Episode Summary
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Courtney Porcella, Marketing Director at coUrbanize. The interview takes a look at her past experiences with marketing and PR agencies for B2B Technology companies. Courtney then takes a deeper dive into her current role leading a marketing team at coUrbanize, a technology company that connects new real estate projects with the surrounding community.
Episode Highlights
- Courtney talks about her background where she studied marketing and worked in marketing for ten years with various B2B tech companies.
- Before transitioning to an in-house role at a technology company, Courtney talks about her four years working for marketing and PR agencies.
- Courtney breaks down some of the pros and cons between agency life and being an in-house marketer.
- Courtney discusses how she’s had a relatively linear career path, by serving the commercial real estate industry, and eventually ending up at coUrbanize.
- coUrbanize is the real estate startup where she is leading a marketing team-including lead generation, branding, and communications.
- coUrbanize is a tech company that focuses on connecting real estate companies with people – these are often cases where large real estate projects are a part of an area and getting community buy-in is critical to the overall success of a project.
- coUrbanize serves large real estate companies that are owning, maintaining, and developing buildings.
- coUrbanize specifically works with people within the real estate company who are tasked with building projects.
- coUrbanize did a brand strategy exercise to get some insights around how they can better position their company.
- Courtney breaks down inbound versus outbound outreach and explains how content marketing helps them get customers.
- coUrbanize does a mixture of digital marketing content and also live in-person marketing.
- When coming on board at coUrbanize, Courtney was supplanting a marketing function that was relying mostly on junior talent and one of her major goals was to show immediate value to the board and senior management.
- One of Courtney’s biggest challenges early on was hitting the company’s Q4 number and she breaks down how she approached that goal.
- The organization’s 2020 goal is to become recognized experts by more people in the real estate industry.
- Courtney’s reading a weekly newsletter called a very good copywriter that publishes micro-content.
- She also follows companies and like-minded people on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Key Points
- Courtney talks about the importance of brand and her focus early on “The reason why I wanted to do the brand work was because I think there’s always an opportunity to assess your brand. Big brands typically do it, you know, every 6 to 12 months. When you’re a smaller company, you don’t have the cash flow to have a brand agency do it.”
- Sometimes small changes can have a large impact and Courtney talked about this concept as she states, “…our demo request page just needed some additional design quality. When you clicked to get a demo, it opened a new page. And even that experience felt a little bit disjointed. So a really easy thing…we spent about three hours redesigning our demo request page to increase the conversions because we were already getting a lot of people to land there.”
