Share Your Journey to Marketing

[Anonymous]

I completed my first "professional" design for a city festival using Microsoft Publisher at age 10. I've never been able to turn off the "Marketer" part of my brain, for better or for worse!

[Jason_Hamilton1]

I started out in Psych, then bus admin Marketing, then web development, SEO, Social etc....  Marketo gave me the ability to use all of these disciplines.  Early in my dev days at an agency I worked at, I created an in house email marketing application that we used for our clients (this was prior to constant contact and Mailchimp and all of the other free/low cost options), that earned me the tile of SPAM Master Jay.  If somebody told me 15 years ago that my career would revolve around a tool that is heavily based on email marketing, i would have laughed at them.  Both I and the industry have come along way.

Looking forward to where the industry is going!

[Anonymous]

I started out in Property Management in roles that were mostly sales, and when I realized I was more interested in the lead generation side than closing, I switched to marketing and got a gig at a software company. Luckily, my company was famous for hiring people with no previous experience! My first responsibility was to implement Marketo at the company, and I have been loyal (to Marketo, that is) ever since.

[Anna_Bruning1]

I had a meandering route to Marketing Ops. I started doing event planning for a non-profit in NYC then jumped to international student recruitment for Navitas. We had a lean team so I was doing sales and marketing. Our corporate headquarters got SFCD and Marketo and I dove right in, building out event programs and landing pages for social media campaigns. The experience I developed there helped me take over all the digital marketing for our 7 US/Canada schools then it was a natural evolution to move to Marketing Operations at Dyn, where I head up their Marketo instance. My experience working in Marketo was a huge part of my success in moving along to different positions.

[Anonymous]

I was a writer, and I transitioned into Sales and then Marketing when the department was more "art" than "science." It's amazing to see how the field has transformed in a relatively short period of time.

[Joe_Reitz]

I joined the Marine Corps my junior year of college, thinking I was going to be a career Marine officer. Fast forward a bit to a blown out knee and a runaway love affair with my now-wife, and you know... plans change. My degree was actually in advertising, and I had previously interned as a marketing coordinator prior to the military. I was kind of a catch-all marketer (still am), but really started out doing a lot of creative... copywriting, design, front-end web development... all the cool jobs that small companies give to young kids because they figure "eh, it's not that important, and they probably understand it better anyway."

I shot weddings on the side for a few years, and became a little better versed in digital marketing on teh interwebz. Eventually, I took a more strategic role in marketing, and decided I didn't have the bandwidth (or desire) to spend all my free time taking photos that weren't deeply personal and fulfilling. That job got me into marketing automation with a different provider (read: the cheaper chicken), and I began to look for a company and role that better utilized the technology platform and would be open to doing bleeding edge marketing as opposed to operating within a lead lifecycle model from the 70s.

So I began with STANLEY right as they began implementing Marketo a couple years ago, and the rest has been a wild ride!

[Amber_Hobson]

My marketing introduction was really by accident! I studied biology with a math minor back in college while working as a zookeeper! When I started here as a sales analyst, I slowly started learning everything that I could about the business and now I do our marketing analytics and run our databases!

[Ashleigh_Davis]

Technology is really what attracted me to marketing, and ultimately, into the technology sector. While in college, I was convinced I'd be working in the music industry my entire life....but after a few years, realized it wasn't as glamorous as it once seemed. I then worked a few odd marketing gigs before stepping into the technology sector and stumbling upon the opportunity to work within Marketo. It's been 5 years now!

[Casey_Grimes]

Had a...very strange journey to marketing: started out in print journalism, but that industry died (and is now something of a shambling zombie.) Saw the writing on the wall during the first few rounds of layoffs over the course of a couple of years and decided to formalize my computer knowledge. Succumbed to the great journalism purge of the mid-2000s. Went into secure data management while heading back to university to study how digital interaction was affecting societal organization, influence and change—but since the study of digital communities hadn't been formalized then, I just had a weirdly specialized liberal arts degree.

In order to move to the West Coast, I found a job that combined online community management and data management, but the company went under and, looking for a job I took an 8-week consulting gig to help a brand establish an online community for their marketing department. On the second week of that gig, the brand had an international publicity crisis, and I was the only person who knew anything about data, so they threw me into marketing to help manage the crisis from a digital perspective.

And I just never left.

[Dan_Prokop]

I was always playing in bands when I was younger, and I was the guy who just naturally gravitated towards leading our marketing related activities.  Art/design was my favorite subject in school, so I would design promo items that we needed and taught myself how to work on websites.  In my freshman year of college, I had a long conversation with my writing professor about choosing the right major for me, and I took him up on his recommendation to get my degree in Public Relations while still doing a lot of media art classes.  I loved the strategic thinking and communication elements that I learned there, and after graduating, I combined all of these skills when I took a job as the solo marketing position at a small B2B company. 

Since then, I've moved to a slightly larger company that's much more focused on growth, which has given me a great opportunity to develop processes and have a bigger impact.  My love of technology and obsessiveness about efficiency led me to implement Salesforce and Marketo, which has been such a fun and interesting addition to my role.