In this episode, we sit down with Katie Hagan, an award-winning digital marketing strategist to dive into the complexities of crafting a brand identity. Bill and Katie explore the differences between starting from scratch versus rebranding, the challenges of ensuring consistent communication throughout a rebrand, and effective tools to develop a strong content marketing plan. Katie shares her experience with creating content strategies that resonate with B2B audiences. From discussing why branding is essential for B2B businesses to the impactful role of internal focus groups in brand messaging alignment, this conversation is full of actionable advice.
Katie Hagan is an award-winning digital marketing strategist with nearly a decade of experience spanning B2B tech, consumer brands, market research, and behavioral health. Katie specializes in branding and content strategy, and brings a fresh perspective to B2B marketing, incorporating creativity and strategic alignment across various sectors.
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Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. It's a very special guest today, I'm looking forward to having on the show for a long time, Katie Hagan, an award-winning digital marketing strategist. Katie, thank you for joining us today.
Katie: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Bill: So Katie, we had an intro call a while ago just talking about what we were going to talk about and just kind of laying the land. And I was really fascinated to see and learn from you and get some new perspective on what's missing in marketing. So I want to know if you could start maybe with a little bit talking about your background first before we dive into two really meaty topics that you and I like, which is branding and content marketing. Maybe start with a little bit of your background and then we'll jump into those topics.
Katie: Definitely. It's crazy. It feels crazy to say this, but I'm coming up on like a decade of digital marketing. So I still, I still feel like such a baby in it, but I'm about eight years into my career with digital marketing. So I started my career in the tech space, actually B2B tech. So I actually started my career B2B from tech and then market research. I had a few years in both those sectors and I got some, I was given advice from a mentor in my undergrad before I started my digital marketing career who works at SAP. And he told me never to pigeonhole myself. And I kind of took that advice to the extreme and I've tried to kind of experiment in every sector of industry I can get my hands on. So I started in tech and market research, both B2B. But I also have a lot of background in D2C and consumer marketing. So I've worked for one of the top 10 biggest toy brands in the world, which was so fun, really great experience. And now I'm in behavioral health, which has actually been a dream of mine. So I'm coming up on a decade of digital marketing and I've worked in so many industries. I've seen a lot, I've learned a lot, and it's been a lot of fun.
Bill: No, that's great. When I think one of the things that's happening and that we're realizing in marketing, whether it's D2C or B2B, because the end user who's experiencing the content is a person, right? There's less difference between B2B and D2C than a lot of people I think really believe there is because, and maybe we aren't to the point in B2B where TikToks are the cutting edge thing that's moving us forward, but we're certainly seeing meme culture, humor, and a lot of those types of things make their way into and pop cultural references into B2B social media. So I think that's a great experience record that you have and kind of gathering all of those different experiences together to really make you a better digital marketer and to give you those experiences. Well, one of the things I'd like to talk about today is branding. We're very passionate about branding here at 50 Marketing at our agency and talking about it because it feels to me like we've, long ago, we demonized branding in the B2B space. You know, that's just for the big D2C brands that only matters telling your brand story, your brand promise and delivering that to your audience, that only matters in the D2C space. And we're finding more more research and more and more outcomes delivered in B2B whenever we're able to communicate branding. So can you talk a little bit about understanding a brand's core identity, why we need to do it, and why you see value in B2B?
Katie: Yeah, so I actually did target audience analysis, establishing a brand for a B2B company. I actually, one thing I left out in my intro is that I actually have agency background as well. I actually have agency background because when I was in the consumer marketing space, everyone I worked with had agency background and I hadn't had that yet. So I was like, when I leave here, I'm going to go to an agency so I can get that experience under my belt. So I took on a B2B role at an agency. So I was actually an internal marketer, internal digital marketing strategist for a marketing agency. So rather than being client facing and doing the work for our clients, I was actually brought on to do the marketing for the agency because what's the saying? It's like the shoemaker's kids don't have shoes. So they, they were a B2B organization who had never prior prioritize their own marketing and they were a marketing agency. And I was brought on because they were like, we've never really taken the time to carve out a marketing strategy and a marketing plan for ourselves. And even though we have a whole staff of marketers, you know, we, they're, they're, dedicated to our, clients, obviously. So, getting back to your question about like, what's the importance of branding in the B2B space. You know, I think a lot of people hear branding and they think it's fluff. But I do think in the B2B space, if you want to differentiate yourself from your competitors, you have to understand what they're doing and what makes you different. And without having a dedicated marketing person or team to really pull that and extract that, you're kind of just guessing on a whim. You could easily just fall into doing what everyone else is doing and not really having direction with your marketing, with your collateral, with your one sheets, your brochures, with your webinars, with your emails. You get lost in the noise without being like, okay, this is who we are and this is how we're different from everybody else. And I've seen that in a lot of B2B space. If you're in a B2B space and they're investing in marketing, it's a sign that you're in a really great company. And there is a reason why you should understand your company's brand. You should establish your brand so you can differentiate yourself from the competition. So I'd love to talk more about that.
