The annual search for the industry’s Rising Stars is back. Maxine-Laurie Marshall reveals who made it on to this year’s list…
Recognition can go a long way, it gives people a sense of worth in the workplace and encourages others to aspire to the same.
With this in mind we wanted to recognise those junior-mid level B2B marketers who are pushing boundaries and doing great work in their respective organisations. This year, for the first time, we opened the Rising Stars up to agencies and were inundated with great entrants from both agency and client-side life.
This year’s Rising Stars all excelled in digital marketing techniques, confirming there is truth in the stereotype that younger marketers are social media savvy. But please don’t think this new raft of marketers are only good at garnering Facebook likes. This year’s stars have implemented marketing technology across their companies, run internal and external training programmes to ensure their knowledge is shared, and generated revenue well beyond their experience would dictate.
So watch out for these Rising Stars, they may well be the CMOs and agency CEOs of the future.
Kirsten Dixon
Job title: Marketing executive
Company: Informa (Lloyd’s List)
Twitter: @LloydsListKirst
Having established herself as the social media guru in the organisation, Kirsten didn’t wait for colleagues to come to her with queries, she provided the company’s editorial team with training and developed a social content calendar. As well as driving the broader strategy for social media she has developed a social media policy and brand guidelines and has also rolled out a rebranding exercise for all of Lloyd’s List Group’s social channels and employee profiles.
In a bid to unite disparate parts of the business, beyond their use of social, Kirsten initiated and organised weekly meetings to bring together marketing, sales, client services and editorial staff that work on Lloyd’s List. This improved each departments’ understanding of what was happening with the product, which proved extremely popular with teams across the business.
As well as using her initiative to unite internal teams and unify the brand’s voice across social channels, Kirsten was tasked with generating leads for Informa’s advertising team for a commemorative Lloyd’s List book. She was solely responsible for the marketing for the project; she planned and executed multiple campaigns, managed the data, designed collateral and wrote copy for the sales team to use, plus managed the social media activity on an on-going basis. She generated over 600 leads, which were tracked back to 63 orders and a significant amount of revenue for the business.
Jamie Tolentino
Job title: Marketing associate
Company: Investec Asset Management
Twitter: @Jamietolentino
Jamie seems to be well ahead in the pressing need for marketers to get a better grasp on technology. Her knack for finding new technology, being able to relate it to a business need, and finding the right partners to help implementation were crucial to the business’ success.
At Investec Asset Management she is tasked with introducing digital innovation within a traditionally non-digital industry, which can benefit the business as a whole and give it an edge over its competitors. No mean feat.
Over the last 12 months Jamie has greatly enhanced the business’ digital offering; bringing relevant marketing technology into the financial services sector with practical applications and generating real information leading to strategic business decisions. She introduced an NFC badge system at a client conference. So when clients attended various breakout sessions they didn’t need to give their details upon entry, their badges were scanned instead. Data was fed into a backend system tracking the session attendance of each delegate, resulting in access to invaluable data of what sessions clients attended, and most importantly, what type of product they might purchase in the future. Subsequently this will be rolled out at future events.
Jamie has been integral to introducing and hiring various partners and suppliers in the digital space including Huddle (a content management system), Crowdcompass (a mobile app CMS), Cloudfind (a smart tagging system), TabletHire and Nearforge (an NFC development agency). She has also successfully implemented Google Tag Manager and applied fresh analytics code to the Investec website, expanded its email remit to include multilingual emails and initiated new PPC campaigns.
Flora Busby
Job title: Social media manager
Company: Xuber
Twitter: @FloraBusby
After being appointed marketing executive, Flora was promoted to social media manager within six months and hasn’t slowed. After being in the position for less than a year she has overtaken five of Xuber’s biggest competitors on social media and driven over 500 visitors to the website every month.
Keen to use her social media prowess to grow the Xuber brand, Flora set out to recognise the company’s online community and launched the Uber Social Awards. These awards were a way to identify people who have been actively championing social within the industry. As well as the awards, she organised the ‘Learn to Love Social Media’ event to offer help to the London insurance market who cited social media as the trend they feel the least prepared for. While she recognises the importance of her external audience, Xuber’s employees are also a priority for Flora.
She project-managed a video to assist Xuber’s recruitment drive. The video has received over 2000 views and has been acknowledged as playing a part in Xuber announcing its workforce has increased by 25 per cent in eight months.
Once people have joined, Flora ensures they are social media savvy. She created ‘Tech tools’ to help employees through a series of videos she made herself. These videos discuss topics such as how to tweet or what a hashtag is. Internal responses include: “Thank you for thinking about us social media-phobes and doing something to help us.”
Flora goes above and beyond managing Xuber’s accounts. She wants to make a permanent change in the way communication happens within the insurance industry.
James Murray
Job title: Digital marketing executive
Company: HH Global
Twitter: @JXMDigital
After only six months of being in the role, James doubled HH Global’s web visitors from 6000 to 12,000 unique hits a month. In doing this he’s had a big influence on its website improvements both in terms of content and functionality.
Knowing that getting content marketing right can be a big win for any marketing department, James focused on creating a company blog and broader content marketing strategy. He integrated and utilised content across all channels at all times to ensure HH Global got great value for any piece of content marketing – both in terms of brand awareness, industry expertise positioning and direct sales ROI.
In doing this he involved employees across the organisation and bought hundreds of leads to the site. Not satisfied with just leads, he redesigned HH Global’s email campaigns resulting in sales-qualified leads.
James then focused his efforts on developing the business’ approach to social media. He increased visibility across all channels, as well as advising on pay-per-click advertising – which the company had never undertaken before – with great results. In three months he achieved 2000 LinkedIn likes and in four months he increased the number of Twitter followers by 50 per cent.
Abi Rowlands
Job title: Marketing manager
Company: Deloitte
Twitter: @AbigailRowlands
Working on the largest professional services sponsorship of its kind at the time is an intimidating start to anyone’s career. But Abi took the challenge in her stride, joining as London 2012 sponsorship assistant, she quickly moved on to managing the Deloitte London 2012 marketing campaign. She owned the strategy and implementation of the creative campaign and the client experience, managing creative and media agencies and a significant budget with activity across print, outdoor, online and experiential.
Post 2012, Abi moved on to become an inhouse marketing consultant, as part of Deloitte’s corporate marketing team. As well as working on the firm’s most high profile marketing activity she advises on marketing strategy as well completing hands on activity such as copy writing and design. Abi’s disruptive thinking has led to a refreshed creative approach to marketing communications. Her efforts have been recognised internally and she was promoted to marketing manager at the beginning of the year, a position in which she has lead responsibility for marketing communications strategy for Deloitte’s investments in innovation and new client solutions.
Elise Oakes
Job title: Associate marketing manager
Company: Keurig
Twitter: @Himypeeps
Elise has moved from conducting initial research as a junior member of the team in 2013 to being directly responsible for Keurig’s UK trade launch in February 2014.
Over this short space of time, Elise has become instrumental in helping to deliver the launch platform for Keurig’s international expansion. Travelling between the US and the UK, she has managed a number of external UK agencies and sales distributors. She also guided the production of a whole raft of marketing collateral including Keurig’s UK website and sales incentive programmes for a number of different distributors.
While delivering her first international launch, Elise continued to focus on her professional development and studied for her MBA. Never letting one be the reason for the other to suffer from a slip in standards she is commended by colleagues for her dedication, support and product knowledge. Maintaining a good relationship with their agencies is something even the most experienced marketers can struggle with. However, Elise has clearly got the personal skills to do just this. She’s impressed her agency so much, her Rising Stars nomination came from them.
Oliver Jones
Job title: Marketing manager – Ready2Series
Company: Capgemini
Twitter:@OliHJones
Oliver has been in his role for less than a year and was tasked with creating a compelling value proposition for Capgemini’s Ready2Series.
Realising the internal understanding of a product is just as, if not more, important as the external view, he has rolled out the Ready2Series across all areas of the business. This roll-out also included new brand guidelines, including a new taxonomy to govern the naming strategy for IP products, and present a more consistent image to the market.
Oliver has been working with business teams on many different products to shape strong value propositions underpinned by clear differentiation of the company’s solutions against competitor offerings, backed up by research.
He then finds fresh ways to convey the message at a product level, creating digital assets like infographics, ipdfs and web content that help the business generate leads and open sales conversations with clients.
Kerry Leech
Job title: Senior campaign manager
Company: Experian
Twitter: @Kerryanneleech
Kerry’s objective was to increase customer engagement among senior credit risk and collections professionals in the UK’s largest financial institutions and generate new business within Experian’s existing customer base developing a pipeline of £1 million, and £400,000 in year revenue.
The end result? A £3 million pipeline, £600,000 closed/won revenue and a 45 per cent increase in direct response and client engagement year-on-year from a notoriously tough audience group who had previously not responded well to product marketing campaigns. This was achieved through Kerry’s creativity, determination, focus and tenacity co-ordinating resources across the marketing and business functions.
Personas were created and used to identify a highly targeted list of contacts. The customer journey began with monthly digest emails, these were supported by bespoke campaigns and roundtable events throughout the year all with the same overarching theme. All interactions were tracked and monitored in a lead nurturing database and where interest was shown they were followed up with personalised trigger emails with further information to drive customers into the sales funnel to build up a unique profile of each individual customer, as well as trends and insights at a company level that help close the sale.
The success has been shared internally, with other business units now adopting a similar approach, and Kerry has been recognised internally by stakeholders and peers. The strategy has been so successful in terms of both revenue and client engagement that Experian is retaining this as its core strategy for FY15.
Vicki Cole
Job title: Marketing manager
Company: Crafted
Twitter: @Pazzy_21
Vicki became Crafted’s first ever marketing manager aged just 24. In less than two years, she has made a significant positive impact, contributing towards increased brand awareness and driving 32 per cent of sales revenue in 2013.
Within months of joining Crafted, Vicki launched the agency’s first networking series, growing it from initial concept to sell-out status. Attracting bookings in excess of 85 delegates, Digital Bites is the antidote to traditional business networking, combining bite-sized seminars on the most important topics in digital marketing with artisan breakfast canapés. As well as growing the Crafted brand, her passion for digital extends beyond her agency. She also helped to pioneer Drive Digital – a series of free educational workshops designed to boost Suffolk’s economy by plugging the digital skills-gap locally.
Never one to forget about her colleagues, Vicki created and delivered a company-wide blog training scheme to ensure a consistent tone-of-voice and encourage higher quality output and recently devised and deployed a client survey to improve Crafted’s content marketing. She regularly seeks training opportunities to boost her knowledge, embarking on email marketing training to further improve Crafted’s monthly newsletter, despite click-through-rates already being three times the industry average.
Vicki coordinated all of Crafted’s inhouse marketing in her first managerial role with a strategy that has directly contributed to a number of significant business wins over the past 12 months, she was also recently named as ‘employee of the year’.
Matt Harper
Job title: Account planner
Company: The Marketing Practice
Twitter: @MattDHarper
Matt began his time with The Marketing Practice (TMP) with zero knowledge of marketing and in 18 months his work has seen a tangible business return for the agency. He has been appointed lead planner on two key accounts including AXA Wealth.
Matt led the pitch for an initial segmentation project with AXA Wealth in December 2012 and has led on almost every piece of work since. It’s led to the account more than tripling in worth and also created substantial additional pipeline.
He’s been leading on developing TMP’s social media and social selling proposition, testiment to its success it is now being taken out to most of the agency’s clients. In the past year he’s led the first major social media project with O2 Enterprise, and now social is a part of almost all the agency’s client work.
As well as achieving great results for clients, his agency has also seen benefits from his work. When Matt joined the company, the planning team was made up of just three people. His work contributed to its success and internal reputation, and now it’s a nine-person outfit.
Caroline Promfret
Job title: Digital project manager
Company: Stein IAS
Twitter: @Cazpom
At the age of 22, with only 18 months experience, Caroline is the sole account manager for Stein’s Engineering Account Group. This includes powerhouse industrial brands like Castrol and Trelleborg. The revenue performance of this group has risen by 50 per cent in the past 12 months.
Working well with clients is an agency’s bread and butter, Caroline makes complex digital communications easy for her clients to understand, this includes Eloqua-driven campaigns delivering them proven ROI.
Caroline also makes life easier for the entire agency. She spent six months mentoring an apprentice, then she took it upon herself to mentor the whole office. After skillfully prising open the purse of the finance director, she developed a software training programme and rolled it out. As a result the agency has done away with Excel for internal purposes and has adopted TeamGantt (web-based chart software). She has proven so valuable to staff development she is being trusted to fulfill and develop the new role of digital project manager.
Abra Millar
Job title: Digital marketing manager
Company: Hallam Internet
Twitter: @Hallaminternet
Abra joined Hallam Internet as a graduate with no marketing experience. Despite this, she didn’t wait for Hallam to offer her professional development opportunities. She dedicates her time both in work and outside to developing her skills. She reads a wide range of industry-specific blogs, regularly listens to podcasts and can often be found browsing the Hallam bookshelf for books on digital marketing.
During her time at Hallam Internet, Abra has qualified for her Google Analytics Individual Qualification. Keen to put her expanding knowledge to good use, Abra has used it to train up other members of the team. She has created a range of guide documents on the topic of link building for search engine optimisation (SEO) and more recently gave training to the full company on the use of SEO management software.
Clearly practising what she preaches, her blog posts are instrumental in delivering traffic to the Hallam website. This self-starter has already been promoted from digital marketing trainee to digital marketing executive and since managing her own clients has received extremely positive feedback.
