Inbound Leadership Insights: Ashley Faus Inbound Talks

Welcome back to another episode of the Sidekick Strategy Expert Interviews Inbound Talk edition. I'm your boy, George B. Thomas, and today we're excited to have Ashley Foss, head of Life Cycle marketing at Atlassian, join us today for this interview. If she wasn't here, well, it wouldn't be an interview and it'd be really boring anyway. Ashley is not only a seasoned marketer, but also a writer, speaker and creative force with her work featured in Time, Forbes and more. Some big names right there, girlfriend. I'm just saying. Today we'll be diving into our session SME vs Influencer vs TL Witch to Nicks in the marketing mix. I love how that kind of rhymes where she shared insights on how businesses can strategically incorporate creators like subject matter experts, influencers and thought leaders into their marketing strategies. By all that is holy, I hope you have a strategy. We'll explore how brands can navigate these roles and decide who to focus on in their marketing efforts. Ashley, welcome to the show.

George, you need to be. I need to take you everywhere with me. Like you read my bio with the most hype you read the title with. You get with the like right Iambic pentameter to get the rhymes. Like this is why I like talking to you because you match the energy. You match the rhyming like same energy.

I love it. I love it so much. Let's, let's be honest. It's, it's about going to play and having fun and actually enjoying what you're doing. And I love talking to humans. And the good thing is you're a human. So we're good to go. Now, Ashley, I do have a question because I love to kind of start with this. How the heck are you doing post inbound 2024?

On one hand, I'm doing good. On the other hand, I'm trying to figure out how to repurpose all of my content from inbound 2024 in the new like LinkedIn TikTok. Yeah, that's not really my preferred style of content creation, but I also did a debate at Inbound and so I feel like it is begging for a bunch of short, quippy videos. But again, I, I kind of want to get the footage. So on one hand I'm doing okay. On the other hand we're struggling.

It's. It's easy to struggle or get overwhelmed. And it's funny because my buddy calls it link Talk. Max Cohen. He is great at creating like that short form what would be on TikTok. But now he's doing on Linked. And it is an amazing thing. So good luck to getting that content chopped up. You might check out Opus clips, by the way, if you haven't checked that out. Not sponsored, ladies and gentlemen. It's just a tool that we love to use. Anyway, Ashley, let's dive into the good stuff. In your session, you discussed SMEs, influencers, thought leaders. Can you maybe just start here on this interview by explaining the key differences between these three types of creators in someone's marketing mix?

This is a question I get all the time. Is there a difference? And if there is, does it matter? And in my opinion, the answer is yes to both questions. So I use my four pillar framework, which I originally developed to help measure and improve thought leaders. So the four pillars are credibility, profile, being prolific, and depth of ideas. So if you're a thought leader, you're actually very strong in all four. But if you're a subject matter expert or an influencer, you're weak in some of the pillars. So, um, usually subject matter experts are strong in the credibility and depth of ideas pillars. These are people, they're practitioners. They deal with the problem all the time. They've been in the space for 10, 15, 20 years. They're constantly working on the problem, they're constantly talking to customers. So they actually have a ton of credibility. And because they're so close to the problem, they're actually really good at coming up at new coming up with new ways to solve that problem. However, they don't really share very often and they don't really share externally, so they're low on those prolific and profile pillars. In contrast, you've got influencers who are maybe okay from a credibility perspective. They're really strong in that profile piece. They're actually kind of in the middle on being prolific because they tend to specialize in a single type of content or a single channel. And then they're pretty low on depth of ideas because they're usually just talking about existing content, existing ideas, existing problems, and existing solutions. One big misunderstanding is that there is a quote unquote, best type of creator, and that's not true. Everybody thinks that thought leadership is the best, or that being an influencer is somehow, it's like an insult, like, oh, you're an influencer. No, the name influencer means they have influence. They are very good at what they do. They're excellent content creators, they're great at driving attention and conversation, they're great curators, and they can add a lot of value in the marketing mix. So I want to Be very clear. The strengths and weaknesses of each type of creator, you need to lean into those to figure out how to use them in the marketing mix. And so this idea of like, which one to nix from the marketing mix, spoiler alert. The answer is you need to look at your goals. You need to look at the gaps that you have both in house and externally. You need to look at what your audience needs to know and whether or not you can actually serve them that information. And, and then you can decide maybe you actually need all three in the marketing mix. Maybe you don't nix any of them, but you use them in different ways.

I love this so much. And part of me is like, from the flip side, I'm like, well, how do I make myself a thought leader who actually influences people? And, but, but here's the thing. What I, what I love is that you kind of ended on this thing of like, you, the human need to do this, you, the human need to think about this. And along that journey, when they're thinking about this, when they're trying to do this thing that we're talking about today, Ashley, they're going to run into the potholes, they're going to run into the hurdles. So in your mind, in your words, what are some of the biggest challenges that marketers are going to face when they're trying to incorporate these SMEs, influencers or thought leaders into this strategy that they're actually trying to achieve?

The biggest issue is actually trying to turn one or the other into a different type. So subject matter experts. This is a perfect example. These are people who are your go to folks, usually internally. For all of your listeners out there, think of the person that can answer your questions. Who is that person? I tend to work with a lot of technical audiences and developer marketing, so I tend to work with a lot of engineers, team leads, etc. And these people are freaking smart. And they tend to sit on a solution engineering team or customer success team. They tend to be, we've got DevOps evangelists for example, or developer relations. Like those are some of the teams they tend to sit in. But that means that a lot of the content that they create and a lot of the knowledge that they share is locked into a very specific set of channels, like the internal, in our case, Confluence pages, Slack whiteboards, customer calls, product demos, sales trainings, right? They actually are creating a decent amount of content, but they're not sharing it externally. And so if I go to them and they don't want to share externally and I, you know, scour their confluence blogs, and I'm like, could I publish this externally? And they're like, what? No, that's not meant for customers like that. That's just meant, you know, I was just fleshing this out for my engineering team. Or. No, no, no, no. That was just to kind of give a little explanation to the sales team that that's not actually meant to go out into the world. And so if I try to turn those subject matter experts into thought leaders who are sharing and building an audience externally, or forcing them to try to share new or disruptive ideas that they haven't tested, or I'm just trying to say you have to share all the time to build an audience that's actually misusing the thing that they're excellent at. So if you partner with SMEs to have them be internal reviewers, for example, to have them help create demo content, to bring them into those executive briefings or customer conversations, they shine in those areas and that is a huge value add, especially for technical marketing. In contrast, if they do want to be external, don't just force them to only stay internal. And I see this a lot where people are so focused on turning an executive or a founder into a thought leader, but those people are too busy to actually experiment with new ideas, and they're too busy to codify those ideas into something that's actionable for an audience. And they're too busy to actually share it externally. So all the way around, they're not doing any of the things that would make them a thought leader. In contrast, a subject matter expert, if you pair them with a marketer, the marketer can help them get more fluent in the skills of creating externally facing content and sharing that and building an audience. And so SMEs are actually perfect. If they want to share, give them that brand halo, pair them with somebody that can help them get fluent in those new skills to move up in those pillars to become thought leaders. So that's just one example with subject matter experts. And then slight tangent on the mistakes people make with thought leadership. But that's, that's one area. And then if we want, I can also talk about some of the pitfalls with influencers as well.

Yeah, let's go ahead and do like maybe one pitfall with influencers. And then I'm curious if there's an, like, you've mentioned three players, and I'm wondering if there's another player in the game. But let's, let's talk about a pitfall for influencers.

