|
SUMMARY:
Dana Bodine, US VP of marketing, Trustpilot, joined me on How I Made It In Marketing. Interview highlights include discussions about dumb wins, trust building, turning challenges into creative opportunities, and navigating a digital marketing career path. |
Action Box: Turn your knowledge assets into a new revenue stream
MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $7,500 each to eligible companies. Apply for your $7,500 AI Engineering Voucher.
I know the pinch when budgets tighten, customers shift, and deadlines close in. Yet, marketers have a superpower: like Superman’s X-ray vision, we see through constraints to the core idea.
That is the essence of our craft – not waiting for perfect conditions but delivering breakthrough concepts right here, right now.
So I loved this lesson in a recent podcast guest application – ‘every challenge is a creative opportunity.’
To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Dana Bodine, US VP of marketing, Trustpilot.
Trustpilot is a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange. In 2024, it reported $211 million in revenue.
Bodine looks after the entire US market, the US portion of an international audience of 64 million monthly active users.
Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Listen on Amazon Music
While at Mastercard, Bodine worked on a campaign called 1 Billion + Beyond. They had to pull off the shoot for this campaign during the COVID pandemic, meaning their typical processes went out the window due to restrictions on travel. COVID-related constraints on their process forced them to innovate and made the shoot even more impactful.
They sourced all local creative and video teams and told incredible stories while keeping the shoot as safe as possible (even though she was located a few blocks away from where they did the shoot, she worked on it remotely). In this case, the challenge informed, and ultimately improved the creative output.
Building the US marketing department at Trustpilot has helped Bodine learn that commercial and marketing partnerships are crucial to making an effective marketing function. Everything you do as a marketer has to be in lockstep with commercial teams.
This is true for organizations of any size – marketing isn’t just about pulling off campaigns, it has to serve as an input into a larger commercial funnel, and truly understanding prospective customers can only come from being embedded in your organization’s commercial team.
Pulling off a website relaunch can be stressful but doing it in the hours before your company announces a SPAC agreement (at Fintech company Pagaya) was a fire Bodine never thought she’d encounter. Having experience with intense demands from leadership, on a timeline that you have no control over, helped her see the value in the relationships she had built with people at her organization and beyond.
We all want to avoid last-minute fires, but when they do inevitably happen, it helps to have a support system that can get the job done.
Bodine discussed how you have to be there when someone is in their moment of crisis, mentioning Adam Grant’s book ‘Give and Take’ and the idea that if you give as much as you can to others, it will come back to you tenfold.
via Greg Boosin, Mastercard
Boosin taught Bodine that while creating sales materials may feel like the monkey on a marketer’s back, it is a golden ticket to elevating the marketing function and ultimately getting a seat at the decision-making table when it comes to driving revenue.
via Alicia Skubick, Trustpilot
If you’re going to be asking for your customers' time – whether it be a call, an email or even a social media post that you’d like them to read – you need to use that time well. Every single touchpoint with customers is crucial, so it’s important to take care and be prepared, professional and valuable.
via Christine Wu, Time Inc.
In her role at Time Inc, Bodine had the pleasure of working with Wu, who taught her that ideas are only powerful when they are based on a specific strategic insight.
Marketing & Communications: It’s important to ‘take a beat’ (podcast episode #140)
The Radical Idea: Customer-first marketing prioritizes customer experience over upsells
Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.
This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages free digital marketing course.
Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.
Dana Bodine: I'm most useful in, you know, really those fintech conversations where they're where we're looking at the margins and trying to build trust very quickly. I get it, I live breathing and eat, sleep that when it's somebody else. And I think it's also part of knowing your team and knowing uniquely what's so wonderful. Like I had a team member who, you know, is the queen dog mom, and we had a long discussion with, you know, a bunch of pet focused clients and event sponsorships.
I'm like, we need to center now. Like she is our chief press officer. Yes, she's probably like less experienced here, there or wherever. But she has the passion, the heart to actually connect. And, you know, someone on my team who, you know, has worked with international customers for the past seven years and understands not just the U.S. market, but globally, will so work with the multinationals.
So I think having that deep connection, as you can tell, like having some sort of emotional connection, makes it more authentic, more real.
Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing. From marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz. Real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior Director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Burstein, to tell you about today's guest and.
Daniel Burstein: I know the pinch when budgets tighten, customer shift and the deadlines close in debt markers, we've got a superpower like Superman's X ray vision. We see through constraints to the core idea that is the essence of our craft, not waiting for perfect conditions, but delivering breakthrough concepts right here, right now. So I love this lesson in a recent podcast Guest Application.
Every challenge is a creative opportunity. Here to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories, is Dana Bodine, SVP of marketing at Trustpilot. Thanks for joining me, Dina.
Dana Bodine: Thanks for having me, Daniel.
Daniel Burstein: All right, let's take a look at Dana's background. So you know who I'm talking to. A slew of interesting brands. You were first starting with being the coordinator of licensing and brand management at DC comics. Hence my Superman intro. Associate manager of digital sales development at the New York Times, director of digital marketing for NBC news.
She worked in strategic marketing and I ad Apple as a vice president of corporate marketing and brand development at time, vice president of global B2B marketing Strategic Growth at Mastercard, Vice President of Marketing PR at Berjaya, and for the past three years at Trustpilot. Trustpilot is a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange in 2020 for a reported $211 million in revenue, and Bodine looks after the entire US market, which is the US portion of an international audience of 64 million monthly active users and 300 million reviews on the site.
