Be Fearless In Content Creation

Know Yourself, Know Your Audience

Aileen Horgan is the VP of Marketing at the category-leading chaos engineering solutions firm, Gremlin. For the uninitiated (like me), chaos engineering allows development teams to thoughtfully inject failure into their systems to build resilience. They utilize a full-range of capabilities, portfolio marketing, pricing changes, critical communications, product manager for a GO2Market side in the Software Space.

Aileen is a customer-centric content-driven B2B SaaS marketer. She specializes in understanding personas (ICPs) - how can the ideal customer can best utilize their software offerings. You have to hone in on who the buyers and influencers are, whether to enact high-touch, low-touch, or a hybrid method. She and her team leverage digital and (virtual) event marketing as a primary lever to dig into this audience.

Aileen notes that her biggest challenge is prioritization of tasks. You must make conscious tradeoffs that yield the highest impact for team and your business.

In order to avoid burnout, keep teams inspired, companies must help their teams balance workload and life. Particularly with the dramatic changes of lockdown, it's paramount that everyone be inspired and focused when completing work.

No Idea Is A Bad Idea (Keep the Mics On)

In order to get the most out of her team, Aileen demonstrates authenticity in being a 'people leader'. “People that work with you and for you don’t have to like you, they just have to trust you”.

Her top tips and practices are Autonomy, Freedom, and Flexibility for team members' careers.

Hands-off to allow for creative freedom. She touts that in order to foster ideas, one should create a culture that makes the team comfortable enough to bring forward ideas. Gremlin operates a weekly 30 min, shared doc, mics unmuted, where they hash it out in real-time.

When building out a project plan, it's best practice to keep it simple. For example, if the campaign is only social, determine how many posts, who’s going to draft them, the sequencing, influence outreach

One of the best pieces of advice she's learned, don’t force it if it’s not there. If the team is not feeling it, the customers won’t either, and the numbers will reflect that lack of enthusiasm. Content should be informed by data and the specific customer journey. Documenting the customer journey and understanding how individual pieces of content fit into that

Not A Blank Canvas

In order to bolster team productivity, one can’t just show up to a blank slate; they need constraints, boundaries, and visions of something to accomplish. Without first getting comfortable with brand guidelines, it’s difficult for marketers to tackle specific campaigns. Guidelines also help direct attention to the particular messaging or vocabulary the company employs depending on the audience. This was an overview of our conversation with Aileen Horgan. Be sure to listen to the full episode and all 9 new episodes! Streaming now on all platforms!

More written content to come next week.