“I am not here to create high-performing content for you. I am here to help this group change our audience’s hearts and minds.” That’s the goal Heike Young set for her team at Microsoft. In this episode, she shares how she shifted enterprise content from chasing metrics to driving real influence.
In this episode, Heike shares how she connects content, creative, product marketing, and demand gen/integrated campaigns like four wheels on a car — remove one, and nothing moves. She makes a strong case for “spicy POV” content for the middle and bottom of the funnel, powered by real stories and backed by solid ops.
What sets Heike apart is her push to help employees find their voices and turn them into creators. For leaders caught between rigid brand rules and creative ambition, Heike offers practical ways to shift culture, fix friction, and build trust through content that resonates.
About Our Guest: Heike Young
Heike Young is the Head of Content, Social & Integrated Marketing at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads global content efforts across blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, and internal creators. Before Microsoft, she spent over a decade at Salesforce, where she built content programs from scratch, co-authored the first State of Marketing report, and launched the award-winning Marketing Cloudcast podcast.
She’s known for pushing content teams to focus on influence over impressions and for championing employee-led storytelling as a powerful alternative to brand-led publishing. Her recent experiments with vertical video and employee advocacy are transforming how B2B brands present themselves online.
Insights and Quotes From This Episode
Heike’s conversation gives you a unique look at how enterprise content teams make an impact that goes beyond traffic and leads. Here are some of the most useful takeaways and standout moments from the episode:
“I am not here to create high performing content for you. I am here to help this group change our audience’s hearts and minds when it comes to Microsoft Advertising.” (12:28)
This quote sets the direction for the whole content operation: Shift how the audience thinks, not just chase surface-level numbers. Heike sees content as a tool to change how people feel about Microsoft Advertising. The real value comes from moving minds, not just hitting dashboard goals.
“The role of content is not that top-of-funnel, ‘ultimate guide’ stuff… It’s more offering our bold point of view, our spicy POVs… convincing people to work with us and invest with us.” (13:00)
Heike focuses Microsoft Advertising’s content on the middle and bottom of the funnel. Instead of making broad educational content, her team puts energy into strong opinions and thought leadership. This kind of content helps drive business results, not just awareness.
“We felt like to make the car go… you would need content, creative, product marketing, and then campaigns or demand gen.” (18:06)
Heike uses the “four wheels of the car” idea to show why cross-functional planning matters. At the enterprise level, you need content, creative, product marketing, and demand generation working together. Each team is key to moving the business forward. No one can work alone.
“If you can get your product marketers aligned… they will be your best friends.” (20:49)
Heike recommends using product marketing’s ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) as the base for content planning. Working closely with product marketers helps content teams make sure their message fits the target audience. This turns possible friction into a strong partnership.
“I would rather just have a content-marketing manager focus heavily on operations and analytics than just, like, being an editor and copywriter these days.” (23:55)
Heike wants a shift in content team roles. She values operational skill and data ownership over just writing ability. With plenty of editorial help available outside, the real advantage for in-house teams is the power to measure, improve, and run complex content programs at scale.
“What you think you’re doing is giving me control of this LinkedIn account. What I’m actually gonna do is make our employees vertical video celebrities.” (29:48)
This quote shows a distribution-first approach. Instead of relying only on brand channels, Heike puts the spotlight on employees as creators. She helps team members become real, visible voices on social platforms, which increases reach and engagement.
“Personal profiles will outperform company profiles every day of the week.” (32:33)
Heike points out that LinkedIn favors individual creators over brand pages. She urges enterprise marketers to rethink their social strategies. Investing in employee advocacy and personal branding leads to better organic reach.
“Be you. That is the takeaway… Don’t watch my videos and think you’re supposed to do this.” (40:38)
Authenticity matters most in creator-led distribution. Heike tells employees to focus on their own interests and strengths, not copy others. Real, personal content connects best with audiences.
About This Season of the Animalz Podcast: Breaking Down the Walls of Enterprise Content Marketing
This season on the Animalz Podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Our mission: demystify these hidden machines and reveal what it really takes to run content at scale.
Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they’ve built, the battles they’ve fought, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Check out other episodes in the season here
Links and Resources From the Episode
Microsoft Advertising / MAI (Microsoft AI): The business unit Heike oversees at Microsoft, covering Bing, Copilot ads, and inventory across Xbox and Activision. This is central to the enterprise content and advertising engine discussed in the episode.
Mustafa Suleiman TED Talk on AI: Heike suggests this TED Talk for anyone interested in AI and looking for a forward-thinking view on artificial intelligence.
Copilot: Microsoft’s generative AI experience, mentioned as a key part of their ad products and content strategy.
Salesforce: Heike’s previous employer, where she created the “content revolution” framework and worked with the Trailblazer community and Dreamforce event.
ExactTarget: The email marketing platform where Heike was the first content marketing hire, later acquired by Salesforce.
Trailblazer Program & Dreamforce: Salesforce’s community and flagship event, cited as models for content and community-driven marketing.
Content Marketing World (conference): Industry-leading conference where Heike’s org-chart slides drew attention for content team structure and strategy.
CapCut: Modern video-editing tool Heike mentions when talking about changes in content creation workflows.
Adobe dashboard: An example of the many analytics tools that can cause confusion in large companies.
Grammarly: Writing assistant tool Heike mentions as a way to help writers and let operations teams focus on analytics.
Follow Heike Young on LinkedIn.
Full Episode Transcript
Heike Young [00:00:00]:
I think, like, product marketers, you know, we can get a little scared of them sometimes. Like, they know so much about the product and they’re, you know, they they hate us. You know, do they just want us to write their blog posts? But I have actually found over the years, like, product marketers to be some of my best advocates when we can really agree on shared goals.
Ty Magnin [00:00:24]:
Welcome to the Animals Podcast. I’m Ty Magnon, the CEO at Animals.
Tim Metz [00:00:28]:
And I’m Tim Metz, the director of marketing and innovation.
Ty Magnan [00:00:31]:
This season on the Animals Podcast, we are pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Hear from content leaders at some of the biggest names in SaaS, sharing the systems they’ve built, the battles they’ve fought, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. Today, we are joined by Heike Young. Heike Young is the head of content, social, and integrated marketing at Microsoft under their advertising or AI business. Before Microsoft, Heike led content teams at Salesforce for almost a decade. And if you check her out on LinkedIn, which I recommend you do, she has a solid following, and produces these delightful short form humorous videos about B2B content and and B2B marketing at large. Excited for you to take a listen in to our conversations today with Haika Young. If you’re like most B2B content marketers, you wanna lead the conversation in your industry.
Ty Magnan [00:01:26]:
At Animals, we help B2B software companies do exactly that by creating standout survey driven state of the industry type reports that help you grow your brand authority, backlinks, and pipeline. In just 12, we run a process that helps uncover narratives from a unique dataset packaged into a beautifully designed flagship content asset that your whole team is gonna be proud of. Book a consult now at animals.co/whitepapers and find out how to set the new benchmark for your industry. Heike, thank you so much for joining the Animals podcast. Welcome. The way we start every episode, as you well know, is with this critical fastball question. What content have you been consuming lately?
Heike Young [00:02:09]:
Oh my gosh. I wish that I could say that it was some super cerebral high brow content, like a really, a really insightful book that I got at the library. But I just, I really try to let my brain rot as much as I need to in the evenings after a long day of work. And recently, I started watching The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and it’s been a balm to my soul just to disconnect and totally tune out. So I really enjoy that one. Shout out to my friend Paul who recommended specifically the Salt Lake City Housewives because there’s so many of these seasons, and, like, I can’t get into Real Housewives if there’s gonna be, like, ten or eleven seasons. I just haven’t seen enough in the show. So Salt Lake City is, like, perfect. There’s a couple seasons. You can get into the drama and just like, I love it.
Ty Magnan [00:02:57]:
There maybe there’s a hack there of, like, to create great content during the day, you have to watch, you know, junk content in the EFA?
Heike Young [00:03:05]:
Everybody has their own process, and there’s probably some content marketers I really respect who are, like, yes. Love Salt Lake City, Real Housewives. That’s the best. And then there’s probably some other ones who are, like, oh, no. I no longer have any respect for Heike. And if that’s you, that’s totally fair. No problem. No harm. No foul. But hopefully, we’ll get into some other things that I I in this podcast that I can earn some of your respect back.
Ty Magnan [00:03:30]:
And maybe with that, we could start with a short intro. So a little bit about your background and then your current role at Microsoft. I’m also curious what attracted you to this role in particular.
Heike Young [00:03:40]:
Yeah. I’m so glad you invited me on this show because I understand it’s specifically for content marketers, and content marketing is, like, that is just my very favorite part of the modern, you know, kind of B2B marketing, role and responsibilities stack. It’s where I came up through is many, many years in content marketing. And, you know, I guess if I’m taking a step back, I am in marketing because I it’s make cool homes with other people. I love the creative process, and I love the collaborative nature of getting to make things with others at work. So whether it’s a video, a research report, an integrated campaign, new brand messaging, whatever it might be, that is really what keeps me in this field and what gets me out of bed every morning is that creative flow and that process. I started my career in book publishing, and so I was, you know, English literature major. Writing and editing was kinda my background.
Heike Young [00:04:37]:
I edited books for a little while. And, I found that for me, you know, the publishing industry was pretty slow paced. Think about it. You edit this book for eight, nine months. By the time you publish it, some of the stats might already be out of date, and you might need to publish an addendum. And so I really craved something with more immediacy, and so, I found my way into social media marketing. So my very first marketing job was as an organic social manager, but then we also did a lot with content at the agency that I worked at. And so, you know, you can’t really have social content without content to talk about.
Heike Young [00:05:13]:
And so it’s like these I think these functions, in my mind, they’ve always been, like, you know, butter and jelly or matcha and boba. Like, they just content and social have to go together. It’s just like the perfect pairing. And so did some social stua at an agency for a while, added on a lot more content responsibilities, and then that is when, I began to kinda hear I mean, honestly, I think just, like, I don’t I didn’t have some grand plan when I set out on this path to work at Salesforce and work at Microsoft and be in B2B tech. To be honest, as a young person growing up in Indianapolis without a lot of tech companies around me, I had heard from some of my friends in Indianapolis that there was this really cool tech company, ExactTarget, and I heard that the benefits were really good if you worked there. I heard that the oaice was really nice. And when you’re in your twenties, these are the things that you care about. And so it wasn’t some Machiavellian plan to get into tech and get RSUs.
Heike Young [00:06:12]:
At that point it was really just, oh, this seems like it would be a cool place to work, and they got content marketing as a new job. And so I was the first content marketing hire at this company, ExactTarget. And so I, you know, was hired on to do research reports and, you know, run a bunch of blog content, etcetera, do some ghostwriting for executives. A few months after I started working there, that company was acquired by Salesforce. And so that is sort of, like, my, you know, origin story of how I got into this crazy world. Then I moved into the brand content marketing team at Salesforce. I was quickly thrust into this very high growth tech environment. And Salesforce at the time, it was really, like, at the center of a lot of these really big movements and changes in marketing, things like community marketing and the Trailblazer program.
Heike Young [00:06:56]:
They were doing a lot of things with events and branding that I think were pretty innovative and still are. And so, yeah, it was just kind of as fate would have it. That’s sort of how I came into this world. I did a number of diaerent content marketing jobs over the years at Salesforce, on that brand team, but also on the product marketing team and more of a, channel centric team running things like the YouTube channel for a couple years. So, yeah, I just was able to jump around to a lot of diaerent roles and opportunities within Salesforce. And after ten or so years of doing that, it was kinda time for me to get a new role, find some find a diaerent type in my step. If anybody listening to this, you know, you’ve been with the same company for a long time. You know how it is.
Heike Young [00:07:38]:
Like, you get super comfortable, and you just need that little push to get you out of your comfort zone. And so that’s where I was last year and kinda what brought me to Microsoft.
Ty Magnan [00:07:47]:
Yeah. And tell us about your current role at Microsoft and and what attracted you to it.
Heike Young [00:07:52]:
Great question. So my current role, I think it’s super awesome and still so grateful that they picked me. They had a ton of great candidates. My current role is head of content, social, and integrated marketing for, some products that live under the Microsoft AI division. So there’s this really awesome guy, Mustafa Suleiman, who heads up, MAI or Microsoft AI, and this is all of the really cool innovation around, you know, Copilot and AI and all of this this amazing stua that’s happening in Microsoft. There’s an incredible TED Talk from Mustafa about AI if you just go on YouTube and search for it. I would highly recommend it if you are at all AI curious and just want sort of a future looking view into some of this stua, but you’re also not totally sure where it’s headed. That would be a great one that I would look into right away.
Heike Young [00:08:41]:
And my world is sort of the B2B arm, which is all about, Microsoft advertising products. So there’s all of these advertising products that live under MAI, and it’s basically just like advertising on Microsoft surfaces. So this could be ads that happen in Bing. It could be Copilot in Bing. There’s a lot of ads you could do through, like, Activision and gaming, etcetera, and so, Xbox. And so it’s basically all of these diaerent places where you can advertise as a marketer or advertiser through the Microsoft ecosystem to the many, you know, billions of users that are on Microsoft, devices and in those systems every single day. So it’s a bit of marketing to marketers, bit of marketing to, you know, advertisers and people who are kinda on the forefront of creativity. And I think what attracted me to this job the most was the mix of areas that I’m able to oversee.
Heike Young [00:09:38]:
And, again, it’s sort of like that mix of content, social, and integrated marketing, which is really just like campaigns is the way we think about it. So it’s like integrated campaign work streams where we’re funneling a bunch of diaerent virtual teams toward a specific outcome, you know, within the context of these campaigns. So the campaign has a dedicated audience and objective, you know, a bunch of tactics that we’ve used to land that message with our target audience. And so, you know, as I was looking for content roles last year, I had been promoted from content specialist to senior director of content strategy at Salesforce. And they’re just to be honest, like, there just weren’t that many great content leadership roles out there that I saw, And I think that’s a miss. There should be a lot of high level, you know, content leadership roles out in the world, but it’s kind of like you’re forced to take some diaerent paths. Like, maybe you go do VP of brand or, you know, there could be some other ways. And some companies do have VP of content, But it’s few and far between.
Heike Young [00:10:39]:
And so I was really interested in this job because it was one of the only ones that I saw, to be frank, on my job hunt that combined a few of these things together and just really had enough inertia around distribution and actually getting all this content up to market. And so it’s not just how can we create the most number of blog posts, it’s how do we really resonate with our target audience through all of these diaerent work streams. And so it’s super cool. My team also has like, I’ve got a team member that just works on customer success stories. I have somebody that just works on employee influencer programs for social. And so it you know, I’m able to kinda tie a lot of these things together in a much more strategic way.
Ty Magnan [00:11:21]:
That’s awesome. What a journey you’ve been on, and what a cool opportunity you’re at. If we can help the audience understand the role of content at Microsoft or at, you know, Microsoft AI, that would be huge. It’s kind of it’s usually hard to kinda to define, but curious how you would articulate that. And maybe you’ve hit on it already talking about distribution and then, you know, there’s this integrated campaigns piece, but what would you say the role of content at MAI is?
Heike Young [00:11:50]:
It’s an awesome question. And I think, when I started this job, I put together a few slides for the team about my content philosophy. Because even though I’m managing integrated campaigns and social in this broader functional area, I would say content is the one where I was really hired to kinda make a big impact on day one. There wasn’t a lot of content being created in the strategic way, and so, I was kinda coming out the gate with a lot of perspective and inertia around content strategy specifically. And I remember putting together a deck for the team, and I essentially told them, I am not here to create high performing content for you. I am here to help this group change our audience’s hearts and minds when it comes to Microsoft advertising. And we have to shift perspectives with our target audience. You know, they don’t necessarily know about the Microsoft services that they could be advertising on.
Heike Young [00:12:49]:
They may know a lot about the competitors out there that they could be advertising with. And our awareness, to be clear, is not really the problem. Like, they know that Microsoft Advertising exists. And so the role of content is not kind of that top of funnel, increase brand awareness by creating the ultimate guide to x y z topics, you know, type of content marketing. It’s really more oaering our bold point of view, our spicy POVs around changes and shifts happening in the market, layering in how generative AI and capabilities with Microsoft are gonna help you uplevel your marketing and advertising strategies and really convincing people to work with us and invest with us. And so it is more of a if you wanna think of it as a funnel, almost more of a middle and bottom funnel strategy mixed with, of course, like, thought leadership and some of those spiky point of views to attract a broader audience. So those are some of the things that I am thinking about as I’m tackling the content strategy.
