The #MarketingMinds series share real-world stories from marketers showing how digital marketing has helped them develop their careers or businesses.
Marketing Mind:
Col Skinner
Profoundry® is my trading name. I’m a UK based Digital Advertising Consultant and Strategist with over 10 years experience.
What is your background in Marketing, and how did you come to be in the position you are in now?
I have over 10 years’ experience in digital marketing that started when I did an internship at an ad agency as part of my Marketing degree.
Which technical skills do you believe are most important in your role?
Analytics software, social media platforms and e-commerce platforms.
Which soft skills prove most useful in your role?
Empathy, creativity and communication.
Which markets does your organization operate in?
All, but mainly English speaking.
Which Marketing or Business related book would you recommend to a colleague, and why?
Start With Why by Simon Sinek. It teaches marketers to look at why someone should buy something and build that into their campaign or landing page.
What can be one of the biggest challenges Marketers face in the industry you operate in?
Competition locally and cut-price from abroad. Clients who have been burnt and are sceptics. An industry plagued by con artists and scammers.
How do you and your team overcome the aforementioned industry challenges?
Transparency and asking good questions from the offset to truly understand a clients business BEFORE pitching our services.
Describe what a typical day at work looks like for you?
A couple of client catch-up calls, followed by adding action points to Trello boards, checking and optimising ad campaigns, writing reports and handling business admin tasks like invoicing.
Please share digital marketing tools that help you and your team accomplish your goals every day.
Google Analytics for data insight and SEMrush for spying on competitors’ ad copy and keywords.
In your opinion, what are the most valuable skills a marketer in your role can have?
Communication. It comes into everything we do, whether that is internal communication queries and feedback to clients, or communicating the clients’ proposition through advertising copy/imagery.
What are some of your KPI’s ?
ROI has to be the ultimate KPI. Clients need to know that their £1 spent gained them +£1.
What is your ultimate career goal?
Going solo was a massive step for me to take and started the ball rolling on building a business I can control and mould into how I believe things should be done in this industry. There is no clear end goal. Just keep learning, adapting and getting results from whatever platform allows me to advertise for my clients.
What are the most important attributes you look for in a Manager?
Empathy. How can they manage if they can’t relate to being managed?
Across the marketing mix, what medium has brought your organisation the best results?
Paid social.
Describe one of the most successful projects or campaigns you’ve worked on. Why was it successful?
I used paid social media advertising across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, to advertise cars for a Dubai based car retailer and in the first six months, their sales by more than 200%.
Have you worked on a project or campaign that didn’t go as planned? Please describe what went wrong, and the key takeaways from the experience?
Sure. Digital marketing is all about testing assumptions so of course not every campaign works out. I don’t have any disasters but I have had campaigns where it seemed the target audience was and they simply didn’t engage with the ads. This usually means they aren’t in the frame of mind to buy or our ass need to be refreshed. Or started from scratch.
What is the best piece of work-related advice you have ever received?
“If you change nothing, nothing will change.”
This goes across every aspect of my career from realising I wasn’t happy and needing to change jobs, to telling clients they need to change something in order to gain improvements.
What do you see as the most exciting future opportunities in digital marketing that you are working on?
I think AI could vastly increase our use and understanding of data as well as aid us within various tools.