The Marketing Teams Of 2027 Will Look VERY Different...

0:00Now, I've hired hundreds of marketers throughout my career, but I think a lot of marketing teams today are about to spend their hiring budget on the wrong set of skills. AI is fundamentally changing how we do marketing from how we write blog posts, produce videos, to build marketing campaigns. If I was building a marketing team today, I would hire for a very different set of skills. and this is how all of you can have those skills to make sure you are in demand and can make a lot of money in your career during this AI era. I'm going to go through the top three roles that I would hire for today if I was starting a marketing team from scratch and these roles did not exist probably a year or two ago.

0:45So stay tuned. Let's go through this on this episode of Marketing against the grain.

0:52Okay, let's get into today's episode. If I was building a marketing team for scratch, or even if you just want to build a career in marketing, or you want to know how does marketing even work today? And what are the new roles in marketing that really matter that you may have never heard of in the past? I'm going to bring you three must have roles of any modern marketing team. I've hired hundreds of marketers over the course of my career. and these are three roles that I think are going to be really important in the future and likely have never really been part of someone's hiring plan in the past.

1:27So this episode is for you if you're trying to grow your business, if you're trying to grow a marketing team, or you're even trying to grow a marketing career, or you just want to see how the modern day companies or companies who are really plugged into the age of AI, what are they doing to grow? And who are the people that are helping them to do that? And so what we're going to do here is we're going to jump into a little whiteboard. And so I'm going to kind of whiteboard this out for you because I think it might be easier. Okay, so the first one I'm going to talk about is a growth producer. So what even is a growth producer?

1:59A growth producer basically makes entertaining content around your product. And that is really important. The average person just wants to be entertained when they are on all of these social channels. And forever we had this thing called PLG. And PLG was where all of the kind of growth folks were. And they were experimental folks. They would run A-B tests and they would try to figure out what would work and scale for their product or service. And that was great in the age of non-AI, where people would do a bunch of research in Google or ads. They would come to your product and they would use your product and you would figure out how to get them to use it more and get a lot of value and then at some point give you some dollars.

2:41And what happens in the age of AI is a lot of that research is all done in these AI assistants. So it's happening in ChatGPT. It's happening in AI mode in Google. And you don't have the ability to influence that as much. So you actually have to be known to someone much further up in their journey. And that's the awareness stage. Hey, if you like what you heard in this episode and you want more, click the link in the description or scan that QR code. We have a ton of incredible resources that can get you started doing this stuff in a very short amount of time. And awareness has never been great to run growth because it was hard to do kind of experimental things.

3:21It was hard to run A-B tests because all of the things you did were quite costly. Now, AI is starting to reduce the amount of money you have to spend to do video production, to do all of these kind of things that were traditionally pre-AI, like guerrilla stunt marketing, right? You've probably heard of some of the old campaigns where you're just figuring out, how do I get people to talk about me? This is not too dissimilar, but it's how do I create entertaining content around my product for an online audience? And so let's bring this to life a little bit. One of the companies that have done a really good job of this is Ramp.

3:58And so Ramp are an expense software. So traditionally not the most interesting category to be in, but why they create pretty entertaining content around their product. This is an example. It's Brian from the U.S. office. Obviously, the U.K. office is much better, but Brian versus Ramp. And so what they did is they set up this glass box in New York, and Brian is doing expense reports. And you can see they have a run-in ticker of Brian versus Ramp. So let's watch a little bit of this. In this box, processing 600 ,000 receipts with these very hands. This is a real thing, right? He's in the box trying to complete this task of 600 ,000 expense reports.

4:37I think that there's been a misunderstanding. We hired Brian to be our spokesperson and now he's doing ramps finances. We love you, Brian. He is the icon. He is the moment. Never heard of automated expense reporting. I don't know anything about automating financial workflows or creating enterprise level financial software.

5:01Kieran Flanigan: Right. So you get it. It's really well done. They created an entire campaign around that. Now, that is obviously an example of bigger budget and Ramp have bigger budget, but you can definitely do a version of this for you, right? You're trying to figure out like one customer frustration, a couple of experiment ideas and bring it to life in really interesting ways. And AI really does allow you to do that because the cost to do video or all of these things has come down. So for this to work, you definitely need someone who can take calculated risks, right? They have to have really great taste, judgment, internet instincts.

5:34It's a pretty new role. Ramp have started hiring for a viral creator producer.

5:39Kieran Flanigan: So to give you a little bit of a taste of how this worked in Ramp so you can figure out how to apply it in your company, Ramp had someone whose job is creative experimentation. This is what we're talking about. This growth producer, creative experimentation. They call it a viral producer. and they brought in a social lead from Mr. Beast's team. So again, going outside of the box, thinking about who can come in and help you on a contract basis. They also have a comedic script writer, which I think is pretty interesting. And then they were just able to move really, really fast. And that is a big part of this, is like being able to move fast, iterate, have a team around you.

6:17Kieran Flanigan: It can be an external team, contractors, but that growth producer is a really part of that. And that is like key number one, Have you got a team that can create entertainment around your product? And I think this growth producer and bringing growth up to awareness and having the ability to move fast on ideas, find signal, and then scale ideas that are really taken off are really important. I think comedy is a really important part of that. Being entertained is a really important part. And that moves us on to the second rule. and this is like one of my all-time kind of wishes to hire and have in any team that i have which is an internet comedian and this really is basically turn your product into something people share with friends and that again is really hard to do but it's so important because in a world where everything it looks the same because ai is created in everything how do you actually stand out now one of the interesting examples of this recently has been alex wang so alex wang was former founder of scale ai bought by meta and then ran and launched muse and one of the big things around a muse and part of the success has really been him meme posting and shit posting and i think having a meme content creator on your team part of that internet comedian team maybe that's all you have is the meme creator but i think pretty important so like they have this little kind of fluffy character and alex wang he has just been going ham on memes so you can go and see some of the memes he's created so they have this character and he's just being posted these crazy memes on x and in a recent interview he actually said like this was a big part of how they grew.

8:07Kieran Flanigan: There's Steve Jobs as Muse. You got Muse here. The little guy is like popping up all over the place. And so you can see he's really had some fun with it. And he actually talked about the fact that that was a big part of their story, a big part of making Muse and Meta cool again. There's the other part of the kind of internet comedian, which is being able to actually remix things, remix culture. And so you may have seen this here that blew up which is the hotel lobby trans this is the original video and then you saw people kind of remix it in like lots of different ways you see a bunch of different versions that it really blew up all over the place right you batman and superman you have elon and sydney sweeney i think that is biden and i don't know that mitch mccallum this is the other one that blew up it's i'm not going to play the music but uh this is the funnier one so this is a drake track called burning bridges and you could put any characters you want into it.

9:07Kieran Flanigan: And so that internet comedian is really how do you understand internet culture? And then with these AI trends, you can really actually blow up in interesting and funny ways. And the other thing I would say about that is there's other interesting ways you can use these trends to grow your brand. So you see CapCut, we're actually providing these templates. And then whenever you use that template and post it on TikTok, below the TikTok video, it would have a call to action to say, this was created with a CapCut template. Other brands have been kind of trying to play around with comedy. Comedy is a really hard thing to do.

9:40When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, do you know if you're showing up or not? At HubSpot, we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in AI search. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first fill, that's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Go check out HubSpot AEO. You can trial it for free and it's going to help you understand how you're showing up in AI search and how you can show up even more.

10:13Kieran Flanigan: But you see ClickUp. ClickUp are another one that have had a comedic writer. You won't love what you do if your workplace is toxic. Just as a PT up for a week. Don't call it ruin a vacation. Hey, I just met you. It's crazy. Don't ask my number. Respect my boundaries. No matter your gender, religion, or race. Talking about discrimination. Work, work, work, work, work, work. Don't still supply some work, work, work, work, work. Don't still supply some work, work, work, work. Tell me why you got another complaint. So you actually have to be able to make fun of yourself, take risks. I think brands forever have not wanted to do that because we've all been pretty corporate.

11:06Kieran Flanigan: So what have we talked about? So the internet comedian, I think one of the really important things is the memes. Like you want to be a meme lord. And trying to get this talent into your team is not traditionally what marketers have done, right? You kind of have an AI remixer to make sure you can be part of trends or even create trends. you want to be able to really just understand short from comedy which is kind of what click up we're doing but basically like can you find someone that can actually bring your product to life in ways that makes it shareable and i think that is like really important and so you have the growth producer you have the internet comedian these things make your product entertaining they help you share that product with other folks and then the third one is one that i think every brand is going to need.

11:56Kieran Flanigan: And that is a creator dealmaker. And so why does everyone need a creator dealmaker? Well, the creator space has really blown up. And all of these creators, let's just talk about what this actually is. You have to have someone that wants to make creators want to work with you. And it's not always just about money. So the creator space has blown up a lot and it's gotten much, much more competitive. And you have to figure out how you can create the right bunch of incentives and the right model that allows you to scale your paid programs with creators. And there's a bunch of interesting things that this person would need to excel at that typically a marketer isn't hiring for, right?

12:48Kieran Flanigan: They actually need to find the relevant talent. And that is not that easy to do, right? It's kind of easy, but there's like some nuances. And so one of the tools I built recently was a creator grader. And a creator grader is trying to figure out where that creator's audience is sharing their content to basically what countries. And so for an example, in LinkedIn, it would go and look at all of the people that have engaged with their content, if you're paying that creator, and look at their profiles and say, what percentage of countries are these people coming from? So if I get 20 ,000 likes on a piece of content, all of those likers, I want to know what country they're in.

13:31Kieran Flanigan: So I can figure out what audience that creator is reaching. And then I also want to see the quality of that audience. So for LinkedIn, an example, I've discovered that a lot of creators are using bot farms to basically artificially inflate their numbers. And how could I tell that? Well, if I look at a creator's post, I could reverse engineer who is common and reacting to it. And then I can look at what countries those people are from, or I could look at the amount of followers those people actually have. And what that allowed me to do is grade the quality of that creator's audience by what countries are they reaching.

14:06Kieran Flanigan: And so if they're reaching my target countries that I really care about, and then the quality of their audience. So for example, one of the creators I ran through it, 80 % of their audience had people liking their content who had no connections on LinkedIn themselves. They were all new profiles. They looked totally fake. And so part of your creative dealmaker needs to be able to understand what quality is. Then you have to offer more than the fee. You have to offer more than a fee. It's not just about the money. It's about the incentives, right? You actually have to figure out like, how can I make that creator want to work for us?

14:41Kieran Flanigan: What are the incentives I can create that would differentiate me from everyone else? What is my unfair advantage? How can I scale this creator program beyond what anyone else can actually do? Then you want to be able to create cool content, right? You want to say, like, how can we bring this to life in a really interesting way for your audience, which means you actually have to understand how can I create something around my product that their audience will be pretty entertained by, will be actually pretty excited by. And then you want to make it worth staying. And so you want to actually make sure the creator program is something that they are happy to be part of.

15:17Kieran Flanigan: At HubSpot, one of the things we did is when we had a creator program, we cross-promoted all of the creators with each other. So when they were part of our program, their audience kept growing, which made it really appealing for them to be part of that creator program. So this is really like three roles that have not typically existed in a marketing team that I think are going to be really important for the age we live in today. That growth producer, how do I make entertaining content around your product? That internet comedian, how do you turn your product into something people share with their friends?

15:48Kieran Flanigan: That meme lord, Alex Wang, doing the thing from you. The AI remixer, can you be part of trends? Short from comedy, the click up, doing the short from comedy. And then creator deal maker, make creators want to work with you. Find the relevant talent, offer more than the fee, create cool content, make it work stand. These are the roles that I think I would have in any modern marketing team. Hopefully this has been of value to you. You could go find some of those folks. And until next time, I'll catch you on marketing against the grain.

16:34From the comfort of your own home, Laura's got you. Looking to break out of your nine to five and start a new business venture? The seven-day weekend is the place to begin. Tune in for weekly episodes featuring a mixture of guests and Laura's hard-earned tips that'll teach you how to build the digital tools necessary to build your own seven-day weekend. If you enjoy learning what makes people tick, then this show is perfect for you. They recently did an episode titled The Entrepreneur Mindset. It's all about thinking beyond the nine-to-five job. Check it out and listen to 7 Day Weekend wherever you get your podcasts.