Ben (00:01.138)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Katie. Katie, welcome to the show.
Kaite Rosa (00:07.35)
Thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me.
Ben (00:09.154)
You bet. Well, Katie, before we dive into the subject, could you maybe share just a minute or two about your background, passions of marketing, your experience in general?
Kaite Rosa (00:18.41)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to. So, as you said, I'm Katie Rosa. Currently, I lead brand at Axonius, a cybersecurity company. We just wrapped up a major campaign with Simone Biles, which at this point for me is kind of like the crown jewel of my career so far. But prior to Axonius, you know, I've really been kind of a start-upper through and through. I've led content at Virgin Pulse, part of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group.
um, at a company called pay factors, which was an HR tech. Um, and I spent about, uh, I think seven or so years in HR tech. And I am a lifelong writer and storyteller. I've been writing since I was seven years old. Um, and started out in journalism, decided that wasn't really for me. And, uh, because I couldn't be like as creative as I wanted to be. Um, and, uh, I got into content marketing and here we are.
Ben (01:19.01)
I love it. Perfect. Well, that campaign you mentioned at the very beginning is something, you know, absolutely want to dive into. Um, and that really does set the stage for the subject today. What we're going to talk about is how to really humanize your brand or make your brand approachable, especially in B2B. Um, so my first question is the Simone campaign, cybersecurity and Simone. Like what, what was the objective there and how did that play out?
Kaite Rosa (01:45.45)
Yeah, it's funny. We started, like we launched the campaign with this ad that said, what does Simone Biles have to do with cybersecurity? So you kind of hit the nail on the head for how we approached it. But yeah, so in 2021, we remessaged Exonius. We did our really first true like deep dive messaging exercise and all of our customers that we talked to, analysts in the industry, et cetera.
Ben (01:55.648)
Yeah.
Kaite Rosa (02:11.586)
kind of kept coming back to this theme of Exonius, helps us control complexity with our cybersecurity and IT environment. And that became our message. We help you control complexity. And we said, you know what? The way that we approach marketing in general, especially our brand at Exonius, is we do the opposite of what our competitors are doing. So our competitors in the industry at large is very, the branding is very militaristic. It's...
It's fighting the bad guys, it's hackers in a hoodie, it's mechanical birds, machine grade, et cetera, not machine grade, military grade, excuse me, if we can go back and edit that one part if you're able to. It's military grade, et cetera. So we said, we don't wanna do that. Nobody is telling stories about real people in cybersecurity, that's what we wanna do. And at the time,
Simone Biles had just gone to Tokyo Olympics where she stepped off the world stage to kind of deal with her mental health. She was dealing with a lot of other things in the public eye. And she's got this background that I think a lot of people don't know as much about that she was a foster kid. And she grew up in the foster system and was fortunate enough to be adopted. But she's doing a lot when it comes to controlling complexity and overcoming adversities in her life. And we said,
there's no shot in hell that she's gonna say okay to us, but what do we have to lose? Let's reach out to her, let's see if she'd be interested. We knew her first question would be like, why would a cybersecurity company want to partner with me? So we created a video, internally we call it the Hey Simone video. Had a bunch of folks from the company basically just talked to her and explained why we thought that she'd be a great fit for this campaign. And she said yes. And...
Two years later, we did three separate shoots with her. We kind of told this story in like three chapters. And we just wrapped that campaign and wrapped that partnership with her. And it's been an incredible journey. And in terms of humanizing the brand, like it did exactly that. It kind of helped put us on the map and really, you know, we saw some fantastic results from it.
Kaite Rosa (04:33.018)
And I think, like I said earlier, it's been for me personally, like the crown jewel of my career so far. It was a ton of fun and I learned a ton about branding and production and all of that.
Ben (04:44.238)
I love it. So with this campaign, you know, the idea of humanizing or making it approachable, the next step is saying, okay, well, engagement, you know, how are people engaging and communicating? How did you see a difference with this campaign of people before the campaign, like engaging with the brand, talking about the brand, looking at the brand? What did the humanization process actually do as far as perspective customer and customer relationships?
