Q&A with Marketing Leaders: Andrew Capland, Director of Marketing at Wistia

infinigrow qa with marketing leaders andrew capland director of marketing at wistia

We’re back with another Q&A with Marketing Leaders, our interview series built to provide SaaS marketing leaders with the best insights and actionable tips on how to improve their marketing planning by learning from the best marketers in the industry.

This time, we spoke with Andrew Capland, Director of Marketing at Wistia.

Wistia is a video software company that helps businesses improve their marketing with video. Wistia allows marketers to add their videos to the web, track their performance, and build and engage with their audiences in meaningful ways. With more than 500,000 accounts, Wistia offers video creation, hosting, and analytics tools to help make business more human.

Andrew is the Director of Marketing at Wistia where he leads Go to Market efforts for their video marketing product. He’s a data-driven marketing geek at heart who’s happiest when analyzing funnel data, running A/B tests, and solving technical challenges to help Wistia grow.

How did you originally get into marketing?

I never really meant to focus on marketing, but I was fascinated with how multifaceted it was. In college, I took an online marketing class – at the time, there was just one online class in the business program at UMass. It was my favorite class.

We talked about how to get found online, how to build audiences, how to design websites, what influenced user behavior, etc. The intersection of quantitative analysis, psychology, and creativity is what really captivated me.

I’m not super artistic so I’ve always gravitated towards the more analytical & psychological side of marketing – how you could influence action. So, I wanted to learn more about that.

My first job after college was working at a big ad agency, Digitas. I worked on huge paid ad campaigns for clients like Disney, Aflac, and Bank of America. I learned a lot about the way that the internet worked and how the biggest companies executed. That ended up being an awesome jumping-off point for my career and I went on to work for other great companies, like HubSpot and Wistia.

How do you see SaaS marketing changing over the next few years?

At Wistia, we believe that SaaS businesses will start marketing like B2C brands by creating their own branded shows as a primary way to build and engage an audience. In a few years, we think that many Saas businesses will have multiple shows they market like a product and will replace many of the previous audience building playbooks.

We’ll also see less emphasis on things like conversion rate optimization and more emphasis on brand building and creating amazing user experiences.

It feels like there’s always more you can be doing to make a project better. More promotional ideas, more segmentation ideas, more personalization, more design, more channels, more emails, more ad campaigns, etc. Finding the right balance between investing enough vs overinvesting is something that we’re constantly evaluating.

As the Director of Marketing at Wistia, are you seeing the creation of video content expanding?

Yes. It’s not only expanding but evolving as well. In the past, video was used as a complement to content marketing, usually embedded in a blog post or alongside other content. Now we’re seeing it become a primary form of content.

We already seeing more companies creating longer-form video and video series to serve as their main content marketing efforts. We’ve actually done this ourselves, with our first original series; One, Ten, One Hundred launched late last year.

Soon, we believe that creating & promoting branded shows will be a primary focal point for marketing teams. We think we’re at the tip of the iceberg for using video to build an audience so it’s an exciting time for sure.

What does your marketing planning process look like?

It all starts with our Senior Management. They set our business goals and revenue targets for the next 12 months.

Once those goals and targets are in place, our team goes in and creates a 12-month marketing strategy for how we plan to achieve those goals. Once we have our marketing strategy, we then turn it into a much more detailed & tactical roadmap, including the campaigns that we want to run, the channels we want to utilize and other various initiatives.

We re-evaluate and adjust that roadmap on a quarterly basis so we are able to adapt to inevitable changes and ensure we remain on track to hit our goals.

We’ll see less emphasis on things like conversion rate optimization and more emphasis on brand building and creating amazing user experiences.

Once you establish your goals, how do you determine what channels to focus budget and effort towards?

Some goals are more straightforward than others. But for many goals, we don’t know the best ways to execute and might have many hypotheses on how to do so. Rather than trying to be perfect – we build in a good amount of learning & experimentation into our roadmap.

For example, when we first started promoting our One, Ten, One-Hundred series – we didn’t know the most effective channels to be sharing the content on so we listed out all of the channels and tactics we thought might be effective – then ranked them in terms of impact and effort required. Then, we took small portions of our budget and applied them to test each channel/tactic in order to learn which were most effective. We slowly increased our budgets and optimized over time, based on those learnings.

How often do you go back to review, evaluate and change your marketing plans?

I kind of touched on this before, but we re-evaluate our marketing pretty frequently. The frequency of our evaluation depends on what exactly we’re reviewing.

If we’re working on a specific campaign, we generally evaluate it on a weekly basis. If we’re working on a longer-term program or initiative, our evaluation tends to be on a quarterly or monthly basis.

For many goals, we don’t know the best ways to execute and might have many hypotheses on how to do so. Rather than trying to be perfect – we build in a good amount of learning & experimentation into our roadmap.

What challenges have you experienced when building your marketing plans and strategies?

Personally, the biggest challenge for me is knowing how much to invest in a project vs knowing when it’s “good enough”.

It feels like there’s always more you can be doing to make a project better. More promotional ideas, more segmentation ideas, more personalization, more design, more channels, more emails, more ad campaigns, etc. Finding the right balance between investing enough vs overinvesting is something that we’re constantly evaluating.

Do you have any advice for young marketing leaders looking to formulate a successful marketing plan for their companies?

There is a lot of value in taking a step back and thinking about what success looks like – and what you think is the best way to achieve that success before you start listing out what tactics and channels you’ll use.

I was guilty of this as well. So many marketers jump right into the tactical work but if you slow down and really plan out what you want to accomplish – you’re much more likely to be successful.

You can follow Andrew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Andrew spoke about taking Wistia’s business goals and creating a general strategy and a detailed roadmap to achieve those goals. How are you building out your tactics?