Midlands Spotlight: Jack Hardy, Digital Marketing Manager
1. What made you want to be a marketer?
In short… I discovered Marketing through circumstance. Like many others, I somewhat “fell” into Marketing. I initially enrolled at university to complete a degree in Architecture but due to issues with capacity I had to change my plans. I was advised to explore another creative degree, that being Graphic Design.
Following an open day I enrolled on the course, saw it through, and graduated top of my class. Then when I got into the working world, I soon saw that a lot of the work I was doing during my degree that I enjoyed was taken on by marketers. So, I decided to make the jump.
I applied for a Head of Marketing role in Dubai and here I am over 10 years later. Being a creative, strategic and analytical person, marketing was a perfect fit for me. A career in which I’m able to solve problems with no two days being the same.
2. What excites you most about marketing?
Having problems to solve and challenges to face. Then ultimately, overcoming them.
3. What has been your favourite project you've worked on/a highlight from your career in marketing?
Just before the 2019 Covid pandemic I started working as a Digital Marketing Consultant for a Parent to Teacher app called Weduc. The premise of the app is very simple, to connect parent and teachers to facilitate a better education for students.
Once the pandemic hit, it isn’t hard to see how Weduc would be incredibly valuable to schools across the world. However, schools had quite rightly used all their budget to support families that were less well off.
This meant that while schools were crying out for such an app, they didn’t have the funds. Further to this with Weduc being a scale up company that had not fully utilised digital marketing before I had just signed up to two accelerator programmes. One with Google Ads and one with Twitter Ads.
So, our entire target audience had no purchasing power and I had fully committed to an aggressive marketing plan…
Based on the CEO once stating that “if anyone was to ever use Weduc, they wouldn’t want to live without it” we started an initiative to launch Weduc Lite. A slimmed down version with limited functionality and onboarding requirements. This was then released for FREE and advertised by the accelerator programmes as well as Covid initiatives.
The idea being that we could do some good in the world and once normality had returned those schools would want to buy the full version of Weduc.
Once it was all said and done, I was able to use my powers for good. We helped a lot of people. And I was able to drive the bottom line for the business and the project ended with a 3,400% ROI.
4. What would your advice be for fellow marketers?
There is a story, journey and rhythm to marketing… make sure you share the story and bring the stakeholders on the journey. If they can help put a brick into the wall, they will understand and appreciate the outcome far more than if you work in privacy.
Be transparent and honest, always. In everything. Mistakes, learnings, failures, successes… you get it. Build trust.
And the 3 mantras I work by are:
- Clarity – You can’t manage what you can’t measure
- Essentialism – Do the right thing, not everything
- Growth – Hypothesise, test, learn, improve.
5. Over the next 2-3 years, what developments in marketing are you looking forward to the most?
The role that AI will play in our working lives, although the big shift towards utilising it efficiently will be here this year (2024) and only get better and stronger in those next 2-3 years.
About the Author
Jack Hardy is a results-driven chartered marketer with over 10 years of experience creating marketing strategies that help drive business growth within B2B Tech and B2B Life Sciences.