Episode Transcript
Ashley Segura: All right so I’m going to start us off with the most popular question and it’s the first question of every episode that we do is what is your go to dish to cook in the kitchen?
Suzanne Kagan: Okay so slightly embarrassing I’m not a great cook I have dabbled a lot
I I at some point about like 10 years ago I was like yes I will try to cook become a great chef but no I’m not it’s not meant to be so my best one is actually keeping really simple dishes and just trying to do them to the best of my ability which is great at this point is creating like a really great breakfast
so every week we have a nice brunch and we’ll do a really delicious omelette bagel cream cheese and lox and nice like a nice salad It’s usually you might go to but it’s there’s like a ways to perfect it over time So it will be tastier
Ashley Segura: Making a good omelet is Challenging like that is legitimately challenging to have the proper ingredients have the proper egg thickness ratio and all of that
so kudos it’s true there’s a balancing
Suzanne Kagan: there’s a balancing act of like spices like I put in sweet paprika I put in yeah so there’s ways to make it much tastier and also I find that the best trick I ever learned was just keep it on very low heat
Ashley Segura: oh yes so it takes
Suzanne Kagan: time
Ashley Segura: yeah definitely and burnt eggs is just the literal worst yeah good call on that okay let’s dive into storytelling I would love to kick things off with talking about your two degrees in creative writing that’s incredibly impressive that your background is in creative writing so what sparked your interest and really your transition from creative writing to marketing?
Suzanne Kagan: I think When I was studying creative writing we all have that kind of goal like can I become a novelist one day or can I become a poet one day? And we know how realistic those goals are so I also had a goal of just being self sufficient so I said how can I take a writing degree? Become self sufficient
and I started out I thought okay I’ll go down the journalism route and so I did a bunch of interviews in college I did a magazine and I did a newspaper right after college and I was like you know what I’m not feeling this is a less about writing and creative writing than is about sharing the story and sharing the news and sharing that with the public
so that was less of what I found interesting
Ashley Segura: and then
Suzanne Kagan: at the time SEO was just starting to be created actually this is 15 years ago you would say SEO nobody really knew what you were talking about And so I got a job because I had that degree in English writing I could prove that I could write well And so I just started writing and I found that there was a lot of connection between You know writing creatively and also writing for or for marketing in general it’s a lot more about intention and like without the muse but there’s a lot about characters and understanding who is that character that you’re writing for?
What are their motivations? So that’s very connected to personas and ICPs and there’s a strong connection there it was like a natural transition
Ashley Segura: yeah there there really is a strong connection there and I like that you’re pointing that out because usually when you think of SEO content writing
it’s okay I’m just writing for the algorithms I’m writing to rank that’s the goal of this whereas creative writing it could be poetry it could be that book that you’re hoping to get published it’s very different they’re they’re looked at and perceived as very different but that’s true when it comes to SEO you are still and marketing in general you’re still creating a piece of content with a goal in mind and trying to attract a specific demographic
just like when you’re writing a book or poems you’re trying to attract people who appreciate poetry or people who are going to like sci fi fiction or like whatever your niche is
Suzanne Kagan: exactly and it’s it’s just I think the benefit of coming from that background is that it’s very easy to put yourself into the mindset of that character that person
Ashley Segura: which
Suzanne Kagan: at the end of the day if you don’t do that in marketing you’re not going to be able to create effective copy or content
Ashley Segura: so how do you come up with the initial character? What does that process look like of actually creating a character persona for marketing?
Suzanne Kagan: I think it’s the same way that a lot of people would do it is you start with kind of the the form of graphic details you want to understand who is this person?
What is their job? Where do they live? Where do they congregate? How do they spend their free time? What are their pain points? What are their challenges? What are their motivations? And then Where the marketing is how does my product solve those challenges and pain points? And then how can I actually get them and motivate them to act?
That’s how you would think from that point from a character when I was writing for example fiction it was a little bit less intentional as more about how do they feel? How do they communicate? But still I understood who are they? What’s their age? What is there? Where do they live? What do they care about?
