Tae: All right, Greg, so happy to be able to interview you here. I got a whole bunch of questions, but first can you give me a little bit of an overview of how you got to be in your position in your career?
Greg: I started in social enterprise with a national charity, but then realized climate was where I wanted to focus my career. So left to join cleantech at Ecobee in marketing, and then from Ecobee, led growth and marketing at a clean energy investment bond called Copower, which then got acquired by the City Community Investment Bank. So, continuing to lead marketing Investment Bank focused on clean energy and social purpose housing, which then led me to this role at SWTCH where I am leading marketing.
Tae: So tell me – who is your primary target audience and how do you tailor your marketing strategies to reach them more effectively?
Greg: The people who buy our services here at SWTCH would be the property owners, building managers or investors who are trying to provide the infrastructure for the tenants and guests to charge at home or at work or at the retail property. So it’s for tenant acquisition retention, it’s for ROI revenue opportunity. There’s lots of reasons why people invest in EV charging infrastructure at the properties. Those people that are our customers. And holistically, we need to meet them where they’re at, so spaces and places where they exist, which usually is online, through things like LinkedIn trade publications and media content that they find is credible. There’s lots of like, real estate publications and whatnot. And then in the physical world, there’s a lot of events, so we go to many conferences and trade shows where we exhibit, showcase our work and bring people to actually have conversations with our core audience.
Tae: Do you have a consistent visual style for your marketing? And do you use a lot of storytelling to accompany that, or what is your strategy in that role as marketing the your charging stations?
Greg: As a challenger brand, we’re trying to compete against the big players, the industry incumbents. So, in that nature, quality in how we look, feel, and show up is a big deal. It’s very important. We’re asking people to put down hundreds of thousands of dollars on infrastructure so it’s incredibly important that we show up very polished in the most genuine way. When it comes to a second question, education is a huge component of our marketing, because they don’t know what they don’t know. So we have to take them on that journey. That means we lean very heavily on case studies, on education pieces, on content that can help educate them in everything from power management to software, billing, how to manage a fleet of chargers, all things that they’ve never done before. So part of that core of our marketing is education.
Tae: Okay, that’s good to know. How do you currently measure the success of your marketing campaigns, especially those that involve visual content, like photos or videos?
Greg: It’s a very long, long sales cycle product in the B to B world. It’s very hard to directly measure the success of particular campaigns on a revenue perspective, because the average person probably sees 10 to 20 impressions before they actually become a buyer. And when you ask them how you found out about us, it was just a blurry, massive “…because your SWTCH, right?” And obviously there’ll be some last touch attribution or something that brings them to our page in the moment that matters. But holistically, we need to rely on impressions, engagements, click through rates, or all those types of metrics that help determine if one particular piece of creative or asset is stronger than another piece, headline, or title. So it’s a lot of micro testing to help figure out those pieces that then hopefully will later add up towards success down the funnel.
Tae: Great! That’s pretty cool to hear. What kind of creative assets do you typically need? Product shots, lifestyle imagery, installations, customer testimonials, etc?
Greg: Yeah, all of it. People want to see what they’re buying. So it’s, you know, product shots with lifestyle shots, because we want to create an emotional connection as much as possible, and to not just have random plugs in a wall as the only visual that they see. And then yeah, like real installations so people can see what it looks like. Finished products are very important. Seeing different settings, different styles, garages, parking lots, yeah, like you name it. There’s so many different places and spaces we try to capture so that the different types of audiences that we talk to can see themselves with our product.
Tae: What’s one marketing success you’re secretly, or not so secretly, really proud of?
Greg: I think using the sophistication of retargeting people, particularly people who visit your website. With cookies enabled, you can theoretically follow them around the internet through various properties, and it’s basically the cheapest way to look much bigger than you actually are. So if you have been to our website at some point, you may eventually see one of our commercials while watching Bachelor in Paradise or whatever show you’re currently watching right now. This immediately gives the impression that we bought ads on ABC, but we didn’t. And so by leveraging digitally connected TV ads, you can use the same demographic and psychographic that you can with an ad like a display ad. You can show a TV ad as nice as you can make it to somebody who’s watching Game of Thrones or a TV show which you culturally connect big budget ads, big budget businesses with being able to have ads on like cable television. But now in this world of digital television you can see an ad for SWTCH and immediately that comes with a credibility that is previously unavailable to companies of small size stars.
Tae: What’s changed the most about marketing since you started and what stayed stubbornly the same?
Greg: That’s a good question. The volume of an ease of ways to get messages out to people and the number of ways that you can with the advent of AI. The number of ways you can get people’s emails is more prominent than ever. The number of social media profiles which you can hit people on, and the number of ways you can gain impressions to your audience has grown substantially than it ever was 15 years ago. When Facebook just started you had these tiny little ad units on the side. But what stayed the same is that attention is everything, so it’s just now harder to get someone’s actual attention, versus impressions are now so cheap. So it’s more about how you actually figure out what is going to gain someone’s attention in order for them to understand what you’re trying to tell them, the story of communication and education. Are you inspiring, educating or informing? It’s just harder.
Tae: Who’s someone that’s influenced you a lot, personally or professionally, but probably doesn’t even know it?
Greg: Well, I would for sure, say my wife, but she probably knows it because she’s shaped me for 20 years. The reason why I’m in climate is because of her focus on the climate, which will be her path and my path for the next X number of years. So I owe a lot to her, for sure, as to like who I am and what I focus on, and also I would say high school teachers. I think there were a set of high school teachers who were particularly strong and cared, and I think they had a very long lasting impact on me and some of my peers.
Tae: What’s a hill you’re willing to die on when it comes to marketing or just life in general? It could be as simple as pineapple belongs on pizza or…
Greg: I was just asking that question to my team. Literally, an hour ago!
Tae: Personally, I don’t think pineapple should be on pizza.
Greg: I’m in for anything. If it’s got cheese and like sauce and cheese. You put anything on that thing, I’m fine with it. It’s like in marketing, like the thing I would die on is that, like, you need to be consistent with the position and tone that you are as a brand. It’s not worth sacrificing quality for quantity.
Tae: Absolutely, 100% agree with you.
Greg: I was just wanting to ask you about Andrew.
Tae: Oh, my husband, Adam?
Greg: Yeah, Adam. He does video production?
Tae: Yeah, yeah. His company’s called Atomic Spark.
Greg: What’s his take on AI video, and how has that changed how he operates as a video production leader?
Tae: I don’t think he uses a ton of AI video, per se. At the moment, he does use AI for other things like audio improvement in videos, because I know he has a really great program that can take out background noise. So if you’re, you know, shooting outside and there’s traffic going by it’s fantastic at taking that extra audio out so you can just hear the person talking. I think a lot of the videos he does are very specific to people and products and places. So it’s not easy to just put in some AI generic content for a lot of it, so it hasn’t affected him as much as it may have some other video businesses, but yeah, we’ll see in the coming years how things change with AI. What about yourself?
Greg: I’m fascinated with AI video as a tool to tell stories that I don’t have the budget for, but I don’t think it’s there quite yet. There’s a world in which having an idea for a shoot of a person in a garage with a charger and telling a story of something that’s like, you know, that’s gonna cost me $25,000 bucks, like, right off the top, whereas, I could iterate that myself for $200 bucks with AI. But the question goes back to the conversation before, of like, quality or quantity. Like, right now, the quality is not there, so I’m not touching it, but it’s just, it’s wild. Yeah, I’m intrigued to watch the speed of quality increase so rapidly that like there’s going to be a point where it’s going to unlock that kind of potential value.