The biggest pitfall that I'll call out for this for influencers is focusing only on your external influencers from a transactional mindset. So just like I mentioned with those SMEs, if they do want to become more prolific and they do want to build a profile externally, those people can become great internal influencers. So some of the examples that I gave of this in my talk, an example of an internal influencer would be Laura Erdem from Dream Data. She's very prolific on LinkedIn. She makes videos. But she's also highly associated with Dream Data, with attribution and with their products and the company. In contrast, Sarah latanzio is who I gave as an example of an external creator. And so she also has a lot offollowers on LinkedIn. She has a number of different brand partnerships. She's not necessarily associated with a single brand or even necessarily with her day job. She's more associated with her topic. And so as brands start to think about this, the idea that we're going to hire someone externally and they're going to just read a script for us, they're just going to like, promote our product or our brand over and over. And it's like, no, the goal is to find people who resonate with an audience. Those could be internal or external folks, and making sure that you're aligned from a values perspective so that they can share in a way that resonates with their audience and they know what that way is because they have already built that audience. Right. So that's a pitfall, is that internal versus external and taking that transactional mindset, that tends to happen a lot with external folks, where it's like, I'm going to basically hire you to read a script and I want to hire someone externally so I can tell them what to do versus that balance of internal versus external and making sure that those people are empowered, not micromanaged.

Oh, yes, empowerment, please. Like, so there's some good nuggets in there. Hopefully people will rewind and listen to that part when they're thinking about applying this strategy. So you've mentioned kind of these three main folks and you've almost tiptoed around this piece that I want to ask you because I believe in your inbound talk you mentioned a statement or was kind of talking about how being good at your job doesn't automatically make someone a thought leader. And so you talk about the top performer. Like all organizations have a top performer. But what distinguishes somebody that is a top performer from a true thought leader in the market? Like where does your brain go for that?

The immediate difference is really on that profile piece. So your top performers are excellent at their job. They're making a ton of money for themselves, for their team and for their company. But if they're not influencing externally in terms of building an audience, standing on stages, being on podcasts, publishing, and if they're primarily solving existing problems, which again, if they're making a lot of money for themselves in the company, they're probably doing a great job building and selling whatever the company is currently offering. That is an air. Those are two big distinguishing areas. But my immediate thought goes to the profile piece and then my next thought goes to that depth of ideas piece. So salespeople are an excellent example of this. The top performing sales folks make a lot of money for themselves and for the company, but they are exclusively selling whatever the company is currently making because that's the only way they can make money. They can't sell something that doesn't exist by nature. Thought leaders are actually producing something new. They're introducing something that's potentially disruptive and they're forcing the audience. Well, I shouldn't say forcing. They are helping the audience think and act in a new direction. Sometimes it might feel a little bit forceful. Right. But essentially that doesn't exist. Right. So that would be a perfect example of somebody who is very good at their job but is not a thought leader in large part because they don't have the profile and they're also weak in depth of ideas.

I love that. And yeah, it, it really depends on what sales rep you get, probably to how that feels. But, but let's move forward because you've mentioned a couple of these words in this interview, but also at your inbound 2024 talk, you spoke about the importance of credibility profile, prolific output and, and the idea of depth of ideas for thought leaders. My question is how should brands prioritize these attributes when they're evaluating the creators that they might work with?

It does go back to what their goals are and what they're trying to achieve. So as an example, influencers help you reach a new audience. They help you get in front of people that you can't really get in front of yourself. And so in that case, they're going to need to prioritize the profile piece of that and the credibility piece of that more than they need to prioritize depth of ideas from a subject matter expertise standpoint. If they're bringing these people in, especially for big accounts or high value clients, or they're trying to bring Somebody in to do a technical review of deep research or product enablement in that case, they really care a lot about that person having strong credibility and then being solid in depth of ideas. So it really depends on what their goals are. And again, this is where I think being very clear on who is the audience, are they internal or external? Subject matter experts are actually really good at doing internal enablement and education. In contrast, thought leaders and influencers are more focused externally. So for example, if you're trying to do a bunch of change management with all of the new AI technology. Right. Everyone is adding capabilities, features, pricing, you know, models into their offerings.

Yep.

Having an expert who can help with that change management and enablement internally is huge. Again, we talked about that salesperson who's helping the salesperson kind of translate a lot of these technical concepts or new concepts into something that they can actually share and sell externally. It's probably a SME that's going to partner. You wouldn't go ask a random influencer to come in and be like, hey, connect the dots between this net new thing that we've built and the needs of our customer. A SME is actually much more capable of helping you do that. So I think this is the other Myth that these B2B creators are primarily focused on helping you sell something to an external audience. They have a different purpose depending on the audience, the goals, the time horizons as well. So thought leadership tends to help you build trust and affinity in the long run. It generally is not going to help you close a deal in the next month. And so I see this a lot of like, oh, we're going to do thought leadership. Okay, do you have thoughts? What is the goal of this piece of content? Well, I mean, clearly it's to sell the product. Okay, that's, that's sales content. That's not thought leadership. It's not educating, it's not empowering. It's not introducing a new idea to help the audience think and act in a new way. It's encouraging them to buy something today that's a very different type of content. So that's what I would say in terms of thinking about when to use them, how to use them. It has to go back to the goals and the audience.

It's funny because we kind of started out, we were talking about this like link, talk type content. I want to go back to that a little bit and kind of double click into something that I believe that you talked about in your inbound presentation about the importance of long form and short form content across Multiple channels. It almost could be two questions, but how, how should marketers approach content distribution when working with these creators in the understanding of multiple channels and long and short form content? What are your thoughts?

I think that in the same way that you have to match the narrative to the format and then the format or asset to the channel, you also have to match that with the creator who is going to share this. So if you get creators who specialize in long form content, content like, oh, I'm going to reach out to you because you have one of the most popular substacks that's all long form written content. And now I'm going to hire you to make a bunch of short form TikTok videos. It's not going to go well. They don't have a presence on TikTok. They're not good at creating scripts in that way. They probably aren't very good on camera. Instead, they're really excellent at creating 2000 word articles on substack. In contrast, you're probably not going to go to the TikTok star and say, hey, we want you to take over and have a regular column on our blog every week. We want you to write 1,000 words like, it's not going to happen. Right? So there's a reason that you ask people to address different types of content, different types of channel, and different depths. This is the other piece of this. I talk about this a lot in some of my other frameworks around content depth. So conceptual, strategic and tactical. There are whole YouTube channels that are literally just kind of feature demos. They're like, how to do, you know, this thing with Ashley, right? Like I'm sitting here drinking water. So it would be like how to, how to use your soda stream to make carbonated water. That's, that's not deep. That's tactical use, intent content. And I could do that for everything in my kitchen. I could show you how to make water, you know, make SodaStream water. I could show you how to turn on my phone. I could show you how to cut an apple. None of that is very deep, but there is a whole market for that type of content. In contrast, there are certain podcasts that go on for three or four hours just like randomly chasing every rabbit. And they're like, let's have a whole conversation about the philosophical implications and the moral implications. And they talk for three or four hours, right? That's a different depth of content. It's a different use case for that content. And so making sure that you're not asking your creators to do Things that are completely outside of their wheelhouse in the exact same way that you wouldn't ask the rest of your content strategy to behave in a way that doesn't make sense. Again, me showing you how to cut an apple, that doesn't really make sense as like a step by step written tutorial. I should just make a video where I'm like, step one, take the knife, step two, take the apple, cut it. Like that's. Yeah, that's not going to be a very good written tutorial. Right. So I think that's in the same way that we think about that for our different topics. We have to think about that from the creator aspect as well.

Yeah. It might make one heck of an infographic, maybe, but for sure not an article.

I have a whole rant about infographics. We don't have to talk about it right now, but the TLDR on it is that most infographics are not in fact infographics. They're just random numbers on a flood of color.

Yep. I do not disagree. That is hilarious. So here's where I do want to dive next though is I am a big believer. Believer in showing up who you are, where you are. The the quickly becoming marketing buzzword around this is authenticity. Even though I think it's one of the most important words that we can actually be paying attention to. And I want to kind of talk about turning your executives into thought leaders without falling into the trap of feeling like you always need to outsource content creation to this other human and where kind of leaning into like how this might be missing the mark on the authenticity of your brand and what it wants to come across as.

