Kim Harrison, a freelance content marketing strategist and author, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to talk about asking the right questions to find your target demographic, why she has such a deep love for story telling, and how marketing extends after the product has been sold. Kim shares her unique experiences with solving urgently painful problems that customers are experiencing and subsequently building a relationship with those customers that allows her to solve more pain points down the line. About KimKim is a professional storyteller focused on strategic communications. She translates complex ideas into compelling narratives, helping teams share their perspectives. She enjoys building impactful stories, and using a range of mediums and channels to reach specific audiences.For 10+ years Kim has worked closely with teams focused on big data and developer tooling. They have brought new methodologies forward, impacted the language used to describe technologies, and even established new industry categories.Links Referenced:Personal/Company website: https://www.kimber.kim/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberh/Twitter: https://twitter.com/kittyriotTranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I’m Corey Quinn. One of the unpleasant-to-some-folk realizations that people sometimes have is, “Wait a minute. Corey, you’ve been doing marketing all this time.” To which the only response I can come up with is a slightly more professional version of, “Well, duh.” And I think that’s because people misunderstand what marketing is and what it means. Here to talk about that, and presumably other things as well, is Kim Harrison, a freelance content marketing strategist. Kim, thank you for agreeing to listen to me.Kim: [laugh] Thank you for having me, Corey. It’s great connecting with you today.Corey: You’ve worked at a number of different places over the course of your career, the joys of freelancing. You have periodically been involved in getting folks from the companies at which you’ve been working onto this show, but it’s sort of the ‘always a bridesmaid, never a bride’ type of philosophy. You were somewhat surprised when I reached out and said, “Hey, why don’t you come on the show yourself?” Which is always the sign it’s going to be a fascinating episode because some of the most valuable conversations that I find I have here are with people who don’t think at first that they have much to say. And then I love proving them wrong. But you’re in marketing. Presumably, you have many things to say.Kim: [laugh] It’s funny, you say that I feel like in marketing, we’re always behind the scenes, we are the ones building and crafting the image, and bringing that story forward of, who is this? What is this company? What is this product? What do they do? Why should I care about it? And, “Wow, those are amazing stickers. I want five of them, please.” So, I’m kind of used to being behind the curtain rather than in the foreground talking about what I do.Corey: People tend to hate marketing, especially developers, when you talk to them, but when you really drill down into it, it’s not marketing that they hate. It is, on some level, a marketing straw man—or straw person, whatever the current term of art is—because they think of the experience through the lens of the worst examples of it. And everyone who has been in the industry for five minutes knows what I’m talking about. Billboards that make no sense where a company spent $20 million on an ad buy and seven bucks over the lunch counter trying to figure out what to say once you have all of that attention, or bad