Next up on our list of Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars is Adam Barker. I previously profiled Adam and 12 best practices he shared at a MassTLC Demand Gen group.
So since you have that article already and since Adam’s company is a little bit security conscious, we’ll keep this brief.
Adam has a rock solid demand gen background first at SmartBear Software and now as Director of Demand Generation for Continuum Managed Services.
Zak: What is the target audience you are marketing/selling to?
Adam: Managed IT Service Providers
Zak: We all know content creation is critical to demand generation? How does your marketing team approach content creation? Who owns it? Who contributes?
Adam: The Demand Gen team owns content creation. They involve the entire company gathering content from all our internal SMEs. It’s a team effort. We also enable our customers to contribute for items like blog series and webinars.
Zak: Interesting, you don’t always get that clear ownership of content from the demand gen team. Now on a related topic, Jon Miller of Marketo has talked about behavior targeting being an area he expects more marketers to get their head around in 2015. Are you doing any form of behavioral targeting or triggers and what?
Adam: A good tactic is to organize your site pages by pain point and place visitors in pain point buckets as they visit. Targeting these buckets with tailored messaging increases email success three-fold.
Zak: OK great. So as I mentioned we have a bunch of tips already from your MassTLC presentation, so let’s shift to more about you. How did you get your start in marketing?
Adam: I started as a graphic designer, but my early roles were on VERY small teams so there was a huge need for me to learn more and more marketing channels and mediums. This instilled a passion for all aspects of marketing in me.
Zak: What do you most enjoy about marketing and demand generation?
Adam: Helping my team learn and succeed.
Zak: What skills do you see as most important for a demand generation marketer?
Adam: We look for “T-shaped” marketers, meaning marketers who have deep knowledge in one particular area (writing, email marketing, SEO), but they also have smaller skill sets and (and maybe more importantly) a desire to branch out and learn other skill sets. In general, a team full of T-shaped people makes your team immensely stronger and more efficient than a team full of “I-shaped” marketers.
Zak: What advice would you give to any aspiring demand generation marketers?
Adam: It’s a skill to be able to “think scale” for every program/request. The ability to look at projects through the lens of customer AND cross-departmentally with how it relates to the larger picture that we as a company are trying to achieve.
Zak: Where can we find you on social media?
Adam: @abarks99 on Twitter, or on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/abbarker/en.
Zak: Thanks Adam.
Enjoyed this interview? Meet all of the Moneyball Marketer Demand Generation All-Stars