AITW - Adrianna Wardzała

At 23, Adrianna Wardzala became marketing director of the company that publishes Harvard Business Review in Poland.

Then she walk away from all of it to build her own agency from scratch. Today she runs a B2B marketing firm where clients have to wait for her availability. In this conversation Ada walk us through the framework she used with those clients, the three mistakes that are making most campaign fail, and how to stand out in a world where AI content is more common than ever. If your marketing has felt stuck, this is the conversation that explain why and how to fix it. Let's get into it.

Adrianna, by the end of this conversation, what are people going to learn?

Actually, that the marketing that looks the most professional, the most polished, is the marketing that nobody remembers these days. And that probably their team or your team is spending 80% of the effort on the pa- on the part that most team treat as an 00:01:00 afterthought. So I'll try to flip the idea on where to spend your time to get results

Ooh, can't wait. Can't wait, because indeed, like, if you're looking right now online and scrolling on socials and everywhere, you'll see all this polish, and sometimes you don't-- can't tell for sure if it's real or not, especially now with everyone creating things with AI. So

yeah. Mm-hmm

the content, the marketing campaigns, the materials, the emails that you're getting, and it, it's getting crazier and crazier.

So can't wait to dive into this.

Yeah, it is

what led you here by

agency?

Okay. So basically, it was not the original plan. Uh, at first I was studying food technology. I wanted to create baby food and like, you know, be a scientist and, like, working in a lab to get the most healthy and nutritious food for babies. But then I started a summer job at Harvard Business Review Poland, uh, and 00:02:00 basically fell in love with the business content.

I started at a call center, so it wasn't, you know, like a high-level job. But basically, I had the access to read the HBR, each issue, and I fell in love with the content. And from there, uh, I wanted to leave, but the company didn't want me to leave. They saw that I'm crazy about content and, and I do, do learn a lot.

So they allowed me to have really flexible working hours to, like, have it with my day-to-day studying, so I combined the both. And then I started moving throughout the company from call center to the knowledge center when I helped out to create, you know, uh, content for learning educational programs for C-suite, and then finally getting into marketing.

And when I landed in there, I knew that it was my, my place. I became the person who knew it all within the company, how to make stuff happen. And then even though I was young, I got promoted to be the CMO. So that's how the 00:03:00 love and adventure happened and the love for compen- content is with me ever since.

Nice. Love the journey and especially those two words, "knowing all" in a company. It's so underrated when you advance through a company to, to be the go-to person for, "Ah, Adrian is the one that knows to fix this or do that and that and that." Can you paint the picture of how important it is for those that are just starting and they're like, "Oh, why should I learn?" Quote-unquote everything, rather than just, uh, being an expert in one thing.

Yeah, and let me just add one more thing. I believe it's harder now because some jobs or, like, people who are starting are also starting in remote or hybrid mode, and they're missing out on a whole lot of spectrum of inside conversations that are happening be- like, you know, within the coffee machine read, that are happening, like, when people are, like, going through meetings and having this lifts experience in the office.00:04:00

But basically, why do I feel that you need to be a know-it-all? Because at first you want to learn as much as possible to know what works for you and what gives you energy, what takes your energy, just so you can find that path. And when is the better time to,

dip into many multiple waters, fail fast and say, no, not the thing I wanna do," than when you're young and you have all the time to, to spend and all the energy to give out the, like, at your job.

So

can be really, really helpful and create meaningful relationships at work, and those relationships will be those that, you know, make you noticed and make you pr- like, promoted even when you're 23.

you know, really understanding what a sales process- Yeah, indeed, because those relationships, m-- s-sometimes people think, "Oh, that, that's nepotism," or "That's or something like that. But in reality, it's like being helpful and being the person that people can rely on you when need something, or they, they can teach 00:05:00 someone like you that are younger, that are like driven and have the energy to learn something new.

And older people that are in the company loves that, loves someone that's come through the ranks, and they see the desire in your eyes to learn the, the craft rather than just being there to, for the sake of promotion.

Yes, definitely. And I personally believe there is a huge gap between, like, kissing somebody ass and being useful and helpful and actually wanting to learn from them. Because when you come with the approach, "Hey, I'm curious, what are you doing? What- how is it important? Why are you doing that way?" And it comes from a place of curiosity, not judgment, it really opens up heart and people who want to share.

Because people really, like, I, I read research the other day that most of the people at work feel unheard. So when there is this young energy coming in, like, you know, with interest, they are very happy to share 00:06:00 and spend time into putting... If you show appreciation and if you show that you use this knowledge to get better and better and be more helpful and be more resourceful.

So that's the, the biggest growing loop you can have. Apart from the fact that, for example, with the, with the managers, with the, with the people that have had much more experience than I did when, when I became, became the, uh, the CMO, I'm still friends with. We created so, such strong relationships at work.

You know, I was learning from them, then we were fighting all those battles hand to hand, and today we meet out on brunches, and we still have, you know, fun and, and have contact and even though we have professionally nothing to do anymore

so nice because indeed, uh, some of these relationships can span years and, or a lifetime, and i-it's so underlooked. And if they are there, like if someone is in those situation in which they don't know maybe 00:07:00 how to ask if their help is needed or how they can contribute, what, where, where should they start?

Yeah, so basically I would start with observation and making yourself aware what job is necessary, what is the big project that is impactful for a person. And of course, as we know, resources are always short. So probably if you say, "Hey,

I can help out with this. How can I help you?" People will, like, welcome you with a smile and ask you for, for help.

just think of a place, of a thing that you wanna learn and make sure, "Hey, I don't really have the skills, but maybe there are some things that I could help you out with, with putting my time, putting my effort, making, uh, making sure that the project moves forward," I'm sure you'll find a place and, and be accepted into a project

you can to actually help them. Yeah, absolutely. I, I, I love that this is so valid as well, even in 00:08:00 a remote situation in which you're not necessarily there physically, but if you're a contractor or an employee and you can apply this principle as well, because it's so much easier to just do the things that are put on your plate, the task and everything there, rather than being proactive. But being proactive is such an underrated thing

I mean, I, I do it with, with our clients all the time because I don't want them to feel that we are the agency guys from email that you email once a week and then answer you a week later. So for example, when we have meetings like with status reports and I see that customer is, of ours is taking too much work on himself, I'm saying, "Hey, hey, whoa, we can take, like, take care of this one.

D- don't bother yourself with this. It's on us. Just think of those things. We need that input in order to be, to be helpful. So focus on the resources here, we'll cover that, so don't worry." So sometimes we even take on more work just to make sure that the things that can't be done by us and 00:09:00 there's still time for the client to, to do it.

Yeah, indeed. And that's a good addition because often, A-a-and that's why the marketing space has a bad reputation because most marketing agency are doing you previously described that, "Ah, they're just waiting for..." Uh, sending over the reports, wait, replying once a month or once a week, uh, to an email and not being truly there, being proactive. simply by doing that, you already differentiate.

now more and more people are doing it, and it's harder and harder to differentiate.

it?

Well, you definitely have to know what your brand, your personal brand, or your company brand is about. The thing that you mentioned, and maybe let's go a loop into the beginning of our conversation, AI makes, makes everything more generic and more, like, very, very flat, if you know what I mean.

Everything is so correct, but nothing, 00:10:00 it makes more sense. There is a lot of jargon, and those big words of impactful work or, like, you know, all those, all those, uh, expression that it uses as- are so big. But when you think of it, they're not really actionable and concrete. So what I say, if you wanna stand out, first of all, put in the effort to get answers to the hard questions.

What is your brand? Who do you help? How do you help? What is it-- What are your non-negotiables? Like, for example, you don't work over the weekends, that's fine. Just make sure that's non-negotiable. It's communicated with a, with a customer. Or, for example, you don't, um, you don't participate in projects that have bad influence or the environment.

Just state it out loud. Those edges, the things that you communicate you do not do, makes you stand out. And I-- like most of the companies, most of the people 00:11:00 don't have it figured out, and also they act from a fear of pl- uh, from a place of fear. And what do I mean like that? Of course, we all know that we need to have a buyer persona, right, for our business.

We need to know who do we sell. But bigger companies, the SME companies, um, they have personas, but for example, fourteen of them, because they're so afraid of saying, "We do not service that audience," that they will lose some kind of magical potential and magical money that probably would never have, that they can't make those decisions what they do not do.

And they end up with a brand that is big, that is hard to communicate, that even if you have a elevator that has twenty floors, you wouldn't be able to tell what are they doing because they think that doing it all is the biggest advantage. Just take a look at the software houses, that the market that was booming, everybody was, you know, uh, fighting to get 00:12:00 all those developers and they, they had those big claims, one-stop shop for everything because they were trying to get as many, as much money as possible by doing everything.

But then when the, when the COVID ended, when the AI happened, those that were not specialized are struggling and are struggling a lot. And actually, those that decided on a niche were able to elevate, were able to explain what are the, the best of, the excellent of, and those I believe are, are doing much better now.

So being for everybody And acting up thinking, "Oh, if we don't say that we do this, we might lose this potential because we actually could do this. We have a contractor. We did a project 10 years ago, so yeah, yeah, it is possible." No. Cross out those things. Make sure that your brand has rough edges, and those edges will be the points where you meet the ideal customer, the realistic customer, not just, you know, 00:13:00 some imaginate...

in- imaginary persona.

Yeah, indeed. And still some will argue that, " Yeah, but I'm leaving money on the table," and, uh, "I, I don't know how to say no," or all the other classic objections. What do you tell them?

You're not leaving money on the table. That money was never up for your grab, basically. If you can't get interested people in what you're doing and what you're passionate about, they wouldn't do business with you. And you can't be passionate about everything in, on, in the world and be world-class at every part of, for example, like technology.

It's impossible today. If you're stating that, you're probably lying to yourself or to your customers

Yeah, indeed. And I want to ask, o-once you do that, like once you truly understand who are they uh, you define your edges and you, you know that, all right, these are the type of people truly don't want to work with, 00:14:00 because I cannot serve them best or for many other reasons. What do you do

then you decide how you can help them. What is the...

human point of view, how can I make their life easier? How can I help them fulfill their ambition? And you can start from answering the question: What annoys you the most about the industry? So for example,

there is a industry s- s- standard that you do something the old way and you know it doesn't work, but people keep repeating the same old story, and you know it doesn't work, and you have proof for that.

So name that enemy. Name that it's a lie.

If there's something that, for example,

I don't know, annoys you because it's simply you have different experience or it's gate- gatekeeping something, name it. Make it visible so you attract the people that agree with you and also don't agree with the industry standard.

So

your contrarian belief, 00:15:00 something that is not obvious, loud and visible for people through social media, through your LinkedIn profile, through your website,

that people know what are you about.

our claim is plain and simple: We save marketing from boredom,

We just don't want to make boring brands.

You can't bore customers into buying. It doesn't work that way in attention economy.

Yeah. And it's, it's a lot of flop out there, like especially now with AI. Like everyone throws together a quote-unquote "brand" and they say, "Oh, it's so nice that we were able to come with this overnight."

Yeah, I did a landing page in 15 minutes. Awesome. Did you take some time to make sure that it's different for, like, that somebody also can't generate it in 15 minutes and have the same thing?

What makes it different? Why you, right? Why this brand should work

I think one thing that is different 00:16:00 is like that somebody wants to come to you. What makes it different? Why do you like, why do people- Exactly. Because most of them, they don't do that groundwork that you mentioned, of really understanding the customers and talking to them. And before, before we proceed with The other steps. I would like to ask that part, like knowing your customers. What they should look out for? are the characteristics of, um, of interest for people? Because often we, we might think about, uh, demographics, but personally, I believe they are not that important anymore.

I agree with you. So I love to look at the psychographics, basically descriptions. Um, let's talk about a simple example of a mic, uh, of a mic for a podcast interview. So, um, yeah, you could say I'm target audience, a woman in their 30s, like being active in social media, but probably, like I- that's not enough to get me.

But if you target me, a woman who is obsessed with p- 00:17:00 business podcasts and who sh- who is, uh, actively doing content creation, sh- who has her own podcast, for example, and is looking up for a creator and would buy a, a mic that, I don't know, The Diary of a CEO that Steven Bartlett is using, now you understand a lot more about my ambition, ab- about my context, and you could create copy that will actually steal my heart.

Because let's think of, get this mic because it has the perfect features that I don't even know about technicals o- of this, of this piece of that, but I know that it was used by top podcasters in ... that I admire, right? So if you use that piece of information, I would have bought without thinking, without get- getting into details of the technicalities from, from that piece of software.

So understanding the context, what are my ambitions, what do I want to achieve, what content I consume, what do I admire, is m- much more important, much more important. And to be honest, 00:18:00 today is much easier than before because we could-- we can scrape Reddit, we can scrape Facebook groups. We could have those large pieces of data, and then have AI help us synthesize and understand what the conversations are about.

So that I love AI for. Of course, I do the big analysis, and then I dive deep into the copy itself, because, like the generalization for a bigger insight is fine, but I also like to dive deep into, you know, the wording, the copy that the customers are using, because I truly believe that the best copy, copywriters don't create their copy, they steal it from their customers.

So we're going big with the data, but then we're going back into, you know, sentences that the people write. So yeah, that's, that's where I would stand. Uh, that's, uh, that's much more valuable than understanding that I am woman in their 30s.

Exactly. And I think there is this, uh, now known meme of Ozzy Osbourne and Prince Charles, I think.

00:19:00 Yes

exactly the same demographic, but different These are psychographics. And often people don't look as well at fears. Like what

fear of losing or not obtaining if they don't take action buying your product or trying your product and so on.

And yeah, often while this can be by some as, I don't know, manipulative, you're doing a favor. Like if you're not serving those you know you can serve best by y- yeah, even using fear or their dreams and so on, it's so, so-- Then you leave money on the table in a good sense and not served. So yeah, knowing them is so, so important.

Y- yeah, getting obsessed about your target audience is, is really important. And actually, the, the plot twist is that the target audience might change, and you might need to pick 00:20:00 up, like, what changed, and let's get the famous case of the Stanley Cup that was, you know, a new obsession. A business has actually came from 75 to 73-- $750 million because three women got interested.

Because you know the story of the quencher, right? The, the cup with the straw that everybody has on TikTok.

Originally, it was in navy blue, in like, you know, uh, in dark green. The target audience were men, outdoorsy, like, you know, people, fishermen, people standing up. And actually, the quencher, the one with the straw, was like the lowest selling item on their itinerary because it wasn't really functioning for them.

And then in Utah, there were three, three women that had a blog that actually figured out that this specific type of g- cup fits perfectly into a car. It's good because when they're running off for their children, they can have their water easily, and they started promoting it on their blog, and it actually 00:21:00 went crazy in Utah, and social media, of course, helped.

That's when Stanley figured out, "OMG, we have a new group. We have a new customer audience," and they went il- all in. You never could have before buy a baby blue, pink, like, you know, pastel lime, all those crazy colors that you see of Stanley. That was never their, their strategy at first. But they learned that there is a new audience, they adapted, and then we know those viral moments that happened, that they leveraged the social media like crazy.

They did limited drops at Target with Starbucks and all of that. And now, I believe most of the Americans have more than one in their cupboards of, of the Stanley Cups, right?

Yeah, indeed.

It's so interesting that when-- And so smart when someone identifies that, that wait a second, there is actually demand for this. People actually ask for this, and then you capitalize as well on, um, social media the right way. Because often people when they launch a brand, 00:22:00 they launch a product- no- don't think around how this specific product might generate content, but not by us, by the person that is actually using it. And that's why some s- some mobile apps are going viral. The, the, I saw s- I, I, I went on the rabbit hole on this recently by researching some potential apps that I can create, and I saw one that was a screen locker, to pray you can unlock your screen.

themselves praying in front of the screen before that unlocked and and sharing, and sharing.

And that's made the app go viral, and now I, I think it's, like, worth 400 or 50, 500,000 monthly recurring revenue. It's insane for a screen locker

Amazing. Really amazing. 00:23:00 But not only that, I know cases, I don't know if you know the tool SocialSonic. It's for LinkedIn post generation, for LinkedIn research, more of that. And the tool itself is okay, but what I love is their recommendation pro- um, program because if you post a post on SocialSonic, dependings on how much reach it gets, the bigger percentage you go, you know, the, the more vir- viral your post gets.

So that's really interesting because they're all about helping you go viral, helping you create content that reaches a lot of people. And once you unlock it with promoting them, they also give you crazy discounts

only imagine that Hmm. I think it was kind of okay, but what I love is that there's a complete pro- um, a program because this particular approach is something that's common, reach the guests with specific needs. So kind of the, the more qualified they will approach the guest. So that's going to be, they're all about helping people, right?

And helping them create that people will allow to see well. Once you apply this information then, they also see an increase in their- Yeah. It, it, it's... And so 00:24:00 I won't say it's overused, but it's, it's nice to see this because at the end of the day, people love to be part the movement. And as you describe at some point that to, to find that contrarian take, because there are people out there that believe the same thing that you do.

And when you find that, when you find that, not necessarily unique idea, because it's not unique idea since others are believing it too, but you have an idea that you truly believe in and you tap into that, you attract your tribe, those will be your ambassadors, that push the product and, uh, your company forward.

Not those that all of them that you try to attract with the all-in-one product like, like you described. So yeah, there are many ways to, to do that. But once, you have this, once you know audience, you have, let's say, your, your unique take, um, and what you stand for or what you stand against, most importantly, and you might add this layer that we, we talk about, the social virality part of it. You're out there on socials and still nothing. What went wrong?

It depends, actually. There are many, many use cases because there is a point in your, uh, in your social media path when, when you actually feel like you're screaming, full-on screaming in 00:25:00 an empty room, and nobody's hearing that, and that's really, really awful. Combine that, that posting actually, uh, and needs, needs from you courage and needs you, the decision to be made, "Okay, I'm comfortable with being a little bit em-embarrassed with what I'm posting," and that's a very hard combo.

People think that being an influencer is an easy job. Uh, it might be easier than going to nine-to-five, but it still requires from you to do a lot in terms of being confident with your audience, being confident with failures. Because all those success metrics on most of the platform are visible. You can see all those flops, and I always say that my TikTok is my graveyard of, like, my flopped ideas or basically the video that, you know...

I, I created hundreds of videos that just flopped, but these are my experiments. These are my learning points, so I'm 00:26:00 okay with them being flopped and from people saying, "Hey, do you actually know a thing about content? You have so many low views." I took a lesson from each piece of content that I adapted and got better, so please show me that many tries that you had and that many lessons on, on getting better at content, and that's the strength.

But that's one of the thing, because what I see over and over again is people jumping into posting without knowing what they want to say, without knowing their contrarian beliefs. And then one more layer, they think they need to sound professional, that they need to use those big words that we are, you know, associating with corporate jargon, and they can't really say what they think because, "Oh, we can't, you know, be very controversial.

