Rethinking Inbound, Outbound & Everything in Between

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6 and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition, to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab, exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand and just plain cut through proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, renegade marketers. Drew here. If you're like many B2B CMOs that I talked to, you're probably wondering whether you should double down on inbound or invest more in outbound. Well, today's episode is going to be particularly interesting because we're talking to a marketing leader who's turned that question on its head. Christina Kyriazi, Head of—How'd I do on the last name, by the way?

Christina: Kyriazi.

Drew: I was so close! Kyriazi. Great. Head of Marketing at PhotoShelter has built a unique model where marketing owns both inbound and outbound, and the results have been impressive. We'll explore how she's merged these traditionally separate functions, the experiments that have worked and those that didn't, and how she's achieving growth with a very lean team. So Christina, welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat today.

Drew: Me too. So how are you and where are you this fine day?

Christina: I'm doing great. I am getting over a cold, so apologies in advance if I sound a little rough, but I am in Charlotte, North Carolina, so I'm hoping for some improvement in the weather here. We had some snow last week, which is very unusual here.

Drew: Yes, I know. Well, we're expecting snow here in New York. And, you know, look, a little bit of cold is actually good. It's unexpected. So I'm not gonna spend any time giving you grief about your affiliation with UNC and the wrong blue. Let's just skip over that rivalry, and let's talk about immigrating from Greece in high school, that must have been a formative experience.

Christina: To say the least. Yes, I sure did. So I grew up in Greece in Athens. My parents suddenly told me in the summer of 2001 that we were moving to the United States. We had 10 days to move, and we came for three years. It was for my dad's job. 20-something years later, here we are still here.

Drew: So that was 2001, not... it was just supposed to be a three-year stint. You go, "Oh boy, this is exciting. I'll learn English, then I'll go back to Greece," where, you know, life is just very different. It is. I've been in Greece a few times, and it just feels like a happy place.

Christina: It's a great place. I'm a little biased, obviously. It's a great place. I mean, it's had its ups and downs, and nothing's perfect, but recently, it seems like things are turning around, especially so it's nice to go visit. It's great to see friends and family when we go back, but we know our lives are mostly in the United States.

Drew: All right, well, and yeah, remarkably, you have almost no accent trace, which I give you tremendous credit for, because I know lots of folks who immigrated over the years, and very few have been able to shed an accent.

Christina: Every now and then I'll say a funky word, but hopefully not today.

Drew: All right. Well, we'll be listening for that. But, you know, I mean, the funny thing is that all Americans have an accent, whether they realize it or not. I'm from California originally, and you know, if you ask me to say a word like M-A-N-Y, or W-H-E-N, it will sound like a Californian. There's just no doubt about it. So anyway, when you took over, let's get right into it. When you took over from PhotoShelter about two years ago, what was the landscape you walked into, and what was your mandate?

Christina: I was brought in to really modernize the marketing here and make sure that we're following all of the B2B SaaS best practices. PhotoShelter was actually not a brand new business, you know, it was actually a pretty well established business that had gone through a couple of iterations of changes. It actually started more of a B2C business, and then evolved into more of a B2B business. So it was kind of at that junction that, you know, I came in and the organization just wanted to follow some best practices to make sure that we can grow at the pace that we wanted to grow. So I was tasked with making sure we have, you know, the right team, the right processes and the right strategy and funding to make it all happen.

Drew: So basically, yeah, everything, right? Process, strategy, and the mandate was, just fix it.

Christina: Yeah, and I can't say it was broken. That's not okay, because my predecessor definitely did a great job, you know, establishing the foundation. It was sort of a shift, you know, the company needed to grow at a much faster pace. So as you know, if you continue doing what you're doing, it's probably going to result in the same outcome. So lots of things needed to change in order to kind of meet the new goals.

Drew: So accelerating growth. I mean, it's funny, I talk a lot about this, that growth is not a strategy, growth is an outcome of strategy, but it is an objective. We want to grow, and we want to accelerate growth. So talk a little bit about the building blocks to getting to growth in your mind and what that initial process looked like.

