Episode Summary
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Rob Yoegel, the Senior Director of Marketing and Angel Guarisma, the Director of Content at Linode. Rob and Angel break down their past work experience in marketing and how they shifted into their roles at Linode. This interview focuses on how a marketing team can employ technical content, in a written format, to generate demand and fuel an overall marketing strategy.
Episode Highlights
- Rob starts the interview by sharing some of his marketing experience and mentions how he was a journalist by trade.
- Rob mentions that with his journalism degree, he had a dream to one day become the Sports Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. And even though he got a position at the Inquirer, he quickly learned that a career in journalism wasn’t the future.
- Angel starts the conversation by providing some insight into his past work experience which includes various roles; as an engineer, teacher, and a developer.
- Angel and Rob provide some background on Linode – it’s a cloud computing provider that gives someone everything they need to start and run a business on the web.
- Linode has almost two decades of experience and evolved with the industry over the last twenty years.
- During the interview, the guests discussed Linode’s ideal customer profile – consisting mostly of developers and then enterprises who are using cloud technology.
- Rob talks about marketing at Linode and mentions how the company has relied heavily on word of mouth marketing and traditional trade shows to drive revenue.
- One of the ways the company has grown is through its highly technical writing and a dedicated effort to high quality content on the blog.
- Right now, the company employs a large marketing team with nearly 20 employees – but most importantly, almost half of the members are on the technical writing team.
- The company has grown to attract SMB and Enterprise customers and the technical content has been a major driving force for garnering interest in these areas.
- Angel mentions how Linode is the largest independent cloud provider in the world and because of that strength, the company must have a focus on thought leadership.
- Rob mentioned how Linode is building out a Rev-Ops team, which includes sales leaders, sales directors, to drive the customer base with larger spends.
- Linode believes in the Paid, Earned, and Owned model and does a lot of paid media buys with Google ad words, both display, and search, to drive traffic to high quality technical content.
- Linode focused on consumer’s and developers’ journeys which includes few calls to actions such as going to their website, creating an account, and spinning up services for $5 a month.
- Linode also has a Reseller Program and Partner Program and a dedicated team of individuals working to bring on those partners.
- Rob explained how Linode offers the same core services like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure – so Linode competes with some of the largest IT companies out there.
- Linode provides support 24×7 and 365 days per year, which is totally free for all customers and includes phone support.
- Angel talks about how his team has tested starting with a video first to drive the highly technical written formats.
- Linode.com/docs gets millions of visitors and page views a month because of the content marketing strategies Angel’s team has followed in the past years.
- Content development at Linode is treated the same as software development, which really helps them focus and get content published regularly.
- Linode’s newsletter is composed around the two-week intervals and shares some insights into researching and writing all of the pieces of developed content.
Key Points
- While talking about the history of technical writing at Linode, Angel said: “the idea was to have content that inspires the user so that not only they just choose our platform, but feel competent enough to deploy their entire business on it and feel comfortable enough to try to troubleshoot some of the stuff themselves.”
- According to Rob, “…every marketer is challenged to make sure that they’re delivering the proper message and content to the right person at the right time, in the way that they consume the content.”
Resources
- Rob Yoegel: LinkedIn
- Angel Guarisma: LinkedIn
- Linode: Website
- Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies
