Marketing Trends

Bringing new people into your business is exciting and it’s important to get the right match, all the way down to someone who fits that stage of the company. Through experience building great teams in her career, Amanda Malko, now the CMO at G2, knows what to look for in job candidates. Going beyond assessing their ability to complete tasks and looking for a future team member who is right for this stage of your company. High-performance team building takes an added layer of thoughtfulness as she explains.“I look for people who are right for the stage of the business are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”Not everyone who’s good at working at a corporation is good at working in a startup environment, and the sooner you find that out, the better! In this episode, Malko, an expert in the world of martech, gives insight into how she thinks about testing new tools, and the way she determines usefulness. She shares great insight from personal experience about how to get the survey results you need to make the best choice for your business. Get a pen, and get ready to take some notes on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Over-Indexing on Immediately Gratifying Ad Spend to Your Detriment: Keep your marketing budget diversified across channels, resisting the temptation to over-index on the immediately gratifying or easy to measure. It is easy to get drawn into the depths of marketing analytics because that is important and essential to running a good marketing team.Every Detail, Down to Word Choice Impacts Survey Results: Direct communication with your customers is the best way to know what they want from you and your product or service. Running a useful and accurate survey is more complex than dropping some questions into a Google Form and blasting that out to your email list. Every word that you use in your questions, the way you order the questions, and the format you choose to allow your respondent to select will all impact the data that is generatedRetention of Customers is Essential for Growth - Don’t Over Invest in Acquisition: Especially as a new business or brand, it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle for new eyeballs. Even as a newer company, you should have already been thinking about what is going to keep people around. The value of a returning customer is the foundation for a strong business and for the growth of the company.Key Quotes:“We hear a lot about sales and marketing fighting for credit. It's really hard for that to happen if you have shared goals if you're both driving towards the same pipeline of revenue goals and you're getting at it in complementary ways, but if you each have your own targets and they don't align at the top that is where you get a lot of that.”“Because more things are going digital and you can measure more. As a result, we tend to over-index in what's measurable and immediately gratifying. That's true to who we are as humans. Social media is instantly gratifying and that's [also] true with our budget. You put a dollar in and within three months you see the dollar out, who doesn't love that?”“I really look for people who are right for the stage of the business and are excited for whatever stage that is. I've worked with very large enterprise companies and I've worked at smaller startups. And in my experience, people are at different life stages ready for different size companies, and excited about the opportunities and challenges that those companies provide. So not just hiring for skill and skill fit, but also hiring for stage fit is really important.”“A lot of software businesses are waking up to [the fact that] retention is sort of the foundation for growth. If you over-index on the acquisition, you're going to find that in a couple of years, (maybe even in a year) you've got a leaky bucket. Make retention the number one metric, if you put those acquisitions. And so we do; retention is our number one metric, followed by acquisition.” “Some best practices [for surveying] are: Be focused on what you're trying to achieve. In surveys the longer the survey, the less likely are you to get [a lower] number of participants, but [also lower] quality of the feedback. Be really clear about what's essential and what's kind of nice to have. Definitely know how you're going to evaluate it cause that'll inform what tool you use. Ask the right questions.” Bio:Amanda Malko is the CMO at G2. She is a go-to-market leader who thrives on leading high-performing, cross-functional teams. Her career focus is on hyper-growth companies working at the intersection of marketing/creativity/technology.Formerly she was the lead of the partner marketing and programs team at Mailchimp, Inc's 2017 Company of the Year and G2's #4 Best Software Company, and before then she was CMO of 360i, named one of the 25 most influential marketing agencies of the 21st century (acquired by Dentsu) and CMO of Tongal, a global creative marketplace with 120,000 writers, directors, and animators. She’s served as Head of Marketing of IgnitionOne, a SaaS ad tech platform, and was the first sales and marketing hire at Massive, a video game advertising platform (acquired by Microsoft). She is a regular advisor to SaaS startups and media companies.She frequently writes and speaks on marketing in the digital age, and has appeared in publications and on stage with AdAge, MediaPost, Mashable, AMA, 4As, Forrester Marketing Forum, CMO Assembly, and others.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

The next business frontier, in terms of physical spaces, is not one you can physically walk on. I’m talking about outer space, and I’m talking about it today with my friend, Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics. I got to know Jason a few years back by chance, and immediately was captivated by his story, his passion, and his ground-breaking work in the space industry. Based in Boulder, Colorado, and in Sydney, Australia, Jason and his team are creating access to new areas of the space industry through better game-like user interfaces. Navigating business ‘friendly-enemy’ relationships in the industry and operating in the complex world of business to government relationships is no small feat, but Jason saw an opportunity as a new graduate and couldn’t say no. “Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.”Lowering that financial barrier to entering the space industry was all it took for Jason to dive in. In this episode, he walks us through his process of disrupting the space industry by creating Saber Astronautics. He talks about the complexities of their business model working with both governments, and businesses. Jason shares about how their innovative PIGI software was created,  and the rise of downstream space industry service companies and micro-industries like this. He’s predicting cool things for the future in space - all this up next on Marketing Trends. Main Takeaways:Business to Government Model: It’s not one talk about a lot on this show but it creates some fun challenges in every aspect of the business. Biggest words of wisdom are, be ready to fight. The contracts are lucrative which means there’s some fierce competition for them. When you get into government contract work, know that the voices of doubt won’t just be coming from inside of your head; the government contracting industry is cut-throat. Space Traffic Regulation Is Coming: The amount of space debris, and operating satellites spinning constantly over our heads is increasing every day, and therefore so is the need for regulation and safety policies. Who should set these, what exactly they should be, and how they would be enforced are all up for debate in the community at this point, as companies and governments alike race to capitalize on the next ‘gold-rush’ of business opportunity. Space For All: What Space Democratization Means: For the space industry, and for business, the creation of CubeSats removed a massively prohibitive cost barrier to both businesses operating in the industry and students learning how to work in it. Companies like Jason’s could raise a normal business-sized amount of capital to start building out software, which they have done. Key Quotes:“It was a fistfight. We competed against companies that were 20 to 100 times our size, two of the largest defense contractors in Australia were our primary competitors, and they led up to, everybody said we couldn't do it. I was getting calls at two in the morning from our competitors saying, ‘what are you doing? You're never gonna make it.’ And we persevered and we made it there. “We have a very strong product and very strong brand in that part of the world and everybody recognized that. We were told by the companies we were talking to that we had to prove that we were good enough and that's how the conversation went. So there wasn't a lot of incentive for partnering in that case. The other part was we started getting a lot of calls from people asking us if we were bidding. The volume got high enough and we said, let's go for it.”“Business to government, if you know how to play that game, is really lucrative. Fast forward, I did my Ph.D. in Australia, this was about 2007 when I was graduating, and there was a new category of satellites called CubeSats. If you think about the size of a spacecraft back then for an industry-level mission and things that are doing satellite communications or, or earth observation, things that produce large amounts of money, these historically are half a billion-dollar spacecraft, massive infrastructure required to do something like that. Well, the new category was what had just been embedded between 2005/2007 and they were the size of a toaster. The cost for starting your space company was less than half the cost of a juice bar range.“Historically space tools are bespoke. It's like the matrix. You've got a whole bunch of words on a screen and operators trying to figure out what is going on. ‘We said, why don't you turn that into a video game?’ It's easy to use this human interface, this user interface, modern UI UX design, and reduce the barrier to entry to actually make space as easy as flying a car is our goal. So normally, like you need a Ph.D. or a Masters 15 years experience to get trusted with, with the satellite. We've got undergraduate interns, 20-21 years old, and first time we sit down, have a go.”“There is no space traffic solution globally. The U.S. military has been running it for most of the Western world, but they want to be space warriors, not space traffic cops. So much more material is coming out there. We've got 7,500 satellites that are active in space today and I think that's going to grow to 40,000 by the end of the decade. Some people are predicting a hundred thousand satellites and for every satellite, you've got 10 times more in pieces of debris floating around and it's all traveling at eight kilometers a second. If you get hit by one of those, that'll ruin your day. We do a lot of work in that field.”“We need someone to do it [patrol space traffic.] It can't be military; can't be a single government; it has to be a consortium of governments. I think it should be a public-private partnership because right now a lot of companies like Saber are competing for tools to be a part of that next gold rush. It's a hard thing to justify because it's related to the safety of flight.”“PIGI is our mission control software. We use it for entry-level design. With it, you're able to design all of your orbits and plan any orbit from it, pretty much any planet in the solar system, and use the outputs of that to plan your business. Students use it for their student projects but we really made this useful for entrepreneurs, people who want to start their own space businesses someday. They use it to calculate the addressable market for their mission plan.” Bio:Jason is a space engineer with 20 years of experience in spacecraft, operations, mission control, and team leadership. Space is a personal passion of his. He founded Saber Astronautics as the mechanism to contribute to this industry. For the last 10 years, this has been a practical application of machine learning and 3d graphics making space easy to control and to solve operational problems such as flight diagnostics, swarm control, space weather, orbital dynamics, etc. Saber now sells to the US Air Force, Australian Air Force, and a growing range of commercial satellite owners. Before founding Saber Astronautics, he was a US Army Major for USSTRATCOM (Space Command) and deployed internationally during wartime. He taught at the Interservice Space Fundamentals Course and served as an active duty engineer at Army Space and Missile Command Battle Lab. Military service also includes 5 years in the field of artillery deployed to a range of hazardous duty locations. As a civilian, he wrote flight software for the Hubble Space Telescope (Wide Field Camera 3) and testing for the International Space Station.As an academic, he lectured for the IRS Space Station Design Workshop, University of New South Wales, and International Space University. He led a research expedition in the high Canadian Arctic and is actively growing the "NewSpace" community co-founding teams such as the Delta-V SpaceHub Accelerator and the University of Sydney space engineering laboratory.He served on the Australian Government “Expert Reference Group” designing their Space Agency and is also active with international think tanks Global Access Partners, NSI, and the Economist, and I'll occasionally provide expertise to Australian News programs. Both through active teaching and through Saber's internship program brought over 250 people into the industry.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Mentorship is a sexy topic that gets thrown around in a lot of interviews, but this week’s guest does more than just talk about it. We caught up with her JC Lapierre, the U.S. Chief Strategy and Communications Officer at PwC as she was wrapping up with a regular mentorship session that she offers to her team. If you really want to see change, make some changes to your schedule; allocate time to things that you say are important, such as molding a younger generation of leaders and do something about it.“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” JC leads by example through active listening to her team and their clients, and she does that through her actions as opposed to just rhetoric. In this episode learn more about the ways JC is focusing on stakeholder and audience personalization, a bit about the new partnerships at PwC, the need for good communication in a large organization, the shift in the ways that people are consuming media. Plus, JC provides us with an update on PwC’s new strategy more than six months into its launch. Hear more from JC and PwC on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go! Main TakeawaysWe have Lost Valuable Strategic-Friction Time in Our Day: Amidst all of the disruption and change in the past couple of years, one of the things many people have lost is their commute time, whether that be flying to meetings in other states, or just driving or walking to the office. That friction in your day, used to allow you to reset yourself a bit in-between parts of your day and parts of your life. Having lost that means losing valuable time to be quiet, and think, and it’s important to realize this loss and create intentional space in your day to let your brain wander.Focusing on Stakeholder and Audience Personalization: Stress less about making sure that every single media channel is broadcasting the exact same message. The more you can personalize your messaging for individual stakeholders and for individual audiences, the better. When we talk about personalization, it can mean swapping a customer’s name into an email, but really you need to be going much deeper than that.  Curating messages for customers and segments of your audience based on their other interests is the best way to get attention.Evolving Channel Landscape and Consumption: As things change rapidly on the media channel front, it’s important even as a large company to stay nimble and willing to try new things and experiment in channels that you are not as familiar with. You can read stories and reports about what the best new tools to use are, but testing it out is the best way to find out what works for your own brand and message.Key Quotes"It all starts with listening, no matter what role I've been in. A I've had like nine lives, nine careers in my time at PwC, but one of the most important things anyone can do in any relationship, personal or professional, is to truly listen and to ask really effective open-ended questions, without judgment, questions without assumptions, embedded assumptions, and to really try to understand what is it that you aspire to do? What are the impediments or obstacles to getting there? What's the opportunity? And then when you've listened to a whole bunch of different data points and a whole bunch of different perspectives, you can start to build.”“You have to listen through informal channels. Before I jumped onto this [interview] I was in what I call a coffee chat with about 15 members of my team. I do these three times a week. I open a sign up for 15 people if [they] want to just have coffee and talk for an hour. It is one of my most effective listening channels. It takes time. It takes effort to listen, but if you really pay attention, my team tells me what I need to do. My team tells me how I need to communicate better. They help tell me what steps I need to take to make it better for them. And to help us have more impact on driving our results. But it all starts with taking the time and creating the spaces to listen.” “We call this the ADAPT framework. There's five forces that are pushing on the world in significant ways. First is Asymmetry. We see asymmetry primarily in the income inequality gap, but you see it in other ways in which you see haves and have nots. D [stands for] disruption that gets at both technological disruption, as well as climate disruption. The second ‘A’ in ADAPT is age. In the U.S. we have an aging population; we have fewer workers than we used to and that trend is going to continue. [This means] we are going to have fewer people to work in the workforce. The P is for polarization, I think we all see it's happening within our four walls; it's happening across the globe, but that increased polarization is growing. [Finally,] the T is for trust.”“The more we focus on stakeholder and audience and personalization, the easier it becomes. The team doesn't have to keep recreating stories or recreating what they are that they're doing [across every channel.] We have to just be consistent, simple and measured in terms of how we bring our audiences along.”“Our people are some of our best brand ambassadors. [I want to] make sure that they feel confident, not only in telling our story, but that they are enormous parts of the story. They are executing our story and they're building that strategy every step of the way with us.”“The way people consume information has shifted. That’s where we (broadly not just PWC) aren't sure what is going to land and what are the best channels to use. So we are going to try everything. [Example,] the work [we did] with Hulu and streaming is outperforming all of the metrics that we set out for it. We are [even] starting a Tik Tok channel. We are going to go to a whole bunch of different places so that we really can understand how information is being consumed and what is the easiest way to share our messages with people that might be interested in hearing them.”BioJ.C. Lapierre is the U.S. Chief Strategy & Communications Officer for PwC leading communications, marketing, brand, and creative teams with heart. Redefining the industry with the best team and technology to better serve our clients as they seek to build trust and deliver sustained outcomes. Committed to my nieces and nephews, adventuring around the world, upskilling teachers in Kenya with Flying Kites and cycling in Boston's Pan-Mass Challenge to raise funds for cancer research and treatment.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Taking the plunge into unfamiliar territory, such as investing, can not only be a difficult fray to enter, but scary at the same time. When should you buy? Should you sell? What is the right stock for you to buy?. The world of finance and largely, participating in investment has long been the domain of the few and privileged. Now, thanks to the companies like Robinhood, becoming a part of the finance world is as easy as downloading an app from your favorite app store. The challenges of communicating with this new class of investors excites Rashad Drakeford, Head of Content Marketing at Robinhood. And Rashad told me all about how e knows that asking the right questions of his audience will help him to guide them through the process of investing, and to their goals. “What we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is: how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone?” This future-focused mindset, paired with an incredible background in politics and entertainment, gives Rashad a unique perspective as a marketer. Whether it’s been through his time working on the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign, or from his experience at Apple, and working on Beats by Dre Rashad’s experience has touched multiple industries and he shared his wealth of experience with me. In this episode, Rashad and I dive into the way he thinks about his influencer marketing strategy, he speaks about some of the incredible leaders he has been influenced by, and you’ll hear about what makes the most compelling content marketing campaigns. Get ready to enjoy all that Rashad has to share on this episode of Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysLeverage What You Have: It can be discouraging as a small business marketer to look around and see all of the cool campaigns with fancy bells and whistles that big companies with massive budgets can produce. The key to getting the most out of your own brand and budget lies in the quality of the stories you have to tell. Good stories resonate, and a good story can help you compete with the likes of fancy, high-dollar productions. The human touch of a great story can have just as much impact with your audience as some fancy production elements. The point is to lean into your strengths as a business and lean into your strengths as a marketing team to compete against bigger players. Picking the Right Influencer: When thinking about your own influencer program, bigger numbers are better, but there are some additional factors you should be considering to make the best partnership decisions. The quality of their audience engagement is critical and the overall alignment of their mission with yours are two of the factors that, when aligned, will serve both parties well. What Does a New Class of Investors Need? The opportunity to reach a new audience is one that excites a creative marketer. First, the challenge is to educate and inform. The best way to do that, to draw in a new audience, is by asking them the right questions. Seeing things from their perspective will help you to craft your message and really connect with your audience. Key Quotes“The way we leaned into our ability to create branded content across social and digital; We were doing virtual reality concerts. This was back in 2013 [when] no one was really doing that. If MTV is able to create interstitials and vignettes that live on linear TV because they have 80 to a hundred million households, what's our value prop? What we landed on was, we have phenomenal storytellers. We have great content creators. We're going to go and create content for brands that we'll use across all of our social media and our digital and linear. And on top of that, we'll white-label it and give it to you to use however you want across your channels. And so we were able to really be innovative in that, in that space.”“Robinhood really did lower the barrier of entry and democratize information and democratize people’s [ability] to participate in the wealth generation process, especially for folks that have been historically, and systematically left out of financial empowerment in this country. I felt like there was an incredible opportunity to come here and help tell stories, to help inspire people to get involved in their financial health and wellness.” “hat we're developing at Robinhood over the next three years is how do we inspire people to think, feel, and act? How do we make them feel confident about their financial future? How do we tell stories of people that they see themselves in? There's a new class [of investors] that's being born out of this moment; how do we invite them in? How do we have our arms wide open to let them know that they're not alone? “The way I have the team approaching [influencer relationships] is avoiding one-offs, and [istead] developing a real partnership with talent that not only pushes forward our business goals but also helps the talent reach their goals. I never walk into a partnership conversation with a fully fleshed-out plan. [I’m] making sure that our missions are aligned because this is not just about someone cashing a check. [I’m making sure] we're both invested and passionate about what we can do together. I don't let how many followers someone has be the determining factor on doing a deal or not. Numbers you see on Tiktok and Instagram and Twitter are important, but what's the engagement and what's the conversion metric from past partnerships or even their own work?”BioRashad Drakeford is the Head of Content Marketing at Robinhood - Head of Content Marketing. Previously he spent time at Apple as their Head of Global Social Media. Before that, Rashad spent some time at REVOLT MEDIA & TV as the Senior Director of Digital Content Development. Because of an opportunity, he came across while he was in college, as a student he became the National HBCU Outreach Coordinator for The 2008 presidential campaign of United States Senator, Barack Obama. This campaign position led to jobs for him as the Obama-Biden Transition Project, as an Associate and Public Liaison in Intergovernmental Affairs, and then took a position in the government at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as Special Assistant in the Office of the Secretary. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

As the methods of communicating messages of love, sympathy, celebration, or holiday cheer have evolved in the last 100 years, the 20 billion-dollar greeting card industry continues to adapt to serve multiple generations of ‘caring-connectors’. This term ‘caring-connector’, used by Hallmark CMO and SVP, Lindsey Roy, to describe Hallmark customers of all ages and demographics, is an illustration of the relational way they think about their consumers at this legacy brand. For more than a century, Hallmark has been giving consumers the tools to make holiday moments of gift-giving and connection unforgettable. Lindsey Roy, CMO and SVP, Hallmark, brings two decades of experience as she helps people connect with each other in meaningful ways. “If I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's consumers wanting flexibility. You think about 10, 15, 20 years ago, you played the game as the manufacturer, or retailer. [But now ] ‘I want it how I want it, when I want it, where I want it.’ Whether it's grocery shopping, or buying your presents for Christmas, whatever it is, people are completely demanding flexibility. That's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.” Giving your customer that flexibility they demand for when, where and how they want you, whether that be via the tap of an app or at a retail location, shows that you’re truly listening to and serving them. In this episode Lindsey and I dive into the role that data plays in every aspect of Hallmark’s strategy including innovating; the ways and thought processes behind Hallmark’s testing and uses for A.I.; how Hallmark’s data strategy is redefining and its rewards program, and a bit about Lindsey’s leadership style. Excited for you to enjoy this conversation I had with Lindsey on this episode of Marketing Trends. Here we go!Main TakeawaysHiring Smart People with Agility over People who Only Check the Right Boxes: Sometimes when it’s time to hire, your team might already have a great need to be filled, but don’t be tempted just to hire the candidates who look good on their resume. Get to know your new hires and focus on finding people who are flexible and open-minded team players. You can always teach people how to use new tools and software, but you can’t teach passion and dedication to the mission. Allow for Your Vision to Iterate and Morph in Practice: When you spend so much time and effort building a particular marketing strategy, it can be easy to over-commit to certain elements or aspects of that original plan. Don’t get too caught up in the details, though. You need to stay agile and be willing to iterate and try new tactics as the data informs, so that you can react to data about the way that your message is being received by the audience. The quicker you can course-adjust to a more connected message, the sooner you can fill the needs of your audience. Addressing Consumer Needs Across Multiple Generations: When you’re a brand that serves everyone, looking across generational needs is important when thinking about where and how you’re going to reach your customers. The new modes and methods for connecting with Gen Z are going to be quite different from those you’ve traditionally used for the Baby Boomers, for example. New social media apps drawing the attention of younger audiences, compared to older generations that may be more prone to read a longer email, for example. Key Quotes“We care about getting people with diverse perspectives. We try to have people with short tenure, long tenure, people who've been in the agency world, have been in the brand world, everybody from the college intern, to somebody who has 25 years of amazing experience, different backgrounds, et cetera. We are very purposeful about that. I'm a believer in hiring good, smart people with learning agility. Sometimes that's more important than ‘check these three boxes. Have you done X on Salesforce? Have you done Y on Adobe analytics?’ I think [when you hire] good smart people that want to learn, and can learn, you can't go wrong.”“From my vantage point, if I was going to narrow it down to the biggest source of change, it's that consumers want flexibility. About 10, 15, 20 years ago you played the game as the manufacturer or the retailer. Now [it’s about the consumer] ‘I want how I want it when I want it, where I want it.’ People are completely demanding flexibility and that's a huge insight into how we're thinking about where we reach people. We always try to have authentic conversations in our marketing.”“[When you ask] what are your perceptions of cards? You learn a lot of amazing things. There are what we would call the ‘caring connector’ archetype: that person who believes that the world is inherently good, that person that believes that relationships are the glue and they're willing to put in the time and effort. These people exist at 12 [years old] and they exist at 92. To figure out what they need and how to tap into what would make sense for them, that's the key to relevance in my mind. Be open, ask the hard questions and make sure that you're investing in innovation to answer those questions.”“We look for what we call ‘when’, W-H-E-N data. And that means, if you are a 28 year-old mom of two, who's a caring connector who shops in these places. It's also important for us to try to have a conversation where we maybe learn when your birthday is, or when your significant other's birthday is, things like that. That kind of part of the data genome around those people who are most close to you, those people who you might want to activate, and we can do that. I'll give you a really basic example. If you buy a card for your sister on August 12th and you have some relationship with us, we can then maybe tell you next July 30th, ‘Hey, you might have a birthday need coming up.’ And people find that helpful if they're like, oh yeah, ‘I’ve got to get that.’ in their mind.” “We always believe that the more personalized is super important. We're doing a lot of experimentation [with A.I.] The biggest live-use case we have with A.I. right now is in our chat bots that come to life in our digital experiences. Consumer care is also part of my world. I get to work with an awesome guy who leads that part of our business and we've launched this year, a couple of chatbots because it's easier for people to interact oftentimes with the chat bot and we have some great A.I. that feels very Hallmark and very helpful, and it can hopefully get people to accomplish their task in a fraction of the time.”BioLindsey Roy is the SVP, and CMO at Hallmark. She oversees Hallmark Global which includes gift wrap, greeting cards, stores, etc. A tragic boating accident while on vacation almost claimed Lindsey¹s life and left her with an amputated left leg, severely injured right leg and injured right arm. Through a challenging recovery process, Lindsey learned impactful lessons on how to harness disruption and find clarity in the chaos. A fresh voice on the speaking circuit, Lindsey has been heralded for her authentic style and universal message. Lindsey has spent over eighteen years in the corporate environment, leading teams in innovation, digital development and product merchandising. She was named Vice-President at Hallmark Cards at just thirty-two years old, one of the youngest VPs ever in a company with over a 100-year history and in the top 1% of brands worldwide. Lindsey combines her unique life experience, corporate background and emotional intelligence to truly connect with audiences.