Marketing Strategy Talk w/ Amanda Nielsen, Partner Enrollment Manager @Formstack

Transcript

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Amanda Nielsen, thank you for joining us for a Marketing Strategy Talk.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  So excited you’re here. I’ve been following you for a while on LinkedIn. You have a really good sense of marketing and personal brand. You’ve already spoken at a couple of large scale conferences across the country. I think you have a lot to offer and you’re so early in your career—that’s kind of a rare thing.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Thank you.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Let’s just dive right in. What first inspired you to get into marketing?

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah, that’s a good question. There was never really one point where I was like, “Oh, I want to be a marketer. This is what I want to do.” It was more so me being like, “Okay. What am I good at? What do I like? What am I interested in and what do I really not like doing?” And so from there I just narrowed down the different types of professions and settled on some type of communications. And then from there it was between broadcasting and marketing, and I ultimately decided I wasn’t as interested in news or sports or anything like that. I didn’t want to be a reporter, but I still wanted to communicate with people. I still wanted to be able to find ways to do presentations and talk to larger groups of people.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, going into marketing I didn’t necessarily think I would be able to go speak at conferences or do things like this where I’m connecting with people. I didn’t know any of that even existed. So, I was pretty excited when I started getting all these opportunities within my marketing scope.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Let’s dig into that a little bit. You spoke at HubSpot INBOUND a couple years ago, right?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yes

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  And you also spoke at one other conference recently. What was that?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. That was at Snowforce in Salt Lake City, Utah. That’s a Salesforce user event.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Nice. I love Salt Lake City. Let’s talk about the INBOUND engagement quickly. How did it come to you? Do you think it was a result of your personal brand you’re putting out there or did you reach out to them? Let’s walk through that.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. It’s a cool story, actually. It was very interesting. I love telling this story because there’s a few different things that I learned from it. Basically, this was in 2018, so that was my junior year of college; the spring of my junior year. I was interning at a HubSpot agency called New Breed a while back during this time, and my CEO came to me one day and was like, “Hey, HubSpot’s accepting applications for speakers for INBOUND. I think it’d be really cool if we had people apply. Can you put together an application for me?” And he named off a few other older employees who had been there for a while and tasked me with basically helping them film a video pitch and come up with a topic, an abstract, and it was a comprehensive application process.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, that was assigned to me because I worked on the internal marketing team. And so, I had helped all of them and submitted their applications on their behalf. I had always been interested in public speaking. It was something I wanted to do. I thought I would be okay at it because I’d been hosting webinars and stuff online and I was like, “Oh, that would be so cool,” but obviously I was like, “Okay, only 20,” at the time, “and I’m still in college.” I don’t want to just be like, “Oh, I’m going to apply too.” I didn’t know what anyone would say if I did, but I was like, “Whatever. I’ll just give it a shot. It’ll be practice for future applications when I have more experience.”

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  So, I filmed a little application on my cell phone in secret and submitted it and I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t think anything would come of it. And then a few months down the line they got back to everyone. My CEO came to me and was like, “Oh, I have bad news. I just got the email. I didn’t get picked to speak, but thanks for working so hard to help me and the others.” And I was like, “Oh.” And so, I went and checked my email expecting my own rejection letter and I didn’t get one, which was shocking. So, that was a really cool experience. Everyone was really excited for me. And so, that was me and my first experience with, I guess, imposter syndrome and thinking I wasn’t qualified when in fact I was quite qualified to speak on the topic. And so, I kind of struggled with a little bit of self doubt all the way leading up to the conference, and then it actually went super well. It was a great experience. I was invited to do an encore session at the event, and I’ve gotten to give that talk at a few smaller scale events as well. So, yeah. It was a wonderful experience.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Really cool story. The CEO got rejected, but you got the call to speak. That must have been a fun conversation.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  (laughs) Yeah. No. He was so stoked for me. He was very proud. Yeah. It was awesome.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  That’s good. I’m kind of curious because that’s a hard thing to do, right? To get into INBOUND. What was in the video? Give away the secrets. What was your topic? How did you do it?

