Margaret Kelsey's Strategic Brand Flywheel

[00:00:00] Ramli John: When people think about branding, they think about logos, colors, emotions. If you work in branding, eric can already feel your frustrations and violent reaction. Margaret Kelsey has worked in brand communication and community in the past. Companies like App, Use, Envision and OpenView has a more holistic view of what brand is. [00:00:18] Margaret Kelsey: The actual largeness of brand is, like, almost scary, unfathomable, because there's too many touch points and none of them can be controlled, or very few of them can be controlled. And it's easier to think about, what are the things I can control? [00:00:31] Ramli John: In this Marketing Powerups episode, you learn, first, when marketing is hard. Hint it's about changing behavior at scale. Second, how content and brand can solve people problems. Third, the four parts to Margaret's Strategic brand five wheel. And then, fourth, how to find a tread through your career to find your next opportunity. Now, before I start, I've created a free power up. Strategic. You can download, fill in, and apply Margaret's Strategic brand Flywheel. You can get it at Marketing Powerups right now. Provide that link in the show notes and description.

[00:00:59] Changing Human Behavior at Scale: The Challenge of Marketing

[00:00:59] Ramli John: Are you ready? Let's go. Marketing Powerups. Ready? Go. Here's your host, Ramli John. It's interesting, like, you're saying creative output for marketers, because, like, there's work creative, which is, like, could be draining sometimes, especially if you're doing it for a client. And then there's creative for the sake of being creative, which is like, I. [00:01:28] Margaret Kelsey: Think that a lot of marketers are drawn to marketing because you get to be paid to be creative. But then what happens, especially in an organization, is that you're always thinking of, what does my audience need? What is the business need? What does the audience need? What is the business need? Where is the intersection of those needs? Brand that can be draining in a way that creating for yourself is just like, what do I want to make brand? It's a very selfish process to just create what you want to make. And in your job, you can be creative, but it's always under the guise of, what is the business need? What does the audience need? What does the business need? What is the audience need? And so that's what I've loved the most about my own art practice is it's reminding myself and centering myself that I can have a point of view and I can create something that then resonates with other people rather than always thinking about what will resonate, what do I create that resonates? What do they create that the business needs? [00:02:24] Ramli John: There's something another person that I chatted with, Mark Thomas, talked about. It's kind of freeing, creating something without any KPIs attached to. I'm not trying to sell this. I'm not necessarily trying to get as many of this sold. Like, if you're creating a course for yourself, or I'm not trying to increase downloads, or I'm just creating this just to eat it. [00:02:47] Margaret Kelsey: And I did that with the Cyanotype artwork. When I first started doing it, I didn't show it to anyone because I didn't want feedback on it. I didn't want people to say, oh, you could sell that, or, oh, if you did it this way. I kept it to myself because I really wanted to strengthen my own taste and my own appreciation of it. [00:03:12] Ramli John: That's so true. I listened to a few episodes with you and Devin, and you're talking about how marketers marketing tends to have unsolicited opinions. Often what he thinks, they know. They think it's easy. Marketing is easy, and you're like, it isn't at all, right? [00:03:32] Margaret Kelsey: I think that, oh, I probably am going to stick my foot in my mouth here. I think that if people think about marketing the right way, anyone could do it. I think that the problem is that the tactical application of marketing is very visible. So people see the tactics and think that they understand the strategic right. And I think that the other thing is that I think a lot of marketers have written marketers for martech. Companies have written articles about how to do marketing easily to try to attract content. Marketers have kind of distilled marketing into something that seems easier than it is by writing for their job, which is really funny that we kind of like shot ourselves in the foot there. And then there's a last thing, too, where it's not that marketing is hard, but it's the fact that changing human thoughts and behaviors takes time. And that's hard, right? It's hard to wait and it's hard to invest, and it's hard to know if you're doing the right thing. And that can leave a lot of folks who are not traditionally marketers like founders very uncomfortable in investing for a long time into something that might not be showing any signs of success. Because changing humans takes a long time. [00:05:03] Ramli John: Yeah, it takes time. I mean, sure, you have tactics, but no same tactic can work to change everybody's different. How do you change people's behavior at scale? It's hard. [00:05:22] Margaret Kelsey: And in some ways, I think that we sorry to interrupt. I think that in some ways, I've always thought sales was the harder of the two, but now I realize that sales is just changing one heart and mind at a time. And that to me, it's like you can tailor your message, you know, who's on the other side. You can search and research. Like, how do you distill that up? So you're changing behavior at scale, and I think that's a really challenging I think that's more challenging now. [00:05:51] Ramli John: That's a hot date. That's like something if you post up on Twitter. [00:05:57] Margaret Kelsey: You do it. [00:05:58] Ramli John: No, it's so good you said it. I feel like it's true. You're right. You're tailoring what you're going to say to this one person as a sales or maybe a group, but they're within the same company. But marketers have to find a balance with trying to target a big enough segment that you're not but not necessarily trying to water down your message at all, that you speak to no one, which is hard. That finding that balance is super hard is what I'm hearing you saying. [00:06:30] Margaret Kelsey: And you see that all the time with copy on websites, right? There's like so much copy that means nothing. There's so much copy that doesn't make sense, but that's okay because I'm not the target audience. So it shouldn't make sense to me and it shouldn't resonate to me. And then there's lots of things that are distilled down to the point where there's website copy that's like we are a company changing how people work. And you're like, I still don't know what you do. Exactly. Aren't we all in B to B, changing how people work? [00:06:59] Ramli John: That's true. Probably that's the reason why people bring they make up new terms, make up new categories, and then people are like, what the heck did you just it sounds smart, but I still don't understand what your company does. It sounds great, but it's confusing, which. [00:07:21] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, I can see the promised land, but I still don't know what I'm buying. [00:07:25] Ramli John: I love how we're digging into this. Yeah. It is about changing behavior at scale.

[00:07:31] Dissecting Marketing Jargon with Margaret Kelsey

[00:07:31] Ramli John: Another hot take. And this is all from episode four of your show with Devin, former CEO of Animals. I'm going to link that show in that episode and don't say it's. Content. I believe that's what don't say content. What's behind that title? I mean, is that in the intro. [00:07:50] Margaret Kelsey: I don't know if we've really explained it, but what we realized, what was happening and actually the eventual premise that's come out of our show is the fact that what I said before, which is that marketers make up a lot of terms that then end up meaning nothing. And I think that the word content is like that, right. And I think as a content marketer who I've heard the word content so much. Right. Like, I've heard founders say, oh, we just need more content. I'm like, what do you mean? Right? Or we just need better content or higher quality content. And so it started off as a little bit of a joke between myself, Devin, and our podcast production agency, sherry, Your Genius. And we thought it was a funny kind of take on a little crotchety take on the world. And then it ends up that most of our episodes actually are unpacking words or ideas that have had so many different meanings and nobody's really sat down and aligned on why are you using that word? What does that word mean to you? And a lot of our episodes end up being an almost dissection of these words and terms and ideas that have been floating around, but nobody's kind of pinpointed on what they mean. [00:09:04] Ramli John: Yeah, exactly. In the stuff that we talked about earlier around marketing is about changing behavior at scale. In episode four, which I'll link in the show notes.

[00:09:15] The Role of a Product in Solving People Problems

[00:09:15] Ramli John: But there was another thing that you and Devon were talking about, how it resonated so deeply within me where like, oh my goodness, I get it. You said product can't solve people problems. And I'm like, yes, it can't solve process problems, it can't solve culture problems. And I am curious, what is the meaning behind that for people who haven't heard that full episode yet? [00:09:40] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, I think that the core of the fact that product can't solve people problems is I mean, maybe it'll be different in ten years, but we are all human beings that come to work, that are very complex, that have our own emotions, that have our own either rationality or irrationality depending on the day. And a product can sometimes solve a process problem, sometimes solve a technical challenge, sometimes solve a piece of that, but it can never identify what the people problem is behind the issue itself. And again, maybe in ten years with generative AI, it'll just be a bunch of bots talking to each other and we're sitting on the beach and drinking our pina coladas. But for right now, we still are human beings that show up to work every day and a product can only do so much. And I think that the conversation that we were having was the fact that your brand and your content programs and your customer success and everything else that you do outside of the product can surround that same problem space that your product is trying to solve for and solve it for the ways that might help the people solve it. Right. So your brand and your content programs and even your community can help solve the larger problems that your target audience is experiencing where your product maybe solves a piece of it and they can expand into holistically solving a lot more of those problems. And that's where brand affinity starts to really increase because people feel supported, your target audience feels like you really deeply understand them because you're solving for more than just the problem that your product solves for. [00:11:26] Ramli John: Yeah, and what I'm hearing is really you can't just give the product and be like, you can figure this out in certain situations that it's possible. But for more, especially in B to B, I think you started talking about this flywheel in that episode. There's a four parts to it. What is that? Four parts? And like I said, you're already starting to dig into it. That really contributes to making sure that your customers are as successful as possible.

[00:11:57] Strategic Branding in Customer Retention

[00:11:57] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah. So it's internal culture, external brand content and community. And I think building that flywheel and specifically tasking a brand team or a brand organization to build and own that makes brand an actual strategic function within your organization rather than a keeper of colors and fonts and voice. And tone and all of those things, they become less of less of almost like a hall monitor and more of an actual strategic function. And so how I think about that is internal culture is all of those culture things that we think about but also specifically cultural values. And I think the closer that your internal cultural values are to your external brand values and that those brand values then actually attract your target audience. So it should be shared values for your community or for your target audience. The more that all of those values are aligned, they actually become a shared decision making framework for people to be able to make really smart and powerful decisions within your company. Right? If you're hiring for specific cultural values that you also know that your target audience cares about, then anytime that your content marketer writes something, anytime that your customer success person responds to a problem and they operate within that value framework and making a decision based on your company values, they're going to get it right, like 99% of the time. And that also unlocks obviously management to be able to focus on other things other than just like always answering questions about what people should do. But then I think that your culture also the piece of it is not just your values but also your obsession with your customer, your target audience, right? And I think that the more that you can bake that into the culture of the organization, that everything you do is in service of your target audience, then you create content and community that's bespoke for your target audience. And then you start to listen to what they're saying and listen to what's happening at the forefront of their industry. And you can feed those insights back into your organization, into your product, for understanding what product features or new products to build. So it starts to become this affinity flywheel where you really care about your target audience and then they start to give you ideas and insights and that sort of thing. [00:14:25] Ramli John: What I really am hearing is, like, this affinity is really about making customers feel like you care about them. And not just like, just because I'm trying to decrease churn or decrease my revenue, but we're changing our culture because we don't just want you to feel that we do actually really care about you as a customer. Is exactly what I'm hearing is about making those customers feel like you care for them and actually living it because people can smell that bullshit when you're faking it just to hit your KPIs is exactly how this works. [00:15:07] Margaret Kelsey: So the funny thing too is the older I get, the more sober I am with like we are actually all in business though, where it does have business value. And let's not be cute about the fact that I actually think it's a better way to build a business because I think a business will be bigger and longer enduring if they do it this way. Ideally you are also hiring people on your teams that deeply care about this problem space or the target audience or that sort of thing. So it's not that it's disingenuous, but we also do have to acknowledge the fact that it's not completely altruistic. It is because we are in business and probably a for profit business. If you're in B to B tech, hopefully making a profit, right? Hopefully the goal is to eventually make a profit. And so we have to be clear about that. There is a strong business case. This is not just pure altruism, this. [00:16:01] Ramli John: Is a good point. What I'm really seeing is you're getting value from both sides. They're getting value and you're getting value through the profit. So it's a win win potentially, it's not them. [00:16:14] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, and I think that the important thing here. And I have said this now in a couple of different places and nobody has actually gotten as mad as I expected people to get, which has been good that I'm not stirring up too much drama, but I fundamentally believe that the arc of software is that it is becoming a commodity. I think it's easier to spin up tech than ever before. I think that even with generative AI, non technical people can code because they can just feed it and tell what wants to build and it'll build it for you. So I think the arc of progress is that technology and software will continue to become a commodity. And I fundamentally know that commodities compete on branded distribution. And so to me it's also a future proofed investment for software companies to make to start competing on brand. Because what they're already seeing and will continue to see is competitors get spun up easier than ever before and competitors can match your speed of releasing. And actually smaller companies are probably faster at releasing products and features than bigger companies are at this point. And so again, that's only going to continue. And so I always think about like well, what's actually defensible right now? And I think defensibility is in brand and in community and in distribution.

[00:17:42] Ramli John Discusses SaaS Companies and SEO with Margaret Kelsey

[00:17:42] Ramli John: Before I continue, I want to thank the sponsor for this episode, 42 Agency. Now when you're in scale up growth mode and you have to hit your KPIs, the pressure is on to deliver demos and sign ups and it's all to handle there's demand, gen, email sequences, rev ops and more. And that's where 42 Agency, founded by my good friend Camille Rexton can help you. They are a strategic partner that's helped B two B SaaS companies like Profit, Wall, Teamwork, Sprout, Social and Hub Doc to build a predictable revenue engine. If you're looking for performance experts and creatives to solve your marketing growth problems today and help you build the foundations for the future, look no further. Visit 40 Twoagency.com to talk to a strategic right now to learn how you can build a high efficiency revenue engine. Thank you also to the sponsor for this episode, HS Free Webmaster Tools. If you want to rank your website higher in search engines, you have to make sure that your website doesn't have any technical SEO issues. Because if you do, that's like trying to run a race with your shoes tied together. That's how you lose. And we don't want that. Luckily, Asia's Free Webmaster Tools can crawl up to 5000 pages to find 140 common technical SEO issues that could be holding your site back from generating valuable traffic. It can also help you find your strongest backlinks, as well as analyze keywords you're ranking for and see keywords search volume and ranking difficulty. For each of those keywords, you can sign up for Free@htraps.com Webmastertools or find that link in the description and show notes.

[00:19:13] Impact of Cultural Values on Branding: A Discussion with Margaret Kelsey

[00:19:13] Ramli John: Well, let's get back to the episode. We've been talking a lot about brand and I've been assuming that that defensibility is about whoever can I keep saying feel? Whoever can make that customer feel like they care the most compared to the competitors. Is that how would you define brand versus what you mentioned earlier? Not just fonts and colors and brand guidelines? [00:19:42] Margaret Kelsey: I think about it the same way that when we think about consumer brands, there is something that people when you buy a brand, it means something about your character or your personality trait or who you want to be or who you aspire to be. Right. It's like little badges of honor or badges of personality that happen with consumer brands. And I think that software companies and software brands can start to do the same thing where it means something to use Asana instead of another tool. It means, I don't know, maybe you're smarter, maybe you're more organized, maybe whatever that is. Right. There is a feeling behind it. Brand an attachment to either an ideal or a personality trait. And the more companies can start to align to those things that their target audience cares about feeling and being, the more you can create emotional resonance in your brand. Right. Because it's not just like, oh, the products and the feature sets and the yada yada. It's what does this mean about me that I decided to make this decision, this purchase decision, that I use this tool every day? That I've decided to change my workflow or my process in order to use this tool instead of another one? And I think that's the powerful thing. [00:21:01] Ramli John: About brand and all of that is like culmination of everything that they've experienced through your, like, consuming your blog post. [00:21:10] Margaret Kelsey: Yep. [00:21:11] Ramli John: Joining your community, going in your webinar, the clothes that the people wear from the company that is showing up on the webinar and the words you specifically use are your titles. All caps versus like, is a sentence case. All of that culminates to that feeling that people get, essentially. It's not just that quantum colors. [00:21:31] Margaret Kelsey: Essentially, yeah. And it's every touch point. And I think that can be scary to a lot of businesses to think about the largeness of brand, I think it's easy to kind of refine it and be like, oh, I only have to worry about that checklist of items. It's fonts and colors and whatever. Not like it's every email that anyone has ever sent externally. It's every single person that has my company attached to their LinkedIn, including afterwards, where they go, brand, what they do. The actual largeness of brand is almost scary, unfathomable, because there's too many touch points and none of them can be controlled or very few of them can be controlled. And it's easier to think about what are the things I can control? I think that that's when we go back to brand owning cultural values and aligning them to external brand values and then using your cultural values as decision making frameworks helps because it scales that process of every brand touchpoint. Feels like the same brand touchpoint because you're using the same decision making framework to make the decision or to have the conversation. And instead of like, oh, everyone memorize this voice and tone playbook, it's more like if you all operate from the same value, you will do that thing. Right. If you value speed and efficiency, then it makes sense that your voice and tone is going to be short and direct and the user experience of it. There's going to be good bullets instead of big wordy paragraphs because that's part of your cultural values and you value those things. So it becomes like a more scalable way to scale culture. Scale brand is if you think of your cultural values as part of that. [00:23:12] Ramli John: Yeah, that's a great example. If there's speed is one of your values, don't give me like a thousand word sentence essentially like just give me bullet points. [00:23:23] Margaret Kelsey: Or do I spend a bunch of time and research before I write the email back or do I write the email back saying, hey, I'm on it and let me do some research and that sort of thing? There's so many decisions that can happen that if you base them on your values, the answer becomes clear rather than kind of everyone doing their own thing that makes sense.

[00:23:47] Investing in Community and Culture for Sustainable Growth

[00:23:47] Ramli John: You mentioned this a little bit about how this is a flywheel, how I'm trying to figure out how community feeds back culture and how I'm hearing or thinking about it is that the more you learn about your customers and your community, it kind of shapes your second iteration or maybe multiple iterations of your culture. Is that about right or did I get that wrong? [00:24:11] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, no, you're spot on. So I think with community we can think about it two ways. There's communities that already exist, where your target audience is already around a water cooler that exists and then eventually you can create your own right. I think people get stuck there where they think that their community has to be an owned community and it has to be a thing and we got to use a tool. And I'm thinking of community as the biggest sense of the word, which is are there collective groups of people that feel like they belong to something? Right? And so when we talk about that, can we create a sense of belonging with a group of people then I'm using that as the terminology of community rather than like a tactical application of like there is a software that builds community or a reddit community or whatever it might be. And so when you invest in community, which is investing in participating with a group of people, providing value, participating in this sense of belonging that we all are together brand sharing things and have cultural norms and have whatever you have a finger on the pulse of what's happening with that target audience and you feed those insights back into the organization, knowing that not everybody in the organization can be so external facing, can spend so much time with the community. I mean, ideally everyone's kind of baked into it but I think with brand and content they tend to be able to live in that external world a little bit easier. And, yeah, you build those insights. And if you need to update a cultural value because the culture of the community at large shifted, then you have your finger on the pulse to be able to recognize the signals that we all care about something different now, or that the conversation has changed or even as silly as the memes that the community uses has changed. That one's out, this one's in. Let's make sure we're adding that into our marketing materials, adding that into our customer success materials, all of those things. You can really start to make sure that everyone within your company understands the changes that are happening so that when they are using their shared decision making framework and their shared values to make decisions, that they're spot on still making sure that everyone feels emotional resonance with your company.

[00:26:34] The Dangers of Uniformity in Marketing: Avoid the Enterprise Blue

[00:26:34] Ramli John: There was like a hot take that you said in one of the episodes for don't say content around the word belonging, that the opposite of belonging is fitting in. And I'm like, Dude, that just like, yeah it did. It was like, shoot, that is so right. Because people think the opposite of belonging is not fitting in. But fitting in is about trying to curve your edges so that you fit the puzzle. Whereas belonging is like every puzzle piece is different and they might not fit together in that picture, but they still belong essentially. [00:27:11] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, I think it was Brene Brown that said that to me and not to me. That would be amazing if she said it directly to me, but it felt like she just grabbed me by the collar and said that directly into my eyes. I was like, oh, I heard you on that one. But I think even going back to the beginning of the conversation, when we're talking about having creativity outside of your work practice, that's what that feels like to me is it feels like my own creative practice. Reminds me of belonging, reminds me of being my full, authentic self, which sometimes can be such a phrase that's said so many times that it means nothing, but that allows me the reminder that it's okay to be different. And then the experience of belonging is the accepting of people in their truest forms rather than everyone has to be the same. And then it reminds me when I'm going and pitching marketing ideas or championing marketing ideas, that the weird ones might be more interesting than the safe ones. Right? Like let's be a little weird here because we want to reach out and accept and identify and welcome the weird bits of others rather than make sure everyone feels like we're all the same. [00:28:41] Ramli John: It's funny you say that. I forgot who it was on LinkedIn. Maybe it was Dave Gerhardt where he showed a bunch of companies within the same industry and at some point they started looking the same, like same color, same thoughts. They're like trying to fit in because they've gone Enterprise or they've gone. I feel like this is like kind of bringing to point that hey, you can't really accept others weirdness if your company itself doesn't want to be weird. What's your take on that? [00:29:13] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, I think that it is an unfortunate thing that happens as companies get bigger, as they start to get enterprise era. Like that Enterprise Blue always creeps into a logo. You know exactly one Enterprise Blue where companies brand goes to die. And I do think that that is unfortunate because I think that it starts to muddy the water a little bit in terms of the resonance. I understand why it happens, but it's just the longer that you can hold on to the weird bits the better, I think. [00:29:57] Ramli John: I mean, this is a hard question because of hypothetical, but if you were in that company that's like going to the Enterprise Blue, would you be like I'm Audi or is there something you could try to like, hey, wait a second, we're starting to go enterprise and starting to try to fit in? I'm guessing depends on your influence, but I'm curious. [00:30:19] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, I've definitely later on in my career become more and more outspoken about what I think needs to happen. I mean, it's helpful right now as an advisor to be outspoken. I mean, it's very useful to me and actually strengthened my own confidence to be able to rattle the cage a little bit and stamp my feet and demand things to be different. But I do think the challenge here, which is not perfectly what you asked, but I think there is nuance here around the fact that being internal, it's very hard to do that. A lot of. The time and I think for some reason and this was actually pointed out to me when I was in house at OpenView, it was pointed out to me and it made so much sense and opened my eyes immediately. That part of the reason that people bring in advisors and consultants and external people to give the same opinion that that person has is for some ounce of credibility that there's an external person that also feels this way. Which is a little silly to think that that is a reason outside of like, there's a new idea or a better way. There's just like external validation of an idea is also worth a lot of money. But I don't want people to think that if they are internal and becoming a little bit of a problem child that they're doing anything wrong. That's just what it feels like internally when you start to be a problem child and that there is I don't know, it's just candidly different when you're outside of the organization versus inside of the organization. [00:31:55] Ramli John: That's true. Yeah, you're right. It so happened like when I was working with Wes Bush, one of the advice that he gave to this company is like, oh, take off your email confirmation. And the guy was like, we've been trying to do this this whole time. And then Wes told it to the CEO. I was like, yeah, let's do it. The guy was like, I've been telling this to you for two years. [00:32:19] Margaret Kelsey: I've seen that time and time again on both being in house and doing it and saying the same thing again and again. But then also now interesting as an advisor realizing my sheer power of just being like my impact differential increased just by leaving and going external. Now it's like, whoa, it's bizarre. It's a power trip. [00:32:43] Ramli John: This is an ad for people to leave their job and become advisory. [00:32:46] Margaret Kelsey: No, sorry, I didn't mean for this to be like a come in, water is wonderful. [00:32:51] Ramli John: Come to the dark side or the bright side? I don't know, the light side? I don't know what to call it. [00:32:56] Margaret Kelsey: I think it's the light side.

