What you need to know:

• Staying in market through Covid, and focusing on end customers rather than b2b partners, delivered big gains for accounting software firm Xero.
• AU Marketing Director, Vladka Kazda, said the company quickly launched new business tools while shifting content strategy and channel mix.
• Results include 48 per cent gain in unaided awareness – and the company continues to back brand investment to drive growth.

Brand advocate

“Having a great business model can only take you so far. Brand is what helps you scale,” according to Xero Marketing Director Vladka Kazda. “Brand is what accelerates growth.”

After 15 years at Carsales.com.au, Kazda joined Xero in 2019. From selling cars to selling accounting software is not the most obvious switch, she told the B2B Marketing Leaders Forum in Sydney.

“But they actually have a lot in common. Carsales disrupted classified car ads; Xero was the first cloud player to come up with the single ledger.”

The cloud-based single ledger helped bring accounting into the connected age; think Google Docs for accountants, but more powerful. It’s one of the reasons bean-counters love Xero – they got years of their lives back.

Yet outside of accounting “brand recognition was really low, so we had to think beyond book-keeping and connect with end users”, said Kazda.

The problem was, “we weren’t actually talking to them. From the minute I realised that, I was on a mission: to get to know our end users as well as we do our partners… and for them to know us.”

That’s where brand came in – internally as much as externally.

Strategic shift

“We moved from biannual brand tracking to monthly, educating the business on the importance of brand, and its contribution to brand equity, which translates to marketshare – and we doubled down on content,” said Kazda.

Xero launched customer newsletters and switched from product-focused content to “more around growing the businesses and giving them more evergreen content”.

Meanwhile, it "upweighted marketing budgets, expanded our direct channel mix and refocused where we were advertising” in a bid to drive growth, she added.

Product, place, promotion... purpose 

Then came more disruption: Covid. While some firms ran for the hills or created pretty bland messaging, Xero doubled down on direct communications that were actually useful. As businesses were grappling with Jobkeeper, for example, Xero condensed its key complexities into a one pager.

Critically, it also quickly opened up tools to help firms connect and apply for Jobkeeper, while opening up a new cashflow tool to all customers (that tool had been in beta prior to the pandemic).

In parallel, Xero opened up its data to help government get a better picture of what was happening to small business at a local level “so that they could better invest state support, to feed it back into the industry”, said Kazda.

“So we didn't shy away, didn't pull back our budgets dramatically. We mixed up our channels, but we absolutely stayed present,” she added. “I think it's a mistake that a lot of businesses made; pulling out and not remaining in play.”

The strategy has paid off, with Xero recording a huge rise in key brand indicators.

“We ended up growing our unaided awareness in our category by almost 50 per cent. That is the result of staying relevant, present and focused on our end users,” said Kazda.

“It’s been a two year sprint. But we’re actually only just getting started.”