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Content is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and the truth is, today it is easier than ever before to create content. A big reason for that is thanks to companies such as Røde Microphones, which create budget-minded products that constantly push the industry forward. For Røde, innovation is the name of the game and no one knows that better than Damien Wilson, the CEO of Røde Microphones. Damien has been with the company since its early days, growing into his leadership role and scaling the business in a rapid timeframe. But even for him, despite the success, the last decade has been a wild ride.“I'm a kid from the Western suburbs, which is not necessarily a nice area and I never thought I'd be sitting in New York doing business, or sitting on a couch with Guns and Roses. When I walk into Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and I see a Røde product, I get excited because I listened to that music of the eighties where Sunset Boulevard was the place to be.”The transformation of the audio industry has been accelerated because of the way companies such as Rode have democratized audio equipment. It no longer takes a fortune and an entire studio build-out, to get professional-sounding content. On Marketing Trends, Damien took me through how Rode has muscled it to the top to compete with legacy brands within the space. He also touches on the unique hiring challenges that Røde has been facing in Australia during the past 18 months, and how the company has been able to pivot through innovating in their use of manufacturing equipment. He also discusses how Røde handles customer feedback to ideate its product line, and how influencers can push your products further. I’m excited for you to enjoy and hopefully learn from this conversation with Damien up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe Secret Sauce: Innovating with Product Manufacturing Equipment: More than ever, supply chain management and sourcing are critical to the success of any business that sells products. Finding the best, most cost-effective tools to build your products might not be created for your industry. You may have to think creatively about what other industries use similar manufacturing equipment that can be modified to build your goods.It Takes Educational Background to Create Great Content: Having an education-focused mindset is a foundational part of good content creation. When you create materials that educate the consumer on products, even if they are not your own, you're building trust with the consumer. This kind of content helps build a community which helps to further push consumers down the funnel.Where to Look for New Product Inspiration: Assess all the other products, aside from your own, that your customer also uses to see where to expand product offerings. Other tools and tech they use to create their finished product could also be an area for you to cross over into. Key Quotes“One of the things that I brought immediately to the company was that style of video-based education, style marketing. Because one of the things that I thought was the big problem with audio brands, especially anything music-related, you needed to sort of teach people how to use the product and that gave them the ability to purchase.”“We have a machine that is specked for making parts for watches. Every high-end Swiss watch manufacturer will have one of these machines. It's the same machine made by Citizen, but we use it to make backplates for the microphones because the precision and the tolerance is so insane. They're making a hundred thousand dollar Rolex's, but this is for a $200 microphone. Other mic manufacturers are not thinking in that regard; they're not thinking about how we can take that machine out of that industry, put it into our version and then create a product around it. That's really the secret sauce.” “One of the things that we did a few years ago was look at our ERP system and look at how we were running the business end-to-end, and sit there and go, ‘Okay, what are the improvements? What process improvements do we need to put in place right now?’ And before we didn't have a mature supply chain team in house, but we grew that super quick. And it was just at the right time, because then COVID hit [and] we started to see some interruption in supply chains. We had the ability to be able to pivot into making things that were completely available to us onshore in Australia. That meant you needed to have the right amount of raw material and all those bits and pieces, which was a testament to the supply chain team getting an AI pay system up and running quickly.”“What we're looking at now is adjacencies that we can move into. We look at our customer and say, ‘What is our customer's workflow? What are they doing?’ They’re podcasters; they’re content creators. ‘What sort of equipment are they using?’ Oh, they're wearing headphones, and those headphones don't say Røde. So maybe we need to work into that adjacency.” “Where Røde has risen to the top in terms of customer sentiment has been the fact that we deliver a product and we keep on enhancing it. And it becomes a schedule of, every three months, let's add something else to this particular product. So the customer goes, ‘Wow, you've done it again.’ And it also shows that we're listening to feedback.”“I'm a kid from the Western suburbs, which is not necessarily a nice area and I never thought I'd be sitting in New York doing business, or sitting on a couch with Guns and Roses. When I walk into Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard and I see a Røde product, I get excited because I listened to that music of the eighties where Sunset Boulevard was the place to be.”“When you get big it's like the mistakes are just amplified, right? In the past, if we made a mistake in a launch and maybe there was a component wrong, or the testing was incorrect, you may be thinking about 5,000 units. Now you're talking about, you know, 500,000. We can't afford that. So we need to have everything upstream and downstream sorted. So we know that we're not going to replicate any of those issues.”BioDamien Wilson is the CEO of The Freedman Group, home to RØDE Microphones, Aphex, Event Electronics, and SoundField. He is a multi-talented senior executive with over 25 years’ experience in advertising, sales, marketing, and business development.  Prior to the Freedman Group, Wilson was Creative Director of boutique advertising agencies The Shop and Peer Group. He joined the Freedman Electronics/RØDE team in 2007 as Marketing Manager and within a year was made Global Sales and Marketing Director. He acted as General Manager of RØDE Microphones, LLC in the USA until 2013 before returning home to Australia as the new CEO of the Freedman Group in 2016.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

A good customer experience requires more than just making the sale. It’s taking a look and analyzing every little detail that pushes them further and further down the funnel... If you design it the right way, the customer experience should be serving the customer first while giving you the conversions you desire. As an experienced marketer Jonathan Rowe, the CMO of nCino, a cloud banking solutions company, has welcomed the challenge of working in a highly regulated industry, servicing big banks.  “From a customer perspective, make sure that they're getting the most value from what they purchased from your product. That's being proactive and giving them that information. It's making sure you can add. We work with our institutions. I've had marketing conversations with CMOs of banks, just because they want to learn some of our best practices. [Think] how can your organization go above and beyond. And then help infuse your brand with your customers; make them help sell your product.”On this episode of Marketing Trends, Jonathan looks back at the exponential growth that he experienced at nCino. He looks back at his academic roots that he says laid the foundation for him that helped spur that growth. But behind the numbers and metrics, what separates nCino and its marketing department from its competitors is its company culture, and Jonathan and I dive into how he’s built a culture, what pillars he leans on and how he thinks about hiring and recruiting talent. Learn more about the way he approaches team building, thought leadership, and good communication up next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysTransitioning from Academia to Marketing: The skills that it takes to be a great academician are more transferable to a career in marketing than you might first think. When you look at marketing as ‘education’ things begin to fall into place. Even if you’re not in academics, looking at the craft of marketing from a slightly different perspective, instead of just focusing on converting customers, maybe a focus on educating them will actually drive more conversions.Looking Like a Billion-Dollar Brand: Even if you’re at the very beginning of your business journey as a start-up, fake it till you make it! Presenting your brand like a top-dollar player from day one sets a tone of excellence for your team, your business, and your customers. Everything you do, every piece of communication, marketing materials, conversations, and attitude all should reflect the top-dollar attitude you want at your company.Use the Channels and Communication Styles your Customers Prefer: Maybe long emails don’t perform well anymore by marketing industry standards, but maybe your customers, in your niche market, still like to receive and read longer messages in their inbox. Adapting your marketing channels and even messaging for your audience shows them that you’re listening and will only enrich your interactions with them.Key Quotes“'I never expected an academic background to transfer to a startup and now high growth company. But marketing is really about educating, right? You're educating a lot of stakeholders, whether it's partners, whether it's potential clients, whether it's customers, whether it's investors, whether it's your employees. And so that to me was a very early realization that really it's about education.”“First and foremost, who are you selling to? Make sure you understand your target market. It sounds so simple, but when you understand who you're selling to, you can then ask yourself the next two or three questions, which is, ‘Where do those people go? What do they look at? What are their interests?’ And that's even before you get to, ‘What is your message?’”“‘Everything we do represents a billion-dollar brand.’ I literally put that on the wall because I think this is true of anybody, even if you're a small business. What do you aspire to be? How do you want your employees thinking about every day when they walk in or take a phone call or make a product or do a service delivery, how do you want them thinking about your business? One of the things you realize in marketing is you don't own the brand.  You’re a steward of the brand. You may help set direction for the brand, but your employees own the brand, your customers own the brand. All your partners are invited like all these different people. In those early years, I wanted us to look and feel like a billion-dollar company.” “[Go] back to understanding your audience, what channels do they engage with? In a lot of industries, you may say, ‘I'm not going to write a document that's longer than two pages because nobody's going to read it.’ That's true universally, but I think in banking, folks are still reading a good deal of information. They also like research; so for us, from a customer perspective [how can we] be a thought leader. It's really understanding our ability to not go to a bank and say, Hey, we know how to do things better than you, because obviously you never want to do that. But to go in, challenge and share research and share data, because now it's your point. Now that we've built up 1100 customers, we're learning a lot about the industry. And how do we share that back to the point about what we talked about with Salesforce, kind of creating these, this community of raving and nCino fans, where again, we entered an industry where a lot of the banks are competitors and they used to never talk to each other. And here we are, you know, almost 10 years later.” “From a customer perspective, one, make sure that they're getting the most value from what they purchased from your product. That's being proactive and giving them that information. It's making sure you can add. We actually work with our institutions. I've had marketing conversations with CMOs of banks, just because they want to learn some of our best practices. [Think] how can your organization go above and beyond. And then help infuse your brand with your customers; make them help sell your product.”BioJonathan Rowe serves as nCino's Chief Marketing Officer, helping fuel growth for the worldwide leader in cloud banking. Jonathan and the Marketing Team are responsible for the Company's global branding, public relations, conferences, creative design, digital, and product marketing functions. Jonathan also oversees nCino's Recruiting Team and all employer and culture branding initiatives. A year-one nCino employee, Jonathan has been instrumental in establishing the nCino brand and leading the Company's marketing functions globally.Prior to joining nCino, Jonathan was a professor in the Cameron School of Business and Director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He holds a Bachelor of Science in International Marketing from UNC Wilmington, a Master of Business Administration from Babson College and a Ph.D. in Business Administration and Management from the University of Auckland.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

The opportunity to work from home may be taken for granted a bit more within the last year and a half, but for years Rev.com has been providing opportunities for tens of thousands to work from home. Adri Nowell the VP of Marketing at Rev, came to our studios in Austin, Texas to talk about what it means to her to see so many people able to work from home with Rev.  Adri’s experience as a marketer and a leader gives her a unique ability to serve both the Rev customer, as well as the tens of thousands of transcriptionists that Rev employs in a massive remote workforce. “We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital who are transcribing at the foot of a hospital bed. Being able to put your child first and be able to provide that type of love and compassion and care for your child while also being able to make a living. Those moments make me so proud.” Learning how Adri runs an ABM campaign, what skills she uses as a leader, and how she thinks about scaling her team will give you great insight into your own exciting growth and leadership. It was so great to speak with Adri in person about her experience in marketing and how they’re growing at Rev. Get inspired with Adri, up next here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe transition from Doer to Leader: When you’re in the trenches doing the actual work, your actual day-to-day responsibilities are different from those of the leadership of your marketing team. Transitioning to leadership isn’t for everyone; some really enjoy the work of making the campaigns happen. When you’re the leader you have to rely on the savvy of the marketers on your team and give them the tools that you know work and watch them make it happen! Account-Based Marketing Challenges: One of the biggest challenges of running a successful Account-Based Marketing or ABM campaign is getting the structure of the accounts right. Define what a segment is, define who your tier one in the funnel is; define what an account is. If you go through this legwork and really take the time to build a good foundation, you’ll have set yourself up for a great campaign. Working with Speed and Excellence as You Scale: When your company is experiencing massive growth it’s tempting to just start moving really fast and being okay with things breaking. If you can take a little extra time to make sure that you don’t go too fast and make needless mistakes, that is way more profitable in the long run.  You need to quickly automate whatever you can when you’re in a high-growth environment so that you can leave that task with confidence as you go to solve the next big problem. Key Quotes“Now that we're going after [more] market segments the marketing responsibilities are going to shift around. We generally test everything that we can; learn quickly; fail quickly; fail cheaply, and for the things that work, invest in them. When you have that type of mindset, you get scrappy marketers that are willing to tackle new challenges, and test new channels or test new tactics.“People get really nervous [about transitioning to leadership]. It's an emotional thing. It's a natural, emotional reaction. And Molly Graham actually describes this really well. And she talks about this concept, this emotional rollercoaster that people go through during these transition periods as she uses the metaphor of building a LEGO tower and then giving away your LEGO tower, which is so relevant. You have all these smart marketers that can jump in and they can tackle a challenge. And they built up their Lego tower and made it successful and then they have to hand their LEGO to the next person coming in. It can be really nerve-wracking. ‘What if someone breaks the LEGO tower? What if they build it back up in the wrong way, or maybe they don't expand upon it in the right way?’ And I've found her description of this to be really relevant and taken her advice to talk about it." “Marketing is never settled. You're never done in marketing. Consumer behaviors are always changing. You always want to go back and retest or test different variations. We measure [our success] by getting people to respond. ‘Are we getting them to the next action?’ Whether that's actually converting into a paying customer or taking the next step with us in their journey… and when new channels work, we expand them; when they don't, we abandon them. [We’re] constantly just exploring new outlets.”“We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital who are transcribing at the foot of a hospital bed. Being able to put your child first and be able to provide that type of love and compassion and care for your child while also being able to make a living. Those moments make me so proud.” “With any launch, you start all the way at the timeframe of ‘What's the problem that you're trying to solve?’ My philosophy is to listen to the market. You should be talking to your customers; you should be talking to your prospects. You should be talking to people that want to do business with you should also be talking to people who don't want to do business with you.”“The most important thing with account-based marketing is in how you structure the accounts that you want to go after. How do you define what a segment is? What is an account? Who are the customers? Who do you want to reach? What are the contexts within each of those accounts? Who goes into your tier one bucket? And then who's kind of your catch-all for what you want your one-to-one for your tier one accounts. You want your tier one accounts to receive more of a personalized experience, but you don't want to overdo it. If you're going so extreme that it feels forced, people are going to reject the marketing material. There's definitely a place for it, but it's really about finding the right balance.”“Speed is tough and the thing that I've found the most difficult is balancing the speed at which you accelerate growth and operational excellence is it's not hard to go fast. It's hard to go fast and not break things. And so that is where we've found probably the biggest challenge is how can we continue to accelerate growth, but at the same time, establish a foundation that is going to scale. And so with marketing, that's incredibly important because you need the right operational pieces. It is acceptable for some period of time to do things manually, but you can't stay there. You have to put operational pieces in place so that you can scale. Finding the right balance is very challenging.”BioAdri Nowell is VP of Marketing at Rev.com. In this role, she serves as the executive leader accountable for the strategy and execution of marketing programs across all segments - individual users (B2C), Enterprise/Mid-market (B2B), and developers. She provides leadership and management oversight across Product Marketing, Performance Marketing, Email Marketing, Demand Marketing, Content Marketing, Web, Brand, and Creative for the company.Before joining Rev, Adri served as the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Bazaarvoice and before that as Director of Marketing at Volusion. Prior to that, Adri held a variety of roles at engineering technology provider National Instruments including Product Marketing Manager and Support Engineer. Adri began her career at the University of Oklahoma as a Software Developer in the Robotics Institute of Machine Learning. Adri holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from The University of Oklahoma, in Norman, OK.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

If you’ve ever been to Times Square, you can conjure up memories of how chaotic and bustling that vibrant hub really is. This is the mecca of OOH or Out-of-home marketing. Thousands of individuals packed into a confined space with endless advertising opportunities. Norm Chait, Director of Out-of-Home Product and Sales at Quotient Technology, regales us with the tale of his work on a campaign for Microsoft that hit the big city. But, more importantly, he has a career’s worth of insight about OOH and exciting details about the ways that data is changing the game in OOH. “We did a PR program a number of years ago introducing the next operating system for Microsoft. It was the largest consumer event in the history of New York City. The ability to take over Times Square, the ability to own every screen in the square (40 plus screens) all sync together, having the physical on-the-ground experience of, um, all the, you know, the different hardware displays...I was like, this is what I do. This is what I love to do. It's bringing a brand experience to life in a unique way.”There is a lot of value for companies especially in the CPG space to consider Out-of-Home advertising, no matter the size of the business. There’s so much happening in the world of Out-of-Home and Norm has the insight. Main TakeawaysProgrammatic Adaptations in the last Year Plus: The market has shifted in countless ways in the past year-plus, and the way that programmatic marketing can step in to help marketing leaders be more nimble is proving invaluable. Getting a faster sense, with data, of how things are performing across campaigns can lead to faster decisions about shifting budgets to markets where they’d see higher ROI. Data Driven OOH in the CPG Space: Out-of-home has a sweet-spot with CPG businesses because of their D2C model. They need to be out in front of the right people in direct ways. When you’re marketing directly to consumers you’re up against huge budgets of mega-corporations that can crush you. You need tech that can inform you about where your best customers actually are so that you can focus your resources on them. The Steps to a Successful OOH Campaign: In order to have a successful Out-of-home campaign you don’t necessarily need to be a mega-brand. What you do need is a plan that includes a few key elements. First, define the category. Next, define the product buyer. Third, identify the buyer’s behaviors and location. These three elements will help you generate the conversions you desire. Key Quotes “I think what was happening over the last 18 months or so [is that] [the pandemic has] changed the way people go to market; it's changed the way people physically leave their homes and where they go and where they visit, all of those things have dynamically changed. So how does Out-of-home now start to play a role? The pandemic has, in some ways, allowed us to fast forward what programmatic can do. [For example] the spikes we saw in one market allowed us to shut things down there and move things to other markets. Being able to be more nimble like that is what we're starting to see.” “We did a PR program a number of years ago introducing the next operating system for Microsoft. It was the largest consumer event in the history of New York City. The ability to take over Times Square, the ability to own every screen in the square (40 plus screens) all sync together, having the physical on the ground experience...I was like, this is what I do. This is what I love to do. It's bringing a brand experience to life in a unique way.”“CPG is a sweet spot for us. We do work across lots of different product categories but our ability to come back to the notion of accountability and confidence using data to show exactly where people are spending their time. Here are the products and categories that they're buying.  We see week over week trends. [This means our] ability to see real time trends and then tie that back to physical inventory is what our clients are excited about. Our ability to guide them as to where people are going, what they're buying, and the trends that we're seeing help them [see the need to invest.]”“Everything we do starts from planning as [first] priority [to] understand what the category is, who the product buyer is, what are their behaviors, and then let us help you identify where they are. [We’re] looking at the entire ecosystem of available assets and scoring (physically) every piece of inventory against that behavior. It starts with an audience. Whether it's a haircut purchaser, frozen pizza buyer, Honda driver or whatever it might be, we start with that.”BioNorm Chait is the Director of Out-of-Home Product/Sales for Quotient Technology. Throughout his career, Chait has demonstrated a keen ability to deliver client solutions by connecting the physical world with the digital world. Prior to joining Quotient Technology, Chait served as the Head of Practice for Ubimo where he spent almost three years. Before joining Ubimo, Chait held various leadership and sales positions. ---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

You may not need to invest any marketing dollars in a new Tiktok channel. If you’re like Nico Dato, the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Podium, you’re thinking about the best ways to not only get the attention that those new well-known channels bring, but also gain the trust of SMBs in order to win them over as clients. But the reality is, there is no right or wrong answer to where you spend your ad budget. The truth is, the only thing that actually matters is what’s performing. The channel mix is evolving every day and it’s important to think about where your clients are and develop a relationship with them, and second, stay abreast of third-party apps that are emerging as new marketing platforms in the U.S. “We do a ton of trade shows, which is something that not a lot of people do. We do a lot of direct mail. We do radio; we do everything you can imagine. For us, it takes three or four touches on average to get someone's attention in the way that we want. A lot of times that comes from a combination of digital, traditional, radio, print… We're marketing and selling to plumbers, insurance agents, car dealers, and, and people who are out there physically working in the real world all day long. Like what a lot of people don't realize about Podium is, if I'm selling to an HVAC contractor, like most times they're like checking out Podium at like nine 30 at night, because they were fixing air conditioners all day, or unclogging toilets, Making sure we get that right channel mix is critical. [Conversions are] They’re not always going to come via Google search.”In this episode of Marketing Trends, Nico and I unpack the best way to grow a team from seven to over 1,000 and peel back the curtain into how Nico has transformed himself from a marketer to a marketing leader. Staying on top of all marketing channels, new and old, is how he stays on the cutting edge. All this next on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysHire for People not just for Needs: When you grow and hire, sometimes there will be a temptation to hire quickly, and in your rush, you may be thinking more about hiring candidates who can help stop the bleeding, so to speak. Instead of hiring for the task you need to be done now, you should be hiring the individual who can best contribute to the company overall. Find someone who can grow with the company, that fits into the culture, and it just might take a couple of extra weeks to find them and train them up. Gaining Trust of SMBs: Small and Medium-Sized businesses are usually the subject matter experts in their communities. For example, the dentist is trusted, personally, by the people that he services. That dentist and his front office staff likely aren’t marketing experts, and it takes an understanding of the trust that they themselves garner, in order to understand the level of trust you need to build with them. Their business is a passion and they need to know they can trust you to be on their team. Increased Utilization of Third-Party Apps in the US: Third-party communication apps like Whatsapp are being used with ever-increasing frequency in the U.S. which is arguably behind this trend in other countries like Brazil, and Japan. This is a whole new channel for marketers to tap into and add to their mix. Key Quotes“I've been super fortunate to learn on the fly. I didn't necessarily have all of this classical training in how to run a marketing team and how to build a comms function and a product marketing function. I've just been so fortunate that my career has just kind of snowballed. [Going from a marketer to a marketing leader] is a huge transition. When you're an individual contributor, you have control over the destiny of the thing that you own. And it’s up to you to work as hard as you want, to strategize as much as you want, to learn from outside sources as much as you want. [Then] all of a sudden you're having to guide a team in doing that one thing that you think you can do really, really well. The secret is that oftentimes they know how to do it much better than you do.”“[The] transition [to leadership] was really hard. I'm not perfect at it by any means, but I think I’ve grown by way of leadership over the last couple of years. It’s a transition that you don't need to make unless you really want to make that jump. t's not easier. There are great career paths in any of these disciplines that don't necessarily mean management.”“[Marketers] are worried about SLS. You're worried about contracts with your customers. You're worried about all of these things. The thing that our CEO has done a really good job of is that, he's tried to keep us focused on the things that matter most. As you're scaling quickly, [identify] the five priorities to align with and get all of the subsequent teams to also align to, in order to make sure that those things are perfect.”“My hiring mantra has always been to hire people, not for the role, but you need to find the right person. I would rather take a longer amount of time finding the right person than having to restart in three months or six months or, or whatever it is. My intent is to find the right person for the role and, and know that the longer-term impact of finding the right person is going to be much greater than filling the short-term need. That may just be a two or three-week difference.” “The one thing that I have found every year becomes more and more surprising -- and probably it shouldn't be a surprise because it continuously happens -- I think that the channel diversification that's happening here in the US and I should be inclusive of Canada, but largely the U.S. is changing. Historically the best way to reach them [was] via email, and then all of a sudden it started to become texts. We are a huge advocate of texting, but what's interesting is we've started to enter the world where consumers are using third-party apps as well to communicate. It's something that you see internationally; you go to Brazil, you might see it with WhatsApp; you go to Japan, you might see it with Line, and et cetera. The data shows in [our] report, 40% or something similar, are starting to use third-party apps on a daily basis to communicate with one another. It's a huge opportunity for brands. There's channel diversification that's happening, and you should take advantage of that.”“At the top of the funnel, we work to try and be everywhere and show that we are honed in, on local business for these businesses. It's why we do a ton of trade shows. We do a ton of trade publications. We do a lot of display advertisements or radio advertisements. A lot of times they just want to know you're legitimate. The hardest thing for local businesses is getting their trust; they've been burned so many times because they are so vulnerable. It's really important to us to make sure they know that we're going to be a partner to them. It's hard to do and there's not one answer that solves all.”BioNico Dato is the EVP of Marketing for Podium, the leading interaction management platform that enables companies with a local presence to conveniently connect at critical touchpoints and help them strengthen their business. Dato grew up in Bountiful, Utah, and attended the University of Utah, where he graduated in 2013 with a degree in economics. Prior to Podium, Dato helped run demand generation at Teleperformance and then managed Zane Benefits’ marketing team.After joining Podium in 2015, he assisted in taking the company through Y Combinator in 2016 - becoming one of the highest revenue-generating companies ever to attend the accelerator. As a part of the executive team, he has also helped secure funding from IVP, Accel, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Summit Partners. In his free time, Dato enjoys golfing and spending time with his wife, Rachel, and daughter, Penelope.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world’s number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.