About NatalieNatalie is the Director of Marketing at the Duckbill Group. Her background includes marketing roles in the localization and SaaS industries. In her free time, she teaches yoga, creates beadwork, and tries to keep up with her toddler. All of which impacts how she approaches growth and storytelling. Natalie resides in Missoula, Montana with her husband, daughter, and two wild corgisLinks:Twitter: https://twitter.com/natveiswilliams
TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part my Cribl Logstream. Cirbl Logstream is an observability pipeline that lets you collect, reduce, transform, and route machine data from anywhere, to anywhere. Simple right? As a nice bonus it not only helps you improve visibility into what the hell is going on, but also helps you save money almost by accident. Kind of like not putting a whole bunch of vowels and other letters that would be easier to spell in a company name. To learn more visit: cribl.ioCorey: And now for something completely different!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Periodically, it seems that I’ve misunderstood the fundamental concept of marketing and interpret it through a lens of aggressively shitposting on Twitter and other places. I have since been informed that what I do is less about marketing and more about creative stunts in public, which are apparently close, but not exactly the same thing. This led to a natural evolution of the Duckbill Group’s understanding of what marketing is, and effectively culminated in our hiring, earlier this year, of Natalie Williams, who joins me today to tell me what a Director of Snarketing might actually do that differs from my ridiculous nonsense. Natalie, thanks for joining me.Natalie: Thanks, Corey. It’s great to be here.Corey: At a high level, something that is one of the most misunderstood concepts across the board is what marketing even is. So, before we proceed down the barrel of inevitable, ridiculous commentary I’m about to levy at you, what is marketing?Natalie: Marketing is a way to attract the audience that you’re looking for and to frame your services, your content, whatever you’re selling, to your audience in a way that makes sense to them. And I think that another piece of it that’s important is, everybody has a pain point; you really have to be able to find the emotion behind what you’re selling in order to attract your audiences.Corey: So, fundamentally an authenticity story more than anything else.Natalie: Yeah, it’s finding that—yeah, the authenticity in what you’re selling, and meeting your audience with their pain point.Corey: So, many times, it seems like the next follow-up question for most companies would be, “Great. So, what emotion is it exactly where people reflexively reach for their wallet and hand all the cash in it to our company?” It tries to be combined with aspects of sales; it tries to, on some level, wind up doing the entire job, in some cases of not even having a decent offering in the first place, but if the marketing story is strong enough, it’ll sell. Is that overly cynical?Natalie: I don’t think so. I think that marketing, it’s challenging in this time, we have so many options, so many choices there, our attention spans are so short. And so I don’t think it’s cynical because there’s a lot of noise to cut through, and I think what’s important is to think of your audience as—or what you’re selling to your audience in a way that, how can I make their lives easier? I think that’s what’s going to, like you said, get people to pull the money out of their pocket and give it to you. What can you do to m