Tech Qualified Motion

Episode Summary: 
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Jennifer Pepper, the Head of Content Marketing at Unbounce. This podcast interview takes a look into Jennifer’s past experiences with B2B tech companies, highlights some of the key strategies Unbounce uses for evergreen content and pinpoints some exciting new functionality rolling out with the Unbounce platform.
Episode Highlights:
Jennifer discusses her background before arriving at Unbounce. Jennifer mentions her work with Vidyard, where she worked with great mentors and learned about full funnel video marketing campaigns. Jennifer talks about how she built the content engine at Unbounce and mentions how the company has nearly tripled in size since her arrival. Jennifer mentions what users get out of the Unbounce platform - designed to help customers building high converting landing pages. Jennifer’s job with content primarily focuses on creating material that’s helpful and interesting to marketers. Jennifer discusses the structure of Unbounce’s marketing team and covers how her role as Head of Content Marketing fits into the equation. At Unbounce, the team uses a Miro board to track content ideas and brainstorm about content marketing projects. Jennifer talked about three key components to the company’s content marketing efforts - focused on 1) “content bingo” or mapping content to the customer journey, 2) Organic opportunities to drive traffic and 3) Upcoming products and feature launches. During the interview, Jennifer described the importance of determining the intent around keywords. The company outlines major content initiatives quarter by quarter and develops a series of content briefs to plan for the content and distribution aspects of the piece. Because blog posts weren’t having a long life, the company established a campaign strategy and promotions part of the marketing team - this helped extend the life of content. The content marketing team strives to work alongside the product team to develop content around new features. Jennifer walks through some of the trends with landing pages over the years and how Unbounce has adapted to customers’ needs. Jennifer dives into the machine learning and artificial intelligence features that will be rolling out within Unbounce. During the conversation, Jennifer talks about the importance of personalization and how Unbounce technology can help drive conversions with some of the new features on its roadmap. Key Points:
According to Jennifer, “Unbounce is a landing page platform that marketers use to build and test high converting landing pages fast without having to rely on developers or anyone else.” Jennifer stated “I would start by saying that Unbounce is a 10 year old company. We have a literal ocean of content available over that length of existence. So personally, I have found that our content strategy needs to encompass serving up everything evergreen versus making more things on like a set publishing cadence. “ According to Jennifer, “...So a big part of our strategy is a library approach to content versus the publisher’s approach.” Resources Mentioned:
Jennifer Pepper: LinkedIn  Unbounce: Website Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Matouš Roskovec, the Creative Lead at Avocode. The interview focuses on the past experiences of Matouš as a copywriter and how he’s transitioned to leading a team responsible for campaigns and content on a variety of different platforms. Learn how the organization builds their conversion strategy after attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to their content.
Episode Highlights Matouš provides some insight into his past work experience which includes copywriting with a couple of advertising agencies before arriving at Avocode. He talked about his working experience as a freelance copywriter for several years before joining Avocode. Matouš discusses the ideal customer profile of Avocode...which aims to bridge the gap between designers and developers. The company provides a design collaboration platform for agencies, startups, enterprises and pretty much any entity that needs to code websites or apps. Matouš talked about how the web has evolved in the past four years and how Avocode originally started as a development agency. Avocode’s founders dealt with the problem of combining design and development, developed several plugins and ultimately landed on developing a single tool which could open a variety of design file formats. He explained their typical customer’s working process which includes the whole workflow of the design process and working through feedback until the design is finalized. Matouš discusses how the Avocode marketing team is constructed - a combination of three teams in Growth, Creative and Customer Success. Avocode’s growth team constantly evaluates the company’s pricing packages and feature set to align with customer expectations and requirements. Avocode uses over 30 paid tools for marketing (Notion, Intercom, etc) and the combination of a variety of SaaS tools allows their small team to be highly efficient. While talking about content, Matouš also talks about The Grit which is a blog series of branded content by Avocode. The Grit is a set of written interviews with thought leaders in the design and development space (check out Product Design Tips from the Twitter Hashtag Inventor, Chris Messina) He explained a content strategy which involves the 20% / 80% rule. The team spends 20% of their time creating new content and 80% of their time optimizing and distributing existing content.  Matouš emphasizes the importance of having marketing inspiration outside the industry you work in (he described StudioBinder as a key inspiration for him). Key Points Matouš says “building a beautiful website is no longer enough. You know,  it has to be functional, it has to be used over and over again. So it has to bring in your customers, more times to show them value. And the only way you can do this is actually to ask for feedback.” Matouš also mentioned that “Avocode is about to release a prototyping feature, and that would be built in very soon, to add in functionality in the whole process.” Avocode has over 100,000 unique visitors every month coming to their website. Resources Matouš Roskovec: LinkedIn 
Email: Matouš@avocode.com
Instagram: cutandcotton
The Grit: Avocode.com/blog
Avocode: Website
Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown talk with Kirti Dewan, the VP of Marketing at Bugsnag. Kirti chats about her role as a consultant prior to joining Bugsnag and then takes us through some of the major marketing initiatives she’s spearheading at the company. Kirti has a wide range of marketing leadership experience with startups and brings a lot to the table with her role at Bugsnag.
Episode Highlights:
Kirti discusses a bit about her background both as a consultant and as an employee  for various startup tech companies. Kirti talks about Bugsnag and its mission to be an application stability and management platform. Bugsnag helps companies capture errors and then prioritize and fix the errors within their development lifecycle. When Kirti joined the team, it had three employees on the marketing side - now she leads a team of six. When coming on board, Kirti had to focus on a lot of the foundational components to marketing - the marketing function inside a young company tends to need a lot more structure before growing too much. Kirti discusses the responsibilities of a marketing organization now, it's very difficult to be both tactical and strategic at the same time. Documentation was a big focus for the team as it started to build out various functions, especially for events. Kirti discusses the importance of communicating feature launches with their product, especially for those that are very important to the customer base. Kirti built out a lot of foundational elements for their content marketing - including explainer videos and other long-form materials. During the interview, Kirti talked about how she helped change the structure of the company so that content became a focus and a responsibility for everyone. Kirti described marketing and marketing initiatives as a “laser pointer” and how it’s important not to chase other projects or try to “boil the ocean.” As a startup, you can’t place your bets all over the place - it’s important to focus on a few channels and go deeper with strategy and tactics. Kirti discusses the development of their ABM strategy, which isn’t a “full blown strategy” - but a strategy that has a focus on segmentation. At Bugsnag, the company divides their content into four different “swim lanes” - areas focused on engineering, product features, thought leadership and sales enablement. The team develops a set of content initiatives for the entire quarter and assigns writers to each of the pieces to ensure a consistent cadence. Bugsnag is fortunate to have excellent writers within their development team and these folks contribute greatly to the highly technical content featured on the organization’s website. In many cases, Kirti uses an audio interview with executives to drive content pieces - this allows team members to just “riff” and produce content at the same time. Key Points:
Kirti stated “The responsibilities within a marketing organization are quite immense. So you are down in the weeds. 10 minutes later, you're really high up at 30,000 feet. You're trying to be so strategic. So it's this constant gear switching, context switching that has to happen in the brain…” Kirti discussed the status of marketing teams at SaaS companies and how many marketing teams struggle to get respect with product-driven companies, “...So depending upon the type of company that you are...marketing can be a different junk drawer, different place of respect. And what happened at Bugsnag is it is very difficult, like other SaaS companies in that it is very, very product driven.” Resources Mentioned:
Kirti Dewan: LinkedIn  Bugsnag: Website Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with the Head of Marketing at COTA, Jaimee Ryan. The podcast episode uncovers Jaimee’s journey as a B2B marketer, why she enjoys the startup culture, how she built a strong marketing foundation and what’s on the horizon with COTA’s marketing plans.
Episode Highlights:
Jaime talks about her earlier career...working for a series of startups Jaime breaks down how she came across the opportunity to work with COTA and why she loves the startup environment She discusses how COTA’s mission is important and how it connects with her as a marketer COTA works with Life Sciences companies, Provider organizations and Payers - all which require different strategies. The organization’s primary source of revenue is through the Life Sciences target audience. COTA provides organizations with real world data that can be used to accelerate clinical trials. One of the major challenges COTA’s target audience faces is the fact that clinical trials are constantly under scrutiny and must continue to be more efficient. COTA’s technology takes a lot of unstructured data and formulates the information in a way that makes sense for their customers. Jaimee describes the state of marketing when she came on board and what she did to build the foundation. At COTA, it was important to establish the company’s credibility in their space and a lot of focus was put into that effort during Jaimee’s first year. In-person events were never a big ROI for COTA and they focus on promoting the research done by their innovative employees. Education material is a very large part of the company’s marketing strategy - building content around real world data and real world evidence. One of COTA’s big company goals in 2020 is to increase brand awareness. Jaime breaks down how her team develops goals - a focus on quarterly objectives called “rocks” drives the process. COTA has a dedicated team member who manages the company’s rocks and holds everyone accountable. Jaimee works to get feedback from internal and external resources - especially when trying to determine what content is the most effective. One of Jaimee’s most effective approaches to understanding COTA’s customers is through listening to sales calls. Key Points:
Jaimee talked about her decision process to get back into the startup world and stated “I decided life waits for no one, so, we just kind of had to go for it. So I jumped back in.” According to Jaime, “When I arrived at COTA, it was messy. The state of marketing was messy, fragmented and disorganized. So really my job, when I came in, COTA had really evolved as a company. But, our exterior identity did not really represent that well. So we were doing very sophisticated things with very sophisticated customers.” Jaime mentioned that she built credibility and thought leadership in a variety of ways “...we did that through white papers, promoting our research through, participating at the major industry conferences. So my job last year was really just to promote the efforts of our research team and our clinical staff, to build that credibility. “ Resources Mentioned:
Jaimee Ryan: LinkedIn  COTA: Website Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Laurie Hood, SVP Marketing at Mobilewalla. The interview focuses on Laurie’s experience in a B2B capacity - mostly with technology and technology marketing. Laurie takes a deeper dive into how marketing functions at Mobilewalla, which focuses on selling to B2C companies across a variety of industries such as retail, telecommunications, travel and financial services.