So, didn't give us a sense of what is your day like as us VP of marketing?
Dana Bodine: Oh, thanks, Danielle. So I wake up and, since most of my colleagues are overseas, half the day is over, so I'm waking up, probably being woken up by my six year old. And I hate to admit it, but I do check slack when I'm at least partially in bed. So for me is like clearing the deck of everything that's coming in and from London and Copenhagen.
Understanding. You know what? I'm walking into from a and it helps me kind of break up my day of the mornings are my global strategy, understanding where the business is, where my big executives are thinking and going and moving, and my afternoons are really us focused. So getting getting on my ton of my calls and and then usually as soon as we hit noon, I get into my US zone and really get to focus on on the US region.
Daniel Burstein: That's great to have all those clocks in your office like we see, like a train station with them on it. And every day.
Dana Bodine: I have it on my, my apple, you know, launch pad. So, and I definitely have it on all of my calendars. And at this point it's become second nature. Like, I understand, like I have a sense of that, like the sun has set in London, I can relax and go have lunch. So yeah, I mean, it's great.
It actually kickstarts my day. And I usually walk in and, and we actually a really interesting communication. You know, there's always our, our senior leaders are, you know, in the morning kind of briefing the leadership team on stuff. So I'm always keeping up of, you know, what our press mentions, what are the things that are on the minds of our, our leadership team and our board and our investors, and then digging into what needs to get done, what leads are coming in, what's our health metrics look like for the US.
So it you know, in a very simple way, it really allows me to start big and then get in our own narrow by the by the end of the day.
Daniel Burstein: Well, that's where you are now. But let's take a look back at your entire career, this journey, see what lessons we can bring from it. The first lesson you mentioned is every challenge is a creative opportunity. How did you learn this lesson?
Dana Bodine: Well, I think this is I mean, this is essentially, you know, why we bully people into writing great briefs if there's no constraints, if the playing field is endless, you know, you can kick a ball in a million different directions, but the constraints, make you focused, make you really understand what you're playing for and how you're going to win.
And there's 1,000,001 examples. And I think this is where marketers have a reputation for a lot of things. But this is the good part where we get to surprise and delight. So when I was at Mastercard, we did a campaign called 1 Billion and Beyond, which was all about including folks in the digital economy. We were filming at the height of Covid.
Literally. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We were filming 15 blocks away in Harlem, and I could not go on the shoot. And it was really interesting because I was watching the live feed for my apartment, like just in my bedroom over there with my whole family, or, and it was it at first when we tackled that shoot, we're like, how do we make this normal?
How do we make this well produced? You always want to have a slick, beautiful story, but then you take a step back and say, that's not the reality we're living in right now. We're showing masks, we're showing the social distancing. We're not going to have a gaggle of executives peering over the shoulders of the local directors and the production crew, and that program, we shot in many different locations around the world and always hired local talent to produce it.
That was very important to us. So I think not the warts and all, but it was the reality at all of of the slick, perfectly constructed story needed to reflect the here and the now and what life was like for folks that were getting their hair done in Harlem. It was at a at a hair salon there. So for me, it was just being it's it's an authenticity check of having those restraints to know that real life isn't perfect.
Real life involves, you know, folks that, you know, have to change the way they think. And do and feel. And, it took a while and Covid for us to actually see the the product of our new reality reflected back on us. And commercials are ads, and it felt like a really authentic moment to really show what functioning a functioning business looks like in the era of Covid.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah, so every challenge is a creative opportunity. That sounds great and I totally agree with you there. But as a leader, is there anything you've done in your career to prep your team for that or to help their team navigate that? Because, for example, when I interviewed Rene Miller, the founder and ECD of the Miller Group, one of her lessons was the more you value yourself, the more likely you are to take calculated risks.
And that is easy where we are in our career now, ride's farther along, but we've got a lot of early stage career people listening, and when they first come across something like either Covid or a challenging creative brief or a budget cut, or a partner that won't let you use their logo or a million different things, right? It can sometimes.
I know when I was younger felt like the end of the world. You had to fight it and you had to do that thing. So now that you're there, long as we said mentioned, you have all this brand experience. Is there anything you do with your team to help prep them or to help them overcome those challenges and have the right creative?
Dana Bodine: I think for part of it is always, and I tell this to my team all the time, have 10 to 20% of your day ready for the unexpected. Yeah, yeah. And then and it look, time is finite. It's nice to think I would have 20% of my time, or at least 20% of your time. That's movable. Or shift a ball and then it takes that time pressure off of like, look, I had this come, this request coming down from my CEO or from one of my customers.
I'm ready for this because I can shift this, or I had this block of time where it's all about I can expect the unexpected. So that immediately just preps the team to have the mindset of 20% of our day, of our week, of our month should be that unexpected time. And sometimes it flexes more and sometimes it flexes less.
So it's giving people the permission to, to to carve out that time and space for the challenges or for the unplanned. And then I also are really focused on, if that 20% isn't being used, go take a walk, go sign off, go go cook, go hang out with your family and friends because there will be times and we're going to ask for extra 20% of time outside of work.
