MaryJane, an advertising major and marketing leader, shares her journey with us. She talks about how she started out in the career field and where things took off for her. In her opinion, PR and communications aren’t exactly one-size-fits-all operations, but very delicate and manual ones.

Introduction

1:00 So my backstory and marketing and communications actually goes all the way back to high school. I got started kind of young. So I was really active in the high school media program at Brooklyn high school just outside of Nashville Tennessee. And there was this competition that our teacher told us about. It was for the Tennessee titans and it was a stay awake competition and it was sponsored by purity milk. So every student was able to make their own one minute long commercial just trying to promote the Tennessee titans with the purity milk spin on it and how the purity milk makes you strong and have strong bones and whatnot.

So the first time I kind of applied marketing to that was you know, I didn’t have the fanciest equipment, I didn’t have all the nice sound tech and the best cameras like everybody else. So I really asked myself what do the judges want to see, what is going to make this commercial stand out as a concept. So I did that, I applied that and I got a lot of diversity in the commercial. I got different ages, ethnicities, everybody and it won Funny story is before we won the commercial actually got a grade of like a C in my class because it wasn’t like all polished and edited perfectly, didn’t have the nice equipment, but then we ended up winning.

So I got to hand my teacher a giant check for the school after we won, which was really cool and then you know that’s when I started kind of shifting my thinking of, okay, do I want to be into filmmaking or you know, am I really more so into the creative concepts and strategy behind marketing. So I declared my major as a freshman.

I went to the University of Tennessee Knoxville. So I was an ad major from start to finish, I got a lot of great knowledge from my classes there, but really the most valuable thing I did just to get into the field was every semester I did a different internship.

So before I graduated college I had completed five internships, big small, medium large ad agencies of different types. I even did a client-side marketing internship. So by the time I graduated, I really knew this is what I wanted to do.

So my first kind of, my foundational experience was actually in the ad agency world at a company called conversion interactive agency and that was definitely my first start with data because they literally had it printed on the wall, data driven decisions. It was a very, very data focused ad agency.

And my title was advertising account executive.

So pretty much my job was a little bit less creative at the time and it was more about analyzing the data and actually telling that story to our customers and each month giving them recommendations based on how the campaigns performed, how we can optimize their spend for next month.

Favourite Campaign

4:00 One really fun campaign I actually worked on at my previous company when I was the director of marketing at Method workers comp that’s a completely different audience. Our audience at the time was insurance agents representing large companies. So we were actually selling insurance to insurance agents, which is a little bit different on the consumer side but you know, we really started with a goal and a challenge and worked backwards from there. So the goal was, let’s increased premium with this set of agents. So we actually made up a creative game called Method World series and it sort of ran at the same time as the college world series and it was pretty much a game of baseball that you know, we built out this little fun baseball die diamond graphic and each base on the diamond or each base was a different bound premium amount.

And the best thing about that campaign is it was really fun and creative which any marketing professional likes to do, but it was very trackable. So we were actually able to keep track of, okay, every time an agent binds this much premium with us, that’s considered a hit.

So then they moved to second base and third base and so on and you know once they get a home run or once they get a score a run then they actually get a prize and we were able to track all of that and the results were amazing. So that was both fun and fulfilling and were able to prove our, oh so I loved working on that campaign,

Data driven advantage

5:42 I would say one of the early memories of using data to my advantage was back when I worked at an ad agency, the agency called conversion interactive agency. So their main customer base was actually large trucking companies look to recruit truck driver. So this was like a very niche ad agency, truck driver recruitment advertising which is actually a huge industry and a lot of people have no idea but it’s huge. I mean that is in trucking. I mean recruiting is key, absolutely gold. So pretty much as an account executive when I’m having these monthly and sometimes even weekly calls with my customers, they’re constantly going to be asking like, okay, why shouldn’t we cut spending? They’re constantly wanting to cut spend and they have to, you have to explain why. So that’s where conversion data and conversion metrics are really important. So knowing especially when it comes to recruitment advertising, knowing cost per click or even cost per lead, which in this case was a cost, you know, cost per application. That’s all good and fun. But what is their cost per hire? How much Ad spend does it cost to get a truck driver driving. So that was really how I learned a lot about data and, I had a great relationship with my clients. I absolutely loved being client facing and because I really let the data speak for itself and I wasn’t necessarily just kind of pulling a sale to of, oh yeah, trust me, you want to spend more money.

