Seven early marketing decisions to build a formidable consumer tech company
It has been one of the greatest challenges and achievements of my career, to be part of the phenomenal Executive team that built ClearScore, recently named Fintech Company of the Year at the Fintech Awards London. I have so many amazing memories of my seven years with ClearScore (2015-2022). From those early days working around the clock in our first cramped tiny office, watching every registration come in and inviting our first customers into the office to learn from them. To conducting hundreds of interviews to scale our tech, product and marketing teams, and grappling with huge datasets to understand our biggest opportunities to expand. To a personal highlight when my team won Financial Services Marketing Campaign of the Year. And reaching milestones like 1 million registered users, and latterly 10 million registered users.
As ClearScore celebrates a decade in business, and as I start out working with start-ups on their growth plans as a Fractional CMO, I am taking some time to reflect on some of the critical marketing decisions we made in those hectic early years, that might help other companies starting the journey.
Deploy a Video game approach for marketing strategy
Anyone trained in classic marketing management knows integrated marketing programmes typically deliver a multiplier effect. Stripping back to one or two marketing channels and one message can feel like you’re missing a trick. However it’s absolutely the right thing to do in a scale-up environment to get clarity about what is working and how well, as well as to enable focus.
There’s no point doing all the expected things if they’re going to drive a small amount of growth, when there’s so much large growth on the table in other areas. I lose track of the number of marketing interview candidates (including very senior ones) who took one look at our approach and recommended we build out our social media. Why? Presumably because everyone was doing that at the time. But honestly, this would have made negligible difference to the outcomes we drove.
In an early conversation, our CEO and Co-founder Justin Basini, described this in video game language which was a big breakthrough for me and really helped me pace the growth of our team and marketing strategy appropriately each planning cycle. We always knew where we were headed with a bigger picture lens. But level one has to be completed before unlocking level two. On level two you get a handful more tools, resources and opportunities, which allow you to work to level three. And so on. It’s this that enabled us to deliver growth to 3 million users with a team of 3 marketers, and judiciously build the team out to 25 marketers three years later to scale to multiple geographies, products and audience groups.
2. Identify and double down on a primary growth lever
I’m a fan of the work of Gary Keller who talks about the importance of knowing the ´One Thing´ you’re focussing on, and for me and my team from early on, we saw extraordinary results from deploying a broadcast media approach - buying up the cheapest television advertising slots and seeing instant conversion. This became our One Thing.
Putting a brand new start-up straight into TV media sounds expensive, however it’s not, necessarily. We had a hypothesis based on studying a similar business in the US, that by reaching a broad audience we could scale with an acceptable Cost to Acquire, and I was able to test this with a budget of around 50,000 GBP plus the cost of creating a very low-cost direct response ad. This was clearly a big chunk of our initial funding but instead of deploying it against a series of channels and ideas, we focussed in order to learn properly. Once we had tested the hypothesis, and seen the results, unsurprisingly our investors wanted to see this scale, and we quickly built expertise in creating effective television ads, rotating for effectiveness, TV media optimisation and analysis. It’s the foundation that our customer base is built upon and these customers are still our customers today ten years on, as they built the ClearScore habit to use ClearScore to take out financial products.
3. Build an extraordinary customer communications program early
From seeing customer data begin to build early on, and from my prior experience in CRM, I felt very clear that email/SMS/app notification marketing was going to be a substantial growth lever for ClearScore. I had a vision that we would send hundreds of thousands of ultra-targeted, different messages and creatives to individuals each day - specific to their financial positions - to be helpful and top of mind when making a financial decision, and for that decision to be made through ClearScore (ultimately creating revenue).
Naturally there was a bit of reluctance from our designers and developers to craft emails and contact integrations when there was work to be done on the core product. However this hunch turned out to be important and the decisions we made in the first years to put in place the foundations for an intelligent, effective CRM program were crucial, as I reflect back. For us this involved hiring a brilliant CRM marketer (Lauren McAloon) who shared the vision around user centricity, and who was able to drive the technology integrations, communications programs and execution which unlocked the next level of growth.
As Ben Horowitz´s ´The Hard thing about Hard things´ explains brilliantly, early hiring decisions are critically important. This is not an area I always got right, and is one I have reflected on deeply. Decisions you make at an early stage of a business become embedded and woven into the fabric of a company and are very hard to unpick.
It also meant finding a technology partner that could deliver on the ambition to send comms to customers at exactly the right moment - when making a financial decision. In this case I appointed California-based Blueshift, and we dedicated significant resources to put in place the data flows and integration required to deliver this. Looking back I had very little grasp of the importance of this decision at the time, nor how complex the integration would be. There were definitely times during that project where I thought we’d made a mistake. However ultimately it was this integration that allowed us to drive extraordinary habitual usage of our product and increase our share of times customer used ClearScore to take out their financial product. Trying to put this in place 3 years later would have been exponentially more difficult and complex. This program ultimately enabled us to drive value from our customer base in a scalable way.
4. All eyes on unit economics
ClearScore has been financially managed very deliberately from the outset, to build a profitable business. Whilst many software businesses were doing huge raises and investing up front in marketing to bring in customers - posting profitability concerns into the future - Justin was very clear that ClearScore would grow profitably. For me as a marketer this translated into having an extraordinary focus on the unit economics of our business, especially at first our Cost to Acquire, which I would track on a daily basis. This level of granularity is not common, and at times was even frustrating, but it was a critical decision that shaped our growth approach.
It led to very tight marketing planning, but it didn’t mean we didn't take bets in new areas. Instead we would factor a testing budget into the overall Cost to Acquire, and identify, prioritise and run tests into new channels or marketing activities. Anything that didn’t show high potential to stand on it’s own feet from a CTA perspective, would not continue beyond the test phase and this meant we would delay hiring, creative and media commitment decisions accordingly. It was on this basis that we scaled our Paid Search, App marketing and Digital marketing strategies.
5. Apply rigour to key partner appointments
After our first hastily made TV advert showed that TV was going to be our One Thing, I started looking for an agency to work with to create our future adverts. The natural approach for Start Ups would be to find an agency through a previous trusted relationship, or through the founders network or even just the first agency you noticed and liked. Something quick and seemingly hassle free. However we took a very rigorous and disciplined approach to appointing our agency, an approach I had followed in bigger organisations to find a strong match between agency ability, team, size, experience - and client. I worked with AAR to identify a long and short list of agencies based on our very specific requirements, and then created a brief for a formal pitch. We had 3 agencies at final stage pitch, and from that appointed a clear winner, Jonathan Trimble´s awesome team at 18 Feet and Rising (now &Rising).
Even though it potentially took a bit more time up front, I am extremely glad we did so and we will be celebrating with the core team at our dinner in July, as they still work closely with ClearScore (and in fact outlived me there!).
Other incredible partners that have stood the test of time and contributed greatly to ClearScore´s marketing success include Jame Beveridge and his team at Boulder Group and the BlueShift technology team.
6. Simple and consistent brand and message
Driving simplicity and consistency was a company-wide approach which our CEO Justin Basini championed throughout his leadership and which has been an immense lesson for me (I can have a tendency towards overcomplicating things!)
It’s important to relish those days when a company is simple, and keep as much simplicity as possible for as long as possible. It means there is absolute focus, minimal distractions and a very clear mission. The emphasis on consistency got even more important as the team grew, as suddenly not everyone is in every meeting, and not everyone was there when that decision was made. So getting the strategy boiled down to it’s simplest form, and then repeating it like a broken record, has been critical in getting the alignment we had as a company. The year I left, when we had around 300 employees, there was a 94% positivity score for ´I am aligned with and understand the mission and goals of our company´ which was entirely down to this clarity and repetition.
This mantra of simple and consistent is as important in marketing messaging as it is in employee messaging. In our adverts it was tempting as we grew, to expand our messaging to include new creative vehicles, to expand the product messaging and to show the product being used in different circumstances by different people. We created ads and communications to do this, especially around the time when it seemed like our core audience was Topping Out. However as we did this, we lost some of that consistency that had been effective for ClearScore so far.
With hindsight, we needed to keep consistency of our core message and creative vehicle even longer than we did. A look at System1 (ad tracking tool which monitors all advertising for it’s effectiveness) shows that those early-years clear, consistent ads drove the most value for us. I love their finding around the compounding effect of creative capital and it’s a brilliant reminder that whilst ten years feels like a lifetime when you’re a marketing team working day in day out on a product, it’s a blink of an eye when creating a brand imprint on our potential customers.
7. Measure (and then resource) what matters most
As a marketer, one of the most frustrating parts of our work can be the difficulty of measuring the impact of that work so there is something so refreshing about a total standing start. That’s where we were with ClearScore in 2015, but before long we had so much data it was hard to interpret, and it required immense discipline to keep focussed on the right thing.
Years 1-2, my team´s focus was on newly registered users or Sign Ups (SUPs) as we called them - defined as a person who successfully completed the 2 minute registration process and set up an account with us. This ruthless focus allowed us to go from an unknown, to dominating our market sector and quickly becoming the number 1 business in the sector. I leaned a lot on Byron Sharp´s ´How Brands Grow´ during this period to help keep us focussed on this outcome. It was important because this success in scaling our userbase gave us the opportunity to attract financial services partners, attract talent, even attract MA offers (Experian tried to buy ClearScore for 275 million in 2018). SUPs were a consistent percentage of new customers who arrived at our website. Around 50%. Yes there were multiple drop off points - some caused by dodgy user flow, some caused by customers getting distracted or demotivated, some caused by security questions. All of these things were optimisable but this wasn’t a big lever compared to simply driving more top of funnel interest and so we didn’t get too bogged down with it, saving that for later.
Years 2-5, I split the marketing team and allocated half of our focus to a second important metric - Monthly Active Users (MAUs). This was important because it showed how many of our total user base were finding ongoing value in our product in any given month, a clear sign of building value in the business. In order to land at this focus, we had to put aside Total Dwell Time, Total Logins per month, Logins per user per month, Products sold per user, Revenue per user, Drop off in the login process, Sections of the site visited, Type of user by action on site. We had an extraordinary amount of data, as we held the total credit file of each of our users as well as tracking every action on our site. And I would spend hours working on understanding all the aspects of how users interacted with the site to derive insights. However for my interdisciplinary teams, each one had a single focus (Designers, Marketers, Product managers and Developers would work together on projects to impact these metrics).
Ensuring these clear marketing objectives had the required resources was a critical decision made by our CEO in our early years. In 2017 and 2018, around two thirds of the organisational development resources were organised against these two teams Acquire and Engage, and would be accountable for the outcomes they would drive. We had total alignment and effective deployment of resources to unlock each subsequent phase of growth. It was also really exciting as teams had accountability and could drive measurable outcomes relatively quickly.
Marketing decisions in the first five years are crucial, and foundational to subsequent scaling. Reflecting back on how much we learned and applied at ClearScore reminds me how fortunate we were to find Product-Market fit fast and how exciting it is to take start-ups on the sustainable growth journey.