Marketing Musings

Outside of my personal projects and adventures, I also have a job. I work in marketing. People think that because I work at a translation company, that I translate or hire or source vendors. But I work in marketing. I spend my days on paid social campaign management, email marketing campaign management and social media management. This work is focused primarily on the UK and North American markets, but I also support HQ in Germany with campaigns in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). I love this international perspective and I love the cultural and linguistic hurdles and challenges it throws our way!

Musing 1

Somebody on social media asked the audience a question: ‘Should marketers be taken more seriously?’ I think, as humans, we’d all like to be taken more seriously, and to be valued and be heard (hence, the popularity of WordPress blogs, I guess!) But, here’s my thought on that:

When you consider the entire buyer’s journey and the many touch points at which a consumer expects to interact with your business (to evaluate it before they take a decision), then you can get a sense of the scope of the marketing landscape.

From every point – from paid search and ABM tactics, to the website and more – consumers want the right information for their current level of interest through a variety of formats and channels. E.g. many people will move from a paid social media ad to the website and then straight back over to the company’s social media channel. They aren’t satisfied with evaluating your company through one channel, alone: especially somewhere so constructed like a website. So multiple channels have to be spot on – this takes a grand effort.

Then, internally, you’ve got sales teams who are waiting for leads. So there needs to be advertising or email marketing campaigns running with the right messaging for that market/target audience (the team I work on focuses on the North American, UK and DACH markets). That takes reasearch, planning and data. As many people will say ‘Taking what works in one market and transplanting it to another is not going to work’ – this is absolutely true. But it’s not just about cultural and linguistic differences (though these are significant). Something like different regulatory requirements can make a key driver of business redundant in certain markets where no such regulation exists.

Throw in GDPR compliance, upgrading parts of your tech stack, data analytics and running a website effectively from the back end through to the front end, then you start to see the very complex picture.

What would this all look like without the marketing department?