MarTech Interview with Heidi Andersen, CMO and CRO at Nextdoor

Nextdoor recently launched several new solutions to maximize Ad performance; Heidi Andersen, CMO and CRO at Nextdoor chats about these latest innovations in this martech catch-up:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Heidi, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Nextdoor? How has it been going since you started your newly combined role as CRO & CMO? 

Thanks for having me! I’m very much enjoying the combined CMO & CRO role at Nextdoor, the neighborhood app that empowers people to strengthen their local communities. Bringing marketing and revenue together offers an exciting opportunity to build a full funnel connected experience that maximizes customer value. In addition, the opportunity to connect the consumer and commercial parts of our business provides operational and resourcing leverage.

3 years ago I joined Nextdoor to lead Revenue and we’ve built powerful advertising and business solutions to help SMBs and large brands connect to customers where they live, and reach them in their local communities. Now I get to build solutions and experiences that create value for all our customer sets. It’s exciting!

Take us through some of Nextdoor’s biggest marketing strategies and the martech that helps power them?  

This year, we’ve run some great campaigns designed to serve both neighbors and businesses on Nextdoor.

At Nextdoor, we know that when businesses thrive, neighborhoods thrive. Helping businesses flourish on Nextdoor is critical to creating vibrant neighborhoods, and so we created our Neighborhood Faves annual local business awards, giving neighbors a way to celebrate and support the businesses they love on the platform. On the Nextdoor app, neighbors can vote for their favorite businesses across various categories, including restaurants, coffee shops, home service providers, and more. The winning Neighborhood Faves are rewarded with a trophy on their Nextdoor Business Page, a sticker to put on a storefront or car window, and a chance to win money towards Nextdoor ads – all of which helps to grow their business and increase visibility.

How has Nextdoor evolved over the years, tell us more about the brand’s advertising platform?

Nextdoor has grown to reach more than 310,000 neighborhoods globally, across 11 countries around the world. We’re currently in 1 in 3 households in the U.S., 1 in 4 in the UK (1 in 3 in London), to give you just a few stats. A huge part of connecting neighbors with each other is facilitating meaningful connections between businesses and their local community.

Nextdoor continues to innovate to enhance the capabilities of our ad platform. Whether you’re a small business, or medium or large brand, our platform gives Incremental reach, and neighbors are high-intent, high value audiences. Advertisers can reach neighbors where they live with highly targeted messages and they can also run platform wide campaigns. Our platform is unique in the sense that our users are connected to place and there’s a high level of trust due to user verification.

Most recently, at New York’s Advertising Week, we launched several new solutions to maximize Ad performance, both online and offline. These included a new Conversion API delivering higher visibility on ROI, connecting online activity to offline impact, expanding contextual targeting to optimize relevancy, making video ads to be available for all businesses, and launching lead generation ads to accelerate customer acquisition. Nextdoor is empowering advertisers to understand performance – both online and offline.

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When it comes to marketing in a digitally crowded environment, what best practices would you share with fellow marketing teams?

Focus on relevance and authenticity. In a sea of digital voices, genuine connections matter more than ever. Understand your audience, tailor messages that resonate, and always strive for meaningful engagements with maximum reach. Ensure your content aligns with platforms that echo your values, and for us at Nextdoor, partnerships like those with Oracle Advertising ensure our ads are delivered in a safe, contextually relevant space, leading to more impactful connections.

If there were five things you could change completely about the state of marketing the way it is today, what would they be?

My Key Principles are :

• Hire and Develop people. The landscape is evolving, skill requirements change.
• Stay customer obsessed
• Focus on what moves business goals forward, do the right things for the right reasons.
• Take ownership. Set and hold the performance bar for marketing strategies and overall business performance
• Invest in continuous Innovation while upholding principle 1-4

Can you comment on the growing use of AI in marketing and your thoughts around AI and the future of adtech / martech?  

Our industry is truly at an exciting inflection point and a key contributor is Generative AI.  I’m feeling inspired about the opportunities this technology can bring to many industries. There’s however much we still need to understand when it comes to applying GenAI in marketing strategies.  For us, it’s exciting to be building our Ads platform and marketing operations with GenAI in the mix.

AI is already an integral part of the product experiences at Nextdoor, and so when thinking about GenAI specifically, I think it’s really important to focus on learning and understanding everything we can about the technology, and then be thoughtful about how we can generate value for advertisers and neighbors. As marketers, we must use GenAI responsibly, ensuring that any innovation remains rooted in authenticity.

In my role at Nextdoor, I’m excited to explore the possibilities to enhance the neighborhood experience for our users and advertisers alike.

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