Day in the life of
Head of Marketing – Lee Webster
I’m the Head of Marketing for Service Club Delivery. In a new SaaS startup that looks more like: managing paid advertising campaigns, handling external SEO contractors, cold outreach campaigns, content marketing strategy, marketing automation, and everything in between. I’m a master of delegation (I have to be!)
My Typical Day
My day to day today is constantly evolving. Working in a start-up during explosive growth means no two days are the same. I’m totally addicted to learning how things work- being very mechanically minded I like to take things to a granular level and understand how things function. So there are not many areas of the business I don’t have an insight into. I think that’s actually the best way to run a marketing department- learn how everything works in the business and then hire and train people to become experts in each field of marketing. This not only gives you the “how” of marketing but also the “why”. I learn from people everyday and our CEO is a great role model. She’s very driven and very human. I think it’s good to align yourself with amazing people in life.
We have some very capable young people working with us and they all bring something valuable to the table. Variety, creativity, and energy are just as important as KPIs.
Pros
Flexing your creative muscle on a daily basis, learning how a business operates in its initial years and how a company goes from pre-seed to series A investment have been some of the highlights for me. Being around since the MVP stages of a company and watching it grow like it’s your own child and watching people grow in parallel is such a rewarding feeling.
Cons
I think if there are cons then you’re doing something wrong. If somethings is not right then- fix it. I’m not saying there won’t be challenges- onboarding huge international clients can be a challenge but if I didn’t enjoy it then I wouldn’t be here! People are too comfortable accepting something that they don’t enjoy. My biggest advice to anyone is if you’re not having fun then go do something else or create yourself a new reality.
Advice to students interested in getting into Marketing
I like to start with a zoomed-out perspective and work my way down the funnel. That means understanding why we do marketing first. How does the business work? Where’s the mechanism that generates revenue? What’s our product roadmap? With even a light understanding of these things, the perspective will allow you to do a much better job even in an entry-level position. Understand what a CMO does. C-level marketing positions are as much about making important business decisions in the company roadmap alongside the CEO as they are about marketing and branding.
Data is everything at a granular level and as you move up the chain of command things start to be more conceptual as your perspective widens. You can’t manage people doing marketing without a basic knowledge of what they are doing and how to measure KPIs but you should also be mindful that you will not be the expert on everything and hiring people and helping them grow into experts is the best way to have a successful team.
My advice to someone looking to get started would be the following: learn the terminology used in day to day operations such as CPA, CAC, ROI, etc, ask questions to the people who are good at specific things, record everything you do and its outcome including spending and performance of absolutely anything and finally, good old A/B testing is essential where you can apply it. After all that is done, analyse the results and apply logic to what you see to detect where changes need to be made.
Finally- there are so many useful nuggets of info, quotes, white papers, illustrations, and more. I like to hoard useful information in the hope that one day it will apply to a specific problem I have. I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes about writing copy:
“Nobody reads advertising. They read what interests them, and sometimes its an ad” – Howard Luck Gossage (1950)
