The Autodesk Approach from Siara Nazir: Digital is the Way Forward
Product differentiation and maintaining a competitive advantage is critical for companies who work across industries. In a concise and clear interview, Jeff Leroux and Shastri Purushotma from Ziff Davis B2B spoke to Siara Nazir, Head of Digital Marketing at Autodesk on how she achieves this every day. Here is a brief excerpt from a truly engaging conversation.
For any company with its products placed across multiple categories, ensuring a competitive advantage in all of these various lines is a genuine challenge. Autodesk was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in San Rafael, California. It creates software solutions for key industries such as manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, media, and entertainment. Ziff Davis B2B’s Jeff Leroux and Shastri Purushotma connected with Siara Nazir, Head of Digital Marketing at Autodesk, and discussed how Autodesk addresses this pressing challenge.
Siara’s Past Experiences and Foray into Marketing
Siara is among the youngest of the business leaders interviewed in this series. She said that she has always been enthused about marketing, since childhood. She was deeply influenced by Lindsay Davidson, her manager at CMP Media, and Lenny Alugas, her reporting manager at Symantec.
Siara’s time at Symantec was of particular significance to her personal growth path – she was part of the Digital Direct initiative which used several cutting-edge analytics models to assess incoming data, garner deeper insights, and over time, improve conversion rates. She says this was a significant real-world lesson for her and says that she is utilizing much of the learnings gathered during this period, in her role at Autodesk.
For a detailed breakdown of this unique ‘Direct Digital’ approach and Siara’s contribution, read the full interview here.
Customer Profiling Then, and Now
In this new digital era, customer profiling has witnessed a complete shift. Gone are the days of staid, one-note profile types and pre-determined persona attributes, said Siara. Today, the customer is a hyper-connected, demanding, and rapidly evolving demographic which needs to be studied and regularly assessed, across a plethora of platforms.
At Autodesk, Siara is now working on a ‘Persona Project’ which would try and answer these all-important questions to understand the ever-changing, multi-dimensional entity that is the modern customer.
‘Customer Renewal’ is Key
When asked how she manages lead generation at Autodesk, Siara spoke of the company’s continued success, the influence of its market-leading products, and commitment to strengthening its customer base. To Siara, this is critical – not only widen the ambit of marketing but also regularly renew customer loyalty and ensure customer satisfaction is at its optimum.
She specifically mentioned Autodesk’s animation software at play across several motion pictures and how the company’s webpage for the product is perfectly synchronized to map curiosity, eagerness to purchase, or definite desire for closing the sale among visiting customers.
This was an interesting session with a vibrant young marketer. For a transcript of the entire conversation and deeper insights from Siara, please read Digital Direct at Autodesk.