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  I actually did a verbal pitch for a topic that I didn’t even get picked for. It was more cultural. I honestly couldn’t even tell you fully what it was about, but it was basically on how to use constructive feedback to help you grow as a professional. And then I submitted a couple other abstracts for topics that I would be interested in. The one that they settled on was How to Leverage Data-Driven Decision-Making and the idea of avoiding analysis paralysis, which is a really common problem for marketers. So, yeah. Nothing super secret about it. I was just being myself, I guess, and that seemed to work, so that was really cool.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. That’s a great story. All right. So, you mentioned New Breed, which is Winooski, Vermont, right?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yes.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Shout out to Vermont. I used to live there for five years.

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. Vermont’s the best.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  So, New Breed Marketing is pretty well known in this space for INBOUND Marketing specifically being a HubSpot partner. It looks like you started up, as you said, an intern and then kind of worked your way up?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. I started there my sophomore year, the summer of my sophomore year at college. Started as a social media intern and then got to wear lots of different hats because I was working on the internal marketing team, so I wasn’t doing any client-facing work. I was marketing for the marketing firm. So, our team was much smaller, much more limited in resources, so I got to do a lot of things that a college student might not be able to do if they’re on a bigger team or at a bigger more corporate company. From there, I took on webinars. That was something I was really interested in because of the public speaking component. And from there I kind of had an interest in partnerships because I had gone to my first conference, which was INBOUND 2017, and I had … Let’s see. I had an experience with Vidyard, who was someone who was interested in a partnership.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, being in talks with them and considering forming a partnership got me really excited. And from there I kind of adopted partnerships as my own, and given that HubSpot was our big primary partner and really our only partner at the time, I was like, “This has worked really well with HubSpot. This seems like something we should scale up in and do more of with the right companies.” And so, from there I adopted partnerships and made that my own, and that really was my main focus for the rest of my team at New Breed all the way up through graduation and then into the summer after I graduated college. So, yeah. That was what got me started on partnerships.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. That’s fantastic. I want to explore how you got a job offer as an intern for your first full-time job at New Breed. I’ve hired a bunch of interns, right out of college marketers and it seems they all lack an office awareness or a motivation to do more or go and make things their own and it sounds like you latched onto that in a really big way. I’m curious to get your take. Why do you think you got hired from an intern to a specialist, right?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. I was actually in a strategist level role. I didn’t come on entry level, which was also really cool, and that was just a testament to my ability to make myself value. And they saw that and reciprocated with that, which was really cool of them. I think, to answer your question, it’s kind of like a two-fold thing. It’s partially on the company and then partially on the intern. At New Breed, they do a really good job of creating a culture of autonomy, especially being in an internal role where resources are limited and I had a manager who was open to trying new things and wasn’t afraid to fail fast and iterate, which was a really big player in my ability to take control and make things my own.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  That would partially be from the culture at New Breed. But, also, it has to do with who you are as a person and your willingness to not be afraid to say, “Hey, I’m really interested in doing this. Can I take the lead?” Or even better, just doing it, which is not necessarily the right way to go about it for every single situation, but there are definitely a lot of ways that young people, interns, people in entry level roles can really take authority and start doing things without having to necessarily go to their boss and ask and say, “Hey, can I do this, this, and this?” One of my things was just going. Like, seeing a problem, knowing that the rest of my team wanted to solve it, and just going and doing it. Rather than asking if I could help, I would just help, which was kind of my method.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yes! Not necessarily asking for permission. Just getting things done. Maybe asking for forgiveness if you go a little bit too far, but again, I don’t think anybody’s going to fault an intern for going above and beyond what they’re expected to do. For all of you young marketers out there listening, I think that is a great piece of advice they should take to heart, which is if you’re an intern, act as if. Go after every single thing you can. Be proactive. I think that is just so underrated, and I think it’s a testament to your career that you did that as an intern. You’ve already jumped your way up the ladder. So, clearly it works, which is really cool. You kind of touched on something in your story about how you went from intern to strategist to partnerships. Why partnerships and why did they interest you?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. Again, this is something that I didn’t even know existed. When I was starting out in college I was never like, “I want to be a partner acquisition manager.” I didn’t even know what that was. It’s kind of one of those niche things that you don’t really learn about. Just one of those functions of business that you overlook from the outside, but once you get into a company you see how important they can be. What I love about partnerships is the core of it is relationship-building, which I’ve always had a knack for, and also getting to combine my marketing skillset. I love to speak. I love to write. I’ve always been interested in content creation and collaboration. And so, I get to do a lot of that being in partnerships, which is really cool. And then it also has almost a sales component. Not really sales. More so you’re selling the idea of a relationship, which I think is really cool. It’s not pitching a product that maybe someone doesn’t necessarily need. It’s more so working together to identify how to create a mutually beneficial relationship and identifying those synergies between your companies to figure out how you can help each other. So, yeah.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yes, I think that’s well said— It’s not selling a product. It’s selling a relationship, and the mutually beneficial piece, which is different. It’s very different. And that’s why I really wanted to talk to you today. What role does marketing play in that partnership ecosystem? How have you leveraged it in your partnerships, past and present?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah, definitely. Marketing is one of my favorite things to talk about mostly because of my marketing background, but also because it’s so valuable and it’s so overlooked, I think, in the partnership world. Co-marketing is just an amazing way to bring together two different audiences and reach people that you would never have been able to reach prior, and then by collaborating with a brand that they trust, you trust, you’re able to create this value that you can’t really find anywhere else. It’s really funny. The talk that I gave at Snowforce recently was about partnerships and how two separate companies can be great on their own. They’re awesome in their own respects. But when two good companies come together it’s really special. I parallel that with Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg’s relationship. They’re very good friends, which a lot of people don’t know.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  On their own, they’re each great, but when you find out that they’re really good friends, it’s so cute and nice and it just makes you like them both even more. And then to take it a step further they create content together. I don’t know if it’s still running, but they had this TV show. It was called Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party Challenge.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  I remember that. They cooked together, right?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. It was delightful. If you ever get a chance to watch the reruns, I highly recommend it. And that’s just something you could never find anywhere else. There’s nothing like it because of who they are as individuals coming together and doing that together was really, really cool.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  I didn’t expect to talk about Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart (laughter) but I’m going to link the video at the very bottom of this article. Please go check it out. That’s really cool. I remember that, and I was actually blown away that you she would agree to do something like that, but I think Martha’s reinvented herself after going to jail for insider trading.

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. That was one of the things. I was like, “They have a lot in common.” They’re both trailblazers in their respective industries. They’ve both gone to jail.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  (laughter) Both gone to jail.

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. They have some cool synergies that you wouldn’t expect.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. That’s really funny. Speaking of successful co-branded partnerships, what would you consider to be your most successful partnership and how did you measure that?

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. I would say, probably to my current role … I’m working at Formstack, a software company, and I personally focus on working with our consulting partners specifically in the Salesforce and Zoho communities. Those are just really cool. It’s funny because I was at an agency doing partnerships with software companies and now I’m at a software company doing partnerships with agencies and consultants, so I’m on the other side of this relationship. I feel like that’s given me some unique insight. That’s been really helpful. But in terms of measuring success, it’s all about your mutual customer, right? You want to just make sure that you’re creating positive outcomes for your partner’s customers. So, they’re making sure that Formstack customers are getting the most out of Formstack.

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  A lot of software kind of just sits and is shelf ware when you don’t have experts dedicated to maintaining and optimizing it. On the other hand, you can’t deliver excellent consulting services without software to uphold that strategy and expertise.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. It makes total sense. I think it’s really interesting too because it’s all about the audience, like you said. You have to have a mutual audience that you can both offer value to, and that seems like an easy thing but it’s not always so easy once you dive into it. It is really a great exercise to ask yourself  “do you envision them being in our partnership ecosystem?” after you have talks. Maybe you don’t. Maybe they’re not a good fit and you move on.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Walk me through your process to actually reach out to these companies and start that conversation about partnerships.

