in the agencies, say as much as you can in as few words as you can. And ChatGPD is not able to do that for us yet. So we haven't yet found it, but that doesn't mean that we can take our eye off that ball. We need to keep looking at it because it's only getting smarter and regulations are changing, like all those illegal implications and so on.

Eric M. (19:57.48)
Okay.

Anu Ramani (19:57.87)
No answers, it's all in flux at the moment.

Eric M. (20:01.832)
All right, now you're the agency owner and you've got a large team, close to 20 people. Do you miss getting into the weeds and being that sort of like that individual contributor? What's your superpower Anu?

Anu Ramani (20:09.678)
Very much. Very much.

Eric M. (20:19.784)
Is it the actual copywriting?

Anu Ramani (20:24.174)
It is.

Anu Ramani (20:27.854)
It's just through sheer hours of practice, years of experience, I find it...

I find that I'm able to understand client problems really easily. Not really easily, but I'm able to understand client problems well. And I'm able to apply insight and transfer ideas from other clients to solve them. I think that is just not a superpower at all. But maybe the answer is I don't have one.

Eric M. (21:02.056)
Yeah. Okay. And before we wrap up, what have you shared with your kids in terms of, in terms of like how you operate and manage your business or have they been involved whatsoever? Have they been in any sort of meetings?

Anu Ramani (21:14.862)
my God, they are so proud. They're so proud. They're not allowed anywhere near any meetings. I imagine it would be horrific for them, me and all my colleagues if my children started working with me. But they're always like, they are real cheerleaders. Honestly, we talk about parents being proud of children. Children being proud of parents is as visceral and powerful.

Eric M. (21:40.711)
Okay. Have you?

Anu Ramani (21:41.294)
Yeah, and wherever they can help, they help. They do like everybody. I mean, my kids always say it's a rite of passage that everybody has to do my filing at home because it will all be in this big thing. And I'm like, everybody, yeah, you can file all my bank statements.

Eric M. (21:49.8)
Hehehehehe

Eric M. (21:54.44)
Okay. And there any specific qualities, that you've tried to instill in them as a business owner, because you know, for one thing you got, you got to sell. I mean, maybe not so much now, maybe you've got a great pipeline of customers, but in the beginning you had to sell yourself and your services. I'm just wondering if there was something that you tried to, give them a little bit of experience as they were, as they were growing up, maybe you told them, Hey, go do that lemonade stand and try to sell some lemonade.

I'm just guessing here. I want to know as a parent, as a business owner, what did you try to instill in your kids if you, if you tried to instill anything.

Anu Ramani (22:32.11)
Good, very, very good question. I was, and when you were asking, I was just trying to think about it. And I think in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, work your ass off is the one thing I keep telling them. They don't like to hear it, but yeah, I haven't talked to them much about it. Some people are just not made for selling, you know, some people just don't like it. They are doers, not sellers. So there is, so I don't know what my kids are going to be or, you know, indeed.

Eric M. (22:46.952)
Hahaha!

Anu Ramani (23:01.006)
anyone who joins Iceland, right? Where will they fit? But wherever you are or whatever your expertise or your route is, don't shirk the work. If you don't put the work in, you can't become good at it. That's the long and short of it.

Eric M. (23:17.736)
Okay. Anu Ramani, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure.

Anu Ramani (23:23.47)
Thank you. So delightful to chat actually. Thank you.

Eric M. (23:26.696)
Yeah, yeah, for everybody listening, I'm going to include links to Anu Ramani's website as well as her LinkedIn profile. And I'll be back next week with another innovator from the UK. If you enjoyed this, hit that subscribe button and tell others abroad it. That's how we go. Thank you very much.