Why Clarity and Customer Insight Drive Scalable Startup Marketing With Maria Botta

Intro: 00:02

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig into their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here we dive deep with marketing executives, experts and innovators to uncover how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. This episode is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies so you can fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations.

With a proven track record, RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions, so you can turn your direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Visit rpmdm.com to learn more. I’m really looking forward to learning from my guests today. I’m thrilled to have Maria Botta on the show. Maria is an accomplished business strategist and fractional CMO with deep expertise in marketing leadership, brand growth, and business scaling for startup companies. 

After earning her MBA in Global Management from Thunderbird, she has been dedicated to empowering founders through high impact marketing strategies and business advisory. A recognized mentor, strategist, and global connector, Maria is passionate about driving innovation, identifying growth opportunities, and building resilient brands in fast paced, evolving markets. Thank you so much for joining me on Response Drivers today, Maria.

Maria Botta: 01:50

Thanks for having me, Rick. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Rick Rappe: 01:53

I want to jump right in and ask you some questions about your career journey and your background.

Maria Botta: 01:58

Let’s do it.

Rick Rappe: 01:58

So what shaped your approach early on in your career? To marketing and business strategy?

Maria Botta: 02:08

Well, my first career was actually in film and television, where I was a producer and executive producer. And after spending, I don’t know, 16, 17 years doing that, I really wanted to pivot. And that’s when I went back to graduate school and graduated, you know, got my MBA, as you mentioned. And that started a whole trajectory for me as I graduated from business school, I started more, you know, I kind of made a manifesto for myself. I call it a manifesto where I detailed what kind of companies I wanted to work with, what kind of work I wanted to do, and the kinds of people that I wanted to work with and how I wanted to work.

One of the things I said was, one of the things I wrote was I really wanted to work with companies who were doing good works in the world, meaning things companies that were giving back and doing things that were innovative, different and benefiting humankind. And that’s really been very aligned to the types of clients and engagements I’ve had so far. So I kind of started with the premise of what I wanted to do, and those companies sort of came to me, and that’s sort of how it all started.

Rick Rappe: 03:31

Wow.

Maria Botta: 03:32

That’s amazing.

Rick Rappe: 03:33

Yeah.

Maria Botta: 03:33

And I know you’ve done a lot, a lot of work with startups and early stage companies. So tell us a little bit about that and your experience in working with those types of companies.

Maria Botta: 03:43

Right. So interestingly enough, many of those companies that are startups really have the intention of going through and really creating a positive impact in the world. I really do believe in impact, you know, that companies that really have a clear vision towards impact. And so that’s why the startup space for me is really so interesting and exciting. You often find companies that are in there who are innovating beyond what we do today, imagining ways of doing business that don’t exist yet.

Right, that they’re projecting or they’re imagining. So to me, that’s the most exciting space to be in. It’s also kind of hectic and never the same day, never the same minute twice, let’s say not not the same day. I would say the same hour twice. It’s very exciting from that perspective because it’s always evolving, always changing. 

As a senior marketer, I have an opportunity to really make a big imprint and a big, you know, yeah, a big imprint on the work that these companies are doing, how they’re getting the work out, who you know, understanding their target audience and really getting it out there.

Rick Rappe: 05:03

What are some of the common marketing mistakes that you have run into as you’re working with these early stage companies? I mean, do you run into a lot of the same types of issues over and over again?

Maria Botta: 05:14

Yes, I do. So because I mean, but these issues are true not just in startups but also in mature companies, more mature companies. Okay. One of the main things I find, because I work mostly with technology oriented companies, most founders are technologists. They’re not finance people.

They’re not marketers, they’re not operations. And so one of the mistakes I find is that there’s not a marketer or a marketing leader in the founding house, you know. And so that means to me that marketing is not important or it’s they haven’t thought about it, they haven’t considered it. And so by the time they bring somebody like me on, it’s like, what? What? 

Instead of, you know, when you’re embedded in the founding leadership, then you can have a lot more say and a lot more impact, like I said.

Rick Rappe: 06:16

Yeah. That’s interesting.

