Filippa Noghani (00:00.206)
Sounds good.
Ben Ard (00:01.998)
Okay, just one thing. Gotta make sure everything's recording, because that would not be fun to not record. Here we go.
Filippa Noghani (00:13.07)
Try.
Ben Ard (00:13.26)
That's working. That's working. Okay, I think we're good. All right. You ready? Okay. Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Felipa. Felipa, welcome to the show.
Filippa Noghani (00:20.428)
Yes.
Filippa Noghani (00:23.854)
Thanks.
Filippa Noghani (00:28.964)
Thank you so much for having me, Ben. Excited to be here.
Ben Ard (00:30.988)
Yeah. And I am going to try to pronounce your name. I'm sure I butchered it, but I'm so excited. This is going to be a ton of fun.
Filippa Noghani (00:36.736)
No you didn't. Absolutely.
Ben Ard (00:40.734)
Love it. Well, Philippa, before we dive into the subject, which is something I really care about, and I think a lot of marketing leaders are struggling to figure out, let's get to know you. Let's get to know your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff. That way the audience gets to know who you are.
Filippa Noghani (00:55.5)
Yeah, absolutely. So I am actually originally raised in Sweden. I have been living in New York for almost 20 years now and sorry, can we just do a retake? Because I just locked my ear.
Ben Ard (01:15.022)
I have had that before, 100%.
Filippa Noghani (01:20.928)
Okay, I can hear you. Sorry.
Ben Ard (01:24.054)
You're good.
Filippa Noghani (01:24.835)
Okay, all right, sorry, where do we take from?
Ben Ard (01:29.964)
You're good. Yeah, well, let's just we'll cut from where me asking, you know, about your background work history. So if you just want to dive in, that'll be great.
Filippa Noghani (01:34.23)
Where my background? Thank you so much, Ben. So my background, am originally from Sweden. I've lived here for the past 20 years, majority of the time here in New York. And I started my career in marketing from the get go. I have a business degree in marketing management with arts background, actually, graphic arts. I know we were talking about designing and so forth.
And I started off in logistics, believe it or not, in a Japanese company and then shortly moved over to the fintech world. So my MO has been coming in as first marketing hire, whether it's a SaaS startup or fintech. And my role has been to build out the marketing function from ground up. So I've been in SEED, I've been in Series A. And then now the past six years I worked in IT consulting.
very different, so more large organizations. I was at Vituso, which is a $1.6 billion company, and then SoftServe, which is half of the size in today, Solve, where I had the global marketing function.
Ben Ard (02:49.23)
I love it. That's exciting. That's a ton of fun. What we're going to talk about today is how to find the balance between brand and demand. And it's interesting because so many people in marketing struggle with finding the balance. Where does it exist? Does it exist at all? Everyone has different opinions. So I'm excited to dive into this subject. Philippa, when it comes to brand and demand,
How do you find the balance? Where are you finding the middle ground? How are you focusing on one over the other? Or what does that look like for you?
Filippa Noghani (03:24.11)
Yeah, you know, it is so tough. think honestly, it's an art which takes a lot of experience, failures and wins to kind of learn how to fine tune and balance that. I have, know, being from the graphic design background, marketing management brand has been like my strong suit. I would say 60 % of my career.
And then for the past six years, especially I think, you know, one big turn for me was when I joined Retuso with COVID hitting, really my role went more into demand and, you know, we're very successful. I mean, the amount of pipeline and business we generated there was amazing. I also had great partners. So, you know, a big shout out to Raghu Ram who was
a colleague of mine, you know, while we were making jokes and competing every day because we were responsible for different sides of the business. You know, he was kind of the demanding guru and I was the brand guy guru. So we would compliment each other very well in terms of sharing skill set, which is also, think, very, very rare in marketing for like people to partner like, hey,
here is my trade secrets, what are yours? And we would like that is our MO. And I think that's one of like the most amazing partnerships I've had in my job. And that also like enabled me to share my kind of brand insights and also gain like demand insights from someone else. And like the outcome of it, I think both him and I, we are now like the, you know, the masters of knowing exactly
where the brand comes in, where the demand comes in, because it's not one or the other. You can have, try to create as much demand as you want to, but if people come to your website and your brand does not look right and you don't have the right messaging, you might as well not generate those leads, right? So I think that is very much the key. And I think there's a huge lack of education on that. You know,
Filippa Noghani (05:40.76)
throughout my career I've had especially startup CEOs reaching out like can I, I just need you to come in and lead my marketing and I'm gonna give you $100,000 in SEO money and then I want you to bring me 10X and I used to just say thank you but no thank you. This is not how it works. So, you know, that's kind of what I've heard throughout a lot of my career and I think.
And I think the problem is also sometimes is that people bring in, you know, so much brand and they forget about demand, right? It's not just like making it look pretty. There is like a science behind marketing, even branding as well, that goes into demand and those pieces work hand in hand. And unfortunately, there is very little knowledge about it. And people just think, you know, all of times like marketing is there to make things pretty. So, yeah.
Ben Ard (06:33.102)
I love that. That's so cool. So a lot of times people that have done both brand and demand realize, like you said, they're not completely two different functions. They need to work together. They need to play off of each other's strengths, but you can't overemphasize one over the other. So to kind of, this is going to be a two-part question for you. Um, how does the brand support demand and then vice versa? How does demand actually support the brand? Like how do they.
lead to better results in each other's market and area.
Filippa Noghani (07:06.318)
Yeah, I would argue that they don't even need to be separated. So I'll give you examples. So the way my team is triaged today, I have one person who leads growth and I have another person who does demand and another person who does partnerships. They all need to generate demand. like brand just has a alley into generating demand. like
they do more overarching content pieces that is kind of benefiting the company overall that is more, will bring in more revenue and pipeline and awareness in the media space, which goes to PR side of the house, right? But they still work with third party vendors to generate leads and advertisements so forth. It's just a different type of content. While the growth engine that...
we have set up is more like go to market. like offerings and solutions and products that we would have gone out to. Now we are a services company, so they're different, but you know, if it wasn't, that's kind of how they would be going to market. And then there's other brand pieces, right? So like the look and feel, but honestly, they all go in hand in hand. So like I have my growth person do...
90 % of the website because it's not just about how it looks, it's actually the content strategy, the pieces of content that will go there and then they complement each other. I lead almost more like with the type of content that goes through versus brand versus demand or growth as we call it nowadays.
Ben Ard (08:46.764)
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I love that. So when you're setting goals for the team, you know, especially if you have like international teams and big teams, how do you fit brand and demand into the overall structures of the goals that you're giving to the team?
Filippa Noghani (09:02.382)
So we are a global team. My goodness, we have a team set up in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Poland, Portugal, Georgia, you name it. And honestly, they all have a common goal is us contribute to the sales team. So it's very simple. our contributions, the way we look at the numbers are
key KPIs are all business numbers. So opportunities that we create within the sales org is where we need to contribute to. So that makes the alignment very simple, very straightforward. So I always say, you I don't care about the leads, the marketing qualified leads, I mean, sales qualified leads are pretty good, depending on what your definition is. But at the end of the day, we actually look at opportunities in the services industries and the IT consulting world.
this is much easier than done, right? Like in startups, think you oftentimes struggle to set those kinds of KPIs. So this is kind of advice, you know, when you're in a larger company, you know there's a solution fit or product fit, services fit, whatever your selling is. While, you know, whatever learn kind of the hard ways, you know, as someone who has gone and seed or series A, hmm.
No one has really checked on the product. You're still testing the product fit and see, you know, does it sell here? Does it sell there? So it's really hard to keep those KPIs as a success of marketing more than like its success of the company and the offering and product itself as well. So it's a combination.
Ben Ard (10:39.778)
I love that. So you set the goal. Here's the opportunity goal, revenue targets, things like that. Then how does the team know when to invest in brand versus demand? know, based off of a previous answer, I know you say they're combined, but is it really up to the team to say, you know, to accomplish this, this is where we need to put our time and effort and one day that may be brand one day that may be, you know, demand or
How does those two levers work in hitting the revenue and opportunity targets?
Filippa Noghani (11:10.776)
So I would say 50-50. like we look at what are go-to markets. Go-to market goes to market at the same time as brand. So they are there together hand in hand. Go-to market is more customized to an audience. Like the difference to where I look at it is, know, when you do go-to market, it's very customized to the buyer and the offering and the problems we're solving for. When you're going out with brand content and demand gen,
for brand, it's more generic. So it's more like who are all of these companies we're going after? And it's a larger umbrella because you are trying to perhaps reach the C-suite. Keep in mind, C-suite is not going to sit there and read all of your white papers. They're going to be like, hey, I've read about you. I saw you in Forbes. I saw you in CIO.com. This brand, this company sounds interesting. And your ultimate goal in B2B marketing is, you know, it's several touches, right? I think,
I don't know if there's any update numbers, but usually it's like seven touches until you really convert. So that is one of your many touches. So you want to combine this in the market at the same time. It's just that you go with different type of pillar contents versus what you would do otherwise. So it's not like do this or do the other. You really need to be out with both if you want to maximize conversion.
Ben Ard (12:36.726)
I love it. That's amazing. So kind of getting towards the end of this podcast. So I only got like one more question and it's crazy how fast these go. Everyone is talking about marketing signals, the information we're getting from the industry, whether it's website visits, intent, et cetera. How do you use signals to understand maybe if you should be investing more in brand versus demand to kind of hit your goals and opportunities that you're trying to achieve?
Filippa Noghani (13:06.082)
Well, we look at what we're converting. I think it's really challenging. But brand, you always have a challenge because brand is like when you're in the media, it's really hard to say, hey, how did that convert? So some of it is like, hey, you get clients in and you figure it out, you know, what things are going. I think the signals that I oftentimes look at is ad spend, right? If we're spending on LinkedIn and the ads are not converting right away, then I'm going to stop that funnel. Or if I'm working with a third party media vendor,
We vet them very thoroughly and so far majority of them have been well, but we kind of give them a list exactly of who we're going after and what they can provide with. We rarely go, you know, take risk of doing, you know, we don't do million dollar ad spend. I think that's when, you know, you really need to think twice. Like for us is, you know, we're very smart with the money that we spend and we keep an eye on it and the signal is really conversion, right? So.
Are we getting leads from it? If we're not, we're stopping it right away. The team is really much on top of it. And I have a leader for each part of growth, demand, brand, and they are responsible for ROI of every program. I'm always there as a quarterback for them, but really, the signals and how much views are we converting? Are we getting leads in? And then we shut it off right away.
Ben Ard (14:28.96)
I love it. That's amazing. Well, Philippa, we have run out of time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your insights and sharing everything today. It's been a fun way to think about brand versus demand and how they can work together better to accomplish our goals. If anyone listening today wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Filippa Noghani (14:51.134)
Easiest way is on LinkedIn. So I highly recommend LinkedIn. Otherwise, Philippa.io is also a website I have and you can reach out through there as well.
Ben Ard (15:02.764)
Very cool. We will link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So anyone listening, scroll down, click on the profile, connect with Philippa. Philippa, again, thank you so much for the time and the insights and everything today. This has been absolutely amazing. Thank you.
Filippa Noghani (15:18.009)
Thank you, Ben. Thank you so much for having me.
