Ask a Marketer series: GEFCO’s Lydia Maule

At The Marketing Pod, we work with in-house marketers across a wide range of industries, and we’re always intrigued by how their roles are so similar in some ways, and yet so different in others. We believe there’s lots we can learn from our fellow marketers, so in our ‘Ask a Marketer’ series we’re striving to gain some insights that everyone can benefit from.

This week, we spoke to Lydia Maule, Head of Marketing at GEFCO UK. Like many marketers, Lydia had to throw out most of her 2020 marketing plan in Q2 due to the coronavirus. But with the Pod’s support, she’s successfully pivoted her original plans and found new ways to engage her audiences from afar - so she’s got plenty to teach us!

Here’s what Lydia had to say...

Describe your job - what do you do?

I’m the Head of Marketing at GEFCO UK, which means I handle all of the marketing and communications for the UK subsidiary of GEFCO - that includes everything from PR to digital campaigns and internal marketing. It’s also my job to work closely with our corporate Head Office, and cascade information and campaigns down from them to my team.

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

Adaptability and flexibility are always key, but they have been particularly important this year! Our marketing plan changed significantly due to Covid-19, and we have had to be really agile to ensure we could still support our customers and staff, so I have needed to be really adaptable.

I also think it’s important to have a good communication style, and to be able to communicate in different ways to different audiences. I’m responsible for both internal and external marketing, so I really focus on understanding each different audience and how they interpret and digest information to make sure we’re getting messages across effectively. Putting things simply is the best approach - there can be a lot of jargon used in the logistics industry and in marketing, and I always try to avoid using it where possible to ensure we’re all communicating as clearly as possible. 

What's been your career highlight so far?

In a previous role, I found myself sitting in a studio with Omid Djalili and Mel Geidroyc - we were running a campaign focused on standing up for customers and we got stand up comedians on board to help with our radio & TV ads! That was quite a surreal experience, and one to remember.

Tell us about a typical working day…

My working day always starts the same way (because I can’t function without a cup of tea!) but after that, each day varies from one day to the next. I’ve been working remotely for a while now, and I can’t say that I miss the long commute, but I definitely miss being in the office where you can just go over and talk to someone if you need something. Now, like many people I imagine, my day is fairly full of Teams calls instead!

I make sure that I take time to check in with my team each day to make sure they’re doing ok and ensure that I am still on hand to help, although most of our communication is through GIFs on Teams! As I look after all of our marketing and comms, every day is different - and sometimes every hour of every day. I might start the day working on a PR campaign, then move onto planning an event, then catch up with the rest of the senior management team - it keeps me busy, but that’s how I like it.

How do you measure your success?

It really depends on the activity. Back when we were allowed to do events, for example, we might measure the success of the event by how many conversations we had or how many people visited our stand. If we’re carrying out a social campaign, we’ll measure clicks or engagements.

One thing I noticed in moving from B2C to B2B was that in B2B, lead times are typically much longer - instead of the immediate results you usually see from B2C campaigns, you spend much longer nurturing leads in the B2B world. GEFCO also offers a broad range of services, which means our sales process can be quite complex. Carrying out digital activity makes it much easier to measure our campaigns, however - you can collect so much data online - but you still can’t be sure whether everyone who engages will become a lead.

What do you love about working in marketing? What don’t you enjoy as much?

I love the variety of things I work on - I’m responsible for a really broad range of activity, which means no two days are the same and I’m always faced with new challenges and opportunities. Working across a range of functions also means I get to work with lots of different people, all with their own unique ideas and backgrounds, which makes my work even more interesting.

I’m lucky because our senior management team ‘gets’ marketing - they understand its value - but I think that can be a challenging aspect of working in marketing in some companies. If you don’t have support from the top, marketing can be the first budget to be cut. It can also be really complex to prove ROI from campaigns - with digital, you can provide much more insight into how your campaigns are feeding the sales funnel, but with brand awareness and internal marketing it can be much more difficult to demonstrate tangible value.

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

Right now, I couldn’t do my job without Microsoft Teams! Sometimes it feels like my only way to communicate with the world, and I love it because it’s really adaptable. It’s enabled me to carry out one-to-one check ins with my team, run a conference for 100 other colleagues, and even attend a virtual awards ceremony with over 350 others, all from the safety of my own home. It really is absolutely vital to me in the current environment.

What has been the biggest change in marketing that you've witnessed during your career?

I think the biggest change that I have seen is the growing importance of customer experience, because customer expectations have risen significantly in recent years. They want to be able to get the information they need almost instantly, which means it’s vital for us to ensure that we think about what information customers will be looking for at each stage of their journey and make it easy for them to access themselves. This shift towards optimising customer experience means that while customer experience was once typically handled by a dedicated customer service team, now it’s a priority right across the customer service, marketing and sales functions.

What do you think will be the next big change that marketers should be looking out for?

I think that virtual reality (VR) will be the next big thing to change the way we market our products and services to customers. Marketers are just beginning to explore the myriad of ways in which they can make the most of VR - at GEFCO, for example, we’re currently working on a VR project that will enable our customers to be transported to each of our UK sites, wherever they are in the world, simply by putting on a headset.

I think the pandemic will only accelerate the adoption of VR in marketing, as while restrictions continue to be eased and tightened, VR can help customers to truly get a feel for a business’s products and services, safely and remotely.

What's your top marketing tip for 2021?

Be prepared for anything!

None of us could have predicted the pandemic, and our 2020 marketing plan certainly didn’t get executed in full - most of the live events we’d planned to attend were cancelled, and we pivoted towards focusing on internal comms to ensure we were fully supporting our people. You can’t predict those things, but now we’ve all had to become a bit more agile, you can ensure you’re prepared for every eventuality by making sure your marketing plan includes a range of different channels, tools and techniques. 

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We’d like to say a big thank Lydia for sharing her insights with us - some of these questions are certainly tricky to answer in the current climate, but it sounds like she’s ready for anything in 2021!

What did you think about Lydia’s answers – is there anything you really agree with, or would like to share your own views on? If so, we’d love to hear from you – email us at hello@themarketingpod.co.uk to have your say!