OFF-MUTE 🔈
💯 Nearly every marketer is doing more with less this year.
💥 Market uncertainty is forcing companies to rethink their plans and find creative ways to increase brand awareness, drive demand and build community with reduced resources.
📊 Our client Jess Iandiorio, CMO at Starburst – a data analytics company – knows first-hand how to pivot on a dime. She recently sat down with our Executive Vice President Keith Giannini to offer her take on marketing during a down economy and explain her decision-making process when it comes to shifting program priorities in order to make an impact. Here’s what she recommends:
☑️ Obsess over your customers. Who are they? What makes them tick or keeps them up at night? Jess said, “The best thing you can do is spend all of your time obsessing over who the customer is, and how you're going to help them. Then build something really useful for them.” The Starburst Data team invests heavily in content that’s creative, educational and helpful to attract the right personas and grow its community.
☑️ Be efficient, yet flexible. Jess looks at marketing budget reductions as opportunities to “refine, focus, reset expectations, and make sure we’re all in it together.” She also thinks it’s good practice to put some money aside for when a big, great idea strikes like lightning out of nowhere, too.
☑️ Balance short and long-term investments. When times are tough, it can be easy to start chopping certain awareness-building activities that are harder to measure than demand-generating ones. “You just have to figure out which strategic bets within these functions you’re going to continue. Make sure you don’t sacrifice your long-term health of the business in order for short-term success,” said Jess.
☑️ Show up where it matters most. Taking an integrated approach to marketing has never been more important to reach new audiences and nurture existing ones. “For us, we might find our audience on Stack Overflow, Reddit or in the Trino Slack community. And so, in analyzing where they are and where they pick up information, we're able to cater to what their needs are from a content strategy standpoint.”
☑️ Set expectations and communicate them. “Expectation management is a big deal right now. If you're a head of marketing or you're an aspiring head of marketing, you should get really good at communicating trade-offs and expected results,” said Jess. That also means that if you have a strong conviction about where dollars need to stay, don’t compromise. Jess encourages folks to always articulate those aspirations through the lens of the company’s goals.
☑️ Run a campaign to gather audience insights. When you’re forced to do more with less, get creative. “One program that we ran trying to engage our technical audience was called Space Quest League – it was a game of four sweepstakes that we ran all of last year. It was very cool and nerdy. People could win swag, free trial credits and other incentives along the way. The entire competition drove increased social followers and pipeline growth. We were measuring every engagement on the backend as a way to really get to know this audience. And we were able to parlay that information and do much more efficient programs for this year, now that we had that baseline of learning,” said Jess.
☑️ Treat agencies like partners. Jess’s team uses multiple agencies, including Inkhouse, to develop ideas and campaigns before they go to market. She said, “It’s a great way to scale expertise that your team may not have.” Jess also believes that honesty and clear communication are at the center of all good partnerships. We couldn’t agree more.
▶️ Watch the entire Q&A with Jess.
