We interviewed Rachel Noble, a Marketing Automation Manager at PFL and Marketo Champion Winter Class 2017. She started her career with PFL during her graduation when PFL approached her with a job in marketing. Keen to explore mathematical aspects of the marketing world, she became a part of the marketing team at PFL and has been with them ever since. She is fascinated with the Marketo platform and sees marketing automation as the best possible approach to escalate marketing operations of a marketing team of any size.

My name is Rachel Noble and I am a Marketing Automation Manager at PFL. When I was in Grad. School, I was studying Mathematics, and I was also a course instructor there, at that time, and I was approached by PFL. They said, we have this position opened, and it’s Marketing but it’s kind of Math, and are you interested, so I said yes, and I kind of jumped into the whole Marketing atmosphere that way.

When I got started at PFL, I really got deep into Marketo platform probably more than anyone else here just because that’s the role that I was in and as I got more familiar with the platform, I was able to share that knowledge and the PFL products in regards with Marketo, so it paved the way for me to be able to help other departments I’ve worked with.

What do you think is the future of Marketo and marketing automation?

Marketing automation is awesome because it allows smaller marketing teams, well, any size of marketing teams to scale their work and they don’t have to focus on big weaves of what they’re doing so that they can focus on the strategy, and engagement and the big picture things and will scale on their growth.

Marketing automation is a way for what is an automated form of marketing, right, so it allows you to do everything from personalizing your information and personalizing emails or direct mail or ads and sending it to the right people at the right time and in a strategically executed campaign so that you can ultimately,  find the right customers where your products help them and obviously they’re raising revenue for you, and then it allows you to report on that, do analysis, and see what’s working.

What are the special characteristics to be successful in this Marketo career path?

I guess I could say that the number one skill that you need to be successful with Marketo is just that very logical base, attention to detail and so Marketo has really brought that out on me and helped me take my vision from both the legs.

What career tips can you give aspiring marketers who are just starting to use marketing automation?

The small details, the little things to the big picture strategy and it helps you bring all of that to one place.

For my beginner side, point of view, be careful cause  Marketo autosaves so that’s a hiccup a lot of people find out too late. From a more big picture point of view, I would say, definitely leverage any sort of persona-based marketing. The segments in Marketo will allow you to do that pretty well and Marketo’s analytics will help you figure out what your personas are since it’s available to you definitely leverage it.

What tips can you give to marketers who want to learn marketing automation and make it their own career?

I definitely recommend diving-in if you are not sure about something or something sounds interesting to you, definitely scope it out, see what you can do. There’s lot of resources in the community so that is a really good place to go for ideas or help with execution, but don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Who inspires you and why?

I would say I get a lot of my inspiration from Emmy Noether. She is one of the very first female Mathematicians who made it far, so she has always been an inspiration to me because she stepped out into a more of a technical, almost, world and made a name for herself it’s really cool to read everything that she’s written.
Hope you enjoyed our one-on-one interview with Rachel Nobel. Stay tuned for more updates. Follow us on FB, Instagram, and Twitter for more updates.