Ben Ard (00:00.77)
Make sure everything's working real quick before I kick it off. OK, recording there, recording there, and recording there. Perfect. OK. Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Becca. Becca, welcome to the show.
Beka Wueste (00:19.37)
Thank you for having me.
Ben Ard (00:21.366)
Yeah, Becca, I'm excited. This is going to be a ton of fun. And I'm actually like super jealous of your background. I think it's a really cool story and I am jealous of all the cool things you do. So maybe before we dive into the subject, if you don't mind sharing a little bit about your background, who you are, all that kind of fun stuff, I think it'd be great for the audience to get to know you.
Beka Wueste (00:42.356)
happy to. So I am currently the director of brand and marketing at integrated data services, which is a government consulting firm. But my origin story is a little atypical for someone in government contracting. I started at a school for art history. I was going to go for studio art, but I went for art history. It seemed more practical. And during the course of that took some classes that involve digital studies for websites and graphic design and writing and
I ended up getting into a career for digital strategy, which evolved into full-time marketing. So it's been a lot of learning along the way, and I've gotten to work with brands from nonprofits to foundations to industry and federal civilian defense and intelligence community. So I've kind of gotten to see different parts of the marketing world through my career and always build a little on what I learned at the last one.
Ben Ard (01:39.714)
Very cool. Plus, Becca is also a published author and artist and all sorts of really cool things. I'm super excited to have this conversation. So again, Becca, thank you for taking the time.
Beka Wueste (01:52.167)
Thank you, I'm excited too.
Ben Ard (01:54.456)
So Becca, what we decided to talk about today is putting people at the center of brand storytelling. Now, when we were talking before we hit record, you mentioned this really cool phrase that I'm really liking, people content equals brand content. Can you maybe explain what that means and what that really looks like to a degree?
Beka Wueste (02:16.486)
Absolutely. This is something that I am extremely passionate about and anyone who's worked with me knows that I like to center the storytelling on the people. And it's because brands rely on people to succeed and to last. When you think about why a brand stays for the long term, it's because of the people behind the scenes that are creating the products or services, the people who are coming up with the ideas, doing the implementations.
the people who are selling and the people who are building and maintaining relationships and serving the customers, a brand can't exist in a vacuum. A brand can't exist without people. You always have to have people who are working to enhance that brand over time. any brand that's been around for any significant sustained period of time, that's the result of a concentrated and sustained effort from multiple people over time. And that's again been true in every industry that I've worked in. So,
for me to tell the story of a brand only in terms of its outputs or deliverables and not the people is missing a large portion of that brand story. And I've spent the last six years working in government contracting, which I know people don't always think of it in terms of that people content and people focus content. think about, know, maybe it's even a drier topic of what is your deliverable and what kind of contracts do you work on? But
In government contracting, the brand employees sit side by side with the customers on site, especially federal civilian projects, defense projects, the people at your brand, on your contracting team, they become embedded with the customer. And so they are the face of your brand every single day. And putting marketing content around them is really just formalizing the role they already exist in.
Ben Ard (04:07.768)
I love that. Plus it feels like there's a lot of momentum, especially in the day and age of AI, to show the people that make up a company who are doing the work, showing the humanity and the people behind the brand. And that is really highly accepted nowadays to the point where people almost don't say much from the perspective of the brand. It's usually the people that come from behind it. But Becca, when it comes to this,
Why do you think the people focused content resonates more than the brand first messaging? Like, why do you think it's a better pathway?
Beka Wueste (04:43.998)
I think there's two big reasons that have always been true but are more relevant today. And the first is making a brand more visible through people. And then the second is building trust. So for the first part, making the brand more visible, especially if you're at a company like mine, which is in the technology space, it feels like there's new brands popping up every night. There are always new brands and they have similar messaging, they're competing for the same eyes and
Ben Ard (05:06.456)
Yep.
Beka Wueste (05:12.466)
A lot of times it's difficult to sort through all of them and you have all of these new brands popping up trying to get as much attention as they can and they're barraging people with messaging. So it's hard for people who don't know your brand to notice you or to care or to get their attention. But if they see a face that they're familiar with, so maybe it's someone they've worked with or they've heard of or they want to work with or it's a mutual acquaintance they've met at an industry event before.
