Be a sponge and listen as much as you can. Go to those optional meetings. The more you learn and are exposed to early on, the better.
MEDIA 7: Could you please give our readers a peek into your strong professional journey of over 14 years?
ELIZABETH IRVINE: I started out writing marketing copy for an IT publisher, TechTarget. All-day I wrote email copy and website copy promoting white papers. This was a great way into a marketing associate role because it trained me to be able to write copy to promote a wide range of topics. I led a few teams over the eight years I spent at TechTarget, but I learned the most (and had the most fun) when I lived abroad and started the digital marketing team for the European branch. The digital marketing space evolved a lot during that time, which forced me to evolve with it -- especially in terms of website conversion, audience development, and email marketing. Personally, it was the most rewarding time of my life because of the amount of travel I was able to do. I met my husband while living abroad, and I was pushed out of my comfort zone more than I expected.
Gartner really opened my eyes to life in an enterprise and the complexities of cross-departmental collaboration. It helped me understand departments that I hadn’t been exposed to previously and I learned how to best support and work with sales from an opportunity-driving perspective. I’ve been at MarketMuse since early 2018 and was their first full-time marketing hire. I was excited about the opportunity to build a team from the ground up and orchestrate the marketing engine. They trusted me and let me run with it -- this was incredibly empowering and humbling. That experience required grit, resilience, and initiative that I didn’t really know was in me.
M7: How does MarketMuse manage to use AI-driven platforms/products for content research, intelligence, and writing?
EI: Funny you should ask! We use our own platform to inform content decisions. It analyzes thousands of articles on any given topic to provide the direction (via Content Briefs) that gives us the best possible chance to perform well. Well-researched Content Briefs can take a few hours when created manually, but they are created in MarketMuse in minutes. So we save time with our platform and have great data to inform decisions. We also use ‘Writer’ to provide an automated review layer for guidelines, grammar, and tone. This ensures consistency in our messaging and it’s able to catch things faster that we may miss as humans.
There’s a lot to reflect on and things that you learn or realize about yourself as you advise others.
M7: Recently MarketMuse launched two new MarketMuse packages. Could you please give our readers an insight into it?
EI: We’re really excited to have launched a completely free product. Our goal in everything we do is to help our audience create better content, whether they become a MarketMuse customer or not. Now we can do that with our software too through a free version that writers and marketers can use to research, write and optimize their work. There is limited monthly use of our applications, but this is great for someone publishing at a slower pace. We also simplified our offering to include one self-serve subscription. This offering includes unlimited use of our applications as well as the option to purchase additional user seats and credits for Content Briefs and First Drafts (AI-generated content). So this package is great for growing teams that are publishing at a faster rate but are still able to manage content audits and keyword lists through spreadsheets.
Here is more information on our new free offering: NEW MarketMuse Free. MarketMuse recently revamped our packages to give you access to more data (for free!). Leverage the new features to research, prioritize, and write the best content on any topic in less than half the time it currently takes you.
MarketMuse Free: Start generating better content at no cost.
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No time limit
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1 User
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Applications: Optimize, Research, Compete, Questions, Connect
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35 Queries per month
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5 Projects
Why we launched the free plan:
It has been a long-term goal to offer something for free in the market and we couldn’t be more excited for this launch. We offered one of our packages for free last year during the pandemic and had an overwhelming response and reaction from the community which further encouraged this direction. The latest free offering puts powerful AI in the hands of content creators so they can research, prioritize, write, and optimize content faster and more confidently.
Why you should be excited about this:
The ‘Free’ offering means that anyone can research a topic, optimize an article, evaluate the competition, and more without worrying about costs. Everyone can write at an expert level. Each piece published, using the data from the platform, ensures the best chance to perform well in search and provide valuable information for the reader — all in less time.
M7: How do you define Content Personalization? Which technologies are garnering the maximum mileage in the marketing sector?
EI: Content personalization is all about your audience -- it’s hyper-focused. You really need to know your audience, both firmographically and emotionally, for this to do well. There are technologies that can help you do this at scale, like Mutiny which is a website personalization tool, and Rasa which personalizes content in newsletters. Technology is incredibly powerful, but it can only get you so far. You have to have the strategy, content, and understanding of your audience in order to educate at scale. It’s more than changing a few words on the page based on industry or company size, it’s about providing content that’s hyper-focused for segments you care about and ensuring they see it.
You have to have the strategy, content, and understanding of your audience to educate at scale.
M7: You were listed in the ‘15 Trailblazing Women In Revenue Marketing’. Could you please share the experience?
EI: I was honored to be invited to join that list, especially by an organization I respect so much. They have amazing leadership in their own organization so I was humbled to be included. There’s a lot to reflect on and things that you learn or realize about yourself as you advise others. I loved being able to give that advice and was really thinking about my younger self and what I would have benefited from learning earlier in my career.
M7: What advice would you like to give professionals starting their careers in this industry?
EI: Be a sponge and listen as much as you can. Go to those optional meetings. The more you learn and are exposed to early on, the better. Find a couple of mentors outside of your organization. I didn’t receive this advice and didn’t have a mentor until joining MarketMuse and found that having a third-party sounding board really put me at ease at times. I’d also recommend joining an organized group or meetup to further bounce ideas, get feedback, or just to listen to others' challenges that you can learn from. Pavilion, for example, has been a great resource for me in terms of learning from my peers and networking, and they offer robust learning opportunities and tools.