Thanks for popping by.
As well as all the Wolves content I’ve penned for the last 30 odd years, I’ve also done a bit of marketing work as well.
Here you’ll find some examples of projects from a few of those roles I’ve completed down the years.
I loved my time at Hills Ford and the rapid change from fossil fuels to fully electric drive trains. One of the many challenges many businesses face is how to engage with you colleagues and share some of the fantastic work that often goes unnoticed. I tackled this initially by launching an online quarterly newsletter, the Winter edtition you can download it below:
Unfortunately, by tracking open rates, we could see this just wasn’t getting the engagement rates we envisaged as a leadership team. This was despite launching an internal app to make finding it a breeze.
So we move the magazine into a video format, which we figured would be more easier for our colleagues to digest. And we were right. Manager’s were encouraged to get their teams opening and watching the video and we showed the Xmas newsletter over a buffet in the boardroom. Food always helps, and maybe the odd beer or two.
A newsletter that historically was printed for the staff at Pre-Met was moved online because of the Covid-19 lockdown.
I then created a page-turning version of the PDF, making it easily accessible for all staff to read and interact. You can see the original PDF by clicking the below.
When I first joined Pre-Met in March 2019, I inherited a website that wasn’t fit for purpose. Many of the pages were incomplete and the website lacked customer focus. I have now relaunched the website which has since seen a huge spike in visitor numbers as a result. It is also now constantly updated and I’ve introduced new sections such as jobs, blogs and catalogues and embedded our social media content.
You can see the new site by clicking here.
Packt Publishing are predominately an online publisher, specialising in electronic books and videos to aid the training of myriad information technology subjects.
Their biggest promotion of the year is the annual $5 promotion. Because the USA is their biggest territory, the campaign would commence on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and run through until the end of the year, which would typically be around 5 weeks.
By introducing a multi-channel approach, utilising social media channels, web, PR, PPC and email, we were able to deliver a £500k uplift (£1m to £1.5m) on a £28k budget. You can find the presentation I did to the board of Packt, which enabled me deliver this promotion, by clicking on the below.
I really enjoyed my 4 and a half years at the Co-op. Whilst there I introduced lots of digital innovation, including touchscreens in store, a bespoke wine website and perhaps my proudest achievement – to transition from an in-store offers leaflet to weekly update website.
This allowed us to be flexible with offers in-store, remove out of stock items and have the ability to quickly respond to changing weather conditions. For example if we were heading for some great weather at the weekend, we could then add on BBQ produce. Conversely if the weather would call for nights in, we could add comfort food and snacks.
The section of the website is still running today and can be found here.
During my near 2 years at Angel Services I managed the content for two recruitment brands – Coburg Banks and Response Recruitment. One of the key performance indicators was delivering traffic to the websites predominately driven by marketing content.
I wrote over 180 industry focused articles and blogs and one in particularly caught the public’s imagination. I wrote a two part post – “100 of the funniest things we have read on a CV”. This was a run down of all the bizarre things that people have included in CVs down the years. From someone’s job history stating that they had a career break in 1999 to renovate their horse, to someone else stating their skills as speaking English and Spinach.
The article gathered some viral pace and we received over 50,000 hits on the website. We added some pop-ups for email data collection and for anybody interested in what services the company could offer.
You can read the article by clicking here. You may notice that the author has changed names, but after leaving the business over 7 years ago, I can hardly blame them!
As we delve further back into my career, achievement examples move from online to the more traditional offline.
One of these more traditional marketing positions was a maternity cover assignment at TUI in Coventry where I managed the third-party marketing for cruise brands such as P&O and Cunard. The cruise marketing was probably the fastest growing sector in the travel industry at the time. TUI focused the majority of their cruise marketing spend in brochures and press advertising.
Utilising what I had introduced during my days at Marston’s (see below) I developed a quarterly cruise magazine called ‘Sailaway’ which included a mixture of cruise news, offers, professional written editorial and competitions.
The magazine was a great success and continued to run for a further 5 years,
During my 5 years working for the Express & Star, I had hundreds of articles publishing either online or in the newspaper.
You can find many examples in the archived articles accessible via the menu. But a couple of my favourites are below from 2008 and 2009.
My oldest career example comes from back when I still had hair on my head! I spent 5 years at Marston’s, in a few different roles.
My favourite and most senior role was managing the marketing for around 2,500 pubs and a whole host of third-party brands that went behind the bar, from Britvic to Budweister and Smirnoff to Stella. I oversaw a marketing budget of £1.5m with the aim to drive volume across the estate.
One of the key issues we faced at the time was communicating all the offers from these third-party brands to the 2,500 pubs. Before I was in situ, the sales team would hand out a photo-copied double A4 sheet of lines of promotions to their accounts.
I decided we needed a more professional method and one that would increase our visibility, not only with these existing accounts, but also with accounts we were targeting to gain from the competition.
I therefore devised the ‘on trader’ a 20 page sales magazine that was published monthly and distributed to the entire 2,500 estate as well as a selection of prospect accounts. This magazine would carry all the offers from the third-party accounts and was paid by the brands that featured inside. All the printing and distribution costs were covered by the third party brands with a premium paid for the front and back cover.
The on trader proved a huge success. Offers featured within the magazine could have an uptake increase of 300%. The magazine still continues as a monthly publication today. I would suspect that at some point it will move online, but I’m proud to have left this legacy!
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