Vladlena Mitskaniouk: Whatever it Takes to See Start-up Success

Sometimes, to maximize ROI, you have to reinvent what success looks like. 

This Head of Marketing is unconventional, creates her own success from nothing, and isn't afraid to go to market with 80% product polish.  

Tight budgets, limited resources, and only so many hours in the day.  Kerry chats with Vladlena about how she's leaning into slick AI tools like Claude and SOMA, being confident in making decisions on the fly, and wearing multiple hats to get products to market without a hitch.  

Connect with Vladlena on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladlenamitskaniouk/

Learn more about Kerry Guard the host of Tea Time: https://mkgmarketinginc.com/about/team/kerry-guard/

Episode Sponsor - MKG Marketing! Creative meaningful relationships with measurable results: https://mkgmarketinginc.com/

Creators & Guests

KG

Host

Kerry Guard

Producer

Elijah Drown

Podcast Manager & Creative Sidekick | Will you create confident content with me?

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This podcast helps Marketing Leaders who work at Tech Companies get their brands found via transparent, measurable digital marketing. Tech Marketing leaders join our host Kerry Guard to discuss what challenges they're currently facing and the creative solutions they've found to solve them.

It's presented by MKG Marketing - a digital advertising agency of experts who specialize in SEO, Digital Advertising, and Analytics.

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It's what can I do with what I have?

What can I do with things I don't have? Hello, I'm Kerry Guard and welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Let me introduce our guest today.

I have the wonderful Vladlena . She is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in data-driven marketing, go-to-market strategy, and empowering cross-functional teams for success. Recognize for guiding marketing initiatives, enabling sales partnerships, and delivering actionable insights to drive executive decision-making. She's got a proven track record in managing both B2C and B2B campaigns with a focus on driving growth and maximizing ROI.

She's passionate about leveraging data to inform strategic marketing decisions and propel organizational success in dynamic, competitive markets. Vladlena welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Hi, everyone.

I'm Vladlena , and I'm Matinu. I'm out here in beautiful Ottawa, Canada in month two of 14 months of winter. How cold is it there? It's not too bad today. We're probably just below freezing, but we do get to negative 40, which we're all looking forward to.

Oh, my gosh. I thought it was cold here with 3C. Yeah, that is negative 40.

I stand corrected and I'm very blessed where I am then. If you want to come to February, the time to freeze yourself off of the weather. Have you grown up there? Have you always lived there, or did you find yourself there recently? I've lived most of my life here. I immigrated here from Moldova when I was quite young. Well, as somebody who's living in another separate nook of the world, it's nice to meet a friendly face of who's used to living remotely.

Very remotely, a very cold spot. So I'm grateful you're here with me today. And to talk about stealth mode and what it means to be a marketer before you could even market. But before we get there, I'd love to know your story of what do you do now, which we sort of hinted at.

But more importantly, how did you get there? So I am heading a marketing at a stealth stage company. We'll definitely dive into those details, but it means doing way more than just marketing. And one of the cool things is that marketing at any organization is very cross-functional.

So it actually prepares you to work in a startup where you might have to put on a business hat one day and a product hat another day. I've spent most of my career in traditional marketing of some sort, usually on the digital and analytics side. As you mentioned, I actually started in B2C. But it was at a financial company that really treated itself as a software company. We built a lot of our own products that actually helped launch a direct trade platform, a RoboAdvisor during my time there.

So I had some product experience while I was there on the marketing side. And then went right into cybersecurity from there. One of the cool things that I get to share is I actually studied hackers in my master's program, which is why I was so interested in getting into cybersecurity. I studied how hackers use technology for activism.

So I've always really stayed on that technology side of the marketing game as a result. You actually studied, what about hackers? Did you study like how they operate, what they're looking for? Tell us more. So this was a communications degree where I had a lot of flexibility to follow into my own passions.

And I've always been interested in technology. And this was at the time when Anonymous was really getting going. We were seeing a lot of change in activism. And then live streaming really became a big thing. And it was a lot about how activists could use modern technology from early on when they were using really initial chats to have private conversations to using live streaming mechanisms in protest for accountability.

That's so cool. I have a lot more questions, but I think that might be a separate podcast that we do not have time for. So I'm going to follow up with you.

We might make that happen. In the meantime, before we move on to the heart of our conversation, I'd love to know what's a challenge you're currently facing right now? What feels a bit hard and out of your control and or annoying for all of the above? I think one of the hardest challenges is knowing when to actually take the marketing hat off. As marketers, we always default to that, even when we're working on a separate project, if we're working on a product side, business side, finance, we always kind of default to marketing.

And sometimes it's not about that in the moment. So it's really learning how to bring my education and my experience from marketing into different areas, but also knowing when to remove that focus for a minute and move on to other things. Well, that is perfect timing because it sounds like you have figured out some of that considering you're doing it. So the question becomes, Valena, did you go into this role knowing that that would be the case and you'd have to be in different roles or was it sort of thrust upon you and you've had to sort of figure it out?