And equally, as much as you're asking people to flex and to and to go above and beyond at the times when that's not needed to be able to dial back and get that time back. So I think bringing in that, that, that that feeling of flexibility, understanding and and reasonableness, reason, reason, all this is, is really important that you know, that you understand your people as true humans and they'll expand when they need to, and then they'll contract when they don't need to.
Daniel Burstein: But that is so true because we can't always have our foot on the gas, right? I've worked at an agency and, you know, you get a brief sometimes hot, right? So then a new thing came along. It was hot, hot and hot, hot hot, hot and hot. And it just became ridiculous. Everything can't be hot all the time.
I like that getting the attitude you've got there then. So that's kind of your relationship to your teams and what let's talk about now, you mentioned building a relationship with commercial partners. This case. Yes. Have you done that? How do you learn that?
Dana Bodine: So I think part of it is I have something in my DNA or in my soul or whatever, where you want to talk about it that likes to win. And I think I have a I have a few flavors of sales in my bones. So I that always gets me excited. I want to win. I want to close a deal, I want to drive revenue.
So I already have that driving force within me. I want to create beautiful stories and and bring things to life, but I want to drive revenue. So I think I have that innate where I can connect with, with commercial folks in that way. And then two is, is really making sure that you a full seat at the table.
And that's not easy and it's not something that has been a given. You know, fortunately, with my sales, my commercial partner in the US now, we we work very closely together. But you really have to especially, I think, in the past now with performance marketing, you know, there's been a real clear, measurable outcome of the work that we've been doing.
But in the earlier days, where the funnel was a little bit cloudier, you really had to earn that space at the table. And I had a really great mentor, Greg Booz, and at Mastercard, who said, you know, don't look at sales materials or collateral as the monkey on your back. It's your ticket to entry. And I always thought that was just so effing brilliant, because, yes, creating sales, there's always the things that everyone has to do as a marketer that is, you know, checking the box.
But that level of engagement with the sales team, of providing them either with education or providing something that will eventually get to a customer that is incredibly important. That's your ticket to entry, and that's a one way to get a seat at the table. And then all of a sudden, you're a key player in making sure that the commercial team fully understands the product and the audience and that everything that a customer is seeing, how it's relayed through a commercial partner, is exactly the story that you want to tell.
Daniel Burstein: So, as mentioned, you've had many impressive brand roles in your career. Can you give us a sense what do you do in that first week or month of the role to build a relationship? Because I've heard kind of a similar lesson from Jean Hopkins, the chief revenue officer. One screener I she said, build strong CFO relationships like that was a real focus of hers.
And she just told the story of how, when she would come in that first week or month and role, that was her focus. And in one place, for example, they had 40 events that they were running. And so because she had that strong relationship, the CFO, she's able to sit down and explain why the budget for travel and entertainment for those events, which was coming all out of the marketing department, should maybe come out of each individual department and really helped her budget.
Yeah. But so for you, Dana, take us into that first week or month and role, what do you do to build those strong relationships with commercial partners?
Dana Bodine: It's it's really that's really good advice, the CFO part. So I'm going to keep that to. Yeah. Is is really it's, it's conversations especially to like you when you're working with commercial folks, they will talk. You know, it's just opening up of having coffee. Have it with every level of the organization. Ask them to take you through like, you know, really the basic stuff of what keeps you up at night.
What's the story you have a hard time telling when you're asking for XYZ. What's getting in the way? What are you wasting your time in? I think especially with a new marketing person coming in or marketing. You know, when I came into Trustpilot, it was a very different type of world for our U.S region. And you know, with change people.
Someone once told me that people don't fear change, they fear loss. So I tried to really understand what were they afraid of losing? What kind of support did they need for marketing and what did they not have that I could provide something that they never thought they needed before? So really asking lots of questions and really being tactical in the sense of what will make en masse this sales floor, it's easier for them to do their job.
It's more seamless to have a conversation with a customer and how I can have those quick, even dumb wins where I'm just making their their life a little bit easier. And, you know, I'm selling them on me and my team and our eventual strategy. So, you know, I have to the pay off the promise. But again, it starts with it's really just like extracting a brief from their brains and then replaying it back to them and having a plan.
Daniel Burstein: So what's it don't win? I like that term. I have never heard that term.
Dana Bodine: Dumb win. I always do dumplings. Like, sometimes like in the past we've had things of like, we don't know what marketing does. I'm like, okay, every, every and every Friday we're going to have a summary of all the key tools, things you should read coming out of marketing. And it was really just a summary of some of the work that we've done.
And it was all from the focus of what the sales need. So it wasn't about like, hey, marketing win. It's like, here are five new case studies. Here's where we get the latest stats on our audience and why this matters. Like a kind of like an Axios Smart Brevity Ask newsletter. And it was just, you know, a well curated email inbox that was spread to the entire sales floor.
And that's a dumb win. And it's just about how do you really do some very simple things to solve some simple, problems? And yeah, there's I've, I've made a career on dumb wins.
Daniel Burstein: I'd like to I'm probably more of a smart, Another place where those relationships can really matter is when things get intense. As you said, sometimes go for a walk during the 20%, because there's other times it's going to be on 120% or more. So, you said you learn to stay calm, under fire and, tight deadlines.
How did you learn this and how did relationships help your.
