Growing ZayZoon
I joined ZayZoon in 2020 as the first full-time marketing employee with one goal: to elevate their brand as the ultimate financial wellness tool.
In my first few years as Marketing Manager, I developed a cohesive marketing strategy that allowed us to grow from a lean startup to a scale-up now worth more than $75mm USD.
Building an authentic brand
ZayZoon is a financial wellness platform that provides employees with access to their money when they need it, without having to wait until payday. When I first started in 2020, the world of Earned Wage Access (EWA) was fairly unknown, so it was imperative to set the ground for a brand to be able to grow. I worked closely with all departments and the SLT to capture what the brand should look, sound, and feel like; and grew it from there.
The process
Building awareness
ZayZoon has a unique GTM strategy, partnering with Payroll providers and platforms to offer EWA to employers so their employees can access it. This means it's a B2B2C SAAS strategy -- and its brand needed to grow into each channel cohesively.
The first step was awareness and education. We developed a pillar content strategy to break down 10 facts about Earned Wage Access that showed its importance to our B2B personas: employers and payroll partners.
This looked like one main infographic and its subsequent 10 facts-- each turned into content pieces with a twist of their own. These were then deployed on all of our channels, distributed with our liaisons in the companies we worked with, and included in promotional emails.
My team had also evolved by then, with a part-time writer and a full-time content marketer whom I worked with to get this out into the world.
I also worked with an external agency to script, produce, and edit an explainer video that could capture what ZayZoon EWA looked like and its importance. As with the infographic, mileage was of the essence, so we made sure to have different versions that would appeal to our audiences (B2B and B2C) in the stage of the funnel they were at.
A cohesive content strategy
With a solid foundation set, I worked to grow our content strategy and deploy it across all of our channels.
This meant coaching our slowly growing marketing team to create more content per vertical; collaborating with our growth team to ensure they knew how to implement the content strategy and that it served them; and also working with our B2B partners to develop new content when needed.
The brand book
The right tools at the right time
Once we had basic assets to tell the ZayZoon story, we worked on developing the right materials to accompany our partners throughout their journey implementing ZayZoon. This included:
- Posters
- Door decals
- One -pagers
- Email templates
- Long-form content
- Customised landing pages
- Event promotional materials
- White papers
- Slide decks
- And more
I also worked closely with the team at VISA who partnered with us to showcase the value of Earned Wage Access with ZayZoon through digital ad campaigns, case studies, and video content.
All of these materials were then compiled into our playbook. A document that, delivered by sections to our partners, introduced all the available elements they could use to successfully deploy ZayZoon.
Mission-led content
One thing stayed constant as we scaled and that was our company mission: to help people be empowered in their financial journey.
I was able to collaborate with the Product team and our President to run a series of ongoing campaigns that led to amazing testimonials from the people who used EWA in their lives.
This included running email campaigns, showcasing their stories in our various marketing channels, and elevating the voices of those who had managed to avoid predatory lending services thanks to ZayZoon.
