How To Solve Marketing Fire Drills With Kyle DeWeerdt From Apprenda [ACM 010]
![How to Solve Marketing Fire Drills with Kyle DeWeerdt from Aprenda](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/how-to-solve-marketing-fire-drills.png?w=3840&q=75)
- Some information about Apprenda and the types of content that Kyle works with, as well as Kyle’s background.
- An explanation of “marketing fire drills”: What are they, and what can you do about them?
- An explanation of buffer time, and how it can help you handle these emergencies that come up.
- How to break down a project to define a deadline and a publish date for content.
- How Kyle manages the process behind the scenes with multiple teams to make sure every task is completed on time.
- Kyle’s best tips for marketers who want to manage their projects more efficiently.
How To Solve #Marketing Fire Drills With Kyle DeWeerdt From Apprenda
Click To Tweet- “The most important thing is to plan when you can.”
- “There are some things that can be done in conjunction ... other things need to be done as an assembly line.”
- “Get everyone on the same page and make sure organization is something they’re looking for.”
Transcript
Nathan: Here’s the story: you’ve just been asked to do something today that’s due as soon as possible. What do you do? Unfortunately, it’s a situation that’s all too common for marketers, who help other internal teams communicate the company’s value proposition. Hey, I’m Nathan from CoSchedule, and I think it’s time for us to prevent marketing fire drills before they become emergencies. That’s why I’m chatting with Kyle Deweerdt today, who is the Marketing Programs Manager at Apprenda. Kyle has come up with a simple system to help his team prevent some of that anxiety of rushing through a project too quickly. His system helps his team prioritize their time to complete their upcoming work to the best of their potential. Kyle’s on the Actionable Content Marketing podcast to share how you can use this framework to resolve fire drills before they even start. Let’s dive in! Alright, Kyle, thanks so much for chatting with me today. Kyle: Thanks for having me, Nathan. Nathan: We are really excited to chat with you. I think that this idea behind marketing fire drills is really important for marketers to help prevent some of these anxiety of rushing through a project too quickly. It’s really important for us to prioritize some of our work so that we can make it to the best of our potential and not just work really quickly and poorly but more so plan out in advance what to do. With that, I’d like to lead into some of first introductory stuff. Could you tell me a little bit about Apprenda and what you do there? Kyle: Certainly. My name is Kyle Deweerdt, and I’m the Marketing Programs Manager here at Apprenda. That means a lot of things, but first let’s start with what Apprenda is. We’re founded in 2007 around the idea of making it easier for people to develop software at an enterprise scale. We sell what’s called a Platform as a Service, and it’s essentially a type of middleware, where IT operators and developers both have a view into the platform, where (from an operator’s standpoint) they’re able to set policy, ensure compliance, and basically more efficiently allocate their infrastructure; while developers – their applications are abstracted away from the infrastructure so they’re less concerned with some of the mundane operational parameters and can focus more on just developing their applications. What that means for me at Apprenda and our marketing team is building awareness around what we’re doing, helping the sales team and helping business development, client services. At the end of the day, I think, every other node of the business is a customer of marketing. We wanna do everything we can to help make everybody’s life easier in the business. Nathan: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. What are some of the projects that you work on there to help the sales and business development teams reach the audience? You were mentioning, sales enablement. What sorts of content types do you work with? Kyle: We develop a lot of written material; this could be anything from white papers to a quick one-pager, maybe like a shorter version of a white paper. We also have recently been developing these whiteboard videos that are one- to two-minute long topical videos with a sales engineer or someone from our development team. They’ve really been a hit. We have someone on the product team, who’s quite handy with the dry-erase marker. Nathan: Very nice. You’re working with all sorts of different content. Could you explain a little bit about your experience before even starting at Apprenda? Kyle: Sure! I come from an agency background. I was at a marketing agency for maybe two or three years before getting into sort of a dedicated company role. It provides an interesting perspective on the idea of content development because when you’re at an agency, your clients are dependent upon a steady pipeline of content. And that’s not to say that’s not the case in an individual company, but I feel like it’s given a more front-and-center priority at an agency because it’s really the dollar value thing that you’re contracted to deliver. I have this kind of ingrained scheduling and prioritization process in the way that I think about how to develop content so that we get out of this idea of just-in-time content delivery, where stuff is coming off the assembly line right as it’s about to be sent live. You can avoid a lot of heartache from doing that. Nathan: I really like that concept of just-in-time marketing, and that’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to have this conversation with you today. The last time we chatted, you mentioned that you had a challenge that you were working to resolve that you had called marketing fire drills. Could you describe what you mean by that to me? Kyle: Sure. A marketing drill – what would be a good example? You find out that a partner event is coming up. We need a booth; we need collateral to hand out. Do we have a speaker for one of the sessions? And it all happens next month. Are we going to be promoting the event? Do we wanna get people that are in our mailing list to attend? Sometimes you just don’t know what you need to know ahead of time, or you don’t know what you don’t know. So we’ve come up with a couple of processes or templated tasks, so to speak, that kinda help address some of these fire drills. I think the partner event is a little bit more of an elaborate example, but sometimes it’s just as simple as, “Hey, we have a piece of content that was just developed without marketing’s knowledge.” Maybe it was something that a sales engineer wrote that was for a specific account, but then it’s thrown over the fences. “Hey, this would be great for demand gen campaign as well.” Nathan: Yeah, that’s a great example. You get a lot of sales enablement material possibly from your sales team How would you approach a project like that, that maybe wasn’t on your radar, but it seems like a really good idea to continue working on for demand generation? Kyle: Sure. I guess the most important preface to that is planning when you can. If you have your weekly campaigns and your monthly events lined out to the best of your ability, it makes room for the unknown. So when these unknown things come up, you have some flex in your schedule, where you can take some time to address it, breathe, and think about what you can actually do with it, rather than just saying, “Oh! Okay, we gotta get something out the door, but I have three other things that are on my plate right now.” If those three other things that were on your plate are running at their own pace, then you can just slot that right into what you’re doing.![The most important thing is to plan when you can.](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/kyle-deweerdt-apprenda-quote.png?w=3840&q=75)
![There are some things that can be done in conjunction ... other things need to be done as an assembly line.](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/kyle-apprenda-quote-2.png?w=3840&q=75)
![Get everyone on the same page and make sure organization is something they're looking for.](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/dedweerdt-apprenda-quote.png?w=3840&q=75)
![podcast_kyle-cta](https://media.coschedule.com/uploads/Podcast_Kyle-cta-770x239.png?w=3840&q=75)