Payroll isn’t exactly what you’d call exciting—so how do you take a – let’s face it – rather boring topic like that and make it relatable, engaging, and even funny enough to capture an audience’s attention?
Joining us today is Jason Ing, Chief Marketing Officer at Gusto, a leading platform that provides small and medium-sized businesses with payroll, health insurance, HR tools, and more to empower their teams both locally and internationally. Jason has spearheaded innovative campaigns like the recent “Choose Gusto” campaign, proving that even the most unexpected topics can connect deeply with audiences.
Resources
Gusto: https://www.gusto.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
Payroll isn’t exactly what you’d call exciting. So how do you take a, let’s face it, rather boring topic like that and make it relatable, engaging, and even funny enough to capture an audience’s attention? Joining us today is Jason Ng, Chief Marketing Officer at Gusto, a leading platform that provides small and medium-sized businesses with payroll, health insurance, HR tools, and more to empower their teams both locally and internationally. Jason has spearheaded innovative campaigns like the recent Choose Gusto campaign, proving that even the most unexpected topics can connect deeply with audiences. Welcome to the show, Jason. Thanks for having me, Greg. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in here, though, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background, your role at Gusto, and what brought you into the marketing world?
Jason Ing: Yeah, certainly. So I lead a world-class marketing team at Gusto. We drive revenue growth in a high-velocity inbound business. I oversee a full-stack marketing team that includes demand gen, product marketing, brand, communications, and creative. And I previously spent nearly two decades at Microsoft and Amazon in leadership marketing roles across demand gen, product marketing, and brand, working on major brands like Xbox, Prime Video, and AWS. And what brought me to marketing was actually Procter& Gamble. I had no business working in marketing. I was an industrial engineering major. But I transitioned into marketing as my first job out of school as an assistant brand manager. And it was a great opportunity for me to explore learning about business and learning about marketing. And here I am still in marketing almost 25 years later. Hey, it’s nice.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I started out as an architecture major, actually, and somehow ended up in marketing myself. So it’s funny how things happen like that. So yeah, we’re gonna talk about a few things today, but I wanna start with the Choose Gusto campaign that I briefly mentioned at the top of the show. Can you tell us a little bit about the campaign and what inspired this bold approach to marketing payroll and team management tools?
Jason Ing: Yeah, of course. ChooseGusto was really driven by two insights. The first is payroll and HR and benefits. These are critical things for small businesses, but they are perceived as tedious. And the second is SMB owners face endless daily decisions every day, especially when they start out. And let’s face it, you mentioned this, payroll and HR are often seen as necessary evils. They’re complex, time-consuming, tedious, even draining, yet so important. And so our goal was to flip the script, show that Gusto makes these processes simpler, more enjoyable, and even stress-free. And so we wanted to highlight Gusto as a trustworthy partner that cares about your business and gives you the peace of mind to take care of a lot of those back-office tasks that allows business owners to focus on their passions.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so you mentioned some of the goals of the campaign, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that, as well as how your team worked to make payroll as we’ve both kind of referred something of dry subject at the least to make it relatable and funny.
Jason Ing: Yeah, so we had two main goals. First was to increase brand awareness and differentiate Gusto from some of the more well-established incumbents like ADP, Paychex, and QuickBooks. Gusto is a challenger brand, and while we’re 13 years in, we’re not 100 or 50 years old like our competitors that are very well known. So our brand advertising focuses on introducing us to SMBs who are unfamiliar with us, whether you’re already in the market or you will be in the market in the foreseeable future. We used humor to humanize the struggles of SMB owners. We compare payroll benefits to things people love to hate, like root canals or elevator music or watching the grass grow. Although we didn’t want to acknowledge this head-on, positioning Gusto as a partner that takes care of that messy back-end task so that users can truly focus on what matters to them, which is building their business and making an impact on their communities, was something really critical for us. So the use of playful and smart humor versus over-the-top slapstick humor to show relatable situations in a smart, witty way was really our approach to making our ads memorable and helping them break through. And we spent a lot of time on just iterating and getting that tone right. Uh, but we feel like we’ve, we’ve, uh, hit that right sweet spot. So really the creative approach, disbalance that relatability and clarity on how gusto simplifies their, uh, small businesses, uh, business operations.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And you know, as with campaign, any campaign, any successful campaign, it’s, it’s a lot of, it comes down to. the execution as well, you know, even some great strategies can look good on paper, let’s say, and then, you know, when executed may leave a little to be desired. But, you know, can you talk a little bit more about, you know, how you developed the creative strategy and, you know, how you identified what would resonate most with your audience?
Jason Ing: Yeah, whenever you start a campaign and you start with a blank sheet of paper or you’re starting to brief, there’s always some functional benefits, things that you need people to understand about what you do that’s critical. But then you also have to balance that against what are the emotional needs of the consumers and the customers that you’re trying to talk to and appeal to. And so for us, it was really about communicating the breadth of our offerings, payroll, HR benefits with some of those emotional needs around peace of mind, time, freedom, and even the joys of running your business. Our process had several phases. The first was we really needed to define who we are as a business and make sure that the creative and the messaging really captures that. And that’s about clarifying our unique point of view, staying true to our brand DNA and understanding how what we communicate fits into a longer term vision for the company. And in short for us, we stand for small businesses, we simplify the complex to get peace of mind, and we are joyfully expressive in our tone. We’re even known for having a pig mascot that appears in our product that a lot of customers like to talk about. And then there’s understanding the customer perspective. So this is about deeply analyzing customer pain points, needs, and expectations. So the key here is how do you bring these two perspectives together? How do you align our authentic brand story with what customers truly care about? And customer obsession is critical. Every company talks about how they’re in it for the customer and how critical that is. But it’s not just about telling people what they want to hear. Great branding and great creative is telling the truth well, ensuring that the messaging reflects both your core identity and what those real customer needs are. And we are not by any means competitor obsessed, but we are mindful that the choices our customers need to make often look at us in relation to our competitors. So we have to make ourselves stand out and make ourselves a very clear choice to them.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And I love the, you know, telling the truth. Well, I think that’s a great, that’s a great thing to be, because I think that other, otherwise you’re going to say something and it’s going to feel hollow. I think we’ve all I’ve seen, heard, watched those campaigns where it’s just like, oh, wow, that does sound really nice, but I use their product or service and that’s not my experience, right? So I think that’s such an important point. And I guess, give us a sense of campaign results. So what’s been the response to the campaign so far? And based on that, what’s next for the campaign?
Jason Ing: Yeah, there has been a very strong positive reception, which we can look at qualitatively and quantitatively. So when we look quantitatively, we look at awareness and we look at some of our top and mid funnel acquisition metrics. We’ve seen meaningful, statistically significant increases in brand awareness, particularly amongst certain audience segments like accountants who are critical in helping advise a lot of their small business clients. We also saw incremental lift in our mid to bottom of funnel metrics from traffic to leads as well. And our bottom of funnel efficiencies, so when you look at things like paid performance channels like search, the efficiencies also increased in terms of what we were paying from a cost per lead standpoint. And one other thing we’ve started recently looking at is, how does Gusto show up in generative AI and in tools like Gemini and ChatGBT? So if you type in best small business payroll, you will see Gusto come up first. I credit that to the cumulative results of all of these efforts combined. And most importantly, we often keep our ears close to social media and we’ve seen very positive anecdotal feedback from our customers and employees. And it gives Gusto, our employee base, a real sense of pride and recognition in seeing what we’re deploying in market. Now, as far as what’s next, we will continue down this We believe consistency and distinctiveness is really critical in creative execution. So we are working on a new set of ads that will launch into 2025 with bigger media investments. I was really excited to see some of our ads run in some NFL programming and the Golden Globes. We are really putting ourselves out there because we feel very confident in the message that we’re giving and how it’s resonating. with small businesses. And so really the key is how do we make this fresh? How do we continue to refine this voice? But to continue to build that recognition for how we support small businesses and doing it in a way that only expressing that in only a way that we could.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about your role as a CMO. And, you know, there’s we’ve got a lot of marketing leaders and aspiring leaders listening to this show. So I want to talk about start with something that is very near and dear to my heart, which is prioritization and setting priorities. And, uh, you know, as a CMO, you know, what are your top priorities when it comes to building and executing in this case, Gusto’s marketing strategy?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Um,
