MARKETING PEOPLE
LAURA ENGLISH Marketing Manager, Equinix Ireland
With over 7,000 employees working across 200 data centres in 52 markets around the world, Equinix is one of the leading global cloud storage companies. Its Irish operations includes four IBX data centres which employ 80 staff, as Laura English explains to John McGee.
Describe your role with the company.
As marketing manager for Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria, it is my responsibility to define and execute the marketing strategies for these individual countries in order to achieve global marketing objectives. The first part of this involves not only managing all country-specific marketing and PR activities, but also organising events, local campaigns and managing social media communications.
The second core element of my role is supporting the execution and implementation of all EMEA marketing programme activity which entails tailoring content for specific markets.
What challenges do you face?
As I’m involved in a number of territories, with different aims and characteristics, it is important to be mindful and stay informed about the individual markets. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. This means that I have to stay up-to-date with current challenges in each market to ensure that our efforts are adapted for and relevant to local requirements.
Interlinked with this is the need to constantly drive engagement and make content relevant for customers. There is a lot of noise in the industry at the moment, but at Equinix I feel that we have a great story to tell. We have to ensure that we communicate that to our existing customers and prospects in an impactful way. Enabling and supporting the sales team also requires time and effort as these two departments have one of the most interdependent relationships within any organisation.
How do you manage these challenges?
As I’m based in Dublin, I derive a lot of knowledge from the local teams in Poland and Bulgaria, highlighting the importance of establishing and nurturing long-distance working relationships. Of course, due to constantly-evolving communication platforms, this is easier now than ever before. Naturally, travel is a prominent part of my daily role but remote and virtual working keeps me close to and informed about relevant markets.
We are in an age where ‘content is king’ and marketers in all industries are faced with the challenge of standing out from the crowd. I believe relevance should always be the main focus. We work to deliver significant value to organisations that are increasingly viewing their datacentre strategy as a source of competitive advantage, so we are very careful in our efforts to create targeted and tailored content, for example for audiences in specific industry verticals. In fact, we have invested a huge amount of time in understanding our market verticals and the requirements of each individual one.
This specialist research enables us to create industry-specific messaging and solutions — we feel that this is far more effective than a catch-all approach.