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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:13)
hello everyone. Welcome to what is our first episode of the new year.
year. Actually, we took a little bit of break over Christmas so that I could drink and eat far too much. So I'm your host, Tom, slightly heavier Tom than the last time you would have heard from me. And I'm gonna get straight into it and introduce today's guest.
So we've got Sarah Cameron. Sarah's the head of content and PR at Comply Advantage. So well, first off, Sarah, hello.
Sarah Cameron (00:37)
Hey Tom, thanks for having me.
Tom Rudnai (00:39)
No worries, thank you for joining us. guess before I do a very bad job of introducing you and your background, do maybe want to give us from your own mouth a quick rundown of who is Sarah and tell us a little bit about where you've been and where you are now.
Sarah Cameron (00:55)
Sure. So yeah, like you said, I'm Sarah, Head of Quanta and PR at Comply Advantage. So we are a company that specialises in financial crime compliance for banks, payments companies and fintechs. We're all about empowering them to eliminate financial crime. So a great mission to be a part of. But yeah, essentially my job is to take that incredibly complex world of fin crime and compliance and turn it into compelling stories to help them.
fight and manage their risk.
Tom Rudnai (01:28)
Interesting, I always find it interesting when
I talk to content folks in like highly regulated industries and industries that aren't naturally, don't take this the wrong way, aren't naturally
compelling and so in story, because I think it makes the content jobs. It's like when I talk to people in cyber security and things like that, I'm like, it's difficult to turn that into really engaging, compelling content.
Sarah Cameron (01:44)
Not sounded, don't worry.
Yeah, for sure. think it kind of ties into why I love comply or why I love my job right now is because there's a real actual moral imperative behind what we do. You we're not just selling tech, we're selling solutions to problems. know, our customers don't wake up one day and go, hey, I want to buy some AI. And they're wanting to buy or like find a solution that helps them stop a human trafficker use their platform. there's a real...
There's a real, obviously the scale of financial crime is awful and I never really understood the scale of it before I started at Comply four years ago. But the fact that the company is on a real mission to do something makes it, the content isn't dry. There's a real meaty story we can get behind to back up what we're seeing.
Tom Rudnai (02:46)
Yeah, it's interesting because I think every startup loves to pretend that there's a big kind of worldly mission behind their startup. But I've always found it a little bit like cringe. I remember working at an email service provider, one of my first jobs in London. And they were very like, this is our mission. We help e-commerce businesses sell more stuff. There isn't really a mission behind this and that's fine.
Sarah Cameron (03:08)
Yeah, that's the thing.
There's dignity in that. Absolutely. I used to work for a marketing agency where I wrote copy for electricians, plumbers and roofers. But I'll tell you something, writing about toilets every day did not give me joy. But here it does. think we ran an event towards the end of last year and we opened with a video with some kind of compelling stats about where we are today in financial crime. And some of the ones that stuck with me are like...
50 million people are in modern day slavery, one in three are children. The FBI had a report saying that the rise of sextortion of minors has risen 650%. So it's a terrible, awful scale. to be with Comply, I think we really do have a strong mission. I love that my job is to...
tell the story about how we're arming those companies with the tools to fight it. So it does differentiate itself from every other kind of tech company. It's a hard job. It's not easy by any means, because sometimes you do just want to talk about how good your tech is, because it is good. But people, at least until they're down the line a couple more touch points, then they'll listen to it. But upfront, that's not really what they're interested in hearing straight away.
Tom Rudnai (04:29)
Yeah, well, and there is something very interesting about us. Obviously, it's not nice, but it's a very interesting world to get immersed into and write about. Let's go back a little bit because we've got straight into comply. Like, talk me through just in your background a little bit, where have you been before this? And I guess I'm always interested. What step in your career would you say was the most formative? Like, is there a place that stands out a moment in time where you started to figure things out? But it might be here.
Sarah Cameron (04:34)
Yeah.
Yeah, no, that's a good question. I kind of I'd probably say the most formative step was the step into marketing itself. I kind of it wasn't a straight line by by any means. I studied English literature at uni. I mean, when is it a straight line? mean, unless you study marketing at uni and you know that's what you want to do. that wasn't the case.
Tom Rudnai (05:09)
the
But that's sad. I
always think about people. I studied product marketing at uni.
Sarah Cameron (05:20)
And I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm sorry.
No, but for me, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I love to read. I love to write. And if I could write about what I was reading, I was on cloud nine. So I did English Lit and then graduated and everyone thought, great, you're going to be a teacher. And I was just like, I don't want be a teacher. Like, I want some free time in my life. I want, I don't want to be tired all the time. And so I did an MSc in publishing because I thought that was the only industry that
book people could go into. And then it was on that course that we did a module in marketing and I was hooked. was everything from, it was creative, was analytical, there was storytelling, problem solving, a of psychology in there. Yeah, so that's how I kind of made it into the marketing realm. I worked at a digital marketing agency straight after my masters where
talking about the toilets and the plumbers and the rivers. So it was very bit of a deep dive into agency life. But the way we work at Comply very much is we are like an in-house agency, the marketing team, especially the content team. it was really good experience for me there to set me up for here. So I'd probably say that's the cure to throw into marketing.
Tom Rudnai (06:41)
Yeah, nice. then tell us a little bit more then for people who don't know comply. Like what are the unique challenges of marketing comply that so we're going to talk about a lot of stuff after this that kind of context that we need to understand in order to understand the way that you approach marketing.
Sarah Cameron (06:57)
Sure. So marketing at Comply, I would say it's a bit of a unique beast. So we're a SaaS provider in a space where sales cycles are incredibly long. know, we're talking massive financial institutions where the decision making process is really rigorous. Then there's our audience, compliance leaders and risk officers. They're not your typical, like, always on social crowd.
They're security conscious, highly private, often hard to reach through traditional channels. You can't just algorithm your way to achieve risk officer. You've got to earn their trust through authority first. But for me within content, going back to what we talking about, that moral imperative earlier, that's probably my biggest challenge is to balancing the gravity of the topic.
And, you know, it's a deeply emotive subject who got to be respectful of the human cost while remaining professional and kind of balancing human with being sensationalist.
Tom Rudnai (08:05)
Yeah, it's interesting. spoke to and I'm blanking on the name now. It's going to come back to me later in this podcast randomly. But some people who also kind of that their audience would see so is and they said it was a really tough space because you kind of want to match the gravity of the subject. But they said they had a lot of success actually by going the other way. And they kind of did some market research and realize their audience there's this kind of
distance or detachment that builds up when you receive so from the kind of things you're talking about and you develop almost this gallows humor and they did this whole campaign around like the whole swear word moment when you when you realize that there's been a cyber breach or something like that and I guess it's probably a pretty similar kind of audience that you're talking to so it's trying to balance keeping it human while still reflecting the gravity.
Sarah Cameron (08:57)
Yeah, for sure. It's a tightrope that we walk and sometimes it might change depending on the persona that we're talking to. You know, we've kind of got three personas of, you know, people that are kind of more business and growth conscious or risk conscious and compliance conscious or cost focused. And depending on who we're talking to, you might have a different underlying personality there so you can test. And it depends who we're talking to. So we can...
be a bit flexible sometimes.
Tom Rudnai (09:28)
Yeah, and what channels have you said that it's so hard to reach audience that isn't often on social? What channels have you found do a very effective?
Sarah Cameron (09:34)
I think, you know, actually email and phone are actually work really well for us. But earned media as well. think, you know, PR, I think we've talked a lot about content, but not as much about PR. That's one of the reasons why it sits with me because PR has very much moved from into being more of a performance channel. And, you know, people are using AI search to...
research a lot more and making sure that our content is showing up on those channels has been a big driver for us this past year and will continue to be this year. So I'd earned media and AI search is working really well for us as well.
Tom Rudnai (10:14)
Yeah, well, and that was one of the things that I wanted to talk about. I you've brought those two things kind of together, which I think makes a lot of sense when you're considering AI as such a priority. I increasingly they do go hand in hand.
Sarah Cameron (10:23)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (10:30)
I guess my question would be like...
Let's start from the top on that one then. like AI search and AI, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. How does that factor into your priorities? Like is it overtaken SEO? Do you expect it to? Like how important is it as channel?
Sarah Cameron (10:41)
Thank
It's good question. think it's definitely not, I wouldn't want to say it overtakes SEO because I think with SEO, that's your foundation for really good content that's going to rank well on AI search engines because it's it's valuable content at the end of the day. It's best good quality content at the end of day is what's going to rank, you know, wherever people are searching. AEO definitely has
taken up a lot more of our brain space in that we've had to think a little bit more differently about how we're repackaging and repurposing our content. Video content for a while was shown to be really influential. So we already slice and dice a lot of our webinar content, but we're making sure it's turned them into shorts, putting them on YouTube, as well as LinkedIn shorts when they did that for a while. don't know, feel like every other day they change what they offer.
Tom Rudnai (11:46)
I'm
not mad to keep up with you.
Sarah Cameron (11:48)
It's
impossible to keep up. We've done a lot of citations, talked about around media earlier, but actually quotes, so embedding lot of quotes from our different events and things. So it definitely has taken up a lot of brain space and it will continue to this year. I think the goalposts really will change a lot, but I think they should, not just because it makes it difficult.
but if they have a set algorithm, if there's a set algorithm on, you do all of these things consistently, you're going to rank number one on chat, TBT, perplexity, et cetera. All you, all you're doing is that the person with the most or the company with the most money is going to be at the top as opposed to the people with the best answer to the question or, you know, with the most valuable content or, you know, even the best product. so I don't mind it being a little bit of cat and mouse because it is interesting.
But yeah, it's definitely gonna... SEO is not dead by any means, but it's definitely gonna take up more our this year.
Tom Rudnai (12:57)
No, I'm with you. I think that they're just very, different disciplines, which I think is something that most people overlook. I think because the leading voices in AEO have naturally become because it's still about discoverability, being the leading voices in SEO, there's an SEO mindset that has crept into everything that's done on AEO. It's about ranking, right? But very few, it's really hard to rank in AI because it doesn't actually want to refer anyone to you. So if we're measuring citations, we're measuring mentions, it has no interest in citing you unless you could
Sarah Cameron (13:00)
Yeah.
me.
No.
Tom Rudnai (13:27)
really force it to. It becomes a lot more about how your narrative and story is kind of permeating into it. think of it as like the old thing of like how are you helping them form the requirements and that's actually the job it's quite different.
Sarah Cameron (13:41)
Yeah,
for sure. think it's also kind of changed or help us think about different types of content to put out there. Previously, I think a couple of years ago, we talked about wanting to do vendor comparison articles, but we were a little bit on edge of knowing whether that was the right call, kind of calling out who our competitors are. Obviously not back linking to them, but is that really a road we want to go down?
I'm so glad that we did decide to make that leap a couple of years ago because those are the ones that have really catapulted us and made us kind of already when we started tracking how we show up on, think ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot are our top three channels for AI search and they have a much higher conversion rate for demo requests than they do on organic, which is quite interesting. But those were the articles that kind of had us at number one.
already. So there definitely is an overlap but it's helped us know what kind of content people are wanting to see when they're using AI search because they're wanting comparisons, they're using it for research so more of an over indexing on bottom funnel rather than top funnel.
Tom Rudnai (14:57)
Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, that's where you will get the citations anyway. So I'm always interested, like, what are you measuring? Like, how are you defining success in AI search? And presumably, there was a process of kind of trying to somehow retrofit like all of the different prompts that we want to be kind of quote unquote, ranking for and how did you go about finding those? I know that's a challenge for lot of marketers.
Sarah Cameron (15:18)
Yeah, it definitely is. think last year was very much of a kind of test and learn year for us. So the prompts that we tracked were a mixture of ones that we already knew that we performed well on for SEO and a mixture of ones that we thought we would perform well on for AI search and then ones that we wanted to be ranking for. And so over the last year or so we've been, for example,
deployed a lot more agentic capabilities. So agentic has been quite a big keyword for us and making sure that we're synonymous with that in the market. So that kind of helped us create a list of our first kind of set of prompts. And then when we're tracking it, we're looking, really, I look at the kind of demo request kind of endpoint to make sure to see that conversion of like, you know, how many demo requests did we get in the past quarter?
you know, how many came from organic versus AI search, because apart from a relatively small investment, to be fair on like our AI search tracking tool, we use Otterly AI, who've been brilliant. They're they're quite a, they're startup. think they started a couple of years ago, but they've been great in kind of listening to our feedback and providing features that we're looking for.
That's what we're looking at. And that's where we've noticed that, you know, the conversion rate from people coming from AI search and then going on our website and clicking a demo is far greater than people obviously using organic because they're finding as probably they're not as high intent when they're on Google versus on chat.tpt, for example.
Tom Rudnai (17:02)
Yeah, well, mean, that's one of the kind of company you don't just get a link, you get a recommendation, right? So AI kind of functions as a trusted advisor. And I think that it feeds into how you need to treat it. I'm always saying you shouldn't, you shouldn't really look at AI as a channel. You should look at it as an actual like a market participant that you need to educate, enable on who you are, what, who you're for, when, how to recommend you. And then you can slowly over time, increase the strength of that recommendation. And that's one of the things we're trying to do a lot of work on here at Demand Genius is
Sarah Cameron (17:11)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (17:32)
measuring that next level below, not just are we getting a link, but is it a link with a recommendation? How is our network leading into the requirements and the way that the LLM talks about the market and things like that. But it's such an interesting space to be working in because it's just this whole new thing to get your head around.
Sarah Cameron (17:39)
Yeah.
Yeah,
for sure. And people have a lot of questions about it. Like even, you know, our exec team and the board have tons of questions about how we're showing up on AI search and what are we doing about it. So it's definitely kept me on my toes the last few months to make sure to give good updates on these are the prompts. This is how we're doing for each of these prompts. This is where we're, you know, it gives, utterly gives us a ranking in terms of like how many citations, you know, with the link and then also kind of where we sit.
on a grid versus any competitors that are also ranking for those terms. So it's kept me on my toes for sure.