Maria Botta: 06:18

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 06:19

Do you find that founders being technologists, that they want to talk about the features of their products a lot more than they need to, or do you think that people are they able to focus on the needs of the consumer?

Maria Botta: 06:34

Well, that’s an interesting question. So I’m a mentor, and Techstars Global, which is an accelerator program, and I get to meet a lot of founders through that. And one of the first things I ask is how many interviews have you done with your target, who you think your target audience is going to be? And I can’t tell you how many times people tell me, well, you know, I know, I know because I know. And it’s like, no, you don’t know.

Do you even know if this is actually a product that you can get traction for? You know, is this something you think it’s a great idea but does? Do other people think it’s a great idea? So to me, that’s one of the biggest mistakes or challenges that founders have when they start out. It’s like they just think it’s a great idea many times. 

And of course, their mothers and their wives or husbands have told them, yes, it’s a great idea, but there is no proof. There’s no business case, you know, for the idea.

Rick Rappe: 07:43

Right, right.

Maria Botta: 07:44

That’s why accelerators are so important, you know, because you get to test an idea Oftentimes in a minimal risk.

Rick Rappe: 07:51

Yeah. Well, it’s totally relatable to me because we’ve taken on several startup clients over the years. And it certainly is interesting because sometimes they want us to put all the features in, you know, features forward and, and list all that out in our direct mail campaigns. And we have to kind of come back and say, really, we need to talk to the consumer about what they need and what they are looking for, what their emotions are, their situation. And, you know, the product is not going to be featured in the same exact way.

We need to talk to the benefits and not necessarily the features.

Maria Botta: 08:29

So yeah, I think oftentimes founders don’t understand like they don’t understand that their audience wants to know what’s in it for them.

Rick Rappe: 08:38

Right. And people are looking for that in marketing messaging.

Maria Botta: 08:42

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 08:42

Right up front. It has to be really clear and like super quick. Otherwise they’re on to the next thing. We’re all bombarded with too much marketing all day long, and so we have to learn to filter it out, really.

Maria Botta: 08:55

And make it simple and easy for people to digest and understand.

Rick Rappe: 09:00

Right.

Maria Botta: 09:00

And they can. You said it. You said it very clearly that they can attach an emotional connection to it, because at the end of the day, that’s how we sell anything is through an emotional connection.

Rick Rappe: 09:12

Yeah, there’s always an emotional need or emotional trigger. And then we back it up with a lot of rational features and benefits to justify the decision that we’ve already made. Yeah. I think well, let me ask you one more question about working with founders and and especially startup founders. I mean, I’ve I’ve had my experiences with startup founders and I know how challenging they can be.

But how do you balance ambition with realistic execution plans?

Maria Botta: 09:42

Great question, because that’s one of the first questions I ask Founders. It’s okay. What are your business goals? So we can align anything that any strategy we create, anything we do moving forward to those business goals. Right?

Well, I want to sell a million widgets tomorrow. Well, there are many things you need to consider before we drive that demand. I find oftentimes people are not prepared from a capacity perspective or operations perspective. It’s like, yes, what if we sold a million widgets? Can you deliver? 

You know, and those are big questions that I ask. I don’t challenge, I ask questions. And I think by answering, asking the right questions, people can think through it. You know, it’s just guiding them to think through it because sometimes they just don’t think about capacity.

Rick Rappe: 10:44

Right? Right.

Maria Botta: 10:45

And that is a big error because if you fail on delivering correctly, you’ve lost a client and possibly more.

Rick Rappe: 10:55

Right. That’s so interesting. In your experience, what separates brands that are able to scale successfully or startups that are able to scale successfully from ones that stall? Have you seen any commonalities there?

Maria Botta: 11:14

You know, a lot of times it’s luck. I’m going to say that.

Rick Rappe: 11:18

Oh, wow.

Maria Botta: 11:19

Luck. The correct network. The correct positioning. Clarity I think, is the most important thing when you go talk to an investor or when you talk to bringing on team members, when you talk to whatever the situation is, clarity in your message is Has got to be right on. You can’t.

