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What’s real: Paid ads aren’t fake - the expectations often are.
Brandy Morton (PR → comms → B2B/GRC marketer → founder) breaks down how to build demand the right way in regulated, “boring” industries without losing the human...and why equity and justice in marketing are not side quests but operating principles. We get into expectation-setting, aligning sales + marketing, and decision rules that move outcomes, not optics.
Brandy Morton (PR → comms → B2B/GRC marketer → founder) breaks down how to build demand the right way in regulated, “boring” industries without losing the human...and why equity and justice in marketing are not side quests but operating principles. We get into expectation-setting, aligning sales + marketing, and decision rules that move outcomes, not optics.
You’ll learn
- How to reset “$5K in, Fortune-500 out” expectations, and what to measure instead across TOFU/MOFU/BOFU.
- A simple foundation checklist: shared target account list, CRM truth, definitions, SLAs, and automation.
- What “human-centered demand gen” looks like in finance/insurance/GRC (and why it converts).
- Equity in practice: breaking silos, aligning incentives, and earning trust in your ICPs and inside your team.
- The “borrowed credibility” playbook: trade media, associations, and trusted SMEs → podcasts, short video, and live/editorial partnerships.
- Brandy’s favorite “turn the PDF into pipeline” moves (checklists, calculators, “12 RFP Questions,” etc.) and the one lever she pulls before “increase spend.”
Timestamps
- 00:00 Cold open: “Paid ads aren’t fake; expectations are.”
- 01:00 Brandy’s non-linear path (PR → sales → GA → marketing leader → founder).
- 03:00 Learning the agency “language” and following the money.
- 05:20 Demand gen = foundations first (shared lists, SLAs, automation).
- 06:40 Why one click ≠ one customer in B2B; stakeholders, cycle length, and metrics that matter.
- 08:10 Resetting $5K expectations with a holistic plan.
- 09:50 “Keeping Up with Kevin”: humanizing compliance with an SME-led series (and the results).
- 14:20 Equity as an operating system: alignment, trust, language, and incentives.
- 17:00 Going solo: permission, community, and your personal “board of directors.”
- 19:10 One action for “boring” industries: talk to a customer—today.
Guest
Brandy Morton - founder of Brandy Morton Marketing; demand gen + growth systems for B2B and regulated industries.
Host
Adam W. Barney: Leadership Coach. Book a Transition Leadership Foundation Call (20 min) → https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/foundation-call-20min
If this hit: share it with a leader who still thinks “equity” is a campaign, not a capability.
Creators and Guests
What is Is Anything Real??
Is Anything Real? is the Reality-First Leadership podcast for builder-leaders who want outcomes, not optics. Each week, Adam W. Barney sits down with founders and operators to unpack positioning, marketing, community, energy management, and influence - plus the numbers behind what actually worked.
You’ll hear: a quick Reality Check, a practical Proof Stack (inputs → actions → outcomes), and one EnergyOS habit you can run this week. Specifics over slogans; humane systems over hustle cosplay.
New episodes every Wednesday at 12:00 PM ET.
👉 Book your 20-min Exploration Call: https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min
[00:07.6]
Ep Welcome back to "Is Anything Real?", the show where we unpack what's real, what's noise, and what's just another budget line that didn't deliver. Here's today's hot take: Paid ads aren't fake, but your expectations probably are. Joining me today is Brandy Morton, who took the scenic route into marketing.
[00:24.8]
Starting in PR, building her chops inside regulated industries, and now running her own firm helping B2B and SaaS companies build real growth engines. Brandy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here. Awesome.
[00:40.0]
You didn't come into marketing. Let's start off here. You didn't come into marketing through the traditional MBA agency pipeline. Walk us through that journey. You know, PR to comms, to marketing leader, to running your own LLC. Absolutely. So if you can believe it or not, I imagined myself as a sports broadcaster, and that's what took me to communications originally.
[01:03.1]
So undergrad, I was in communications, studying journalism, and wasn't quite getting the roles and things after college that I wanted. I had an opportunity to do an internship with my dream company. I got there and like totally froze in front of the camera, and so like, time to pivot.
[01:20.9]
Let's, you know, let's try something else. But this is great knowledge to have. And so, I got my master's degree in PR after spending about five years in sales. I got a marketing position with no formal training. Just wanted to jump in there and really just kind of fell in love with it and love the opportunity to bring some of that human-centered approach and real curiosity around, just like why people do the things that they do, and how can we influence decisions.
[01:46.0]
And it really felt like a good combination to bring to a marketing role. That's incredible. And I know when we talked before, you said the scenic route gave you a unique perspective. How would you say that shows up in the way you work with your clients today? Yeah, I think it's unique in that I try to see mutual beneficial outcomes as much as possible.
