MarTech360 Interview With Germaine Hendrik, Marketing Lead, Quantcast

“MarTech is the vehicle that makes sense of it all. The progress we have made with marketing automation is inevitable in this technology-enabled environment we live and work in today.”

Hi, Germaine, can tell us something about your professional background?

My career path has been an interesting and rewarding one. I started off working in public relations straight after university, and then went into the banking and finance industry afterwards where I stayed for over four years. After I finished up a contract role at Standard Chartered Bank Singapore, I decided then to dive back into my passion in marketing and communications, which led me to accept a role in content marketing. I’ve never looked back since.

Over the last 8 years, I’ve become a specialist in content marketing, and have been lucky enough to have worked with multiple dynamic businesses in creating marketing strategies that bring their products and services to life.

In 2020, I joined Quantcast as a marketing specialist and have since moved into a Marketing Lead role in the business.

Tell us about your role at Quantcast.

As the regional marketing lead for Quantcast Asia-Pacific (APAC), I oversee all the marketing strategies and activities in the APAC region, which covers nine countries including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia.

On a daily basis, I work with several teams to plan and execute on several initiatives and drivers that help us grow our brand in market. This includes managing our press, editorial and thought leadership programmes, paid and social media tactics, events and sponsorship opportunities, as well as client partnerships which we take a tailored approach with.

I also work closely with the commercial team to ensure that our marketing plans and activities are making a positive impact in the region, opening doors for conversations and ultimately, helping them to sell.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview With Adrien Menard, CEO & Co-Founder, Botify

What sets Quantcast apart from the competition?

Audiences are at the heart of the trillion-dollar ad tech industry. That is where we started in 2006 with Quantcast Measure, a free audience insights tool that provides publishers with real-time insights about their audience to help them monetize ad inventory on their websites.

Today, over 100 million web and mobile destinations leverage Measure to understand their audiences, which provides Quantcast with a rich source of unique real-time data. This is really the secret sauce – our data, combined with the AI and machine learning technology (Ara®) we’ve built to help businesses thrive in a privacy-first world without third-party cookies.

Unlike stale third-party data loosely classified into packaged segments, the Measure live data set gives marketers a real-time view of evolving online consumer behaviour, putting us in a great position to help our customers deliver perfectly timed, uniquely relevant advertising to audiences that matter the most to them. This means businesses that use Quantcast often see outcomes and results that surpass that of the same campaigns run with similar ad tech platforms.

The other outstanding feature about Quantcast is our people. I know everyone says this, but in our case we’ve validated that through recent studies that prove people love working with us and for us. It’s not just the awesome service and the passion our teams bring to find the best solutions for our customers, we also have a fantastic, inclusive culture that is the result of having great leadership. Quantcast helps our people be their best selves at work, and that has in turn made our customers consistently happy, which helps us thrive as a business. It’s a magical recurrence that isn’t something you can find just anywhere.

How, according to you, are MarTech and marketing automation helping in transforming the entire marketing landscape?

One of my favourite things about marketing is that it’s always evolving, simply because businesses and people evolve.

As Beth Comstock, former CMO & Vice Chairperson of General Electric once said, “marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.” I couldn’t agree more. To be a marketer is to keep on the pulse of what’s changing in the world, and in my opinion, we’re at a converging point between influence over buying decisions and the data that enables this influence to happen.

MarTech is the vehicle that makes sense of it all. In my opinion, the progress we have made with marketing automation is inevitable in this technology-enabled environment we live and work in today. Automating how we market our businesses is merely part of the advancement we’ve made using technology to make life easier.

As a result of this advancement, the marketing landscape has not only been radically transformed from physical to digital. Gone are the days where people only knew about a product because they saw a flyer or billboard somewhere. Businesses are now able to use MarTech and digital marketing tactics to form relationships with their customers, leverage data assets to get ahead of their audiences, and shape decision-making around content consumption, brand perception, and purchasing behaviour.

Of course, the reality of this all is that the marketer’s remit has also been entirely transformed to keep pace with the changes in the current landscape. Digital, data analysis and creative skills are all part and parcel of the typical “do-it-all” marketer’s toolkit today–particularly in lean organisations–and whilst that’s a huge challenge for many, to me it also means various newer opportunities to learn and grow in the field.

