Episode Summary
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristian Pellegrino and Justin Brown chat with Blair Felter, Marketing Director at vXchnge. The interview focuses on her past experiences with programmatic advertising before shifting over to an in-house role with a technology company. Blair also breaks down how she’s built marketing functions at a few technology companies, blending content, advertising and other marketing tactics to drive demand.
Episode Highlights
- Blair starts the conversation by providing insight into her past working experience which includes oil, gas, pharma and the fintech industries.
- She talks about her working experience and how she helped a mobile app company and fintech financial services company to start their marketing departments.
- She also talks about her responsibilities at vXchnge, which starts with establishing the brand and getting the other core components of marketing in place.
- Blair highlights what vXchnge does and who the company serves. vXchnge is a data center and co-location operating service provider.
- The company mostly focuses on an organization that has to process online transactions and needs their services for auditing purposes – this is the company’s ideal customer for the most part.
- vXchnge is a data center that is engineered for perfection and has an incredible SLA uptime rate.
- She mentions the fundamental difference between vXchnge and its competitors which have built locations in a variety of growth markets.
- She discusses how the company has evolved its marketing since she joined and she’s witnessed the focus shift more towards doing shorter blogs and videos instead of long-form blog posts.
- She believes that a customer needs to know what you’re doing for them…plain and simple and this comes through education.
- In 2018 to 2019, their traffic grew 525% only by doing SEO building and just being smarter with the content.
- She explains the importance of Google reviews and how it helped vXchnge in establishing customer relationships and allowed people to find them based on their location.
- vXchnge has a nurture program that is purely based on educating customers – the focus is more about the content and moving them into sales when they’re ready.
- For generating long term content, vXchnge relies mostly on organic engagement with a target rollout of one blog post per week.
- vXchnge is concentrating on tech talks and webinars as the content has worked quite well over the last year.
- Blair mentions how webinars helped them reach people in the short-term – in one scenario within a week of advertising.
- One of vXchnge’s primary pieces of content is its data center migration checklist – it’s super simple, but has had a large impact on prospects.
- vXchnge strives to work on the content that has less information available online and that’s where they stand out from the rest.
- vXchnge uses HubSpot for marketing CRM and can track everything from their website and nurture their programs.
- Blair mentioned that podcasts are her favorite outlet to learn about marketing strategies working for B2B buyers.
Key Points
- Blair said that “our company built this proprietary software where basically you get to see everything, like, your cabinets, your power consumption, and bandwidth. You get to see all of that within the software. So that security blanket or that transparency that you didn’t have before.”
- Blair mentioned that “…from 2018 to 2019, our traffic grew 525%. Just by doing SEO, we didn’t do any paid in 2019 and it was strictly organic. Just being smarter with our content.”
