Today we are joined by the powerful Erin Blaskie. Erin is currently a fractional CMO advising startups and scaleups, currently working with Jamieson Law, Ridgebase, Heirlume and Staffy. 

Before going back to freelance, Erin spent 4 years leading marketing teams at Fellow, a SaaS platform for meeting productivity as well as L-SPARK, a SaaS accelerator. 

But Erin’s start in marketing goes further than that. in 2004 she launched a virtual assistant business (one of the firsts) and later pivoted that to a marketing agency where she worked with brands like Disney, Microsoft, Ford, she’s worked with Hollywood actors, authors and speakers helping them craft their brands. 

She runs a no fluff-tactical newsletter with 10k+ subscribers, she has a huge Twitter audience topping 36k.

She’s a TEDx speaker, her writting’s been featured in Forbes, entrepreneur, adweek and the wall street journal.

She’s also a post grad intructor, an entrepreneur mentor and a mental health advocate. 

Holly shit, Erin, how do you find time to appear on podcasts with all the stuff you have going on haha?

Here are the questions our listeners submitted!

Freelancing

What do you wish someone would have prepared you for before starting your digital marketing career?

I would especially love to learn her tips on setting expectations and boundaries with clients in her freelance/agency work. 

Do you feel like you’re more sales than marketer? Do you spend more hours working freelance? more than startup?

All things being equal, do you think that as a freelancer, you can learn faster? more clients, more projects, more breadth of problems and tools.

Startup in-house
Curious what Erin would say about which marketing roles/functions are better to hire in-house versus hiring freelance.

What are some of the biggest tactical marketing mistakes you see startups make? I say tactical because I think the de facto answer is based on not having a strategy in place.  

What are the best marketing strategies for early stage companies when budgets are sparse?

Show notes
Check out Erin's site.

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Today's episode features a call-to-action for our listeners: take a few moments, check out Women of Martech, and share it with someone you think could benefit. 

We're joined by Melissa Ledesma, Executive Director of Women of Martech. Here's an overview of her bio: 

Melissa Ledesma 

• Director Of Content & Comms at DMS (Digital Media Solutions), a leading global ad-tech enabled performance advertising company
• She's also Executive Director of Women of Martech
• Before the ad world, she spent several years in real estate, mortgage and entertainment playing different PR/event, email marketing roles.
• she works out of New Jersey and spends a good chunk of her time giving back, recently being named to the Board of Directors of her local Boys and Girls Clubs to enrich education and training of at risk children and teens

Women of Martech's mission is concrete and actionable: to raise the profile of the women and their achievements in the world of Martech. Melissa walks us through how the Women of Martech community is helping women at all stages of their career to reach that next level. From member spotlights and insider resources to connecting with a vast network of 800+ martech pros, this community is like a superpower for your career.

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Naomi is Director, Global Marketing Operations at EFI, a 3,000+ person tech company in the printing industry. She’s based in Vancouver but she’s been working remotely long before it was cool. She has 12+ years of experience leading high-performing global B2B demand generation teams. 

Before EFI she ran Marketing Ops at Sophos a cybersecurity enterprise company. Naomi is also one of the founding members of “MO-Pros”, the biggest Slack community for marketing Ops pros and recently launched a platform/site.  

She’s been interviewed by prominent podcasts for her efforts spearheading a large scale enterprise migration to Marketo. David Lewis, the godfather of marketing ops podcasts says that Naomi is in his top 10 marketing ops people he’s ever worked with. 

Noami dives into the 3 things that stand out in most marketing operations profesionals: 

1. ask a lot of questions and think outside the box
2. ability to explain complex technical concept to non tech people
3. multi task skills, sometimes the sky is falling

Most marketing job postings should be read as a guideline and not taken as a prescription. The most important thing to demonstrate is your ability to learn something. 

When Naomi is hiring on her team she’s looking for a balance between:

- technical chops

- cultural fit

In the interview process, it's key to get to chat with people from other business units to assess that cultural fit. 

Take home assignments are not super common for entry level roles, you can get a ton from how someone answers a question. 

Naomi values curiosity, looking for data opinions. How do you test that in an interview, what attributes shine?

The attribute that allows you to suceed is you have to be curious and always ask why. You have to be willing to break things down and rebuild it better fast and stronger. Open ended questions get interesting conversations. Let candidates explain problem solving. Look for condidates that demonstrate personal bias recognition. 

What's it like being a Director level MOPs at an enterprise company?
Aside from lots of meetings (lol), understand where business partners want to go, can our current tech stack support those goals. Tech adoption, get everyone to use Marketo to most potential.

How can people who want to stay in the IC path develop a long term career growth?
Naomi sets up her team with subject matter experts. Things change too fast, having experts on specific pieces, web, email, data, so they can stay on top of those areas and bring it back to the team and educate the rest, share knowledge.

Here are key elements of Naomi's onboarding strategy:

•  Marketo university
•  1-1s with key stakeholders
•  Viydyard videos for short training
•  Make sure person is plugged in and fits in
•  Training the data model, week by week

What should marketers do in their first job:

•  always asking questions
•  how can we do this better or not
•  why do we do this this way

If you're interested in marketing tech and you aren't a member of The MOPros community, you can signup here.

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Ever get stuck waiting on a dev to update a small piece of code to fix a form/email/webpage?

How about the confidence that comes from speaking at eye-level with development?

Marketers have so much to gain from learning even a baseline of code.

In this episode, JT is going to make the case on why you should learn some code, and I’m going to introduce you to a new community focused on helping marketers learn to code.

Dude, you are always talking to me about coding. Share with our listeners your own journey.

What is unique about marketers wanting to learn how to code?

How hard is it to learn coding?

It’s going to take time to learn to code. How do you stay motivated over the long-haul?

Detach learning to code form your career -- make it a side-hobby with no implications on your job

Devil’s advocate: why not just spin up a webflow website or some other no-code option?

I know you’re itching to introduce it: tell our listeners about the community.

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In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career.

Sonya Gankina, listener and recent University of Ottawa graduate joins the show as our fourth and final #topmartechprospect.

Sonya's question for us: Do you think there is still a place for Don Draper-style verbal presentations in the 2021 remote marketing world?

I'm mildly ashamed to adminit I've watched all 92 Mad Men episodes at least twice. This is my favorite scene out of all the episodes. The Kodak carousel is the perfect example of how to tell a compelling story. 

Your average marketer would've described the new Kodak product as a NEW revolutionary slide projector. You can take a TON of pictures and put them into slides and you can share them with a room of people.

But instead, Don took a different approach.

"This device is not a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It takes us to a place we ache to go again. It lets us travel around and around and back home again, a place we know we are loved."

The full clip is worth the watch to get the full emotional punches.

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Show notes:
Reach out to Sonya on LinkedIn for a coffee or to connect
You can visit Sonya's website and check out her digital marketing services and creative portfolio

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In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career.

Milan Fatoric, listener and recent University of Ottawa graduate joins the show as our third featured #topmartechprospect.

Milan's question for us: What are the top 3 things you would tell every marketing student or recent grad to STOP doing?

Here's some of the takeaways:

1. Stop chasing a salary, chase interesting problems to solve, the money will follow

2. Stop trying to establish yourself as an expert right out of school, instead, get a job and a side hustle and build credibility. Let others call you an expert.

3. Stop relying on job boards to get a job you really want, instead, reach out to and hangout with people that are in jobs you want. 

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Show notes:
Reach out to Milan on LinkedIn for a coffee or to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milanfatoric/

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In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. 

Augustine Karczmarczyk, listener and University of Ottawa student joins the show as our second featured #topmartechprospect.

Augustine's question for us: When it comes to building a personal brand, how can one balance publicity and privacy?  Can you be credible while concealed, or is being out in the open something you simply must embrace until you’ve established a presence?

Check out the episode for JT's full rant on why you don't need to be an influencer. 

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This is next part is from Augustine:

Hey, thanks for being one of six people in the world to look at podcast show notes! You’re probably a librarian or simply here by mistake – but EITHER way, I’m glad you’re reading this. I must have been too starstruck during our recording to mention that I welcome LinkedIn connections here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/augustinek/

If you want to talk timber frames, off-grid housing, or a freelance project, please reach out! If you haven’t heard yet, I’m a “top martech prospect” sooo, you might want to act fast! ;)

I also can’t pass up the chance to put my personal website https://augustinek.com on here too for a sweet SEO backlink boost. Look out “Saint Augustine of Hippo” – I’ve got your ranking in my sights.

All the best & talk soon!

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In this series we profile a recent marketing grad or a current student and answer some of their most pressing questions about the world of martech and how to be happy in your future marketing career. 

Justin Silver, listener and University of Ottawa student joins the show as our first featured #topmartechprospect.

Justin's question for us: What does your “starter pack” for digital marketers” look like?

Check out the meme we used to answer this question.

Posting on Reddit: “how do I get a job without experience?”. Don’t post this question on social. Want experience? Market yourself. Build a website. Build a social media audience.

Last minute changes. Despite a documented process, there’s always a last minute campaing request to hit quota. You just have to embrace it. Email is fast, but use it wisely.

Manager in your title. Everyone is a marketing manager these days. Marketing has it’s own milatiristic understanding of rank. Marketers love to invent titles for themselves. You need to realise that titles are secondary to the things you build.

Friendly reminders. Are you really running a marketing operations project if you aren’t sending weekly “friendly reminders” to people who have missed deadlines?

ABM. Email everyone in the company, with the same unpersonnalized email, non stop. Don’t. Do. This.

Fire extinguisher. Carve out some firefighting time on your calendar if you’re in MOPs. Things break. Things suddenly become priorities.

Looking at the martech landscape and thinking “I need one of each”. FOMO in martech is a real thing. I’m not using x or y and I’m missing out. Digital marketing isn’t about having all of the tech. It’s about using your tech to the most that you can.

Pocket talk translator for integrating tools together. Your CRM calls them leads, your marketing automation tool calls them people, your analytics tool calls them users. Translation required.

Gotta get on . Bernie Mitts expired in what? 2 days? You don’t have to be an early adopter for everything.

Loading screens for days. Whether it’s a big Marketo insteance or a long time frame report in GA, marketers battle with slow reports every day. You shouldn’t need a gaming PC to run your automation software.

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Show notes:
Justin's LinkedIn Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/justin-silver-14b393108

Justin's site: https://bit.ly/3cCSMPk

Conference mentioned: Legacy conference.

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Steffen Hedebrandt is co-founder of Dreamdata.io.
Transcripted borrowed from here.
For a deep dive into attribution see this article.

Phil Gamache:

What's up, guys? Welcome to the Humans of MarTech podcast. His name is Jon Taylor, my name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future-proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing.

Phil Gamache:

Today on the show, we have a super special guest. We're joined by Steffen Hedebrandt. Steffen got his start in the world of marketing doing some SEO and some growth consultancy in the startup world. And he moved to Oslo in Norway to work in sales/BizDev for a company called Elance, which would eventually become Upwork after the oDesk acquisition. And he stayed there for three and a half years and moved back to Copenhagen and took a position as Head of Marketing at Airtame, a wireless HTMI product startup which John and I know very well. And at some point during your time at Airtame, you solved some pretty cool big attribution problems with some custom engines, and you started to get this itch about starting your own company.

Phil Gamache:

In the summer of 2019, you, Ole and Lars, both former SVPs of Trustpilot made the plunge and started DreamData. So today the main takeaway is going to be that, gone are the days where enterprise companies are the only people who can solve multitouch B2B attribution and tools like DreamData are solving this for startups and SMBs. So Steffen, thanks so much for being on the show, man.

Steffen Hedebrandt:

Thanks a lot, Phil. Really looking forward to it. We've talked a lot about this topic before. I'm sure we'll get pretty deep pretty fast.

Phil Gamache:

Like myself, I've evaluated DreamData quite a bit, so I'm super familiar with the platform itself. John, I don't know how much you know about it, but I wanted to kind of start off with your journey a little bit and go back to when you were working at Upwork basically, this big tech role and how different was that from your previous role in the startup world and what did you like most about both roles?

Steffen Hedebrandt:

From the get-go out of university, I joined the Vintage and Rare, which is basically, or I don't know if they exist anymore, but it was a platform for selling vintage instruments where kind of gathering shops and the shops would then put their instruments up there. And the first craft that I really learned after studying was really SEO because if you have 10,000 instruments, then you really want to have those instruments on top of Google instead of your competitors there. And, I just got super fascinated by actually how big an impact you can have when you understand that Google algorithm and how to friendly manipulate a little bit towards your own business.