Bill: No, no, absolutely. We're just going to keep unpacking that. So one of the things I see with a lot of companies when they do approach brands. So let's make the assumption that they're going to invest in marketing. They believe in branding and that's a big assumption. But let's go with that for now. And if they start with that brand, we know the companies like to talk about themselves from their perspective. And that's an important aspect of the process. But let's talk about target market. And why it's so important to understand your clients and your target market and who you want to communicate with as part of that branding process.
Katie: Yeah. So one thing I have found from that one project with that agency, but also working at a wide variety of organizations in my time in digital marketing is that some people within an organization will have an idea of what your company's brand is. And it's not very much in line with what the customer or the client thinks your company is. So one thing that I think is really important is to kind of do internal focus groups to understand what everybody, not everybody, but like across teams. So what your leadership team assumes your company's brand and messaging is, what your business development team thinks, and then like your customer facing, you know, customer service, account, account managers, you know. I like to do small focus groups across a company when you have the bandwidth and you have a dedicated project like this to understand, what do we internally believe we are as a company? And just internally, so not even taking in consideration your customers and your clients yet, internally, you are always gonna get such mixed reviews if you don't have an already well-established brand. It's actually, it's so fascinating. It's fascinating to hear what leadership's take is on what your company's brand is versus people that are facing the customers every day. And I like to take inventory of pulling people from different teams to understand what that is. Because then, once you actually dive into who your actual target market is, you can kind of marry them and be like, OK, where are the miscommunications and misunderstandings happening? Why does this team think we're this, but this team thinks that? So what I like to do is kind of take inventory internally before you even start thinking externally. That's always a lot of fun for me. But from where you go from there, in my opinion, is trying to get understanding from the customer-facing team members. If you don't have access to your actual customers and clients, it really depends on your industry and your organization. Some organizations will be like, yeah, we've had this client for 10 years. I'd love for you to hop on a call with them to understand why they work with us. You don't always have that access. So you have to work with your team internally that faces your customers or talks to your customers. That's your business development team. That's your customer service team. That's your account managers. And sometimes that's even your billing department, you know, it's the billing, because sometimes your reputation in terms of billing with your clients and vendors, can be, you got to get really creative with how you can take inventory on how, on how your company is seen. On top of that, social listening, looking at your reviews, really taking inventory across the board and getting really creative is being like, okay How are we viewed? What do people think of us? Why do people work with us? And when you kind of take shop internally on top of like those traditional inventory measurements of like I said, social listening, email responses, reviews, you start to get a really good picture of like, okay. This is what we're seeing as a company. Are we happy with this? Or do we need to redefine this?
Bill: Absolutely. One of the things I think that's funny is when you go through this process with companies, and I'm sure this is true in D2C and probably more true in B2B is when you start asking leadership and various divisions of the company for their interpretation of the story, I've gone through those processes and at the end of them wondered if all of those people actually work at the same company or not, right? Especially if they don't have it developed and it hasn't been like an initiative. It's like, Do you all talk? Do you guys, have you met before? Do I need to make introductions within your company? And these aren't companies that have 10,000 people, right? These are smaller companies with hundreds, maybe, you know four or 500 people max and in the leadership and in the executive team and the management structure, there might only be 30 people and you wonder if they've ever met before. So I think that's kind of a funny part of the process. When whenever you. What's that?
Katie: Yeah, I said it definitely is. And I'm thinking like, like you said, I've just worked at a company with like 50 people and different teams have different takes on what the company’s, and like you said, then a couple hundred, it's the same exact thing. The one thing I'll say though is when you decide to do an internal focus group, although it can be very time consuming, you're opening up those conversations to prepare your teams. They're like, okay, I'm a part of this focus group and word gets out that like marketing's picking everybody's brains on these things. So it kind of actually prepares. We're going to talk about later about internal buy-in doing those groups actually preps people for that buy-in of like, okay, we're redefining our brand. And maybe my answers aren't what other teams answers are. And it kind of, kind of sets the stage for, you know, doing a rebrand.
Bill: No, absolutely. You can build momentum, right? Because not only do we have to look at the marketing function and the initiative that we're launching with branding, but we have to look at the change initiative. How are we going to assist affecting change in the organization and help their leadership? And it's not by three months after the project, slapping down, hey, here's the new branding, read it, live it, love it, right? We got to start to build momentum. And that's more difficult in some organizations than others, right? There's always a continuum of adoption and absorption and integration. But whenever you were working with, so we won't name the brand, but you were working with one of the largest toy brands in the world. And whenever you looked at, you guys had a massive rebrand initiative. It was tremendous in its scope compared to like a B2B rebrand where you'd have 40 or 50 people in the company. But when you look at the agency experience you had with B2B rebranding and the large multinational toy brand that you did rebranding with, were there a lot of parallels between those two situations and processes?
