Mandy Hornaday: Do you get better work out of AI than your team does? Same tools, same access, and somehow what comes back to you is better quality. That was me for the first several months of this year, and I assumed it would even out as everyone got more practice with AI, but it didn't. The gap actually had nothing to do with how good anyone was at using the tools.
Mandy Hornaday: Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Hornaday, and today I'm going solo on what I call the marketing brain, what it is, whether you need your own and what it's unlocked across three very different companies for me. Maybe you're fractional and taking on new clients. Maybe you're in-house a few years into the role, trying to get a whole team pulling in the same direction. Either way, this is where I'd start. Let's get into it.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, so just for some background context, there were several things coming to a head for me in the last few months that ultimately led me to creating a marketing brain for every client that I run as a solution. And so one of the things that was happening more and more frequently, which I know we've all been experiencing for a long time now, but before I was taking on new clients, almost every single client asked me, how can we move faster and do more with less using AI because we don't want to bring on a big team or a lot of resources? And so that was one of the main questions that was sort of circulating.
Mandy Hornaday: And in parallel to that, I was evaluating my own interest in taking on and flexing out of my traditional CMO seat where historically it's really just been pure strategy and team leadership and collaboration with the C-suite and things like that, which is still very much a part of the CMO role. But I was starting to ask myself whether or not I wanted to start blending into execution a little bit. And did I feel like now that I had AI as a partner that I could take on work that I hadn't historically taken on? Still within the strategy realm, but things like a brand strategy that I would have historically never have taken on before. For those of you that know me, I've got a heavy demand generation and operations background. And while I enjoy brand, it's not my zone of genius.
Mandy Hornaday: But I was really starting to ask myself questions of whether I could take that type of work on or product marketing, things like that. And so both of those two questions were circulating around in my head of, clients want to move faster. They want to be AI forward. They don't want to hire big teams. Is this work that I could be interested in?
Mandy Hornaday: And then for the clients that I was already actively in from a CMO perspective, the teams that I have around me, while wonderful, I was noticing a wide variety or a wide spectrum, if you will, of AI fluency within the team. And some people were highly fluent and using it to produce great output and other people were getting frustrated with AI because they couldn't get great output and so they were abandoning it and going back to doing work manually.
Mandy Hornaday: And along these lines, I had a huge desire for the work to be up-leveled because as we all know, the playbooks are changing in real time. What used to work for years is no longer working and we really have to step up our game. And so I had this strong desire to really rip apart almost every playbook that existed and rebuild from scratch. And I knew that everyone on the team needed to be working from one single source of truth strategy wise in order for us to be rowing in the same direction.
Mandy Hornaday: And so, you know, I had this kind of new client questions happening. I had these existing client questions happening. And in parallel with this, I took a 12 week AI course. I did an episode on it a couple of weeks ago in terms of what I learned and some of my key takeaways. Feel free to check it out if you're interested. But one of the big parts of the AI course was talking about the context and documentation layer.
Mandy Hornaday: And so I really dove into this concept of a marketing brain. And if we think about what a marketing brain really means to me, and I'm sure different people have different opinions, but for me, the marketing brain is ultimately everything that is important to the work that we do or how we operate and run. So that could vary from the business strategy and goals. It could vary to your go-to-market motion and your go-to-market strategy, all the way to your brand strategy, your product marketing strategy, your ICP, even to who's on your team, which resources do you have at your disposal? Who are the key stakeholders in the company? How does work move throughout your organization?
Mandy Hornaday: And I like to think of it as anything that if I were to hire a kick-ass chief of staff on my team, what is everything she would need to know in order to do her job well? And that ultimately comes down to a combination of things we have defined in the past and that everyone's running off of, things that we've never defined in the past and everyone's just sort of operating in the gray or has different responses for, and then things that live in my own head but have never been distributed out to the rest of the team, right? And so it's kind of a blend of all of that.
