Humanizing B2B Marketing at Marqeta


 

The Gist:

  • AI as a supporter. AI should be a tool to enhance and scale marketing efforts, not replace them.
  • Empathy and understanding. Applying consumer-focused principles to B2B marketing fosters authenticity and human connection.
  • Cultural connection. Leveraging cultural trends can deepen authentic connections with B2B audiences, going beyond product-centric approaches.

Karna Crawford, Chief Marketing Officer at Marqeta, shares her philosophy on regaining humanity in the B2B customer experience.

In this insightful interview, part of our CMSWire TV series, “The CMO Circle,” she discusses the importance of tapping into emotional connections while leveraging data and technology to create impactful marketing campaigns. Crawford also delves into the challenges — and benefits — of integrating generative AI into marketing processes, exploring the potential of AI for enhancing productivity and scaling personalization efforts.

Table of Contents  

Episode Transcript

Michelle: Hi Karna, thank you for joining us today.

Karna Crawford: So good to see you, Michelle. Thank you for taking some time out to chat with me.

Michelle: Yeah, so let’s just jump straight into the interview. You’ve been working in marketing for years, and I know that one area you’re focused on is how to regain humanity in the customer experience. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that means?

Karna Crawford: Absolutely, and I think the way that I would approach it is thinking about it more broadly in B2B marketing as a whole and then how that then impacts the customer experience. Historically, technology-centric B2B marketing is very tech- and product-focused. And even with the work that we’ve done at Marqeta, we’ve had great success in telling very product-centric tech stories to some of our audiences that are product and text-centric buyers.

But what we realize is there’s this opportunity to think about customers like people, not just companies buying technology, and therefore be able to tap into this marriage of data and insights and technology while also having a conversation that’s tapping into emotional connections for them. And obviously how you emotionally connect with someone as a business person may be different than, Michelle, how I would connect with you if I was trying to sell you a Coca-Cola.

At its core, you still have emotions tied to your business. As you get ready for every podcast, you might be concerned or worried about whether or not your technology is going to fail you or whether or not you’re going to be engaged enough with the person, and those types of feelings are things we can tap into to really make both interesting and higher impact marketing. And that marriage is really important. And as a result of that, it means that we can use technology in new ways to both more quickly understand what those opportunities are and then in a more skilled way understand how to scale our ability to tap into that with larger audiences and in larger reach.

Michelle: So what does that look like when you try to take that philosophy and incorporate it into your day-to-day processes or even the ethos of your team

Karna Crawford: Yeah, absolutely. So an example of this shift that we’ve been embarking on is a campaign that we have live right now that’s called Grow Together. And in this campaign, we’re tapping into an insight around how important and critical it is for growth and fintech companies to know that their partner is not only going to serve their needs today, but is actually going to be a thought partner and a leader that can help them grow to the next level.

While that has always been true for Marqeta, it hasn’t necessarily been what or how we talk to this audience. So the first thing we did was utilize technology in a combination of our insights and research and pulling in from our data feeds, but then also doing social listening to identify: What are the things they’re talking about? What are the things that are generating more than neutral sentiment? And that’s where we found our core insight.

Then I had the team really use that to build out the creative concept for the program. And we used this as a great opportunity to leverage generative AI to hone how we could get tighter and tighter on how we use that insight. And then also to develop a rich suite of creative assets that have variations based on who they’re going to go to that we wouldn’t have been able to do at the same scale if we didn’t have the AI technology to help power speeding up our productivity.

We then are now marrying that on the backside with the way we are looking at the data. We are measuring whether or not only if they engage differently and our conversion rates are different, but also measuring the difference in sentiment, the difference in whether they find it relevant and so therefore measuring the emotional connection in some ways. And we’re seeing really, really promising results with this shift and getting great engagement and great customer feedback or prospect feedback as a result of it.

Related Article: What Is Customer Experience (CX)? A Comprehensive Guide

Michelle: With generative AI, everyone’s trying to implement it now into their businesses to save time, save money, what have you. And when I think about integrating more technology, I feel like that takes you away from humanity. How do you get that balance of getting the benefit from it while still regaining that humanity aspect?