Dana Bodine: I think I think the biggest thing, especially being a marketer really at the inner you know, I started in marketing back in the wild west of early digital marketing. Right? We were selling home page takeovers and, and, you know, impressions. You know, I was media planning, you know, dinosaur. So I was you're always a marketer at the intersection of technology, of commercial, of engineering.
So there's a lot of things that you have to operationalize that you don't actually fully understand. And that's where the relationship piece came in, where I can say, look, I'm I'm a marketer. Please explain this to me like I'm five. Got it. Now I need to regurgitate that and said, I'm going to explain this to a customer like they're five.
So I think honestly, the interpersonal relationships down to the four person that's helping me get my laptop set up to the person that's cleaning the bathroom, that's setting up lunch, every single touchpoint of of at least the office environment when I was, you know, doing a Spac announcement for a startup, I was working at, it was I was literally on the phone with our IT manager, you know, halfway across the world and was given a coffee by someone in facilities that helped me out in the middle of the night.
And that's that's the village you have to create, and you also have to pay it back. You have to be there when someone is in their crisis moment or in their moment where they're about to go live with a website ahead of the market's opening. So I think, you know, I think Adam Grant, give and take it like that, that whole mantra of how much you can give to others, it all just comes back tenfold.
And that's what I try to see, especially when I'm really frustrated at work or feeling like I'm useless or something's really, you know, not connecting for me. I take a step back and this is something I've had to teach myself. It's like, what can I do to help other people are there's something I can make someone's life easier, do a little project and then hopefully get that, that gets paid forward in the future.
Daniel Burstein: And was there any of those kind of more commercial partner level people that really helped with the Spac? Because I'm less familiar with SPACs, but definitely when you're going public, I mean, there is a set of regulations and legal and I mean, there's so much involved that is outside of marketing that you got to do. Right, because, yeah, I mean, it becomes.
Dana Bodine: A.
Daniel Burstein: Liability. Yes, exactly. So I wonder when you're going through this, it's intense. You're trying to get a website like all that is going on. Any of those commercial partner level relationships helping you navigate that.
Dana Bodine: So I think not not so much commercial commercial. I'm like, hold your horses, don't sell or talk about anything. As we're making this very sensitive announcements, I always and I actually push them to the back burner. My my war room at that time was my legal team, my investor relations team, like the my closest companion was our head of legal that was doing all of our SEC filings.
And that's someone that I had never worked before to different organization. And that was my most important relationship and really understanding. Again, it's just like anything else. What's the problem statement? What's what are we trying to solve for? What are we trying to protect ourselves from. And then how do we say that in a way five different times.
And then look at the risk associated with each. It was actually a really interesting exercise because it you know, from a marketer's perspective, you want to go big and say the biggest, broadest way that your product is doing something amazing. But in a really sensitive situation like that, there's so much risk involved. You have and that's where the boundaries come in.
And making you more creative. You have to be very specific of what you can and can't say, and then be creative and where you can play what.
Daniel Burstein: How is it reining in the whole sales folks, too? Because there's no time. Your your company's talked about more than when you're going through going public, a Spac, whatever. I mean you're in the news constantly. They want to get out there I'm sure, and talk to clients. So how did that work?
Dana Bodine: So I mean, first of all, it's a lot of that part. It's very much top down. Like, you know, we we scare the living daylights out of everybody. I'm like, hey, are all of your correspondences discoverable? And this is a time I think that's worth so important. And this is where working with PR and your agency partners is so important.
Like you have to let your media tell that story, whether it's your the release that you do for investor relations, it's the release you do to finance media. And that's where you know, you're you're not going to if you have a commercial team raring to go, I give them the tools to be like, hey, we're publishing, you know, we're going live on PR at 9 a.m. we know we have an embargoed story that's going to hit an hour later.
Wait, send your customers that article. Don't set up meetings, but give them something. Throw them a bone. And that's where you really have to have a preplan to say, you know, like, we're not going to be able to rely on our normal song and dance and collateral, but we can speak through our communications channels, and that's the tools that we have to give our commercial team.
Daniel Burstein: And I always love looking at people's backgrounds and the other kind of places they've worked in their career and, and seeing what they can learn from it. And you have that media experience, and I wonder if anything from that media experience help you in these tight deadline environments. Because, for example, when I interviewed, Sydney Van Horn, who's a global head of marketing communications at McKinsey and company, she told the story.
She worked at CBS news, and she gave an announcement to the, the person reading the news to read as obituary, and she got the person's name slightly wrong on an obituary. And so from that, she learned it's important to take a beat. We've got all these intense deadlines in media. You've got to take AP, and we've talked about you New York Times time, all these all these media brands you worked at there, anything that you took from there.
Now when you're working on these intense marketing deadlines?
Dana Bodine: Yeah, I mean, I think I took, a certain amount of it, rewrote my brain and some of it for the positive and some of it I think, for the negative. I thrive on short deadlines, like when it's like we had a FTC announcement at the, I bet almost about a year ago about fake reviews online. And we had to have a very real time response that we were in the moment we were watching news happen.
I loved it like that was I was like, this is game time. This is their Super Bowl. I was doing what, minute by minute like, but I also know I can't sustain a life that way. Yeah. And some things require time to think and marinate and not everything is is a down to the wire thing. So I think I'm inherently drawn to short deadlines, really going big and going home.
Like I have that drama for media and I've had to learn to back into, especially when I moved to Mastercard, where I really went for the longer term of, wow, I can work on a campaign for nine months, as opposed to turning around a proposal or a concept in nine hours in media where I had before. So it really it really stretches my brain.
But I really thrive in the media moments, in the times when it it's go time, like when we're doing a Spac announcement, like I was all for it. Like I couldn't do it every day. But at that moment, that was when, you know, really the the rubber hit the road. I also think I think about things and headlines very much, even though the marketer and I've been taking on PR in my most recent roles.
But I'm, you know, a marketer at heart. I do see I see things through a series of headlines and news and think about things and snapshots and stories, and then I also think it's incredibly motivating. I had a boss once who at the New York Times, said to us, and I was at the New York Times at the tail end of the war in Iraq, and she said, look, every single news organization has left Iraq.
The work that you're doing, the money that you bring in right now, my little decks that I'm doing is a 23, 24 year old at the New York Times is helping keep the lights on. And our Baghdad bureau. And that's important. And that level of, you know, it's dramatic, it's gravity, it's storytelling. Motivated, made, motivated. It worked till 11:00 at night.
It motivated me that that there was this higher purpose of we were helping spread the truth and actually, you know, get information out there when other media companies couldn't afford to do it anymore. So I think that the narrative around it, the bigness of the mission, helps me then articulate the importance of what we do to the teams that I work with.
Daniel Burstein: What a beautiful connection that that boss made to connect what you were doing. I mean, that's that's what we all need to be doing with our teams for everything. But that's a beautiful connection.
Dana Bodine: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Burstein: Well, we just talked about some of the things that that Dana made and her currents and lessons we can learn. In just a moment, we're going to talk about some of the lessons from some of the people she collaborated with. But first, I should mention that the how I Minute and marketing podcast is underwritten by Mech Labs.
I, the parent company of Marketing Sherpa. You can get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry, and our AI guild and the community to collaborate with. Grab your free three month scholarship to the AI Guild at Join Mech Labs ai.com ads joint Mech Labs. I.com, Mech labs ai.com to get artificial intelligence working for you.
All right, the first person you mentioned kind of briefly earlier, Greg Boson from Mastercard. You said you learned from Greg to you can get a seat at the table by creating sales material. So you kind of hinted at that before. You want to kind of take us a little deeper down the road.
Dana Bodine: Yeah. I think, you know, I think again, all of our jobs are incredibly administrative sales and commercials administrative. So I think, you know, marketers always roll their eyes at doing the one sheets and the Dax. And again, it's not my favorite activity, but it's your ticket to entry on that, that commercial roller coaster. It gives you a seat at the table where you have to in order to create those things.
You have to get closer to the customer problem the customer need. You have to understand what you're creating and whether you're filling a knowledge gap on the commercial side, or you're actually speaking directly to a customer. And it really helps break down the barriers because I think, you know, commercial folks are inherently competitive and protective of of their customers.
That lets you in. That's, that's that's the the the key that unlocks. Okay. Now I have to lay my cards out in front of you. So he really positioned it as a source of power rather than kind of the subservient support role that marketing sometimes this position does. And I think I play with that too. Sometimes I have to say, look, you got to be honest with me and tell me good, bad and ugly what we're dealing with.
So I can help enable you to to have great conversations. And it opens things wide up that it would not have had the opportunity to do if I was just in my marketing build in power. So I think it gets closer to real talk and it gets closer to really, and, and I think part of the, the, the always divide with marketing and in commercial is a lack of empathy.
And I think is, is the closer you can get to helping enable commercial to do their job, you really get closer and and being able to empathize with their day to day.
Daniel Burstein: I will mention to you've had some managers who did an excellent job positioning how your role fits in. If we all had all these managers of our career, that's fantastic.
Dana Bodine: You have to know how I'm motivated. So they're probably like, all right, Dana needs to get up and do a really annoying project. We have to make it. We got to bring like, you know, Spielberg level, storytelling to get her to do anything. That's probably what they have to do.
Daniel Burstein: Oh, good. Empathy. Gary, talk about seat at the table with the sales team. How do you get a seat at the table when it comes to new product development? Because when I interviewed Stuart Benton, the president and CEO of Bradford Soap, he told me that new product development lives within the marketing organization at his company because from an R&D perspective, he wants to deliver stuff that will sell, right?
Of course not be that way. Sometimes it's totally disconnected. They're building something. We just got to sell it. Although we know the customer wants something else. Yeah. So in your car, do you have any examples of how you figured out how to kind of get a seat at the table when it comes to product development?
Dana Bodine: I think what's really and I've been you know, I was at Apple who does, you know, zero product. They design things that they know people will like. Rather than asking people what they think they were like. It's really what's interesting now, I think, and being what I love about my role now is that our target audience is me as selfishly, I there's no learning curve that we're selling to marketers and leaders.
So having that credibility with the product team, one I you know, in my former roles, I would have been purchasing Trustpilot, and a user and, you know, deeply invested in the success of my trust score for my business. So one, there's, you know, that's kind of like a canned. Hey, I'm, I'm your in-house target audience person.
And I think to, I think what the marketer can really offer and be and super helpful in the product organization is again, with having a really close commercial relationship, it gives another shade of insight into what customers want that is outside the transaction. So the product folks will talk to commercial and I'll hear from commercial, hey, this is what they want.
