Why Customers Don’t Care About Your Product

Interview by Katy Cesarotti with
Jessica Pantalleresco: Chief Marketing Officer at Vision6

Digital marketers face constant upheaval as search algorithms, social media platforms and customer privacy laws change and evolve. Jessica Pantalleresco is especially attuned to the challenges of short digital lifecycles. As Chief Marketing Officer of Vision6, an email marketing and SMS automation platform, Pantalleresco markets to marketers. She has to stay on the leading edge of industry developments to provide relevant, useful content to Vision6’s customers. Pantallaresco honed her user-centric approach as a marketing manager in the company’s Australia office. She relocated to New York to direct Vision6’s global strategy as CMO. We spoke about maintaining agility and efficiency in the competitive digital landscape. 

How do you communicate your business solutions to those outside of the marketing automation world?

Our overall communication goal is to solve our customer’s pain points, more than it is the product. Communications are more about how we can help them do their jobs better and easier. When there’s so much competition, no one really cares about your product; all they really care about is the job they’re trying to do the quickest and easiest way.

Going forward, what do you think will be the most difficult aspect of communications for your company or industry?

Social media platforms run on a 24 hour cycle. It takes a lot of resources and budget to create a well-streamlined and effective marketing funnel that matches the audience you’re trying to reach. That landscape keeps changing—you have to be agile. Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook change literally every single day. I think that’s one of the biggest pain points for marketers: there’s so many different platforms, everything’s manual, and being able to prove ROI on each of the different platforms when they’re all funneling into the same campaign. Privacy and data laws are also continuously changing. Understanding what you can and can’t do with consumer data can be stressful, especially when you’re predominantly marketing on digital channels.

What changes would you like to see in the digital marketing sector?

As a marketer and also as a consumer, I would like to see more focus on user experience. We’re so used to communicating with customers from behind a computer and screen. I think that people often forget about the human on the other end. I notice that marketers put a same size fits all approach on all different platforms. Where I might not mind seeing an ad on my Instagram story, I may not want to see that ad on LinkedIn or other things.

What metrics do you use to ensure your strategies are working?

Website visits, bounce rate and time on page are all really important. We focus on what percentage of website visitors sign up for a free trial: how many of those people are converting to a customer? The metrics on the actions they take in the product before they convert form the narrative for our next campaign. It’s easier than ever now to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. We can instantly optimize and allocate budget more accurately. I can A/B test on a couple of platforms and know in hours which ad will perform better. I don’t have to manually set up the entire campaign.

What resources do you use to keep up with marketing insights and trends?

We went through a complete website redesign, so I spent a lot of time on awwwards.com. I’m constantly looking through their award-winning designs for how other SaaS companies are presenting themselves. Moz is really good for SEO and web health. Recent Google algorithm changes that have negatively impacted rankings for a lot of businesses. I also subscribe to marketingprofs.com — they cover almost all digital campaigns and trends. Our own customer database is our biggest source of inspiration. There’s so much wealth in talking to our customer success team. We send out surveys and ask customers about their biggest pain points and their jobs to inspire new solutions.

What recent marketing communications projects, events, or initiatives at Vision6 are you most excited about?

Vision6 holds an annual email marketing summit, EMSA, that is the largest email marketing conference in the southern hemisphere. We host the best and brightest marketers from around the world in Australia, and we also contribute to the global marketing community as well through live streaming. As marketers ourselves, it’s really cool to hear from leaders and brands we admire. We just revamped our branding and redid our logo with bigger, brighter colors for a fresher look. It’ll be interesting to see how our audience responds, especially people who have been coming for 15 years.

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About the Writer

Katy Cesarotti is a copywriter at Gallery Design Studio. Katy believes that, with clear and concise copy, innovators can spark emotion and drive action in their readers. She’s written for magazines, blogs and cutting-edge startups.