Abbott Elementary: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Heartfelt TV Series with Senior Director of Brand & Digital Marketing at Collibra, Victoria Bowman

You may not think of people at work as your community, but they are. 

And when you build strong relationships with your community, you get more done. It’s more creative. It’s more resourceful. The results are just better.

That’s one of the things we’re talking about today with the help of our special guest, Senior Director of Brand & Digital Marketing at Collibra, Victoria Bowman.

Together, we take marketing lessons from Abbott Elementary, including partnering up with your coworkers, showing that you understand your audience, and testing your ideas before investing in them.

About our guest, Victoria Bowman

Victoria Bowman is an accomplished marketing leader with extensive experience building brands and accelerating growth in fast-paced award-winning companies, including Collibra, MITRE and Dell Technologies.

She is Senior Director of Brand and Digital Marketing at Collibra, the leading data intelligence platform. Her team includes Brand and Creative, Digital & Websites, Social Media, Community and Marketing Operations. Victoria fosters a strong culture of trust and collaboration on her team, empowering impactful cross-functional work on campaigns, events, website optimization, thought leadership programs and evolution of the brand. Collibra was recently recognized with wins in multiple categories from both the MarCom Awards and Communicator Awards.

At MITRE, a nonprofit which performs R&D on behalf of the federal government as well as industry partners, Victoria helped Strategic Communications navigate proper brand marketing in an organization dating back to 1958. Her primary focus was on relaunching mitre.org with a design system refresh and 90 net-new pages of concise content, as well as developing the employer brand and deploying high-impact campaigns to talent acquisition targets.

As Director of Brand Marketing at Dell Boomi, a SaaS company within Dell Technologies, Victoria built and led large cross-functional teams of creatives and developers, relaunched the corporate website twice during her tenure, rebranded the company, and created infrastructure and improved processes that helped Dell Boomi to scale. These strategies enabled growth initiatives and lead-generating campaigns that resulted in direct, measurable business impact.

Prior to working in tech / SaaS, Victoria held leadership roles in consumer packaged goods and online retail organizations. In those positions, she created innovative visual communications and marketing campaign strategies that effectively engaged B2B/B2C channels, planned and executed large events, expanded omnichannel brand awareness, and directly increased sales and customer retention.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Abbott Elementary:

• Partner up. Don’t feel like you have to operate alone. Working collaboratively with others results in a more thoughtful, creative, and unique outcome. Victoria says, “Relationships are crucial to your success. All of the characters on Abbott Elementary really rely on each other. And they've built trust by learning across generations and different backgrounds. And I think that culture of trust really is what fosters great partnership and creativity and innovation. Fostering connections and gaining that shared understanding and having mutual support is important, and the element of discovery that comes from all of those shared experiences.”
• Show that you understand your audience. Appeal to their values, concerns, frustrations and priorities. That’s when content “clicks” for them and you create an emotional bond. Victoria says, “Show that you understand and speak to and meet the needs of your audience. Exemplify that in your marketing, that you understand their problems, you understand their needs, that you are listening, that you're accessible.”
• Test. Try out new marketing strategies before really investing in them. Victoria says, “Be entrepreneurial. Try out new things. Experiment and test and improve the benefit before you sink budget and resources into something. That’s how new activities can turn into successful programs. Never lose that sense of curiosity and that entrepreneurial approach.”

Quotes

*”To be successful at content marketing, you cannot work in silos. It takes a village to do B2B marketing well, and that means keeping the communication flowing and building trust and having that open collaboration.”

*”Bring your whole self to work; your creativity, your resilience and humor. You really, as a leader, should set an example of how to be open and curious and flexible and authentic because it is contagious and it will help you to build an amazing culture on your team.”

*”Experiment often. Learn from what works and what doesn't work and keep iterating. Model for people what it looks like to learn from failures and keep moving forward with optimism and lessons learned. So make sure you celebrate the wins that you recognize the great work and you build on it.  

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Victoria Bowman, Senior Director of Brand & Digital Marketing at Collibra

[5:49] About the creation of Abbott Elementary

[9:49] Marketing Lessons from Abbott Elementary

[23:34] The Power of Different Perspectives

[24:20] Importance of Setting in Storytelling

[24:43] Building Community and Brand Consistency

[25:29] Content Strategy and Customer Engagement

[28:45] Collaborative Marketing Efforts

[35:51] Measuring Content ROI

[42:12] Careers in Data Series

[43:44] Victoria’s Upcoming Projects

Links

Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn

Learn more about Collibra

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. 

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. 

Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.