Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Jennifer Montague, director of marketing for Dixa, on making a career change at a later stage in life:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and I’m excited to be here with Jennifer Montague, director of marketing at Dixa, a global customer service software company based in Copenhagen. Thanks so much for joining us, Jennifer.

Jennifer Montague 0:24
Thank you for having me.

Shaheen Samavati 0:25
So can you just start out by telling us a bit more about your background and how you got into marketing?

Jennifer Montague 0:30
Yeah, absolutely. I have a bit of an interesting story because I did a massive career change in my mid 30s. So I was working in customer support at FIFA, the football organization in Zurich, Switzerland, where I was helping football clubs in Asia and the Middle East process the transfer of their players. During that time, I took over the Twitter account and quadrupled the followers in under a year. I also saw that the more I invested in marketing materials, such as newsletters, the less basic questions I would get on a regular basis. So I started investing more in content and the more I did, the less time I spent telling people how to reset their password or the really basic stuff and I could focus on the very complex cases, which was great. So I said to my boss, hey, I like this marketing thing. I’d maybe like to try that a bit more and they said no. They were very corporate and very structured. This was your job and that’s the way it was. So I had the opportunity to relocate to Copenhagen, Denmark and I saw this as an opportunity to reinvent myself. So I took on an internship. So I was probably one of the world’s oldest interns, I joined a startup based in Copenhagen and I was the digital marketing intern. That was actually the best decision I ever made. So of course, it was difficult, obviously the salary drop and having to start all over again when I had been working for a number of years, but I learned so much in such a short time. I was doing the grunt work, I was doing the manual entering of negative keywords and all the boring stuff that no one wanted to do. But it really helped me get a really good understanding of digital marketing. The company was actually really great, they invested very heavily in me as well. So within a year at that company, I went from intern to the head of digital campaigns. Within three years, I’m a director sitting here talking to you. So I wouldn’t have gotten to do all of that if I didn’t have to do that early on and I think a huge part of that also is that my employer gave me that chance. Yes, I worked very, very hard but also I was given a lot of opportunities. So I’m really grateful to that company, for that opportunity. I also think because I started at the bottom and worked my way up, I’m actually a better manager for it because I understand what everyone else is doing and what they have on their plates. So that’s where I am now.

Shaheen Samavati 2:55
Yeah. That’s interesting. We actually did a live chat on our Facebook group a little while ago about career questions. We had a career advisor on the chat and a question that came up was for people who want to get into marketing at a later stage. The typical advice is get an internship or something like that and it’s like, how do you do that if you’re already so far along in your career? But it’s interesting that you did an internship. How did they consider you for the internship I guess, is the question?

Jennifer Montague 3:23
No, that’s a great question because actually, I had applied for other internships. I had one company actually say, um, we think you gave us the wrong age because there’s no way that this mid 30s person is looking for this recent graduate position. If you go to a startup, startups are so much more open. Startups are still trying to figure out what they need in the first place. So I went to this startup and I said, I want to learn digital marketing, I wanted to learn PPC and Google Ads and all of that. But in exchange of that, I’m a native English speaker, so I can help you with your content. I have experience in event organization, I have other experiences that I can bring to the table. So even though I’m the intern, I’m also going to be able to contribute in other ways. So that was one way of opening the door. But I will say that for a lot of people, I think the salary is an issue and if I didn’t live with someone who made a decent salary that could support both of us, I probably would not have had that opportunity. So there are barriers to that and you know, it’s not all blue sky, and everything’s great and just go for it. I did take an 80% salary cut, but for me it was an investment in my future, so it was worth it. I was very lucky that I was in a position where I could do something like that, even though maybe, sometimes the pride can be a little bruised to go from being the head of something to an intern. It’s humbling as well and like I said, I think I’m a better manager for it now as well.

Shaheen Samavati 4:50
Why did you want to make this career change?

Jennifer Montague 4:54
Yeah, well my mother owned her own marketing agency. So that was something I grew up with, so that idea of being creative and getting messages out there is something that I’ve always been interested in. I used to have a blog with a pretty decent following. So I like to write, I like to express things. But there was one thing that I didn’t know anything about and that was Google Ads, PPC and making money. It’s great to get content out there but how do you monetize that? How do you actually make money for a company? It was just something I had no idea how it worked and I just really wanted to know how it worked. So I decided that would be good. I tried doing content and because I didn’t have a content role coming in, it was very hard to get your foot in the door at a higher level. But also I wanted to learn more about this unknown but super important side of marketing, which was the digital side.