Christina: Yeah, it was all about establishing a strategy at first. So you have to have something in mind that you want to strive towards. So I did, and I had a really clear vision in mind that I shared with the board and the senior leadership team, and we all stacked hands, that that's how we wanted to go about doing things. Once that was, you know, aligned with everyone.

Drew: What was the strategy? And, you know, how much interaction did you get with the CEO and the board, and did they push back at all?

Christina: They did not. Everyone was very supportive. So the strategy was... so, our TAM is humongous, as we discussed, and we wanted to go after, you know, very specific segments of the market. So we actually, you know, refocused our efforts, and we said, okay, these are the segments of the markets that we are going to go after. I'm not going to share them on this podcast more specifically, because I don't want to disclose anything confidential. We definitely agreed on, you know, here's the focus area, and here's who we want to go after, and then it was a matter of executing on that. And honestly, I know it sounds so simple, but that's where a lot of things tend to fall apart, frequently, is in the execution portion. Because it's one thing to kind of articulate a strategy and say, I want to go do this, but then you actually have to get it done.

Drew: Just in case someone listening didn't know TAM. TAM is total addressable market, so we said it could be everybody, but that's not efficient. So we're going to focus on a few segments, and by that, I'm assuming it's like vertical B2B applications of the product that you provide, which we should probably clarify at some point, but has to do with photos, right? And but even within that so you say, Let's go after sports or whatever, a vertical, you still need to have an insight and a value prop to go after them. And I just want to make sure, before we leap into execution, there's still some strategic underpinnings that it would be great to sort of get a sense of.

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. So just to clarify, PhotoShelter is one of the leading digital asset management systems out there, and we have almost 2000 customers that are leveraging some of the biggest as you reference, sports teams, higher education teams, healthcare organizations and all kinds of other organizations that are using us to really house all of their digital assets and also organize them and distribute them to the right people. Our TAM or total addressable market, theoretically, is huge. It's pretty much anyone who has a marketing department that has any kind of visual, whether it's a graphic or a photo or a video or audio, even files that they need to organize and keep in a central hub. So that's obviously too much to address without having a gazillion dollars in your pocket. So we had to focus. And as you said earlier, as we selected those key verticals to go after key segments of the market, one of the first things, and actually one of the first people that I hired, was product marketing. Because I think product marketing is a really, really crucial strategic arm of marketing that really helps you hone into, what's your value prop for your different segments? What are your different use cases? And then how do you translate all that and communicate it to the market?

Drew: I want to go into that a lot, because product marketing is one of these areas. It's like, if we had a sales counterpart here, they might not understand actually what they do. And these folks are hard to find. So you talked about value prop and being able to translate that, so they have to have an understanding of the target audience, that particular vertical, and where your product solves a particular pain. I mean, their job is kind of to find the insight and connect, you know, with the problem and the solution and the pain and the gain, right? And how does that actually work? And what makes a great product marketer?

Christina: Yeah, so I have a brilliant product marketer. I actually was lucky to have worked with her before. So it was a very easy transition, and the relationship was already there. You described it. You're pretty spot on in the way that you described product marketing. A really, really core function of Product Marketing is understanding your customer, your market, and what makes them tick, what their problems are, and you know, ideally translating that into the solutions that you have. So a lot of that is listening and doing research. I think that is a really, really crucial step, and I actually participate in that very, very actively. So one of the very clear things that I told my board before I joined was, in my first 90 days, I want to talk to as many customers as possible. In my head, I had about 30 customers that I wanted to talk to. And, you know, obviously my product marketer also was there along for the ride as well, and that, I think just talking directly to customers gives you such a unique insight. You can get to it very, very quickly. So that was one part of it. The other part was actually doing some quantitative research, which I was lucky to be able to do fairly quickly. So that definitely fed quite a few insights into it. And then you start to leverage a lot of the sales calls, like, what are people talking about during the sales calls? You listen to them, you gather insights. You start to do market research, competitive research, and the product marketing function really pulls all of that together and turns it into insights, like actionable insights that you can actually turn into execution across all functions of marketing.

