Lauren Roady, Digital Corporate Marketing Manager at Semtech, is the latest marketer to take part in our marketing expert interview series. From Lauren’s top tips for marketing automation campaigns to her view on the 3 biggest marketing challenges, we asked Lauren a variety of questions to learn everything we could about our latest marketing expert.
In which marketing activities do you specialise?
I’ve had the great opportunity to support everything from event marketing to sales enablement in my career so far, but I’ve found my happy place in digital marketing analytics. Digital marketing itself is an enormous landscape, so “specialty” is probably a misnomer. There are so many hats to wear in this field, every day brings a new challenge, plus the standards and toolsets are constantly changing. I’m a content creator, UX designer and statistician rolled into one. In school, I excelled at math and statistics, and love a good Pivot table, so the data analytics that come with digital marketing are like a warm cup of tea for me. You see a lot from this behind-the-scenes position in an organization; people outside of marketing communications have no idea the amount of elbow grease that can go into a single campaign. It’s rewarding to be able to measure the results and celebrate with the hard-working team that made it happen.
How did you get to this point in your career? Was it planned, or did you just take opportunities when they appeared?
In college I studied graphic communication with an emphasis in print and image management, earning B.S. from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, one of the few graphic communication programs in the U.S. I love print because it is a fantastic intersection of design and technology. There’s an amazing world of engineering and science behind those tiny little dots on paper that make a printed image. From packaging to signage, print is all around us every day. While I didn’t choose to make a career out of printing, that knowledge is advantageous in marketing communications where we are constantly using imagery and visual experience to communicate or enhance our message.
By sheer luck, I’ve had the great opportunity to contribute to high growth businesses in earlier roles in my career. In a previous role, I rocketed from the first marketing professional on payroll to the manager of a department covering complete in-house services for multiple business units in just a few short years. That level of exposure to continuous challenges and growing responsibilities gave me the opportunity to sample from every specialty within marketing communications. That experience wearing many hats in a high growth organization gave me the flexibility to pursue a more specialized role in digital marketing.
What are your top tips for a great marketing automation campaign?
- Set it but do not forget it. Messaging changes, market maturity evolves and new content is constantly becoming available. Drip campaigns should be revisited on a regular basis just to refresh content alone. Performance metrics should also be reviewed to optimize deliverability and engagement.
- B2B can learn a lot from B2C. Every morning I open my personal email and delight in the clever campaigns that consumer brands are running to get my attention. It’s inspiring and challenges my paradigm in B2B. Though the sales and buying process for B2B and B2C are starkly different, people are still people and principles of brand awareness and thought leadership still apply when influencing prospects.
What have been the biggest changes to B2B marketing in the last 3 years?
The bar is continuously rising on best practices. By my observation, personalization was the golden ticket in the Tenties (2010-2019). But now segmentation and personalization are a bare minimum, and new privacy laws rolled out in recent years (GDPR, CCPA) make leveraging personally identifying data a delicate dance to maintain consumer trust.
The vast amount of tools in the market have also been game-changing. What sets “good” marketing apart is not just a clever marketer any longer, but the variety and complexity of tools at his or her disposal. The IBM Marketing Trends report, which I adore, coined the term “martecheter” in its 2019 issue. A martecheter is a technically savvy marketer, and IBM states this is one of the greatest marketing advantages.
What do you think will be the biggest change in the way you approach your campaigns in the next 3 years?
It’s very easy to stay siloed in a warm a cozy marketing communication bubble and get lost in the metrics of digital marketing. The challenge for professionals in my role is to come up for air and get a reality check by aligning with sales and business development, to more effectively fill the lead funnel.
In the martech world, I am very interested to see how artificial intelligence will be further applied to everyday marketing tools. Advancements in natural language processing and search sentiment, for example, will be interesting to watch.
What are your 3 biggest marketing challenges?
- Demonstrating return on investment. Marketers create so many touchpoints for a brand, many of those offline or outside of our marketing automation platforms, making it difficult to attribute campaign efforts to revenues.
- Sales and marketing alignment. Has a B2B marketer ever answered this question without mentioning sales and marketing alignment? This is a classic challenge, particularly for corporate marketing where long term thought leadership and awareness objectives are often prioritized over near term sales conversion objectives.
- Balancing experimentation with known formulas for success. Trying a new strategy, tool or process can often be disruptive, but well worth the temporary discomfort. Making mental space for experimentation is hard, but necessary in order to evolve and deliver new value to our customers.
Tell us about the best campaign you have ever run.
Sometimes the most outstanding campaigns can be shockingly simple. At Semtech we launched a campaign offering side by side comparison of two connectivity platforms for the Internet of Things (IoT). Campaign elements included a gated infographic, blog, and week-long social media campaign. The organic traffic and social engagement were so outstanding, we realized it would be a strong candidate for a pay per click (PPC) campaign. The content itself was simple and low budget to create. Years later, whenever this campaign is reshared on social media, it’s almost as powerful as the first time. The key to success with this campaign was simply the buzzworthiness of the keywords.
Which campaign didn’t work well, but taught you a lot?
Early in my career, I made the mistake of allowing too much human error to influence campaign reporting. I’ve learned that unless you’re using technology and automation to measure a result, you should expect nothing, and certainly should not rely on manually collected or subjective data. It’s humbling when a campaign fails because it reminds me that my preconceived notions or opinions are nice, but what really matters is the data. I keep my favorite quote written on my office whiteboard: “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” – quality guru W. Edwards Deming
If there was one thing you could change about marketing automation systems, what would it be?
I’m quite pleased with some of the new features I see being rolled out around AI. For example, when an email campaign has an above average unsubscribe rate, I like it when my marketing automation system proactively points that out for me and tells me what I could do to improve in the future. There are seemingly endless metrics for me to track, so when a system is smart enough to flag anomalies and bring them to my attention, and then go the extra mile to tell me what to do about it, that system becomes more than a tool, it becomes a critical asset. Analysis paralysis is a real problem in digital marketing, and AI can help direct my attention to where it will make the biggest impact.
If you could get more marketing budget, what would you spend it on?
Data integration and sanitation. The volume and variety of data within an organization and its tools (plus external resources) are so powerful. Harnessing all that data, ensuring it’s clean and reliable, and turning it into actionable insights is the stuff marketers dreams are made of.
And a little bit about you… What do you like to do in your spare time?
I live in beautiful Camarillo, California with my cattle dog and two cats. I enjoy road trips and hikes with my dog, cooking for my family, and reading my way through the public library. In a never-ending pursuit of craftiness, I am teaching myself to sew in 2020.
What career would you have chosen if you couldn’t work in marketing?
I’d probably try to find some way to make a full-time career out of writing Yelp reviews. I love giving feedback, and appreciate when others leave thoughtful, objective reviews for me to read when evaluating destinations, dining, entertainment, etc.
If you had three wishes from a genie, what would you ask for?
- Apparition (a la Harry Potter) – it’s 2020, why are we still wasting time on long plane rides and sitting in traffic?
- Three more hours per day (one uninterrupted work hour, one for personal life, one for sleep)
- A real-world Ctrl+Z button (with unlimited use, of course)