Find out how Kate Owen won out for ‘Marketer of the year’ for delivering over 300 new content assets, 33 case studies, 30 blogs and over 250 social posts reaching key targets across multiple industry sectors.
In her current role, Kate is helping lead the transformation of Capita’s marketing function. Capita is a multi billion pound company which delivers consulting, transformation and large-scale delivery solutions for clients across all sectors. Around half or our revenue sits in our biggest accounts – which Kate owns from a marketing perspective. She creates and drives strategy for how we engage with clients like BBC, Aviva and O2.
Most recently as a result of COVID as well as leading and setting up the new ABM function here at Capita in September 2019, Kate has also taken on the role of Director of GTM campaigns in March 2020, managing an additional team of 15 and setting up the plan Capita campaign response to COVID in a 12 week timeframe and already showcasing exceptional results.
Our challenge has been to take a fragmented, junior marketing team which has been seen as an events and powerpoint execution arm and transform it into a highly commercial function and a critical lever for our future growth. As part of this, since joining, she has developed a new organisational structure with supporting processes, established an account-based marketing practice, recruited exceptional talent and created a new campaign execution framework. She has built strong relationships with internal SMEs and sales leaders – and has refocused our materials to make them more relevant to the industry challenges our clients face.
Kate brings an energy and pace to her work, which helps us position the function in an entirely new way. She is relentlessly client focused and the more junior people in the team are learning from her how to put the customer at the heart of any thinking. She is a talent magnet and since joining we have been able to hire some highly credible industry experts – much of which is due to her passion and enthusiasm for account-based marketing, and marketing more broadly. Leading in a transforming environment needs a balance of vision with pragmatism – plus a level of resilience – and Kate role models this every day, she is a trusted voice for the CMO and the kind of person that you feel extremely lucky to have on your team.
Prior to working at Capita, Kate worked at NHS and also at Thomson Reuters (now Refinitiv) a $6bn global data, insights and analytics company marketing into the financial services sector. Again, she was part of a transformational leadership team at both organisations – turning the marketing function around from an order taking events machine to a team that was driving the growth of the company with fully attributable ROI – and winning awards for creativity and omnichannel execution.
Her teams have been responsible for designing, writing, and producing innovative content across all channels and campaigns such as print, digital, events, direct mail, special reports and thought leadership. She owned the global channel strategy working with the digital team, PR and internal comms to ensure that content was compelling and engaging for clients and sales – and was the key point of contact for relationships with internal and external agencies driving costs and efficiencies for the business.
Kate is highly creative and strategic but also pragmatic and commercial. At Thomson Reuters, she brought scale and industrialisation into the function so that other teams could take multi-channel campaigns “off the shelf” and worked with the central brand team to ensure that there was consistency in how we used our brand platform in a compelling way relevant for customers to tell compelling marketing stories and messaging frameworks.
She has natural authority and people actively seek her out to work with – across marketing, sales and the broader business. She has spoken at numerous external events and taken part in podcasts to share her knowledge and experience with the wider B2B marketing community participating as a speaker in over 10 different events this year to date.
Kate has a commitment to always doing the best thing for the business, alongside having a very strong sense of purpose which infuses her thinking and her marketing strategies. She is passionate about mentoring and developing young people through sharing her own experiences to inspire potential marketers of the future. An example of this is her voluntary work as a mentor with the charity I Can Be, which enables 7- and 8-year-old girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to explore jobs they otherwise may never be exposed to, building their curiosity and confidence along the way. She works with schools in Greater London where there are high levels of disadvantage and there is less likelihood that children will be exposed to a variety of jobs or visit neighbourhoods outside of their own and has also worked extensively with Young Enterprise over the last nine months.
Kate is an avid believer in social responsibility, and this is evident in the creative ways in which she works CSR initiatives into her campaigns – which benefits us by aligning the values of our organisations with the values our clients, while doing good for the wider community and planet.
An example of this was in her last role, where she delivered a number of high profile campaigns working with the CEO of the charity Silver Line, which supports elderly people who are lonely. Kate worked with her to promote the work Silver Line do within her marketing campaigns which delivered positive impact for both organisations and national wide media coverage. Through thinking like this she has been able to access C-suite clients in an entirely new way – which is crucial for the success of B2B businesses that sell complex, business critical projects.
Capita is committed to educating and inspiring the next generation in financial, environmental and social consumerism and creating better outcomes for customers and citizens.
Capita over prior years has received some negative press coverage and so from a brand perspective there has been a need to re-set with existing and prospect customers the value Capita can bring and Kate’s roles in both ABM and GTM campaign delivery is crucial in helping to deliver against this.
Kate has demonstrated across her previous three roles across private and public sector how she is a transformational leader with the customer at the centre and focused on delivering ROI for the companies she works for. This is evident in the results she has delivered at each of these companies.
From a content perspective she has led the ABM and Industry team to create in the last six months alone over 55 pieces of thought leadership, developed over 35 industry specific content pieces to see over 70 new visits from key accounts alongside an additional 120 customer insight pieces and research assets YTD to support key account origination, she and team have supported over 12 industry specific events and webinars generating over 650 new contacts within key accounts, all this in a nine month timeframe.
In launching the GTM campaign strategy and response to COVID with a new small client experience team in a three-month time frame, Kate delivered with the team over 300 new content assets, 33 case studies, 30 blogs and over 250 social posts reaching key targets across multiple industry sectors.
Most recently, she was involved in the creation of an idea that harnessed her passion for social responsibility topics that has reached key decision makers at C-suite level within key accounts Capita were not able to reach previously, she helped work with Young Enterprise to influence over 197,000 young people globally pre, during and post COVID with the campaign and achieve an
ROI of 1:13,833 or 1,383,300% influencing over 150 opportunities.
In addition to the above, in leading and setting up the new ABM and campaign teams collectively she is demonstrating multi-billion pipeline contribution to marketing in salesforce over the last 9-12 months. In terms of ROI, she has helped influence and accelerate over 470 high value opportunities in a nine month time period with a staggering
ROI of 1:3833 for some of our largest customers and biggest brands in the UK
. This was a team and a strategy that did not exist prior to the start of this year.
“Kate is a stand out boss. As a marketer, she is incredibly creative, keen to test different approaches to deliver marketing that is both relevant and authentic. She values new perspectives, and has definitely instilled in me the use of a much broader range of research and evidence to inform marketing decision making. She never loses sight of the numbers, focusing on demonstrating RoI for all marketing activities. As a manager, she has prioritised my professional development, and given me every opportunity to challenge myself to achieve more.”
Christa Norton, Head of Telco and ABM, Capita plc
B2B Marketing Awards 2020
This submission won the award for
‘Marketer of the year’
at the B2B Marketing Awards this year.
