How to Achieve Cut-through as a Creator with HubSpot’s APAC Marketing Director, Kat Warboys

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, Kat Warboys has truly mastered the art of strategic creativity. With over ten years of experience in marketing automation and CRM platforms – and seven years working as marketing giant HubSpot’s APAC marketing director – it’s safe to say that Kat has an impressive wealth of marketing knowledge, experience, and expertise to share. 

When she’s not kicking goals at HubSpot – managing everything from sales enablement to customer advocacy – it’s Kat’s personal mission to help marketers and creators alike realize the importance of their role in the customer experience. 

“It’s an inspiring time to be in marketing,” says Kat. “We have a huge opportunity to impact the customer experience – now more than ever. Marketers and content creators are becoming synonymous, and they’re thinking about the entire customer journey, from becoming aware of a brand to hopefully driving them to become loyal customers and advocates.” 

But how is marketing relevant to creatives? How can content creators, freelancers, and creative professionals navigate the current marketing landscape and use it to their advantage? 

If you want to promote your creative work, improve your ROI, or grow your community but have no idea where to start, you’re in the right place – we asked Kat some of our creative community’s top questions, so you don’t have to! 

Ready to leverage digital marketing to increase visibility for your creative work? Read on to learn Kat’s top tips, advice, and proven marketing tactics for the modern creative professional, covering everything from building credibility with an audience to achieving cut-through in the competitive creative space.

Before the digitalization of marketing, branding ruled the space, meaning we needed a lot of content creators. When the Internet came along, we pivoted more towards the science. Businesses needed people with experience in technology and the digital space to help us crack the code on paid advertising, so we saw a lot of deep channel expertise and paid SEO channels that required quite a lot of science. 

Now, with the advancement of AI, we’re seeing that shift back toward the need for content creators. AI tools will commoditize many scientific marketing areas, leveling the playing field for brands to compete at a high standard across those channels and causing the pendulum to swing back to content creators. Now is a crucial time for content creators to think about their role in marketing as it will focus heavily on content.

Brands and marketers find it hard to get cut-through online; tactics that once worked for them are less effective now. We put a lot of time, energy, and investment into our content, so we need to think about how much we’re creating and why we’re creating it.

First, determine your growth objective. If your goal is to get 200 new clients per month, you’ll probably need around 2,000 visits. You can then start to look at what’s currently working for you. Where is most of that traffic and your visibility coming from?

Is it coming from your website, email subscribers, or social media? Can you increase your efforts, post more regularly, or send more information to your subscribers? If you can’t get any more out of those channels, it’s time to diversify.

The key to success is understanding your audience and knowing what they want. If you can’t answer that, I highly encourage you to rethink your audience. A great tool called Make My Persona will guide you through the exact questions you need to know to determine your audience.  

Creativity without direction will not yield the best results for business growth – and that’s the role that strategy needs to play. Creativity needs to be directional, and if you’re spending a lot of time revisiting your strategy, you probably didn’t get it right from the get-go.

Invest time and energy into reviewing your strategy early in the year. It should be clear and articulate, with a maximum of 2 to 3 things you plan to execute – any more, and you’ll lose focus. If you get that piece right, the rest of your year should be about aligning your content to that strategy and working toward execution, production, and content creation. 

Creatives and content marketers are skilled at creating great content – brand storytelling, videos, blogs, website assets, social content, etc. However, you must also make the process easy and delightful for your customers.

Think about how you’re moving your customers down the funnel. If I engage with your website or a social post, what’s the next logical step to get in touch? Many creators and content marketers miss a huge step here by forgetting to progress that engagement into action. If you rely on a form on your website for people to get in touch, you’re also missing a trick here.

There are several free, easily accessible, no-code-required tools to help you build chatbots on your website, which is a far more delightful, human way to interact with your customers. 

The key takeaway is to tap into that momentum and engagement you’re getting at the top of the funnel. Think about creating a seamless, easy experience for people to contact you once you’ve engaged them.

There are many methods to research your audience, but it comes down to two core use cases. The first is detailed data – what’s great about my current product and offering, and how am I helping my customers discover and buy from me?

I highly encourage engaging focus groups and interviews with your existing customers. They can tell you what they love about your product or service offering and provide deep insights into how you are creating that experience. 

On the other end of the spectrum are high-level insights into your industry or topics and trends that customers might be interested in. Social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social are excellent for helping you track and monitor conversations related to your brand and industry and discover topics that will resonate with your audience to inform your content strategy.

Audience refers to the total addressable market – one that already exists and is an excellent fit for your product or service. You want to capture as much of that audience as possible for your community.

Your community refers to a group of individuals with a common interest, profession, or expertise that unifies them. 

Your audience is the who, and your community is the how. In this day and age, community is becoming a powerful lever for brand building and growing your audience – and a targeted audience at that. 

If we break down personalization, we’re talking about the ability to create an experience or tailor your product, service, or content to somebody in a way that makes it feel like it was designed specifically for them. 

When we nail personalization, we see many benefits, including improved audience engagement and higher conversion rates, and – as a result of that – improved cost per acquisition.

If you’re not sold on personalization or think it’s not worth your time, here’s one way of thinking about it. Why market red wine to a white wine lover? It just doesn’t make sense. Your work, designs, and content should feel directly relevant to your audience, which will look different for different segments or industries. 

First of all, add value to your content. The role of content should be to inspire, entertain, or educate. 

Second, humanize yourself, your brand, and your content. We’re all consumers; ultimately, we want to connect, engage, and see your personality. Focus on humanizing your brand, especially if you’re a small business. 

And lastly, with the evolution of AI, technology will soon take care of content planning – anyone can create a great social media campaign at the click of a button. To make your content stand out and resonate with your audience, you’ll need to create content that showcases your unique perspective, one that’s thought-provoking and subjective.

There are a lot of exciting opportunities in recent technological advancements, AI being the most noteworthy, but it’s also presenting a lot of challenges and questions.

We are seeing an interesting shift in the type of marketing we need. AI will commoditize many menial tasks and level the playing field for brands to have world-class paid SEO strategies, which means the role of creators will become increasingly important and emphasized.

What AI cannot do is replace humans’ ability to be creative and bring unique perspectives – and this is where creatives are going to be extremely important.

AI is also taking away many of those manual tasks we don’t love to do. Many creatives may think it will replace their role, but I think it will make us more efficient. It’s taking away much of the ideation and grunt work – such as providing title header options or filling in the blanks in meta tags. AI is merely an assistant to reduce the manual tasks and allow you to focus on the creative work.

All of them! You need to be thinking about your entire lifecycle process. Google will help people discover you. Your website will help you convert customers, and word of mouth will help generate referrals and start the whole process over again by bringing in new business. 

Also, don’t forget to change it up. One mistake I see brands make in their marketing is doing what they’ve always done and being afraid to test new channels and experiment – even if it’s having diminishing results.

Firstly, leverage user-generated content. This could be content from your existing customers showcasing your work in the wild. It could be reviews or testimonials. Connect with your customers and ask them to create content to do some of the work for you. 

Secondly, done is better than perfect. The marketing space is changing so fast, and the people who win will be the ones who experiment. You may not get it right, but you will learn so much in the process.

And that’s a wrap! We hope you enjoyed learning all of Kat’s top marketing tips for creatives. While you’re here, check out these great interviews with world-renowned designer Jessica Walsh and Aussie design icon Beci Orpin, or brush up on the top marketing trend predictions for 2024.