TOP CMO: Kirsten Markson, Keap - 'Unlocking the Power of Data-Driven Storytelling'

Kirsten Markson  0:00  

We use music and really different creative copy and data that told that story of how it feels when you get this locked in for your business.

Ben Kaplan  0:08  

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This is top cmo with me, Ben Kaplan. today I'm chatting with Kirsten markson CMO at Keap. That's the CRM and marketing automation company that you might know by its prior brand name, Infusionsoft. Houston's career started in market research. I love that creating a lifelong passion for data and how it can be used for positive change. Kiersten loves thinking about how marketing teams can be most effective, even during a looming recession. And she does that by focusing specifically on how to reduce friction with customers and feeding your content engine to train customers to self serve. So how can you use data to tell a story there's anything but boring, let's find out with Kyrsten markson.

One of the things that you've spoken about which fits your background is understanding your customer really, really well. And how understanding their journey and their touch points, which a lot of times we do as marketers, but understanding that a deeper level, a lot of marketing flows from that. So what do you mean by that?

Kirsten Markson  1:40  

Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me, it's wonderful to be here. This is a topic that I care a lot about, I think marketers have to be experts in their customers understand them deeply kind of what their day to day looks like. And how to do that. In my experience. I've done both big kind of expensive version, which is formal research, asking them at scale, doing large scale segmentation, surveys, things like that. And then my background, I've kind of developed those and, and done the research piece of that and kind of tie that to strategy. But there's also very grassroots ways that you can do that, that don't cost anything that include you know, just calling up your customers listening to sales calls, listening to Customer Success calls, looking at all of the kind of information that is coming in from your customers, what they're asking for what they're struggling with, and then trying to be in the places that they're that they spend time. So they're they're forums where they spend time places online, really getting to know them through talking to them to looking how they behave in those spaces. What are they talking about? What are the hot topics? What are they challenged by all of that is really important to then craft your strategy to understand what should we be talking about, you know, what part of this conversation Do we can we add to what pain points can we solve? So in our executive team, we recently did a customer empathy project where we were assigned a customer that was going through onboarding, we had regular kind of meetings with that person. And this is very one to one. So that can be dangerous, because you get, you know, one perspective that can overweigh other things. But it was really interesting to do that as an executive team, because unlocked just a really great conversation about the gaps in the customer journey. So So I think research can be kind of at scale and can be formal, but it can also be kind of an ongoing thing that you do by touching in with customers by talking to the folks who are customer facing every day, and being kind of where they are online and understanding what the you know what, what they're thinking about all day, because that's what's going to fuel the creativity to think of, you know, the campaign's the content, the things that are going to speak to them and the language that they use.

Ben Kaplan  3:36  

And what is your opinion, I think in terms of trends in market research, we're at top, we're a full service market research agency, primary and market research agency. Also, I think there's two maybe bigger trends, and I'd love to get your perspective on and how it sort of impacts understanding the customer. So one is that smaller, more bite sized market research, right, like more pulse things in the moment, we're gonna do smaller chunks as opposed to the big monolithic annual study. And then two would be continuous research that actually you're doing this all the time, because you're tracking over time, let's say with a panel, what's your brand awareness? Where do your competitors stand relative to you? So when you think about understanding the customer, do you try to think about smaller bite sized pieces? Do you think about more continuous always on tight market research?

