Today’s interviewee works at boutique mother and baby brand Jojo Maman Bébé.
Emily Palgrave-Davies is Performance Marketing Manager, driving traffic to all that cute clothing. She gives us some great insight into working with biddable media on the client side…
Hi Emily. Please describe your job: What do you do?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: I head up the team that manages all biddable advertising channels at JoJo Maman Bébé. This includes paid search, paid social, display, YouTube and native. Essentially, we buy advertising space in real-time on the biggest online platforms in the world such as Google and Facebook.
Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: I sit on the Ecommerce Team and report to the Head of Ecommerce. I also work closely with our Marketing Director.
What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: Excellent attention to detail is key for my role. Our adverts are always on and are bought in real time based on criteria that we have specified in advance, so we need to be sure that everything is set up correctly. One typo can cause you to overspend by £1000s overnight, a clumsy bulk edit can switch off half of your adverts completely. It’s quite easy to make mistakes!
The ability to multi-task and keep your mind on several things at once is also really important. There are so many moving parts behind each campaign’s set up, you need to be able to factor all of these into your decision making.
Being data-driven is crucial. Though creativity is important for writing ad copy and developing innovative strategies, you must be very comfortable analysing the data that underpins all of our decisions. I probably spend about 70% of my day working in spreadsheets.
Tell us about a typical working day…
Emily Palgrave-Davies: The first thing I do each day is check what each of my channels spent yesterday and how much revenue was generated, then compare this to our targets for the day and check how performance is tracking for the month to date. From here I can take a closer look at the campaigns within each channel and move budget from campaigns that aren’t performing as well to those that are performing very well to generate as much revenue as possible from our spend.
My team also carry out general account health checks each morning to ensure everything is running as it should be. Next I might attend a meeting with the whole marketing team to discuss upcoming promotions, offers and events. This is useful as it allows me to plan how we can support these using online adverts and gives me time to brief any assets that we will need to our Graphics team.
I might then have a call with our account manager from one of the platforms we advertise on such as Google. On these calls we usually discuss account performance and any new technology that we might be testing. They will also make suggestions for how to improve our account health.
Finally I might put together some analysis to send to the wider business, such as seasonal search volume for the upcoming months so that other departments can see when Google users are likely to be shopping for certain seasonal items (such as winter coats, Christmas jumpers etc.) and use this to inform their own marketing or merchandising activity.
What do you love about your job? What sucks?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: For me it’s so satisfying to see good results. I love looking at our year-on-year figures and seeing growth, it’s what drives me to keep improving everything that we do. I also love how quickly everything changes in the industry. The way we work looks very different from one year to the next as the platforms that we advertise on are constantly developing new technologies and adding new features. It means that I never get bored as there is always something new to test.
I love doing my job at JoJo Maman Bébé because I work with such a forward-thinking team that give me the freedom to experiment and be creative in my approach. I also love that we do everything in-house, which means I can get involved in things that are totally outside my job description like video production!
One thing that is frustrating about my job is that it’s never finished – there is always more optimisation to be done!
What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: Generally, my targets are based on return on advertising spend, so cost and revenue are the key metrics that I need to keep in balance. We are now starting to run more brand awareness activity through my channels though, and for this we look at things like engagement and purchase consideration. We have worked with Google to run Brand Lift Surveys on some of our recent YouTube campaigns which have really highlighted the impact that adverts can have top-of-funnel, even though they don’t generate sales directly.
What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: I would be lost without Excel! We work with such big data sets that Excel is central to everything from daily monitoring of performance to reporting to carrying out in-depth analysis on specific campaigns or tests. Google Analytics is also really useful to see how our channels work alongside other digital channels such as email and organic search.
How did you end up at JoJo Maman Bébé, and where might you go from here?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: I came to JoJo Maman Bébé from a specialist Paid Search agency and initially I just managed our paid search activity. From here I gradually expanded JoJo Maman Bébé’s activity across more biddable channels. When I was agency-side I always wished that I could dedicate more time to each client. I now love being in-house as I can completely immerse myself in the brand and I know so much more about what’s going on across the business.
I’m actually going on maternity leave in August so becoming a parent is the next big thing for me! But there is much more that I’m looking forward to here at JoJo Maman Bébé. We have seen such amazing growth across biddable channels in the last three years and we are only just dipping our toe in the water with video and online-to-offline campaigns, so I’m excited to see where we go with them.
Which campaigns have impressed you lately?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: Patch Plants’ paid social adverts have really caught my eye recently! As a homeowner who loves plants but can’t seem to keep them alive for more than a few weeks I should imagine I’m their ideal customer, so they’ve really nailed their targeting. I think I am often more interested in how I have been selected for targeting than necessarily the content of the advert. Having said that I do love the quirky names they’ve given each of their products and the cute video adverts they’ve created.
Any advice for marketers beginning their career in retail?
Emily Palgrave-Davies: Keep up with industry developments as much as possible. Technology and best practice changes so rapidly and you need to know what the next big thing is to get the best results. There are loads of great industry blogs out there to help you with this.