Coral Edwards of Harvest on building marketing machines
On this week’s Leaders of Marketing Podcast, I got to talk to Coral Edwards who is the marketing lead at Harvest. Harvest is an awesome company that has the goal of enabling companies to work smarter through their time tracking and project scheduling tools Harvest and Forecast.
Coral and I talk through what makes Harvest special, things they are working on to grow their company, and advice for other aspiring marketers.
Setting a Foundation
Over the past year, the marketing team at Harvest has grown from 1 to 3 team members. Coral has been there since last April and has been an integral part of setting the focus for the team and the company’s marketing efforts as they move forward.
She talks about how important it has been for them to get alignment and focus at the start rather than just diving into marketing the company without a plan. They’ve defined a set of principles that identifies what purpose they are serving, why they would do something, and why they wouldn’t do something.
This has been key in driving their direction, messaging, and creative process.
For example, when revisiting their site, Harvest’s marketing team looked at the Tour page through the lens of their marketing principles and asked the following question, “Does this page answer a problem someone came to the site with?”
Rather than just listing out features of the software, they were intentional on building a story arc that answered the visitor’s questions or solved their problems. Because of this, their tour page really focuses on helping the end user, and that is the power behind their key principles.
Growth Focus
Coral and the team have been focused on building Marketing Engines, systems and processes that generate results with little work from the team.
Their current focus has been on growth, and that means they are focusing a lot on their paid search campaigns. And, like any good machine, the team at Harvest had to make sure their paid search efforts were as efficient as possible.
Coral is very data driven, so she has identified specific KPIs that can help her measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. While net new users for Harvest may be a good indication of the company’s growth over time, she is more concerned with new users from paid. This KPI allows her to measure the effectiveness of specific campaigns.
Knowing what KPIs will tell you about campaign success is essential to running as efficient of a marketing machine as possible.
Working Remote
Harvest has a remote team, and talking with Coral, it looks like they have done a great job of finding structure that works to facilitate that. They use a couple of my favorite tools to help facilitate communication and project management.
She mentioned Slack is integral in communicating with the team efficiently. Slack is a great tool that can replace the confusion of email threads among team members and really streamline the way you talk.
Trello is another tool used at Harvest to help them manage projects and keep tabs on tasks.
One other piece I found interesting is the way they conduct their meetings. They use Google Hangouts, and even though some of their team members work in the same location, they will split up for meetings and each join via their own computer.
It is the combo of these tools and procedures that help make working remotely as smooth as possible. In fact, when I asked Coral about the difficulties of being remote, she really couldn’t name one. She loves it and says that the company is very flexible and makes it easy to work that way.
Advice for Marketers
Coral has worked in several marketing departments before finding her way to Harvest and attributes a lot of her success to networking. It has opened doors within the industry in a very unique way. When asked for advice for young marketers, she mentioned four things.
- Do something that you love
- Learn as much as you can
- If there is a place you can carve out a personal competitive advantage, do it
- Understand that marketing for every company is different, it is not one size fits all
It was great talking to Coral, and I love her story and focus at Harvest. I hope you found value in this interview, and be sure to join us next week for another awesome episode of the Leaders of Marketing Podcast.
You can find out more about harvest at www.getharvest.com.
Leaders of Marketing is brought to you by:
DarwinApps helps marketing teams hack growth through engineering.
They are a software development agency that focuses on being a resource for marketing teams.
Is engineering becoming a bottleneck to achieving your marketing goals?
Contact DarwinApps to learn how they can help.
