Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Mariann Bartucz, online marketing manager at Starschema:

Carlota Pico 0:13
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Content Mix. I’m Carlota Pico your host for today’s show and I’m excited to introduce Mariann Bartucz, who is online marketing manager at Starschema, and has almost a decade of experience in marketing and communications. Welcome, Mariann and thank you so much for joining us today on The Content Mix.

Mariann Bartucz 0:35
Hi, thank you very much for the invitation.

Carlota Pico 0:37
Mariann, so you’re joining us from Budapest, Hungary, right?

Mariann Bartucz 0:41
Yes. I’m here in Hungary now.

Carlota Pico 0:43
Excellent. So could you tell me a little bit about Starschema and how you got into your current role.

Mariann Bartucz 0:50
So I started working here in January this year and before I was working in Germany at a huge company, which was dealing with factory automation systems. The main goal when I started to do the work here was that they were able to provide me with a really great challenge, which is related to digital marketing. I’m really a big fan of digital marketing, online marketing campaigns, brand building so it was a really great opportunity. As you mentioned, I’ve already dealt with online marketing for almost one decade. We are growing very fast so it was a great challenge.

Carlota Pico 2:04
Okay, were you always in the technology field? Or is that something that you just hopped into?

Mariann Bartucz 2:10
Since 2015, but I also have some side projects in different fields, but this is the main market that I’m focusing on.

Carlota Pico 2:19
Okay. How did you get into technology, because from a language point of view it’s quite technical?

Mariann Bartucz 2:25
Yes, it is, but in 2015, I got an opportunity in Hungary from a company that was in Graphisoft Park and I really liked the challenge they provided me. They were dealing with IT related things, so they were developing building survey software. I got the opportunity to deal with marketing costs, I had to build up a lot of things from zero, Facebook, LinkedIn. They were just redesigning the web page and I had the opportunity to work together with a really great web designer guy. I learnt a lot about user journeys, testing ideas and this is where my IT related career started.

Carlota Pico 3:10
Okay, well, I’m going to tap more into that, considering your extensive experience running social and Google campaigns, the next section of our interview is actually going to be about paid advertisement, what are a few best practices for running LinkedIn campaigns?

Mariann Bartucz 3:27
So I think it’s very important, it sounds a bit ridiculous, to have deeper knowledge about the topic that you do. So it’s not enough, only to send a couple of sentences about something, you will need to feel the whole topic on your own to be able to give the right impression about the things that you would like to advertise. After, I think it’s very important to test things. So I always do a big test to be able to see which kind of texts perform better, which kind of images you should use. If you can be, maybe sometimes a bit more playful, or you have to be more serious, or which market, which images, which texts perform better. It’s really depends, for example, in the Dutch region, it’s different in the US, it’s different in Hungary. I think it’s very important to test these kind of things and it’s very exciting also.

Carlota Pico 4:19
So from your experience, what type of content works the best on LinkedIn?

Mariann Bartucz 4:24
It really depends on the market. It also depends on the topic. Usually for webinars, for example, we use a more easy or playful text, but for white papers and these kinds of downloadable materials or lead generation forms we use a bit more strict things.

Carlota Pico 4:45
Okay. Do you have experience using Sales Navigator on LinkedIn?

Mariann Bartucz 4:49
I used it abit, but mostly our SDR colleagues work with Sales Navigator.

Carlota Pico 4:58
Okay. So how do you tap in to your different personas on LinkedIn?

Mariann Bartucz 5:04
Through LinkedIn and Facebook targeting, it’s very easy now to follow how my campaigns perform because every time when we get a new lead from any of my campaigns, I immediately can see it in Salesforce itself. So I can see the name, the email, the company data, and everything that I have to see. I also can check which channel did they come from, so LinkedIn, Facebook, which kind of AB test did they come from? So it’s about the system now.

Carlota Pico 5:34
Okay, so you extract that data and then do you optimize those campaigns according to the data that you receive?

Mariann Bartucz 5:40
Exactly, yes.

Carlota Pico 5:42
Okay. Do you have any other tricks in terms of optimizing campaigns for LinkedIn? Then we’ll move into Facebook, of course.

Mariann Bartucz 5:49
I think the creatives also has a really huge role in the ads, because this is the first thing that grabs people’s attention. So it’s important, what kind of colors do you use, what kind of text you use on the image itself, how long is the text. It’s very interesting, I found that usually those images perform much better, those that contain any kind of human related things. It can be even a face or an eye or something that’s related to humans, even if it’s about data science, or factory automation or whatever.

Carlota Pico 6:23
Okay, so really, humans are ones that have the best performing type of campaigns when you have them as part of your visuals?

Mariann Bartucz 6:33
Yes.

Carlota Pico 7:09
Okay, okay. Well, let’s zoom into Facebook. Could you talk to me a little bit about the campaigns that you have going on right now on Facebook?

Mariann Bartucz 7:17
Yes. For example, we now have a couple of campaigns that are connected to some kind of webinars because of this current COVID situation. Plenty of people or companies are going to LinkedIn and Facebook to be able to somehow create different events, which is very interesting. For most of the companies, Facebook works better and also in a B2B environment. So most of our huge projects, which came through paid marketing, came from Facebook and I think it’s very interesting, because other companies that I was working for were very skeptical about Facebook. LinkedIn is for B2B marketing but let’s keep Facebook for our friends because there are only people that are curious about their neighbors and friends, breakfast, dinner, or whatever. But it’s very interesting to see that it really works in B2B as well.

Carlota Pico 8:16
Okay, what makes your campaigns work on Facebook? What do you think is your secret recipe?

Mariann Bartucz 8:21
The thing that I already mentioned to you, the creatives and the text itself. So you have to be a bit interactive and you have to talk to people. So not just only say, learn more, read more, watch it now. You have to be talkative and the people have to feel that you care about their problems and you really can provide solutions from your professional experience.

Carlota Pico 8:23
Okay, so you’re using your social channels as a customer service support system as well?

Mariann Bartucz 8:57
Yes.

Carlota Pico 8:58
Okay, very interesting. Mariann companies are expected to spend 120 billion dollars on marketing by 2021. So that’s in four months time, and a huge chunk of this will be spent on digital marketing. So let’s say you had a million dollars, a million dollar budget to spend on any marketing activity that you want, what would you spend it on? And why?

Mariann Bartucz 9:24
It’s a good question. I would spend on two main things, if I say for example, B2B marketing. One is marketing automation, I think a lot of companies already started to use these kind of online marketing or automation tools, but they couldn’t or didn’t start to utilize all the benefits of them although you can get really great reports, results about your campaigns, your lead management processes and everything. The other thing would be community building. It’s also another thing that people or companies don’t like to do so much and I think it’s really very important because you have to be able to trust in people and now you have really good opportunities to take part in these kind of activities like podcasts, meetups, online meetups, things like this, there are really, really great opportunities. For example, I was looking for a couple of things in Nordics because I had a product launch event last year in Sweden, and I was trying to find different opportunities to get closer to people who were working in a very specific field. And there are plenty of meetups there. So definitely community building, I think it’s very important.

Carlota Pico 10:37
Okay, so community building as a means to lead generation?

Mariann Bartucz 10:42
More so yeah, and also building brand awareness.

Carlota Pico 10:45
Okay, very interesting. Well, Mariann, we are going to be moving into our set of rapid fire questions, which are your recommendations for our audience. To get the section started off, I’d like to ask you about your source of inspiration. So who do you admire, a professional role model or an influencer?

Mariann Bartucz 11:02
Maybe I would mention three people and also some companies that I’m following. So of course, I could mention huge companies like Apple and Nike, for example, Nike I think is really good because it is about your feelings. So how do you feel about things because if you watch, I think, a commercial, for example, or if you watch their texts, or read their texts, you can feel yourself there inside the ad, you can feel that you’re powerful, you can do things and this is the same thing that I feel, for example, when I go through some Apple related content. So I really like these kind of things. Also my current CMO, he gives me a lot of simple inspirations and I’m very thankful that we can talk about a lot of things. One thing is very important, he accepts ideas from me, but he always has a first question, which is why? This is a good thing, because I also have to overthink my things and if I talk about things, I can see the positive and negative sides so much better. I have a previous colleague from a previous company, we are still working together on some kind of project. He is a designer and he has really great ideas because he’s very professional in how colors, phones, buttons, things like this influence people, they influence everything. So I could also learn about that.

Carlota Pico 12:29
Okay, very interesting. And what about a book, a community, an event or a group that you’d like to recommend to our audience?

Mariann Bartucz 12:39
For example, when I was working at a software test automation processing company, I found a guy who created a community, which is called Ministy of Testing and I think the thing that he is doing is very interesting, because he just started to build up a community from zero and now he has conferenced plenty of meetups because of the way he does it. So he’s interactive, he is really interested in people’s opinion about the professional sphere that he also does. So the person I would mention is him and his stuff that he’s doing.

Carlota Pico 13:20
Okay, and what’s his name?

Mariann Bartucz 13:22
Um, so the thing that he’s doing is called Ministry of Testing.

Carlota Pico 13:28
Okay, so the project is called Ministry of testing?

Mariann Bartucz 13:30
Yes.

Carlota Pico 13:31
Excellent. Okay, and to wrap this interview up, what’s your favorite app or tool at the moment?

Mariann Bartucz 13:38
To be honest, my favorite tool is what we’ve brought up at the company now. The thing that I mentioned to you, I can track my campaigns very professionally, this company is about is dealing with data. So data science, data engineering and we just adapt a support system where I can track everything that I do. Through a Microsoft BI report, I can add all the details about my campaigns, I can track all the things that we implemented in Salesforce itself. So we didn’t use a external tool, which just built up something there. So yeah, probably its our own tools now that I could emphasize.

Carlota Pico 14:21
Okay, Mariann, thank you so much for joining us on The Content Mix. It was awesome to meet you, to learn about your tech experience and to also meet someone in Budapest, which is a city that I absolutely love.

Mariann Bartucz 14:36
Thank you very much for the invitation and for the opportunity.

Carlota Pico 14:39
The pleasure has been mine. And to everybody listening in today thank you for joining us on The Content Mix. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out The Content Mix. We’ll be releasing interviews, just like this one, every day. So keep on tuning in. Thanks again. Have a fabulous day and see you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai