Episode Summary
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown interview Brooke Browne, the Marketing Manager at Smartbridge. This interview focuses on her past experience in marketing, often operating in smaller teams. During the chat, Brooke talks about her priorities at Smartbridge and how the company uses the talent of all employees to contribute to their content marketing initiatives.
Episode Highlights
- Brooke mentions how she started her career in marketing while she was getting her college degree.
- Brooke has been working with Smartbridge for the past eight years.
- Smartbridge is an enterprise business technology consultancy, and targets those companies that are looking to transform their digital roadmap.
- Smartbridge deals with a lot of robotic process automation – upgrading, and modernizing ERP systems, CRM, ECM…all the acronyms.
- The digital presence of Smartbridge was non-existent when she joined the organization eight years ago and she’s been a big part of leading the charge ever since.
- During the initial years, content marketing was their fundamental marketing strategy and remains a core focus of the company’s plans.
- Brooke chats about one of the first blog posts that generated interest – it was a very simple “how to” post that generated traffic and led to revenue.
- At present, Smartbridge uses a wide range of marketing techniques such as content marketing, search engine marketing, advertisements on the radio and more.
- She mentions that Smartbridge is hyper-focused on content marketing and publishes their content on different social media platforms and through podcasts.
- Smartbridge is quite consistent with articles and writing posts but also works on video content to drive more interest.
- Smartbridge uses a lot of sales intelligence tools that help them understand what a particular company is looking for (intent-based data).
- While getting started with podcasting, the organization concentrates on authentic thought leadership and sharing a little information about them; to people who want to listen, even if it’s competitors.
- At Smartbridge, business analysts, data scientists, developers – all contribute to marketing content and the company ensures this is outlined in the hiring process.
- Their hiring process is quite transparent; a candidate may or may not be a marketing person but must contribute to their marketing and sales efforts.
- When producing content, the marketing team gets help from a variety of employees – even if it’s just doing a screen recording or a rough draft to get a piece started.
- Smartbridge implements an incentive program, so anytime an employee gets published, he/she receives a $50 gift card.
Key Points
- According to Brooke, what was old is now new again, “We’re doing radio ads locally which is a fun thing. We even dabbled with the idea of running some billboards.”
- Brooke said that “…cadence is so important. It’s always challenging when we’re always limited on time and what we can do. So we have to triage what we are working on and what’s going to reach the audience. You know, the best audience has the best time and you can do what you can with the data that you have, but a lot of it’s a combination of luck, experimenting and data-driven insights.”
Resources
- Brooke Browne: LinkedIn
- Smartbridge: Website
- Smartbridge: Podcast
- Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies
