Heike Young (Microsoft) on Building Trust and Influence With Employee-Led Content

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Jun 3, 2025

Heike Young, Head of Content at Microsoft Advertising, shares her wealth of experience in enterprise content marketing. She emphasizes the importance of shifting perspectives over just metrics in measuring success. Heike discusses how her team prioritizes employee-led content, fostering creativity beyond traditional brand publishing. She also explains the collaborative nature of content, creative, and marketing ops at Microsoft, and how she built a scalable system with innovative tools to enhance engagement and influence.

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ANECDOTE

Heike Young's Career Journey

Heike Young’s career started in book publishing but pivoted to social and content marketing for immediacy.
She grew through roles at ExactTarget and Salesforce before joining Microsoft Advertising.

INSIGHT

Content Role Focus at Microsoft

Content at Microsoft Advertising focuses on shifting audience perspectives through bold, spicy POVs.
The aim is influence in mid and bottom funnel, not just increasing reach with top funnel awareness.

INSIGHT

Four Wheels Framework

The "four wheels of the car" framework unites content, creative, product marketing, and campaigns.
Integrating these functions deeply ensures strategic and operational success in content programs.

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See how Heike Young, Head of Content, Social & Integrated Marketing at Microsoft Advertising nails enterprise content. In this episode, Heike explains why she measures success by shifted perspectives, not just metrics, and how her team prioritizes influence over reach.

She breaks down how content, creative, and marketing ops work together at Microsoft, and why empowering employees as content creators beats traditional brand-first publishing. You’ll learn how she built a scalable system using pre-approved decks, self-serve video tools, and bold POVs aimed at the mid and bottom funnel.

👤 About Our Guest: Heike Young

Heike Young has built and led content teams at Salesforce and now Microsoft Advertising, where she oversees global blogs, YouTube, employee advocacy, and integrated campaigns. Her approach is rooted in operational rigor, deep cross-team alignment, and a belief that content’s true job is to change how audiences think. Heike’s frameworks help enterprise content leaders cut through silos, shift team roles toward analytics and operations, and unlock the creative power of employee voices, making her a go-to resource for anyone navigating the complexities of large-scale content.

📻 About This Season of the Animalz Podcast: Enterprise Content Marketing

This season on the Animalz Podcast, we’re pulling back the corporate curtain to show you how the largest, most complex B2B SaaS teams actually get content out the door. Our mission: demystify these hidden machines and reveal what it really takes to run content at scale.

Hear from content leaders of some of the biggest names in SaaS sharing the systems they've built, the battles they've fought, and the lessons they've learned along the way.

⏳ Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction: Why enterprise content engines need new rules
02:09 – Heike’s career path: From ExactTarget to Salesforce to Microsoft Advertising
06:56 – Building research-driven content programs and the “content revolution” framework
08:41 – What is Microsoft Advertising? (Bing, Copilot, Xbox, Activision) and the scope of the content engine
12:49 – “Changing minds” as the north star for content—not just performance metrics
13:51 – Why “spicy POV” content wins the mid- and bottom-funnel
18:06 – The “four wheels of the car”: Aligning content, creative, product marketing, and demand gen
20:49 – Turning product marketing into a content ally (using ICP for planning)
22:55 – Why content teams must own their analytics (and avoid dashboard overload)
23:55 – Evolving content roles: Why operations and analytics matter more than copywriting
28:13 – Employee creators vs. brand channels: Empowering real voices for distribution
32:33 – Why LinkedIn’s algorithm favors people over brands (and what to do about it)
34:47 – Tools and workflows for modern video content (CapCut, LinkTok Guide)
40:38 – Operationalizing authenticity: Letting creators show their real voices

🌐 Mentioned Links & Resources

Microsoft Advertising / MAI (Microsoft AI) (00:08:41): The business unit Heike leads, including Bing, Copilot ads, Xbox, and Activision inventory.
Mustafa Suleyman TED Talk on AI (00:08:41): Heike’s recommended resource for understanding the future of AI.
Copilot (00:08:41): Microsoft’s generative AI experience, central to their ad strategy.
Salesforce (00:06:56): Where Heike built research-driven content programs and led the Trailblazer community.
ExactTarget (00:06:12): Heike’s first content marketing role, later acquired by Salesforce.
Trailblazer Program & Dreamforce (00:06:56): Salesforce’s community and flagship event, models for content-driven marketing.
Content Marketing World (conference) (00:14:41): Where Heike’s org-chart slides on content structure drew industry attention.
Grammarly (00:23:55): Writing assistant that frees up content teams to focus on analytics.

Connect with Heike Young to follow her latest content strategies, frameworks, and employee advocacy experiments.

💡 Enjoyed this conversation? Subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, or head over to Animalz Podcast. You can also follow us on Xor LinkedIn.