The way most marketing teams approach AI is probably the way I approach my inbox at 4:59 p.m. on a Friday.
With reckless optimism and zero consequence.
But Katie Miserany, SurveyMonkeys Chief Communication Officer and SVP of Marketing believes the real problem isn’t AI, but rather that most marketers have forgotten a fundamental truth: Just because you can talk about something doesn’t mean you should.
Katie Miserany
Chief Communications Officer and SVP, Marketing at SurveyMonkey
- Claim to fame: Miserany’s proud achievement is not a single launch or campaign… It’s the people. She has been fortunate to meet, hire and mentor incredibly talented people who have chosen to follow Katie from team to team and company to company. Miserany told me, “Building workplaces that people want to join again and again shows me that I’m creating environments where people can thrive, do their best work, and feel truly supported. That’s the kind of legacy that makes me proud.”
Lesson one: Stop using arbitrary marketing measures.
Remember the TikTok ban?
The SurveyMonkey team was thrilled. Almost immediately, they knew they had to jump on the trend by conducting a survey about how people felt about TikTok.
(I can relate. I remember sitting in an airport lounge writing a panicked blog post about the TikTok ban because HubSpot thought we should cover it too.)
And just as Miserany’s team was preparing to publish its findings, TikTok released its own study.
“Guess what the media reported on?” says Miserany, laughing. “It was TikTok’s study.”
Emily Kramer (née Master in Marketing, Graduate) has an expression for this temptation to jump into every trending topic just because you can. She calls it “random acts of marketing.”
And Miserany doesn’t think it will be enough anymore.
“To gain a foothold in this new chapter of B2B marketing, the foundation needs to be stronger. You can’t do arbitrary marketing actions. You need to build your foundation, understand your customers’ needs, and then have the knowledge to do it.” Discipline and judgment to only build on that foundation rather than chasing shiny things” she tells me.
More volume without a strong foundation? That’s just noise.
Lesson two: Build your foundation first, then repeat everywhere.
When she was executive director of the Sheryl Sandberg Foundation, Miserany worked on a campaign aimed at making men allies of women in the workplace.
She and her team did something that most marketers would find excruciating: They spent ages in the planning phase.
“They’re a small organization…so you would think it would be tempting to just jump in (with something),” Miserany tells me.
Instead, “we spent so long trying to kill the idea.”
They asked themselves: How much does it cost? How much are the costs? not are you doing it?
After meticulously defining their vision for the campaign, executing it felt “almost effortless.” Even better, it allowed for consistency.
The team created something called “The Well” – a document that spelled out exactly how everything should be talked about. If something in the well was called “stunning,” you couldn’t call it “gorgeous.” You stuck to the script and you had to explain why you deviated from it.
“The The repetition of exactly this language is really important for the breakthrough“ explains Miserany.
“And then all of your channels have to do the exact same thing to have any hope that someone will see it, recognize it, remember it and feel good about your brand.”
The lesson for leaders: Take time to plan and trust your marketers to tell the right story every time.
Lesson three: Try scaffolding.
Miserany gets frustrated when she sees good marketing ideas being implemented in a vacuum.
Your solution? What she calls scaffolding.
Recently, SurveyMonkey’s head of brand chatted with Miserany about the possibility of sponsoring Formula 1.
But Miserany didn’t really get excited about the idea until she heard what it could entail—like a conference, a webinar, and a follow-up email nurture campaign.
“A Formula 1 sponsorship sounds cool, but I’m not that excited about the potential of the company until you can connect it with all these other things and surround it with different tactics and different storytelling to make it helpful to our customers.”
The takeaway for SMB marketers? Before you launch a campaign, ask yourself: What else can we build on top of it? How can we turn a good idea into an integrated experience that surrounds our prospects in a way that is actually helpful?
Because in a world where everyone has access to AI and can produce content, the brands that break through won’t be the ones that use more isolated tactics. They will be the ones doing fewer and better things.
Bonus: The SurveyMonkey feature that SMB marketers sleep with.
Before we wrapped up, Miserany told me something that surprised me: SurveyMonkey lets you survey people you don’t know.
Want to test logo designs? Ask about product preferences? Validate a business idea? You can reach a target audience (including specific industries, locations, or demographics) without having to hire an expensive research company.
