Marketing Masters Monday
This series puts the spotlight on one member of our Marketing Masters program every Monday. To learn more about this program, check out our blog post and for the full roster, visit our Marketing Masters website.
Today, we are thrilled to feature Jon Uland, Director of CRM and Artist Engagement at Level Music Group.
Keep reading to hear what growth marketing means to @"Jon U.", what he likes most about using Iterable, and more.
If you have any questions for Jon about how he's leveraging Iterable in his marketing campaigns, let us know in the comments.
Jon's Fun Facts!
* I raise money and write music for independent episodic TV, features, and short films, and run a music discovery YouTube Channel: Moon Village Music.
* I have an indie rock project: Bonnevillain.
* I’m trilingual, working on polyglot status → I speak English, Spanish, and French.
When and how did you get your start in marketing?
I fell into the Utah startup crowd as I was finishing my undergraduate at BYU. I just started doing basic PR for a Kickstarter project that became very successful, and caught the “startup” bug. I went on to become a web developer at Qualtrics, but soon found my way back to marketing when an email position opened up at a local startup called Needle. From there, the rest is history.
What do you love about your role?
I’m pretty picky about my “roles.” Whether I’m starting a new venture, or working for an established one, I lean toward roles that allow me to be curious, stretch and flex my skill sets, and always be learning something new. When I get to straddle the strategy of marketing communications and the nitty-gritty details of data engineering, I’m in a great place.
What does growth marketing mean to you?
Growth marketing is more of a philosophy for me. It involves creating and scaling a sustainable business. It’s a dual focus on both increasing the number of new customers while retaining the ones you already have.
What do you like most about using Iterable?
I love, love, love playing with Iterable’s API and tapping into what information I can send and receive. I also love tinkering with Handlebars code in emails to try and deliver more personalized email experiences.
Besides Iterable, what are the other tools in your marketing toolkit? How are you leveraging them?
I work for scrappy startups, so my toolkit varies from company to company. However, I love Profitwell for tracking MRR, Google BigQuery/Data Studio for storing and displaying data (for cheap/free at smaller volumes!), Figma for design/prototyping, and Google Sheets for crunching numbers and writing custom functions/codes in Script Editor. Really I’m a huge fan of anything Google Drive-related.
Where do you go to learn about the latest marketing trends and technologies? (websites, podcasts, etc.)
HubSpot (sorry!), The Verge, Wired Magazine, and the occasional eMarketer report (so. dense.). I also subscribe to Music Business Worldwide because it’s industry-specific to me. For broader trends, a simple Google search does the trick (i.e. What’s a TikTok??).
What advice would you give your high school self?
HAH. It gets better, dude.
If you weren’t a marketer, what would you be?
Who is anybody without marketing? It’s the core skill that you need to really get anywhere in life. But seriously, perhaps I’d be a sustainable, creative architect, a la mode de Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m very into the nexus of form vs. function.