Episode Summary

Katherine Hunter-Blyden, a fractional CMO, discusses her career journey from Fortune 500 companies like Ford and Progressive to serving small businesses. She shares insights on modern marketing strategies, the importance of email marketing and content distribution, measuring business growth, and how AI tools are transforming marketing efficiency. The conversation covers practical approaches to brand building, direct response marketing, and the critical differences between marketing at scale versus scrappy startup environments.

Key Quotes

"Email marketing is extremely efficient—if you have a customer base, you can get your message in front of them at minimal cost. Building and segmenting that list is essential for every business."
"You need to spend as much time distributing your content library as you do creating it. Distribution channels like social media and email are where content actually drives results."
"When someone is in-market and searching for you through paid search, capture their information immediately with a landing page. Search costs are going up, so monetize that intent by getting them into your CRM."

Transcript

Hi, welcome to Tales From The Sky Lounge. It's a podcast about business consulting and venture investing. We get out there in the world and talk to people who are making it happen and get their stories. So if you could like and subscribe, it really helps us get our message out.

Today in the Sky Lounge, Katherine Hunter Bleden. Hi Katherine. Welcome to the Sky Lounge.

Hi Todd, thank you for having me. It's good to have you.

Katherine, want you to give us a little background. Who are you?

Absolutely. So I am today a fractional Chief Marketing Officer to my clients, and the journey here has been quite varied. I started out in a pricing role. I wasn't an actuary, but I did some pricing work in an insurance company. From there, went off to business school, and post business school went to Ford Motor and worked in marketing in different areas of marketing. Left there, went back to the insurance industry in a product management role, and spent the first half of my career in different Fortune 500 companies, and then spent the latter half of my career working with small businesses and middle market businesses. And I ran a startup for a short time.

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