For our sixth interview series, we feature Natalie Nagele, Customer Advocate, Team Mediator at Wildbit- A startup that created products such as Beanstalk, Postmark and dploy.io. By the way, at Brightpod, we absolutely love Beanstalk and Postmark.

In this interview, you can read more about Natlie's work at Wildbit, her favourite marketing tools and productivity tips as well her advice for budding marketers.

Your location: Philadelphia

Your favorite gadget: iPad mini

You start your day with: Huge hug from our three year old daughter

Your favorite time-saving trick: Saying no and delegating

Describe an average day at Wildbit?

I usually start my day around 7:30 am, getting ourselves and our daughter ready for our day. We get to the office between 9–9:30 am. Usually, the day begins with clearing out my Inbox and responding to anything that the team needs since I left the day before. We also catch up with anyone who needs something or anyone who is being blocked. Then we have a family lunch at 12:30 prepared by our Wildbit chef. We take this time to just talk and catch up. The afternoon is when I get my project work done. Whether it’s writing a newsletter, editing a blog post, or planning new releases with the team. We finish between 5–5:30pm and then go home to spend family time with our daughter.

As a ceo/marketer in a high growth company, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

I stay away from social media during the day, unless it’s to make an announcement for the products. I also delegate, a lot. And I think most importantly I keep a lot of running lists. It’s probably pretty archaic, but I organize a huge list of tasks I want to get done, then break them up into smaller lists, based on priority. Since so many things get thrown at me daily, it’s nice to see some items getting checked off. I use these priorities to stay focused, and it also helps me when it’s time to switch to something else.

Our team plans sprints with weekly/bi-weekly iterations. I haven’t been as successful with those since my day changes all the time, so instead I try to come up with one large project for myself each week. That can be writing a new help article, writing a newsletter, reach out to 10 customers, etc. This way, I’ll know what to work towards, even though my list is long and the tasks change daily.

I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 5 tools you use and how do they help you?

We have a very robust dashboard for all of our products that tracks a lot of business analytics. I live in there daily. We use Mixpanel to generate reports on all the data we collect. This helps with answering quick questions, i.e. how many people upgraded to a certain plan in the last 10 days.

We use Google Analytics to track visits and pageviews. We also use CrazyEgg to keep track of site redesigns to make sure we’re communicating what we want the way we want. We want to make sure that we design elements that resonate with people. For example, we may create something that isn’t a button, but ends up being treated as one. That needs to be fixed and CrazyEgg helps us with that.

We’ve used some A/B testing apps in the past, but recently built our own. It’s nothing fancy, but combined with Mixpanel I feel more confident in the results I’m seeing.

How do you’ll market Wildbit? Can you give some details as to how you ramped up signups when you started out?

When we started Beanstalk we did a lot of integrations with other services. In return, they added us to their marketplaces or blogged/tweeted about us. That really helped get more people to see and try the product and really launched us to the market. We’ve repeated this with all three products and it has done really well for us.Nowadays we spend some money on ads, conferences, and giveaways. We’ve recently started to send swag to customers who have been with us a certain amount of time as a way of saying Thanks. We want to remind them that there are real people behind the software and they seem to be really appreciating it.

We really think the best marketing is building a great product. We’re not very analytics focused. We tried to be at one point, but as a small team we learned that our return on focusing to build a great product was much higher than trying to analyze and move the needles a few points in the positive direction. (if that makes sense)

Wildbit has very successful products and has a growing list of customers. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

We try to listen and pay attention to what our customers say, but we haven’t always made this a big effort. Recently I’ve been reaching out to customers directly and offering to have phone calls with them to get to know their needs and what they’re working on. It’s been great to apply this understanding to our own product development.One of our biggest advantages is that our audience is the same for all three products (all developer focused). So we’re able to market the products to our own customers, and also understand their needs from how they use one of the other products. That knowledge is what led us to launching Postmark and recently dploy.io.

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

I think staying focused is critical. I try to avoid the noise that happens around me. So I set a goal and work towards it, without letting what my competitors do distract me. So that means staying away from social media, keeping really good to-do lists and staying close to my team and what they are working on.

We set goals for our marketing efforts and then only evaluate once we’ve finished what we’re doing. We try not to second-guess ourselves until we’ve followed through with our plan.

A big thanks to Natalie for taking the time out to answer these questions. We wish her and the rest of the Wildbit team all the best with everything they do.

Tune in next month for another edition of ‘How Marketers Stay Productive’!

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