By Caroline Forsey

The way most marketing teams approach AI is probably the way I approach my inbox at 4:59 PM on a Friday.

With reckless optimism and zero follow-through.

But Katie Miserany, SurveyMonkey’s Chief Communication Officer and SVP of Marketing, thinks the real problem isn’t AI — it’s 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 accomplishment isn’t a single launch or campaign… It’s the people. She’s felt fortunate to meet, hire, and mentor incredibly talented people who’ve chosen to follow Katie from team to team and company to company. Miserany told me, “Building workplaces people want to join again and again tells me I’m creating environments where people can grow, do their best work, and feel genuinely supported. That’s the kind of legacy that makes me proud.”

Lesson one: Stop doing random acts of marketing.

Remember the TikTok ban?

SurveyMonkey’s team was excited. Almost immediately, they knew they needed to hop on the trend by conducting a survey on how people were feeling about TikTok.

(I can relate. I remember sitting in an airport lounge writing a panic-induced blog post on the TikTok ban because HubSpot felt we should cover it, too.)

And just as Miserany’s team prepared to launch their findings… TikTok released its own study.

“Guess what the media covered?” Miserany says with a laugh. “It was TikTok’s study.”

Emily Kramer (a Masters in Marketing alum) has a phrase for this temptation to jump on every trending topic just because you can. She calls it “random acts of marketing.”

And Miserany doesn’t think it’s going to cut it anymore.

“To scale in this new chapter of B2B marketing, the foundation needs to be stronger. You can’t do random acts of marketing. You need to set your foundation, understand your customers’ needs, and then have the discipline and discernment to only build from that foundation instead of chasing shiny things,” she tells me.

More volume without a strong foundation? That’s just noise.

Lesson two: Build your foundation first, then repeat it everywhere.

When she was the senior director at Sheryl Sandberg’s Foundation, Miserany worked on a campaign aimed at getting men to be allies to women in the workplace.

She and her team did something that most marketers would find agonizing: They spent forever in the planning phase.

“You’re a small organization… So you would think the temptation would be to just start running [with something],” Miserany tells me.

But instead, “we spent so long beating the idea up.”

They asked themselves: What’s the cost of doing this? What’s the cost of not doing it?

Once they’d meticulously nailed down their vision for the campaign, execution felt “almost effortless.” Even better, it made consistency possible.

The team created something called “the well” — a document that …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron