About me
I was always a creative kid. I would take any old items lying around the house and transform them into a story; something that would usually involve me fighting alongside my favorite heroes, The Ninja Turtles.
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As a teenager, if someone put something in front of me, I'd persist and find a way to come up with a solution. I could write, design, and problem-solve. I had great people skills and was an effective communicator. I had a passion for technology, math, and analytics, and I liked to do a bit of everything.
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When it came to what I wanted to do at university, I, like most people, had no idea. Originally, I wanted to pursue an industrial design degree, then psychology, finally settling on an arts degree (psychology and media communications) with a minor in marketing. In retrospect, I always knew that marketing and advertising was the perfect mix of all of these interests, and the area that I would ultimately end up in.
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Fast forward to my second year of undergraduate studies, I was enrolled in a subject called Brand Dynamics. The whole concept of guerrilla marketing blew me away. The idea that you could dive into the minds of people and influence their decision-making in such unique and unconventional ways was a lightbulb moment for me, and I became obsessed. It sparked a fire that pushed me to further my studies with a master's in Marketing.
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My first taste of the real world came in a part-time capacity working for UNO Australia, a multi-discipline creative design agency. UNO gave me a blank canvas, a set of paintbrushes, and all the paint in the world to work with. The beauty of UNO was that they had never truly had a marketing staff member before. It had always been a designer trying their best, but ultimately giving up when it got too hard. They had an incredibly old website, no social media presence, no client database, no email marketing, and generated very little content.
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Surrounded by some incredible people, I went about transforming the website, building it up from scratch with a $1500 budget, which remains to this day my proudest achievement. I then established their social media channels and ran them until my departure. I created accounts with MailChimp and developed our own set of email templates and a database to work with. I started producing my own regular articles in addition to revitalizing Channel UNO (their quarterly whitepaper). I invested heavily in educating myself on how websites are built and run, ultimately providing consulting services to some clients looking for new ones or hoping to improve their existing ones.
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Another huge learning curve for me was design. Having a range of designers from all walks of life giving me their advice and guidance, showing me how to use certain programs and shortcuts, fast-tracked my knowledge of the Adobe suite. Most importantly, I learned what hard work looked like and what it was like to work in an agency environment with strict budgets, timelines, and clients of all shapes and sizes.
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After four amazing years at UNO, I decided it was time to move on. While I felt like I had achieved and learned so much there, I missed having a real marketing mentor to teach me some of the finer details, and I was keen to expand my knowledge of website project management, construction, and search engine optimisation (SEO), which I was falling in love with.
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After a short search, I came across an exciting opportunity at SMSGlobal. SMSGlobal is an enterprise-grade mobile messaging provider and a SaaS-based telecommunication specialist. In simple terms, it was a startup that sold SMS and had its own platform which allowed users to manage their services online. From day one, I found it challenging. The fast-paced and highly competitive industry meant my first few days were spent getting my head around the content strategy I would nurture, with the purpose of increasing the site's organic traffic. Mixed with this was my responsibility to now manage a much larger and more complex website, multiple social media channels, an email marketing database of thousands, copywriting tasks, technical content writing, SEO audits, analytic reviews... and I was also now their in-house designer.
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Our marketing team ebbed and flowed in size. The high-paced nature of the work meant a pretty steady rotation of staff members coming and going. By the time I had finished up there, we had about six or so in the team, up from two when I began, and I looked after a few of them.
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There were some major learning curves for me at SMSGlobal, and I credit it with being a fundamental part of shaping me.
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Firstly, the web. Two front-end designers, six backends. Any questions I had, these guys would take the time and really work through it with me. I truly learned so much from them about website maintenance and build management, and it gave me the confidence to tackle any web project moving forward, understanding both sides of the build.
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Secondly, SEO and paid search. I was really lucky to have worked with some great people, and two, in particular, taught me so much about both of these areas, which I have carried through with me to this day.
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Thirdly, content and content strategies. By the time I had left, the blog was bringing in 15% of the website traffic via organic means - it was a tough grind, but we achieved our goal.
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Fourth, design. It truly was a crash course in design, and thankfully my guys at UNO had given me the foundation I needed to get the job done. I had learned so much, and my confidence to tackle any design task, no matter its size, was sky-high.
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Going from around 50 people at SMSGlobal, Findex, one of Australia's largest Finance and Accounting firms, had roughly 3000 employees and 150 offices across Australia and New Zealand. It was huge. Suit and tie every day, sharp, respectable, often in the media, Findex was a massive leap for me and a place where I really learned about stakeholder management, patience and the challenges of multi-brand management.
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Starting out in communications as a content creator, I was given the task of managing and preparing the monthly and quarterly newsletters which would go to our clients. Often ghostwriting technical content pieces for senior staff members, editing blog articles, presentations, speeches, and more. It was tough, very tough and I felt the stress of it all, but learned so much along the way. After 12 months, however, and showcasing some of my digital marketing skills, I was given the opportunity to move into the marketing team and focus on digital projects.
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Besides the typical BAU tasks, some of the more interesting projects I was able to work on at Findex were things like SEO audits on all five websites we were managing, proposing content strategies, redesigning digital assets and landing pages for events, as well as designing microsites for promotions and educational purposes. However, the two projects that stand out to me most would have to be the Findex Community Fund which I designed from scratch with the help of the digital and design team, literally drawing the curves over and over by hand until they were perfect, and a series of dashboards using Google Data Studio to showcase the performance of our websites, allowing key stakeholders to deep dive into data as required in real-time; a stretch goal my manager challenged me with that I had delivered on.
Just as I had started to settle in at Findex, an email about a job opportunity at Bennelong came along and changed everything. From the moment I saw Bennelong House, I knew it was where I belonged. Bennelong, operating in the funds management space, was the perfect fit for me. It was small enough to be agile, yet large enough to offer invaluable experience and learning opportunities from talented people. Bennelong was looking for a digital specialist to join them, with a primary focus on their growth and expansion, as they had recently opened an office in the UK and desired to open another in the US under the name BennBridge.
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My main focus was to start building a new website for Bennelong and their six boutique fund managers, which later expanded to also include our UK and US offices and their boutiques. In total, I worked on 12 interconnected sites across three countries, which included databases, improved Google Sheets feeds, and more. I also built several new dashboards to help the team better understand the web performance of the sites, similar to what I had done at Findex.
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Another key focus of mine was rebuilding and updating the assets we were sending out to clients in Marketo, our marketing automation platform. The assets, including landing pages and emails, were designed to be on-brand, responsive, and improve the user experience. I used a newly introduced module builder, which allowed any team member to edit the templates, thus accomplishing another objective of the build.
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Having worked both client and agency-side in a variety of industries and environments over the last decade, and having gained a breadth of experience, I am extremely proud of my achievements. As I move forward, I look forward to new challenges and the opportunity to make a mark on the world of digital marketing. For now, I am excited to continue being part of great organizations, helping them realize their full potential and be part of their success stories.