PROFILE: Emma Hewage, senior marketing manager EMEA, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Emma Hewage, head of marketing EMEA, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

It’s the little things in life that often matter the most, right? And it was the attention Emma Hewage paid to the small details that got her noticed and led her onto a path that would see her as senior marketing manager for LinkedIn’s marketing solutions across EMEA.

Hewage began her career working in charity and student radio with dreams of being a DJ, but when she was put in charge of spoken word programming she feared she was at the uncool end of something that was already uncool. However, she loved it, explaining: “The more I got into radio, the more I realised I really enjoyed producing content and documentaries, and spoken word was something I was passionate about.”

While she was temping as a receptionist to fund her way through university she asked the agencies if they had any work with production companies. While she was transcribing interviews about climbing the north face of the Eiger, she meticulously translated all the German words she heard and checked they were spelt correctly. It was this attention to the small details that got her noticed. Hewage says: “They were like: ‘wow, this isn’t the usual temp we get in’ and they were interested in having more conversations.”

From TV to marketing

Those conversations led to a seven-year career in documentary making with a focus on biography and arts. To get from biopics to marketing there was a move to London and a stint at Microsoft. Hewage says: “Basically, when I saw how much it’d cost to buy a flat down here I thought: ‘No, telly isn’t going to provide for us.’ So I started looking at other adjacencies where I could transfer my skills, and through a strange quirk of fate I found myself at Microsoft. I found my skills from having been so audience-focused and thinking about communications and how you take quite complex ideas and make them very simple were something they really valued.”

Noting the difference between her time in consumer media and business marketing she touches on one of B2B’s biggest problems: “There is a tendency for people to be overly focused on their own message and their business news rather than what’s going to really resonate with the audience.” Well before the current trend of brand journalism Hewage bought her skills to the B2B marketing world, saying: “I felt there was a real opportunity to take that more journalistic skill set and put it into a business context and help people to translate business needs and objectives into language that would resonate with other people and tap into their wants and desires.”

Hewage believes the ability to do this is more important in B2B marketing as the amount of thought that goes into a B2B purchase is far greater: “When your reputation and livelihood is potentially pegged to a decision you’re making, you think a lot about that.”

Relationships

Knowing her staff are key to building those important relationships with customers, recruitment has been a big focus for her. LinkedIn is in hyper-growth and intends to be for some time yet, so ‘team and talent’ is a number one operating priority for the company as a whole.

Talking about her approach to hiring the right team members Hewage says: “Relationships are really important, both with your customers and the people you’re working with. I think really carefully about each individual and how they’re going to add to the energy, momentum and dynamic of the team. I think, in some instances where you’re hiring for a specific skill set you know you need someone who has experience in that specific aspect. But more often, the approach I’ve taken is to really hire for cultural fit.”

This approach makes even more sense when Hewage explains, in her view, a fundamental shift towards more collaborative working is happening in the business world. Speaking about LinkedIn, she says: “Being a social network you’ve got a lot of people who are very sociable and very good at collaborating and communicating within our team, and that’s something I’ve really noticed is a core way of how we get stuff done here. We’re really good at bringing together a group of people and quickly moving through a problem to action, but listening to all the different streams of input along the way.”

Finding a balance
 

But don’t think it’s all plain sailing in the marketing department at LinkedIn. Hewage is still human and therefore shares many of the same challenges as her peers. There are currently two things she admits to working on at the moment and both are around creating a balance. The first is about putting the right emphasis on being globally consistent and locally relevant. Although she notes the positives of being a global brand and benefitting from the buzz that is inherent with being part of the social media set in Silicon Valley, Hewage says: “The challenge is sometimes people have a very strong sense of identity and there’s a tendency to say: ‘that’s US-focused’ or ‘this isn’t specific to me’. We have to work out how to strike the right balance. Being headquartered in the US, the marketing team is bigger over there. If we were to try to replicate or localise everything perfectly we’d be setting ourselves up for a really tough time, trying to reproduce the work of 45 people and then think of how we do that in Germany, France and Spain.”

Hewage’s second challenge may come as a surprise considering she works at the world’s largest digital network designed specifically for professionals to connect with each other. She’s constantly working on finding the right balance between being digital and creating opportunities for people to interact in person. She says: “I think there comes a point when there’s no substitute for bringing people together, for either a roundtable or half-day event, and giving them the opportunity to hear from their peers about how they’re negotiating the same challenges.”

This acts as a nice reminder that as social media plays an increasingly important role in marketing, you shouldn’t lose sight of all the channels available to you. If LinkedIn’s Hewage recognises at times there is no substitute for face-to-face marketing, ensure you also maintain a multichannel mindset.

Hewage’s top tips

  • Remember you want to spark a conversation on social.
    Rather than your posts being a neat ‘a+b=c’ with a nice full-stop at the end, write content in a way that gives people the opportunity to interact and to share. You want to invite people to engage.
  • Repurpose your content.
    We like to talk about slicing the turkey, or getting creative with your Sunday leftovers. Put it into lots of different formats and use it several times. Just because you publish something once doesn’t mean your audience has seen it.
  • Make your marketing feel human.
    Remember there is an emotional aspect to B2B decision making as well. People are people at work as well as at home.

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