Seeing that person's face pop up associated with that brand makes them pause and it makes them find out a little bit more about what that brand is. This is true for me. If I see a new brand, I think, okay, but then if I see that a friend of mine or a colleague of mine is now working at that brand, then I'm interested. It sticks in my mind a little more and it raises that awareness. But beyond just raising awareness, I think one of the things that people-centered content is very effective at is building trust.
We all know that trust is very low when it comes to a brand, whether you're talking B2B or B2C. Brands always gonna say the best things about itself, So of course there's going to be a little skepticism on the part of the consumer, again, whether it's an individual consumer or a business, because they know the brand's positioning itself. But when you are evaluating whether you wanna go with a brand, it's helpful to know what the real people who have firsthand experience have to say about it. And this is something that all of us do.
Ben Ard (06:19.928)
Mm-hmm.
Beka Wueste (06:40.38)
If you're going to buy a product, you like to read reviews from the people who've used it. Why did it work? Why did they like it? Is it better than something else? If you're interviewing for a job, you probably go to job sites to see what does this company do for its employees? Is this a place that I want to be? And when you're reading reviews from real users, it does influence your decision-making because even if you're not thinking as consciously,
Part of you knows someone is willing to associate their reputation with this brand. And that's to me more compelling than just a brand saying, we can do something well. And when you have a customer say that a brand has delivered on their promise or an employee say, this brand has taken care of me, it speaks volumes on such a specific and human level that's so much more convincing than vague brand promotional copy. And I think right now it's especially important because there is an overwhelming amount.
of just the volume of marketing material people receive every day from every channel that they're on. And I think people want good news and they want to see positive outcomes and people focused content gives them that.
Ben Ard (07:46.668)
And I love that. love so many of those things that you talked about, especially when you're talking about the reviews and the real people. know there's so many times where I'll see a brand talk about free returns or some kind of promise. But if I can read any kind of a testimonial from a customer who had a bad experience, needed to send something back and then got something and they were easy to work with immediately. I trust that brand and I feel like that that's authentic. So I think there's so much to that.
And I'm a big believer in stories and examples. So Becca, any chance you have any stories or examples when a people-centered piece really connected with an audience?
Beka Wueste (08:24.372)
Yeah, I can think of a few examples that I've worked on over the years, especially when you are looking at brands that have maybe a more difficult story to tell or a complex story to tell. think when you can take something from this large scale story and make it specific to one person, it really does make it easier for customers to relate to. So some of the people focused campaigns that I worked on at my last organization, which was also government contracting, one was an academic spotlight series about the
partnership between industry and academia. And that's not necessarily something that's selling the product, right? You're not going to read an article and then click, all right, now I'm gonna buy $100,000 worth of software licenses at the end of it. That's not what the people-focused content is doing. But what it did in one case was it highlighted a specific university that we were working with who had non-traditional students. Most of them were either recently retired military veterans, active reservists, or their spouses.
Ben Ard (09:07.064)
Yeah.
Beka Wueste (09:24.512)
So these were people who had very non-traditional paths and high barriers to entry for higher education. And so our company gave them projects to work on, real actual client work to work on during the year, gave them licenses. And when it came time to sort of tell this story, I actually spoke to a specific student and a specific professor and said, what did this mean to you? What has this done for you? And that story did so well and got so much attention because it wasn't just saying, hey, we have good products.
Our products and our commitment to our products and the commitment to the future of the industry resulted in this partnership, which means that this person for the first time in his life felt like he was being treated like a priority student and not like he was some sort of hassle who had to be catered to because of his non-traditional schedule. So that was one that did really well. And it wasn't with the cell in mind. It was about the storytelling. Another one is our internship series at my previous organization.
Every summer I assigned the interns a capstone article and they had to write what they learned because I don't think an internship should just be labor for the organization. It should be beneficial to the intern. I've had really great internships and I want to pass that on. And those stories always did so well. We got so much engagement in their interaction. And it's because it wasn't us saying, we are good at what we do. It was the students saying, here's the breadth of things that I learned, which shows, you know, the variety of things that our organization could do.
Ben Ard (10:32.885)
Yeah, absolutely.
Beka Wueste (10:53.64)
It also focused on the people who are full-time employees when the students would say, I learned so much from my mentor on contracts or from my mentor on technology. And the students had this enthusiasm that they weren't required to have. They weren't full-time employees. A lot of them were going back to their schools. So they didn't have a personal vested requirement to be positive. But when they were fusive, it was contagious. And it told a better story about the brand. And again,
wasn't a sale at the end of it, but it was part of that long-term strategy of saying who we are and what we do. And I think one of the other ones that I really, really enjoyed was a spotlight on an engineer who'd been doing aerospace engineering for decades. And he talked about the progression of projects he had worked on and gotten to nurture over the decades.
People love progress stories. They like to see before and afters. They like to see outcomes. And when you can have someone say, this is where I started, this is where I was from, and it's because I was with this brand the entire time, that speaks more about the brand than the brand saying, our employees like us. It's just more believable. So I'm really excited to be bringing that to my new role at Integrated Data Services. And at IDS, we serve primarily Department of Defense and federal civilian customers.
One that I'm really excited about launching this month is our Veterans Day campaign, which has turned into a Veterans Month campaign. We have so many veterans on our staff that we're going to be doing a series of interview articles highlighting one veteran per day, just learning about what motivated them to serve, what leadership lessons they learned from their service, how it helps them help our customers, and also asking them what their advice is for people who are planning that transition from service to the civilian workforce.
As the responses came in, I was really inspired. And again, this isn't selling our product. This is about the people. But for me, this is, I'm so excited about this campaign.
Ben Ard (12:51.136)
I love that. And I think a lot of marketers are all a hundred percent on board with telling the right stories, talking to your customers, talking to your employees. But when it comes to the end of the day, and I'm sure you felt this pressure before, and this is kind of a curve ball question, so I apologize. There's always that immediate pressure to perform and hit metrics today. And I'm curious how you balance those and how you really prove the value of that content.
And the good that it does with really like the, pay-per-click ads or the short-term content that's meant to just drive conversions today. How do you balance that and make sure that this kind of content really shines, even though like there are stresses on marketers to hit performance goals this month.
Beka Wueste (13:41.546)
Some of that really is having to advocate for the people first content and educate and manage the expectations for what the content can do. Like I said, people aren't reading a story about someone and then immediately clicking by. It's explaining to people that you can measure the effectiveness of this content through different metrics than just your sales and revenue increasing. You're not gonna measure the effectiveness of this through your revenue. You're gonna measure the effectiveness through how does this begin someone's journey?
Did this tap into one of our employees networks for people who previously weren't aware of us, but because we spotlighted that employee, we saw an increase in engagement. Did this particular series of articles result in more industry reaching out to us? It's those more difficult to measure metrics that are important to share with your leadership and.
It's always reminding people that marketing isn't just one single facet. You can't just do one tactic. You have to be doing that long-term foundation building, which people building content does, or people focused content does, while you're also working on those short-term timely campaigns. So, you know, I've been working on this Veterans Day campaign, but at the same time, we have a lot going on with our product releases that's short-term. So I've got the press release lined up for that. It's really having to plan and manage your content.
and be aware for yourself that you're not going to see quick results from everything you do and learning how to communicate that with your leadership so that they understand and they trust. And I'm lucky I've worked for a leader who understands the value of the people-focused content and has seen the engagement metrics and those non-tangible, non-measurable factors, like going to a conference and saying, I saw one of your team members on LinkedIn the other day highlighted for XYZ, that kind of word of mouth.
brand awareness and recognition is difficult to measure and prove, but it is there and it's more easily accomplished with the people-focused content. So it is a balancing act for sure. it's not for the impatient of us, but it's worth it.
Ben Ard (15:48.654)
Absolutely, I love that. Well, Becca, these episodes are short and sweet so everyone can get back to their daily activities and doing their marketing. This has been amazing. I really do appreciate the insights, the stories, the examples, and really just the advocacy for putting people at the center of your brand storytelling. For anyone listening to this episode who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Beka Wueste (16:17.13)
They can find me on LinkedIn and they can connect with me there. I'm happy to connect and discuss ideas and especially if it's about people, people-focused content, before and afters, case studies, anything that's gonna help you tell your story, I'm happy to discuss. So please feel free to reach out to me.
Ben Ard (16:35.746)
Amazing and for anyone listening scroll down to the show notes. You will find all the Bekah's information right there Becca again. Thank you so much for the time and insights day. Really appreciate it
Beka Wueste (16:46.794)
Thank you so much. really enjoyed talking with you and I hope something was helpful for someone during this episode.
Ben Ard (16:54.2)
Perfect, love it.