I'll say a little bit of both, but in the best way. I came into this role in a large part because I do have a lot of subject matter expertise in the solutions we're building from my time, both as a marketer, but as well as marketing to cybersecurity and developers and really understanding that cohort. So I came in expecting to work very, very closely with product and engineering. But I think there's a characteristic a lot of marketers have where we see an opportunity to get involved and we just can't help but volunteer ourselves. That was a lot of the case here where I really wanted to step in and be part of more than just let's talk about branding and messaging for the product that we're building, but let's actually work with our Alpha and Beta customers. Let's look at how we marketing and this side of the go-to-market initiative internally in our company can contribute to product specifications, to mockups, to working very closely with engineering on the requirements of what we're building.

So definitely it was partially that there was an opportunity to step in there and partially because I can't help but get involved. When you're obsessed with customers like marketing is, which we really are marketers have to be obsessed with customers, we are always going to get involved in product one way or the other. In terms of being obsessed with the customer, we're going to take a slight detour here folks, don't worry I'll bring her back center in a second, but I think this is so helpful because at the conference, I actually attended a talk by Teresa Roy. It was a wonderful, she was talking about Blockbuster, she opened the conversation with Blockbuster. I mean, how could you not be invigorated right off the gate, but she was talking about voice of the customer and how she approaches it from an internal perspective. I feel like all marketers have a little bit of their own secret sauce in regards to what being obsessed with the customer means.

So I'd love to hear from you, Valena, on what is that for you? What does obsessed with the customer mean? I think a lot of being obsessed with the customer is actually spending time with the customer is on one side and the other time is spending time where the customer is. And I think that is a gap that some marketers still kind of have to learn to embrace. It's one thing to talk to your real customers to have those customer interviews. It's one thing to ask for feedback, to run surveys, to look at the data of what your customers and prospects are saying. It's another thing to go to events and not just sit at a trade show booth, but actually go and sit in at the sessions. A great example I would, I often give is at a previous company I was at that was a very, very technical company, well beyond my skill set marketing to API and platform engineers, I was taking Kubernetes courses on the weekends.

It's really about more than just asking who the customers and more about kind of the ethnographic research of spending time in the communities with your customer. I love that. I think the actual spending of the time sort of gets lost. We sort of pretend we know what the customer wants without actually asking the customer. So I love what you're saying in terms of ways to spend time with the customer.

And then way to go above beyond, I don't hear this often. I've been doing this podcast for over five years. I can probably count on my right hand how many people have actually said that they have taken courses in regards to what their customers do.

So hats off to you for being part of that very small elite group. It is no small feat to wrap your head around developers. I have my husband as a developer and I remember several times getting on a whiteboard and being like, okay, I hate you to explain how containers work for me, please. I give it to me. And so he would just sit down and give me a lesson and similar Kubernetes and containers and things like that.

So it's so helpful to have a grasp and hats off to you for actually going above beyond call of duty on the weekends. Back to where we were headed with our conversation in relation to all the hats you have to wear in working with more of a stealth startup and not being able to actually market yet. I do want to know in terms of getting ready to market, right?

What are you thinking about? You don't have a product that's ready, obviously, I'm assuming. But I also probably feel like there's probably some things you sort of need to put in the building blocks, so to speak, of what this would look like when you are ready to go to market. It's actually quite a fun opportunity.

Not a lot of marketers get to come into a company that doesn't already have your brand and your vision and your message and your persona is defined. Usually you're handed those. It's like you're given a little book of here's the building blocks. We figured them out for you.

Now you can go run marketing. Whereas in this case, it's all about really identifying the building blocks that we need to have really early. So some of the very early work we did was doing that traditional definition of what is our ICP, who are our personas? What is the maturity model of the technology they use? Where do we fit in?

What is the right time for us? All the way down to messaging. We do, when you're working with early customers, whether it's design partners or beta customers, you have an opportunity to test messaging in a really isolated risk free way, which is very unique. You're not just putting something on a billboard and hoping that it resonates. So we are really able to kind of iterate early on our messaging. And then as our product evolves and shifts, we can challenge ourselves at every moment of does the messaging still align with the direction we're going to product?

So it's this unique approach. We actually have to be very agile with how we're looking at it. We can plan messaging. We can plan branding, but we're continuously iterating as the product evolves.

So it's almost like marketing gets the follow along with product into the go to market motion versus the traditional where you arrive, there's a product ready, and you're layering marketing on top of it becomes much more of a cohesive campaign to build the product and the marketing together. I imagine it's a blessing and a curse, right? A blessing because you do get to build with them, but a curse in the sense of how much you have to pivot. Do you find that you have to change your direction or your messaging or the work like almost redoing your work over and over again every time there's an aha moment with product? I like to not think about redoing it. I like to think about it as an evolution.

And it's funny. I think we you and I had a discussion about how a lot of these startup mentalities are transitioning to enterprises, but I am actually seeing more and more enterprises looking to be more agile with their messaging, looking to be more agile with the products and their and their suite. So I think marketers even outside of a pre product startup are now experiencing this. Well, last quarter, we had this product and we were marketing to this audience, but this quarter we're shifting quite drastically.

And I think that's becoming the norm. The scale at which we can learn, optimize, tweak our messaging, but also the scale which companies are building product means I think every marketer has to be ready that today we're selling one thing to one person, tomorrow might be another. And you can always take learnings from where you started to bring them into where you need to go.

I think this is really key because I feel like it's a delicate balancing act. As we know with marketing, especially to a complex audience of a bunch of skeptics who don't believe in what we do and they only interact with it because they absolutely have to. Yay, marketing to developers and IT people.

It's so fun. We know that it takes a lot of time, right, to build up that trust and to have that relationship with them, and that they're not going to buy with us out of the gate. So in terms of that pivoting, and I love what you're saying about more of an iteration approach, how do you internally keep your team iterating without feeling like you're constantly pivoting because when you pivot, you sort of lose some of that momentum that you had towards the other thing. I think one thing is you can pivot a lot and you can pivot your product, but there ideally is a core vision that you're building upon. And often that's about solving a sort of problem for a sort of person. Your product and the offering and the feature set and what you launch and when might change, but if you're focused on we're trying to solve this problem for this person, that keeps everybody focused and in line on working towards the same thing.

And it's not uncommon. You see you see startups pivot, you see enterprises pivot, you know, we see we saw major rebrands with Jaguar recently. So it's not unique by any means, but it's a question of who's your audience and what are you trying to bring to them. And as long as that is always your core, you can keep everybody moving forward, you can maintain that momentum. It sounds like brand is that sort of pillar that generally never changes. Jaguar took a huge swing and hats off to them for giving it a world regardless of how it landed. There was a lot of mixed reviews about it, but they took a swing and they took it big on brand. And I think that's where we're all sort of headed in regards to brand being important. And I love what you're saying and why I'm doubling down on it is because you can, it sounds like it's a lot easier to pivot often when you have that always on brand messaging that is about the audience and the overarching challenge and problem you're looking to solve for them. And then the nuts and bolts can sort of move with that. But that would be the way to allow your team to pivot in a way that also keeps them grounded to something so key would be to build to build that brand.

Are you thinking about that in regards to it's not, it sounds like from a self standpoint, brand is sort of where you're sitting right now of what is this going to look like when we launch and who is that audience and what is that messaging? Or are you starting to get more down through the funnel already? Or are you going to hold off on that piece until you're up and live? What's sort of the order of operations when it comes to coming out of stealth? I think you do have to look at this.

I think you have to come from it. Brand is a component, but I really believe in the current motion that we're seeing in the market towards GTM strategy. Brand is a component of your go to market strategy and it can guide a lot of where you go with that strategy. But for your brand, you have to know who is the unique audience you want to serve. You often see startups coming out with this concept of large target audiences B2B.

B2B is a wild, large space. So I think one of the things is finding your niche to some extent, at least for getting started. There's a lot of products out there that could be used by everyone. But by starting with a niche, you can actually be very successful in a market and then expand.

So I think that's part of it. It's like really understanding your go to market strategy first and foremost, especially in startups. One of the things you often see is founder led sales. You might not have an AE right away, so you really have to build operations to sustain that as well. I've had a lot of background in operations, so we're probably a little bit ahead of the game in terms of being able to implement our technology stack. Of course, we did start with the startup approach. Even in early days, we needed a CRM. And as a traditional marketing operations background, I'm used to having a hub spot, having a sales force, but most startups from day one are not going to have that. Does that mean you don't have a CRM?

No. So either you go and you pick a less expensive SaaS platform if you have budget. But even for myself, for the very first days, I looked at the tools we already had.

And I think that's something even enterprises are challenging marketers to do. It's like, what tools do you already have and how can you be creative with them? So for us, early on, I looked at we were using Notion for product documentation, for general company documentation. I looked at, well, Notion has database functionality. A CRM is a database.

Why can't I build a mini CRM into Notion? It's a tool we already have. Yeah.

Right. So you can build a company table. You can build a leads table. You can associate those tables. You can build account tables. You can create, and now they even have an AI layer. So I think that's a lot of what marketing at early stages as well. It's what can I do with what I have?

What can I do with things I don't have? That's fascinating. Notion is so malleable. It's also sort of overwhelming to me. It doesn't feel as intuitive to me as a marketer, but I can understand from a dev standpoint why that might work for them. So it's interesting to me that I feel like we go to our go-to tools because we feel like we can work faster if we know how the tool works. So how did you use Notion before or was this brand new to you?

I had used Notion lightly. I've had it at a few organizations, but usually it's more of like an internal communications hub. I had a thesis about 10 years ago that all marketers would be technology first marketers. I don't think we've gotten there yet, but I do think we're still moving in that direction where more marketers are able to pick up the tool stack.

And it's actually kind of a similar concept to what you're seeing right now with how SDRs are transitioning. There's that fancy new title we're seeing of go-to-market engineers. But all it is is saying SDRs who do research using a marketing ops, sales ops tech stack that they directly have access to. They're using clay, they're using perplexity, they're creating their own workflows, they're creating their own automations. But I think marketers really have to start thinking about as being marketers and engineers as well. We can't always wait and hope to have marketing operations resources.

Lovely if you do. I highly recommend companies at the right stages get ops resources, but a marketer shouldn't be scared to use a tool. In fact, they should be at the forefront. And you have AI now. I don't want to say there's no excuse, but you can go and ask Claude or chat GPT. I want notion to do this. How can I do that? And it'll walk you through step by step.

So true. I'm a pretty advanced Excel user, but I was trying to figure out a formula for something and I was doing it on my own. I was like, I know I could figure this out on my own, but have to anymore. So I had chat how to create this walkie formula and it gave me like the whole thing as one line and I could stick that into one cell. But then I asked it to break it apart so that I could see the math unfold and it did that for me too. It was absolutely wild. I was like, this is, I'm going to be so much faster. This is wild and awesome. So yes, hats off to you for not only figuring out notion beyond the base case of internal communication, but go to chat and figuring out how to expand on it. I love that.

And I do think as resources get tighter and marketing budgets, stay the same or decrease. We are going to have to get incredibly creative with the tool sets we have. So, you know, peeking over your shoulder what the devs got going on is not a bad idea. Their tools are very versatile and I love that.

In terms of, oh, go ahead. I was going to say it's like, historically, the build versus buy debate has been kind of limited towards do you have a developer to build that object for you? If you want to buy a small tool, do you have a platform engineer or dev ops person and they would build tools for developers, right? It was the internal developer tooling. You would rarely have a developer with the capacity to build an internal tool for a marketer. But now marketers can go build those internal tools themselves.

And it could be everything from even many applications. Like you could think of a growth marketing and SEO applications of building something that you can launch as a marketer without necessarily having a full engineering team behind you. Yeah, I think it's really interesting to think about what tools are out there that do one very specific thing and then how you can stitch them together to make one system that then goes end to end. And I actually, there was a talk at Cybersecurity Marketing Con about this exact thing.

They basically gave away their entire tech stack and how they have them synced up so they can really, truly see the process end to end. And I think that's where we're all headed of trying to crack that nugget of how do we see what our marketing is doing and how it's impacting the customer journey and what are all those touch points and giving credit where credit is due, not just to one, but to the whole collective. So yes to that. And I do think that we're in a savvier place as marketers and the tech now exists for us to be able to do that. In terms of the hats you wear, we've been talking about our sort of that go-to-market strategy.

And I want to pull that apart a little bit further. But before we keep heading down that rabbit hole, I'd love to understand more of what impact you've had within your organization, pre-Stealth Mode that's outside of marketing. How has your marketing skills transcended just that GTM motion? So a lot of it has been on the product side. It's taking my knowledge of customers and messaging.

And a lot of it is even marketing the test criteria. When you want to bring beta customers, you still have to pitch them. If you want, theoretically, if you were to want to have investors, you would still have to pitch them. So those pitch materials actually do apply to more than just selling the product.

Sometimes you're selling your company in a different way that you need to kind of bring to light. The other is just kind of internal product discussions, working day-to-day with engineers. A lot of marketers have more of that experience than they realize and that they can bring to the table in a product role. If you've worked with web engineers, if you've worked with marketing operations, a lot about is taking that request you have, that concept, that vision, and translating it and working with an engineer in terms of like how to implement it, and making sure that translation happens. And that's actually why I think marketers are some of the best people at using AIs because we're so used to taking this theoretical, out-there concept that somebody has and drilling it down to a documented vision that we can write down on a piece of paper and then ask somebody to go do something with it. So I think a lot of that is like translating that subject matter expertise and those visions from kind of like our conceptual phases into what an engineer would go and build. That almost sounds like a PM on the product side.

That's fascinating. I mean, that's really what they do, right? They figure out what the audience needs and what features need to happen.

And then they work with engineers to bring those features to life in a way that meets the customer's expectations of usability. So am I... Yeah, so definitely if you're wearing the PM hat a little bit. Yes, but how how much easier is it going to be to actually sell the product having done that? Yeah, when you're involved at this stage, it makes a world of a difference. Not only because you're passionate about what you've built, but because you really understand why people were asking you to build it.

Because one of the things we did early on actually, on the marketing side, we could argue, GTM side, is we probably interviewed 50 plus people in our target audience and really kind of built like a day in the life of their pain points of what we're trying to solve. What tools are they using? When are they using them?

When are they running into gaps? And those customer interviews pre-product are just invaluable and making sure you have the right balance of breadth of perspectives while not over rotating. I think one of the things you see a lot of startups do is they have a singular massive beta customer and they build the ideal product. But then what you end up with is customer fit, not product market fit. So finding that balance of having perspectives you can bring in, getting that customer fit, but making sure that customer fit is representative of a wider market. How do you ensure that? Is that getting a variety of potential customers into that flow?

Or is it getting the customer feedback building and then getting the product into the hands of new potential customers? How are you sort of approaching, how are you doing that? That sounds awesome. And I want people to go do it.

So teach us your ways. I think there's actually a few different levels of variety that you need. One is actually just personality. Take your target ICP, your target persona. There's very different personalities. Somebody selling me a marketing operations tool might be very different than somebody selling somebody else a marketing operations tool. So in your personas, you almost have to think there's a target persona, but there's different personalities within those personas. And making sure you actually challenge yourself. Who is the person who's been in that role for 25 years and knows how to do it? It might be less accepting of change.

Who is that person who's been in that role recently, but is passionate and is using all the latest, newest things? How do their perspectives differ on the solution that you're offering? I think that's one thing. It's just that differentiating experience, personality perspective. The other is going to be actually market size.

Early startups tend to have a different perspective of quickly using a new tool and iterating than people at traditional enterprises. And the third is verticals. Even if you have a target vertical for your initial go-to-market strategy, you should still test your product in other verticals if it's applicable. If your product is a complete vertical product, that's a different story. But if you just chosen a market that you think you'll have more leg room in, that doesn't mean you only test in that market.

Go and ask friends in other markets. If you're testing a creative design tool, don't just ask the designers, right? Ask the marketers who might use it. Ask the people at financial companies.

Ask the people at creative agencies. Because sometimes you'll get little tidbits of information that only come from that differentiating opinion. But when you bring it back to your target audience, say, hey, I heard this.

Your target audience is like, oh, yeah, I felt that way too. But maybe they just didn't communicate at that time. What are you trying to say, Vlad Atlanta, that we're all human and a little bit different?

And our experiences, we take it into consideration. I don't know. What an idea. I I I've been totally sarcastic, but I also totally believe in what you're saying. And I, yes, we set so stuck in tunneled vision on who we think this ideal customer is. And we don't really think about the breadth of who they are as individuals from what you're saying in terms of company size and their career experience. But even to add an industry, right, of whether they're in finance or whether they're an actual creative, I think is so important.

You can even look at GEO of where they are in the world. There's so many different ways to think about the intersectionality of these people. And we can definitely swing too far the other way and overwhelm ourselves, then not have enough qualitative data to really be able to say for definitively short, you know, definitively one way or another. But I do think figuring out what those key aspects are that are going to impact the product and finding the right people is crucial. And that's something we all think about. So yes, to that.

Yes, to that. The other thing that's interesting is finding a balance of trusting the internal subject matter expertise. There's often this odd phenomenon, especially in larger enterprises where a subject matter expert is brought in. But oddly enough, their opinion is valued less once they're brought in versus when they were external.

So really thinking about if you're bringing somebody in for subject matter expertise, make sure that you have value, but also never mistake internal subject matter expertise for fully 100% representing your audience's perspective. Even if you're part of the cohort, even if you're marketing to people like yourself, you're still not your target audience. Just like I said earlier, you can get customer marketing fit. You can easily create brand messaging that resonates with you if you are buying it, but you're not buying it, even if you're very similar to the people buying it. So it's like this odd balance of you need internal subject matter expertise, but you can't mistake it for actually being your buyer.

Yes, I guess to both of those. One of the things I love to remind when I when I start off as a marketing leader and I'm working with founders is I love to remind them that they built the thing for themselves. You saw an opportunity to build this thing because you wanted it.

What did you want it for? And really digging in with them on that as a starting point to then say, okay, how do I go find more people that were having this problem that you were having? And that might look like you and then branching out to where all the different use cases beyond just using that person as the end all be all. So yes, to that of your internal team and especially your founder, why did they start this thing?

Why did they want it? In terms of your go to market strategy, I want to know more around the like how you're thinking about bringing this thing to life or are you know, let me ask this question first, how far out are you do you think of coming out of stealth mode? Do you have any sort of indication of how much time you have?

Is it always changing? How do you sort of play within that space of known or unknown? I feel like that's one of those things you almost don't want to say out loud because you don't want to jinx it. Yes, yes. Right. It's been so many times in companies like it's actually pretty common, especially in enterprises, where marketing is like, go, go, go, we have to launch our January 1st campaign, the products coming out and marketing is always so ready. And then January 1st comes out and you're like, okay, well, the alpha test for the product gave us some feedback, we're going to push it out through once, right? So it's like, I've learned as a marketer to just always assume that a date is flexible. And I think that's made the startup life a lot easier is to learn that very, very early on in my career. But you always want to treat it like it's tomorrow.

And I think that's the balance that marketers are in. I don't want to say it's an unfair circumstance, but it is a unique circumstance where we have to be ready to be completely flexible, but we also have to be ready to be told go tomorrow. It's often we do what we call it the hurry up and wait dilemma.

Yeah, so okay, let's assume that maybe, but hopefully not because that's terrifying, that you were told that you're going live. I'll get I'll, I'm not going to say tomorrow because it's December, let's say January 2nd, we get a week in a day here to like, think about think this through, but are you ready and sort of what is your initial, you know, strategy as it stands today, knowing that tomorrow is another day and it could be totally different. But as you're thinking about the product today, and as you're thinking about going to market with this, what sort of those we talked about the building blocks of the brand and the, the, the more nurture piece, but what do you have today and how are you thinking about bringing that to life? I think because we established brand early on, that is, that is a piece that evolves, but you can always lean on what you have today. And one of the things with brand that's interesting is there's always a temptation to hold off because it's like, it's not perfect.

We're not there yet. Is it right? Is it not right? Did we do enough testing? But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how perfect it is, you're going to launch it today in a year, you're going to redo it. In six months after that, you're going to come up with a campaign that takes over your entire brand messaging anyways.

So I think part of it is not holding on too dearly on the final product. It's not, are you ready? It's what is ready and you go with what is ready, right? So whether that's, you can always have in your back pocket a soft launch where you have a website and you, some collateral and you go, you can do the full marketing campaign launch.

Like we'll see, you know, I personally have done a lot of big, big campaigns for product launches and for companies for branding from from billboards to airport buyouts. But it's not about having the right set. In that circumstances, what do I have?

How do I make that work? And I think marketers are really good at taking that and putting together a working campaign. I'll never forget what a role I joined at one point. Day one, and it was our annual biggest conferences in two weeks, you have to launch advertising today. And at first I was, that was my reaction at first. I was like, today's day one, we need ads today, the events in two weeks. But halfway through the day, I was like, well, let's do what we, what do we have?

Let's use what we have. Let's not over rotate on how would I usually do this? Well, usually I would have three months notice and I would have a design team and I would do this. Stop thinking about what you would usually have. But what can I do with what I have today?

And I think that is how you launch a lot of companies is if we're ready to launch, you go, you know, last thing you want is marketing to hold off a launch. I love to know what, if you could just finish the story out for us on that campaign you did where you only had two weeks to get people at this event, what was the execution on that? What did you have?

And what did you run with? So the one thing that was good is we had a very good customer base for that event. So we already had a good volume of people.

I was on the digital side at the time. So one of the things is I never like to wait if there's a backlog in design, I'm going to create a bad design and get the designers spent five minutes fixing it rather than waiting two days for them to start from scratch. That actually is actually some, an option I often take is I'll do a bad version of something to get us started.

Because if that even cuts 10% of the time or moves, creates a momentum people, there's an interesting reaction when people see somebody do something, they know they can do better, they're going to jump on it. But in that case, I was like, what do we have? Well, we had a website for the event. So okay, so we have enough imagery, we have enough information. Within I think a day, I was like, okay, I can get LinkedIn ads live.

I know our target market, we have enough collateral, LinkedIn ads, I can throw into Canada and put something together. Search is text, I can go do search. And I can only imagine how much easier that would have been if I had AI. If I could have just thrown that website into chat, GPT and said, hey, give me some guidance, or even better, my favorite right now, I'm pretty obsessed with Claude, because you can give it some materials. Here's a couple images, here's a text, create an ad for me, it'll write, write, react code and actually create the image of the ad for you. What? Right, create a landing page, go write the code for you, right? And it does it live in front of you. So this ability to mock things up, iterate, create things fast, launching that campaign in a couple of days like I did last time would have been a thousand times.

I gotta go pay the cost now. And I do think that's one of your expectation of marketers is to be able to say, we have an idea today, do it tomorrow. One of the biggest trends I'm seeing in B2B marketing is the speed from viral trend on, let's call it TikTok, to before it, there'd be a transition to go from TikTok to Instagram to Reddit. And then about a month later, B2B marketers would have the same meme on LinkedIn. That was the time frame. We had right now, you're seeing same day, you're seeing the same day B2B marketers picking up these B2C, these generic memes and trends, entering them out into B2B marketing, same day. And I think we have to use technology to be able to keep up with that. Claude, it's the first time hearing anybody saying that they're using it.

And it sounds very different than chat GPP in regards to the real time aspect. Are you using a bunch of AI tools or those you're to go choose? What sort of your, I know guys, I'm going on another tangent again, but bear with me.

I just really would love to know like what AI tools you're testing out right now and what you're loving and what you are feeling like about. I do try to use as many of them as I can, at least when I come out to understand their fit. I think we're seeing more and more people realize it's not that one is better than the other. It's that there's a tech stack of AI tools and you're using the right thing.

So for myself, I like, uh, perplexity is a great AI search. If you need current information, that's one kind of biggest gap with Claude is their information is still, I think April 20, 24. I think it even corrected me the other day saying like, oh, we're not in December, 2024 yet.

I'm like, yes, we are. So it's not about the most recent information. Um, but I find it's models very powerful in terms of maintaining the context window in your conversation. So you're less frequently correcting it, reminding it, asking for iterations, and it's forgetting a previous fix much better for coding in my experience so far, but I'm not using the level of coding.

I know a lot of people are using GitHub code assistant, which is supposed to be very powerful on that side of things. I like to use chat. You BT is validation.

It's not my favorite to start with in most cases, but I love to throw something I had one AI come up with and I go to chat. You BT and I say, what do you think? What would you have done differently? What what outcome? So it's almost like that second opinion, kind of like a physician second opinion. So that's what I like to use chat.

You BT for, um, image generation. There's obviously mid journeys, top tier. There's no, there's no question about that, but there's more open source versions and there's also quick ones. I have friends who aren't even in the industry who realized on Facebook search, you can ask it to create pictures for your kids and it'll, I need a picture of a cat wearing an elephant ears and it just a second later that it's there.

Right. Um, I actually often use the Bing image search. It's accessible.

It's easy. It's not the most powerful, but it does what I need it to do. Um, the built in AIs and a lot of products I find are not quite there yet. Notion is slowly getting there.

It's more helpful. Figma is launched. It's slowly getting there. I think we're going to see those pick up. Um, and then we're seeing cool things on the coding side on in terms of like V zero, which is creating quick components for friend and UI really quickly.

Um, just the other day I saw, I think it's called lovable, which is a dev app where you can text, create a restaurant app that only shows restaurants with these kinds of things and let you rate it and like here's, and it goes and creates you that app really quickly. Wow. So there's there's quite the back. I think marketers really do need to pay attention. Um, I have been refreshing the open AI, uh, video model that they just launched publicly every day to try to get an account. But if you're not playing with those as a marketer, it's going to be hard to keep up. You're no longer going to be able to wait six months for a video production agency.

And I think within a year, you're going to have to lean on some of these tools to maintain the speed of marketing. Yes, I, I'm overwhelmed in a good way in a, I need, I need to branch out kind of way. I've been, I've been very invested in chat, GPT, um, mostly because I sometimes I think I got to get a handle on something before I can add to it. Um, especially from, I feel like I'm not learning chat right now.

I'm learning prompting because I feel like the only way to make chat GPT work really well is to really hone your ability to ask it the right questions in the right way and iterate on that over time to get to the best result. You can't just ask it the first time. Don't act on, don't do that.

Iterate on it. It's, it's, um, I, I spent quite a bit of time on the marketing analytics side. And one of the things I've often worked with, uh, analysts, especially those coming new, new into the field is training them on understanding what a person is actually asking for. Um, and that's something AI doesn't do well today.

They're not trying to understand what your intention is. Not yet. I think we're, we're getting some improvements, but a data analyst really has to, when you asked me for the bounce rate on this specific page, what was the intention?

Right. If, did you want to know if it was performing? Did you want to know if it was performing better than something else? Did you have an inkling that something on the page was wrong and you wanted to check it? What is your intention with that question? And that's one of the, those things you almost have to ask yourself as you're working with AI is not what are you asking it to do, but what is your intention?

And often giving it that context makes a world of a difference. There's a big difference between saying, write me a page about this versus saying, I'm a marketer at a B2B company. I sell to this audience.

I'm having this issue selling to this audience. I think we're going to solve it this way. Here's copy for a page. Help me create a page that solves that problem. So I think a lot of that prompt engineering is about building intention into the ask.

Yes. The context is key for sure. It definitely does a better job when it has all the information, as much information upfront as it possibly can around why, why this thing. There was a question earlier about another AI tool called Sora S-O-R-A. Is that something? Yes. That is the video AI tool I referenced. I have not gotten access to it. It just launched publicly.

After this call, I'll probably do another refresh and see if I can get it. But that image duration video generation, that's not the only one. There'll be more that come out. But we're seeing it come out in production too. Coca-Cola's latest Christmas ad this year. They spent a lot of money every year producing it.

They used AI. There was very mixed feedback. There were those of us who definitely can't buy them and who were blown away that it could even be done, that it could be done to that extent. Then there's a lot of people calling out saying it's still not quite there in terms of having that human element. Even when humans animated, there was this interesting concept. I'm sure you've heard of being uncanny valley. When a human animates something, it still comes across as human. When an AI animates it, we're still living that uncanny valley, that unconscious feeling that something isn't right when you watch the video. To be transparent, I think we're going to surpass that very, very fast. I mean, yeah, deep fake alone is a step in that direction, which is sort of kind of terrifying and also awesome at the same time. It's a great opportunity for cybersecurity companies.

For sure. Let's close out here with anything you have for the audience in regards to, I don't love advice. If you have any experience sharing you can do around getting started and stepping into that stealth mode. What's one thing you wish you knew stepping into this mode of knowing you were going to be more than a marketer? I think one of the things I wish I knew was the change of being a day-to-day operator at a running company versus at an earlier stage company.

You have to really shift your mentality. When you're used to looking at what has to be done today, what fires do I have to extinguish today? When those are your two questions as a marketer and then you shift into, it's not what has to be done today, but what should I be doing today? They're very different motivational methods. That's why I think some people thrive in one and not the other. Some people really thrive in that external motivation. At this stage, you really have to have a lot of internal motivation and drive to get past that. There isn't something ever in a single day you absolutely have to do because a client's waiting for it tomorrow or it's in production and it's broken or an email went out and a link didn't work.

You're never thinking like that. You really have to challenge yourself to be motivated on a day-to-day basis. If you can do that, if you have that drive, it is so fun because then you get to really think creatively of, you know what, there's something I think we could do and I have the time to go do it.

Time to go do it. What a novelty. I feel like as marketers, we tend to not be able to do anything unless our back is against the wall and things are on fire. That is a huge mental shift. How do you stay motivated through that of feeling like, you know, technically you don't have all the time in the world to the point you made earlier of needing to feel like you can launch tomorrow, but at the same time, there's probably because of the shift in mentality, there probably is a little bit of that breathing room where it almost feels like you do have all the time in the world. So how do you stay motivated and on top of execution when it feels a little too easy to slip into this more theoretical, philosophical ideation place like when you don't have to execute just yet or you feel like you don't have to execute just yet because you're not live. You don't have a thing.

I think there's two things. One is you have to be very diligent about setting your own deadlines, even if they're not set and some sort of external factor. And then you have to actually find a feeling of rewarding completing that task. You know, I've been writing blogs and content. I know we're not going to launch tomorrow, but I still have a goal, right? I want to write this many pieces of content for our launch and I want to do it by this date and almost do it like even if you don't have a date set, if you have a date set, it's a little easier.

But even if you don't have one set an arbitrary what if we launch date like we're talking about and create that work back plan just like you would for a campaign because worst case, you're ready early and you get to iterate pivot. But even more important is you actually have to be passionate about the product you're building. That's something that you often see is people go to early startups because of the fun of the startup, the concept of the startup, but it's not just the startup life you have to be passionate about. You have to be passionate about the product you're building because that is what's going to keep you motivated. That's going to is what's going to spark that extra idea of something that you can work on that day that can contribute and add value.

I love that. Yes, I find it really tough. I'm not going to lie as somebody who likes to get my hands dirty and make things.

I find that I do that best when I do have my back up against the wall. So I feel like I would have I would really struggle with not having a clear deadline. So making my own. I also feel like for me, having an accountability partner would be really key, which I do at MKG. You know, I'm my own marketing leader, but I have a PM Avery Davis.

I don't know. I can't imagine life without you who holds me accountable to say, you said you're going to get this thing done. And it's not. And hey, it's kind of a waterfall cascade of when you don't hit a deadline that the people behind you can't hit their deadline. And I'm like, Oh, no.

So there's that for me, it's like, okay, this thing isn't going to happen tomorrow, but my piece has to happen because of all this other sort of stuff. So I think even if you are a solo marketer, part of a team having some sort of accountability, who would you are if you needed that? If you needed that, but you didn't have it as a mark, like if you didn't have a marketing counterpart, right? A lot of times you're a solo marketer in these situations. How who would that person be if you if you didn't need that as part of your organization right today?

Would you have to count a bit? I do think when when you're this small, I think you have to be really, really in touch with the founders. And I think it's one of those the second you communicate something that you are going to deliver to one of your founders, that in itself is a extremely high level of accountability to me.

They don't have to check in. It's just like when you communicate, I would say equal if you tell a CEO that you're going to get something done at a bigger startup or an enterprise. If you're telling your C level leader, I'm going to do something. It's it is very motivating to me that deadline. Yes, I am so something about even over communicate deadlines that are arbitrary that are ones I came up for myself that don't have an extra. I'm going to do this by this date just to do it. Does it does it affect them if I don't do that date?

Possibly not. But by communicating that I've set that date to myself to a third party, that sets that level. It does.

It does. I feel like the minute you say it out loud and you tell somebody you're going to do something, then yeah, better deliver because it builds that trust. Because even if it's even if it doesn't matter to them today, when it does matter to them in the future, they know that they can trust you to get it done because you've already built that trust, that level of commitment and trust. I love that.

I'm so grateful for this conversation. I think so many marketers are heading into that sort of fractional subject matter expert realm. And the idea of being able to join a company sooner than when they've raised money or when they've come out of you know, once they have the product is so it's I don't think it's going to be an opportunity that that they'll always have. But to keep their eye out for that, I think is going to be a moment of an opportunity. I think there's going to be a lot of products coming out of the woodwork as we head into, you know, with all these layoffs. That's sort of one of the wonderful happenstances when layoffs happen is people go build and they go create.

And as marketers, we get to come along for that journey and what better way to do it than to show up sooner than later to make it happen. So, oh, I am a little jealous that you get to build from the ground up. I'm a little jealous that you get to set your own deadlines and create your own sort of way forward. I'm like really jealous that you get to hang out with the product team and influence that.

And I'm so grateful and honored for this conversation, Vadalena. Before we close out, where can people find you? LinkedIn is definitely the best. I'm probably on 20 different Slack communities.

So, if you're in, you know, marketing ops professionals or cybersecurity marketing society, I'm there as well. We have to get you out next year. It was a wonderful conference. Before we go, before we close out here, my favorite question, given the holiday season and just the fact that I feel like we all sort of need this right now of joy. What's currently from a personal standpoint, bringing you joy, or what are you most looking forward to personally in the coming weeks and months to bring you joy?

So, I'm hoping I have a couple of days set aside. I started a new hobby maybe about a year ago or so. And it's an interesting hobby for me because one, it's something that involves no screens.

Two, it's something that I'm not obsessed over to the point of trying to turn into a daily thing. So, I started bouldering, so like rock climbing without cables. And you can't check your Slack while you're climbing a wall. So, there's something very special about the disconnect that you get when you're doing an activity like that where it's both physical, it's mentally challenging, the puzzle of how do you climb up the route, how do you, and then being able to completely turn off the day-to-day thoughts about whether it's work or life and really hone in on the activity you're doing. But, again, it hasn't become an obsession for me. So, I'm not looking at how can I be the best boulder, or I'm not looking at compete, I'm not looking to go every day. It's a fun hobby I can do every week or two. And it's something I'm really enjoying to try to get a couple of days in over the winter holidays. I love the disconnect piece. And what I, not just about screens, I think that's important, yes to that. I will be doing that with my children as much as humanly possible.

We are not sitting in front of the TV over Christmas holiday. That's my mission. But even more importantly, the brain break. Y'all, we're going to need a brain break over the next few weeks as we close out 2024 here. Take it.

Find that thing where you can't think about anything else, but what's in front of you. Not that you necessarily have to go bolding without ropes. That sounds awesome and terrifying at the same time. But like for me, I play tennis. So for me, when I'm out on that court, I cannot think about anything else, but that ball going back and forth because the minute it does, I have missed the ball and I look like a goofball swinging through midair. It's great. So I do think finding that thing is just so key to not just have over, you know, this next few weeks, but what is that thing you can keep doing to get that brain break throughout the year is just so critical for our mental health and I'm here for it. So thank you so much for sharing that with us. Thank you for being on the show, Vanlena. It was lovely to meet you. Thank you to everybody listening.

If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share. This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency with SEO and Digital Ads, helping you bring your brand forward for those complex audiences, those CSOs and cybersecurity practitioners out there who love to not engage with us, but know they have to. We are here to help you build that bridge and trust.

Yes, yes to that. Hats off to Elijah. Thank you, Elijah, for being in my producer.

I'm so grateful to you. If you'd like to be a guest, please DM me. I'd love to have you on. I am filled up through January, but I'm going to need to fill up for 2025. So let's go. Let's do it. I would love to have you. Thank you all so much. Have a wonderful, wonderful Friday and see you next time.