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Shelley Morrison shares her insights on mastering marketing through experimentation, creativity, and building an innovative culture. She discusses how her background in advertising and marketing has prepared her to thrive in an ever-changing industry. She emphasizes the importance of embracing risk, testing new ideas, and fostering psychological safety to encourage idea-sharing and learning from failures. Shelley also stresses aligning brand and creative efforts to positively impact demand generation. Listeners learn about Shelley’s approach to monthly test-and-learn sessions and how sharing results openly helps teams improve continuously. Useful recommendations are provided on history podcasts and inspiring B2B marketing leaders.
Shelley Morrison, VP of Global Growth Marketing at Domo, is a seasoned full-journey marketer with deep expertise in global demand generation, offline and digital media, growth strategy, and sales and marketing alignment. She’s skilled in leading best-in-class global marketing teams and is a savvy, data-driven marketer with high-scale expertise, systematically establishing operational rigor and accelerating marketing programs to maximize efficiency and drive business results while ensuring personalized and relevant experiences for customers and prospects alike.
“Brand creatives are the initial imprint of the brand on the audience. Someone is going to see your brand ad and it is so crucial that it is exactly how you want your brand to be seen.”
-Shelley Morrison
Shelley felt strongly that her academic background in both advertising and marketing prepared her well for the constant changes in the industry. She mentioned that having both perspectives allowed her to understand the intricate layers of marketing and how different channels and strategies can affect business results. The flexible and nimble mindset she developed helped her adapt easily to new changes and challenges throughout her career.
Shelley explained that her agency experience helped her thrive at Domo because of the constant testing mentality and push for innovation that agencies foster. At agencies, clients expect the best work every day, so there’s flexibility and agility required to pivot quickly, shift strategies, and try new things. This environment of continuous experimentation and risk-taking allowed Shelley to easily transition to Domo, where a similar culture of testing and proving ideas exists. Her background prepared her to rally her team around innovating and pushing boundaries without fear of failure.
Shelley emphasized the importance of creating psychological safety for teams. She said leaders need to intentionally build an environment where failure is acceptable as long as lessons are learned. Regular test-and-learn sessions where results, both successes and failures, are openly discussed help foster this. It’s not about punishment for failures but collective learning. She also stressed the need to start with safety – it’s not enough to just say “try new things”, people need to feel comfortable taking risks without repercussions. Regular sharing of learning makes the experimentation process less risky by involving the whole team.
Shelley explained that for their monthly test-and-learn sessions, each person on the team presents a single slide summarizing a recent test they conducted. The slide includes details like the hypothesis being tested, intended results, and a summary of how the test performed. It also captures the key lessons learned and how those lessons might be applied going forward. Team members then discuss each test for 5-10 minutes, including asking questions. This allows everyone to learn from each other’s experiments, whether successes or failures. It fosters a collaborative culture where continuous improvement is the goal, rather than blame for failures.
Shelley emphasized that brand and creative play a crucial role in imprinting the brand message and how the company solves problems for their audience. She noted they consistently see lifts in downstream metrics like website visits and conversions after running brand campaigns. At Domo, they’ve been running brand campaigns throughout last year and into this year, seeing positive momentum. However, she stressed brand messaging still needs to be customer-focused and solve real problems. As an example, Domo brand ads focus on how their product solves the audience’s challenges, not just technical details. This balanced approach of aligning brand, creative, and demand generation strategies has worked well for Domo according to Shelley.
Shelley recommended the “Unobscured” podcast, which takes a deep dive into various historical events and periods to uncover the true context and lessons we can learn.
–Mark Boothe, Domo’s new CMO, who she described as very energizing, incredibly smart, and good at customer storytelling.
–Wendy Steinle, Domo’s former CMO, who Shelley said is a stellar storyteller and someone she learned a lot from during her time at Domo.
–Lacy Zimmerman, Head of Customer Marketing at Domo’s marketing organization, whom Shelley admires as an amazing marketer and source of learning.
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