What are the challenges that they’re facing now? Who are their friends? Who are their peers? And they’re very easy ways to get into their mindset so there’s some exercise that you can do as a creative writer and actually apply that to marketing so one of the things I remember doing back college and also in my masters is we would write a letter
from that character so that you would actually embrace their tone of voice and it’s shocking You know how much you start sounding like that character versus yourself and then you can start feeling their frustrations You can start really understanding their pain points You can start really understanding what they care about and you can do that same sort of thing it’s like when you’re listening to customer calls or when you’re You know speaking to one of your persona in person Real life are doing interviews
that’s when you can really understand that you’re just hearing it and embracing that and understanding that
Ashley Segura: what if you don’t have a sales team though? Cause I’ve talked to so many brands even large brands who are like okay we don’t have CS we don’t have customer success teams we don’t have sales teams
like we’re bootstrapping it and doing our best and trying to figure out aside from the demographic details that Google analytics will tell you or Instagram’s analytics or MailChimp’s analytics like the real analytics where you can understand how they are speaking what their frustrations are
like how do you go about trying to find that information when you don’t have a customer that you can go directly to talk to or you don’t have sales calls that you could go listen to?
Suzanne Kagan: So there’s a lot of ways actually nowadays that you can do that so one of the things that I’ve done in the past even when we did have sales calls is I would set up
interviews with people you just start reaching out to other peers and interviews I remember my last company we were targeting other marketers so this made it a little bit easier I could reach out to other marketing leaders and we would say Hey I’d love to talk to you about this specific topic
just get your advice you’re an expert in this field so that’s one way to do it the other is that you can be a lawyer and check on social media all the time people are very public and they’re very vocal so
Ashley Segura: yeah
Suzanne Kagan: you see it all the time there’s thought leaders for every type of niche
there’s thought leaders in learning and development there’s thought leaders in marketing there’s thought leaders of like CFOs it doesn’t even matter if you’re scared to reach out to a CEO there’s plenty of CEOs who are scared speaking online and contributing their thoughts and sharing so you can hear their challenges
the other is going into different Slack channels different communities or also reaching out to your peers and like 2nd 3rd degree connection to try to connect you to others just don’t be afraid because at the worst someone’s just going to ignore your message or they won’t respond but if you don’t ask the answer is just going to be no
Ashley Segura: yeah and this is something that you can totally do on LinkedIn and just send out say 20 connection requests with a message of what your intention are of like Hey I’d love to interview you to get some feedback about X Y and Z or hear your experience as a CFO and then if you send say 20 30 connections out
you may only get two or three that actually connect and be like yeah let’s jump on a call but that’s two or three that’s great you can build from that exactly
Suzanne Kagan: and that’s how I learned I learned so much saying that we did it and you can also change your ICP too and you can also convince others who weren’t necessarily in your ICP or weren’t your persona before to actually first of all be aware of your product during that time because you’re introducing yourself and you’re essentially
sometimes even demoing without intentionally demoing so you’re getting that brand awareness from them but it just it it exposes them to your product and off your mission as well so I think that can be really helpful but also you can find out that there’s people who weren’t your ICP and then you can almost convince them to become your ICP during that conversation because you’re putting a face to that brand as well
they have a personal connection
Ashley Segura: now yeah and brands shouldn’t be limited to just two or three ICPs and that’s usually okay that’s a starting point let’s create two or three personas and get really detailed about it let’s give them an image a face and a name and all of that but that changes over time
and as you develop your brand story and continue to tell that story and it evolves For sure your personas are definitely going to evolve with that have you seen with your extensive experience in marketing and marketing B2B and B2C companies when brands make a pivot in that storytelling that it opens up this whole new demographic or is it usually just diving deeper and more targeted when they switch their brand story?
Suzanne Kagan: I’ve seen I’ve seen an experience both I’ve been in a bunch of companies that started out for example as PLG and they were B2C they would have an e commerce following and then they would shift more to a B2B sales motion and that completely changed so they would go from let’s say freelancers to enterprise and then you’re completely changing your demographic
but sometimes you start finding out that for example I remember in one company we were in we were focused on marketing and sales professionals and we just kept seeing more and more L& D learning and development professionals come in and that’s what the data was showing us they were the ones purchasing plans
they were the ones who were engaging they were the ones who were strong advocates and they were happy to talk about it in case studies and so we started making a massive shift towards that targeted audience so that can happen often
Ashley Segura: so how do you like taking a few steps back and you’re either an established brand who has a story to tell or your new brand who’s trying to figure out your story
how do you even begin that process to really understand and define what your brand story is whether it’s for the internal teams or public facing like where do you begin to write that story?
