Team announcement
Meet Butter's Content Lead: Eric Doty
Eric Doty likes to have fun with his work. It’s how he got into marketing in the first place, and it’s what’s ultimately brought him into his new role as the first ever Content Marketing Lead at virtual collaboration platform Butter. “If you go to the Butter website, you're immediately hit by the splash of bright yellow, the emojis…it just seemed like a fun product. As a content marketer, having a super fun, playful brand to work with was immediately exciting to me.” Eric brings a unique perspective to his role, having studied cognitive science and linguistics. It means he has an in-depth understanding of the way language works with the mind to stimulate people and provoke the right reactions. “I like the immediacy of results on whether your content is working or not. You can see the traffic and if people are reading what we're writing, but then also, is it leading people to start a trial? Or is that leading people to the activation step, where they become paid users? “For Butter, as a SaaS product, you can directly see each of the stages, where you're doing really well or where you're falling short. From a marketer’s perspective, that's what makes tech - and SaaS in particular - really interesting to me.” A passion for hockey, and his native Ottawa Senators, got Eric into the world of marketing. He was studying at the University of Pennsylvania and created a Twitter account and a blog called Bonk’s Mullet to connect with fellow fans, seeing he wasn’t with any in Philadelphia. “I was writing The Onion-style parody articles about the team, just as a personal, fun thing to do. That got me really excited by the process of coming up with ideas and writing articles. I started spending more time doing that than grad school, which I was supposed to be doing, and something clicked that this is what I love doing. Grad school wasn’t my passion, so I left.” Eric got into writing for SEO, and picked up a range of skills that encouraged him to go out as a freelancer. He’s done that for almost six years - and still continues to do outside of his work with Butter. He believes having a broad base has served him well up until this point, even though he’s now fairly specialized in content marketing. “There’s the concept of a T-shaped marketer, where you start with a wide base of skills, but then over the course of your career you get narrowed down into one channel of expertise. But that base really helps you - I had jobs where I was just working in spreadsheets all day that didn’t have anything to do with marketing, but if I didn't have that experience, I wouldn't be able to set up nice, automated workflows today. “If you're narrowly focused on being an amazing writer, then you're just going to get really good at writing. What I like about the path I took is that you pick up a bunch of different jobs, and a variety of skills.” His dedication to continuing his freelance work often means he has a few extra hours of work at night, but Eric’s more than happy to balance his two work lives. He says he’s pretty good at checking out of work when he’s off the clock, especially watching hockey with his wife (he still runs his hockey Twitter account), going to the beach and playing guitar.
