Q: What was your reaction to winning the award?
Kathy: We’re so appreciative about it because B2B marketing is so different from B2C, and B2B has made strides over the past few years, especially at UL. We have really improved our capabilities and talent over the last five years and I just felt like “Wow, this is a wonderful recognition.” There’s so much more to do and we have to continue to evolve along with the market as a trend. I was extremely proud and excited.
Q: What did UL look like when you first joined?
Kathy: I started UL five years ago as the president of corporate marketing. They didn’t have a CMO, and we had about 12 people in corporate marketing. We were working with an agency in New York at the time who was not doing us favours and taking a lot of our money. They managed our website and it was so poorly done. Businesses didn’t enjoy working with this agency and they ended up building their own websites, so it completely proliferated our digital landscape and the same for social media. Our service offerings were, I’m not exaggerating, 248 websites and 80 social channels, and you just can’t have impact with that and we didn’t have inhouse capabilities and did not have a demand generation function. We did not have a marketing automation platform or CRM either.
It was such a surprise how far off we were. So we needed to start by bringing in new talent and going ahead with communication and branding. We started with a full evaluation of the brand and value and how we should start from there. We now do this every year and so we created a whole new brand framework.
Q: How has it grown since then?
Kathy: We launched our first global campaign, ‘The World Runs on Trust’, and it began with thought leadership. We thought about what types of things we should be creating, how to fill that top of the funnel, and how they can drive it down the funnel. We brought in Marketo with sales operations and we two CRMs to set up marketing operations or an analytics function. Now we have full dashboards that we can measure and track. And now, our digital team manages our website, which has massively improved conversion rates.
We created a sustainability function within marketing, which is definitely so important to the brand at UL, and it consisted of environmental sustainability and social sustainability, which is our social corporate responsibility. We published our first sustainability report last year and continued to make progress on understanding our environmental footprint and giving back in our community. Putting the building blocks together, we have a great international marketing team with activation and implementation in the brand or around the world. It’s been super fun and a building exercise over the last few years.
Q: What was it like when your company went into lockdown?
Kathy: I think we were ready. We were definitely not prepared for the level of webinars we would have to immediately kick off. We would have to then kick off a LinkedIn live event and needed to bring in new technology. It was a lot of learning and a lot of agility which was actually kind of fun and innovative because we’re not typically a company that feels like that, so our marketers were empowered to be a digital leader for that and get the right content.
The biggest upside we’re seeing is an amazing increase in real leads, and the ability to track marketing attributed revenue down the road. We have a much better line of sight for tracking for events. Now with a webinar, we have email addresses coming in through there and tracks it back to the website. So the uptake in MQLs has been a great surprise.
Q: What is a trait of yours that has helped you become a better leader?
Kathy: I am pretty pragmatic. I have a sales background and have spent 10 years in sales. I grew up on a small farm in Illinois, and I don’t speak overly eloquently. I don’t use a lot of fluffy words. I think there’s benefits to coming into a company not having this big showy marketing talk. My style is more about what do we need to get done and how can we do that? There’s definitely situations where you need to check your ego and you’re trying to get done what you can for the greater good. I’m more collaborative in that sense.
Also, just realising that the culture needed to change and using transparency to show that. In hindsight, I remember certain moments. There was a time when I put the budget up on a slide for a presentation and none of the marketers had any idea how much money was spent on corporate marketing or what it was spent on at the time. We needed that push.
Q: What’s been the proudest achievement?
Kathy: I would say moving up to the executive team was a huge show of trust and accomplishment. It was great to be recognised for that.