Tim Metz [00:13:51]:
Can you speak to also what does team look like? Like, how many people on the team? What kind of roles do they have?
Heike Young [00:13:57]:
Org charts are so fascinating to me. And, I was at a session at Content Marketing World a few years ago. I it was like, you know, a dia, there was a panel and a few diaerent brands were talking about their content teams, and people showed a slide of their org charts. Every single phone went up to take a picture because I think, it’s like we never know, yeah, like what other people’s org charts look like. It’s like, what the heck is that? And so within our team, I report to a brand marketing leader. So he’s, like, our senior director of brand marketing for this area. He reports to a general manager slash global CMO for this area. So she’s, like, our marketing lead, and then my boss is our brand marketing lead.
Heike Young [00:14:41]:
And then my team is, you know, a few diaerent parts of social media. So, I have a couple people helping me. They’ve got social responsibilities, also a couple other things that they do. But there’s, there’s a couple of people that are helping me, like, day to day with social. One person that’s mostly dedicated to kind of that employee influencer stua that I mentioned. There’s a content team that has primarily one person powered by a big, agency support model. So, like, an editorial manager, content marketing manager doing a lot of editorial guidance, content marketing operations, and content analytics, and then supported by an agency that does a lot of writing for us and just a lot of that really creating a bunch of content. And then there are, four integrated marketers on the team.
Heike Young [00:15:30]:
And so these are my, like, campaign leads. They have one, maybe one and a half, maybe, like, a smaller campaign each. And, one of those people is entirely dedicated to customer success stories. So that they are they are sort of the connective tissue tissue between me and the content and social strategy and the rest of the organization. So they would have a virtual team put together for their campaign. They would have weekly calls with the product marketers and, yes, the other stakeholders that are working on that virtual team, And then we work really closely together on, bringing the full vision to life through content, social, and these integrated campaigns. So, you know, some of the pieces shift a little bit here and there, but that’s kind of at a high level, how everything is how everything is, structured.
Ty Magnan [00:16:20]:
Nice. In our correspondences leading up to today, you talked about the four wheels of the car. Right? We’re talking about stakeholders for your integrated campaigns and for content. Can you help, the audience understand, like, what are the four wheels of the car for you? Does it only apply to Microsoft? Does it apply to all content types? How do you see that? And then maybe we can get into after that, like, the stakeholder relationships, and how do you relate to product marketing versus demand or some of the other wheels of the car?
Heike Young [00:16:50]:
Yes. So I have to shout out some of my former colleagues at Salesforce who really helped me, live out, a lot of changes together. We saw a lot of content transformation when I was there, and we actually there was a whole bunch of us content marketers at Salesforce several years ago that embarked on something that internally we called the content revolution. Uh-oh. Because we saw that there is this need inside of the company to really be revolutionary in how we were distributing gated content, you know, using forms, using, you know, all of these kind of old school tactics to market our, our ideas to our audience. And so we put together this framework, a few years ago together when we’re doing this to really spark cross functional collaboration, which you’ve spoke to. And so it was this idea of the four wheels of the car, and I’ll explain exactly what they are. So we felt like to make the car go, to make the ideas go, you would need content, like a content strategy arm, a creative arm, so somebody that’s looking at the branding, the look and feel, somebody doing product marketing, so guiding everything with the messaging and with regards to how this actually supports and ladders up to the product narrative.
Heike Young [00:18:06]:
And so you got content, creative, product marketing, and then campaigns or demand gen kind of being that last one. And some organizations will structure that role a little bit diaerently depending on how their sales, their sales team works, etcetera. But at Salesforce, it was really sort of like a campaigns team that was doing a lot of paid boosting of the content, making sure that if we were doing ABM or events, all of that was wrapped up into a demand gen. Yes. Like, all of that was wrapped up together. And so we came up with this model. We felt like these four functional areas really need to not only play nice together in the sandbox, but they need to be deeply, deeply integrated. And so, with varying degrees of success, I’d say, some of the years that we did it, it worked better than others.
Heike Young [00:18:54]:
But the goal was to have an integrated planning process, but we didn’t have a creative strategy being made over over here and a content plan being made over here and product marketing doing this thing. But it was all four of these groups coming together on one slide deck that brought the full team to bear. And I bring that same philosophy to my team. You know, now at Microsoft, some of the players are slightly diaerent. But I really think in most organizations, you have to bring probably all of those functions together in order to be really, really successful.
Ty Magnan [00:19:27]:
Yeah. They all have something to bring to the table. No doubt. Like, what is content without creative? You know? And you’re gonna get in trouble if you don’t loop in the the product marketing team and get that messaging right. You know?
Heike Young [00:19:38]:
And I think, like, product marketers, you know, we can get a little scared of them sometimes. Like, they know so much about the product, and they’re, you know, they, they hate us, you know, do they just want us to write their blog posts, and they, they think that we’re just the, you know, the content intern team. Are they gonna just throw all of our our ideas into chat GPT or something if if, push comes to shove? But I have actually found over the years, like, product marketers to be some of my best advocates when we can really agree on shared goals and, like, shared objectives. And when you really show them that you’re thinking through their ICP, their goals, you’re using their messaging the way that you’re supposed to. I’d say probably some of the best content plans I’ve ever made in my career were ones where I got into a room with a team of product marketers, and I used their exact frameworks to just be the foundation of my content plans. And I so I’m not gonna take the exact words that they use. Some of them might be a little cheesy or not audience centric or whatever they might be. But I’m gonna take that framework because they have laid out.
