Joining us in this episode of C2C Podcast is Julie Perino, the Senior Director of Customer Marketing at Marketo and Adobe. Marketo is one of the foremost marketing automation software and was acquired by Adobe back in 2018. 1. Julie loves the idea of companies engaging with their users both online and offline. While there has been an upward trend in engagement online, she believes in meeting customers wherever they are because nobody can deny the value of face-to-face connections. So when Marketo’s customers meet together through Marketo User Groups or “MUGs”, it becomes a community where everyone has something to share and learn from others. 2. She also describes the “Fearless 50” program. This program celebrates marketers from across the globe that are using bold, fearless marketing, out of the box thinking and driving innovation at their companies. Through this program, Marketo helps the chosen 50 individuals because of their marketing efforts, offering them opportunities to learn and grow their career. 3. It’s hard for community managers to prove that their work impacts revenue. For Julie, she has done it with customer adoption scores. It’s interesting to learn how they are connecting the dots with their community work with how customers are adopting Marketo at their work.
Joining us in this episode of C2C Podcast is Julie Perino, the Senior Director of Customer Marketing at Marketo and Adobe. Marketo is one of the foremost marketing automation software and was acquired by Adobe back in 2018.
1. Julie loves the idea of companies engaging with their users both online and offline. While there has been an upward trend in engagement online, she believes in meeting customers wherever they are because nobody can deny the value of face-to-face connections. So when Marketo’s customers meet together through Marketo User Groups or “MUGs”, it becomes a community where everyone has something to share and learn from others.
2. She also describes the “Fearless 50” program. This program celebrates marketers from across the globe that are using bold, fearless marketing, out of the box thinking and driving innovation at their companies. Through this program, Marketo helps the chosen 50 individuals because of their marketing efforts, offering them opportunities to learn and grow their career.
3. It’s hard for community managers to prove that their work impacts revenue. For Julie, she has done it with customer adoption scores. It’s interesting to learn how they are connecting the dots with their community work with how customers are adopting Marketo at their work.
Derek Andersen:
Welcome to the C2C podcast, I am your host Derek Andersen. After holding my first event in 2010, I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community based in over 100 countries. Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time, your customers, yet I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community, where people could experience your brand in person or at scale.
Derek Andersen:
On this show, we talk with the brightest minds and companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in-person experiences for your brand and customers before your competitor does. I'm excited to have our next guest, Julie Perino, who is the senior director of customer marketing for Marketo and Adobe company.
Derek Andersen:
Marketo is the industry leading marketing automation software and they were acquired by Adobe in 2018. Julie's a perfect combination of someone who both gets, who cares about community but has technical and marketing knowledge to create customer programs to drive huge impact. Lots to learn from her, take a listen.
Derek Andersen:
Julie, can you describe for the three people that are listening to this, everyone else will already know what Marketo is, but can you tell us what is Marketo and what does the product do?
Julie Perino:
Yeah, absolutely. So Marketo is a marketing automation platform and we focus on helping companies better engage their customers and help them really drive value for their customers.
Derek Andersen:
And tell us about the Marketo Customer Advocacy Program? How does it work and how long has it been around?
Julie Perino:
So I started with Marketo about three years ago and the main elements of our customer marketing program were already in place. So I was very fortunate inheriting a really solid program to begin with. So user group, community, our online community, some core elements of the program already in place. But today we've broadened that program and we've essentially pulled all of our advocacy programs under an umbrella program called Advocate Nation. And we've aligned all of the advocacy programs to the customer journeys, so that our customers can, based on where they're at with us, really engage at different times with different programs.
Julie Perino:
So, for example, if they're a brand new customer, we certainly encourage them to jump into our online community, to join our user group program, so they can immediately connect with other users, really from around their region around the country, around the globe to learn from each other. And then all the way up to our elite advocacy program, which we call Marketo Champions. So once they have Marketo on board for a number of years and get certified and get savvy, they have the opportunity to throw their hat in the ring to become a Marketo champion.
Derek Andersen:
One of the really interesting things about you specifically as it relates to Marketo is the fact that you were one of Marketo's earliest customers, if I have it right, so you now work there, but you have been using the product, different companies that you've worked at. When did you start using Marketo? Where were you the first time you used it?
Julie Perino:
Well, you're right, Derek. Before coming to Marketo three years ago, I was a Marketo customer for eight years, and so since very early days of Marketo I have been a fan of the brand and the product and really passionate about it, and have the opportunity to myself to implement Marketo, so I think why I'm so excited to be in the position that I'm in and driving customer marketing for Marketo, which again spans our advocacy programs as well as adoption programs, which help our customers drive greater success with the platform, which is certainly the on ramped advocacy.
Julie Perino:
It really feels full circle, I guess you could say, and it really helps me I think knowing and understanding what our customers are moving through each and every day, having walked in those shoes myself I think brings a pretty unique perspective to what we do.
Derek Andersen:
You have more than 70 user groups of passionate customers who get together in real life and share their love of Marketo, they're called The MUGs. Why do you think it's so important for brands to have these kinds of events?
Julie Perino:
I think it is so absolutely critical because you've got to meet your customers wherever they are. Right? So certainly online in those communities, the engagement we've seen of course over the years has been incredible. But I also think there is still nothing that replaces that face to face connection, with not only your customers, but of course those customers talking to each other and learning and sharing best practices, and really getting better because of it. So I think both together really is the best combination. You really can't, I think drive success with your customers or engagement with that community by really doing just one or the other, I think it has to be both and they have to work together.
Derek Andersen:
Every community has it's stars and MVPs and you have an incredible program called The Fearless 50 and I'd love if you could just explain and share with other companies how it works and how they could maybe do something similar at their company.
Julie Perino:
So the Fearless 50 program was born last year when came forward with the theme for our annual user conference. Our summit event called "The Fearless Marketer", our Chief Marketing Officer, Sarah Kennedy at the time, really encouraged us as a team to think creatively and think big and bold. She came forward with this amazing idea of curating this amazing group of marketers from across the globe that are driving what we consider to be bold and fearless marketing, out-of-the-box thinking and driving innovation at their companies. So this program was really designed to engage and surface those amazing marketers throughout the world.
Derek Andersen:
Yeah, it's really interesting, I mean we've seen, this trend of people really leveraging their LinkedIn profiles and using brands like Marketo to improve their personal lives not just their professional lives, but just to really elevate them and where they want to go over the course of the rest of their life. Do you think other people, do you think this works, like creating these Marketo champions, does it work for most companies, some companies, how applicable is it to other brands?
Julie Perino:
I think we have seen some amazing success with the Champion Program as you've kind of alluded to, and really helping people elevate their careers, and really, as you said, impacting their personal lives as well, both personal and professional growth. And I think it really, for some companies I think it may be a little bit challenging to kind of get underway. I mean, we've had the good fortune of having some amazing passion and connection to the brand from the very early days of Marketo.
Julie Perino:
And so I think for us it was really kind of this natural lean into those passionate users and really building a program to just engage them at a really high elite level. So I think it is something certainly every company should aspire to and I think it is an amazing way to build advocacy and to just build excitement and passion for the brand.
Julie Perino:
So I would encourage each and every company to really think big and think in that direction. There's so much that benefit really from both sides. These champions are amazing sounding boards for us to help us form where we go with the product to other layers of company strategy. Tapping into these Marketo champions also helps us to fuel content. They love to share their expertise. So when I talked a little bit earlier about how my team also drives our adoption programs, we rely heavily on those champions to help us create masterclass content and amazing content to help their fellow users get better at using Marketo.
Derek Andersen:
A lot of people in our industry and in the community space in general have a hard time proving that their work impacts the bottom line. From a high level, could you explain how you prove value of these programs inside of Adobe and Marketo?
Julie Perino:
Happy to share with you some of the ways that we're measuring today. And I think it is data and proving value is increasingly more important for all of us as we look to do what we do. So we'll share with you from a couple of different perspectives how we measure value today.
Julie Perino:
So certainly from the customer advocacy side of what we do, we measure program engagement and growth over time. Certainly, quarter over quarter, year over year. How many more customers are we engaging across all programs in total? And each and every program has its own kind of growth targets. We also measure influence on revenue amongst our cohort of customers that are engaged in these programs. And so I think there's some amazing value that we can certainly prove through that advocacy program engagement.
Julie Perino:
On the adoption program side of things, actually a little bit more, a little bit easier to measure in a precise way. We are able to connect the dots by the work that we do there in increases in customer adoption score. So how much more our customers are more deeply kind of adopting and using the Marketo product in different areas of the product that we know will drive value for them. And we've also been able to connect the dots with the work that we've done there on influence on what we would consider to be at risk retention revenue.
Julie Perino:
So for those customers that essentially are from a starting point on a low adoption score, how are we able to kind of elevate them to a kind of in the safe zone adoption score and attach those and connect those dots to that retention revenue. So we are really excited as a team, that it's actually something we're working a lot on in the coming months of really getting much more precise in how we measure value and impact to the business.
Derek Andersen:
I mean there's so many factors that go into it. You have a number of different programs that touch probably different types of people and different kinds of customers, but is there one sort of North star KPI that you use to determine success? Is that too simple a way to look at it? How do you think about that?
Julie Perino:
Yeah, great question. We don't have a single KPI that I would consider to be the North star and I think a bit of a challenge for us just in the breadth and the depth of what we do as a team and the different programs that we drive across both advocacy and adoption. So I think it's hard for us to center on just one specific metric. I think certainly the goal as it is with every company, and I think every marketing team is to connect the dots between driving revenue impact to the business.
Julie Perino:
And so I think if we can continue to center around just how we're able to positively impact, not only retention, customer retention revenue, but also customer growth because we believe through everything that we do, whether it's advocacy or on the adoption side, it is positively impacting their use and their perception, if you will, of the brand and the value that we're driving for their companies. So we know that really connecting the dots to revenue is what matters most to the company and our leadership team.
Derek Andersen:
So you have online programs, you have offline programs, you have these programs that elevate specific users in those different worlds. How do you tie all of these things together? It sounds like a ton of different things to manage first of all, but just how do you tie it all together for the end users, so they understand how all these things are happening and how they work.
Julie Perino:
Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of different ways. I mentioned I think a little earlier in the discussion what we call Advocate Nation, which is our portfolio of programs. And I think by tying what we do really on both sides of the fence, both advocacy and adoption, tying that to the customer journey, it makes it really easy I think for our customers in addition to our internal teams. Our customer success managers, our account executives on really being able to help our customers understand the benefits of engaging with us across our portfolio advocacy programs.
Julie Perino:
How it can help them as a customer get more successful at leveraging the Marketo platform and driving impact for their business. So I think aligning it to the customer journey on both sides has been really important. On the adoption side, everything that we do there is aligned to the customer journey. So a portfolio of really nurture programs or engagement programs there as well that go from onboarding through to kind of getting you up and moving with Marketo, getting you kind of into a steady state of leveraging the solution and then advanced use of the product as well.
Julie Perino:
So really aligning to the customer journey I think has been key to helping us drive success with the programs and really helping our customers understand kind of what programs to engage with and when and how that drives value for them.
Derek Andersen:
Where do you see the trend of brands building customer to customer communities going over the next, it's hard to think 10 years out, but the next five to 10 years, what do you think is going to happen with these communities? Are they getting bigger? Are they getting smaller? Are they becoming more necessary? Will they fade and necessity, what do you think?
Julie Perino:
I think more necessary without a doubt. I know that as Adobe looked at Marketo and kind of the way that we engage our customers and this amazing customer community, and ecosystem that we've grown over the years, that we've branded as marketing nation certainly was a key element in having Adobe look at Marketo and look at us and what our value could be to them and how we could really work together to drive a customer-centric mission going forward.
Julie Perino:
So I think we have seen and we have realized the power of that customer community really at large as mentioned kind of at the marketing nation level, and I think all the way down to the local Marketo user groups, just the power that that drives for us, the connection to the brand, the success that we're able to drive and why people over the years have really bet their business on Marketo. So I think just the power of that community in connection to the community really is cited even by our customers themselves as one of the key reasons why they choose Marketo over others.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod. Again, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.