Mandy Hornaday: And so a marketing brain could certainly be very vast depending on the company size, how much context there is to document, how long you've been around, right? How big your team is. So for the $500 million client that I run with a team of 15 and a ton of internal stakeholders, the brain is huge and it is a work in progress and I am not going to sit here and tell you that it is done because I have to take it kind of piece by piece.
Mandy Hornaday: Whereas the marketing brain for my pre-revenue healthcare startup was done the first 30 days that I started and took on that client because they're still in the infancy of the organization. And so we were able to document a lot of the mission and the vision and the product and the ICP and how we're going to go to market. A lot of the rest of the stuff doesn't exist yet.
Mandy Hornaday: And then I actually have a client that's probably in between that they're about $150 million. They've clearly established product market fit in the marketplace. They've got a lot defined, but they also still have a lot that is undefined. And what's been really cool, and I'll share this more in a little bit, is that I've been able to use the parts that we do have defined well to influence and help build the parts that we don't have defined well.
Mandy Hornaday: So I'll get into kind of what that means and get less vague here in a little bit, but the part of the marketing brain that I've really learned to lean into in the first 30 days of taking on a new client is what I like to refer to as the strategic core part of the marketing brain. And for me, this consists of 14 files. That list could change and grow for sure. But there's about 14 different files and I'll run through them really quick so you can get a feel for them and start thinking in your mind which ones apply to you and your business.
Mandy Hornaday: But if you're B2B, I'd argue most of them apply if not all of them. But I've got things in the strategic core part of the brain that include things like a company overview, business strategy and objectives, the go-to-market motion, the ICP and buying personas, the buyer's journey and deal mechanics, products and solutions, proof, credibility, reputation, the customer portfolio and expansion, the competitive landscape, brand strategy and guidelines, audience engagement map, and things like that.
Mandy Hornaday: And some of these files, by the way, are just for AI to be stronger at doing the work it needs to do. So I've got a glossary and market language document that is really for the sole purpose of making sure AI has the context it needs. But it's also been great for things like onboarding. So if you turn this documentation into an AI partner, like an onboarding partner for the go-to-market team, there's some really cool use cases for this to be used for onboarding, for sales enablement, for filling out RFPs, right? You can kind of start imagining how this brain can come to life in so many different ways.
Mandy Hornaday: Now I like to start with the strategic core when I'm walking into a client for the obvious reasons of everything builds on top of the strategy and the strategic foundation. And so when you think about campaign strategies, when you think about an event strategy, when you think about your paid media strategy, or frankly, even just your marketing plan or the resources you need to hire and bring in, all of that comes from your strategic core and making the best decisions for the business.
Mandy Hornaday: And so often, as I'm sure most of you have experienced as well, this documentation, one, it doesn't exist in most organizations. And two, not only does it not exist, but a lot of times there's not alignment on what the strategy for these areas actually is.
Mandy Hornaday: And so that's been one of the best forcing functions as I walk into an organization. There's a lot of ways you can start with existing internal data to pull this together or to use AI to reverse engineer some of this documentation. I've learned so many tips and tricks for how to build the brain in a way that actually powers AI in a useful way. But a lot of the work itself actually is decisions that need to be made. And so for my first 30 days with a new client, not only is it a great way for me to learn the organization, but it's also a great way for me to add value immediately by helping them establish some of these strategic decisions that need to be made.
Mandy Hornaday: Now, just to be super pointed here, you might be asking, where does this brain live? What actually is it that you're talking about? Are you talking about a Claude project? Are you talking about, you know, what is it Mandy? And for me, my marketing brain itself lives within Google Drive.
Mandy Hornaday: Now your version could be OneDrive, it could be SharePoint, it could be Dropbox, right? It could be a lot of different versions. I purposely use Google Drive because most of my clients are on Google. And the really cool power move here is to have Google Drive for desktop. I believe they also have OneDrive for desktop and Dropbox for desktop.