[00:32:57] Harnessing the Power of Brand for Companies: A Conversation with Margaret Kelsey

[00:32:57] Ramli John: Yeah, we've been talking a lot about this. What would you call this? You've been calling a flywheel brand affinity flywheel. What would you call this? Because I need to give some marketing. [00:33:08] Margaret Kelsey: I know well that's my fear is like, do I give it a marketing name and then it's just some other thing that gets like, oh, there's a screenshot somewhere that a founder sends their marketing team being like, this is what. [00:33:18] Ramli John: We need to do. [00:33:18] Margaret Kelsey: And everyone's like, yeah, that's what we're doing. What I really think this is, is a way for brands to truly be strategic levers within an organization. So if we're going to call it like a, I don't know, brand efficacy framework strap brand strap jet, I don't know, I don't know what to call it yet. But I think there's something there. And I just think that this is the way. If you want to think about everything that Brand should touch and own, outside of the normal small checklist of being a hall monitor on these certain things that get created, this is what I would put under their purview and their influence to make sure that it's truly a strategic and impactful organization that makes sense. [00:34:07] Ramli John: Brand Efficacy lover or Flyer, don't try. [00:34:13] Margaret Kelsey: To lock it down. [00:34:16] Ramli John: Have you come across a company that does this? Well? If you were going to look at a company that does this brand fly real well, which companies have you seen or even worked with or maybe that has done this forward things well? [00:34:36] Margaret Kelsey: It's so funny, I feel like in that same podcast conversation, dev Brand, I were talking about the fact that and it could just be that it's where we're at in our own careers right now, but the ones that we think about are the ones that did this back in 2014, 2015. I think Buffer was really great at this, still is. I think that like Zendesk Wistia, there was companies that cropped up around that time when PLG was not even called PLG yet. I don't know, we were calling it like B to C to B or something, and we didn't have the name PLG up for it. But there was this understanding that if you needed to build a go to market motion that requires a free trial or freemium experience, you need to have a large funnel of free acquisition. And that comes from attracting as many people from your target audience as possible, as cheaply as possible. And that tends to be in this brand top of funnel content community inbound marketing, jargony, Jargon and Jargon. But it was that kind of movement that started, I think, for software companies to begin to think about how do we look at not how do we look at the finance and procurement person that's going to make this decision that then the software is going to get rolled out through the company. But truly, how do we target the end user and get them to care about our company? And I think that I'm sure there's fantastic companies doing it right now, but I think the ones that always come back to me are the ones that I kind of grew up alongside of when I was at Envision, when I was watching them all do it, too. And we're kind of sharing tactical implementation of this stuff. [00:36:33] Ramli John: That makes sense. [00:36:34] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah. [00:36:34] Ramli John: Those are some really classic ones. One that I've recently come across, how it's been around for a while is around Gong. They've been using a lot of memes. We talked quite a bit. Yeah. And then they have I don't know if I think they have a customer community, but they've really gone all in being weird with his social posts. [00:36:54] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah. And a strong content program and then I think too that people who use Gong will say stuff like, oh my God, I love Gong and I need Gong. And it's like that kind of affinity of, I don't know, I've seen the gong. I can envision the gong logo in my head very easily. And that's same probably because I've seen it on a t shirt and people are wearing it proudly. [00:37:21] Ramli John: I love it. Thank you for sharing this. Before I shift and talk about career power ups, any final words or tips to marketers who are tuning in around brand, around this clyville?

[00:37:36] The future of marketing: Embracing change and adaptability

[00:37:36] Margaret Kelsey: I think a huge kind of blanket recommendation right now is to not be too stuck in the work you have been doing if you are an expert in a certain channel or a certain type of marketing, a certain style of marketing. I think what we've seen definitely over the last three and a half years, but specifically over the last, I don't know, six months, year, is that everything is changing rapidly underneath us on both a macro level, but also a channel level and a consumer behavior level. And everything is changing way faster than it used to. And I think that if more marketers can come back to the basics of why do I even do the work that I do, what am I even trying to do in this channel or with this playbook? The more that you can start to draw parallels to other types of marketing, to other tactics, to other channels, whatever the other specificities that your company might need, and you're going to start to see new opportunities. And so I'd say don't be too precious about the work you've been doing or the specialization that you've been in because the marketers of the future will need to be super adaptable. I've said I would take a scrappy generalist today over the best specialist any day of the week right now, because I think we just need that kind of experimentation and fire in marketing again. [00:39:09] Ramli John: I love that. That's good.