Heike Young [00:20:49]:
This is the ICP. This is the product they should buy. You know, they have laid out that information. I’m gonna layer that with what I know about channel performance, about audience, and sites, etcetera. We’re gonna combine that, and then once we do, we can sort of be unstoppable. So, you know, if you can, yeah, I think if you can get your product marketers aligned to where they see that the content’s gonna perform so much better once you’re working on it, they will be your your best friends.
Ty Magnan [00:21:17]:
So I love the positive outlook on that and and sort of how you think about what a good collaboration looks like between content and product marketing. One role that wasn’t in the car or one of the wheels of the car and I’m curious where you tuck it in is, what do we wanna call it, marketing ops or, like, measurement or analytics? How do you see that part? Like, where does that part sit? Is it under demand gen? Is it under an integrated campaign manager? Maybe it’s diaerent in diaerent roles.
Heike Young [00:21:48]:
One of the best content teams that I’ve ever been a part of was probably the one where my VP of content had a direct report that was, like, the director of content operations reporting to her. And this person was just in charge of the tech stack for all of the content marketers. This person was in charge of one dashboard dashboard that every content marketing in the company could use and access with all of the data in it. They would do regular refreshes of that dashboard and really treated it like a product that we could all, you know, access and benefit from, and get analytics from and just have every content marketer in the company measuring the same way. I’ve seen too many times that when these things are not centralized and everybody’s measuring things their own way, somebody’s coming out of the woodwork, especially in bigger org. If you’re at a smaller company, you might not really relate to what I’m saying. But if you’re in a bigger org, you know, few hundred employees, a thousand plus employees, there’s people that come out of the woodwork. They say, oh, you know, I just did our best performing blog post ever.
Heike Young [00:22:55]:
Look at this. It got this many views. And then somebody else says, well, what dashboard are you looking at? Because the one I’m looking at says, this is the highest performing piece of content. And then someone else says, oh, no. But you aren’t looking. You didn’t you know, we’ve got this Adobe dashboard over here. And so suddenly everybody is not speaking the same language. They’re not speaking from the same dataset.
Heike Young [00:23:14]:
And this is a really big problem at big companies. You just not everybody is reporting from the same information, and they’re just not all aligned. So I would say it depends on kinda how this is structured. I would say at many companies today, I would prob with the proliferation of, like, great writing talent out there that you can access on a freelance basis, you know, so many great agencies that are out there that can support you. Honestly, I just feel like I would rather have a content marketing manager focus heavily on operations and analytics than just, like, being an editor and, like, copywriter these days, especially with all the tools that you could use, whether they’re, you know, Grammarly, whether you train an internal agent on your editorial guidelines. Like, there’s so many tools and so many ways you could empower people to focus on the editorial stua. Like, I would rather just have a content marketing manager or leader that’s looking after some of that ops and analytics stua in a really structured way.
Ty Magnan [00:24:19]:
I like that answer a lot because, I think content teams sometimes don’t take ownership over that dashboarding over the measurement of the work that’s being done that they’re doing, right, or responsible for. And sometimes they leave it to demand gen or marketing ops or, like, it sits somewhere else. But, really, maybe they don’t get, you know, the attention, the kinds of reports they really need to be most successful in order to, like, you know, advocate for themselves in the business. So I like the idea of, like, having that be an internal seat. Makes a lot of sense to me.
Heike Young [00:24:50]:
Yeah. And it’s easy to just kind of say, oh, well, we we didn’t get the data that we wanted, so we’re just not gonna use it. Or, oh, well, we’re still waiting on x y z and just not take ownership. And I just don’t think that isn’t good in most situations. Look. If you’re listening to this, you’re like, no. I truly don’t have any way to access the data. They’ve locked it up.
Heike Young [00:25:13]:
I mean, you are between a rock and a hard place, and by all means, take a load oa, go log oa for the day. Don’t stress yourself out about this anymore. You’ve done enough, and you should just stop trying if if people are truly disempowering you in this way. But if there is a way for you to get some ownership of that data and do it yourself and, like, DIY this type of dashboard, even if it’s a slide once a month. You know, like, hey. Once a month, we do this slide on our blog channel, our social channel. We update these specific things. Something you can actually go dig up metrics for and own and come back to your leadership and say, here’s what we did.
Heike Young [00:25:58]:
I always think it behooves you to have ownership of that stua.
Ty Magnan [00:26:02]:
I like it.
Tim Metz [00:26:03]:
Are there other roles that you would love to see on content teams that are not on the content teams that often or, like, new roles that you see emerging that you’re excited about?
Heike Young [00:26:12]:
The two jobs that I and when I first joined this team, there were two roles that I really saw critically important that we didn’t have somebody dedicated, you know, kind of full time staa for. And I touched on them a little bit, but one was a dedicated customer success stories person, and the other was a dedicated kind of employee social influencer person. And for both of those roles, like, I had people one person had been doing a bunch of customer success stua previously, but it was, you know, with a little bit more of, like, a sales focus. And I was real with that job, I was really trying to bring it into the integrated marketing model. So, like, regardless of what your campaign is, when you need a customer story in that research report or in that social campaign or whatever it is, you have a person to go to that has relationships with sales, that knows how to get these customers talking, that has templates for all these things, and is improving those templates over time and rooting them in the rest of our content strategy. And so that was, like, super, super important to me. This is some customer success stories is something that was really, I guess, instilled in me when I was at Salesforce. If you’ve ever been to a Salesforce event, you know that they lead with customer stories.
