Marketing is huge: it’s competitive, it’s erratic, it’s ever-evolving, and it requires you to be a jack- (or jill-) of-all-trades. SEO, content, social media, PPC ads? Yeah, chances are – that’s just your morning. On a Monday. And the rest of the week you’re just trying to run your strategy while still keeping up with the constantly changing marketing field in the age of digital disruption.
Marketing, in short, can be daunting and easily overwhelming – especially in the tech and startup world.
But all this has not distracted from its’ popularity as a career. In fact, we’d argue that the turmoil of the tech and startup marketing industry is what makes this new generation of marketers a force to be reckoned with. These marketing professionals who take on the challenge of a disrupted and tumultuous field are, by large, violently curious, driven by challenge, enamoured with adversity and have an unequivocal thirst for the next big thing. They are both students and inventors.
As a talent matching platform that’s helped some of Europe’s fastest-growing tech firms and startups like Uber and Rocket Internet grow their commercial teams, we’re constantly interacting with these insurgent startup marketing professionals on their job search. And one thing we’re continually fascinated by is the broad range of backgrounds and reasons that actually drove them into starting a career in the marketing industry in the first place…and we wanted to share these with you.
So, we turned to 17 marketing leaders in some of the UK’s hottest startups and tech firms to ask them one simple question:
What Drove You to Start a Career in Marketing?
Emma Tully, LendInvest
LendInvest is the UK’s leading marketplace platform for property lending and investing, and one of the UK’s largest non-bank mortgage lenders.
“Marketing plays a huge part in our day to day lives. It influences almost every decision we make, from which political party we support to which toothpaste we use. These decisions affect our behaviour, and customer behaviour affects customer demand. Marketing has to move quickly in response to customer needs, as well as to industry and technological advances. To succeed in marketing you need drive, entrepreneurialism and pragmatic thinking. Combine those three things and you have the ability to impact people’s everyday lives. That’s what drove me to start a career in marketing.”
Emily Forbes, Seenit
Seenit helps brands and organisations create collaborative video with those who matter the most. Fans and employees become mobile film crews at your fingertips.
“I didn’t start my career thinking I would go into ‘marketing’, but I did always talk about a career in storytelling, it was such a passion of mine. My first job in film was at Working Title where they were producing a documentary called ‘Senna’ at the time. I had the opportunity to watch some early edits of the film and saw that when a more personal home video was edited into the film, it transformed the story. It suddenly turned a sport and athlete I didn’t know into something I could respect and connect with because it felt human. I soon got into documentaries, being moved by real stories championing real people. For me, this was the most powerful way to educate and inspire. This is still at the heart of what I do today with Seenit, connecting real people to stories and organisations they feel passionate about.”
Cat Millar, Qubit
Qubit is the leader in highly persuasive personalization at scale. Their technology gives marketers the tools to understand their visitors and personalise their online presence to drive conversions in real time.
“I came to work in marketing via a Masters in publishing, so understanding audiences, their behaviour and how they interact with brands and content is something that has always been central to my career. Initially, I focused on social media marketing, working as an analyst at a B2C agency. This impressed upon me the importance of data, not only for performance measurement but as a tool to get to know your customers better – an essential skill for any marketer today. I was attracted to the tech startup scene as, similarly to social, it’s an area where the need to keep learning never stops. The chance to communicate new products and ideas that are at the bleeding edge, seeking to revolutionise and perhaps even rejuvenate industries like retail and travel, is an exciting challenge.”
See how professionals from Google, Facebook & Dropbox are using Kandidate’s network to confidentially discover tech and startup marketing job opportunities.
Learn more on www.kandidate.com
Darius Meadon, Founders Factory
Together with Blue Chip corporate partners, Founders Factory builds and scales early-stage technology companies across multiple sectors.
“I started a career in marketing because I am passionate about using a combination of rational, data-driven approaches and creativity to solve problems. I am particularly passionate about probing the human element of business problems. This obsession with human insight has inspired me to probe the minds at hearts of a Zulu king, a Russian oligarch, numerous grannies, mothers, truck drivers and my three-year-old niece. Marketing is always in flux and I find it stimulating to be in an industry where I’m constantly learning new skills and using new tools to solve complex problems.”
Caroline Lucas-Conwell, Viber
With more than 800 million unique users on the platform, Viber allows people to connect in the way that works best for them.
“Innovation, ideas and technology drove me to marketing! With the world around us evolving so quickly, I found marketing for tech a really exciting, fast-paced place to be. As a B2B marketer, I love the complexity and challenge that tech products bring when it comes to having to tell stories in new, creative ways and then measuring that impact! Tech doesn’t have to be boring. How can you recreate a narrative for a piece of tech otherwise complicated to understand?”
Russell Holm, Kalo
Kalo, their mission is to enable any company to turn good ideas great with freelancers. Through their technology and their people, they strive to remove all boundaries that people face today in the workplace.
“The blend of analytics and creativity are what hooked me onto marketing. What’s helped me be successful is my willingness to test anything while extracting learnings from even the biggest failures. At the end of the day, we are measured by numbers, but if you only gauge performance with hard metrics you’ll get stuck optimizing in a silo. This is where the creative side of marketing kicks in. There is nothing better than the crazy moon-shot idea of beating the optimized-to-death legacy campaign.”
Nicole Hayward, Antidote
Antidote is a digital health company on a mission to accelerate breakthroughs in potentially life-saving treatments by bridging the gap between medical research and the people who need it.
“I was attracted to the disruption of the marketing discipline, which registers a ten on the Richter scale at startups. In our digital world, today’s marketing maven doesn’t spend exorbitant time on conceptualized positioning decks and creative iterations. She is curious. She experiments and applies learnings. With two degrees in engineering and a (reasonably good!) eye for creative, I found digital marketing to be a great fit.”
Ben Slater, Beamery
Beamery is a candidate relationship software built for companies that are proactive about engaging with the best talent and don’t just rely on applications.
“There are very few careers that are as broad and as a deep as marketing. It’s not an art or a science, it’s both, and you can approach it from any direction that you please. Personally, I love the freedom that you have to shape a company’s brand and define how it is perceived in the market.”
Tristan Pirouz, DeepCrawl
DeepCrawl is the world’s most comprehensive website crawler, providing actionable data for flawless website architecture.
“With a background in sales and strategy consultancy, I joined the DeepCrawl marketing team to do more of what I was already doing – driving growth. Digital marketing enables me to build scalable, and more value-driven sales processes. This, coupled with a creative and measurable environment, is what excites me about digital marketing. Further, in a marketing role, I feel I am able to build rapport more genuinely with an international crowd, exchanging experiences and growing alongside my peers. Effectively not much has changed, I’m still in sales, only that marketing permits me to be faster, and have greater reach in delivering targeted value for increased performance.”
See how professionals from Google, Facebook & Dropbox are using Kandidate’s network to confidentially discover tech and startup marketing job opportunities.
Learn more on www.kandidate.com
Alysia Wanczyk, Seedrs
Seedrs is the world’s leading equity crowdfunding platform. Seedrs makes it simple for anyone – from angels and venture capitalists to friends and family – to become investors in ambitious, growth-focused European businesses.
“I actually fell into marketing. Having decided that politics wasn’t the game for me and that I didn’t have the cut-throat sales bug after having worked in ad sales, I realised that I did actually enjoy understanding people’s problems and trying to find solutions. I stumbled into my first proper marketing role while working in a pub. I had friendly regulars who shared that they were looking for a marketing manager for their startup, and I let them know that I studied marketing and it sounded like a great role. The rest was history. My biggest tip for getting into marketing is to keep hustling and looking for the right role, even if it means taking a detour.”
Sara Carty, Stuart
Stuart is a disruptive B2B on-demand delivery platform that connects retailers with local couriers, enabling anyone to deliver anything at any time.
“For the most part, a career in marketing happened accidentally! I had every intention of going into the world of beauty but found a job on the marketing team at a tech company and loved it from day one. I’ve been quite fortunate in that I’ve touched every aspect of marketing from data analysis to content strategy and everything in-between. Working in tech has also allowed me to learn skills such as coding and design which I think are becoming more vital to a marketer’s skill set. I’ve worked in both corporates and in startups and loved both, but within a dynamic and fast-paced startup, you can see your impact almost immediately which keeps things exciting!”
