How to Build Brand in B2B with Marissa Kraines, VP and Head of Marketing at Webflow | Ep. 389

0:01Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. And today I have Marissa on the podcast. She's the VP of brand marketing at Webflow or head of brand marketing. And we're going to - All the above. All the above. Multiple things. She probably has other titles we don't know about, but we're going to talk about B2B world building, how to push the limits of B2B, and she's doing some cool things at Webflow.

0:56So we're excited to chat. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm stoked to be here. I want to just start. How did you get into marketing? Yeah, I think that my path into marketing was kind of natural in that I was always creative. I was always kind of a go-getter wanting to build things. Even in high school, I was part of the newspaper writing about the music industry. In college, people would ask me what I studied, and I'd say not very much or very often because I had 10 internships in the music industry, trying everything across marketing, booking bands, management, but was always focused on how do I connect with audiences?

1:40How do I help the people that I work with connect with audiences? And when it really comes down to in marketing, it is that connection. It is bringing people together. It's creating emotional connection. And so it kind of just built from there. And it was never an official like, oh, you're a marketer. But that path and that focus on the connection with people led me into marketing and having titles that were very specific to marketing. We talked a little bit about this behind the scenes, but we want to talk about world building. And when people think about world building, you think about like the Marvels, the Disneys.

2:17But what does world building mean in a B2B context? For me, it doesn't mean anything different. I mean, when we think about B2B, I like to say like if you're in social media and you're scrolling on your phone, are you a different human because you work in B2B marketing? Or are you the same human that you were when you're at home with your family or playing with your pets? And so I don't like to think of it as B2B. I like to think of it as P2P. It's people to people no matter what you're doing. So while I am building marketing organizations for B2B work, you still have to think about how you relate to humans.

2:58And you have to build worlds where people can connect. And so when I'm building worlds, I'm thinking about campaigns as larger than just a single moment. Our most recent campaign, we're calling it the AI guy, owning your narrative. And it's the start of something larger. So we are showcasing a liminal space where AI is actually humanified. I think that's the word. He's made into a human AI guy. And he is like the voice of what goes wrong with AI. And this is the start of something larger. We think about the characters that we can build within this liminal space that are representing other issues people are having with technology across the board and how well Blow can fix that.

3:46And the reason I get really excited about having this world within this liminal space is that it's ownable. It's something that I can say, we own this liminal space. And every time that we bring character to life in that, our audiences and new audiences can recognize it. They can recognize that these people are living in a similar space. We don't necessarily need to rebuild that initial narrative of where they are. And so it allows us to do a lot more further down the road because we don't always have to rebuild and retell the story at the beginning. I was at Salesforce for about 12 years, and they did this incredibly well with their characters.

4:22It started with a single character, Astro, who was a representation of the practitioners at Salesforce. And they built it into a world of characters. It was the Salesforcelandia. And each different type of practitioner had a character that represented them. And people felt so connected to these characters. We saw tattoos. We saw haircuts with designs of these characters. We saw everything. People were so connected to this world. And they felt that it not only defined what they were doing in their work world, but it helped them define themselves and how they were going to further their careers.

4:55And so seeing that world really inspired me to build them for my future career. So I know Salesforce built this world over time and it's crazy and it comes like in product, in IRL, on social, everywhere. But let's go back to you just came to Webflow six months ago. Like where do you even start with a world building? I mean, do you start with the character? Do you start with, because even like Salesforce example, you have to have a multiple parts of the business barred in, like product, like sales, everybody needs to be built in. So how, where does this all start building this, this AI guy and how does that work?

5:44Ah, so I launched the AI guy campaign on my four month anniversary. So I'm about four and a half months in right now, uh, almost five. But I think that I was looking at a lot of what we were doing at Webflow in terms of brand, and it wasn't necessarily breaking through. And I was given some incremental budget in my second quarter at the company and said, go, do something. And I think the freedom that's allowed when you're new is special. It's something I haven't had in a really long time. So it was definitely very special to have that trust and that being like, hey, you can break some things, you can try some things.

6:20And one of the things I first did was not breaking things. It was tried and true. I brought in an agency that I've been working with. I worked with for years at Salesforce called New Motion. and I kind of, we really thought about what are the insights that we have around AEO, which is answer engine optimization, and what people are kind of dealing with because of how we're now searching. It's not SEM anymore. It's not SEO. It's people are searching on anyone, ChatGVT or Claude or any of these. And so we were like, okay, so what's happening in the search? What is the insight that people are actually experiencing that we can bring into kind of a human fold?

7:08And New Motion is just such a great partner, and we were able to go back and forth with them. And again, I had that buy-in initially from my CMO, who's, he's left me be autonomous, but he also asks some really great questions, and we definitely worked hard with him to make sure that we are kind of positioning it honestly about what our product does for ADO, but also in a way that it connects to that emotional experience. The buy-in that I had to get across the board for building this was, you know, as a new person, it was definitely kind of bringing along the executive team. It wasn't a surprise to our CEO when these came out.

7:45They had kind of been primed along the way. And we were very thoughtful around how we did create like a feedback loop. and that included a feedback loop for the script. It included a feedback loop for the revisions. But I also, again, had that autonomy to make a lot of the decisions upfront. You know, I was like, I want this AI guy to be part of me, but like, I want him to be punchable. I want to like, I don't want him to be, I want him to be kind of that intern that has all the confidence in the world. Initially, we were thinking of Cousin Greg as like the inspiration from Succession, Like someone that just comes up to the podium and like he says what he's going to say.

8:27And like he doesn't care if it's right or wrong. He's just like, I'm confident that this is what we have. And that's kind of how I think about AI in a lot of ways, unless you're really creating an environment for them to have the right information. So definitely brought along the e-staff and was able to get that buy-off. But also really, I'm not going to lie, took advantage of being new and trying new things and pushing the limits. yeah and i also think i mean obviously you came from a place where it's worked and you have prior experience where you could prove hey this did this this did this this lefted the say bookings or pipeline or influence revenue it's not like it's a different company it's a different but it's kind of cool because you get a start from all the learnings you've learned over being in Salesforce for so long and then piece them together to make this world.

9:23I want to ask, why do you think B2B companies get stuck with not doing stuff like this? I know it's a, why aren't more B2B companies world building? You see Salesforce, but you can, like on your hand, you can't name, I couldn't name five companies that are in B2B are trying to world build right now. I think it's not just world building, but it's bringing, like it's creating, making tech kind of human and how we think about it and how we talk about it. I think that a lot of people think that you need to give a, especially at the brand level, they still think you need to give a demo. You need to do a full product demo for someone to care about your product.

10:03And that for me is, it like hurts my soul when they're saying top of the funnel, right? When people don't even know your name yet, you need to give them a full demo. And again, where are they discovering you? They're discovering you in AI search and they're discovering you in social media. No one wants an eight minute product demo in social media. They're not going to follow you. So when you're thinking about building content for, for discovery, you have to stop them in their tracks. You need to actually build humor. You don't need to show exactly what the product does. That is why you create a full funnel of content and a full funnel of marketing because they know your name.

10:43they're interested, they stop, they're much more likely to go and learn more. They're not trying to get, create, understand the entire world of your product on social media. And they're not trying to understand all of the abilities of a product when they don't even know if they need the product yet. They don't, they're not even in the market. I mean, LinkedIn's B2B Institute is like one of my favorites to quote, but when it comes to brand, they say it's a 95-5 rule. So 95 % of your buyers are not in market yet. Only 5 % are. So if you only focus on that 5 % and give them like, here's exactly what our product does at the top of the funnel, you're missing the long game.

11:21You're missing the ability to build your business for the long terms. You want to be top of mind and you're competing with kittens and babies and politics in your timeline. So if you're not standing out and you're not creating something that is relatable and people are actually interested in stopping and looking at, you're missing a huge audience that can be your future buyers. One thing that I actually, I worked really closely with Colin Fleming at Salesforce, and he is now the CMO at ServiceNow, and I see them world building. And I'm like, I wonder if I kind of helped inspire that from conversations I've had with this team and work that we'd done at Salesforce, because they're also saying, hey, these are the humans that are interacting with your product.

12:06And yes, they have Idris Elba as the main guy within these commercials, within this content. So that's definitely a reason to stop your thumb on a piece of content. But then they're building out these other characters that represent the users of their product and the situations that they're going through and really building out what are their concerns? What are their comments? What are the reasons that they are actually interested in ServiceNow and how ServiceNow is actually helping them? So I'm seeing it more and more. It's exciting. And it also just like creates a larger group of characters that you can play with.

12:41And like, you don't have to just consider a single character, a single element, a single campaign, it can be built out over years, it can create familiarity. And it goes back to that 95 % of people that are not in market yet, if they're familiar, once they get into market, you're the first in their mind. So you have AI guy, like what is the strategy to start getting him into parts of campaigns, parts of channels, parts of ads? Like how, how do you set that up for, so you have this character. Now I want to start adding, making sure the character is in our world, in our assets, in our product. What is the checklist for that?

13:24Is it a slow build into different places as a fast build? Like how does, how does a character get introduced in a way that feels natural and easy and human? Well, I think that first part is we had, we actually created, I think it was like 37 assets with new motion, which is kind of insane. And we're using them across paid media and organic as well. But we were also not just thinking video sizing. We were thinking about what are the memes that we can create from this? We work closely with our social team to be like, how are we utilizing stills from this? How are we creating memes from this? How are we creating this an ongoing part of our community management across all of our social touch points as well?

14:10future we're definitely thinking about how do we build out additional characters for our additional product releases and kind of have that reference back we used a actor named richie moriarty who is an incredible improv artist but he also is in the show ghosts if you've seen that he was in he's been in a bunch of different things but he is hilarious again he's filming ghosts they're on all the time so i'm not going to be able to use him in every single area but we're thinking about how do we build in that character while maybe not exactly him into things like our events. We have a big user conference in September and we're thinking about how do we create photo opportunities?

14:53How do we create interactive opportunities that use that character? And they really allow people to identify and have takeaways that are kind of built off of the character. So both visually and in interactive content using him. So we're definitely looking at all our touch points and all of our kind of the ecosystem of content that we're going to be putting out into the world and how we use him, but also how we use the idea of him, the idea of an AI guy, that confident intern that may not have everything right, but it's going to come to the table like he does. So I want to take us a step back too and say, like, as a brand person, what are your thoughts about where AI is at, where AI is going?

15:38Because, I mean, you must have thoughts because the AI guy is kind of like the people who are pushing the limits too far with AI and not being human and being robotic. So what are your thoughts on the current state of AI? Where do you think it's going, especially from like a brand lens? Okay. So I'm just going to say it. I love AI as a partner. I don't think that it can be that final output. It's definitely someone that I work with. Again, it's like a human to me. Claude's my buddy. I'm like working with Claude all the time, giving him feedback. We're going back and forth. And so I think that it's actually been so exciting and so helpful to kind of have that.

16:21But I think in general, there are notable ways that AI has been going too far. I think I just saw that there is a Super Bowl commercial that's like built completely on AI. And that is actually a press piece that they're putting out into the world and they're showcasing it. I don't know if I could say that AI is necessarily a shortcut though. And I think that that's something that people are a little bit afraid of. It's like people are just going to use AI and there's not going to be a human in the loop. And I see when people, it's notable when people do that. You see the copy, you say, okay, no one came back and read that.

16:57They just put it out into the world. And it is so obvious that it becomes a big detriment to people that do that. So I think that as long as there's a human in the loop and you're having a conversation and you're going back and forth and you're reading what's being written or seeing what's being showcased and giving feedback, it becomes not a, it's not a shortcut, but it's also, it's not human free. And from a brand perspective, I mean, we use it all the time. One of the things that really excites me actually is in like surveying. We of course want to survey and see how our content is doing. We want to get a lot of information on how our brand is doing overall.

17:38And yes, we can do a large Qualtrics survey with humans, but there's also synthetic AI surveying now. They have synthetic humans that can relate and be part of your survey. It's a lot less expensive, and you can do it a lot more often. So I think that that's a really cool way that AI is being used to actually measure how your brand work is doing. Yeah, I think, I mean, like you said, as a partner, I mean, a lot of us don't want to take – like there's a lot of things to read over there's a lot of data coming in and to even have like a quick way to summarize and and take out what ai thinks is the key takeaway versus what i think is the key takeaway and also because now as a brand team you can sift through all a lot more touch points than you did before um before you had to go through everything manually get a spreadsheet maybe hire some interns or someone to go through it and clean it up and it's just this whole but now you could just feed something through ai get common messaging points comment something it's just so much better to have it but i do agree it's just that i always say you can't teach taste and a human's taste yes i'm like high five on that one it's like that's the biggest thing you can't teacher it's it's so hard and also like someone who's been in brand a long time will know what looks good for brand someone in social a long time would look what is good for sure someone in content who's written for a long time knows what good writing looks like you need that that extra eye to know hey this doesn't look right this doesn't look yeah this and you need this doesn't it won't hit on social because i've tried tested make a meme idea here versus a meme idea here and i would say 90 of the time my meme idea beats ai and i'm trying hard to beat myself um which is because i think it's just taking things that's already on the internet instead of coming up with original thoughts and um so i think i'm excited for the days where it does get more and more better but i think the taste element is still not something that could be taught A million percent.

19:53And even when you are using like Figma AI or Canva, you still have to decide, do I like this? Do I need to keep going and keep working through it and keep on? It's not quite at a place that is good enough. Um, Canva and, and Figma buzz are great to have like easy creation, but again, you have to know, like, is it just easy or is it good? Like, uh, you can, uh, I'm like so on board with the idea that like taste matters more than ever. I really think more than ever it, it matters. Um, one thing I, it's like, I don't know about you, but like so many marketers I know, including myself, it's like, my brain is just going a million miles an hour.

20:33So I'll just like type out like every thought in my head in Claude. I'm like, can you organize this and make it make sense? Okay, thanks. And it's like, especially when I'm like giving feedback for creative, for written, for anything, I will just like, I'll take my notes, my feedback notes in Claude, and then they'll come back and they'll be like, here's what you actually meant. And here is what you can share that can be useful. And as someone that like has a lot going on, my brain is everywhere. Like that That has been just so helpful. One thing I wonder is, how do you measure world building?

21:10What are the points that you look at to show that AI guy is a success versus a failure? So the guy says less the world building yet, because we're still in the process of building. We just have this one guy in the liminal space and a few different characters coming in. But, I mean, we are really working on measuring pipeline. Initially, we did a lot of paid media for this. So if you see it on your TV when you're watching anything on like Paramount or Peacock. So not only are we measuring pipeline, we're measuring like click throughs into our website and usage. We have an AEO assessment on our webpage, which is like you put in your website and you're like, how are we doing on AEO?

21:54And we give you feedback. So those kinds of measurements of people actually doing that. But we are working on surveys. We are doing brand surveys and it's something we're creating a kind of a baseline in this quarter and then we'll be building it off of that. But my goal coming in was to build brand. And I think one thing about Webflow that's really interesting is that it's been around a while. It's still a startup, but it's been around a while and it has a reputation. Like there's definitely people, a lot of people in the creative world know Webflow because they use it to build their portfolios.

22:24And so they think of it as maybe it's similar to like a Wix or a Squarespace. And the truth is that we're not. We are much more in competition with AEM and WordPress. So my job is not only to build the brand, but it's to change the brand narrative that it is an enterprise product. And so I'm being measured on how not only is the brand known, but is it known as an enterprise grade product? So those are the things that we are measuring for in like with Qualtrics and with other surveys. And it's kind of also showcasing that we are doing a production grade campaign and we're not just doing something like simple.

23:05And so having that be across your TV screens and your social across the board is like hopefully showcasing to people like we not only understand the issues that people are going through because of AI search and how it's changed, how people are kind of building their websites and how people are getting referenced on these. But also like we take ourselves seriously in a funny way. Like we take our humor seriously and that we actually are really moving up market. one thing i know at salesforce and i at webflow as well as you both have a lot of partners that help like with webflow and and salesforce they have a lot of partners so how how does that work when you have a lot of external people talking about webflow versus intern like how does the brand team work to get that message out to these partners to make sure that they are on the same page as well and get them excited about what you're building.

24:03You know what? We have an incredible partner team. We have both a partner team and a partner marketing team. And honestly, you're absolutely right. Our agencies are like one of the biggest ways that we are, that we sell, we go to market. As noted, like we are not a Wix, we're not a Squarespace. It does, you do need professionals to build your website in this, in, in web flow. So having agency partners be there and build that, build, be like, they're selling Webflow for us because like we build in Webflow and we are, so it's like a two-way street there. So we definitely are working closely with our partner marketing team to make sure that we are providing them all the necessary assets.

24:43I think one thing that's interesting is we are actually working with specific B2B influencers that are focused on agencies. And so we are working with folks that are speaking directly to agencies. One that we're working with is called Breaking and Entering. And they're agency guys that have like humor, that they're like very humor forward in their content. And their content for us is built specifically to speak to agencies. And so we want to provide them with as much information as possible. We want to make sure that they know that we care about them. We also want to represent their work as much as possible.

25:24But we also just, we recognize that it's not necessarily the same message. They don't want the message that, hey, Webflow is easy to use because their job is to make Webflow. And if it's too easy to use, they're not necessary. You don't see the Wix and Squarespace's partnering as much with agencies because that's not necessary. So agencies are not that we need to like alter and like our messaging when we're speaking to them because they need to know that their value is still in building those websites. And also one of the common threads I'm hearing from what you said throughout this conversation is the element of humor.

26:03And I just want to know how that plays and why should more B2B brands include humor? And what are your thoughts on how it should be included in marketing to feel authentic to your brand, to feel doing right? Because I know you've said memes a couple of times. there's a lot of things that you're doing you're working with a funny agency uh influencers and you have a hot take about influencers we could talk about that too but i just want to know like how you think about humor um incorporated into marketing i think humor is one thing i think it's emotion in general and it's understanding the human like experience um again like humans don't care to see an eight minute demo they want to have something that they can emotionally relate to if it's humor, if it's sadness, if it's warmth and understanding those moments that people are feeling that and really kind of digging into those, that's the biggest thing.

26:56I mean, you think about, I think I see this post on like LinkedIn all the time. It's like the, is it not Twix? It's maybe it's not Twix, but it's one of those, it's like who you are when you're mad, when you're angry, when you're hungry. And it's like, we all know that moment when we're hungry. And so it's like when people, when they're like, here's something that you can do, you can eat a Twix or whatever. Probably not the best ad because I can't remember the name of which candy bar it is, but I do remember this is who you are when you're hungry. Because it is a human emotion that you have empathy for and feeling empathy for your audiences and the moments that they are feeling these things.

27:34That is what you need to dig into. And then you dig into it with humor. You dig into it with warmth. I think a few of, in terms of our AI guy ads, one of the people was asking for lotion and like they're like I I just want lotion for me like give me recommendations for lotion for me and AI guys like going off on like this tangent of all these lotion options that are not good for her and similarly with like I need I need wide shoes and AI guys like here's what I found on wide shoes and it's like no no no but I need ones for me um and I think that that's just like a very it's a moment we all have been in where ai has answered us in a way that it's like no this is not the answer i'm looking for like are you are you dumb and like i like we've all felt that we've all been there i mean like i even was like i finished a book recently and i was like i can't understand the end of this and i was like can you guys help me understand then this book and they're like we don't know what that book is we'll go research it and like but then they're also like we we can't figure it out i'm like wait you really are like you can't figure it out.

28:41That's the first time I've heard that. And so we all have been in these moments that it's a moment that are like human reaction to what it is. And I think especially because I'm actually marketing to marketers, which is like the most fun ever. I get to be my own personal like guinea pig and be like, do I react to that? How do I feel when I see that or I hear that? And like, it's, I personally, again, I react to humor. So like, I'm like, all right, I'm going to dig it in humor. We all know like the, is it Enya that, or Sarah McLachlan ad for the pets. Like we all know that ad, that like song. I'm not going to sing it, but like, you know what, you know what I'm talking about?

29:27Like save the animals. Like we all know that because it like pulls at our heartstrings and like just those emotional moments. And if it's humor or if it's sadness or if it's love, like if you can identify those moments and identify the things that are like in real people's lives, that's what you're hitting on. No, I like that. I think, like you said, there's different ways of pulling on hard strings. And I think humor is one way that's just low lift that everybody does every single day. And if you can take a problem, like you said, someone's having with AI slot, like the AI slop that comes out or the AI answers where you get annoyed and you keep going down the rabbit hole and they keep giving you the wrong thing.