I’ve talked to many freelancers who started in-house and then embarked on their own journey, but Lindsay McGuire did the opposite.
Lindsay started her career as a journalist freelancing in women’s lifestyle content. After five years, she grew tired of the self-employed hustle and went in-house with the largest credit union in Alabama. As the company’s first digital content SEO specialist, Lindsay was responsible for launching its blog, creating a digital content strategy, and more.
From there, she worked at United Way before landing in tech. Today, Lindsay is the Associate Director of Content and Campaigns at Goldcast, where she oversees every type of content the company produces, from blogs and long-form content to small- and large-scale virtual events, videos, and everything in between.
Learning to Run Engaging Virtual Events
As a marketing leader for a top events platform, Lindsay had to quickly get comfortable hosting virtual events — despite having zero background in it. She credits her prior podcasting experience with helping ease the transition.
“It’s a very similar world to live in as far as project management skills and knowing what you need episode to episode,” she says. “It gave me a great foundation to build upon.”
However, podcasting and events are definitely not a 1:1 trade. Podcasts are not live, and you can edit them after recording — something you can’t do if you slip up at a live event. With audiences that number in the thousands, Lindsay finally understood the pressure her event friends were always talking about!
“The challenge of every event marketer is how to keep your audience engaged,” Lindsay explains. “My biggest learning has been to test new things and have a platform that allows you to run engagement plays. Being able to use the chat, share docs, run live polls, and have interactive engagement moments for people makes it feel like I’m not just spewing info at people. That’s boring. Events shouldn’t be a one-way street.”
Flexibility is also key. You can prepare and rehearse all day, every day — and you do need to do your due diligence to be prepared — but just know that something will probably go off course. Your tech might glitch, your guest may not show up, someone might say something awful in the chat — or worse! The more you embrace that and roll with it, the better. Maintaining your mood, motivation, and momentum in the face of those obstacles will make you a better event marketer.
AI Is Making Marketers’ Lives Easier and Harder
Lindsay’s excited that AI allows marketers to do things we’ve only dreamt of in the past due to bandwidth, budget, or resource constraints — but she’s also realistic about it.
“I want people to see the power of AI. AI is making us less limited in our scopes, ideas, and creativity. But it’s not going to come in and do everything for us. It needs a wrangler. It needs a trainer. It needs a leader. And that is who marketers are! That is our role.”
While AI is making it a lot more feasible to get many things done, Lindsay admits there are ways it’s made life harder. “The market is flooded across all channels, content types, campaigns, and motions,” Lindsay emphasizes. “I think the crux of it is: Yes, you can do a lot with AI. You also have to understand the power this gives you and the cliffs you might fall off if you use it incorrectly.”
Marketers must be mindful to maintain quality, consistency, and trust with their audiences as they scale. “No one needs to use AI to create 1,000 directory pages or definition pages,” she points out. “We’ve seen the bad uses of AI, and I’m hopeful that as we progress, these poor experiences will minimize.”
Lindsay likens the current AI landscape to SEO. Yes, there will always be people employing questionable SEO practices that might lead to economies of scale, but those strategies will also backfire at some point. She sees the same thing happening with AI over time as things naturally course correct.
The Shift to Video-First Content
The shift to video is happening. Even LinkedIn is beta testing a video lab and adding a TikTok-style, endless scroll feed.
People who capitalize on video now and find the right AI and workflows to make video production easier will come out on top. “At some point in time, content marketing became strictly blog posts. I think we’re finally at the next shift of content where we’re beginning to think video-first instead.”
Lindsay’s approach to creating content that can reach those who prefer video or text or audio is to opt for multimodal content — i.e., content that includes all three! “Then you don’t have to pick and choose which audience to address,” Lindsay states. “You can use all the assets together, and people can plug and play. You’re still getting your message across, but you’re able to present it in a way that people prefer to consume.”
One place to find goldmines of video content? Webinars, conferences, and summits! Use that to fuel your content strategy and repurpose those videos into social media campaigns, blog posts, long-form content, and other assets. For example, after Goldcast’s AI Summit, they turned the five-session summit into an ebook that included video snippets, quotes, and imagery.
Returning to Work as a Birthing Parent
Lindsay recently returned to Goldcast after her second maternity leave. She was surprised to find this time around was more difficult than the first.
“I thought it would be easier, and it was not,” Lindsay recalls. “I think that’s a misconception a lot of people have. In retrospect, I’m a little bit older now. I also already have one kid, which has a lot of impact on your energy, brain space, and lifestyle. Even though this is my second time having a baby, it’s the first time I’m doing this because I’ve never had a baby and a toddler.”
Her job is also different than it was the last time. Working at a tech startup like Goldcast, things move fast. Lindsay returned to work and was met with a product and positioning very different from the ones she left. Her priorities had drastically changed, even though she was only gone for a few months.
After her first maternity leave, the SVP of Marketing at Lindsay’s former company reminded her to give herself grace. She is trying hard to remember that this go round. “This is hard,” she admits. “Being a woman in the workplace is hard, regardless of whether or not you have kids. Then, you add in the intricacies of being a working parent.
“My body is physically falling apart, my hormones are out of whack, my emotions are all over the place, and you can try to push it aside or push through it. Lately, I’ve been realizing that I can’t push through as much anymore. I need to be realistic about what things look like going forward. I need to find my champions who will remind me to take a step back and have that grace for myself.”