We can't say this or that because what if somebody disagrees with that?" Actually, in order k- to get a good results from a content, you need to, you know, piss 80% of the 00:27:00 people to get your 20%. So all those constraints makes really a bunch of posts really about nothing and without emotion and without strong point of view.

And multiply that by the amount of AI posts that are generated from a really single dumb prompt, "Write me a viral post about X." This strategy can't work. It simply can't work. It won't be interesting enough. What actually works if you want to, uh, if you want to leverage social media for your business is, uh, going through the pain of thinking, of distilling your point of view of, on things that matter and actually started stating them in a way- that you actually understand how to capture, uh, capture the audience.

Because the one case, people are like, you know, mediocre, no point of view, no voice, no emotion, bland posts. And the other case I 00:28:00 see very interesting niche posts with so awful hooks that nobody clicks. And if nobody clicks, then nobody can learn from you. No matter how clever, smart, groundbreaking your content i- is, if nobody clicks, nobody s- sees it.

And those people who do those really, really interesting and in-depth posts often despise the art of the hooks. They think that, "No, no, no, I'm better than that. I'll just write pure in- pure content, pure knowledge. It should, you know, do the job on its own." Newsflash, it won't. Right now, we are consuming that many content that we simply protect ourself from boredom and our, you know, thumbs are just doing the job automatically.

So actually, what our job is to stop the 00:29:00 thumb from scrolling, because our normal behavior is just to go through, not... Our conditioned behavior is not to consume a piece of content, but rather decide to swipe off of it. So the art of hook, the art of gra- gra- mm, grabbing attention is an important part of doing also the very clever and smart content.

So having those two is important. So we have a strategy, and we have the art of the, mm, of the grabbing attention figured out, and we actually decide, "Okay, I'm gonna use it. I'm gonna leverage that."

Yeah, and I love the fact that you mentioned, um, the painful art-- a-act of thinking. indeed, like, we live in a world where we got used to commodity. And It started a long time ago, but I think it was super accentuated during the pandemic when we start getting food at our door and other things and like, 00:30:00 and now AI is telling us whatever we want to hear, not truly what we need to hear very easily.

And we, we got lazy. We don't think for ourself anymore. And that's painful. That's painful because we not just, as you mentioned, create boring content, but bore our potential customers to death and they, we, we will just kill our business like that. Um.

So for example, uh, Probably every copywriter on the, on the world knows the PAS format, so problem, answer, solution to, to say.

But now we need the anecdote to be there, to be validated, to say, "Hey, how I did it, how my customer figure out. These are the numbers. I read a thousand books, so you didn't have to. Here's the digest and here's what you think of." We need those personal things, uh, to make sure that we stand out and we provide 00:31:00 value.

Because if your post is only things I could hear from ChatGPT, why did you publish it? I could have asked ChatGPT. I need your opinion. I need your emotion. I need your experience put in there in order for it to be, you know, standing out from AI.

Yeah, and that lived experience is so, so underrated. We, is the kind of one of the only ways to, to stand out nowadays because didn't live your life, didn't live your problems that you face in your business or situation that you went through. And while sharing that, other humans, not robots, will resonate with it. yeah, we might end up in a position where probably most of the content out there will be, um, But if you allow ourselves to be part of it by just regurgitating AI slop, we, we don't help ourself and our 00:32:00 business.

speaking of that, like where people should look for content, like is just social media the only platform they should need to be focusing on?

No,

No, definitely not. I believe that social media and content basically in the dig- digital space, so I also mean blogs, I also mean newsletters, are like some kind of nets that we are creating that we can get our customers basically to be aware of us. But then I really, really love the power of, uh, real-life interaction.

So events, small events, micro events, small dinners for 10 people are helping to bridge the gap between this digital experience and the real-life experience, and that make the connections really, uh, really grow the business. So often when we create strategies, we have, of course, social media presence, we have blogs, we have podcasts, 00:33:00 depending on the format the customer is mostly comfortable with, and then we do in real-life events also as the, you know, as the missing part.

Because yes, paid, uh, performance marketing is part of the game, but it can't, um, can't, you know, make those experiences, uh, invalid. I believe that if you want to have a full ecosystem, you should play all the cards that are available in your deck. And of course, you don't have to do it at first, but make sure that you have a strategic plan to build your ecosystem to be consisting of social, of SEO or the, the AI enhanced right now version of SE- SEO, of the events and of the paid activities.

That way you can have the whole ecosystem that will be working for you in many, many ways.

Yeah, indeed. And I think people are craving more and more this, uh, since, yeah, we not just as 00:34:00 many say a trust, uh, epidemic, in the same time, we crave that connection that got lost easily thanks-- because of the smartphone, because of the pandemic and so on. And what is better than meeting face to face with a real human being than, than these real life events where you can connect to a level that no, I don't know how many calls or video calls will do.

We-- It won't. It won't. It simply won't. And I have so many examples from my life, like I went to a conference, I shake the hand of a person, I talk for half an hour, then we sit next to each other watching the keynotes, we haven't talked after that in probably two or three years. when we reconnect, that real life event connect us again, and only from that 00:35:00 experience we become, uh, uh, helpful to each other. We increase the connection, we increase the, the, the, the sim-- I would say the single real thing that matters in today's world. And that led to different opportunities and so on. And are so many examples out there. But Yeah, I think it's an underrated way, and of the ways a lot of people will make as well a lot of money in the future.

Because when everyone is like the new SaaS, the new AI agent, the new AI thing, those that will build experiences will differentiate themselves.

Yes. I need to warn you about one trap that I've seen a few companies fall into, because that sounds great and that sounds really logical, and the companies that do understand that often make one major mistakes. I had a customer that we had a very aggressive,

of all the points, but also we 00:36:00 decided, okay, we're doing event with a big name,

celebrity, big speaker

and we want to do, do, do those meetups.

And we did that, I don't know, for six months. So a lot... Six events, that's a lot of work, that's a lot of leads, that's a lot of hustle to do.

issue.

Although the marketing team delivered the leads, delivered the people, delivered the great speeches, we paid a lot of money for the speak-

the salespeople that were about, that were supposed to building those relationships actually mingled only with themselves on the events and did not approach the customers.

And after that, the business said, "Hey, it doesn't work. We don't get leads from that. We get names, but nothing happens." So if you send on those events people that are not comfortable with networking and not comfortable with talking to strangers, are not comfortable with, you know, being a little bit cringe when you meet a new person, the strategy won't work.

And you can't assume that somebody w- who works in sales will 100% have that 00:37:00 skills. Just don't assume it. Make sure you have the networker, you have people that are bubbly butterflies in, like, the social spaces. It's not obvious these days, especially with people are used to remote working, who are used to, you know, working hybrid or something, that social skills are not obvious.

And please, if you do that strategy, which is awesome, make sure you also have people, like, delivering that strategies who have the set of skills of meeting new people and making meaningful connections.

That's, that's a powerful one because indeed, sometimes we overlook. You say, "Ah, okay, we, we read the revenue, we hire the speaker, we bring people together in a room, and the magic will happen by itself." as you share, it is not easy, and it's not-- If you don't have the right people, if you don't have the right environment to, for those connections to happen, it, it's so easy to, to be overlooked.

And

it won't be a waste. The 00:38:00 brand building will happen. The community building will happen. But the direct revenue that the companies obsess over won't be that close, won't be, you know, just that, you know, push and pull solution that you see that the Excel file is growing. So it's not all a wasted work, but if you want that revenue to be out there, make sure the right people are in the room and doing the job.

Yeah. I'm a big advocate of learning from mistakes. What other mistakes have you seen out there?

Oh. From what kind? What kind of mistake? What, what, what bucket?

from social media campaigns to other type of, uh, marketing campaigns that you either

saw others running?

So one of my most repeated one that I see over and over again is, um, being obsessed with your brand, with your brand guidelines, with your brand book, but in a wrong way. That you make those perfectly po- 00:39:00 polished graphic that, you know, you have a template that is a template that has to be a template and every other post has to be with that template.

And simply the template-ification, the brand stiffness, really not being able to experiment, uh, s- is suffo- suffocating the content really many times because those templates often look like ads. People don't want to consume ads, they want to consume content. So you're killing your content or your idea of a story with a graphic that looks, uh, like an ad.

And time and time again, I see when I have those lovely customers that are brave, that are okay with doing memes for, for ads, we see that the ugliest, the most funny, the, the, the craziest ads draw the best attention and they're not always brand coherent. It doesn't mean that we say crazy 00:40:00 stuff and do not maintain our brand essence.

It means that we do not have a brand, you know, a brand guidelines and the one template that we just multiply and we just change the copy. No, we actually experiment. We allow ourself to go off the, you know, the, the, the route and then draw conclusions from what worked, what... And that's a hard issue, especially in bigger companies when you have those, uh, I call them the temples of brands, um, because probably most of the time there is a chief or, or a person that is solely responsible to making sure that everything is within brand guidelines.

And those brand guidelines sometimes are suffocating the creativity and the effectiveness of the messaging that we're doing. Let me tell you one more. This one killed me because this was my customer. So, um, we were working on a big video, uh, a video, uh, promoting a construction site. So we had drones, we 00:41:00 have multiple cameras.

We spent a day at the plant, you know, eight weeks of editing back and forth, back and forth. And then the distribution of that video was one social post and putting it on YouTube without thumbnail and without a thinking of a, of a title

Oopsie.

When I saw that,

can we make a thumbnail for you guys?"

Because our hearts were bleeding that, you know, the distribution was, was so bad of such a really, really nice video that had good reviews, uh, for, uh, internally that people really, really enjoy. We spent a lot of time making sure the story is okay. But if you create a video that you will, for example, you know, do a show and you have a customer in a room and you do a presentation, you just play that video, that's okay.

You have their attention bought in because that's the- they're on a meeting. But if you want people on social media to see the video, you 00:42:00 can't just not do a thumbnail these days. YouTube is not a Dropbox. YouTube is not like, you know, a place to... But look at those corporate YouTube channels. A lot of them have no thumbnails or a title that is so internal, or basically, "Episode 903: Introducing Name of Product."

That's not a title that would grab attention, and I probably can assume that you spent more than 30K creating the beautiful corporate video that you just messed up because you didn't think about title and thumbnail. So putting high effort and a lot of money into creating the content and putting zero thought into the distribution.

That's one that kills me a lot.

Yeah, true. Like, and it's so often to see, like-- And it, it's like, I don't know, selling anything without a package. Like anything. Like just putting the raw materials on the table and expect people 00:43:00 to purchase. And, uh, yeah, uh, uh, this is more real than ever on, on YouTube, but as well, like you mentioned, on social as well.

Like if you just throw it out there, put a lot of effort in anything that you create, and then, "Oh, I'll just share a

and you'll add a five-second animation of your logo at the very beginning of each short video and probably think that it's, it does best for your brand. doesn't. Yeah

That's sad. And the first mistake that you share, uh, I'm guilty of it. I, I think, I believe while podcasting might be a bit different, but now thinking of it, every single episode's kinda use the same layouts It's templatized. And same with the short session from the episodes. actually experiment the last couple of two weeks, but not enough, I'll say. And to your point, they kind of look 00:44:00 almost like

Don't make your content look like ad. We don't want ads unless

they're Super Bowl ads. That's when we want ads, okay? If it's not Super Bowl, think of your content as a content and make sure that people know it's genuine, it's content, it's point of view, not just a, you know, um, a piece of, uh, product that you'll be shoving their throats

Yeah, indeed.

And I, I must ask, like, the-- especially, uh, the moment recording this, uh, Google just had, uh, their uh, event, and like the content created by AI and by humans is kind of getting blurry. It's, it's all, I won't say the same, but you won't be able to tell soon what's real and what's not. What is that piece, apart from the thing that you already mentioned with sharing your own story, your own experience, what's 00:45:00 that piece that us as humans can add to the table when creating content that someone will say, "Yes, I, I want to watch this fully. This is a real human, it's not AI"?

Yeah. So for me, a lens of empathy. So we as humans can really understand the context of emotion of, uh, a topic that is touching some of the hard stuff. So being, uh, respectful, being understanding of that is very important, but also your reputation. If you're known for sharing, for sharing only the best, you know, movies recommendation, if you share, you know, another one, people will just trust your recommendations.

So also, like, uh, the number one question that I would ask, uh, yourself right now as a founder especially is: How do you make your reputation stand out? How do you make sure that your 00:46:00 reputation, what you're known for, is helping you, your business? And those things are simple because our reputation is not our personal brand.

It doesn't start with a social post. It starts from if I say, "I'll send it to you by the end of day," I do it, or I warn you that I couldn't make it, and I'll do it in the other time. If I say, "I'm going to your kid's party," I will be there. If you have an issue, I will not say, "Just come with solutions. I don't wanna deal with problems."

I'll actually listen and share what I would do. So these are the things that are building the things that you're known for. And if you have those in real life, if you start posting, if you start presenting online, those peoples will be your supporters as long as you make sure that you're a good human being.

And it doesn't mean that you can't make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, and it's okay. And we, uh, give ourselves hard time for them, and we rethink, 00:47:00 restructure, and then come out better. So it's about, you know, being a cohesive person in real life and an online, uh, thing, and I believe that's very, very, uh, visible because you could probably name some people, some big names out there, some big creators that you know that started, they're relying on AI a little bit too heavy, and it's not them anymore.

It's their avatar, right, that is showing up online

Nice. Nice. I love that perspective because indeed, uh, those elements bring together makes us human, uh, eventually. And yeah, there are many others that we can add to that in order for truly to, to be, " Yes, this is me. This is real me. This is the real personality that I have. This is my reputation. That's all that.

And yeah, you'll get this from me if you follow me, not, I don't know, the other channel that or the other business that it's just recruiting and the chaos lob."

Yeah. The thing that, 00:48:00 for example, I get a lot that within my videos that I share with my con- I'm very bubbly and expressive, and I get some contents from people, "Yeah, that's so inauthentic. I feel that you're acting out. That's, you know, too much." And then the people that actually know me go into comments, "No, no, she's like that in real life.

Don't worry. It's her." It's like, you know, they know me. They know that I'm not just being more expressive on the video. It's just that I am that way, and they go out and protect my, you know, my reputation by saying, "No, it's not an act. She's actually that positive, crazy person also in real life."

