Meet Cyrus Molavi, Marketing Analyst and Automation Specialist at TERAPEAK
What’s your favorite part about being a marketer or about the discipline of marketing?
What I like about marketing is that it's in transition--it's becoming more about speaking to the right people, at the right time, in the right way, and then measuring your success. To me, it no longer means buying media time and presenting your products in a way an average person might appreciate. It's now about reaching the long tail--speaking directly to a person's situation at a certain point in time, and keeping them interested by providing the information they want to hear. What really gets me going is the data that is now created from these new marketing actions, and all of the insights and improvements you can make from using these metrics.
What steps led you to your role today?
Studying business at university, I was taught to make many processes automatic, and to move from ad hoc action towards routinized effort. Marketing Automation appealed to this training, and my natural tendency to make decisions supported by data-driven facts made it easy for me to adopt. Eloqua tends to attract product evangelists, so it's not surprising that our Director of Marketing was the one who introduced it to me, and made the case for how it could help our business.
Where do you go for inspiration and new ideas?
I follow content created by a number of professional thought leaders such as Eloqua's Steven Woods, Joel York of chaotic-flow.com as well as other marketing blogs, but some of my most salient ideas come from analyzing our marketing program results, and gleaning ideas when segmenting our contact database. If the audience responds (or could respond) very well to a certain tactic, that's inspiring, and it tends to give birth to even more ideas.
Have you seen a great marketing campaign recently that really blew you away?
What consistently blows me away is the amount of free press and advertising that Twitter and Facebook receive on a regular basis. It's been at the point for a while now where they will get a plug in the middle of an expensive TV spot for a completely unrelated product--"Join us on Facebook," and the like. Granted, it's not a marketing campaign, but it is a great demonstration of word-of-mouth marketing (taken to a corporate level.) French regulators certainly impressed me when they turned this observation into a news restriction, but I'm surprised we haven't made our marketing calls-to-action de-branded. We never used to say "Google us!", did we?
What’s your favorite thing about Eloqua (either the product or the company)?
I love how I can now access and analyze our contact database without the use of developer time or resources. This has been especially valuable for us. Combine that with collateral creation, automated programs, and web profiling, and I'm a pretty happy user.
Can you share one thing on your ‘bucket list’?
I enjoy wilderness journeys--having done many hiking and canoeing trips in the past. What I'd like to do someday is combine my outdoor experience with the rock-climbing skills I've learned over the last couple years into a full-fledged mountain climb. I want to go from valley to peak in a day or two using what I've learned to get me through.