Markigy: The Science of Marketing Strategy · Leanne Dow-Weimer

From Noise to Noteworthy- Creating Impactful Marketing w/ Kerry Guard

·58 min·3 clips

MKG Marketing mapped onboarding, renewals, and offboarding on one giant customer-journey sheet.

Leanne opens with coffee and a promise to talk about what's working in marketing. Keri explains that MKG Marketing started in 2011 with her business partner, Mike Kras, first in Washington State and then in San Francisco. Their first client was Box.com, and the agency has stayed focused on helping SaaS and other complex brands get found through digital marketing. The work is a mix of digital ads and SEO. Keri says the audience she serves is often cynical and distrustful, especially in cybersecurity and data management. That makes the real job less about pushing messages and more about building trust in a way that feels authentic. She is blunt that the goal is not to sound salesy or sleazy. The conversation keeps returning to how marketers learn from actual customers. Keri argues that the fastest way to get good is to have a lot of one-to-one conversations. She points to sales and customer success as the people who usually have the richest primary-source knowledge. Marketing, in her view, is often the secondary source. That means internal debate should start with curiosity, not authority. When sales says a white paper will not help get appointments, the better move is to ask why. She pushes against the reflex to force marketing ideas through the organization without listening first. Leanne and Keri both land on the same point: people closest to the customer probably know more than we do. Marketers can join calls, listen in, or work through sales and customer success when direct access is not possible. The bigger test is whether the company is truly hearing from customers in some form. Once it does, the marketing should help people make thoughtful decisions. And sometimes that decision will not be the brand, which Keri treats as a hard but necessary truth.

As heard by us

A sober look at marketing where trust, not hype, has to do the heavy lifting.

The conversation centers on marketing to audiences that do not want to be marketed to, especially in SaaS, cybersecurity, and other complicated categories where trust has to be earned.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if your buyers are skeptical and your team keeps arguing over what marketing should say.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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