James Stacey inadvertently became a marketer through his love of numbers. Having originally studied business, he first broke into the world of marketing by becoming an analyst for a publishing company. Soon after, he was promoted to their marketing team to help improve their content based on his findings.

Fast-forward to today and James is now a well-seasoned B2B marketer and program marketing manager for the EMEA region at Red Hat, the leading provider of enterprise open source solutions.

In today’s interview, James sits down with Shaheen Samavati to chat about all things B2B and B2C marketing and offers many lessons from his 8+ year career.

Tune in as James weighs in on the debate of gated vs. ungated content, shares why creating practical, easily-digestible content is a winning strategy, and explains how anyone—not just those with a marketing background—can leverage their skills to make it in the industry.

You can watch the full conversation in the video above or on YouTube, and listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Rapid-fire recs

  • Useful resources:
    • The B2B Marketing Magazine. “I try to read up about my industry, and I’d recommend anyone do the same. You should understand your industry, your product and your customers so you’ll be able to better serve the people that engage with your marketing.”
    • The podcast Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee. “I quite like podcasts that help me develop as a person because I think the better person I am, the better marketer I will be and the better I’ll be able to contribute to my business.”
    • The online community Finite. “It’s a B2B-focused online community. It’s got a Slack channel as well, which is really interesting to see what my equivalents in all different businesses are doing. It’s a really nice community to be a part of.”
  • Productivity hack: To-do lists. “Obviously, you’ve got all of the productivity tools like Monday.com, Asana, Trello, but if you’re ever working with people and collaborating, it just takes one person not to be updating those tools for it all to fall to bits. So for me, I plan my whole week on a Monday. That really helps me understand the big rocks—what are the biggest things that I need to get done that week.”
  • Favorite app: Google Drive. “Having previously worked at companies that used Microsoft Office, it’s such an easy place to be now.”
  • Suggested reading: Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight. “It’s really, really interesting and nice to see that the challenges of yesteryear are still the challenges of today, albeit with different tools at our disposal.”
  • Source of inspiration: Simon Sinek. “If I’m ever scrolling through LinkedIn and I see something from him, I can’t help but stop and watch it—even if I’ve seen it before. He just makes the overly complicated sound simple. There’s no way you can’t watch one of his videos and not be inspired to actually make a change in your own day to day.”

“Marketing is a broad field. You can have so many different personality types and interests just within marketing. If you’re artistic, then there’s creative routes that you can go down within marketing. If you’re numbers driven, then programmatic is a growing field within marketing.”

Connect with James and Shaheen on LinkedIn.

This post was edited by Mary Kresge.

For more insights into B2B marketing strategies:

B2B content is about storytelling – Evgeni Hristov, marketing manager at Tradin Organic

Effectively utilize storytelling in B2B marketing

Take risks that pay off – Noémie Baudouin, B2B content manager at JobTeaser


To see the full transcript, click on page number 2 below.