Eric Meyerson, global director of consumer marketing at Eventbrite, speaks to ClickZ about how the introduction of content marketing helped the company reach consumers in far away places.
Eric Meyerson, global director of consumer marketing at ticket and registration platform Eventbrite, has developed a number of campaigns that have exceeded expectations in the two years he has been there. He has also moved the company into a new direction. His secret weapon? Content marketing.
When Meyerson joined Eventbrite in July of 2013, he took over a team that dubbed themselves "City Marketing." This team focused on brand evangelism and lead generation in the company's top metropolitan areas. By encouraging the use of content marketing, Meyerson transitioned his team to focus on awareness and emotional engagement for event organizers. Within a year, his team started to focus entirely on consumer marketing.
According to Meyerson, content marketing is the backbone of his division's marketing efforts. "Content marketing is an indispensable tactic that falls into our broad consumer marketing strategy, helping drive brand awareness throughout the funnel," he says.
Meyerson's team conducts content marketing in many ways: publications for organizers and ticket buyers, social media, webinars, white papers, surveys, and so forth. In 2014, they grew Eventbrite's social following and engagement by more than 70 percent across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook in the company's major six metro areas: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago and London. Meanwhile, Meyerson's team launched Brite Space and Yes Address, a series of events and live experiences in 2014 and 2015. This immersed more than 6,000 influential consumers in those same key metro areas.
In order to maintain a healthy balance between creativity and business efficiency, Meyerson and his team constantly measure Eventbrite's content across different channels. "We test a variety of content marketing (Read more...) we build best practices, and we try our best to measure what is working and what is not. For example, we track if a piece of content actually turns into an order: does a site visitor purchase a ticket after he or she reads an article?" says Meyerson.
"Of course, not everything is measurable, because it's hard to track character behavior over the long term. I think it's a general issue across the industry to effectively measure repeated touchpoints that help change consumer behavior over time," he adds.
Speaking about his own journey, Meyerson believes that real achievement happens one step at a time. Prior to Eventbrite, he was head of content partner marketing at YouTube. Before that, he was head of advertiser marketing at Google, where he learned a lot about how to manage resources effectively from "incredibly smart people."
"No one plays small ball at Google, because their expectations are huge," Meyerson recalls.
During his first two years at YouTube, his team grew video advertising revenue by more than 400 percent, and began transforming brands' and agencies' perception of YouTube from a brand-unfriendly user-generated content site to a must-buy. But the milestone in Meyerson's Google career, he notes, was the platform's first TV upfront-style event called, YouTube Brandcast, which generated $100 million in upfront deals and over 500 press hits.
"These experiences taught me to think big, and helped me transform Eventbrite's marketing strategy," Meyerson says.
Like many marketers, Meyerson started out as a programmer. Although coding skills are useful for digital marketing, he didn't consider himself as a marketer until he received his MBA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and garnered more professional experience in the marketing field.
After acquiring more than 15 years of industry wisdom, Meyerson has learned that it requires a wide range of skills to be a good marketer including both technical and essential business communications skills.
"I've been a programmer, a product manager, and a marketer. But earlier in my career I didn't spend enough time and energy aligning with people outside whichever department or function I was working in. I've since found that keeping current with people across an organization, from the executive level on down, can help drive way, way more successful results, and also help your internal visibility," he says.
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