You can’t have a whiff of BS. You got to be clear and honest 100% of the time. And I think that is one of the things that distinguishes successful startups. Yeah, sometimes founders just like to blow hot air, you know, and it’s just like, no, sorry, but I can see right through that.

Rick Rappe: 12:08

It’s funny. That resonates with me as well because we’ve definitely worked with us. We’ve worked with a couple of software companies over the years that have had some really big, impressive systems for business, for managing business and things like that. And they had a lot of bells and whistles and a lot of components to them, and they were just super hard to explain. And, you know, you couldn’t go out and like quickly grab people’s attention with something that they could latch onto.

We had to really try to educate people as to what this does, this and this and this and this and this. And it’s like, just pick one thing and do it really well. I think would have gotten them a lot more traction than trying to sell it as something that does everything all at the same time.

Maria Botta: 12:57

So but you could say. Hey, this thing does everything that 25 other products that you spend money on does. You could have said something like that, right?

Rick Rappe: 13:06

Yeah. That’s true. There’s probably a way to put to make it more clear for sure. Yeah. That’s the, that’s the, that’s the difficult part that we sometimes we face as a direct marketing agency is that we have to take the brand positioning that they’ve come up with.

And sometimes it’s like, well, is that really perfect or not? I’m not sure. So we like to work with people like you who are guiding them to really build the brand positioning that needs to be in place. Yeah. How important do you think direct response marketing is in the early stages of building a startup company these days.

Maria Botta: 13:46

Direct response can be extremely effective and it’s cost effective too. Done right, if you know who your target audience is and you know exactly what they want to see and how they want it delivered up, it’s super effective. I think I was telling you before we started the program at one very effective program that I did, Reaching Out. It’s an advisory firm that works with generational handover or sales of high, high end agricultural enterprises. So think vineyards or, you know, enterprise level tomato farms, you know, things like that.

And so a lot of times, you know what happens. They get, you know, handed down generationally. But the kids don’t want to, you know, the grandkids don’t want to don’t want to take it over. They’re not interested. So but it’s very valuable and it’s also a very emotional thing. 

So working with an advisory company that does advisement to these particular individuals, we created a beautiful package. It was beautifully designed, very to the point, you know, there’s interactive because we incorporated QR codes. We did a lot of really interesting things so people could really get a very full picture. It wasn’t just a written package, but it was also very interactive. It was very successful. 

Yeah, very highly personalized. Also to each it was different than doing like a mass direct mail. It was the opposite of that. It’s very, very highly Tailored and customized.

Rick Rappe: 15:38

Yeah, and it sounds like it wasn’t a cheap approach to put together. Yeah, it was probably pretty expensive.

Maria Botta: 15:44

No, because, you know, the direct mail piece was really the start of it. And again, as I said, it was very interactive with videos and very and the videos were created to that individual. Okay.

Rick Rappe: 15:57

So that personalized videos with QR code, personalized QR codes, that’s a powerful combination for sure.

Maria Botta: 16:04

Oh, it was beautiful. It was not for anything, but it was really a beautiful, beautiful campaign that we put together.

Rick Rappe: 16:10

Yeah. And you got a high response rate.

Maria Botta: 16:12

We did, we did. But, you know, that requires a lot of research, too. You know, we research very carefully. You know, we knew what the hot buttons were for each and every one of our audience. So, you know, it was very highly curated in that way, but super successful.

Rick Rappe: 16:31

Yeah, we’ve definitely done some campaigns like that ourselves in the B2B space, where we wanted to get through for a very high ticket item, and we’ve sent some things in the mail, like in Fedex packages or, you know, big dimensional mailers. And yeah, they definitely get attention and you definitely can get through and talk to people if they’ve received it. And it’s very — it can be a very, very effective strategy. Well, I know that you’re currently traveling and you’re a digital nomad. And I’m just curious about how has it been to work and travel at the same time?