Oh boy, there's a lot of things in here that we can dive into, so I'm going to try to focus it. First of all, you don't do thought leadership for a founder or an executive. In order for someone to be a thought leader, they have to have thoughts and be a leader. So if they have no thoughts, you're not making them up. If you as a person are doing all of the research, coming up with all of the ideas, fitting it all together, writing it, filming it, publishing it, measuring it, refining it, optimizing, you are the thought leader. That's you. Doesn't matter whose name you slap on it at the end. If all of the actual thinking and doing is coming from someone else, that person is the thought leader. So that's the first thing. The second thing is if you do have somebody that actually does have a lot of thoughts, but they're not fluent in the skill set of creating content. That's something where it makes sense to pair them with someone who is fluent in the skill set of content creation and distribution. And in that case you're going to have to have a robust intake process. And that could just be the person recording their thoughts or writing internal blogs or doing internal presentations. Totally fine to use that as source material. And this is actually an area where AI can help, they can help you create transcripts, summaries, they can help turn it from one type of content into another. I just discovered NotebookLM which will actually create podcast style audio which is like crazy. So you can give it a blog transcript and it'll basically generate these two, a male and a female voice having a conversation about that piece of content. So like that's a perfect example of how you could take source material from somebody that is actually really good at creating long form content. They have ideas, they either don't have time to go on a podcast or they don't have time to record a video. But you could potentially use AI to turn that source material into another type of content. So that's, that's distinctions I would make. You can't have a ghost thinker, you can have a ghost writer, but that implies that there is someone to ghost. And so they have to have that source material. And then to your point about authenticity, it's a double edged sword, right? They may have written that original piece of content, but if I now give it to Notebook and other people, in this case AI people are talking about it, you lose the voice of that original creator. And so I think there is something to be said for leaning into the places where those people feel confident, if they feel very confident on LinkedIn Live, that's awesome. Let them go live. If they want to blather on for 45 minutes, don't try to force them to do link Talk and create 45 seconds clips. A marketer can take that and do that with that source material. If somebody is really good at creating, you know, 2,000 word sub stacks, that's awesome. Let them write their content and then let a marketer help them parse that out on LinkedIn. And then you know, the person can say, hey, I normally write about this topic over here. Here's three nuggets from my latest article. But if you want to see the whole thing, you know, go over here and read it. That's something where it still gives that same voice and that same feeling that you're talking to that person because it has actually come from them. And then the last thing I'll say on this, there was actually a great post about this on LinkedIn today. Someone was talking about sharing vulnerable content or really personal or like the super messed up stuff that has happened in their life. And that content does drive a lot of engagement, but it doesn't necessarily attract the people who are going to take the action that you want them to take. So if you go back to your goals, if your goals are reach, there's a lot of things that you can do to get reach. Things like the crying CEO of like, I had to lay people off and I'm just torn up about it. It's like, okay, this isn't about you. Actually, the people who got laid off, they are the people that are having trouble and like it. It's not going to go well for you to be crying about that. Right?

Yeah.

So there's an element of it where it's like, so is your goal to make people feel sorry for you? Is your goal to get a lot of reach? Like, what is the goal of this post? And if you don't have a good answer to that, maybe don't post it? Or if that goal is actually counter to your core goals, which are to build trust, build rapport, build relationships, to ultimately attract job candidates, attract strategic partners, drive revenue. Right. It's probably not going to align even if it is quote unquote authentic. It's not going to align with your ultimate goals to post certain types of content. So we are always our full selves, but we show different facets of ourselves in different moments. Right. I don't bring Jim Ashley to my podcast interview with you. Right. Jim Ashley was at the gym this morning. I also don't bring podcast Ashley to the gym. Yeah, Podcast Ashley is too chill. I know that's surprising given how fast I talk. But like, podcast Ashley is too chill for what I need at the gym. Right. So I think that's the other piece of this. This idea of authenticity is leaning into the facets of yourself in that moment that are aligned to your long term goals for that particular endeavor.