Shaheen Samavati 5:50
And, by the way, we should mention for context that you’re from the US. What brought you to Europe?

Jennifer Montague 5:56
I studied abroad and I never left. I studied abroad for my junior year and I ended up extending it by a year, doing a Master’s, getting a job and I just found love and never really left Europe. I’ve been here 20 years now, I’ve been in Europe in general in four different countries. So I really like it here. No disrespect to the US and my family still live there and I go visit them—when Corona allows—but I just really enjoy living over here.

Shaheen Samavati 6:12
Yeah, awesome. It’s a common story. I also came to study—originally I’m also from the US. So going to what you’re doing now, can you tell us what’s a typical day like at work for you and what your responsibilities are?

Jennifer Montague 6:44
Yeah, sure. So I’m the director of marketing so overall my responsibility is to oversee marketing, which is a very easy way of saying I stay in a lot of meetings. My day is usually dominated by meetings but that’s just because I’m responsible for making sure that marketing is aligned with company initiatives. Marketing is one of those departments that is involved in pretty much everything. SEAs need to rely on marketing for messaging, product rely on marketing for product features and our sales team obviously relies very heavily on marketing, we’re ordering hoodies for people, we’re doing everything. So I start my day with a meeting with my team. In the first instance, we’re 100% remote like most of the world is right now. So it’s really important that we have daily meetings where we make sure we’re all aligned and everyone knows what they’re doing. Then I’ll be in a customer success meeting, then I’ll be in a product meeting or then I’ll be talking to the executive team. Where’s the direction going? Are we headed in the right direction? Hey, sales, how are these leads doing? Do you need any content from us? So I spend a lot of time in meetings to make sure that marketing is aligned with the rest of the business.

Shaheen Samavati 7:57
And so for those who don’t know, can you tell us a bit about what Dixa does?

Jennifer Montague 8:02
Yeah, so Dixa is a customer support platform. So we provide for companies looking to streamline their customer success. You can get your phone, your chats, your email and your Facebook messages and your WhatsApp messages, all the channels that maybe your customers are coming to you on, all in one place. So customer service agents can see the relationship that person has had, they can see their orders, they can see their complaints, they can see the whole string of conversation with that customer and provide really personalized support. But at the same time we have very intelligent workflows where, depending on someone’s query, they can go to a different agent who is better skilled in that area. So it’s all about making customer success happen faster, more efficient and more effective for businesses.

Shaheen Samavati 8:51
And I think during your time at the company it’s raised a couple of rounds of venture capital. I have also worked in startups and I know what impact that can have on the pace of things within the company. So I was curious, what’s your experience been like working in a fast growing startup like Dixa and how does that compare to your previous roles?

Jennifer Montague 9:17
I think when startups talk about the rocket ship, it sounds a bit cliché, but it’s really been a rocket ship. It’s been in hyper growth. So I joined the company in November and in February, we got the second highest funding in Danish history, which is really, really exciting. Obviously, in the lead up to that there’s a lot you have to do. You have to make business cases, you have to be very, very active in the market. So it was hitting the ground running as soon as I arrived, even during my onboarding I was in the middle of doing all kinds of really cool stuff. I’ve worked in fast growing startups before, but this has been on a whole new level. I think we’ve doubled in size in a very short amount of time. It’s really exciting but at the same time it can be a bit chaotic, right? You grow really fast. New people come in, who’s doing this, who’s doing that? But I really enjoy that. I think going from a very corporate structure like FIFA, where you knew what your day held every day, that’s nice. But I love the fact that every day, I don’t know what’s gonna happen next and I’ve learned so much in a really short amount of time, because you have to. You have to keep up and that’s something I really enjoy.

Shaheen Samavati 10:24
So can you tell us about Dixa’s target audience and what your channels are for reaching your audience?

