From Code to Content: How to Speak to a Technical Audience with Aurora Starita

Overview:

In this episode of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders, Aurora Starita joins Kerry Guard to dive into the art of writing for technical audiences. With a background in both marketing and coding, Aurora shares her insights on creating content that speaks to engineers, cybersecurity professionals, and technical buyers—without losing their attention. From leveraging AI to refining messaging for clarity, this conversation is packed with actionable advice for marketers looking to level up their content game.

Transcript:

Aurora Starita 0:00

Okay, I get it. It's a commercial piece. It's not it's not gonna go in the loop. It's not gonna go in the Library of Congress. But still, I want someone to see it. I want it to have some impact.

Kerry Guard 0:17

Hello, I'm Kerry Guard, and welcome back to tea tie with tech marketing leaders. I have the amazing Aurora Sarita with me. I'm so excited. I've been counting down the days for this one, and I'm a little bit about Aurora, and then we'll get to the heart of our conversation in regards to technical content and how to write for a technical audience. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a breath of fresh air. I feel like there's a lot of conversation swirling around right now in terms of how we do content, especially thanks to Hey, hi, showing up and blowing up our spots all over this, all over the place. So I think it's going to be nice to realign on Who are we talking to and how do we need to say what we need to say in the most human way possible, but also in the quickest way possible. It's going to be good. It's going to be good. A little bit about Aurora. Aurora. Starita has that rare left brain right brain balance. She's a curious creative with a tech degree as a resourceful content writer, editor and strategist, she has over a half a decade of experience combining writing, marketing and technical skills to deliver informative, engaging content for B to B organizations. If you're spending as much so much time puzzling over revisions that you wonder if you should have written the piece yourself, you need more than a writer, her process is through. Her process is thorough, and gives her a long, brief, a little more with a passing comment. Anyway, I love this, and I want to keep reading it, but you could all head over to LinkedIn and check it out. It's always nice to know, Aurora, what you do, thanks LinkedIn. But really, what I want to know is your story. So where are you now, or maybe going, and how did you get there?

Aurora Starita 2:09

Okay, yes, I am in this very moment, extremely high on life and my own farts a little bit. So I'm so excited to be here. Probably will say something I'll regret, but that's okay. So where I am right now, but I can't, I won't say the name, but I've just gotten an offer with an awesome series C Company. The marketing team is literally the land of unicorns. So I am so honored to have been chosen, and I'm so excited to start next week like, this is fast moving thing. But where I started was only, obviously, I have a technical degree, so I when I was in school. I wasn't as in love with programming as I thought I would be, but I loved business. We had to take two business classes, and we would watch like YouTube videos out of, like Y Combinator. And you know, we would have, we would have products that we came up with or that we took off a list. I came up with my own, thank you. And you would have to test them and position them and and sell them. And I was like, this is fun. Like this I could get obsessed with, and I did, to the detriment of my other classes get so obsessed with that, and I didn't know that so much of that was marketing until almost like seven years later, I just thought like, Well, it sure would be fun to be a part of a startup, but I have this technical degree, so I have to do something technical. But I was, you know, just sort of on kind of a stay at home mom situation, and a friend asked me to do some writing in application security. And I was like, Whoa, this is so fun. This is amazing. This is such a great time. And like, what a cool way to think about things. Like, I can use the technical side of like, what I know, but I can also use the psychology and how do I reach somebody, and how do I make the words fun? It's just kind of a cooler, bigger project to me than I kind of ever found with just coding. But I also still do like coding. I don't want to say that I hated it, but marketing is just it's just so weird and open ended, and. Like, there's no, you know, a code has to run. It has to work. Yeah, you know, there's, like, physics there. It has to do something that you said it was going to do. And marketing is just like, you make it up, whatever. I

Kerry Guard 5:16

have a similar sort of balance in that. And I'm not a coder. I know enough HTML to be dangerous and how websites are wired, but I do. I when I hit a technical issue, I call on my husband, who is an actual coder, but I love the logic of coding, which I think lends itself to apply that to marketing, because marketing is so open ended, you do need to sort of create your own constraints and guardrails to work within, and then, you know, optimize, iterate from there. So I'm with you. I think that's also why I absolutely love it, because you can combine that logical thinking, coding brain with the open to make marketing a little less open ended,

Aurora Starita 6:02

exactly.

