You Have to Do Everything: A Conversation with Justyna Dzikowska

Justyna Dzikowska is the head of marketing at Brand24, where she leads a team driving 70,000 unique visitors a month through organic content, SEO, partnerships, and product marketing. She has been in marketing for over 13 years, working with companies like Packhelp and Ogilvy, testing strategies across B2B, SaaS, and tech. Her hard take is simple: marketing works when you focus on ROI, not vanity metrics, and when you double down on what is working rather than what is trendy.

What makes Justyna worth listening to is that she runs marketing inside a company literally built on tracking brand mentions, so she lives in the data. This conversation is about cutting through the noise, why most companies waste budget on the wrong things, how to build content that drives revenue, and why the honest answer to "which channel?" is usually "all of them."

ROI over vanity, and monitor the trend

Justyna is best known for saying content is king, but she is quick to update it: it only works when you look at ROI. She learned that the hard way, writing blog posts that got thousands of views from exactly the wrong people, personas who would never buy. The metric she now watches most is the trend, because things change so fast that you cannot skip the next platform every other week and call that a strategy. Companies said they did not need TikTok because they were B2B, and now they say they do not need to think about LLMs because their audience is not there.

She is clear-eyed that ignoring LLMs is justified by today's data, since traffic from them is still small in most Google Analytics dashboards. But the trend is growing roughly tenfold month over month, so the real question is where it will be next year. Her point is that a good marketer stays just ahead of the curve. You do not debate the ethics of a platform, you do your job and go where the eyeballs are, checking each new trend for relevance and speed of change, because that constant monitoring is now the job for the rest of our careers.

Human stories, not feature pitches

Making analytics and data platforms interesting is hard, but Justyna's approach is the same everywhere: start with people, their challenges, and their motivations, not the product. Brand24 runs with 12 to 15 personas, which she admits sounds ridiculous and which nobody remembers by name, but that is not the point. The variations capture genuinely different pressures. A one-person startup marketer and a corporate marketer can share the same motivation ("I have a family to feed and I need results by Monday"), while two people in the same company can have wildly different drives, from impressing a boss to fighting a specific competitor.

Those human stories are what make content land, which is why almost every blog post starts with a character in the middle of the narrative rather than "here is our dashboard, buy it today." She ties this to a deeper truth she returns to later: humans built society by exchanging stories, so we are wired to listen to them, but nobody wants to hear the story of a new feature and how it works. So instead of "our tool measures this," Brand24 tells the story of how a company like Patagonia ran a campaign, and lets the tool be the thing that measured it.

SEO authority is everything that isn't SEO

Brand24's domain rating is around 80, which is enormous, and Justyna's answer for how you build that authority is deliberately provocative: everything that is not SEO. Companies build SEO teams that focus on domain rating and architecture, and when something is not working, it is usually the young, brave person in the room who says "maybe it's brand awareness, maybe we need more social." She thinks that person is right. You do not get the exposure and the links without partnerships, relationships, and being on the right meetups and conferences.

This is where her "do everything" thesis gets nuanced. Brand24's written strategy focuses on organic traffic because the data shows it delivers the best-quality leads per the ROI, which technically means skipping social, PR, and influencers as line items. But that is not how it works in practice, because a terrific link can come from a relationship, a newsletter, or a meme dropped on TikTok, not from a perfectly optimized 10,000-character article. So you have to be everywhere and do everything, because the channels feed each other even when only one is your named priority.

The algorithm tax and the boost myth

Justyna is honest about a frustration many content creators share: you can produce perfect, unique, first-to-market content, and the algorithm still hates it, because it also expects you to post every day. She hates advising smaller businesses to create 40 to 60 percent mediocre content just to feed the algorithm, calling it unsustainable, but for now the pragmatic move is often to embrace it, stay current with the tweaks, and pray your great content gets noticed. The one hopeful shift is LLMs, which will search for genuinely unique data and can surface the first, original source even when the traditional algorithm buries it, an advantage Brand24 has because it can generate its own data with the platform.

She is equally sharp about the biggest myth companies still waste money on: if your organic content is not working, you need to pay to boost it. She admits she falls into this logic herself and hates it, because Google's algorithm can detect that you have a budget and will want you to spend more, which sounds paranoid but is what marketers observe. It is a hard message to sell to leadership, but her instinct is that sometimes the honest answer is that you should not boost, you should fix the content or the targeting.

Curiosity is the whole job

Ask Justyna what makes a good marketer and the answer is curiosity, an openness to do things you have never done and are not naturally drawn to. She jokes that marketing is a perfect job for people with a bit of ADHD, because you are interested in everything, do it now, forget it, come back in three months and improve it. But she balances that with the reality that some roles reward deep, long-term focus on one domain, so the hire depends on matching the person to the position. She tries to place people where their genuine interest lives, because work is best when you do what you like.

Her hiring red flags are pointed. A "no-go zone" ("I never learned Google Analytics because it's boring") is nearly disqualifying, and her favorite screening question is simply what the person last read. "I actually don't read" is, for a content marketer, deeply suspicious. She is also thoughtful about protecting creatives from burnout, checking in regularly on whether people still like what they do, because the mental-health toll of working in social media and content is now a C-level topic, not a footnote. And she practices what she preaches on her own career, publicly stating she is happy at Brand24 and does not want other offers, because she loves the product she used at every previous company.

Key takeaways

A few things worth keeping.

Watch the trend, not the vanity metric. ROI tells you what works; trend-monitoring tells you where the audience is going. LLM traffic is small now and growing tenfold a month, so act before it is obvious.

Tell human stories. People are wired for stories and allergic to feature pitches. Put a character and a motivation at the center, and let the product be what measured the outcome.

SEO authority comes from everything else. The best links come from partnerships, relationships, and being everywhere, not from one more perfectly optimized article. You have to do everything.

Beware the boost reflex. Paying to rescue underperforming organic content trains the algorithm to make you pay more. Sometimes the fix is the content, not the budget.

Hire for curiosity. The best marketers are interested in everything and willing to try what they are not drawn to. "I don't read" is a red flag for a content role.

Frameworks worth stealing

Persona variation, not persona minimalism

Do not collapse your audience into three tidy personas. Brand24 runs 12 to 15 because the same role carries genuinely different pressures and motivations, and content that names those human stakes lands where generic messaging does not. Nobody memorizes the names, but the variety shapes better content.

Story-first content

Start every piece with a person and a motivation, not the product. Instead of "our tool does X," tell the story of a real brand's campaign and let the product be the thing that measured it. This works even for dry, technical products, because humans are built to listen to stories.

Do everything, feed the priority

Pick a primary channel based on ROI, but do not silo it. The best links and reach for your organic priority often come from partnerships, newsletters, events, and social, so treat the other channels as feeders. "Do everything" is a restaurant with starters, mains, and desserts, not one dish.

The last-read hiring test

For content and marketing roles, ask what the person last read. A specific, enthusiastic answer signals the curiosity the job depends on, while "I don't really read" is a red flag for someone whose work relies on reading and writing.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Content works when you look at the ROI, not the views from the wrong people.

You're not gonna get exposure without partnerships and relationships. SEO authority is everything that isn't SEO.

Nobody wants to hear the story that a product has a new feature.

And the reframe on the "which channel" question.

We can't serve only one type of food unless we are a food truck.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. No prep, no warning. Here is how Justyna handled it.

Best advice you've ever received? Don't worry. Easier said than done.

Advice you ignored or wish you had listened to? If you feel someone on the team is unhappy or not doing their best, act now instead of waiting months to talk about it.

What would you tell your younger self? Sleep more and eat better, though she is not sure she would be where she is without pouring her youthful energy into her career. She wants a world where that trade-off is not required.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Relevant positioning in the age of LLMs, which are far less transparent than Google was about how they rank and surface content.

Favorite spot? A modern Polish-fusion restaurant in Wrocław, now hard to book since it hit a ranking, where the dish names are familiar but the taste is a surprise.

Tool you can't live without? Besides Brand24, a Rzeszów-built tool that was recently acquired.

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Justyna Dzikowska is the head of marketing at Brand24, with over 13 years in B2B SaaS and tech marketing, and a lecturer at the University of Wrocław. Find her on LinkedIn or at brand24.com.