Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with VeraContent’s Carlota Pico and Nigel Hawthorn, EMEA marketing director at McAfee:

Carlota Pico 0:13
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Content Mix. I’m Carlota Pico your host for today’s show, and I’m excited to be here today with Nigel Hawthorn who works at one of the most well known computer security software companies in the world. Yes, I am talking about McAfee. Welcome, Nigel. And thank you so much for joining us today on The Content Mix.

Nigel Hawthorn 0:37
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Carlota Pico 0:39
Well, it’s great to have you Okay, so I’m actually going to start today’s show off with a joke. Are you ready?

Nigel Hawthorn 0:45
I guess so.

Carlota Pico 0:47
Okay, so ready, Knock knock.

Nigel Hawthorn 0:50
Who’s there?

Carlota Pico 0:52
Our new ebook.

Nigel Hawthorn 0:53
Our new ebook who?

Carlota Pico 0:56
We only ask that you fill out the following 14 fields for free copy of this punch line.

Nigel Hawthorn 1:05
Only 14, looks good.

Carlota Pico 1:06
Yeah, not too bad. Humour can go a long way. Okay, so back to business. Tell us about who you are, how you got into your current role, and also how it’s related to content?

Nigel Hawthorn 1:19
Yeah, sure. Okay. So my history, if I go back a long way was that I started to train to be an actor, which, of course is all about communication. Then I fell into the IT industry as that was another interest of mine. And now I think to myself, without realizing it, I’ve pulled the two areas together, because marketing is all about having empathy with your audience trying to communicate a story to them, educate them, and influence them. And of course, that’s what acting is also all about. So I now mainly write content, give content, talk about things to people about IT security, but bringing my acting skills whenever I can.

Carlota Pico 2:00
Okay, excellent. So you’re an actor turned marketeer. Excellent. And what is McAfee? I briefly introduced it, but if you can give us a 30 second elevator pitch, that’d be fantastic.

Nigel Hawthorn 2:11
Yeah, McAfee have been around for about 25 years. They’re probably best known for providing anti malware for laptops, but actually they do a lot of other IT security technologies, especially for large enterprises. I’m particularly interested in providing security for cloud computing.

Carlota Pico 2:30
Okay, excellent. Now moving into the b2b space, because obviously your b2b marketeer expert, what can a b2b company on a low budget do do attract the right type of attention to their brands?

Nigel Hawthorn 2:46
Yeah, so in my career, I’ve worked for three small startups, usually based in the States, and I’ve been the first marketing person outside the US and so I’ve had to work on a budget of sometimes zero. And really content is king. That is clear to me. And what you need to do is try to make your own news. So look at perhaps surveys, look at statistics, try to contact people who you know can help influence your customer base. So analysts and journalists and so on. And if you get customers, start promoting them so that they can speak for you, promote them to events, make them feel good. And get them not to just echo what you say, but what they’ve achieved with whatever your technology is. So you don’t want a customer to say, Oh, this company is fantastic. What you want them to say is, I have this problem. This is how I addressed it. This was the outcome so that they’re saying something slightly different to you, but of course reinforcing your message.

Carlota Pico 3:53
Okay, spinning off of that response, content development is an art that requires effort and time. It’s often brushed aside under the premises that anybody can write. Would I would disagree on But anyways, that’s another topic. How do you get management to buy into a content development strategy that may not generate an immediate return on investment?

Nigel Hawthorn 4:20
It’s a great question. It’s a difficult one to answer because unfortunately, you have to do a lot of work. And I was thinking before this interview of a couple of experiences in my life, where I couldn’t get people to see my vision. I had this idea for either a document or a video or a presentation. And when speaking to one or two people, they didn’t quite get it. So actually, I worked on it and created it and almost gave it to them just about finished. And honestly, sometimes that is the only way to get people to buy into it and say, yes, now I understand what this crazy person has been talking about. So you really need to deliver to them an almost finished asset to be able to get some people to buy into why it’s there, what it means, what it’s doing, how it’s moving the conversation forward.

Carlota Pico 5:16
Okay, excellent advice. How do you become a content creation machine and also stay relevant in a world that is constantly changing or evolving? I mean, this is especially true, we’ve seen this manifest itself through COVID-19. Marketing professionals from across the world have had to shift their strategy from night to day and adapt a new one. And the world is constantly moving in so many different directions that sometimes it’s hard to produce content that’s relevant for every moment of the day.

Nigel Hawthorn 5:49
Right. But even in your question, you’ve pointed out every moment of the day, I also think every different audience. So what do I do? I would like to say, you know, recycle, re promote, reuse, you’ve created something, maybe it’s a two page document. Well, where’s the video version of this? Where’s the blog version of this? Is this correct? For every audience? No, it isn’t. Nothing ever is. So how do you find someone else that you can reuse some of that content in a slightly different way. So, you know, think of a two minute video that sits on Twitter. Think of something longer that people who really love detail want, all based around the same core information, but a lot of reuse and recycle can go a long way to really making your business a content king.

Carlota Pico 6:44
Okay, and that will also keep costs low, I’m assuming.

Nigel Hawthorn 6:49
Yeah. And actually, of course, each one gets easier and easier to make. And therefore, you can out-market your competitors. Even if they’ve got more resources than you have. And if I think back to a company called Sky High Networks, when I joined it, it had a number of competitors that were of a similar size. But we produce something like two times the amount of content that they did. Because we realized that at that time in that market, education was everything.

Carlota Pico 7:21
Okay. Excellent. This leads me to my next question, Is there ever a perfect piece of content?

Nigel Hawthorn 7:30
Well, a quick answer would be no. And I think that goes back to the point about knowing your audience and empathy and what do they like to consume and how do they like to consume it? I like to read things. I can read fast, I can go backwards and forwards I can look for the salient points. My daughter loves to watch things on YouTube. I find video actually, sorry to say this in a video, but a difficult medium to distill a lot of information into what I really need, but that’s me, and maybe that’s my age. So there’s no perfect content, because your audience will be taking it in in different ways. Some people will need a lot of detail and some people will hate detail why on earth are they repeating themselves? You know, nothing is perfect. Therefore, everything you do, you should deliver in as many ways as you can.

Carlota Pico 8:22
Okay, so basically, people aren’t black or white, there is no right or wrong answer to content, and people consume content in different shapes and forms.

Nigel Hawthorn 8:32
Indeed, and I would say the other thing, that is the reminder that we can all use when somebody says, well, how is marketing different from sales? You know, I would say salespeople need to be focused, they need to absolutely direct everything that they do at the person is going to buy whatever it is that you’re selling, the person who owns the budget, but we marketers need to be broad. Who else cares? Who can you influence? For me, it might be governance risk and compliance and finance are not people that the sales people will call on directly, but they can influence the sale. So once you’ve got your idea of a piece of content, how do I take that content and repurpose it for a different audience? What do they need to know? They don’t need to know everything, but they need to know something. And then you can create lots of different ways of using the same core information.

Carlota Pico 9:23
Okay, Nigel, so although you’re in b2b marketing, within b2b, you’re always targeting a person because at the end of the day, companies are run by people. So your personas are people within the companies that you want to acquire as your clients?

Nigel Hawthorn 9:40
Yes. And, you know, if I can be mean, sometimes I’m sent an email with an asset on it, and somebody says, what do you think of this? And if I’m in a bad mood, my answer will be, who’s the reader? What do they think? Are you trying to educate them or you’re trying to sell them something and if they don’t know the answer to those questions, then it’s no surprise if the piece of content doesn’t really hit its mark, always have in your mind, the person that you’re writing for. And if it’s a 12 year old girl, or if it’s a 55 year old person in this particular company with this job title, think more about them. Who are they? What do they care about? And even ask yourself, get a picture of them in your mind? How big is the company that they work for? What’s the vertical market that it’s in? How long have they been in that role? All those questions, you might not know the exact answers, but if you write it down, then the content will be so much better because you know, you’ve written something that you hope is perfect for that audience.

Carlota Pico 10:44
Okay, excellent. I do want to put some of this theory into practical examples. So to finish the section off, could you zoom into a content project or marketing campaign that you’re particularly proud of? Its purpose, of course and what made it stand throughout your career.

Nigel Hawthorn 11:02
Yeah, well, I’m going to go back a while. And I’m going to talk about when I worked for a company who were introducing technology to filter access to the internet. And what we found was that we and every other company in the industry talked about the features. We talked about, look, we can block this, we can keep your users safe, but there was no passion. There was no so what? And so what I did was I invented a character. I called him Bob Kent, something simple, easy to remember. And I pretended to be that guy. And I went to websites that I shouldn’t go to and I saw the messages appear on my screen saying, Bob, don’t go here. And what I did was I took what was a standard message that we’ve been using for I don’t know a couple of years and turned it on its head and said, well, this is the outcome and it really resonated with people who previously sat there, honestly going, yeah, I’ve heard all this before. And so I do think that’s where perhaps a bit of acting, a bit of getting into the shoes of your audience really works. And again, I would say that what it also did was it elevated it from being a conversation only with IT people to a conversation with, in that case, HR. They said, now I get it. Oh, okay. So if I’m not having my employees go to bad places, then they can be more productive. Great. So it allowed you to talk the same message but to a different audience in a slightly different way.

Carlota Pico 12:42
That is such a creative example and also a perfect way of pulling some of the skills that you learned through acting into your current role as a marketeer. Excellent.

Nigel Hawthorn 12:53
But we’ve all got background we can use. Don’t sit there thinking, well, I haven’t done acting, so I can’t do this. But you’ve all got things either in your personal life or in previous history that you can bring to your marketing role, and that’s what makes us all special.

Carlota Pico 13:07
Okay, well moving into the next section of our interview, it’s a rapid fire set of questions. So basically your recommendations for our audience to get started off I’d like to ask you about your source of inspiration. So an influencer or professional role model that you really admire?

Nigel Hawthorn 13:25
Yeah, no excuses. But Steve Jobs still influences me because he was able to take again, complex ideas and technologies and produce very simple communication methods to get that message across. So he’s definitely an influence. And I know you’re going to ask about books. So this is called The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and it talks about putting together a presentation and trying to make sure that you’ve crafted it exactly to your audience and very simple chunks of information over a period of time to take people through a message. So both an influencer and a book there. I’ve got another book as well, I know you’re going to ask. So now this is perhaps specifically for the IT world, but there’s lots of it. It’s the series of books called Crossing the Chasm and have a look for it. It reminds people that as a market changes, your audience changes. So the people who buy your product on day one, who are probably very innovative people looking for something new will be different from the people who buy the product in a year or two years time. So your messages need to change and points out the bad news of lots of people getting it wrong when they continue to market to this small group who’d already made their buying decisions while the bigger market was missed. So I think the Crossing the Chasm books, and there’s a series of them, are really valuable.

Carlota Pico 15:04
Okay, Nigel, since we’ve already covered books, I’m going to move into our last question of today’s interview, which will be what’s your favorite app at the moment?

Nigel Hawthorn 15:13
Well, I guess there are two really, because, you know, life is all about communication. And it’s WhatsApp to get in touch with people and communicate, but it’s Twitter to keep live, up to date with what’s going on right now, and perhaps I’m a little bit obsessed with Twitter and making sure that I know what’s going on this second.

Carlota Pico 15:34
Okay, excellent. Well, Nigel, thank you so much for joining us today on The Content Mix. It was awesome to meet you, and to talk about so many different marketing and content topics.

Nigel Hawthorn 15:44
Thank you. It was great to do this.

Carlota Pico 15:47
The pleasure was mine. And to everybody listening in today, thank you for joining us on The Content Mix. For more perspective on the content marketing industry in Europe check out The Content Mix. We’ll be releasing interviews like this one every day, so keep on tuning in. Thanks again. Have a fabulous day and see you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai