Content Inspo Digest #1: Your Go-to-Market Fortune

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chloe Tse, Director of Content at PartnerStack to hear all about their award-winning, tarot-inspired campaign, Your Go-To-Market Fortune. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Carina: Your Go-to-Market Fortune is such an intriguing campaign. Where did the idea for it come from? 

Chloe: It starts with bringing your whole self to work. I’m a Zodiac queen and I am a tarot reader (for fun) myself, but I’m also a data-driven content person. In my first year at PartnerStack I was really trying to figure out what content resonated with our audiences and what actually helped people convert. 

I always like to do two things: marry a need with a creative angle. My background is in women’s lifestyle and I pioneered the Zodiac format at Slice. That became the inspiration behind the article, The Best Tech Jobs for You Based on Your Zodiac Sign. It was a contentious piece at first but also became our most trafficked piece. That showed me there was an appetite for this kind of content. 

Carina: You said that first article was contentious, so how did it go trying to convince your team that a whole tarot-inspired campaign was a good idea? 

Chloe: I was really lucky that Charles, who’s the Head of Brand at PartnerStack, was really bought in and helped push it. There were some folks internally that were a little more skeptical. This is the challenge about doing something innovative, people definitely question you. 

To level-set, I don't think you can come out the gate just doing creative content. I do think that there's a certain level of privilege to be able to do that. You need to prove results, right? It's revenue. People need outcomes. They need to understand that the content is leading to conversion. You need to back up creativity with performance, with numbers, and I think that's something people sometimes get wrong about it. People had a lot of pushback around the Zodiac article, but it performed and generated intrigue. 

It's not about creativity for creativity's sake—it's about learning who you're dealing with, figuring out their profiles, and then finding those passion alignments that you can get really creative with. And I think you can absolutely have creativity and performance. You’ve just got to think deeper. You've got to connect more dots. This is where the neurodiverse people of the world really have an advantage, because it's connecting a lot of invisible dots. It's understanding business behaviour and human behaviour and having an intuitive sense to tell a story across channels in a way that's going to resonate with the audiences that you're after. 

Carina: I’m so curious about how, exactly, you went about creating this marketing-inspired tarot deck. Can you walk me through the process?

Chloe: The goal of Your Go-to-Market Fortune, while it can seem witchy or quirky, is to help people feel seen and help them solve their partnership problems. We wanted to find pain points that really resonated with people in partnerships, so we started by identifying those problems. 

For example, you see these marketers who have software buying decision power, and they're closing out a quarter and they just panic and say, ‘I'll just go buy this tool.’ They think the tool's going to solve their problems but it doesn’t fix their strategy problems. So we turned that archetype into the Queen of Reckless spend.

Or you see these people who just look at their competitors' campaigns and they’re like, ‘oh, that worked for them.’ So they just replicate it. That’s how we came up with The Immeasurable Marketer—she’s blindfolded, just rolling the dice.  

So the logic for that quiz and the groupings of the cards actually happened on my living room floor. We grouped them into four main problems that partner people experience, and we worked backwards from there to create the “readings.” 

Carina: What would you have done differently if you had to do it all over again? 

Chloe: I think it’s different now, because it’s timing and the market. We’re in the year of the B2B influencer, so I'd have more influencers involved. We handed out the deck at events, but I think I would do event activations where we’d do live card readings to make it more interactive. I didn't have a video the first time, and I think that I would've made a lot more noise.

Carina: What do you think is the value of doing a campaign like this that’s more quirky and out-there? 

Chloe: It's a conversation starter. People are talking about it, and that makes brands sticky and memorable. And guess who's behind B2B buyers? They're people. And it's how you stand out in a saturated market that's put out a lot of content—a lot of the same content—for enterprise companies. Enterprise companies also like intrigue and creativity and campaigns. That was one of those things that we knew and we had data to support. 

I think at the end of the day, people are looking for solutions to problems and how you tell that story can be really interesting. And for me, that's always my goal. I want to create stories that resonate. I want to make an impression, an imprint that shifts the way you think just a little bit. 

I know this is cheesy, we work in B2B SaaS, but I do think through campaigns and through stories, you can be a little bit better. You can learn something new and make decisions that benefit more people. 

Thanks so much to Chloe Tse for sharing her process with me! Stay tuned for the next edition of content inspo digest for more great content stories.