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah, definitely. Obviously you want to lead with value, and that’s kind of true for any ask, whether you’re in sales, marketing, and beyond. You want to be respectful of people’s time and attention, so always leading with value is our go-to and my personal go-to. So, being upfront and being straightforward in your ask and saying, “Hey, you do this and I know that we at Formstack work with companies just like you to provide X, Y, and Z value and help their customers do X, Y, and Z.” So, being very upfront and getting straight to the point and not trying to be misleading or anything like that. Most people don’t do that, but you never know. And then the other thing is leveraging that greater community. Salesforce consultants are a tight knit community. There’s lots of them. But everybody kind of knows each other when you’re in these specific niches.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  I always check and see if we have a mutual connection or maybe they work adjacent to another partner who maybe they admire or they specialize in the same thing, so there’s almost a little bit of an element of competition even. It’s like, “Oh. Well, if our competitor is working with Formstack maybe we should look into it too because it could be a competitive edge.” And so, always referencing that mutual relationship if it’s there, and then if it’s not there being upfront about it and being, “Hey, you don’t know me. I don’t know you, but I really do believe that we could find some mutual benefit from collaborating. Would you be open to an exploratory conversation?” And just offering that up there. Not being super pushy or like, “I want to explain to you the benefits of the Formstack partner program.”

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  More so like, “Let’s compare notes. We probably know the same people in this community. We’re working in similar spaces. Let’s just connect.” And if all it results in is a connection, that’s okay too. I’m all for expanding your network on behalf of yourself and your company, even if it doesn’t result in what you wanted to achieve it’s always good to know people and to form connections no matter how small they are.

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  Ian

  478

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  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  That’s good advice. I’m VP of marketing in my day job. I cannot tell you how many robotic emails I get from salespeople, partnership managers, just literally exactly what you said. “I would like to partner with you because we’re the jargon, jargon, jargon company…” It’s really shocking; the volume of those types of emails. I think your approach, which is basically just a human approach, be human, make the human connection, I think is one of the smartest things you could do in that space especially if it’s relationship-based, right? Nobody starts off a relationship with a robot email. That’s just crazy. So, props for you on that. I think that’s a great approach.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  So, partnerships. Taking a step back. Most people, when they think of partnerships, and I’m going to be a bit controversial here, think of old men doing the partnership job when they’re in their late 50s and 60s. It’s so refreshing to see a young woman in that space, but also seeing more women join the partnership movement. Walk me through what that means to you and what you see happening in the next five years.

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  That’s so awesome. I’m so happy that you brought that up because I want to highlight Zak Pines, who is Formstack’s VP of partnerships, and his decision to take a chance on this 22-year-old who literally graduated college less than a year ago to be a partner manager at this big, amazing software company. And he was so intentional in being like, “We want to help our partners. I don’t want your traditional channel sales manager literally just trying to secure MR. That’s not what our partner program is built on. It’s built on support and basically creating a community.” And so, he was able to recognize that in me that I had an alignment with him in being into the idea of support, community, helping people, and then the rest will follow, rather than leading with sell, sell, sell. Like, we’re just trying to help ourselves.

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  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. Shout out to Formstack and Zak for making the call. I think it’s super important, and I think it’s the future for sure. I’m happy to see them investing in young talent to help redefine the role.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. Like you mentioned, it’s not that common as of now. It’s getting more and more common, and a lot of my phone calls with prospective partners … I’m meeting with decision-makers at a lot of consultancies, agencies, and like you said it is a lot of older white men and that’s kind of just the nature of the industry at the moment, but more and more I’m seeing diversity and allies emerge, which is really important too. My LinkedIn network, my Twitter network has been so beyond supportive and amazing and really shown me just how many people care. Even if they don’t talk to you on a daily basis, you may not even know them until you need them. And it’s really cool. My personal brand and my network have kept me afloat through a lot of different things, and it’s that one thing that’s stayed true since I’ve really started my career.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Let’s dive into that a little bit. The personal brand. I agree, you have a great personal brand on Twitter and LinkedIn. You’re very active. You post often. You have really insightful comments. What does it take to build a personal brand and what advice would you give to, again, some of those younger men and women out there that want to break into marketing and develop that personal brand? Where do they start and how do you approach it?

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. It’s a good question. I think personal branding is a non-option at this point especially if you’re in the business of marketing, partnership, sales, that’s all relationship-building no matter how you spin it. You’re a person working with other people or trying to work with other people. And so, neglecting your personal brand is a huge missed opportunity. Personally, I’ve always liked social media, but it wasn’t really until I started working in my first internship at New Breed and kind of immersed myself in the mar tech space and started seeing influencers and all these different folks just going and using all these platforms for professional content. I had never thought of using Twitter. Twitter was kind of dead to my generation. Nobody I know uses Twitter for personal use, but a lot of people use it for business. Not a lot of people my age, necessarily, but a lot of people.

