Building a brand from the ground up with Oyster HR's Kevan Lee
Building a brand from the ground up with Oyster HR's Kevan Lee
Kevan Lee:
The best B2B marketing is B2C marketing in a way, because you're selling to people at the end of the day.
Peep Laja:
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff, I don't do filler, I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know, how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win? Today's guest is the senior VP of marketing at Oyster, Kevan Lee. Before joining Oyster, Kevan spent six years as a VP of marketing at Buffer, a social media management platform that helps brands and businesses engage with their online audience. Kevan is an expert in brand strategy, marketing leadership and category creation, and shares his expertise through regular appearances at events and on podcasts. In this episode, Kevan walks us through some key marketing strategies from across his career. We discuss differentiating on your brand's story, the benefits of handling PR in-house, and why the category name you choose matters. Let's get into it.
You were at Buffer for almost seven years. Buffer was a product-led motion, was it?
Kevan Lee:
It was, yeah. We didn't have any sales team, so everything came through marketing product.
Peep Laja:
So now in hindsight, what worked really well for marketing, and on the flip side, what were some things that did not work?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah. So seven years ago, the concept of product growth didn't really exist, so we were doing this thing, we didn't have a name for it. I guess what I've learned since then is it's really important to connect your go-to-market motion with your channels and your channel strategy. And so since we were product-led growth, we relied on a lot of organic growth, a lot of virality, word of mouth, a lot of these triggers that came from the product to get more acquisition back into the funnel. And for us, the organic side ended up being a lot through content marketing. We were lucky to be somewhat early in the content marketing game, and so built a pretty strong moat around our SEO and thought leadership work.
There was a bit of category creation that happened at that stage, too. The concept of social media for businesses was so new and nascent. There was a lot of pent-up demand for how do you understand how to be on Facebook as a business, when Facebook had always meant having your own profile and things like that. So we had a lot of education to be done, which meant a lot of keyword volume to go after and just a lot of ways that content could show up in those cases.
Peep Laja:
How many articles were you shipping at a time?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, so I was brought on to kind of build out the go-to-market engine. So it was just me, the solo marketer, and I would write four, 2000-word posts a week for the blog. So we did 150, 200 a year the first couple years. Pretty high volume.
Peep Laja:
What else worked besides producing blog articles?
Kevan Lee:
So we had a really strong brand, which often seems very much like art when we're talking growth and PLG and all these different things, but brand for us, it showed up in our word of mouth acquisition. For every one customer we attracted, we could do the math and see how many customers that person would bring in. For us, we had some attribution modeling once you got into the product, once in the signup flow. So word of mouth was really big for us, and then the brand also was really key for things like direct traffic, referral traffic, and so we just had a lot of free traffic coming to the site. And then it did become kind of an exercise in conversion rate optimization and driving folks toward activation and upsell. And so as a marketing team, we were responsible for signups, and so we had seven million users over my time there. Then getting those signups to convert into paying plans was where a lot of our effort and focus went, as well. So we kind of operated both like pre- and post-signup in a way.
Peep Laja:
So if one wanted to start building their brand from scratch today, what would you advise them to focus on?
Kevan Lee:
There's a lot of different pieces to it. First and foremost, why do you exist as a brand, as a product, as a business? What makes you different? What problem are you solving? Be really consistent in how you talk about that answer to the why question, and then ideally you're connecting that why to some larger tension out in the market, because I can have a why for building a business today, but if it doesn't matter to anyone but me, then the business isn't going to go very far. And so it's connecting that why to some sort of tension or zeitgeist moment happening in the market itself.
From there, then you're able to build out your brand purpose, your brand personality, your brand stories. So we go through an exercise called, we call them story structures where you have this kind of hero story at the top, but then four complimentary stories that kind of filter back up into that bigger hero story. And you can take those stories, maybe one story is fit for this persona, one story is better for this persona, one story's better for a persona that won't exist for five years, but you got to plant that seed today. And so being very deliberate about the stories that you tell underneath that why umbrella, which sounds all very vague, but I think once that why is clear the rest of the pieces start to fall into place of what that looks like.
