Emily Dumas accidentally got into marketing as a career.
When she finished college, Emily set out to become a magazine journalist, creating a blog so she’d have a writing outlet and portfolio. “For a while, blogging was a hobby that I was hoping to turn into an actual journalism career,” says Emily, who remains an unofficial bookstagrammer today. “But in the meantime, I needed to get a real job.”
Growing From Community Manager to Content Lead — and Beyond
Her search led to a role as a community manager at a small coworking space, where she started a business blog for the company and began to learn the basics of marketing.
This was when she began to see that marketing might be a viable long-term career.
Her next job took her to work in marketing full-time with a startup in Boston. After a couple of years there, she left to join the Crayon team early on, where she worked on a small team (her and the chief marketing officer) to handle every aspect of the company’s marketing.
“Working at Crayon was pivotal to my career because that’s where I learned a lot about product marketing, competitive intelligence and sales enablement,” Emily explains. “Before Crayon, I had no idea what any of these terms meant, and now they’ve helped launch my career. After Crayon, I went on to work at ZoomInfo as the content lead for their product marketing team. But I really missed full-funnel marketing.”
Today, Emily is a senior content marketing manager at Evernote, where she specializes in content strategy and SEO. While she’s done a bit of everything throughout her career, she’s happy where she’s landed.
“If you’d asked me 10 years ago where I would be, I don’t think this is what I would have said!” she says. “But I’m extremely happy at this point in my career, and I can’t wait to see where I grow next.”
Achieving Efficiency and Productivity With Evernote
Because Emily works for a company known for its organizational tool, it was only logical to ask how she balances her time. Unsurprisingly, she uses Evernote in conjunction with productivity approaches she learned from a co-worker, Brittany Naylor.
Emily relies on recurring tasks and a weekly to-do list to balance her projects, manage product launches and follow up on things. She also blocks off her calendar to allow for uninterrupted focus time.
“There Are So Many Ways to Be a Content Marketer”
Emily believes a reframe is needed when it comes to content marketing’s reputation. “Sometimes content can be seen as boring or not important from a business point of view; therefore, it isn’t prioritized as an early hire,” she explains. “But the world of content is growing and changing, and there are so many ways to be a content marketer.”
For example, you could be a podcaster or videographer — in today’s marketing landscape, that falls under content marketing. Every aspect of content marketing drives revenue, making it critical to a company’s efforts.
“Content marketing efforts feed the top of the funnel, and if you aren’t getting folks into the top of the funnel, you aren’t making any money,” Emily says. “Not only is content marketing fun and exciting, but it’s also important to the overall success of any business.”
Emily’s first major content campaign at Evernote illustrates the broad impact of content marketing. For Mental Health Awareness Month, Emily’s team partnered with Talkspace, wrote blog content, brought on influencers, created social posts for every platform, added Evernote templates and experimented with video content.
The campaign built connections with a wider audience than Evernote would have reached using just one of those communication methods.
Offering Community and Content Recommendations
Emily is a part of the Product Marketing Alliance, Content Marketing Leaders (a Slack community), and CreativeMornings (host of in-person and virtual field trip events). These groups have introduced her to talented professionals in her field and given her space to grow, ask questions, get help and network.
To stay plugged into the latest marketing news, Emily follows the #marketingtwitter hashtag on Twitter and subscribes to newsletters from companies like Some Good Content, HubSpot, Semrush and The Hustle. Staying current with trending conversations helps her discover new tools and tactics for her work.
Finally, given Emily’s love of reading and sharing books online, we had to ask: What are her latest book recommendations?
She really enjoyed “Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It” by April Dunford. She also recommends “Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product that Sells Itself” by Wes Bush.
“Both of these are geared toward product and product marketing professionals,” Emily says, “but there is a lot of benefit for content marketers, too.”
