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Your go-to digital marketing toolkit: Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders Podcast.
In-depth discussions with leading voices in tech marketing, uncovering the challenges they face and the innovative solutions they're implementing.
Our goal is to provide you with sincere value, perspectives, learnings, and transparent advice you can apply directly to your digital marketing strategy.
This podcast is a proud production of MKG Marketing (https://mkgmarketinginc.com). Our tailored digital marketing strategies for B2B SaaS organizations are transparent and measured: making every impression count.
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Welcome to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders.
I'm your host, Keri Gard, CEO and co-founder of MKG Marketing. And today, we have the unicorn of cybersecurity content, Laura Kenner. Laura has hacked her way from tech trenches to content machine mastermind. She's the hacker of success, driving ROI of SESGTM strategies for B2B, SAS brands. Get ready for insights powered by her AI accelerated engine, real world scrappiness and a passion that turns code into compelling stories.
Laura. Wow, that was a fabulous introduction. It's all heart and part of having a podcast, sci-kit-cu I appreciate. Thank you, Elijah, for getting us geared up here.
Before we dive in, Laura, we've been playing around where we have a game first to introduce the topic. I know. I know. It's very exciting. We're going to warm up with a little game that I'm calling true or false vulnerability rapid fire.
While I think of a better name, Elijah's going to have a timer going behind the scenes. I'll tell you about a cybersecurity fact or fiction. And you've got three seconds to shout out true or false, then 10 seconds to explain why. Oh, boy. Okay. All right. All right.
Let's do this. So cybersecurity fact or fiction, and then you're going to tell us why you think it's a good factor fiction fiction. AI copy tools always produce robotic text. Oh, darn. I'm going to say yes. True. Oh, true. Why?
Because just the tool alone. Yes. That's what you're going to get. If there isn't human in the loop, if there isn't, if you're not providing a lot of context yourself, if you're just saying give me a blog, that is what you're going to get. It's going to be generic.
It's going to be boring. So yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll unpack that later, folks.
Don't you worry. Yes, we have. All right. Next question. Short form social media content can't drive real conversations factor fiction.
Oh, fiction. Short form can start conversations. And if that can be sometimes more effective than the long form, I see these super long posts. I'm not sure if you're like deeply following someone or deeply into the topic. You might read it. That's something like that all the way through. But when you're on social media, you're probably expecting shorter form content, but it has to be, you know, it's going to have some punch. It's going to be have some emotional, you know, points to something that grabs the audience attention and makes them want to react to it and want to respond and want to have a conversation. So that's the real trick in that, but it can be short and sweet.
Short. Ghost writing can never capture an executive's true voice. Oh, false. Okay. Because as long as the ghostwriter makes the effort to really get to know the executive and their personality, their background, the things they care about, you know, the series of interviews with them, as much as you can get to know them, you can capture their voice.
A good ghostwriter can do that. Effectively. I mean, no one. Yes.
Cloud computing services are inherently insecure. Oh, gosh, it's my understanding. There's a lot of sort of built in basic controls, right? In your public cloud systems, everybody uses, but they clearly, they aren't enough. I've worked for enough different types of products and understand all the places that they lack. And really, the cloud environment is a rented space, right? And you're running all of your systems there and you ultimately are responsible making sure that everything you are running there is stay safe.
That's not the responsibility of your cloud provider. So. Subject matter expert driven thought leadership is too niche for most audiences.
No, that's fiction. God, subject matter experts are the drivers of real conversation and real facts and real what I like to call boots on the ground experience. Like they know what's going on.
So they really, they're not generating fluff like a G.P .T. might do, or even a writer who's not well informed about the topic might do. Long form content is dead for SEO and engagement.
Fiction. Long form content is excellent when you really need to, wow, educate and dig into a topic, you know, but again, it needs to have a purpose. Just pumping out white papers or long boring webinars or that kind of thing.
If it doesn't have a strong purpose and a strong, if people aren't getting something from it, if they don't have something to take away, if it doesn't become like a reference that they want to go back to, if it doesn't become a light bulb moments and they learn something and take something away from it, then it's, then yeah, it's useless. All right. That is the end. Thank you, Laura. Our resident cyber security unicorn for your amazing insights and being such an amazing friend.
I appreciate you. All right, we got some questions here that we're going to get into in terms of the topic. We unpacked a lot there around what Laura's superpowers really are and now we're going to dig into it.
My first question for you, Laura, is what sparked your journey from cyber security expert to hacker of success in marketing? Well, it was a ronin and plan to take, but that's how life is, right? For a lot of people. So I'll start with, I was a midlife career changer, okay? I worked as basically medical office support type roles for many years. I wasn't happy. I wasn't going anywhere and I decided to get a degree in cyber security and I graduated with a degree in May of 2022. And while doing that, I had a baby and yeah, it was very exciting years back, oh, in 2020, I'm sorry, it happened in the middle of me, like I graduated with my associates degree in 2020. So, you know, no marketing stage for me or anything like that.
Yeah, a lot of drama, the whole world fell off that. So I got the degree. I wanted to be part of tech. I wanted to be part of cyber security, the whole good guy, bad guy, the defense of the nation, defense of our data, defense of our privacy. These are things that are important to me and I just wanted to be part of it. So I got the degree and I was technically trained to be an analyst, like a security analyst or a SOC analyst, really could have gone multiple directions because it's sort of a general degree.
I'm going to have certifications in cyber security on CompTIA at SecPlus and Network Plus. And I keep those up because I want to keep my tech hands still in the soup. In the soup, that doesn't make any sense. I want to keep my tech hands in the clay or whatever.
Yes. So I got the degree and right, but the thing is before I didn't go looking for work in marketing, I thought I was going to be an analyst. But before I graduated, I'll never forget this, three weeks before I graduated, I was like, I don't even have the degree yet. I was approached by a company looking for a technical marketing specialist. And to be honest, I almost didn't respond to the email.
I thought it was a scam. But they found me on LinkedIn. So this is a huge plug for LinkedIn. I did know then that I needed to optimize my LinkedIn because it was a challenge to change what LinkedIn was showing me and who was finding me because it just wanted to show me all the medical hospital or doctor's offices, connections. And I wanted to move into this new world.
So I found that I needed to start getting those keywords in there and my certifications in there. And it worked and they found me. And I was very happy that opportunity was presented. And I took it with, you know, open arms.
I was very excited about it because I had this technical training, but I also have always loved writing, communicating. Like that's just always been my jam. So now I could do both. I could take technical topics and speak to a variety of audiences that sort of that is what I'm good at. And this was the perfect job for me. So I just, that was my first job in this field.
That was about a little over three years ago. And I just grew from there. And so the marketing side, I've learned basically on the job from and from paying attention and from listening to people and, you know, learning as much as I can. I'm basically a sponge.
So I love that. I mean, you have to be, you have to be a sponge and marketing because it's always so always changing so quickly too. But that's exactly why I wanted to be in cybersecurity.
My old role was stagnant. And I knew cybersecurity was never going to be stagnant because there's always new technology, always new challenges, like the whole good guy, bad guy battle, you know, whatever you do that, whatever the defenders do, the all offenders are going to find a way to get through it and the game continues. So it's a very exciting field to be in in general. And marketing, it turns out, has a lot of those aspects too, because it's we can get into this later, but it feels like the landscape is shifting under our feet basically daily. So the old playing books, they say just stop kind of being effective, they stop working.
So you're always looking for something new. And that's, that's my brain works. Yeah, I wonder if the playbooks ever really worked or if we just kept pounding the same nail to make it work. Now we can't make it work anymore.
We're going to get into it, folks. What does a content machine with a cybersecurity engine look like in practice? I was dubbed the content machine at my former company, because I could quickly and effectively get out good content.
And I did on a regular basis. And it starts with, like I said, my technical training, I could understand, I could work with product management, product marketing, and marketing and sales and try to really hone in on what the piece of content is for, what's the purpose, make it effective, all those things. And once I understand that, yeah, I just, I just, I'm kind of a machine. I kind of, I just understand how to put the things together to meet the need and get it done. It sounds like your expertise in cyber as well from having your degrees and sort of starting, you mentioned it earlier in the rapid questions of the boots on the ground and that firsthand experience of that deep expertise.
I imagine that gave you sort of that leg up of being able to quickly whip out content because you are, you were, you were in that seat. Yes, to understand the product probably better than maybe the average person who hasn't had any cybersecurity training. I do encourage that for most people working in cyber.
I'm doing more and more sales and marketing and code market teams are people are taking the initiative to learn, at least get certifications and that kind of thing because it's a very technically tough field to be in. And you need to understand what you're talking about or you can't talk about it effectively. So the cybersecurity engine is my training behind the content machine is my writing skills, my content skills.
So that's what that means. Where does your content and writing skills come from? You said that it was a passion of yours and something you really loved, but where did that, where did you learn that was that just something you self taught and just did a lot and then you're able to use it more in that, that first marketing job or did that come with your previous experience in medical?
Like where did that originate from? Basically, I've sort of always been a writer. I think probably a lot of people can relate to that. And just always, those are the classes I got A's in, that's the classes I loved. And surprisingly, my technical degree, I didn't think there would be much writing in it, but there was a lot of writing in every class, which made me happy because that's how I most effectively communicate. So I guess it's partly natural, but also learning the type of writing and the type of writing needed for marketing and selling a product that I basically learned on the job from my peers, you know, from watching them, but I'm a quick study. And how do you tailor messaging for technical versus non-technical audiences? It is a very, we mentioned it, very technical industry.
Do you always sort of lean into that and speak their language? Do you also, are you also trying to meet other people who are maybe not as technical, but need to know this stuff? How are you balancing those? For technical audiences, I try to put myself in their shoes. Now, I can't call myself a boots on the ground. I've never actually worked as an analyst. I haven't actually had that experience.
I was simply trained. So at least I understand the language that they use and I understand, you know, the general topics, but I try to give them what I think they want and also communicating with the SMEs on the team, like communicating with customer success and sales people. Okay, what are you hearing?
What are you hearing from prospects? What are you hearing from customers that they like about the product and try to take those messages and get them out to the curious, the audience? So the technical audience is going to want to know more about what can they do with it? How's that going to help? How's it going to help them in their day-to-day lives? Is this going to make their life more complex? You know, just try to address the objections that they're going to have as users. Usually the end users are more worried about, you know, how long is the onboarding?
How is this going to work with my other tools? So I try to address those concerns up front, whereas for the business buyer, they're more worried about, is this going to save me time and money and, you know, what's in it for me and is it going to reduce my risk significantly? Is this something I even need to be concerned about? It sounds like you're playing very much into that problem solution sort of messaging, depending on who you're talking to. Is that, am I picking up what you're putting down there? Yeah, I would say that's true.
Yes. In terms of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, that lovely fud thing that I haven't talked so much about, but I feel like when you, I'm having this problem myself, where when you talk problem solution, it tends to naturally fall into creating a bit of worry and fear and uncertainty, just naturally, right? You're talking about the problem and then trying to create and paint this little glorious, wonderful dream solution of how we're going to save the day. How are you navigating messaging in regards to that? Do you find that you do have to sort of poke the bear with the problem of this? These are the potential problems that you could face that does happen to create fear and certainty and doubt or do you pivot and make it more like a positive outcome?
How do you navigate the world of fud in this wonderful, what's running through my head? I'm deeply against fear mongering. I feel like there's too much of that in this industry and really vendors should avoid that kind of speak. You have to remember the people you're talking to, they're very aware of the cybersecurity threats. This is what they do all day. You're basically insulting their intelligence when you're coming in with all this threat stories and fear mongering. It's disrespectful to what they do. What they want to know, their fear is really, can I get my job done effectively?
Can I support and protect the business I work for? That's their fears. I just try to avoid that kind of language all together and try to on their level. This product is going to solve all your problems. It's going to be glorious and not oversell either because everybody, people sense that. They know that. Avoid that sort of sensationalism. I try to avoid that too. I just try to take a very down to earth attack and think about what do they care about on the job and what are they trying to get done and what are they trying to accomplish? How do I do this with your tool? Where do I find that with your tool?
Try to get into those rather than practical advice rather than, if you don't get this, you're going to be taken out by the next round somewhere. It's disrespectful. I love that. I totally agree. Yes.
How do you breathe? Because you talked about needing to create connection and vulnerability and not vulnerability in terms of cyber security vulnerability, vulnerability in terms of emotion and connection. How do you marry the practical with also getting somebody to feel and connect to the brand as well? I feel like I need an example in front of me. I work a lot better case by case basis. I feel like I do it all the time, but I can't think of any specific examples right now.
When it comes to social media posts, I try to at least have a strong hook. It's not always emotional. That can be hard to do consistently, especially for technical products. It's not always what I'm trying to do.
