Episode Summary
Liam Moroney is no stranger to the ups and downs of startup life.
“[T]here’s enormous risk that comes along with working at a startup, you don’t have the stability or predictability that a lot of big companies have,” says Liam who is VP of Marketing at Rocketrip, which helps enterprise companies reduce travel costs through employee award incentives. Rocketrip is Liam’s fourth startup.
It’s a good thing that Liam can handle riding a professional roller coaster — doing marketing for a travel-related startup in the age of COVID-19 is tricky.
In this episode, Liam discusses his tactics for changing the game for the travel rewards industry through content marketing, including the importance of updating Rocketrip’s messaging and the overall go-to-market strategy, with the understanding that there will be new concerns for travelers post-COVID.
“There are anxieties. There are going to be challenges. There are going to be stresses when it comes to travel,” Liam acknowledges. “So we want to make sure that we’re leaning into that because we don’t want people to travel more than they need to, or more than they’re comfortable to.”
Guest Profiles
- Name: Liam Moroney
- What he does: As the VP of marketing at Rocketrip, which helps enterprise companies reduce travel costs, Liam is a driving force behind delivering impactful messaging and reinventing market strategy for travellers post COVID-19.
- Company: Rocketrip
- Noteworthy: Liam, who moved to the United States from Ireland in 2008, has been involved in the B2B tech marketing space for the majority of his career. His work has focused mainly on Adtech, Martech and now, Traveltech.
Key Insights
- When it comes to SaaS user experience, don’t disrupt the process that a consumer is already familiar with, amplify it. Rocketrip is able to do this through integration with other platforms. “Our goal is to make sure that we’re not disrupting how people book travel today because tools like Concur are built very specifically for that purpose. So what we do is we make sure that we’re just adding additional insight and functionality within those tools,” he says.
-
Aligning yourself with like-minded partners and fostering those relationships ensures greater success. Historically, Rocketrip has always had marketing success around events and partner relationships. With COVID-19 taking in-person events out of the picture, Liam and team have been focusing on enhancing relationships with partners.
“Our partner channel is actually one of the ones that I’ve been spending a lot of time building out and investing in because we work within tools like Concur. Partners have always been one of those areas where if you’re aligned with them and if their sales team knows how you impact their upsells or cross sells ... that’s where you can build a lot of camaraderie.” he says. Build out a partner channel and spend the time nurturing them. Be a guest on their podcast or contribute to their partner content — there are endless ways to show support. - When it comes to generating successful ad campaigns, Rocketrip leans heavily on its SDR team. Liam says he’s learned to use feedback from the sales process to influence the way they’re creating and serving ads to potential consumers. His team started with testing and messaging through the SDR team. From there, they collect the data and use it when developing new ads. In order to broaden reach within companies, he notes “we’re expanding our ads to serve more of the decision makers and influencers within the buyer group.”
Episode Highlights
- Build a meaningful reward program experience
“The way that we built our program was to make sure that it didn’t follow that path. We wanted to make sure that the rewards that we’re offering are things that are personal and meaningful. We have built out a complete reward store – there’s hundreds of different options in there. You can do very simple shopping ones where you could book an Amazon gift card. You could do Visa cards, but there’s also everything from clothing to food. There’s travel experiences. You can donate to charity.”
- Changing messaging for changing times
“What I will say is that since COVID-19 has really kicked in, it forced us to really think a lot
about changing all of our messaging and our go-to-market strategy and one of the reasons is actually one that was probably inevitably coming, but really forced us to accelerate it,
which is that our messaging — prior to me arriving — was very much focused on cost savings … we were leaning very heavily into the benefits, but we weren’t really leaning into the why of what we actually deliver and that’s the cultural impact, that’s the personal rewards.”
- Investing in great partnerships reaps great rewards
“Partners have always been one of those areas where — if you’re aligned with them and if their sales team knows how you impact their upsells or cross sells, or even in some markets where they may not have as much presence — that’s where you can build a lot of camaraderie. So we built a partner channel, we built out a partner team. We spent a lot of time on that and we invested a lot of time with them.”
- Creating the marketing domino effect
“You can get someone interested with that fun, cool branding — flashy marketing statements, all the quick little bar charts — but when you get them in the door and you really start to talk about what that means, and they really dig into the tech, you have to prove that out really quickly and upfront. And then there’s going back to the rest of their team. … It’s about winning over that first person, and then getting all the other dominoes to fall with them.”
- Focus your content marketing on your contribution to the industry
“[T]here’s this interesting thing you see with content marketing, where people think of it as an editorial journalistic type of a strategy where it’s not meant to talk about yourself. It’s to talk about the industry … but it doesn’t mean that you can’t use content to talk about what you’re an expert in. A good example of this is we [Rocketrip] know that one of our strengths is the complexity of our algorithm. Our algorithm has been developed over years and trying to build an algorithm that can predict behavior is very difficult. We have competitors who have tried. We even have partners who have tried themselves at certain points, and it’s very, very difficult and it comes up in the sales process a lot.”
- Data should elevate your sales process
“Often one of the things that our salespeople will lean into and say, ‘Well, we’ve got the algorithm that is this level of accuracy, and we’re able to predict to this degree of complexity,’ but they don’t really have something that helps them in the sales process beyond one sheeters. That’s where, when we have a data analytics team who worked very hard on this … I want to shine a light on those people and have them start to write content like, ‘Why is it so difficult to actually generate an algorithm for this? What are the things you have to factor in?’ Without giving away the secret sauce, we want to be able to try and highlight that … We want to use it as a way for the salespeople to say, ‘Well, if you’re talking to any of our competition, are they doing these things?”