Nice. And that's powerful because-- And I don't get, uh, people that try to act in a different way or w-w-- for example, when creating content. Because that's so much energy to, to become someone else just for the act of creating content or just for the act of or a campaign, rather than, " Dude, just be yourself," and that will be so much easier to not just 00:49:00 create content, but when you'll meet that person, that client in real life, they'll say, "Oh, you're, you're exactly the same. It's not someone else behind the camera, someone else in real person,

I completely understand that, but I also understand it's not that easy because we have so many internal voices talking to us. For example, "Ada, your accent sucks. You shouldn't speak in English because you're not, you're not native. Let, l- don't do it. Don't do it." For example...

way.

Uh, thank you, but like, you know, the internal conversation that we can make ourselves believe that this is a thing that's stopping us for, from doing something.

So we, we will use AI to polish our accent or we'll use... Or for example, with the, you know, the, the, the mistakes that I make in writing all the time. Like I'm, I'm quick and I do typos like crazy. Yes, I do fix some of them but some of them just l- leave out there and okay, it's me. I, I accepted that I can make typos and it doesn't mean that I'm a stupid, not professional 00:50:00 human, right?

But I had to talk to myself for a long time to actually believe that because the, the internal voices, the critics, the, the standards that we want to hold ourselves are really, really crazy. So I do understand or agree, just be yourself. It's the best strategy out there. But I also agree that it needs sometimes a lot of internal conversation to feel that it's okay to be me out there.

It's okay that I'm not perfect, right?

Yeah, true. Especially when this ancient brain that we still have, it's pushing us to not be afraid, not be rejected by others, and be part of the tribe. We, we are safe, actually, but yeah, it doesn't know. So

internal conversations are, are

We, we live in a times where emails are the equivalent of lions who could eat us, right? So yes, we do feel strongly attached to the written words, to the what people say, what they 00:51:00 email us, when in fact, no, it's not a lion on the savanna. It's not the same. But we live in a, in a world where that's exactly the same

Yeah, true. And before I put you on the spot to reallocate the budget of a business for their marketing campaigns, I'd like to ask if those that are listening right now is " Yeah, she's, she's the type of person that I want to work with," where they can find you?

Oh, basically on LinkedIn or on any other platform. Yeah, LinkedIn is my favorite social media, favorite place when I spend the most, uh, most time. Uh, but basically on, I'm on TikTok, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Instagram and Facebook. So wherever you put my name, you'll find me

Thank you

And you have three minutes. Imagine a B2B SaaS that is pouring all their budget, and they have roughly in Google Ads. How you redistribute that for the current marketing environment in a way that you'll have more return on investment 00:52:00 than

Okay. So I would actually

testing phase into organic content before I put any money on the ads. I love doing organic testing and then seeing what works and then putting money behind the things that got sticky. So what I would do, first of all, have a real clear understanding of a persona and topics that we want to cover.

Then reverse engineer the attention. Use tools like one of 10.

Use tools like SocialSonic to understand what is currently grabbing the attention. Think of the outliers. What are outliers? Outliers are the content pieces that brought new audience for the, uh, for the channel. So things that already grabbed attention.

Think of that hook, think of that topic, and answer simple question, what is my point of view on that? One, why that point of view is relevant to my audience? Create copy on that. Share your thoughts. Look what gets the initial traction.

get initial tractions are turned into ads, are boosted, 00:53:00 are turned into multiple pieces of content in multiple formats.

One sticky message can be turned into a video, into a carousel, into, um, into a podcast, into, um, a LinkedIn article. LinkedIn right now is the number two source for AI SEO, for the AI quotation, so don't sleep on that. Make sure that the thing that got, got the attention is turned into multiple pieces of content, and do it again.

After it's done, do it again.

maybe they don't even care about that content. Nice. Nice. And that's the thing I think most people miss, the fact that once you have that winning Piece of content, can just use that probably for the life of your business. Because if that resonates with someone, it'll resonate with someone else and someone else and someone else, in different formats, of course, depending what they consume and so

For one customer, when we started working, when we were looking their, um, their product market fit and 00:54:00 we were testing out multiple, uh, um, value propositions, we found one, uh, piece of copy that was delivering crazy amount of leads. And what we did, because like after six of eight months, the ad on Meta was kind of, kind of dropping in the, in the ad spend and the results, we switched the typography, we switched the co- the, the colors.

We did not touch the copy, and we ran it again, and again, the same numbers. So we just refreshed the same thing. We looked for another creative angles to have the same message because we knew that the messaging worked and the idea was how can we say the same message for a thousand different ways? And we kept rolling it out for one and a half year

This was Ada Wardzala on Authority in the Wild. And if this conversation make you think differently about marketing, you know what to do. Follow her for more insights subscribe and leave a comment below to tell us your opinion and how you do and why you do marketing campaigns in your 00:55:00 business. Until next week, Pura Vida.