Movable Ink Vice President, Marketing interview: We speak to Jessica Vogol, VP of the personalisation experts, in the latest of Press Gazette’s Marketing Maestro interviews. This series is produced in association with Lead Monitor, New Statesman Media Group’s content marketing arm.
What’s been your proudest achievement in your current role?
My proudest moment has been building out the marketing team at Movable Ink. When I started in February 2015 as a Product Marketer, the team was only four people. As I moved through the ranks at Movable Ink, I worked closely with GTM (Go-to-Market) stakeholders to understand the needs of the business and build out the marketing team to help serve those larger strategic goals.
What media channels do you see as most important and best value when it comes to marketing spend and activity?
In our space (B2B), I think it’s pretty difficult to beat LinkedIn. I’ve worked across a number of different industries and products, and have always loved the precise targeting that LinkedIn offers, as well as the ability to start small and test which creative, ad types, and strategy works best for your organisation.
What is your advice for mastering social media?
Sometimes as marketers, we can feel like we need to be everywhere – from LinkedIn to TikTok to the Metaverse. Unless you have a large team of dedicated social marketers, it’ll be quite difficult to be strategic and effectively engage audiences across every platform. As with LinkedIn (and other paid media), I’m always an advocate of picking one or two channels to start with, and leveraging those learnings to build out a presence on others.
It’s also important to leverage your employees when it comes to mastering social media – your engaged employees can be your most powerful brand advocates. We try to provide really turnkey content and copy that our teams can use to share whatever Movable Ink stories they’d like on their networks.
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In your opinion, what is the main difference between B2C and B2B marketing?
The main difference I see between B2B and B2C marketing is the audience type you are reaching and how you communicate with that audience. With B2C marketing, you’re often looking for short-term wins (for example, purchasing a product from your website or opting into a certain promotion). With B2B marketing, quick wins are rare and you’re generally playing a longer game – B2B marketers are focused on building relationships and leveraging different tactics to prove a product or service’s return on investment.
One of the main similarities we can sometimes forget, however, is that even though as a B2B marketer you’re selling to a business, you’re also selling to an individual. As soon as B2B companies realise people are people, we’ll be able to see a greater creative shift in what we can expect from B2B marketing.
What is the key to producing engaging marketing content and what types of content works best for you?
As we all know, human attention spans have become shorter and shorter over the years, and every media organisation is competing for that attention. There’s a balance between providing enough education and information with brevity. Hour-long webinars don’t always cut it, so chaptered-content or short-form video is a great way to hit the most important points and engage your audience.
While there’s not one type of content that performs best, our strongest performing pieces have been laser focused on the audience they’re created for. For the email practitioner, that might be aspirational user cases and for the marketing leader, it’s an executive brief with what we think is most important and appropriate for their level.
How important is technology in modern marketing?
As a marketer at a marketing technology company, I am a huge advocate for ensuring I have a tech stack that supports my team’s needs, programs and strategic goals. I’ve also experienced times when we’ve been ‘over-stacked’ with marketing tools and not getting as much traction as we could have. I like the idea of ensuring you have your basics covered (marketing automation, social publishing, webinars, events, and a CMS). Ideally, each year we can also pick something that we consider ‘nice to have’ or test some new and innovative initiatives – such as intent data and webchat.
What future marketing trends will become mainstream before too long?
This may be controversial but I’m hoping it’s not the Metaverse… I think we need more face-to-face connection.
I do believe that AI will help marketers develop a more long-term relationship with their audiences and significantly improve relevance. It’s already entering the mainstream and has the potential to become one of our best allies, helping marketers shift from a ‘campaign’ mindset to a more ‘moments’ mindset with every experience personalised to the individual.
And finally, if you could ask your peers for one piece of advice or help, what would it be?
I’m not sure if any of my peers have the answer, but I think we’re all looking for the magic bullet on performance measurement. What data, insights, or attribution models have been most helpful for you to understand what’s working?
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