Peep Laja:
Can you give me a specific example of a story you crafted and then how did you tell that story and what channels did you use?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, so at Oyster, we have the story structure and we have the top stories about creating equal opportunities for folks around the world when it comes to employment. Oyster is a global employment platform, and so this type of employment is better for people, it's better for the planet, it's better for businesses. So that's the hero story. One of the stories underneath that, then, is all about the value of looking beyond your existing talent pools to find talent elsewhere, what that can unlock for business. So that leads to telling us stories around global hiring. It leads to telling stories about the talent acquisition war that has happened over the last couple years in terms of the bigger zeitgeist of remote work and the bigger zeitgeist of the great resignation. And so it connects to those bigger narratives through a story that ultimately builds up to this bigger picture for us at Oyster around global employment.
Peep Laja:
Now, Oyster is not the only one telling that story. Your dear competitors or Deal or Remote or whoever else is there, they could be saying similar things and maybe even are saying the exact same things. So should your story be differentiated?
Kevan Lee:
It should be differentiated, for sure. I think it's interesting to always go back to that why. So for instance, the why for Oyster is we're doing this work in order to create a more equal world. And so a lot of our story and messaging differentiates itself based on that mission. It differentiates based on the type of impact that we want to have in the world.
So some of our other stories are around things like ESG is one of the storylines that we have, and so environmental social governance policy kind of things. Some of it is more around the work-life balance for folks and the global workforce and what it's like from their perspective versus maybe a company like Deal, which is more about the financial flexibility and freedom of this type of approach to things. It's very much you even see them listed as a FinTech company in a lot of ways, and we would never, Oyster, list ourselves as a FinTech company, and so we're going after the same problem space, but coming at it from different angles. I think that's where the brand really comes alive. The market can start to distinguish some of these things in that sense.
Peep Laja:
Story is essential to brand identity. There's also sameness in stories. Folks go for the obvious and rely on formulas over original thinking. The Arnold Miller StoryBrand framework is massively contributing to the sameness problem out there. People following it end up with stories to the just like everyone else's. The problem with the StoryBrand framework is that it's assuming you are the only one doing what you're doing, so everyone in your space selling to the same ICP will end up with basically an identical basic story. This book is written for plumbers, not marketers. Unless you're a category creator and can position yourself first in the mind of the target customer, you need a differentiated story.
So there's the Simon Sinek first they need to care about the why and then the what.
Simon Sinek:
People don't buy, what you do, they buy why you do it. When we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do.
Peep Laja:
I personally have always believed that in B2B it's mostly bullshit, because I don't know, have you ever bought a CRM because of why they do it? I don't even know why they do it, and also frankly, don't care. So do you think your buyer cares about your company's mission?
Kevan Lee:
I absolutely do. I think that B2B marketing is a shell for B2C marketing. The best B2B marketing is B2C marketing in a way, because you're selling to people at the end of the day. Someone once told me that an RFP process, so request for a proposal, kind of the checklist that bigger companies go through when they're making vendor selections, an RFP process is simply justification for an emotional decision that you've already made. And so if I can get to that point of someone knows my brand, someone's connected with what we're talking about, they need our solution, they're sold and the RFP is just like, I don't know, it's just that last justification step to get there.
Peep Laja:
So let's imagine, so there's a company out there and they're looking at different options, including Oyster and alternatives. Is the internal conversation just, "I really feel moved by the mission and that's why I think we should go with Oyster," or is it they never mention it, they say, "No, look at their features," and whatever, the capabilities and the pricing. And so the why is actually not discussed, but it's the internal motivator or is it discussed that, "This has a better mission"?
Kevan Lee:
I wouldn't go to my CFO and be like, "I want to spend 50,000 on this software because they're B Corp." But I think it's more about that you're so bought into this brand that you're willing to tell that story to your CFO in a way that you kind of become a salesperson for the brand in a sense. You become that advocate, and it's not necessarily about you know what the CFO cares about so you mention those things, but you personally know there's no other option here. It has to be this brand and I'll find a way to make it happen.
Peep Laja:
I see the logic there, but I'm not convinced. I don't know the missions of any of the tools in my tech stack in any of my three companies. Maybe it's just me. But then I asked on social media if they can name B2B tools they have bought, chosen over competitors just because of their mission. And guess what? Nobody could name even a single brand. So at Buffer, were there any other important pieces to the marketing engine?
Kevan Lee:
Acquisition for us was content marketing and word of mouth. We also had a community play that we ran. So this was initially through something as simple as a Twitter chat back when Twitter chats had a decent size volume and attendance to them. And so that lasted for a while. We sequenced from that into a Slack community, so we had a good community based there, which also fit kind of the content marketing and word of mouth growth loops as well. Those were the main ones.
I think PR was maybe the last one, which is also kind of content adjacent. And PR for us was about a means of syndicating our content to get it in front of more people. It was about telling some of our brand stories through some of the unique things we did, we had transparent salaries, we had transparent revenue dashboards, all these kind of unique things, but then also telling the story of the product and the story of some of the impact that we wanted to have in the world, too. And so PR was a really helpful lever. We had PR in-house, which is something I highly recommend if you can swing it, because you get to know the brand in such a strong way that you can tell that story in a much more compelling way.
Peep Laja:
And so PR was done in actual magazines and publications or how was it done?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, we got our founder on a couple of covers, which was nice, but more so it was through digital media sites like Forbes and Time and Fast Company, places like that was where we tried to get it. We had a couple goals, like Entrepreneur Magazine I think was one of them, New York Times was one of them, but those were maybe once or twice a year. It was more the drumbeats of the digital stuff that helped us grow.
Peep Laja:
And when you say if you can swing it, meaning that hiring PR people is very expensive, or...
Kevan Lee:
It's much easier to go external for that early and to just hire for other roles, and so it becomes almost like an opportunity cost exercise. If you have one person on your team, would you rather have, I don't know, a growth marketer or an ops person or something like that, or a PR person? And PR is an easier, tends to be an easier skill to outsource to agencies and things like that. You'll lose a little bit in making that call.
Peep Laja:
Whether you choose to outsource PR or invest in an in-house team, one thing is clear, so much of whether your marketing or PR works is whether you have something interesting to say consistently. Most don't because it's hard, but being somebody's favorite media for a niche is huge. Invest in having things to say. A good PR person or agent is important. Ultimately, researchers and analysts who can create original, compelling data to pack up your company's mission are as important of an investment. If you are thinking about hiring a PR agency, here are a few things to bear in mind from Axia Public Relations Jason Mudd.
Jason Mudd:
So you want to start figuring out, do I like these people? Are these people I want to be working with? Are these people that I'm going to enjoy working with? The second thing you should really be asking yourself is do I trust them? Because public relations is so important, you want to make sure that you trust them. The third thing you should ask yourself is can they do it? Have they done it for others? Can they prove that they've done it? And the last thing you want to ask yourself is can they do it for us? So do I like them, do I trust them, have they done it for others and can they do it for us?
Peep Laja:
So today you're at Oyster, you've been there almost two years. And is this a sales-led motion there?
Kevan Lee:
It is a sales-led motion, yes. I was brought in to help introduce some product-led components. So if you come to our website, you can see you can get started for free, but most of the revenue does come from sales.
Peep Laja:
So what are the key differences in how the marketing machine is set up?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, it's almost night and day different. So at Buffer, we didn't raise much money. We went more a sustainable route and were a profitable business for my last four or five years there. At Oyster, we've raised a ton of money. We've been on the hypergrowth VC-backed path, which gives you access to different resources and also different goals and targets, as well. And so for us, we have built out a very predictable inbound demand gen engine, half through paid channels, so paid search and paid social, and the other half through organic channels, so content, word of mouth, again PR, so some of the similar Buffer playbook at Oyster, but it's very much balanced with that paid side. So paid search and paid social are a really big portion of what we do. We also do quite a bit of events at Oyster, and so that's kind of a bridge between both the paid and non-paid side. They obviously cost a lot, but we do a lot of interesting brand stuff and activation stuff there, as well. So it's a totally different mix because of the different type of business Oyster is.
Peep Laja:
Is content still on the blog for SEO or is it like LinkedIn organic or social media?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, I love that question because content... I can often get locked into content as a blog post. And so yes, we have a blog at Oyster, but the biggest contributions from content for us, they come from our PR and our thought leadership, which is, we have four or five ambassadors within our company on LinkedIn. So if you go and see our CEO's presence on LinkedIn or our co-founder's presence is huge, expansive stuff, posting four or five times a week on all sorts of different topics and gets tons and tons of traction for the brand. So that's been our biggest content play. We also have a podcast. We've dabbled in video, but primarily it's the social media and thought leadership stuff with the PR that's given us the biggest traction.
Peep Laja:
If you don't have a large budget, organic social media is your best marketing channel. Case in point, in 2021, Rise at Seven, a creative agency that had only been around for two years, managed to reach four million in revenue by using organic social as a flywheel. Not only did organic social bring them new clients and reinforce the relationship with existing clients, but it also helped them attract high-quality employees. They became an employer of choice. Their social flywheel started with attracting people who are eager to post on social anyway. This is mainly the younger demographic. Every employee was encouraged to post on social daily and company founders amplified their voices. The social content was mainly about the great work they do. This is the other side of the coin. They went for clients that agreed to be talked about, who wanted publicity, who wanted to win awards.
The work they did for the clients became an endless source of social content. The founders were very active in social, but it wouldn't have been enough to carry the whole thing. So almost all employees became advocates. Interestingly, this was not regulated or administered by the company, only encouraged. Everyone was on their own, free to post whatever they wanted. They were getting most of their clients through organic LinkedIn content through personal accounts. And these were not even small clients, minimal one million a year revenue companies, mostly above 100 million in annual revenue. The most amazing thing to me is that they didn't even have an email list. They were not relying on SEO, they cultivated their employer brand purely on social, and even lead generation happened mainly through social organic content. It's an impressive case study and shows what a well executed social strategy can achieve.
And the pay channels, are we talking like Google search or is it LinkedIn heavy?
Kevan Lee:
Yep, so we do paid search and paid social. Paid search is 90 to 99% Google. And on the paid social side, it's very much LinkedIn is our primary there. We've also dabbled into Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, but LinkedIn is the primary one for us.
Peep Laja:
In your experience, what does your CCV need to be at to do LinkedIn ads profitably?
Kevan Lee:
I don't know that there's one single answer for where you need to be to make LinkedIn work. Kind of depends on how you're using LinkedIn, but in my experience, 15,000 to 20,000 is typically where I would start before really investing in LinkedIn, because it does have a longer payback and costs a bit more to really get traction there.
Peep Laja:
So you guys got started and then the pandemic happened and nobody planned for it, and then just the changes in the macro environment carried you and maybe still carrying you. So how would you quantify the impact of timing here?
Kevan Lee:
I think timing has been everything in my career. I think it's huge. I think Oyster has been interesting to see the timing even over my two years of being there. And so I joined mid-pandemic when everyone was still working remotely, and then you've had... I think what that showed was that remote work existed before the pandemic of course, but once everyone was forced to do it, you kind of saw that this actually can work at scale and can work for a variety of businesses and maybe even my business that I hadn't thought of before. And so it kind of opened everyone's eyes to the possibility.
And then you kind of saw this kind of return to work mode. You saw also the macroeconomic stuff which reduced hiring, which is obviously a key fuel for a global employment company. You need companies that are hiring people. And so timing has been great, it's been bad, it's been okay. I feel like I've seen five different versions of timing within this business. But I think to go back to the start of the business, this business started before the pandemic with the understanding this is where the world is going eventually. I think the world got there a lot faster than we thought and the world is still headed and trending in that direction, and that's kind of the longer-term belief that gets us motivated and helps us see a rosy path ahead still.
Peep Laja:
So global employment category I'm guessing is growing fast. And so do you still worry about helping to expand the category, so most of your efforts are directed at evangelizing the category and defining the category, or are you already thinking about differentiation and positioning against the competitors and things like that?
Kevan Lee:
So I think we have to do both category education and expansion plus differentiation, and even choosing a category name is a way of, I guess it's a way of doing both. Like you're differentiating with the name that you identify as, you're differentiating with the way that you describe and define that category. As an example, within our space of helping companies hire people from anywhere, you can hire people either as full-time employees or you can hire them as contractors. And so by us choosing the name of global employment, we are kind of planting a flag in the sand of saying we believe full-time employment is what we do best and it's what we believe in long-term versus some of our competitors, which are building out more of like a contractor feature set going to market or with a contractor messaging. So it's been really interesting to see how the choice of a category name can kind of differentiate you in a way and to dictate some of that.
I think naturally you're going to see tons more growth in the space regardless of what you call it, but what's really important for us is that we're clear in what people should expect from a global employment platform. And so as part of that, it's the education process of when you are standing up a people operations team, you need an HRIS system like a Workday, you need an ATS, like a greenhouse, you need an ERP, like a NetSuite, and you need a GEP, which is our acronym for global employment platform, which is something like us. And you kind of show them this world in which these are the four things you need, this is how they complement one another, and that's ideally the foundation that you're setting for people to kind of frame you in relation to everything else. So huge amount of education around that piece. But then we're also hopeful a lot of differentiation comes out of us being clear about what that category means.
Peep Laja:
There's some idea out there that you can't be a category of one. I think you absolutely want to be a category of one as long as possible. Being a monopoly is the dream. Tesla was basically of category one for a long ass time. Consumer of many auto products, like Chrysler's minivans, your category can be a differentiator if you can get more specific than anyone else about the problem that you are addressing. You win as a category of one when one, you bring out a product with substantial innovation that creates a new sub-category, two, you stay a monopoly as long as you can while building up moats. If you're starting out in a category swarming with competition, chances are you haven't been intentional enough in defining your niche value proposition, as Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir explained in this talk at Stanford called Competition is for Losers.
Peter Thiel:
So let me say a few things about how to build a monopoly. And I think one of the sort of very counterintuitive ideas that comes out of this monopoly thread is that you want to go after small markets. If you're a startup or you want to get to monopoly, you're starting a new company and you want to get to monopoly, monopolies you have a large share of a market, how do you get to a large share of a market? You start with a really small market and you take over that whole market and then over time, you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles. And the thing that's always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one, because that's typically evidence that you somehow haven't defined the categories correctly and it normally means that there's going to be too much competition in one way or another. And so I think almost all the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.
Peep Laja:
So when you look back at the previous two years at Oyster, I'm sure you've learned a lot compared to your day one at the job. So what are the more surprising things that you learned and where are some things that you got wrong, bets that didn't pay off or things like that?
Kevan Lee:
Yeah, so many in both buckets. I think one of the things that we had to do at Oyster given how fast we were growing, is to hire ahead of need and to sequence faster than you thought you might need to sequence. And that has gone really well in some cases and it has gone not so well in other cases. I think my default state would be to validate a channel or validate a strategy before you go out and fully resource it with bringing headcount or spending a lot of extra money on it. And we didn't really have that luxury. Capital's available, the opportunity is here, the timing is right, let's go for it. And so we built out some channels that didn't end up paying dividends and had to repurpose some of those resources in other ways. But we also were able to sequence into channels like events and podcasting that did really well for us and helped us get to this next stage.
And so I think anytime you're doing this type of work at the pace that we're doing it, you're going to have some hits and you're going to have some misses. And I think it's what you do, what you learn in both cases that becomes really important. And so on the hits, how do you learn what happened well there and do more of it? On the misses, how do you learn what you missed and how do you correct that by redistributing resources, pointing people in different directions, kind of owning that outcome?
Tactically speaking, since we had such strong paid foundations, how do we get more scale and more efficiency out of those channels? And so for us, that's things like hiring more operations folks to help us build out the lead funnel in a more robust and disciplined way. It's sequencing to different types of ads on paid search and paid social. It's even sequencing to different channels like going from LinkedIn to YouTube as an example, different media types. So how do you build that sequencing roadmap within a channel like that? How do you evolve the rest of your strategy to match all these changing dynamics in the macroeconomic picture?
Do you spend 250,000 to do some big splashy thing at Saster to get brand awareness? But then, what if $250,000 is a lot of money all of a sudden, which it is for pretty much everyone? You have to rethink that event strategy from scratch and be like, "Am I okay showing up in a big way here and what opportunity cost comes from that if I have to say no to something else? Am I okay with that? Or do I use that 250 to go sponsor five $50,000 events?" And so we had to really completely redo an event strategy. Some of our bigger budget line items, we had to really rethink those to get them in a good spot.
Peep Laja:
Are you guys sponsoring or were you sponsoring a lot of events?
Kevan Lee:
We had a pretty healthy sponsorship calendar. It was initially a lot to get our name out there. Both Oyster and I were very new to this whole thing, and so getting our name out there was really key. And then more recently, it's been about how do we get the ROI out of this event? How do we make sure it's worth it? And I think those are two... you end up in two very different places if you're trying to solve for each of those things.
Peep Laja:
I hear from a lot of demand gen leaders today that demand gen or demand acquisition channels are just getting too costly, too competitive. Are you feeling that? And if so, what are you doing about it?
Kevan Lee:
We're competing against companies that have hundreds of millions in funding. And so I think our space is hot and our competition is fierce. It requires more of a long-term lens with this stuff, and so I'm advocating for us doubling down on brand activities as an example, because this again is something I care a lot about and I think does help you win in the short, medium, and long-term when you have that uniqueness about your brand and that resonance with the brand. And so sometimes that means running campaigns that are a bit more maybe messaging focused and more focused on your core value rather than just trying to pay as much as you can to get more leads in the door. It's like being more focused about who is our precise ICP? What are the things they care about? How does that connect to our brand? Let's be fully focused on this group. Let's not get distracted by the excess.
I think it's less of a land grab mindset, which might have been relevant a couple years ago, and more of a land ownership mindset. I know where I want to live, I know where I want to be. Let's make sure that we're doing the best we can to show up there. And so it requires a lot of discipline, but I think it's necessary and worth it in this demand gen landscape.
Peep Laja:
So what are three key lessons learned for Kevan? One, be clear on your identity, the problem you solve, and differentiation.
Kevan Lee:
Why do you exist as a brand, as a product, as a business? What makes you different? What problem are you solving?
Peep Laja:
Two, timing is everything.
Kevan Lee:
I think timing has been everything in my career. I think it's huge.
Peep Laja:
Three, be as specific as you can when defining your category.
Kevan Lee:
It's been really interesting to see how the choice of a category name can kind of differentiate you, in a way. And so by us choosing the name of global employment, we are kind of planting a flag in the sand of saying we believe full-time employment is what we do best.
Peep Laja:
One last takeaway from Kevan.
Kevan Lee:
Anytime you're doing this type of work at the pace that we're doing it, you're going to have some hits and you're going to have some misses. And I think it's what you learn in both cases that becomes really important.
Peep Laja:
That's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.