Episode Highlights:
Laurie breaks down her past work experience before arriving at Mobilewalla in 2018. Laurie started her career as a consultant at Accenture, and later on joined IBM where she was VP of Product Marketing.  Mobilewalla marketing focuses on three primary things, driving brand awareness, generating demand, and enabling our sales teams.  Mobilewalla is a data and insights company, with expertise in consumer intelligence solutions. Laurie was the first marketer at Mobilewalla.  At Mobilewalla, the company also partners with advertising agencies to help them serve their clients. They help companies increase customer loyalty, grow revenue and improve the predictiveness of their models and effectiveness of their marketing spend. Mobilewalla places content on their own channels, website, social media properties and partners with groups who serve or try to attract the same target audiences.  Mobilewalla is also shifting towards becoming more digital by actively participating in webinars and other virtual formats. Laurie talked about how her team is reaching out to local groups, who would have done in-person events, and then offering content to help them produce virtual events. On a quarterly basis, the marketing focuses on publishing a significant piece of content - like a white paper - and then two to three blog posts a month covering themes such as data enrichment or leveraging artificial intelligence in marketing. Laurie talks about how the company has developed content in a designated section on their website as “Technology Briefs” and discusses how these pieces take a much deeper dive into areas not available in traditional blog posts. Laurie also mentioned that she started many marketing initiatives from a standing stop...and started with a website for the most part. So, there’s been a strong focus on just creating foundational material needed for the marketing team. Laurie’s important lesson for marketers “What do I want to do, but what can I do and what can we do and do well". Laurie uses HubSpot’s blog for staying up to date and for ongoing marketing education. Key Points:
Laurie states “ So for most marketers, whether you're B2B or B2C, marketing boils down to the same key goals, attract, retain, and grow. I want to attract new customers, I want to retain the ones I have and I want to grow the business I'm doing with them.” She also quoted “And with my customers who are B2C marketers, it's that much broader scope of attracting a consumer. Many of them are trying to leverage digital channels to do that and just that different perspective versus that much more structured sales process of a B2B sale.” Mobilewalla’s key tactic is content marketing and focusing on providing quality thought leadership around a variety of industry topics. Resources:
Laurie Hood: LinkedIn Mobilewalla: Website Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown sit down with Kevin Alansky, the Chief Marketing Officer of Higher Logic. The interview focuses on Kevin’s career as a B2B marketer, his experience leading marketing efforts for technology companies, the evolution of the CMO over the years and highlights some of Kevin’s goals with Higher Logic’s marketing team.
Episode Highlights:
Kevin breaks down his past work experience before arriving at Higher Logic in 2019. Kevin talks about his experience leading marketing teams for analytics companies and going head-to-head with large analytics companies like Tableau and Sisense. Higher Logic is predominantly focused on two areas - associations and corporate markets. Higher Logic’s online community platform has a strong customer base and the organization has expanded into marketing automation with recent acquisitions (Real Magnet and Informz). When Kevin joined the marketing team, it was at an inflection point and the team was moving from a startup to a more mature model. Using and analyzing data was a key component of the growth within Higher Logic’s marketing team (now consisting of 16-17 team members). As the team grew, project management and communication became more vital as the team had to organize their work more efficiently. Kevin experienced a bit of culture shock coming from professional sports marketing to higher education (when he transitioned to Blackboard several years ago) and he was able to learn the importance of understanding your target audience. When arriving at Higher Logic, Kevin focused a lot on regular cadences with not only the marketing team, but with teams outside of marketing. With 3,000 existing customers, Kevin placed a focus on improving the onboarding experience and building out the customer marketing team. Kevin discusses the strong content team that’s in place at Higher Logic - which includes a strong commitment to thought leadership material that’s beneficial to both customers and prospects. Higher Logic is currently in the process of rebuilding the company’s website and improving its current marketing technology stack. Kevin outlined the Community Leader Changemaker program launched by the organization and discussed how Higher Logic highlighted influencers and other thought leaders in the association space. Kevin talked about the evolution of CMOs in the 90s (being brand-driven) and how the role has evolved to more of a data-driven role now...especially with B2B SaaS companies. One-on-ones are a big part of the communication at Higher Logic and Kevin has a focus on his team’s career aspirations and helping them along their career path. If you want to connect with Kevin on LinkedIn - make sure to mention you heard him on Tech Qualified!  
Key Points:
Kevin states “So, you know, a lot of it is just getting the team and the experience that I've had to be able to give them the right tools, give them the right structure, give them the right vision. And quite frankly, it's my job to, you know, stay out of the way and let them do what they do best.” Selling to associations is very much a relationship-driven business and shares many of the same qualities Kevin experienced when selling to higher education clients. Kevin had a 16 or 17 person marketing team, but wanted to flatten the structure a bit so he could get into the weeds and understand the work that’s happening. Resources Mentioned:
Kevin Alansky: LinkedIn  Higher Logic: Website Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies