CMO Chats with Evihn Vaszily, Global Manager of Omni-Channel Marketing for Illumina

Hi everyone. My name is Evihn Vaszily, and I’m the Global Manager of Omni-channel Marketing at Illumina. 

 

Evihn, Tell us a little bit about you and your role at Illumina. 

Yeah, definitely. Essentially, I am the go-to for global digital strategies, so I work pretty cross-functionally with stakeholders across the organisation, namely those on the product side, the segment side, and the sales side, with all the different business units to coordinate with what the overall digital customer journey looks like and build that out. I then work with teams to execute it and kind of optimise as we go along. 

 

Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into marketing.

Yeah, definitely. I’ve been in marketing for roughly 11 years now and originally started on the agency side. So I started off the agency side, working with a number of different kinds of brands, getting my feet wet, and getting to know a lot of different types of businesses. From there, I transitioned over to the client side, working with a few different companies. I worked with Petco for a little bit. I worked with an industrial distribution company called HD Supply. But I got into biotech by accident, actually. I had a recruiter reach out to me with an opportunity at Thermo Fisher Scientific back in 2015 as a contract role at the time. And I said, ‘You know what? Let’s give this a try,’ and I took the role. I ended up getting taken on full-time about a month and a half later. And here I am; I’ve been in the life science space for roughly seven or eight years now.

 

What does Illumina do?

Illumina, first and foremost, is a medical device manufacturer. It’s a company that makes gene sequencing devices and all the associated consumable equipment that goes along with and facilitates the function of those gene sequencing devices and things in general.

 

Can you tell us, Evihn, what your main marketing focus is at the moment?

Yeah, definitely. A big part of my role is getting our new product launches off the ground, especially the bigger ones that need global scale, reach, and global coordination. In any given year, Illumina is always an R&D-focused company and is always releasing its next biggest product on the market. But apart from that, it’s also making sure that, in general, we’re leveraging the latest and greatest marketing technologies and methodologies across the organisation for whatever we’re doing: whether it’s for new products or for products we already have on the market, or getting into new markets, whatever it may be.

 

How do you define success in marketing?

Ultimately, that depends on the goal that you’re trying to augment with marketing. But first and foremost, I’d say marketing is really a means of connecting those who are looking for a solution to a problem they have with a business or an organisation that is able to solve that problem. A successful marketing campaign or a successful marketing organisation in general, in my eyes, is one that is able to do that most efficiently and effectively, if that makes sense.

 

It does. What would you say is the biggest challenge for marketers today?

Oh, yes. It’s an interesting time to be a marketer. There’s a lot of great things happening, and there’s a lot of challenges.  The biggest challenge right now is increasing privacy restrictions and introducing new regulations in countries worldwide. You’ve got countries like Brazil, Turkey, and even countries outside of what we tend to think of as the most restrictive, like the EU, where you have GDPR in place now, putting similar regulations in place such that you can’t do things the way you did them, let’s say three to five years ago. It’s a lot harder to collect people’s data, and so a lot of the time, we’re kind of, I’m not going to say we’re flying blind. We’re flying with less information than we were able to capture previously in parts of the world like that. It’s finding new ways of capturing that data. A big thing, too, is leveraging your first-party data as a company to make up for some of the visibility and some of, for example, the third-party cookie targeting capabilities that we’re evidently losing more and more here.

 

Definitely. Now, let’s talk about marketing’s relationship with sales. Out of all the marketing initiatives you’re in charge of, which one has your sales department traditionally been more grateful for or excited about? 

Well, an initiative over the course of the past year, a year and a half or so, at this point, has been for the introduction of more of an account-based marketing strategy. There are a few areas that we identified towards the beginning of last year; actually, we called the digital white space opportunities or areas where it would make sense for there to be a digital play, working hand in hand with our sales team. This has been kind of a collaborative effort whereby we’ve identified certain product areas and certain suites of customers or sets of accounts that we could target first with a digital play and create a whole customer journey, a step-by-step process, with aligned messaging across both the marketing and the sales side and work them down this funnel and address some of the collected areas that we identified originally. 

 

Which marketing strategies have wielded the most success in terms of engagement and lead generation?

If we’re talking overall marketing strategies, we’ve had a ton of success on LinkedIn—LinkedIn tends to be our bread and butter. It’s where the majority of our customers are spending a lot of their time. There’s just a lot of data that we could use as far as targeting there.  one of the big advantages to LinkedIn, too, is the ability to go back to the account-based marketing play for us to take a list of accounts, match that list of accounts, target only individuals at those accounts, and then kind of layer LinkedIn standard targeting parameters on top of that to make sure we’re reaching the right people within those organisations.

 

Definitely, and talking about lead generation, Evihn, I’d like to know who your ICP is.

That’s an interesting question. We don’t have one ICP. Illumina has lots of different types of customers: we have research institutes; we’ve got customers that are in the clinical space developing all sorts of clinical therapies; and we, of course, target healthcare practitioners directly in a lot of cases; we have universities in there; we have government institutions. There’s a really wide variety of customers that we’re selling to, depending on what product we’re talking about. Furthermore, different product portfolios are going to have different ICPs, too. We have high-throughput instruments, for example, that are designed to handle massive amounts of data and a lot of samples running through them; that’s going to be for a larger organisation that works with a larger data set, of course. Then, we have benchtop instruments, which are designed for much simpler, smaller operations. So, it really depends.

 

Sounds good. Now, let’s talk about events. What is the most successful event you’ve hosted? And why?

If we have to tie it back to one, it will probably be the Illumina genomics forum that we hosted in 2022. That was perhaps the biggest launch event that Illumina had ever done. It was actually primarily done, amongst other things, to herald the launch of the Novaseq X, which was probably Illumina’s biggest product launch in a decade. The amount of overall hype that we generated around some of those launches was unparalleled, I’d say. I mean, we had Bill Gates and Barack Obama speaking there—If that gives you any idea of the grandeur that we brought in there—those are some of the names and some of the attention we were able to draw there, that should really say it all. 

 

That is pretty impressive. Now, my next question, Evihn, is: How do you measure an event’s ROI? 

There are definitely direct attribution methods; we had things like QR codes where we were capturing people’s information in real-time. But a lot of it is to lift brand recognition, too. I mean, sure, you can take and quantify things like direct leads or conversations started. You can have your sales team come in and say, ‘Here’s how audiences originally found your brand or became interested in the product and actually want to reach out and start the conversation around it’. Just on a broader scale, you can also conduct a brand study whereby you survey and talk to your primary audiences beforehand and afterwards. See how things impacted brand recognition, people’s perception of your brand, people’s perception of your expertise, or your ability to serve certain spaces, certain markets, etc.

 

And how do you track the impact of your events on pipeline and lead generation?

Like I was saying before. I mean, part of it is direct attribution methods. Again, if you can get your sales team talking to your customers, you get them to tell you directly how those conversations got started, that’s great. If you have a means of tracking people coming from a certain source again, whether it’s via QR code or if you have a conference, for example, if you have a dedicated URL, you’re giving people a dedicated way to actually go and sign up for something. Again, you’ve made a direct contribution there. But again, a lot of the time, there are benefits that are a bit more intangible than just the leads and the direct conversation starters that are a result of those events.

 

What are the most significant challenges you face when hosting events? 

One of the biggest challenges is just making sure that you’re getting the right people there and that once those people are there, you’re having the right conversations with them. It depends if you’re talking about an event that’s being hosted by the company directly. It’s a lot easier to kind of control that environment, but a lot of times, if it’s a trade show, or if it’s just something where there’s a lot of noise, a lot of potential distractions there, again, it’s about two things: the outreach at the beginning where you’re getting people interested in making sure they’re on board and getting the conversations on the books before the event starts. Subsequently, it’s about the follow-up, too. Following up beforehand, making sure everyone’s still on board, getting people in the room to have those conversations intra-events, and then, of course, following up afterwards and keeping the conversation going to make sure that the sales team or business development is on top of making the most of the conversations that happen with those right people, if that makes sense.

 

It does. It does. What career advice, Evihn, would you give to anyone starting in the marketing industry?

For anybody starting off right now and just thinking back to the beginnings of my career, there’s a lot of temptation, especially within the marketing space because it’s so diverse, and there are so many different parts of marketing to zero in and get really good at one part of marketing. Maybe, in the beginning, you’re focusing primarily on SEO; you’re focusing primarily on social media marketing or paid social, whatever it is. And part of that is just the nature of how marketing teams are designed. When you’re first starting off, you’re probably a lot more focused on the execution piece, so you’re going to be on a team where you’re doing one more specific function within the marketing work. But I would say, try to get your hands on as many different parts of marketing as possible, even if they’re not necessarily part of your job description or your goal, to try to get out there and get exposure to them, understand them. If nothing else, work with the teams that are in charge of and responsible for those parts of marketing so that you understand the bigger picture. Because as you’re moving forward in your marketing career, and if you ever want to rise the ranks, move up, and eventually, of course, manage greater parts of the marketing function, you’re going to have to know and understand those things, even if you’re not necessarily an expert at them. So, get to know the bigger picture as much as possible.

 

What’s the piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t apply to modern marketing leaders? 

I love that question, and the biggest one from my perspective, and the one that I’ve seen change even through the course of my career, is that it no longer makes sense to adhere to this idea of rigid long-term annual planning. Now, I want to preface this and start by saying it’s not to say that you shouldn’t do long-term annual planning. That’s super important. It’s important to start that process relatively early because it does take some time, and generally speaking, the bigger the organisation, the more kind of cross-departmental collaboration has to happen for everything to get locked in, from a budget perspective, for example, and so on and so forth. But more so than ever. Things just change so quickly now: the landscape changes quickly, the technology changes really quickly, and the opportunities change, and just what’s happening on the market is constantly shifting. So, if you create a long-term plan and stick to that plan no matter what, you’re not making changes and adapting and shifting as you go along throughout the year; you’re missing out on opportunities that come up in this day and age. So, create that plan—but by all means, stay adaptable, stay flexible, stay nimble, and ebb and flow with what’s happening in the market at any given point in time. 

 

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for marketing leaders today that might not have been available in the past?

An answer that a lot of people would probably give is anything that you can do with AI, and I do believe that. Certainly, we’re on the precipice of something big. What you can do with AI today is nothing compared to what you’ll be able to do with it in three to five years, for example, in my opinion. It has the ability to take, adjust, and synthesise large amounts of information more quickly than we’ve ever been able to do in the past. And that works wonders for things like analysis; it works wonders for things like content creation, and it’s not to say that it’s going to replace the work that we’re doing as marketers. A lot of the time, it’s going to take it, augment it, and make it so that we can kind of do more with less, so that’s what I’m excited about right now.

 

What does the future of marketing look like?

 That trend of doing more with less is going to continue. The focus on efficiency and fully leveraging the tools that we have to do more with less to a greater extent is probably going to keep going. I also think, just to speak to something I mentioned previously, that given that more countries are putting data privacy restrictions in place, it’s probably going to become even more important to leverage that first-party data to really work customers’ information into your data ecosystem so you can take that and use it for targeting purposes across a whole suite of different channels. Really own the conversation without relying on some of these things that have traditionally relied on, things like third-party cookies, for example—which, again, even though they’re not going away necessarily, Google said they’re going to introduce in the near future an inactive opt-in for that. A lot of people are still going to opt out of that kind of tracking. I would still proceed as though they’re going to go away, even though they’re not.

 

How would you describe the role of the global manager of omni-channel marketing in one word? And why?

If there’s one word, I would say conducting, and I use that in a musical sense. It’s a symphony. This is a world where customer expectations are increasing, and the different components of this journey kind of blend and seamlessly work together. It’s no longer one conversation happening here, another conversation happening here. From an omni-channel perspective, even though I’m not necessarily the one coordinating every part of the customer journey, I need to know what that part of the customer journey looks like, and I need to understand and work with those who are coordinating those things to make sure that the conversation sounds the same. We’re using the same language, we’ve got the same imagery going, and basically, we’re meeting the customer where they’re at in their journey. So it doesn’t seem disjointed and almost schizophrenic, depending on how they’re interacting with our brand. Because, again, that’s the expectation these days. It really is.