Mind and Machine: Two Different Paths to Marketing Mastery

The Gist

• Human touch. Emphasizing emotional connections in B2B marketing can enhance customer relations and engagement.
• Strategic AI. Integrating AI in marketing should enhance, not replace, the human element.
• Media trust. Establishing an in-house media presence can significantly boost credibility and trust within an industry.

Episode Highlights

• Humanize B2B marketing, where business customers are treated as individuals. Emphasize the emotional aspects of B2B interactions to enhance marketing campaigns, making them more relatable and effective.
• AI should be used to enhance rather than replace the human element in marketing. By leveraging AI for personalization and efficiency, technology can support human-centric marketing strategies.
• In-house media platforms build trust and authority in specialized fields like cybersecurity. Creating a separate news entity within a company provides unbiased, valuable information that establishes the company as a trusted authority.
• AI tools boost marketing team productivity and creativity, enabling more extensive campaign outputs. The use of AI in daily marketing operations can enhance the capabilities of small teams, making them more productive and versatile.
• Address team concerns and organizational culture changes when adopting new technologies. Companies can mitigate fears around AI by positioning it as a tool that complements human skills rather than replacing them.
• Balancing immediate marketing tactics with strategies that build long-term brand value. There’s a need for a strategic focus on brand sustainability over just achieving short-term goals.
• Identify and capitalize on unique opportunities in platforms like YouTube for B2B marketing. Marketers should look beyond conventional strategies and find “white spaces” that offer long-term advantages in brand positioning and audience engagement.

Editor's note: This podcast transcript was edited for clarity.

Michelle Hawley: Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of “CX Decoded,” your source for the latest trends, insights and advice in the world of customer service and contact centers.

I'm Michelle Hawley, your host and senior editor at CMSWire, and today we have an exciting show lined up for you.

We’re going to explore two different paths to marketing success with two of today’s top marketing leaders.

We’ve pulled together some of the best takeaways from our interviews on CMSWire’s TV show, "The CMO Circle". In just a little bit, we’re going to hear from Karna Crawford, chief marketing officer at Marqeta, and Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Recorded Future.

Both of these experts bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the realm of marketing, and they have a lot to share about their own strategies.

Let’s hop right in and get to some of these big insights.

Takeaway Number 1: Humanizing Business-to-Business Marketing

In the world of B2B, it’s easy to think of businesses as just that — businesses. But Karna talks about how important it is to go behind the scenes and treat your business customers like people. And that means tapping into the emotional side of marketing.

In today’s world, where technology and data often dominate the conversation, Karna’s perspective is refreshingly human.

Karna Crawford: There's this opportunity to think about customers like people, not just companies buying technology, and therefore be able to tap into this marriage of data and insights and technology while also having a conversation that's tapping into emotional connections for them. And obviously how you emotionally connect with someone as a business person may be different than, Michelle, how I would connect with you if I was trying to sell you a Coca-Cola.

Michelle: Karna talks about something really important here — the need to create marketing that resonates on a personal level, even in a business context.

How does it work? It means understanding the emotional aspects that tie into business decisions, and then using the technology we have on hand to enhance those connections. If we can address those emotional needs, we can foster deeper connections.

By recognizing that business buyers are also people with emotions and personal experiences and frustrations and pain points, marketers can create more compelling and effective campaigns.

Related Article: B2B Marketing Strategies: Today's Playbook Defined

Takeaway Number 2: Prioritizing Humanity in Day-to-Day Processes

Michelle: Let’s keep building on this theme of humanizing B2B marketing, because it’s an important one. It’s one thing to talk about humanizing marketing, but what does that look like in practice?

Karna talks about just that, giving us an inside look at how that philosophy translates into day-to-day processes at Marqeta.

Karna Crawford: An example of this shift that we've been embarking on is a campaign that we have live right now that's called Grow Together. And in this campaign, we're tapping into an insight around how important and critical it is for growth and fintech companies to know that their partner is not only going to serve their needs today, but is actually going to be a thought partner and a leader that can help them grow to the next level.

Michelle: By focusing on growth and partnership, Marqeta aims to build deeper connections with its customers, which involves using insights from social listening and data analysis to understand customer needs and sentiments better. The campaign uses generative AI to create tailored messages and content that speak directly to these insights.

Karna Crawford: We used this as a great opportunity to leverage generative AI to hone how we could get tighter and tighter on how we use that insight. And then also to develop a rich suite of creative assets that have variations based on who they're going to go to that we wouldn't have been able to do at the same scale if we didn't have the AI technology to help power speeding up our productivity.

Michelle: By integrating AI in a way that supports and enhances human connection, Marqeta has seen some promising results when it comes to engagement and customer feedback. Not only does this approach personalize the customer experience, it also helps scale marketing efforts.

Takeaway Number 3: Balancing Humanity and AI

Michelle: AI. You can’t escape it even if you try. So how do you make it work for you?

Our third takeaway is all about the balancing act between AI and maintaining that human touch. Karna talks about how she uses AI for her marketing efforts without losing the human element.

Karna Crawford: I think the first thing is for us as marketers is not to think about these things as at odds with each other, technology versus humanity, and make sure the way that we are approaching technology is technology as an enabler of us bringing humanity into what we do..

If we use that as the starting place of our mentality, it allows us to make sure that the way we're leveraging that technology is through the lens of: How can it help me scale? How can it help me personalize? How can it help me measure whether or not I'm doing that effectively? As opposed to sitting behind the technology and letting technology be the face and the voice and make all of the decisions without any human touch to it.

When you let that happen, and then when you don't have your team consciously always thinking about it through the lens of your customer as a human, how are you impacting a human? That's when technology becomes this benign thing and you lose that touch. But if the foundation of your marketing strategy and philosophy is customer first, customer sentiment, customer need, then technology becomes a tool to support that as opposed to the replacement of it, I think.

Michelle: Karna’s point? Technology should support and amplify human-centric marketing strategies rather than replace the human touch.

At Marqeta, they use AI to analyze customer data and social media trends to create personalized marketing messages that resonate on an emotional level. 

So the technology aspect is there. It has to be. But it can enhance marketing efforts while still ensuring the human element stays at the forefront. AI can automate and streamline processes, but the core message and engagement with customers remains personal and human.

Related Article: Why Human-Centered AI Is a Winning Strategy

Takeaway Number 4: Challenges in Operationalizing AI

Michelle: Implementing AI in marketing isn’t a simple task. Karna talks about the difficulties they’ve encountered at Marqeta and how she’s tackled them. Can you guess what the number one challenge is?

Karna Crawford:  I think the place where I have run into the greatest challenges is, as I start to engage on this, helping my team not feel threatened by it and see it as a powerful liberator for them and enhancer of what they do versus being afraid of it marginalizing them. And so I've spent a lot of time helping my team see how we should think about AI in marketing as our scaler.

We have a small team. We invest in a very modest way and we have to make every dollar count out of it. So don't think of it as what it's going to do that you no longer will need to, and instead think of it as: How does it become my team? I only had headcount for one designer, for instance, but all of a sudden through this, that one designer might equal three or four. And so helping my team see it through that light of how it is their supporter as opposed to thinking of it as their competition.

Michelle: Fear around AI, and AI taking our jobs. It’s a big topic of conversation. And Karna highlights just how important it is to reassure your team and listen to their concerns.

AI doesn’t have to be a threat. Instead, at Marqeta, Karna encourages her team to see AI as a tool that can enhance their efforts, capabilities and productivity. And those conversations, which should be ongoing to address concerns and talk about the benefits of AI, need to go hand-in-hand with a larger cultural shift within the organization.

Takeaway Number 5: Building Trust With In-House Media

Michelle: Tom Wentworth from Recorded Future has some big ideas about marketing — and they might be a little different than what you’re used to hearing. His big focus? Building trust with an in-house media company — something that he’s used to build credibility in the cybersecurity space.

Tom Wentworth: Bloomberg is most well-known for their news organization, Bloomberg News. And we thought, well, why don't we sort of build our own news organization as a way to build trust with our audience? And if we did this, and if we're able to successfully do this, we can start really building a relationship that would be almost impossible for anyone else to replicate.

Michelle: Tom’s approach with their media company, Recorded Future News, has allowed his company to provide valuable, unbiased news, with almost no topics off-limits. The result? Trust and strong relationships with their audience. It’s an initiative that’s helped Recorded Future differentiate itself from competitors and position itself as a trusted authority in the cybersecurity industry.

Let’s listen to Tom talk a little bit more about how this in-house media initiative started and the steps they took to build it from the ground up.

Tom Wentworth: So the whole genesis of this was there's just so much happening in cyber and there are so many interesting stories that just weren't being told. So we said, why don't we just go out and hire our own reporters and go do this? And this wasn't ever meant to be a marketing investment. This organization we call Recorded Future News does report into me technically, but I don't think of them as marketers, we don't involve them in team meetings, like they don't think of themselves as marketers at all. They have their own separate entity actually, at Recorded Future.

Michelle: Maintaining this journalistic integrity, keeping the news separate from the business, is what Tom credits to the organization’s success.

He hired real, experienced reports and allowed them the freedom to cover relevant topics without marketing interference. And the result is a credible news organization that the company’s audience can turn to for relevant information they can trust.

Tom’s commitment to maintaining journalistic integrity within Recorded Future News has been key to its success. By hiring experienced reporters and allowing them the freedom to cover relevant topics without marketing interference, Recorded Future has built a credible news source that its audience trusts. And trust.  And that trust translates into a whole lot of benefits for the business side of the brand as well.

Related Article: Customer Trust: The Backbone of Digital Age

Takeaway Number 6: The Power of Long-Term Brand Building

Michelle: Another big focus for Tom is the importance of balancing short-term marketing tactics with long-term brand building. He even gave us some insight into his past mistakes and the lessons he learned from focusing too much on short-term gains.

Tom Wentworth: So I worked with a company called Acquia, in the CMO role, about 10 years ago. And love Acquia to death, great experience. I made the tragic mistake of just only committing to hitting the number in the short terms. Every quarter, me and our head of sales would sit down and we would, you know, wonder why we weren't hitting our numbers or why we weren't growing faster.

So I spent all my time and all my budget doing things that would help us hit the number this quarter. I didn't think for a moment about, well, how do I build a better brand for Acquia? How do I think about getting Acquia in front of the kind of people who think about Adobe? Our biggest competitor was Adobe. Everybody knows Adobe. No one, relatively speaking, knew about Acquia. And I never spent a minute thinking about how to solve that problem.

Had I spent time thinking about how to do something there, I think Acquia would have gone public and would have been maybe, you know, even bigger than they are now. And it was the biggest mistake I've made in my career by far.

Michelle: Tom’s point? CMOs need to invest time and resources into long-term strategies that build a sustainable brand — rather than over-focusing on getting those immediate results. So how does he do that at Recorded Future?

Tom Wentworth: I think about two-thirds of my time should be spent thinking about how I'm going to help this company hit our quarter, hit our number this quarter and maybe next quarter, in 2024. But about a third of my time is spent thinking about what are things I can do in marketing that are going to have an unfair advantage over multiple years. It takes a lot of discipline to do that.

Michelle: Tom’s approach involves spending a big portion of his time on strategies that will provide long-term benefits, even if they don’t show immediate or even easily measurable results. But ultimately, this kind of long-term perspective is what you need to build a strong, sustainable brand.

Takeaway Number 7: How to Leverage Podcasts for Brand Engagement

Michelle: In addition to its news site, Recorded Future has also ventured into the podcast space. Tom talks about moving away from the norm with its narrative-style podcast and how it complements their overall media strategy and further engages their audience.

Tom Wentworth: We decided to build sort of a narrative documentary style podcast. And to do that is hard because you have to have a showrunner, you have to write a script, you have to set up interviews, you have to do a different level of production on it. So in order for us to do this, we went on and hired a real legit podcaster. We went on and hired Dina Temple-Raston, who was a very well-known podcaster on NPR. She has a voice like an angel. Not only is she a brilliant storyteller, but she just sounds like a podcaster. It's incredible how good she is.

And we gave Dina a production team. She brought over some of her team from NPR and we now have built, so we call this podcast Click Here. And it isn't just this interview every week. It's these real cool stories. Like Dina, her team flew into Ukraine right after the war and sat down on the ground level to figure out what's happening and did some incredible reporting.

Michelle: And Tom’s commitment to high-quality production — and a little bit of risk-taking — paid off, with their podcast achieving some significant success and recognition in the tech news category.

Tom Wentworth: Now this podcast has become, we're in the tech news category. And it's essentially every week like Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Recorded Future.

We're in the top 10 of this tech news category and getting over a million downloads a year at this point and growing. It's been an incredible success.

Michelle: With this investment in high-quality content that resonates with their audience, Recorded Future not only has another avenue to engage their audience, but it also reinforces the brand’s credibility, authority and trust in the cybersecurity space.

Related Article: Seamless Omnichannel Strategy: Best Practices for Customer Engagement

Takeaway Number 8: Finding White Space in the Marketing World

Michelle: What does that mean exactly? According to Tom, it’s identifying those opportunities that other marketers are missing out on and committing to them for the long-term.

Tom Wentworth: I think in some ways, marketing is like this game of arbitrage where you're always trying to find the white space to go where no one else is, but the natural tendency is just to follow the crowd.

Like my competitor is on TikTok, so I should be on TikTok. If you do that, you're going to fail without a doubt. Don't do that. So I think the first thing is to start to find things that you can do uniquely and own and commit to over a long period of time. Because if you go do that thing for three months, it's going to fail. If we had looked at the Record, our news site after three months, we would have cut it. It would have had 10,000 views a month. Terrible, right? We just hadn't built an audience yet. It took us a year to really start to see the results of building an audience.

Michelle: It’s all about being unique, taking risks and sticking with it. And here we go back to those short-term vs. long-term marketing tactics. You can’t pick an objective and stick with it for a couple of months and then throw in the towel if you’re not seeing instant results. Sometimes, big successes require big time investments.

Tom even offers up a suggestion for where he’s seeing a lot of white space right now — YouTube for B2B.

Tom Wentworth: I think YouTube for B2B has this massive white space. What's great about YouTube is the algorithm prioritizes stuff you like. So if YouTube knows you like B2B and you're a B2B publisher putting content out on YouTube, I think the algorithm could direct a ton of content to you.

Michelle: Owning the white space is hard. But as Tom has shown us, if you stick with it, it can pay off big time.

That’s All We Have for Today…

Michelle: We’ve covered some amazing insights from Karna and Tom — two very different yet successful paths in marketing.

These different paths show that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach in the world of marketing. Instead, it’s about finding what resonates best with your audience and staying committed to your strategy.

A big thank you to Karna Crawford and Tom Wentworth for sharing their invaluable insights, and a big thank you to you for tuning into CX Decoded.

Stay tuned for more discussions on the cutting edge of customer service and marketing. Until next time, I’m Michelle Hawley, signing off. 

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