This week we feature Blaise Lucey, Director of Product & Content Marketing at Bitly. Bitly is a link management platform that helps brands see clear across the Internet. Bitly users create 300 million links per month and those links see around 10 billion clicks every month around the world.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Bitly, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

Your location: New York City.

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Your favorite gadget:

I have a lot of old-school, non-screen, analog watches. Do those still count as gadgets? Really liking the new one I just got from Original Grain.

You start your day with:

The gym, scrambled eggs, coffee — in that order!

Your favorite time-saving trick:

Blocking off tasks in my calendar during the day — that way, I know I have part of the day to concentrate.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily:

The Bitly Blog (of course!), Marketing Land, AdAge

"Honestly, the more notifications you have bombarding you, the less you can concentrate on creating quality content or thinking up great campaigns."

Describe an average day at Bitly?

After clearing out my email in the morning, I usually look at the Bitly content calendar to see what’s coming up and what we need to keep pushing to make sure it gets across the finish line.

Then, I’m working on content strategy or executing on a piece of content, which could range from a blog post, video, or webinar. I’m also regularly meeting with sales to work on product marketing collateral like case studies, sales decks, and feature sheets.

As a marketer, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

Airplane mode. And getting Slack, Gchat, Facebook Messenger, and every other social channel out of sight.

Honestly, the more notifications you have bombarding you, the less you can concentrate on creating quality content or thinking up great campaigns. Dividing the day up into blocks where you are heads-down is crucial.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing/ inbound, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3–5 tools you use?

Marketo is the most crucial tool we have in terms of building the forms that we use to generate leads from content like webinars and guides.

Infer helps us score those leads based on demographic data like job title and company.

Unbounce has helped us streamline the process of creating landing pages and quickly tweaking and testing them on the fly.

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

We’re constantly interviewing and sourcing use cases from Bitly users to find out how they’re using the product. Bitly is a versatile tool, kind of a Swiss army knife for analytics, and it’s always interesting to see how someone like a country music singer, a nonprofit, an eCommerce surf shop, and a media company all use Bitly in their day-to-day.

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

We build content that can be distributed across multiple channels. For us, webinars work the best. We can promote an upcoming webinar about Instagram or multichannel marketing across email campaigns, social media, and our blog to drive registrations.

Then, we score all of those leads based on a bunch of different factors to decide whether we should send them to an automated email drip campaign — full of relevant content — or send them to a sales rep who can follow up directly, hopefully with some content as well.

Depending on the stage of the lead, the content will change. People who really just registered to learn new social media tips get more content around social media. Prospects that are a bit more qualified get content that will move them further down the funnel, like use cases or feature sheets.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

I think the number one thing marketers need to do is create a calendar for campaigns. Having a macro view of what’s happening in Q1 — and what needs to be done — really helps scale efforts throughout the year.

Second, have a place where all those campaigns and collateral are stored, both internally and externally. Otherwise, if sales reps want a recording of a webinar from four months ago, you might not be able to point to one right away. Or, externally, you could be missing out on leads that may be visiting the site and find the content then.

Content teams especially can work really hard to build out tons of stuff, but if there’s no visibility or distribution, then a lot of those efforts go to waste.

How do teams at Bitly have fun at work?

Every Wednesday, we have a tradition called “Lunch and Learn,” where we get lunch delivered to the office from a local New York restaurant. Bitly gets together — and our Denver and San Francisco offices tune in via Google Hangout — and one Bitly employee presents about something that has nothing to do with work. That way, we get to learn about the passions that people have outside of the office.

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A big thanks to Blaise for taking the time out to answer these questions! Bitly Enterprise customers use Bitly to track performance across social networking, SMS, email, offline, and other channels. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out Bitly.

The ‘How Marketers Stay Productive’ series asks marketers their tips & strategies for staying productive. Every week we’ll feature a new guest and the tricks that keep them working smart. Know someone you’d love to see featured? Email Us.