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  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, I kind of just started dabbling in it. My professor, my capstone professor, and she was my advisor all through college, she was a really huge adopter of leveraging LinkedIn and Twitter for professional purposes. In our final capstone, basically it was all centered around branding yourself as a professional, creating content, sharing your insight, putting it out there. It was really cool to see someone in academia really understand that. A lot of traditional marketing classes and coursework are like, “This is a case study about Apple.” They’re very B2C focused, very product and functionally focused. And so, a lot of times these more personal qualitative elements of being successful in business get overlooked. And part of it is just this is new stuff. Maybe textbooks 15 years from now will be like, “Building a LinkedIn personal brand is really important to success.” But we’re just not there yet.

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  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, that’s kind of been my experience. And just being myself, being authentic. At first I was like, “I really don’t want to post anything on my LinkedIn. What do I know about anything?” And so, I started small, like baby steps. If I wrote a blog post that I was proud of I would share it. And then as I gained more confidence, more knowledge, I started sharing more and more and infusing my opinion into things which is really important too because a lot of people are very hesitant to take stances, especially in a professional context. But personally I’ve found that sticking up for what you believe in and what’s truly important to you as a person can never harm you. If it turns some people off, it’s like, do you even really want to associate with those kinds of people? Probably not.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, that was kind of a hard lesson for me to learn, but I’m so glad that I did and I’m so grateful to be at a company now that is so supportive of all of our employees being really active on social media, being themselves, sharing personal things, sharing their stances and their values. Formstack has been really great at encouraging that too. So, it’s awesome.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  That’s great. I think you’re right. The personal brand is one of the more misunderstood elements of marketing in today’s world. Academia is generally behind the curve on that. I think they have a very good framework for traditional marketing and things like that. You learn a ton on the nuts and bolts of it, but I think you’re right. There’s nothing in the textbooks about building a personal brand and how it could benefit your company you work at.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  I’m kind of curious. Generally, the people that build those brands are jumping on the next best channel first. I’m going to put you on the spot. What do you think is the next channel that’s going to blow out for personal brand?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Oh. Definitely TikTok.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  You think so?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. Hear me out here. I was mystified by TikTok for a while. I was like, “What is this? Why are all these kids dancing to the same song?” I didn’t really get a good grip on it. But actually I took some time in between my current role and my last role and did a lot of exploratory content while I was on my job search, and TikTok was definitely one of the things I was like, “I want to figure out how to use this. I want to figure out how I can create a niche,” because it is a super up and coming platform and it’s not going away anytime soon. And, no, B2B decision-makers aren’t really there yet, but people who are 15 to 16 now are going to be B2B decision-makers in a little over 10 years.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  What you adopt when you’re young doesn’t just go away. You kind of keep those preferences for life, which I think is really important to know. And so, as B2B professionals, we have to adapt to meet them where they’ll be, and if you can get a head start on that, that’s really important. Yeah.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yes, I agree. That’s why I asked the question because, generally, if you get ahead of it, you have a better chance of being successful and owning that new channel. The people that have the most followers in the existing channels are generally the people that were there first and spent a good amount of time developing their market.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Definitely. And I dabbled in figuring out how to capitalize on these trends. One of the things that’s a core pillar of TikTok is there’s a sound. It could be a snippet of a sound or something from a popular video and everybody creates content based off of the same song or sound and it has a general theme. I was like, “Okay. How am I going to make this related to my profession? I do not know.” One of the videos that I’m proud of that was a cool example of how I could turn something silly and people would be like, “Oh, it’s for kids” into something relevant was I created a video … This was when I was in my job search. The trend was this song. It’s instrumental, and then at the end it’s like, “You know I’m your type.” And there’s a lot of different takes on it. But I was like, “I’m on a job search. I want to figure out which employers are looking for people like me. I’m a type for this kind of company.”

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  I kind of played on that and was like, “If you want someone who is really good at building relationships, cares a lot about diversity and inclusion, loves to speak in public, you know I’m your type.” And so, I got a lot of positive feedback on that, which is really cool. But, yeah. So, I’ve kind of just been messing around with it in my spare time. I definitely want to make a point to invest more time in TikTok content in the near future.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  That’s clever. Is that how you got into Formstack?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  No. No. Not directly. I don’t know. It might’ve played a role. It was on my LinkedIn.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. Right. That’s really cool. Speaking of young people, I have a daughter. What would you tell her if she wanted to break into marketing in 15 years or so?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  That’s a good question. I would tell her to lean on her strengths first and foremost. Marketing, you can do so many different things. You don’t have to be this extroverted relationship-builder or anything like that to be in this field. There’s a lot of different functions of marketing and different personality types and skillsets compliment that. It’s really important to be aware of what you’re good at and giving yourself credit where it’s due. For a long time I was like, “I don’t know what I’m good at.” I didn’t want to come off as cocky or arrogant going into an interview and being like, “I am good at this,” but I don’t know why I felt like that. It’s part of that imposter syndrome. Especially women sometimes don’t feel like they’re qualified to be blunt in what they think their strengths are, and being straightforward, and they should be more sheepish or bashful, which obviously isn’t the case, but that’s kind of a natural inclination.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, first and foremost figure out what you’re good at. Figure out what you like would be the second thing that I would recommend. Do you absolutely love working in non-profits or something that has to do with social good? You’re probably not going to love working in a really corporate place that manufacturers textiles, right? And a lot of times you’re not going to figure that out right away and you’re going to have to do a few different jobs to figure that out. My very first internship was at a 70-year-old HVAC company as a social media intern. I didn’t have any social media. That was a really interesting experience for me. And from there I was like, “Okay. This is not the kind of company I want to work at.” It was a good first experience, but it helped me figure out what I did and didn’t like.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, you kind of go through a lot of that, and you’re always really learning about your preferences no matter what job you’re in. Right now I’m still learning and I will continue to do so through the rest of my career. But being cognizant of that and figuring out what kind of company makes you happy and figuring out how you can tap into those values and things that make you feel really fulfilled even if you’re not necessarily in a job that’s perfectly equipped for that. What I mean by that is being able to access those things and contribute. At Formstack we’re a forms company. Yes, it’s software, but what really makes me happy and makes me feel fulfilled is helping people, building relationships, being a role model, and being able to connect with people in the greater community.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  By doing things like this and talking about being a young woman in this industry and giving advice and talking about diversity and how to foster inclusion, I’m able to do these things that aren’t directly to Formstack as a business and the business model, but it’s just a function of my job. And so, that’s what really fulfills me, which is really cool. And you can always find ways to tap into your passions no matter what kind of role you’re in.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  That’s great advice, let me recap. So, play to your strengths, do what you like, keep the learning mindset, and match your values. I think that’s really solid advice. Ava, if you’re listening, take that to heart. It’s really cool. Thanks for that. We’re going to come to a quick wrap up here. I know we’re coming up on time, but let’s do a lightning round. Are you ready for this?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Oh, geez. Okay.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Lightning round! What are your three favorite brands right now? B2C or B2B. It doesn’t matter.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Oh, it’s a good question. I really admire Rothy’s. They’re a shoe brand made out of … I think it’s from plastic recycled water bottles. Their branding is excellent. Their mission is really cool. They’re one of those D2C unicorn companies that you’re seeing more and more of with Away and Outdoor Voices.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Are they Brazilian?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  No, I don’t think so.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Oh, okay. There’s another company out of Brazil that does a similar thing. They’re like Allbirds.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah, I love Lululemon too because of just the community component of their brand. I really, really admire the community they’ve created especially in the mid of this COVID-19 stuff they’ve been doing a lot to encourage people to be mindful and keep practicing yoga, keep exercising, keep doing what you need, whether that’s doing an Instagram Live meditation session with all of their followers. They’re constantly doing things to bring people together, and it’s not really focused on the clothes or the product, which I think is awesome.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. I saw that recently. They’re doing live classes. It’s a really cool idea.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. I don’t know if I have a third brand off the top of my head. This isn’t really a brand, but one of the things that I really love is the dogs that I follow on Instagram are creating merchandise which I just think is so cool. One of the dog organizations is called French Bulldog Village Rescue and they rescue Frenchies from all over the country. This artist has been doing really beautiful watercolor portraits of the different dogs who are Instagram famous that have come from French Bulldog Village and she’s selling them. I actually have some examples right here. She’s making stickers of these beautiful dogs. This one is a real dog named Ollie and there’s a real picture of him with a squirrel on his Instagram. And she’s donating all the benefits to the rescue that these dogs are from which is awesome. That kind of stuff makes me so happy. So, yeah.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. I’m a dog guy as well, so that has me right in the heartstrings. That’s really cool. I would consider them a brand too. I mean, they’re on Instagram. I’m sure that counts. We’ll count it. We’ll count it. So, final question. What are your three favorite marketing books?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Oh, my gosh. I don’t know. I may not be a true marketer for this, but I don’t read books for marketing stuff really.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  That’s okay! Where do you draw inspiration from then?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  I read a lot of blogs. That’s part of just my learning style. If I’m going to pick up a book I want it to be a trashy romance novel or something scary. I love doing my learning online whether it’s listening to podcasts or I have a bunch of different blogs that I’m subscribed to. I follow a lot of people on Twitter in this space. Whenever I want to improve my skillset or learn more about this, I find a thought leader in that space and I follow them, and I’ve found having that steady influx of content related to that topic has definitely helped me absorb and just be more in the know of things I want to learn about, which is really cool.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

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  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  That’s great. Yeah. I think there’s just a ton of content out there, so I think that’s probably just me being old asking for your books, but I totally understand that there’s other-

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  I have read a bunch of that, but you don’t have to read books to get that information these days!

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  And finally, give us your top three trashy romance novels then. No, I’m just kidding.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  (laughter) No. Absolutely not!

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  So, anything else you want to talk about? Throw some plugs out there for Formstack again maybe? Talk about what you guys do.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Sure. Yeah. Salesforce consultants, Zoho consultants, marketing agencies, or anyone who can benefit from data collection, the partner team is awesome. We work with so many different cool partners. I was talking to this woman yesterday who is basically creating a self-serve consulting platform for small gym owners and giving them the ins and outs of everything they need to know and do to run a successful gym and incorporating tech savviness. She’s showing them how to do lead generation. She’s leveraging Formstack to digitize all of their intake process. It’s so cool. So, that’s just been a really awesome part of what we’ve been doing.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And then I guess this is a cool timely plug. In light of the COVID-19 stuff, we’ve seen a lot of people doing really awesome things to help their communities and Formstack really wants to help with that. One really awesome example that we came across, there was a premed student and she was leveraging Facebook to create a community and start recruiting people to do shopping for elderly people who are at high risk to leave their homes right now. She was coordinating it just through Facebook. She didn’t really have a process. And one of our partners, Spark Orange, they’re a Salesforce consultancy and they specialize in non-profits. One of their foundations actually stumbled across it in a news article and reached out and was like, “Hey, we want to help.”

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

  Specialties

  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  And so, she got them set up with Formstack for free obviously and is basically helping them scale up and streamline their volunteer intake process so that we can help more people. And I think that’s so cool. If there’s any other people doing awesome things like that in the community definitely let me know because we want to support and provide the tools wherever we can.

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. I feel like everybody’s stepping up. I know it’s kind of a crazy time, but all of the companies I just see in the news stepping up and offering free services, a lot of companies are raising limits on usage and sends and things like that. It’s just so cool to see the community come together. Even if we are so far apart with social distancing I still feel like we can come together as one, which is really encouraging to see.

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. It’s been awesome!

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Yeah. It’s great. Well, Amanda, thank you so much. It’s been insightful. You can check her out on LinkedIn, right? What else? Twitter?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

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  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  Yeah. Twitter!

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Okay. TikTok?

• 

  

  Amanda Nielsen

  0

  Title

  Manager

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  Marketing Strategy Partnerships Social Media

  Amanda Nielsen

  (laughter) TikTok. Yes. Yup. I’m on there as well!

• 

  

  Ian

  478

  Title

  Founder

  Specialties

  Customer Experience Demand Generation Marketing Strategy

  Ian

  Very cool. Thank you so much for joining once again Amanda. This has been another Marketing Strategy Talk, I’m your host and Founder of Marketing Strategy, Ian Luck. Don’t forget, to subscribe to get marketing strategies of all-kinds delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge.