Tell us about yourself

My name is Sam Shrager, and my official title is Executive Director of Marketing Communications at BCB Group, though I just call myself Head of Marketing - feels a bit friendlier! I've been here for just over five years. My jam is B2B marketing and storytelling to institutions about what problems and challenges of theirs we can solve in a way that gives people confidence and trust and gives BCB credibility and authority in the space. 

How do you see your role as a B2B marketer in driving broader industry or sector change?

It’s really important to us to get the right content out at the right time to reflect well on the industry and to address future innovation, so I really champion the provision of really good, valuable content, internally and externally, that really resonates with potential clients and industry partners

I'm very keen on partnership marketing. We do a lot of joint webinars and interviews to get a wealth of content with industry partners or brands that we work with and want to align with, who are sort of big deals in the industry. We're really coming up with some really meaty customer success stories and partnership success stories - that works incredibly well.

It's really important to build trust, credibility, and authority, particularly in my space, which is crypto. Let's be honest, it's a bit of a roller coaster in terms of news stories that come out. So we're really focused on getting the message across that BCB Group as an institution is actually resilient, reliable, reputable, regulated, and here to stay.

Partnerships work best when it's an ongoing thing, not just a one-off. For instance, we've done work with Fireblocks and Ripple in the industry. We might start off with something like a couple of syndicated webinars or panels that we're both on together, just discussing the potential partnership and how we will be working together. Then we might do a press release, followed by more written content and video content with both companies. We've also done side events at some of the major industry events. At Money 20/20, we worked with Ripple on this amazing side event at a venue in Amsterdam which nobody's ever been able to use before for a corporate event - it was a bit of a first. It was the rooftop of Soho House Amsterdam!

What's the most provocative idea or strategy you've implemented in your B2B marketing? And what was the response?

Interestingly, probably the most provocative thing we did wasn't particularly provocative, but it was about getting buy-in from key stakeholders. It was literally just an SEO strategy to get people to understand that our clients would look on Google for what we do.

We embarked on that with a three-month window to prove the model worked. What was really good was that at the time, a lot of our competitors just weren't doing it in this space. I think everybody's upped their game now, so it's a lot more competitive. But we ended up in the top three on Google search engine results pages for a B2B fintech company in crypto, that’s pretty good! It ended up giving us some really great quality leads for the sales team. So much so that they would say it's like shooting fish in a barrel, it's so easy. 

On the other end of the scale, this year, BCB Group actually sponsored the over 40s World Real Tennis Doubles Championships at Queen's Club. It was literally just shirts on the guys, a bit of corporate stuff. We could invite people, and it was like a money-can't-buy experience because Queen's Club is incredible. Hugh Grant was there that weekend - It was amazing.

Can you share an example of how you've used storytelling to provoke change or shift perceptions in your industry?

Storytelling is so important, and people who aren't in marketing sometimes don't really get that. So I've been working really closely with the exec team at the moment on the investor deck, bringing it into a consistent story and really working on their messaging for investors,  consistent with the new brand. That's gonna filter down into the rest of the company, sales team, etc. 

But I think the really important thing when it comes to storytelling and content strategy is to get back to that thing of, "Hang on, why are we doing it?" We're not just pumping it out for the sake of it. It's got to be valuable, it's got to be relevant, it's got to resonate with our audience.

From our point of view, we've still got a fair bit of way to go with education in our industry, too. Getting people to understand the benefits, why moving money at the speed of the internet is the future, and how it's just going to make everything better and easier and seamless, with less slippage. It's just reinforcing and repeating that. 

What is the biggest change needed in B2B marketing right now and how do you feel you're contributing to it?

For me, it's all about being creative and innovative. We need to move away from getting stuck in the past. I'm saying this specifically from BCB's point of view and our competitors in our industry sector. I think it's really important to move away from that whole "we've got to look corporate" type of thing. Okay, that's important for investors and potential clients, but I actually think it's really important to show the face of a company as well. And by that, I actually mean, literally faces, which is great because people buy from people. Let's be honest, we're all people!

We had a photographer in for a couple of days, taking candid shots around the office of the different teams, people working, and it's so good, it just brings everything to life. So I'm really excited about using those throughout a lot of our materials and content as well.

I think that's a real lift from that slightly staged, stagnant, old-school B2B approach. For me, that's the brilliant thing about being in the crypto and payments industries - you can push the envelope a little bit on being more creative. It's not like you're in a traditional wealth management firm or something where you're really stuck with what you've got to do and it's going to be very conservative. We can do some quite cool stuff, which is really exciting.

How do you encourage your team or organisation to think more boldly and embrace change in their marketing approach?

I try to be as creative as possible, but at the same time, I keep a real handle on the fact that you've got to be commercial. It's literally about building a business case for a CFO on this piece of the budget and explaining to them why this is going to work, what the benefits are going to be, and what our projected ROI is going to be too.

For me, it's that whole balance of being creative and innovative but at the same time being commercial and aware of whether the investment is justified. What I'm also always keen to do is a bit of benchmarking - I think that really works well.

For example, a couple of years back, our previous CEO decided to sponsor a podcast. It was a big industry podcast and it was great, it got us a lot of returns. But there were some questions internally about the size of the spend. We could see what we were getting, but people wondered what else we could get. So I did a huge benchmarking presentation with lots of research on what other options looked like, just to give the whole C-suite an idea of, "Okay, we're paying that for that. But we could sponsor an F1 team, for example, for this same amount of money. Would we want to do that? Or there's this other podcast available,or we could literally be ubiquitous at all the events across the year. What do we want to do?"

It's about bringing them with you in terms of making them understand what the options are, but also showing that we're making sensible choices based on expertise. We're being subject matter experts in our lane of marketing and we can advise accordingly. 

What makes B2B marketing ‘changemaking’ in your view in one word? 

Innovation.

What is your one piece of advice for future changemakers on how to be more effective in B2B marketing roles?

I think the key thing is don't get complacent. I probably have done it at times, and sometimes you just need a bit of a wake-up call to think, "Okay, let's reinvigorate." You don't want to stick with the same-old corporate approach.

Just keep bouncing ideas off other people. I love talking to my fellow marketers in the same industry. I find that great, it's so good. As I mentioned earlier, the partnership marketing we do is fantastic. That really invigorates us as well.

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