💬 Ben: Genya, it’s great to finally meet! What are you up to now at Adyen?

💬 Genya: Sure! So I'm the Digital Marketing Manager, part of the Global Acquisition Marketing team, at Adyen, an end-to-end payments solution.  

I’d describe myself as a bridge between the local and global marketing teams with a core focus on Paid Social and Display channels. My role is really about enhancing the in-house knowledge that we have on these channels and scaling best practices from region to region. 

We’re a big company now – over 4,000 employees – and lots of regional marketers aren’t familiar with all the resources available to them. Part of my job is to observe the challenges faced locally and know when to connect colleagues with the right people internally. Ultimately, the global team is responsible for leveraging that helicopter view to help local teams do their jobs faster.

💬 Ben: Sounds like they’re keeping you busy – how does this compare to your previous role as Head of Marketing at Reducept?

💬 Genya: Reducept was an early stage start-up building pain management software for patients. I started there as a Mobile Marketer and progressed to leading the marketing team. I was still quite operational in the role – that's what I enjoy about digital marketing, being hands-on with channel optimisation, testing and analytics. All of the ‘nerdy’ stuff!

At Reducept, we had a real appetite for trying new things and testing different campaigns, nurture flows and website optimisation. I’m super grateful for my time there because I got to speak directly with customers and operationalise their feedback quickly.

I think the key difference is that at Adyen, I’m more of a consultant. I talk about how things need to be done and create playbooks for others to use, but I'm not really owning the budget of campaigns. We also work with digital agencies, so there are lots of outsourced operational tasks to coordinate.

💬 Ben: Quite a broad set of experience then! What trends and changes are you noticing in digital marketing right now?

💬 Genya: From a B2B perspective, most of the channels that we currently use were initially built for B2C audiences, and the algorithms are optimized for large volumes of data, which is not exactly applicable to B2B marketing. At Adyen, we’re working with an ABM approach to reach out to preferred enterprise customers. Sometimes we want to target as few as a thousand people with particular messaging, which forces us to think of new approaches outside of traditional channels.

I’m also seeing a lot of ad and content fatigue from customers. Over the last few years, things like B2B webinars and whitepapers have been all the rage. It seems like customer attention and appreciation for high volume content pieces is on the decline, and to convince anyone to download something or to join a webinar is becoming increasingly difficult. So the challenge is standing out from this abundance of information and convincing potential customers to invest their time in you. 

On the plus side, this oversaturation means that companies who invest in quality content do really well.

There’s also a lot of ‘dark funnel’ going on. This makes achieving complete attribution between channels less feasible than it used to be. Maybe now’s the time to start measuring things from the bottom up perspective and involving other teams to measure success. This shift has led to conversations between sales, marketing and partnerships around this shared responsibility for driving performance. We don't need loads of KPIs, we just have to agree on a few that we all want to go after.

💬 Ben: Agreed, it’s a team effort. And what’s been your biggest marketing learning at Adyen?

💬 Genya: At Adyen, I got to learn more about how the organisation as a whole operates, beyond just marketing. In my previous roles I was often siloed from other functions and unaware of how valuable we can be to each other. I think that's the main learning I’ll take with me in my career: how to enhance communication between teams from the get-go.

There’s power in everyone working together. As cheesy as it sounds, it's the truth!

💬 Ben: Shifting gears now to the topic of the year: how are you and the rest of the marketing team using AI?

💬 Genya: In such a big company, it can be tricky to pioneer something so new. And because we’re a bank, we have additional security considerations that other businesses don’t need to think about.

But there are still a few tools that we’re testing. ChatGPT is the main tool I use to remove time-consuming tasks like crafting emails and drafts for internal playbooks. If I need to create an internal presentation, but I don't want to spend too much time doing it, I can just provide an outline and ChatGPT creates a full draft. I think our Paid Search team is seeing some success with ChatGPT and Bard for things like keyword and topic research, so it’s starting to shape up!

I'm not a native English speaker, so having a tool that can correct my grammar is amazing. I've no idea how I used to live without this. In the past I would get help from Grammarly, but this platform isn’t able to factor in tone of voice and other nuances.

For marketers who aren’t native speakers, AI has the power to skyrocket their skillset, because you can be a great marketer in the technical sense but marketing is also very much about written communication.

💬 Ben: Glad to hear you’re experimenting with it. In a few years, do you think we’ll be able to automate more marketing tasks?

💬 Genya: Good question.  I think we are still lacking the understanding of how to practically integrate AI into our daily work lives to maximize our productivity. We as individuals need to spend more time learning how to use it to properly harness the power of this technology. There’s a potential cost in being the first company to implement it in terms of getting everyone trained up and understanding the limitations. Big companies are not always able to take these kinds of risks, but we’re definitely excited to see where it ends up.

💬 Ben: So are we here at Arcane! One last question before you go – any advice for someone trying to break into marketing?

💬 Genya: First of all, I believe everyone can do digital marketing. You don’t have to be either super creative or super analytical, but equal measures of both (in an ideal world).

Also, I’m a firm believer in University education but I see a tendency among colleagues to migrate to marketing from various fields. So formal marketing education isn’t necessarily a barrier to enter this profession. There are plenty of resources online that you can use to level up your marketing skills and gain very up-to-date knowledge. Just make sure to always stay curious about marketing, it evolves at a rocket speed!

Honestly, all you need is an internet connection. I can do my job from anywhere and take control of my own progression. I can learn what I want, when I want, and I know that these skills are going to be transferable from company to company.

You need to be strong at the technical side of things but also know when to trust your creative instincts.

💬 Ben: Awesome, thanks Genya. Keep an eye on our blog for more interviews from industry experts!