Suzanne Kagan: There’s a combination it depends on the stage of where the company is at often you can come in there’s some kind of idea
I’ve come into a lot of startups who I would say they had some kind of idea of who their brand is there’s always the founder who came there and has the a vision for that brand and what the tone is and you do those exercises of understanding like If this company were a car what kind would they be?
Because they’re like thought provoking it’s not it just Give you an idea if there’s for some reason there are Volkswagen Beetle like a beetle versus Alexis or a Tesla then it tells you something very different and then you have to understand how the company right now at that current time is being perceived who is the audience that is trickling in and who’s coming in and then does that match the vision?
Of that company so if it doesn’t match the vision then it means that you need to completely change your brand story and that’s it’s not just okay we need a new website we need a new logo it’s really what are the words that we’re using? How are we communicating this message?
Who are we? So you try to understand what it is you want to accomplish? Who do you want to reach out? And what type what are your revenue targets as well with that audience? Yeah and then you go from there building it out what is your one line? One of the questions I always ask when I first come into a company is if you had to describe this product in one sentence how would you do it?
And most companies have a very big challenge doing this and so you’ll send out like a survey to all employees and a lot of people can’t do it or even had it what is your elevator pitch? How do you explain that? So you start developing that and then you start trying to understand what is your unique value proposition?
What’s your UVP? Then you break it down into per person is okay the here’s your personas which one is also within those teams who’s the influencer who’s the buyer who who’s the user? Because often those can all be different and then how do you communicate with them? What is the language that you’re going to use?
And then essentially create like a messaging matrix for all of them based on what are their challenges and then how are you going to address that with your product and what’s that language and that is distributed then to all the different departments so sales is also creating some collateral off of that
customer success can use that type of language
product understands that and they start using that type of language when they’re creating UX copy and then you’re all speaking that same language and also influences obviously the design as well so that’s all fabio the brand and the story
Ashley Segura: not going to lie when you said the one liner put it all in one sentence I got a little bit of anxiety because I was like okay how would I describe content? Yum in one sentence cause I feel like that’s that’s that above the fold homepage you got your heading and your subhead that is your opportunity
and that’s that big one liner opportunity and we’re constantly modifying that and I found that taking that and putting it into chat GBT and being like what do you think this company does based on this headline and subhead? And that response is always Oh man okay so we’re still not there yet or it’s still not really clear what we’re trying to say that we’re offering and then to have like actual clients or customers be like give them A preview of it and be like what do you get from this?
What do you think that this means? And then their perspective is totally different too so it’s definitely an evolving thing being able to come up with what your company’s one liner is but you’re so right once you have that everyone in the brand needs to be able to echo that message
Suzanne Kagan: yeah and it’s really hard to do
it’s really hard to communicate that messaging across the different departments and the trick is Even with ChatpGPT it also depends like too because ChatGPT can be a great or any type of LLM can be a great partner when you’re brainstorming but you need to still give it the context so that it is using the right brain to to communicate with
so it’s what I my trick for that is if I want to use it as like another marketing brand I tell it like you’re the world’s best marketer and we’re going to have a conversation yeah it’s like I inflate ChatGPT a little bit because it’s the same if you told that to somebody you’re talking to another market you are an amazing marketer
let’s have this conversation then they start thinking that way too yeah otherwise their brain is all scattered across every single thing that they know and they know a little bit of everything
Ashley Segura: yeah that’s a good point and with these LLMs that’s the biggest point is to be able to train them
and so here’s our brand’s initial story what kind of sales collateral would you do to support this initial story and ask it to be that best marketer in the world and go from there? Exactly
Suzanne Kagan: and it does it really helps it’s good but then you need to anything you get from TradCPT or any LLM then you need to validate it
so then you need to start reaching out to these audiences and say does this messaging resonate with you? Because I started having those conversations when I’ll go into a company and we’ll develop some messaging or we’ll have a new product feature released and before it goes live I’ll reach out to a prospective buyer somebody else or a friend who has that type of job title
and I’ll be like okay what does this sound like to you? And they’ll give you need to do it with people who you really trust and who won’t sugarcoat and they’ll just say I don’t get it or I do or that I don’t think this is for me but I think it’s for that audience and then it opens your mind
Ashley Segura: so aside from directly asking your audience how are you gathering data to support a story or to say that Hey this story is successful that we’re trying to put out into the world?
