Content Marketing & Sales for Revenue Growth: Interview with Raine Chang

Welcome to Marketer Interview, where we feature conversations with marketers from various industries and backgrounds.

Today, we are thrilled to have Raine Chang, the Marketing Manager of Kobalt.io, join us to share her expertise on the intersection of content marketing and sales collaboration.

With nearly 10 years of experience in the industry, Raine has successfully implemented strategies that have driven revenue growth for her company.

Let’s dive in!

What inspired you to pursue a career in marketing?

My mom has been a great inspiration and a fantastic role model.

She takes on so many roles in her career. She is the COO, HR manager, marketing manager, admin, and receptionist, all at the same time.

While I always find it hard to understand how she juggles so many roles and responsibilities, she has shown me the fun of marketing by having me support her in many events, from concerts and pop-up stores to running press conferences as a teen.

These were some of my early memories of how marketing is done, and it is just natural that I want to pursue a business degree in Marketing.

After graduating, I took up a role as an event specialist in local governmental bodies. That was when I wanted to pursue a Master’s in Advertising to make myself a better Marketer. This is basically where everything starts.

I was lucky to have the opportunity to work with the Executive Director at that time in running a huge rebranding campaign, which paved my way to becoming a brand ambassador at the organization I worked for.

Covid hit the event industry hard. I was fortunate to have accumulated enough experience in branding and content marketing, allowing me to switch to becoming a Content Manager at a Greentech startup.

Content is an excellent compliment to digital marketing. Before joining Kobalt.io as a Marketing Manager, I was a Digital Marketing Manager at a car dealership. All these have made me the Marketer I am today.

Can you walk us through your current role as the Marketing Manager of Kobalt.io?

My role at Kobalt.io encompasses many aspects, including branding, design, content, event, digital, social media marketing, and more. You wear so many hats at the same time, but you also make so many impacts on every aspect of Marketing here.

We get to voice our opinions and run experiments to test them out. Running a startup is about building something, learning from experiences, and pivoting. You don’t just launch a product or service. You want to make a dent in the world.

What are the critical ingredients for a successful content marketing strategy?

Marketing is fun because, fundamentally, you are interacting with humans. There is often no right or wrong. It is more about how well you listen to your prospects and customers, sometimes when they don’t know themselves well.

Successful content marketing is about reaching them at the right time, using the right tool/ on the right platform. This will ensure your audience finds the conversation natural and value-adding but not disruptive.

How do you measure the success of your content marketing efforts?

Depending on the tools/ platforms we use, there is a handful, but they are nothing special from what everyone else is tracking.

Standard email marketing metrics include open rate, click rate for website, conversion rate, scroll depth, etc.

The key, however, is to identify and prioritize those meaningful to your business and track the progress over time.

If you are at an early stage of running marketing, you may want to track social profile audience growth, but if you are more mature, you want to focus on metrics that tell you how well you retain your existing client base.

What are some common challenges when trying to align marketing and sales teams?

I have been fortunate to work with a highly supportive sales team who are transparent about their needs.

As a marketer, I focus more on the top of the funnel to build content that draws in an audience, but my sales peers can educate me on what they have seen that is useful in closing a sale.

What are some effective tactics for fostering collaboration between marketing and sales teams?

Regular sales and marketing meetings are one thing, where we can discuss what happens around our customers.

By understanding more about what marketing does, sales can provide first-hand feedback on where marketing should focus efforts.

By tracking and sharing marketing efforts and performance, sales can attribute how marketing activities help boost sales performance and volume over time. In addition, regular joint meetings are about creating an avenue to build culture and foster communication.

Creating a form to collect sales requests and a list that tracks them all will help drive marketing efforts in areas where sales need support. In addition, making a list transparent and prioritizing high-value action items helps sales plan their sales activities.

How do you use customer feedback to inform your content marketing strategy?

Like many other organizations, we publish our customer testimonials to build authority. We also leverage the same content to boost engagement on social media, driving interactions.

This may be irrelevant, but one fun idea is promoting some of our customer services to our other customers. Because we have built a large enough client base, we want to highlight some exciting services from one customer and share that with our other customers.

Can you share any tools or software you use to streamline your marketing and sales collaboration efforts?

Hubspot is our brain and engine for marketing and sales.

How do you stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends and technologies?

I enjoy listening to podcasts. They make good bite-size content for a coffee break. I also subscribe to many marketing newsletters and attend events to stay current.

What advice would you give to someone just starting a marketing career and looking to specialize in content marketing and sales collaboration?

Be kind. This article has always stayed on my mind as a Marketer.

Kindness scales better than any other negative emotions you may have. It ratches up and leads to more compassion, trust and openness.

Put this to your marketing work, and make sure what you do is doing something good to someone. It could be your client. It could be your teammate.

By being kind, you listen to their needs, and only by listening can you do good marketing and foster better collaboration.