Heike Young [00:27:23]:
Like, you show up for Dreamforce and every single billboard in a city is, like, littered with pictures of the customer, not the Salesforce executives. Right? It’s the customers. And that’s one thing that the company does really well. And then the other thing that I had somebody start focusing on was this idea of employee influencers and employee, advocacy on social media. And I don’t see that many content teams doing this role yet, and I think we will very soon. We already are starting to see more teams take on this focus. But, you know, I I’ve spent the past year plus in my personal life kind of dedicating a lot of my time to figuring out what works on LinkedIn, you know, what are some of the trends there in terms of, like, innovative content on LinkedIn. And it just struck me as I came into this job and I got ownership of a LinkedIn and an Instagram account.
Heike Young [00:28:13]:
One of my very first days, I pulled up the analytics for the LinkedIn page that I manage, and it’s got, you know, 50 thou 5,000 plus followers. Like, it’s not a tiny page. It’s not huge by any means, but it did no. It’s a decent sized page, in the grand scheme of B2B marketing, especially for something where nobody’s been, pushing it that hard. Right? They’ve got a little bit of organic content, but not a ton. And one of my first days I opened up the analytics, I had only seen, like, my personal analytics for the past year on LinkedIn, and I was just, like, used to those numbers. And so when I went in and I saw that there were posts that had, like, hundreds of impressions, like a few hundred impressions or something. I was like, wait, what is going on here? And it just it became so clear to me.
Heike Young [00:28:59]:
LinkedIn, all these other platforms, and I love LinkedIn. Shout out to LinkedIn. Microsoft owns them. Best, you know, best social media platform ever. I spend a ton of my time using LinkedIn. Yeah. I love it. But, like, they want you to buy ads on LinkedIn.
Heike Young [00:29:12]:
They don’t want you to buy get free organic reach for every single brand post that you put out there. And so it makes so much sense that personal profiles would outperform company profiles every day of the week. And so, I’m like, you’re putting me in charge of social media. What you think you’re doing is giving me control of this LinkedIn account. What I’m actually gonna do is make our employees vertical video celebrities. Right? And put them, put their content in front of our target audience in new ways. And so we basically stood up, you know, we’ll program for this. There’s decks.
Heike Young [00:29:48]:
There’s slides that employees can use. Like, I’m way more interested in 20 employees that are gonna do this really well than a hundred people copying and pasting links.
Ty Magnan [00:29:58]:
Right.
Heike Young [00:29:59]:
You know, to our blog posts. Like, that doesn’t really interest me. I’m interested in those 15 or 20 people that see the value, and they’re gonna wake up in the morning thinking, how can I turn this customer meeting into a cool video? Or how can I, you know, film something at this event that I’m at and make it into a really interesting TikTok? Like, those are the people that I’m super, excited to work with.
Ty Magnan [00:30:20]:
Man, there is so much to unpack here. So, yeah, excited we made it to this point in the podcast. So for folks listening, if you haven’t seen Haika’s LinkedIn, go there now. Okay? It is fun. It is clever. It’s, funny. And and really, she’s kind of, I don’t know. What do we call it? Like, you’ve you’ve you’ve you’ve mastered this kinda genre of?
Heike Young [00:30:43]:
LinkTok. Yeah. I don’t know. LinkTok is something that some people call it, like, the combination LinkedIn and TikToks, the Shorts. You know, you can call them, like, yeah, Shorts. Yeah. And I know, like, I hear people complain sometimes. They’re like, oh, I just don’t want LinkedIn to turn into TikTok.
Heike Young [00:30:59]:
TikTok. Like, I like LinkedIn the way that it was. But we have different media for telling different types of stories. The types of stories that I tend to gravitate toward, you know, a lot of times, they are a little bit more humorous, like a skit a sketch. Like, there’s a character being portrayed. And I just have never found a way to do exactly that in, like, a text post. Like, I just I find that a video is a really compelling medium for exactly what I’m trying to do. So I try to bring that while also educating people.
Heike Young [00:31:29]:
Like, I’m not trying to purely just, you know, entertain you for absolutely no business value for you, no career growth value for you whatsoever. Like, hopefully, you will leave, a tiny bit, a tiny bit more informed about something, but also entertained. So I think we can have I think we can have both, on LinkedIn and definitely not trying to take away anybody’s, text posts. I am trying to take away the polls, though. Those are the polls. I’m sorry. We just don’t need the polls on LinkedIn. We’re all done with the polls.
Heike Young [00:31:58]:
Right?
Ty Magnan [00:31:59]:
Yes. You heard it first here. No more polls. And, also, I love that you came clean on, like, the, the algorithm favoring the individuals. It’s like, okay. Yes. We’ve heard about this. We’ve talked about this.
Ty Magnan [00:32:10]:
It feels a little more official hearing it from you being a Microsoft person.
Heike Young [00:32:14]:
To be clear, nobody has ever told me that. Like, no one’s, you know, I I know a few people from LinkedIn. They’re all wonderful. Nobody’s ever said to me, you know, oh, yeah, the brand profiles underperform standpoint, it always does better on the personal page by many, many times over. And it’s not just the engagement. Because I think there’s an element of of course, you know, you wanna engage with the person. Like, if I’m just thinking about me, I’m the consumer, put on my consumer hat. If I see you guys post a video, I’m more likely to like that than Animalz posting a video.
Heike Young [00:32:49]:
Right? Because I wanna support you. I want you to think, oh, yeah. Haika, you know, gave me a high five virtually today by liking my video. Like, I’m thinking about your reaction to it, and, like, I wanna be kind and supportive. Whereas, you know, I see a brand post something. I’m not my immediate reaction isn’t give love to a brand per se, and some brands are It’s
Ty Magnan [00:33:09]:
Who’s behind that?
