[READ] Interview with Skai’s CMO, Margo Kahnrose

Our very own Chief Marketing Officer, Margo Kahnrose, was recently featured in AuthorityMagazine.com. 

In the post, she talks about her background, her current role, and offers marketing tips and insights learned from her fifteen-year career.

Below are a few excerpts from this post. Read the article on AuthorityMagazine.com for the full interview.

In your opinion, what makes the company you are marketing different than others in your space?

Skai was born of independent thinkers and maintains that pedigree to this day. Each step along the company’s journey has been fueled by the three original founders making good bets on what areas of digital marketing to expand to next. They believed in the advertising potential of Facebook and Amazon well before others did and began developing solutions for those sectors which have become industry leaders. 

That steadfastness and ability to trust your own instincts, no matter what the rest of the industry is doing, is an unusual quality in the leadership of a venture-backed company. Even more rare, even with all of that confidence at Skai comes an equal measure of humility, which is one of our core values. People give our CEO grief over “humility” as a corporate value — like, aren’t we proud of our success? But he simply says, you need to show up every day with a growth mindset. To be humble is to remember our connection and fallibility as humans, and the minute we get complacent, we get lazy. That speaks to my personal ethos.

What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?

First, identify the projects that you love, the ones that you happily lose hours working on without even feeling it, and seek them out — that serotonin will carry you through more tedious moments and days. If they are few and far between, come up with ideas to make them more frequent. The “what” of this is highly individual and personal, but you know it when you experience it. 

Second, don’t become a slave to your calendar. Take ownership of your schedule. Get to know your body clock and time-manage to your strengths so you’re not constantly swimming upstream. In marketing, there is always, always something to do — so if you’re incessantly yawning at 3:00 pm and can’t think straight enough to edit that copy, or to confidently email that journalist, don’t! Check-in on the numbers or tackle the lower-stakes housekeeping items on your to-do and make good use of your fresher, more focused hours the next morning. Rest and sleep always make for better work.

What “3 Non-Intuitive Marketing Strategies” have been most effective for you in your industry?

Acquisition marketing via digital channels is well understood in consumer companies, but it’s surprising to me how well it works in B2B today, as well. Just five years ago, the marketing team at Skai was almost entirely focused on brand marketing tactics like media and analyst relations, webinars, content, tradeshows, and events, and that was normal for the software and technology industries. The thinking was that when the offerings are complex, and the addressable market more niche, demand is best captured via influencers and in-person connections.

Today, my team still does all of those things, but we also have a robust performance marketing program that runs paid and organic search and social as well as website conversion optimization, and it generates a significant and pretty predictable number of inbound leads. But managing that requires budget and staff, which always comes at the expense of something else, and it’s not always easy to say “Ok, we’re just not going to sponsor that big tradeshow where everyone is going to be and where we’ve always been because we’ll have a lot more visibility into the ROI of that $30K if we put it into paid search instead.”

I’ve found a good balance between the old and new, corporate brand and performance marketing, with a lot of effort put into tracking and measurement, which is the best way to stay in control. With more visibility, you can pull different levers between your channels and programs to suit the needs of your business at any moment in time.

Read the full post on AuthorityMagazine.com

Book a Meeting of Skai