MarTech Interview with Jake Athey, VP of Marketing and Sales at Widen

Jake Athey, VP of Marketing and Sales at Widen shares a few top marketing optimization best practices in this short Q&A:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Jake, tell us about your marketing/sales journey through the years and more about your role at Widen…

In 2004, I started as a marketing intern at Widen (now an Acquia company), which empowers organizations to create powerful brand experiences through digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) software. And I’ve never looked back. From intern to marketing coordinator to now the Vice President of Marketing & Sales, I am celebrating almost 20 years at Widen. Throughout the entirety of my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to work hand-in-hand with Matthew Gonnering, former Widen CEO and now General Manager at Acquia. He instilled in me a deep appreciation for technology in marketing and was my first introduction to DAM.

My career in marketing has been the perfect combination of my two passions – engineering and branding. As a child, I was particularly interested in engineering and building bridges, but once high school hit, I became increasingly drawn toward branding and communications. I’ve achieved my childhood goal of building bridges – but rather than between destinations, I build them between brands and customers, marketing and sales departments, and leaders and employees.

As a marketing leader, what are some of the core best practices that you feel B2B marketing leaders need to follow more of today to drive team alignment and output to achieve faster results?

It’s all about having great relationships. The best marketing leaders not only have strong relationships with their immediate teammates but also with members of other departments across the organization to ensure they have a 360-degree view of how all of their efforts benefit the bigger picture and KPIs.

More specifically, there are several best practices that all marketing leaders should follow that can be broken down into two parts. The first, and larger part, is human resources. By this, I mean coaching, team-building, recruiting, and communicating. Cultivating an experienced, inspired team is the biggest driving force to success, efficiency, and alignment. The other is a leader’s ability to effectively plan, budget, and collaborate. These practices may seem like a given but they are truly vital to meeting your goals and creating strong results.

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We’d love to hear more about your marketing processes closer to home at Widen and how the team optimizes elements like marketing measurement/attribution to evaluate overall performance and individual efforts?

At Widen and Acquia, we look at a number of metrics to evaluate our performance. Of course, we look at ROI for our initiatives and martech stack, but we also assess how our efforts directly correlate to customer retention and customer acquisition. This gives us an understanding of how we are growing as a company, tells us whether our marketing resonates with our audience, and helps fill in the whitespace for improvements and what our customers and prospects want to see.

On a more technical level, we also keep a close eye on metrics such as lead generation, length of engagement, click-through rate, etc. The most successful companies are those with a subscribers-rule mentality, and that’s what Widen’s marketing team encompasses. For example, we don’t buy and blast mass lists for lead generation. We take the time to dig into our analytics to ensure the content, emails, and campaigns we deliver are resonating and valuable.

When it comes to platforms that can boost sales-marketing unity and processes; how would you highlight the importance of DAM; tell us about some of the various ways you’ve seen leading brands enable output/processes with DAM platforms.

DAM should really be top of mind, but for some businesses, it’s an afterthought. With one DAM platform, users can source all their digital assets, coordinate workflows, and publish content, boosting efficiency and saving money. DAM helps ensure brand consistency across various platforms, extends the value of your digital assets, and helps your teams make better informed decisions about their content. It gives teams across the organization self-serve access to current and approved assets – infusing speed and efficiency across workflows. It also allows businesses to adapt and repurpose existing content for other uses, lightening the workload for marketers and helping salespeople get ahead.

Life Fitness, a global leader in helping people lead active and healthy lives, is a great example of a company leveraging DAM. The company’s creative team produces brand and marketing materials that support a wide range of global campaigns, product launches, and sales campaigns. Their DAM system allows them to control the distribution of their content across internal teams, external partners, and clients – bringing sales organizations to the next level with its 24/7 self-serve functionality. For context, the company has had 7,540 total asset uploads in the last 12-months leveraged by over 2,800 users.

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Five things you’d tell B2B sales people and marketers to keep in mind for the rest of 2022?

A potential recession is certainly top of mind for salespeople and marketers. Every business decision and strategy is going to be under a magnifying glass. To prepare, I would suggest honing in on the systems that drive the brand and provide the best ROI. Keeping the brand strong across the board and knowing what systems are essential for your company’s enduring success will help ground the business throughout challenging times.

1. Personalization is what sets apart a good customer experience from a bad customer experience. Consumers increasingly look for the brand that understands them and is going to deliver a tailored experience. Marketers need to deeply analyze and manage the data they have to gain insight into their consumers’ needs – and act on it.
2. With consumer data in mind, the future of data privacy is a big conversation in 2022 – especially with the swirling talk around Web3.0. If you haven’t already, you need to start thinking about what changes in regulations can mean for your business and its systems.
3. As layoffs start to sweep the technology industry, we have to prioritize the employee experience to boost morale and ease the minds of our employees. While strong leadership and a positive work-life balance and culture can grow the employee experience, it’s equally important that businesses provide employees with the best technology and integrated platforms to do their job successfully, effectively, and with more ease.
4. The phrase “Content is king” has never been more relevant than in 2022. To compete and get ahead, producing compelling, engaging content is a must for marketing teams – from e-books and reports, to social media posts and blogs. This is where systems like DAM come in to help produce content of the highest caliber – by organizing the branded images or videos needed to build outstanding narratives.

A few thoughts / predictions on the future of martech and how you feel this space will shape up and evolve further over the years.

The martech field is going through a massive transformation with new virtual realities, automation, and a cookieless future on the horizon. This is new to all of us and you really can’t jump into these advancements without having a solid foundation in place. We need to get our data, assets, and content all in a row so that we are prepared and able to adapt to the new technologies and regulations that may come our way. It is an exciting time for marketers!

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