Olympics: B2B Marketing Lessons on Making Big Content Investments with the VP of Marketing at AppsFlyer, Carolyn Bao

Making big marketing investments is a huge deal. But lucky for you, we’re here to help.

We’re bringing you five keys to deliver on a big investment.

And we’re taking those lessons from the Olympics with the help of our special guest, VP of Marketing at AppsFlyer, Carolyn Bao.

Together, we’re talking about capitalizing on a cultural moment, committing to the long haul, ensuring activation is fully prepared, and so much more.

About our guest, Carolyn Bao

Carolyn Bao serves as the Vice President of Marketing for AppsFlyer, for the North America region, driving multi-channel efforts for the AppsFlyer mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform. She is an accomplished marketing executive with over 20 years of leadership experience at technology companies, specializing in software and SaaS marketing go-to-market strategy, data-driven business innovation and building high-performing marketing teams. She has deep domain knowledge of marketing tech stack and advertising technologies. 

Beyond her commercial role, she nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit as an MBA@Rice faculty member and a founding board member of Silicon Valley Leadership Community.

Recognized with accolades such as LinkedIn’s “Top Voices” and Product Marketing Alliance’s “Top 100 PMMs,” Carolyn is celebrated for bringing products like Facebook Attribution to global markets, building high-performing marketing teams, and thought leadership in ‘women in leadership,’ ‘marketing management’ and ‘mobile growth strategies’ through key speaking engagements for educational and professional events. Carolyn built her career portfolio through leadership roles at technology powerhouses including Moomoo, Facebook, Visa, and Yahoo.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From The Olympics:

• Capitalize on a cultural moment. Pick something in the cultural zeitgeist to inspire your content. If it’s already resonating and getting talked about, your content will too. Carolyn says, “I think leveraging critical cultural moments is one of the key growth drivers for any marketing department.” And she adds, “Really think through for your category, what is that cultural moment that we really want to capitalize on? In B2B marketing, not everybody competes in the Olympics. But we do compete in terms of how many in-person interactions we have with other practitioners. And that's where these in-person conferences immediately became popular again after we came out of COVID. So I think that's maybe something to really think about, is what is your Olympics equivalent.”
• Commit to the long haul. Big investments in content mean lots of planning for the pre-, during and post periods. How can you maximize the campaign and make the most of the big investment? Carolyn says, “Not a lot of companies have the ability to plan in massive time horizons, like every four years. A lot of marketing teams are probably working one to three quarters out for most of it. But I do think it's interesting to think of like, what are the big, massive bets that you can make that you might not be able to make every year that can show who you are as a brand.”
• Ensure activation is fully prepared. Don’t sell yourself short by creating content without planning through distribution and activation. Make sure it’s fully considered and you’re making the most of that investment. Carolyn says, “To activate marketing around the Olympics at this scale is massive. This is sort of our Coachella for marketers, because we don't get to have this many dollars to spend for the majority of us. And meanwhile, even if we are with a huge brand, it is not often that we have this kind of massive celebration. So the scale is super important. The second piece that's very interesting is in terms of how to ensure marketing is done right. There is a great deal of discipline in running a smooth marketing operation, which I think everyone can still also relate to because no matter big or small, for our marketing campaigns to be successful, we have to also wear that operational hat. And I think there's a lot to be unpacked from studying how the Olympics have been done.”
• Commit to the production cost. Big ideas come with a cost. Follow through with the full potential of the project, including the price of it. But the good news is that marketers have become a lot more efficient. Carolyn says, “Savvy marketers are not doing marketing content production the same way as old time marketers. Because they create these stories, they run it on mobile marketing channels, they run with a very small dollar amount, and they already got data to tell them what stories resonate with who. It pulls their feedback loop a lot shorter.”
• Know your ICP. Ensure your content will land with its intended audience by truly knowing your ICP. This means understanding their values, what motivates them, and the value you can offer them. Carolyn says, “Deeply understand whom it is you're really trying to influence. Knowing your ICP and knowing what you want your ICP to think or do differently from your storytelling is critical.”

Quotes

*”With constraints, creativity really differentiates a good storyteller from a mid storyteller, leveraging the Gen Alpha language. The more you understand the limitations, the better it is you stay focused and think about within all of these constraints, what else could we do?”

*“If you are building a B2B brand, really make sure that there is a founder side of the humanized story. So that it's not just this brand, but it's actually the why the company was founded and how the founders have built the company.”

*” Let's ground our work back to marketing fundamentals. Our marketing fundamentals is storytelling and we really need to understand whom we're talking the story to, what we want them to think or do differently. This is the first. The second piece is, please do not be afraid of developing that left brain as a marketer because the tools to help us measure our work and tell us the feedback of how well our storytelling did are becoming a lot more available. If you don't know, search it up, use chat GPT, but really, really deeply understand marketing measurement and the data that is at your disposal to make you a better marketer. The third piece that's super critical is do not forget stakeholder management because with the village that supports us is what we can work on our day to day, the blocking and tackling, but also when the time is right, advocate for big activation like the Olympics and really make history. Have fun with it.”

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Carolyn Bao, VP of Marketing at AppsFlyer

[2:54] B2B Marketing Lessons from the Olympics and AppsFlyer

[4:14] Olympic Marketing Campaigns and Sponsorships

[36:09] Human-Centric Storytelling in Marketing

[42:28] Key Takeaways

Links

Connect with Carolyn on LinkedIn

Learn more about AppsFlyer

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. 

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith Gooderham, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. 

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