Billy Moran, Marketing Leader

I keep my eyes and ideas on the skies, but my boots and results are firmly grounded. I’m a get-the-job-done marketing director with experience in small start-ups and large enterprises. My work spans markets and disciplines to drive branding, lead generation, and content creation for companies and audiences in deeply technical spaces.

I’m at my best when mixing business focus with creative communications driven by a nerdy interest in high tech innovations. >> See where I’ve been on LinkedIn.

"Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line." - Warren Bennis

Experience

I’ve always worked in some kind of technology environment, with the bulk of my career in B2B marketing of network management solutions. I’ve also spent time marketing for advanced research organizations and technical publications. For me, all effective marketing comes down to the same two rules:

Know your audience
Show & Tell them a compelling story

A load of work goes into each, but if you have both of these covered you’ll know how to find (and get found by) your customers, and then how to get them interested in your message—which leads to success.

LEFT: Why is there a pig floating over this trade show booth? Keep scrolling to find out…

Marketing Strategy

Finding clever ways to stretch a tight marketing budget to generate outsized impact is something I enjoy the most. Examples include creating a fun email campaign that drives a time-starved prospect to voluntarily sign up for an online product demo (hint – good targeting and give them a small drone!), or running a rebranding exercise in-house across dozens of interviews and iterations to bring a storied brand in the semiconductor industry up-to-date with global marketplace.

> Adapting to CovidWorld

Delivering tradeshow-like demos during a pandemic over video… with beer.

> An audience with no time for email

Give me a one reason to open this email. You have 0.25 seconds… go!

> Maximum-Use Content

When you have good content, chop it up and use it all over.

Content Creation

Compelling content first has to break through the noise plus be in a format that appeals to the target audience. Only then can content be effective for marketing or pull in the right people with SEO. In my role at Uplogix, educating our audience about what was possible with our product was a key piece of our marketing. Another important aspect was getting the most mileage from the content — using it on the website, in email campaigns, trade show booths, and more.

Right: I wrote and created this 2-minute explainer to highlight product features that differentiated us from the competition. The animation was done in Adobe Illustrator and After Effects utilizing graphics originally created for PowerPoint.

Sales/Marketing Team Integration & Processes

Creating effective work processes takes a clear understanding of the goals and resources available, good communication with stakeholders, and then a willingness to make changes based on how things are going. As director of marketing, my lead generation goal was to drive qualified prospects to a 15-minute introductory call. Get the right people on that call, and 90% of them moved on to a 1-hour demo. The challenge was that network admins are notoriously busy and hard to contact so we used a combination of ongoing email lead nurturing with an active calling campaign. Developing the right lead status tracking meant I could measure this second-stage pipeline at all times.

LEFT: Using a combination of Netsuite as our CRM and Hubspot for marketing automation, the Sales and Marketing teams were tightly integrated.

Illustration

I was curious enough and in the right place at the right time to ride the new wave of desktop publishing and digital illustration in the 1990s. Whether drawing B&W scientific sketches of rocks pulled up from the seafloor at the Ocean Drilling Program long ago (really!) to technical drawings at National Instruments, to installation guides for network admins, getting a message across in a clear illustration comes in handy.

RIGHT: Knowing a few rules makes creating an isometric drawing in Adobe Illustrator easy. This set-up drawing came in the box with a set of USB console adapters.

About the pig…

THE CHALLENGE: How to make a small company stand out from The Big Boys on a shoestring budget at a massive trade show?

Know the Audience: Network Administrators @ Cisco Live—probably the biggest gathering of network nerds on the planet, all looking to learn about new products AND have a fun week in Las Vegas.
Have a Good Story: Like our product that does unexpectedly cool stuff, nobody else had a 12-foot floating pig over a booth set up like a rock concert stage. When will you trust network automation? When pigs fly? Gotcha!

ROCK ON: I spent half as much money as the year before on a “standard” show booth and doubled our leads. Fun fact – Floyd The Pig cost all of $250, custom made in China.

LEFT: After his Cisco Live tour, Floyd the pig, also shown here at a holiday party at the Driskill Hotel, became an unofficial mascot appearing at company events. We gave away slingshot flying pigs at shows to remain memorable.