#38 Inside the heavy lifting of marketing operations ft. Kimi Corrigan

In this installment of the Unsubscribed! Podcast, Kimi Corrigan discusses her career to date, from her first role as a corporate marketing manager (doing PR, trade shows, design and everything else in between) to her current role as Expel’s VP of Marketing Operations & Strategy.

Kimi fondly recalls the day she first encountered Silverpop — one of the first digital marketing platforms. After a merger, the company she was working for switched to Marketo, and Kimi quickly became obsessed — reading every community post she could find on it. The real question was how could she do marketing automation all day, every day?

It happened naturally, in fact. A full-time marketing automation role opened up at DuoSecurity and something just clicked. One moment it was Kimi on her own, and the next, the amount of work to be done required another hire. And then another. And so on. Always excited about sharing and teaching others, it wasn’t long before Kimi was stepping out of the weeds and having key conversations with cross-functional leaders to translate the valuable work being done by marketing ops.

These days, Kimi still enjoys bringing people into the profession and helping them to thrive. Technology helps to accelerate their knowledge and skills, and her experience helps to remove roadblocks. Right now she’s scaling an ops team — part of her dream team based on the company’s size and goals. The freedom to run separate but related teams in platform ops and campaign ops has created the opportunity to be more strategic and creative around the workload. They’re super focussed and help her carve out a competitive edge.

Listen to the complete podcast to hear how Kimi’s career in marketing evolved, her thoughts on decentralised and centralised strategy, and why clear ownership, proven integration, and strategy fit should be the key decision-making factors when bringing onboard new MarTech.

Follow Kimi Corrigan on LinkedIn.