Chip CMO interview: We speak to Alex Latham from the investment and savings app in the latest of Press Gazette’s Marketing Maestro interviews. This series is produced in association with Lead Monitor, New Statesman Media Group’s content marketing arm.
What’s been your proudest achievement in your current role?
Building the team. When we started Chip, the marketing team consisted of me and a content writer. Now, we have three teams across acquisition, user engagement and brand. All the teams operate amazingly and are led by experts. I like to think we’ve built an amazing culture of collaboration and high performance… but we still have a laugh at the same time.
What media channels do you see as most important and best value when it comes to marketing spend and activity?
User referrals are always a key channel for me. A very hard nut to crack but turning your users into advocates and leveraging their word of mouth is what makes B2C marketing engines great. It’s also great value as, fundamentally, it’s not about how much you spend, it’s about how you treat your customers and the experience you give them.
What is your advice for mastering social media?
Do something different, and become a domain expert in a niche. Social content bombards people, so you have to stand out and offer real value in what you’re saying.
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In your opinion, what is the main difference between B2C and B2B marketing?
For me it comes down to the difference in messaging, as the channels are relatively similar. I always think B2B marketing is about having a really clear, potent message about value targeted at a small group of people. B2C is about needing to have a potent but much broader message – this is hard.
Good marketing is always potent so creating a message that is impactful to hundreds of thousands of people is the key challenge for B2C marketers.
What is the key to producing engaging marketing content and what types of content works best for you?
It’s simple in theory but hard in execution. Good content needs to make someone ‘feel’ something. Be it funny, heart-warming, informative – the content needs to leave someone feeling something and triggering an emotion. So much content gets homogenised because marketers try to conform to what everyone else is doing – this often leads to content that doesn’t make anyone feel anything. It’s important to take risks and focus on the feelings.
How important is technology in modern marketing?
It’s everything. Good marketing is a mixture of creativity and data. Technology enables creative decisions to be taken quickly and executed upon. It also unlocks the data and enables better decision making from a creative and audience standpoint.
What future marketing trends will become mainstream before too long?
I think the use of AI is going to become much more prevalent in the future. We’re already seeing the main paid social platforms (Meta and Google) leverage AI for user targeting. However, I think we’ll see AI become more prevalent across traditionally offline platforms like TV and OOH, too. Beyond that I’m interested to see how AI will also contribute to the creative process – we’re seeing AI copy become more common, and I think that will become more mainstream across creative.
Eventually I expect there to be a marketing stack that uses AI all the way from creative to media placement, and then feeding back into a continuous performance loop.
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