Jennifer Montague 10:32
Yep, so it can come out as complicated but in the simplest of forms we’re looking for customer centric businesses. So businesses who really want to treat their customers well. I know that sounds very generic, but there’s some people who really, really make a strong effort and we want to work with them. So people who have maybe more than two channels for customer support, maybe phone and email, or telephone and chat, things like that. But also people who want to turn their customer support into a competitive advantage. I gave a talk not too long ago about how customer support is the new lead generation. So if you have really crappy customer support, word gets out and people don’t want to deal with you. So it’s businesses who want to leverage this, we call ourselves the customer friendship company because we want to help businesses make their customers their friends so they keep coming back for more and help evangelize for their brands and things like that. So that’s our target market. In terms of channels, we have quite a few that we try to reach out to this audience because they can be everywhere. So we do use a lot of social media, both organic and paid. We are on review sites, because we do have competitors who I won’t mention. We used to do physical events and that’s a great way because we want to build a movement, we’re a disruptor in terms of customer service. So we want to educate people on how we do things and why our way we think is the best way. So we do a lot of events, we’re turning those obviously into webinars. We also do a tonne of content to really educate people. Customer service is something that hasn’t really changed much over the years and we’re changing it. We’re trying to explain to people this thing that you do all the time, it can be done differently and hear us out. So that’s why content is a really big part of that.

Shaheen Samavati 12:34
So could you tell us a bit more about your approach to content and also the tone of voice you use across your content?

Jennifer Montague 12:41
Our tone of voice is, like I said, we’re conversational, right? We’re friendly, so we try to be a bit informal but at the same time knowledgeable, competent and people that you trust. So if you look at the spectrum, where informal is on the left and formal is on the right, we’re slightly left of the center. So we want to be friendly but also knowledgeable. So, of course, that can change depending on the nature of what we’re talking about but we try to stay true to that throughout our communications.

Shaheen Samavati 13:16
So could you tell us a bit more about how content plays into the marketing mix and how you align your content strategy with the strategy of the company?

Jennifer Montague 13:24
Yep, absolutely. So we have very specific ICPs, ideal customer profiles, and within those customer profiles we have different buyer personas. Within those buyer personas, we know that different messaging works for different people. So there’s a lot of levels of content, messaging and what we’re trying to convey. So we did this research, we have a lead intelligence team who are brilliant, they can pull out data and analysis of everything and anything you could want. So they know really well, these are the customers we need to win because these are the ones that get the best out of our product and stay with us the longest. So we know who we want to win. So within these ICPs, they have different value drivers. So we know, for example, that our internal champion, so the person who’s gonna get our foot in the door and say we need this product, tends to not be a decision maker, they tend to be the person who we help the most. So we make content to help that and that would be, in our case, the customer service agent. The person on the ground, answering the calls and the person whose life is made easier with our product. So they’re our champion, but they’re not the decision maker. So they have to go to their boss and maybe their boss cares about efficiency savings. How long does it take my team to answer a phone call? How long do people wait for an answer on chat? How do we get that smaller? So they care about something else, so we have to make content to that. Then their boss, who maybe has to also be part of the decision, is maybe the sea level and they’re wanting to know, well, this is our customer service platform, we can’t change that. What happens to business continuity? How do we get everyone up and running in no time? So we make content for that. So there’s a lot of content, but it’s because we’re trying to make it useful and valuable for every person who is going to be part of our journey.

Shaheen Samavati 15:21
So what do you think is the best way to measure content performance and justify content budget?

Jennifer Montague 15:27
I think this is a tough question for content managers because when I was a digital marketing manager, I could say here’s my ad and it made this much money, can I have more money? It’s very easy when you work in that PPC world where I come from. But content is different because you’re not necessarily able to point to a blog post or to a webinar and go this is where that person came from. But we know that for us the average sales cycle could be up to a year, depending on the size of the customer. What are they doing in that year, they’re not going to see one ad and then a year later go, yeah this seems right. They are going to engage with us, they’re going to look at more content. At the same time, we know that our number one channel is organic. So where does that organic traffic come from? It tends to come from our SEO optimized content. So we have invested very heavily in data platforms to help us really get a picture of the buyer journey. We use what we would call multi touch attribution. So a lot of companies either look at the first thing someone touched or the last thing. We look at everything throughout and we allocate a percentage based on how much we think that influenced that person. Content is always a huge part of that. So my company has been really, really great in that they saw that as a wise investment. It’s not cheap, it’s not something that maybe a lot of smaller companies are able to do. But if you can, using analytics platforms that help you say this content has helped close X amount of deals. Maybe it wasn’t the last thing, maybe it wasn’t the first thing, but someone came across this in their journey and this is the thing that people come across the most. That’s how we can justify continuing to invest in this content.

Shaheen Samavati 17:14
And that this kind of relates to the question about how does content help you generate leads?

Jennifer Montague 17:20
Yeah, like I said, the majority of our customers come through organic or directly to our website, which from a tracking point of view is kind of a nightmare, because it’s like where did you hear about us? But if there isn’t tracking on it, then chances are it wasn’t an ad. So they must have heard about us either through our PR efforts and PR often doesn’t allow tracking, but they’ve heard of us. So they’re putting Dixa.com into their browser, so that’s probably going to be content. We also had a website relaunch in October and in that relaunch, we really focussed on SEO. SEO was not something that really was seen as a priority. I think just because there’s so much to do as we were growing so fast, but we really doubled down and we’ve seen a 54% increase in organic traffic. Organic equals free and that’s great. That’s what we want to see and that’s what the executive team want to see. So we know that content plays a really, really crucial part of our strategy and of our buyer journey.

Shaheen Samavati 18:23
Yeah. So to get specific, could you tell us an example of a campaign or a piece of content that worked really well?

Jennifer Montague 18:31
Yeah, actually. We have one that I’m really, really proud of, which to me works very well. So when this virus that no one really knew what was going on was looking like it was becoming a serious situation, if you could think back to January/February. We, as a company, knew that we needed to do something not only to prepare ourselves, protect our business and protect our employees, but also to protect our customers and potential customers out there. As this approached Europe in March, it was very clear that something big was about to happen that was going to disrupt people’s lives and businesses and we needed to do something. So we actually did, we started preparing a lot of content about preparing to go remote, particularly for customer service teams going remote, because a lot of these teams have to be physically in the office if you have a phone system and they’re not going to be able to do that. So how can we help people prepare for going remote and also remote onboarding of staff. There’s a whole new way of working. So we focus on creating content such as blog posts, webinars and things like that around this topic to help our customers but also businesses prepare for that. One of the things we did that I think is really, really cool is we had our own internal handbook on remote working and mental health and the different policies that our company has put in place. We made that public, which is something usually I don’t think companies would do, to make your own internal staff handbook public. But we thought this is something that a lot of companies could maybe find useful. So that was the content side but also in terms of product offering, we gave our product away for free. All onboarding, all support, we gave it free till September. At the time, we thought maybe this would be over by September. Weren’t we naive. We gave our product away 100% for free, we guaranteed that we would get your team remotely on boarded within a day. So business continuity wasn’t disrupted and your team can work from the safety of their home. Making sure that business wasn’t impacted or at least as much as it possibly could. As much as we could control your business continuity continued on without too much interruption. So from a business perspective, obviously, this was a success, we had the highest number of prospects taking advantage of this offer. When it ended in September I think maybe one turned, but everyone else stuck with Dixa and are a paying customer now. But most importantly we got a lot of feedback from people that felt the empathy that we were trying to convey. We weren’t just doing this to make money, we were doing this because we have the resources to help you and to tell you what you should do. Here’s what we’re doing and maybe we can help you. We got a lot of positive feedback from customers and prospects that our content was really helpful during what was a difficult time.

Shaheen Samavati 21:28
What was the creative process for that because it’s sounds like you reacted really quickly. So how did you manage to get that all off the ground so quick?

Jennifer Montague 21:37
It was it was done very quickly but I was thinking at the time, people were contacting me and they were trying to sell me stuff. I was like, not now we’re in a pandemic, not now. Then I thought, wait, that’s probably what other people are feeling. Other people are probably thinking this, and I dug out my college psychology of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and I was like, okay, there’s certain things that people need right now. They need security, they need financial security, they need to know that they’re going to be okay. We tried to tailor the campaign around those things, how can we overcome these obstacles and that’s where we came up with the idea. But in terms of launching, the longest part was making sure that this 100% free for five months isn’t going to financially ruin our company. So there were a few moving parts with finance and the sales team and how can we make this work. That was probably the longest part because obviously there’s a lot of things to consider when you’re going to do an offer like that. But everyone was on board with the concept. It was just how are we going to make this work. Then it was a case of creating a landing page, where we could put all this content out. The handbook was already done. So we put that out there in the first instance and then we had time to make a webinar. Then the content team did the blog post, we had the content going. Then once people started engaging with the content, we would then show them ads about how they could get the product for free. That’s how it took off. So I think the month we launched it was our busiest month, which was a sign that we did something right, something resonated with people in that month.

