Cooking for Chefs or What I’ve Learned Marketing to Marketers
I’m a marketer who markets marketing technology to marketers. It’s incredibly meta and akin to cooking for chefs. It’s also a luxury I’ve come to appreciate. As the ideal target prospect for the product your company sells, you have an unfair advantage. You intimately know the pains, fears and needs of your buyer, making it easier to translate your value proposition into messages that resonate and programs that compel action. You are also in the enviable position of being able to provide direct feedback to the product team on killer new features and functionality that solve real-world problems marketers face every day.
I have been fortunate to spend the last several years in demand gen roles at some amazing marketing technology companies – first at Eloqua and more recently at Lattice Engines. Being an internal customer of the companies I have worked for has allowed me to evangelize, advocate for and be truly passionate about the technology we sell. And that leads me to my new role as VP of Marketing for LookBookHQ.
But first, a history lesson.
Unless you’ve been asleep for the last few years, you know that content is everything. It is the central component to any effective marketing strategy and the very essence of how we market and sell today. As the Harvard Business Review so aptly put it: “The phenomenon of content marketing and brand publishing has unfolded rapidly because it responds to consumer preference.”
Storytelling is at the heart of every great brand and yet, as marketers, we’ve been so focused on how to think like digital publishers and build content engines, we haven’t been as mindful about what happens to that awesome content once we distribute it. We tend to see the click or conversion as the finish line, when it’s actually the starting block for our customers and prospects — the beginning of their content journey. The next wave of content marketing innovation must focus on how we, as marketers, can go “beyond the click” and hold on to our audience’s attention once we have it.
This is what’s so exciting about LookBookHQ.
Like a tree that falls in the woods when no one is around, can you call your content marketing initiatives a success if you don’t really know how they’re working to engage buyers? Sure, you can measure clicks, social shares and form completes, but these won’t tell you whether someone actually read or watched your content. LookBooks combine two things I am passionate about: intelligent, behavior-driven nurturing and content engagement analytics that allow marketers to provide a more relevant, personalized and customer-centric journey than ever before…. and allowing buyers to consume content in a way that suits their preferences and pace, not ours as marketers.
As marketers, we invest so much time and money getting the precious click, yet that engagement is too often “one and done.” But it doesn’t have to be this way, and I believe it won’t be for long. I’m excited to join the LookBookHQ team and start spreading the word about another disruptive marketing technology that will change the way we engage with our prospects and customers at every point along their buying journey. I’m also thrilled to be an honorary Canadian once again and to have found another great team that I soon will call family.