Maria Botta: 17:15

I love it, you know, it’s very exciting for me because it gives me the opportunity. One of the things that I wrote when I graduated from, in my personal manifesto was that every year I wanted to spend time learning about business in other countries, because business culture is very diverse, very different. In fact, today I had a conversation with somebody about, you know, I’m a person. I have my own personal brand. But in parts of Europe, this is not the way people do it.

It’s unheard of. So it’s interesting, right? Like you. So every day I’m learning new things. And that part I find really exciting. 

Like at the end of the month, I’ll be going to Estonia to a technology conference there. You know, I lived in South Africa, you know, learned about macadamia nut farms. So I’ve been able to really just look at the world from a different perspective and constantly learning.

Rick Rappe: 18:20

Yeah. That’s exciting. Well, I’m quite jealous of that lifestyle. I think I might have to explore that and follow you into the digital nomad.

Maria Botta: 18:30

It’s easier for me because I have no, no, no attachments, you know moment. So. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 18:37

Well, these days with Zoom and everything, it’s pretty easy to travel around, I must say.

Maria Botta: 18:44

Listen, wherever there’s good internet connection, I can make it happen.

Rick Rappe: 18:48

Yeah.

Maria Botta: 18:49

You know.

Rick Rappe: 18:50

So that’s exciting. Well, another quick question for you about startups. I’m going to bring it back to startups a little bit. When you’re getting started with startups, I mean, what are some of the things that you have to focus on to drive response I know a lot of most startups have a very limited budget. So what are some of the levers that you or or channels that you go to first, and which ones do you see the best returns from?

Maria Botta: 19:19

Yeah, I mean probably the same that, you know, larger companies use, you know, direct mail whenever possible obviously has a really good ROI. Sometimes that’s not possible. Email marketing is another channel that you know it’s effective and it has a good ROI. In some cases. Social media has been excellent even in B2B scenarios.

You know, certainly on the consumer side, depending where the demographic of your audience is, it really speaks to the channel that will be successful for you. You know, like if your demographic is older, you know, I always tend to swing it towards Facebook, you know, if it’s a little if it’s middle, you know, Instagram and certainly the other photo apps. And then of course the big one, TikTok, which is the content monster but very effective, You know. So I think it’s about creating really effective content. A lot of it. 

And see what sticks sometimes. You know, sometimes. And digital offers you that ability, you know, to do it. So I really like to mix it up. I like to go between analog like I call analog old school marketing and, you know, digital like for example, I’m working with a company now. 

We’re doing digital billboards.

Rick Rappe: 20:59

What’s that like? What’s a digital billboard like?

Maria Botta: 21:02

They are they’re billboards like in the old traditional format. But they’re not paper.

Rick Rappe: 21:09

They’re moving.

Maria Botta: 21:10

Yeah, they’re moving, but you know. Right. I hadn’t done a billboard campaign in a really long time. And so this was really fun to do. And I can change the creative quickly and often.

So it keeps things fresh.

Rick Rappe: 21:28

That’s interesting. Yeah, well, being from the Pacific Northwest, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of rules against billboards in certain places. So, like, there’s not that many billboards around, although in some cases, some places up there, there are exceptions to the rules. And we see moving billboards and things like that. So it’s definitely not something that I think of very, very much.

But I know it’s a big it’s a big channel.

Maria Botta: 21:56

It is. And it’s something that sort of kind of died out. But you can use it very effective. Again, you know, changing out the creative often using QR codes even. You know, I thought QR codes were going to die a long time.

And I was like, yeah, no. And I’m just always surprised how they keep becoming more and more integrated.

Rick Rappe: 22:22

And so Covid Covid changed that, right? Like a lot of people figured out how to use QR codes for their restaurant menus. And like, I think Covid really helped QR codes catch on and helped everybody understand what do you do with those?

Maria Botta: 22:38

Oh yeah.

Rick Rappe: 22:39

We were doing a lot of testing with QR codes before that and years before that, in fact. And we found that like mostly it was marketing people that were interested in what a QR code is pointing to. And beyond that, not everybody understood it.

Maria Botta: 22:53

But yeah, it’s like now with VR and AR, right? Being able to integrate technology into our campaigns is really exciting for some clients. It’s the perfect fit.

Rick Rappe: 23:08

Yeah. Well, and there’s exciting things that we can do these days with the integration of direct mail marketing and social media, streaming TV, streaming radio, you know, we can hit the same households, at the same people, in the same households with multiple different things, kind of all at the same time. So there’s really like a symphony effect around a prospect rather than and that can be based on a predictive targeting model that we’ve developed based on a customer profile rather than just guessing at like, who should we send this to? So there’s a lot, a lot more data and a lot more targeting capabilities than ever before, which is really revolutionizing a lot of things.

Maria Botta: 23:54

But yeah, there are definitely a lot of ways to understand your customer. To me, the most fundamental part is understanding your customer. Customer from interviews, really knowing your customer from really talking to them and having a having a constant feedback loop. That to me is super important.

Rick Rappe: 24:15

Yeah. Do you encourage the founders and the people that you work with in, in, in your who are your clients to actually do that research themselves, or to hire like a research firm to go out and do interviews with customers?

Maria Botta: 24:32

We do it. I always recommend to do it in several different ways. You know. QR codes again, for example, you know, if you’re in a brick and mortar scenario, having that QR code there where people can respond, you know, to a three question survey or submit a Google review or do any number of things is super important. But I think there’s a number of different ways.

There’s the big research, right? The big stuff where you do, you know, the old school quantitative and qualitative work. But then there’s also you should be having feedback from your customers or your audience on a bunch of little touchpoints. And so not just the big stuff, but in smaller ways too. So a combination, I would say. 

Yeah, big syndicated research is expensive. You know, quantitative and qual can, you know, really dig into a marketing budget for a startup.

Rick Rappe: 25:35

Yeah, but I bet it does. Yeah. What trends do you see shaping the future of marketing for startups in the next, say, five years? We’ve already talked about some of them. What other trends come to mind?

Maria Botta: 25:53

Well, I mean I obviously.

Rick Rappe: 25:55

Yeah, AI is the hot topic for sure. Yeah. Are you seeing companies using AI more and more just to develop content, or what are some of the other ways that they’re using it?

Maria Botta: 26:07

I’d say probably content development, although one of my clients really loves grok. And every time we have a one on one meeting, he’s like, you know, I talk to grok, and I think what’s exciting about AI is that it can I say right now where we are with AI is that AI is better with humans, and humans are better with AI.

Rick Rappe: 26:31

Yeah.

Maria Botta: 26:32

We’re not at the point where AI is going to gobble everybody’s lunch. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 26:37

Right.

Maria Botta: 26:38

Right. And because AI is very flawed also, you know, we there’s all kinds of problems with AI with, you know, being skewed and all kinds of different things have biases and all that. So but I do like the idea of AI impacting in a way where it kind of stretches you to think a little bit, maybe something you hadn’t considered.

Rick Rappe: 27:04

Yeah.

Maria Botta: 27:04

And so really, I think that that is the cool thing. Also, I think there’s new problems that are coming out of technology that people need to find ways to solve, not just cybersecurity issues. But this, you know, machine learning ML models that are skewed and biased, that need to be. Somebody said something the other day on one of the podcasts I listened to, which I thought was so interesting that maybe machine learning models should be geographically or, you know, segmented, that you don’t use the same because right now the models are all coming out of the Western world, right? Or maybe in some cases, some in Asia.

But we’re really not seeing the models emerge from other places. So that means that they’re lacking inputs that would be valuable in other regions. So maybe we need to think about them more on a regional level. There’s a lot of interesting problems that are begging for solutions, you know, that come up. We’re evolving into this direction that I find fascinating and potential business businesses, you know?

Rick Rappe: 28:23

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When we build predictive models for our clients, we usually are doing it in just the US because we’re really focused on mailing in the US. I couldn’t imagine trying to use a model then like globally. That would be incredibly challenging, I’m sure. Because all the data sources are different.

But even within the US, we find that like compiled data is different regionally. Yeah, it can be very different in the West Coast versus the East Coast or.

Maria Botta: 28:53

Absolutely. Or the middle of the country. Exactly. And so that’s. A yeah, that’s a really interesting problem. And a way to figure out a way to solve it is, I think, so interesting. You know, how do you guys handle that? Curious. Now I’m turning the tables, asking you questions.

Rick Rappe: 29:12

Well, you know, we look at every situation kind of individually, trying to figure out what’s the best way to approach this, targeting the targeting challenges. And then we let the data guide us. Once we start testing things, then we become very data driven and we look at where does this work and where is this not working. And then we’ll try to address those issues. We have one client for example, that we built a predictive model for.

But the predictive model kind of sits on top of a segmentation system that we built. So we already figured out like there’s ways to segment their market into different areas or different types of customers depending on a few different variables. And then we put on top of a couple of those segments a predictive model that works really well within the segment, but we wouldn’t really try to apply it to the other segments necessarily, because, well, that’s where predictive modeling kind of falls apart is when people say, I want to profile my customers, and then I want to use that to predict direct mail performance. Yeah, well, it’s two different things because maybe not all of your customers were acquired with direct mail. So we, you know, we have to make sure that we’re building the building, the model off the right thing and using it for the right thing and making sure those are matching.

Rick Rappe: 30:36

Right. So yeah, every situation is different. But it’s the possibilities are more and more endless these days.

Maria Botta: 30:47

Yeah, yeah.

Rick Rappe: 30:49

And we used to have to do predictive modeling with a team of statisticians and a.

Maria Botta: 30:54

I know, substantial budget.

Rick Rappe: 30:57

And now with AI and machine learning you can do things very, very quickly. And yes. It doesn’t take it much more accessible for even small companies, even startups. So absolutely.

Maria Botta: 31:09

Absolutely.

Rick Rappe: 31:12

Let’s see. I want to ask you a couple more questions and then we can wrap it up. Is there a favorite business or marketing book that has helped to shape your thinking?

Maria Botta: 31:24

Well, I’ll tell you a book that changed my life.

Rick Rappe: 31:27

Oh.

Maria Botta: 31:29

So at the time when I was considering graduate school, because I went back to graduate school and did an executive program, so it was a little bit later in my, in my track, in my professional life. Somebody gave me and I was really in the creative field, even though I was a producer, which, you know, I was in the financial, but I was really in a creative field and I thought, well, nobody’s going to want me to go. Nobody’s going to take me in, in a business, you know, degree. Right. And somebody handed me Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.

And so reading that book which said, basically, the world belongs to the creatives, which I kind of agree with. and you know and this notion of left and right brain and what does that mean. And it really opened up my eyes and kind of changed my thinking on yes, I probably know a lot more about business than I think I do, and I probably can bring more to it than maybe people with more traditional backgrounds.

Rick Rappe: 32:32

Interesting. Wow. That’s great.

Maria Botta: 32:34

And Daniel Pink changes my life all the time. I mean, his writing is amazing.

Rick Rappe: 32:40

Yeah. For sure. Yeah, he’s got some great books for sure.

Maria Botta: 32:44

Oh, yeah.

Rick Rappe: 32:46

What’s the best piece of advice that you’ve ever received in your career so far?

Maria Botta: 32:52

It’s a piece of advice I received and I often give. Listen.

Rick Rappe: 33:01

One word advice. Very smart. Well that’s fantastic.

Maria Botta: 33:06

Thank you.

Rick Rappe: 33:07

Thank you for that. And with that, I think I’ll wrap up for today.

Maria Botta: 33:11

So hey Rick, thank you so much.

Rick Rappe: 33:14

Thank you very much for this opportunity to learn from you. And where can people learn more about you and get in touch with you?

Maria Botta: 33:22

I’m on LinkedIn and Maria Botta MBA. I also have a website mariabotta.com and that’s com. You can reach out to me there. And yeah LinkedIn is always a great way to connect with me.

Rick Rappe: 33:38

Awesome. All right well thank you again and we hope to talk to you again soon.

Outro: 33:42

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

Just drop us a message at Response Drivers at rpmdm.com. Until next time, keep driving response and making your marketing work smarter.