Faith Hoefner has been helping customers launch & deploy advanced landing page solutions with LiveBall for almost 4 years.
She’s been there, done that and seen it all. Yet every day brings a new wild & crazy landing page request. Her role at ion as marketing technologist is to provide customers with assistance in setting up exports, integrations, advanced logic, customization and more. Heard the story about the ‘back button can’t go back’? That was Faith’s handywork.
I asked Faith to tell us more about her life as a marketing technologist for LiveBall. Here’s what she had to say…
Q: So, what do you do in your role?
A: As a marketing technologist, I help our customers come up efficient solutions to accomplish advanced functionality in LiveBall. I help facilitate integrations between LiveBall and third-party platforms, set up data exports, leverage advanced rules and help troubleshoot. Basically, I help customers fully take advantage of all the features of the platform. Sometimes that means just pointing people in the right direction, other times it means rolling up my sleeves and digging in to code.
Q: What is your typical day like?
A: My typical day is pretty unpredictable and always interesting. Since we work with such a diverse range of customers, we receive a wide variety of support requests to leverage LiveBall in unique and interesting ways. I’m usually putting out a few fires, investigating questions, and finding solutions to challenges. It’s a lot of emails, calls and meetings.
Q: What’s the most challenging thing about your role?
A: The most challenging thing about my role is staying on top of the growing amount of platforms and tools available in the marketing technology world. We always want to be able to provide the most relevant and effective recommendations to our customers, so it’s necessary for us to be up to speed.
Q: What’s the most challenging part of marketing technology for our customers?
A: From lead acquisition to campaign analysis, interactive marketers have access to a multitude of tools and platforms. It seems to be a challenge to develop a cohesive program across multiple platforms and, at times, reconciling numbers eats up time that could be spent gaining insights for optimization. It can be tough to figure what efforts actually foster optimization for your landing page program and what efforts are frivolous. It’s easy to get caught up in the weeds so sometimes it’s important to say “Let’s poke our head above water and re-evaluate what we are trying to accomplish with this.”
Q: What do you do to stay on top of all the various tools and technologies our customers integrate with?
A: I follow platforms our customers use on Twitter and subscribe to their blogs to stay on top of updates and new releases. Also, I’m always excited when a customer comes to us with a request to integrate with a platform we haven’t worked with before. I spend a lot of time educating our internal teams as well—it’s important we share information and all develop expertise in marketing technology.
Q: What’s your favorite thing about LiveBall?
A: It’s hard to name just one, but even as the platform grows into a tool that can accomplish complex, highly advanced functionalities, it remains an extremely user-friendly, intuitive platform.
Q: Is there any particular challenge that stands out in your mind that LiveBall helped a customer solve?
A: Yes, many! I love working on integrations with customer systems where LiveBall is exporting to the customer’s environment and receiving data back via an XML response. For example, a customer might be creating a registration path in LiveBall, but they don’t want to create duplicate accounts in their system. So, when the visitor enters their email, LiveBall posts that to the customer’s system and the customer’s system sends LiveBall a response. Based on the response we can configure a no-code set of logic to impact what the visitor sees in the registration flow. It’s really cool.
Another one is using LiveBall’s look up tables. For example, we have customers who have field representatives that need to receive leads instantly as they are submitted on the landing page. LiveBall performs immediate data exports and can deliver real-time notifications to your representatives to assure that your leads are contacted as soon as possible. You can even control which representatives are notified based on the lead’s location!
I also love when we come up with an entirely new way to meet a customer’s needs. Recently, customers were requesting to be able to manage and analyze both form leads and phone leads right in LiveBall. They wanted to see how many form leads and how many calls they got from each landing page test. It was exciting to bring this vision to life with our engineering team—now we do a lot of integrations with Mongoose Metrics for call tracking. The list goes on and on…
Q: Do you think all this marketing technology integration is going to get easier or more difficult for marketers in the coming couple of years?
A: I think as platforms grow and become more advanced, the technical knowledge required to facilitate integrations and exports is also going to become more advanced. There may be a hump to get over, but I believe most platforms and tools will strive to become more friendly and standardized in their integrations with other marketing platforms.