It's funny because when you're telling that story, two things came to mind. One, reach is cool, but the right reach is even better. I'll never forget, I worked for an organization where mistakenly we started ranking for the Yellow Pages and for Burger King. And, well, let's just say we ended up killing those pages because we're like, this is not the right traffic. These are not the humans that we want to talk to. Like let's just kill those pages right now. The other thing that was funny you'd mentioned Notebook LM and Ashley, I'll have a quick nerd moment and then we'll get back to this influencers conversation that we're talking about. We actually use Notebook LM to bridge a gap in the HubSpot space of keeping up with HubSpot updates, where we actually have a podcast that we launched using that technology called the Update algorithm by Sidekick Strategies, where it will do a conversational podcast based on the latest update of HubSpot. And it is crazy how crazy good it is. And what's funny is we actually attack this in a sideways tangent of the conversations we're having because we created Ben Binary and Luna Logic and now we're building those AI brands in the space around HubSpot updates. Anyway, totally nerd moment. Let's get back to the.

I love all of that. It's like the conspiracy theories where they've like got the string, but I'm like, oh yeah, I'm following the red string. We got it. Okay, we're not gonna rabbit hole because now I want to go on a whole journey with you to follow the red, red thread, but we'll put it away.

Speaking the red thread, Tamson Webster, we're giving you a shout out here because that is an amazing philosophy. Okay, let' dive back in. So it's so again, it's kind of like reach or awareness. Right? It's a great thing. What's really important is the engagement and the conversion slash, the conversation, the relationship. So so many times influencers will drive that awareness. But how can these marketing teams, these brands, make sure that their collaboration leads to actual meaningful engagement and conversion? Therefore, at the end of the day, some roi.

Yeah, this goes all the way back to finding and vetting the right influencers. So one mistake that a lot of people who are new to influencer creator marketing make is they go with the biggest person and this idea that like, we need to get this huge name to fill the seats. And this is, this is true for a lot of industry conferences. They get a lot of celebrities, they get musicians, they get sports stars, et cetera. And it is very cool to go see these people at the conference. That in no way actually means I am willing or able or interested in buying whatever it is you're selling. And that could be a job. Right? Like, especially at the thought leadership level where you're trying to attract investment partners, talent. It's not just that short term revenue piece that's great that you spend a lot of money to get an in, you know, a celebrity or an influencer to come to your conference. But I just don't really know what that has to do with me. Right. So being very intentional about making sure that there is alignment in the audience between what who you're seeking to reach and who that influencer actually has influence with. And then the values alignment is also key because when you look at the types of engagement, if you just see people saying like, super cool, agree, love it. And again, that's a very, very big tell on LinkedIn that there is not a lot of depth of relationship, trust or affinity with those accounts. If that's the kind of engagement that you're seeing, it doesn't matter if they tell you that they're getting millions of impressions, you can go skim through the comments and see that there is no actual relationship there. So that would be my biggest recommendation, is be very intentional about the audience. It's not just about the audience size, it's also about the audience fit. And then that values alignment is key and making sure that what you think is valuable, they also think is valuable. And they're actually driving that same thing.

Yeah, so good. So good. I. I want to take a step back for a second. By the way, I've got this question and one more for you and then we'll close this bad boy out. I want to think about the businesses who have been standing around the pool, but they haven't dipped their toe in, they haven't dove in, they're just kind of looking at it like maybe, maybe not. For those companies that are kind of in the, you know, early in their creator led growth journey or have not started at all, where should they start? SMEs or SMEs as you called it, by the way. The entire time we've been doing this podcast, every time you do that, I think a captain hook and I think it's smead anyway, but SMEs, influencers or thought leaders, like where, where, where should they start? And more importantly, maybe like why? Why is that the place you start when you're just getting going on this creator led growth journey?

I'm gonna be a broken record and say you gotta go back to the goals. I actually can't answer that definitively because I don't know what their goals are. Right. And this will vary depending on the industry, the size of the company, the maturity of the market. So as an example, in highly regulated industries like finance, like healthcare, there are certain things that they can and cannot say. And so in that case, working with a SME is probably going to be their best bet because they have to run everything through legal. There are certain things that they literally, legally cannot say. So trying to go hire an external influencer, that's not going to work because they need more control. And so in that case, having a subject matter expert even. It's funny, I was actually, I was at dinner with somebody at Inbound who works in regulated industries, and I was like, could you literally just read out some of the laws or some of the terms of services that people don't know? It's literally just right there. And that is the whole video series. Or maybe you say what this means in layman's terms is whatever it is. Right? Because the legalese is hard. That could be a whole video series and a subject matter expert could read it. It's okay that maybe they're not the best on video, but that's something that you could start to put out or translating some of those terms. So that would be an example of, hey, SMEs are probably the right people to start with because you're going to have a lot of issues trying to hire an external influencer, get everything through legal. Like, it just the ROI doesn't make sense. In contrast, if you're a larger brand, looking at those internal and external influencers, helping people feel confident that they can share, this is another thing I see, right. It's not just about employee advocacy. Everybody thinks that employee advocacy or employee amplification and internal influencers are the same thing. That's not true. The big difference there is that internal influencers have their own strong personal brand. So again, going back to my example of Laura Erdem, she wears a hat like this. This has become a thing in her personal brand. She wears hats all the time. She's got it in her LinkedIn photo. She wore one at Inbound. You know who she is? You're like, oh, it's the hat lady. Oh, it's also the dream data person. Right. She's. She's got this equally strong personal brand. She's not just shilling for dream. She genuinely is passionate about the attribution and sales enablement space. And the fact that she happens to work for a company that provides that, like, that's almost serendipitous to the content that she promotes. Right. So that would be another example where maybe you're a large company, you have been trying to do employee advocacy or employee amplification, but you've been trying to do it by just saying, like, share this link on LinkedIn, share the blog, promote this event, right? Maybe take a step back and think about how you enable people to create and share their own content that they're, you know, feeling good about. And then last I would say, thought leaders. This is great for a lot of people who are in new industries, companies who are actually changing the game and producing new technology or doing a lot of research. In that case, they have the ideas, but they just might not have a spokesperson or they might not have a great platform for them, which is a perfect opportunity to pair with a marketer. And so there might be sitting on this excellent pile of research. And so in that case it's like, all right, we kind of need to find somebody who can help us put this out there because we actually have strong depth of ideas, but we're weak on profile or being prolific. And so in that case, it's a different flavor of the problem. So in terms of where to start or who should jump into the pool, first you got to look at the goals, you've got to look at the audience, you got to look at the talent that you have in house versus the budget that you have to hire externally. And that'll help you start to understand. But those are couple of examples of different types of industries or maturity or company sizes that might make sense for each type of creator.

Again, probably another rewind spot for you as the watcher or the listener. So as we land this plane, my last question, I need you to put the one piece of advice hat on. Right, so thinking that one. Yeah, you see what I'm doing there? So you've worked with some major brands and some DOT leaders. Like, what is the one piece of advice that you would give to marketers before they start their next campaign?

Go back to your audience. Who are they? What do they need to know? What are their pain points? Where are they spending time? How do they like to consume information? I know that sounds a little funny given that we have been talking about this internal or marketing focused creator mindset. But at the end of the day, the reason you work with these types of creators is to reach your audience, to help them solve their problems, to help them along their journey. And so if you don't know who they are, you don't know the types of content that resonates with them. You don't know the gaps in information, you don't know where they're spending time. It doesn't matter who you hire, what kinds of awesome content you produce, you're not going to hit the mark. So I would actually say even if you think you know who your audience is, go back, just double check it, Spend some more time with the audience.

I love that so much. Ashley, when I hear you say that, I hear you say focus on the humans. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And focus on your goals. Ashley, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. If people want to connect or have questions, where do you want to send them?

I would love to see everyone on LinkedIn. I talk about this stuff all the time there and then. I also love to get in conversations on LinkedIn. So that's the place.

Very cool. Hub Heroes it's clear that navigating the roles of SMEs, influencers and thought leaders in marketing is all about aligning your goals with the right type of creator for the humans that you're actually trying to impact. If you're ready to dive deeper into creator LED growth and optimize your marketing mix, Ashley's guidance offers the perfect roadmap. So make sure you connect with her and don't forget to check out Atlassian for innovative solutions to boost your team's collaboration. And as always, you know how I have to end this. Remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy hubspotting along the way.