Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Carlota Feliu Argila, marketing leader at HP, on conveying innovative ideas through content:

Carlota Pico 0:14
Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Content Mix. I’m Carlota Pico, and I’m excited to be here today with Carlota Feliu Argila, who is HP’s EMEA marketing leader for their 3D printing and digital manufacturing section, and has over 12 years of experience in marketing and communications. Carlota, fantastic name, and thank you so much for joining us on The Content Mix!

Carlota Feliu Argila 0:41
Thank you very much to you for inviting me to be here. Glad to be here.

Carlota Pico 0:45
Awesome. Well Carlota, to start off the interview, I’d like to learn a little bit about your background, your experience and how you got to where you are today.

Carlota Feliu Argila 0:55
Yeah, okay. So I studied journalism, I started on the world of writing from the journalist perspective, but I quickly moved to the “dark side” of business and marketing, because, it was natural so it wasn’t anything that I planned honestly, so it was just because I started first working on a broadcast and working on radios, and then I quickly moved into corporate communications, and then from there easily I moved into marketing, no? First in the public sector, then after in the private sector in a leisure company. And then I moved to this tech world, so doing B2B marketing for a technology company, which is what I’m doing right now, and my passion, right. Because I’ve discovered that apart from loving the marketing and all this stuff, also I love technology, I love innovation, and I feel that it gives me, let’s say, an extra thing among all the good things that the marketing brings, which is the fact that you are continuously doing new stuff, and that you’re communicating about challenging things and things that are really changing the world, no?

Carlota Pico 1:18
Because of your very varied background, I’d like to learn more about the differences between marketing for the public sector and marketing for the private sector.

Carlota Feliu Argila 2:33
Well, there are differences in the way that you do stuff, but at the end, you realize that you are always, like, selling ideas, no? And you’re selling ideas in the public sector and you’re selling ideas in the private sector, the only thing is that in the private sector, there are products behind these ideas. But at the end, the type of strategies or the principles that are behind are very similar, no? And you learn a lot working on the private and more politics sector, no? How important it is to be consistent, to stick to an idea, and how difficult it is to sell an idea, to send a message that has a powerful idea behind it and that makes this idea arrive to the people. Because you can send tons of messages, but if there is no strong idea behind, it will be empty words and it won’t stick on no one’s mind, no? And that is something that you learn from the politics side and the public side. And it’s a good learning also for the private sector.

Carlota Pico 3:41
I couldn’t agree more, Carlota. Our backgrounds are actually very similar. I started off in journalism as well, and then I moved into the public sector and content marketing and business development. And now I’m in the private sector, and I couldn’t agree more. For me everything has to do with a return on investment. So putting the budget, allocating the budget to where it actually will create an impact for the company. And on a public side, where it will create an impact on policy as well.

Carlota Feliu Argila 4:08
Exactly.

Carlota Pico 4:09
Talking more about HP and about current times, because we are living a very peculiar environment currently with COVID-19. Since you’re HP’ s 3D manufacturing section lead when it comes to marketing, let’s talk about COVID-19. HP and its global community of digital manufacturers quickly mobilized their 3D printing expertise and production capacity to develop medical equipment to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this is great publicity, how has COVID-19 affected your business and hence your marketing strategy?

Carlota Feliu Argila 4:50
Well, obviously COVID-19 is something that affected all of us, and HP also, and the 3D printing community too. The good thing is that, as you say, that I’m very proud on how quickly HP reacted, and especially the 3D printing division, how we all reacted, and especially the engineers, the R&D teams, and not just HP but also all our network of partners reacted very quickly, and started to manufacture facemasks and respirators, ventilators, etc. So, obviously doing this shift means that we stopped to do other stuff, so it was an impact of course, but we took a responsibility, we took a decision to use what we have to help as we can on the COVID-19 crisis, and we are very proud on it. And from the other side, in terms of my area, marketing for 3D printing. Obviously there have been some challenges and there will be some challenges, because most of our customers have been closed during a while, and we need to also redesign some strategies, considering that a lot of events and trade fairs are not happening. So obviously, this is something that impacted us all, and it makes us need to be more creative on the way that we are doing marketing and planning marketing for the following months. The good thing is that also we make more people understand how relevant 3D printing can be for solving some supply chain challenges or manufacturing challenges, and how 3D printing can manufacture products that we are using in our real lives. Because for most of the people, still 3D printing is something that they don’t really understand what’s the benefit from it, if it can be used just for prototyping, or if it can be used also for producing products, for manufacturing. So it was a good way to show to the world that 3D printing can solve real-life problems, real-life challenges on the manufacturing side, on the supply chain side. So that’s great, then we have from now the challenge of adapting our strategies, and this is something that every marketer should do. Because I mean, the world has changed, the world is changing and has changed. And as marketers we should acknowledge that, we should acknowledge that probably our potential customers are not in the same point as they were three or four months before. So we need to understand them, to, let’s say, rethink all our plans and readapt everything to the new situation.

Carlota Pico 7:37
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. During your response, you mentioned event. I understand that HP is very active when it comes to events. How has it switched overnight from events to other strategies when it comes to marketing? For example, are you now hosting webinars? Or what are you doing to fill in that time and that gap?

Carlota Feliu Argila 7:59
Yeah, well I think that this is something that we all are doing, and you can easily see if you go through the LinkedIn feed plenty of announced webinars, announced virtual events, so we are all moving towards this new type of activities, no? And I came from the startup world, and on the startups, this is something that we did a lot, because obviously the budget from startups doesn’t allow to go to all the events that you want to go, so you need to be more creative and do a lot of virtual and digital stuff. But we are all now going towards that because I mean, it’s what we need to do. And I can expect, and this is something that is already happening, that we will start seeing, let’s say, more creative things rather than just a plain webinar. And we are already seeing these new formulas. In fact, HP, yesterday we had a very big virtual event where we announced several launches, etc. And it was a very good experience for us, for 3D printing at HP, because it was like our first big virtual event. So obviously a lot of learnings that we will need to take from there and lots of improvement that can be done. But we are very happy on how this very big virtual event went.

Carlota Pico 9:26
So you mentioned happy, which is a buzzword. It’s very easy to say happy, but how are you measuring that happiness? So for example, how are you, what KPIs are you using to measure the results of that virtual event yesterday?

Carlota Feliu Argila 9:43
I mean, obviously there are more, let’s say, campaign-level and campaign performance-level KPIs, but then at the end, what is relevant for us as marketers is to understand how we are contributing to the business, I mean… most important metric for us. So to understand what opportunities we are finally generating from it and what we are selling from it, no? And this is where we want to arrive. In the middle there are many other metrics that we analyze at a more detailed level, and depending on the department, we will be analyzing one thing or another. But at the end, what we have clear that is relevant for us to understand is that: how marketing is contributing to generate and to influence opportunities.

Carlota Pico 10:34
Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. In an earlier conversation that you and I had, while we were off the record, you said that content is the backbone of your marketing strategy, which goes hand in hand with Bill Gates’ comment back in 1997, in which he coined the new trending phrase “content is king.” What do you think separates good content from great content?

Carlota Feliu Argila 11:04
Well, I think that, I mean, and this is something that a lot of people have talked already about that, no? I mean, which is important regarding content, is that you need to be authentic, genuine. Because I mean you can build easily tons of content I mean, just digging online, looking for information, doing some research. You can find great things to put on paper that will result okay for most of the people and will resonate well, and okay, you will read it, okay. But these won’t shake anyone’s mind, shake anyone’s prejudices, shake anyone’s ideas. So if you want to really make an impact with content, you need to first have clear, what’s your positioning? And from there, be authentic and try to find and to explain things that no one else has explained yet. I know that it’s difficult, but I mean, just by saying what the, I mean the things that, just by being honest on what you think, on what’s your point on the topic, etc., you can easily explain things that are more authentic. And what is sounding, especially in technology companies and innovative companies most of the time, obviously, let’s say the source of this authentic content, of this genuine content is not marketing, because most of the times it’s content about, I don’t know, things that are more technology related or even science related. And if you want to create something that is relevant on this field, you need to involve people that is not just marketing, no? And this is one of the challenges, to create good content for innovation, innovative and technology companies, that most of the times you need to involve people from other teams, and you need to create not just a methodology, not just a process, but also a culture that makes that everyone in the company, everybody is part of this content generation, of this content strategy.

Carlota Pico 13:17
So you’re relying a lot on thought leaders and on higher management, your executives, who also provide content to feed your blog channels, to feed your social network channels or your marketing material. How are you putting some of that theory into practice?

Carlota Feliu Argila 13:33
So during all my experience, I’ve done that. Yeah, I have content from one side, and not just the senior, let’s say the C-levels, for the more thought leadership content pieces, but also, I mean, involving even people from R&D, people from engineering, people from many other departments, because everyone has something valuable to explain, to share, that can be helpful for marketing to generate a good and genuine piece of content. And again, when it’s challenging here, it’s first to, I mean, because you can put a very good process in what are you, okay you explain to everyone how they can contribute and even you can train them, etc. But at the end it should be part of the company culture, the fact that everybody has a voice in the content. Because at the end content is one of the main assets that the company will be generating, apart from the products and the services that they are selling. Content is another great asset that the company is generating, that should be understood as something that is not generated just from marketing, no?

Carlota Pico 14:41
Definitely. We are coming towards the end of the interview, well towards the end of this first section of the interview, because we will move into a rapid-fire set of questions as well later on. But before we finish up, I do want to ask you again to put some of the theory that we’re constantly reading online into practical examples. And for that reason, I’d like to ask you about a marketing project that you’re particularly proud of, its results, and how you made that happen.

Carlota Feliu Argila 15:14
Okay. So, at this point, maybe I will highlight the project at a previous company, at Datumize. I mean, because we put in place a content strategy, not just a content strategy, but an overall inbound strategy that had very good traction, very good results. And it was tough, because I mean, the type of product that we were selling at Datumize, it was a complex product; it was a solution for gathering dark data. So a concept that was very unknown in the market, very unknown even by technical people. So it was something very techie, very niche, and to try to transform that into something understandable for our potential customers, which not all of them were technical people. So it was super challenging to put all the pieces together, and to make sure that we were sending to, that we were creating content that was appealing, that was engaging to all these people, but at the same time that has this authenticity, this genuineness and this, let’s say, rigorousness that when you are talking about the technical things, you need to have still. So I can say that this is a project that I’m very proud of, because we acheived to have a very good track, a very good engagement, and we achieved to generate very good opportunities, even from different sectors, and especially using the content also. Yeah.

Carlota Pico 16:51
Were you communicating to all the different sectors and all the markets in the same way, using the same language, or were you adapting it?

Carlota Feliu Argila 16:58
Yeah, totally. Especially, I mean, and especially not adapting it just for the sectors, but also for the different type of profiles that will be interacting with your content. Because even inside the same sector, you need to have and take on that sometimes this content will be read by a CTO or someone in the tech side, but some of the time someone more in the business side. So you need to balance that you have content for both, and that when someone that is a CTO is reading business-oriented content, doesn’t feel that it’s too, let’s say, that it’s not rigorous. But at the same time that if someone from business is reading tech content, feels that he can understand at least something, no? So to balance this, it’s very challenging when you are generating content for a tech company, but I think that it’s key too.

Carlota Pico 17:47
So in terms of the way forward, you are zooming into different personas, just finding those personas, and then creating valuable content according to their interests and according to their characteristics.

Carlota Feliu Argila 18:00
Yeah, exactly. And content to cover all the stages, I mean content to cover all the process, all the journey for these personas, from the more awareness to the more conversion or decision content, yeah.

Carlota Pico 18:12
Okay. And to finish off this section, before we move into our set of rapid-fire questions, what’s one piece of advice that you would give to recent graduates who would like to pursue a career in marketing in Europe?

Carlota Feliu Argila 18:28
I would say to read a lot. Read, and not just books, I mean, there are tons of interesting content online that you can find. There are tons of blogs, pages that you can follow to be up to date on everything. But read a lot, from the most basic things… and not just read marketing-related stuff. I mean, when I mean read it’s… because at the end if you are going to be involved in content, you need to have a very open mind, you need to have a lot of culture in general. So yeah, read a lot.

Carlota Pico 19:08
Be curious, read a lot, push yourself beyond borders. Excellent, I couldn’t agree more. That would be the exact advice I would give to young professionals as well who want to get involved in our industry. Okay, and moving into the rapid-fire questions: what’s one app or tool that you can’t live without or that you can’t work without?

Carlota Feliu Argila 19:30
I’m a super fan of Evernote, because it’s an easy way, I mean, I love to navigate and dig and scroll on a lot of pages, etc. And it’s easy that you find something that you like it, and then when you want to go back and look for it, you cannot find it. So I’m a super fan of tagging, taking snapshots and saving things in Evernote for the future. And then when I want to revisit something or I want to share something with my teams because I find it inspirational, or just I want to share it online, then I have there in Evernote my list of things with my classification, which is like my mind, classifying things. So yeah, I love it.

Carlota Pico 20:10
Okay, excellent. What about a marketing influencer in Europe or in the EMEA region that you follow, that inspires you, that provides you with valuable content?

Carlota Feliu Argila 20:22
The truth is that in Europe, I don’t know if I know someone. Because I see that the ones that I follow are all from US, so I follow Mark Schaefer and I am subscribed to the newsletter, { grow }, and I check always the website. I also read a lot of books, and follow Seth Godin, and also Dave Gerhardt from Drift, which now is another company, also I follow him. And not just them, I also follow some blogs or some sites that have very interesting information about content marketing, about marketing in general, about business.

Carlota Pico 21:06
Okay. And to finish up this section and also our interview, what’s a valuable European group or event that you recommend others also attending?

Carlota Feliu Argila 21:18
Yep. So I’m involved in some Slack channels. Slack is another tool that I love too, because it allows to easily be involved in several network, and collaborate and coordinate with some people. So I’m part of the Growth BCN Slack channel, also part of the Online Geniuses Slack channel, which is a worldwide one, but there are then channels and threads for different locations, and there is one for Barcelona too. But then apart from that, I would say that most, I mean, it’s good to be in these type of communities and be part of these bigger channels. I’m also in the Women in Tech Slack channel, which is more broad; it’s not just for marketing, it’s for women in technology. But apart from that, I would say that what is important is that you build your own network, and then do your own connection, and with different marketers and even from time to time that you have a face-to-face—or right now face-to-face is more difficult—online conversations and chat with other peers working on marketing. Or even, I’ve done also some mentoring for some people on the startups or shown some junior people, and you can learn a lot also from junior people because they are with fresh minds, fresh ideas. And I think this way that you will build your own network.

Carlota Pico 22:45
Absolutely. I’m actually part of a Women in Tech WhatsApp group. So perhaps our paths will cross again, in one of those Women in Tech groups. Awesome, those are great tips, Carlota. Thank you so much for joining us today on The Content Mix and for sharing your insights with us.

Carlota Feliu Argila 23:03
Thank you for having me here.

Carlota Pico 23:05
And thanks to everyone for listening in. For more perspectives on the content and marketing industry in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com. We’ll be releasing interviews like this one every week, so keep on tuning in and see you next time. Bye!

Carlota Feliu Argila 23:24
Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai