How to be more umbrella
I had already shared my conversation with Crowdcube’s VP of Marketing John Hills here, but now with some extra reflections and notes. Truly, a gentleman in the world of marketing leadership, as you will see from the below. Thanks again, John!
A few topics worth building upon:
"Do less, do better". We see loads of versions of this advice around marketing, but it was wonderful to see how this comes to practice in John’s work with his marketing team. It’s easy and feels exciting to say we want to nail 5 channels from the get go. It’s hard and a marker of discipline to say we want to double down and master one at a time, and use resources effectively for the benefit of the business.
Spend 20% time creating, 80% distributing. There is a tremendous action bias in our industry which makes us want to create new stuff and sometimes get to distinct new ways of expressing ideas, but similarly there’s a diminishing return in doing this without distributing the stuff that already works. In other words, creative consistency in the world of social and content is achieved by knowing what your top hits are, and re-running them every now and then. And this is important because…
Most followers see nothing twice. This is among the greatest fears of social pros, and perhaps even more so people who are not social pros, but in reality reposting successful content is a way to beef up reach and frequency to build associations. It works for paid media, but it’s also a foundational piece of non paid media. We need to get more disciplined at saying one thing a thousand times.
Free text not rigid drop-downs. I LOVE a good effectiveness chat, and John delivered the goods on this front as well. We all know that asking new customers how they heard about us is important, but John specifically talks about how you want to keep it open because people sometimes give you nuggets for how they discovered you. When i ran marketing at Group Think, we discovered a lot of random strategy directories that way, which otherwise we wouldn’t have heard of before!
Market your work internally. One of my greatest frustrations with the discourse in marketing right now is actually how we (mis)treat internal audiences. If we run a campaign or launch a new product and customers don’t get it, we don’t blame the customers, we re-visit customer orientation (or do it for the first time, in many cases!). And yet, if marketing is misunderstood internally we say it’s the internal audience’s fault! There may be more to be discussed around the idea of internal customer orientation, whereby we know how to best position our work so it has a chance to work.
Your job is to be a propagandist. When writing strategy or managing wider marketing functions, it’s amazing how a huge part of the job is to keep repeating the same storylines in order to help them stick. John talked about needing to repeat the same key messages roughly 6 times for internal stakeholders to retain them. Similar to the adage about advertising campaigns, it’s only when you’re bored of the message that it starts to really wear in.
“Assume blame and delegate praise”. This is as good a leadership mantra as i’ve ever seen one. It’s amazing how rare it is though, isn’t it? Related to this, John talks about his role as that of a ‘professional ozone layer’, which exists to protect the team while letting necessary pressure come through. I once saw the distinction between an umbrella manager (protects the team from the rain of shit), and a funnel manager (funnels the rain of shit straight onto the team). We should all be more umbrella managers.
Measure what you can control. There’s often a dismissive type of comment about how if social or content or [insert other parts of the comms mix] don’t directly drive sales, they’re not an important investment. John’s advice is simple: if direct attribution isn’t possible, track competitive benchmarks and leading indicators. For example, his internal effectiveness story is made up of how Crowdcube went from #8 in LinkedIn engagement vs competitors to #1, showing an indicative result of creative working better. But then they also track how social plays a role in generating leads, which then get qualified into opportunities, which help them close more crowdfunding deals. So, this allows him to say about 10% of Crowdcube’s inbound leads now come from LinkedIn, which offers a good leading indicator for contributions to the business. This is simpler and more sophisticated than many companies i’ve ever seen operating in this space, and it’s how you do it in a cost efficient way.
Know your place in the world. Not in the sense that you should belittle your own views or opinions, but the fact John lived in multiple countries has taught him about humility. About recognising that there are different, and equally valid, ways of doing things. In an industry that glorifies cultural and tactical tribalism, this is a good representation of how embracing ‘bothism’ can set you up for making wiser work decisions.