Kaite Rosa (05:14.378)
Yeah, that's a great question. Pretty much right as soon as we launched it, we had so many people just saying like, minus the, you know, what does Simone Biles have to do with this and just going to our site or watching our videos or talking to us about it out of sheer curiosity. So many people identified her, whether it's my kid is in gymnastics and like loves Simone, this is so cool or...
you know, a lot of employees came our way because they said, I identify with her. Why is a cybersecurity company putting a black woman in sport as they're kind of the face of their company right now? So we got, it was a lot of anecdotal conversations around how Simone drew them in. And then, you know, from a performance and metrics perspective, we increased our.
brand recall rate and recognition rates astronomically. And we just saw incredible performance there. Same with our earned media value and branded search and all of those metrics.
Ben (06:17.678)
which I love, which we had talked also a little bit earlier about the different kinds of messaging when it comes to it. You've got product messaging, brand messaging, you've had internal discussions and trainings it sounds like for your team on this. How do you differentiate when to do brand messaging as opposed to like product messaging? And like you said, you kind of talked about some metrics. What are some of the things that you should measure
when you're doing brand messaging, because I think sometimes we get caught up, at least I've seen this in my career, let's do a brand campaign because we need the awareness. But we're gonna measure it in MQLs. And there's a disconnect. So how should we look at brand, and how do you measure it in the right way to know that it's achieving the business goals for that kind of a campaign?
Kaite Rosa (07:08.554)
Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like it's every like marketer or brand marketer, content marketers, like big, you know, this is a long-term play and the goal cannot, in my opinion, cannot be, we wanna drive leads or we wanna close deals directly from this campaign. Like it's just unrealistic. So like when you said MQLs, I was like cringed inside because that's just not what it's about. So.
In fact, on our first iteration of our campaign, the first chapter, we put a demo form on the page and we were like, not the goal. If someone fills it out, sweet, I will take it, but that is not the goal. And ultimately, we were analyzing the performance of the page moving on to the next campaign and we were like, nobody even made it that far on the page. Nobody is looking at that. And it was like a two scroll page, right? Like it was super short and people didn't get there because it's not the goal. So.
what are we measuring? We're measuring, we're looking at first and foremost kind of the, for a while the number that we were like hanging our hat on, or the metric that we were hanging our hat on was aided and unaided recall. And that's what we were measuring. And made me a little nervous because for a while that was like the only metric that I had. We as a company accelerated really quickly out of startup mode and our data maturity was like a little bit behind, you know, it's gotten over the past year, it's gotten a lot better.
Ben (08:19.477)
Yeah.
Kaite Rosa (08:29.75)
But that first year I was like, shoot, OK, this is all we've got, so it better be good. Now I am looking at branded search. I am looking at, I'm actually looking for all of my notes that I have here on this, because I just put together a whole presentation. Branded search. Earned media value was a big one. So.
Ben (08:57.687)
Mm-hmm.
Kaite Rosa (08:58.294)
We partnered closely with PR for this. The awards, we've won a couple awards for this. So that, you know, definitely more of a brand awareness play, but primarily just, you know, top of the funnel metrics. And anytime someone wants to get into the more nitty gritty, it makes me a little anxious for that.
Ben (09:16.202)
Yeah. Well, what's interesting, I think one of the distinctions and correct me if you look at this different between branded and product or demand led messaging is brand. Your recall metrics and your branded search are perfect to me. I think that those embody it because I may not have a need now, but a brand play is I know that if I have a need,
Kaite Rosa (09:40.087)
Yes.
Ben (09:45.622)
that need can immediately be associated with your brand. It's the top of mind thought process of, oh shoot, cybersecurity came up three months down the road in one of our board meetings and someone said, hey, we gotta improve here. And immediately, I think of your business and I'm going to go search it, kind of an idea. And so when the moment is right that branded traffic is golden.
where I feel like the other messaging is more about, I have a need now, how do I capture the demand? And it goes back to that discussion of like, you have your dark socials and stuff like that, and you also have creating demand versus generating demand versus capturing demand, things like that. But with a branded search, I imagine, it has this nice long tail effect, but it also is like for most businesses, one of the greatest conversion rates of all the channels.
