For the last 7 years, I’ve been hard at work creating exciting nurture funnels and managing campaigns across multiple channels. I’m proud to see my work play a role in helping businesses use technology to enhance human interactions, rather than using technology to automate processes.
I learned the ropes in the digital marketing space by helping people take the relationship with their customers to the next level. Designing, coding, and marketing products for distribution to such a diverse and crowded industry has taught me a lot about people and the need for customer-centric solutions that rise above the noise.
Along the way, I found my niche in marketing automation, learned to listen, researched, measured, and stayed laser-focused on solving the right problems using the right tools and channels.
And in today’s ever-evolving workforce, there is an increased need for workers who can tackle tasks that require creative and technical know-how. The role of the marketing automation manager is a prime example of this.
In a nutshell, I’m responsible for administering marketing campaigns, testing and analyzing workflows, lead generation, lead nurture, lead scoring, and identifying tactics for improvement. The tools I work with primarily are Hubspot and Salesforce, coupled with a heap of other marketing tools like ZoomInfo, Outreach, and Asana.
The team I’m on is responsible for marketing automation and demand generation for the company, among other marketing functions. We’re all about leads, revenue, and acquisition!
In my role, I focus on helping my teams move forward in any way I can—from lead generation to campaign execution, to using Hubspot for handling lead inquiries, I’m always available to provide direction and support.
My goal every day is to use all of the tools in our marketing arsenal in ways that lead to strong opportunities for our sales team. So whether that’s creating reports, working on email campaigns, executing nurture campaigns, optimizing chatbots—we do whatever it takes to get prospects interested in Bold Commerce’s services and solutions.
I also work closely with our revenue operations team. We collaborate on the technical side and together determine the types of campaign attribution that will generate the strongest results. We have nurture streams, chatbots, Slack, and reports set up to identify marketing qualified leads, opportunities, and customers.
There is nothing better than when a campaign is successful for the company and we’re seeing strong leads come in and meetings booked. If the sales department is happy – then I’m happy!
I feel that I’m in a really great position to help the company succeed by growing our demand generation framework. When the synergy between marketing and sales is successful, the company wins.
But it’s not all rainbows and unicorns, as the work never really ends. There is so much management and documentation needed for all of the moving pieces. And there is a lot of foundational work that needs to be done before anything gets automated. But perhaps the most challenging part of the role is determining how marketing impacts the sales pipeline.
We know when someone fills out a form, opens an email or registers for an event. Our goal is to track all activities we perform back to what leads to a won opportunity so that the company sees the value of the marketing contribution.
But this also makes the work surprisingly fun, since we use this data to go back and look at successful campaigns we've launched and use that to plan our next great marketing piece.
There are several people on the marketing and revenue operations team that are working with Hubspot on a daily basis. To help keep the team motivated, I show them the big picture and impact their work has on what we’re trying to achieve from a marketing perspective.
It’s important that we’re linked with campaign plans strategically, all on board with the target and KPIs, and keeping everyone looped in from the beginning.
Interested in a career in marketing automation?
To learn more about marketing automation, Hubspot has a heap of courses and certifications to get started. I also suggest checking out Google’s Digital Marketing course, Salesforce Trailhead, Marketo - and, of course Hubspot.
Christian Baun
Christian Baun is a marketing automation specialist with a background in demand generation, content marketing and email marketing.