Kirsten Markson  4:20  

We think about both and so we have different ways that we accomplish both one probably more formal than other but there's kind of a blend of informal approaches there. So in terms of poll questions and surveys, like we do have things we put into the product, little questions that we ask or out in social media various ways to get a pulse on what people are thinking or customers are thinking or audiences thinking so that is, that's something that we do as well as ongoing interviews. So we have a dedicated customer kind of in competitive intelligence person who's doing interviews constantly kind of in the background, asking questions, getting feedback from you know, qualitative conversations and sharing that in a in a monthly review or in the moment reviews with our marketing team. So We do try to capture those things in terms of continuous research. And most people kind of accomplish that with an ongoing panel or community. We don't have anything formal like that. But we do constantly track kind of what folks are talking about in the communities that we do own as well as our partner community. So we sell our direct sales, as well as our partner community. And those are people that are extremely helpful for understanding customer challenges as well, because they are out talking to people every day. So we do do research with them, we get input from them and do kind of questions to them to get feedback on what their customers are saying to them what challenges they have. So we have different ways to do that. But I do think it's much it's incredibly important to have an ongoing kind of flow of insights coming in, whether that's research that NPS data, other kind of data that you're collecting in various ways that you check in with regularly versus the monolithic, you know, annual study that that tells you what point in time, but maybe, you know, not kind of help you formulate answers as you go because the questions change as you go and what you need to understand changes. So I think there's a formal conversations or just interviews or outreach or survey questions that you can put out there in very cheap, scalable ways and get really good insight into what people are thinking.

Ben Kaplan  6:11  

At top agency, we're believers in snackable content. That's the process of making content creation more efficient, effective and scalable, by first creating your most important original material, and then distilling derivative content from it. So first, we make pillar content for our clients. That's content like a data report, a long form article, or even a podcast episode. Then, based on that pillar content, we make macro micro and nano content, macro content, or additional major pieces of content that amplify key ideas. micro content is a creative mashup recut for new platforms at audiences, nantel content that's bite sized pieces that are reinvented and reimagined for more engagements. And here's the kicker, we might assign individual content items to be attributed to different marketing channels, platforms, or members of accompany C suite leadership team. The result is not only that we can make content faster, making it less expensive for our clients. But we can also stay more on message for what really drives perception of their brands. And in terms of like the background in the evolution of the company key previously was called Infusionsoft Infusionsoft was pretty well known marketing automation software with a sort of a small business bent to it small to medium sized business. But some people were sort of cult supporters of it or used it and then told other people about it. As you evolve, you change the name to keep you went from more of a marketing automation positioning as I understand it to more of a CRM for everyone. And since you've revised that, so take us through what has been like which even maybe predates you as well, the sort of journey and evolution to that. And what that means for understanding the customer. Now, when a lot of companies we talk to are always kind of going up market where they're always I'm trying to get to the enterprise customer, they pay a lot, you lock them in, they don't change providers quite as much you keep the opposite structure, which is let's go down market and then you revise that talk about that and understanding your customer and which customer you're actually targeting.

Kirsten Markson  8:17  

Yeah, this does predate me quite a bit. The brand changed over three or four years ago. So every went through evolutions, which I think made it harder First, keep by Infusionsoft. So it's kind of both and and then fully evolved into key over time. And the goal was to have a product that could get could serve more people expand the addressable market was true, Infusionsoft had a very dedicated loyal group of users, there was a lot of passion around it, but it had kind of a reputation for being challenging to use. And so there was the goal for the new product. So it's not just a change in brand, but there was actually a new product developed and is key, which is much easier to use. It has a very beautiful, easy to use interface. The goal was to make the process of building automation and sales and marketing automation and CRM just so much easier for small businesses, because the Infusionsoft product did require a very steep onboarding. It required a lot of kind of usage to get into the flow. And so the recognition of that was to try to build something that was easier that everyone could use. So that was the goal in developing both the brand and the product that you would have different levels of product for different types of users, very small businesses could use keep people who are less familiar with sales and marketing automation could use key and then you would have the Infusionsoft product for the sales and marketing automation experts. The traditional kind of Infusionsoft user could keep doing that. And right now we're still evolving both sides of that. So there there are product levels and Infusionsoft still exists in our product line. And it's being worked on and improved. But we do we do have different types of users to kind of track to that based on their sales and marketing expertise and in their use cases. So where are they fit in which one they should use but because we have both and ended, the rebranding, I think was challenging because it wasn't a full scale flip to keep. It's evolved over time. So now we do business as keep exclusively and we really are embracing that. But our user is very similar to the Infusionsoft user, right, our ideal user, somebody who understands sales and marketing automation is going to get the most out of the product, but the keep the lowest level of the product would just keep have a lot of automations built in. So even somebody who is less familiar will, will be able to do this. And they may have less complex automations. But they won't have, you know, they have kind of pre built things they can use to get the common use cases done and in a very easy to use format.

Ben Kaplan  10:41  

So how does this all impact then? A little bit more of a flow burn? Or an or an evolution rather than revolution? Or flip a switch? How does that impact now your marketing? Do you think about industry verticals that you're marketing to? Do you think about use cases that transcend industry that are common? Do you start structuring your campaigns around there? Or do you take an approach, that's where a platform, you can find what you want in it? And so, you know, we can kind of do all things or do you find you have to focus down to show people how it matches their need.

Kirsten Markson  11:15  

So we do both, we try to have both running, we have the kind of overall brand platform kind of advertising and content that that is more of what applies to everybody. And there is a lot that is very similar in in people's use cases. And you can imagine, there's just things that everybody kind of needs to do to ensure that their follow up is automated, that they get back to customers, they have regular communications that go out that are despite, you know, that exist, despite the type of business but we also have see that when people go out to search for a solution like this, they are often searching with industry, kind of vertical keywords are looking for solutions. And the number one question that customers tend to have is, you know, what are people like me doing what is important to a business like mine? What do I need to build first, what should I consider one of the best practices and they really do think about it in the in the context of their their business, their use case. And so we do have, you know, built out these these kind of vertical or industry kind of pathways where people can learn about the software through organic search, or even advertising programs that are customized to the type of business that they run. So we we kind of have both, but we've tried to create entry points to learn about the brand, based on how someone's searching so that they will get to us either way. But the vertical pieces are important because they do want to see customer stories about customers or people that are like them business owners that are like them, and understand what they did very specifically. So when they go from the marketing into their onboarding and coaching, they get very specific kind of, you know, use case playbooks that are specific to their industry and there is overlap. But there are nuances there that we know very well, having been in this space for so long that we really want to elevate in the bargaining that wasn't there previously, but during my tenure, we have created those entry points, because we just know that that's something that people are interested in. So we try to do both.

Ben Kaplan  13:01  

So what you're saying to paraphrase is that you have your own vision of what entry points might be, but you can't even if you like, let's say want to elevate the brand to hear elevate understanding, if people are searching for it in this way, you have to go where they're searching, you can't totally divorce yourself of that. Because if they think of you of like, I'm looking at marketing automation for acts or CRM for why and you just need to show up, you have to sort of in some ways, respect the user, respect the customer, and not just ignore that this is what they're looking for, even if you want to elevate this to something else in terms of your overall brand or market.

Kirsten Markson  13:33  

Yeah. So swimming against the tide, on that, I think making things harder for us. And we have great stories that are industry specific. So creating those options for people that if they can, you know, they want they are searching that way, we just know that from the volume and the research that we've done. So how do we recapture that interest? How do we, you know, elevate what they're thinking about and show them based on the way they're, they're thinking about it someone like me, this is what success could look like, these are the things that you should be thinking about. And there are nuances in what you know, different types of businesses call things and use different terms. They have different areas of focus sometimes. So although the use cases are really common across, you know, any kind of business, there are nuances there. So I absolutely agree like meeting people where they're at is important, because that's how they're they're telling us in the data that that's how they're they're looking. And you're a

Ben Kaplan  14:23  

b2b business, but your democratic one, you're an accessible one, you want to have a wide base. So how do you do it? Here's a question that is often asked of us, too, which is how do you do b2b marketing that isn't boring? How do you do it where it's not, you know, you just become a set of features, particularly if you're SAS or Software as a Service software, you're used to having like the page where it's like, here's all the checkboxes of things we do. Here's our competitors usually do it a little bit self serving, right, your competitors have blanks on there as you have a lot of check boxes on yours and you leave off the one competitor that had more stuff than you from Matrix right or something like that. So if it's gonna come down to that, but you want to make this less boring and infuse some energy into this, how do you think about it? How do you approach

Kirsten Markson  15:09  

it? Yeah, well, I think there's a few things that are important to think about the people who are making these decisions are people with emotions, so you want to tap into those emotions, they respond to beautiful creative approaches. So we want our stuff to look good. We want it to differentiate and what they're seeing, when we look across b2b advertising, there's often really, you know, everything kind of can look the same. So you don't want to blend in you want to stand out. And so I give the team a lot of kind of creative time to think about how do we do that, effectively, that tells a story of the brand. But I think, you know, people are not just making decisions based on a feature matrix that are super logical, even in enterprises, it's about how does this brand make you feel? Do you feel seen? Do you feel excited about being part of a community? Does it feel like you as the personality of the brand, what is it adding to your life, so all of those things, as humans go out into the world, I believe, make those decisions not based on extremely detailed feature metric matrices at the top end, maybe we get to that point, as we go through that journey, that we do need to check the boxes, we are absolutely looking at that. But there is an emotional connection that has to happen before that, to get people excited about the brand and get people excited about what you're doing. So that that is an important part of things, how we try to make it less boring, we try a lot of different things. And what we're trying to tap into is the feeling of excitement of peace and calm sometimes of when your business is running on autopilot. And you can do what you're really excited about doing and not worry that your customers are being left out in the cold that you're not getting back to them, that you you have things running on automations it is a very empowering feeling. And that's what the brand stands for. So we have tried some really interesting things to try to communicate that we had a silly ad that had a cat with sunglasses with that, you know, that feeling of like, you know, kind of when your stuff is working, that sense of satisfaction when you can build an automation and you can see those results come in. It's a really cool feeling. And so we use music and and really different creative and coffee that that told that story of how it feels when you get this, this locked in for your business. And that was just an entry point. And it worked pretty well. But we are trying a lot of different approaches some that are more kind of the vanilla, we have the ongoing programs that run evergreen, that that are much more about the feature set, we try to make those as attractive as possible, we're really lucky that our, our interface of our product is very pretty. And those ads tend to do better than even faces. So we use a lot of customer stories and, and images of people small business owners but But ultimately, the UI of the product is what works best in our research in our in our testing that we've done. But we are trying to do more creative things we have had. We have quarterly campaigns that are the ones where we take more of a a little bit of creative flyer sometimes to do something different. We had a big campaign that was a entrepreneur superhero. So what flavor of entrepreneur Are you? And what what how does that? How do you build a team that matches your strengths? And we use a comic book kind of look and feel that looked really differentiated and was a way to capture information about our prospects, but also give them information about kind of this is the type of thing that you need in your business. Here's your superpower, but also your weakness, how do you hire people that are going to complement that? How do you think about marketing what's most important to you? So that was a fun campaign that was pretty different. And it did do those work. But the Evergreen kind of feature based ones we have to run at the same time, because we want people to see both sides.

Ben Kaplan  18:41  

The reason why people think b2b marketing has to be boring, is because they think there are certain table stakes and their industry, there are certain things everyone has to do to be in the game. While you might have those items on your checklist to the way in which you do them can be highly creative, and differentiated. Try this thought experiment. Make a list of three priority items for your industry marketing program, then annotate your list the things you're expected to do for each. Instead of just doing them ask yourself, Why am I doing them? Is there another way that I can deliver the why without doing what has always been done? The Power of Emotions and b2b marketing is underrated. Because of the fact that even on very technical topics, I would view like emotions as kind of like a shortcut to a place meaning you know if we all had unlimited time, and we were all doing like our super due diligence to go through and do everything we'd go through this like your 20 point checklist of things and research all that but most of us don't have time. So we use different queues and other things as a shorthand as a shortcut. So we say, Okay, well like is this product built for my use case, but I need you might look at a few things. You might say like, oh, do they kind of get the struggle I'm going through, they get what I'm feeling they understand this. So because they understand me, they probably built it for my use case where then you go through and you say, like, does it have, you know, this particular feature? Well, it might have it, but you're not sure if it's good or not. But it's like, oh, they understand me again, or they actually understand what's the need for this in a deeper way more than other people I can understand or I don't want to, you know, spend all my time having to learn how to use this product. So you take other cues for that. So I almost view emotions, and how we communicate as a shortcut to a destination. If they're really committed, they can go through all 20 points to get there. But if you want to get them there and two moves, you use emotions to do that.

Kirsten Markson  20:41  

Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do in different ways, that kind of feeling of, I see, do they see me they understand what I need, some of the campaigns are more focused on that. And then some are more focused on the emotion specifically of how it feels when you achieve these things, your business, that sense of pride is so it's just so important and in what people are striving for when they are working on their business, those moments of celebration that you have conquered something that seemed really hard, and that you didn't know that you can do but where your partner in that because we will help you we have the background. So that kind of coach voice to that comes out in the creative as much as we can. How does this reflect

Ben Kaplan  21:15  

unpaid channels? It's a time now companies are trying to do more with less doing really compelling, thoughtful, if it's earned media, if it's organic media, whether that's digital or non digital, how are you thinking about? How does that message come through? How do you try to do more with less even at a time of budget cuts,

Kirsten Markson  21:33  

when we build something, we get the most out of it. So we are trying to use things across channels and use content. So we have, you know, a set of content creators, but we also have people in the company who are experts in different things. So we are trying to extract as much as we can, from all of those different experts to create content that we can use in those organic channels, whether it's social media, whether it's, you know, our website, we have a partner base that is really passionate and experienced and has tons of insight. So we are we're tapping into everybody in our kind of world that we can feature including customers partners, in our events and our content in our organic channels. So we're trying to kind of tap into everything we can and then everything we create, try to distribute it in a way, whether we were cutting it, where we're using it in different ways that we get the maximum value out of what we have put into it and creating the plan for that upfront because we have more limited resources. And you don't want to create something that just goes in. You know, we've all been in probably marketing teams that spent a lot of effort on something that didn't get seen by that many people. So when we want to get as many eyeballs on things as we can and reuse things we do much we think about planning from an integrated way across channels. And we're thinking about distribution of what we produce to make sure that it's going to pay off if we're going to invest a lot of time into it. So that's how I would say we were thinking about it, we're experimenting on social media, including Tik Tok, how can we create content that short form, so there was a lot more long form video that was were produced that he made, and we're shifting to, you know, authentic, short form, quick hit of inspiration and education, because that's how people are consuming media. So trying to use our resources that we have in different ways to meet the moment and learning as we go. So looking at how things perform and trying to really understand how can we get more out of what we're producing at all times,

Ben Kaplan  23:26  

we have a method we call it snackable content, what it means is you start with pillar content, which is like your your most important content. And then from that you derive macro, micro and nano content from which doesn't just mean smaller pieces, it also means focusing on a new angle focusing on a new way. So maybe your pillar content is a data study that's looking at how changing behaviors and how people use marketing automation tools. But maybe there's one little insight from that that becomes its own thing. That's not even the main point of that data study. But it has its own little audience that's separate for this use case or industry. So we find it's one a lot more efficient to create it, but then to it makes you more on message because you base it more on the pillar content.

Kirsten Markson  24:11  

Yep. And I think we do something similar. In we have a very successful campaign that was kind of accidentally produced from some segmentation research that we did that was about very thing, suddenly, we had our own data that we could pair with other things to create an ebook that also went into kind of Bite Size advertising, that's also feeding an ROI calculator now that we have some more data to base that on. So there's a lot of kind of things that can come out of content that you get the most out of it that may have not been part of the plan intentionally. So even your your framework, we ended up with pillar content where we had originally kind of planned on a more internal usage, but we realized that we had the bones of something that had a lot of interest externally. So turn that into more extracted some of it to turn into a Trends report that then fed different advertising and content programs and then also using that data I work with other data we have from our own product usage data to tell even kind of other smaller stories about how people are succeeding when they use sales and marketing automation and what to expect in terms of kind of benchmarks and things like that. So we didn't have as much of a framework sometimes, but we take advantage when things start to evolve to that look like they're going to be interesting and try to make the most out of it.

Ben Kaplan  25:24  

I think the biggest misconception about using data in your marketing, especially for external use, is that it's really just an analytical exercise. Power of data is actually in the storytelling process. It's the fuel for the story you're trying to tell, because it helps reassure your audience that the story is real, and authentic. And if you have valuable data, which isn't necessarily easy to come by, your story is more valuable, and your brand or your thought leadership position is more valuable to by extension. And this idea of using market research for external marketing purposes, in my mind, having a valuable data is like writing a book 10 years ago, honestly, from someone who in practice, I was an author, right? Like if you want to be a thought leader, go write a book 10 years ago, now, you might not want to take the time to write the book and a year to publish it. And all these things, valuable data makes you valuable. So what was the insight you had, that you realized we'd have a bigger life and could feel all these other things externally?

Kirsten Markson  26:38  

Yeah. So I think we asked questions about how people felt about their marketing what was easy or challenging, you know, what their budget were. So we have people who are customers, but also panel. So you have a pretty broad swath of people that we're giving small business owners to who were essentially answering the question that we know is top of mind as people go through this process of, you know, what should I be investing in most of our customers are our people who have to do marketing for their business, they're not necessarily marketers, or they have to hire a marketer, but they have to get educated about, you know, how should I be thinking about this as an, you know, as an expense for my business, I have to decide what strategies to use. So we have a lot of data about how people thought about that, what they found easy or challenging how they selected tools and strategies. So that became the bones of then, kind of here's here are the trends and where people are investing. Here's what people typically do when they think about which types of tools they need, and when to when to hire or when to add a tool, those types of questions. So it was really just data that we could use to talk about how small businesses were making decisions about marketing and answer that question again, of like, what are people out there doing? And how can I learn from them? And think about my own programs? And when where should I be investing? What should I be thinking about? So we had some some good data that we were using just planning to use internally, once we saw that what we had it made sense to repurpose it into more external facing, and then we can pair it with some product data, seeing what you know, what were the common plays that people were creating in terms of automation? So we could talk about what are the common strategies that are being used that work best? What is a company that's growing and scaling? doing that? How can we reverse engineer that and tell that story to about so we can create that kind of expectation of this is what you should be doing? If you want to grow your business and the year ahead?

Ben Kaplan  28:23  

Marketing is a big job. Being a CMO is a big job, what are the things that you're not doing now that you'd like to be doing or that you wish you're doing what's on the roadmap for things that you need to build out in the next one to three years,

Kirsten Markson  28:36  

I think, more training content that is more industry and vertical based. So thinking about more prescribed people are looking for answers, and they're looking for us to be thought leaders. And there's more we can do to build those things out. So it's a thought leadership and continuing to share our best practices and insights about what works when it comes to scaling and growing a small business. Infusionsoft back in the day had an incredible content program, educating the entire market about things like lifecycle marketing and things that were very new at the time. And we are we are doing what we can in terms of content, but thought leadership and content is where I would like to continue to invest as well as programs and events for small business owners to join together and share with each other so we can be a mechanism to create that community community is where I want to continue to invest because people love to learn from each other love to feel part of brands that create community and connection. And when we get our customers together, they're extremely generous with their time they love talking to each other. That's again, like you know, they want to hear what what's working for other businesses like them. So we would continue to invest in thought leadership and ways to connect people through community, whether that's formal in person events, smaller masterminds, other types of ways to connect people so that I think it's it's where I would like to invest in the future. We're doing some of it but there's more that we can we can do to build that out.

Ben Kaplan  30:00  

It's sometimes forgotten that another form of thought leadership doesn't mean you just like, here's our expertise, eat it with a spoon, it could actually just be facilitating connections, other things, if they're coming through you, if they're connecting through you, if you're a platform to connect, then that can be really powerful thought leadership, it doesn't always have to be, here's the How to steps one through five from us, that there's a broader view of it.

Kirsten Markson  30:26  

Great. And our CEO is very passionate also about entrepreneurial kind of people who are entrepreneurs or wellness. So what does a good life look like? For someone who's running a small business? How do you take care of yourself, that's an incredibly hard thing to do. It can, you know, you can neglect family and other aspects of your health if you're too focused on it. So thinking broadening out, kind of what the brand stands for what we talked about, that's naturally happening, because this has been an area of real passion for him, I think, is is of the moment that people are really thinking about what is building a good life look like for some people building a small business is really, it's the means to have the freedom to live the life that they want. And that aspiration is really important. So they're hungry for content, outside of just, you know, the mechanics of it, and about how do you live your life? How do you use time? Well, so there's a lot of expertise that's been built up in this company working closely with this community, a lot of passion around these topics. So So yeah, the thought leadership is, is can extend pretty far I think we have, you know, the the people to share and that and the processes to put it together. That may not be as obvious but as is definitely tied to what the brand wants to stand for. And does stand for,

Ben Kaplan  31:35  

what is your marketing superpower? And what is the superpower that you would like to have, if you wish it had what is your superpower now and then what is the superpower you aspire to have?

Kirsten Markson  31:44  

This is gonna sound maybe kind of weird, but I think it comes from you probably understand, but being in market research early in my career, I had to to kind of read through just tons of information and data and tell the story with it make sense of it, build strategy from it. So I think that my some of my superpower is just processing a lot of different inputs for the market and putting together this kind of understanding of it and trying to help people see the opportunities and strategies out there. So you know, just having done that, as a market researcher, just getting reams and reams of information, you had to process back from things like quality of questions, you had to kind of understand what people are saying, and how do you translate that into strategy that was kind of what I was doing in in in my agency life and I think that that's a superpower that I have as well as getting people motivated, inspired to rally around that insight like okay, this is what is important to folks how are we gonna speak to them, and I love that strategy piece. But that ties directly to y which is the you know, the creative execution of all of that. I love working with extremely strong designers who can kind of take that strategy and translate it visually and copywriters who can translate the language of it to be something really super compelling and that is, you know, if I had a sidekick that's what I need that sidekick so I can do the kind of strategy that inside

Ben Kaplan  33:03  

I'll be the Robin to your Batman or the Yeah, I don't know Sonny, the your share the whatever it is that you would like the creative person with you. And you're gonna go delve into the reams of data and find a story.

Kirsten Markson  33:14  

Yes, exactly. And I think I can see Yeah, it's like you, you understand and see great design and great creative, I am not always a person that can get us to that point out of the box, you know, so I love having that creative partner. I'm not a designer, it didn't come up that way. I'm very passionate about design, because I think it's incredibly important to communicate your brand. So I love working with strong creative folks like that, because they can take that insight and really just make something incredible if you give them space to do that, and freedom to do that and encouragement and direction.

Ben Kaplan  33:47  

According to Kirsten Markson CMO of Keap part of your role as a brand is to give your audience a sense of peace and calm, that they're doing the right thing by working with you. Read through tons of data, but always find the story in it. Connect that story to each of your customer personas. And don't be afraid to message it creatively get more from less. Content in organic channels, you smartly can have the very highest return on investment. Meet the audience where they are and better yet, be the connector that helps them connect with their peers. If you do that, your marketing will be anything but boring. For top CMO, I'm Ben capital.

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