Mandy Hornaday: But one of the really powerful moves as you move from a single player AI environment in your marketing organization to multiplayer where everybody's working off of the same documentation and context and same skills and things like that, which is obviously where so many of us want to go. The Google Drive for desktop app is really powerful because it allows you to use tools like Claude Cowork or Claude Code on your desktop with the files, but it also syncs directly to the cloud so that the rest of your team can also be referencing the same exact files, which as you can imagine, allows everyone to be working off the same strategic core and producing higher quality work.
Mandy Hornaday: And the last thing I just want to pause here and say is that if you hang out on LinkedIn, so many of us are getting thrown all of these skills packages and scheduled tasks and workflows, and all of those things are amazing and can be amazing. But what I find really interesting is that a lot of people aren't focusing on the core source of truth, the documentation that those agents and skills and workflows should be working from. And it just feels like classic marketing for us because we're solving for the tasks and the execution without actually addressing the strategic work that needs to be done underneath.
Mandy Hornaday: And so for me, I've found personally that focusing on the strategic core documentation upfront then allows your skills and your workflows and your scheduled tasks or whatever you want to layer on top to be so much more powerful. And frankly, even if in your environment, you're not allowed to do scheduled tasks or use Cowork, or do any of those things, frankly, AI as a sparring partner becomes 10 times more impactful when you have this documentation in this context behind you.
Mandy Hornaday: And hey, maybe you feel like your AI instance does have this level of context and information about you and your business and you feel like you're getting great output. But I would ask you to think about whether your team has that same level of context and input in their AI instances. And are you all working off the same source of truth and information? And that to me is where there's huge unlock for your entire marketing team.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, so let's actually go into a few different examples just to help get the juices flowing. And hopefully there's some tips and tricks within here for your own business that you can pull out and use. So for some background, I have built about four marketing brains out across different clients. Then each one certainly got better as I went. And then I went back and kind of retroactively updated the brains to benefit from the expansion of my knowledge.
Mandy Hornaday: But the first example I'll give you is this pre-revenue healthcare startup. Now I don't have any experience in the healthcare field. I have some in life sciences within professional services, but for the most part, healthcare is not a space that I know a lot about. And I totally respect everyone who has deep healthcare experience because it feels like an industry like no other.
Mandy Hornaday: But a few months ago I had taken on this new client. One of my near and dear friends and old colleagues was working with this pre-revenue startup. She loved the mission and the vision and knew that they really needed a CMO to come in and set the go-to-market strategy, set the monetization strategy, build the acquisition strategy, you know, a lot of different things. And so she had asked me to come in and I agreed.
Mandy Hornaday: And I very quickly realized I was out of my depth because this subsector within healthcare was the rare disease space. And there were so many different acronyms, so many underlying politics within the landscape, so many different organizations that you had to know about and how they all interconnect in order to kind of break in. And I truly would leave every call with the founder thinking, oh my goodness, what was she asking for? How does this change my strategy? You know, it definitely put me out of my comfort zone.
Mandy Hornaday: But because I had built the marketing brain, which by the way, I was able to do through transcripts where I had interviewed her, through deep research, through all of her past press and publications, through the website, through sales enablement, lots of different contexts existed that I was able to pull from in order to build a pretty solid marketing brain for the first version. And it was my lifesaver.
Mandy Hornaday: And truly within a month, we were already redoing the website, creating brand videos, creating product marketing materials, creating a live video Q&A campaign. And I would frankly never have been able to do that six to 12 months ago, or at least do it well and do it with confidence, had I not had AI as my strategic sparring partner powered by the marketing brain lying underneath.
Mandy Hornaday: And one of the amazing benefits as well was that as we brought on more marketing freelancers, they also were able to walk in and immediately start delivering, many of which did not have experience within the rare disease space or even the healthcare space as well. And I was able to bring in a content and product marketing team who, while excellent, that's why I brought them in, typically had historically needed 30 to 60 days of ramp up before they felt like they really understood the founder's voice or before they really understood the brand voice and could truly write on behalf of the brand.
