How Heike Young Uses Humor to Transform B2B Marketing

It’s rare that a B2B marketer is funny on LinkedIn.

And not “posted a meme about ChatGPT taking over my job” funny.

I mean genuinely, “I would watch this content in my free time” kind of humor.

And she’s got 20K followers (and some viral videos with 4M+ views) to prove it.

Today’s expert tells us to stop obsessing over high-performing content, and why your buyer persona is bingeing Selling Sunset, too.

Heike Young

Head of content, social, & integrated marketing, Microsoft

Job: She leads the Microsoft teams that shape their storytelling and ensures their content strategies resonate with target audiences.
Claim to fame: Multimedia content is Heike’s superpower. She grew her LinkedIn following from 2K to 20K in one year by posting funny videos. She also launched Salesforce’s first branded podcast, and her team managed Salesforce’s YouTube account with 800K+ subscribers.
Fun fact: Heike used to run her own business throwing princess birthday parties and story hours for kids.

Lesson 1: Your goal shouldn’t be high-performing content. Period.

When Young walked into a conference room during her first day at Microsoft (this may have been virtual, but for the sake of the story let’s picture the Mad Men office), she told her team that her goal isn’t to create high-performing content.

Her goal is to change minds.

Every time her team creates a piece of content, she asks herself: “What can we create that’s actually going to change the hearts and minds of our audience? And that’s a heady task.”

Here’s an example that hits home for us: At HubSpot, we’ve hit millions of views each year on one post alone — “The Top Movie Quotes of All Time.”

(Yep. About as far from a product conversion as you can get.)

But this year we took another look at that post and said, “Does it matter that it attracts millions of views if it has nothing to do with… well, HubSpot?”

So we (finally) retired the post. (I suggested a Viking funeral, but we settled on a 301 redirect.)

This is Young’s motto and driving motivation behind all of her work. She says, “We hope it performs well, but really our goal is to create influence and to change how people think and act — and for our brand to grow when they do.”

There’s a bonus to this lesson: Creating content that changes minds means writing, recording, and posting content that is provocative and unique. And that’s the only type of content that will cut through the noise, anyway.

As Young puts it: “Bold POVs are pretty much the only content left that resonates.”