Ian Hillis
Hi everyone. Welcome to PayFAQ: The Embedded Payments Podcast brought to you by Payrix and Worldpay. I’m your host, Ian Hillis, and today I’m talking with Brittany Clark, SVP and Head of Marketing at Payrix and Worldpay for Platforms, and we’re going to talk about how software companies can market Embedded Payments successfully. Brittany, welcome to the show.
Brittany Clark
Thank you, Ian, it’s great to be here.
Ian Hillis
I am excited for this episode, and I know this one’s going to be especially insightful for the software companies out there looking to maximize the impact of Embedded Payments through effective marketing. So, we’ve got the right expert to lead this conversation. Let me tell you all a little bit about Brittany before we get started here. So, Brittany is a collaborative marketing leader with over 15 years of experience taking B2B and B2C products to markets worldwide. When Brittany joined Worldpay in 2022 as the Head of Marketing for Worldpay for Platforms including Payrix, she brought a keen eye for detail in understanding why people use products, how their experience can be improved, and working cross functionally to build a strategic, customer-centric roadmap that meets business goals. Before becoming a part of the Worldpay for Platforms team Brittany led marketing teams at Diligent, Mailchimp, and Etsy, diving deep into the needs of B2B SaaS companies and delivering personalized, engaging experiences that build long-term, loyal customers. When Brittany is not thinking about the customer journey for Worldpay and Payrix partners, she likes to travel and spend time outdoors, camping, hiking, and backpacking with her family. Let’s get started. Brittany, you made a big pivot in your career to focus on Embedded Payments. Let’s start there. Tell us a little bit about why you’re excited about this area coming from your software-focused background.
Brittany Clark
Yeah, the best software companies at their core are laser focused on providing the best experience they can for their customers, and in order to do this, they both anticipate their customers’ needs, and they’re constantly pushing the limits of what technology is able to do. And at Worldpay for Platforms, we get to support our customers on both fronts. First, Embedded Payments are becoming, or have become, table stakes for the platforms we serve and their customers. So small businesses (like daycares and dentist offices) expect transactions for both their business and their customers (the consumers that they serve) to be seamless, and our technology helps them do that. But second, the market and technology are evolving rapidly, and I think embedded FinTech on the horizon is really opening and kind of paving a lot more opportunity for us and our customers. So, they’re not just thinking about payments anymore. They’re thinking about embedded lending, card issuing, how much more that’s starting to hit the market. And as a marketer, it’s a dream to both work in a space where technology is moving this rapidly, and to be working at a company like Worldpay that has such a depth of industry experience and talent. So, it’s kind of a no brainer to join the team.
Ian Hillis
I love it, and that resonates deeply. I think when I try to explain payments to folks, I try to describe solving a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are just kind of rapidly changing real time alongside that. So, for the wrong person, that’s terrifying. For the right person, that’s exciting. So, Brittany, you got a broad set of experience. You’re specifically focused on software companies. How different are marketing payments compared to other areas of focus for a software company? What have you seen? Is it similar, or is it dramatically different?
Brittany Clark
Yeah honestly, I think the core principles are still the same. And for me and the team, I think it always starts with the value that you’re providing for your customer. So, getting to the value story as kind of the starting point, it usually begins with a pain point, and I’ll use our space. So, for example, your customers go to make a payment, they get pushed out to a different window. They have to re-enter all of their personal data. The form fill isn’t working. You can’t support them because payments are being supported by a third party. It’s not integrated into your experience, etc. So, if this is a starting point, and what Embedded Payments allows you to do is to make all of that seamless just a few clicks away for your customer. That’s kind of the genesis point for all of your materials. So, I think that that feels the same to me as other software that I’ve marketed, but the unique differences for payments, it does come down to a lot more technical issues, security issues, so things like compliance, you’re managing financial data. So, there’s definitely a more technical side. What I’ve seen is there’s a more significant element of education involved. So, it’s important for software companies to think about how they’re educating their customers prior to releasing this new functionality. And I think in the FinTech space, the regulations, the policies that are changing, it can significantly impact the user experience that you have to create how you keep your software platform safe and secure and make sure that you’re not an easy target for a data breach. It impacts the tools you use to protect your customers, and I think that’s very different from, say, a B2B SaaS platform that is helping your employees celebrate each other, or powering your job postings. There’s a lot more, I think, intricacy to marketing, payments and financial services in general.
Ian Hillis
There’s a lot of details to keep track of, particularly if this is new for someone. I’m wondering, Brittany, if you were to put your hat on as a marketing leader for a software platform, they’ve got a new Embedded Payments solution. How would you start to market this new functionality? What would those first steps be, and how would you grow that?
Brittany Clark
When I think about marketing strategy and the tactics, I tend to do the exercise on two fronts, first about our current customers, and then second, start to think about new customers. And so, while a lot of the materials and the messaging will often be the same, and maybe there’ll be a little bit of a different message you want to put out to new customers, the majority of it is the same, but the channels used can be quite different. And I also get this question from cross functional partners about how much we’re spending on different marketing strategies. So as a rule of thumb, we try to save the majority of our paid spend, especially paid media spend for acquiring new customers, and we leverage other channels to communicate with our existing customers. And it might seem like a simple point, but I think it’s worth reinforcing here. So, if we’re starting to think about how we market Embedded Payments to our existing customers, I’d always kind of assess the following. One, what opportunity do we have to surface this new functionality inside of the current customer or user experience? Think about what regular communication channels you can tap into. So, you know, for us, we have monthly product webinars, we do quarterly webinars, we have quarterly business reviews. So, what are those kind of regular cadence of touch points? And then once you kind of know what the opportunities are to speak to your customers, think about (and this is often done in tandem or simultaneously) how we want to tell the story. And one thing I found is, I think, commonly thought of as best practice in the B2B marketing space, is tapping into your customer community is often the most powerful way to both drive interest and drive adoption, and that often takes the form of having a beta partner and building a case study, running a joint webinar, for example, where you talk about the customer’s pain point, how your product solves the problem and what value it has helped your customer to unlock, and I think in payments in particular, relative to other spaces, there’s a huge opportunity for B2B platforms to provide thought leadership. So, for example, partnering with your payments provider to talk about or host a webinar thinking about where Embedded Finance is heading, and that allows you to drive interest even ahead of an offering. And then, assuming you’ve built this interest, I think the other thing that feels important is to make the discovery process seamless, so having demo videos where the customers can understand: ‘Yeah, great. I want to do this, but what does it actually look like, and what is the experience I get to offer to my customers.’ Making sure relevant API documentation is really well built, you’ve got clarity around pricing, you have a quick means to allow them to turn on the new functionality if they’re interested. We do so much work in marketing to get someone interested in the product. I think there has to be that really close partnership with the product and engineering, and often it’s the, you know, the legal team and the pricing team, the contracting team, to make sure that it’s easy for your customers to start using the new product once you’ve gotten them interested in it. So that’s kind of how I would approach existing customers. The new customers, to me, it’s a little simpler. Starting point is: Is this functionality mission critical for our new customers? Is it going to be in their top three buying criteria? Oftentimes, I think with payments, it’s not necessarily a top three buying criteria, but it is table stakes. So, they want to know that their partner is going to allow them to have this functionality. And so, in that situation, I would probably have some, potentially have some, materials at the top of the funnel. And one of the things we’ve done is put out thought leadership with publishers that speak directly to our audience. So, a trade publication, for example, if you host a webinar there, you can often get new contacts into your CRM, and then, you know, down funnel, thinking about payments functionality. I think it’s probably not going to be in the first sales touch point, but down funnel in those sales materials, your customers will probably, or prospects will probably, want to know how you provide that functionality. So, making sure that material shows up down the funnel as well.
Ian Hillis
One of the pieces you mentioned, particularly in relation to the existing customer base, was this idea of building a customer community. And I think many software companies aspire to do that. In your previous experience. How have you seen that done effectively? What does that look like? What does that feel like? I know that’s a very aspirational thing for software companies. How do you build that customer community feel?
Brittany Clark
You know, I’ll reference one of the companies that I think does this the best. It’s a company called 6sense. We use their technology in our marketing stack, and they have done an incredible job of community building. I think it started small. I believe it started with a Slack channel of CMOs, and they’ve kind of built that out, and they now host regular (and they’ve been doing it, I don’t know, I’ve been joining them for two years now I think) Friday coffee hours with outside experts. They cover new trends in the marketing space. It’s not about their technology. They’re not marketing products to us, but we’re talking about everything from how you can carve out more time for yourself to work on strategy to the ideal B2B marketing tech stack. So, I think what they’re doing with that is creating a few different touch points. You know, you get the digest and email, and they’re staying relevant. They’re staying in our inbox, but they’re also showing their customers that they care about us. They’re on top of industry trends, and they’re kind of becoming that expert that we’re going to be in community, both with each other and with a thought leader. So, I think that they do it extremely well.
Ian Hillis
That’s a great example. And you mentioned kind of touch points, and a variety of topics. I think often software companies need to communicate a variety of topics to their user base. For example, new products, feature updates, etc., and that may feel like they’re over messaging their audience. What are your recommendations on how companies can strike a balance with external communications?
Brittany Clark
Yeah, I think there’s a couple tips there. One is going back to the value story. The starting point always must be about your customers and what they’re trying to do. And as an organization, I think when you’re thinking about your marketing and your value story, it’s a good time for you to reflect on how much empathy your organization has for your customers and how well your team (and that means everyone from engineers and product folks to support and marketing) truly understands the people and the communities you’re serving. And I think the kind of rule that I’ve seen is that the best tech companies make customer empathy the heartbeat of their organization. It’s what they wake up and think about all the time. So, I think that’s the starting point for any great marketing content. But to deal with what could be 20 different messages or 20 different emails can often be overwhelming for your customers. They’re not going to be able to pick up on all of those stories. So, going back to that, one thing that’s worked well for teams I’ve been a part of is anchoring to two or three key stories that you’re telling over a year. And an example there is, I was at Mailchimp, where we started to move beyond email marketing. So that was a core product. That’s all that we had done, and we were starting to move beyond email marketing for the first time and all the other products we released to support other marketing channels, from social media to websites, it all supported the core message of more than email marketing. So, distilling that into that simple message, we could have told six different stories, but instead we told one story that was supported by all the sequential product releases.
Ian Hillis
So, we talked about the complexity of payments and how that can be especially challenging to really nail down. What recommendations do you have for software companies on how to craft a payments value prop, or message that really stands out in the market?
Brittany Clark
I mean, we talked about it a second ago. Payments is table stakes. It shouldn’t be, and I don’t think it can be a friction point for your customers. And so, for functionality like this, it’s less about delivering the message and more about the software experience that you’re providing. But if I could give two pieces of advice, it would be to keep it simple. So, keep that language simple, especially with something like payments, it can get very jargony and confusing. So again, distilling it, making it simple and easy to understand. But I think there’s also a huge opportunity to get your customers excited about where this market is heading. We’re kind of at the tip of the iceberg right now. Embedded Finance creates expanded revenue opportunities, and it also is going to provide a way for platforms, for B2B SaaS platforms, to increase customer stickiness through new services. So, I think we’re only starting to see that. And I think the more you can start to talk about the market where it’s heading; position yourself as a thought leader. And then as new technology comes out, you’re there, leading the way, paving the path, whatever vertical you’re serving, I think that would be my advice.
Ian Hillis
That’s fantastic advice. Brittany, as we close out here, what additional marketing wisdom would you like to impart to our software companies before we wrap up?
Brittany Clark
I mean, we haven’t talked a lot about marketing as a practice, and I think a lot of people listening to this podcast are probably not marketers. So, I’ll say I think the most important thing is hiring a great team. And that can mean a team of one. It could mean a team of 30. But to me, there’s four traits that really every great marketer I’ve worked with shares. One is empathy. Again, that’s the starting point. A strong bias towards partnership, not working in isolation, working closely with the product team, the commercial team, whatever partners. They have critical thinking skills, being able to ask a lot of questions and really distill down to the why, and a passion for marketing. So, marketing, like the payment space, is evolving rapidly. Right now, there’s a lot of new technology that can help marketers do their jobs better and faster. And so, hiring experts who are on top of these trends, they’re engaged in the space, and they’re constantly pushing the boundary of how technology can help you grow your business better. That’s what I would wrap up with.
Ian Hillis
Those are exceptional closing thoughts. Well, Brittany, thank you so much for being on the show. This was fun. I hope we get the chance to bring you back again soon.
Brittany Clark
Awesome. Yeah, there’s a lot more marketing knowledge and fun to talk about, so that would be awesome. Thank you.
Ian Hillis
Awesome. Thanks, Brittany. We want to be a trusted resource for software providers who are out there trying to make sense of Embedded Payments and finance to help them get the education they need to make the business decisions their customers and investors will thank them for. Thank you to everyone joining us today, and I look forward to continuing the conversation our next episode.