[00:39:11] Career Power-ups for Marketers: Insights from Margaret Kelsey

[00:39:11] Ramli John: Final advice around that topic, let's just talk about career power ups. I think you've been in marketing now for about 15 years. I'm like trying to cut based on your LinkedIn, you worked at Envision, you work at App Use, which a lady. [00:39:26] Margaret Kelsey: Never tells her age, but yeah, it's probably around there. [00:39:29] Ramli John: You've also worked at OpenView, but you have this amazing career now. You're an advisor, you have the show. I'm curious what's power up that's helped you with your career? There's something that could be a soft skill, it could be networking, it could be something more marketing related. But what is something that's like helped you get a leg up in your career? [00:39:52] Margaret Kelsey: I think I've always tried to be pretty introspective of why I am doing the thing, why I want the next job, why I would want to go to that company versus not and what that's created. Now that I've looked back on my career is a really strong red thread through all of these different opportunities. And so while I didn't see it at the time, but I was being introspective about what is most interesting to me with every new opportunity, now that I look backwards, I can see that I've always been obsessed with creating shared language. So originally, when I was a content marketer, it was creating shared language with my target audience, right. Making sure that when I was at Envision that I was speaking a shared language with designers, that I really, even though I wasn't a designer, that I could understand where they were coming from and what they cared about, and that I was using the right words. And because I didn't know what I was talking about, then I was actually getting designers to write for me because I couldn't do it. But I cared about that. And then when I started to manage people, I started to really care about the shared language of our team, about making sure that people felt like they belonged and felt like they understood how to be highly performing, that they understood how to be stretched, but also how to be supported. And then I started to look upwards as, how do I create a shared language as I manage up? Right. As I start to make sure that executives understand what I'm working on and what my team's working on. And now that I'm external, I really care deeply about this shared language between a founder and their head of marketing. I think that this is like the next piece of my career of creating shared languages to make sure that this relationship works really well. So now it's, again something. If you're early in your career, you might have no idea what your red thread is going to be. But if you're thoughtful enough about the opportunities in front of you and what thing you want to work on next and what part of your brain you want to activate, then eventually you'll look back on your career and have a pretty strong pattern of what it all meant.

[00:42:01] Understanding When It's Time to Move On: Insights from Margaret Kelsey

[00:42:01] Ramli John: I'm curious when you know it's the right time to move on. I'm sure you're looking back, you knew it was time to move on when X happened, and did you get advice from folks or I guess, how did you figure out what was next after you know it was time to move on? [00:42:18] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, sometimes it takes a while from me, from when I know it's time to move on to figuring out what's next. And I think that's a normal occurrence to kind of be done with it before you even know what's the next thing. I always feel that within myself, that I get bored. I just get bored. And it's not overwhelm. It's burnout. I think the difference between the two is burnout is when you don't have the emotional ROI of the work anymore, where, just like you're putting in work and you don't feel a return on investment in the emotions and the energy that you're putting into it. So that, to me, is a very big signal, whether the opposite of that is overwhelm, where you have so much to do. Brand maybe you love it all, but you have a lot of work on your plate and you're feeling chaotic and overwhelmed. Overwhelm can usually be solved by taking time off and taking a vacation and taking a break. Burnout is rarely solved by that because you come back to the same situation where you give energy and you don't get it in return. So to me, it's a very clear signal when I've burnt out, not because of overwork or anything like that, but just because the emotional ROI isn't there. That's a very clear signal to me. And when I feel it coming on, it's almost a little sad sometimes because I'm like, Damn it, I've solved the interesting problems and now I'm done. [00:43:41] Ramli John: That's an interesting concept, emotional ROI. This is actually the first time I've heard it. I understand. It totally makes sense when you say it, the emotion you're putting into it is not. You don't feel like you're getting a return. Like you're, I guess, talking about affinity and bread. You don't have that sense of affinity now for that work, the team or maybe that company, or that, I'm not entirely sure, but whatever it is, you've lost the affinity that has gone away. [00:44:10] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, exactly. [00:44:13] Ramli John: In terms of, like, you were talking about when it's time to move, how do you find I guess I'm trying to figure out how do you find your next step? Talking about, do you have any advisors? Or you just start looking when you know it's like you've lost an affinity or how do you do it in the past? And for people who are tuning in, who might be feeling that emotional ROI, what would be the steps you would give to them? [00:44:40] Margaret Kelsey: So I'm a little woo woo with this, and I fully believe that when you start to make a little bit of effort, the universe will start unveiling opportunities to you. And so I think the first thing is you just have to make some sort of movement to what you want that's different, whether that's reaching out to people in your network. I think the term networking is one of those old fashioned words where I don't really like to network, but I like to talk to the people that I like to talk to that has in my, I guess, network. So part of it is that you start putting out the feelers, you start understanding what it is. You start to maybe even have conversations and recruiting calls and things like that, and you see what feels good and not good to you. Right. And I think part of me is I usually make my own kind of decision making framework on what things I value in the next opportunity what things I want, what things I don't want. But that only really comes from me having a couple of calls and starting to research companies and starting to understand it. And so when I was leaving OpenView, I was starting to think about that of like what is my next step? And my decision framework was much different than it used to be, which was what was the next in house job that I wanted. Instead, what I really wanted this time around was I cared a lot about decoupling. Impact had, money made and hours worked and I wanted each of those to be independent levers because I wanted to explore what enough was for each one of those things. I've been in high growth startups, I've been in a venture capital firm, I've been in these places where hours worked was a pretty locked in thing. You didn't get to really play around with that. It was like a lot. And also in marketing it's not a variable business or it wasn't really a variable comp structure and so money made when you join a company is also pretty locked in. The thing that you can kind of play around with is Impact Had but that's organizationally depends on the organization and the structure and the team and all these different things. And so what I became obsessed with in this last time around was once those things became really clear to me, I was like the only way to have each of those things be independent levers is to go off and try to build my own business so I can play around with what enough feels like. [00:47:05] Ramli John: That's such a good framework or like a mental model like that three levers that income made, the impact made and the third one was time. [00:47:15] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, hours worked, like how much time? And it's really funny because what I realized is I'm a total impact junkie. And so I used to think like oh, how much hours do I actually need to feel like I've used my brain in a way that because it's not zero candidly. When I was on maternity leave I was desperate to use my brain in a strategic way. Again, it's not 0 hour for me, I need some of this work in my life. Which was also a really great realization to understand that I don't have to do this, I really want to do this. But the hours worked. What I realized was like as long as I'm having impact, I am limitless. [00:47:54] Ramli John: That's true. And that impact, especially as you scale up your advisory, you do more courses, you can lower your hours work and increase your impact income made. Which is like I guess another reason why people should come to the life side. [00:48:12] Margaret Kelsey: The water is wonderful. Come on in. [00:48:17] Ramli John: Don'T tempt us. I'm just joking. [00:48:22] Margaret Kelsey: I feel like I need a disclaimer of like I am not trying to influence anybody to leave their current job. Especially if I have a contract with you where I'm not supposed to bring people away from your company. [00:48:35] Ramli John: You're changing behavior at scale. Hold on, that's funny. [00:48:40] Margaret Kelsey: Something I did think it is. [00:48:42] Ramli John: Thank you a lot. It is happening. I feel like people are becoming more aware of this like with layoffs and it's not as secure as people think. Like working at a full time job because you're locked in the hours and you can only control so much of those three lovers. I think you can't really control any of those lovers unless you have some kind of impact. [00:49:05] Margaret Kelsey: You can kind of like have more impact, have less impact, care more, care less kind of thing. But that's the only one that you really get to and that's why that whole thing around quiet quitting was going around is because it's really the only lever if you're full time employed that you can do is kind of this hours worked, impact had thing where you just kind of coast, right? You maybe work less hours and have less impact but you still make the same amount of money and that's quiet quitting as those levers kind of in that position.

[00:49:39] The Changing Landscape of Marketing Teams

[00:49:39] Margaret Kelsey: I think that to your point though about marketing exodus right now it is really interesting because I think it's not the worst thing in the world. I think more companies are looking especially as everything is changing and shifting, they're looking at scaling their marketing team as more of a fractional or freelance way. I feel like a couple of years ago we wouldn't have never thought of having a freelance brand designer or freelance whatever it might be. And now it's kind of baked in that you're going to have a lot of freelance support on your marketing team. And so I don't think it's the worst thing that there's a lot of folks leaving or getting fired from full time roles and starting up their own freelance businesses or fractional businesses. I think that that's probably what both businesses want and need at this moment when they're trying to figure out their strategic. But I also think that the reason that this is happening is because marketers have kind of lost their way for a little while. We were starting to be a little fat cat syndrome where there was money going around. We didn't have to be super efficient with how we were spending it. We could kind of coast and rest on our laurels and right now we're back into wartime mode, right? Do more with less. And I think that there's a lot of marketers out there that haven't quite been really judicious with every dollar spent or hour spent. I want to be clear that it's not just your budget but it's also your hourly allocation to different things, right? Like this whole idea of maniacal focus and killing your darlings is something that I am constantly coaching marketers on because we like to do a lot of things, brand spread ourselves thin and never kill a program. And I think that can be really hard for founders and CFOs to look at and be like, what are you doing over there? [00:51:34] Ramli John: I feel like the reason why marketing teams are doing a lot is there's that insecurity some of marketing is hard to measure. So by measuring the number of blog posts we put out, or the number of videos, or the number of webinars, hey, that's measurable. But some of the stuff is like it's hard to measure in terms of I mean, I'm sure this attribution is. [00:51:58] Margaret Kelsey: Hard and this is the thing. If you're only measuring Attribution, then it is really hard to know what to kill. But if we're thinking of marketing as essentially two functions, the first is saturation of channels where your target audience lives with a consistent message that resonates. So you're hijacking frequency and recency bias. You're staying top of mind with your target audience. You're not even converting them yet. You're literally just saturation of a channel with a message that resonates. The second part is identifying signals of readiness and then converting those people, right? So Attribution can happen in that second part. And you maybe have some attribution to the first part. But what we need to do is know that there's ways to go and measure each of those marketing functions, right? Like some people call it brand and demand. Some people would like we've again muddied up the waters with all of these terminologies around what these things actually are. But if we can agree that marketing is fundamentally those functions, then when we start to look at, okay, all of our brand and content programs, the goal is a consistent message in a channel that our target audience lives already lives in. So it's like consistency, resonance of message, whether and we can test that in lots of different ways. And the goal is not actually even converting yet on that point. It's literally just did we do the thing? Did we do the thing? Are we consistently showing up? Are we in that feed? Are we in their inbox? Are we in their physical direct mailer mailbox? And so I think that we have to think of marketing as both of those things and not just get so lost in Attribution land where we're saying, oh well, everyone that came through actually was first touch. Attribution goes to this thing, even though they heard about us for five years on our podcast before they actually had the pain point enough to come inbound through the thing. That worked. I'm always fighting against that because I think that if we're only going by Attribution, we're missing a big piece of the pie. [00:54:07] Ramli John: So good. It's so true. I love that really to cut down.

[00:54:12] Transitioning into an Advisory Role in Marketing

[00:54:12] Ramli John: I'm curious once again, this feels like an ad for people who want to get into advisory, but if you had what kind of advice would you have for marketers who are like they are in that mode where they're looking for the next thing and they're considering advisory doing advisory role. You already talked earlier about reaching out to your network and asking advice and opening up doors. Any other tips that you would share for people who might want to step into what is that called? The warmer water? [00:54:48] Margaret Kelsey: Yeah, I don't know, bathtub temperature water. My advice is as you're thinking about doing it, absolutely go talk to people who are already doing it, who are in the have their own businesses. They will all tell you conflicting information on how to do your business, how to structure your fees, how to package your work, how to do whatever, that's fine. Take all of those inputs and then figure out what would be right for you. I think the other piece is like understanding why you're doing it and what you care about, right? I have the same work that you do for brand values you can do for your own personal value work, your mission, vision, values, what you care about in this world. One of the ones that I deeply care about is actually this web three value of subtraction. And so this idea is that I have it written on my board over here. We push opportunities outwards, we're thrilled to see others succeed. We try to matter less. And so that's core to my business philosophy that I've brought in to the point where I'm graduating people that I could easily keep on a retainer for more months. But I want to matter less. I want them to fly. I want them to go and do the thing by themselves. And so it's something I care deeply about. But then it turned into a business value that I think is good for the long term for the business, but definitely in the short term is a little scary to kick people off your roster. But I think understanding what you're doing it for, what you care about, really helps you in your journey and also will help you understand that. Those buckets of enough. I think I had a really good friend, I'll call her a mentor too, but she's a dear friend who has been an entrepreneur for many, many years, caroline Zook. And she, when I first started off building my own company, gave me that advice of understand what enough money is like. Put a number on enough so you know when you reach it. So you can put your energy and time elsewhere into the other things that can be built and grown and fulfilled. Because if that number isn't set in stone somewhere, of like, that is enough. Now I can go worry about other things. You will be blinded by chasing the increase of that number and not settle into a world in which you can truly do make a life that's aligned to your values. So I think that was really great advice. I think the last thing that I would leave you with is it was on the tip of my tongue and now I'm blanking. Go talk to people about it, go figure it out. And then I don't know. You'll never be ready. Go try it. There's probably another job waiting if it doesn't work out. Like, give yourself a financial runway that you feel comfortable taking a chance on yourself and have that clear in your mind of how long you're going to give yourself to try to make it work. And then sometimes it's just you got to go do it. [00:57:47] Ramli John: Just do it, just do it. Just like that Nike slogan. Just go for it. [00:57:51] Margaret Kelsey: Jump out of the plane.

[00:57:56] Insightful Discussion with Marketing Expert Margaret Kelsey

[00:57:56] Ramli John: Second to the last question in terms of an advice you would give yourself, but a younger version of Margaret, like if you can travel back in time, maybe she's starting out in marketing. What would be like an advice you would set up to that time portal and that would help the younger Margaret maybe avoid mistakes or not necessarily change the past because the past define who you are. But what would be that advice that you would give yourself? Good. [00:58:24] Margaret Kelsey: I would remind myself that I am at a company to provide impact to the business. And that is my job. My job is not to work within the confined or the defined hierarchy that exists. It's not to make sure everyone agrees with my decision or my method of whatever. I think that I have over indexed on collaboration and I don't know, niceness at the expense of what I should have been doing, which is understanding and figuring out how to have the biggest impact for the business that I can. I think that sometimes what I've seen from fellow marketers is that we see that a hierarchy exists. We see that there's somebody senior to us that we need to, I don't know, build a relationship with or get them aligned or defer to their idea when ultimately what you're tasked to do is have the biggest impact for the business. And a lot of on the other side, what I'm seeing from founders is that they just created the structure, the hierarchy, whatever it is, because they needed one and that was one that they created. They're always looking at it as like, how can you have business impact? And you're like, I don't know, this hierarchy sucks. And they're like, well, I just made it up. Like I could make up a new one. Just like, tell me what you need in order to have business impact. And I think that's something that I both failed at that now. I'm seeing a lot of conversations and helping a lot of visibility between founders and their heads of marketing of the fact that it's all made up. So you can make it up or you can change it, and you can ask for it to be. Changed. Or you can highlight the fact that there is something that needs to be changed in order for you to have business impact, but it's not an excuse to not go have business impact. [01:00:13] Ramli John: Had such a fun and insightful chat with Margaret. You can learn more about Margaret's work via her website, margaretkelsey.com and Tadco IO also follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can find all of that link in the description and show notes.

[01:00:26] Marketing Powerups with Margaret Kelsey: Insights and Advice

[01:00:26] Ramli John: Thanks to Margaret for being on the show. If you enjoyed this episode, you'd love the Marketing Powerups newsletter. I share the actionable takeaways and break down the frameworks of world class marketers go Marketing Powerups.com subscribe and you'll instantly unlock the three best frameworks that top marketers use, hit their KPIs consistently and wow their colleagues. I want to say thank you to you for listening and please like and follow Marketing Powerups on YouTube, Apple Podcast and Spotify to feel like extra generous, kind of leave a review on Apple podcast and Spotify and leave a comment on YouTube goes a long way in others finding out about Marketing Powerups. Thanks to Mary Sullivan for creating the artwork and design. And thank you to Fisal Kygo for editing the intro video. And of course, thank you for listening. It's all for now. Have a powered out date marketing in Power Ups until the next episode.