We’re excited to share our latest conversation with Arianna Vogel, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Foursquare. Arianna leads the go-to-market strategy for Foursquare Attribution, Audience, and Proximity, and as a six-year veteran of Foursquare, Arianna brings extensive expertise and leadership to our organization. In this edition of FSQ Faces, Arianna shares a glimpse into the world of a Product Marketer, talks innovative solutions that are advancing campaign tactics, and offers her POV on the future of the industry.
It’s great to catch up with you, Arianna. As part of this interview, we’d love to learn about your role within the Marketing and Communications team, your approach to solving customer problems, and your idea of what disruption is coming next. Without further ado, let’s jump in!
You recently celebrated six years with Foursquare! To kick off our conversation, what excites you most about your role as a product marketer tackling customer issues?
Thank you so much! What continues to be exciting about working in this role at Foursquare is that the world of marketing and ad tech evolves ceaselessly. As a Product Marketer, this means that I am constantly being inspired by innovations in our industry, analyzing or anticipating trends, and learning newly invented ad tech acronyms and initialisms. From there, I have the opportunity to help our team better service our customers and build great products through these insights. Every year and every day continues to bring new and fresh experiences.
Retailers across the country are seeing increases in store visits. What are some key moments across the year that you would recommend marketers pay close attention to–specifically when it comes to their campaign investments? What are some key tools that can help marketers maximize campaign ROI?
We’re nearing the busiest and most fruitful time of year for marketers as the holiday season rapidly approaches. This time of the year is especially exciting at Foursquare because we help our brands and agencies design strategies to make this crucial final quarter a resounding success. I recently learned that 2024 is actually the shortest holiday shopping season in five years with only twenty-seven days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
In a truncated period when it’s particularly challenging to cut through the noise, I recommend planning exactly how you’ll measure the efficacy of those holiday efforts and taking advantage of the option to change course mid-Q4 – this way you can reinvest in what’s working and deprioritize what’s not. Foursquare Attribution is a powerful solution to help you understand those optimization opportunities across your entire campaign and ultimately drive ROI.
In your opinion, what are the greatest opportunities for innovation in marketing today? How is Foursquare rising to meet the occasion?
Today’s most successful marketing strategies are intrinsically linked to and informed by an understanding of the consumer journey. In a world with so much choice, the way customers move through the funnel is constantly changing. Understanding how, when, and through which channels your customers are converting is vital. Solving for this and finding the right solutions to respond with agility is a common challenge brands and their agencies are facing. We want to help answer this challenge and are in the final stages of developing an expansion to our Attribution product, which will incorporate additional outcomes beyond foot traffic to better quantify the impact of media on the full path to purchase.
I’d be remiss to leave AI out as a key innovation in the location-based solutions arena, where our tech has been leveraging sophisticated machine learning models to inform our data quality and products for quite some time.
In light of Google’s recent announcement regarding the future of cookies, how is Foursquare ensuring Attribution’s methodology remains effective without relying on them?
As a member of #teamfoursquare, we are constantly making adjustments to promote and embrace a privacy-forward future in advertising. We’ve been preparing for a world with or without cookies for years now, and Google’s most recent announcement doesn’t have a major impact on how we already have and continue to innovate our technologies to enable accurate campaign measurement in a way that exceeds industry standards.
What motivates you to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible for our customers? How do you foster collaboration and alignment between the marketing team and other orgs at Foursquare, such as Sales and Engineering?
The best innovation comes from human and customer-centered design. Putting the customer first creates a north star that makes it easier to align cross functionally, whether it be with sales, marketing, or engineering. When the customers’ needs are placed first, collaboration thrives and decisions are made with greater ease–lessening the influence of internal preferences driving the path forward.
Based on your professional journey, what advice would you give to aspiring Product Marketers who are just getting started or looking to grow in their careers?
Become the expert on your customer by understanding their pain points, their terminology or lingo, and even how they spend their time. For B2B Product Marketers, it’s worth considering if your customer commonly reads a certain publication. Make it a regular practice to read the content they’re consuming. When you deeply understand your customers, you better understand how to communicate with your audience and improve your ability to be an internal advocate for their needs.
What would you like to see for the future of Foursquare, and what impact do you hope to make?
Foursquare celebrated its 15th anniversary this year and many of our marketing solutions have been empowering the world’s largest advertisers for nearly as long. Despite this, the world of marketing and reaching consumers now looks completely different. We are at a moment where many advertisers are deeply re-evaluating the platforms, strategies, and technologies they use to market, and Foursquare has the expertise and culture of innovation to evolve with our customers. It’s an exciting challenge and I am eager to continue contributing to that joint growth and success.
