The People of Digital Marketing is a podcast made for aspiring marketing leaders. In each episode, I interview marketing experts from around the world. Marketing leaders from Fortune 500 companies, agencies, and startups share their career advice, challenges they’re facing, and roadmaps for how to keep growing every day in the world of digital marketing.
If you want to lead a marketing team one day, start your own business, or if you just need some expert perspectives on doing marketing the right way—this podcast is for you!
Shelagh Dolan is the Content Marketing Manager at Quora, where she has led the content strategy for Quora for Business, the platform’s advertising division, since June 2022. With over a decade of experience, Shelagh has a proven track record of crafting content strategies that align with sales goals and drive growth for global B2B brands. Before joining Quora, she held key roles as the Director of Content Marketing at eMarketer and Senior Content Marketing Manager at...
“At my core I’m not a marketer, I’m a writer…” With a decade of freelance and in-house marketing experience, Brooklin focuses on helping both clients and freelancers stand out. The memes are free. He is also the Co-Founder of BEAM Content, a B2B content marketing and content writing agency that makes B2B content that isn’t boring. Questions and topics we covered include: Why writing as a skill became a big focus for Brooklin early in his career How Brooklin started his...
“I ultimately believe that product marketing should own pricing…pricing is a function of your company’s positioning.” Dan Balcauski is the founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility, based in Austin, TX. He focuses on helping high-volume B2B SaaS CEOs define pricing and packaging for new products. Over his career, he has worked in both B2C and B2B companies ranging from startups to publicly traded enterprises. Questions and topics we covered include: What do...
“[A buyer persona] is the understanding in detailed terms, of the attitudes, needs, concerns, decision criteria, and buyer’s journey around a specific type of buying decision…it is not a profile of an individual…” Jim Kraus is the President of Buyer Persona Institute (BPI) and a leading authority on buyer personas and buying insights. In addition to his work at BPI, Jim is an avid blogger, author of the Buyer Persona Buzz newsletter, and is currently working on a second...
“Differentiate yourself by making sure that you have people in-house that have worked with the brand, understand the brand, and connect with everyone [in the team]—so you don’t just have a random team working on your account and 50 other accounts…” Melissa Rosenthal is an award winning marketing exec and the Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp, focused on making the world more productive through best in class SaaS marketing! Previously Melissa was the CRO/EVP at Cheddar, a...
“What we found is that if we talk to the customer…it actually drove the conversion back up…The average answer rate for a ‘branded call’ is almost 30%.” Alex Levin is Co-Founder and CEO of Regal Voice. He leads the GTM teams. Prior to Regal Voice, Alex was a product manager at Personal and Thomson Reuters, and then joined Handy (acquired by ANGI in 2018) as an early employee. At Handy and then ANGI Alex led growth and marketing. Alex grew up in New York and received his BA...
“Turns out it’s a lot more difficult to get other people to talk about you, compared to you just pulling up a Google Doc and creating a piece of content…” Farzad Rashidi is the lead innovator at Respona (https://respona.com/), the link-building outreach platform that helps businesses increase their organic traffic from Google. He previously ran the marketing efforts at Visme, where he helped the company gain over 18 million active users and pass 3.5M monthly organic...
“Brand positioning is much more than a marketing exercise…it underpins the entire organization.” Mark Evans is the principal with Marketing Spark, which offers fractional CMO and strategic advisory services to B2B SaaS companies. Mark's areas of expertise include brand positioning, messaging, and content-driven growth plans. Mark has a podcast and recently published the second edition of his DIY marketing book, “Marketing Spark.” Questions and topics we covered included:...
“Marketing touches every part of the business. Marketing is…equally as important to sales organizations as ‘sales’ itself.” Justin Mink has spent a career in leadership and founder roles at companies that have grown from 0-1000s of employees, raised millions of dollars in capital, and that have been valued at over $1B. In 2007 he moved to Dallas from the Washington, D.C. area to launch the Franchise Division at digital marketing firm ReachLocal, helping take the company...