Shaheen Samavati 23:17
Impressive. That’s a great example, thanks for sharing. So I was curious, you mentioned that at Dixa your team is fully remote, was it remote even before the pandemic situation started?

Jennifer Montague 23:31
Absolutely not. We have this beautiful office right in the heart of Copenhagen, it was relatively new as well—we had just moved in when I started. If you had asked me in February or March, ‘How do you feel about your team being remote? ‘I would have said absolutely not. We need to be near each other. The coffee machine is where a lot of ideas happen…and I was wrong. I was definitely wrong. We are more productive than ever when we’re remote, because you’re not having those disruptions. The lockdown eased up in Denmark at one point over the summer. We were very lucky. We could go to restaurants, we could be together. I think the limit was 50 people. So we had a rota in the office. So we started coming in two days a week. Then my team said, can we maybe make it one? I really like working from home. So it was like okay, we can make it one. Now we’re in a much more strict lockdown where there’s no more than five people. So we’re at 100%. But there’s a lot of talk about what’s going to happen when we do go back to work, who will want to go to work, how are we going to do that? We’ve found that we have the technology to do things remotely. I just hired my first person in London. So she’s not going to physically be in the office every day with us, but we’re confident that we’re going to be fine. So maybe you can interview me again when this is all over and see where we’re at. It will be interesting to see how we do that once this is all over.

Shaheen Samavati 25:01
Yeah, I think a lot of companies are in the same situation. Learning the benefits of remote work could forever change the way companies operate. So I was also curious, especially in this remote work situation, what tips do you have for maintaining work life balance?

Jennifer Montague 25:19
Yeah, I think this is a really important topic. This is something I’m really strict with my team about. I’m lucky, I have the spare room that I’ve turned into an office. Not everyone has that luxury, especially in Copenhagen, with tiny city apartments. I think it’s really easy to just sit in front of your computer all day long. When we go to the office, we cycle to the office, we go for a walk at lunch, you’re walking around, you’re talking to people, we’re not doing that anymore. I could feel it myself, actually, I have a partner, a four year old stepson and a puppy and they all need my attention and it was really hard to shut off because I’m in the house all the time. I just closed the door and it was really difficult for me and I know that for my team it was the same. Some people don’t have distractions, if you live alone it’s really easy to feel lonely and just focus on work because you can’t go out and see your friends. So for me, it’s very important to unplug. I could feel that I wasn’t very present in my family life and then that made me resentful of my job because I was like, well I’m always working. But it’s my choice, it was up to me to always be working, no one was forcing me to do it. So I needed to put some boundaries in. So one of the rules i’ve enforced on my team, for lack of a better word, is that we all share each other’s mobile number and at six o’clock, we turn off our notifications. We use Slack, it’s very tempting to check Slack constantly. So we said if anything happens and it’s urgent, we’re not brain surgeons, we work in marketing, it can wait until the morning. But if there’s anything really urgent that needs to happen, I’ll call you. So don’t feel that you constantly have to be checking and I have that agreement with my boss. So at least at six o’clock, I stop checking, don’t check your email, don’t check your phone, because if something’s important they’re gonna call you. The other thing that we’ve started doing is we have organized, in Denmark we have a very big tradition of Friday bar. So usually, when you’re in the office, every Friday around 3:30/4, you grab a beer with your colleagues and you socialize. It’s a very big part of Danish culture, especially in businesses, to get to know your colleagues. We can’t do that anymore so we have a digital Friday bar. So we have one that’s company wide but actually, my team has said, can we just do one that’s just us, because maybe being in front of 170 people on zoom isn’t really my jam but I’d much rather do something in smaller groups. So we’re doing that every two weeks. Then the other thing that we’re doing is I’ve made it mandatory that everyone must take a walk every day because it’s very easy. Especially here in the winter, it gets dark at three, the sun is gone. So I’ve told my team that everyone needs to put in their calendars at least 30 minutes for a walk. So there’s certain things I’ve made mandatory but only because I care about your mental health. The other thing that I think people forget is in Denmark, you could get around and people could see their families and things like that, as long as it was under a certain amount. But my whole team at one point was American. We couldn’t go to see our families, I haven’t seen my family in over a year because I can’t go home and they can’t come here. That was really weighing heavily on my team, that worry and concern. One of the things I said to my team is, if you need to take a day where you just feel like crap, you can’t focus and you’re sad, tell me. I’d much rather you take a day and recover and come back 100% than power through at 40%. So taking care of the team’s mental health and your own mental health is really important right now. I think if the lockdown has taught us anything, it’s taught us what is really important. Of course, work is important but also having your family and making sure everyone’s okay is more important. So that’s my tip, take care of yourself first and work will be okay. Work will be fine if you take some time for yourself.

Shaheen Samavati 29:16
Yeah, work will probably be better.

Jennifer Montague 29:19
Very true, it’s much better if your mind is clear and you’re not feeling homesick. You know, if you want to call your mom, call your mom. We can reschedule this meeting. Nothing is that important that you have to sacrifice your mental health for us.

Shaheen Samavati 29:34
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good point and a great perspective as a manager. So I wanted to ask you for a few more of your recommendations. So how do you stay up to date on marketing trends?

Jennifer Montague 29:48
It’s not easy because things change real fast, don’t they? There’s a lot of webinars out there and online events these days. I have to admit I’m one of those annoying people who sign up for something but don’t attend the live event because I’m usually in a meeting. But I do watch those in my spare time to see what other people are doing. I’m also privileged enough to be a member of a number of CMO groups. Even though I’m not a CMO I’ve got the connection somehow. I sit in to a lot of networking events, I get to hear what people are doing. I’m part of a lot of networks where we share best practice pretty regularly. I also mentor three people, which is really cool. I would definitely recommend that to any marketers out there who have experience they want to share. Obviously, it’s great to share and it’s great to help people, especially now when so many people have been laid off. Two of my three mentees have been unemployed because of COVID and one has just found a job, so that’s really cool. So it’s really nice to give back but at the same time, it really keeps me on my toes because they’re in different industries to me. They’re doing different things to me and then they ask me a question and it’s like, Oh, I haven’t thought about that. So it’s a really great way to almost spar with someone when they ask you for help and you want to help, you have the impetus to go and find the answer for them.

Shaheen Samavati 31:08
Yeah, that’s very cool. Then any productivity hack you can share?

Jennifer Montague 31:14
Yeah, definitely repurposing. Repurposing is my bread and butter right now because I do have a relatively small team. So one of the things that companies get wrong when it comes to content is they think quantity makes up for quality. That means you have people working really, really hard to make stuff that doesn’t really have much of an impact, right? So I’m a big fan of quality and I think you have data at your disposal. Look in your Google Analytics or other analytics platforms are available. Don’t know if I have to say that. But look at your analytics and see what’s working. What is driving your traffic, because I bet it’s not all of these blog posts. I bet you there’s a handful that are really performing well and double down on that. An example of that is at one of the companies I worked at, we had literally hundreds of blog posts out there. They had been making one blog posts a week for years and I looked at the analytics, and I saw that one post that was about two years old, generated 80% of our traffic. So why the hell are we spending all our time writing all of these other ones? This is what’s resonating, this is what people care about. So take that blog post, update it, turn it into a webinar, turn it into a podcast, turn it into an infographic, how can you milk that one blog post because you know that’s working. So that’s my productivity hack. Stop creating lots of stuff that won’t work and start looking at what is working, then figure out ways to milk that as much as you can.

Shaheen Samavati 32:42
Yeah, it’s a great tip for all content marketers. Then a favorite marketing or business book?

Jennifer Montague 32:50
Yeah, I like anything by Martin Lindstrom, I’m pretty sure he’s Danish. He looks at big data but he puts it in very actionable day to day interactions. So I thought that was really good. Natalie Nahai’s book, Webs of Influence. She talks about web psychology, which is something I had never even heard of and I saw her speak at an event in London. I was like, I’ve got to get this book. I read it maybe two years ago, I have it here in my office with bookmarks, because it’s really, really interesting about different techniques you can use to influence people’s behaviour online. Everything from what colors to use when you’re trying to convey a certain message, to having little checkboxes pop up when people fill in their information because it gives them an endorphin rush. There’s really cool little hacky things in there that even without realizing I probably use every single day.

Shaheen Samavati 33:49
And any other resources for marketers you recommend?

Jennifer Montague 33:54
Yeah, I think Perpetual Traffic is a really great podcast. It’s very heavy on digital and particularly paid social ads, but it’s something where they go and they do stuff and then they tell you what the results are. So you don’t have to do it if it doesn’t work. They’re really good at keeping up to date on latest changes in algorithms and stuff like that. So if you’re into digital, that’s a really great podcast. Then I also read the Harvard Business Review and I’m not doing that to be a real big nerd. But I think it’s really interesting because it covers all aspects of business. As I said earlier, marketing has its toe in everything. I think it’s really cool to hear about what’s happening in other areas of business and formulate ways that marketing can can be involved.

Shaheen Samavati 34:42
Awesome. Lastly, who’s a professional role model or a source of inspiration?

Jennifer Montague 34:49
Yeah, professionally speaking, I really like the stuff by Simon Sinek. He talks a lot about leadership and for me it’s more important to be a leader. I am a marketer but I’m not executing anymore. I’m leading a team to make sure they execute. So one of the things that I really like, deviating a little bit, Lorne Michaels, who’s the producer of Saturday Night Live, he once said if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. I really believe that, I’d rather be surrounded by people who know more than me in their area and listen to them and steer the ship. Simon Sinek is really great when he talks about leadership, Find Your Why is his most famous but he did a TED talk called why good leaders make you feel safe. He talks about different CEOs and CMOs and how they focus on the people first. When you focus on the people, the people want to give back, the people want to perform, the people want to excel, and how you can be a good leader and get the best out of your people. I rewatch it a lot because without being dramatic, it was really life changing. It made me really want to be the best leader I can be. So maybe not necessarily hitting up the latest marketing trends, but figuring out ways to get the most out of my team.

Shaheen Samavati 36:09
Awesome. I haven’t seen that one, I’ll definitely have to check it out. I’ve seen a lot of his videos but not that one. So we’re reaching the end of the interview. So I just wanted to give you the chance for any final takeaways or any parting advice for other marketers in Europe?

Jennifer Montague 36:26
I think not necessarily just in Europe, but all over the place. One of the things, I know I keep talking about people, but take care of yourself and take care of your people. That’s the most important thing to do, especially now it’s so much harder to find new people once your team burnout than to just take care of them. But in terms of practical advice, for anyone out there who maybe is just starting in marketing, or if they’ve been made redundant because of COVID, a tool that’s been really useful for me and my mentees is write your ideal job description. While you’re doing that think what is it that you want to do every day in your job if you could write your own job? Would it be working for B2B or B2C? Would you be in tech? Would you be at a startup? Would you be in a corporation? Would you take on comms? Would you do digital? Write your ideal job description because that will help you focus your efforts. Especially if you’re looking for a job during a pandemic, it’s tough. I know it’s hard. If you focus on what it is you want to do, you can focus your efforts in the right place but at the same time, once you do this exercise, you know you can do your own sales pitch. You can sell yourself because you know, I can own this and I can own that. My mentee who got the job recently, this was the tool that she used that was really helpful for her to decide what to talk about and where to look at and it worked out. So I try to do that every once in a while as well. Where do I want to go? What do I want to do? I think it’s a useful tip for anyone looking for their next opportunity.

Shaheen Samavati 38:01
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a excellent tip and a great note to end on. So thank you so much, Jennifer, for sharing your insights with us today.

Jennifer Montague 38:09
Thanks for having me. It was really great.

Shaheen Samavati 38:12
Thanks to everyone for listening in. For more perspectives on content marketing in Europe, check out veracontent.com/mix and keep tuning into the podcast for more interviews with content experts. See you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai