🔥REVEALED: The SHOCKING Truth About Brand Marketing Secrets

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And welcome to another episode of Chats with Jason. I am of course, your host, Jason S. Bretra. And this is the show that helps you transform the experience to transform your business. I'm absolutely delighted to have our guest with us today. Katherine Strachan is an absolute sensation. She's achieved a lot in her career and she's recently released a book to help guide you and other marketers and entrepreneurs to achieve success as well. Today she's an international keynote speaker. Fractional Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, a strategy consultant and author. She sat on the boards of numerous organizations and she was the co founder of Copyhouse that she helped grow to a team of over 30 people doing over $2 million a year in revenue. Katherine, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today.

Thank you so much for having me. Just a small correction there. I was the only founder, so I was a solo founder of my business. I grew it from myself to a team of 32 with 2 million annual reoccurring revenue on my own.

So just to add that is an important correction. My apologies for that. What an excellent achievement. Now the new book, Scaling Success. How to Build a Brand that Breaks Barriers. I was checking out some of the reviews online and absolutely phenomenal. Must read for any entrepreneur. The kudos for you is widespread. Doesn't matter where people buy the book. I've got a copy of it and absolutely loving it. What made you take that step, though, to write a book about starting and scaling a business?

I had always wanted to write a book. I am a book nerd. By childhood, I was the only kid in my hometown that knew where the public library was because I would spend all summer there. I did two degrees in English Lit. I did an undergrad and then a master's. And then after my master's I set up Copyhouse, which by its name was a content marketing copywriting agency. So I've always been really big on words. I already do a lot of public speaking. I have a strong personal brand with over 18,000 followers on LinkedIn. So, you know, I'm already telling a lot of stories. It was a perfect kind of accumulation to put it into a book. When I came to write the book, I found it a lot easier to write than, say, my dissertation where I didn't know what I was talking about. When I wrote the book. What was really required was discipline to sit down every single day and write 2,000 words. But I wrote the book in about two months. I wrote it in January, February last year, just by sitting down and writing and following the outline and the strategy that we had set before I started writing the book. So it fell out of me, which makes me think that it was maybe a little bit overdue.

Yeah, absolutely. And who would you say is the ideal person to pick up a copy of the book, read it?

I would say that anybody who's thinking about growing a company or is helping to lead the company, especially marketers. Marketing is such a big part of any company. Growth really drives me crazy. Quite often now in my fractional work, I come across brands who've been going for 20, 30 years and have grown by word of mouth and have grown by investing really heavily in their sales, but have not thought about their marketing. And it really drives me nuts because I think that marketing is probably one of the biggest growth levers you can really pull in the business. So Copyhouse grew so successfully because about five months in, maybe we hit the pandemic. And when we hit the pandemic, so I started building the agency in January 2020 and the pandemic obviously happened in March 2020, which was obviously not great timing. But what I did and how we grew out of that and how we survived and then ultimately thrived was by investing in our positioning, investing in ourselves and investing in our marketing. So I got a bounce back loan, which in the UK was a government loan that the government gave businesses to help them survive during COVID and I used all of that to invest in our marketing. So brought on a marketing manager and like really doubled down on all of our marketing activities, which I was like a very early startup, we were only about four people at the time, is not a move that most startups make. And it's probably one of the best things that I did during that journey that really helped us to accelerate because while everybody else was pausing their marketing activity, cutting marketing budget, we were going harder. So we were able to even as a startup, like kind of leapfrog over them and take all of their market share because the economy was going to come back, things were going to resume. So while everybody else was busy panicking and cutting, we were covering that lost ground that as a startup we hadn't gained.

Yeah, well, interesting that you say you've done work with brands that have been around for decades and they really haven't paid any intentional focus on their marketing practices and I would say probably even in their brand development in that process. Why is it that so many organizations have this lackluster approach to marketing? It either happens by accident or if they do have A marketing department, it's not necessarily always has a seat at the table, so to speak, when it comes to the big decisions. Why do you think marketing does sometimes get that second tier seating?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's especially common in B2B. So B2C tends to understand the value of marketing because they have to reach a very big audience and sell quite a lot of products. If you have a shoe company, you have to sell thousands of shoes to have a profitable shoe company. Where if you're a B2B company, you only really have to sell one, one or two multimillion dollar softwares a year to have a profitable business. Most B2B companies are also often set up by your more technically minded C suite. So they're normally set up by like a CTO cio, people who have actually built that product that they're selling. So they're normally more technically brilliant, but then therefore also more introverted and less likely to like fully understand the value of marketing and are also more risk adverse profiles and personalities. Marketing is a little bit of a risk, especially when you first get started because you don't really know what's going to work. There's a fantastic saying that 50% of my marketing works. I just don't know what 50% that is. If you can't articulate it because you don't know it very well that like you pay this, you're going to get that, then it's really difficult for those more risk adverse C suite to sign on for it. One of the values that I now do a lot as a fractional CMO is like knowing how to talk to a cto, a cio. Not a lot of people know how to talk to those profiles. Not a lot of people know like you know what it is that they actually want to hear and you know how you can communicate these brilliant marketing ideas you have to these more conservative C suite profiles that you might need to get signed off. Did a really interesting episode last week on my podcast Marketers Unleashed about the CFO profile. Because CFOs are like archenemies a lot of the time of the cmo. They're the ones that are cutting down the budget and not signing off marketing spend. It was really interesting to see into their shoes of what their role looks like and what are some of the things that they're thinking about. But at the end of the day to get these more conservative profiles on board, it is often just talking the language that they talk and understanding what they need to hear. But I think A lot of like organizations don't invest in marketing because they're led by these more technically brilliant people who don't necessarily understand the value of it because they don't understand the value of it. Don't understand the correlation between sales and marketing. So, you know, they think we need sales. Okay. So they invest really heavily in like a sales outreach agency or like having a very strong 30 person sales team, but aren't investing in their marketing. Which like is for anybody who knows marketing. We know that marketing drives inbound leads. These inbound leads are far more likely to convert or lead to higher paying, longer lasting customers. You, you can't really do sales well without marketing, so having both sides of those coins. But if you don't know marketing, you don't know that about marketing. You just think, I need sales. So you bring in this massive sales team and you're spending all your budget on this big sales team that is probably not achieving the results that you want.

Yeah. So it was remiss of me. I should have asked up front though, how do you define marketing? Because there are some different answers out there. So how do you define marketing?

Yeah, marketing is obviously like super all encompassing. But I think at the end of the day, what it boils down to for me in the most like I had to bring it down to a one sentence definition, is building relationships with your audience. It's about building that relationship with your audience to the point that they trust you and they only want to buy from you. And good marketing does that. And it has to use many different channels, it has to use many different levers. It has to use many different approaches and techniques to do that. But that's why, like when I build a marketing strategy, I always start by looking at the audience because who is it that we're trying to reach, who is it that we want to buy from us and where are they already spending their time? There's no point in being in a big magazine publication if they don't even read that publication. You're just wasting your budget, your resources, your time, your energy. Getting into say, Forbes, say for example, if your audience are stay at home moms who don't read Forbes, then you know, there's no point in that. You're not going to actually be able to move the lever. Now when we think about audience, one of the things that I often get the brands to do is to think about not just like the people who buy, but also investors. So if you're one of these companies that lives on funding rounds building that Profile of the investor. Who is going to be the perfect investor for your business is part of that building the profile of your perfect employee. So who do you want to be as part of your team? Not as an individual, but what do they look like in a personality type and a mindset like who are they? Because your marketing can solve pretty much any problem in a business. Whether it's getting investment, whether it's hiring, whether it's retaining your staff, whether it's selling your product. Most of the time it is used for selling the product. But it's worth thinking about all the different stakeholders that you need to build relationships with to have a successful business.

So do you have any hints for us about how to identify your ideal audience? Because based on what you've just said and your book, it's a critical part of getting the marketing right.

