Mia Fileman 0:05
This is Got Marketing? – a podcast with ideas, strategies, and tactics to help small businesses create smarter marketing. I’m Mia Fileman, a professional marketer, and the founder of Campaign del Mar. In this show, I chat with creatives and strategists about the different aspects of marketing, but without the fluff. Let’s dive in!
Hello, friends! Welcome back to the Got Marketing? Podcast.
Entrepreneurs are obsessed with scaling – thanks to the online marketing gurus assuring us we can scale our businesses to six and seven figures in our sleep. But what the heck does it mean to scale your business? Is it really as easy as suggested?
To have this conversation out, I phoned a friend who has grown her marketing technology company to seven figures. Jess Ruhfus is the founder and CEO of Collabosaurus – the matchmaker for brands. She is also a podcast host, an in-demand speaker, and a recent B&T “Under 30” winner. Welcome, matey!
Jess Ruhfus 1:08
Hi! Thanks for having me! How exciting with your podcast!
Mia Fileman 1:12
I know! It’s finally happening after a very long time in the incubation chamber.
Jess Ruhfus 1:18
I’m just stoked we could bring the carpark conversations to everybody’s earbuds.
Mia Fileman 1:23
Correct. Yes, that’s an important point.
Jess and I have had a “same, same, but different” conversation on Instagram Live. At the time, there was some jackhammering happening at Jess’ office, so we affectionately called it the carpark convo.
Jess Ruhfus 1:38
I sat in the carpark with a cardboard box and my computer atop the cardboard box.
Mia Fileman 1:45
See, that’s love. That’s when I know that your love for me and Campaign Del Mar—
Jess Ruhfus 1:51
It runs deep.
Mia Fileman 1:52
Yes, exactly.
All right. Let’s get into it. What the heck is scaling? How is it different to growth?
Jess Ruhfus 2:05
Yeah, good question.
You’re so right that entrepreneurs are obsessed with scaling. It’s in every conversation I have with every investor and every start-up founder. Everyone is talking about scale, scale, scale.
It’s super interesting to actually look at the definitions and seeing them side by side. Scale is the really fast growth without an increase in resourcing or funding. It’s actually incredibly hard to achieve. Not every business is structured in a way that is suitable for that kind of growth whereas growth is that “slow and steady wins the race” inch by inch growing, but then as the growth happens, so does your need for resources and investment into the business.
Mia Fileman 2:54
It’s a unicorn.
Jess Ruhfus 2:55
Exactly.
Mia Fileman 2:59
Spoiler alert! Not going to happen in your sleep.
Jess Ruhfus 3:03
No, and it’s so much work. It’s one of those things; people think you press a button, or you launch a course, and you make sales in your sleep.
Yes, sure, Collabosaurus – subscriptions come through while I sleep. Sometimes, I wake up and subscriptions have come through, but does that mean it’s not hard work? Absolutely not. It means I hardly sleep. That’s probably the best definition.
Mia Fileman 3:28
Correct.
I would love to hear the Collabosaurus story. I never get tired of it. Take us back to the beginning of the business. The carpark convo is back! Take us back to the beginning and walk us through the last six years of Collabosaurus and where we are now.
Jess Ruhfus 3:57
Actually, I went to uni wanting to work in film. Lied my way onto the set of The Great Gatsby. Worked on some music videos. It was super fun. I remember being told, “If you want to make it in the film industry, you’re going to have to move to the US, and it’s a lot of low pay for a long time before you can get that coveted job because there’s just not many in Australia.”
I remember thinking at the time, “No, I want to earn a decent wage and go into something where I don’t have to move to LA or whatever.” I found PR. Ended up graduating in public relations with this really excited, wide-eyed, rose-coloured glasses to what PR would be like and started at a boutique fashion and lifestyle PR firm in Sydney.
I was a total fish out of water. I felt like my experience was like The Devil Wears Prada in real life. It was so intense – such long days with very little pay and an intense, toxic work environment. As part of that role, we were pulling together media launch events for fashion clients and trying to find venue partners and goodie bag inclusions, and food and beverage partners, and a beauty brand to come in and create an experience for media and influencers who are coming along.
I remember thinking back then, “There must be so many small businesses who would love to get in front of this kind of opportunity with media,” but what typically would happen is that publicists would ask their other publicist friends who had clients. Effectively, if you didn’t have PR representation, you were missing out on that opportunity, and PR representation is expensive.
