Interviews with Marketers: Tariq Khan

As Director of Content Marketing at Algolia, Tariq heads the creative development and content strategy for thought leadership as well as marketing campaigns. Prior to joining Algolia, Tariq previously worked in a number of countries as a journalist, ad copywriter, brand manager, creative director, and a content strategist across a number of industries including news-media, luxury travel, public education, banking and financial services as well as cross-national advertising. Based out of Austin, TX., Tariq enjoys reading, traveling, photography and is a self-professed sci-fi and history nerd.

What do you love most about the marketing world?

There are so many different things you can do as a marketer. What are you top three technologies that you always go to?

This is a tough question due to the proliferation of role-specific marketing technology.  Having worked across the entire marketing value chain (including news media, advertising agencies and in a number of industries on the brand side), I’ve had different sets of “favorite” tools that I have relied on depending on the job.
 
However, if I had to pick three favorites, I would say first the Atlassian tools suite, Jira and Confluence to facilitate my team’s agile shared service model. 
 
The second would be Figma because as a design tool it is very user-friendly. Figma gives my team the flexibility to rapidly prototype concepts and surface them quickly. The ability to present multiple content formats and creative artwork at a higher level of fidelity helps us better communicate with diverse work groups – particularly non-marketing functions such as engineering, R&D, and product teams. This helps us get decisions we need quicker to bring things to market at a higher velocity.
 
Finally, our suite of analytics tools allow us to monitor content engagement and how effective we have been in delivering value for our stakeholders and customers.

Tell us about a few challenges you have had to overcome? What kind of challenges would you talk about that other marketers would be interested in learning?

In my experience in multiple industries and countries, the key challenge for marketers in every situation is: how do you continue to keep moving the needle for your customers, your organization, and your team in meaningful ways that drive growth? You need to continually add critical skills, capabilities, and knowledge to stand out and stay ahead of your competition. 
 
However, the great part about living in the golden age of marketing is that you’re also living in the golden age of online learning. You can learn a new skill or become platform certified within the span of hours. Online learning is a great opportunity to stay ahead of the curve and add new capabilities and insights to your team that help you deliver to the organization’s overall growth strategy.
 
At a more macro level, another constant challenge is ensuring that your initiatives are laddering up to the content strategy goals of the organization. Marketers are now managing a plethora of channels and touchpoints – all of which have streams of data that give actionable intelligence. Marketers need to be able to read into that data to identify the trends, distill the information, and ensure that each moving part is contributing to the larger strategic plan that is driving key deliverables for the business. 
 
Lastly, a challenge that I see a lot of marketing teams struggle with is creating processes and structures to maintain quality while delivering at scale. As we build out a steady stream of successful initiatives, marketers need to create a process architecture to execute on strategies in a repeatable, reliable, and scalable way. I am a big proponent of using project management frameworks like agile that let teams work in an independent, self-managed structure with established methods to manage dependencies and key accountabilities. This gives my marketing team the freedom to be creative along with the flexibility to quickly pivot while consistently delivering quality work. 

Are there some skills you bring to the table that you did not know would be relevant in your field?