Yeah, I normally run a workshop with my client to help them define this. I'm actually running a workshop tomorrow with one of my new clients to help them map out who it is that we're targeting and who we're going after. I think it's important for you to realize like right off the bat that you don't sell to everybody. Nobody sells to everybody. Even like the B2C brands that are selling thousands of products do not sell to everybody. Everybody. Sephora doesn't sell to everybody. They sell to a lot of people, but they don't sell to everybody. So starting with being really clear on who it is that you are working with and not being afraid to really niche, niche down or be specific on who it is that you're targeting, but taking the time to sit down and like really think about them. Because one of the things that you see a lot is like very surface level profile. So you see, oh, we're targeting like ctos. I'm like, okay, great. What type of organization do they work in? A CTO that works in a big corporate versus a CTO that works in a startup is going to be a very different breed of animal. Who are they? What's their appetite towards risk? What are they thinking about? What are they awake thinking about at 3am? B2B is very emotive. The things that we're awake thinking about at 3am are far more likely to be tied to work than they are to be tied to something in our personal lives. The emotion in B2B is really high. There's a lot of stress, there's a lot of like responsibility. There's big risk with these decisions because if you put in a multi million piece of software and it doesn't work, you're probably going to lose your job. So there's a lot of emotion that goes on here. So it's really important to understand this emotion. Even in B2B environments, we are emotive creatures and psychologically, we, even though we might like to think that all of our decisions are logical and rational, we are psychologically driven by emotions more than we are driven by ration and logic. So being able to tap into this is really important. So good profile should really look at all of this. And then once you've done the workshop, to set that hypothesis, you need to test it. You need to have conversations, you need to speak with people who match that profile, both that already know your company, but also ones that maybe don't, to see if these assumptions that you're making are actually correct or if you need to alter, adjust them, change them. That's the thing about marketing as well, is that it's constantly in an iteration process where you're learning and developing and growing and you know, your strategy and your profiles are a reflection of what you know to be true at this very second. But as you get going, as you learn more about your audience, as you think more about your business, as you run campaigns and learn what works and what doesn't, you then need to take these insights back into what you're doing so that you're constantly learning and growing and developing. And these profiles should not just be like, oh, we did it once five years ago and now they sit in a drawer. No, they need to be something that you're thinking about all of the time. Because at the end of the day, if you're just spending money to make the brand look good, but you're not actually connecting with your audience and you're not being effective.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And I always wonder, why is it that organizations want to sell to everyone in terms of being able to deliver a message that is effective? If you're trying to message to everybody, it's very difficult to get that right. So when someone's niching down, when a business is niching down or getting really specific about who they serve, what are some of the pitfalls that they can do when they're looking at that niche or creating that niche? What are the some of the lookouts that they should have?

Yeah, I mean, I think this requires like a leadership vision as well. So you need the senior leaders in the company to have a really clear vision of like, where you're going as a company and what that Future looks like often it's a mixture of what you do well and you know, what is needed in the market, what your audience needs, where you have a strong right to win. So I did this process with Coffee House actually when the pandemic first started because up until the pandemic we had done like travel recruitment, we had done like all sorts of industries. We didn't have a clear niche at all. And when the pandemic happened, we lost a lot of travel and recruitment clients. Those are industries that were on their knees. But we had always done a lot of technology and financial services content. And what I did was I looked at what we did well. So we did technical content very well. And in the market, especially at the time, because this was before the big tech boom, there weren't a lot of other agencies that did this well. It was also something that was really needed because these brands specifically look for content marketing agencies that have financial services experiences because it's so hard to get them on board and like up to speed. You don't want to be working with somebody who doesn't understand financial services at all. So there's a need for it, there's market gap. We do it well, we have the skills, we have the abilities. Okay, this is going to be a good positioning for us. Let's go hard after that. And it did really prove to be positioning for us. I've helped a lot of brands do this since and it is really a combination of looking internally, what do we do well, what do we have the skills, capabilities to do? What does a market need? That's an important one because you might be brilliant at something, but if nobody's going to buy it, then you know you're not going to be successful. And are we going to be facing a lot of competition? You can go up against a lot of competitors, but you're going to have to be aware that you're going to have to invest heavier in marketing. The more competitors you have, the more like share voice. That's already taken. You have to compete harder for it. So it's not that you can't go into these competitive industries, but you should definitely be aware of who you're competing against. I've helped a lot of brands who have also like created categories and creating something completely from scratch is also a difficult slog. So I think from a competitive focus, it's probably easier to find something that like is a little known at least so that you know you're not trying to create something totally from scratch, but doesn't have A massive amount of competition in it. So you can hit that sweet spot. If you go on either side of that spectrum, you are definitely looking at a bigger marketing spend. If you are creating a new category, you need to educate your audience on what this category is. So you're going to have to spend heavier on your marketing than if they already have a good understanding or awareness of it. So it's a little bit of a balancing act there. Those are the three main kind of focal points that I would look at to create that positioning statement. I think when it comes to brands trying to sell to everybody, it's often a lack of leadership and vision at the top level, but also a presence of fear. They're scared that if they just do one thing, they're putting all their eggs in one basket. But it's much easier to cut through the noise if you're really clear on what you do and who you do it for. So I use this example all the time of being in a crowded street and you're just going, hey, everybody. Nobody looks at you. Nobody listens to you. When was the last time you took a flyer from somebody and actually used it? Probably never. But if you are going, hey, guy in the blue shirt, like, all the guys wearing blue shirts are going to turn around, or an even better one is, hey, mom, like all of the moms in that area are going to look at you, promise you that. And it's the difference between, you know, falling on deaf ears and being able to cut through the noise and really make people sit up, pay attention and listen to you. And you can't build a relationship with somebody if they are not listening or interested or even aware that you're there.