They want it for this price. They need it ASAP because our competitors are doing XYZ. I think a marketer, when you're close to the commercial function and you would really talk to a lot of customers, you can give those shades of gray of like, actually, it's not about the price, it's about the value that they're actually they're actually driving here.
And the time to value is six months when we really need it to get it to three. So what Dimensionals is the commercial feedback? And I think that's, that's where you get the table of, of you having a voice that is adding context and color to the normal inputs that they're going to have already. And again, for me, you know, product development starts in marketing because our customers are all marketers.
And, so, you know, that to me is a bit of a slam dunk. I that's a, that's an easy answer for, for Meyer.
Daniel Burstein: All you've got to do for that. Well, let's talk about that. You talk about customers. How do we get to know customers and how do we know what they want? You said you learn from Alicia Kubik at Trustpilot to truly be customer obsessed, respect the customer's time. So what does this mean? And how do you do it every day.
Dana Bodine: I think, well, first of all, just talk to customers. And I think, you know, I, I have had the opportunity to sit with a lot of customers now and really and they love talking to me because I get to geek out over marketing, having conversations like this of like, oh my God, remember we were buying leaderboards 15 years ago and how crazy that we couldn't measure anything.
So I think one, having an authentic experience to an a real conversation and to coming to the table with value to say, hey, cool, you guys, our customer, thank you for your business. But how did you guys know you haven't tapped into X, y, Z that's included? Here are some best practices I can have. Our creative director walk you through.
How to create compelling ads that drive ten x click through response than you would have had otherwise. Like how? How I can give. I think the giving part is really important. Where again, I'm not getting on the phone just to like hobnob and and talk shop, which is important. Everyone needs that. But also what can I leave behind that actually this at that 30 minutes, that hour with Dana made me use this product more smartly, you know, made me understand other use cases, made me rethink about the way I use this creative.
It's like what I can give and what I can leave behind. And what Alicia, you know, drives home and she oversees not just the marketing function, but the customer experience function now is like, you know, we know this. We're in the attention economy. We know we're competing for time more than even we're competing for money of like the value of that 32nd video of that two minute time.
Someone is reading a thought leadership piece that is a gift that is precious. What are you leaving with them to make that that time spent worthwhile? Not just throwing stuff together and saying, this is a written piece of content. Are you really making those five ten minutes worthy of that audience's time and taking that level of gravity? And again, back to the dramatics of what are you?
This is someone's time that they're not spending walking their dog. They're not cooking dinner. They're not with their kids or what you're doing important enough for them to take a pause and spend time with your brand.
Daniel Burstein: And how do you determine that it's you that talks to a customer, like when, you know, customer comes up and it's like it's going to be Dana is going to be someone else. Like what? Why is is why in what situations are you the most valuable use of their time?
Dana Bodine: Yeah, I'm the most valuable to some time. I mean, because I come from a finance and fintech world, I've been working a lot with our fintech and payments clients. So for me, you know, especially when they're there, we work really closely with, you know, basically the, the, the challenger brands, the, the new innovative products. They're not you know, it's probably before they're going to be acquired by a big, financial service company.
And that's where I was before. So for me, it's really easy to speak the language to be like, look, I know you have this much budget and this amount of scrutiny. Let's look at like all the the data you need to surface back up to your CFO and back into how to get that. So I'm most useful in, you know, really those fintech conversations where they're, we're looking at the margins and trying to build trust very quickly.
I get it. I live, breathe and and eat and sleep that when it's somebody else. And I think it's also part of knowing your team and knowing uniquely what's so wonderful. Like I had a team member who, you know is the Queen dog mom, and we had a long discussion with, you know, a bunch of pet focused clients and event sponsorships and like, we need to send her now.
Like she is our chief press officer. Yes. She's probably like less experienced here, there or wherever. But she has the passion, the heart to actually connect. And, you know, someone on my team who, you know, has worked with international customers for the past seven years and understands not just the US market, but globally will go work with the multinationals.
So I think having that deep connection, as you can tell, like having some sort of emotional connection, makes it more authentic, more real and more exciting for the because, like anything else, it's not rocket science. Whatever someone needs to get up to speed on how to, you know, measure conversion rates for a fintech versus a CPG company, we can figure that out.
I think finding the the right human to have that, that that connection to the client, really comes through in those conversations.
Daniel Burstein: Well, what you're saying I don't want overlook this guy. I think it's a brilliant use of your team and understanding deeper, not just, you know, that person is in charge of the CRM or whatever it is, but understanding who that whole person is deeper, and then looking at your customers and understanding them deeper and doing a little matchmaking, I won't I won't sing the song from Fiddler on the roof.
We talked about, we talked about I share the name, one of the actors, but you are doing a little matchmaking there, and that's very impressive. All right. But some, marketers even codes might be a little nervous getting on the phone with customers, talking to them. As we mentioned, you do have that lovely media experience. Is there any questions you ask or anything that's really worked well to either get the conversation rolling or I'll give you an example.
I interviewed, Nathan Landis, the vice president of marketing at octane, and one of her lessons was to market effectively. You have to think beyond what your product does. You have to understand the role it plays in your customer's lives. So when she started that, and they're like financing for like, I don't even know these called like the quad hoppers in the powersports kind of motors, sports type of stuff like dealerships.
It's all out. They do the financing for it. So we're talking to these owners of these, you know, motorsports, franchises. She did not have that experience at all. And when she got in some of these conversations, she realized a lot of the most helpful things was just understanding their lives more like the the bigger piece, not just her product.
And the calls would go like an extra half hour because they get into that very human element of things. But for you, Dana, do you have any good go to questions or.
Dana Bodine: I think I think that's spot on. I think understanding and I think getting out of the, the navel gazing centricity of what about my product? Everyone's going always going to ask what can what could our product or experience change to help you? I think finding out, like, what are the big things that challenge you every day? You're waking up as the head of marketing for, you know, maybe bare delivery.com and you sell teddy bears across the US.
Trustpilot may not be the product that you're thinking of, but, you know, for example, it's the shipping provider. I'm not in shipping. That's not what our core product does, but we can actually glean some really interesting audience insights from shipping providers based on some ways we can tweak our product, and we can actually work with a customer to do that.
So that's where it's like really challenging, asking about their whole problem statement, not just in regards to how you're quote unquote relevant, because one, I think that's self-serving. You're not actually interested in their problems. Yeah. And then two, I think that opens up a new opportunity to say, wait, could our could my product or anything near it help solve something or be a piece of the puzzle that helps solve that?
And then that's also valuable when you talk to a product team to give them that color of like, look, if we had custom tagging and we were able to look at, you know, all reviews that had to do with shipping issues with this teddy bear conglomerate. What, you know, could we service set up for a customer like, oh, yeah, we could totally do that.
So I think it's really, you know, there's times where you want to be really focus and there's times you want to just completely let open up all the guardrails. And I think when you're talking to a customer, giving them as much wide space to really express themselves. Again, it helps you empathize with what they think about day in and day out.
And, and it gets you outside of your tunnel vision of just your product.
Daniel Burstein: You're also talking about context and, and, another lesson you mentioned was ideas are only powerful when they come with context. And that's what you're really doing. Well, there is understanding the customer context. You said you learned from Christine Woo at Time Incorporated. How did you learn this from Christine?
Dana Bodine: So Christine is great. I mean, we were almost yin and yang. And, you know, early part of my career was like, Dino is the brainstorm or she's the one that comes up with ideas. We think of big, wacky ideas. We have campaigns, we run them. But I was based in very little data besides after the fact measurements, it wasn't really driven by any type of survey data or quantitative or qualitative or anything trend work.
And, and Christine really paved the way and taught me about like, look, a grain of sand. I need to learn. But what's a core truth, which is what data points are that keep your house up and keep, keep, keep the foundation of of the big, most beautiful creative idea that you're trying to build. What are the foundations that resonate?
So we did a body of work where we looked at, you know, just trends and how people were consuming media and storytelling and created a whole thought leadership piece around some some key trends in how people are experiencing culture. And for me, that was and that also too, it wasn't a wide we came with a few set of data points and facts that we were able to define these different trends and then built ideas on top of it.
And it was it was really interesting to me because then it it drove real importance and relevance for what we're doing and why it matters. So she brought, you know, me close. I was always the gal that's like, I don't want to see the numbers. I don't want to, you know, but that's again, another ticket to ride is having the data to say, look, customers are changing the way they're buying.
You know, media budgets might be up, but media, it's more expensive. So it may look like there's more to work with. There actually isn't. So here's where we got to, you know, create some space for our customers. And she really taught me how to, like, lean into it and see it as just like another opportunity to gain credibility with your audience.
Daniel Burstein: That's when I think a context to. The other thing I think about is marketing's role in protecting the value proposition and brand. And I wonder if you've ever been in any of those conversations with other departments and you had to stick up there. And I'll give you one quick example of a sample from just my life. I wrote once a customer, customer first marketing prioritizes customer experiences over upsells because I had this specific experience of Barnes Noble, sort of your Barnes Noble shopper there.
But I would go into Barnes Noble, and every time I would buy something, they would the cashier would be like, hey, do you have a membership? And they always try to sell me on the membership. And then one day I went in with my daughter and she bought some, like an anime thing or something like that. Instead of the cashier doing that, the cashier actually had a conversation with my daughter and they kind of geeked out.
And we're big fans. And I kind of got thinking, like, you know, most of the stuff I could just buy online easier and cheaper, right? But I come in here into a bookstore because it's more of an experience. But somewhere in that grand scheme of that company not to pick on them. I love Barnes Noble. They decided that we need these upsells, we need to sell these memberships.
Right. And there was a meeting, and they were the right people in the meeting and all that. And in that meeting, there wasn't a marketing or brand leader that said, hold on, what is our value proposition of our offering? And yes, while it's important to sell upsells, we need to protect that value proposition, which is probably experience based.
If people are going to the store instead of being online. Okay, that's a long way to say. That's just my experience. You know, in your in your experience, like, have you you had all these great conversations about working with all these different departments and doing that. Have you ever had to, you know, stand up and say, hey, these things make sense from a business perspective and margin whatever.
But there's a bigger picture. There's this brand we've been building in our nine month campaign. There's a value proposition, and by going for this goal, like we're missing that piece, or am I just way off on this? You can shoot me down to.
Dana Bodine: No, I mean, absolutely, I think I mean, even when we deal with it with our day in and day and at Trustpilot, trust is our is in our in our name. It is so critical. It's what we offer the tools for businesses to build with their customers and it gets so tactical sometimes when we're even thinking about how we're conversing with folks on LinkedIn or other social media channels.
So one of our key tenants, or Trustpilot is we don't delete authentic reviews. So let me kind of take a step back of like, all right. We're going to you know, everyone has trolls on social media. Everyone has to deal with all sorts of challenging conversations. We have to take that value and take that wherever we are. We're not going to delete weird comments in the plot, things that are on platforms elsewhere than our own, because that's still the core truth of, you know, we don't hide real feedback, whether it's rational or irrational.
So Trustpilot has done a really great job of teaching me to the nth degree of how we take that value forward and everything that we do. Are we making sure that every single ad that we're putting out there, like, yes, shots from the rooftops, that everything is great, but we have an ultra extra trusted standard of with this pass muster on our platform.
And that's what we hold ourselves to across the board. So not deleting of comments, making sure we're really grounded and be able to to, to cite our data, making sure that we're rooted in real experiences. And that's and again, that it gets a bit pedantic sometimes and it gets a bit, you know, like, all right, how much can we talk about trust?
And I'm just trying to post an article on LinkedIn. But, you know, it's it's one way to drive a culture. And then and then once it becomes inherently part of your personality and how you view the world, then brand management is, is taking care of on its own, because everyone has that filter that they built in themselves, and everyone in organization is actually really talented at good.
And being able to to see that wherever they go.
Daniel Burstein: That's great. So we talk about many different things, about what it means to be a marketer. From all your stories and all these lessons, if you had to break it down. Dana, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer listening?
Dana Bodine: I think listening more than speaking, which we don't have a great track record of, myself included, you know, we love to talk and we love the storyteller, but I think the most important thing is listening. And, you know, being able to hear from your commercial partners, your product partners, and most importantly, your customers and being able to articulate that back and show value of the time that they spent to give that information to you, that you do something useful with it.
So it's listening and then being able to do something really powerful to it, being flexible again, having a 20%, 30%, whatever it is to expect the unexpected because the world and technology is changing faster than we can create our marketing plans. And that's what keeps things exciting. So I think I'm a huge fan of the marketing generalists of being a functional, can run, can jump, can fly.
But maybe like, you know, I can only do a little bit of karate myself. Everyone's going to have their specialties. But having across the board some of the, the core, competencies of a marketer, and I think being able to write, you have to just be able to write and I, you know, maybe I sound old school in the world of ChatGPT and Grammarly and everything else, but like, I think very especially now, people are sussing out what's authentic and what's not and being able to have it true, beautifully written correspondence, whether it's just an email to a customer, whether it's an ad in Times Square, you have to be able to write.
Daniel Burstein: And writing is thinking, don't outsource your thing. Yeah, yeah.
Dana Bodine: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Daniel Burstein: Well, we got there. Well, so if you had to give a Trustpilot review to this interview, Dana, what did I do? How did we do here?
Dana Bodine: I would give it a 4.8 out of five. We're close because honestly, what we find is, is, consumers trust a 4.8 score more. They need a coach. Like they trust a five star score. Because five feels perfect. It feels like there's something not. How could how could an insurance company, how could a podcast, how could anything be perfect?
And then. But the 4.8 shows some humility and some maybe there was mistakes, maybe it wasn't perfect, but it's real. And I would choose a 4.8 business over a five star business any day that we.
Daniel Burstein: Well, I'll take a 4.8. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time today. Dude. I really enjoy this.
Dana Bodine: Thank you Daniel I appreciate it.
Daniel Burstein: Thanks to everyone for listening.
Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing rpa.com and.
Join our thousands of weekly case study readers.
Enter your email below to receive MarketingSherpa news, updates, and promotions:
Note: Already a subscriber? Want to add a subscription?
Click Here to Manage Subscriptions
Get Better Business Results With a Skillfully Applied Customer-first Marketing Strategy
The customer-first approach of MarketingSherpa’s agency services can help you build the most effective strategy to serve customers and improve results, and then implement it across every customer touchpoint.
Get More Info >MECLABS AI
Get headlines, value prop, competitive analysis, and more.
Use the AI for FREE (for now) >Marketer Vs Machine
Marketer Vs Machine: We need to train the marketer to train the machine.
Watch Now >Live, Interactive Event
Join Flint McGlaughlin for Design Your Offer on May 22nd at 1 pm ET. You’ll learn proven strategies that drive real business results.
Get Your Scholarship >Free Marketing Course
Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (with this free online marketing course)
See Course >Project and Ideas Pitch Template
A free template to help you win approval for your proposed projects and campaigns
Get the Template >Six Quick CTA checklists
These CTA checklists are specifically designed for your team — something practical to hold up against your CTAs to help the time-pressed marketer quickly consider the customer psychology of your “asks” and how you can improve them.
Get the Checklists >Infographic: How to Create a Model of Your Customer’s Mind
You need a repeatable methodology focused on building your organization’s customer wisdom throughout your campaigns and websites. This infographic can get you started.
Get the Infographic >Infographic: 21 Psychological Elements that Power Effective Web Design
To build an effective page from scratch, you need to begin with the psychology of your customer. This infographic can get you started.
Get the Infographic >Receive the latest case studies and data on email, lead gen, and social media along with MarketingSherpa updates and promotions.
