Wednesday night, Storm Ventures hosted an incredible evening with Heidi Bullock around Demand Generation. In attendance we had about 40 members of our community — CEO’s, CMO’s, VP’s of Marketing, and VP’s of Demand Gen. For those readers who don’t know Heidi, she is the VP of Demand Generation at Marketo — and we can assure you, this effectively makes her one of the go to expert on demand generation.

When we plan events at Storm, we think about two key aspects. We think about the “fun” factor and the “education/helpfulness” factor of the event. Successful events strike a perfect balance, and while it might sounds like striking this balance is trivial, we can assure you that it isn’t. Luckily, for this event we had a speaker who’s personality, knowledge, and enthusiasm instantly ensured success on all fronts.

Key Theme

The key theme of Heidi’s presentation was the important role that Marketers have within modern day companies. She spoke about a number of the responsibilities marketers have, some of which are listed below.

• Attract & acquire new customers by driving more inbound website traffic, converting website visitors to buying customers through Search Engine optimization, web and mobile personalization, social and display ad retargeting
• Engage them in personalized, relevant conversations with the right message, at the right time and on the channel of their choice — including email, mobile, web or social
• Measure & maximize revenue and Return on Marketing Investment across channels and showcase marketing’s impact on revenue. This focus on metrics and data empower marketers and give them credibility at the revenue table.

On top of all of these responsibilities, there are more tools available than ever before, so it’s incredibly important to be able to track, measure and attribute ROI to all the activities available. Being a marketer today is like juggling a hundred balls, so the more we can leverage automation tools like Marketo, the stronger todays businesses become.

We were fortunate to have Heidi discuss the way that Marketo thinks about the world. Over-all, our companies learned about how a sophisticated organization can leverages scalable strategies to ensure success at every stage of the customer journey.

So once again, Thank you Heidi for spending time with us.

Heidi’s Presentation slides

If you want to hear more about what Heidi thinks, check-out her blog posts at: http://blog.marketo.com/author/heidi-bullock.

‍