So based on just the small conversation we've had already, it's quite clear that a marketing manager, marketing leader has a lot of different things that they've got to juggle to get it right, to cut through the noise, to get attention on the organization. I know that in your book you talk about hiring marketing managers, but I'm wondering if you could share with the audience what you think makes a great marketer.

Yeah, I think it's a difficult question because it depends on the organization. It depends on what you need as a company. So there's not just like one good marketer. It's about, like, where the company is and their growth journey and what they need to get them there. A very good example of this is when I first hired a marketing manager at Coffee House. I thought that I wanted the best out there, so I wanted Somebody who was very senior, had a lot of really great experience and that actually ended up not being the right move because when you hire somebody very senior, they want to do the strategy. So the more senior marketer, the more strategic they are, the more that they want to be involved in strategy and not the execution. But as a small brand and as a startup, we really needed somebody who was more on the execution side. She only lasted probably about six months before we had to hire again. And that time we hired somebody who had less experience. So on paper was not as good of a marketer. If anybody can't see me, I'm doing air quotes as good of a marketer, but was much more into the execution. I think you need to think about where you are as a company, what sort of experience you really need. You're not going to be able to hire somebody who can do a hundred percent all of marketing because marketing has so many different disciplines in it. So what you want to look at is looking at where is most of your demand required. For example, this week I'm helping one of my fractionals to define that job description actually of a marketing manager for their organization. Their organization's very content driven. So you know, we're going to be looking for a marketing manager who is got probably 80% copywriter, 20% marketer manager. When I was hiring for marketing manager at Copyhouse, we were doing a lot of events and community based stuff. I didn't actually need that copy, I had that copy elsewhere in the organization. So what I was looking for was somebody who could do a lot of events and could do that community building activity. So what you really need is an idea of what sort of marketing you need mostly and the understanding that you are going to have to supplement. So no marketing manager, no marketing professional is going to do 110% of all your marketing needs. So the goal is to get somebody in house who can do 80% and then you're going to need budget to pull in. Good copywriter is not going to be a good designer. At the same time, you know that's not going to happen. Somebody who's really good at organic is not going to be really good at paid most of the time. So finding somebody who can do everything equally is unrealistic. So what you want to do is think about what you need the most of where you can supplement. Maybe you already have some like skills in house. So this client that I'm building the job description for already has like a web developer. Okay, great. Our marketing manager doesn't need to do web development, they can just do marketing and content marketing. So really looking at where you already have skills, where you have skill gaps and you know where your product prepared to spend on budget and like where you need the bulk of your support, it is really helpful to get like a strategic person in as say fractional to do this overview for you. If you've never done marketing before and you don't really know what you're doing because it's a difficult thing to get right. The hiring process is not the easiest if you haven't done it before. So one of the things I often help clients with is to help them define what this job description looks like and then help them to find the right person for it. And yeah, if you don't have a larger marketing strategy, it's hard to know where you need a marketing manager and where to pull in that support. So it can be quite helpful to get somebody who does know it to give you some advice and some consultation before you go down that route. What I find a lot of brands do when they hire that first marketing hire is they hire somebody like really junior, like a marketing executive, but they don't have a marketing strategy in place, they don't have any marketing insights. A CT founder has just decided we need marketing. Okay, great. Hire the cheapest marketing person you can possibly find and then they just dump that on them. And they're normally fresh out of university, they don't really know what they're doing. It's not nice to them and it's not nice to the brand either. It sets them up for a really bad experience. When you hire junior, you have to be aware that you're going to have to support them, nurture them, train them, develop them. It's not just about the price point because you need to put a lot of time and energy and resources into developing and nurturing them and bringing them up to speed. And it's, it's not going to help the brand either because they're not going to know what they should do or what's going to work or what direction to head in. So it drives me nuts when I see that because I don't think it's fair to either party.

Yeah, I think also based on what you were saying, even if you were able to find that unicorn that could do 110% of the requirements of the role, their best value may not actually come from that 110%. You might actually be hurting yourself by trying to get a unicorn that can do elements of everything. Where as Opposed to having someone that really can target in on those areas that are going to drive the needle forward and then have other people specialize in the other areas. In your book you talk about the importance of a personal brand and executive profiles. When I talk to people always, you get one of two responses. No, I don't need a personal brand because my work talks for itself or the company is the brand. Or you get the other end of the spectrum, which is, yes, of course I need a personal brand. Why do you think personal branding is so important in 2025?

Yeah, so the company is a brand, but your personal brand runs alongside it. So the personal brand is a separate marketing strategy almost. So your personal brand should be about you and talking about the things that you're passionate about. Obviously there's going to be a little bit of a crossover there with your work, but it's almost like a separate stream. So it's not like an either or. You need to do the brand for the company, but you also should do the brand for yourself. It's because it adds a human element to it. Nobody buys from a faceless organization. Nobody's going to want to buy from some company, especially startup scale up company, that does not have a front leader. But if you look at any of the major tech companies, they have front leaders. Everybody knows who Steve Jobs is, everybody knows who Bill Gates is. And this is because that's how you get that trust, that credibility. People do not build emotional relationships with faceless organizations. You don't. It's like having a personal attachment to a computer. Maybe in the future as computers get smarter and can mimic some of that human behavior. But typically you don't have personal relationships, most people don't with inanimate objects. And a company, a faceless company is an inanimate object. Nobody knows any of the people who work there. Nobody has a personal relationship with it. You just have the company that is pushing out content about what it does and its features and its products. That's not the ingredients for an emotional relationship. What a personal brand does is it gives you a leader or an anchor even that people can build that relationship with. There's some really, really interesting stats out there about how the human brain actually builds relationships. So you don't have to spend one on one time with people to have that relationship. If somebody consumes up to eight hours of your content, they think that they have a personal relationship at best friend level with you. So it's why like when Michael Jackson or the Queen died, like people were like in beside Themselves with grief, even though they had never ever met them. Now, I'm not saying a Michael Jackson or the Queen, but when you're creating content at that level from a personal brand, people do build an emotional relationship with you. And I've seen it firsthand. I've also helped a lot of my clients, both at the agency and now, to build those brands. So I've seen it from their perspectives as well. But it opens so many doors. So it not only helps with sales and brand awareness, but it also helps with recruitment. People want to know who they're going to be working for. They want to know what that kind of leader is like, are they a good person to work with? That helps massively with client retention. Clients like having somebody that they can have that relationship with within the company. Your employees. We'd all like to think that employees are going to stay forever, but they're probably definitely not. Normally depends on the environment. Getting two to three years out of an employee in the private sector is normally good benchmark. Maybe you might get 5, 10, but it's highly unlikely. So if you're looking at a two to three year like turnover and you have clients in a business that is going to be longer than two to three years and you want your clients to have a relationship with somebody besides that account manager who might leave in two years for a better opportunity, it has a really big impact across the business on so many different things. I've built pretty much my whole entire career through my personal brand. So I started building my personal brand on LinkedIn about seven years ago when I was working as a freelance copywriter at an digital agency. Somebody reached out on LinkedIn and asked me if I'd write them some blogs. And I was like, oh yeah, okay. And also at the same time, oh, I can make some money off LinkedIn if I invest in this, it will bring some more opportunities for me. So I started getting active all the way back then and it's opened so many doors for me. It's brought in pretty much all the new business for the agency, all the employees pretty much as well in some shape or form. And yeah, massively accelerated my own career. I think it's a massive investment in yourself. So even if you're not doing it for the company, you should do it for yourself. When you are made redundant or need to find a new role, your personal brand's gonna come with you. I've just gone through this massive transition away from the agency, having sold and exited it now as a single one person band, which is an interesting transition that's massively helped me to do that. It's helped me to find my new fractional clients. It's helped me to continue to have speaking engagements. It's helped me to launch my book. I did a Amazon bestseller campaign for my book where we needed to sell as many copies as possible within a 24 hour window. Like, it was a pretty intense thing. So I just sat on LinkedIn message all the people who had engaged with my content on previous posts about the book. Hey, can you buy a copy of the book? Hey, can you buy a copy of the book? LinkedIn actually kicked me off that day because they thought I was a bot. But it was me. It was me. Having those number of connections meant that I was able to sell like 400 copies of my book in one day, which is crazy. You couldn't normally do that. So it's created so many opportunities for me. So even if you're not thinking about building a personal brand for your company, you should think about doing it for yourself.

Makes lots of sense. Katherine Strachan, congratulations again on your book Scaling for Success. How to build a brand that Breaks Barriers. We will have in the show notes, of course, links for how people purchase a copy of it. Where else can people follow your work?

Yeah, so I'm really active on LinkedIn, so check me out on LinkedIn. I also have a podcast called Marketers Unleashed which you can find on Spotify. Yeah, it's really super interesting. We talk to not just marketers, but people who are connected or related to the marketer role, who they might have to have relationships with. And yeah, bring a lot of really great insights. So check me out on LinkedIn, find me on Spotify, or buy my book.

Fantastic. We'll be sure to share the links in the description of this podcast episode. Now, before I let you go, Katherine, what's one thing someone watching along or listening to this episode should do as soon as they finish listening to improve their business?

Build your personal brand.

Sounds like a perfect way to end the show. Katherine, thanks again for your time today.

Thank you for having me.

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