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My career started nearly thirty years ago in the Marketing Department of Deloitte & Touche. A junior position, but an opportunity that I’ll never stop being grateful for.
I worked with the Partners in Charge of Pharmaceuticals & Healthcare, Construction and Corporate Finance in producing printed materials to support their sales activities.
As part of their standard protocol for nurturing talent, I was sent for psychometric testing and I was identified as an INTP with no cognitive bias between logical and creative thinking. As a young Marketing Assistant I had no idea that this result would change the trajectory of my career in exciting and intellectually challenging ways forever.
They assigned me to a project working on their first Intranet, and then another on content creation for Deloitte’s website and the rest is history.
Onwards and upwards I returned to my home town of Swansea for a position as the Direct Marketing Manager of Travel City Direct. A company specialising in package holidays to Florida and then later select European Destinations.
These were the days when people booked their holidays from glossy brochures mailed to your doorstep, or teletext – a marketing channel that seems a long distant memory.
Travel City Direct wanted to optimise their brochure delivery, reducing postage costs and create a database of customer purchase habits. The business objective was to target them with the right offer, at the right time, to encourage repeat customers.
I worked with Wyvern Magic to create the database and design the schemas to make the project a reality. The results were impressive. Sales increased, despite a reduction in the number of brochures sent out and a loyal customer base was identified and nurtured.
After the catastrophic events of September 11th, the travel sector took a blow from which it would not recover quickly and a new opportunity presented itself.
Coloplast Limited needed an accomplished marketer with database experience to work on the implementation of Siebel CRM (now Oracle) across their Sales & Marketing departments.
The objective of the project was to achieve one view of the customer, from nurses in hospitals, and in the community, to individual patients ordering medical devices such as colostomy bags and catheters to use in their home.
In addition to this they also required management reporting systems which would enable everyone from Regional Sales Managers to the Managing Director to better understand how to drive the business forward toward sustained growth and increased share prices.
The project went well from design, testing, implementation and user adoption and several of the consultants from Siebel suggested that I should pursue a career as a Business Analyst Consultant.
After a year or so of ensuring that the Coloplast Implementation was fully adopted by our Sales Team and a few tweaks to the Analytics implementation I took their advice!
Second only to my current role as Marketing Geek for small businesses, this part of my career was certainly my favourite!
I settled into a small consulting firm called Inforte in Covent Garden, London where my role was to ensure a successful implementation of a customised version of Siebel CRM by becoming a liaison between the client and our team of developers.
Whilst I only spoke one language, I did have the ability to communicate effectively with marketers, high level executives and users and apply my knowledge of their business model to provide a design specification to our team that would meet the needs of the business at all levels.
I worked on implementations at Clients such as Christies, the auctioneers, and The Lawn Tennis Association which is the organisation best known for Wimbledon, but also ensures that British Tennis Talent continues to be nurtured from local tennis clubs across the country.
Whilst there, Inforte was acquired by Business & Decision a global data consulting firm.
Then I got married, moved to Folkestone and The Marketing Geek was born…
Much as I would have loved to continue working with Business & Decision, it became clear very quickly that family life and high level consulting were not compatible. But helping businesses succeed in Marketing was still my highest passion.
During maternity leave in 2010 I retrained in areas more in demand by small business such as Web Design, Email Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation.
Since then I’ve been a Freelance Marketer for businesses just like yours, helping you succeed in finding new customers, nurturing your existing customers and becoming more visible in the digital world.
