Modern CMO

Introduction

Stories of leaders building customer experiences

In early 2018, Mixpanel decided to focus in on selling to marketing departments, and wanted to establish themselves as the thought leader in the space. What better way, than for the content team to arrange exclusive interviews with enterprise CMOs and startup leaders. These interviews sought to highlight the messy, behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating exceptional customer experiences, and the challenges–and victories–that still lay ahead. They wanted to emphasize how data plays a key role in all of this.

The problem

CMOs featured as the face of this microsite

Getting involved early in the project was crucial. A big part of why we were able to get elite marketing leaders to sit down for interviews was by sharing our vision for the whole project. I was responsible for pushing a central hub experience for people to keep coming back to as we got new interviews. Because we decided to go that route, the scope of this project was to think through a design system that could easily be updated in the CMS for our marketers. I designed the pages and helped art direct several awesome illustrations in this ongoing project.

A .mp4 is worth a thousand words

Two core pieces

A flexible system built for marketing teams

These are the core screens of the Data & the Modern CMO report. We needed easily editable and infinitely addable interview pages that could be shared across networks. And of course we needed a place to put them all. I worked with the lead content writer on the project to understand the categories to build a flow that would allow readers to find the specific topics they were most interested in as easily as possible.

Testing Phase

Breaking up lots of content with minimal assets

We worked with an illustrator to concept out a style that revolved around the floating icons used throughout the pages. I wanted to test out a new font pairing so as to distinguish this page from Mixpanel's main site. We used the gradient to give it a “Mixpanel presents…” feel, but given that many of the interviewees were not Mixpanel customers, we wanted to give it a more distinct feel from main site than other pieces of content.

Mobile mood screens

Tweetable quotes are an important aspect of these pages and were crucial in moving the user around the page. The floating, parallaxing elements are designed to break up the space on particularly long articles with minimal assets. We tested a couple different placements for the orange body of introduction text, and found that moving it down the page and getting directly into the article led to the highest engagement.

Section conclusion

Outcomes

In early 2018 Mixpanel’s content marketing team lead a campaign for exclusive interviews with enterprise CMOs and startup leaders.

This project was and continues to be a huge success for Mixpanel on the thought leader front. Since there was a lot of direct work with a CMS I learned a lot of what you can and can't do, and how a content marketing person approaches it. Unfortunately I also learned about how gating your content can really hurt engagement. We ended up ditching a system that allowed special shares within a CMO's network in favor of just letting the content be free to read through. Interestingly enough, even though these pages generate less leads without the gate, the teams were able to attribute several high quality leads to this project thanks to Mixpanel's willingness to push the boundaries.

Resume

Shots

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Credit to Nick Slater & Mike Casebolt for the awesome illustrations