According to you, where does Content Marketing fit into the MarTech landscape? How do you envisage the future of content marketing in the years to come?

As an avid writer, I maintain that ‘content is king’ and will be for a long time to come.

Living in a fast-paced digital world where entire transactions take place online means that content is often the means by which a business makes its first impressions on a potential customer. People can form a distinct image of a business based on one very well-written sales email, or from a terrible social post.

Content is therefore, or should be, the most important aspect of marketing in any modern business. Coupled with the right MarTech, and the possibilities are virtually limitless and can help companies use messaging to drive impactful customer interactions, track progress on what content types work best to engage with their audiences, and create omnichannel experiences that keep people coming back.

Essentially, the two should not be separate – marketers considering what types of MarTech to invest in should also consider what types of content works best for their audiences, and what gaps within the marketing organisation can technology fill. For example, if Company A gets great engagement via social media, but has a small team of time-poor marketers, it would make sense for them to invest in a social media management platform that decreases the time it takes for the marketing team to create content that resonates with their followers.

In my experience, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach with MarTech, which is a problem I think many businesses face. There are countless options when it comes to MarTech that focuses on content marketing alone, from platforms that help to create content ideas to ones that just focus on the editorial project management aspect of things. It really depends on what’s right for your business and figuring that out is the toughest part in my opinion.

What does the future of content marketing look like?

I have a few predictions:

• High-quality content only, please: A quick search on the web tells you that there are anywhere from 500-700 million blog posts sitting on over a billion websites globally. An overabundance of data is creating information overload, so even higher-quality content is needed to gain and maintain trust amongst consumers in future.
• Influencers as trusted publishers: Influencer marketing is likely to skyrocket even further in coming years, as people look more towards people like themselves to try and test a product out before buying.
• People are watching and listening more than they are reading: My take is that audio, podcast and video content consumption is going to surge even more, particularly on mobile devices, in favour of written content. Whilst written content still has its place, it is likely to exist more for search and empirical purposes rather than to inform and entertain.
• Content will evolve along with emerging channels: As the metaverse proliferates, along with channels such as TikTok, gaming and CTV, we’re likely to see content take newer shapes and forms. It will be interesting to see what these look like in coming years, but one thing I am certain of is that the future of content will be driven by user preference. Shareability and virality are driven by consumers, so my thoughts are that if you want your content to be seen, it’s got to be great, and it’s got to be where your audiences are.

How should a business plan its content marketing strategies in order to attract their target audience organically?

It’s widely acknowledged that a content strategy needs to start with a business’s audience. That is true, however in my experience, a good content strategy starts from overarching business objectives first, assuming that a business has already considered its audience when creating its goals for the short, middle and long-term.

Once you know what the business objectives are, you can then create marketing objectives which then tapers down to key messaging and then what your content strategy needs to be from there.

In a world filled with noise, attracting audiences organically is becoming increasingly difficult. So I would focus on a few things:

“Create a content strategy that aligns with overarching marketing and business objectives, but allow room for change and growth.”

Marketing is ever-changing, and content strategies should serve as a guideline with key messaging, channels and formats, rather than restrict creativity and agility. A lot of content strategies are detailed to a fault and –e.g. one blog a week, 3 social posts and 2 infographics a month on X topics, targeting 6 of our 10 personas–but a lot of times this tends to fail given moving goal posts, resourcing issues, changing priorities etc. What then happens is people start to disregard this one big content strategy that took weeks to put together, and the whole thing becomes a waste of time. If a content strategy starts from your audience, remember that your audiences can change, and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of reactivity.

1. Understand who your audiences are using real-time data. Creating a bunch of target personas bucketed into groups with assumptions about their challenges, pain points and opportunity areas is not an accurate way to target your content. People are complex creatures and most want to be understood before being sold to. Organisations that figure out a way to combine real-time audience insights with their marketing strategies will be able to create much more relevant and compelling content.
2. Understand that content is not a short term solution to driving revenue. I’ve found that content is viewed by a lot of organisations as ‘something we need to do, but it’s not helping us to make money’. That’s because content marketing is not a discount coupon (or at least I don’t think so). It’s a way to make an impression, create interest in your brand, open doors to conversations, drive leads, and nurture engaged audiences down the sales funnel, among other things. If your business is bringing in leads from your content efforts, but are not closing them as much, it doesn’t always mean that the content isn’t working. That’s why it’s also important for organisations to be able to measure how their content and other marketing efforts are impacting sales throughout their customer journeys.
3. Hire the right people and empower them to do their jobs. Great content takes a lot to come together, and it’s not something that ‘everyone can do’ in all honesty. My opinion is that a lot of people think that content marketers are just good writers, but great content marketers live and breathe their brands, key messages, and have a deep understanding of how to create impact beyond just using words and design. I would start by identifying what skill sets are available within a business, then hiring to fill any gaps, and empowering your content teams with the tools and autonomy to do their jobs.
4. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Ask yourself if it actually matters that you’ve posted three times on social media this week instead of five. Question if an article needs to go through 12 rounds of changes before it gets published. Does it matter if the video gets launched this week instead of next? If the answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, fair enough. If not, don’t lose too much sleep over it. Volume isn’t always the answer, what’s more important is relevance and connecting with your audience, especially if you want to attract them organically.

How, according to you, does marketing automation impact the traditional sales and marketing funnels?

In the 80s and 90s, marketing and sales were often a combined job role. Today, the two departments are often separated, but it is extremely important that they are aligned. I view marketing as an extension of sales, and am lucky to be in a business where there is very much a close partnership between the two departments. Also, traditionally, the sales funnel probably only had very few levels. Today, there are at least 6 I can think of–awareness, discovery, intent, evaluation, purchase and advocacy.

As sales cycles have become more complex, largely due to the advent of the internet, marketing automation should effectively and more efficiently help sales to make better connections with customers, while helping both marketing and sales understand more about who they are selling to, so they can improve tactics in future.

Marketing automation also provides scalability, allowing more people to be reached with less resources. Put it this way, if everyone was still only doing cold calls and sending out flyers in the mail, most businesses would not be able to grow beyond their locale, realistically.

Could you name some platforms/tools that you use for marketing?

We use Marketo as our main marketing automation platform, which syncs up with Salesforce.

These are key tools for us, as it is truly what aligns sales and marketing on the backend and allows us to produce reports and dashboards which helps the business understand the impact of our marketing efforts.

Asana is our main editorial project management tool that we use to collaboratively produce content across the business. We also use Hootsuite to unify and provide visibility across the social media activity generated by all marketing regions in Quantcast, and Splash to manage most of our events in APAC.

Lastly, we use the Quantcast Platform a lot, it allows us to plan, activate and measure on our advertising campaigns, the very same way we’d do for our clients. Our target audience is mainly marketers, so by using the product ourselves, we’re able to quickly identify issues and where we can improve our offering. We’re not afraid to put our money where our mouth is!

What would be your advice for all the aspiring marketing professionals out there?

Marketing is a very diverse field to go into, and I’m a firm believer that if you do what you love, you’re naturally going to be great at it. Figure out where your interests lie and it’s likely you’ll be able to find a discipline in marketing that suits your strengths. For example, if you enjoy diving into data to solve problems, a marketing analytics role might suit you well. If you enjoy playing around with videos, consider a content production role.

When I joined the ad tech industry two years ago, I was lucky enough to become a mentee to Gai Le Roy, CEO of the IAB Australia, an experience I consider invaluable. Having a great mentor at the start of your marketing career can really help set you up for success, offer learnings and different perspectives, and open a few doors you might want to walk through in future.

And finally, embrace the industry. Marketing is ever-changing, and all the great marketers I know succeed because they genuinely love what they do, and always keep on top of the latest trends, industry developments and news. I would recommend subscribing to a few key publications relevant to the field you’re in, (for me it’s AdAge, Advertising Weekly, ExchangeWire, The Drum and CMO), following a few thought leaders (Seth Godin and Michael Ferrier are a few of my favourites) and listening to podcasts where possible.

Thanks, Germaine!