Marketing Trailblazers: Q&A with Megan Potrzeba

Every day we learn about the smart, innovative ways LookBookHQ clients are running marketing, and these stories are too good not to share! Marketing Trailblazers is a series dedicated to showcasing these successful marketers and sharing their tips, tricks and wisdom with our readers.

For marketers, ensuring nurture campaigns are properly tailored to the audience is critical, but this level of relevance isn’t easy to achieve. When Megan Potrzeba, Marketing Automation Manager at Appian Corporation, realized that her targeted drip campaigns weren’t targeted enough because “not all members of an industry are created equal,” she decided to do something about it. In this Q&A, you’ll learn a little bit about Megan and how she found a smart, scalable way to make email nurture programs relevant again and dramatically improve her campaign results. 

 

Define yourself as a marketer in one sentence.  

I’m a B2B Marketing and Content Automation Leader

 

What challenge(s) kept you up at night before you started using LookBookHQ?

The biggest challenge we faced in 2016 was around relevancy in our lead nurturing programs. We had industry drip campaigns set up that would fire off to all new leads we captured solely based on the 7 industries we focus on. What we found was that not all members of one industry are created equal. We needed to treat them uniquely.

 

Ah yes – that’s a common and persistent problem! How did you solve it?

After identifying that pain point, we started shifting to a persona/topic-based model, layering it on top of our industry drip campaign strategy. We identified 3+ topics within one industry that we pulled out. Then from there, we packaged content together within those topical areas, and if someone viewed one asset in the group, we started nurturing them with the rest of the assets associated with the piece they had already viewed.

 

So how did LookBookHQ come into play as you improved your nurturing strategy?

When we were rolling out our new topical email drip campaign strategy, we came across LookBookHQ and noticed that it complemented the initiative very well.

We took the content that was already running in our campaigns and created LookBookHQ content experiences with it. We started using the intelligence around the content they consumed in LookBookHQ experiences to move them around the drip program in a more meaningful way. By using LookBookHQ, we also started creating complementary pieces of content. Previously we’d create an eBook and maybe write a blog about it after posting it on our website. Now we’re shifting to a model of creating an infographic, video, whitepaper and multiple blog posts to support that anchor asset. LookBookHQ is really showing us the importance and effectiveness of this.

 

Amazing! It’s always nice to gain insight into how the content is being consumed. How have your nurture program metrics changed since launching these new nurture programs?

In 2016, we saw our email nurture campaign open rates that were previously between 12-18% and our click-to-open rates that were around 12% or less increase dramatically to over 35% and 25% respectively.

 

Describe your experience getting LookBookHQ up and running.

We implemented our LookBookHQ instance quite fast and had our first LookBookHQ content experience up and running in just a few short weeks.

 

Any advice you’d give to new LookBookHQ users?

Think about the channels you plan to use LookBookHQ in and come up with a naming convention in the beginning. This will help not only with organization in the platform but also in Google Analytics if you plan on using those metrics for ROI. I was so excited to jump in that I created a number of them and launched them without thinking about this!

 

What’s your favourite thing to do when you’re not working hard at crushing your marketing goals?

My favorite hobby is to travel. My husband and I try to leave the U.S. at least once a year to experience new cultures, food and history.

 

Are there any other nuggets of wisdom you’d like to share with fellow marketers?

I’m sure you’ve heard it a hundred times before, but it’s so true: Don’t try to boil the ocean.

Having a big picture in mind is great for a marketing strategy, but you can’t possibly launch and implement everything at once. In today’s marketing universe, it’s important to be agile and consistently plan, create, analyze and improve. As long as you’re doing this, then you’ll set a strong foundation for every marketing initiative you start – no matter how big or small!

 

Want to learn more about how you can take your content marketing efforts to new, innovative levels? Connect with Megan on Twitter and LinkedIn.