Karna Crawford: Yeah, I think it’s a great question, Michelle. I think the first thing is for us as marketers is not to think about these things as at odds with each other, technology versus humanity, and make sure the way that we are approaching technology is technology as an enabler of us bringing humanity into what we do.

If we use that as the starting place of our mentality, it allows us to make sure that the way we’re leveraging that technology is through the lens of: How can it help me scale? How can it help me personalize? How can it help me measure whether or not I’m doing that effectively? As opposed to sitting behind the technology and letting technology be the face and the voice and make all of the decisions without any human touch to it.

When you let that happen, and then when you don’t have your team consciously always thinking about it through the lens of your customer as a human, how are you impacting a human? That’s when technology becomes this benign thing and you lose that touch. But if the foundation of your marketing strategy and philosophy is customer first, customer sentiment, customer need, then technology becomes a tool to support that as opposed to the replacement of it, I think.

Michelle: Yeah, I see that. You know, there’s a lot of businesses where there’s these stories coming out about how they’re letting AI take the lead and then something’s happening with the customer and it creates this bad experience and it’s just, I think that balance is definitely necessary.

Karna Crawford: Yeah, you know, we at Marqeta are still, like many companies, in the early stages of how we’re operationalizing AI in the organization. And one of the balances that we’re trying to strike is the starting place of what we’re doing is only using AI on things that may drive an automation, but it still has a manual touchpoint to it so that we can ensure that we don’t put ourselves too early into a risk of AI making choices and decisions that we do not have a control mechanism over.

We will potentially get there because we will build technologies that can provide controls or at least flag from a controls perspective, but in a world where we don’t have that, I’m focusing us on how do we utilize it for automation, but not let itself run. So it may automate certain things, but there are these key touchpoints and checkpoints where we are building in human controls to double check, to make sure there’s no biases, to make sure everything is functioning the way that we envisioned when we built out the infrastructure and built out that automation, et cetera.

The Challenges of Operationalizing AI 

Michelle: For this whole philosophy, to implement it at the organization, I would imagine it goes beyond the marketing team, you have to go through different levels. Can you talk about some of the challenges or any resistance that you’ve come up against doing this and how you’ve handled it?

Karna Crawford: Yeah, absolutely. So the one great thing about Marqeta is that we have always been innovators and legacy liberators, breaking old legacy ways of doing things and challenging the status quo. So the good news is from a holistic perspective, we’ve been adopting AI pretty early. In particular, we’ve been heavily focused on AI within our product and technology teams to help increase operational efficiency, productivity, streamline the work effort of both our developers and our customer developers, etc.

So as I’ve started embarking on this in the marketing organization, we’re starting actually from a really positive place as an organization. I think the place where I have run into the greatest challenges is, as I start to engage on this, helping my team not feel threatened by it and see it as a powerful liberator for them and enhancer of what they do versus being afraid of it marginalizing them. And so I’ve spent a lot of time helping my team see how we should think about AI in marketing as our scaler.

We have a small team. We invest in a very modest way and we have to make every dollar count out of it. So don’t think of it as what it’s going to do that you no longer will need to, and instead think of it as: How does it become my team? I only had headcount for one designer, for instance, but all of a sudden through this, that one designer might equal three or four. And so helping my team see it through that light of how it is their supporter as opposed to thinking of it as their competition.

The other challenge frankly is just building AI into infrastructures operationally takes time and investment. So even though ultimately it is an investment that will return dividends in terms of productivity, efficiency, higher quality work product for certain work streams, etc., it still requires an investment early on. And so some of the challenge that we face every day is where we’re investing in helping to continue to refine the role of AI in our operation versus investing on the next thing that we can get out the door now of our day-to-day.

And that’s kind of the classic challenge that any business faces with any new technology, being able to maintain day-to-day while, at the same time, investing towards the future. And so this year we’re dipping our toe in and making some early investments. We’re working with our technology team to utilize our marketing information and our marketing business data to help inform an in-house AI tool so that we are starting to build our internal investment that will make it easier for us to scale it for optimization and scale it for productivity.

Related Article: How AI Integration Can Power Better Human Experiences



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1 Comment
  1. Thanks for sharing. I read many of your blog posts, cool, your blog is very good.

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