Katie: I'll say there were parallels, but I had more access when it came to B2B. So the one thing I always say about B2B is that it doesn't get enough credit for how creative you can be in marketing. You know everyone consumes consumer marketing regularly and it's like, it's sexy, you know, like everyone loves consumer marketing. You know, I think a lot of marketers in B2B are like, well, I can't do that because I'm not in consumer marketing. And like you said, slowly B2B is getting meme-ified. Like I think within the next few years, we're gonna see more B2B marketers taking even more risks and getting permission from internal stakeholders to do that. My agency life definitely prepared me for this. So we've relaunched what used to be a household toy brand name back in like the 80s and 90s. And so I learned a lot from the agency, like prepping like having those questions for leadership, how to sit down with the team internally. What was different with consumer marketing was that this was a license for a brand that already existed, that was asking us to relaunch, resurrect a brand that had been retired for a couple generations. So I had to get creative because I couldn't go to the licensing team. Technically. I could only work with the toy company itself, the people that were on that designated team. And what was really great about this company is you were really assigned to brands that you were passionate about. So I had people on my team that had background in this brand, grew up with this brand, had experience with this brand. And I was what I feel like, like I said earlier, I feel like a baby in marketing. I was one of the younger people on, greener people on this team. So I picked the brain of the leadership on this team about like, what was this brand before, you know, it were retired. And I had, I know how to have those conversations because of what I did in B2B. But what I got to get creative with on the consumer side is the social listening. I got to really like turn up the notch. So there was a lot of collectors of this old brand. So although like they were no longer selling this toy, there were still people collecting the ones that were still on the market. So I just joined a ton of Facebook groups for the collectors of these brands. And I started asking the people that were collectors of this brand, what this brand meant to them in the same way I had done in the B2B space. So I actually was a better consumer marketer because of my B2B experience. I was like, I can't go directly to this huge licensing company. How do I do market research without the money? It also wasn't, it was a big relaunch, but we did not have the budget you would assume we would for the size of the company we had. So it was like really boots on the ground. How do I find out what this brand's identity once was and how can we redefine that in this generation? So I joined a ton of Facebook groups and started talking to collectors and having conversations with collectors about like what this brand means to them. What were their favorite commercials, what's their favorite lines of the product? And I just collected all that information and saying, okay, if we let go of this part of this brand, this is really gonna hurt former fans of the brand. And the collector fan base was one of our target personas. So it was parents with young boy children. And then we another market we were targeting were collectors. So we couldn't isolate collectors in this relaunch. So we had to understand them through and through on top of understanding the other audience, which were like the parents. So how do you tie that into the B2B space? One of the things we're also going to talk about is what's the difference between like redefining a brand that currently exists versus a new brand. And I will say like, when you redefine a brand that already exists, even in the B2B space, you do not want to isolate the people that are already fans of your brand. That is the biggest thing I've learned on both the B2B and D2C side.
Bill: Yeah, one of the things I think that's important when we look at branding is when we look at our existing client base, just like you said, it's so important that we embrace our current clients because that's the easiest group to sell additional product to, additional services to. So when we look at our brand promise today, and I think this is where also companies get in trouble. Your brand promise today needs to be what you can deliver today that marketing can communicate, that sales can sell, and then customer service can deliver and perpetuate throughout the life cycle of the client's experience with that product. Too many companies' leadership gets so focused on the aspirational part of their brand. Hey, in three to five years, we want to be this company. Hey, great. Congratulations. But guess what? Marketing shouldn't communicate that primarily, sales shouldn't sell that secondarily and customer service can't deliver that. So let's make sure the brand promise we can deliver today is communicated. And then let's make sure that if we have aspirational branding communication, we designate it as such. So today we're the company that does XYZ and we're growing to be the company that can do XYZ plus one, two, three. That's okay. But you have to delineate existing, you know, existing brand and aspirational brand. So I think that's so exciting and interesting the way you guys worked on those two personas, because those are very difficult personas to optimize for because they're, I'm aware, offline, we talked about what that brand is and was and I had experience with that as a young person. And I could see how collectors would perceive that brand for people who played with it in the 80s and 90s, as opposed to the young people today. That's a totally different animal, that's an interesting take on that. Whenever we look at branding, launching a new brand as opposed to rebrand, what do you think are some different ways we need to engage with the process or get involved to make sure that's a successful outcome for either of those two approaches?
Katie: Like I said, to make a rebrand successful, it's really having internal buy-in across your teams and not isolating your customers, even though you have a dream of what you want your company to be. The thing with a new brand is that you get to decide off the bat, you know, what you want that company to be, what you want the voice to be, what you want your target audience to be. And so long as that audience actually exists and there's a need for your product, you can have as much fun as you want with like a new brand in my opinion, you know. You can get you can get creative as you want. But a rebrand you have to be very formulated and very careful and sometimes you have to be more subtle and sometimes you can't make everybody happy internally in order to keep your existing customer base, especially if you're successful because of your existing customer base. Sometimes a company needs to pivot because their existing customer base is not going to make them money in five years, you know, with the way the industry is shifting. That's a different conversation. You know what I mean? It's like, okay, then how do we, how do we become a company that, you know, Fortune 500 companies take a look at? If we've only, if we've only served small businesses for five to seven years, how do we become a company that Fortune 500 companies are going to trust? And that is an entirely different conversation in terms of rebrand and operations. That's like, and that's a rebrand you have to actually get operations involved. So I will say in order to be successful, you really, from an internal standpoint, have to be, you have to be in line and have to have internal buy-in. I think rebrands are a lot more difficult than just brand launches for something that's brand new. But I don't think, I don't think a lot of people really think about that. You know, sometimes people are like, want a lot. I see this all the time on LinkedIn. A lot of people think a rebrand is just changing your company's logo. And that's not what we're, we probably should have said that first. Like a rebrand isn't changing your company's logo. That's definitely a part of the process a lot of the times, but when we're talking about rebranding, we're talking about changing the direction of your content, the direction of your tone, the direction of how it goes so much deeper than just your logo change and a website change. You can change your logo and change your website, in my opinion, without an actual rebrand. But a true marketing rebrand, you have to be very careful about because if you only do it because of your aspirations and don't get buy-in internally and externally and really understand where you stand in the market, it can hurt. It can really, really hurt your business, I think.
Bill: One of the reasons why we find so many clients come to us and two or three years ago, they redid their website, they redid a logo, they redid their style guide, they redid those things and they're still not happy with it. It's still not having impact. Almost 99 out of 100 times when that occurs, we find it's because all we did was put a fresh coat of paint on a bad brand message. Not understanding that brand and not communicating that brand promise to the intended target audience. So there's, there's brand messaging and then there's targeting and a couple other aspects. But the real reason why this fails is not because there wasn't great creative, you know, not because the website doesn't look nice and the, all of the, the professionalism and the creativity in the graphics and the design and those elements. It’s because if you're just putting a fresh coat of paint on a bad brand communication, you are not going to affect the change that you want no matter how many times you say it and whether you deliver it through your website, through video, through social media and there's high frequency, it doesn't matter. So I couldn't agree more that that is a big miss and something that is missing in marketing today.
Katie: Yeah, no, I agree. And I guess speaking more on that, it's just if someone heard that and that resonated with them, they're like, then what am I supposed to do? I don't understand. I keep redoing my website. I keep redoing my logo. Like, what am I supposed to do? And I'm sure that will resonate with some people. Because like I said, I do think rebrands can be… Rebrands can be confused with, if you’re not in marketing, as just a fresh coat of paint and I actually did work at a D2C brand that I came in and there was a rebrand happening and it was just, we're changing our stock photos to be more aesthetic and aspirational. We're changing our logo. We're doing this and we're doing that and I was just kind of like, well, why are we doing this? You know like and I just asked a lot of questions and they actually didn't, because of the questions I asked, that company actually never went through with the rebrand. You'll see they are still the same brand that I that they were when I came on. Because there was other there were other competitors doing something very simple. So let's just say I will obviously I'm not gonna mention any of the brands here, but they… This is gonna be so location specific But ShopRite at the grocery store, I don't know if you're familiar, ShopRite at the grocery store changed their generic items to a brand called Bowl & Basket, and they made their brands very, all their generic store brands, super aspirational. And it actually makes you feel good about buying generic brands. Usually when you put the generic item in your cart, you know, you're like, oh my gosh, I have to get the cheap one. I'm not getting like the beautiful packaged item. I have to save money. Buying generic items isn't a great buying experience, right? ShopRite had this great, great, great, great rebrand where they made all of their generic items in their grocery store look elevated, look beautiful. So shopping on a budget no longer feels like kind of a stab to the heart or something embarrassing where you have like all of... So, this company was trying to do that before ShopRite had done it. So this was years ago, this was right before the pandemic. This very, they're the oldest, they're actually the oldest brand in their market and they're a recession-proof brand. They're a great organization. And I came in at a time where they were trying to rebrand into like this elevated, this elevated product and elevated imagery. And I love anything aesthetic and aspirational. I'm a big user of Pinterest. So you would think if you know me personally, you would be like, why weren't you on board with that? Like I'm confused. But understanding who their buyer was, I was like, their buyer were people that, I don't want to get into it because this is more on the D2C side. It wouldn't do what ShopRite did. So people bought from this brand because they weren't aesthetically pleasing. It was just, it was a tool for them. It was a tool for them, for their house that has been trusted for over a hundred years. And if they made such a quick pivot, it would have isolated their target demographic, just based on like who these people were age wise, location wise, income wise. But I took a look at all that and I was like, wait, what if, what if we, don't do this? You know, what if we make a more subtle shift? We can change the imagery, but you start changing the packaging and the website and the experience. The people that the people that are gonna appear in your marketing and the lifestyle you're giving in your marketing is not gonna speak to the people that have been buying you for generation after generation. And you're a recession-proof company, which shows we need to keep that customer base. You know what I mean? They didn't want the new customer base. They were always gonna still cater to that customer. I was like, your customer is not gonna like this. You know what I mean?