I moved on from that role into a small business marketing education company where we would take brands through a 12-month course as to how to DIY your own marketing. Partnerships were really part of that. I was working more with small businesses in this role and realised that so many of them weren’t doing partnerships or collaborations because they had been burnt before. They had been taken advantage of. They didn’t really know where to start. Or they were sending pitch emails out that were terrible and not getting any responses back.
Right around that time, a guy in the office was on Tinder. I was like, “This is great! You can swipe right, swipe left for days! That’s awesome!” At the same time, I was trying to find collaborators for an event. That was just an incredibly time-consuming process. I thought, “Why doesn’t this exist for brand collaborations?”
I started Collabosaurus. It launched in 2015, but I started it in 2014. It’s a matchmaking platform for brands. We now work with over 8,500 businesses like Seafolly, Marks & Spencer, Dermalogica, and Marley Spoon. We essentially matchmake brands together for really clever marketing collabs and partnerships. We don’t have enough time to go through the last six years. It’s been a rollercoaster ride. That’s for sure!
Where do you want to start?
Mia Fileman 7:06
That is such a great story. I really don’t get tired of hearing it.
From the outside, it is just so inspirational to me. I’m like, “Yeah, I want to get to the stage of Collabosaurus one day.” It just goes to show how rosy things can look from the outside but having worked with you now for a couple of years, I’ve come to understand that it hasn’t always been easy.
I would love to hear some of the bigger challenges that you’ve encountered – just to make other entrepreneurs feel validated that their challenges are so normal, but also to provide a bit of a “watch out!” and “try to avoid these potholes!” kind of message to them.
Jess Ruhfus 7:57
Totally.
Looking back, one of the biggest periods in Collabosaurus where I totally hit burnout at the end of it was attempting to raise capital back in 2017 to 2018. I spent about 18 months – on and off, but probably solidly for about eight months – really trying so hard to raise investment capital for Collabosaurus because I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do, and it was what everybody else in the tech sector was doing in Australia.
You open up TechCrunch or whatever and it’s “so and so has raised 60 billion.” AfterPay just sold for 39 billion the other day. You read these stories, and you go, “Oh. Everybody is doing it. Must be easy.” I thought that’s what you were supposed to do.
The only way a tech company like Collabosaurus could really grow – which I have a lot to say on anyway, but – at the time, in the very early stages of Collabosaurus, looking back, it probably wasn’t the right thing to do, but I spent about eight months hustling so hard. I went to San Francisco for a couple of months, speaking to anybody and everybody who may be interested in investing in Collabosaurus. It was so exhausting.
The business was pretty much just me full-time at the time. Me leaving the business to spend so much time talking to potential investors and editing decks and speaking to lawyers and the whole thing was detrimental for the business. At the end of 2018, I remember coming home from San Francisco. It was Christmas and we had $2,000 in the bank account. I was like, “This is so bad. It’s run into the ground. Maybe I just give up now. Is that the end of Collabosaurus?” because I can’t raise capital.
It seemed as though nobody I spoke to believed in the company and believed in my vision. Then, I was like, “Am I crazy? Maybe I’m insane and this actually isn’t a good idea because everybody has told me it’s not a good idea.” It was back to the drawing board. I spent a couple of months mulling it over and having a crisis of everything and then realising, “You know what? There was an idea that came out of Sa Francisco.”
I happened to be at a networking event. The head of marketing at Gap was there. She mentioned something about brand collaborations. They received about 150 collaboration pitches every single month. At the time, I said, “Yes, we can help with that!”
The tech wasn’t set out to help with that kind of thing at the time, but it gave me such a great idea – lightbulb moment – for a feature which is now called the Pitch Portal that we launched in 2019 off the back of maxing out a credit card and giving Collabosaurus one last shot. Asos signed up off the back of that. Olay signed up off the back of that. It just spiralled and kickstarted a big growth period for Collabosaurus the.
Mia Fileman 11:01
Wow! So good!
Jess Ruhfus 11:04
That’s one of the challenges anyway – doing what you think you should be doing just because everybody else is doing it. I look back now, and I go, “That’s such a no-no.”
Mia Fileman 11:13
Absolutely.
What about some of the terrible advice that you received around that time? I know we’ve spoken before and there were some real cowboys just shooting their mouths off. Let’s hear some of that.
Jess Ruhfus 11:28
It’s funny with investment raising. I was young. I was 23 or 24. I was speaking to everyone and anyone, and that was a bad strategy, looking back, because I was speaking to people who didn’t know my target market, didn’t know the pain point, didn’t know marketing, often didn’t even know tech at all. Maybe they’ve come from a banking background or insurance. I’m trying to tell them how cool collaboration marketing campaigns can be. They don’t see it because they’ve never felt that problem before.
I think a lot of the advice came from good intentions, but I would take it – not having a grain of salt. It was like I took it as gospel. “Yeah, maybe I should target the insurance sector?” because this one person said, “You should do this for insurance or something.” I’d spend months going down that road because I’m like, “Well, if I make this work, then he’ll invest.” That was just so stupid.
I had another investor say to me, “If you want to raise capital, you need to sell the fact that you’re female and under 30 because that’s your only selling point.” That’s just one of the gems. I was like, “Well, if that’s my only selling point, what am I supposed to do? Wear a low-cut dress and walk into these meetings?” That is so horrifically embarrassing.
I took a lot of advice as gospel when I should have put it through that filter of where this advice is coming from and whether they actually have the experience and insight that can inform this kind of advice.
Mia Fileman 13:16
Didn’t quite a few of them ask you when you were going to have children?
Jess Ruhfus 13:19
Yeah, that was another one! “When are you expecting having children? With female entrepreneurs, you never know how much time you’ve gone.” I’m like, “Time you’ve got until what? I explode? What’s the question here?” It was so bizarre. It was draining and exhausting and just deflating.
At the end of it, I was so deflated and confused with what I wanted to do with the business and if my vision was even worthwhile. All the while, the emphasis in all of these conversations is scale – scale at all costs. I took that to be gospel as well. Scale at all costs! Let’s get to burnout with $2,000 in the bank account and very few pathways to get myself out of that.
Bad advice would have been all of those things, but also just listening to the wrong people and thinking “scale at all costs” is some kind of success metric when I don’t see that as a success metric anymore.
Mia Fileman 14:27
That’s such an interesting point that scaling, especially with your experience, is risky. You almost lost Collabosaurus going through that cap raise process. Now, Collabosaurus has never been stronger, and you’re completely bootstrapped. We don’t talk about that enough that scaling is inherently risky. In fact, it’s the number one reason for start-up failure – premature scaling – because it’s literally walking to the cliff and being pushed before you’re ready to jump. It’s that amplification of everything.
You have a scalable model. In fact, your product works at scale even better because it means that there are more brands to collaborate with, and there are more industries on the platform – big players, small players, more geographical partnerships that can happen for in-person events. That actually works really well.
What about the rest of us where we don’t even have that as a scalable model yet but are being told that we should scale at all costs?
Jess Ruhfus 15:39
For goodness’ sake.
Growth is good. Look at focusing on the right things at the right time for the right reasons. If you’re focusing on scale too early in the game just so that you can get investment interest – which is exactly what I did – it’s totally the wrong way to approach it. I should have been trying to scale the experience and nit-picking apart customer feedback and stuff like that at that early stage.
You always think you have a scalable model. Then you get to scale, and you realise that your operations need an overhaul. That happened in 2020. I was like, “Yeah, it’s good to go! We are scaling! It’s working at scale.” And then, it hit a point. I was like, “We have to seriously rejig internal processes,” because things were getting missed and things needed to be automated. Sometimes, the tech fails you as well.
It’s not as rosy as this linear line – the picture that people paint about that scale. Often, operations need to be completely overhauled. You’ve got to get foundations right. But, often, you don’t know what right looks like until you’re in it and you have to build the plane on the way down off the cliff. That’s kind of been my experience.
Mia Fileman 17:07
That’s what I wanted to talk about next – what should businesses do when they’re thinking about scaling? You mentioned some of them – getting the right business foundations; thinking about whether you need to pivot, for lack of a better word, so that you do have a scalable product; spending time on those operations; the customer research and customer insight phase which is such an important part of the scaling process because serving 20 customers is so different to serving 2,000 and 200,000 customers.
When we’re dealing with only two or 200 customers, we think that they represent the mass, and they don’t. That sample size is actually too small for it to be statistically significant for a much bigger audience.
Recruiting, training, and retaining the right team; and, exactly as you mentioned, the technology.
Is there anything else that you think are “do these things first”?
Jess Ruhfus 18:15
Something that’s been really, really helpful for me is nailing down the three metrics that basically the entire basis of Collaborsaurus is formed on and all of our marketing is informed by.
Customer acquisition cost is number one. How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? That could be things from Facebook ads. It could be things like running events. It could be things like PR. If you look at all the ways or things that you do to try and attract customers, what does that add up to per customer on average? Once you get a fair bit of data together, it’s really easy to see what your profit margin is and stuff on customer acquisition cost versus lifetime value which is my next metric that I track. That’s how much a customer will spend with you in the course of the customer’s lifetime.
In addition to that, there’s churn rates. Because I run a subscription tech company, that’s incredibly important, but churn rates and lifetime value go pretty hand-in-hand. One will inform the other, but especially when lifetime value rates take a long time to build because you need a fair few years of data before it’s anything meaningful. In the meantime, looking at things like churn – how frequently and how many customers do you lose month on month, for example, and what percentage of your customer base is that?
Mia Fileman 19:40
Exactly.
If you don’t have that data, then maybe focus on making sure that you get it and that you have the right systems in place in order to make the right decisions before just peering over the ledge and going, “Well, she’s scaling, and she’s doing really well. If it works for her, it’s definitely going to work for me.”
Jess Ruhfus 20:01
Yeah, what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for others, but the metrics thing is so important. For a long time, I was looking at vanity metrics – how many followers we have on Instagram or whatever – but, really, you’ve got to be looking at sales metrics once you get a little bit further down the line. They can seriously help you scale your business because, once you’re focused on them, it allows you to tweak your strategies to make any one particular number better.
If I’m like, “Customer acquisition cost this quarter is far too high, what can we do to reduce that?” then we can actually really focus our energy in reducing the customer acquisition cost and making us more money in the long run.
Mia Fileman 20:43
So good, and so necessary.
Talk to me about building your team for Collabosaurus because you’ve gone from a one-woman show to a team. How’s that been for you?
Jess Ruhfus 20:59
Really hard! I’m not going to lie. Team building stuff has probably been my second-biggest challenge with Collabosaurus, I think, because you also assume, “I’ll just get another me, and they can do all the things and double my output or double what I’m able to do.” That’s not the case at all. There’s so much that needs to go into process creation and training. There’s team culture and everything as well, especially with your small and growing. One hire has the ability to make or break your team.
Hiring has been really tricky. I’m not going to say I’ve had a really smooth run. I’ve worked with some incredible people over the years. Some hiring choices I have made probably haven’t been the right ones.
When was it? This year? I can’t even remember what year it was. I think it was earlier this year. There was a time when I lost three staff in three weeks. That was massive, but what that did was it kickstarted the operations overhaul and process overhaul that we needed to do anyway, but it was the kick up the bum because, when three people left in three weeks, everything that was customer management related fell back on to me, and Collabosaurus is far too big for any one person to manage that right now. I was like, “Well, a scalable model, it needs to be able to manage that amount of customers without an account manager sitting there, going through all of the accounts, for example.”
There’s a silver lining to every cloud. My goodness. It’s been tricky.
What I do now which has been really, really helpful is we use psychometric testing on new hires. I’ve always done this, but this has always been really, really valuable – getting people to do tasks and things as part of the interview process because then that shows you what the actual work is like.
I’ve often found people who come across a bit like me – extroverted and chatty. They’re people I totally vibe with, but they often don’t necessarily equal really high-quality work. I’ve had to incorporate some really great testing as part of the interview process. That’s been super helpful – psychometric testing and some skills testing as well.
If you’re ever hiring for software or tech people, there’s a platform called TestDome. You can put developers through based on your tech stack. For me, I’m not a coder. I can’t look at ASP.NET and C# code and go, “That looks great! You’re hired!”
Mia Fileman 23:48
“Good job! Nice colons!”
Jess Ruhfus 23:51
Yeah, and when it comes to customer success or marketing, for sure, I’ve got different informed opinions about who would work and who wouldn’t, but when it comes to code, it’s so tricky. I have my senior developer who runs a lot of the interview process, but we also use things like TestDome for skills testing which has been so good, so I highly recommend stuff like that.
Mia Fileman 24:10
I totally echo what you said about making potential employees submit some work or submit a task. This is actually just really relevant. I’m looking to build my team, and I got right down to the end of the interview process with a really hot candidate, and just at that minute, I’m like, “Mia, you know you need to ask for work samples, so just do it!” even though I was so confident it was all going to be great because they performed so well in the interviews. Great confidence. I’m so glad that I asked for the work samples. They were good, but they weren’t up to the salary expectation. I would have essentially been overpaying, and I don’t want to overpay.
Jess Ruhfus 25:00
Totally.
Mia Fileman 25:01
Yeah, and I think that’s another really interesting point around the whole guru narrative. Well, if you are a service-based business, all you need to do is launch a course, then you don’t need to hire staff. You’re just teaching this course. It’s just you and potentially a VA in the Philippines that you underpay, but that’s not an ethical problem or anything. Or is it? It can just be you, but both of us – you and I – are online course creators. I work full-time and have a permanent part-time employee. I’m now looking to bring on a second permanent part-time employee because – spoiler alert! – when you start to grow your online courses and you start getting some serious numbers through there, it’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of energy to properly service those students and provide accountability and provide feedback. If you don’t do that, then you’re going to be letting them down, and you’re not going to get good reviews on your course, and then no one else is going to join.
Jess Ruhfus 26:16
I think the grass is always greener. Hey.
Over Christmas last year, we were in a lockdown on the northern beaches, and I just started a product business because I have so much time. Why not? Let’s do that for fun. But the grass is always greener. I’m running a tech company. I look at friends who run product companies and go, “How fantastic! You just create the product, sell the product, and that’s it.”
Mia Fileman 26:41
What about the shipping? What about the warehousing and the manufacturing?
Jess Ruhfus 26:45
I know! For sure! I feel like that’s the warehouser’s problem or the manufacturer’s problem, but people look at Collabosaurus and they think the same. “Wouldn’t it be great to just have a software subscription where you’re making money in your sleep?” “Wouldn’t it be great to run a course and it’s just you and you don’t have to stress about all of these things.”
The grass is always greener and there are huge implications and challenges and issues that a lot of them are very similar. Staffing is a big one. That is a shared experience for every founder I speak to. It’s very, very hard to compete as well against the large corporates, especially with salary expectations as you grow.
I had a 22-year-old staff member with no experience ask me for a $90,000 salary the other day. I just thought that was crazy, but you know what? She’s gone and gotten a job that pays that. I’m like, “Good! Good for you!” I just looked back at my toxic days working in PR going, “Wow!” At that level, I was earning maybe $30,000 a year.
Mia Fileman 27:54
Hey. Look, I salute the big kahunas that she had. That takes chutzpah!
Jess Ruhfus 28:00
For sure, there was chutzpah there.
But, yeah, times have changed, and I think for small business it’s really hard to compete – really, really hard to compete – so you’ve got to find all these other things that you can do to attract and retain staff, for sure.
Mia Fileman 28:15
Yes, absolutely.
All right. I want to do what is our favourite thing in the whole world to do, and that is to talk about marketing campaigns because you have adopted a campaign marketing approach to growing Collabosaurus. Of course, you have! You are a marketer – a professional marketer.
Before we jump into talking about some of our favourite collaboration campaigns, I would love to hear from you any marketing campaign tips because, obviously, my listeners hear from me all the time, and they know all of my tips, but it would be so interesting to get yours as well.
Jess Ruhfus 28:56
I’ve actually been consulting with a brand that has just launched their business. a lot of things came up there that are just so front of mind.
The first one would probably be to allow yourself enough time to leverage all of the marketing and touchpoints within a campaign. I cannot tell you how many conversations I have with people going, “We’re launching next week. Let’s do it.” It’s like, “Whoa! You’ve missed a huge opportunity with pre-launch teasing and hype building and amplifying and leveraging a campaign so that you get the best possible results.”
A campaign isn’t a post on Instagram. It isn’t one email. A campaign is – you’ll define this so much better than me – a series of connected events that’s all driving towards one big goal. In order to do that properly, you need time to do that. I’m not sure what your campaign recommendation is, but I would say at least six weeks.
Mia Fileman 30:01
I now say 12 weeks, actually. Campaign Classroom is now ten weeks, but I think 12 weeks is that sweet spot because, exactly like you said, the launching next week, you have no options left. It’s organic socials and potentially paid socials, but collaborations are out, PR is out, influencer campaigns are out, creating a kickass video is out. What’s left? Some EDMs and some posts? In which case, that is more always-on marketing rather than campaign marketing.
Jess Ruhfus 30:36
There’s so much you can do on a limited budget. You don’t have to spend big with a PR agency or whatever. There actually is lots you can do for an effective launch campaign on a budget, but with enough time allowed so that you can get heaps of touchpoints working for you and you can invest the time to achieve the results. You’re just not going to get crazy launch uptake in a week.
Mia Fileman 31:03
No way. I made a Reel on Instagram about that. The scariest thing for me is when someone books a consult with me. “I’m launching soon. I’d love your advice.” I’m like, “Great! I love launches! Let’s talk about it.” They’re like, “We launch in a week or two weeks.” I’m like, “I’m so sorry. We can’t pull rabbits out of hats.”
Exactly as you said, if you don’t have the budget, then you need to put in the work. We need to lean on earned and owned media channels which don’t cost the earth, but they take grit. We need to write email sequences. We need to shake trees. But all of that is time. If you don’t have time and you don’t have money, then you’re a wee bit screwed.
Jess Ruhfus 31:50
Exactly! Look at brand collaborations. 90 percent of the ones that happen on Collabosaurus don’t involve cash exchange whatsoever, but they do require time. You can tap into a whole audience of people for no additional cash with a creative collaboration, but you’ve got to plan all this stuff out – the ads, the social, the EDMs, the collaboration partnerships, the PR, and all of that. You need many, many weeks.
Mia Fileman 32:18
Exactly.
Factor in enough time to property plan and execute your launch or your campaign – yes, definitely!
Jess Ruhfus 32:30
Tip number two would probably be to collaborate. It would amiss if I completely didn’t mention that. Brand collaborations are probably one of the most effective ways to cost-effectively reach a whole new audience of people in a creative and authentic way. It doesn’t always have to be competitions will give away collaborations which I think a lot of people in their minds go to. We’ve got some great examples that have been super clever and creative with brand collaborations to share in a moment.
Look at things like gift with purchase or bundled products or a content series. Would you create a podcast in collaboration with somebody? Or a limited episode podcast? Or a mini online training in collaboration with another brand? Or a limited-edition product? I think I’ve already said this, but a gift with purchase. If you’re launching something, maybe the first 50 orders could get a gift with purchase in collaboration with another brand who also wants to get in front of your audience. That can drive more sales and more reach as well because it’s not just you that’s talking about your amazing product or service. You’ve also got a buddy also shouting from the rooftops about how amazing you are as well.
Mia Fileman 33:44
Yes, such a great tip! I don’t think I’ve ever run a marketing campaign in the last three years of Campaign Del Mar that hasn’t included a collaboration component.
Jess Ruhfus 33:53
There you go!
Mia Fileman 33:54
Because my love for collaborations and Collabosaurus runs very deep.
Jess Ruhfus 34:01
Amazing!
I’m trying to think. My number three tip – which will be my last probably in terms of campaigns – would be that it just makes it easier to sit down and batch it because content is actually a thousand times harder if you’re like, “I’ve got to do a post here, and I’ve got to do a Reel here, and I’ve got to do an EDM,” and they’re all not connected in terms of messaging.
If you have one overall message, one overall goal, you can sit down and batch that into different content types, but it actually saves you so much headspace and time because you know what the messaging is, you know what the pain points are, you know what the solution is, you know what the action you want people to take is, and it just makes it so much easier.
It was like that with our app launch. We treated our app launch as a campaign. We ran an event. We did a video. We did PR. We did organic and paid. We integrated it on our website. We did all kinds of different things, but it made it so much easier! That was a launch campaign. We collaborated around that as well, of course. We did collaborations around the event and the launch. We had enough time to amplify it, but it was so much easier to sit down and map out the content rollout plan for that because I had all of those ducks in a row in terms of what I was talking about.
Mia Fileman 35:22
Yeah, because of the big idea. Everything then is just a matter of rolling it out into different formats and different channels, but the big idea informs the campaign, so I absolutely love that as opposed to this scattergun approach of “What do I post? What do I write?” It’s so cohesive and so connected.
I guess what I love the most about campaigns is that you can then reuse them. The Gurus campaign that I recently ran is not going to be the last time I run that campaign. That’s coming back. It will be so many of those elements, all of those posts, all of those emails, and the landing page are all going to be reused and repurposed again, then I can build on it and do Gurus II. All of that investment in time and planning is not lost. You see brands reusing their campaigns all the time.
Jess Ruhfus 36:21
Absolutely, and so you should! If you invested time and money into this hard-hitting, amazing, big idea and campaign, you should be able to repurpose that again. Also, remembering that a lot of content only hits a small percentage of your community anyway, especially when it comes to organic content. Posting about something once or twice or three times and then that’s the end of it is a bit of a shame, really. It’s wasted.
Mia Fileman 36:45
It is so wasted because, yeah, the Rule of Seven where it was that audiences needed to see something a minimum of seven times before they take action has now become the Rule of 30.
Jess Ruhfus 36:59
Yes, I was going to say it was 22 in 2018. I remember hearing that. Actually, that concept is from the 1950’s in the Hollywood film industry, before social media, before we had been bombarded with a million and one messages and super saturated ways. Yeah, I’m not surprised it’s at 30 now.
Mia Fileman 37:20
Exactly.
Jess Ruhfus 37:20
That’s why you need 12 weeks! You need 12 weeks to get in front of someone 30 times. If you’re getting in front of someone 30 times in one week, they will just hate you.
Mia Fileman 37:28
Correct. Exactly. That’s right.
Let’s chat about some of our favourite recent collaboration campaigns. You start us off, and then I’ll share one of mine, and then you share one of yours.
Jess Ruhfus 37:45
Well, one of my all-time favourites – and this was a couple of years ago, so it’s not super, super recent, but it’s just a classic, and it involves pasta – is Pasta Rummo and Fendi. They teamed up and basically Fendi’s fashion show invitation was a box of pasta that was beautifully designed and just looked like such a nostalgic, classic, fun thing to do. I just thought that was so clever. I’m desperate to mimic that collab and do something where we invite people to a Collabosaurus event with a co-branded pasta box. I’ve just got to make it happen. That’s probably my number one all-time favourite brand collab.
What about you?
Mia Fileman 38:28
Yeah, I just want to say how much I love that one because of taking you to Italy and bringing in that personality of the brand and setting that reminiscent, nostalgic experience of eating pasta in Italy. I love it.
Jess Ruhfus 38:46
It’s also a bit unexpected. If someone had said to me, “Who should Fendi collaborate with?” I’m not going to say, “Pasta Rummo.” Now that I’ve seen it in real life, that’s brilliant and it does make so much sense, but a lot of my favourite collaborations aren’t necessarily the first thing you’d think of.
Airbnb and Barbie’s Malibu Dream House collaboration – that was insane and so clever and beautifully executed, but if you had asked me before I saw that campaign, “Who should Airbnb collaborate with?” I would have never said, “Barbie!”
Mia Fileman 39:23
Do you know that they’ve done a Winnie the Pooh house as well now?
Jess Ruhfus 39:25
Aww. Have they? Great!
Mia Fileman 39:27
Yeah, in the same vein as the Barbie. You can go there with your kids and experience the whole Winnie the Pooh experience, I guess.
Jess Ruhfus 39:35
So good.
Mia Fileman 39:36
I’m a big fan of the collaborations that are really creative and that make people sit up and take notice and go, “I can’t believe Fendi is collaborating with a pasta brand!”
Jess Ruhfus 39:47
Yeah, so clever.
A collaboration can be in support of your bigger campaign. Like you said, you haven’t done a launch without a collaboration involved as part of helping promote a campaign launch, but it can also be its own campaign. You could do something really big – like the Airbnb and Barbie one – and that in itself was an entire campaign and fuelled content.
Mia Fileman 40:11
Yeah, that’s the big idea.
That’s actually the “collaboration is the big idea” in my pick which is Kip&Co which is a home soft furnishings company. They make linen and pillowcases. They collaborated with Babbarra Women’s Centre which is a group of indigenous artists. They used this incredible indigenous artwork for their collection. That was the big campaign. I absolutely loved it because the designs are stunning.
Jess Ruhfus 40:50
The content was stunning. I saw the ads for that. Whoever shot that campaign just did such a wonderful job. It looked amazing. So eye-catching.
Mia Fileman 40:58
Correct.
What I really loved about it was that it generated so much earned media because of the relationship with our indigenous first peoples. It was really their story, showcasing them, and celebrating them. I just absolutely loved it. I thought it hit so many great markers of a really successful campaign.
Jess Ruhfus 41:29
So many successful collaborations do have that storytelling element to it. Pasta Rummo and Fendi – that nostalgic family-owned story was woven into that campaign which I really love. That’s awesome.
Mia Fileman 41:43
And then, you’re supporting not just an Australian brand but a whole part of our community that needs to be supported.
Jess Ruhfus 41:57
Totally.
The storytelling element is so massive. Charities can definitely play a part as well in terms of brand collaborations. I’ve seen plenty of really powerful collaborations that have a social awareness element to it. Thank You did a beautiful one with Sarah Elk which was another artist collaboration. Artist collaborations are totally booming at the moment. They did a handwash with the limited-edition packaging which was so clever. Easily done. Raised so much awareness. It was great.
Mia Fileman 42:32
I think customers today are demanding that from the brands that they choose to support which is like, “I love your products. They’re great, but do they make the world better? Do they make our country stronger? Do they support minority groups and underprivileged communities? We’re seeking that.” That’s why Who Gives A Crap is one of my favourite brands in the whole world because it has that whole social responsibility built into the product. It’s not tacked-on and shoehorned. It is their purpose, and they live that purpose. As a result, we’re so much more in love with that brand, plus their marketing is fire.
Jess Ruhfus 43:13
I know. So good. They’ve done some really good limited-edition artist collabs and stuff. I’m just trying to think. I can’t remember the name, but there’s quite a few that they’ve done that have been really great. If you’re sitting on the toilet with a Who Gives A Crap stack of toilet paper, it’s something to read, it’s fun, and unwrapping it has an unboxing experience almost for the Who Gives A Crap stuff.
Mia Fileman 43:40
Yeah, I loved the Christmas collection last year which was the A to Z collection. They collaborated with an artist to do the design, but then each roll of toilet paper had different letters on it, so you could make words.
Jess Ruhfus 43:55
That’s so good!
Mia Fileman 43:57
Yeah, and there was some great user-generated content that came out of that of users having a lot of fun. There was a game that they suggested for families to do Scrabble with the toilet paper. It was straight up and down brilliance.
Jess Ruhfus 44:16
So good. I love it. Oh, my god. That’s a whole other conversation. If you can get people to share what you’re doing? Golden. You’ve nailed a campaign.
Mia Fileman 44:25
Correct.
All right. What else?
Jess Ruhfus 44:28
What else? Well, the second one on my list is Nimble Activewear and Koala Mattresses. These guys teams up on a bit of a content series, but at the heart of it all was a limited-edition set of sleepwear or loungewear that was called Move to Snooze Sweats.
Basically, you could buy the Move to Snooze Sweats from Nimble Activewear. Every set, you would go into the draw to win a Koala mattress. But what they did as part of this campaign was it was all around rolling content to promote a better night’s sleep. There were all of these activities. Nimble Activewear released an eight-minute video with tips as to how you can improve your sleep. There was an EDM campaign that went out with a bunch of tips and tricks and strategies. It all tied back to that limited-edition sweat set, but there was a competition as part of it. It was leverage. It was a well-leveraged campaign with lots of moving parts and elements to it.
Mia Fileman 45:29
You know how I feel about fully integrated campaigns, Jess.
Jess Ruhfus 45:33
Yes.
Mia Fileman 45:34
They really light my fire.
My other favourite is Taika Waititi who is an epic director. He collaborated with the Roald Dahl Story Company to create a YouTube collaboration, actually, during COVID. This one really spoke to me as a mum because I was trying to work with kids at home. Anyone that was going to provide some entertainment for my children was a winner in my book.
Jess Ruhfus 46:08
It spoke to me because the Hemsworths were involved.
Mia Fileman 46:12
Correct!
Jess Ruhfus 46:13
You don’t have to be a mum to vibe with this collab – 100 percent.
Mia Fileman 46:16
Correct, yes!
Essentially, what it was is Taika invited some of his celebrity friends – including the Hemsworths – to read James and the Giant Peach which is such a great book. This was a collaboration that went over several days on YouTube and just sensational content that was created – all to benefit, actually, a not-for-profit. It ticked so many boxes. I think what I love about this is the timing of it.
Marketing campaigns for big corporations get planned years in advance. At L'Oréal, we were planning the Maybelline campaigns 18 months before we launched, but COVID obviously threw a very big spanner in those works. Any big brands that could mobilise as quickly as this one did and pull it off, I really tip my hat to that.
Jess Ruhfus 47:19
Totally.
Binge and The Iconic did that too. They moved fast and released their Inactivewear campaign which was all around people sitting at home, binge-watching Netflix. Binge was trying to get in there as a competitor to Netflix. That was just so clever.
Being timely and relevant and piggybacking off current news and pop culture, that can be really, really effective too – 100 percent.
Mia Fileman 47:44
Absolutely.
Well, it has been such a pleasure, Jess. I could have spoken to you for hours, but we’ve already clocked 47 minutes. I don’t know how that happened. It was like, “Blink and it’s done.”
I urge everyone to go and check out Collabosaurus. It is such an epic platform. Check out Collabosaurus on Instagram. Anything else that you’d like to share, Jess?
Jess Ruhfus 48:07
No, come find me. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast! Congratulations on Got Marketing! Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! I can’t wait to listen to the other episodes.
Mia Fileman 48:16
Thank you! All right. Bye!
Jess Ruhfus 48:20
Bye!
Mia Fileman 48:25
Thank you!
You listened right up until the end, so why not press that subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling? You can also connect with me, Mia Fileman, on Instagram or LinkedIn. Feel free to send me a message! I’m super friendly.