But actually, being able to show them what we’re doing and what might happen if they pull spend, particularly during Covid, was when that was really important. So yeah, that was definitely one of my early memories.

Metric To measure

7:29 So I would say PR and communications are a little bit more top of funnel, but even then, like sometimes you can sneak like a conversion focused CTA in there. So, for content and like PR blogs, those kinds of communications, I always try to have some kind of call to action at the end that we can track. So, you know, even if it is a thought leadership piece, I might try to kind of plug our product at the end or if we’re talking about, let’s say, my team writes a blog about the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Then at the end, maybe a soft sell of like, and if you’d like help establishing these, you know, email info at namecoach.com and whatnot. And we would just make sure that that link is trackable. So in that instance it might be clicks, it might be, you know, we might be able to actually track that into a one opportunity but with press releases specifically, obviously we want to know how many impressions, like how many eyeballs we have on these ads. Sorry, on these press releases and then we also want to know how many publications picked them up. It’s great to know the audience breakdown. So is it actually reaching the people we wanted to reach? Those are probably, you know, what we watch for the most when we’re doing a press release

Favourite metric

8:55 In any campaign, my dream metric is conversion. So conversions can mean something completely different depending on the campaign, depending on the company. So, you know, with truck driver recruitment, advertising a conversion is a higher at in insurance, a conversion is bound premium at name coach or you know be to be a conversion is a one opportunity or an account so as much or as possible as that is. I really try to push for tying conversions to anything even if it goes from top of funnel to, you know to that one opportunity because even if let’s say an email, a video, a press release, a blog social post isn’t necessarily what created that conversion.

It’s really nice to be able to tie that touch point to it as an assist I guess you could say because it really does take multiple touch points to create a conversion, it’s never just like the one thing well and for name coach, like I said the metric is always going to be wanting to know like what the one opportunity is.

Dream metric

10:04 So you know, I guess it would be a ratio because we wanted to spend to it. So you know, for conferences, for example, if we’re putting x amount into a certain conference, what is the ratio for a conference, spend 21 opportunities. Another thing that, you know, I’d say is on my wish list that I don’t necessarily have access to, but we’re working on, it is actual customer data so that we can build case studies because obviously I work very closely with sales. So even though I don’t always have visibility into conversions, I still have access to it in a sense because I can work with them to send that information over with customers and even, you know, there’s another added barrier but we love access to certain customers data just you know, within recent so that we can know how we’re proving our oi and how we’re helping them and that looks like different things depending on the customer of course. But you know, partnering with them just to see like okay if your use case for our product is for recruitment and retention, if you’re using name coach to help with that, then, you know, can we see what percentage recruitment and retention has improved in the last year since you started using our product.

Anything like that can also help with marketing because you can actually feature that in case studies, social posts.

It’s always good to just prove what you’re doing instead of just saying it.     Future of PR & Comms   11:36 The future of these tools, in the future of data, if you know companies or tools or platforms can figure out a way to really streamline you know, touch point attribution to make it to where okay we’re able to tie in the top of the marketing funnel to the bottom of the marketing funnel because I think that one thing, I’ve noticed at any company I’ve worked for is that is a very manual process internally. So if I could just wave my wand and work with a company or a solution that just kind of figures that out for me. That would be great because it is a very manual process and it’s a very delicate process because it’s not exactly one size fits all, so I don’t even know if it would be possible, but if it would be possible to be very cool, so you know, anything is possible in the future, but I definitely see that being really ground-breaking.

My two Cents

12:27 My tips would be to not assume anything and to let the data speak for itself because it’s really easy to just kind of assume that you’re like, well no one likes this or people don’t think this way, but you don’t know, I mean that’s completely anecdotal, just based on your personal experience, how many people out of people in the entire world have you personally met? Like it so much, it’s a very small percentage and especially with name coach when we’re dealing with, I mean we’re a global brand, like we’re dealing with people all over the world, all different kinds of backgrounds, so that’s been very humbling for me just because it’s a brand new audience that I really don’t can’t just assume that I understand.

So, you know, don’t make any assumptions, let the data speak for itself think of yourself as a scientist where you’re not supposed to have like a, you know, you’re not supposed to take the data to prove a point that you already want to make. Like you actually need to. If the data is not in favour of what you want it to be, then you need to dig in and figure out, how do we change it?

But you know, not necessarily.