Ep 36 | The Story behind Lately Inc and the Growing need for Social Media Management Platforms: a chat with co-Founder and CEO Kate Bradley Chernis

In this episode, we had Kate Bradley Chernis talk about the inspiration behind Lately Inc and the latest social media marketing trends that are prevalent in the B2B and Tech marketing domain. 

About Kate and Lately Inc:

Kate Bradley Chernis is the Founder & CEO of Lately, an AI-powered marketing dashboard that helps reinvent marketing processes to give individual marketers the power to create and scale smarter and more consistent messaging. 

Kate initially created the idea for Lately out of spreadsheets for her then-client, Walmart. Well, not just Walmart but also tens of thousands of local, small business and nonprofit affiliates who were all using her spreadsheet system – because they all had the same problems – lack of coordination, widespread redundancies, no proper visibility and no organization. 

Prior to starting Lately, Kate served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. 

Top ten takeaways from the episode:

1.”I was a rock and roll DJ in another life!”

2. “It was during a trying time and week that I met some Angel Investors who loved me and my idea and wanted to give me the initial fund to start this!”

3. “What was so interesting with the Walmart project is that what I created for them helped other businesses with the same kind of marketing challenges.”

4. “The spreadsheet system I created became a map for marketers. Because, in a big way, marketers have to do alot of the same thing again and again.”

5. “As social engagement tools go,  tools like Lately literally help curate and scale social media marketing in minutes. The demand for social engagement will always be there because its a channel that can help marketers with revenue. So optimizing social channels enables that effort in many ways.”

6. “While we are an AI-powered company, one of the things we often tell our customers is that our goal with AI is to help marketers with their efforts, but at the same time we tell them that they cannot remove the human element from their writing when marketing anything.” 

7. “It is important to retain one-to-one elements of personalization and communication.”

8. “About 80% of what an external agency can do is what a social engagement tool can help small and medium businesses do in half the time.”

9. “Marketers now have to say the same thing differently, in different ways across multiple channels. That’s the biggest challenge today.”

10. “People spend hours writing long form content. But that content needs to be re-purposed and re-shared many times after that, that’s one of the main purposes of social media engagement tools like Lately Inc – to help marketers scale.”

About the podcast

Sunny Side Up is a series of 15-minute podcasts. Leaders and innovators share what they’ve learned in the B2B tech sector on topics related to marketing, product management, sales, and leadership.