AITech Interview with Danielle West, Director of Corporate Marketing at Nutrient

Insights on rebranding challenges, strategies, and AI’s role in marketing from Danielle West, Director at Nutrient.

Hi Danielle, we are delighted to have you with us. Tell our readers about your professional background and your journey of becoming Head of Marketing at Nutrient.

My career has been a bit of a journey! I started in the agency world working on advertising campaigns and branding development before moving to the ‘client side’ working in both B2C and B2B companies. I’ve been fortunate to gain experience at large listed companies as well as at smaller privately held businesses and one Covid Unicorn that was a bit of a wild ride! Each has had its own unique challenges and learnings.

I was approached a year ago with the opportunity at Nutrient and at first I was skeptical, at the time it had a weird name (still PSPDFKit) and it did something with PDFs and documents that was technical and complex. But it was a unique challenge: five established companies had come together through acquisition and had some high-growth goals. Yet marketing to date has been primarily inbound!

I felt this was an amazing challenge to pull from my variety of experiences as we built out the marketing organization. The opportunity to start with a pretty clean slate, at a company that’s established and has clear goals, but with a startup mentality. I was hooked.

What strategies do you employ to ensure successful execution when managing B2B marketing campaigns across diverse industries?

At Nutrient we have three lines of business, each with a unique problem that we solve and a unique audience we are trying to connect with. And we have to talk to each of them at the same time without alienating the others!

Any campaign is really just a series of activities that promote a message to a defined audience. There’s no real magic recipe for success, but rather sticking to the basics and doing them well.

Keep the campaigns specific – who is the audience and what is the action you want them to take. From there, decide on messaging and channels. When you try to get too complicated or go too broad, your message gets watered down and you can no longer tell what is working or not working.

The more you know about your audience, the more successful you’ll be. Having a clear understanding of where and how they want to be engaged is the first step. After that, keep iterating! In today’s world, people need to hear the same message 20+ times, so variety plus trial and error is key.

What factors prompted Nutrient to pursue rebranding? Do share with our readers any specific challenges that influenced the decision.

Prior to the rebrand, we were five companies globally that had come together through acquisition. Our growth goals required us to be able to cross-sell our products and tell a cohesive story.

Being five individual brands with five individual websites not only created a disjointed sales experience, but was also confusing for customers with different support teams, billing systems, etc. We reached a point where it was very clear we needed to bring everything together in order to support our future growth.

How would you describe the brand’s identity prior to rebranding and after the revamp? Highlight the strategies that you and your team implemented to ensure a smooth and successful transition.

The brand identity prior to rebrand was very fragmented. Each of the original five companies had a unique brand, tone of voice, and selling proposition. Even within the same line of business, it was a confusing story. The rebrand is still only a month old, but we are already seeing the benefits of a consolidated brand, story, and clear distinction between our lines of business – and how we speak to each of the audiences. I think every team internally is already seeing the benefits; marketing has much clearer story to tell, sales is using a single slide deck that starts with our brand vision and then drills down, and even across product and engineering teams it’s nice to have consolidated products and consistent nomenclature.

Knowing that this would be a massive change for our employees and customers, we wanted to give everyone a heads-up and focus on training. We started communicating with our customers a few weeks before the rebrand with a ‘something is coming’ message, this not only made sure everyone was paying attention but created some buzz and excitement! Our teams spent a lot of attention creating slide decks, training on the story, and making sure everyone in the company – regardless of role – was familiar with the new brand.

How do you plan to communicate the company’s new identity to existing clients so that they can feel informed throughout the process, and how would you ensure that the brand voice reaches a broader market?

As mentioned, we started communicating with customers in the lead-up to the rebrand, making them feel like they were in on a secret. Since the go-live, we’ve had a number of communication touch points including emails coming from our CEO and from the brand itself, giving it a personality, paired with a personalized outreach from our Customer Success team. We’ve had a number of blogs and social posts that give insight into the project from various perspectives, including marketing, operations, product, and the leadership team.

With every message, we are thinking about expanded channels to continue to spread the word – and leaning into PR and media opportunities!

What marketing campaigns have you and the team devised for the upgrade and the launch event?

We recognize that Nutrient is an unusual name for a tech company, so to help support our new brand story and to help showcase our brand mission we wanted to anchor our campaigns in our products. We have a quarterly release that showcases our product features, customer stories that highlight our use cases, and our PR features key themes such as how the industry is leveraging AI. This is the same approach we are taking as we plan for next year.

Changing and evolving are constant cycles of any company’s growth. Can you tell where this rebranding process will take Nutrient in the near future?

I’m excited to see how this rebrand will help us evolve and change faster. It’s helped us streamline internal tools, processes, and people, and get clearer on our goals and targets. We are no longer spending time aligning internal teams but rather focusing on where is the best growth opportunity, what gets us the most ROI and how we can iterate faster.

It’s also allowing us to lean in to AI even more. With everyone internally aligned, an a clearly defined brand and tone of voice, using tools like Writer, Claude, and ChatGPT makes us even more efficient.

What advice would you like to give to other companies that are considering a rebrand?

A rebrand is about discovering who you want to be, what resonates with your customers, and what is the story you want to tell. Spend the time making sure you’re clear on those things before you start the actual rebrand activities! Also, a rebrand is much more than just a marketing activity. Make sure you engage a cross-functional team early to ensure the roll out of the new brand is seamless!

Danielle West

Director of Corporate Marketing at Nutrient

Danielle is Director of Corporate Marketing at Nutrient. She is passionate about brand development and bringing brands to life through campaigns and events. She loves to travel, learn about (and drink) wine, hike with her dog, and listen to true crime podcasts.

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