Kerry Guard 6:04

I have questions on on parenting, but I will have to take that offline. Sure you know, what challenge Are you currently facing right now? What feels hard and sort of in your way?

Aurora Starita 6:16

I would say outdated thinking about marketing is probably the biggest one, especially within content just SEO strategy that is, you know, maybe five years or more out of date. I, to some extent, I wouldn't say it's a challenge for me, but it certainly seems to be a challenge for content writers in general is AI. I hope to give some advice to people on how to use AI to help you and rise above and know. And people will say, I can tell you didn't use AI. And you'll go, Okay, thank you. But yes, exactly, but yeah, I think outdated thinking and marketing. You know, marketing moves so fast and sometimes leadership. They their heyday, their when they were doing super good, was 10 years ago or longer or even shorter, it moves so fast that you know the strategies that you used you, yeah? So I would say, like, that's, that's the big challenge right now.

Kerry Guard 7:31

I can't help myself, because we're an SEO agency, so I have to know, yeah, what? What feels outdated to you in terms of SEO strategies that you feel like are still being used, that maybe need to like be shelved. Okay,

Aurora Starita 7:43

so the like, if you are a small company, if you're a startup, and your plan is to get organic traffic through, like, high level articles where you've got your parent pages and the child's and all of the keyword things, and like Cisco and Palo Alto and, you know, Comcast technology solutions and all these other people already have that content, you are wasting your time. You were wasting your money, and you were wasting your time. You were never going to get on the first page of Google. It's not going to happen. You got to be looking for new keywords, new long, teal keywords. And you really got to think about, what is the buyer thinking about? What are they searching? Because I could tell you that a person who is about to buy a product doesn't say like, best practices for you know, that's not what they're searching.

Kerry Guard 8:37

No, yeah, no, they are not searching best practices. That's a that's a marketing term, folks, let's Yeah. Oi, I totally agree. I I think digital ads is sort of having a sim, a similar hiatus of not hiatus. It's having a similar surgence of thinking differently as small, being a smaller company, being a startup, being in a very crowded space and trying to compete, it's and the way with AI and and the way people are searching has changed. So there's just, like a lot, we got to move with the times, for sure. And while some of the the foundational elements of SEO still are important, though, to your point, the nuance right has has to be more creative. So yes, that I could talk about that all day, but that's what we're here for. Well, we'll have a lovely sidebar, and then we'll have another conversation. It's going to be so good. I love having repeats. It's going to be awesome before we move into what we do want to talk about today, which, as I mentioned, is content specific, because that's that's a word sweet spot, and how we talk about it to technical audiences, I do have a word from our sponsor. We have a sponsor folks in privato is back again. I'm so grateful to. Them. Thank you so much for sponsoring Tea Time with tech marketing leaders. A little bit about improvato. They transform your marketing data into powerful insights by seamlessly unifying and governing marketing data from over 500 plus sources, automating your marketing reporting and unlocking AI powered actionable insights to boost your ROAs head on over to improvato.io forward, slash T, dash. Time. For your free marketing data quality audit, it'll analyze your Google ads and trade desk campaigns to discover inefficiencies that are pulling your ROAs back. So get on over there. Download that report. Get going. Thank you so much. Oh, I appreciate you. Let's talk about content for a technical audience. I feel like the tides are shifting. We've been told for a very long time now to not talk about our product, to be more thought leader, to be high level. It sounds like the buyer. You know, the buyers changed a lot. We've talked about this over the past year too, in terms of how they buy, but it sounds like, because of who the buyer is, how we talk to them has to change too. Is that? Is that fair to say, because they're, you know, when you're talking about tech and B to B, and specifically cybersecurity, talking to really smart people, right? So, so are we being too high level? Do we need to change the way we're doing things? Tell me about the challenge that you're seeing out of the way people are currently using it, and then we'll start moving towards a fix for it.

Aurora Starita 11:44

I think this might tie, in some ways, to old SEO strategy, especially for content writers who are not strategists, per se, are probably at the bottom of the stack of even understanding why something happened in the past, you know, like why they wrote that article, or why what the bigger strategy was they might not know. And so you can kind of get into this. Well, this is how it's done, and this is how you're supposed to do it, especially if you go read old things and you're going, Okay, well, this is how they did it. So this is how we were supposed to do it, where, yes, you were talking at this, like talking about very high level things, staying on the surface. Another reason marketers do that, though, is because they don't understand the technology and it's easier to stay on the surface. And I don't know if you've ever seen this as a marketer, I can definitely see this in copies sometimes, where somebody moves in circles around a few points and that doesn't, the piece doesn't actually move, and you can, for me, I read like a fear. There's like a fear of actually saying anything, because the content writer doesn't actually fully understand the topic. And I think that that's not necessarily on the content writer. I think a lot of lot of places will set them up for failure. They won't give them SMEs to talk to. They won't provide them with somebody who can help them get that depth. But yeah, when, when you write things like that, you're just meeting a quota for some number of words and for some number of blogs, and the blogs go on the website and nobody reads them. Buyers are not reading things like that. They're going to go a few sentences in, and I don't know that they'll necessarily know what's wrong with the copy, but they're just going to tap they're just gonna tap out. They're like, this, isn't it back? Let me find something else. Like, if you even happen to make it onto, you know, Google or somehow onto their computer screen in the first place, if they even were to start reading it, they're not going to finish it. They're not going to share it. It's not going to go anywhere. So when we talk to technical buyers, we not only need to speak, we need to respect their time, right? Like, let's not send them things to read that are 1200 words, but could have been 600 that's a huge thing. Also is like some places are still counting content writers on word count, and so you're, you know, trying to extend your content even though you have no more things to say. It's very, you know, it feels very like high school essay is due.

Kerry Guard 14:59

It. I remember those states, yeah, back in double space, Yep, yeah.

Aurora Starita 15:07

So,you know, be careful with word count, because there are perverse incentives there, where you might get crappy copy because your word count is too high. For some reason, some marketing, you know, managers will want 2000 words on something that, like buyers are not going to read, that

Kerry Guard 15:29

they're not so what? So what are buyers going to read? Then, like, where has this shift come? Is it kind of like how video content is gone, where long form is a nice to have and something we should have. But really getting the clips from that and getting that out onto social media is sort of the new the new way people consume information is content moving in that direction as well, of needing to be a bit more quippy and to the point about one very specific thing, versus trying to write a novel. Yes.

Aurora Starita 16:03

I mean, I still think there's room for long form content. But if you can make your long form content, like if you have an ebook or a guide, something that is genuinely helpful, it does have to be genuinely helpful to the customer, to the buyer, like it's or they're, nobody's going to download it. And I'm kind of anti gated content in general. I think there are some areas where you can have it, but in general, I think most things should be free and available, and it should be a company's contribution to the community to make it that way. But yeah, so I think if you can take something long form, and then this is just awesome, like wet use of time too, and use of effort, get your snackable bites out of it. Use those on social media. Use those to drive interest in the longer piece, because, I mean, it's, you know, the difference between reading, you know, a short blog, and reading an entire book. Like persuasion does take time. And if you are making a particular argument for how people should think about something, or how they should be, you still need that long form, whether that's long form, video or written content you use, it takes time, and that's still valuable to do that, but you won't drive interest. Nobody's trawling LinkedIn, going like, where's my next 3000 word PDF to look at. So, yeah, you have to, kind of gotta grab them first with with some really interesting hooks. I find

Kerry Guard 17:51

the hooks to be so I wrote about this yesterday on LinkedIn. And actually, I've been using, I don't know if I I've been getting a little help from chatgpt. I'm not gonna lie. I'm like, I wrote this, I wrote this LinkedIn post, and I just need a thing. What's gonna be the thing that's gonna hook it better than whatever I have written? Because I know what I have written is not very good, right? So I've been finding it really helpful, because I find the hook so hard to write is that? Why is it so hard to write a hook? Or is there, like, best practices on what a hook should entail, like, or is it just practice? Is it just a B testing, like? Is it all of the above?

Aurora Starita 18:32

All of the above? For sure, a lot of times I find writers, or just anyone who has written something, writers, per se, but like a lot of times, the your hook will be there, but you've put it in the bottom, and so you kind of have to flip your story, like if you're telling a story and you've got this climax, if you can bring that to the top and then work down, that makes sense, yeah. So, like, a lot of time just check what you've already written. The hook might be down in the bottom, but it also might be, yeah, exactly. So you can bring that to the top and then wind down, especially LinkedIn, because you get, like, what, 200 characters or something before the fold? Like, it's really tight,

Kerry Guard 19:25

yeah, I always have to, like, you only get 200 characters for the full but then you also only get so much copy in the post. Like, I always have to, yeah, refined, refined, refined, to get it underneath. Yes,

Aurora Starita 19:38

I know. And it feels like you have a lot. But then as you start writing like, oh, okay, I guess I'll have to shorten that story be

Kerry Guard 19:45

a little more impactful. Well, I think that's what we're really trying to talk about today. You know, let's talk about the audience in particular. So when we're talking about a technical audience and and honoring their time in your experience, what do. You think they care most about, if you had the TLDR it or to have the hook or get to the point, what do you need to lead with, to bring them in initially and capture their attention their problems?

Aurora Starita 20:12

It's like, it's all. It all comes back to, like, just Product Marketing basics and knowing what they care about. What do they what are their problems? What are their issues? But I also think that there's room for I mean, the best way, especially on social media, to kind of get them hooked on their problems is to have a meme, a meme that shows their problems and that will be shared and that will be loved, and they will love you. So, you know, it's also brand. It's not just all you know, in one area, but yeah, I mean, I think especially if you're kind of thinking of a LinkedIn audience, there definitely are, I would say there's, like two camps. I would say I who knows what the percentages are, my very scientific guess based on nothing except just what I'm seeing is like maybe 670, 5% of LinkedIn is kind of using it for fun in a way, like it's industry stuff. They're getting information, but they're not trying to go heavy, um, they're not trying to get super duper technical, like I would say, Don't post your super duper technical things on LinkedIn. They rarely get a lot of traction. Sometimes you'll get some deep conversations with like, between, you know, maybe 234, nerds, but like, you won't get super like they don't do as well. Funny stuff does well, and 75% of people are looking for that on LinkedIn. And, like, maybe 25% of people really, legitimately. They, like, you know who they are, because they'll complain about all the rest of the posts. They always post about that. Like, I am just here to keep up with my industry. And I don't want to see these political posts, and I don't want to see these jokes and these memes and but they are a minority, and they're probably not buying so they're go with

Kerry Guard 22:29

loud. Yeah, yeah. I mean, personal content does really well, and like done surprisingly, so making coming back to that human aspect, everybody just wants to interact with real people, so knowing who those real people are, and knowing you as a brand and the people behind it is definitely where things are headed. I love this aspect of like finding the humor again, but when you're talking to a really technical audience, how do you find that like, I guess it's the inside jokes. This comes back to you need to be technical yourself, right? We were talking a little bit about how you can tell when a content writer sort of dancing around the issue because they don't really understand the issue and they're afraid to actually say it out loud, because if they say it wrong, they will get reamed. I think LinkedIn is a bit similar, right? So it's you. You got to be part of the industry to be able to make fun of it, right? Oh,

Aurora Starita 23:31

yeah, absolutely. But chatgpt is your shortcut. Chatgpt can be your cheat, because, like, look, you're not going to get a big college textbook and learn everything, but you can, and I do this all of the time. One of my really good friends is not a marketer. He's a distinguished engineer. He is so technical, and it's not just like technical concepts. Every time he talks, he's rattling off like 10 different like Amazon, like AWS products and like 10 different companies. And it's like he is so in it. And instead of saying, John, what does this mean? What does that mean? What does this mean? I just copy that whole comment. I put it into chat GPT, and I say, tell me what all of these acronyms are. And the cool thing is, I say, tell me what all of these acronyms are. Chat GPT, so smart will not only tell me what all the acronyms are. It'll tell me, like, anything that's kind of close to anything that's like a name of a product or anything else, and we'll say, this is what this is, this is what this is, this is what this is. This is what this is. And then it'll give me a summary at the end. What this commenter is saying is, whatever about these products. And now, like, did I learn. This thing, am I going to remember it forever? Maybe not, but in that moment, I understood. And when you add all of those moments up, you can so quickly just catch up and be able to talk, talk the talk with, with your technical you know audience, even though you're just a marketer. Man Chad

Kerry Guard 25:22

is like, open the door. Yeah, I think this is really helpful because, yeah, I mean, I might, like, I mentioned, my husband's a developer. He's very technical. He's got his niches in like.net, which is not something everybody uses and so and he, he builds products for developers. So it can't get any more meta than that, right? And I but he still has that, you know, even though he's technical person, he is not dry, right? He still has all the things he loves to do outside of being a developer. And so I think to your point about memes and sort of those inside jokes and sort of poking fun at the industry, is a great opportunity to build that trust and to Terri pride and you're in in that human way. And chat is definitely a way to figure some of that out. You know, by perusing the content of folks and bringing that into chat and saying, Okay, here's what my audience is talking about, how can I lend myself into the conversation in line with what my product does, and we can play, you know, have some play and some fun. And like, let's, let's see what we got here. So I chat. GPT has become quite the thought partner. Oh yeah, I

Aurora Starita 26:37

was so, I was so, like, not impressed with AI. And I was very skeptical of it, skeptical of people being, like, the hype and everything. And I the first few times that I tried, you know, chat, GPT, I was like, okay, yeah, I mean, like, I'm impressed. You know, it's, it's cooler than some of, like, the the games that I would play as a kid where you would, like, try to talk to some kind of bot, but it only had, like, this tiny menu of things that it could say back to you. Like, obviously, it's cooler than that. But, yeah, in the last, I don't know, six months it's become like I'm using it all the time, and I also use it to you have to be careful. You can't use it for fact checking everything. But if I am writing a piece of something that I know is the technology has been around for at least long enough that a lot of people have written blogs about it, which is going to be in the training data. I can ask, did I get this right? Did I speak about this correctly? Am I understanding it right? And if I've got some little, tiny thing or chatgpt will also pick up like, well, this is correct, but also you should mention this. It's super helpful if you're trying to, you know, fake being more technical than you are. Chat GPT will help you. You just gotta use

Kerry Guard 28:11

it smart. I feel like the more I'm talking to content writers about AI and chat GPT, the more I was sort of skeptical at first. If, like, do I even bring up AI with these folks? Am I gonna get in trouble? Like, are they even they're probably not using it, and they're probably angry about it, but yeah, but the more I talk to you talk about it, the more I'm finding it's actually very much not taboo. Everybody's definitely leaning into it, and you're all using it in an incredibly smart way that isn't having chat necessarily, write your content. I find that it can't write my content as well as me. It doesn't, it can't quite capture my voice, which is more conversational, like I even if you've read it, read about like did post. I actually have. I actually pretend the audience is asking a question, Should I make it very conversational? Like, kind of calm myself out, yeah, and chat. Can't figure that stuff out, right, so, but I love what you're saying in regards to double checking or using it to bring ideas forward and to, like, not dance around the idea, but actually, like, nail it down is a great way to use the tool. Let's talk about the flow of content for a minute, because we, I love that you talked about for LinkedIn, sort of putting the punch line at the top as the hook. Well, we, when we met in our prep call, something you said that I really liked was about, even just in your emails. There's sort of a format that works really well in terms of getting to the point I feel like we've been I mentioned this when I sort of opened up the conversation, but it feels like for so long we've been told to not talk about our product, right? Don't talk about features. Don't talk about your product. I. I feel like, given the audience, we might be learning that actually getting to the point is more important than trying to appeal to their thought leadership humanity sort of side in that regard. So help me. Yeah, bring me through on that in terms of, do you always want to get to the point? When do you not? And then what's sort of that flow of best practice of talking to that audience in a way that's a little bit more big, bam, boom. Well,

Aurora Starita 30:36

I mean, you want to get to the point about what their problems are specifically, instead of talking about what the industry's problems are, right like so you know today's cybersecurity landscape, you know that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't matter to them what is going on. You know, everywhere it matters what's going on with their job. And they don't need to be educated on the very basics of what their job is. They need to be educated on that they have this issue, this thing that stops them from getting their job done, and you solve that. And so they have a pain point, you solve that pain point, and you can get to that really fast. But I would say, you know, generally, it's just they don't have a lot of time. You're not going to get their eyes for that long. So, you know, the state of the world is probably not that interesting to them. The with their state is right now most likely because you know what their tech stack is, or, you know, and some of this comes to, like, accounts based marketing, but even if you don't have that, and you're just, you know, trying to get it out to a particular audience, and, you know, don't there's, there are generalizable problems within your space, wherever it is, in cybersecurity, that you can talk about, but you should be specific to specific problems and not like, yeah, I don't know the cybers, the landscape thing always comes up, the ever evolving cybersecurity landscape,

Kerry Guard 32:34

yeah, I think we all know what the the general problems are within cyber I love I've never really heard anybody call it out so crystal clear of really honing on what problem your product solves, I feel like we gotten away from that a bit in this notion of not being allowed, quote, unquote, allowed, to talk about our product and features, but at the end of the day, your product and features solve specific problems or multiple problems, and what are those? And how do you communicate that and ask the right questions, right? So I guess that's you know. How for you and your team, from a content perspective, where are you figuring out, with the help of maybe some internal folks, what that pain is and how to and how to talk about it in the same way that your audience is experiencing it. Because, unless you're living it day to day, I imagine, you know, that's kind of hard to it's hard to do. It's possible, but it's hard.

Aurora Starita 33:39

Reddit is such a good you know, place to find exactly how people are talking about the pain, because it's not just like identifying their pain. You also need to identify how they talk about their pain, because you want to use those same words. Somehow you know that you marketing that works really well is like a mirror to to the to the audience. So Reddit is great, like, so you can kind of get from like a, like a PM, or, you know, somebody more technical, kind of a, you know, yeah, our customers were asking about this, and they were having this issue, so we added this feature, and then you can kind of use that to kind of start your your journey or search through, you know, Reddit is great because it's like open to the public, but if you can get yourself onto Slack channels and discords and Things where there are a lot of cyber security people talking, and, you know, the dream, it's not necessarily that you need to talk to your buyer all the time, because the buyer is no longer usually one person. It's the whole it's a whole committee. And in some. Way as every single user you should kind of consider as, like, a little part of your buyer, and like how you want to reach them. But yeah, use, use the like people love to talk, or it's just on the internet, just talking all the time, like, go find it and go steal it and then put it in your coffee. I think

Kerry Guard 35:24

that's it's just Reddit is interesting. And there was a talk that was done at cyber marketing con about it in regards to listening. Like he kind of opened the talk about in regards to marketing on Reddit. And really, he ended with, you don't market on, don't know, Oh, Ellie,

Aurora Starita 35:47

talk on, yes, I was there. He is great,

Kerry Guard 35:52

yeah, it was so good. We were there. We were right there. We did you

Aurora Starita 35:58

probably saw me because I was actually volunteering. So I was there in like a purple, probably,

Kerry Guard 36:06

small world, folks, small world, halfway in the world now, but we, yeah, we collided. It. Didn't even know it. Oh, we didn't

Aurora Starita 36:12

know it. But, yeah, great talk market. I haven't left a few comments on Reddit, like, where I've and I've said, like, but please take every single thing I say with a grain of salt, because I am a marketer, because I was genuinely trying to be helpful and not market. So I think honesty is always the best policy. So if you're going to comment on Reddit, tell them who you are. Don't lie. Don't act like you're another user, because anybody can click your username and see that you only leave comments about this one company, and you're always saying how great they are, and nobody's gonna trust you. They'll figure it out. They will figure out, yes, yes, purple vest. And then you don't have to, you don't have to talk on Reddit, though. Don't feel like you have to engage. You can just take, yeah. Just take the words

Kerry Guard 37:09

Yes. Trevor van Warden, who is in our comments right now, hanging out, having a lovely conversation with Elijah, was at side market con as well. We're buds. We're hanging out. So yeah, next year we'll have a reprise. Oh yeah, there's actually a really great conversation that's happening in the comments around couple things you had said, or one was about the gating aspect and how, yeah, we just need to not do that. Trevor said, one of the good things, one of the things about gated is that there's not a differentiation between gating as organic search indexable content that resides on your website. So I think that's such a good point in regards to talking about SEO and old practices actually on gating and not having them as PDFs and as like actual content on your website is helpful.

Aurora Starita 38:01

Yeah. True, yeah,

Kerry Guard 38:05

Good point. So that lends itself. Is there anything else in terms of, you know, we talk a lot about on gating content and how it should live, and how to measure, I would think that's the biggest point, pain point that comes into flex of like when people push for gating and ungating content, how do you within your organization talk about on gating content and the importance of it, and sort of help bring people along when they're having that moment of like, but then we won't get our MQLs and our leads, and then what Do we do

Aurora Starita 38:40

again? I mean, so in the organization that I'm going to I already know that they are all with me that like MQLs is not that is not the sole metric that you are going to be measured on and on gate on gate on gate. But in some of the other places, you know, where I've worked, you know, I'm just hitting my head on on the wall, like I'm, it's, it's really disappointing to me, personally as a content writer, because I put so much work into something, and I throw in a lot of personality, I often come up with most of the graphics, and not that I do them, but at least, you know, the ideas, and then amazing designers put their time into it, and then you're like, and now all that hard work, and it's like, okay, I get it. It's a commercial piece. It's not, it's not going to go in the loop, it's not going to go in the Library of Congress. But still, I want someone to see it. I want it to have some impact. But I mean, generally, if you know, if people out there need to make an argument, it's like the KPIs in general, need to be looked at, always for perverse incentives. Is, are you setting up metrics that cause people to do things that are actually ineffective because they're working for the metrics instead of working to be effective to actually reach your overall goal? So leadership just always has to watch out for that, and has to evaluate that. And you know, if you are not a leader, if you're, you know, if you're an individual contributor, and you see this happening, give it a shot. Bring it up. You know, here's, I want to be effective, and I want to be considered a good employee and get my next, you know, get my bonus or whatever, get my good performance review. But these things are in conflict. So what can we do?

Kerry Guard 40:52

What metrics are you using from a content standpoint, especially if it's on gated, to know that it is being that it is effective and it is helping towards the ultimate goals of revenue and pipeline.

Aurora Starita 41:05

Yeah, isn't that tough? I think, yeah, I think that it's really hard to say, like there's going to be one metric. I think that, you know, CMOs and other marketing leadership, you know, it's, it's not up to me to to put these things into place and to measure them, and smaller companies got to have a smaller budget to actually take measurements. In a lot of ways, you kind of have to, if you're a really small company, you're gonna have to track like vibes, right? Like, how is this going? What are customers? You know, when, when people are reaching out, are they telling you, like, Hey, I saw this, or I saw you guys were involved in this, or doing this or doing that. And then, if you're bigger and you've got more money, you can, you can actually track like brand awareness, and you can track that the actual number of readers and things, and then it's just a the sales cycles are so long in cyber that it's just generally really difficult. I almost feel like you just have to, I don't know. You should please have somebody on me to tell you, yeah,

Kerry Guard 42:26

I mean, even leading indicators, right? So you're looking at engagement, terms of with the content, and knowing that you're getting the right people, and that the rate, you know, I guess it's really just about eyeballs at that point, which isn't bad, as long as they're the right eyeballs. I think at this day and age, pulling up those KPI, the leading indicators right that map towards those business outcomes are where we need to sort of put those pieces together from a correlation versus causation standpoint. And so I think we're headed in that direction as marketers, we know that that's what needs to happen. We're just having some internal battles with folks who still want those MQLs, and it's like, let's not do that. Let's put some key leading indicators on here to know that what's working and what's not towards moving people from through the intent funnel towards those ultimate demos, but, yeah, let's not, let's not gate, if we don't have to. Yeah, okay, don't gate. I'm here for it. I am here for it. I could talk to you all day. Aurora, I'm so grateful for this conversation in terms of how we connect with our technical audience and using chat GPT to help us along the way, to be able to say the thing, to know who they are, to know what they care about, to be able to reach them as humans and with a little bit of humor, to use Reddit to make sure we're using the same language in terms of the problems we're solving. Thank you so much for all of this amazing we're gonna have clips, Elijah clips for days on this I'm so excited before we go one last Is there anything we didn't cover? One last tidbit that you want to leave people with as they continue down the content journey with AI sort of shaking things up and having to change the way we do SEO, well,

Aurora Starita 44:18

I had a LinkedIn post about how not to sound like chat G P T. I just want to remind people use chat G P T, don't sound like chat G P T, and what that means is, mostly, don't repeat yourself like especially if you're writing like a blog something longer form. A paragraph can stand on its own. And honestly, paragraphs should be two sentences long. These days, everybody has ADHD, everybody is doesn't have time. You cannot do these blocks of text. So two sentences, pick it, and then that's it. Say those two sentences. Do not say the first sentence. Again. Stop doing that. And then also, I. Don't write like your English teacher is going to read it and like grade you on it. Write like you're talking to a friend. You know, maybe not, depending on how you talk to your friends, but you know, write like you're having a nice, casual conversation. And the other thing that I want to say is that, like, technical buyers. Obviously, you know people, they're technical, they're buying technical solutions. They're smart,but they don't want to, like,they, yeah, they don't want to read your like, French philosophy level, like, it should be really clear, and you don't have to use big words. You don't have to, you know, break your thesaurus out. Just be truly casual, and you will sound good, and you won't sound like chatgpt. And also say the weird thing, put your silly joke in there. Maybe it'll make it, maybe it won't, but you will be surprised how often the person above you either doesn't notice, didn't check your stuff very, very well, or liked it and was like, You know what? Let's throw that in there. That's funny, and then it grabs people's attention when you have kind of semi dry material that has a little joke in it. But also, don't be too jokey. Just also gotta balance. You gotta balance. Yes,

Kerry Guard 46:27

I love it. I'm so grateful. Where can people find you? Aurora.

Aurora Starita 46:31

You can find me on LinkedIn. Aurora Starita. And it's also like the URL, linkedin.com/in/aurora, Starita. I grabbed it. There's no other Aurora staritas, so I got it one of

Kerry Guard 46:45

a kind. Yeah, I actually took my husband's last name by design for that reason, because there was a million Kerry Ellis's, but there was only one Kerry Guard. I was like, yes, SEO for the win, because we've been talking about the importance of being human outside of work, which I know you have lots of joy inside of work right now because things are happening, but outside of work, what is currently bringing you joy

Aurora Starita 47:10

It's like, silly, but just decorating my house has, like, just really been fun, and it's terrible, because I do end up with, like, like on Instagram reels, like, watching these home renovations, and it happens in like 30 seconds. And it seems really possible for me to do that thing. And then, then I realized how they speed up time and cut things. But, yeah, I've just been, just been enjoying, you know, just making my space cozy. It

Kerry Guard 47:44

looks so cozy. It looks so cozy. I love it so

Aurora Starita 47:47

bit dark for an office. Honestly, I might have made a mistake here, but, yeah,

Kerry Guard 47:52

yeah. But it's all you're iterating. It's gonna be great next time we see you, you're gonna, yeah, it's, it's gonna be a little different every time I look forward to it, which means we just need to hang out again, so we're gonna go to me, hey. Well, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you to our listeners. Thank you Trevor van Warden for joining us as always, and Elijah for holding down the fort. I appreciate you both. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share this episode was brought to you by mkg marketing and in privato, mkg marketing is a digital marketing agency that helps complex B to B brands build trust with their audience through SEO and digital ads. This episode was hosted by me, Kerry Guard, CEO and co founder kg marketing. And if you can't forget about my podcast, sidekick music next and mastering done by Elijah drown, and if you'd like to be a guest, DM me. I'd love to have you on if you're a marketing leader and you want to have a conversation, spill all the tea. Let's do it. I love it. Thank you all so much. Bye.