#09 Evolution of Marketing Technology ft. Rosemarie Diehl, Verizon Media

Verizon Media’s Rosemarie Diehl stops by Unsubscribed! to chat with Pierce about her journey into Marketing Ops, how technology has evolved in recent years, and how the pandemic impacted their marketing strategy.

Show Notes

Rosemarie’s journey into marketing started at a company called Candle Corp. As part of the sales ops team, she worked closely with marketing, and after experiencing both the B2B and B2C sides, she discovered that her passion for analytics was a natural fit with marketing ops.

Since making the move to marketing ops, Rosemarie has noticed how quickly technology evolves. She notes that it’s critical to keep your tech stack up to date by evaluating it on a half-yearly basis. This will help identify gaps in your channels and allow you to stay familiar with the features of your marketing automation and CRM tools so you know how they integrate with other platforms.

Before the pandemic, Rosemarie’s typical work week involved reviewing upcoming campaigns, finalizing how to execute them, and connecting the dots between marketing channels and campaign pieces to optimize the outcome. But since last March, they’ve made a hard pivot to virtual events. Now, they’re running engagement between Marketing Ops, Digital Marketing, and Events teams, and Rosemarie notes that they’re facing a new set of challenges, the largest of which is trying to mimic in-person live events while battling online fatigue.

“Really make sure that event you’re offering is something that is relevant to your audience, is happening at a critical time, and provides that differentiator of why they should join yours versus all the other ones they have in their inbox”

Now, Sales is using marketing automation to personalize their outreach and strengthen their relationships with customers and prospects. They’re working to fill in the gap between B2B and Sales to make up for the loss of in-person meetings, dinners, and conferences.

Rosemarie came to the world of enterprise marketing through a series of acquisitions. After Candle Corp was acquired by IBM, she had the chance to observe how the smaller company was integrated into existing processes and systems. She notes that at the beginning of the acquisition, everything became centralized, but over time, the process switched to a decentralized approach so that the local market could execute outside of the global organization. Still though, she emphasizes that it’s critical to maintain standardization and consistency between countries while incorporating the uniqueness of each region.

Companies often go back and forth between centralization and decentralization. With centralization, everything is standardized and controlled, but it only takes one instance where something doesn’t quite fit to make a strong case for decentralization.

With decentralization, regions have more autonomy of message, but brand consistency and experience often aren’t as strong, and manual workarounds are required for reporting. Ideally, organizations can find a happy medium between both worlds, and that’s where a tool that allows for brand standardization across regions can make a big difference.

Rosemarie closes by saying that emails are as foundational as ever, and she anticipates that they will continue to be the primary way to reach their audience. Now more than ever, she encourages marketers to avoid audience fatigue by making sure they’re sending the right information to the right audience at the right time.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why it’s critical to continuously review your tech stack
• How to engage your customers and prospects, even without live events
• The challenges and opportunities of a centralized versus a decentralized approach to marketing

Check it out to hear all that and more. Enjoy!

Follow Rosemarie on LinkedIn and Twitter.