Experiential and Channel Marketing Lead

The Experiential and Channel Marketing Lead will own the experiential marketing, channel marketing, and sales enablement practices within the marketing department at Donaldson Company, creating high-quality, differentiated events (both traditional and digital), customer interactions, and virtual selling opportunities to foster growth. The candidate will utilize deep experiential and channel management expertise to create virtual and in-person programs and experiences that lead to increased customer touches and conversion rates, as well as growth and retention of existing key customer accounts. This role will be based out of Bloomington, MN.

Role Responsibilities:

Build the vision, strategy, best practices, and continuous improvement of assigned experiential marketing channels and activities that are directly tied to customer engagement, lead generation, product/service trial, and sales enablement. Foster continuous innovation, test new capabilities and develop new ways to connect with customers digitally to support customer acquisition and conversion goals. Examples include but are not limited to:

• Own the virtual/online event marketing discipline, including webinars, virtual tours, demos and customer events 
• Curate virtual selling activities and tools including video conferencing, video selling, eMail marketing activities, and podcasts 
• Lead the alignment of tradeshow strategy for both traditional and virtual events. Work in collaboration with regional marketing and sales teams on annual corporate theme development, coordinated global events calendar and best practices 
• Manage the implementation of 7-10 annual customer events, including planning, budgeting, project management and measurement. Direct other team members in the implementation of smaller, regional events throughout the year

Work directly with MSA sales account managers on channel marketing programs and practices that support growth and retention of strategic customer accounts. Examples include but are not limited to:

• Lead the strategy and implementation of strategic account branding, co-op advertising, merchandising support, and demand generation campaigns 
• Manage the Donaldson MSA distributor portal, including asset creation, promotion, analytics, and support 
• Own management and content strategy for the MSA sales enablement platform (HighSpot), including asset creation, sales play development, and analytics and reporting

Perform lead management and integration activities related to marketing activities. Use the Donaldson customer relationship management (MS Dynamics 365) and marketing automation (Marketo) platforms to ensure timely lead follow-up and reporting.

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking protocols to ascertain if marketing efforts are having their desired impact. Perform regular return on investment analysis and provide feedback and recommendations to management.

Work closely with internal stakeholders and external vendors to produce exceptional execution of marketing programs. Implement project management and P&L best practices related to these activities.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 3+ years of digital customer acquisition and virtual selling experience, including development of strategy and best practices. 
• 3+ years of event planning and logistics management experience, including development of event strategy, annual plans, and execution. 
• Knowledge of event/tradeshow best practices is required. 
• 2+ years of channel marketing program strategy and/or implementation. 
• Prior experience using customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, such as Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce.com. 
• Experience using Microsoft Office software (Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Word).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Communications, or related field. 
• Proficiency (2+ years) using marketing automation platforms, such as Marketo, or Eloqua. 
• Desktop publishing skills including proficiency with Adobe Suite. 
• Experience managing relationships with tradeshow vendors, agencies and other external partners. 
• Proven ability to move easily between generating big, creative ideas to driving process improvement, to executing details and administration. 
• Experience building, executing and scaling cross-functional marketing programs from concept to completion. 
• Global business experience with proven ability to collaborate and implement marketing efforts across cultures and around the world.