Alicianne Rand is the personification of a marketing unicorn. She has a head for analytics and marketing science and a heart for creative and design. And, as anyone who knows her can attest, Rand is passionate. It’s that passion that earned her an early position at NewsCred, where she’s grown her team into a powerful revenue center for the company, with 70% of NewsCred’s 2014 deals having touched at least one piece of marketing from her team. Rand led the charge when NewsCred kicked off its Content Marketing Summit in 2013, and has doubled the event’s audience since. Rand shifted the mind-set at NewsCred toward its current design-oriented focus, which helped the company score Digiday‘s 2014 Best Content Marketing Tech Platform Award.
Marketing strategy: I come from a creative background doing brand design, so I believe a strong brand purpose is critical. I’m into the science and analytics in marketing, as well. We work to show that marketing is not a cost center, but a revenue driver in the business.
Winning ways: Building such a phenomenal team has been a great accomplishment. We’re a small team, but we come out with tons of creative ideas, and we’re inspired by the bigger mission of our company. I’m also proud of the fact that marketing contributes to more than 30% of the revenue at NewsCred on a first-touch basis, specifically in our B2B departments.
Defining moment: There wasn’t a single defining moment for me. It was my intense curiosity that helped get me here. With that, and the experience I got from my work as an intern at ABC, I landed at NewsCred. I’ve been here since the beginning because I really believe in the founders, and what we’re doing.
Trend watching: I’m really interested in understanding how content creation, consumption, and sharing are intersecting with the latest innovation in technology. Take a platform like Facebook, and look at the rise of BuzzFeed, and note how intertwined the two are. They really power each other. The pace of innovation is incredible. Look at the Internet of Things; the way software is intersecting with our regular lives.
Words to live by: Our CEO once said, “Be irrationally optimistic in everything you do.”
Good read: I read a ton of blogs and books because a lot of the latest innovation can’t be taught yet. As far as books go, I’m reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain by Steven D. Levitt, and Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger. The blogs I follow are the NewsCred blog, GrowthHackers, and TomTunguz.
Good advice: “Strive for something huge. Not everything is learned through school. A lot of the most exciting thinking is happening in the real world. What sets the most creative leaders apart is connecting very different ideas together.”