Bill: Yeah, because every one of their competitors in their market wants to be like that company that's recession-proof and is consistent, right? They don't care about the new marketing. They just care about that consistent cash flow and beautiful inventory turns and all of those things.
Katie: Exactly.
Bill: Well, one of the things I want to pivot to a little bit here is so we've talked about branding. We really talked about what's missing in branding, some different approaches. Your experience in not only D2C, but B2B and how those worlds are kind of colliding in the way we communicate to the market. But let's assume we have a company and we've gone through the branding exercise. We have that core branding defined. It's tight. We then move into content marketing, right? Cause now it's time to like, okay, we have that, that, that North star that we're heading towards. And now we've got to get that out in the market. Maybe talk about your experience with establishing a content marketing strategy and like a roadmap or plan for different folks, both internally and then externally in your agency experience and what you've learned may be missing in some of those strategies and just kind of talk through your experience there.
Katie: Yeah. So one thing I actually didn't answer my own question earlier was, you know, when people are repainting the house and like changing the logo, they're like, are we supposed to do? And the biggest part of, in my opinion, how we can tie the branding into the content strategy is understanding how you want to rebrand is taking inventory of all your content. A majority of your content. If you have years worth of content, not all. Don't overcomplicate it, but taking inventory of your existing content and understanding what works and what doesn't. So I was working in an agency, like I said, I was on the B2B side trying to understand how we could market ourselves better. And I took a look at our blog content, which fed our email marketing, which fed our webinars, which fed our social. Their blog, you know, and this was probably right before like video got really big. So, like, blog content was feeding every piece of other mark all the other marketing channels and it was very in-depth. It was very in-depth marketing So I'm talking like the ins and outs of SCF the ins and outs of paid search. So I'm going to end, and I'm more of a generalist digital marketer. I have eight years in digital marketing as a whole. I've managed everything from social, email, website, and then worked with people that are specialists. You know what I mean? That they dive deep into the SEO and that I can rely on. So for me, I was reading some of these blogs and I was like, this is a lot. This is a lot of information for me who has a career in this. Who is our audience? Who's our audience here? And when I met with leadership, like you said, in their opinion, the audience were small business owners and C-level executives. And I was like, well, we're not generating content for them. We are generating content for specialist marketers who are trying to learn more about this, this very specific niche. And it was great, great, great content for SEO. It was great for their website too. So, you know, one thing I always say is like, don't come into a new marketing position and tell everyone what they're doing wrong because you actually might not know the method to the madness, you know? I just had to ask a lot of questions and look around because so we had a ton of content created by some of the marketers there that, you know, they were just requested to do this content. But it wasn't really taking the target audience into consideration. I'm like, well, this is, this is something we have to think about. So leadership was like, we want more content for C-level executives and small business owners. And then the people that were working with our customers and our clients and were client facing were like, they aren't the people getting on these calls all the time. You know, it's people that are trying, they're, we're working with companies that have maybe one marketer or an admin doing marketing that needs to, you know, so there was just a lot of disconnect. So when you're coming up with a content roadmap, to get back to your question, everything I say is long-winded, it's so funny. To build a content roadmap and a content strategy, you need to understand that target audience. And like you say, say we already have them built out, you have to understand where your audience is in the funnel for your specific marketing channels. I'm at a behavioral health company right now and I do a majority of. I oversee all of our content and I manage our social media channels. If you were to ask, you know, hypothetically, someone on the leadership team, what type of social content we should put out, someone might say to me, well, it needs to be about getting treatment. It needs to be about going through our healthcare system. But what I've found because of the audience in my marketing channel is that the people that are in that channel have already gone through the healthcare system with us. They've already gone through our continuum of care and we need to give them support to stay healthy. You know what I mean? So you have to deeply understand where your audience is in your channels so you can create content for them. I think that's really important. Someone that's visiting your website might not be through that continuum of care yet. So you need to answer those, you need to answer questions on your website might, social might not necessarily need to answer. So when you're building a content roadmap, it's not only having an understanding of your target audience, it's where they are in the journey for your channels. And when you build that roadmap, one of the things, like I said, especially because marketing teams are so small, is building those bigger pieces of content that can feed your other channels, whether it’s in-depth blog content. Or videos and podcasts like this. You can take a transcript from this. You can create a blog. You can create a couple of carousel posts. You can create TikToks and Instagrams for Instagram reels. So that was a really long-winded way to answer that question. But I do think it's like understanding where your audience is in the channel and mapping out the type of content they need for that journey and then adapting your bigger piece of content to match those channels. That's my favorite way to do it. Instead of just turning out, turning out, turning out content blindly, you'll exhaust yourself. And then someone's going to come in one day and be like, why did we write this blog? This doesn't speak to our audience. You know what I mean? And it's like, wait. So, and to tie all the way back to the rebrand, when you're rebranding, these are things that take into consideration. So you know how to readjust your white papers, your… what the blogs are gonna say, what your landing pages are gonna say, what your ads are gonna say. It's like, where are these people at in the funnel and how can we speak to them in a way that'll really stand out to them? It's really understanding your content, what has worked before, where your people are at, and then mapping it out for the year if you can, if not six months, about what type of content we wanna develop for these people to nurture them at each point in the funnels.