Drew: It's so interesting in the old days in the agency world, that would have been an account planner, that was the person who would assemble all the things. But now, and as because I'm talking to we're having so many conversations about generative AI, so much of what you're describing can be done probably synthetically. I know the folks at Evidenza are doing a lot of this market research, but this probably when you did it two years ago, this, you were doing this the way it was done 10 years ago and 20 years ago, you actually had the heavy lifting, with a possible exception of listening to the sales calls, because you might have had a Gong or something like that type right to record them. So this is a time consuming process. How long did it take you? So you did 90 days to do those customer insights. How long did it take you to get from there to a really insight rich strategy that you could use against a specific vertical?

Christina: It's not, in my mind, it's not a like, "Okay, today, we're done. Tomorrow, we're good" process. It's very much an iterative process. So, you know, after talking to customers, you get the first level of insights, and you can start implementing some stuff based on that, and then you get some quantitative feedback, and you can start implementing some stuff around that. So it wasn't like a, you know, one day we turned the page, and everything was perfect. It was very much. You know, within the first 90 days, formed a less fuzzy picture of what the market is like. 90 days after that, we had an even clearer picture. And honestly, after we started executing certain strategies based on those insights, we learned even more. And then we kept adjusting our strategy. And to this day, and I'm sure in the future, we will continue adjusting based on all the new things that we're learning. Because, let's be honest, the market continues to evolve. It's not stagnant, so you have to be able to change with it.

Drew: Such an important point as you're talking about this, and I'm thinking about these individual verticals, there is this notion that PhotoShelter could mean one thing to this group and another thing to this group, was there a point where you brought them together under an umbrella idea for the brand?

Christina: Yes, and there are many different use cases, even within the different verticals, right? Like some people may appreciate what we call a real time workflow, like you're at an event and you really need to quickly get photos, videos and other assets from the field to social media in 60 seconds. I mean, PhotoShelter powered the last Super Bowl, so both teams and the NFL were using PhotoShelter to get all of their assets out. And then you have others who are like, I just want to build a really strong archive, and I might have a million, you know, assets in there, and I want to be able to find them easily through AI. So that's a very different use case, right? But it could that could both be sports organizations, for example. In my mind, it's really important to identify what are the, you know, top 10 different use cases that your customers use you across all verticals, and really hone into them and make sure that you know, you translate those into marketing and even sales speak during the sales conversations.

Drew: We were talking about this the other day in a huddle. And the tricky part of this is that no one uses all the applications that you have. You can never get all the features out there. So how did you decide, sort of, what was the tip of the spear? If you will the one or two magical things that would get the conversation started.

Christina: I call those the wow moments. So I actually am able to extract those fairly easily from having conversations with customers. So in my those 30 or so conversations that you know, we had with customers, you know, I use a certain discussion guide to help extract those and they become very, very quickly, very, very clear what those moments are, the wow moments are, and you have to really lean into them, right? Like, if your customers tell you that when they see, when they saw blah, blah, blah, during the demo, they stopped in their tracks. I make a mental note of that, and I'm like, "Okay, that is a wow moment." Or when they tell you, "you know, I realized I needed this because I saw this," that's a wow moment. Like, those are the moments that you have to document and make sure that you're constantly surfacing to the top, because those are the the moments that make people act right. That's, that's that's the key of marketing, is, how do you convert someone? How do you make them act? And then after that, you can educate them on all the details of your product or all the details of the features, but you really gotta capture them at the moment that they're gonna act.

Drew: It's funny, because if you don't have wow moments, you probably don't have a right? You have a problem. So that's really interesting. And again, you know, anybody's listening to this show knows that I love to say that, that you know, CMOs can never talk to enough customers, whether it's at the very beginning or or ongoing, because the pursuit of the wow moment as a goal for every customer conversation is a really nice little addition to the thing. So what it essentially does is it turns CMOs into sort of putting their product marketing ears really forward, right? Because you've got to try to find force out that wow moment. Okay, so you identified these wow moments. Now let's talk about structurally, because at the beginning of the show, I said we were going to talk about inbound and outbound. So let's start to get into how you divided up those motions and, you know, I guess we should probably start with, most folks have inbound, but how it became that you put outbound under the marketing umbrella?