A lot of the content that I put out for companies is educational. It's more about awareness. It's more about lighting a light bulb, but it's not necessarily going to be an emotional connection. Emotional connection is sort of bigger. It's sort of part of your brand. That's hard for me to do without something like give me an assignment and I'll do it.
For me to talk about it in a general way, I think it's hard for me to nail down. All good. I appreciate you for pulling that apart for us as much as you could and maybe I'll store your pop in and you'll cut me off and we'll dive right back in.
If not, that's okay too. What makes Bootstrap GTM strategy different from traditional agency models? My approach is just, like I've said, very down to earth, very practical, very kind of scrappy.
I lean heavily. What I know best is organic reach. Working with SEO teams to help draw people to the website. I'm pretty good at that writing content for that. I dare say I've successfully done that before.
I feel like my approach is a little less try the next shiny thing or try to be like the competitors or try copycat methods. Is this going to be effective? What are we trying to do with this content? What's our plan?
What stage are they at? It's very important. A very early startup that basically is figuring out their brand is different than a more established startup that is long been established but trying to make some pivot. It's different kinds of challenges in different spaces. I just try to think those things through and be practical and a little bit scrappy and try to be scrappy. Be as effective as you can with what you can do organically. Of course, you're going to need ads.
You're going to need paid and a syndicated and all the things. But you've really got to your organic should be strong. There's no reason that it shouldn't be. It's the foundation. It's the base. In terms of the go to market is a big thing right now. It's the new shiny.
I don't want to say shiny. I think it's the basis. It's that before the marketing plan. It's that huge step back and that big sort of has it all fit together.
Right. It sounds like your go to market strategy is very much content driven. This is just, it's the voice of your company. It's what everyone sees. It's not, it's writing. It's your blog. It's your videos. It's your advertising. It's everything expressed to the public is your content.
It is very important and it's key. But I understand that that's not the whole go to market engine. But I do strongly believe and this is another one of my pillars of I guess my strategy is that sales, the whole go to market team needs to work together and they need to communicate because there's a lot of breakdown and there's, I hear a lot everybody saying this right. We need to be aligned that really needs to come from leadership or it's not going to happen.
Right. So the first go to market hire, the first people in charge of setting up the first hires and the systems needs to see that and enable it and encourage it. And it shouldn't be sales and marketing meet up once a month and sales talks about their numbers and marketing talks about their numbers. That's not the kind of conversations that are really helpful. Like it's not about showing off what you're doing. It's about, Hey, what are you hearing over there?
Sales, what are you hearing from prospects? You're out on the street. You're talking to people all the time. You have valuable information we could use over here on marketing.
Maybe we'll better understand how to speak, you know, about the product. Maybe we're going off on a tangent over here. That's not working at all.
You're doing something else over here that is working on the street. Right. So we need to be communicating and then customer success.
Same thing. How are the customers feel about this product? What do they like about it?
What are they not like about it? Without that information, I'm, I'm, I hate the chat to be T word, but just came in my head flying blind. I'm flying blind without that information. So really teamwork makes the dream work. Right. And going to market strategy is tough. It's, it's tough.
It's a tough market. And I'm not going to, I'm not here to claim that I'm an expert. I'm three years deep into this industry. And I'm learning and I have made it my mission to learn everything I can about what makes a company successful. Like what really you take two very similar companies or very similar niche, what makes one rise above the other?
Like what is that? I'm trying to solve that problem both through my work for companies and through the boost drafts over community that I have started because I feel like that will help enable communication between all the people. And maybe we can figure some things out along the way. There's power in community. So I'm learning together.
I love what you said. There's so much we can learn from as the marketing team from the different teams internally, because they all touch the customer differently. And really what we're learning and what I've been learning and working with Elijah for the last six months is that story is really the backbone to the success of any sort of marketing. and go to market where we're all sort of rallying around the same branding, the same stories, the same YS to your point. And so being able to talk cross-functionally and learn from each other and what those stories, what those customer success stories are, is that bread and butter to everything that you do from a content perspective. So I don't know how you would get that information if you weren't talking to the people who were talking to the customer on a regular basis. Marketing can be so disconnected from that. Like, you can come to find out that what your customers say about your products has nothing to do with what you're marketing over here. So that disconnect, that's a road to failure.
So just saying, try to communicate, try to be on the same page. And what you said about stories, the story especially for small startups, I love working for a small start. I love working for startups.
I have a startup bug. It's tough. It's challenging.
It's flying the plane while building it, right? It's stressful. But it's also very exciting. And it's this huge opportunity to like, OK, let me take what I know and work with other people and let's try to figure this.
Let's try to make this thing fly, right? So that's very exciting. But that story, there's a reason why the founders, and this gets lost. There's a reason why the founders started the company in the first place. They saw a problem. They thought they could solve. For some, they probably have a very specific person in mind, a very specific audience in mind. They experienced something on the job, perhaps back in the day. Usually former technical people themselves. And they built this thing to solve a problem. But as the go-to-market team spins up and everybody kind of comes in with their own ideas and objectives and, well, this works at my former company, the story gets lost. And I think, you know, you got to hold on to that.
Agreed. Elijah is actually going to interview me for the podcast because I am taking a break. Sorry, Elijah, I'm spilling your tea because I think that's important. And I agree that our stories as founders definitely get lost in the sauce. So I'm both excited and a little nervous being put in the hot seat. But yes, I'm excited to share our story as as we began in 15 years ago. So that's going to be awesome.
Yeah, I can't hear that. You talked about data and that being part of the glue that sort of holds the organization together from a GTM standpoint. How do you measure the ROI of content in a cybersecurity context? It basically comes down to SEO for the website content. And I work closely with the SEO team. I'm not myself an SEO expert, but I know enough to be dangerous is what I say. I understand the basic concepts.
If you give me a goal to write to, I'll nail it. That's what I do. But when it comes to social media, that's harder. When it comes to like YouTube, that's harder. When it comes to video ads, CTV, things I'm seeing that I think companies should start getting into a little bit more over here on the video side. This can be harder, but there's still there's always metrics somewhere. There's always, you know, it's so challenging. I want to do things I'd like to talk about are LinkedIn and YouTube.
I'm a little obsessed with both of those. And companies like to use those, especially LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is so frustrating because, sure, you can get some engagements, but that's like vanity metrics, right? What you're really what I'm really looking for when I'm working for a company is that not the same employees and same like friends of the company are engaging, but that new people and potentially your ICP are starting to engage. That's where it's like ding, ding, ding, something's working. Like that content's making its way out of your little circle and finding the right people.
So that's a huge challenge. And that's not really anything to do with the likes or the reshares. It's just a lot of people just sort of they pay attention.
Your content don't necessarily engage with it, but they might come to you someday and say something. So it's that becomes like hearsay. It's it can be really hard to prove. It's totally brand building.
It totally is one of my favorite metrics in that. And it's hard to do with startups because you're so new. But it's something to start paying attention to. And then look at overtime is are more people searching for your brand name? So is your brand search volume growing? Now, you don't know why that's growing, especially if you're doing a lot.
But if you're doing one thing like LinkedIn and video, and that's sort of the only play you're making, then looking at how that might be impacting our more people searching for you is one leading indicator that I quite. Yeah. So and that is a strong start. I think LinkedIn is a strong start for B2P.
There's really no better hub, I guess, to start with. Yeah, I do love. Elijah asked me all the time, like when he's looking at what we're posting on Cross Channel is one of the things he's looking at. And we always talk about is who's new that liked or engaged with the content. So it's where that ABM motion and thinking through that, I think is killer.
And totally agree with that. What advice do you have for founders with zero marketing budget? Where should they start?
Well, what should they stop doing? Oh, boy. Well, I'm a founder of a zero marketing budget. By that, I mean, I'm a consultant and that's my paid work. But for the bootstrap cyber community, that's a passion project. That's not making any money. And I spent a lot of time on it.
Maybe it will someday monetize and all of that. But that's a slow process and I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to it because, you know, client work comes first. But so I'm just taking what I know. It's also a proof of concept like, OK, I'm a marketer. I can do all these things for other companies, the companies I work for.
Let me apply what I know to my own. I don't want to call it a business, but my own community and see what I can do. So creating content, build a website, writing a blog, making the videos, doing the LinkedIn posts, all the things.
The newsletter, which I realize I'm way behind all the things. And it's time consuming is a lot. So if you're, you know, you've got no budget, it's your time and effort and try to have some strategy, though. You can't be 10 places at once. It's even though you want to.
It's hard. So I focus on LinkedIn and YouTube and my website. And that's a lot.
It's a lot is enough. So, you know, choose your battles, pick your battleground and try to be at least consistently there and participating and, you know, connections. I can't say enough about networking and connections and communicating with other people, especially on LinkedIn. And it's not just about you shouting at the crowd. It's about you participating in conversations. That's what really builds your trust and relationship with other people.
So that can really help your business too. So if you're starting with zero, it's down to you and you've got to find the time and have a plan and just get at it. You got to feed the machine. I talk about LinkedIn and feeding the machine all the time to your point. It's not just about, I think I just read a stat from Alex who owns a company called Aware where you can use their platform to easily post and engage with your audience.
It's an awesome tool. But he just posted that you need to be engaging with other people's content daily 50 times a day. But I follow a lot of people, especially anybody.
If they don't have to be in cybersecurity business, right? I just follow people who make sense to me, who are talking about marketing and sales and content and what's effective. And I've learned from so many different genres that I feel like I can bring it back home. And as part of what I'm doing too with my own content is take these lessons that I am picking up and figuring out how to apply them to the cybersecurity go to market team because I feel like we're a little bit behind. I feel like we're a little behind all the hot trends right now.
And for some reason, a little bit resistant to doing some things that I don't know outside of our niche companies are doing. So, yes, I heard the same thing. Like it's more effective now. And I think I'm starting to experiment with this and I feel like it's it's truly just changing like that's one of those landscapes that shifts under our feet all the time. We're slaves to the algorithm, I guess. But and that's very frustrating, but you do the best of what you got, right?
Still the best platform to be. So you start to be there and figure out how to make it work. So I am finding the commenting is very effective. And now what's as a person going in and commenting plus trust with you and potentially sideways to your brand. But as a company, a company page going in and making a lot of comments.
I haven't figured out how to navigate that yet. That's a little bit tricky because immediately because it's a company logo popping into a combo, it's immediately feel salesy. So and can be off-putting. So that's that's a delicate dance there. But you better have something.
You better come to the table with something to say or something to ask the conversation. That's all I know. I could tangent there. I'm not going to go on like I'm sorry.
No, no, I love I totally agree. LinkedIn LinkedIn is definitely tectonic right now in terms of how it's shifting under us. I actually just read a post from somebody today who's she's got 88,000 followers. She started the concept around hype women, hashtag hype women. And she started the meme with Jamie Lee Curtis, who like I think I forget who it was, but she like they were both up for Oscars. This other woman won the Oscar and she just like hugged her and cheered.
It was like so excited. So Erin's kind of a big deal. Maybe you follow her.
I don't know. But she's leaving LinkedIn and going to substack. She's like, I'll still be here. You can still connect to people. I'm taking my content elsewhere because I'm tired of LinkedIn. Basically, strong arming me and not getting my content in front of people. And so I think that frustration sort of coming through. I was having that frustration earlier this year where I was like, I'm posting, I'm doing all the things.
I'm commenting. I'm engaging with people, but like nobody's saying the thing. And then I hired an expert storyteller and he helped me find my voice that wasn't so when I write, I write very technically and kind of cold. And so he helped me take my actual voice of how I talk and translate into posts. And now things are like going crazy.
So I, yeah, I agree with you. LinkedIn is a tricky one. I think if you are a founder and you're struggling with it, don't just bang your head against a wall.
Bring somebody in who's doing the thing and doing it well and can help you figure out how to get it to work for you so you don't feel like you're working against it. It's just one of those things. It's where you need to be right now. Right. When you mentioned nobody, it's all you, but what you said there though that's working, it's really that it's more genuine.
It's coming off as more human not as maybe you tend to write a little bit stiff or not sure how to characterize it, but you know, try to make it first like you would talk to a person and that's yeah, you gotta remember that. Yes. Yeah. I don't want to take all of that. Sometimes I'm just trying to get something out and don't put much hard into it and yeah, there's nowhere, but sometimes I put everything into it.
Right. Like I like this thing, whatever it is, it's really important to me, you know, and I put a lot of time and effort in thinking about what I'm exactly what I'm going to write and try to be as real as I can and try to be down to earth and all the things I believe in. And it just goes nowhere and it's so frustrating. Like it's starting to feel, I don't blame people for leaving or for trying other avenues because it's starting to feel like high effort, low, low results. So, you know, LinkedIn, what are you doing to us?
What are you doing to us? Authenticity is totally true. So if you're a founder and you're on the struggle bus with LinkedIn and you feel like you're posting all the time are two pieces of a con, I think between Laura and I with two pieces of advice. One is start commenting, start engaging with the community, get in there. And it doesn't necessarily have to be on your customers' content. Influencers are great. People who you aspire to just start engaging and to find your authentic voice. I love to send videos to Elijah and then he helps me deconstruct them and then write the post in my talking voice versus my writing voice. And that has made a huge difference.
So lots of great avenues to develop authentic content. If you're stuck, try something different. I think the one thing we've learned, Laura, between the two of us talking here is to not keep taking the same hammer and the same nail and just banging away.
You got to keep iterating and pushing and pulling. Yeah. We're all working for a living, right? And we're trying to get things done and we're trying to get things out. It can be hard to take a breath, step back, take a look and you're like, to have that moment to even realize what if that changed something. What the hammer is not working. Like, why isn't this working?
It takes that moment to break out of it, but you're totally right. SEO is so important to you and it's been something that's worked so well for you for so long. How are you combating that in terms of geo? Like, geo is coming into play now. Have you changed your strategy from a content perspective? Are you seeing our engagement on your website go down? Like, you're getting less clicks and views to your website because of geo.
How is geo playing a role in your SEO strategy? I'm paying attention to things. Everybody's losing traffic. And I think that's going to continue from what I'm seeing. There's more and more generative answers and people are going directly to the AIs to get answers. And I'm hearing that the ways to get found by them is to be grand mentions, basically. So your blog and your own company page on social are probably a little less effective there.
The machines are still going to read those, but what they seem to trust more is what people are saying over on Reddit or what other people on social are saying about you and linking back to you. So how do you make that happen? That's actually something swirling in my head right now. You can't just jump into Reddit and be like, our product's great, blah, blah, blah. Like that you'll be shut down immediately. So it's about drumming up buzz, I guess. Drumming up conversation, getting people to talk about you. And that can be really hard when you're a small company and just even trying to get people to know that you exist, let alone talk about you. Like, I think of the old country song, like, give them something to talk about.
Let's give them something to talk about. That seems to be one of the keys to get found. But I don't have that all figured out. I think we're all learning as we go. I do think, I haven't changed the way I write or what I do because I do think quality, helpful content is always going to be useful. So and it's going to get found.
It's just getting less organic traffic from search. All right, one more. I can't help myself. What's one myth about A.I.
Assistant Copywriting you want to bust? It's automatically going to be awful. There's no way it can be impactful and effective. But it can because what matters isn't the A.I.
What matters is the human in the driver's seat, the human in the loop. Yes, if you just sit back and say, write me some ad copy, write me a webpage based on this. Yeah, it's going to be generic. It's going to be awful. But if you're a writer, you know how to, you know what's wrong with it.
You know immediately what's wrong with it. And you can sit there and have a conversation with it and it learns. So one of the powers of these tools is the more you work with them, the more they learn how you want things done.
So then more of my writer-ness becomes part of the machine. And it starts anticipating what I'm going to say like, no, I don't like that. That's too salesy. I don't like that. That's too stiff. I don't like that.
That's too fear mongering, things like this. And it does learn. And then I still ultimately, I'm in control of the end result. And I know what I want out of it.
So I could get into it as a whole. I've basically forced the machine through my own writing process, everything I would do. But that's not something like, that's tricky when it comes to like generative. I'm not generative. I'm sorry, agentic. Like I'm not sure how I would teach at this point an agentic workflow that would actually work. But I'm thinking about it.
I'm thinking about trying. Oh, right. I'm going to circle back with you on that. Because I think there's a big myth floating around right now about agentic not really being there yet for anybody to figure out. There's people who claim that they've done it, but when people actually go to use it, they say it's still too willy nilly.
It's still making up so much and not actually doing the thing that needs you to do. So I'm going to, I'm going to see as you dabble, we're going to start going back on that Laura. There are so many tools that it's overwhelming and I'm trying to, I did my first, I'm so proud of myself though. I did my first two step zap on Zapier.
It was, it was for free. I'm like, let me try. I know nothing about coding. All right.
That was not part of my training. And I'm like, try all these things. I'm having conversations to chat, CBT was the best thing and kept coming back to Zapier. I'm like, fine.
So we get in there. One problem I have, I subscribe to all these emails. I subscribe to all these newsletters.
Because these are people I follow that give me ideas for content and teach me things. And I want to collect all of that goodness and find topics to talk about for my own content for bootstrap cyber. Well, that's a long, you know, time consuming process, reading all those emails and taking notes and figuring out what's, what aligns with my brand and so on.
So I just build a two step zap, read all emails tagged with this tag and pull all points related to blah, blah, blah, give it information about what I was, what my brand likes to talk about the topics my brand talks about. And it put it into this document in my Google Docs and put out it does it. It did it. And I was like, oh, I like literal doll drop. I'm like, oh my God, I have the power. Like I was like drunk with power. I'm like, what? And it saved me so much time.
I'm like, wow, that alone, that one little zap. Like this is something I do want to experiment with. But the trick ultimately is still going to be, how do I get workflows? And there's this between automation and agentics too. Agentics, when you let it make decisions for you, which I'm nervous about myself.
But workflows, automation for some tedious tasks like that, like sorting through a ton of emails and pulling out the good bits. That's a huge time saver. And I see a lot of value in that.
So I'll be playing with that as I go forward. Oh, workflows. I totally agree workflows. There's power in that. If you have the time to really like figure it out. There is huge power in workflows. So again, again, I'm going to follow up with you.
I feel like, ah, yeah, we're going to, we're going to follow. If people want to learn more about things like this and follow your content, now that you're going to start teaching us all about AI workflows, where can they find you? Where can they subscribe?
Oh gosh. Well, follow me on LinkedIn, Laura Kenner, and check out my YouTube at Bootstraps.tv. And on LinkedIn, oh, I also have Bootstrapsyver.com is my website.
And then my home, my home grounds, they can always contact me there. So good. Laura, before we go, my last question for you is because you are more than a marketer. I'd love to know outside of marketing, what is currently bringing you joy in your personal life?
Oh gosh. See, I knew you were going to ask this question and like the answer I want to give is my child, my son, the light of my life, love him so much. But this feels too like everybody would say that. So one of the weird things I find relaxing and enjoyable is I'm a huge Aldi nerd, Aldi, the grocery store. It's a discount grocery store is growing like wildfire here in America. And I've been doing that for a year. But there's like a whole culture around it now. And I follow Facebook groups, Aldi groups, Aldi, I love shame groups. If you're familiar with the aisle of shame. Well, it's a little grocery store and they have the aisle of shame is there Aldi fines and it changes every week, every Wednesday. So Aldi nerds, we call ourselves know this. And that's it makes like a treasure hunt. So you go in there and every week there's something new and it's all shame. And it could be anything from like a food processor to a pair of shorts or socks or something like really helpful goods.
I would say mostly household goods, sometimes clothing and all in all over the year that all shame changes called the all shame because like that's where you blow your budget. You're like, well, like don't look, don't look. So sure how they know that.
But yeah, kind of I like to when I have time to just go down and stroll and see what's in the all shame and see if anything I don't need that I want. They're just a two at first. At least you're getting out.
That's better than yes, further than the two a.m. I'm Amazon of shame. Which oh, I do that too. I do that too.
Yeah, that's yeah, I didn't need that. Or I'll even sometimes I'm like, I surprised myself. I'm like, oh, that was in my car.
Apparently I ordered it. Oh, we have all been there. Especially when you have kids and you're up with them in the middle of the night. It's just what happens.
I think you love that. Because I'm a mom. To go to the grocery store alone and that's the key though. It's not with little man. I love him to death. But little man, why are we here? Without the drama, I just stroll around, take my time. I find it relaxing. I love that. I love that. And now I'm going to go check out Aldi because I've never heard of it. And I'm going to go down that rabbit hole and I can't wait.
That is because they're so funny. Thank you so much, Laura. I so appreciate you. What an episode.
Our resident cybersecurity unicorn for your amazing insights and being such an amazing friend to the MKG team. If you loved this episode, brew another cup and binge these tea time hits through our SSS feed. Episode 12, where we were scaling pipeline first through paid media, learn how to engineer as it actually converts. As well as episode eight teaches you SEO secrets in the Cloud Security Pro.
We dive into priority pruning and SERP feature wins. Last but certainly not least, I'll leave you with episode five, where remote leadership meets marketing, explore the art of crafting culture in a hybrid world. All of these details will be in our show notes for you to explore. I'm Carrie Gard, host of Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. This episode is powered by MKG. We manage the details. You capture the market. See you next time.