Bill: Yeah, so one of the things you brought up there, which I think is so interesting from an agency perspective, when we look at marketing to our core ICP, our ideal client profile, we like to work with marketing managers or folks who have that responsibility at their company, because a lot of people wear that hat, right? And two or three others. But one of the things I think marketers get trapped in is we like to write and talk about very in-depth technical concepts. So like if you have someone like an agency produces content around SEO and there's only about 3,000 things you can do in SEO every day right and then they want to really take a deep deep dive to show people how smart they are. What we found resonates more with our core audience is here's a problem, you share it, we have an approach that we believe is a solution to that and here's how we would do it from a very high level. Right. So for instance, you and I have talked about branding from a very high level. If we were going to do a brand exercise, there's a whole lot more that we would do and bring to the table, but we're only going to be here for an hour to talk about it. So we can't boil down, you know, 30 or 40 hours of a process into five minute conversation. So I think you're right on with the way and how does that translate to the work we do for our clients? Right. And the same thing, we need to stop being so technical to impress people about how much we know, because nobody cares about who you are or what you do unless they know you understand their problem and can provide a solution. And then they'll take the next step in the journey. And I completely agree as well with what you said, as far as then find out where in the funnel, where in that journey that piece of information needs to go. One of the questions I want to ask you, and this is something I think we as marketers face, and I think marketing managers would really benefit from this conversation. You go through a rebrand, you go to the content market, like the content mapping, and you're going to get requests from sales, ownership, leadership, every person in the company, every division wants to have their say in what content gets developed. Do you have advice on, and let's be honest, nobody has the resources or the time to deliver all of that. I don't care if you have 20 people on your team and a $10 million budget, the list will exhaust the resources available. Do you have any advice for marketing managers where you would say, hey, this is how I would approach that process to try and prioritize or get down to what we have to do as opposed to what we want to do as we develop content?
Katie: Yeah, definitely. No, that is something my entire career, no matter where I've been, no matter, like that is, that is the biggest thing about being in marketing is like, everyone has great ideas because we are all consumers of marketing. Everyone has marketing ideas. But, and I just to remind marketers too, cause it can be frustrating. I just like to joke about it. It's just like, you know, none of us can go to our finance departments and give them advice. You know, I can't imagine going to my finance department and be like, hey, I have an idea of how we're going to beat this recession. You know, like I, hear me out. But everyone is passionate about marketing and exciting about marketing. So it can be troublesome to always be getting feedback and input, but it is great that just everyone is so invested in marketing. So keep that in mind and just laugh about the fact that you can't go to other departments and do the same. But when you're having the bad day, just picture yourself doing it. Just imagine. That always gets a kick. Me and my team always laugh about that. But what I would recommend and I have tried to do everywhere that I have worked if it wasn't already in place is developing messaging topics and content frameworks based on where your audience is in the, so you have your marketing channels, right? And there's different needs for your audience based on the channels. After understanding that, diving into that, we could, like you said, spend an entire day talking about how to understand that. Derive messaging topics from those channels. So what are the things we are going to talk about or we do talk about on a regular basis? And I'm telling you, they can be as high level as thought leadership, thought leader, aspiration. Where I am, we have also storytelling. We share stories of people in healthcare who have great outcomes. So it could be storytelling. Coming up with just some general, I would say maybe like three to five messaging topics, max, like I think five's even pushing it. Three is probably your safest bet, especially for smaller marketing teams. Developing your messaging topics, content pillars, whatever you wanna call them, the content pillars that all your content will revolve around. From there, what I like to do is map out the type of content you need month over month under those messaging topics. And I had a director once who she is like one of my favorite people I've ever worked under. She was director of content strategy. I came in and she gave me a list of blog topics that we were writing for the year with a freelancer. She said, these are the topics we're writing about. Our white papers are gonna be based off of this. Our brochures are gonna be based off of this. And she had the dates lined out and everything. And I was like, I want to be this person. She had the content built out for the year based on the messaging topics that work for her company. And then brought me on and I've never seen that level of content organization. And I was just like, this, is going to save our lives. So she was like, if someone is going to ask for a blog topic or a webinar, one of these things has to come off the list. Our freelancer, you know, we have a tight budget. Our freelancer can only do so much. This is what she is given. If you were to give her another topic, one of these have to fall off the list. When, so anyway, however you decide to do it, there's a million ways to come up with your messaging topics and map out your content for the year. It really depends on your company. Just having a framework in place helps prioritize requests. So if you have at least a quarter mapped out, or at least a month out of content mapped out of what you are doing, when something comes to you, you get to prioritize it based on a couple variables. You get to say, does this fit within our messaging topics? Yes or no. If it does, okay, great. Is this higher priority than the things that are on the list? Yes or no. No? Okay, is it evergreen? Is it timely? If it's evergreen, okay, let's put this on the back burner for when we're mapping out the next stage of our content, whether that's the next quarter or the next month, you know, or next year even. If it is, you know, say it's timely, it's something for an event coming up or a holiday coming up, you get to look at your content matrix and say then what isn't a priority? What has to come up? If you so much as have that flexibility, if you have that flexibility and say, which, I will say I do think in terms a lot of marketing teams and departments do get to have that say where they're like, okay If we are going to do this campaign if we're going to create this piece of content, something else has to get moved to the next month. It's not we're not doing it, it's we have to move it. So having those things in place protect you from requests coming everywhere. So where I'm at now we get meme requests a lot. We've talked about the memeifying. And I would love to memeify where I'm at, but based on our messaging topics, we don't, humor isn't something we're experimenting with. You know, we experiment with storytelling. Sometimes that storytelling can have some playful anecdotes in it. We have storytelling, we have encouragement for people who have gone through our continuum of care. We have thought leadership. And this is all like very, you can see this across our channels, but we aren't in, I can easily say when someone's like, can we do this really funny thing? I'm like, this doesn't fall within like what we do as a company. This is how we can adapt it. If it's not funny, how can we make it encouragement? Or how can we do something similar in storytelling. It just helps you get the control back and not saying marketing is about control, but you do need a level of control to maintain burnout in marketing. Or you are gonna be pivoting, starting and stopping left and right. So having the framework in place to be like, does this fit within our plans? Is it timely? Is it evergreen? Is it a necessity? And when you get to talk to leadership about like, okay, if we do this, then this thing might not happen or we're gonna have to create time and space. It is a life saver. It's a lifesaver that I don't see a lot of marketing teams have in place because we're so busy putting out fires and responding to requests. But I'm telling you, it is well worth the month to put together a content framework. It is, it's so worth the burden. It's a lot of work upfront to be like, okay, what are we talking about? Let's map the things out. But it will save your life every week as those requests come to you. I couldn't recommend it more. If I could just do that for a living, that's kind of what I have done for most of my career, is come in, give that framework and be like, this is how you're gonna save your life in marketing. I would do that forever for everyone if I could, because it makes things a lot easier. And instead of just telling people no and getting people upset, then people outside of your team understand the process and respect marketing more for the formulated process as far that are in place. When you say yes to everything, you do start to lose respect in a way. I hate to say it because we do have to say yes a lot, but at the end of the day, if we're showing people we can say yes to everything and making everything work, everyone's like, well, then why couldn't I do it? It was my idea. You know, when people see there's a process in place and a strategy in place, and a formal submission process to get those yeses or nos, people start to look at it as, hey, we're going to a team and tell, it's as like we're going to finance and telling finance what to do. It starts to bring it full circle. It starts to feel like that because they're like, they know what they're doing. And I think every marketer knows what they're doing, but sometimes we have to prove we know what we're doing. And that's the burden of marketing.
Bill: Sure. No, that's, I couldn't agree more. And I guess I want to kind of transition to this next topic. And it's very timely in this conversation. One of the things I think that's missing for a lot of marketing managers is their ability to communicate back to their leadership about unrealistic expectations. And you were talking about the yeses and we can't say yes to everything. Whenever we look at a lot of, most companies have zero to three marketing employees, marketing titled employees. And they are, whether someone wearing that hat part time or like they're one person, they're the marketing person and doing all things to marketing. What do you think would be valuable to communicate? Because you have a lot of experience D2C, B2B, agency side, internal marketing department. I mean, you've had, you've dipped your toe and had great, tremendous experience in each of those buckets. What do you think would be good advice or insight you could provide around managing expectations and how we need to kind of balance that with saying yes, saying no, and really driving results for our organizations?
Katie: Yeah, so I have a mentor right now that actually says it's not about saying no, it's maybe saying yes, but, or yes, but, or maybe, or not right now. You know what I mean? So I will say that is that's such a good question because I still I still struggle with it. You know, I've been in my career 10 years and there's some things you just absolutely cannot say no to. But one thing I was just saying to a colleague recently is that sometimes not everything's gonna get our 100%. You know, if you have to actually say yes to everything, then we do have to be very, we do have to communicate our bandwidth. We do have to say, well, X, Y, and Z is currently in the works. This campaign I'm currently working. You have to really establish with like your leadership and your management. Like these are the things I'm working on. We can do this, but I just want you to know like, I don't know how we're gonna make it work, or it's not gonna be the best it could be. It's not the best it could be. So do we wait for a time when we can execute this perfectly, or do we execute it at 90% instead of 100%, or do we put something else on the back burner? And it's not so much, I know how to prioritize my to-do list. It's having everyone else, you literally as a marketer need internal buy-in from leadership and your management on your own to-do list. Like saying like, hey, I'm deprioritizing this, are we okay with that? You know, because with three people on a team, it's humanly impossible to get all of these things done. Obviously you don't have to say it's humanly impossible. It depends on your, like, I'm very candid in my, everyone I work with I have great relationships with, so I'm pretty, I'm a candid person. So I'll be like, hey, like, I wanna do this. I would rather do it in Q3. I'd rather put this other thing on the back burner that I don't think is a necessity. It really is just talking about your to-do list and how your management and leadership wants you to reprioritize. And when you are very candid and open about that to-do list and the time it takes, if you have great management and great leadership, they'll help you be like… It'll help manage expectations. That really is what it is. You don't need anyone to micromanage you, but you have to manage up a lot in marketing. You have to manage up and sideways. So you have to say like, hey, this is, this is what it is, you know, like, so it's just being candid. It is being very candid about the to-do list and the bandwidth and the time it takes. So also you need to have understanding of the time it takes to get your projects and campaigns done. So you can speak to whether you use like a time sheet. Or like the Pomodoro, like kind of just have a good understanding, generally speaking, of the time it takes to get certain content and campaigns off the ground. So when you do get those requests that are an absolute yes, you can say it's gonna take X amount of hours, it's gonna take X amount of budget, and these other things have this amount of time. So how can we make this work? And usually that helps. So it's just having really candid conversations with a really great attitude too. So like, it it's hard to it's, it's easy, not hard. It's easy to get frustrated in marketing. But when you're very candid in a conversational, like teamwork way like hey, I want to do this. But like how can we make this happen instead of like this is impossible. This is a no. Like don't.. approach those conversations too empathetically in a teamwork way very like, you know I think people are more easy and understanding to adapt to you when you're like, hey it’s x amount of hours, I want to do this. I want to, I think it's a great idea. How can we make this happen? Like, what are we putting on the back burner that everyone's okay with? So it's just getting buy-in and being open and having really hard conversations, but doing it in a way that isn't prickly, I guess.
Bill: No, that's great. I think you're absolutely right. We have to manage up sideways all directions, right? It's like you're taking fire from all directions. And one of the things I've found to be valuable is just like you said, instead of saying, no, we can't do it, say, yes, we want to, but, and then actually having solid evidence and information about, okay, this is going to take 20 hours for the team next week. And we're already at like 110% capacity. So something has to go that is equivalent or whatever. And then, you know we're to lose momentum on these other ones we were going to finish. So we just have to, none of this happens in a vacuum and we have to be really careful and, guard our time and guard our core initiatives before we chase the latest, greatest, newest idea that comes down from on high from the conference or the article or the social post that someone read and now thinks is the new strategy that's going to propel us forward. So if you knew someone who was just starting out in B2B marketing, do you have any tips or recommendations? You know, they're the new marketing manager. They've just got their job in this position or taking on this elevated role. Any tips or tricks that you would recommend for them?
Katie: Yeah, I would say make friends with your business development team. They are your friends, not your enemies. The biggest piece of advice that took me a little too long to learn. Work well with your business development team. They will have the most ideas. But if you have a good relationship with your business development team, it is going to make a world of difference. It'll make work a lot of fun. Look outside of your industry for marketing inspiration. That is why I've loved B2B marketing. It is so easy right now to just look outside of your industry and see something kind of unique someone's doing and bring it into your space. And it makes waves because people can get really stagnant in B2B because like I said, people kind of get down and out about it because it's not consumer marketing or, you know, we have to, we have to stay very formulated. You can get creative in B2B. I've had some of the, I've had the most fun in B2B marketing. I'll tell you that. Like no one believes me. After working in a toy company, I, some of my top five stories are B2B. I've loved it. So you can have fun in B2B, look outside of your industry and see how you can adapt. Those are my two.
Bill: So Katie, this has just been a lovely conversation. Whenever I come out of an interview like this, a podcast conversation, and I feel I've learned a lot more after all these conversations, that's just really validating to me that the Missing Half is doing what it's intended to do where we are trying to understand what's missing in marketing. So thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Katie: Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it too. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.
Bill: Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. So thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Please subscribe, like and share. Have a great day.