Matthew Robinson, ContentSquare
ContentSquare is a user experience (UX) analytics and optimisation platform that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and websites.
“The seed was first planted when at 14, during a careers advice session at school when I filled out a questionnaire based on various personal preferences and the result that popped up was ‘marketing’. I am probably the only person on the planet to have a careers questionnaire result actually transform into my current profession! As someone who is curious, creative, borderline ADHD, and somewhat fond of attention-seeking, working in a hugely varied role, juggling multiple projects and applying my written skills to create compelling cut-through campaigns, seemed a far more preferable option than being a Geography Teacher, so I stowed that thought away. Years later, I knew marketing was for me and combining my fondness for technology, I started my marketing career for a broadband startup and haven’t looked back since.”
Tiana Portugal, Tide
Tide is a current account that saves businesses time and money. It’s packed with powerful tools which automate bookkeeping and make paying and sending invoices much quicker.
“Growing up in Brazil, I’ve been exposed to some of the most creative and powerful advertising and I remember being fascinated by how brands made people feel about things. From an early age, I knew this is what I wanted to do. Fortunately, it seems my instinct was right: I have always been involved in marketing throughout my studies and career. After all these years, I’m still motivated by growing brands through building deep, emotional connections.”
Diana Mitroskina, onefinestay
onefinestay was started in order to give people a new way to experience travel – staying in the finest homes in the best cities, with an unprecedented level of service and care. They’re the only company that visits and vets each home in person.
“I joined onefinestay’s operations team three years ago and was originally involved in supply (homeowner) acquisition. Our office sat within onefinestay HQ, where the guest acquisition marketing team also resided. Watching them from the outside I became very much interested in the ways of selling niche onefinestay products to new guests, and in growing our top-line revenue. I relocated to the team to help run the distribution partner business and had success in increasing our marketing channel’s revenues by ten times, and in building a technical product feed to integrate our inventory with major online distributors. Having taken yet another new path in the company, I am now managing our digital marketing initiatives and enjoy experimenting with the continuous technological advancements in the field.”
See how professionals from Google, Facebook & Dropbox are using Kandidate’s network to confidentially discover tech and startup marketing job opportunities.
Learn more on www.kandidate.com
Geraldine Michel, Ambie
Ambie is a smarter way for businesses to manage their background music. By combining music experts with SmartCloud technology, they help hundreds of businesses increase efficiency while creating the perfect atmosphere.
“I actually specialised in marketing during my Master’s degree after a gap-year internship as a marketing assistant, and as I was writing my thesis on brand and innovation, reading everything Marty Neumeier wrote. It became clear to me that marketing was a great combination of deep understanding of a business/industry, end-customers, data/P&L and creativity. After working for an ad agency and few years in retail marketing, I naturally moved to tech marketing working for Zipcar, GoCardless and now heading marketing at Ambie – where data is key, where flexibility and agility matter most and where quick decisions need to be made to best serve customers and achieve startups’ objectives to grow.”
Dennis Volkmann, Depop
Depop is a global marketplace – a mobile space where you can see what your friends and the people you’re inspired by are liking, buying and selling.
“I’ve always been curious about people and passionate about business and creativity. I’m also someone who needs frequent learning and challenges to be happy. Marketing was a natural way to connect all of that. After working in an agency and client-side roles, startups proved to be a fantastic environment for me. I learn every day. After a few years with Airbnb, I’m excited to be leading a very talented and passionate marketing team at Depop.”
Hayley Dixon, Opteo
Opteo helps AdWords professionals manage and optimize their AdWords accounts. Their mission is simple – build things that improve the day-to-day experiences of AdWords users around the world.
“I got my first marketing ‘break’ by accident. I was saving up to go travelling after university and the company I worked for had an opening in the marketing department. When I started it seemed like everyone was speaking a completely different language. Phrases like SEO, PPC, CPM were totally alien to me but I loved learning about them all. The great thing is, I’ve never stopped learning – there are always new, smarter ways to do my job – and that continues to drive me. I also really love that marketing gives me the opportunity to be both creative and analytical, it’s the perfect mix.”
Ready to see what offers you can get from Europe’s fastest growing startups? Head over to www.kandidate.com
