No matter the industry — higher education, pharma, manufacturing — our clients come to us looking for help finding ways to grow. Name: Brian WalkerTitle: Campaign Studio LeadLocation: Indianapolis, IN What is your role? What are your responsibilities in your role at TrendyMinds? Brian: I am the Campaign Studio Lead at TrendyMinds. This means I’m responsible for making sure our clients get up-to-date, forward-looking strategies to help them grow their businesses. This includes building — or establishing — methods for capturing data, ensuring privacy, and reporting to ensure they have security and insight into their performance. What is your Studio? What services does your Studio offer? Brian: Broadly speaking, we support our clients’ digital marketing needs to help them make more of an impact across channels with informed campaign strategy, channel plans, and data visibility. Lately, we’ve worked closely with multiple clients on email and account-based marketing (ABM) initiatives, with brands wanting to reach their customers with highly-targeted, actionable messaging. We’re also always working to enhance our data capabilities by bringing together business intelligence and data science to inform all the marketing and sales decisions our clients must make. (Learn all about Campaign Studio services here.) What types of challenges does your Studio help to solve for clients? Brian: No matter the industry — higher education, pharma, manufacturing — our clients come to us looking for help finding ways to grow. At the end of the day, they need to reach new customers with the right message while staying cost-conscious of their marketing budgets. We help them reach the right audience in the right places in cost-effective ways. One important method of maximizing marketing dollars is staying adaptable. If something isn’t working, change course! But that requires insight into what is actually working or not working. That’s why much of our focus in Campaign Studio is on taking performance reporting beyond “this campaign worked or didn’t work” so we can gauge the effectiveness of specific components or audience touchpoints. For example, if we see the ad creative is driving traffic to a landing page, but the landing page isn’t driving conversions, we know we need to pivot something there. What types of projects do you enjoy most or find fulfilling/intriguing? Brian: Look, there are a lot of marketers and agencies who can sell headphones, but I love working with clients that want to target a really niche or specific audience such as a certain kind of healthcare provider or higher ed professional. One of the neatest campaigns I can remember working on targeted single parents searching for night classes to advance their careers. We were able to see, on a personal level, the impact that campaign had on people’s lives because we were able to connect them with life-changing opportunities. What is your background? What were you up to before you joined TrendyMinds? Brian: I started out in news media working for a local ABC station. That’s where I met my wife! After a while, I decided on a career change and spent seven years at Statwax before we were acquired by TrendyMinds where I now lead Campaign Studio. What new developments or current trends do you find most exciting about your area of expertise? Brian: I have to mention artificial intelligence. Google has been releasing some cool and potentially game-changing updates. They’ve teased the possibility of using AI to predict ways to better engage your audience or optimize your website. It remains to be seen how this will impact some of the highly regulated industries many of our clients come from like healthcare and education. Privacy is another big question we’re facing. Customers are much more educated and aware of the personal data they’re willing to share. Tracking methods are changing or going away entirely, and we’re constantly having to find more creative ways to understand what’s going on. Do you have advice for anyone starting out in your area of expertise? Brian: Get comfortable and familiar with data. There was a time you could work right in the platform and that was enough, but now you need to understand data and analysis. If you know how to pull a story from data, you will be indispensable to any organization. What are your hobbies outside of work? Or what is something people are surprised to learn about you? Brian: I love spending time with my family, which includes my wife, a five-year-old, and a cat named Snowboots. I’m a foodie and craft beer/cocktail fan, so I love exploring new restaurants. I also enjoy cooking at home.