[02:08.1]
Right. It's the idea that you can be very aggressive about your goals and be very metric-centric, but also understand at the end of the day, every buying decision, there's a human on the other side of it. There's emotional triggers, there are pain points, there's fears, there's aspirations that they have.
[02:24.6]
And so it's really been nice to bring kind of that operational data-centric, you know, revenue-minded mindset with understanding that you only meet those numbers when you can really make a connection with someone on the other side of it. Right. That's a really important point because that connection is so critical.
[02:43.1]
You know, I know also you have a General Assembly digital certificate. That allowed you to sit at the table with agencies who speak in charts and jargon. What were you in that moment outside of those traditional things that the agencies tend to bleed into?
[03:01.6]
Well, it started with actually working in a role where we had the outside agency. We were going through these charts and meetings every week, and they're going through all this jargon, and lots and lots of acronyms. And I would get out of the meeting and ask my boss like, okay, so what did that actually mean? Where did the money go?
[03:17.2]
Did we actually make any money off of it? And so nobody can really answer those questions internally, which was mind-boggling because here's this channel we're spending lots of time, money, energy into, and it feels like it's on another planet, right. Until someone jumps in there.
[03:32.8]
So that's actually what motivated me to go to General Assembly. Like, someone's got to speak this language. Someone's got to be able to have real conversations about what's actually happening, and do some optimization. And so that's where I really just kind of took the onus on myself to do so and learned about all the wonderful things that we can do and all the things that we probably should not do.
[03:53.9]
Right. But really put paid media and paid advertising in its proper place in an overall marketing plan. Right. It's not a silver bullet. It's not going to necessarily translate directly into revenue all the time, but like having real expectations around what it does.
[04:09.3]
And I feel like I tend to have that conversation a lot with my clients as well, because particularly in the growth marketing world, you want to get to that running fast. There's lots of expectations, you have to have speed. But in B2B, there's just too many factors to put too much credence in one avenue.
[04:28.5]
Right. And then I guess probably looking back from where you are today, I would imagine not being formally trained actually turned into an advantage in where you are today. Right. Oh yeah, I did. When I got my first marketing position, I was working with the VP, and I said, look, I'm going to be straight with you.
[04:48.1]
I don't have an MBA, I didn't take any marketing classes in college, but I really have a strong work ethic. I will Google anything, I will ask any question. And so, being willing to be vulnerable like that and be very honest about it, I think, has helped me a lot too, because I will ask a question, I want context, I want background, and give me the data, give me the spreadsheets.
[05:09.7]
What are the best practices? There's lots of science behind what we do. And so it's not that we're reinventing the wheel or coming up with something groundbreaking all the time. So being willing to learn, I think, has helped a lot. That's incredibly important. And you know, I know you specialize in demand gen and scaling growth engines.
[05:26.1]
From your perspective for listeners, what does that actually mean? Because I think that can be interpreted in a number of different ways, actually. Yeah, I've had the privilege to be marketer number one or marketer number two in a lot of my previous corporate roles. And I feel like in any inflection point where there's growth on the line, whether it's a big business, an enterprise, or a small one, there's a lot of foundational pieces that are sometimes not in place.
[05:49.8]
And it's even as simple as do sales and marketing have the same target account list? Right. I've seen that happen where they don't in many, many cases where one has an outdated one, and the other one has the most updated one. Absolutely. Is it a spreadsheet somewhere, or is it actually built into the CRM?
[06:07.6]
Right. I've been places where there was no marketing automation at all. We've had to build it, unfold it, build it back in because it just wasn't fitting the needs that we had. I've been places where there wasn't even an SLA between marketing and sales. So when I think about foundational going back to those very basic, how do we communicate?
[06:27.3]
What's our single source of truth? What is the north star? Do we have the same definitions? How are we defining success? And you'd be surprised, particularly in B2B organizations where some of that isn't as mature as you think it would be. I know, also, we talk about is anything real in paid advertising?
[06:44.8]
And paid ads are, I'll say, quote, unquote real. But I know you've also shared that the expectations are often what's delusional? What's the mismatch between what clients accept, expect, and what ads can realistically deliver? I think there's a couple places.
[07:00.5]
I think it's that idea that we're going to put money into this thing and there's going to be a direct and traceable output one-to-one. This dollar created this many of dollars. And that's not necessarily true. I think, like the average B2B deal has like 6 to 10 stakeholders and takes like 6 to 12 months.
[07:18.2]
That's a lot of people, a lot of touch points. And so I think you're not necessarily positioning yourself for success to kind of have that one directional approach when it comes to paid advertising. I also think, you know, 1 in 4 MQLs actually converts into a real opportunity.
[07:36.5]
Right. So if you think about just like measuring MQLs or thinking about just the clicks part of it, I feel like you miss the opportunity to get into the right conversations, be in front of the right people, and then take that one particular avenue and layer it with other ones, and then kind of look at things from a broader perspective.
[07:55.5]
Yeah. And then in your work today, how do you reset a client who believes that their $5,000 campaign is going to deliver Fortune 500 results? Yeah, you know, I try to make sure that we're looking at things, kind of holistically.
[08:11.4]
Right. So we've got our $5,000 campaign. We've also got top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. I know the funnel's dead. The funnel's never going away, guys. Right. Eventually. All right, maybe we'll come up with something different. Funnel, flywheel, whatever it is. But here are all the other touch points. Right.
[08:26.5]
Here is our super highly segmented audience that we're going after. Here's why. Right. And here are expectations about the different places we should be expecting things. Oh, by the way, we're doing thought leadership. We routed our IPCs. We're using AI to get super hyper personalized with the content.
[08:45.9]
We're doing different content types. So like just kind of framing it in the context of all of the things that we're doing to get in front of this audience that will helpfully move them forward in a buying process. I love it. And then looking across B2B SaaS, regulated industries, how do you help those kinds of clients cut through?
[09:04.7]
I've seen it time and time again. The fear, the compliance, or the boring perceptions, honestly. Yeah. I think it goes back to that human-centered approach. Right at the heart of every decision is someone who's trying to get a promotion, impress their boss, protect their job, help their co-workers, make a bottom line.
[09:27.4]
And so thinking through the things that are actually going to help them, I think, helps you get better content, get in front of the right people, deliver the right messages, right. Pair up your value proposition, the things that really help them. Something I love to do is taking a large meaty piece of content, everyone puts a report out, everyone's got great beautiful white papers.
[09:50.5]
How does that now translate into checklists or calculators, or you know, one of the best things we did was "12 Questions to Ask During Your Next RFP." That's something actionable that someone can act on immediately. Right. And the best place it performed: LinkedIn.
[10:08.7]
Interesting. Awesome. I would love to understand from your perspective what's one demand gen lever you tend to bet on before you just say increase ad spend? Yeah, I love to leverage, particularly in B2B, the audiences of people who have already got their street cred.
[10:31.3]
Right. So think about trade media. You think about influencers. There are people who are already trusted, and so just aligning your brand with those people gives you an instant status that you maybe couldn't generate just on your own. And then they've got a captive audience.
[10:48.2]
And most B2B organizations have associations or industry publications that they can partner with for the things that work. Right. Video, podcasts, virtual events that they do. Even if you're going to do something like leveraging display advertising, they tend to have really high open rates and click-throughs.
[11:07.4]
So, because again, I get an engaged audience going to them specifically for knowledge or to answer a question. And so, typically, if there is a budget, that's a place I love to start. Interesting. I know also, we touched on this a little bit, but you've worked in fintech, financial services, insurance, those are industries that many people would probably call dry.
[11:31.1]
How do you bring the human back into that marketing? Yeah, I think it's listening to the audience, right? What are they asking questions about, what are they interested in, what are trending topics and keywords?
[11:47.3]
And again, leveraging data you can already access to start content from the beginning. Right. I also think looking at the different types of assets that you can create different forms, lots of short-form video works really well, because again, it's another human talking to a human.
[12:02.4]
I worked with a company where we were trying to launch a new solution in the governance, risk, and compliance space. So talk about being boring, right. And we had to think about a great campaign to kind of get this kicked off. And I was talking with the team, and we said, hey, we've got a great internal SME.
[12:19.9]
He used to be in the role of the people we're trying to get to. Why don't we position him? It was during a time where there was breaches everywhere and regulations were changing minute to minute. And so we came up with this idea of "Keeping Up with Kevin", and the point was Kevin's keeping up with regulations so that you don't have to.
[12:41.5]
It was a video blog series that we launched, and we had lots of short little clips for social, and we purposed them all over the place where regulation would come out and he would say, hey, this just happened. It was like a fireside chat. Right. This is what it means for you. This is how you can position yourself to be prepared for when a regulator comes.
[13:00.5]
And of course, there's a wink and a nod to how we can help you to do those things, but it was a great way to make a connection. I mean he had like double-digit growth in his LinkedIn connections. We built lots of great pipeline. Of course, we did all the other things you do. We do a product solution. But that was a great way to take something that inherently is confusing or boring or seems very kind of like meta, if you're not deep down into it and technical, and just make it very relatable.
[13:26.7]
Well, that's an amazing example because it does balance the need for compliance with storytelling in a regulated industry. But ultimately, people still buy based on, you've said this to me before, fear, trust, and education. So I can tell in that example how you work towards that.
[13:45.4]
And that was so critical in making that work in something that is a little dry, a little boring, at least at face value, but still essential as a human or as a consumer who's in that ecosystem and needs that product. Absolutely. If you're a compliance director, or an analyst, or the person that has to walk the regulator through whatever audit is going on, it's very important, and it's nice to know that someone is on your level and understands it and can speak your same language.
[14:12.8]
Right. I love it. Shifting gears a little bit, let's talk about equity. You and I both care about reshaping this industry to be more just. How do you see marketing playing this role in that systemic change that we're both working towards? Yeah.
[14:28.3]
So I feel like, particularly me this year, I've spent a lot of time digging into my community and making connections and just trying to be a resource, and also accept resources and insight from other people. And I think that's a big step.
[14:43.6]
I feel like a lot of times there's misalignment between, obviously, marketing and sales, but even other parts of the business, and the goals, and the grind kind of get into the way. And so a lot of what I try to do is help to build some of that alignment between the different parts of the business.
[15:01.4]
And it's amazing how, if you can break down some of those silos, get everyone speaking the same language, communicating more, it helps to break up a lot of that tension. And I think that probably gets into this idea of what happens when agencies don't prioritize that equity lens.
[15:21.6]
Right. That's the slippery slope that ends up happening. But more widely, how do you see that apply here as well? Yeah. You know, tell me more what you think. Tell me more about equity. Sorry. I mean, I have to say that the way that we market, we think about our ICPs, we think about the right people we need to hit, but equity not being a part of how we think about that, ultimately leaves us either insensitive to our potential customers.
[15:53.5]
It breaks down those internal systems across marketing and sales, product, and leadership. Where do things break down when we don't put equity in the focus of what we're doing, in terms of our work? Yeah.
[16:08.7]
I feel like a lot of what you just mentioned, this goes back to trust. Right. And setting clear expectations about what someone can do, what their specialty is. You know, as marketers, there's lots of things that we can do. Right. There's things that we kind of gravitate toward one aspect of it or the other.
[16:25.8]
And being on the same page about how we define success. Right. I know for us, a lot of it comes from, oh, brand awareness, or we executed really well, or it looks really nice, or MQL is still a big driver of things, and that maybe doesn't necessarily translate into somebody else's goals.
[16:46.3]
And so I feel like when we don't have that up front, that's kind of when the things tend to come down. Interesting. And then. Then kind of to get to one of my last questions here, what advice would you give to someone who's about to make the leap from corporate to solo?
[17:03.7]
Yeah. Just do it. Just do it. I know that when you're in-house, I know for me, there is a sense of kind of perfectionism, or there's the right time, or I need to know, I need to learn this, or I need to have that. And I feel as though a lot of people are way smarter than they think they are.
[17:24.3]
Right? So, like, you know your stuff. If you have done campaigns, if you have, you know, been a marketer for a while, particularly when things are evolving and changing, different brands, I feel like we kind of make a picture of what it should look like when we're ready to make the jump.
[17:40.7]
And that picture may or may not ever materialize. And so, you know, do it scared. Start small. Build your board of directors, right? Have someone that's in the trenches with you, someone that can cheerlead you, someone that can kick you in the butt if you need that too. You know, but really kind of make the decision to do it and just jump in.
[18:02.0]
There's lots of people in the independent entrepreneurial world who are super supportive. I was very lucky to have lots of great friends and colleagues and peers who supported me and gave me all their stories. Hey, don't do this because I did it.
[18:17.8]
I promise you. Go this direction. And so, the support is there, community is there. And, if you're even thinking about it, if it's giving you energy, then lean into it. Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Brandy, this was powerful.
[18:33.5]
We went from PR detours, to demand gen engines, to humanizing compliance-heavy industries, and there wasn't a boring moment in sight here. Where can people find more about what you're building at Brandy Morton Marketing? Yeah, the best place to find me is on LinkedIn.
[18:50.2]
That's where I'm the most active. And so please reach out, send a request. I post quite a bit, and so I love to get people's perspectives. Any comments, all that kind of stuff. I'm learning too, so I would love to hear from you. Cool. Awesome.
[19:06.0]
And then for the B2B founders listening who feel like their industry is too boring for good marketing, what's one move they should make right now? Oh, gosh. Talk to a customer. If you think what you're doing is boring, I guarantee you, if you get to spend some time with an end user or a customer, it will change your mind.
[19:29.5]
Put yourself in those shoes, no matter what the places you're coming from. Right? And, not just those shoes, put yourself in other people's mindsets. Absolutely. It will give you a very different perspective, because I guarantee you, they don't think it's boring. All right, well, thank you, Brandy.
[19:47.3]
Thanks for tuning into "Is Anything Real?", the show where we look past the hype and get to the heart of what works. I'm Adam W. Barney. One last thing here: If you think regulated industries are boring, you're just not paying attention. There's more heart and compliance than in that last carousel ad you might have might have launched.
[20:06.5]
Let's humanize it, let's reframe, and let's get real. Brandy, thanks for joining today, though. Thanks for having me.