Jason Ing: You know, I first prioritize customers and how do we reach them depending on whatever stage they’re at in the buying journey. Sometimes that’s before they’re just thinking about starting a business to their well in market. And so I do think a lot about how I’m allocating my investments from bottom of funnel, mid funnel and top of funnel. So that’s really important as a leader that to drive credibility in the marketing function In today’s world, especially in B2B SaaS, you have to be driving measurable business outcomes and thinking about how are the things you’re doing, how are they driving revenue growth through acquisition, expansion, retention, How are you educating customers? And ultimately, how do all these things collectively deliver a message that drives more people to understand your brand and like your brand? And so there’s always a trade-off between short-term revenue goals with long-term brand building investments. And I would always advise anyone in marketing to think about it holistically. Deliver the numbers, but also think long-term. So it’s not about You do brand here and you do performance here in silos and it’s the accumulation of brand plus performance. I see it as brand times performance or multiplied by performance. to ultimately get to the outcomes you want over time. And really, it’s all about looking at understanding your customers to make sure that when you’re doing all these things across channel, you’re not forgetting about your creative, your messaging, and how you’re really carving out a clear space in people’s minds. And so that’s how I think a lot about just how I prioritize. It’s really about delivering results, thinking about things through brand and performance, and then making sure your messaging is sharp.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And I love that integrated way of thinking as well, because otherwise you’re invariably going to get things that feel, this fits in one bucket versus the other. It’s going to feel very binary or something. That said, there’s always, with prioritization, there’s always things that you have to kind of put above others. And then sometimes you have to either make cuts or cut things all together. What budget items or what areas do you consider uncuttable regardless of economic priorities and things?
Jason Ing: Yeah, I would say there’s really no budget item that is completely off limits. But to me, it’s about making sure you’re balanced across the purchase funnel. I think that’s very critical. And too often times, CMOs will look at, well, I will only do the things that I can measure and cut everything out. And I would caution against that. I think you have to have things that are um, top of funnel, you know, whether that’s if you can afford to do brand, you know, TV ads, great. But I also recognize that not everyone can or should do TV ads depending on their audience, but you need to manage some level of PR or thought leadership to get the word out there. You can leverage a lot of community or social media, but so to me, it’s not about cutting out like sections of the funnel, but it’s just about paring down and focusing on the things that you know are most important. But like mid funnel, SEO, content marketing, paid search and paid search, SEO and paid search. You know, if you had to really prioritize ruthlessly and you have the team that can execute on it, make sure that your own channels are strong, like people are going to your website. Your website is your storefront, so you definitely don’t want to skimp on that. You want to think about design and optimizations constantly on that. And then when I think about just other things, just budget mix, There is a, I apply this rule where, you know, roughly 50% of what I spend has to be measurable in some ways. 30% would be what I would consider an experiment. And 20% is what I’d consider feels right. You’re not always going to be able to measure everything down to a science, depending on. you know, the state of your MarTech stack or where your business is and its journeys. And some channels are harder to measure than others, like at a home or if you do a sponsorship activation. So what you need to think about there is just making sure your mix of budgets is aligned to some kind of framework based on good judgment. But if I were, if someone were to tell me like 90% of the marketing I do is a feels right category, I would say, okay, that’s a little bit of a dangerous place to be. Your CFO is not going to like that. And just think about how you place your bets well, because at the end of the day, as a CMO or any marketing leader, you are stewarding precious company resources. And for the executive team and others to feel confident in your ability, you have to show you can manage those resources well.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. And, you know, as, as with some of the other things that, you know, just, it feels balanced and, um, leaves room for some, to your point, some experimentation leaves, leaves room for some things that to your other point, just feel right. But yeah, if it’s, I, it would be, um, a bit challenging if 90% of, of the budget was things that were not attributable or anything like that. So that sounds like a good, a good balance. One other thing that, you know, certainly a common thread on this show and just everywhere is the role of AI. And, you know, in this case, the role of AI in marketing. What are your thoughts on, you know, where is your team and your approach to implementing AI in marketing? And, you know, where do you see it going?
Jason Ing: Yeah. If I could get on my soapbox, I would tell all marketers that we as a profession, we’re not adopting this quick enough. And I have been very clear with my team who has been really great about testing into AI and looking at all the different ways AI can improve productivity and creativity by not just automating routine tasks, but like using AI tools embedded in things like You know, we use BrightEdge and ClearScope for our SEO and a lot of the AI comes in in terms of making sure that gets well optimized for searchability. There’s so infinite ways in which AI really helps marketers and in some ways it’s very purpose-built. Like we are one of the, we should be the early adopters because of Ultimately, what we do is we put content out there, whether it’s creative, in visual, or in words. In words in particular, a lot of content generation is really made better and faster by AI. Now you have to be careful. You have to navigate through legal considerations, especially things related to copyright and video and content. But you also need to be mindful that you’re not just farming it all out to AI. You have to be what they call the human in the loop. You have to be inspecting everything. that comes out of AI, and it’s just really, really important to make sure that you treat it more like you treat… I like to say ChatGBT is like my intern. I bounce ideas off it. I’m very clear on how I prompt it, and it gives me an answer that I can trust a lot of times, but like an intern who’s new at this and learning how I work, I’m not always going to, it’s not always going to get things right. And so I think just, just be on the edge of that learning curve. And I certainly think my team has done a great job in terms of just, uh, heating the call of being very AI and future focused.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And, you know, I think AI and AI adoption is certainly part of a lot of different types of B2B marketing has evolved quite a bit over the last several years. Um, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how do you see, whether it’s AI’s role or some other customer preferences and the preference changes, how have marketing programs evolved in the B2B world?
Jason Ing: Yeah, more and more campaigns and marketing outputs have to be data driven and more personalized than ever before. SMB marketing, it’s kind of like this hybrid between it’s B2B, but it’s also B2C because there’s so many of them out there. It requires highly relevant and targeted messages. that speaks to pain points. And what I often notice is a lot of marketing, I’d say like mediocre marketing or mid marketing, as the kids would say, it’s just very self-expressive, like we do X. And it’s like, well, do people really care that you do X because you do X and so does 10 other vendors out there, right? And so speak to customers where they’re at, speak to the problems and the solutions that you offer. And I do think AI-driven strategies like content personalization and trigger-based marketing is really key. And I’m liking a lot of tools like Typeface, for example, that really help automate that at scale and help kind of ease the burden of having to make things so tedious when you’re launching a campaign with thousands of assets. I do also think that brand messaging, there was a time when people were like, oh, you don’t need to do brand because everything is performance driven. I’m glad to see that that’s coming back in terms of people recognizing that there are limitations when you’re just focused on performance-based channels. You need them to work together. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a multiplier effect. And so I think those are some of the things that kind of come and go, but The channels change, the tools change, but the fundamentals ultimately are the same.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and so talking a little bit about, you know, we’ve got a wide range of people listening to the show, some earlier in their career, some later. But, you know, for those starting off, certainly it’s a different world than it was when I was starting off my career. And, you know, we talked about AI and things and, you know, you’ve had an impressive career in marketing and, you know, just wanted to get your advice on What should young marketing professionals just starting their careers, what should they be keeping in mind now?
Jason Ing: Yeah, I think I’m a little old school, but what I would say is be grounded in those marketing principles or their fundamentals. And if you forget any of them, there’s like the four P’s and things like that. The most important one just to remember is always be grounded in customer understanding. Be the voice of the customer, know the customer inside and out. That is so critical. The other is, you know, master the details and work hard, but never lose sight of the bigger picture. Especially when you’re early on in your career, you want to understand how things work, how to execute a campaign, what makes a campaign great or not. just working hard and being really attuned to the details and then when it’s done understanding like did it work did it not work how did this fit into the bigger picture of the strategy is it’s really important and as you progress in your career like that wasn’t clear to me when i did my very first campaign which was a diaper direct mailer. We put a sample in there and we mailed it to a bunch of people, but then when I look back, I’m like, oh, that was a great example of direct marketing, of targeted marketing, of measured marketing approach. And a lot of those principles, while I’m sure P&G still does that today, it was like, I have done versions of that type of campaign in a more digital or an automated fashion today, but I still think about that very first campaign that I did because I worked so hard to get that done. And then the last thing I’d say is be a truth seeker in all things. Challenge biases, disconfirm your beliefs, look at alternative perspectives, and use data wisely. At the end of the day, great marketing, as I mentioned earlier, is truth told well, but know the truth. Know the truth about your customers, your competitors, about yourself. as well. I think those things collectively will serve you well in your career, regardless of what type of product or type of marketing you do.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love that. Well, and maybe to that point about seeking the truth, last thing I want to talk about with you is, so Gusto has an economics research program that does research on small business economy. I would love to hear a little bit more about that and, you know, how this influences the marketing strategies and campaigns that you run.
Jason Ing: Yeah, I mean, again, this goes back to being truth-seeking and data-driven. We have over 400,000 customers, and so we can glean a lot of insights from different industry types, how they’re reacting to things like wage increases or macroeconomic trends like interest rates. And we were even just looking at the impact of tariffs and how that could impact small businesses if some of these things go through. And it’s really about looking at that and then figuring out how do you derive these insights, deliver them to customers in a way that’s relevant to them through, you know, we have a research blog, we have a blog for small businesses. It’s embedded in our product marketing message, as well as how we speak to customers more at the upper funnel through some of our lifecycle programs. So like recently, we also did a study on year-end bonuses around December. to help SMBs benchmark what their compensation strategy should be going into the year. And so doing all this work, it not only helps small businesses, but it’s managed to get us on Wall Street Journal articles and Forbes and Fortune and the New York Times because we are very transparent and we’re speaking to data and trends that millions of small businesses care about. So it’s really kind of taken a life of its own as far as helping us deliver something that’s really important to small businesses, but to help also shape our brand and to get feedback on the types of things that our customers are responding to so that we can find more of those type of insights and be even more relevant as we continue to develop our content.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a win-win. I mean, it helps, it helps the small businesses and it helps the brand. Yeah, that’s, that’s great. Well, thanks again for joining today, Jason. One last question I’d like to ask everybody here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Jason Ing: Yeah, always be learning, always come in with a day one mindset. Like I start every week pretending, well not pretending, often I don’t know something and trying to learn it new. But also looking at, okay, what am I doing now and where could I be wrong or where could something have changed that might require pivoting. And so it’s this idea of having a, like, I worked at Amazon for many years, but it’s like this thing they call day one mindset. And it’s really important that you always be intellectually honest with yourself and realize like you, there’s the world is changing. Our customers want more. Competitors are coming out all the time. How are you staying ahead of those things? And it’s not a paranoia, but it’s it’s more of a curiosity driven approach. I think for me, that’s really what drives me to stay agile and on top of things as best I can, of course.