Steffen Hedebrandt:

But, that was an almost bootstrapped kind of project which led me to reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris and dipping my toes into places like Elance and trying to hire people from India and try to connect them with the other freelancers you had in Europe and other freelancers you had in the US and then suddenly you have this web of people all over the world that you have to make work and that's quite a challenge.

Steffen Hedebrandt:

Fun story, my first job was, I put up a job for a person to add people on Myspace that's set with a guitar in their profile image. Super non valuable, but it was just to test down. So our vintage and rare profile had more followers. I learned a ton there and we didn't make any money, but we were greatly successful on Google and having been there for I don't know how long the was, three years or so. I actually got approached by Elance as they were setting up their European office and asked whether I wanted to join that and try to promote Elance in Europe. And, me being a big fan of the platform, I thought, okay, well, I haven't made any money in the last three years, so, let me go get a real job for a period.

Steffen Hedebrandt:

So, the music instrument platform was really fixing anything digital, this ads, SEO, et cetera, where Elance's and Upwork was much more the traditional business development like doing PR, doing events, handing over a list of keywords that you would like to have targeted. And so it's a much more you can, say hands-off than the nitty gritty of running your own a platform, but it was really interesting to try to be part of this classical California tech company and see that from the inside. It also got big so I think we were 70 when I started at Elance. And then, when it was Upwork, it was maybe 500. I think my true love lies around the smaller companies where it's bigger from thought action, and you see the impact of your work much faster.

Phil Gamache:

Something we talk with so much about on the show is the value of small companies. And well, just knowing what you like and the environment that works best for you. You touched on the SEO front. I think, as we talk more and more about attribution in this episode, SEO and attribution that they go together like peanut butter and salty water. It just is such a hard combination to get right.

Phil Gamache:

How many times in SEO land are you talking to an executive and your trying to explain like the value of SEO and you're like, hey, well, you know that dominating search rankings and owning thought leadership and the brand space that you have there. But then connecting those dots, I think, a lot of SEOs end up thinking attribution a lot because they want to really tie things to that revenue. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how your journey has brought you from SEO into the attribution?

Steffen Hedebrandt:

Yes. It's like super critical spot on topic for attribution. And I think we also showed some of you, some of this stuff still when we pitched Dreamdata. The main attribution challenge is that there's so few things that we purchase the very first time we experienced it. I’d buy an ice cream on a hot summer day right away. But even just a pair of running shoes you’d go to a couple of sites. You'd maybe switch between your computer and your phone, et cetera. And if we’re then talking B2B, which that's what we address with Dreamdata, then we're also talking maybe multiple months, multiple stakeholders, even your teams has multiple touches with the customer as well. And then, very quickly it gets really complex.

Steffen Hedebrandt:

Just before I go to kind of how we solve it, what we really can see across all our customers is that all the organic traffic works really well to start journeys, but they're so rarely the last step of the journey. So that's where you end up in this disconnect between all the value you actually create by driving a lot of search traffic to the website. But then the sales people is the ones that convert the traffic, and then they get all the reward for closing the deals. But the deals might never have gone there if you hadn't brought in all the traffic.

Jon Taylor:

And, we go to this data-driven path where we want to see direct lines and businesses becoming so data-driven that we almost detach ourselves from thinking through the real marketing picture. You're right. You come in through SEO and then you download and nurture, you get ...

Try to send your welcome emails on behalf of coworkers who live in the same shoes as your target users.

If you’re in B2B, chances are you’re using your own product, at least a coworker is. Let them write the welcome email for new users.

This is especially powerful when you serve many different verticals.

Example: if you sell to marketers and sales. Ask all new users to identify with sales/marketing in the signup process. Send the welcome email to marketers from a marketer at your company who showcases how they use the product for marketing use cases. Send the welcome email to sales reps from someone on your sales team who showcases how they use the product for sales use cases.

JT: Okay Phil, you showed me a screenshot of this question you answered in a Slack community.

PG: Yeah shoutout to Elite Marketers and Founders Slack community that was started by Joel Musambi and Tomas Kolafa, two Ottawa-Toronto marketers. 

JT: So the question was about building email onboarding flows for b2b products and any great resources or things that have worked well. 

I know that during our time together at Klipfolio we experimented a lot with emails but in your past you’ve done a bit of freelancing and moonlighting in email onboarding land.

What’s this magic welcome email that works extremely well?

PG: So I want to preface this by saying that this really only works if your product sells to different segments of users. And this is usually the case right?

If you only sell to marketers for example, there might still be segments in the decision makers, so you could talk to the marketing manager who’ll be using the product, you might talk to the marketing ops person who needs to integrate new tools and you might need sign off from the Director who’s the decision maker. 

JT: yeah we could do a full episode on segmentation, maybe we should. Okay so let’s actually use an example here, let’s go with a popular name and let’s pick a tool that tons of verticals can use, lots of use cases. 

PG: Yeah let’s go with Basecamp. 

Project management tools. There’s so many of them. In part because everyone can use a project management or todo list type of tool.

Basecamp sells to a bunch of different roles. Marketers, sales, product teams, finance, you name it, there’s a use case for it. 

JT: So I’m on their site now, when you start a trial, there’s a few questions they ask you up front, did you go through this already?

PG: haha yeah I did a bit of prep for this.

When you start a trial of Basecamp they ask you for name and email, then company name and job title/role. 

They then ask if your company has these departments/anyone that works in these roles, they list sales, rnd, marketers, finance and managers. 

Then they even ask for a use case, if you’re working on any of these projects, site build, event, new product launch or rebrand. 

JT: That’s actually quite a lot of info to ask upfront. I’m okay with it if companies are doing something with that info though.

So you finished creating an account, Welcome emails come in about 5 mins later. Are you happy? 

PG: I’m actually really sad haha. Basecamp is a tiny team so email segmentation and onboarding is probably super low on their list. I remember when they hired a head of marketing their job posting said something like “this job isn’t about email nurturing, though very important, the scope of this role is much broader”. And that makes a ton of sense. Small team, you gotta prioritize. 

JT: So the welcome email wasn’t segmented?

PG: Sent from support@ and there’s no segmentation content in there despite knowing my role and my use case. 

They are probably using that data to inform other decisions, but I didn’t get any segmented content that could’ve boosted engagement.

JT: Okay, let’s say I’m Jason or Andy at Basecamp and we hire you to upgrade our email onboarding and you need to impress the shit out of these guys. What does the welcome email look like?

PG: Yeah so let’s go back to some of the questions Basecamp asks users in the signup process.

By asking for job title, they could lookup specific words and put me in a role bucket. 

Something really cool that they do in the onboarding is ask what departments you have setup and to invite someone from that team. In this case Basecamp knows if someone is from rnd or finance. 

JT: So user signs up, you know they fit into 1 of 5 role buckets:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Rnd
• Finance
• managers

PG: So then next step is nominating 1 person in your company for each of those role buckets. And you help them write the welcome email from their perspective and share how they use the product.

So the welcome email to marketers comes from Andy, their head of marketing, he shows Basecamp in action for a product launch he completed recently and walks through his daily process for running marketing through basecamp.

Rnd email comes in from DHH, their famous CTO. He probably reminds you that he created ruby on rails in the welcome email haha but he’s probably able to craft something totally different for a technical user compared to a marketer in Andy’s email. So maybe in that email DHH talks about Basecamp 3’s API improvements or how they break up user stories into subcomponents and sub tasks.

The manager email comes from Jason their CEO and he walks other managers and team leaders through the Small Council team setup they use internally or maybe the campfire sections and how to keep the team in touch and highly collaborative.

JT: love it.

What you’re doing is creating instant connection with empathy in your welcome email. It’s written in language you’re familiar with and the use cases shown are super familiar with your world.

PG: Yeah so haven’t done this in a bunch of places there, it doesn't always work, especially if you serve a very niche audience. But usually in B2B someone in your company resembles your target user.

I find it super fun to work for a B2B company that sells to marketers or marketing ops. So I’m someone on the team but I’m also very close to the customer’s worlds, I live in similar pain points every day.

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