“Everything we do just goes back to helping, and if we just do that authentically we know that…the value will come back to us.” Chelsea is a former journalist turned empathy-driven marketer who leads content marketing at Lavender. Her 11+ year career spans diverse industries, from agencies to publishing, branding to SaaS. She draws on her multi-faceted experience and journalistic roots in her content approach and principles, which are hyper-focused on human-centered...
Here’s a special episode for all of you lovely marketers out there! In this interview, I chat with my mentor Maurice Bretzfield about AI and how marketers can get started using tools like ChatGPT. Maurice is an AI and Marketing Consultant. He helps organizations increase revenue and decrease costs using the power of AI and MarTech. Maurice has been a digital marketer for nearly three decades and today enjoys working with organizations to integrate MarTech into their...
“The word ‘manager’ can take on a lot of different formats…there’s a lot of different ways to seek out leadership opportunities.” Trisha Gallagher is a marketing strategist and mentor with nearly 15 years of experience in planning and executing successful marketing programs. Having held various roles in marketing both in-house and agency-side, Trisha brings a unique perspective to her role as VP of Marketing at Marketri, an outsourced marketing and fractional CMO firm. She...
“66% of websites don’t need to do SEO. There’s no reason that they should bother.” Eli Schwartz is a seasoned SEO expert and consultant with over a decade of experience, helping prominent B2B and B2C companies like WordPress, Shutterstock, and Zendesk drastically enhance their organic visibility. Formerly leading SEO at SurveyMonkey, he boosted organic search to become a major growth driver. An accomplished speaker and author of the book “Product Led SEO”, Eli’s insights...
"A good well-rounded CMO is going to be someone who understands the full buyer's journey...the full marketing-sales funnel." As a Fractional CMO and GTM Strategist, Corey brings a 25-year track record of extraordinary success as an entrepreneur, sales leader, and CMO for a $150M+ agency called Scorpion (where he was the 1st marketing hire and grew the team to 30 people before leaving). Today, he helps B2B SaaS and Agencies grow from 7 figures to 8 by doing less, not more....
“If you can understand business, it will make you a better marketer.” JC Polonia is the Head of Growth at LOOP, a car insurance company based out of Austin, Texas, that takes biased and discriminatory data out of the industry. He’s also the founder of Digitality, a New York-based performance and production marketing agency. From local small businesses to venture-backed companies, JC developed his chops for growth marketing from the grassroots. Data-driven and...
"I need content to connect dots that I didn't know were connected before...Otherwise...I could go look all this stuff up already on my own." Tracey Wallace is the Director of Content Strategy at Klaviyo. Prior to that, she was the head of marketing for two early-stage start-ups (Eterneva and MarketerHire), and the Editor-in-Chief over at BigCommerce. She has 13 years of experience in content marketing, and began her career in Journalism. She is also a content creator for...
"When you stop selling, you stop growing...If you think that you're maxed out right now...what if you lose a client?" Ali Schwanke is the CEO and Founder of Simple Strat, an agency of expert strategists in sales and content marketing for B2B tech companies. Ali and her team focus on growing businesses through technology and automations, specializing in the implementation of HubSpot. Ali is a sought-after speaker and co-host of HubSpot Hacks - the popular YouTube channel...
“If there’s not a fit between your personality and the environment that you’re in, it’s going to be difficult for you to drive impact. This is regardless of how much you know in your [marketing] domain.” Patrick Moran was most recently an Executive in Residence at Reforge where he led the Growth Marketing, Experimentation and Testing, and Brand Marketing programs which he also co-developed. Previously, he was the Head of Consumer Marketing at Houzz and held leadership...
“It doesn’t matter if you’re employed or not, it matters if you’re employable…if you learn the skills around how to grow ‘capital-efficiently’, [affecting] the growth curve in a positive way—that’s incredibly employable.” Bill Macaitis is an advisor and board member, guiding aspiring unicorns and helping build out world class teams and innovative go-to-market strategies. Over his 20 year career Bill has achieved five successful exits and powered growth at three of the...