Mandy Hornaday: But leveraging the marketing brain allowed them to deliver really great work. And the founder, even with one of the first things the content and product marketing person delivered, the founder responded and said, oh my gosh, I could cry. This is exactly what I want to be saying to the world. So not only was the founder really thrilled with the work and the quality that it was being delivered, but my freelance team was also beyond grateful and just raving about the brain and how quick they were able to get up to speed because they had all of this documentation to be able to work from.
Mandy Hornaday: Now, I'm not going to pretend that taking on a brand new industry is super easy now. I would not be one to say that. It still felt challenging and challenged my brain in very new ways. But I will say it was an opportunity that I took on confidently and felt like I could confidently deliver on. Whereas six months ago, a year ago, I would have never said yes to that opportunity. And so it's really challenged my thinking in terms of what are we capable of? If we have the right strategic instincts and the right foundation behind us, you know, certainly there's a lot of different work that we can take on as CMOs and as marketing leaders.
Mandy Hornaday: Now, the second marketing brain that I built that I'll share with you was for a $150 million company that never had a marketing team. They had never really focused on branding and messaging. They needed to redo their website and they needed a full rebrand and brand strategy. Now this was the first six months of work that needed to be done.
Mandy Hornaday: And this was also one of the clients where the CFO was saying, hey, we really want to be AI forward. We want to do this right from the beginning. We want to be able to be fast. We want to be efficient. We want to be able to scale the marketing operation, leveraging AI. Can you share your approach and your model for doing that?
Mandy Hornaday: And so again, this was a company where maybe I historically would not have taken on before. Usually I have somewhat of a team around me. It doesn't have to be a big team, but even just a few resources for execution is what I typically am comfortable with because I really enjoy scaling functions, not necessarily building functions from scratch. I applaud all of you builders out there. I am just built slightly differently.
Mandy Hornaday: But again, this was an opportunity that had come my way. It was with people I really liked and trusted and wanted to work with. And so I said, yes. And not only did I agree to take on this work as a solo fractional marketing leader, which was out of my comfort zone, but two, I took on work where it was not necessarily historically my strength, right? Brand, product marketing.
Mandy Hornaday: But the idea of figuring out how to build an AI forward marketing organization was really intriguing to me. And I wanted to be able to put my skill set to a test. And so for the build on this brain, there was obviously a lot more context because this has been a company that's been around for over 20 years. They have multiple products and solutions. They've got multiple audiences, but from a strategic core perspective, they had maybe only about 60% figured out and the other 40%.
Mandy Hornaday: So when you think about the brand strategy and the brand guidelines and their solutions, positioning and messaging, a lot of that didn't exist and needed to be created. And so I was able to build the parts that did exist and document those in the first 30 days and then spend the next 30 days fleshing out the brand strategy, the solutions, messaging and positioning, things like that, leveraging the 60% of the brain that existed.
Mandy Hornaday: And that work is still in progress. We're actually launching the new brand in November and I've got a very small freelance team. I've got a designer, I've got a writer, and I have a developer. And that work is still in progress. It's set to go live in November. I'll probably do an episode or two breaking down how we approached that work because they are doing the work directly from the marketing brain. And that's part of how we're able to move so fast and do it at half the cost of your typical agency.
Mandy Hornaday: Now, the third example I want to give you here is for the $500 million client that I work with, really large marketing team. And this brain is still a work in progress. And my approach to it was definitely different than the first two. The first two clients, it was sort of the non-negotiable, this is what I'm going to walk into the organization and do in the first 30 days of working together. And that will continue to be my approach as I take on more clients. To me, it has become a non-negotiable.
Mandy Hornaday: There's so much that can be built and spun up in terms of AI partners and skills and scheduled tasks and things like that off of the documentation and having that really strong source of truth in place. It has really evolved into the gift that keeps on giving in a compounding way. And so that's the messaging I'm actually leading with clients on, hey, we want to be AI forward. We want anyone on the team to be working from the same source of truth. And we want to be able to scale with quality output quickly. And so therefore this will be our first 30 days. And so far, no one has given me pushback and everyone has really enjoyed having access to this strategic knowledge base.
Mandy Hornaday: But for my third client, I've been working with them for well over a year now. We've got a really large team and actually the first thing I started with in terms of the marketing brain was the team and the decisions side of the brain. I actually talked about the AI partner I built on last week's episode. I would definitely check it out if you also experience work stalling out or friction with work moving forward. Maybe you have bottlenecks, maybe you have a lot of gray areas in your department, or maybe you're the bottleneck and you're stuck having to approve everything. Definitely go check out last week's episode. I think you'll really love it.
Mandy Hornaday: And for this client, that was the part of the marketing brain that I started with because it was by far my biggest pain point. It allowed me to free myself up in the day to day enough and get the work unblocked and moving forward so that I could take a step back and focus on the strategic core. Luckily in this organization, we had done so much strategic work over the last year that people for the most part on the team were operating from the same source of truth, even though it wasn't documented. But we all in our heads, you know, we'd all done the work together.
Mandy Hornaday: But really for me, the impetus for wanting to go deep on building the marketing brain actually came from the fact that I wanted to tear apart the playbooks that we were running. I wanted to really shake the team out of the day to day of this is the playbook we run and we apply it across all these different segments and these different industries and these different audiences. And I wanted to challenge the team to rebuild and reinvest in what the strategy should be and have a sparring partner to do that.
Mandy Hornaday: I was getting a little frustrated to be honest with some of the output that was coming to me. And it actually came to a head with a recent campaign we did in the higher education industry, because up until that point, we had mostly built a B2B campaign playbook that was doing okay. I still wanted to tear apart and rebuild a lot of those playbooks, but it ultimately came to a head when we started going into this higher education space because it does not operate like B2B whatsoever. It's very different where they buy, how they buy. There's so much that was different from our typical playbook.
Mandy Hornaday: And so I took the time, had been building these marketing brains for my other clients at the time. And I said, you know what? I am going to build out the strategic core specifically for the higher education industry. And we'll start there as a place to grow because this particular client serves probably 15 different industries, has three different divisions, five different solutions, multiple buyers within each of those solutions. It's a pretty complex go-to-market operating model. And so I wasn't going to be able to build the strategic core part of the brain overnight or frankly, even within 30 days.
Mandy Hornaday: And so I started with that one part of the brain and I really outlined who's our ICP in this industry. Which solutions are we selling in this industry? What's the buyer's journey and deal mechanics look like for this particular industry? Where does this audience actually engage? Where do they show up? How do they make decisions? And I spent a few days realistically gathering and reverse engineering this information. And I paired it with the campaign sparring partner around how I like to see campaigns built and be executed and all of the best practices there and paired those two things together.
Mandy Hornaday: And the team instantly within a week or two had such a stronger strategy walking into that campaign kickoff. And as a result, after they met with that division and sales leader, the sales leader came back and said, oh my gosh, it really feels like you know us and we are so excited to support you and be a partner in this campaign. We will do whatever you need us to do. And historically, this particular division leader was one of our toughest critics. And so this was a massive win and really got me excited to build out the rest of the strategic core.
Mandy Hornaday: Now, again, we're taking it in slow parts and I'm really trying to focus on the areas where it'll yield results the fastest. So for me right now, it means a few of those core base files and then the particular priority segments that we've really honed in on. So there's four priority industries that we're really going hard on right now. And so my focus has been to build out the strategic core for those four areas to start.
Mandy Hornaday: And it has been awesome because now that we have that strategic core documented, our events strategist is able to build a much stronger events and associations and partnerships strategy based on where our buyers actually are and how they actually make decisions.
Mandy Hornaday: We have been changing our paid media strategy in the higher ed example specifically. The division leader had originally told us no one is on LinkedIn within higher ed. We don't want to be on LinkedIn. And rather than taking her word for it and going to other areas and other platforms, which we did still do by the way, but actually AI had said, yes, that's generally true. There's not a lot of engagement on LinkedIn within higher education. However, there is a distinct white space that exists because your competitors aren't there and they're not going after that particular audience.
Mandy Hornaday: And so we actually ran a small pilot campaign and it massively outperformed any of our other segments. And we actually drove in a multimillion dollar deal opportunity with a very well known university that was heavily influenced by our paid LinkedIn campaign.
Mandy Hornaday: And really the learnings were endless. I mean, again, one of the other things that AI shared through some of the engagement and buyer behavior was that email is actually a really big channel for higher education. And so while historically for our other segments, we weren't seeing any success with outbound email marketing. This was a channel we decided to focus on and put a little bit more effort in because this particular audience is still highly engaged with email. And AI was right.
Mandy Hornaday: And so those are just some small examples of how we were able to take a campaign that probably would have done moderately well to now doing exceptionally well. And we actually have extended the campaign from being a 90 day focus to being a year long focus because of how successful it has been. And a lot of it came down to the root of taking the time to do the strategic core documentation for that industry that then influenced a lot of downstream decisions that we probably would have made differently had we not had that strategic core information in our back pocket.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, so those were three different examples. Hopefully it gave you some inspiration and helped you envision what a marketing brain or at least the strategic core part of a marketing brain might look like in your own organization or within your own clients. And I think one of my biggest learnings coming out of building four different brains at this point is to try and keep your documentation as evergreen as possible.
Mandy Hornaday: I purposefully don't upload or include information that is still a work in progress or going to very quickly become out of date because what you don't want to happen is for your team to be working off of stale information. And so I've tried to opt for information that's going to be evergreen and true of the company and will last for at least six to 12 months.
Mandy Hornaday: Now that being said, certainly updating documentation and documentation governance and things like that is a whole new set of responsibilities that we haven't necessarily had to think about before as CMOs. And I think is becoming increasingly important. And so for me, I took the first stab at creating a lot of this documentation and making sure that it was right.
Mandy Hornaday: You certainly, if you've got an amazing product marketing leader, or you've got an amazing demand gen leader, you could work with them to create and assign out documentation that they particularly own and create and have governance around. That would be my end goal. But for each of these clients in these particular scenarios, I'd led from the front and created the documentation to start. But then in my larger client, I handed off the responsibility for maintaining this documentation to my specific team leaders that owned those areas.
Mandy Hornaday: So a couple tips on documentation updating. So for some of the earlier stage companies that are still trying to figure out product market fit, their startups, they're learning every day. Frankly, I would be updating your marketing brain documentation pretty frequently. I personally set up a scheduled task to run weekly to start when I'm taking on a new client because I'm learning so much during the intake. There's so many different calls and meetings and new information that I'm learning at a great speed. And so early on, I am doing the work on a weekly or even bi-weekly basis to make sure that the brain is getting properly updated and reflecting the true state of the business. Whereas with some of my larger clients, once I get that information right and it's in there, it's pretty locked in and really only needs to be reviewed, you know, every six months or so.
Mandy Hornaday: So two final things I'll encourage you to really think about if and as you start your own marketing brain. And the first one is start with where your biggest pain and friction in your day to day is. Maybe it's your campaign strategy or your playbook. Maybe it's the quality of work that your team is doing. Maybe it's the fact that the work is inconsistent. Maybe it's that you're turning down new clients because you don't feel confident in being able to deliver. There could be a myriad of different things. And I would just say, choose one problem to fix within your team or within your client and start there.
Mandy Hornaday: And last but not least, don't forget to activate this information within your organization. You can do so much once you have this strategic core documented. You can build campaign strategy partners. You can build go-to-market onboarding partners. You can build sales enablement and RFP support partners, right? Don't forget to get creative around solving your bigger problems within your go-to-market teams, leveraging this documentation.
Mandy Hornaday: All right. I hope there were some tips in here that got you inspired to create your own. And if you'd love to learn more about building your marketing brain, remember, this is only one part of the broader CMO operating system of how you can leverage AI to run your function at scale. And I'm inviting senior marketing leaders like you to join a founding cohort to build together as a community. Doors officially close September 30th. I'll link to more information in the show notes, and I'd love to have you there. All right, everybody. As always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