Tom Rudnai (18:28)
Yeah. Well, that's, I think that's quite an interesting thing to talk about a little bit of like, how do you stay up to date? And then also how do you keep the organisation up to date? So let's take the first one first, because I think I speak to like events or meetups in London. I speak to marketers all the time who are like, I have a day job. I'm also meant to be the authority on AI and marketing, how we can use it as a kind of source and as an efficiency driver. And it is like overwhelming to stay on top of all of that. Are there like,
techniques or habits or particular sources that you have found particularly good for keeping you up to date.
Sarah Cameron (18:58)
Mm-hmm.
Honestly, I feel like LinkedIn keeps me up to date whether I want to want it to or not. Yeah, it definitely it definitely is a really hard thing to juggle. And because you know, as you said, like being an authority, it's not just on AI and marketing, it's on how and what our industry is doing. You know, we we report quite regularly on changing regulations and
know, sanctions updates, et cetera. And so I need to be somewhat abreast of all of that, you know, to make sure that our content is valuable. But then I also need to be abreast on, you know, all the new marketing things. I think LinkedIn is a good one for me. go, I try and like fit in a lot of webinars and throughout the month, you know, maybe one a month that is focused on marketing. And honestly, I mean, I don't know.
maybe their ads are working well, they're targeting me well, because I feel like I'm not even really having to research them, they're just in my inbox or they're on LinkedIn. So I try and diversify it, make sure that I'm not listening to the same voices all the time, because I think that's where you can get a bit of group mindset and not actually try things that are that innovative, you're just kind of doing what everyone else is doing, which might not work for your company. But yeah, I mean, I'll always take a recommendation as well, so.
Maybe you can share how you stay abreast of it, because I don't know if I'm always doing it very well.
Tom Rudnai (20:27)
I mean, we spend an awful lot of time doing like original research, which is the really fun part. And that's one of the things we try to put at the core of everything we do, because I think there's a huge opportunity and there's a lot of kind of, I think there's a lot of myths out there as to what, how LLMs actually work and how you can sustainably rank within them.
Sarah Cameron (20:49)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (20:50)
So I end up spending spending huge amounts of time down and around the the other thing I mean, I just find talk to chat GPT about it No one better to tell you how to get seen in chat to your teeth and chat GPT And it will break down you can ask you can ask it after it gives you an answer Like how did you arrive at that? Where did you look things like that? And it's a really good way to kind of work back and get a sense of how you might be able to influence that so I'd encourage people as well as looking to other people for Advice and guidance like I think it's very important to have that time to play
Sarah Cameron (20:59)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (21:20)
And if you play with these things, you get to understand them a lot better.
Sarah Cameron (21:24)
Yeah, I know that's a great idea.
Tom Rudnai (21:27)
And the other question I had off the back of what you're saying is like keeping the organization up to date because I guess that is something that's also going to fall on you and again, it's a one of the quirks of this is the early adopters for AI just so happened to be our investors and our CEOs and people like that, right? So it's often like trying to manage their perspective of how important it is how to do it. That's something that they're very interested in. How do you go about
managing that, the right expectations and teaching them of like the reality and the practicalities of what you're doing on the ground.
I guess maybe another way to put it is just how you go about reporting on success, right? Like what metrics do you pass upwards and what context do you try and put around those to explain it and explain what you're doing and how you're influencing those metrics?
Sarah Cameron (22:12)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, okay. think, yeah, when it comes to senior execs and kind of reporting, there is a line to toe and sometimes there's the stuff that we want to talk about within marketing and it's different to the stuff that they care about. So packaging it in a way that links it back to our business goals for the year is the way to get their attention. With AI investment, for example,
Like last year, I was looking to increase headcount for my team and putting the business case together. The thing that moved the needle and allowed me to have the budget for this extra person was the slide I included that said, because of our strategic investment in AI, I only need to ask for one person as opposed to three. So that was very tangible for them. That was a real kind of business impact. Whereas I could have gone and said like, okay.
you know, this is what we're doing with AI search. This is how we're using AI in webinars. This is how we're using AI in case studies or, you know, report generation, et cetera. But, you know, as nice as that is, it's not really what they care about at the end of the day. You know, they care about the bottom line and kind of putting it into terms that are, you know, favorable for them. So that's the learning curve.
Tom Rudnai (23:42)
think it's a really nice reframing of the kind of AI efficiency gains though. Like I hear far more than I would like to about whole marketing teams or large proportions of marketing teams being kind of made redundant at the moment because the general approach is the job is getting more efficient so we need less people but it's a nice reframing like we have invested a lot in making each individual more efficient so you should give more individuals right if the goal is growth then
Sarah Cameron (23:57)
Mm.
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (24:12)
and then put more people into that very efficient machine and you will get massive returns. Is that something that like, how tough a battle was that, I guess? yeah, did it fall on kind of willing ears?
Sarah Cameron (24:30)
To be honest, it wasn't that tough of a battle. And that's because I'm lucky enough to work for a company that really, really values content. And it really, it fuels our inbound pipeline massively. So to not give it that kind of weight or that thought, it's going to affect us big time.
Tom Rudnai (24:39)
Hmm.
Sarah Cameron (24:52)
So thankfully I've got kind of a history of good performance to back me up there. yeah, think with content, I think you're right. is so, it is hard to see, especially copywriters kind of being slowly phased out. Although I do think that we'll kind of come back around where companies realize, oh, we don't have someone that knows how to write and that'll be an issue. One thing...
I did make a conscious decision to change within my team. Previously we had copywriters that was like their job role, junior copywriters, senior copywriter, mid-week copywriter. I have changed that to content executive purely because while they do a lot of writing still mainly in editing, refining text, I think it sets them up for success in the future on their CV because at end of the day they are doing more than writing.
Copywriters always are, they're doing research, they're editing. It's more than what it says in the tin. think content executive is a bit more broad, highlights a few more skills. So that was also kind of part of the deal. I framed it in a way that I'm just not looking for a writer. I'm looking for someone to come in and really help us with our workflows and, you know, optimize how we're using AI, like automation for various tasks so that they can actually focus more on creativity.
So I think that framing helped me get signed off.
Tom Rudnai (26:22)
Yeah, it's a marketing role, not just a writing role. And I do think, one thing I'm saying pretty clearly, I mean, we just...
when we kind of think of our capacity planning and stuff like that, we just hire marketers. There were specialisms within that, but I think everyone has to be a generalist, whether you're on the technical or the marketing side of our business. I know one thing that stood out to me when we did our of prep call before this, just that I wanted to pick up on, is you mentioned that at Comply Advantage, you consider yourself to be an AI first company, which is something I always think is interesting because I think I hear that a lot and it means very different things to very different people.
I hear more from younger companies who are starting out now. I guess you've obviously, you can apply a vantage that's a little bit more established. Like what does an AI first company, what does being an AI first company mean to you and how does it change the approach that you take to content and to your role?
Sarah Cameron (27:05)
Thanks.
Yeah, you're right. I feel like every SaaS company is AI first. But I think for us, it's not a buzzword. It's a necessity for efficiency. So I said earlier that people don't, our customers don't necessarily care first off about our fancy engine. Maybe they do down the line, but they care about the AI can process millions of data points and find that.
one needle in a haystack that a human analyst would miss. So for us, AI first means technology is architected to solve the problem from day zero rather than just bolting it onto a system. What that means for marketing, maybe is a bit more nuanced. So I kind of think of it in three...
in three pillars and it all kind of comes under my banner of working smarter this year. So first is, you know, like how we're using AI to make our marketing efforts more efficient, which we can come back to later if you want. And then secondly, we'd be like adapting our strategy to how our customers are using AI. So that's the whole GEO side that we talked about earlier. And then thirdly, kind of using AI to...
completely get rid of one and done content because I think repurposing and repackaging is, you know, every content marketers goal for this year. I don't think I've seen anyone else that's not talking about it. It's all over everywhere. So, you know, taking one hero piece of content and turning it into 20, 30, 40, you know, bits of derivative content, whether that's podcasts or training material, blogs, webinars, the whole shebang. But that's roughly kind of what it means for us. It's not just
using AI for the sake of AI, going back to what saying about bolted on systems, think, you know, it's really easy to get swayed by the nice, bright, shiny new thing that's going to solve a relatively small problem. It might not seem small, but in the giant ecosystem of the company or marketing, might be. And then it can, you can very easily have five or six.
really good AI tools to solve five or six really small problems, but it's not really efficient. It's not lean. You've got your marketers in your team manage software more than they actually think about creative solutions that only marketers can do. that's one thing we're doing this year is really refining our marketing tech stack to make sure that there's room for efficiency. And if it does mean that we need to kind of spend more, you know,
when it comes to getting sign off, that's the side I would focus on. I'd be like, look, we don't want to end up in a kind of AI tool sprawl that actually goes against what our whole, what our product that we're selling is all about. So, you know, we're kind of mimicking that within our own team.
Tom Rudnai (30:27)
I I like it. I guess I could sum that up with you. work from the problem rather than from the tool. think a lot of people share chase shiny objects, as you say, and it's like, look, we've got this thing now and we can do this thing that we don't need to do. You're like working from what's the impactful problem to solve, what's the bottleneck or what's the big new channel or big new content format or whatever it is that we want to be able to achieve. And can we use AI to allow us to do something impactful that we couldn't do before?
Sarah Cameron (30:57)
Yeah, and I think it's really easy to get in the mindset of like, if you're busy, if you are in a position where, you know, I don't think I've ever met someone who's part of a marketing team that they would say is overstaffed. I mean, you know, I think it's more on the other side of things. And so everyone's stretched your time poor. So to see one tool that could help you alleviate one thing.
it's really attractive to be like, yeah, let's do it. Let's just do it. But it's having that strategic mindset of seeing not just where one bottleneck is, but where multiple are, and then identifying the biggest bottleneck. you know, they might all be different and you might need multiple tools for it, but you know, to be strategic and lean, identifying the biggest bottleneck and which tool can maybe help with that and maybe one or two others. And then, you know, it's a lot of brain space.
mean force you to kind of zoom out a lot more especially if you're like me and you do have to zoom in a little bit sometimes on execution but it's time worth setting aside I would say.
Tom Rudnai (32:08)
Yeah, and then you mentioned that like you use it for a lot of efficiency. I guess what are some of the specific use cases that you found it's really helped and like what are the most impactful things that you found that it's allowed you to do?
Sarah Cameron (32:22)
I would say one of the things so far, so we use monday.com for all of our project management and we have a lot of automations in there. So if we're running a campaign, everything, like if we identify which type of campaign it is, it's already auto populated on everything that needs to be done and everyone's automatically tagged. When something is done, it automatically goes to the next person. So it just reduces a lot of...
back and forth that's quite needless sometimes. And sometimes we use, you know, using Slack, things can get missed and using email, things can get missed. So that's really helped us a lot. I mean, that's a relatively small thing, but that's helped. I one thing we're working on right now that I think will be really impactful is creating, we use Geminix, we're a Google company, primarily. So we are building a commercial gem.
for the company to use. have a tech stack gem already that our Chief Technology Officer created, which kind of, you you can go to it you can ask any question about our product and you'll get a really kind of solid answer. We're creating a commercial one which is trained on, you know, all of our, not just our tone of voice and style guidelines and everything, but also on all of our product overviews, of our personas, of our positioning.
of why we built what we built and our brand differentiators. And it will be, I think, massive for the whole team, but we're going to create sub-gems for the marketing team as well so that if we have, say, a really big report, we can then kind of say, okay, we're dividing this up into X amount of blog posts, X amount of webinar outlines, X amount of social posts, and then we'll get...
everything in a one hour that we can then just review and it can go out. So something that would normally take weeks will hopefully just take us a couple of days. But then obviously that's why I've got good writers that understand what good writing is so they can go in and edit because it won't always produce like the highest quality that a human wants to read because humans want to read stuff from other humans at the end of the day. But I think our gem because it's trained on our tone of voice it's already kind of got us.
80 % of the way there.
Tom Rudnai (34:49)
Yeah, I like that. I'm kind of implementing a new rule for myself this year, which is if I get an email that I can see is written by AI, I'm not going to reply. I don't care who it's from. I have no issue with you using AI to write stuff that's meant to inform me. Don't read it. But if you want me to reply and you want to relate to me, write it yourself. I think I'll take the same reporting content. I guess one last question on that, the clean up of that last...
Sarah Cameron (34:56)
See you next year.
Tom Rudnai (35:17)
point was just how it's like when you're hiring more junior marketing roles and more junior content roles, how has the approach that you're taking and the existence of AI changed the skills that you're looking for and changed the like your interview process, how you go about kind of testing for that, I guess.
Sarah Cameron (35:38)
Yeah, good question. I think we just hired a junior content exec actually into my team and I don't know whether this is old school, but I like to test both things. I like to know that they can use AI for content creation and I like to know that they can't and they can still write well without it. So one of the writing tasks that I do set is I ask them to not use AI for it, not use Chapitubt. Obviously for research.
happy for that, but I just want to see what their baseline is first. But a new task that we're adding to this new role that we're hiring for is I'm having a, like a, what do call it? Not a challenge.
A task, that's the word, a task for them to kind of show us live how they would kind of build an AI kind of workflow for them to work from. So if they were given a blog prompt, what would they do? Can they build a gem? Do they know how to do that? What would their inputs be? If they can't build it, that's fine, but kind of understanding what they need in order to.
have good efficiency, it would be kind of top of mind for me right now. It's an interesting one, think, especially for junior roles.
Tom Rudnai (37:11)
What's your take on
idea of like, I know it's something that gets a bit of conversation at the moment, the idea of a content engineer. Do you think that's a good concept?
Sarah Cameron (37:21)
Frankly, yeah, like I think it depends on the company and for us, absolutely. So the role we're hiring for right now, it's kind of that content engineering that I'm going to be looking for, for experience in. Because for us, we need it. You know, we're a scale up with really aggressive goals and for us to meet those goals, you know, especially for inbound, we're going to have to create a lot of content and be savvy about the way we...
we put it out and where we put it, but without the right workflows in place, we're not gonna be able to meet those goals. I think, know, you see a lot, I think, of debate on LinkedIn around how AI is used, and some people completely hate it, and some people are all for it. And I think it's context dependent. I think at the end of the day, if you're using, you know,
AI and your content engineering as an extension to your brain not to replace it, why would it be a bad thing?
Tom Rudnai (38:26)
Completely agree. Right, I'm conscious we're getting towards the end of our time. So what I always like to do at the end, Sarah, is a couple of quick fires. So I'm going to skip one because I think we've covered a lot on AI use cases we like. I'll go straight to, I guess, a little bit more for you personally. Like, is there a skill or a trait that you have that you think has been particularly like a real needle mover for you in your career?
Sarah Cameron (38:51)
Good question. Probably honestly the past year has been the biggest needle mover for me as I've moved from being an individual contributor into leadership. So it's been a massive learning curve for sure. I think as an individual contributor, you're judged on your craft, you your writing, your creative ideas, your ability to get X done and Y timeframe. But in leadership, my output is my team success.
So I've really had to up level on stakeholder management and brutal time prioritization, which has been humbling. It's still something that I'm working on every day, but letting go of the doing and focusing on enabling is a skill I think I'll just keep refining every day.
Tom Rudnai (39:41)
What's the biggest thing you needed to learn that you didn't expect?
Sarah Cameron (39:47)
M2
not let perfect get in the way of good. I'm a perfectionist, so that is a hard lesson to learn. And I think when you're in junior roles or you're kind of at that mid-weight level and you do take a step up, until then you're judged on quality kind of all the time. You know, is this good enough? And you know, getting feedback from managers and wanting to get as little feedback as possible because you red pen.
for a writer is never fun. It's definitely a bit of a hit to the ego sometimes, as it should. But yeah, I think not letting perfect get in the way of good is something that I didn't expect to learn because I kind of thought the more senior, previously thought the more senior you get, the more perfect you have to be or the better you are at your job. And that's true to an extent, but actually what it looks like is being able to recognise great.
traits and skills in other people and you know enabling them to use them well and inspiring them to you know actually work towards something bigger than themselves and you so yeah still humbling.
Tom Rudnai (41:05)
Yeah, it's an interesting point actually, because I think early life teaches you that perfectionism is something to be encouraged, right? At school, it's the highest grades you can get, everything is taught to do your best work. And I think then as you grow up, need to, it's learning what good enough looks like. And sometimes that is perfectionist, which so maybe it's right that we kind of teach people to have that pride, but it's also learning when it just needs to be an hour of 10 and get done.
Sarah Cameron (41:23)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think I never thought that velocity would be more valuable than perfection. So now, you know, there's so many projects in flight right now. I'm just focused on get a V1 on the table. You can iterate later and that's fine. Whereas before I'd be like, no, version 10 is on the table and we're not touching it again. So I'll learn and curve through and through.
Tom Rudnai (41:38)
and
Yeah, velocity of a perfection, that's a great line. There's the sound bite for the episode. But I'm really bad at quick fires, by the way, I always get distracted. What's so if this is a bit of a fun one, if I were to give you or if your CEO was to give you kind of carte blanche for one campaign or one project, and the way I think about this is like the project that he would never be, he or she would never be stupid enough to actually sign off. What would you do?
Sarah Cameron (42:00)
You
Okay.
I would... Let me think.
I'd want to invest even more in high production video content. I absolutely love working on video content. We do case studies with our clients and I love working on them. We do really cool settings, do it in a studio, we film one in a cinema. But beyond that, I'd want to kind of do more cinematic storytelling, like do something around the human impact of financial crime.
I kind of want comply to feel like a media house that sells software, just happens to sell software. I would love to do something like that, like a feature length film. Yeah, I would love, I think that would be so fun. I think it would be brilliant brand awareness, frankly. Whether it would get approved or not, I don't know, but I love that idea. That or if I'm allowed to choose another one.
Tom Rudnai (43:19)
picture like a Netflix documentary style.
Sarah Cameron (43:34)
I may be original research. We do this already. do a survey of 600 decision makers, senior decision makers in compliance, and we compile this big survey, big report every year. I would love to increase that data set by 10 times or 20 times. So we have even more data points on more people. could go really under the skin of what those leaders are thinking about.
and have more data to work from, I'd probably need to hire, I don't know, like a data journalism team to do that well. So either of those would be lovely. Thank you. What? Perfect. Yeah. So if you could just let my boss know that you're going to send that money, that would be brilliant.
Tom Rudnai (44:10)
Nice, or both. The original research feeds into the documentary and it's all perfect.
Yeah, that's how it's
about 10 million dollars to create Netflix. I like the original research, but it's a more sensible one, but it's something we focus very heavily on. Like you said, all of the benefits in terms of redistribution, a lot of it comes back to the quality of the initial pillars. Certainly research is one of the best ways to kind of from our research to show.
Sarah Cameron (44:23)
I love that. Love that.
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (44:45)
of signal authority to LLMs and obviously I think more human time can go into those pillar pieces.
Sarah Cameron (44:52)
I think it's really well proprietary data is really the only more you've got left at this point with with Gen.E.I. So I think the more you over index on it the better and not just for you know yes for rankings but also just for the sake of your readers and your audience they want to see something new they don't want to read the same thing over and over again.
Tom Rudnai (45:11)
Yeah, absolutely. And then last one I've got and I'm going to rephrase this because my new year's resolution is to swear less on this podcast. so for you personally, what was the biggest screw up that you've made in your career?
Sarah Cameron (45:21)
You
I I screw up.
it's hard to think. I think honestly it just goes back to that not letting perfect get in the way of good because the amount of times that I maybe stalled and just didn't get things like, well I'm not missing deadlines because I don't think my type A personality would ever let me do that but you know.
I don't know how, I don't know. That makes it sound like I've never made a mistake, which is absolutely not true.
Tom Rudnai (46:08)
agreeing to join this podcast.
Sarah Cameron (46:10)
No, not at all.
I'm trying to think. think maybe, I mean, maybe this is a little bit more existential, but taking things too personally. I think at the end of the day, as a writer, as a creative person, anything that you create, you pour your heart into, and that's what makes you a creative person. And so a bit of you is in everything that you do.
even if it's just a blog, if it's a video, whatever, there's a bit of you in it. And so as soon as critique comes, or not even critique, just feedback, it can feel like a personal attack. And that's not true. You're all working towards the same common goal. The more views you can have on your work, the better, because it makes it better. That's amazing. And so kind of welcoming that feedback.
is definitely something that I do now that I previously did not do and I hated it. I hated having to hand something in and think, oh no, it's going to get ripped apart. And this is a reflection of how awful I am, which is not true. So I don't know if that's really a screw up, but it's backwards thinking. So kind of moving away from that was definitely a positive for me. So thankfully I don't think like that as much anymore.
Tom Rudnai (47:32)
No, I think it's common though. And I think creative, there's a little bit of you in it. I mean, try starting a business. It's a creative thing that you get incredibly attached to and you go and like, you get rejection a lot. mean, investors, some of them will take joy in telling you that it's a bad idea and you're going to fail and you have to kind of get over that.
Sarah Cameron (47:54)
Probably why I'm not going to be an entrepreneur any day soon.
Tom Rudnai (47:59)
Anyway, cool. Look, so I've loved this last thing I was asked before I let you go. It's just one recommendation that you have for anyone, whether it's like a thought leader, a book, a podcast that they should check out.
Sarah Cameron (48:13)
Um, I think I would recommend, and this came from a recommendation from an old manager of mine, um, is, know, the masterclass website. Um, and ironically, as much as I love reading, I really don't like reading business books. I don't like reading marketing books. I find them so dry. I find them so boring. When I read, I want to be transported away into a fictional land. And that's where I'm happy. Love that it works for other people. For me, if I'm learning.
you know, I want to learn from people, from mentors, and I think Masterclass was quite a nice extension to like my own personal mentor circle. Two courses that really stood out for me, Bob Iger's Business Strategy and Leadership. I'm a big Disney fan. So kind of hearing how he navigated the company through like multiple transitions and like objective failure at different points was...
was really interesting in a masterclass in and of itself. And also Hillary Clinton's on the power of resilience. It was actually really moving to hear that one. yeah, just about how people show up in a room and that kind of influence they have is something that I'm trying to do in my career. So I found that really helpful from both a business perspective and more on a soft skills side of things.
10 out of 10 would recommend. And I think Kim Kardashian has a course on there as well. I don't know what it's about, but.
Tom Rudnai (49:44)
I might try Hillary Clinton before Kim Kardashian I think. I'm working my way through
one at the moment on Matthew Walker, something like that, on sleep and how to get better sleep. once we finish that, maybe the Hillary Clinton one sounds interesting. Anyway, look, perfect. Thank you very much, Sarah. I've really enjoyed the chat. Hope everyone who's listening at home has as well. And yeah, thank you for making it to end of the episode if you're one of those people. All good.
Sarah Cameron (49:54)
Okay. Okay.
Thank you for having me.