1. Before we dive into your role at The Guardian, what has your career journey in marketing looked like so far?
For the past 15 years I’ve worked as a marketer at some of the largest media and entertainment companies across Australia. My most recent role before joining The Guardian was as the Head of Marketing at the ABC, where I spent around 6 years bringing together the TV, Radio & News teams to focus on our overall audience journey and growth. Before that, I worked at companies such as Yahoo! 7, Universal Music and NOVA Entertainment
A fun fact: one of my first projects at Universal Music was launching Drake & Nicki Minaj in Australia and New Zealand.
2. Transitioning into work, what the heck does the Director of Growth @ The Guardian do?
Before diving into my role, an essential concept for all new marketers to be across is the marketing funnel. It’s a six-step model that describes a customer’s journey from first finding out about your business to purchasing a product.
Growth marketing takes ownership over the whole funnel and looks at specific actions you want the audience to take at each level, with the intent to move them towards the bottom of the funnel, building advocacy.
Understanding what initiatives fuel growth at each level is really important, for example, PR to build awareness of your brand, or 1:1 email newsletters to drive further engagement with your product.
Growth marketing is focused on making sure you’re building a deeper relationship with your customers or audience through Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and creating value for those using your products. It’s also about understanding specific pain points where customers drop off – and devising experiments that plug these gaps.
N.B. Traditional marketing is all offline channels such as billboards, TV commercials and print – what you normally associate with marketing in popular culture.
Hence, as Director of Growth I work with another team member on two main responsibilities:
- Strategic planning: planning the 12 month growth strategy at each stage of the funnel
- Tactical help: working with publicity, marketing, product or reader revenue campaigns which improve the performance through the funnel, including data-driven experiments at poor-performing stages to make a more seamless audience journey
3. What’s an example of a campaign that you’ve worked on and what was your role in bringing it to life?
Campaign Name: “Full Story Podcast” – COP 26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow
What is it?
I’ve recently been helping the marketing team with a campaign for this episode of our podcast. It educates listeners on all they need to know about Australia’s involvement in past conferences and our current stance on climate change.
What was your role?
My role here has been helping with the tactical execution of the campaign. Coordinating street posters, working with our partners at Apple & Spotify to get the podcast featured in-app as well as digital and audio ads that run across our network. Referring back to the funnel, these activities should increase awareness of the episode and boost “acquisitions” in the form of podcast plays/downloads.
4. For students who are curious about a career as a growth marketer, what do the entry level pathways look like?
The majority of what a growth marketer does is to run initiatives that return the desired effect at each stage of the funnel. Hence, if you’re interested in working within the growth space I’d highly recommend starting out in a Digital Marketing Coordinator or Digital Marketing Assistant where you’ll get exposure to a myriad of marketing technology platforms – these will be the tools you use to run your initiatives on in future.
5. What’s one thing you recommend a student who’s curious about becoming a marketer do right now?
Learn as much as you possibly can by just putting yourself out there and trying new things. The more knowledge that you have the better the decisions you can make for your career and better know what area you want to pursue.