Kaite Rosa (10:44.554)
Yeah, yeah, and you're right. Whereas if we're doing, well, let me back up. So one thing I should have mentioned is that in this whole campaign, we don't mention the Exonius tool at all. And that at first was difficult for people to wrap their heads around. They're like, what do you mean? We're gonna put all this money into this and we're not gonna mention Exonius? And it's like, no, because like you just said.
The whole goal is that when you're ready, you remember who we are. The whole goal for me was that our logo, you know, came in at the very end of the clip. And my whole goal was that someone would just remember that logo and maybe, maybe they would go to our website and say, what does this have to do with Simone? But it was not to, it was not a demand generation tactic at all, unlike where in content marketing, I believe it really hits both buckets, right? Like,
If you want, if you're, if the education piece is required for your audience, then I think a solid content marketing strategy is not only going to put you as like the trusted leader for content and learning about it, but it's also going to, you're going to have the CTA at the end of your, at the end of your piece of content or worked within there in some way. Um, we didn't do, we didn't, we didn't do that here. It was never like learn more at exonius.com slash demo or, you know, anything like that. It was.
It was, I want people to have such a strong emotional connection with what they're seeing that they remember us. Period.
Ben (12:11.911)
Yep. Yeah. And B2B brands don't do this as much as B2C, but I feel like the industry is starting to catch up. You know, like the Dove and Johnson to Johnson do like a beautiful job here of, hey, it's not about the product per se, it's about the individual or, you know, the ducks and oil and all sorts of stuff. Like it's a, how do I have, how do you have an emotional connection to my brand?
Kaite Rosa (12:37.422)
Absolutely.
Ben (12:37.822)
And I think B2B we have to, like the B2B journey is still emotional. Even cybersecurity, and I love how you're doing that differently. Like you're creating an emotional tie. One last question, cause we're almost out of time. You talked quickly with me before we joined on the podcast about 2024 and how you're looking at telling stories. How are you approaching the storytelling?
And again, humanizing not just, hey, this is cyber security and all those great examples you used of like the metal armored this and that and whatnot, but like, how do we humanize the people in cybersecurity and tell their stories? How are you approaching that? And where did that idea come from? Things like that. I'd love to hear about it.
Kaite Rosa (13:23.402)
Yeah, so without giving away too much detail, we are telling practitioners stories in a relatively unique way. I think, well, I'm biased, but I think it's unique. And it all started with our last iteration of our campaign with Simone. We had Simone sit down and sit down with three other folks. They were all strangers. They all wrote letters to their younger selves.
looking back on times that they overcame complexity, overcame an adversity. And we had Simone sit down with a practitioner who was not a customer, a customer who had a really compelling story and actually didn't talk about Exonius at all, and then an Exonius employee who also had a really interesting story, and just started like talking about their lives basically. And people latched onto it so much and they loved that we were highlighting
practitioners in a way that wasn't all about like, hey, what tools are you using? But it was more about like, these are the struggles that cybersecurity people are uniquely facing. And basically we're like, there's something here. And we, the stories we want to tell, aim to flip the narrative on what you think of for cybersecurity practitioners. I think they get kind of stereotypically viewed as like, the hacker in the hoodie.
the guy or girl in their mom's basement, dark, creepy kind of like hacking away. And it's so much, there's so much more than that. They're so multifaceted and such great stories about these people that are just super unique. And so that's what we're going with and pulling inspiration from, I'll say like documentary style.
Ben (15:08.814)
Very cool. Awesome, looking forward to it. Well, Katie, thank you so much for the time. I really, really appreciate it. This is super enlightening and has given me a lot of really great information about the brand and how to do that better. If anyone wants to continue the conversation and connect with you online, how can they reach out and connect with you?
Kaite Rosa (15:29.366)
Yeah, absolutely. People can find me on LinkedIn. It's K-A-I-T-E Rosa, not the traditional way of spelling it. Or they could send me a note, katie.rosa at exonius.com.
Ben (15:42.466)
Love it, perfect. Well again, thank you for your time, appreciate it.
Kaite Rosa (15:45.302)
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks to your listeners.