Suzanne Kagan: So there’s a lot of different ways you can do it I always test with ads first because it’s really easy and quick so I’ll create if I want to test out new messaging I might test it out if my audience is on LinkedIn I might test it on LinkedIn
if it’s on Facebook I’ll do it on Facebook or Instagram TikTok that’s one way I might test it out with the landing page especially too so you want to also connect that so landing pages are a little bit easier you can do it for one campaign you can set the specific budget that you want to have for that campaign and see is it resonating?
Ashley Segura: Is it working? Yeah how much are you spending to do something like that? Cause I could already hear the brands who are like we have small budgets or our budgets are barely getting through as they are there’s
Suzanne Kagan: always a tiny bit of budget it doesn’t have to be a lot really but I do believe that you should when you do create your marketing plan you should set aside a small percentage for those types of tests
there’s other different types of tools that you can use for example at Anyword one of the tools that we use it was like a website optimization so what it would actually do is you could put in four different messages and it would alternate them so I could do it for a period of let’s say a week and it would alternate different messaging and then I could see which one actually drove more conversions
Ashley Segura: that’s amazing that’s MailChimp and email providers A B testing subject lines or send out time exactly the
Suzanne Kagan: difference of this one is that you could do I could test out four different headlines at a time and often if you’re coming from a if you’ve been creating copy for a long time you have a pretty good idea
there’s some type of intuition you have an idea what will work and then you always are trying to back it up by data so this is a way to prove your hunches or disprove it
Ashley Segura: or disprove it exactly so especially with a creative writing background like you’re you have to have a little bit of a thick skin to consistently get feedback and especially in creative writing it’s people don’t always see your vision and with branding and marketing Storytelling in that like your consumers are not always seeing your vision let alone your head of marketing or your higher ups
they aren’t always seeing it so what do you do in those instances to where okay the data has come back? It’s not resonating people are not getting the message of this new piece of content are you going through and like just deleting things? Are you updating content? What’s usually your protocol once you get any kind of feedback that this isn’t working?
Suzanne Kagan: It’s always good to understand why something’s not working because there’s a lot of reasons why something might not work it could actually be the right message but it might not be the right time it might have been the right user it might not have been the right part of the funnel I find a lot of times that data can be very misleading
like it’s essential but it can be very misleading so you have to really understand what it is telling you because I I see all the time people tend to misinterpret data like they’ll say this campaign is working because people click here but then you go okay but how many conversions did you actually get from that?
Or did it end up having a conversions later? Or for example attribute your initial attribution will tell you like oh it’s not working because we have so much we have so much coming from Google or from which and then you find out later when you actually do self report attribution that no actually they sell you on a podcast so you know something didn’t work versus it’s just you have to continue to ask questions
not to be hostile like you can give it up you don’t have to but you should understand what does it mean that it didn’t work? What was the full context of that? And sometimes we find out that it actually was working it was just the wrong test
Ashley Segura: so basically come up with a story or identify the story that the data is telling of why it may have not worked and what you need to change
exactly and how often are you going through and looking at your analytics like now talking about just content in general and seeing what’s working? What’s not working? How often are you going in and checking your analytics to identify that?
Suzanne Kagan: So you have to do it at least on a weekly basis it depends
like I as a marketing leader when I have a team I do expect someone to be checking that sometimes even on a daily basis depending on what what they’re working if it’s a landing page and we’re spending budget on it then yeah I want to understand how that’s working and if there’s any problems because sometimes something’s not working let’s say your messaging isn’t working but for some reason the CPA button
wasn’t working or it went to the wrong place often there can be an ops issue instead of content issue so it’s always good to check whoever’s responsible are owning that piece of content it’s their job to then check is this working? If it’s not make sure and then if they’re seeing for example especially for PPC it’s or Facebook
if they’re saying okay I just spent a thousand dollars on this campaign and we didn’t see the results and you make optimizations quickly and then that also involves the content because everything is content you’re using content to support all the initiatives
Ashley Segura: yeah are you basically checking analytics to identify what went wrong?
Making those changes in real time giving it more time depending upon the campaign type and then utilizing that data for future content or it’s really just dependent upon the campaign any campaign that you do you
Suzanne Kagan: still need to have a postmortem and understand what worked or what didn’t work
and then you can learn from there if you’ve never done it before then this campaign is your benchmark so it’s helping you understand What does it mean works or not work? Then you go from there but it also depends on what the offer is or what change or if it’s the same demographic or if your product has evolved or you’re highlighting a specific feature
so it’s so dependent
Ashley Segura: yeah that makes a lot of sense do you have any advice for anyone who is coming from a I don’t know if you have a specific creative background whether it’s writing or arts and wants to get into marketing
Suzanne Kagan: sure
definitely use what you’ve learned if you’ve come from creative writing you have a leg up because a lot of people aren’t learning and don’t understand how to get into the head of a character or of a persona
use that and use those skills but I would also say in the same way that imagine that you’re writing dialogue for people love copy is that way so one of the tricks I do when I was writing copy or content is I would always read it aloud and if it sounded natural that was just a really easy way to gauge if this is good content bad content
and also take away the fact of quality writing for marketing is very different from quality writing for fiction or quality writing for creative nonfiction so it’s more about what actually works and what’s going to evoke and help somebody understand that you have a solution for them
so I think there you can use the idea of motivation and playing with emotions not playing but evoking emotion and so that’s a huge benefit the difference here is that with marketing everything is very intentional and goal oriented so you have a goal in mind you have to keep in mind you just need to make a mind shift that this isn’t about your feelings or having a message you want to get out to the world
that’s not what this is about it’s about understanding who your audience is what is the goal? Are you creating this content for brand awareness? Are you creating this content for acquisition conversion? Yeah and if you have that in mind if you understand what is the action you want them to take help them lead to that action
and also what is the channel? Because every channel requires a different type of content so just become an expert in understanding what is the type of content that’s popular there and also follow brands where you feel like they they have good engagement they there’s certain things that they’re doing
right
Ashley Segura: yeah that’s honestly fantastic advice for even marketers who are in marketing who need a small bit of a wake up call of this is how you really do it this is how you really create content that connects with your ICPs this is how you create ICPs this is The core of traditional marketing and what makes a great marketer from a marketer who is not a fly on the wall and who isn’t listening who isn’t on all these different platforms and identifying what the trends are how to shape that content and tell that story on Instagram versus telling it on your blog versus on your webinars
all very different versions of the same story
Suzanne Kagan: exactly it should all sound familiar it should all sound like your brand you should have an identity and a personality to your brand but I think one of the things is that you have to remember or someone who will come in is that if you’re working with one company that is always going to be that personality
unless they evolve to something else but their personality isn’t really going to change that tone of voice isn’t really going to change unless there’s like a complete rebrand or they’re in very early stages so you can just become an expert in that very quickly and I’ve seen some companies that they really some of their strongest marketing power was really trusted
amazing content with an amazing personality that just
Ashley Segura: an
Suzanne Kagan: audience and then that’s how your audience can fall in love with your product and your brand
Ashley Segura: yeah it reminds me of the early Wendy’s Twitter days and back when Chipotle had like a funny voice on there and people would literally connect with these brands specifically because
they thought it was funny they appreciated the humor and so they would choose those vendors versus other vendors and it’s that’s really when you’re in a really competitive niche it can be as small as that’s why they’re choosing you over the competitor
Suzanne Kagan: it’s true if they feel a personal connection to they will just choose it
if they people choose products that are likable
Ashley Segura: yes yes yeah they really do as we wrap up I definitely want to know what is your current secret sauce right now? What’s that strategy tip maybe a recent book that you read or webinar series? What’s your current secret sauce? My current secret sauce?
Suzanne Kagan: It’s actually pretty tricky
I think One of the things that I just do all the time is I always do a check in on LinkedIn so I have just found there’s so many great peers out there who are just sharing their advice all the time so my story Secret sauce which I don’t know who it is so basically I read through different LinkedIn posts from different thought leaders and leader doesn’t need to be somebody who has a hundred thousand followers
when I was when I was working for a company that had a very niche tech audience it would sometimes 3000 followers but they were this helped me understand that audience so well because I could understand what were they talking about? What are their pain points? What are the topics?
What do they care about? How do people engage? What are the types of images they’re posting in their content? So you can learn so much just from even micro influencers on LinkedIn And then where I do is I just post Save the post and then I have a reference for later to look back on
Ashley Segura: yeah saving the post is key because there’s so many times I’ll try and find it in my feed like where was that post from three days ago?
It’s gone forever thank you so much for being on the show and for everything you shared today this has been so good
Suzanne Kagan: it’s it was really great for having me
