MarTech Interview with Geoff Clawson, VP of Product, Websites and Marketing at GoDaddy

Geoff Clawson, VP of Product, Websites and Marketing at GoDaddy shares a few thoughts on GoDaddy’s new marketing planner while taking us through a few top martech and marketing tips and best practices in this quick chat:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Geoff. Tell us more about your role at GoDaddy, what does a day in marketing here look like? Also, what made you foray into marketing…? 

I am Vice President of Product for our Websites and Marketing team. We have the awesome opportunity to help our small business customers create their online presence through products like Websites + Marketing and Managed WordPress. We offer products like email and social marketing, search engine optimization, and customer engagement tools like GoDaddy Studio – a suite of creative tools designed for small and mid sized businesses which enables entrepreneurs to create beautiful visual content for all social media platforms with thousands of customizable templates to choose from. We also partner with our Care and Services colleagues, one of GoDaddy’s true points of differentiation, to build websites and to provide marketing services on behalf of our customers. Nothing makes my team happier than when we see customers succeed, so we try to keep real customer stories at the core of everything we do, celebrating their wins often and always learning how we can help more customers become more successful. 

In terms of my journey to marketing, like so many I was hooked and still remain enamored of brands like Nike and more recently Airbnb, who create such a powerful narrative around their products, establishing an emotional connection with their customers and to ideas bigger than the business itself.

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We’d love to hear more about the GoDaddy Marketing Planner, its top features and benefits to marketers? 

Marketing Planner provides entrepreneurs and small business owners an easier way to plan, create, and schedule content for their social media marketing needs. With Marketing Planner, content can be scheduled up to four weeks in advance, ensuring small businesses reach the right customers with the right message at the right time. It also offers creative suggestions and built-in templates making it easier than ever to create relevant and engaging content. Once the content is posted, customers can track engagement using the metrics dashboard and continue learning about what appeals to their customers on social media.

What inspired GoDaddy to introduce this planner and can you take us through some other exciting/upcoming innovations that users can look forward to? 

Our mission at GoDaddy is to empower entrepreneurs everywhere by giving them the tools, insights, and support to transform their ideas and personal initiative into success. Whether entrepreneurs are just starting a business or are looking to scale and grow an existing one, we offer products and services that save small business owners precious time, seamlessly and intuitively solving their online presence, marketing, customer engagement, and commerce needs. The recent launch of our two point of sale devices is the latest example, unifying in-person and online sales in one place.

How are you seeing the growth of social media impact overall B2C and B2B marketing tactics today and in what ways do you feel this will evolve in future? 

As any experienced marketer knows, you (your brand, products, and services) must be where your customers are. Given the unparalleled growth over the last decade, social media has become a foundational element to all marketing strategy playbooks, driving material results across brand and performance marketing objectives for both small and big businesses alike. The power of social media is in its ability for companies to easily establish a point of online presence with a built-in facility for fostering a two-way conversation with customers. Through free and paid distribution, small businesses have the power to efficiently reach new audiences, to build communities around their brands, and to drive sales. One of our more recent launches includes integrating GoDaddy’s Dashboard with Facebook + Instagram ad builder where business owners can create ads and track results from one central hub to help find, attract and convert more customers through the power of social media.

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Some best practices that you’d like to share on martech and marketing metrics – a challenge many marketers still struggle to bridge? 

∙       Keep it simple. Small and big businesses alike struggle when they try to do too many things at once. Pick the three objectives you are trying to move and focus on those until you have achieved the desired results. Once results are achieved, build from there.

∙       Trust but verify. You may have strong beliefs about who your customers are, what are the most compelling value propositions that drive conversion, what social content inspires the most engagement, etc. but you should test those assumptions with specific measurement KPIs so you can invest to scale confidently.

∙       If you aren’t already tracking Net Promoter Score (or a similar customer satisfaction quotient), it’s never too late (or too early) to start. Once you establish a baseline you can then measure other dimensions of product, marketing and customer service among others, always keeping a clear line of sight as to how your customers perceive your brand. 

A few marketing leadership values that you feel B2B marketing leaders need to inculcate more in their teams and structures/hierarchies? 

Know your customer and their needs. Know your product, especially what differentiates it from other choices in the market. As a leader, your team is your customer; be obsessed with how you can help them succeed. Frequency drives recall: you can never say enough times to your team the vision, mission, strategy, and priorities.

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GoDaddy helps the world easily start, confidently grow, and successfully run an online presence.

Geoff Clawson is the VP of Product, Websites and Marketing at GoDaddy