Interview with Miranda Gahrmann from Cloudways

1. As the product roadmap evolves, brand narratives must also become more precise- especially for a technically nuanced solution like Cloudways. Amidst the risks of alienating legacy buyers, what precautions can marketing leaders take to convey reliability even as the product scales rapidly?

As our product roadmap evolves rapidly and our product offering deepens and widens, it’s key to keep the value proposition at the forefront, the why behind what we do. In our case, we’ll take care of the infrastructure, keeping applications fast, available, secure, and cost-efficient, so our customers can focus on what matters to them, their business. This narrative covers our existing product ranges as well as future ones and ensures customers have a consistent understanding of the value we deliver.

As we expand our product offerings, we’re also deepening and continuously improving our products for our existing customers. They should continue to experience the same level of comfort and peace of mind as today, while we make it easy for them to expand their feature set, including launching AI agents.

2. Breaking through to the technical buyers’ choice paralysis requires speaking a different dialect, one preferably backed by accurate data. How can you ensure transparency between each marketing layer to build trust with a highly cautious audience, without completely wiping out the simplicity in your messaging?

For product offerings, a clear, distinct explanation of what each product is for and who it is intended for, will help users more easily understand which product is best for them.

Two of our core products, Cloudways Flexible and Cloudways Autonomous, each have a distinct focus. With Cloudways Flexible, as the name suggests, the user can choose the cloud provider, server location, database, and more. Cloudways Autonomous is ideal for websites with traffic spikes, as it autoscales during those spikes and automatically adjusts infrastructure resources, removing the need for manual server management, capacity planning, or performance tuning, and keeping the application online and fast. This means customers don’t have to worry about their sites going offline during a viral campaign or the shopping season.

Adding data to the product offerings and specifying where the data is sourced from will make the benefits to technical buyers more tangible, increase trust, and help compare products.

Regarding transparency across marketing layers, we do this mainly in two ways. First, we ensure that for each product, we have a detailed outline of how it works and the benefits for the user. Across all products, we embed our brand proposition, which positions simplicity as the ability to turn complex infrastructure tasks into guided workflows and 1-click actions. These documents are then accessible to anyone in the organization.

Second, by supporting strong collaboration, alignment, and information sharing between teams, we streamline our campaigns and, across the different marketing layers, communicate the same key points.

3. Much of security-centered messaging, ever since the unprecedented rise of AI, is just fear-mongering. Do you believe it’s possible to communicate perceived risks by reframing such an aggressive positioning into a more enabling approach? Or is urgency a necessary evil?

One tactic in marketing is fear marketing, where you tap into a potential customer’s worry, fear, or anxiety and then provide a solution. It can be effective, however, when fear marketing is done poorly, it can be seen as manipulation, which can reflect negatively on the brand and on sales.

At Cloudways, we focus more on empowerment than on fear-based marketing. Yes, we’ll highlight security concerns where appropriate, such as the security risks associated with self-hosted AI agents. However, that’s tied to a solution – like our managed AI agents – and to how to make it more convenient, easier, and safer for the user to enjoy the benefits of AI agents without the known risks.

Another example of the empowerment we provide is Cloudways Copilot, which monitors servers and applications 24/7 to instantly detect issues and identify root causes. If Cloudways Copilot detects an issue, it proactively messages the user with a recommendation on how to fix it. This helps our customers resolve issues faster, before their visitors notice them.

4. AI has democratized content production, but it also risks flooding the market with emotionally uninspired assets. To what extent must marketing’s baseline for ‘quality’ evolve to avoid settling for what is only technically perfect?

Humans want to connect with other humans. However, AI-generated content is flooding the internet. According to GPTZero’s dashboard, 43.5% of LinkedIn posts are AI-generated, and this is evident in the sentiment and comments from LinkedIn users complaining about the ‘AI slop’ online.

We also see this across other channels, particularly in SEO. It’s very easy these days to create content, but AI-generated content is often shallow, lacks storytelling, offers little new information, and isn’t emotionally inspiring. By now, there are typical word choices or contrast patterns in the text that make people recognize it’s AI-generated.

While generating content with AI may seem like an easy, cost-effective way to produce it, it can do more damage to a brand than it appears at first glance. Users are disappointed when they notice that content is pure AI and don’t come back, and it will be harder to rank on Google, since Google will also raise the bar. So while AI can help with idea generation, research, review, etc., the idea, engagement, and impact will depend heavily on the person behind the keyboard who made the effort to create an insightful content piece.

5. A developer-centric environment rewards utility and performance, the primary value propositions. Can you walk our readers through the basic pillars leaders must enforce to prevent a brand from ‘sounding’ like a commodity, and still speak to the tech audience’s demands?

To sound authentic as a brand and avoid coming across as a commodity, the brand value proposition needs to be connected to a functional benefit. A quick example is Red Bull, where the brand is centered on action, and drinking a Red Bull gives you energy.

In a developer-centric environment, these functional benefits need to be tied to performance or utility to appeal to developers, such as speed, uptime, and reliability. In our case, we offer peace of mind, which translates into the functional benefits of not having to manage their infrastructure and spending less time on server management, as Cloudways handles it with 99.9% uptime. Also, in case of any questions, we offer 24/7 support, so customers know they can always reach out to us.

6. We’re all seeing that our users want the power of enterprise-grade AI infrastructure, but they remain fiercely loyal to the simplicity that Cloudways was built on. When the product roadmap and the brand identity are pulling in opposite directions, how do you underscore a center of gravity for your marketing narrative that doesn’t compromise on either?

Due to rapid developments in AI, our product offering and roadmap have evolved as well. As part of our brand value proposition, we want to maintain the simplicity Cloudways users are used to and turn complex infrastructure tasks into guided workflows and 1-click actions.

This principle will also apply to our AI products as we roll them out. We just went live with Managed AI agents, bringing the same simplicity users are used to for hosting websites and applications. In a few clicks, users can set up their AI agent OpenClaw, and we handle infrastructure maintenance, such as keeping their AI agent up to date. Therefore, we don’t see a shift toward AI as a contradiction of our value of simplicity. They can go hand in hand.

7. Tech buyers often need to experiment (and test) before the final purchase, especially when the product is premium, technically-nuanced, or computer-heavy. What are the must-haves of an attribution model that can recognize the upstream value of the learner’s path and bridge it to the gradual enterprise conversion?

Tech buyers rarely convert on the first touchpoint. They’ll usually start a free trial, go through the knowledge base, and watch our online videos before visiting the pricing page. To properly track which parts of the learning path contributed to the conversion, as well as which channels they came from, an attribution model needs to cover the following:

• The attribution model needs to be multi-touch, so that all touchpoints and the educational journey that built the trust leading to the conversion are attributed.
• The first and last touchpoints should receive higher weight, since the first touchpoint is how the buyer came to use, and the last touchpoint is the one that led the user to a conversion.
• Signal-based scoring for high-intent actions. Actions like launching a server or connecting a domain to a server are stronger signals than a page view, so they should carry more weight in the model than passive engagement.

These insights will help us improve our marketing efforts to reach our audience more effectively and to understand which parts of their educational journey are most important. Just as importantly, they will flag when a self-serve account’s usage depth, feature adoption, and high-intent actions begin to resemble those of an enterprise prospect, so sales can step in with the right context rather than starting cold.