Heike Young [00:33:09]:
Yeah. They’re creating great content and that’s exactly. Exactly. It’s like and so, you know, I think that it stands to reason. And so if you are a person, especially in B2B, I just think if you’re a person in charge of social, you know, take the brand pay the brand page is like a tiny part of the equation. Like, think about everything else that social means. Like, social doesn’t equal organic posting from a brand account.
Ty Magnan [00:33:33]:
Right. Right. I could take us back to your two k months or year. Okay? You had two k followers, not 32 k. I’m imagining you didn’t, like, nail it on the first go. Right? And as we all know, putting out putting content out there, like, you’re putting yourself out there. Right? You’re in a vulnerable state. Can you take us through maybe, like, what some of those first iterations were and kinda, like, how you found your way to this pretty what seems like pretty dialed in, formula that’s helping you grow your reach.
Tim Metz [00:34:07]:
And that you’re also teaching others. Right? Let’s let’s and let’s then go into that.
Heike Young [00:34:11]:
Yes. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. And, yeah, I have kind of based on my learnings, I had so many people over the past, especially, like, half a year or so, start to ping me and ask me, like, well, what kind of equipment do you use, and how do you come up with these video ideas? And so as you astutely said to him, I put it all kinda into this guide that you can check out. It’s, like, the main link on my LinkedIn page. That’s kind of, like, my first, you know, ebook oaering of this type of content because I spent so much time thinking about it. I when I started this, you know, I had a couple thousand followers. I just it never ever would have dawned on me.
Heike Young [00:34:47]:
It just never would have occurred to me that I would one day monetize my, you know, audience on LinkedIn, that I would do, like, brand partnerships, some amazing companies. I mean, it was all just, like, so far out of the realm of what I was trying to do at the time. And I say that because if you’re kind of like, oh, this is totally overwhelming. Even doing, like, one video seems overwhelming. As overwhelming as that might seem to you now, that is exactly how overwhelming what I’m doing now would have seemed to me then. So just don’t worry. If you’re kind of thinking about it, like, oh, I wish I could do this more, maybe it’s not even for your personal self. Maybe you’re wishing you could do this for your brand, or maybe you’re an entrepreneur, or maybe you are a content and social marketing manager at a company, and you wish you could harness the style of content more.
Heike Young [00:35:33]:
You know, I had very little video editing experience. I had done a TV news internship in college. I’d done, like, I’ve done, like, some radio DJing in college. That was on old technology, not on TabCut, like, none of the tools that we have today. So it’s not like I had a bunch of experience working in these, types of systems to make this kind of video. And so I had this idea, you know, had very few followers on LinkedIn, mostly just the people that I was connected to. But I really I was on maternity leave, and I was spending a lot of time watching these TikToks late at night, like, watching all these funny videos, and I was, like, super inspired by the people that I saw making this really funny, like, skit style content. And I was like, I wish that I could make something like this that would be for B2B.
Heike Young [00:36:22]:
Yeah. And then just, like, remixing it for, like like, I had the idea, but I had no idea how I would get there. And, my first few tries at doing it, I mean, there was a lot left on the cutting room before that you’ll all probably never see, you know, didn’t see the light of day that I just, like, deleted because it was, like, way too embarrassing. I remember filming a lot of stua, like, at certain times of day in the morning because I was like, oh, this is the only time that there’s, like, enough lighting. Like, I didn’t know how to work with the lighting that I had in my house. Like, I just was like, oh, if it’s 08:30, like, it’s too late. Like, I can’t record a video that day. Like, I just didn’t know anything about, you know, setting up a shot.
Heike Young [00:36:59]:
I would I would love to tell you that I looked at the data and came up with this grand strategy. But to be honest, I kind of ignored a lot of data in this journey. And I had a lot of data early on that told me my text posts outperformed my video posts for a long time. Long, long time. Like, I would get hundreds of likes on my text posts on LinkedIn, and I would get, like, fewer likes on my videos. And I just kind of didn’t believe that. I was like, I just think that if I keep trying, you know, I’m gonna I’m just miss DeLulu is the salulu so often, and this was definitely one of those moments where I was just
Ty Magnan [00:37:42]:
Yep.
Heike Young [00:37:42]:
So DeLulu. I just, like, I kept doing it against all
Ty Magnan [00:37:46]: Yeah.
Heike Young [00:37:46]:
Odds, because I just believed in it. So, yeah, I kinda went against some of the data. I would use text posts to give me topical insights, but then I would keep feeding that into the video format. If you’re listening, you’re kind of inspired, but you’re not sure what to do. I just think if you keep, iterating it doesn’t even have to be something you show to everybody. You don’t even have to post all of it on LinkedIn. But if it’s, like, you keep showing it to friends, I had a few friends that I texted my first few videos to, and I was like, is this embarrassing? Is this cringe? Like, what do I do with this information, guys? And they were really honest and helpful in giving some very good directional feedback. So, like, a trusted circle of friends and mentors can serve you really, really well.
Ty Magnan [00:38:32]:
That’s great. Some really practical tips there. Bring it back to Microsoft. This brand of humor, right, that is shining through your LinkedIn profile, has it been challenging to bring that through? And not that, like, Microsoft AI’s brand your brand by any stretch. They’re diaerent things. However, like, you know, having a brand in a I don’t think a Microsoft is, like, this big brand. I mean, it’s a huge brand, but it’s not like this, like, playful, humorous one. Right? So I’m just curious how those two things, have you been able to bring forth any of that into, what you’re doing, you know, through the corporate?
Heike Young [00:39:09]:
I think it’s a really good question. And what I would say in response to that is I think that video is gonna perform the best when it’s authentic to you. And authenticity, kind of a corporate buzzword, but I feel like I totally warranted in using this right now. I am creating these humorous get style videos because it’s authentic to me. This is drawing on my experience as an improv actor, something that’s taking comedy writing classes. Like, this is authentic this is something I’ve been practicing for a long time. That might not feel authentic for you. What might feel authentic for you is writing parodies of songs in a B2B way or, I don’t know, like, doing, like, parodies of, like, exercise.
Heike Young [00:39:55]:
I have no idea what your interests are. Maybe you’re doing maybe your personal passion is, like, cooking, and you’re doing a cooking show when you’re making it B2B. I think that is my takeaway for you, not, like, be funny. It’s just, like, be you. That is the takeaway, and that is what I try to tell the individuals that I work with on the employee influencer program. It’s like, don’t watch my videos and think you’re supposed to do this. Watch and think, how does this inspire something in me that, like, I’m gonna now bring to the people that follow me because it’s authentically me and myself? And so I also think you get away with more authenticity when you do post from personal profiles. Right? Like, brand accounts, like, yeah, they’re always gonna have to be on brand.
Heike Young [00:40:38]:
Posting from our CMO’s page, our VP’s page, other, you know, even, director level or other junior level employees that have something to say, we can let those people be themselves. They’re posting it from their own channels. And, like, not only is that okay, it’s actually encouraged.
Tim Metz [00:40:54]:
Nice. Thank you. Where should people follow you and your work?
Heike Young [00:40:57]:
LinkedIn is still the best place to follow me. You know, I’m Heike Young on LinkedIn. If you find the person that works at Microsoft, it’s probably me. I don’t think there’s that many Heike’s that work at Microsoft, so hopefully they’ll find me on LinkedIn. If you’re so inclined as to follow me on TikTok, I do post a lot of I guess I would say the the jokes are, like, slightly diaerent. I post a lot of, like, parenting jokes, like mom content, and I’m I’m testing I’m actively testing a lot of things on TikTok.
Ty Magnan [00:41:27]:
Nice. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with us. It’s been great to get to learn from you, take some inspiration, and, yeah, I’m excited to carry it forward. I’m sure our audience is too. Thanks, Heike.
Heike Young [00:41:38]:
Oh, thank you all so much for having me. Getting to chat with content marketers is, like, truly my fam, So appreciate everybody, listening in.
Ty Magnan [00:41:46]:
So, Tim, are you ready to be a LinkedIn influencer?
Tim Metz [00:41:48]:
No. I’d rather be on TikTok. No. There was an interesting distinction that I never thought about, like, how how people respond differently on TikTok versus, LinkedIn a bit more professional. It makes sense.
Ty Magnan [00:42:00]:
Yeah. Well, and the point, like, of one, that’s, like, where professionals are hanging out, you know, people are wearing suits. I don’t think a lot of people have their TikTok profile as someone wearing a suit, as themselves wearing a suit. But also the fact you put your name on it is interesting. Right?
Tim Metz [00:42:13]:
Well, one thing I wrote down is, like, I think there’s a lot like content marketers should learn maybe from product marketers. That’s something that came up. It’s like this almost like a blog post maybe. It’s like, I think there’s some stua to unpack there.
Ty Magnan [00:42:25]:
So I think there was a discussion.
Tim Metz [00:42:26]:
Blogs. Yeah. Kind of knew this but like, yeah, the employee advocacy side of like getting employees on LinkedIn and getting them to post there and that’s yeah. Thinking like, yeah, there’s a lot more to it than just saying, oh, for example, here we have a workflow where you can leave your voice message. It’s like like how can you really empower people to use their personal brand and then how do you how do you bring in the company brand and, yeah, just focusing a lot on that whole process and training and things like that. Like also the soft aspect of that. I think that’s actually quite interesting for companies and even for us as an agency.
Ty Magnan [00:42:59]:
Yeah. Definitely that. Right? I feel like we could have gone another, Could’ve gone three times as long just like going way into the weeds on that alone or going way into the weed on, you know, how the campaigns team is collaborating with other folks within Microsoft or like, there are there’s a lot to learn from Haika. I think that’s why she makes a a good follow on LinkedIn too. It’s because she, like yeah. There are some fun videos there, but she’s actually sharing some, like, insights along the way too that compound nicely. One thing I liked that she talked about was having someone who’s focused on content ops on your team, right, and prioritizing that over potentially having writers in house. If you lead measuring the ROI of content to demand gen to someone outside of your org, you just might not get the views you need to be able to, like, advocate for yourselves or optimize the program versus if you do have that owned in house by someone, you know, very capable, you can do those things.
Ty Magnan [00:43:57]:
And then I also, of course, like, biased, but Heike is right. Like, there are a lot of good freelancers and agencies out there. I know one of them, animals.co. Check us out. You can, you know, request the sales, demo at any time. They can help you fill those gaps. Right? And help scale better than you can. Right?
Tim Metz [00:44:14]:
Yeah. It’s almost like the distribution or the or the production fallacy at scale that we all just always keep focusing on the production. And then and then, like and so what she was saying, what you’re now also saying is, like, actually the production in some ways is getting easier. There’s other solutions for that. So, like, why not focus on other, things that are important like the analytics and maybe even distribution is something we’ve talked about before as well.
Ty Magnan [00:44:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Alright. Sure. We’re good. To our next enterprise episode. Thank you all for listening.
Ty Magnan [00:44:43]:
We’ll see you in a week or so with another great guest.
Tim Metz [00:44:47]: See you.
Ty Magnan [00:44:47]: Bye bye.