Industry veteran Joe Chernov starts his new job as VP of Content at HubSpot today, and he joins the marketing SaaS vendor at a time when content marketing is becoming more robust and ingrained in marketers’ overall strategies. Chernov — along with Mike Volpe, CMO at HubSpot — sat down with Demand Gen Report to talk about the new position, what he plans to bring to the content marketing table at HubSpot and how they have seen the industry grow over the years.
DGR: Joe, what do think you can bring to the table in your new role?
Chernov: Here’s what I want to accomplish: HubSpot has groomed an entire generation of online marketing managers, and I think there is room — and I think Mike would agree — for HubSpot to broaden its base within different roles inside of marketing and horizontally in different departments of the organization. What I really hope to contribute is to help the company take what it has done extraordinarily well, and run that playbook for some different audiences as well.
DGR: You are both veterans in the industry, how have you seen trends in content marketing change over the years?
Chernov: I think everybody read HubsSpot’s Inbound Marketing Playbook. It’s like all the marketers got what they wished for – a whole bunch of companies have become publishers — and the signal is now lost in all the noise, making it hard for the signal to emerge. I think that as the number of publishers increase exponentially, we get a lot of noise out there and I think that companies are struggling to get their signal heard.
Volpe: There are a lot of people who are at least trying to implement the Inbound Marketing Playbook but, in my opinion, I don’t believe they are doing it well. They are sort of implementing a bastardized version of it, or they are missing the fundamental principles and doing a poor job of it. Marketing is moving in the right direction — becoming more buyer-centric and less interruptive — but we still have a lot of work to do to help marketers be more effective with content.
DGR: How do you plan to help HubSpot’s content get through all the noise?
Chernov: I think that the relationships I have with people at the CMO level of organizations can help HubSpot target. Also, there’s a huge luxury from the start since HubSpot already has the skills and a built-in audience to push through the noise. There are some assets in place, but I think I’ve done a good job in my career to create some premium content that — in the end — has an extremely high value (at least I hope it does). I think I can fold some of that kind of content into the machinery that HubSpot already has.
DGR: You have worked with companies of varying sizes, ranging from Eloqua to Kinvey. Does the company size affect a content marketer’s job, and what other factors affect a content marketer’s game plan?
Chernov: It’s a little bit like age. It’s not how old you are, it’s how old you act. And it’s not necessarily how big the company is, it’s how small the company acts. HubSpot, for its size, has a lot in place where it feels like a small company. Almost everybody is located in the same office, for instance. It’s not a distributed organization. HubSpot really thought through how to keep the nimbleness of a small company, even when the company grows in size. One of the challenges for big companies is the amount of hurdles you need to jump in order to get stuff done. It’s going to be really hard to be successful, even with a generous budget.