Christina: Yeah, so we are, and have been, traditionally, pretty inbound heavy, but we definitely have an outbound motion that works and helps bring in its own set of pipeline. The decision was really, you know, and we actually went back and forth. We had BDRs under sales moved into marketing later on. What I found in this organization is it worked best to have BDRs as closely aligned to marketing as possible. It just makes all of our activities a lot more efficient and helps us go a lot faster. I am not a marketer or an executive that is territorial. In other organizations where it's worked much better in sales, I am totally fine with that too. So I think you just got to do what works best for your audience and for your market based on your strategy. Now our BDRs handle both inbounds and outbound, so I don't have separate teams, like some of them don't handle only inbounds and some of them don't handle only outbounds right now. So it just made more sense to have them much closer aligned to marketing.

Drew: It's funny because this is a discussion probably two or three years ago in huddles. We talked a lot about where should BDR sit? And of course, sales would always argue they should sit in sales, because that's the path for them forward. Ultimately, I would say we came out about 70% of us and said no, no. Needs to be under marketing. One, because you need to take the issue off the table whether that was a good lead or not. You can't be sitting there where the sales people are saying now that lead or that opportunity isn't really an opportunity. So to me, that was the essential part of it. Two, I think it solidifies a partnership a lot closer because it gets marketing a lot closer to what needs to revenue. And, you know, and ultimately, that makes marketing smarter and better, in my humble opinion. Okay, so now let's talk about, I mean, you started to grow faster, or you have grown faster than you were before. Talk a little bit about sort of the marketing, and give some examples of the plays that you were running that you think helped drive growth.

Christina: We focused quite a bit on the audience at first. So we wanted to make sure that our audience, you know, in the markets that we wanted to be known for, knew about us, and that's something that wasn't really there before, as much you know, as it is now. So we started opening up new programs like more and better advertising, making sure that when someone searches on Google, I know it sounds very simple, that we pop up to the top. And we also started to go to various trade shows and events, because I really wanted to make sure that people knew the PhotoShelter brand and we were in front of them. And honestly, the past, you know, early 2024 especially. Actually, you know, for the most part, was a lot of experimentation and trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And we learned a ton through that. So we saw quite a bit of uplift in 2024 once we turned on all of our new programs, and then we plateaued a little bit. I started to, you know, once we became smarter, you know, we established our own new processes. We saw what worked and what didn't work. Then I started to say, Okay, this set of spend that I have right here seems to not be doing so much for us. So in Q4 I decided to take that spend and experiment some more. So we found three more, you know, set of tactics that we could be doing, and did small tests to see what works and what doesn't work.

Drew: Okay, that was a lot, and I want to break it down. Break it down, because there's some really good gems that I want to get to. We have Byron Sharp, who, you know, wrote the book How Brands Grow, and one of his key sort of metrics is reach, right? And the broader the reach, the better. And I am curious how you, since you use the word awareness, often, marketers don't use that word anymore because it feels fluffy. It's like brand, but in fact, it is reach. Did you have any kind of tracking that showed you you were making progress against your verticals?

Christina: Yes. So we were able to track, you know, how much pipeline are we producing in each different vertical, how many leads are we producing, and then how many meetings? So we are able to track the whole funnel all the way through to close won business for different verticals, different tactics, and so forth. So it became fairly easy to be able to tell what's working, what's not working, and to be able to stack hands on, okay, we're going to pull back on this, because it's really not doing much for us, apparently, and we're going to reallocate this funding to something else.

Drew: So I was actually asking about the broadest possible reach, which is awareness, and whether or not you're tracking awareness, because tracking leads is people who respond but don't necessarily close. And so I guess I need to understand how long your sales cycle is to be able to sort of figure out whether or not there's correlation between more leads and close won.

Christina: Yeah, it's not a long cycle, a quarter or two.

Drew: That is, consider yourself extremely lucky in the world of B2B, because that's really short, and then you can start to see causality, right, pretty quickly, whereas a lot of marketers who have, you know, year-long sales cycles have a real problem with that. Okay, so sorry for interrupting. You were starting to see the programs were working and driving deals to the finish, and because you have such a strong inbound program that it's even easier. What was working and what wasn't working?

Christina: What I'll call more of the mass softer advertising seemed to not be working as well for us. I did not cut the whole thing. We still have some in the market, because I do know that there's a soft correlation between, you know, mass advertising awareness, what you're getting organically through the funnel. So I do think you should still keep some, but there definitely was an opportunity to cut back a little bit and reallocate that funding to more targeted tactics. So we shifted towards, how can we get in front of our audience in a very targeted way, as efficiently as possible? So that meant maybe, instead of going to a massive event that had 20,000 attendees that maybe we drowned at, maybe we go to a 200-person event that is spot on our ICP, like our exact target, and we know our exact, you know, prospects are going to be there, and we can actually book meetings from them. So that was one of the biggest shifts that I think we did, and it seems to be working really well. So we're investing more in 2025.

Drew: And what's interesting there is that may be a diminishing returns, because at some point you've reached all the little 200-group things and you need to expand. You know, you either have to go to bigger events or something. And it's interesting because most of the time when you pull from the mass, your overall reach drops. And when your overall reach drops long term, you have a problem. Right, but not short term.

Christina: Yeah, exactly. And that's why you gotta keep a good balance, right? Like you can't just cut it completely and hope that it's not gonna impact you six months down the road. You have to keep some going in market to continue driving awareness so that yourself six months from now doesn't hate you.

Drew: Yeah, exactly. And that's a really tricky thing. And I do think that there is short-termism. I've been ranting about this a lot. Short-termism tends to push the CMO to focus on that quarter. Yeah. And not six months or a year. And, you know, ideally, I CMO has their eye on 12 months, 18 months down the road. Okay, we need to take a quick break so I can do a little live ad read and then we'll come right back and continue the conversation. So much good stuff to go to, but so stay with us.

Now, speaking of marketing leadership, when I meet CMOs for the first time, I usually get this question: "Hey Drew, what's the deal with the penguins and CMO huddles?" First, I thank them for asking, since it means our marketing is working. Then I explain that a group of penguins is called a huddle, that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot more in common than you think, and that we donate 1% of our revenue to the Global Penguin Society, which means we are not animal appropriators. Now, I like to say "flocking awesome." That sounds flocking awesome, but what really is flocking awesome is how our community supports each other. If you're a flocking awesome B2B marketing leader, swim over to CMOhuddles.com and get started for free.

Okay, we're back. So you sort of jumped in there a little bit and talked about how you sort of ramped up with SEO, and that went counter to market trends. Talk a little bit about that and, you know, is SEO still working for you?

Christina: Yeah, I see SEO as a long tail strategy, right? It's not like you can turn on SEO one day and the next day the leads flow, right? But it is really crucial because at least with our audiences, the majority of them are searching online. They're marketers, right? They're savvy, they're very digitally savvy. So being at the top there is actually an awareness tactic because let's face it, if you're not at the top of the results, you don't really exist. So it's really, really important. It is a long tail tactic. I don't expect results out of it immediately, but you know, you should be thinking about how do I produce the right content to help Google or Bing or whoever rank me at the highest possible level, because if I don't rank there, then I have to pay for that on paid anyways. So it's kind of a yin and yang thing.

Drew: So when you say it's a long term thing and a long tail thing, when, how long did it take you to get from "we wanna rank for this keyword" to actually ranking for a keyword?

Christina: Yeah, so I would say it took almost a year to start even ranking, 'cause before that we weren't even ranking for anything. After a year, we've now moved up quite a bit. Still not where I wanna be. So there's still probably another six months to a year before we are at the top, top when we are in a very, very competitive market. So I've seen that. I've been in businesses before where I turned on SEO and it worked really, really quickly, but it was very niche and we kind of got to the top very quickly. So it really just depends on the market. But that's what I'm talking about. It's a year or two years before you start to even see anything out of it.

Drew: And it's gotten particularly tricky now because with AI search, right? Cutting into Google search and Google changing its search platform and its algorithm as it likes to do, you know, a lot of brands are seeing less organic traffic. And so now you sort of go, okay. And maybe your team has, are geniuses and have figured out AI search, if so, I wanna talk about that, because there are, you know, lots of folks who say they're impacting the AI search engines, but I really haven't seen it.

Christina: Yeah. I think the jury is out on that. It's, in my opinion, too early to figure that out.

Drew: Right? It's probably not too early to try and see what you can do. But again, I suspect it's the same sort of long tail cycle to have an impact to suddenly show up in ChatGPT or probably wouldn't there because they don't, but Perplexity, for example, or, you know, Google if in their search.

So, all right. Won't get there. So we talked about, we talked about SEO, we talked about advertising, sort of cutting back on that, being more targeted, and that seems to have been the whole key for everything for you, is that being more targeted, having an insight, knowing what the wow moment is, and then finding a place where you can share wow moments with the prospects. Were there any big surprises in this last two years in terms of, "gee, I really thought this was gonna work this way," and it either worked better or worse?

Christina: So interesting because at first something wasn't working and then we made it work. So the surprise was more, so sometimes it's not the tactic that's not working. It may be your process that's not working. And as I said in the beginning, we used to advertise a lot to sort of mass audiences in the beginning, and we would get a lot of what you might consider like download leads, right? People downloading something, showing some light intent, which we know that's not an easy one to convert immediately. So we started to look at, okay, what's our process? When a lead like that comes in the system, how do we process it and how do they, you know, where does it go? How fast do they get to it? And we started to really hone into our BDR process. And once we actually implemented a speed to lead initiative where our BDRs were getting to those leads a lot faster. I mean, sometimes people were like still reading the document and our BDRs would call them. Oh gosh. And that ended up converting a lot better. So we ended up, you know, turning some of those programs back on and now that we have a better process and we know that when someone downloads X, Y, Z asset, if we call them within, you know, the first five minutes they, there's a high likelihood they're gonna convert. Then I guess what the process was the problem, not the tactic.

Drew: And that's a big lesson and we, this came up in a huddle recently, where someone had gone back to a tactic that hadn't worked before. They were just doing it wrong or doing it differently. And then once they fixed it, or tried something, which is why sometimes you just have to keep experimenting or why you always have to keep experimenting. However, I wanna go back to the, they download something and you call them. Didn't some of 'em say, "gee, that's creepy. How'd you get my number?"

Christina: They do have to opt in. They're very clear that they're opting in, and they can choose to opt out, obviously. Right. And it's not like it's a hundred percent, you know? Right. You've got to think about these tactics you might have, whatever. I'm just going to make this up. A 5% chance of succeeding, but it's 5% more than 0%, which you were getting before. So, you've got to still think that the majority of them are not going to come through, but something is better than nothing.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, I think one time I was on a website, I hadn't given permission other than providing my email and I got a phone call from the company and I thought, okay, that's creepy. On the other hand, I was impressed that they had the ability to sort of find my phone and, and, and good for them. I do want to point out, we had Jay Baer, his latest book on speed. And you're really proving that out, is that when someone is on a website looking at it, that is the moment of interest. And so if they actually have intent beyond just, oh, that's nice to know. You may be doing them a favor by calling them, right?

Christina: Yeah. You just got to make sure you're, you're, the intent that you're picking up is right. Right. And, and I'll say this in Q4, I actually did quite a bit of shopping for various tools myself, and it's frustrating as a buyer when you go to a website and you're trying to find information, you're like, oh, I now have 30 minutes. Like this is my 30 minute window, right? Busy the rest of the day. Let me do some research. And you fill out the form. And then you sit there, right? Like, well, there goes the 30 minutes. I'm now in a sea of meetings after, you know, 11 o'clock. So it really, you have to strike when the iron is hot. And I think, you know, research proves it again and again that the vendors that respond immediately are the ones that are most likely to get selected.

Drew: It's such a basic thing I think the key though is understanding, I mean, in the old, I mean I remember this conversation I had with John Miller over 10 years ago when he was still at Marketo. And the genius at that moment was if someone goes to your pricing page, they want to buy. And so it's really simple if you can engage with that person. And so you just needed to know what that signal was. Which gave you a 5% chance of someone actually answering the phone. Because I know whenever the phone rings these days, I do not pick it up. Right. Unless I know who it is. So, okay.

So that was a surprise going back, anything else in terms of sort of lessons that you've learned through this process that have helped you sort of, at the beginning the goal was accelerate growth, and I'm assuming that you have been able to accelerate growth, right? Yeah. You know, looking back at the two years of work, what were kind of the couple of the critical, insight to action?

Christina: One of the biggest things that many marketers or maybe non-marketers think about when it comes to creating successful marketing is having the right content and the right volume of content at the right time. Because for example, I find case studies really, really powerful. It's a really crucial part of content and marketing that you need to have in order to make all of your channels really efficient, right? Investing in that content creation upfront will pay dividends tenfold down the road. So that's a big lesson that I continue to learn, you know, at every single, you know, new role that I start, it's a foundation, right? Like content is really, really crucial and it's very easy to oversee and be like, oh, that's like. Content's not going to air quotes generate leads right now. So why would we invest in it? Well, guess what? Content is what funds all of your tactics. So that is a key learning that I think a lot of people don't think about immediately. The second one is definitely process that we already talked about. I mean, process can make you or break you. And then third one is to continuously measure and adjust. Even right now, I mean we did our Q4 experiments, we learned. We are implementing new tactics in Q1, we're going to learn more in Q1. Some things are going to work and not work, and guess what? We're going to readjust in Q2 and so forth. So it's like a constant change that you just need to be okay with. And you need to not attach your own self-worth to your, the worth of your tactics, right? Like if a tactic doesn't work, it doesn't work for whatever reason, right? Move on. It's okay. Try something else.

Drew: Exactly. Yeah. So I'm wondering because content is, was, is the first thing that most marketers have been using generative AI for. I'm wondering if you are finding that that is changing your ability to generate content and if, if at all, that's impacting your overall program.

Christina: Yeah, so we actually use AI for the early part of the content creation process and for a lot of intelligence and like best practices following. We do not use AI to write our content. I still believe that humans can still write better content, especially content that other humans are reading. So, we still leverage real humans that are very talented to write all of our final content. But when it comes to, you know, like, hey, I need to quickly, like I have a thousand things and I need to organize to create a brief, like that's a great point to bring an AI to help you organize that quickly so you're not wasting your time there. Or if you need to ideate, right? Like, I want to write about these things like, help me get started so I can actually start, you know, down a path of creating the content. So to me, that's where content is right now. Does that mean it'll change down the road? It might. But humans still seem to have the upper hand there.

Drew: Yeah, I'm wondering have you created a, like a brand GPT at this point where it has sort of your brand style and style guides and so forth, or you're not there because you're still relying on your human voices to be that?

Christina: We're still relying on our human voices for the most part, but we definitely have guidelines that they follow and, you know, anytime we do any kind of ideation, we plug those in as well. And there are various tools that help you do that. So it's, we're definitely using AI. But it's not replacing the human work.

Drew: It's got to happen. I mean, let's put it this way. And this is what we're starting to see now through the conversation with the huddles. Some are finding that they are able to get that answer. The question, how do I do more with less at least, less team, less freelancers, for example, when it comes to content iteration. We've got a big report. We need to parse it out into five different types of things. Great. Because it's original content, those folks are either being reassigned to do more strategic work or they're being moved.

Christina: We have a lean team, so it's not like I had a team of 10 working on content. So the lean team, lean teams actually I think, figure out very quickly how to leverage technology so that they can do more with less. I think the bigger teams are probably where a lot of the changes are going to start happening first.

Drew: Yeah, you talked about a little bit about AI being baked into your product now. Talk a little bit about just what that looks like, because I know that a lot of marketers are looking to their vendors, their software companies that they work with, to do that, to accelerate the use cases. So talk about that.

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. So there are a few different use cases. I think the most fun one to talk about is, "Hey, remember that picture or video or graphic that you created three years ago where you wore a yellow T-shirt and you were looking to the left? Go find it. I need it for a campaign tomorrow." So when it comes to visual assets, it's very hard to search for them, and it used to be that you would have to categorize them, right? You might put metadata in it and might describe it to its best extent, but let's be real. You can't describe someone looking to the left or wearing glasses or what have you, every single little detail.

So the coolest features that we've released since I've been here is what we call the AI visual search, which basically is you just use natural language and you describe the asset that you want to find, and it finds it and other similar assets to a scary, accurate degree, and it literally pops it up right there and then. So my team uses it a ton. I mean, we use it for many different reasons. And then our customers obviously use it a ton because if you have millions of photos or videos or what other things you may have in your library, you need to be able to search for them in an intelligent way. So that's one use case.

The other very unique use case that we found is the AI actually tagging on your behalf, right? For example, tagging people when you have a Super Bowl level organization and you have seconds to distribute head shots or the live action shot of Patrick Mahomes throwing the ball. Humans cannot do that. When I think at an average event, you might produce, I don't know, three to 4,000 pictures, for example. So the AI can actually—you can train the AI to recognize players, to recognize employees, to recognize people, important people to you. And as soon as you upload it into the system, it tags it and then you can find it and do whatever you want with it. So that's another use case. Transcribing video is another great use case. I mean, I use that all the time. That's a super, super helpful feature to actually turn video content into written content. Those are some of the key ways that we use AI within our product.

Drew: It makes total sense. It's funny because just yesterday, I was filling out a form. I had to put the license plate of the car. I didn't know it off the top of my head. I go into my Apple photos and I just said "license plate" and boom, up pop five pictures with the license plate, one of which was my car. I mean, it's cool. And then the photo ID thing, we were in Africa a few months ago, and there were a few birds that I hadn't written notes down. I uploaded it to Perplexity and I said, "What's this bird?" And boom. And I knew it was right because I had heard the name when we saw it. So picture identification, picture sorting, and video—I mean, any kind of visual assets are just hard to search because they're not written content, right?

Yeah, I mean, I just think about all the visuals that all these organizations have, and if they don't have an asset management system, they just have no way. I mean, let's face it, a Gmail search is terrible and Dropbox search is really terrible. And even though they want to be, that's not an asset management system. And maybe they will get there. I want to make sure that I understand. Going, summarizing all of this, is there sort of—if you look at PhotoShelter and you look at your brand, is there an overarching story that you're putting out in the market?

Christina: Yes, absolutely. So we really invented the real-time workflow for the market where marketers can get their assets from whatever live event or from their action shots into the system and then sent out into whatever audience that they needed to. And most recently, we actually acquired a company that helps kind of close the gap in the last mile, which is called Socially, and basically helps our customers get their assets from DAM into the hands of their influencers and key stakeholders. They can in turn post them on their social media. So our key message out there is that marketers, as you said earlier, are more and more being asked to do more with less, and they don't have the time to waste to do things manually. So they definitely need a system to help them do all that stuff.

And we believe that at the pace that the market is moving right now, where things are changing very quickly, marketers need a platform that'll help them do that almost in real time, whether you are a healthcare organization that hosted a community event for cancer patients and you need those photos or videos to be uploaded immediately so that you can share them at your next newsletter, or you are hosting the Super Bowl and you literally need to get your photos, videos, and other assets out in seconds to hundreds if not thousands of people.

Drew: Wow. Okay, so let's wrap up with two dos and one don't for CMOs who are managing both inbound and outbound in their department.

Christina: I would say number one, make sure you have a really, really well-defined process as you're implementing all your various tactics. Because it's one thing to generate the lead, it's another thing to convert the lead. And number two is always be measuring, whether—have a really clear goal of what you're supposed to measure for each tactic. And measure up against it and see what's working, what's not working. Sometimes the measurement will be softer. Sometimes it'll be very straightforward and more down funnel. So those are my two dos. My big don't is don't sit idle. I think that's going to kill every CMO. If you're just sitting there sitting back and thinking, "Oh, I'll just do the same thing we did last quarter or the same quarter as last year. It's easy. Copy, paste." I think that's a recipe for disaster and it's probably going to result in a down quarter.

Drew: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more on that last one. And I have to say, I don't think there's a member of the CMO Huddles community who is sitting idle, who even has the opportunity to do it. If anything, the challenge is more the short-termism, which is to change, change, change. You have to improve, improve, improve, and sometimes that is counterproductive. But for the most part, because there are some things that are working that aren't broken, maybe you can do them better. But you're right. And I think the flip side of this is really what your whole story is about is continuous experimentation, right? And I really appreciate that. Well, Christina, thank you so much for joining us. This is an amazing conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Christina: Thank you for having me.

Drew: For more interviews with innovative marketers, visit renegademarketing.com/podcast and hit the subscribe button.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!